Ringlord Technologies Amiga Products
Amiga
The Amiga computer made its debut in 1985 and quickly established itself as the world's first desktop video and multimedia publishing platform. NewTek released the Video Toaster for the Amiga, capable of blending multiple live video sources and mapping them onto arbitrarily moving 3D objects. For a mere US$5000, this brought to the desktop the capabilities for which TV stations had been paying 10x as much.
Among the more prominent uses of the Amiga for modeling and for rendering special effects are shows and movies such as Max Headroom, Robocop, Terminator II, The Abyss, and Babylon 5. The Amiga became almost ubiquitous at TV stations to render weather maps and perform live scene transitions of various kinds.
Even today, few computers are capable of matching the Amiga's instant responsiveness, lag-free video playback, and out-of-the-box video1 capabilities. At the time, 64 color EGA was barely a year old and 16 color CGA was still the standard; 256 color VGA was two years away from release. Add to that a full multitasking operating system and 4096 colors and you have a computer that should have taken the world by storm. In some quarters, it did; generally speaking, it didn't.
The Amiga's operating system was tied intimately to its proprietary hardware — impressive as it was — which kept the Amiga from taking full advantage of rapidly accelerating advances in the more componentized markets; and with upper management's complete lack of understanding of what they had on their hands with the Amiga, they ran the computer into the ground. By 1994 it was all over, though even today (some two decades past the Amiga's heyday) many still use their Amigas and they know why!Our Amiga pages are here primarily for historical purposes; we have some stuff to read and stuff to download, but our development for the Amiga is currently not proceeding:
| Product | Description | Platforms | Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| AORMTool | A small tool to search and maintain a database of over one thousand useful terms involving general computing and the Amiga in particular. The program knows the HTTP protocol and can be configured to download a new copy of its database whenever it becomes available. | Amiga | 1.1 |
| Image2C | Converts IFF ILBM images using the iffparse.library to create C-source code. | Amiga | 1.2 |
| KingFisher | Originally a wildly popular replacement for Aquarium, a tool to search Fred Fish's Fish Disks database, KingFisher evolved to cover Fred's CD-ROM based distributions as well. | Amiga | 2.26, 1.40 |
| MakeURLAlias | A program that you can install in your web browser to help you create Workbench shortcuts (in the form of an ARexx program) that will launch your favorite web browser and instructs it to take you to the given URL. | Amiga | 1.0 |
| PrettyHTML | Intelligently wraps and indents HTML for improved readability. Improves correctness of the HTML by quoting tag attributes and supplying closing elements for table items. Can improve modem-compressibility of HTML by lower- or upper-casing all HTML tags (also improves readability and consistency). | Amiga, GNU/Linux | 2.2 |
| Split | Splits any binary or text file into even-sized blocks, either based on a line-count or on a byte-count. This will allow you to easily split large files into nicely sized chunks that fit on multiple floppy disks for easy transport via sneaker net. | Amiga | 3.0 |
| StreamDisk | Grabs a set of disk sectors (any block-addressable device), and writes them to a file. Can be used to read arbitrary blocks of data from a hard disk, for example, regardless of partition boundaries or file systems. Has been used to recover otherwise unrecoverable data, though this is by no means a trivial process. | Amiga | 1.1 |
| Strings | Scans any binary or text file for sequences of what appear to be human-readable strings of plain text. This is useful for situations where you want to know what all the options are for an undocumented program, what dynamic libraries the software might be referencing, to seek out secret messages in the code (or a copy of your Amiga's ROM!), etc. | Amiga | 2.0 |
| Weblord | A powerful, high-performance page building tool. We use it to build our website (yeah, we drink our own coolaid!) | Amiga, Java, GNU/Linux | 4.0 |
| WrapGuide | A small tool to word-wrap AmigaGuide® documents at or before a certain text-column. Use of this tool allows the developer to write advanced V39-style AmigaGuide® online documentation, and then create from these documents the necessary V34-style versions that, when installed on an older Amiga platform, are properly word-wrapped at fixed columns and cause no harm to the older software. | Amiga | 1.1 |
| WriteSight | A Writer's Tool | Java, GNU/Linux | 1.0 |
1 Video refers to the type of signal that you can send directly to your TV set, not merely graphics.
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