Amazingly, New Commercial Amiga Games are Under Development 53
Mike Bouma (Slashdot reader #85,252) writes: Pixelglass Games and BitBeamCannon are working on new commercial Amiga games. Metro Siege is a 2-player beat 'em up for the Amiga 500 with 1 MB of Ram. You can watch a teaser trailer here. Alarcity is a shoot 'em up for the Amiga 1200 and Amiga CD32. You can watch an earlier campaign trailer here.
If i.e. your classic Amiga broke down there's good news for you. The Amiga 500 mini (Essex Retro Gamer overview) is set to release in early 2022 It will be able to play Amiga 500, Amiga 600 and Amiga 1200 games in WHDLoad format. It's available for pre-order at Amazon.com and local shops worldwide.
If i.e. your classic Amiga broke down there's good news for you. The Amiga 500 mini (Essex Retro Gamer overview) is set to release in early 2022 It will be able to play Amiga 500, Amiga 600 and Amiga 1200 games in WHDLoad format. It's available for pre-order at Amazon.com and local shops worldwide.
Re:all 3 users are happy (Score:5, Informative)
There is still a decent Amiga community out there, lots of people doing interesting things.
The Amiga was one of the first affordable home computers that was powerful enough to do development on. Prior to that in the 8 bit age games were often developed on more powerful machines, compiled and then loaded onto the target machine for testing. While it was possible to do development on the machines themselves, lack of memory was a major issue, as well as lack of decent debugging tools.
Now we have even better tools for the Amiga. The WinUAE emulator has a very powerful debug mode that allows you to see how all the DMA slots are being allocated, something that was almost impossible back in the day.
Re:all 3 users are happy (Score:4, Informative)
There is still a decent Amiga community out there, lots of people doing interesting things.
The Amiga was one of the first affordable home computers that was powerful enough to do development on. Prior to that in the 8 bit age games were often developed on more powerful machines, compiled and then loaded onto the target machine for testing.
I can assure you that we used to compile on other machines for the Amiga, too.
Rebooting and Amiga all day long and waiting for it to boot off a hard drive was no joke. Amiga hard drives were a complete pain in the ass.
(unlike Atari ST drives - the ST had a SCSI port on the back. You just hooked them up and they booted in seconds. We actually used to use Atari STs to edit/compile Amiga games).
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I had an A2000 with a 20MB SCSI hard drive. 10MB allocated to the Amiga and 10MB allocated to the bridge board.
Still a bit slow to boot but *much* faster than booting off the 3.5" floppy drives.
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*much* faster than booting off the 3.5" floppy drives.
No arguments there. ;-)
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Many Amiga developers did not use hard drives. They use large RAM disks instead. As long as you didn't power down it was viable. I know some who honestly felt that the same amount of cash spent on extra RAM was a better deal than getting a first hard drive. At the time of the Amiga 1000, the PCs just were crap in comparison; you could compile on them but it was slow and clunk.
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Many Amiga developers did not use hard drives. They use large RAM disks instead. As long as you didn't power down it was viable. I know some who honestly felt that the same amount of cash spent on extra RAM was a better deal than getting a first hard drive. At the time of the Amiga 1000, the PCs just were crap in comparison; you could compile on them but it was slow and clunk.
True.
You still had to start the boot process going with a floppy disk though.
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I had a 4 MB (IIRC) external RAM unit with parts of it set aside as RAM disk that was recoverable after a crash. The first startup for a session copied lots of stuff from the HD onto the RAM disk and took some time, but subsequent boots booted mostly from the RAM disk. It made development bearable. That and a good SEKA derivative. :)
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Rebooting and Amiga all day long and waiting for it to boot off a hard drive was no joke. Amiga hard drives were a complete pain in the ass.
(unlike Atari ST drives - the ST had a SCSI port on the back. You just hooked them up and they booted in seconds. We actually used to use Atari STs to edit/compile Amiga games).
Once again we see that developers are not necessarily IT guys.
SCSI was the dominant interface standard for Amiga hard drives during the platform's lifespan. Some later Amigas had onboard IDE and they booted plenty fast as well. Some early Amigas had other standards which were problematic. For example in my A2000 I actually had an MFM disk (it was an official early controller with both ST-506 and SCSI interfaces) and the controller wouldn't boot from MFM so I had to boot from floppy, load the HDD driver, the
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There is still a decent Amiga community out there, lots of people doing interesting things.
Yep.
As a game developer of the Amiga era I can say I'm really impressed by (eg.) this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Tinyus is rather exceptional, isn't it? Written in C too. GCC produces very good 68k code these days.
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I believe you need a fancy Amiga to run it smoothly, but, yes, it's quite a feat of programming for Amiga hardware.
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There is some slowdown on an A500 with 1 meg RAM, but it's not too bad. A base A1200 has almost none.
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There is still a decent Amiga community out there, lots of people doing interesting things.
Yep.
As a game developer of the Amiga era I can say I'm really impressed by (eg.) this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
You should look at Dread, That is likely THE most impressive Amiga game in recent history... https://www.youtube.com/user/k... [youtube.com]
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Don't underestimate that, pixel-art games are actually selling pretty well, most of them with graphics that are even worse than what an A500 can achieve. Yes, you can't chage 60+ bucks for them, but that's usually not even remotely necessary to make them break even.
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Finally a use for RPGMaker. :-)
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soon to be 4 motherfucker!
kickstart rev's workbench rev's? (Score:2)
kickstart rev's workbench rev's?
