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[Sidewinder]

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.

[SamuraiCrow]

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.

[Sidewinder]

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!

[SamuraiCrow]

Thanks.  PM sent.  BTW, I didn't know you used YIM.  Do you mind if I add you to my buddy list?

[Sidewinder]

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.

[fxx]

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?

[SamuraiCrow]

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).

[fxx]

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?

[SamuraiCrow]

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.

[fxx]

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

[Lonewolf10]

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

[Sergiusz L.]

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"

---
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.

[SamuraiCrow]

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.

[Hungry Horace]

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!

[Sergiusz L.]

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.


---
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...