Having owned an Amiga microcomputer is apparently a little bit like having shaken hands with Shoggoth: no one can escape unchanged from the experience. Thirty-two years on, [Neil] at The Retro Collective remains haunted by the memories — specifically, the memory of BlitzBasic 2, an Amiga-specific programming language he never found the time to use. What better time to make a game for the Amiga than the year 2025 of the common era?
[Neil] takes us on a long journey, with more than a little reminiscing along the way. BlitzBasic may not have been the main programming language for the Amiga, but it was by no means the least, with a good pedigree that included the best-selling 1993 game Skidmarks. Obviously BlitzBasic was not a slow, interpreted language as one might think hearing “BASIC”. Not only is it a compiled language, it was fast enough to be billed as the next best thing to C for the Amiga, according to [Neil].
[Neil] wasn’t the only one whose dreams have been haunted by the rugose touch of the Amiga and its scquomose BlitzBasic language– you’ll find a version on GitHub called AmiBlitz3 that is maintained by [Sven] aka [honitas] to this day, complete with an improved IDE. The video includes a history lesson on the open-source AmiBlitz, and enough information to get you started.
For the vibe-coders amongst you, [Neil] has an excellent tip that you can use LLMs like ChatGPT to help you learn niche languages like this not by asking for code (which isn’t likely to give you anything useful, unless you’ve given it special training) but by requesting techniques and psudocode you can then implement to make your game. The LLM also proved a useful assistent for [Neil]’s excel-based pixel art workflow.
If you’re wondering why bother, well, why not? As [Neil] says, writing Amiga games is his version of a crossword puzzle. It may also be the only way to keep the dreams at bay. Others have taken to writing new operating systems or reproducing PCBs to keep vintage Amiga hardware alive. If some gather under the light of the full moon to chant “Ia! Ia! Commodore f’thagan”– well, perhaps we can thank them for Commodore for rising from the sunless depths of bankruptcy once again.
I will remember the Amiga Power review of Skidmarks 2 forever:
COWS! WHEELS! CARAVANS! GO!
Truly it was the game of champions, bested only by Gravity Power which was a PD game that Amiga Power liked so much they paid the creator to make a few tweaks and a level editor and re-release it on their coverdisk.
x86 PCs went from primitive 2D games under DOS to Windows 11 and full RTX cinematic experience we have now.
Amiga went from beautiful 2D games to e-waste bin because it could not adapt to market demand like PC. No one cares about some boring point-and-click adventure games when there’s Duke 3D or Half Life available.
Agreed, regarding how Amiga changed from technological leader to being left behind, but I would any time prefer an adventure game telling a story over a boring kill-them-all-or-they-will-kill-you game. For me, the cinematic experience made gaming uninteresting.
It’s all looks and little soul today. Boring to the bone.
There was something fascinating about early 3D games, though.
The feeling of being alone in an artificial world. Most modern 3D games don’t have it anymore.
It was that Langoliers kind of feeling, I think. Being alone in a world that’s mute and left behind.
This video describes it well, I think.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEtTpkzv50c
But, regarding the topic at hand, programming on the Amiga OS was (and I suppose still is) way more fun than on any DOS or Windows version. The API was very clean and well thought out.
Ah, there it is again. The old Amiga vs PC rivalry! :D
Seriously, though, it’s all fun in its own way.
On DOS, many of the early commercial IDEs can be found.
Borland software, for example. Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, Turbo Basic..
For a change, many developers find it relaxing to go back in time and code in an old IDE.
And DOS has that old text-mode feeling, similar to old Unix systems.
The fact that VMs can easily run DOS (at full speed, since it is x86) makes it worth a try.
On Windows 3.x, there used to be many Visual Basic programmers in the 90s.
Especially in shareware scene (shovelware CDs are a time capsule of that).
VB3 was very popular and many indie developers tried to start a company from home.
It was the continuation of the bed room programmers of the 80s, basically.
