Daedalus2097

Yeah, compared to AmigaBasic, ARexx was a massive improvement, and I have been using it a lot since the '90s. I don't think I have an Amiga setup where it doesn't feature in some way or another from boot. It's not a direct replacement for AmigaBasic, but it wasn't really intended to be (it's not BASIC after all), rather an included programming language that you can start using right away. It was one of the very smart moves by Commodore IMHO, only to be hobbled when they screwed over the guy who created the Amiga version. It's a testament to the language and the quality of the original version that it's still included and integrated with the latest OS 3.2 and 4.1 releases with essentially no changes in >30 years. Unfortunately, Commodore didn't include the ARexx manual with their budget machines, which means it was pretty much invisible to the casual observer, with no obvious editor, documentation or examples. That's changed now thankfully.

True, though it got better with a little extra CPU grunt. Too much horsepower though and it ran too fast and became unplayable - much like many early PC games To be fair, the CD32 (AGA) version is an improvement too, getting closer to the VGA version. On top of what has already been said, you get quantization errors that increase as you approach they Nyquist frequency (which is 22,050Hz in your example). While yes, in theory you can reproduce that frequency with a 44.1kHz sample rate, what it will look like is a 22,050Hz square wave, regardless of the shape of the wave you put in. And what happens if your frequency is, say, 18kHz? You get a horrible noise in your waveform because now you have a square wave with a variable duty cycle (sometimes 1 sample high, sometimes 2 samples high) and variable amplitude, because the peaks don't coincide with the sampling points and so you can't get an accurate representation of that waveform. 44.1kHz is certainly good enough for most purposes, but it's when you get into certain edge cases that you start to see (well, hear) the limitations. Of course all of that pales into insignificance once you start involving lossy compression, which has a far greater impact on the sound.

Yeah, I got funny looks in uni with my Amiga C reference books BASIC was thrown in because in the '80s to try and sell a computer without BASIC was seen as foolish. BASIC was still pretty popular well into the '90s though, perhaps moreso in Europe than the US. Regarding the more "modern" Amiga BASIC variants, Blitz Basic is still being developed as an open-source project under the name AmiBlitz, and is currently receiving pretty regular updates. It's very capable, and while it'll never hold a candle to a modern IDE, the environment is vastly nicer to use than anything that was available during the Amiga's lifetime. It needs an upgraded system to run, but under emulation that's not an issue. Here's a screenshot of the current AmiBlitz3 release as I used it for a recent game jam entry.

And there's the thing. PCs, expensive as they were, were designed to be upgraded piecemeal. So were Big-box Amigas, and both commanded a high price. But CPU, hard drive, sound, graphics upgrades for them both were more or less plug and play (moreso on the Amiga than PCs of the era). Upgrading a "home computer" is generally going to be a more problematic proposition. Upgrading by pulling chips isn't ideal, but it was also extremely easy to end up with a dead PC by upgrading chips - Cache memory, CPUs, FPUs weren't always in ZIF sockets at that time. And such upgrades were usually crippled by the lack of fast RAM, unless the upgrade included that on the board too. That said, the A500 offered a much better way of upgrading the CPU through the side expansion slot. Naturally, because this is a full external device, they were more expensive, but there was nothing (other than perhaps cost) preventing the easy addition of far faster CPUs, lots of RAM and a hard drive. With the possible exception of having to upgrade the Kickstart chip if you had an early A500, it could all be done externally, no soldering, no pulling chips. Just plug & play. An SVGA card for $199 in 1992 is probably pretty reasonable, the prices were tumbling dramatically around then. For example, a VGA Wonder 1MB for example was $399 at launch in 1991 and $219 by mid-1992, and the predecessor model with 512kB in 1988 was $699.

Amiga BASIC only works properly under the first major OS release (1.x) and only on a 68000, so you'll need to set up your emulator accordingly. An A500 spec configuration should do the job. Amiga BASIC was dropped from the OS and replaced by ARexx starting with release 2.0.

