@blakespot
of course it depends on what you want to do with it, but i use my pegasos2 and X5K beta systems every day. here's some of the stuff i use regularly:
audioi'm a big music buff, so i have a ton of audio files sitting on my AOS4 machines. nearly all of my CDs have been ripped into MP3s using
adripper, which is a terrific tool which pulls in all of the CDDB information on each track into ID3 tags as well as encoding the audio, and i use
amigaamp3 for playback. i also use the latter to listen to internet audio streams. everything is nicely organized with
atunes. i also do plenty of recording, so i use
audio evolution for most of my editing work, unless i'm doing stuff with MIDI, and then i use
HD-rec. i also have tons of MOD files, which i play with
milkytracker,
hivelytracker, or
schism. i keep meaning to buy
digibooster pro, but haven't gotten around to it. and, lastly, i use
amipodder to sync up podcasts that i either play on my 'miggies or on my blackberry when in the car. there is so much audio software that works with AOS4, but this is the stuff i use regularly.
emulationbefore discovering amiga a few years ago, i had been into other retro computing platforms. luckily there are plenty of excellent emulators for software for nearly every system you can imagine. i can play mario brother 3 using
amiNES, all of my mac games using
basilisk2, DOS games with
DOSbox, atari ST games with
hatari, apple II software with
KEGS, all of my C64 games -- including support for joysticks via amigainput -- with
VICE, and even SNES ROMs with
warpsnes. your AOS4 installation comes with E-UAE and the full set of commodore ROMs, so you can already use that for games that aren't system friendly (which would work like any other 68k app). there are plenty of others out there (like stuff for neogeo, atari lynx and jaguar consoles, etc.), some of which are exclusive to acube's
game DVD -- which i would recommend anyway.
graphicswow, there's piles of choice here. much of what i use is actually classic software, mainly
arteffect 4,
amifig, and drawstudio 2. for pixel work i use
personal paint 7.3 and grafx2. but i also have fxpaint 2.0, imagefx 4.5, perfectpaint, and
tvpaint installed on my machine, too; i just don't use them as much. one tool i've been using more and more is
sketchblock and the fractals tool developed for it. it's awesome, and i use it in conjunction with a wacom tablet. i've also been playing with 3D graphics lately, and have purchased copies of aladdin 4D, cinema4d, and lightwave 3d 5.20. all of those work well, although i recommend watching mbrantley's
video on setting up LW. in truth, though,
blender does pretty much what i want, and it is also great for
video editing. lastly i've organized my photo collection using
amiphoto and use
warpview for slideshows. some folks prefer
fastview, and there are plenty of others. basically this is a category with tons of options, both classics like photogenics or wildfire 7, and new AOS4 titles.
internetthese days my pegasos2 does a lot of work on the 'net, so i've got a bunch of stuff to use. i use
amirc for IRC, rather than
wookiechat, for stability reasons (i'm on IRC constantly). my main ftp client is
pftp, although some prefer
amiftp. there isn't much choice for newsgroup clients; you can use the 68k ones on aminet, but i'm using
newscoaster, and i recommend it. email is handled ably by
simplemail -- although others like
YAM. my main web browser is
odyssey, although i occasionally still use
OWB 3.32 or
netsurf, the latter having some unique features i like. don't bother with timberwolf. for things like google chat, i use a third-party jabber server and
jabberwocky as the client. let's see... i also use
twinVNC for connecting with my PC, the
rdesktop client for connecting to my wife's PC, and
bigsister for watching webcams. one thing that i used to use before i gave my SAM to another amigan with the
native AAMP stack, which included mysql, apache, and php, all with native amiga GUI admin tools. really, really handy for testing stuff out for intuitionbase.com.
officeproductivity software is something i usually use on my office PC since i need powerpoint, but for home use, i've got plenty of office software that i use on my amigas. i'm quite partial to
amigawriter for personal letters and other word processing needs. clean, simple, and easy-to-use. i'm in the minority on that one, with most of the other guys i know who use AOS4 preferring either finalwriter 97 or wordworth 7. i still use digita organiser, although i usually import it into
aorganiser so i get pop-up reminders. spreadsheets are done either in
staram plan or, if i need to import something from work, i'll fire up
gnumeric and
amicygnix. i also have turbocalc 5 and finalcalc installed on my machines, but i don't use them often. for keeping track of my collections i use finaldata but am in the process of developing an application around
muibase for a retail business i'll be starting soon. it's an amazingly powerful database system. finally i use
hollywood designer for putting together presentations (which powerpoint isn't required), and that's terrific software. worth every penny IMO. oh, and i admit to being a word geek, so i also love
wordnet.
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