AMOS running in a Museum Display

Took my kids to the Dinosaur Museum in Dorchester today. Haven't been for 20 years myself (since I was a kid) and when I was last there they had a Spectrum running a little program that showed you how tall and heavy you were compared to some dinosaurs. Well the program was updated in 1992 to an AMOS program running on an Amiga! It's still there and it actually pretty neat, quite polished (screen fades, scrolling, nice fonts etc).

Has anyone else seen a really old computer running a museum display recently? Maybe a BBC micro or something?

AMOS in a museum. How appropriate. :)

I was actually very fond of AMOS when I used my Amiga. I had Blitz as well and although that was far more powerful I could never get into it (despite trying) as the docs were far too complex for a beginner like me. AMOS on the other hand had great docs.

It`s funny how the situation is still the same. Blitz still seems the best bet overall but the docs of other products still overshadow it.

Jason.

I heard that the big museum in London is waiting for "Clive Sinclair" to die so they can have him stuffed and mounted - apparantly he has agreed to it - same sort of thing as stuffing a pet dog.

You're mental, puki.

QuickSilva: I enjoyed Blitz Basic 2 a lot because previously I'd been using assembly so had a good grasp of programming but found assembly very slow to develop in. Blitz was so much easier it was great! I saw AMOS and STOS to but for me it wasn't as flexible as BBasic.

@Puki: erm, OK.

Yep, AMOS was the business. The 3D was really good for it's time, and if you did some careful planning, you could do gigantic playareas.

Are you kidding me? AMOS3D was crap!!

Not a museum, but my family and I recently went ten-pin bowling (a couple of weeks ago). It was a bit of a sorta combo centre that had minigolf, and a video arcade and whatnot. They also had a slot car track where you could race and it would keep track of your lap times etc.

The machine keeping track of your lap times? An old breadbox Commodore 64.



Strangely, no-one else in my party was interested. Heathens.

AMOS. Brings a tear to my eye. I'll not forget the day I saw the box on the shelf and the drive home... Remember, back then I was going from QB45 to AMOS.

I loved AMOS, I wrote a set of (terrible) windowing routines that I called AGADS. Sold a couple of copies through some kind of shareware group. AMOS 3D was worthless though, I ended up buying AMOS pro and then moved on to a PC.

AMOS rocked, especially the Pro version with Compiler, but I agree Amos3D was very very slow and not useable at all - although temporarily something to be curious about.

I sharpened my programming teeth in the AMOS world and learnt a great deal with it :-)

I had EasyAMOS, AMOS, and AMOS Compiler. Loved 'em. And I remember watching the amos pro demo over and over, wishing I could buy it :)

Those were the days...

I had AMOS, AMOS Compiler, AMOS 3D, AMOS Professional and the AMOS Pro Compiler.

Liked AMOS, loved AMOS Pro, and couldn't stand AMOS 3D.

>Are you kidding me? AMOS3D was crap!!

No it wasn't.

It was good enough, and with 3D and the compiler, you could make some pretty good games.

no matter what you say

it was better than STOS (and not cos that was for the ST)
i mean come now
16bit floppy based micros still going

10 print
20 print
30 print

i was all WTF

there is Amiga Amos Forum

http://amos.pspuae.com/

Are you Francois Lionet?

I think you're letting nostalgia get in the way of your judgement. You should probably take another look at it, then come back here and tell everyone just how rotten and useless AMOS3D really was.

AMOS Pro was good, I'll give you that.

i love the way freescape games like driller and total eclipse were ok ish speeds on the st and amiga yet the freescape (iir scripted) 3d construction kit ran like it was on the speccy

Amos 3D was crap and also it was very slow too.
Amos Pro was Great for it time in the past.

Anyone else feeling a little old?

That 3D construction kit was a real stinker. I was excited about it then saw how it ran...

>Are you Francois Lionet?

No.

>I think you're letting nostalgia get in the way of your
>judgement.

Nope, no nostalgia there.

>You should probably take another look at it,
>then come back here and tell everyone just how rotten and
>useless AMOS3D really was.

The only problems were the low number of models and the weird XYZ orientation, but it was great otherwise. The compiler was really needed for AMOS3D, but that was to be expected for 3D anyway.

AMOS was great until the AGA chipset came along. I bought AMOS and AMOS Pro and spent a long time half-finishing projects (just like I still do).

I did end up figuring out how to 'do' asm (bought DevPac), use monam to step through code (which I actually understood) and ended up releasing a version of the little speed-up patch program for Alien Breed 3D 2 that let you patch the warez version of the game (the original patch only worked on the original game) by using Monam and Amos Pro to figure out the different checksums.

Just before I left the Amiga for the land of PC, I'd made a little ASM intro thingy like the cracktro's of the day, but all mine did was display some text (appeared character by character, typewriter style) and had a basic copper effect plus a shadow effect using bitplane offsets (or something) and a carefully managed palette.

