Using your Amiga Active CD

Moving around your AACD

The Amiga Active CD has been designed to be as intuitive as possible. Generally you simply click on whatever interests you. If you watch the status bar near the top of the window you will see various messages. These relate to whatever is under the mouse pointer at the time, a sort of online help feature. Whenever some text is highlighted and underlined like this, you can click on it to move to another page, or hold the mouse over it to see a message.

You can quickly jump to any section of the Amiga Active CD using the buttons on the left of the screen. The large AA button in the top left corner will always return you to the Welcome page.

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Getting started

Welcome It is best if you start the CD by running the Welcome icon in the main CD window. This ensures that any files or settings needed by the CD are available. The first time you run this it will copy a couple of files to your hard drive. Nothing is added to your startup, there are no mysterious programs running in the background. This is done to make it easier to use the CD next time. If you just want to run a single program, or SearchCDs for a file, you don't want to have to run Welcome load up these pages to do it. Once you've run Welcome once, the SearchCDs and Setup programs will work without needing it again.
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NewIcons and GlowIcons

The layout of the CD drawers is based on the NewIcons system, and using the GlowIcons style of icons. We have optimised the icons for fast loading and minimum memory usage, by using very basic standard images, the standard images from Workbench 3.1. This gives a faster display, with lower memory usage, at the expense of a less colourful display for those not running NewIcons.

If you do not have NewIcons running when you start Welcome, you will be given the option of running it. This is not absolutely necessary, but you will not see your Amiga Active CD as intended if you do not. Agreeing to run NewIcons when the requester appears will only start it the one time. nothing will be changed on your system, no files will be copied, and NewIcons will no longer be running after your next reboot.

If you wish to keep the NewIcons display permanently, you can find all you need to install it in the Graphics/Resources drawer.

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Your Amiga, your choice

AACDprefs Rather than us deciding which programs to put in the tooltypes of the various icons, we have given the choice to you. Each icon uses AACDfile as its default tool, this uses your choice of viewer or player for each type of file. The default setup should work for everyone, but you can change to your favourite picture viewers and mod players by running AACDprefs.

Once you have run AACDprefs and saved the settings, they will be used whenever you double-click an icon from the CD, even after copying it to your hard drive. Directory Opus users will already be familiar with the idea of filetypes and will probably have theirs set up. To save having to do it again for AACDfile, you can easily set AACDprefs to use your Directory Opus settings.

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Finding files on the CD

SearchCDs Each Amiga Active CD contains well over 30,000 files, often over 40,000. Finding the one you want can be a long job, especially when you've got several CDs to check.

The SearchCDs program will quickly scan the index files of Amiga Active and Aminet CDs to find the file you want in a few seconds. It doesn't stop at telling you where the file is. When searching the Amiga Active CDs, you can jump straight to the drawer containing your chosen files.

Aminet CDs contain most material in compressed LhA archives. SearchCDs will not only find the archive, but extract the files for you too.

SearchCDs can also check the index files for the full online Aminet archive. The results include links to download the file, so you can do your searching offline and only dial in when you have found what you want.

Quick Search, only available if you have the full version of AWeb, will find files on the current CD without needing to start any other program. Simply type the name of the file in the string gadget at the top of the main window.

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Removing the CD

RemoveCD We hope that the only reason you'll want to remove AACD09 from your drive is that you've just got the next Amiga Active CD, but there are times you'll need to take it out of the drive.

While it won't do any harm to just remove the CD, you will probably notice that the AACD icon remains on your Workbench. This is the way Workbench works. To avoid this, double-click the RemoveCD icon before ejecting the CD. This will even eject the CD for you if you're feeling particularly lazy and your CDROM drive supports it (most do).
Warning! Some CD drives can have unpredictable side-effects when using software eject. We implemented this to make life easier for the majority of readers, but if it causes you any problems, use manual eject instead.

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Setting up the CD automatically

Amiga Active CDs now have the option of automatically initialising themselves.

By installing the autorun program in your WBStartup drawer, your Amiga can detect when an Amiga Active CD in inserted and automatically run the relevant parts of the Welcome script.

The first time you Autorun your Amiga Active CD, you will see a requester asking if you want to load these pages too, or just initialise the CD. You can see this requester each time or make a permanent choice. This behaviour can also be controlled from AACDprefs.

Installing Autorun

Click the "Install Autorun" button to install Autorun to your WBStartup drawer. It will not overwrite any existing program in there.

Autorun works transparently in the background, setting up your Amiga Active CD when it is inserted into your CD drive. If, for any reason, you want to insert an Amiga Active CD without Autorun setting it up, hold down either Shift key for three seconds after inserting the disc.

Autorun is a commodity, it can be disabled or quit from the Workbench Commodities Exchange program. For more information about the Autorun program, see Autorun.guide. If you want to remove Autorun permanently, either delete it from WBStartup of click the button below.

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Opus filetype for Amiga Active CDs

This is a Magellan filetype that adds entries to the popup menu of any AACD.

The extra options are:

  • Welcome
  • Search CD
  • AACD Prefs
  • Initialise CD (without loading welcome page)
  • Remove CD
This means that Opus users can now get straight into the AACDs without opening any listers to select icons.

Here is more information and installation details.

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What's new?

When you use a new Amiga Active CD for the first time, you'll see a "Newsflash" telling you about any changes to the CD.It only appears the first time you use that CD. Click on this link to see it again.

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