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Geek Culture / Do you still have your old STOS/AMOS Code ?

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Kevin Picone
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Posted: 5th Jan 2010 19:45 Edited at: 11th Aug 2010 23:18
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Just a quick question aimed at those who from a 16bit BASIC programming background, primarily those with experience with STOS / AMOS dialects on the Atari & Amiga platforms.

If that's you, do you still have your old code ??


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MSon
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Posted: 5th Jan 2010 23:02 Edited at: 5th Jan 2010 23:04
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No, all my old atari and amiga discs went years ago, i remember when my old atari st broke, all it would do is say "You have a ghost virus in the memory"

Poor Poor Atari

Although when this happened, i upgraded from my old atari and amiga to a PC with Windows 3.1.

I remember there use to be an Atari ST at my High School with a piano and Cubase Installed, Atari was always good for that, but i never liked the highrez moniter, (GREEN SCREEN HORROR)

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Freddix
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Posted: 5th Jan 2010 23:07
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I have ALL my olds AMOS / AMOS Pro source code :p

There are games, app, some samples and small demo
And there is also an Amos/AmosPRO extension developed under 680x0 assembler ( DEVPAC 3 ) :p
I have posted the extension on the Amos Factory website few days ago :p

I will probably make a small site with all my old sources ...
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Dazzag
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Posted: 7th Jan 2010 12:01
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No. I looked through all my old ST disks about a year ago (I had to use a special utility in some cases) and none was left. Either I've lost a load of disks or they are corrupted (amazingly small amount of disks corrupted after 20 years).

Was really sad as I lost a load of poetry a few of us did at the time, also short stories, a novel (was rubbish though), and a fair bit of STOS code (including 3D stuff). I especially regret a pretty good dungeon master remake and a not bad LOM remake (both minus monsters but the navigation worked just fine), both of which I was quite proud about. Story of my life though; work ages on something, get really close to completing it, then get bored and move on before anyone really gets to even see it let along play it... sigh...

Cheers

I am 99% probably lying in bed right now... so don't blame me for crappy typing
Current fave quote : "She was like a candle in the wind.... unreliable...."
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Kevin Picone
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Posted: 7th Jan 2010 12:47 Edited at: 11th Aug 2010 23:19
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Yeah, I think a bit too much time has past. I've still got an image of 'whatever' was on my old hard drive, mirrored to the PC. So i can fire up UAE and have a tinker. But, only got a selection of the disk images, due to disk errors.

Oh well, so much for legacy code..


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Dazzag
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Posted: 7th Jan 2010 13:42
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Heheh, yeah, I think restarting a project 20 years on is asking a bit much. Would be nice to see my old stuff running but it was a long time ago...

I remember a while back finding a program that would run DIV code perfectly on new machines (not Fenix or whatever it was called) and posted excitedly on the retro games forums where there used to be a DIV forum showing an old Cybernoid clone I had made about 8 years earlier working perfectly in Vista. About 3 years earlier it would have been the greatest thing ever (DIV used to be amazing to program 2D games in), but it practically was ignored. Sad, but sometimes have to leave things go. Shame as DIV had a brilliant way of working that made creating games like Cybernoid an absolute doddle really... Cry...

Cheers

I am 99% probably lying in bed right now... so don't blame me for crappy typing
Current fave quote : "She was like a candle in the wind.... unreliable...."
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Kevin Picone
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Posted: 7th Jan 2010 14:35 Edited at: 11th Aug 2010 23:19
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Quote: " I think restarting a project 20 years on is asking a bit much. Would be nice to see my old stuff running but it was a long time ago..."


yeah.. I can't imagine firing up some old project today and continuing it. But after looking through my own collection of abominations, There's the odd app that may be useful to somebody for something. So i suspect there must be others also. Providing they didn't have to invest any energy in porting it.


After only a tiny bit of tinkering, I can see (and have tested) a way of executing at least some AMOS applications directly through PlayBasic without really lifting a finger. Of course, the test only supports a tiny subset of the AMOS command set. So it's not really of any great use at this time.

But with a little work it could be useful...


Quote: "
I remember a while back finding a program that would run DIV code perfectly on new machines (not Fenix or whatever it was called) and posted excitedly on the retro games forums where there used to be a DIV forum showing an old Cybernoid clone I had made about 8 years earlier working perfectly in Vista. About 3 years earlier it would have been the greatest thing ever (DIV used to be amazing to program 2D games in), but it practically was ignored. Sad, but sometimes have to leave things go. Shame as DIV had a brilliant way of working that made creating games like Cybernoid an absolute doddle really... Cry...
"


yeah, that's a shame...


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Dazzag
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Posted: 7th Jan 2010 16:57 Edited at: 7th Jan 2010 17:01
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Yeah, I remember the Dungeon Master clone I did in STOS being actually quite good at the time. Apart from a lack of monsters it was pretty convincingly similar about a few months after the original came out. In the end I just got too drunk at Uni and forgot about it. Shame really as after that a load of clones came out and cleaned up. Stupid lazy git...

