amiga

87 Articles

The Many-Sprites Interpretation Of Amiga Mechanics

December 31, 2025 by 17 Comments

The invention of sprites triggered a major shift in video game design, enabling games with independent moving objects and richer graphics despite the limitations of early video gaming hardware. As a result, hardware design was specifically built to manipulate sprites, and generally as new generations of hardware were produced the number of sprites a system could produce went up. But [Coding Secrets], who published games for the Commodore Amiga, used an interesting method to get this system to produce far more sprites at a single time than the hardware claimed to support.

This hack is demonstrated with [Coding Secrets]’s first published game on the Amiga, Leander. Normally the Amiga can only display up to eight sprites at once, but there is a coprocessor in the computer that allows for re-drawing sprites in different areas of the screen. It can wait for certain vertical and horizontal line positions and then execute certain instructions. This doesn’t allow unlimited sprites to be displayed, but as long as only eight are displayed on any given line the effect is similar. [Coding Secrets] used this trick to display the information bar with sprites, as well as many backgrounds, all simultaneously with the characters and enemies we’d normally recognize as sprites.

Of course, using built-in hardware to do something the computer was designed to do isn’t necessarily a hack, but it does demonstrate how intimate knowledge of the system could result in a much more in-depth and immersive experience even on hardware that was otherwise limited. It also wasn’t free to use this coprocessor; it stole processing time away from other tasks the game might otherwise have to perform, so it did take finesse as well. We’ve seen similar programming feats in other gaming projects like this one which gets Tetris running with only 1000 lines of code.

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Chip Swap Fixes A Dead Amiga 600

December 18, 2025 by 12 Comments

The Amiga 600 was in its day the machine nobody really wanted — a final attempt to flog the almost original spec 68000 platform from 1985, in 1992. Sure it had a PCMCIA slot nobody used, and an IDE interface for a laptop hard drive, but it served only to really annoy anyone who’d bought one when a few months later the higher-spec 1200 appeared. It’s had a rehabilitation in recent years though as a retrocomputer, and [LinuxJedi] has a 600 motherboard in need of some attention.

As expected for a machine of its age it can use replacement electrolytic capacitors, and its reset capacitor had bitten the dust. But there’s more to that with one of these machines, as capacitor leakage can damage the filter circuitry surrounding its video encoder chip. Since both video and audio flow through this circuit, there was no composite video to be seen.

The hack comes in removing the original chip rather than attempt the difficult task of replacing the filter, and replacing it with a different Sony chip in the same series. It’s nicely done with a connector in the original footprint, and a small daughterboard. The A600 lives again, but this time it won’t be a disappointment to anyone.

If you want to wallow in some Amiga history as well as read a rant about what went wrong, we have you covered.

Off-Axis Rotation For Amiga-Themed Levitating Lamp

December 8, 2025 by 5 Comments

Do you remember those levitating lamps that were all the rage some years ago? Floating light bulbs, globes, you name it. After the initial craze of expensive desk toys, a wave of cheap kits became available from the usual suspects. [RobSmithDev] wanted to make a commemorative lamp for the Amiga’s 40th anniversary, but… it was missing something. Sure, the levitating red-and-white “boing” ball looked good, but in the famous demo, the ball is spinning at a jaunty angle. You can’t do that with mag-lev… not without a hack, anyway.

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Blue Hedgehog, Meet Boing Ball: Can Sonic Run On Amiga?

December 5, 2025 by 10 Comments

The Amiga was a great game system in its day, but there were some titles it was just never going to get. Sonic the Hedgehog was one of them– SEGA would never in a million years been willing to port its flagship platformer to another system. Well, SEGA might not in a million years, but [reassembler] has started that process after only thirty four.

Both the SEGA Mega Drive (that’s the Genesis for North Americans) and Amiga have Motorola 68k processors, but that doesn’t mean you can run code from one on the other: the memory maps don’t match, and the way graphics are handled is completely different. The SEGA console uses so-called “chunky” graphics, which is how we do it today. Amiga, on the other hand, is all about the bitplanes; that’s why it didn’t get a DOOM port back in the day, which may-or-may not be what killed the platform.

In this first video of what promises to be a series, [reassembler] takes us through his process of migrating code from the Mega Drive to Amiga, starting specifically with the SEGA loading screen animation, with a preview of the rest of the work to come. While watching someone wrestle with 68k assembler is always interesting, the automation he’s building up to do it with python is the real star here. Once this port is done, that toolkit should really grease the wheels of bringing other Mega Drive titles over.

It should be noted that since the Mega Drive was a 64 colour machine, [reassembler] is targeting the A1200 for his Sonic port, at least to start. He plans to reprocess the graphics for a smaller-palette A500 version once that’s done. That’s good, because it would be a bit odd to have a DOOM-clone for the A500 while being told a platformer like Sonic is too much to ask. If anyone can be trusted to pull this project off, it’s [reassembler], whose OutRun: Amiga Edition is legendary in the retro world, even if we seem to have missed covering it.

