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New Commercial Amiga 500 Game Released
Mike Bouma writes: Pixelglass, known for their "Giana Sisters SE" game, has released a worthy new game for the Amiga 500, called "Worthy." Here's a description of this cute action puzzler: "Assume the role of a fearless boy and collect the required number of diamonds in each stage in order to win the girl's heart! Travel from maze to maze, kill the baddies, avoid the traps, collect beers (your necessary 'fuel' to keep you going), find the diamonds, prove to her you're WORTHY!" Time to dust off that classic Amiga or alternatively download a digital copy and use an UAE emulator for your platform of choice. Have a look at the release trailer.
But I did have a 1000, then a 2000 and a 1200
But that was many years ago, I didn't bring the Amigas with me when I migrated (legally) to America 16 years ago.
There are still commercial games being released for the C64 every year (+ smaller free games). I don't follow the Amiga-scene as closely as the C64, but surely it's the same there?
Not complaining about the Amiga getting some attention on slashdot, I just don't see why it's news.
There have been quite a few commercial titles for the Amiga in the last few years actually, shipped on floppy disks in a fancy box with user manual just like back in the day.
Not published by the giants like Psygnosis and DMA Design, but individuals and smaller publishers, but nonetheless there are still a few handfuls of newly made games published since 2010.
Of all the old dead computers, the Amiga is remarkably alive. There's even new hardware being made for it even today.
Ahh yes the wonderful memories. (I had in chron order: Amiga 500, Amiga 2000, Amiga 1000, and finally the Amiga 1200 ... i also ended up buying a friend an Amiga 3000 so he could do pro video work with Video Toaster, which he later repaid me -- sometime when i had the Amiga 2000. Amazing times.
If i'm not mistaken the PC was in CGA 4 color mode with beep-beep speaker sound. Mac's were in black and white. While the Amiga 500 was doing things in 4096 HAM graphics modes, full multi-tasking, and with stereo sound. Just to name of few of its brilliant architecture.
Just to show my support and respect for that machine I will go buy the game now
You mean I need to buy a RAM upgrade just to play this game!? Damn!
Its not news....
All emulators have save-states. I agree that WinUAE in particular has too many options to chose from, but to be honest what you're describing here is a case of "you're doing it wrong."
Try FS-UAE, it's made to work both like a flexible emulator, and a hassle-free Amiga gaming front-end.
Chip RAM and Fast RAM. (Chip RAM is more flexible and accessible by the custom chips for audio/video; Fast RAM is only accessible by the CPU. Fast RAM is faster (because the CPU is never held up by the custom chips.)
While Chip RAM is a necessity, Fast RAM isn't. A normal Amiga 500 will have 512kB of Chip RAM.
Trust me, compared to the wonderful world of EMM386.EXE with Conventional, Expanded, Extended and Himem, Amiga memory management is not tricky.
And, yeah, BIOS is a PC term. ROM is the generic term, and on an Amiga, it's called Kickstart. Workbench 1.3 runs with Kickstart 1.3. Workbench 2 with Kickstart 2. In fact, in reality, the "OS" is mostly stored in Kickstart (ROM). (Classic example, the program that runs the entire user interface shell (explorer.exe in Windows terms) is a mere 6 KB. No, it's not some literally incredible compression and hand coded assembly feat -- it actually just kicks off code that's stored in ROM.)
What that boils down to is the Kickstart and Workbench boot disks should match. And, as for 'virtual hard disks', On the Amiga 500, often home computers of this era didn't have hard disks (stupidly expensive things at the time, especially as they were SCSI based) so it was far more normal to boot from floppy disk. Later on, with Amiga 1200s, IDE disks became available and booting/running from HDD became far more normal.
Basically; you're used to modern PCs where the ROM is only the very basics and the OS is generally loaded off disk; whereas most other computers of that era (especially Macintosh, Amiga, Atari, Commodore 64) are more load from ROM based. (Although frequently they did need a disk to boot from, that disk didn't have anywhere near the entire operating system.) These preconceptions probably didn't help you!
Yes, Macintoshes worked the same. It wasn't till much later that MacOS was mainly loaded off disk.
(And, no, Wikipedia is wrong, kickstart is not just the boot firmware. It's more than that. After all, it contains Exec, which is the real kernel of the Amiga operating system. Of course, it was common for Amiga games to ignore the operating system and interact directly with hardware - frequently, a reset / reboot was the only way to exit a game!)
