Ultimate Amiga
Other => Introductions => Topic started by: Sidewinder on November 10, 2005, 06:05:39 PM
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Hello,
I'm Sidewinder, the webmaster of The AMOS Factory. I'd like to introduce myself and offer my assistance to anyone interested in AMOS. Please make yourself at home here. My hope is that this web site becomes a comfortable home for those who use or once used AMOS.
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Hello Sidewinder.
I am apparently SamuriCrow since the username requester doesn't accept usernames longer than 10 characters. I look forward to future developments of Mattathias Basic.
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Sorry about that. I just change the maximum to 25 characters. PM me if you want me to change the username to something else. It's good to see you around here. Hopefully I'll be able to set this site up with some good info on AMOS for the retro programmers out there. Maybe it will keep some people busy while I continue development on Mattathias BASIC. Anyway, welcome to the AMOS Factory!
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Thanks. PM sent. BTW, I didn't know you used YIM. Do you mind if I add you to my buddy list?
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Ok, I just changed your username. Sure, add me to your YIM contact list if you like. I'm rarely on-line for long, but it's always good to chat.
BTW, sorry about the delay. I was on a little vacation out of the country last week.
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Well, I might aswell take the time to introduce myself, and also sneak in a question :)
My name David and I'm from Sweden. I took the username fxx here but I normally use fx (but 3 chars were minimum). Don't know what more to say about me? I own 7 Amigas, but my A4000/040 40MHz is my main Amiga.
I'm currently working on a RPG game in AMOS that has been hibernating for a few months now :( I hope someday soon I will continue working on it, because this is a project I really wanna finish, but I'm quite sick of it all right now so who knows ...
I also just recently started working on a Super Mario Bros clone (and I seriously mean a clone - with stolen graphics from the Super Mario Allstars and all that) which I don't know if I ever will finish, it was more of a "how good can I make it look with 32-colors" attempt.
Anyways my question is this, I use Icons to draw the world. This works fine and is fast as long as I'm not double buffering the screen. As soon as I turn on Double Buffering it feels like AMOS only can draw one icon each frame. Is there any simple solution to this?
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Welcome to the Amos Factory, David. I wish you well on your projects.
As for the double buffering problem I would think that speed would not be the main problem so much as chip ram since a side-scrolling engine would need at least two screens plus 3 tile widths for each of the two buffers.
Are you using Autoback or not? It sounds to me like you are trying to code this PC style and plot all of the tiles on each frame update instead of using the autoscroll circuitry in the Amiga chipset (hence the concern over chip memory).
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Hi, thanks for the answer
I'm not doing this the PC way
I have opened a 640x224 screen, where the visable gameplay area is 320x224. Since it's a Super Mario Clone I don't need to go back (scroll to the left) so there is really only 1-direction scrolling involved. Anyways as the screen starts to scroll, using hardware scrolling, I draw one line of tiles to the right outside of the visible area, and also one line of tiles to the left of the visible area, so that once I have scrolled all the way to the right, an exact copy of the current image will at two places on the screen. Sorry if this is a bad explanation but if you have done scrolling on the Amiga, perhaps you understand what I mean :)
Anyways it all works fine as long as I'm not double buffering the screen. Without double buffering I can almost blit a full 320x224 screen of 16x16 tiles on my 040, but I only plot 13 tiles (2 times, 26 tiles in total, but at different frames - I want this to be playable on a 68000, or atleast a clean A1200), and it takes like 13 frames if I run it with double buffering.
If I do it with Bobs instead (which I often did in my early AMOS coding days) it works fine, but using lots of bobs is no good. I haven't played with Autoback but isn't that only for Bobs?
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I am familiar with scrolling on the Amiga. :-)
Try putting autoback 0 before the beginning of your main loop and after you are done with your graphics plotting do a Wait Vbl and a Screen Swap. That should speed up your double buffering. The downside to this approach is that you have to take into account the Bob Draw and Bob Clear commands yourself.
I think the problem with the autoback updating is that it only allows Bobs to be double-buffered correctly. I think that all other graphics operations are performed on BOTH the physical (visible) and logical (backbuffer) screens which defeats the purpose of double-buffering. When you first start out Amos assumes you want fully automatic double-buffering which corresponds to the autoback 2 which takes this approach.
One more tip: If you have an additional tile width on the right side of the screen you can be drawing tiles only a few at a time per pixel scrolled instead of having to plot a whole column of the tiles in a single frame. This will free up the blitter for plotting more bobs per frame of animation.
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Thanks for the info, this sounds like what I was looking for :)
I'll play with it later, tomorrow probably because I'm very tired right now and should really be off to sleep :)
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Hi folks,
I'm back ;)
Any news on how it went?
Were you talking about compiled or uncompiled code? Not sure if it would make any difference though ;(
Regards,
Lonewolf10
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Hi again
My nick is Sersoft (aka Selur).I was registered before restarting this forum. So it's nice to see you again.
Original instruction says " WAIT VBL can be included to achieve perfect synchronisation, and is especialy useful AFTER a SCREEN SWAP"
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In my opinion AMOS is not good for arcade platform and shot'em up games.The graphics operations in Amos are too slow.
But it's good for turn strategy and adventures (where is a lot of static graphics with few animated objects).
However I will be writing RPG game (still drawing graphics) so I'm wondering if Amos is fast enought for it.
But I saw "Bloodfest" game by Mellowchips (simple pseudoRPG game written in Amos) and it's is quite fast.
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Hello Sersoft,
Amos should do just fine for an RPG. The reason the blits are slow is that they are all done in the custom hardware on the Amiga. Some other programs use a utility similar to CPU Blit that helps the blitter along when the CPU is idle. There wouldn't be any idle time when running Amos programs, however, since Amos disables the multitasking.
