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1stGuide
1stGuide is a shareware file viewer, programmed by Guido Vollbeding, and has been a firm favourite on the Atari scene since the eighties. Most of the popular image, audio, resource and text files are supported with current development concentrated on the emerging JPEG, MPEG and PNG formats.
1stGuide is compact, AV protocol compatible, runs on any TOS (Atari) compatible platform, and can be installed as a desktop accessory or program.
Unrecognised filetypes are displayed in ASCII format, optionally in hex dump format and also offers the ability to link files together to form a hypertext.
1stGuide runs as a program or desktop accessory and is capable of viewing/playing the following standard file formats in GEM windows on all Atari machines, all system configurations, in all screen resolutions and colour depths (1 Bit Monochrome up to 32 Bit TrueColor):
- IMG
GEM-(X/T)-Image picture files, Level-1/2/3 (1 Bit Monochrome up to 12 Bit RGB XIMG Colormap, RGB-TrueColor/Gray/Alpha TIMG direct pixel) - IFF
Interchange File Format: ILBM - Interleaved Bitmaps (1 Bit Monochrome up to 12 Bit RGB Colormap) - GEM
GEM-Metafiles (including bezier curves with apropriate VDI, e.g. NVDI >= 2.12) - RSC
GEM Resource files (simple up to 64 K and extended > 64 K) - PNG
Portable Network Graphics, all 'flavours' according to the current specification - JPG
- JPE
- JPEG
Joint Photographic Experts Group - pictures:BR> JPEG/JFIF-Standard (24 Bit TrueColor, 8 Bit Gray), Baseline/Multiscan/Progressive Support - MPG
- MPE
- MPEG
Moving Picture Experts Group - movies:
MPEG-1-Video-Standard (24 Bit TrueColor)
MPEG-1-System (Video+Audio interleaved) - SAM
- SND
- AVR
Sound-Sample files (8 Bit Mono only at the moment) - DOC
- OUT
- *
Textfiles (including attributes)
Furthermore, hypertext-like links can be defined between files which can be used to create large information systems for interactive use with 1stGuide.
Pressing [Control]+A (or holding down the right mouse key by clicking on the 1stGuide entry in the Desktop accessory menu) displays the (German) configuration dialog where preferences can be set.
Registration benefits include:
- Key to remove opening shareware reminder screen
- Master disk containing the latest version and ancillary files
- A nice warm feeling knowing you've supported ongoing 1stGuide development!
Other reading
- Atari World #11//p83: Public Arena review of 01/96 release, rated 8/10
- Atari World #6/October 1995/p85: Public Arena review, rated 6/10