New Commercial Amiga 500 Game Released 123
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.
I never acrually had A 500 (Score:3)
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.
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Games that followed Commodores programming guidelines works on A1200 but commercial companies wrote hacky crap back then too. Sometimes it helps switching to OCS-mode and turning off CPU caches in the boot menu but if there is a lot of cycle timed stuff you might be screwed anyway.
This game works out of the box on the Amiga 1200:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
To get the bulk of Amiga 500 games to work on the Amiga 1200, you could use a bootdiskette with ReloKick/TUDE (aminet.net) and afterwards put in the game to boot.
Alternatively there are WHDLoad installs for nearly all Amiga games, which takes care of this transparently (amongst bug fixes, high score savings, adds a HD icon, etc):
http://whdload.de/ [whdload.de]
Re:I never acrually had A 500 (Score:5, Interesting)
There were quite a few games back in the day where the game itself ran fine on A1200 (or A4000, accelerated amigas etc), but the copy protection scheme didn't and caused the game to crash. Cracked versions ran just fine, while legitimately purchased versions crashed.
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Not sure who told you that, but no, unless it was trying to write as you ejected it, it was fine. Even if you did corrupt a disk, the rest of it was still readable, only the file that it had been trying to write would be damaged.
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But that was many years ago, I didn't bring the Amigas with me when I migrated (legally) to America 16 years ago.
Guilty before proven innocent?
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Why is this news? (Score:5, Interesting)
Not complaining about the Amiga getting some attention on slashdot, I just don't see why it's news.
Re: Why is this news? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Well, they aren't supported - the companies behind these platforms are long dead (except maybe Apple), and the platforms dead.
However, just because the machines are effectively dead, doesn't 'mean there isn't still a fan community. And better yet, a lot of these platforms are still readily available, because they were made in such quanti
Re: Why is this news? (Score:2)
Planet X2! (Score:3)
Here's a new real-time strategy game developed last year by the "8-bit guy" [youtube.com] for the Commodore 64: http://www.the8bitguy.com/plan... [the8bitguy.com]
I'm not sure they're getting rich on this, but if you're nostalgic and love to code... why not?
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Check out the 8 bit guy on youtube. He just released a RTS game on C64.
Re:Why is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Why is this news? (Score:1)
Serious question: how well can a developer get paid writing C64 games? Are these part time projects or can a developer afford to work on these full time?
It's been a long time since I've done any C64 programming. Is it possible to find the C64 Programmer's Reference Guide or some of the Compute's books online? Those were very helpful for learning C64 programming.
One scene I was involved in and I'm sorry to say is pretty much dead is TI calculator gaming. There are still a few releases, but most of the develo
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From following many 8-bit retro computers i'd say C64 and Amiga are the two most active.
Amiga was a 32-bit computer.
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Of course there's still a reasonably healthy C64 demo scene [csdb.dk] and the C64 mini has its fans, so I guess this is not that great a surprise.
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was also thinking about Planet X2, but that one (and several others) was relased in 2017:
http://www.the8bitguy.com/product/planet-x2-commodore-64/ [the8bitguy.com]
Not as impressive as I imagined, but 2018 isn't over yet.
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This "Aliens" themed one was released yesterday:
https://psytronik.itch.io/orga... [psytronik.itch.io]
Slashvertisement (Score:2)
Its not news....
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The guy ain't gonna make megabucks from this, it's only sold 140 copies so far.
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I'd say it's news for geeks. It's a polished new release for a 32 year old platform. The guy ain't gonna make megabucks from this, it's only sold 140 copies so far.
Agreed.
Retro games are huge for geeks. There's not only the nostalgia factor; they have to be at least a bit good in actual game play, as they can't rely on stunning visuals.
Re:Why is this news? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think it's good to include some more light-hearted news items from time to time. Sam's Journey on the Commodore 64 is IMO newsworthy as well, it put a smile on my face just like Worthy. :-)
Sam's Journey release trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Retrogaming is still big. I would really love to see a new Amiga home computer which covers such games, maybe using SDL/AmigaOS4/PPC like A-Eon is working on (A1222/Tabor).
http://blog.a-eon.biz/blog/ [a-eon.biz]
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Yeah, there are still regular releases on the Amiga. This one does look exceptionally nice, it has to be said.
It's an interesting time for Amiga (and C64) developers. Back in the day, pre-internet you had to rely on books and, if you were lucky, text files posted on BBS systems to learn about the system. If you owned a disassembler or monitor cart you might be able to look at other people's code and figure out how it worked.
Now not only is all that knowledge online and searchable, but you have extremely goo
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Ugh, I've got a mod stalker again. Whipslash, are you seeing this?
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There is a small but upward trending market for New Games for Nostalgic platforms.
I find these new Games really show off the capability of these old systems, combined with all the new tricks that modern development can offer.
Today development for a C64 would be like programming a Game back 30 years ago with the development staff with access to a Supercomputer for development. That can optimize to a massive level for the Target system, while the code can be more manageable.
I have seen some nostalgic remakes
Quite a few commercial games actually (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Agreed. I tend to watch 8-bit guy, and other retro channels and its truly astonishing how much new hardware and software keep coming out for the system. I've been leaning on buying a collection of retro Amigas so i can try out this new hardware and software.
Fun fact DMA Design, since you mentioned them, renamed themselves and are now known today as Rockstar Games. The same fellas who do Grand Theft Auto. Several other game companies, who birthed on the Amiga, are still around today. Just under differe
Re: Quite a few commercial games actually (Score:1)
From Lemmings to GTA.
It's all about brutal slaughter :-D
Trapped in Amiga Hell (Score:1, Flamebait)
I knew nothing about the Amiga, and a few months ago set up an Amiga emulator to play an obscure game exclusive to that platform. Learning the basics about all the different systems and specs and addons and which were most appropriate for a latter-day game was a drag. The system has more classifications of RAM than DOS did. It was harder than it should've been to figure out why nothing happened when I turned on the emulator, even after configuring BIOS. I had to pay attention to which OS versions worked wit
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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.
Re:Trapped in Amiga Hell (Score:5, Informative)
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!)
Re:Trapped in Amiga Hell (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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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.
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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/ [amigaforever.com]
WinUAE has different goals (Score:2)
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 [http] 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 accu
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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 o
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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.
Re:Trapped in Amiga Hell (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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.
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Wish they just emulated the AmigaOS API so you didn't have to faff with it.
http://aros.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
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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 run
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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.
Awe was Synonymous with Amiga (Score:2)
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 stere
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I had a cga monitor on my Amiga for a while. The Amiga has an output that will drive it. The clocks are the same. Worked okay for text displays, where there is lots of contrast, and I was just using it mostly for text at that point. Bbsing and text internet.
Pc graphics went from ega to vga in the Amiga's day. Most Amiga games use nowhere near 4096 colors because it's non-trivial to even display that many. Easy enough for stills but not animation. However the Amiga did manage to continue to smash the PC in t
For all 1MB Amigas (Score:2)
Somehow the trailer does not look that awesome (Score:1)
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, ...
RAM hell won't happen on any Atari ST. :P (Score:1)
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 limi
Cracked By Crystal (Score:1)
Waiting for it to be cracked by Crystal, it wouldn't really be 'amiga' if it wasn't cracked =D
what about Amiga Bomb Jack Beer? (Score:1)
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 crashed (Score:2)
preview guide channel used to run on Amiga it crashed a lot.
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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.
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Missing option: hot grits.