AMOS box. Old Amos basic programs to PureBasic?

[Kapslok]

Hi there,

I thought I could contribute a solution for porting old Amos basic programs to Windows. Of course it's still unfinished, but I was interested if others have need for such environment?

Idea started with a classic game that I did back in -94 and when I changed to PC's I wasn't able to play that game except through an Amigaemulator. My game didn't use all sophisticated features of AMOS, which made the conversion considerably easy.


What the current version of AmosBox is capable:

- screens, memory handling, windows, bobs, musicmodules, sounds, sprites (doesn't support all features though)
- Amos soundbank (Abk) import (brings up the old 8-bit amiga sfx)
- basic set of Amos commands and their Purebasic equivalents (Print, input, ink, pen, text, draw, cls, palette...)
- Amigastyle font & mousepointer (to get back the good old memories...)


What is missing is the Amal-implementation. Amal was used to get smooth movement and animation to sprites and bobs. It's a built-in language inside Amosbasic. Also Amos bob-Abk import would make it easier to convert the graphics.

There's the Url to test. And I gotta admit, most of it is pretty messy code. There's couple of small demos and some graphics files to be included.

http://www.reignofarch.com/Amosbox017.zip


And the ported game resigns here, but it is in finnish language... and windows-only at the moment (No vista).
However, I'll update the link if the english version gets ready.

http://www.reignofarch.com/gamedl/WoA17plus.zip



For those who don't know what AMOS is, I need to say that it was one of the most advanced game-programming-basic-languages on Amiga platform. There was plenty of games which were written on AMOS. Some of them true classics. Amos basic got some competors later on, such as Purebasic-Amiga-opensource and BlitzBasic 2. The author of Amos Basic is François Lionet (he did Clickboom and other gamemakers) and year 90-92 ... as I remember right.

And please note this is not a purebasic wrapper of any sort. It's just some PB-code for converting the Amos basic sources to purebasic.

[Flype]

I used a lot Amos back in years, and especially the OSDevkit extension (made by a friend of me).

This an interesting demonstration, never think before about emulating a language.

I agree that emulating AMAL should be quite complicated.
Syntax was too strange for me, i should first understand it before emulating it .

But abk should be more simpler, i remember i've done (very back in years) 'Amos Sampler Bank Maker' which allow to easily make samples collection in .abk

Thanks for this funny box/time.

[Kapslok]

Ok, nice to hear some comments! It really is an experimental box, but funny enough it seemed to work well for one project. You can imagine the nostalgic feeling when a game started in year -94 comes back alive on these new machines. All those big pixels with >carefully< chosen colours from reasonably big palette of 4096 colours... What comes to Amiga and PC, the different byte-order caused some problems.

Amal was a pretty neat thing if you tried to do something scrolling smooth... (actually it seemed quite hard to get anything smooth on Amos... well, maybe 25th of seconds )... I still have the Amos pro guidebook and it seems to describe Amal, bank structures and other stuff in detail... So. Wish me luck! Maybe I port the whole thing to Pure.

[djes]

I have several old programs coded in Amos, especially editors to create tables for my assembler projects. I have also two or more little games I wrote for the fun, and an ANSI editor that I'd like to see working!
Good luck for this project! If you want a french translator to speak with François Lionet, mail me

[Blue Steel]

François Lionet also did jamagic for the pc from memory

[case]

francois lionet is a founder member of clickteam http://www.clickteam.co.uk/about.php. i used amos on amiga ,) it was great

[byo]

I work for Clickteam from time to time and they are very friendly and take their products seriously.
Yves, Francois and Jeff are some of the most respectable people I met on internet.
It's always a pleasure to work with them.

[Kapslok]

AmosBox is now much better. This is version 0.31

Added features:

- Linux support
- Amos Sprite Abk loading. Your old sprites come back to alive!
- Organized the code
- Includefiles removed. Topaz8 font and mousepointer are in Datastatements
- lot more of AMOS PRO commands...
- 2 small demos

in one zip file:
http://www.reignofarch.com/AmosBox031.zip

A small example of sprite-abk loading looked like this:

Code: Select all

XIncludeFile("AmosBox.pb")

; AMOSBOX sprite abk loading demo.

load("Slaygon.abk",1)
SpriteBank(1)                ; make sprites out of this bank

palette($313,$494)
paper(1) : cls()

Repeat
	For b=0 To 4
		For c=1 To 5
			bob(b*5+c,Xscreen(Xmouse())+c*30,YScreen(Ymouse())+b*30,b*5+c)
			If mousekey()=1
				pastebob(Xscreen(Xmouse())+c*30,YScreen(Ymouse())+b*30,b*5+c)
			EndIf
		Next
	Next
	Waitvbl()
ForEver

End

This example and the abk file is included in the zip-file.

Greetings,
Kapslok

[Swos2009]

I am former Amos coder and I have to say I really like it...

Keep going

[Kapslok]

Nice to hear AMOS still has some reputation. I've been developing a game on top of AmosBox named World of Arch. There is a download link for the game on the website http://www.archmonster.com. It however, crashes on some windows xp setups.

Amosbox is currently able to extract amos soundbanks (abk) and amos sprites (abk). I'm currently thinking of changing the concept so that the box wouldn't use sprites at all even though they're very fast. Images could be processed in a thread, which would open new kind of approach to it.