User avatar
leighb2282

Posted Wed Jan 24, 2018 12:16 pm

Ah! My misunderstanding!

And yeah, probably like yourself every place that has an archive of fish disks always seem to have .lha even for full disk contents.

Were the original fish disks back in the day bootable on their own or were you expected to boot workbench first before inserting the fish disk? was there some sort of menu system if they were bootable?

intric8 wrote:Leigh:
I would be against links to Aminet
That's not what I meant I would do. I would host everything here. What I meant was if you did a search for an individual program's file name on Aminet, you could find that one file. It was more a revelation that the programs had been broken down to their individual parts.

I'd represent everything as packages and disks as shown in the mocks. I'm just saying it would be very easy to make each file name (in the mock for "Disk page" as a red link to the file itself - here - in addition to the entire disk zipped up, which you could download from the top of the page as well.
Freds disks, ordered by disk and all programs presented in .lha format if you were to provide links to individual programs this might be a good resource to use as it would preserve links to the correct disk/version of an app.
That's what I'm trying to say, except that I would host them here and not hot-link to external sites. But I'd also host the original Zipped up packages of all of the original disks. ADFs would be ideal, but I don't think I have an easy means to do that (nor has anyone else ever tried to do that... it would take a ton of work - more than I can offer right now).

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Wed Jan 24, 2018 12:48 pm

Were the original fish disks back in the day bootable on their own or were you expected to boot workbench first before inserting the fish disk?
No, they weren't bootable. You were expected to launch Workbench and go from there. To that end, a lot of the programs didn't even have icons - you had to either make icons for them or just run them straight from the shell.

User avatar
leighb2282

Posted Wed Jan 24, 2018 11:02 pm

intric8 wrote:
Were the original fish disks back in the day bootable on their own or were you expected to boot workbench first before inserting the fish disk?
No, they weren't bootable. You were expected to launch Workbench and go from there. To that end, a lot of the programs didn't even have icons - you had to either make icons for them or just run them straight from the shell.
Apologies for going on a slight tangent here, but how WOULD you create icons for them so you could click on the included programs in workbench?

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Thu Jan 25, 2018 11:17 am

I think these days most people use 3rd-party tools for the classic OSes.

I let a program do it all for me. Specifically, I'll launch Directory Opus, which has a "Add Icon" button. I browse to the drawer that has all of my un-iconed programs - like a fred fish disk. By default if you don't have icons for those programs WB won't display them. You'd have to go to the shell to launch them. But in DOpus, you can easily browse to the drawer and just click on the program to highlight it. Then click the "Add Icon" button. It'll create the 'programName.info' icon for you. The next time you open the drawer in WB, you should see a generic icon for your program that you can double click to launch.

User avatar
Zippy Zapp
CA, USA

Posted Thu Jan 25, 2018 10:33 pm

+1 for DOpus. If you are using 2.0+ you can also show all icons from the menu. This will show all the files on the disk with generic icons. A hammer for an executable, etc.

User avatar
A1-X1000
Toronto, Canada

Posted Tue Apr 05, 2022 2:53 pm

@ intric8

would be awesome to have ALL the Fish disks available in o :shock: :boing: ne place...nowadays ADF's of the disks would be the way to go though that's ALOT of disk to ADF :shock: :boing: <3

User avatar
iljitsch

Posted Fri Apr 22, 2022 5:04 am

What I would like:

A browsable archive of all the Fish Disks. So no ADF files that require extra time and software to open, but just everything there so you can go through it from the Workbench or in your favorite file browser. (I still use ClickDOS_II!) Make sure that each directory opens in an appropriate view: icons, all files as default icons, all files as a list.

A big index that lets you browse based on Fish Disk number as well as program name.

And also: on non-Amiga systems. So convert the text files and AmigaGuide files to something that modern systems can open easily.

Ideally, this should all fit on a CD so Amigas with a CD drive can read everything natively.

1000 880k floppies would seem to be more than what fits on a 700 MB CD, but I assume not all disks were 100% full. Still, with the converted text and AmigaGuide files and indexes, that would probably be a tight fit. Perhaps in a few cases ZIPing some files (not too onerous on the Amiga, the default on onder systems) would help.

I guess if the pandemic comes back and I'm looking for a new lockdown project this would be a nice juicy one.

BTW, too bad that I got rid of all my Fish CDs.

User avatar
dddaaannn

Posted Sat Apr 23, 2022 11:32 pm

@iljitsch It sounds like you would enjoy (or previously owned?) the Gold Fish CD-ROMs, a two-disc CD set of all of the Fred Fish discs. ISOs on Archive.org: https://archive.org/details/gold-fish-april-1994-disc-2

Aminet has contents listings and documentation:

http://aminet.net/package/disk/cdrom/GoldFish-Apr94
http://de6.aminet.net/docs/rview/GoldFish.txt

You might also enjoy King Fisher, an Amiga Fred Fish database app.

(If someone knows more official links for these, please post. I have local copies and had to search for their Internet homes.)

User avatar
Solex68

Posted Tue Jun 28, 2022 6:51 am

@intric8 - You've got my vote.
Fred Fish Disks were the best public domain disks available when I was a kid. I used to download them and sell them for a $1 each (without a label) at my local computer group in So Cal.

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Tue Jun 28, 2022 8:59 am

Welcome, Solex68!

Where in SoCal are you from? I was born in San Pedro (LA), and lived in Palos Verdes, Hollywood, Arcadia and in
west LA off of Sunset Blvd a bit south of the Laemmle Royal theatre on Barry Ave.





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