Paul Kienitz’s Amiga freeware, including Q-Blue

The download links below are various pieces of freely redistributable software that I wrote for the Amiga computer from 1988 to about 1995. The biggest program, Q-Blue, was originally shareware with a registration price of $20 (US) but due to declining interest it has now been released as freeware. Most other archives include source code. In most cases AmigaDOS 1.x is not supported, but in some cases there may be an older version that works with that system. If you are wondering about 1.x support for a given program, ask — I do feel like, where any interest exists, it might be good to restore 1.x support, as probably the majority of remaining Amigas still run it. In fact... I think I might start working on re-1.x-ifying several of these. I could call the effort Project One.

If you actually use any of the programs on this page, I’d appreciate hearing about it. Send any feedback to paul@paulkienitz.net.

Q-Blue is an offline BBS mail reader that supports QWK and Blue Wave packet formats. To download, or for more information, go to the Q-Blue page.

Miner is a clone of the Windows game Minesweeper. Though the rules are, at bottom, the same, there are slight differences that will probably let you get a faster score with this game than with the original Windows version. click Here to download Miner-6.lha (124k).

Tripppin is a Workbench version of a board game called Trippples^® (published by Aladdin), in which the computer can play against you using a tree lookahead strategy. You can adjust how far ahead it looks, for an easier or tougher game, or play another human. Click Here to download Tripppin-4.lha (37k).

Dr is a CLI command for listing directories. It has lots of powerful options which can do things like carry out a command on each file which matches a complex set of criteria, and it is highly optimized for speed, which is important given the slow nature of directory scanning in the standard Amiga filesystems. By default, .info files (icons) are hidden, to reduce clutter; their presence is indicated by listing files with icons in an alternate color. It solidly outperforms competing programs such as NewList in both speed and versatility. Click Here to download Dr-20.lha (61k).

New! Click here to read the Dr user manual with HTML formatting.

(I was going to offer Dr 1.6 here also, for those who are still running AmigaDOS 1.2 or 1.3, but unfortunately it has been lost. I was sure I had saved a copy of that release, or that it would be online somewhere, but nope. Dr 1.6 had most of 2.0’s features, and also had fastscan.library, which overcame the severe performance drawbacks of the 1.x filesystem for searching directories, sometimes achieving speed increases of an order of magnitude over naive algorithms.)

Also new:
Move is a CLI command for moving and renaming files. It comes in two versions named “Move” and “Name”, with the former being more optimized for moving and the latter for renaming, but each able to do the other’s job with a command line switch. The “Name” version is particularly helpful because it lets you specify the new name or location relative to the directory that the target file is in, rather than your current directory, which can save repetitive typing. It can also relabel disk volumes. This was the first Amiga utility I started coding but the last one to be finished; it sat half-done for decades, good enough to be useful but not good enough to release, until now. Click Here to download Move13.lha (28k).

And for those interested in fiddling directly with the Amiga’s hardware,
BlitLife is a graphical app which plays Life, the classic cellular automaton created by John Horton Conway. This is purely a technical exercise, because what it does is implement the Life growth algorithm entirely by applying bulk logical operations to the playing field with the Amiga’s blitter, controlling it by hardware pokes. The calculation takes place inside the graphics bitplane that is displayed onscreen, along with some buffer planes. Click here to download BlitLife.lha (3k).

All of those are also available on Github, along with some non-Amiga stuff such as Lugi.

The following programs are all just small utilities... I’ve created dozens over the years, but these are the ones most likely to be useful to others:

FRX is an alternate version of the RX command, for launching ARexx scripts. The difference is that it treats its command line differently, allowing you to specify an AmigaDOS-style command template for whatever arguments your Rexx script takes. It also handles quoted strings with spaces in them properly. Any serious Rexxist could find this a necessary enhancement. UPDATE: added complex usage example Compile.rexx to the archive; it was supposed to be there all along. FRX-4.lha

RexxWatch monitors what other programs are doing with an ARexx port. It lists every command or other message sent to a given port name. This can be handy for debugging ARexx scripts that try to control another application. And FindPortWatch reports every incidence of a program trying to look up a message port (including an ARexx port) by name; if you can’t figure out the name of the ARexx port that needs watching, this might find it for you. RxWatch2.lha

CLImax opens a CLI console on a custom screen with no borders. Handy for those who do a lot of CLIing and find the usual window gets in the way a lot on the Workbench, or want the maximum possible width. UPDATE: added helper utility FixCLI to the archive; it was supposed to be there all along. CLImax9.lha

Hear is a CLI command that plays an 8SVX or raw audio sample. Various options control channels, repetition, pitch change, etc. Can play multiple sounds in fixed or random order, pick a single random sample out of a directory to surprise you, etc. Hear-1.lha

CenterScreen causes programs that open non-overscanned custom screens on overscanned systems to make those screens look nicer by centering them instead of jamming them all the way to the left. It can also be used to force noninterlaced screens to use a smaller default font than the rest of the system, which helps with some naive programs that don’t expect you to use a larger system default font. CentrScr.lzh

ibm keymap — for programs that can use an alternate keymap, and which you might use with the IBM or MS-DOS character set instead of the ANSI/ISO character set normally used by the Amiga, this keymap makes it easier to type alternate characters, such as umlauted letters, in a way compatible with the character set. Terminus by Jack Radigan is an example of a program that can make valuable use of this keymap. ibm-kmap.lha

CardMemLater is a thingy for owners of Amiga 1200s with 16 bit wide PCMCIA memory cards. It causes “fast” ram to be allocated after chip ram, rather than before, because in this case it’s slower than chip ram. CardLater2.lha

In addition to my own independent software, I was also a principal maintainer of Zip and UnZip for the Amiga. The Info-ZIP Group provides free software to compress and decompress PKZIP-compatible file archives on a very wide variety of computer platforms. As a member of the group, I have also contributed to the project in non-Amiga areas, particularly the Windows version. The group’s main web page provides access to source code and executables for different platforms.