Interestingly a CS/Maths degree mate of mine got right into things at that point (after I showed him the dungeon master clone) but was more interested in going straight to assembly and started to write these cool raster routines and huge text scrollers. Very nice they were. Know what he does now? Director at EA apparently in SF. Should have concentrated more on the complicated assembly stuff that went over my head a bit at the time rather than drinking lots... As it happens I did actually find his code on my disks, just nothing of my STOS stuff. Ho hum, still goes over my head...

Cheers

I am 99% probably lying in bed right now... so don't blame me for crappy typing
Current fave quote : "She was like a candle in the wind.... unreliable...."
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Kevin Picone
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Posted: 8th Jan 2010 17:41 Edited at: 11th Aug 2010 23:20
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Quote: "Yeah, I remember the Dungeon Master clone I did in STOS being actually quite good at the time. Apart from a lack of monsters it was pretty convincingly similar about a few months after the original came out. In the end I just got too drunk at Uni and forgot about it. Shame really as after that a load of clones came out and cleaned up. Stupid lazy git...
"




Haven't used STOS myself, don't suppose you (or anybody here) is familiar with just how similar / dissimilar STOS & AMOS are ?

Quote: "Interestingly a CS/Maths degree mate of mine got right into things at that point (after I showed him the dungeon master clone) but was more interested in going straight to assembly and started to write these cool raster routines and huge text scrollers. Very nice they were. Know what he does now? Director at EA apparently in SF. Should have concentrated more on the complicated assembly stuff that went over my head a bit at the time rather than drinking lots... As it happens I did actually find his code on my disks, just nothing of my STOS stuff. Ho hum, still goes over my head..."


Ahh yes, back in the day. I come from more an assembly background myself, mostly used Amos to write tools in. Wrote the odd game for the spastic society with it though. While it had some neat features built in, it just wasn't very quick, even once compiled. Ended up with wrapping parts of my engine(s) into it.


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Mnemonix
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Posted: 8th Jan 2010 18:17
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I was talking to geecee3 about AMOS the other day, I'm considering porting the game i'm writing in DBP to the amiga!


But yea, AMOS rocked. Never used STOS.

Mnemonix
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Van B
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Posted: 8th Jan 2010 18:48 Edited at: 8th Jan 2010 18:50
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STOS was horrible. STOS is the ugly, older brother of AMOS.

Sorry, I know a lot of people liked it, but it just fell flat on it's face when compared with GFA Basic. Any programming language that uses line numbers should be cast into the abyss and never spoken of again... maybe a bit strong but personally I just meddled with it, don't think I used it to finish any games as it was so damn cumbersome and slow. The Misty extension was quite cool, and the 3D extension at least offered something different. I used Sprite Works which was a 68000 library of add-ons for GFA Basic, which gave access to pretty much everything a ST or STE could do. All the blitter stuff and module playback, sprites, map system, sound effects... damn good little plugin. GFA let me use interrupts and all the internal hardware calls on the ST, which were pretty vital. Something that was most fun though was making accessories - these were programs on the ST that just sat there, TSR's that could be interacted with, a bit like a screensaver. I'd make little gadgets to do all sorts of things - mini games, calculator style apps, sound sampling and playback. Back then, these little applications sitting in memory were hugely useful. For me, there was just so much that STOS couldn't cope with.

I have to appreciate Dazzag's willpower at making a DM game in STOS, it's pretty damn tricky to work out the coordinates and graphics - started a 4 player one like Bloodwych in GFA, disk corrupted and lost it, but damn it was fast . I had pushable blocks like in Captive, so you could trap other players and suffocate them, but there wasn't much to it beyond that. GFA supported the extra 2 ports on an STE, so it was quite easy and fun to make simple multiplayer games. Think lots and lots of weird variations of Pac Man.


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Kevin Picone
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Posted: 8th Jan 2010 19:21 Edited at: 11th Aug 2010 23:20
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Mnemonix,

Quote: "I was talking to geecee3 about AMOS the other day, I'm considering porting the game i'm writing in DBP to the amiga!"


Wow, that's really brave ! - Amos is an option of sorts if you wanted to port to the original (OCS/ECS) Amiga. Just depends on the what your game does, but you'd get a much better results rolling the render engine yourself and building a DBpro to C translator than using Amos.


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Mnemonix
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Posted: 12th Jan 2010 00:23
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Perhaps - But you have'nt seen the game yet

Hopefully it will be simple enough to port over to the Amiga. I'll let you judge that when I (finally) release it

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Kevin Picone
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Posted: 12th Jan 2010 06:19 Edited at: 11th Aug 2010 23:21
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Quote: "Perhaps - But you have'nt seen the game yet"


What type of game is it ?