And that's to be expected, given the A500 was released in 1987 and probably cost a tiny fraction of what that 486 cost. It's just a shame so many Amiga users weren't into upgrading the way PC users were. And a PC (with a hard drive and monitor) for the same cost as an A500 with a hard drive and a monitor in 1990 won't have been a particularly great Wing Commander experience. There are trade-offs here and there of course, but considering CPU power, the Motorola families generally kept pace with the Intel CPUs - at a given clock speed, a 68030-powered Amiga could match a 386, an '040 Amiga a 486 PC and an '060 Amiga a Pentium PC. Graphics capability was a different story, as most people went for poorly-expandable machines because they were cheap instead of expensive machines that could be fitted with graphics cards like the PC. The Amiga's advantage gradually turned into a disadvantage when VGA started to become affordable in the early-mid '90s (a VGA card in 1990 cost more than an A500 for example), and people were still clinging onto their A500s.

*Legal* options? Not really. It's not at all hard to find illegal copies though... You don't need to spend $10 however - if you can stretch to $1.99, you can buy the Amiga Forever Essentials bundle for Android which includes Kickstart licences (Kickstart is what the "BIOS" is called in Amiga terms). You might also be able to use the open-source replacement OS, which is called AROS 68k, but compatibility isn't great. But ultimately you do indeed need one Kickstart ROM image or another to run an Amiga emulator.

Excellent I'll be the guy giving an ARexx tutorial workshop with a pint in my hand

And the results are out! Well done to the winners, with NEONNoir a worthy winner, and Capacitor's revenge and Settle the World some excellent runners up.

I was reminded of this jam while embracing the crunch of the Blitz Basic jam, and I see the page doesn't exist any more. Did anything come of it? I thought it had a couple of people signed up...

After laying low for a couple of years due to the pandemic, Amiga Ireland will be back in person this coming January. This is a two-day event held in Athlone in the middle of Ireland, with a big social element. There will be games competitions, workshops, presentations, special guests and lots of friendly chat over the weekend. It takes place on the 13th and 14th January, tickets and further details are available at https://amigausers.ie/ There will also be a creative competition, which is open to anyone regardless of whether they are attending the meetup or not. There are two categories: MOD music and pixel art, and entries will be shown and a winner picked at the show. The closing date is 6th January, and details can be found at https://amigausers.ie/creative-competition-2023-submit-your-entry-for-display-and-voting-at-amiga-ireland-online/

One week left of the Blitz Basic Game Jam, and there are a few pretty good entries it would seem. Settle The World is looking incredible, my own entry will be far from finished but will hopefully at least be playable. Judging and public streaming of all the entries will be happening in November.

Hmmm, just a couple of things to note, in case you haven't already tried them. First off, the Amiga is a complex beast to emulate, and can be surprisingly heavy going on even quite powerful hardware. To help with this, the various emulators typically take shortcuts to improve performance. It might be worth checking that certain options aren't enabled or disabled that require a lot of resources. The first and most obvious one is to make sure JIT is enabled and is given the maximum RAM. This uses a JIT CPU emulation, which is less accurate but *vastly* quicker, and good enough for 90% of uses. Enabling this option will disable cycle-exact for the chipset, which is also a feature that takes a lot of grunt to implement. And yes, using the generic ROM that WinUAE comes with will be slower than an original Amiga ROM due to its nature so it's definitely worth trying an original ROM. The older versions of these can be *cough*found easily enough on the internet for testing purposes; if you find that it makes a large improvement, you can always shell out for a licence then. Anyway, enjoy the journey. The Amiga's an impressive machine, and with emulation you have access to all sorts of hardware expansions that were quite expensive back in the day. It's nice to have a couple of different systems emulated - maybe a basic one for floppy-based games like a standard A500 so many people had back then, and another setup with fast CPU, the latest OS, graphics cards and the whole lot to see what a powerhouse it really was or could have been.

