How to Write Your Own Games - for the Amiga

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.

Re:

[Valgrus Thunderaxe]

The Mormons of computing.

Re:

[jwhyche]

There are Amiga owners out there that still think the Amiga is going to make a blazing comeback. That 30 year old technology is better than my 8 core i9.

Re:

[backslashdot]

Your core i9 is 50,000 times faster than an Amiga 500 .. are you 50,000 times more productive?

Re:

[jwhyche]

It is a possibility with as many times as the Amiga 500 would fall over and die.

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

Part of what makes coding for the Amiga so much fun is that you have to find clever ways to do things if you want to get good performance.

An i9 will run crappy code at blistering speeds. That's valuable, it means it's much easier to build complex software. It's not as much fun though.

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[backslashdot]

I can't say any game played on a modern computer is 50,000 times more fun and dopamine releasing than playing a similar game on the Amiga. Yes it looks better visually, but there is only so much high you can get from that. Of course for watching movies or sports, a modern PC does provide a 100x better experience.

Re:

[drinkypoo]

The Amiga was good at shoveling sprites and doing a lot of colors, and in its early days nothing could touch it. So for the kinds of games that were around then, it was really more than adequate from a hardware standpoint. But the kinds of games you can play on a PC are more immersive than a classic/typical Amiga, and I find that they engage me much more strongly. Sure, you can upgrade an Amiga to the point that it plays pretty modern games, but by then it's not really the same thing any more and you've mad

Re: Amiga People

[MixelsLab]

There really arenâ(TM)t many of those as a percentage of the active Amiga user base. ðY...There are nutcases in every scene. Most treat it as a fun hobbyist side-machine with some fun, unique limitations (and strengths) to work with.

Re:

[moogaloonie]

I have to assume that most people who didn't use an Amiga regularly assume the community exists because people can't let go of that "30 year old technology". No wonder people think Amiga fanatics are all idiots. What they are holding on to, and still find generally superior, is the experience of using an Amiga. My 50MHz Amiga 4000 from the mid '90s feels just as responsive as the Win10 Ryzen workstation I'm writing this on, it just lacks the computing muscle for modern audio/video/CG tasks. Lack of memory p

Re:

[K. S. Kyosuke]

The Motorolmons of computing?

Re:

[fibonacci8]

More the Betamax of computing. A technically better product than the competition that still went by the wayside because everyone moved on anyway.

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[AmiMoJo]

Unlike Betamax, the Amiga was very popular with consumers. Especially in Europe. Ultimately what killed it was Commodore failing to invest in the platform. It needed to keep evolving and updating like IBM compatible PCs were. Instead we got AGA, a 32 bit extension of the chipset, and never saw a really next generation model.

The Amiga was also ahead of its time. When it was released memory speeds were limited, which make it difficult to extract the best performance from the system because DMA slots were limi

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[drinkypoo]

I guess they thought that the 68020's instruction cache would do the job, and it was more valuable to have a larger amount of chip memory.

They probably thought people would expand the RAM like they did with most other Amiga models. With the A500 it was practically mandatory to upgrade from its initial 512kB even if the only thing you wanted to do was play games from floppies, because so many of the high-profile titles required 1MB (like Dungeon Master.) Meanwhile it was not at all unusual to bump into the limitations of 1MB chip when trying to use the Amiga as an actual computer, so having 2MB on the 1200 only made sense.

To my mind where they

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[AmiMoJo]

The SNES Mode 7 rotation is very impressive for the time. It could scale as well. People think the Neo Geo is powerful, but it can only scale down and doesn't do rotation at all.

I don't know of any arcade hardware that used anything like the Amiga's co-processor for raster effects, except for ones that were based on computers and consoles. There was actually an Amiga based one from Arcadia, which runs one of my favourite games: Sidewinder.

Anyway, dedicated arcade hardware with raster effect co-processors pr

The last article posted to Slashdot

[suso]

Will be an Amiga article.

I mean, really? That's horrid journalism.

[BabbleFish]

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

[fermion]

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

[DrXym]

Use Lattice / SAS for C and assembly. I'm sure the Amiga technical manuals are out there too for blitting stuff around.

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[AmiMoJo]

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.

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[DrXym]

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.

[Crass Spektakel]

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.

Re: Uh, Nope.

[MixelsLab]

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(

Re:

[drinkypoo]

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.

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[PommeFritz]

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.

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[drinkypoo]

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:

[tlhIngan]

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

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[AmiMoJo]

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

If the Amiga had been really forward thinking

[Dasher42]

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

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[BeaverCleaver]

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.

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[NormalVisual]

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. ;-)

Amiga games? ASM!

[daniro]

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

Re: Amiga games? ASM!

[MixelsLab]

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.

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[NormalVisual]

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.

Some more tutorials and examples

[Mike Bouma]

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]