| cosam.org |
| Amstrad CPC-464 | Commodore Amiga A500+
For its time, the Amiga was a truely awesome computer. After having a go on a freind's A500, I simply had to have one. I saved pretty much every penny I had for ages, but then had the wonderful surprise that my parents had bought me one as a Christmas gift. By then the A500+ was out, which featured an updated Kickstart ROM and Workbench, but unfortunately didn't run all the old games. However, after reading about the machine and its new Workbench in Amiga Format, I figured I'd be spending more time on serious computing than games anyhow. Coincidentally, I never came across any games that didn't work on the A500+. Specifications
ProgrammingMost of the programming I did on this machine was with yet another BASIC variant named AMOS. This was a great package that allowed you to do all that cool Amiga-type stuff using a relatively easy high level language. I started programming a huge number of games, none of which were ever finished. I also did my A-Level Computing project on the Amiga, which was an application for designing Entity-Relationship diagrams. Being spoilt at school with 25Mhz 486 PCs got me into the Windows 3.1 look and feel, so I ended up programming basically an entire mock-Windows, drag-and-drop GUI in AMOS. As far as I remember the cool-looking Amiga GUI (the Intuition widgets) was either incredibly difficult or just plain impossible to use from within AMOS. Not to be discouraged by my previous attempts at assembly language programming on the CPC-464, I gave this another bash. Amiga Format gave away an assembler with one of its issues, in which was the first part of a coding guide from none other that programmers of Bullfrog Productions, of Populous and Magic Carpet fame. I managed to scrape together a couple of simple games, and accumulated more Guru Meditations than anyone I knew. Games
The Cartoon Classics package I have includes a decent game of
The Simpsons, the rather dire Captain Planet (based on
the environmentally friendly cartoon of the same name) and the most
excellent Lemmings. I also bought the wonderous Populous
II and the first two Monkey Island games. Like everyone
else at the time, most of the other games I had were cracked copies
(tut-tut)...
ApplicationsI spent no end of time making graphics and animations in Deluxe Paint III, including a parody of the then popular TV show Gladiators, which you will be able to download from here when I get it copied over. Later on, Amiga Format magazine started putting full (but usually slightly dated) versions of popular packages on their cover disks every month, so I soon had a huge collection of Amiga apps ranging from random scenery generators to word processors. LinksAmiga, Inc. | My current set-up |