The RF shield isn't really needed and many people with expanded machines simply ditch them. So it should be fine, but if you have a longer cable it should just be a matter of fitting it correctly.

Oh, that's a good spot, I didn't see that one. It's most likely bent from being slightly out of line and then forced further when the cable was reattached at some point. That's a signal-carrying pin (/RDY), and without it the drive won't be recognised. That needs to be carefully straightened and the cable carefully fitted to make sure it mates properly, but chances are it'll work fine. The plastic base of the connector usually prevents the damage going any further. Yep, that's a standard part of the Shugart floppy specification. Sometimes it's ignored and you have all 34 pins available in both connectors, but the pin isn't used for anything then (and keyed cables won't fit of course). In particular for very cheap devices (e.g. the Gotek) and cables (most Amigas I've seen have unkeyed cables), it's cheaper not to have them keyed as they don't have that extra manufacturing step. The pin is definitely missing from the A600 and A1200. I'd assume from the other Amigas too, but my memory isn't that sharp with other machines as I haven't spent quite so much time inside them with a soldering iron

Should do. Just bear in mind that the end of the cable at the Gotek probably fits either way around, and it won't work if it's connected backwards or misaligned. If the Gotek itself is showing the USB drive as connected on its screen, then the issue probably isn't the USB drive.

That's not a broken pin, you'll find that pin is missing from many Amiga floppy headers. It's for keying so that you don't connect the cable incorrectly, and is designated as that on the schematic. You'll notice that the hole in the cable connector is filled with a plastic blank, not a metal pin. Panic over

Okay, first I need to clarify something: Do you mean you want the Blitz Basic editor to open in a larger resolution? Or do you want your code to open a larger resolution screen? By default Blitz Basic will open a 640x200 (NTSC) or 640x256 (PAL) screen for the editor. If you're using the original release of Blitz Basic 2.1, the editor it comes with (called Ted) is pretty primitive as it is intended for use on older Amigas, and from memory it is a fixed resolution. On the extras disk there's a much better editor called SuperTed (along with a much better debugger and much better command library) which I strongly recommend you install. If you use the CD ISO that I linked to, they will be installed by default. SuperTed will open the same resolution screen that Workbench uses, so whatever you choose in Workbench will be copied. Personally I use 1920x1200 If you mean you want your code to open a different screen resolution, that's a different story. The Amiga natively uses screens that are 200 pixels (NTSC) or 256 pixels (PAL) tall. Interlacing the modes doubles these for a 400 or 512 pixel tall screenmode, and monitor drivers allow you to use any other screenmodes the hardware can handle, e.g. graphics card modes and AGA modes, but these are difficult to use when accessing the hardware directly. The simplest way to code for these screenmodes is to use the OS instead, and to do this you use the Screen command. The help page for the command (press Shift+help with the cursor on the word Screen) will list the main flags used.

Typically 320x200 (or 320x256 for PAL machines) is the standard resolution used by most games on the Amiga. But it is possible to use higher resolutions. The Blitz manual isn't too bad, but is far from perfect and tends to ignore the fact that most of the magic numbers it gives you are actually things like OS constants, which means additional options are available if you simply add in the corresponding values from the OS developer documentation. First things first though, are you using the latest version of Blitz 2? There have been a few updates since Blitz 2.1 was released, and you can get the latest version as an ISO image from http://ubb.plus/ Then, what resolution are you looking to use, and are you writing system-friendly or hardware-banging software? The two approaches are quite different, and each has its own way of doing higher resolutions. For system-friendly software, you can open an Intuition screen of any available resolution using the Screen command (including graphics card screens) with the appropriate flags set. If you're banging the hardware, there are two command libraries offered: the Slice library and the Display library. They aren't generally compatible, and the Display library is the newer one, intended to replace the Slice library. This can also open a high resolution display using the InitCopList command, again with the relevant flags set. Unfortunately, using interlace while banging the hardware isn't supported by either library, so while you can output up to 1280 pixels across, you're still limited to 256 pixels high without resorting to extra trips. Just be aware that using higher resolutions will be slower on real hardware, especially on non-AGA machines.

