Amiga support and maintenance software performs service functions such as formatting media for a specific filesystem, diagnosing failures that occur on formatted media, data recovery after media failure, and installation of new software for the Amiga family of personal computers—as opposed to application software, which performs business, education, and recreation functions.
The Amiga came with some embedded utility programs, but many more were added over time, often by third-party developers and companies.
Original utilities Commodore included utility programs with the operating system. Many of these were original features, which were adopted into other systems:
Installer is a tool for the installation of Amiga software. It features a LISP-like language to handle installations. The Amiga Installer does not support dependencies or track where the installed files are delivered; it simply copies them. AmigaGuide is a hypertext markup scheme and a browser for writing and reading web page-like documents. AmigaGuide files are text files in a simple markup language, which facilitates editing and localization in any ASCII text editor. Commodore developed the AmigaGuide format before the World Wide Web was widely known. Consumers who bought Amiga computers in a store did not receive documentation on how to write AmigaGuide documents.
Utilities borrowed from other systems Update tools: Updater is a utility to keep system and third party files up to date AmiUpdate was developed by Simon Archer to keep installed third-party programs up to date. Grunch is a software center for AmigaOS and MorphOS. MorphUP allows MorphOS users to install and update new third-party software. None of these update systems was widely used by the Amiga community.
Commodities and utilities Amiga places system utilities in two standard directories:
The Utilities directory contains programs like IconEdit. The Commodities directory (volume SYS:Tools/Commodities/ or SYS:Utilities/Commodities under AmigaOS4) contains executable applet-like utilities which enhance system usability, like for example the ScreenBlanker, the default screen saver shipped with AmigaOS. Commodities are usually loaded at system startup. Many require no interaction and do not feature any GUI interface. A system utility called Exchange allows the user to disable, enable, hide, show, and quit Commodities.
Hard disk partitioning AmigaOS features a standard centralized utility to partition and format hard disks, called HDToolBox. MorphOS uses an updated version of the SCSIConfig utility (since MorphOS version 2, HDConfig) implemented by third party vendor Phase5. In spite of the name, "SCSIConfig" possessed a unique feature at the time, which was providing a consistent mechanism to manage all types of disk interfaces, including IDE, irrespective of which interface the disk(s) in question used.
Diagnostic tools AmigaOS diagnostic tools are usually programs which display the current state of Exec and AmigaDOS activities.
Active process explorer: Scout, Ranger System calls and messages: SnoopDOS, Snoopium Memory management: CyberGuard, Enforcer, MemMungWall, TLSFMem by Chris Hodges Virtual memory: GigaMem, VMM Benchmark utilities AmiBench, AIBB Degrading tools: Degrader (which "degrades" modern Amiga systems to performance and hardware equivalents of legacy Amiga models)
Promoting tools Promoter and ForceMonitor are utilities that allow the user to control the resolution of Intuition screens for Amiga programs.
Game loaders WHDLoad is a utility to install legacy Amiga games on a hard disk and load them from Workbench desktop instead of floppies, on which they were often delivered.
jst is an older utility which the developer abandoned in order to concentrate efforts on WHDLoad. Old jstloaders can be read with WHDLoad, and jst itself has some early level of WHDLoad compatibility.
Command line interfaces and text-based shells The original Amiga CLI (Command Line Interface) had some basic editing capabilities, command templates, and other features such as ANSI compatibility and color selection. In AmigaOS 1.3, the program evolved into a complete text-based shell called AmigaShell, with command history and enhanced editing capabilities.
Third-party developers created improved shells because the console-handler standard command line device driver (or "handler" in Amiga technical language) is independent of the command-line interpreter. This program controlled text-based interfaces into Amiga. Console-handler replacements include KingCON, ViNCEd, and Conman.
Some well-known shells from other platforms were ported to Amiga. These included bash (Bourne Again SHell), CSH (C Shell), and ZSH (Z shell). The shells taken from Unix and Linux were adapted into Amiga and improved with its peculiar capabilities and functions.
The MorphOS Shell is an example of Z shell mixed with the KingCON console handler. It originated as a Unix-like shell and is provided with all the features expected from such a component: AmigaDOS commands (more than 100 commands, most of which are Unix-like), local and global variables, command substitution, command redirection, named and unnamed pipes, history, programmable menus, multiple shells in a window, ANSI compatibility, color selection, and so on. It also includes all the necessary commands for scripting.
Amiga WIMP GUI interfaces Starting from the original Amiga WIMP standard desktop, Workbench, Amiga interfaces were enhanced by third-party developers. Amiga users are free to replace the original Workbench interface with Scalos and Directory Opus. The standard GUI toolkit, called Intuition, was enhanced in OS2.x with the introduction of GadTools; and third parties created their own toolkits such as Magic User Interface (MUI) (the standard on MorphOS systems) and ClassAct, which evolved into ReAction GUI (the standard GUI on AmigaOS 4.0).
