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Amiga Workbench 2.0. Workbench 2.0 was released with the launch of the Amiga 3000 in 1990. Until AmigaOS 2.0 there was no unified look and feel design standard and application developers had to write their own widgets (both buttons and menus) if they wished to enhance the already-meager selection of standard basic widgets provided by Intuition
Clever programming (a library named Janus, after the two-faced Roman god of doorways) made it possible to run PC software in an Amiga window without use of emulation. At the introduction of the Sidecar the crowd was stunned to see the MS-DOS version of Microsoft Flight Simulator running at full speed in an Amiga window on the Workbench.
The Workbench software and many other programs and games are also copyrighted and illegal to download, although there are a number of recognized sites which offer free legal downloads of Amiga games. The Amiga Forever [2] emulation package offers legal copies of Kickstart, Workbench and various games.
Another non-official name was "Workbench", from the name of the Amiga desktop environment, which was included on a floppy disk named "Amiga Workbench". [2] Version 3.1 of the Amiga operating system was the first version to be officially referred to as "Amiga OS" (with a space between "Amiga" and "OS") [3] [4] by Commodore.
In 1990, AmigaDOS 2.0 was released. The interface of the Workbench GUI was changed to a fake 3D aspect using gray shades. For the first time, Commodore introduced a style guide for developers on AmigaOS; because of this, the majority of Amiga software developed for AmigaDOS 2.0 had a standardized GUI that improved usability.
An unusual feature of AmigaOS is the use of multiple screens shown on the same display. Each screen may have a different video resolution or color depth. AmigaOS 2.0 added support for public screens, allowing applications to open windows on other applications' screens. Prior to AmigaOS 2.0, only the Workbench screen was shared. [11]
Also created on Amiga, were the multimedia interactive TV non-immersive Virtual reality exploring software Mandala from Vivid Group Inc., [b] and the Virtuality System Virtuality 1000 CS 3D VRML all-immersive simulator from W-Industries (then Virtuality Inc.), [b] for game entertainment in big arcade installations and theme parks, based on A3000.
Since Workbench 2.1 an Amiga Guide system for O.S. inline help files and reading manuals with hypertext formatting elements was launched in AmigaOS and based on a viewer called simply "AmigaGuide" and it has been included as standard feature on the Amiga system.