I also learned C using SAS/C and started writing a BBS program (actually had some reasonable functionality).

I did release a few BBS door programs I'd written in Arexx.

Learned Amiga E too. Lovely language, awful lack of support.

That's what I used. Devpac 2. Made a dew little demos and games but never released anything.

I agree with Andy, Amos3D was great. I used it for a college project, to create a little VR world which we then recorded in realtime onto video. I know the three of us doing the CGI stuff all got A's and I had the programming lecturer bugging me for weeks about Amos3D. So it must have gone down pretty well.

I made a paint program in Amos, sold 1 copy for 5 pounds. Paint programs were all the rage in Amos at the time. Also made a fruit machine game which was actually quite playable. Also took a very long time writing a compression system. But I did find the lack of proper AGA support a major issue after a while. Blitz at the time didn't quite have the `easiness` of Amos but it was faster. Eventually made the switch.

I agree with Gfk, Amos Pro was cool at the time, but Amos3D was just kind of silly. It was difficult to make objects with it and it was horribly slow. I don't think I ever saw a single game made with it. The hardware performance just wasn't there.

Thought I was the only one around that really liked the amos scene. It was my first real programming language, I did half finish a lot of games on my always awsome amiga:) I liked the sprite editor in amospro so much that it inspired me to make a more "modern" verison for blitzbasic, and blitz3d. Currently it can import the old school amos image bank files. You know the bobs. In turn my prog is called "bob studio" of course you have to get your pc to read the amiga disk then save it on you hd for fast access) also does files like the standard bmp jpg etc... I need to take the time and make a loader for the compressed images amos us to save. (Just the source code written in blitz so this file can be used with bob studio) I still have the blitzbasic programming book and looked at the file strucure, but just haven't had the time to write the function to load compress image files. I also wrote functions for blitz similar to amos commands like Anim, Move_X... which made it real easy to control the sprites. I hope to release it to the world soon.(A bunch of years late I'm Sure) Enough of my shame less plug in..... Amos brought a lot of joy and long hours of computer time in to my life:) Great Community everyone keep up the good work.

>I agree with Gfk, Amos Pro was cool at the time, but Amos3D
>was just kind of silly.

Why? It did 3D and did it well for it's time.

>It was difficult to make objects with it

It took me about a week of reading the manual and experimenting to get to grips with the editor...

>and it was horribly slow.

hence the compiler.

>I don't think I ever saw a single game made with it.

There were many games published, but most did not credit AMOS, so you would have to look for things like the requesters used ingame, text in the exe, various files on the first disk etc.

>The hardware performance just wasn't there.

BS, even on the A500 AMOS 3D worked well, provided you use the compiler, although clearly it was faster on the AGA Amigas.

It didn't do 3D well. It was too restrictive. It wasn't that Object Modeller was 'difficult to make objects with' - it just was not capable of anything far beyond primitive shapes.

AMOS3D was a turd. AMOS3D + compiler was a turd with a daisy planted on top. A marginal improvement but ultimately it was still a turd.

For me Amos3D, okay, it had a few demos which were sort of interesting but still very slow, the editor was just kind of odd and didn't have very useful editing tools, it seemed you could only edit one small object at a time, it was all flatshaded, no texturemapping, and the framerate was not smooth at all. Perhaps it wasn't just that its interface was slow but that the hardware just couldn't run the 3d fast enough to do anything decent with it. Ok so spinning cubes look nice but not entire scenes or complicated objects. It was really an attempt to do 3d on a machine spec which was not up to the task.

Well spotted Grey, brings a nostalgic tear to my eye! I released a 4-disk licenseware Monkey-Island style game, as well as several freeware titles. I loved AMOS so much, went from 1.0-1.2-1.3-Pro. At the time Blitz also seemed unfriendly to me. I recently revoked the rights (someone came out of the blue who was a fan and wondered if I minded making it freeware!)

You can check it out here:

Keith's Quest on HOL



I agree AMOS 3D wasn't really that usable though, but it was a brave move at the time... Even had basic texture mapping as I remember.

wow, coolness!

Sonic, that game is gorgeous!

hey sonic

I went your website and it look very good :)
keep it coming :)

AMOS was great. How else would you create look up tables? AmigaBasic? Come on.

Amiga Basic was soooo slow it stunk. I used to program my 8 bit computers loads, then I got an Amiga and tried out BASIC on it and it was so bad I was actually put off programming for a little while + the games were distracting of course - even programmed on my friend's ST down the road. Eventually figured out MonAm a bit then got DEvpac and it was all go!

AmigaBasic was probably the slowest basic dialect I've ever used.... Perhaps it's not such a great idea to have software written by one of your main competitors? :-)

(Amiga Basic was written & designed by Microsoft, for those who don't remember)