If only someone had given us a tip off, hint hint.

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The most exciting search engine 68k can handle.

There’s Nothing Boring About Web Search On Retro Amigas

October 31, 2025 by 23 Comments

Do you have a classic Amiga computer? Do you want to search the web with iBrowse, but keep running into all that pesky modern HTML5 and HTTPS? In that case, [Nihirash] created BoingSearch.com just for you!

BoingSearch was explicitly inspired by [ActionRetro]’s FrogFind search portal, and works similarly in practice. From an end-user perspective, they’re quite similar: both serve as search engines and strip down the websites listed by the search to pure HTML so old browsers can handle it.

Boing search in its natural habitat, iBrowse on Amiga.

The biggest difference we can see betwixt the two is that FrogFind will link to images while BoingSearch either loads them inline or strips them out entirely, depending on the browser you test with and how the page was formatted to begin with. (Ironically, modern Firefox doesn’t get images from BoingSearch’s page simplifier.) BoingSearch also gives you the option of searching with DuckDuckGo or Google via the SerpAPI, though note that poor [Nihirash] is paying out-of-pocket for google searches.

BoingSearch is explicitly aimed at the iBrowse browser for late-stage Amigas, but should work equally well with any modern browser. Apparently this project only exists because FrogFind went down for a week, and without the distraction of retrocomptuer websurfing, [Nihirash] was able to bash out his own version from scratch in Rust. If you want to self-host or see how they did it, [Nihirash] put the code on GitHub under a donationware license.

If you’re scratching your head why on earth people are still going on about Amiga in 2025, here’s one take on it.

Reviewing Deluxe Paint, 40 Years On

September 16, 2025 by 25 Comments

When Deluxe Paint came out with the original Amiga in 1985, it was the killer app for the platform. [Christopher Drum] starts his recent article on just that note, remembering the day he and his mother walked into a computer store, and walked out with a brand new Amiga… thanks entirely to Deluxe Paint. Forty years on, how well can this killer app compete?

[Christopher] isn’t putting Deluxe Paint head-to-head with modern Photoshop; they’re hardly in the same class. Not Photoshop, no, but modern applications that do what Deluxe Paint did so well: pixel art. There was no need to call it pixel art back then, no, but with the resolutions on hand, all digital art was pixel art in 1985.

Or 1989, which is when Deluxe Paint III came out– that’s the last version written by Dan Silva and coincidentally the last version [Christopher] owned, and the one he focuses in on his tests. It has held up amazingly well.

Sure, you don’t get a full 24-bit colour palette, but most pixel artists stick to limited palettes still anyway. You don’t quite get a modern UI, but presence of useful keyboard shortcuts allows a Hands-On-Keybord-And-Mouse (We’ll call it HOKAM, in honour of HOTAS in aerospace) workflow that is incredibly efficient.

About the only things [Christopher] found Deluxe Paint III lacked compared to its successors were a proper layering system, and of course the infinite undo we’ve all gotten so used to. (DPIII has an undo button, but it could only store one operation.) He also complained about cursor latency for some brushes, but we wonder if that might have had something to do with Windows and the emulation layer adding a delay. One thing Amiga was always known for back in the day was the snappy cursor movement, even when the processor was loaded.

There were just as many features he found had been forgotten in the new generation — like palatte swapping animations, or flood-filling line gradients.

It’s a small detail, but that’s a nice gradient tool.

Anyone who owned an Amgia probably has fond memories of it, but alas, in spite of Commodore’s recent resurrection, we’re not likely to see a new one soon. On the other hand, at least when it comes to pixel art, there’s apparently no need to upgrade.

via reddit.

(Thumbnail and header image by Avril Harrison, distributed by Electronic Arts with Deluxe Paint.)

An Amiga Demo With No CPU Involved

September 2, 2025 by 27 Comments

Of the machines from the 16-bit era, the Commodore Amiga arguably has the most active community decades later, and it’s a space which still has the power to surprise. Today we have a story which perhaps pushes the hardware farther than ever before: a demo challenge for the Amiga custom chips only, no CPU involved.

The Amiga was for a time around the end of the 1980s the most exciting multimedia platform, not because of the 68000 CPU it shared with other platforms, but because of its set of custom co-processors that handled tasks such as graphics manipulation, audio, and memory. Each one is a very powerful piece of silicon capable of many functions, but traditionally it would have been given its tasks by the CPU. The competition aims to find how possible it is to run an Amiga demo entirely on these chips, by using the CPU only for a loader application, with the custom chip programming coming entirely from a pre-configured memory map which forms the demo.

The demoscene is a part of our community known for pushing hardware to its limits, and we look forward to seeing just what they do with this one. If you have never been to a demo party before, you should, after all everyone should go to a demo party!

Amiga CD32 motherboard: Evan-Amos, Public domain.