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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.
From following many 8-bit retro computers i'd say C64 and Amiga are the two most active. About the same level in terms of new software releases. As for new hardware though Amiga has a lot more out and coming out than C64. For many hear on /. we have had Amigas (and C64's incidentally) growing up so news like this is fantastic. Gets me more excited to buy/donate/take part in such a project because it brings back great memories. I wouldn't have known about this release if it wasnt posted here. So at least for me, this post helped.
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!)