At some point in prehistory, you may all recall the level of hysteria 
around a revolutionary technology known as "multimedia". For several 
years, suddenly everything was multimedia-this and multimedia-that. I'm 
not sure exactly why, but after a while everybody sort of forgot about 
it and went back to their normal lives. But anyway, the Amiga at one 
point had several "multimedia construction kits".

One well-known one was Scala. This started out as a simple (but 
"powerful") video titling system, to be used with a genlock device. 
(Look that up if you don't know what it means.) It later evolved into a 
complete system where you could script sounds and animations together to 
produce interactive multimedia applications. (Or just do more 
complicated video editing, if you desire.)

I recall there was a Scala coverdisk, but I couldn't figure out how to 
make it do anything Oh well!



Then there was a program called Vista. (No! Wait! Come back!!) This was, 
quite simply, a fractal landscape generator and renderer. You import a 
"DEM" (Digital Elevation Map) and Vista adds some fractal noise to 
generate a landscape. Vista will then either output this as a polygon 
mesh the size of a small planet, or it will render it for you itself.

The native renderer wasn't fantastic, but it was OK. The images 
certainly were nothing like "photorealistic", but in later versions of 
the software, they started to come moderately close. Indeed, the last 
few versions even had trees and other vegetation, and streams running 
down the valleys, etc. (The trees were, of course, fractally generated 
once again.)

Again, there was a coverdisk containing an early version. While the 
graphics it produced weren't sensational, they were fairly fast (e.g., 
10 minutes to render a vast complex landscape), and it was quite fun to 
"explore" the islands you created. (The program could *build* DEMs as 
well as import real ones, IIRC. But that was disabled in the coverdisk. 
Well they gotta make you buy the real thing somehow!)

(Unfortunately, I don't have any images to show you. Suffice it to say 
that only later versions featured polygon smoothing, and I don't think 
any version had texture mapping or radiosity.)



And then there was AMOS (AMiga OS). I forget how many different editions 
were produced - AMOS, Easy AMOS, AMOS Professional, etc. In spite of the 
name, it wasn't actually an OS at all. It was a a programming language.

When you buy AMOS Professional, what you get is

- An interpretter for the AMOS language.
- An extensive IDE.
- A set of multimedia tools inclusing almost everything but the kitchen 
sink, *all* written in AMOS itself.
- No less than *seven disks* stacked full of multimedia files and demo 
programs.

Technically, AMOS is just another dialect of BASIC. It doesn't have line 
numbers, does have GOTO and GOSUB, and has procedures and functions, 
uses "$" and "#" to distinguish variable datatypes, and IIRC has local 
variables if you want them. The core language is no more powerful than that.

However, it has VERY strong multimedia capabilities. If you imagine the 
most feature-encrusted lump of software possible, AMOS was like that, 
but with bells on.

Want to load a Protracker module and put it on looping play? Two 
commands. Want to load an IFF image and cycle the colour map? Two 
commands. Want to create 3 independent framebuffers and overlay them? 
That's 3 commands. Want to load an animation and play it until the user 
presses a mouse key? That's one command.

The thing comes with a paperback manual the size of a Linux bible. (!!!) 
One time I did sit down and count the number of commands in the command 
index. I checked twice; 809 unique commands, not including the multiple 
syntaxes for each command. (!)

There was an entire seperate sublanguage called AMAL (ANimAtion 
Language) just for moving sprites around the screen. There was a tool 
for capturing and editing mouse movements to make a flight path, and 
AMAL could then animate one or more sprites along that path. AMOS also 
implements "software sprites", a trick that allows the 8 hardware 
sprites to be multiplexed into two-dozen apparently independent elements 
onscreen. Automatically.

(Alternatively, BLOBs (BLitter OBjects) do the same thing, with a 
different set of restrictions, using the Amiga's specialised BLITER 
(BLock Image TransfER) hardware.)

There was also a sprite editor, supporting sprite animations and so 
forth. Both the path editor and sprite editor were written in AMOS.

There was also another completely seperate language called... actually, 
do you know, I can't even remember! But basically, there was a large, 
complex GUI painter tool (written in AMOS), and you could attach short 
scripts in this UI sublanguage to every possible mouse event on the GUI. 
You paint your GUI, save it, and code your application to load it and 
attach scripts to it (by putting the scripts into strings). The scripts 
could change visual elements (e.g., make a button change colour when you 
click it) and invoke AMOS procedures and so forth.

The vast library of software that came with it included a sprite editor 
and animator, a fairly sophisticated sample editor, a GUI painter, an 
animation path capture and edit tool, a "resource editor" (you could put 
program strings into a file to enable easy localisation), and probably 
several other things I've forgotten.

They also apparently ran a competition for users to submit interesting 
AMOS programs, and AMOS Professional comes with several disks full of 
the results. There was several fractal generators (L-system and 
Mandelbrot/Julia), parallax scrolling demos, infinite ball trails... One 
natty little program loaded a song and played it, showing some animated 
VU meters. (There was a function to get the current intensity of any 
channel. Unfortunately, this is just the note on/note off signals, not 
actual audio loudness...)