Another emulator board in a fancy plastic case (Score:2)
..and right there in the product description "Side-load your own games via USB stick". Yeah, I'm sure the Amiga originally had USB. /s
It's really a shame every single one of these retro gaming revival devices end up just being some off-the-shelf ARM hardware running an emulator. Save yourself the $140 and just download RetroArch, I guess.
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Many Amiga enthusiasts these days have a GoTek USB Floppy Emulator installed in their real Amigas instead of the original floppy drisk drive. Those take USB sticks instead of floppy disks.
Floppies can be quite unreliable, and there are no floppy drives in modern PCs or Macs, so there is no interoperability with PCs either.
And you could fit many disk images on a single USB stick.
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Well, technically the device probably won't ever get released - Amiga rights are co-owned. Cloantro owns the rights to the Amiga ROMs, while Hyperion owns the rights to the new versions of the OS. (Cloantro owns the rights to the legacy OS).
Now, getting the licensed ROMs is easy - Cloantro makes them avai
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Amiga forever essentials is $1.99 on the play store. It provides enough roms and disks to get started, albeit not a complete set.
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The Amiga originally had a cheap DSDD floppy drive that they used a special format with that made Amiga disks less reliable than anyone else's disks, but stored 880kB where the Macintosh stored 800kB and PCs stored 720kB. (3.5" DSDD floppies were only ever reliable on PCs, guess why.)
Whether the machine has real internals or not the original floppies can fuck right off. These days you can download disk images for pretty much anything.
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Whether the machine has real internals or not the original floppies can fuck right off. These days you can download disk images for pretty much anything.
Yeah except your own stuff. I still have many floppies in storage that probably are spoiled by now, several of which have assembler sourcecode, amos code, and the binaries and their output, such as animations, demos, small games, and music.
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Yes, there's personal data. Or, there was personal data.
I used to have a 44MB Syquest in one of my A2000s... I have neither disks nor drives now though
Is it so amazing? (Score:2)
There are games being developed commercially for most retro systems, if you take a broad view of what constitutes commercial. They do charge a little for nice boxes, disks, cartridges etc. but not much which is commercial in the "we do this full time for the money" sense.
On the positive non-commercial side, they rarely make any attempt to prevent copying, and usually give away the games as downloads themselves. (Copy protection schemes broke enough vintage disk drives as is, we don't have more to lose!)
Psyt [psytronik.net]
The hardware sounds nice (Score:2)
The hardware sounds nice but i fail to see the point of playing via an emulator on USB devices. I could do that on a PC. VICE and FS-UAE are excellent for that. I would expect to be able to plug a competition pro joystick in a hardware recreation. Via DB-9 ports. Or at least an old fashioned USB joystick.
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In the description of the Amiga mini they show an USB controller. As in gamepad controller. Not even a USB joystick. The C64 mini can use a USB joystick which looks like an old competition pro. That is what i was talking about. :)
I am aware of the disk drive problem, i own a SD card reader for my C64.
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Seems like it would be pretty easy to take one of the Arduinos that can be made into other types of USB device and make it into an interface to hook one of those sticks up to your PC. Maybe even two of them. I'd imagine someone has done this already but I didn't find it in a cursory search.
Probably a fair price for a retro gaming console (Score:2)
This is a hardware-based console, though emulation is being used it seems possible there could be upgrades for more functionality than just gaming.
There are other options for those who do not have original Amiga working hardware, a less expensive commercially supported package is Amiga Forever software emulation. https://www.amigaforever.com/ [amigaforever.com]
There is a lot of free software on http://aminet.net/ [aminet.net] and note new entries still happen today. Also free and licensed https://archive.org/details/so... [archive.org] and there are o
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AF had a lifetime offering not that long ago. About the price of two updates.
Am I too late to the party? (Score:3)
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Not for sale right now, but it's available for pre-order [amazon.com].
Not that I would buy anything on Amazon.com or encourage anyone to do that. Slashdotters should know better than to support them.
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It's important to note that keyboard is non-functional - it's for show only. So that's not really an Amiga; apparently it's strictly an emulator for running Amiga games.
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Holy shit, I was willing to admit that someone might think that was cool but the keyboard doesn't work? Fuck everyone involved in this project.
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Yes they do. [modeltford.com] Some even new.
Crap (Score:2)
Well crap. My Amiga 1000 only has 512k ram, and that's even with the 256k ram expansion installed.
When they want a new Commodore 64 game ... (Score:2)
Attack of the PETscii Robots ! (Score:2)
The 8-bit Guy's "Attack of the PETscii Robots" is coming soon to Amiga too. ...
It's already available for:
- Commodore PET
- Commodore VIC-20
- Commodore 64
- Commodore 128
- Commodore Plus/4
- Atari 800 (and higher)
- Apple ][
https://www.the8bitguy.com/pro... [the8bitguy.com]
There's a already a community of coders who are working on ports for:
- Amiga
- NES
- X16 (the yet-to-be-released computer)
- Tandy CoCo 3
- SNES
- BBC Micro
- Apple IIGS
- MSDOS
- 68k MacOS
- and more
David, The 8-bit Guy, makes the source code available to anyone want
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Should I wait fot the Amiga Maxi? (Score:2)
Since they developed the C64 Maxi just a year or so after the C64 Mini came out maybe I should wait for the Amiga Maxi.
The Amiga Maxi would then have a working keyboard and not just a mock keyboard that this Mini has (again if they follow what they did with the C64 Maxi).
Since it is still (basically) impossible to get the C64 Maxi in North America I guess I may be waiting a LONG time though.
The Amiga (Score:2)
An elegant computer for a more civilized age.