Amiga and Macintosh surely had something similar,
but I haven’t much experience here, so I can’t mention examples.
I’d like to hear them, though. It’s always interesting to learn something new.
The reason the Amiga got left behind was that it just cost too darned much. High enough that people who could afford the Amiga could see that the Mac was within reach, and far enough above the C64 that a lot of people would settle for that. Maybe the Apple 2e/2c/2gs were in the same zone, but had that absolutely enormous software catalog.
All due respect but the Amiga was enormously successful. Why it was left behind had nothing to do with the C64 or Apple 2s, it had everything to do with the implosion of Commodore and a lack of a meaningful followup to have a story against the PC much later.
There were many reasons, I think.
Wrong decisions at Commodore, piracy culture of users (turned publishers off), Amiga hardware falling behind, PCs dominating market, end of home computer era etc. pp.
Perhaps it was a mix of all of them that caused the decline, rather than just one.
About the Mac.. It was popular in the US early on, but not so much in Europe, Russia, China or Japan.
Here in Europe of late 80s/early 90s, Macintosh emulators where more popular than real Macs perhaps. And these emulators ran on Atari ST (and Amiga).
But what do I know? I’m no Amiga die-hard, I probably lack the experience to make a proper statement.
Generations of future users will likely still try to figure out what really happened to the Amiga.
I had C64, then A500 an then A1200. Later I got turbocard with 68030 and MMU and 8MB RAM for A1200. It was great machine that even run Linux. But then PC became cheaper and better so I moved to running Linux on Pentium based PC. It was also time when Windows95 came with 32bit and full preemptive multitasking. With that the PC became solid machine. All the advantages of Amiga were matched and surpassed and became legacy features that started to drag the platform down – no memory protection, bad support for higher screen resolutions, bitplane based graphics, fonts designed for 640×256 resolution (see also the screenshot), slow CPU. For me Linux PC became the new Amiga – same freedom of choice and hackability but better hardware. I am still happy that I had it at the time when PC was just laughable garbage so I could avoid the 8086/286/DOS/ISA/CGA/PC speaker days and enjoy all the games, demos and coding in C and 68000 assembly on 32bit OS instead.
Agreed, the PCs economy of scale completely wiped out the competition. Commodore, aside from mismanagement and slow to react market demands couldn’t offer a platform that could develop as quickly as the PC. Apple also barely held on, though they managed to carve out an existence, and later grew enormous with other clever tricks and devices.
No.
It was simply business users.
Amiga was clearly not marketed to office uses.
The name is a tell, ‘Female Friend’.
How is that going to go over with the average office type HR B#*$?
The first business users didn’t want a computer, they wanted ‘a Visicalc’.
So they bought an Apple 2.
When it was time to replace that, IBM was a ridiculously overpriced player w Lotus123 and Wordstar ready to go early.
‘Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.’
I do. I also do enjoy text-adventures for C64, Spectrum or Apple II. They’re like interactive books.
Likewise, there are still many fans of the NES or Sega Genesis.
Personally, I don’t have the nerves or energy to play badly rendered 3D games
all day in which every map is the same and where there is no or little storyline.
I’d rather play a game of chess, which is more entertaining to me. But that’s just me.
But yeah, Duke 3D, Doom, Wolf 3D, UT and Counter Strike do appeal the masses.
Just like sports do. There are supposedly many people who enjoy being intoxicated in front of TV,
while watching some major sporting event.
What about Half Life? It has one of the best video game stories ever, written by Marc Laidlaw himself. Episode 3 would’ve been a masterpiece if it wasn’t cancelled by 2010s wokism movement.
Wot?
Loved coding with it. It quite literally gave you a commercial quality feel to your creations. Unlike Amos which often dragged itself along at a basic pace (even with its compiler extention)
Before my amiga 500 died in 1993 I managed a bordered screen version of the forest stage of shadow of the beast. All the parallax and colour with the beginning of multiplexed sprites.
Still miss blitz & my amiga