Viktor: "Back to AMOS. I have now the manual in front of me, and yes, you ´re partly right. But about the commands: I do not count the 3D commands"
DB is primarily for making 3D games though - you cannot discount over 50% of the command set just because AMOS didn't have it
I will let you discount the non-essential commands (ones that just return values as opposed to perform actions).
"cable commands like for accesing the hardware I/O (Parallel/Serial ports in AMOS PRO)"
I agree this would be marginally useful in DBPro, but times have changed now and really how often do you need to access the parallel or serial ports? On a PC there isn't even a way to be 100% sure those ports even exist! See how the Amiga was SO different? Very fixed, closed, contained environment. You knew exactly what you had, what speed it ran at and what each chip did. Times have changed.
"Polygon and Polyline, Paint (Fill), Clip (okay, I personaly did not need this), Set Line, Set Paint, Set Pattern, Hslider, Vslider, Setslider, Def Scroll, Scroll, Flash, Mouse Zone."
Mouse zone would be quite cool, but not really hard to write
All the 2D graphics operations though I feel are a little out-dated now. I'm not saying we don't need them, but they're much lower in importance.
"You see, 2D graphic was not the weak point of AMOS (or STOS)."
I've got to disagree with this - the amount of 2D commands was not weak, but the SPEED was extremely poor. On the ST some of the top games like Enchanted Lands or Lethal XCess (or even some Ocean factory-line assembled dumps like Robocop or Total Recall) - none of those games could be re-created in STOS without the use of machine code extensions. I personally guarantee it! For AMOS it was quite similar although it was more powerful than STOS - but even so some of the awesome Amiga games just could not be written in AMOS - it simply wasn't fast enough, the core functions themselves took up too much CPU time and the poor sprite handling ate up most of the rest. Use machine code and all your worries vanished though. I'm not just guessing this, I do remember it very well from the time - I know what 68000 coders really thought of programs like STOS and AMOS
they were quite an arrogant bunch I agree (akin to Blitz users today) but fundamentally, they were right.
AMOS and STOS were ideal at getting people into programming though - people who otherwise would never have had the chance, people who were perhaps too young to grasp the complexity of 68000. They gave hope to thousands and people embraced those two programs and made them do amazing things, no doubts about it. You obviously loved it! I used to love coding in STOS too and for that reason I have fond fond memories of both languages.
But please keep those memories in check and don't forget that they were not actually quite as amazing as you might think they were!
Raven: "anyone notice that there aren't a great deal of bad things said about AMOS"
Really? That's not how I remember it! At the time AMOS (and STOS) were the laughing joke of programmers. Sure they allowed people to write games and demos (etc) but they were so slowed compared to (insert any other language here) that all the time real programmers would take the piss out of AMOS! Sometimes AMOS games were SO noticeable a mile away, you'd see the juttery sprites or recognise the mouse pointers or sounds. It was a wonderful grounding and for those who did really put hard work into it you could create some good things - but rarely without extensions of one kind of another. I remember STOS well and it was only really of any use when some machine code extensions came out that totally replaced the sprite, animation and music commands
Cheers,
Rich
"Gentlemen, we are about to short-circuit the Universe!"
DB Team / Atari ST / DarkForge / Retro Gaming