There are a few decent options on the Amiga. GCC is there for pretty much industry standard code, but is a little heavy and clunky to use. Dice C is pretty good and more Amiga-centric, VBCC is probably the most commonly used one though. Most C coding on the Amiga tends to be for applications so most code examples will be along those lines, but you've got the full Amiga API at your disposal including all the graphics, sound and controller functions, and banging the hardware can be done without too much trouble if you prefer.

This game jam had been scheduled to finish up at the end of August, but has now been extended by two months to finish at the end of October. This is mainly to do with many of the entrants not making as much progress as they had hoped over the summer, and because the aim of the jam is to further the knowledge and experience with Blitz Basic, the more complete the entries are, the better it is for the community. Also, it seems that some of the entries are very ambitious in scope, not least the Colonization-inspired "Settle The World" entry, which is shaping up very nicely indeed.

Kickstart 2.04 or above But you can use bootdisks, or even modified bootblocks to switch Kickstart 1 machines into PAL or NTSC modes if they have the required motherboard / Agnus revision. From memory, you need a rev 6 A500 motherboard and an 8372 Agnus for soft switching to work.

Just going back a little, you probably don't need to worry about coating the board - it doesn't look like there's any exposed copper. The exposed areas look like they're already coated in solder, which has the same effect. Regarding the metal shells, to my knowledge only Commodore original expansions came with the shells, and that was because they were an option to have fitted when the machine was bought. They kept the RF interference protection of the complete machine intact. I've never seen shielding on any 3rd party expansions (and the Commodore A501 will work just fine without the shielding too).

Yep, the daughterboard was because the OS wasn't finished and they needed to launch the machine. The comparison with the C128 is slightly skewed as well by the fact that the C128 had to be priced very cheaply for what it was, because people didn't really see the big advantage over the C64 (itself very cheaply priced by being sold in the millions). So if the C128 was more conventionally priced based on what was in it, it probably would have been a bit closer to the A1000 price. Chip count is one thing, the types of chips were another. Sure, both had custom chips, but the Amiga had four times as much RAM for example (including 256kB on the WCS daughterboard). Ram was expensive back then - in 1984/85, RAM cost around $1 per kB. Even up to the end of the Amiga in 1994, the RAM was typically the single most expensive line of the BOM. Yes, the Amiga was designed around video, which gave it some critical advantages over PCs, but it was also designed to be easily expandable. It might have been external for the A1000, but the Zorro bus was still an advanced expansion system that would not be surpassed in terms of capability until PCI came along. At the time of the A1000, graphics cards weren't really necessary as the onboard graphics already surpassed most PCs' capabilities, but they could have been used if they had been developed. The A2000 from 1987 could add them internally of course, just like PCs.

Heh, it just shows how different people's ideas can be. For me, the OS was one of the key things about the Amiga that set it apart from everything else. Both in terms of using it and coding for it, it was so much nicer to me than Windows 3 and MS-DOS, and why I used it for serious stuff long after most others had ditched their stock, floppy-only systems. And of course there's no arguing that modern systems are exponentially more useful, powerful and capable, but hardly a day goes by using Windows and Linux without lamenting not having some particular feature of Amiga OS. Indeed, and to a certain degree there's still a bit of that in Linux and FOSS communities these days. They did try, and were reasonably successful at it (well, Commodore at least) but by the early '90s the market was too cutthroat to sustain that sort of business for Commodore. I had a Commodore 386 PC back then. It was utterly unremarkable compared to any number of other clunky, sluggish 386 boxes available aside from the Commodore badge and one other feature: it had audio as standard (unusual for 386 boxes), and the audio output was through phono connectors like the Amiga instead of 3.5mm jacks like every other sound card.