Somehow I remember playing Amiga games at our neighbour back in the day to be more fun and also look more "interesting", no? I would have thought with modern tools and such new games would look more awesome, like the 8-bit computer guy's space thing for the C64, ...
I think blaming the Amiga for problems setting up an emulator is a little unfair. There are several versions of the Amiga, and each came with a ROM and the correct disks for that ROM. If you bought an operating system upgrade, you'd get the right ROM and right disks with it. Additionally, the disks for older operating systems generally worked with newer ROMs.. There was nothing difficult about it. The term "BIOS" is inappropriate, the ROM contained the core operating system, not merely the bootloader and I/O library a BIOS contains.
One other thing to note is that people running games generally didn't run the disk part of the operating system. The game would run directly from the disk, the computer booting right into it.
RAM... it wasn't hard for actual users in practice and there weren't "more classifications of RAM than DOS did". DOS had various types of memory which literally could not be interchanged - applications that used "extended" etc RAM had to use it. For the most part, with the exception of one type of usage, both (or all three, if you count low address space non-chip RAM) types of RAM were interchangeable. The "exception"? Chip RAM had to be used for anything that involved graphics or audio. And that was it.
Ultimately though it sounds like either your emulator didn't have built-in profiles supporting the stock Amigas, or did but you choose to tweak them in the same way a novice might start tweaking hardware settings in a PC emulator. If the former:
Amiga 500: Kickstart 1.3 + 512k chip RAM + OCS
Amiga 500+: Kickstart 2.04 + 1Mb chip + ECS
Amiga 1200: Kickstart 3 + 2Mb chip + AGA
If you want to run games, that's enough. You don't need anything else. If you want to use it as a serious machine, you'll ideally need the same version of the disk part of AmigaOS as your ROM.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
WinUAE has become overly complex, I agree. I once wrote an Amiga emulation tutorial for OSNews.com, step by step, but since then so many new features and options have been added (even AmigaOS4 for classic PPC upgraded amigas!).
The solution I think is to get Cloanto's Amiga Forever package instead, it includes pre-installed scripts for games/workbench, ROMs and a GUI frontend:
https://www.amigaforever.com/
Good luck with that. You can get away with correcting typos, but changing anything more significant than that is damn near impossible and not worth the hassle. Too many users, with too much free time, have too much of their ego wrapped up in 'their' articles.
Required reading for internet skeptics
The Atari ST was (oversseas) seen as a perfect mixture between Business&Gaming.
I had quite a few exclusive games (Bolo...), quite a few IDEs (Pascal, C...), quite a few serious programs: Signum (which I did my thesis on), huge DTPs, midi.
The shareware/floppy/cdrom/print "Scene" here did rival the Amigas.
Nice fact: The ST was purely sold with the hd mono monitor in Europe, you could just attach any good and large pal tv to it.
The extreme versatility was ignored it the states. The name Atari was just limited to cartridges.
If you want to play a game on an Atari ST/or Atari ST Emu, you have to decide whether it should be in mono/hd or color low rez. Done. RAM is just RAM, OS is just OS. :P
That sounds like a very strange way to run an Amiga game. Amiga games almost never ran from Workbench. In fact, I know of no game which required an install and then running from Workbench.
Normally you had an Amiga, with Kickstart in ROM, and you booted from the first game disk. That was it. And that is how it's still done on the emulator.
Installing OS and then game is a very roundabout way, and not normal. I can understand you had problems since you did something hardly anyone has ever done in the history of the Amiga!
Wish they just emulated the AmigaOS API so you didn't have to faff with it.
http://aros.sourceforge.net/
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
The game came on several disks and I didn't want to swap between them constantly. Also, installing the english patch more or less required a hard drive install, which AFAICT requires running the game from workbench. I agree that's not a typical step, though.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
There will be no constant swapping. Multidisk games for the Amiga were pretty much uniformly very smart about that. And swapping disks in the emulator is a keypress away, it's really smooth and simple.
Patching will not require a hard disk install; usually installing to hard disk on the Amiga means copying the files over. There is no registry, not even any ini files, just a directory with files. You can patch those files and put them on the disks again, or even patch on the disks.
It's very far from a typical step. It's almost completely unheard of. And it is very amusing you complain about "emulate the AmigaOS API" since games do not use AmigaOS. They go directly on the hardware.
The only reason you had to "faff with it" was because you decided to do you. Seriously, don't blame the Amiga for something the Amiga makes dead simple, and the amulator makes dead simple, but which you decided to make difficult.
