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From: john13@garfield.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Hidden Multitasking?
Message-ID: <3637@garfield.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 10-May-87 19:41:40 EDT
Article-I.D.: garfield.3637
Posted: Sun May 10 19:41:40 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 13-May-87 01:38:17 EDT
Organization: CS Dept., Memorial U. of Newfoundland, St. John's
Lines: 22
Keywords: Printmaster

One of the things to consider when buying any piece of Amiga software is,
of course, how well it supports multitasking. A program that doesn't may
be no more useful than a version running on any other model of computer.
I just learned (by accident) that PrintMaster, which has gotten bad press
for not being multitasking, in fact does not take over your machine - just
the Workbench screen. It doesn't have any problem letting you go about your
business on another screen, and it would be only a single line in C to write
a utility to flip the CLI window to the front and so be able to use that.

I'm wondering how many other programs that seem to take over the Amiga actually
do; some require you to boot from their disk, some autoboot into the program
(a bad idea I feel), and some Guru if anything else at all is run first. But
with a bit of tinkering, it's almost always possible to get around these
requirements. I can still remember when DPaint was slammed for being too
unfriendly to multitasking...the only caveat for DP II seems to be "don't
be cd'ed into ram when you run, because the copy-protection will Guru when
it tries to access the ram disk".

Are there any other programs which don't at first glance appear to let you
multitask which can be coerced into it?

John