Just be sure to turn the Autoback to OFF and use Screen Swap manually. That will allow the blitter to do its magic without the screen swap happening automatically. If the Amos compiler doesn't yield enough speed for you, you may have to wait for Mattathias Basic to be released. (You could also use AmiBlitz but, unlike Mattathias, it won't be able to use the PowerPC or Pentium chips effectively under newer Amiga-like hardware.
If you use 16-color sprites wherever possible (only 4 per row) you can speed up the graphics plotting dramatically. Sure you're stuck with 16 colors and they're the 17-31 and transparent in the palette, but they have no "draw" or "undraw" time involved since the images are overlayed in realtime.
Lastly, you might want to do your Wait VBL BEFORE the Screen Swap to get that sychronization. I suspect what you discovered was a typo in the manual.
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hi there,
i'm totally new to this forum, i found it though a link given in a thread i started over on EAB "AMOS: are there any survivors?" - i'm glad to see i'm not the last one left!
i really cant code too well, as i'm a musician by trade, but i do like to tinker a little in AMOS... i have 2-3 "mini projects" on the go, all of which i simply play around with once in a while... at the moment i'm building a frontend for the loading of one of my fave games "Bloodwych" and it's data disk... the idea is to hide the HD loading behind some text and stuff that looks like the game menus... nothing too tricky, but i still keep hitting problems!
i'm a keen retro-gamer and die-hard Amiga and Speccy fan, and this current project is actually to aid the running of the game(s) on the PSP amiga emualtor! (eventually to be coupled with the AMOS program i wrote to read the game's map data... perhaps one day this will become an editor too)
funnily enough, i've notced some talk regarding programming an RPG.... many years ago my brother started coding a version (copy) of Bloodwych in AMOS and i still have the source code if anyone whould like a look? there's not much to it, and it's in dire need of cleaning up (more a "proof of concept") you can simply walk around a defined map of pillars and walls... but i'd love to see a full AMOS clone of Bloodwych one day (largely because map editting etc has its limitations).. perhaps some teaming up or code swapping could be done through the forum?
anyway, i'm sure i'll pop in a fair bit... my AMOS pro manual rarely leaves my bedroom, so it's always close to hand to remind me to get back into it!
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hi HungryHorace
It was me by the way.... :-x
You are next person who I'll be need. :-)
So can you write a music for cyberpunk RPG ?
(it will be some kind of "Hired Guns" game)
...you have still the source code ? Great !
any kind of that will very help me.. just send me it please
on sersoft@wp.pl or selur@wp.pl.
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for about 2 months I will finish whole first tilset graphics and I will show you beta screens.
However I'm wondering of creating special website for persons who would want to help or co-operate with me...
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hehe, yeah i can write you some music. ;)
MED (my preference) or MOD ? any limit to the total filesize or anything? i assume its intro/menu music rather than in-game music... if you really want a tight size-limit i can always make it quite "chip-sound"-ey ... though i'm sure i can come up with something a bit cyber-punk!
i'll find the right source and upload it for you in a mo! as i say, dont expect much from it! (esp. not reagarding clean-ness of code!) but it does show the main-map principle working on AMOS.
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hi again
I think med is a bit better then mod because med allows to play samples during playing music and mod is not.
Well I think one music should have maximum 150Kb for intro/main menu and second music max. 50Kb (menu & options before starting any misson).
All should run on OCS machines so if you can write also music during game (with also some new sampples )it will be available on 1Mb++ Chip ram as extension (like in Hired Guns).But then I want to adjust with you kind of this music and I will you send some *.mp3 music as example.
Well I don't expect anything :-) because I've written a lot of programs which I'dont understand today after long time.
Maybe I will understand maybe not...we will see.
And don't hurry up with writing music ... we have time :-x
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well i can be quite good at taking my time, so feel free to give me all the details (references, max channels etc), and i can compose it at a leisurely pace. 1 game i planned to write in AMOS almost only exists as it's music. kinda sad really, i'd love to make that game one day. (Alien Breed in the style of Sensible Software)
tbh, i would expect all MEDs would work on an OCS machine really, but it'll prob. be a v3 or 5 octamed file, and 4 channel, even though i'll use Soundstudio to make it... so there should not be a problem there. i'll try to get some original sounds in there too, rather than my usual "ripping off from other mods" technique! i have pleanty of synthesisers to record, and a massive bank of samples to manipulate. :-D
if you decide to call the .med library directly, please let me know some details! i've had a few problems with MEDs in AMOS a number of times... including i think trying as you will, to have music and SFX together. (my latest problem with MEDs is detailed in another thread)
i've uploaded the source... www.djcresswell.com/amigaonline/bloodwychamos.zip
you'll need to assign BW: to whereever you put the font files. also, uploading it like this means everyone can have a look at this 12 year old code!
i would have posted it earlier, but i've been too busy playing the real bloodwych on PSPUAE!
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well..at first I think we should leave that topic because it's welcoming topic :-D (I'll create "project rpg" topic please write there there)
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I have been working on some coding for yet another war game on the Amiga. It's turn based, and I was wondering if you would have any samples or sounds, meds, raw, etc that you would be willing to share with the public?
I've been making some myself, and since I have not programmed in AMOS in years, I am having a bit of trouble finding some of my old sounds/samples.
Thanks for your time.
Sandlizard
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Hello,
I'm new to the forums, and kinda curious about the RPG that is being worked on. Is there any demo or sample coding that I could see how you guys are going about this?
I am working on yet another war game, battleships, carriers, etc. Just seeing what can be done. I don't know if you guys need any additional help, or a tester in any way, but I would be willing to help.
Thanks,
Sandlizard