Click Here to download unz550xA.lha (138k), UnZip for the Amiga in LHA form. (Released February 22, 2002. UnZip 6.0 finally came out in 2009 but is not yet supported.)

Or, Click Here to download unz550xA.ami (163k), the same program in self-extracting form. (CD to the directory where you want to unpack it and enter “unz550xA.ami” as a command at the CLI prompt.)

Once you have UnZip so you can unpack it, Click Here to download zcr23xA.zip (158k), the Zip compressor for the Amiga. (Release 2.3 dates back to November 29, 1999! Zipi 3.0 came out in 2008 but is not yet supported.) This release supports encryption, which at one time had to be omitted from the build due to overeager regulation of “munitions”.

Another outdated obstruction besides the old encryption law was the bogus patent on LZW compression held by Unisys, an outfit which behaved like assholes in trying to stop everyone from using compression algorithms that have been treated as public domain for decades, and are an integral part of some widely used file formats such as GIF, without paying them first... even if your software is free! Fortunately the patent is now expired, but what this means is that the version of UnZip available here (which predated the expiration) cannot decompress “shrunk” archives created by PKZip 1.1 or Zip 1.1, and to decompress them you need to either get an old version or a PKWare version, or recompile UnZip yourself with unshrink support activated. (The support is still there in the source code.)

This version of UnZip also no longer supports "reduced" archives, because the unreduce code is the one piece of source that violates the stringent requirements for “free software” promulgated by people like the Free Software Foundation (the GNU bunch). Nobody used “reduce” anyway. If for some reason you want it, the unreduce source is available separately from Info-ZIP’s site.

The final compatibility issue is with the “deflate64” compression recently added to the Zip format by PKWare, the company that originally developed the Zip format. Support for deflate64 decompression apparently works dependably, but may not have been sufficiently tested yet at the time these builds were made official.

I have looked at making Zip 3 and UnZip 6 available here, these being the final versions that the Info-ZIP Group produced before going on hiatus. They support a set of much more modern compression algorithms than those in the classic Zip versions, including PPMa, LZMA, BZip2, and WavPack... but unfortunately those algorithms can’t be included in an Amiga build, because they are designed for 64 bit processors with lots of memory. These new versions also can support files bigger than 2 GB, but again this won’t work on an Amiga. The versions I can make lack support for all of these. The new versions also support UTF8 filenames, but the Amiga’s character set was already fully supported. If I released Zip 3 and UnZip 6 here, the gains would be:

Except if you’re enquiring specifically about an issue with using them on the Amiga, if you have any trouble with Zip or UnZip or any feedback, report it to the Info-ZIP Group with this web form, not to me personally.

Another collaborative project is Wanderer, a character-mode Unix game by Steven Shipway, which was ported to use Amiga graphics and sound by Alan Bland. I saw ways to improve the port, so I made a new version, called 2.2P. It’s a puzzle game where you move around a map, causing various consequences which make it difficult to leave. Click Here to download Wanderer22P.lha (235k), including source code.

And finally, this page includes my modified version of the hairy hackers’ text editor, Uedit by the late Rick Stiles. Mostly I just cleaned up bugs, rather than adding new features, but the archive also contains many of my new commands which you can compile and use inside the editor. THIS FILE IS NOT VERY USEFUL UNLESS YOU ALREADY HAVE UEDIT 4. Click Here to download Uedit4K2.lha (146k), my revised version, with command language files and source code diffs.

You can now download the original Uedit 4 release here. It is split into three archives, because that is how it was released, and there are some filenames that don’t combine smoothly into a single archive. The files are:

I’ve also worked a bit on UAE, the emulator for simulating an Amiga under another system such as Windows or various Unices, but I don’t think any of my code is currently in the distributed version... I think the advantages of AmigaDOS are illustrated nicely by the fact that when I ran UAE on a 200 MHz K6 with Matrox Millenium II video, AmigaDOS’s user interface was often faster and more responsive running in an emulator, with all the speed penalty that any emulator entails, than Windows 95 was running natively. And as for NT... when I first put NT4 on my machine at work I had to add another 64 megs of ram just to stop getting delays of up to ten seconds between clicking on a menu and having it pop up, due to all the disk thrashing it had to do first. AmigaDOS never ran that poorly on even the most basic possible hardware, with only half a meg of ram.

(I then bought a 2000 MHz Pentium 4 with 512 megs of ram, and for the first time in my life I saw Windows 2000 run without godawful lagging. That’s how much computer it took. At this speed, the Amiga emulator became roughly as fast as my real Amiga 3000 was before it died. Nowadays, with the emulator offering JIT compilation and running on a modern processor, AmigaDOS becomes impossibly fast, booting in like two seconds.)

Amiga Software by Paul Kienitz