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Amiga

How to Write Your Own Games - for the Amiga 35

Posted by EditorDavid from the writing-retro dept.
Mike Bouma (Slashdot reader #85,252) writes: With the release of the A500 mini (which also supports A1200 games) and its side loading feature you may be interested to get started with Amiga Retro games development. This is why I collected some recent Amiga games development tutorials and added some additional information.

A popular game programming language on the Amiga is Blitz BASIC or AmiBlitz as the freely available and open source version is called now. The latest version (v 3.9.2) was recently released. The best known game developed with Blitz Basic is Team 17's original Worms game for the Amiga 500 in 1995. Meanwhile the Worms franchise has sold over 75 million game units across many different platforms. Daedalus2097 has just started an AmiBlitz video tutorial series on Twitch.tv: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. An example AmiBlitz game currently under development is Super Metal Hero (A1200) and here's a shooter level in the game.

REDPILL is a 2D game creation tool written in AmiBlitz by Carlos Peris and is designed to empower people to create many games for Amiga without programming knowledge. It's still early days but the first games are already being designed using this tool. An example game designed with this tool is Guardian — The legend of flaming sword.

The "Scorpion Engine" developed by Erik 'Earok' Hogan is a closed source game engine with all software developed for it open source. It offers a modern Windows IDE for development. In this video, Erik Hogan guides Micheal Parent from Bitbeam Cannon step by step as they create a legit retro video game from scratch. Various new games have and are being developed using this engine. An already released game is Amigo the Fox and an example game under development is Rick Dangerous (A1200 version).

If you want to dig deeper into Amiga coding then here's a series of Assembly game development tutorials by Phaze101. An example game currently being written in assembler is RESHOOT PROXIMA 3 (A1200).

If you are unexperienced with coding but would like to then here are some Amos (BASIC) tutorials for you: Rob Smith's How to program Wordle in AMOS on the AMIGA and Lets Code Santa's Present Drop Game.
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How to Write Your Own Games - for the Amiga

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  • The last article posted to Slashdot (Score:3)

    by suso ( 153703 ) * on Saturday May 21, 2022 @02:59PM (#62554974) Journal

    Will be an Amiga article.

  • Those may be "some" ways to write games for the Amiga, but they're miles apart ... and you haven't done any research on the more mundane, but likely useful ways.

    Given the way the OS is encoded for development, C is going to be an obvious mid-level choice. In the time of the Amiga, both MANX and Lattice C compilers were available. That said, starting with a copy of the header files for either, you should be able to adapt them for (say) gcc or clang. Advantage there is a nice cross-compile environment. Bu

  • And you can subscripts to a magazine (Score:3)

    by fermion ( 181285 ) on Saturday May 21, 2022 @04:03PM (#62555054) Homepage Journal
    The magazine has code you can type into your computer and when you run it will let you play a game! You can modify it as you like!

  • Old school (Score:3)

    by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Saturday May 21, 2022 @04:33PM (#62555104)
    Use Lattice / SAS for C and assembly. I'm sure the Amiga technical manuals are out there too for blitting stuff around.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      SAS C was actually a port of GCC. You can use a modern version of GCC, and cross compile with a plugin for Visual Studio Code.

      Modern GCC does a decent job of optimising 68000 code. Check the recent port of Gradius to the A500, it runs incredibly well and was coded in C and compiled with GCC.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DrXym ( 126579 )
        Lattice (later SAS) C wasn't a port of GCC, it was their own software. It didn't even have the same command line tools or syntax as gcc which was kind of annoying if you ever did try to port anything from Unix.

        What it was for its day was an extremely competent implementation of the C standard, probably the best commercial toolchain the Amiga ever got. There were a few other commercial compilers such as Aztec C (which kind of sucked), and DICE (highly regarded). It finally got gcc ports as well as cross-co

  • Uh, Nope. (Score:3)

    by Crass Spektakel ( 4597 ) on Saturday May 21, 2022 @06:33PM (#62555292) Homepage

    Uh, toying around with Blizz Basic will not result in good Amiga Games. You might something gamy but not what really made the Amiga stand out.

    Check this:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    Some of that stuff was so far ahead you couldn't do it on a PC until 20 years later.

    And just to make sure, the Amiga WAS a great system. From 1985 to 1995 no money in the world could get you a better overall computer. And I claim that it took at least a 2x2Ghz PC running XP to really beat it in most aspects. Honestly, I never understood why people back then were willing to pay ten times more for a lousy Mono-Mac, Textmode-PC. The only computer even comming close was the Atari ST and that one was only better in niche applications.

    • There were a few big commercial games made in Blitz. The only reason Blitz wasnâ(TM)t used in more titles is it was too late to matter. Skidmarks is still one of the smoothest racing games on the system.. If you look at some of the stuff people are making in Scorpion (which is compiling with blitz) now theyâ(TM)re just as impressive as the old games, particularly Danteâ(TM)s castlevania port, Neesoâ(TM)s Super Delivery Boy, BitBeamcannonâ(TM)s unnamed tutorial game, etc.. weâ(

    • And I claim that it took at least a 2x2Ghz PC running XP to really beat it in most aspects. Honestly, I never understood why people back then were willing to pay ten times more for a lousy Mono-Mac, Textmode-PC.

