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.
Personally I think it was a lot of little the, like what you mentioned, but the biggest thing was lack up inexpensive upgrades. For 20 or so years, I reservation had the same computer case, but everything inside of it changed over the years. Upgrade the video card, swap out the motherboard, upgrade ram, etc. You could make meaningful incremental upgrades to your PC cheap and didn’t need to replace the whole thing. I don’t believe the Amiga could have ever replaced the PC (because of this), but it definitely could have replaced apple who also had a similar closed ecosystem.
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.’
Here in Europe we had no issue with it, I think.
Shame wasn’t a factor, we didn’t need an IBM sticker to feel safe of being fired.
The A2000 was a serious desktop PC and both Commodore and Atari had been established in PC clone business, too.
Business software and real applications had been available on both Atari ST and Amiga until ca. 1992, I think. Again.. circa.
That’s when Atari ST remained a MIDI computer but was less and less being used as an office PC.
The Amiga remained useful until 1994 for certain tasks such as running latest D-Paint or as a video editing computer in TV studios.
But ordinary applications? I don’t know.
As a layman I get the feeling that by early 90s the Amiga became more and more a sole game and demoscene machine.
Previously one application was being ported and made available to other platforms.
All the good stuff seem to have been pre-AmigaOS 2.
By early 90s, sophisticated applications rather ran on PC on Windows 3 or Atari ST by that time.
PCs also got more versatile. OS/2 and Windows NT looked so much more powerful than Amiga OS.
And then the hard disks.. PCs had not only big, cheap AT-Bus HDDs
but also 1,44MB and 1,2MB floppy drives and CD-ROM drives got popular.
ZIP drives appeared by Windows 95, too, which also were more of a PC/Mac thing.
But again, I lack the experience. It’s just my point of view, which other laymen may or may not share.
To Amiga fans, the AmigaOS and the A600, A1200 and A3000/A4000 were surely very relevant, even.
But to casual users? I’d dare to think they rather associate the 80s with the Amiga platform. A1000 and A2000+A500.
It was not only video editing (= the Video Toaster that handled TV signal and added realtime effects and overlays to it), it was also 3d modeling and rendering, the Lightwave 3D was quite good at the time. According to history https://lightwave3d.com/documentation/lightwave-history/ they ported it to PC in 1995. Rumors say it was used to make some scenes for Blade Runner movie.
A1200 had IDE interface so (2.5″ laptop) harddisks and even CD-ROMs were not an issue. I bought my A1200 with 20(?)MB hard drive already inside. The Aminet software archive was regularly distributed on CDs (for free if your software was included in it, I have few of them) and it was using long filenames unlike DOS. And as I mentioned above at the time even the performace was same or better than PCs – you could get turbo card with 68030 and 68882 FPU running up to 50Mhz so it matched 386 and 486. But then Pentium came at 60,75,100,133,… Mhz and AMD an Cyrix clones and that was end of it (for me). 68040 and PowePC cards were very expensive and couldn’t match it anyway.
Oh but the Blade Runner is 1982 and the Lightwave 3d is newer so it is just a rumor. So it was probably the other way around, people tried to recreate Blade Runner movie scenes on Amiga.
“and CD-ROM drives got popular” forgot to mention CDTV (A500 with CD-ROM) and CD32 gaming console. CD32 was basically A1200 plus CD-ROM plus some extra chip for planar to chunky conversion so games like Doom run better on it. Many AGA games for Amiga A1200 had CD32 version with lot of extra stuff like prerendered video scenes and audio tracks as part of the game (in 1993/94).
As for productivity software there was some office and DTP package and even something was bundled with A1200. The OS supported printers very well, I don’t think there was an issue with that in 1994. It is just that PC hardware (PCI bus, Pentium, 3D video cards with 800×60 and 1024×768 resolution) + Windows 95 became better and cheaper than Amiga. Windows 3.1 was still worse but with win32 api in Win95 both software and hardware surpassed Amiga in everything practical at that time. Also Linux kernel and Debian got pretty usable at that time too – you no longer needed to compile everything from source and install stuff by hand. And it run better/faster on PCs then on the Amiga.
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.
The way Commodore and the Amiga management ballsed it all up has been extensively and exhaustively documented and discussed, there’s no great mystery.
