Amiga Basic AMOS was so powerful

[PhilBoz]

It can't just be a rose tinted memory that AMOS was so useful, so easy to learn and so powerful. It gave access to high speed graphics for games and display without pain.

What a wonderful program to have on the Raspberry Pi. The RaspPi and Amiga share a similar ethos although decades apart in technology.

Bring François Lionet out of retirement if he is still on the planet and set him to work.

How many agree?

[Jaseman]

AMOS was awesome - and fun.

However I've been following the RaspberryPiTutorials on YouTube.  It's very like AMOS in many ways.

http://www.youtube.com/user/Ra.....iTutorials

I strongly recommend this to you.

[Chabaoul]

And btw, françois lionet is not retired, still working in his development tool company.

[Joefish]

STOS and AMOS were pretty good, and rival Blitz Basic is still around for Windows PCs at least.

Something else that might be worth looking at is something called SpecBAS - it's a Linux / Windows enhanced BASIC based on the syntax of Sinclair BASIC.  So it uses line numbers and has immediate execution like all those old BASICs.

[ArborealSeer]

found this on wikipedia..


Despite this, a small community of enthusiasts are still using it. The source code to AMOS has since been released under a BSD style license by Clickteam – a company that includes the original programmer.



IIRC I had a full boxed copy  of Easy AMOS, then had AMOS Pro from a cover cd.

[rubikwizard]

Blitz Basic on Amiga was fantastic and it is still fantastic in its modern form. I currently use the Windows version but they also make it for Mac and Linux. I wonder if it will run on the Raspi?

http://www.blitzbasic.com/Prod.....index_.php

[Zobeid Zuma]

I used quite a few different BASIC environments back in the day, on both Atari ST and Amiga.  For application coding my favorite was GFA Basic on the ST (because the Amiga version of GFA Basic was a disaster), but it didn't provide much game functionality.  I poked around some with STOS, AMOS and Blitz, which had all those cool functions for games (double-buffering, blitting, animation, scrolling, collision detection, etc.), but in many other ways they seemed primitive.

There's no question in my mind that Python is a great leap forward.  It's a much more modern and improved programming language.  What it really needs is the right IDE and the right APIs and development tools for easy graphics and animation.

Python, IDLE and PyGame are a start, but it all seems sort of half-baked right now.

[Mequa]

My XAMOS (Cross-AMOS) project may be of interest.

It's already working on the Raspberry Pi, albeit slow at the moment (due to unaccelerated graphics), with a native implementation of a subset of AMOS - already including support for the AMOS Animation Language (AMAL).
Nevertheless, this project is in early alpha stage (currently all my own work in my spare time) and still needs a lot of work before it matches Francois' original.

Link to forum thread
Link to download

[DavidS]

There was a source download available for the original AMOS, though I can no longer find the source code.

It would be nice to see a good port of AMOS to RISC OS Pi, and AROS Pi. Though done from the original (DO NOT USE C++ TO IMPLEMENT BASIC, USE ASSEMBLY AND/OR BASIC).

[ZXDunny]

There was a source download available for the original AMOS, though I can no longer find the source code.

It would be nice to see a good port of AMOS to RISC OS Pi, and AROS Pi. Though done from the original (DO NOT USE C++ TO IMPLEMENT BASIC, USE ASSEMBLY AND/OR BASIC).

Firstly, the original source was almost exclusively 68k assembler. Translating that to the Pi would be a very, very non-trivial job indeed.

Secondly, what's wrong with writing a BASIC interpreter in C++? I code in Delphi, and believe me the code that is produced could not be done better in assembly - the debugger assures me of that. Your idea that only Assembly and BASIC can be used makes no sense. Please explain.

D.

[rickvanner]

I worked as the Project Manager on STOS and AMOS in the 90s when I was at Europress / Mandarin Software.

I now co-own and run TheGameCreators. We developed DarkBASIC and lately AppGameKit. These are BASIC style programming languages similar to AMOS & STOS and we have a FREE Pi version to anyone who registers on our site. Check it out here>>HERE