Another even more snazzy program drew a set of disco lights and made 
them flash to the rhythem of the music. I immediately took the code 
apart to see how it managed to work so well... I discovered that the 
colours of the lights were actually *completely random*, and their 
apparent synchronisation with the music was completely psychological! 
It's amazing what the human brain can do, eh?

There were also at least 3 complete computer games written in AMOS.

- There was a standard "fly a space ship through a cave without getting 
killed" thing. (But half way through, the ship rotates and the direction 
of scrolling changes. And the levels are actually very large!)

- There was a straight-fowards Tetris clone. (But with some neat 
graphical touches. In particular, the screen showed several hundred 
colours using Copper trickery that AMOS could do for you automatically. 
And as you played the game, these colours slowly scrolled, looking 
something like a sunset in the background.) There was even a savable 
high-score table!

- There was a board game called Quatro. I forget how you play it, but it 
featured an AI that was actually quite hard to beat!

There might even have been more games than this, I can't remember.

AMOS was explicitly designed to allow 3rd party "extensions" to be 
written. (In fact the user manual contains detailed step-by-step 
descriptions of all the main AMOS data structures involved.) My dad 
purchased a few of these:

- CRAFT (Colours, Requesters, Animations, Fractals, Text) added commands 
for automatically generating colour blends (think FractInt's palette 
editor) and colour-cycling multiple subranges simultaneously. It also 
added the ability to invoke AmigaDOS requestors with arbitrary text. But 
most of all, it added built-in commands for rendering Mandelbrot/Julia 
fractals. (And, obviously, very much faster than interpretted AMOS 
code!) There were also some string-processing commands added.

- TOME (which we never actually owned) was ment to provide a tile-based 
level editor and commands to make it trivial to build platform-style 
computer games.

- IntOS added the ability to use the Amiga's native Intuition UI system 
rather than AMOS's own system. (AMOS was very nice, but it basically 
took over the whole machine for itself while running, and wouldn't play 
nice with other applications.)

Later the makers releated AMOS The Compiler, which my dad bought. It 
came with a selection of compute-intensive demos, which all sped up 
drastically when compiled. It also ment you could give your AMOS 
programs to people who don't have AMOS. (But the program will basically 
hog the whole machine while it's running.)




In the other corner was Blitz Basic. I never really used this very much, 
but I did try out an AF coverdisk containing a stripped down version. 
While AMOS liked to control the machine itself, Blitz had an explicit 
command to completely disable the OS and hit the metal directly. (Hell 
only knows what would happen on a modified Amiga!)

As the name somewhat implies, Blitz was designed to be *fast*. There was 
a Doom clone written in Blitz at one time. It was called Gloom.

http://www.mobygames.com/game/amiga/gloom/screenshots/gameShotId,71050/

As you can see, the graphics utterly sucked. I actually bought this 
game, and was very dissapointed by it. The Amiga Format review praised 
the game for being a technical milestone, but basically had nothing else 
positive to say about it. I think it got a rating of about 49% overall. 
For comparison, the excellent Flashback got 97%.

http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/flashback-the-quest-for-identity/screenshots/gameShotId,74063/
http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/flashback-the-quest-for-identity/screenshots/gameShotId,2983/
http://www.mobygames.com/game/jaguar/flashback-the-quest-for-identity/screenshots/gameShotId,27498/
http://www.mobygames.com/game/snes/flashback-the-quest-for-identity/screenshots/gameShotId,117925/

On a blurry old TV, those shots look pretty amazing. And the character 
animation is rotoscoped - the first time an Amiga game had had this. The 
resulting movement is increadibly fluid and life-like even to this day!

[Yes, I know none of those are Amiga shots. They don't have any. Trust 
me, it looked more or less the same.]

The later Universe game was similar:

http://www.mobygames.com/game/amiga/universe/screenshots/gameShotId,32843/
http://www.mobygames.com/game/amiga/universe/screenshots/gameShotId,32844/

Looks horribly dithered now, but on my dad's old TV it really looked 
like half a million colours. I was astounded that it could look so 
real... how times have changed, eh? (I only played a short demo from a 
coverdisk.)



And then there was The Settlers.

http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/serf-city-life-is-feudal/screenshots/gameShotId,74247/
http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/serf-city-life-is-feudal/screenshots/gameShotId,147479/

(Again, the Amiga shots don't show any actual gameplay, but this is more 
or less what it looked like.)

Man, you could spend *hours* playing that game! It was rated Gold by 
Amiga Format, and rightly so. There have since been several PC versions, 
which me and my dad still play. (Although sadly since going to a 
dual-core PC, none of them function for me any more... It was becoming 
quite buggy and unreliable anyway.) I still dream that some day I'll 
write my own game along these lines...




More nostalgia as I think of it!

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

Post a reply to this message