Amiga Advanced Graphics Systems
Many users have added advanced graphics drivers to their Amiga. This lets the AmigaOS handle high resolution graphics, enhanced with millions of colors. Standard GUI interfaces with this capability are CyberGraphX, EGS, and Picasso96.
Graphical engines Graphical libraries available on the Amiga include: Warp3D, a 3D graphic engine for Amiga TinyGL (MorphOS) and MiniGL (AmigaOS), implementations of subsets of the OpenGL graphics engine X11, also available through the Amiga versions of Cygnix Cairo Vector Library, available on AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS SSA (Super Smooth Animation), a proprietary system for playback at 50 Hz or 60 Hz. proDAD Adorage was the first product to use this. GTK. On Amiga it is being developed as a GTK_MUI wrapper, to map any existing graphical features of GTK to the standard Magic User Interface (MUI) graphic user interface system.
All Amiga systems can also support the SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) cross-platform, multimedia, and free software libraries written in C which creates an abstraction over various platforms' graphics, sound, and input APIs, allowing a developer to write a computer game or other multimedia application once and run it on many operating systems.
PostScript Amiga supports PostScript through Ghostscript and SaxonScript (included with Saxon Publisher). Ghostview is the foremost used graphical GUI for GhostScript on the Amiga.
Since AmigaOS 2.1, in the Prefs (Preferences) system directory, there is a printer preferences program called PrinterPS, which allows the use of PostScript printers on the Amiga.
TrueType fonts, color and anim fonts Original Amiga outline fonts (also called vector fonts) were Agfa Compugraphic fonts available since AmigaOS 2.0 with the standard utility Fountain (later called IntelliFont) from Commodore. Third-party developers added support for TrueType fonts using various libraries, such as TrueType Library I and II, and LibFreeType library.
The standard diskfont.library also supported bitmap multicolour fonts (ColorFonts), such as the commercial Kara Fonts, or even animated fonts also originally created by Kara Computer Graphics.
Font designer software Commodore provided a bitmap font editor called FED. Personal Fonts Maker was the most widely used Amiga software to create bitmap fonts, while TypeSmith v.2.5b was the de facto standard utility to create outline fonts.
File management
Backup and recovery In the first Amiga OS releases, Commodore included a standard floppy disk recovery utility called DiskDoctor. Its purpose was to recover files from mangled floppy disks. Unfortunately, this utility worked only with AmigaDOS standard disks. A major fault was that it did not save the recovered data on different disks, rather it saved the info on the original and performed its operations directly on the original. It wrote on original disks and destroyed non-AmigaDOS disks (mainly autobooting games) by overwriting their bootblock. DiskDoctor renamed recovered disks to "Lazarus" (after the resurrected man in the New Testament).
These features were undocumented and led to an Amiga urban legend that there was a computer virus nicknamed the Lazarus Virus,DiskDoctor in Amiga Glossary on AmigaHistory Site whose final purpose was to make disks unreadable and renaming it with that name. Third-party developers released data recovery programs such as DiskSalv, which was more often used to validate Amiga filesystems on hard disk partitions.
Other Amiga disk repair and backup tools included: Floppy only: Disk Mechanic, Disk Repair, Dr. Ami Floppy and hard drive: Ami-Back Tools, Ami-Filesafe Pro, Quarterback Tools, Amiga Tools DeLuxe, Diavolo Backup Smart File System (SFS): SFS Recover Tool, SFSDoctor, SFSCheck 2, SFSResize 1.0
Disk copiers During the 8 bit and 16/32 bit era, copying software was not considered illegal in many countries, and piracy was not perceived as a crime by most users of home computers (usually young people). Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum software was often copied using cassette decks, while IBM PC, Atari, and Amiga software was typically copied using special programs called disk copiers, both for speed and because especially self-booting floppies often used custom formats or hacks that could not be faithfully reproduced through file-by-file copying. Disk copiers were thus engineered to copy any floppy disk surface byte by byte, often using special, efficient, and advanced techniques of programming and "Disk Track driving" to maintain Floppy Disk read/write head alignment.
In the early days of the Amiga platform, about 16 disk copiers were created in a short amount of time (1985–1989) that enabled copying Amiga floppy disks, including Nibbler, QuickNibble, ZCopier, XCopy/Cachet, FastCopier, Disk Avenger, Tetra Copy (which enabled the user to play Tetris while copying disks), Cyclone, Maverick, D-Copy, Safe II, PowerCopier, Quick Copier, Marauder II (styled as "Marauder //"), Rattle Copy, and BurstNibble.
The legality of such programs was challenged in later years, in countries culturally close to the U.S., via PR campaigns, lobbying and legislation, but in their heyday, disk copiers (like Marauder, X-Copy, and Nibbler) were sold as boxed copies complete with instructions, warranty, and EULAs, like other productivity software.
There were also copying solutions that included both hardware and software, like Super Card Ami II and Syncro Express I/II/III.
DFC5 could only copy standard AmigaOS formatted disks for backup purposes; however, it multitasked inside of the Amiga Workbench GUI.