Near the end people started to realise that users would buy upgrades to run 3D FPS games and stuff like that, just like the PC market were, but for a long time (too long) that wasn’t the norm so development was restricted very strongly to what would run on standard hardware – A500, A500+, or A600/1200.
That plus Commodore flushing vast sums of money down the toilet rather than develop and support new hardware left it dead in the water.
“development was restricted very strongly to what would run on standard hardware – A500, A500+, or A600/1200”
There was also more limited use of full Amiga capabilities because developers also wanted to sell to Atari ST owners.
Eventually, nothing could save either platform because PC clones became less expensive, the user base was vast resulting in a huge variety of software, and their ability to use expansion cards enabled sophisticated sound and graphics for games.
I hope you’re joking, if not you have no idea of what you are talking about Amiga computers were miles ahead of PCs on 3d engines. So much so that they were used in CGI way after the company died. They died because the management and the marketing was an absolute joke and because Win PCs penetrated the offices thanks to IBM, while Commodores was pointing everything on home users or creatives (musicians and cinema mainly)
To be fair, by 1990 onwards there was Autodesk Animator, Autodesk 3D Studio etc.
Sample videos:
Autodesk Animator Demo Reel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTl-pPlaD7Q
Autodesk 3-D Studio Release 2 Demo Reel (1992)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sgq10etls5k
On a 386DX, an Intel Rapidcad or i486 you could do quite some serious rendering by late 80s/early 90s.
The VGA card appeared in 1987, and many VGA compatibles existed by early 1988.
There even were updated Super EGA clones with VGA BIOS support that appeared as early as mid-1987,
so mode 12h in 640×480 in 16c were possible, at very least.
Realistically speaking, a PC was sort of multimedia capable by 1988 onwards, when VGA, AdLib/CMS and Covox Sound Master and SpeechThing were available.
In principle, I mean. I won’t argue about money or if PC/Amiga was better.
If you had to ask for price at the time, then you likely couldn’t afford anything anyway.
A high-end 386 or 486 PC was cheap compared to a real graphics workstation.
But anyway, I should mention too that the A2000 had been used by cartoon animators
and for early multimedia things things like telemedics.
Here is a wireframe animation, for example:
https://youtu.be/-_j48O50crQ?t=130
In principle, I assume, it was like this:
-A1000: the original, expensive prototype only a few had
-A500: everyone’s favorite toy/game computer
-A2000: ugly duck, but a workhorse; expects CPU card (68030 etc) to be seriously capable
-A600 and up: I pretend doesn’t exist
But again, just a layman here.
The people I talked to had in real life had an A500 most of the time,
I can’t remember anyone mentioning having had an A600 or newer.
I guess that in my country the A500 remained popular (and affordable) until Commodore closed the doors.
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
My wife and I bought a motel on tnd NSW South Coast in 1993. I didn’t want to spend a huge amount of money on a commercial motel management program, so I wrote my own in Blitz Basic 2.
It took about 6 months to get working, but then it handled everything – front office, back office, tax returns, purchasing. I was in the unusual situation of having an Amiga for my business and a PC for fun and games.
Loved my Amigas. Was heartbroken when they died.
Professional software developer, with nearly 3 decades of experience, which ironically started with Visual Basic 5, was started around a decade earlier, thanks to C and the Amiga. There’s no point, in going backwards, which is exactly what this language does.
Hi! Please let me explain to you something about Visual Basic and advanced BASIC dialects in general:
They’re very useful for prototyping. Just like this Amiga language is.
And VB was meant to be a RAD IDE, a rapid application development, integtated development environment.
At its heart, it was meant to quickly have a working prototype application,
which then still could be rebuilt in another language (Visual Studio covered other languages, too.)
Comparing BASIC and C is like comparing apples and orange, I think.
If for anything, I think, then both can be compared with Object Pascal (Delphi).
I started off with a C64, I modified that with a custom eprom ,we had an eprom programmer from England that worked on the C64. I then upgraded to an Amiga 500, I upgrade that with a huge 20mb hard drive and an extra 4 mbs of ram. I then started the PC route with a 486 computer and Win95. Not a fan with the forced upgrade to Win11. I built my last machine about 5 years ago and it is still fast on Win10. Fun times.
Bring back AMOS!