Running Amiga games on an Amiga emulator makes DOSbox seem complicated. What you did was the equivalent of installing Windows 3.1 on DOSbox to be able to run a pure DOS game.
There was no api in a lot of cases. Commodore documented what hardware addresses registers lived at in their addison wesley hardware reference guide which was one of the only early bibles of documentation available and you manipulated them directly. for example bit6 of bfe001 is the CIA's left mouse button state register, copper registers for background color etc. Some routines you could call from ks by calling them directly too, since the easiest way to get the best performance was to turn off all the running operating system and just handle your own stuff yourself in the vertical blanking region (interrupt called from routines stored at $00004c).
Then, CBM moved some of the rom locations between revisions of the kickstart rom saying anyone doing this was not using things properly and they should have been using c and the c api's to access everything (slowly) and moved the memory map about so you had to be using their memory allocation calls instead of turning things off completely, which you found new things living at in different revisions of the chipset roms, which is why you see compatibility issues between for example 1.2 and 1.3 chipset games and demos that really pushed the performance envelope.
If you pick for example a earlier rom such as ks 1.2 unless you need some fancy feature introduced later, give it plenty of slow and fast ram, and start off with the lower cpu emu's, pretty much most stuff will run on the base variants with just a 512kb ram expansion.
The fact it even works mostly at all is a miracle, and the emu peeps will tell you the stuff that doesn't was "badly coded" and should be rewritten. Given the benefit of hindsight that's probably correct, but its not how I remember things going down at the actual time.
Source, I used to code games and demo's for the amiga in m68k in the late 80's.
Waiting for it to be cracked by Crystal, it wouldn't really be 'amiga' if it wasn't cracked =D
If you want an easy solution then Amiga Forever packages up the WinUAE emulator, the ROMs, a launcher, pre-installed OS images and a bunch of other goodies.
For most games you just double click on their name in the launcher and play.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Amigas have different kinds of RAM depending on where it is connected, but the only kinds most people need to think about are chip and fast. The os is called amigados, the graphical desktop is called workbench. If you just use one of the emulator profiles, you don't have to figure out the configuration.
On the other hand, I found whdload (the main way to play older games on Amiga) to be a boondoggle. Most games don't work with readily available images. I tested many, many of them on my 1200 before I sold it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Did the amazing Amiva conversion of Bomb Jack make it to slashdot recently? That is seriously impressive and beats the hell out of the Elite conversion. If you have an amiga then you just tty it!
preview guide channel used to run on Amiga it crashed a lot.
Here's a new real-time strategy game developed last year by the "8-bit guy" for the Commodore 64: http://www.the8bitguy.com/plan...
I'm not sure they're getting rich on this, but if you're nostalgic and love to code... why not?
Toni Wilen, the programmer for WinUAE has different goals in mind other than creating an excellent gaming experience. He's trying to recreate the *entire* Amiga ecosystem in a single program. His web page usually has him asking for obscure boards and roms because he wants to emulate it all. I think this is a grand goal.
Every single board I used to drool over in the old Amiga magazines and wish I could buy, he wants to emulate. So for someone like me being able to run an Amiga Blizzard board or an accurate Amiga 4000 or some such...it's a way to scratch a very old itch.
Toni also got MMU emulation working, which made Amiga Linux possible. It was a HUGE kick to see the old m68k linux stuff come up in the emulator. Not everyone's cup of tea, obviously. But a lot of fun. Reading the EAB threads as the thing was coming closer and closer to boot was pretty exciting. I'm sure I'm a minority on that, but still, I thought it was a lot of fun.
But to your point, WinUAE can also provide an excellent and simple gaming experience. The first default configuration tab has default *stock* Amiga configurations right there. Just select an OCS Amiga 500, and 99% of your games will run. You don't have to drill down into the tech stuff and twiddle chipsets to make things work.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
There will be no constant swapping. Multidisk games for the Amiga were pretty much uniformly very smart about that. And swapping disks in the emulator is a keypress away, it's really smooth and simple.
ISTR doing a bit of swapping, and I hardly even had any multidisk games. However, in an emulator you can just give yourself three external drives and generally not do any swapping, even the virtual kind. Only a few games use more than four disks. For those games, it's bananas to not HD install them.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The local community access television station here as recent as 2013 had an Amiga whose sole purpose was text crawls for advertisements and subtitles like the ones that pop up showing the names of the hosts or interviewers.
Use a little common sense once in a while. --Book of Mooch Ch. 5 verse 14