Amiga Exes?

Does anyone know of a way to get an amiga demo/game and related files and instead of running them in WinUAE, compile them into some kind of PC executable file? This would be REALLY cool and I would use it to release some of my old Amiga stuff.

Is one throwing down a gauntlet? Be really nice if you deliver these as online games as well :D

{EDIT}I see you need a ROM set and that it's copyright Commodore.

aye the ROM is not publicly released like it is with the Spectrum, there's always somebody who "owns" Commodore and is trying to revitalise the brand - which always ends in abysmal failure.

The nearest to a solution I can think of is Pure Basic which allows for PC/Amiga/Linux development in the same way BMax does PC/Mac/Linux - but that wont help you convert old games across.

Yes it would only be available to people with a ROM set I guess, I have one! I think it would be great, maybe I'll have to wait 5-10 untils someone makes it free or something.

GA: Unfortunately, there's no quick way of doing what you want. If you've still got the code to your Amiga creations, your best bet is converting them by hand to Blitz/C/whatever.

Would the graphics really meet the grade though? Not impuning your artistic skills, but Amiga stuff was generally very low res and stingy with colours.

No it wouldn't make the grade as far as modern stuff goes, I just wanted an easy way to show off my old Amiga stuff without the need to WinUAE but I totally overlooked the ROM issue, bummer.

"Would the graphics really meet the grade though? Not impuning your artistic skills, but Amiga stuff was generally very low res and stingy with colours."

And yet they still managed to beat the pants off some of the crap that`s realeased today.

Personally I find the old pixel art style of yesterday far more attractive then the 3D of today even if that boasts more realism.

Any chance of seeing some screens of your Amiga stuff GreyAlien as I was (am) still a great Amiga fan.

Jason.

If you write something to do this, just don't provide the ROM image with the download. Where people then get the required ROM is legally nothing to do with you, then. :)

Problem is it's all still on my A1200 HD. I copied all my tracker mods about 8 years ago but never the code and program files as WinUAE didn't exist, so no screenshots I'm afraid.

Bummer. I have stuff left on my A1200 to. I wonder what the best way to transfer it is. Maybe email it from my Amiga to my PC address. Shouldn`t take to long via broadband the only problem is it`s been so long since I used my miggy that I cannot remember how to get onto the interenet with it, I`m sure I`ll have a lot of fun trying though :)

Jason.

Find yourself the requisite adapter and connect your A1200 HD to your PC. WinUAE can read it.

**EDIT** failing that, null modem cable, NComm on the Amiga, HyperTerm on the PC (I think) and initiate ZModem transfer.

Transfer rate is really slow, but Amiga stuff is small :)

I agree - the most impressive visuals I have seen for a long time were in the video clips from Ragdoll Kung Fu - the sprites and grass and plants waving in the breeze etc... it all appears to be 2d flat planes but arranged in parallax layers - truly a beautiful game.

3d graphics really don't have the same appeal - engines like Source and Doom3 just look OK but never have I looked at a 3d game and really appreciated the talent behind it, whereas I can look at old 2d sprites and still be wowed. For example the graphics in the Metal Slug series are superb, as are the sprites in R-Type.

I wonder why pixel graphics have this effect on me? Perhaps it's because I'm older and grew up with 2d games on the C64 and Amiga...?

Yeah, metal slug games are great. I think our interest in game creation helps us appreciate the amount of work that must have gone into making those graphics. Those games must have a simply huge amount of sprite frames. Great stuff.

I agree about the work that goes into sprite art. 3D graphics are kind of technical and I think anyone can make half decent models with a bit of practice but pixel art is a much harder skill to learn.

I would love to see more pure pixel 2D games made in Blitz, it could easily throw the sprites around. I`m surprised that not many have tried. Antony Flack springs to mind but even his work is not pure pixel work.

Jason.

Well, that's the problem really: doing decent pixel art just takes so long. It does for me, anyway. I've done some sets in the past that have taken me absolute AGES. That's why I appreciate games like Metal Slug so much. :)

"requisite adapter" And waht would that be then a 2.5 to 3.5 convertor of some kind?

I've heard about the null modem cable options before. Is Ncomm on the Amiga Workbench already? If not I can put it on a PC floppy formatted to 720K and use Amiga MessyDos I spose.

Ncomm is available on Aminet, as is a "free for the Amiga community" keyfile for it (it used to be shareware). Only a few hundred KiB so it'll fit on a 720 floppy no problem.

Ncomm was probably the best terminal proggy for BBSing between Amiga's :)

Can't remember the name of that other one. I remember there was a new version almost every week and the executable weighed in at a whopping 400KiB or so... Had more features than you could shake a stick at and would even 'do' 16 colour IBM font stuff. Ah, I do recall it now, it was called.... (wait for it).... Term.

I used TwinPC & serial (?) cable at the time, which has both an Amiga & PC client and has built-in support to copy files over.

(I had both a serial & parallel cable hooked up between my old Amiga 2000 and Amiga 1200. Only had one monitor for a while, so I ran the Amiga 2000 headless. but it had a good chunk of data on it and contained my CD-ROM drive that I also used on the A1200.
I had a program that could run a 'network' and mount remote drives as if they were local, over the parallel cable. The only problem was that I could not initialize the initial handshake for the parallel stuff on the headless system when needed... So I hacked together some stuff in AMOS that did this for me:
The AMOS program ran on boottime and stayed resident. It would monitor the serial cable for a signal send from my other computer, also send by an AMOS program. When the required signal came in, it would then kick in the program to initiate the Parallel handshake, and the network would be established. Bit of a mickey mouse solution, but worked perfectly. :-)

It is also possible to mount a 720K formatted double-density PC floppy disk on an Amiga, which would allow you to copy files over without the need for special cables or which is pretty easy as well.
I am pretty sure that the 720K feature is available built-in with Workbench 2.0 or above, before that you needed a special program if I recall correctly.

I still have a few dozen files on my Athlon 2800+ that started their life on the Amiga 2000, 15 years ago.
Couple of modules, and some sprites for a game that I really should redo one of these days and start making. :-)

Yeah, MessyDOS, like I said allows you to to the 720k disk thing, I did all my mods like that.

You could pick up a PCMCIA NIC pretty cheaply such as this one:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=8240847187&ssPageName=MERC_VIC_RSCC_Pr4_PcY_BIN_Stores_IT

Then just FTP everything across.

thats neat.

VP, wasn't that Xterm or Zterm or some such? written by some swiss or german guy I think, seriously cool item that one, never seen anything like it since. Nothing else even came close. Had the 3d effect top and bottom bars, Oh, like the windows task bar in fact. Hmm..... :O)