PureBASIC, could be an option. No idea if the Amiga version lets you get a little dirty though


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Kevin Picone
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Posted: 12th Jan 2010 06:23 Edited at: 11th Aug 2010 23:22
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Amos To PlayBasic Test

This is rather trivial example of an AMOS program running in PlayBASIC. The translation is very simple and only include a tiny subset of Amos native functionality. Even so, it's still able to convert the original Amos code into a running PlayBasic program. In this particular example the program runs, but there are various graphical errors. Replicating the drawing behavior hasn't been 100% implemented. Although performance wise, there's no comparison. Running the code in PlayBasic is a lot faster than under an Amiga emulator.

At this point there's no grand objective, more a curiosity. This is one of those idea has been sitting in the back of mind for years, so i figured i might as well try it out.


See Here For Some basic Shots


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HowDo
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Posted: 12th Jan 2010 11:52
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Kevin Picone I may be a bit out of date with what Amiga OE is doing lately but I thought it had away of begin able to right the code then use a compiling engine to make it work with the cpu you required.

Could be I am miss reading what you are doing and the above statment will be no use at all.

Anyway Good luck on what you are doing be cool if you make work on 99% of the codes out there.

Dark Physics makes any hot drink go cold.
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Kevin Picone
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Posted: 12th Jan 2010 19:14 Edited at: 11th Aug 2010 23:23
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HowDo,

Quote: "I may be a bit out of date with what Amiga OE is doing lately but I thought it had away of begin able to right the code then use a compiling engine to make it work with the cpu you required."


Sorry but I'm not sure I follow you. I think you're talking about the emulation of old Amiga (68000) applications on new Amiga's ? So if, then we're not really on the same page. I'm looking at a way of converting old AMOS source codes + Media from the Amiga, to Windows.


A lot people come from an Amiga / AMOS background, so i was just wondering how much of this stuff people still have..

What i'd been thinking about, is what if people could convert their old legacy code (their games made in AMOS) directly into PlayBASIC code. So the user doesn't have to be hands on about it.

This people could leverage at least some of their old back catalog of programs, with modern PC performance. Now, of course there'd be lots of limitations. Languages like AMOS relied heavily upon 3rd party plug ins. So any serious converter would have to provide these frameworks also. While I like the converter idea,I don't like the idea that much.. - So that isn't going to happen !

This is the kind concept that could fit into the PBFX. So the user imports the legacy code (via a custom importer) and the conversion builds a PB version of the code, attached to the Amos styled frame work.. The PB version of the code wouldn't look the same though..

Ie. This Amos Code


Becomes this in PB code



So the original AMOS command set is wrapped into a set of emulation functions. The actual logic code is native PB code. This method would work for a number of old legacy 8bit/16bit languages actually. In fact, it's how i normally move code between different dialects.. Old and new.

Another approach could be to write an AMOS interrupter in PB. Which is much like how the Kyruss II and Kyruss programs work.

While it's a fun distraction, it's not something i'll be investing any serious time into at this point ...


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HowDo
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Posted: 12th Jan 2010 20:27
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Quote: "I'm sorry, but I'm not sure I follow you. I think you're talking about the emulation of old Amiga (68000) applications on new Amiga's ? So if, then we're not really on the same page. I'm looking a way of converting old AMOS source codes + Media from the Amiga, to the Windows."


Seem I'm a bit out of touch with how the Amiga OE was doing, the above idea did not get off the ground, Ho well..

Dark Physics makes any hot drink go cold.
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Dazzag
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Posted: 13th Jan 2010 16:36
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Quote: "Haven't used STOS myself, so I don't suppose you (or anybody here) is familiar with just how similar / dissimilar STOS & AMOS are ?"
Main thing I know is STOS used line numbers and AMOS didn't. I think I remember hearing he wrote STOS first then wrote AMOS after fixing any mistakes and enhancing the original idea as he went. Not that I would admit that at the time. ST forever etc!!!

Quote: "Sorry, I know a lot of people liked it, but it just fell flat on it's face when compared with GFA Basic"
Yeah, I fiddled with that quite a bit, but just preferred STOS for games stuff. I moved on to QBasic and the original Visual Basic for Dos (oh yes...) after that and almost got something done for Terry Pratchett in it. I almost had a deal with his agent for copyright to all his books before I stupidely got a job and forgot all about it in a haze of booze. Doh...

Quote: "I have to appreciate Dazzag's willpower at making a DM game in STOS, it's pretty damn tricky to work out the coordinates and graphics - started a 4 player one like Bloodwych in GFA"
Yep, was tricky if I remember rightly. I was also quite off my face a lot of the time so I'm amazed I got anything going. But you get a lot of free time in Uni. It actually worked out quite easy in the end. My Lords of Midnight one was much more annoying for some reason if I remember rightly. Bloodwych? Yeah, I had mine going just before that came out I think. Cursed lazy attitude of mine where I get another idea (LOM, beer, birds etc) and drop the current one like a stone.

Cheers

I am 99% probably lying in bed right now... so don't blame me for crappy typing
Current fave quote : "She was like a candle in the wind.... unreliable...."
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