      Software support, obviously. I think you're a bit confused on the timeline though. 1995? Pentium is from 1993 and any Pentium-class system with a high quality PCI video card will absolutely stomp any Amiga with a 68k. And I don't remember when the PPC accelerators came out, but they cost more than a PC.

      Amiga was awesome in its day, but its day ended well before 1995.

      • I had a 68060 accelerator card at 50 mhz with a vga video chip as well (RTG). It wasn't cheap, but not as expensive as a PC by a long shot. It was roughly the same performance as the early pentium systems (at ~60mhz). However, those quickly got faster and faster after that.

        • I had a 68060 accelerator card at 50 mhz with a vga video chip as well (RTG). It wasn't cheap, but not as expensive as a PC by a long shot. It was roughly the same performance as the early pentium systems (at ~60mhz).

          In terms of pure CPU performance, sure. But even a basic old school PCI bus is grossly faster than the fastest Zorro bus*, so the rest of the system is a letdown compared to "modern" PCs (with a PCI bus.) The Amiga's architecture, which made it faster than everything else in its early days, held it back later.

          Once PCs got ubiquitous accelerated peripheral cards, the Amiga's performance lead was over and done. And this happened in the late period of ISA PCs, so between fast 486s and the Am586. Amigas clawed

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        Software support, obviously. I think you're a bit confused on the timeline though. 1995? Pentium is from 1993 and any Pentium-class system with a high quality PCI video card will absolutely stomp any Amiga with a 68k. And I don't remember when the PPC accelerators came out, but they cost more than a PC.

        Amiga was awesome in its day, but its day ended well before 1995.

        Well, I think in common use by people, but yeah, probably around 1993 or so.

        The problem with the Amiga are many and the PC (and Mac) were eclip

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      You might be surprised. Back in the 90s I used Blitz Basic to do some demo effects. It made setting up and cleanly shutting down very easy, and you can inline assembler for the performance critical parts.

      Check out the recent port of Gradius, called Tinyus. It runs at 50 fps with only a small amount of slowdown in places on an A500, and was written entirely in C and compiled with GCC. It's better on a technical level than 99% of commercial games ever released, including all the ones written in pure assembler

  • It's amazing that people still write games and demos for an old machine that lacks basic features, like sending users notifications, and stealing their data. How quaint! Where's the Amiga demo with a like+subscribe model and backing everything up to the cloud?

    I guess none of us kids in the 80s and 90s realized the importance of hardware-accelerated ad-optimization. No executive would have ever killed that!

    As is, I haven't heard a single report of Amiga users' credit cards leaked from an insecure S3 bucke

    • I remember the shareware back in the day when the author listed their address in the readme, in the hope that you would send them a fiver.

      • I was one of those Amiga authors, and surprisingly I occasionally got sent money for a shareware Yamaha DX7 synth editor I put out in the late 80s. Still good to see people that remember what things were like back then, and the appeal of old-school BBSs and other such things. It was a wonderful time in computer history, and I miss it dearly, but it's been over and done with for decades now.

        Still got my A1000, A500, and A1200 though, and they all work. ;-)

  • The Amiga is limited. BLITZ Basic, AMOS, etc is slow and even more limited. There is ONE way for programming the Amiga and it's hardware: The Amiga Hardware Reference Manual https://datassette.nyc3.cdn.di... [digitaloceanspaces.com] So for REAL retro game retro programming it's 68000 assembly language, an assembler, and the manual. Also the hardware programming is much more interesting and the knowledge one can gain from there is much more useful when learning embedded systems. Another plus (as BabbleFish mentioned) is, the 68000
    • This seems really weirdly elitist? Have you been paying attention to the Amiga games scene of the last few years? Blitz isnt that slow (and you can use ASM within it) .. Not everyone is able to learn ASM, and yet a lot of nice games are coming. Many genres of game dont even need to-the-metal speed to work well, either. A game is a game, regardless of the tools used.

    • I did plenty of Amiga coding way back when, and Manx/Lattice C with the RKMs was far more efficient for actually getting stuff done. I also used the Metacomco assembler quite often, and the 68000 instruction set is a joy to work with (mostly because the instruction set is extremely orthogonal), but it's far from the only way to get good performance on the hardware.

  • Pong for Amiga: How to write a video game in a day:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    That game was written in C.

    An example Amiga 500 game written in C/C++ is Tiny Bobble:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    To code demo or game in Amos :
    https://github.com/alain-trees... [github.com]

    An example of a game currently under dev in Amos (Bubble Story) :
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    Metro Siege is using Enable Software's Engine9000 and apparently they also have a "Super Secret" game under development using this engine. 8-)

    https:/ [engine9000.com]

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