Amiga Forever

So I got hooked on NotesBuddy, one main reason being the ability to use animation. I had a renewed interest in animgif and soon found myself launching Amiga Forever software on my ancient desktop PC. Amiga Forever is a software emulating the Amiga OS. With Amiga Forever, one can run software designed for the Amiga computer. But what is an Amiga computer?

Back in 1985, when the Mac was still running on black & white screens and Windows 3.1 was the OS of choice for the corporate world, the Amiga computer came out with a color display, multitasking, a GUI & Unixish command line interface, and more. Following a friend's advice, I got an Amiga 1000 (A1000) and had many hours of fun and learning, exploring various aspects of computing. I went on with an A2000, then an A3000, even one with a Video Toaster 2.0, but eventually mismanagement took the Amiga computer's life. I even helped run the local Amiga users group by serving in various positions. In the end, with the advent of the Internet and newer technologies, it was simply too expensive to upgrade the ancient Amiga. I still have the A3000 with the Video Toaster housed in its own external case (Toaster Cozzy), but the computer is not even plugged in.

I do have Amiga Forever the emulation software installed on an old PC. I only have one useful program on it - PersonalPaint. PPaint is basically a bitmap paint program, sort of like Photoshop. The one thing I use PPaint for is to generate animgif of words. The Amiga has the special capability of using animated fonts, or animfont. PPaint's included ARexx script makes generating animated text a snap. Just type in a word and click a few buttons, and you have yourself a very fancy word animating to life. By default, the animation is not in animgif but thankfully there's another ARexx script to handle the conversion. During the conversion, you get the chance to set the delay time for each plus other configurations. The included animfont for PPaint, Bullion, is not enough so some time ago I doled out $70 or so to get the The Kara Collection - a collection of color patterned fonts, animfonts, etc.

Shown in this blog entry are some co-workers' names made with Personal Paint on Amiga Forever, using the Bullion animfont. I'll send them to my co-workers via NotesBuddy. I would love to make custom animgif instead of using those found on the web, but the task takes time, so for now, I'll be content with animgif of names. I will make more animgif with other animation styles and animfonts. If you want a word made, drop me a note!