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Comment by postmodest | Hacker News Reader

Are people doing this on vintage hardware or new hardware? (Or emulation?)

I believe a number of the devs who have been around for decades are still writing actual code with their preferred tools that run on Amiga. But I wouldn't be surprised if even there, most of the coding is being done in emulator, because the modern workflow is so much snappier that way.

However, the cross-platform build stack has gotten comprehensive, and straight modern hardware has become the method of choice for a lot of devs (including myself). There is an "Amiga Assembly" extension for VS Code which does a ton of heavy lifting for you, including setting up the build tools, and even grabbing a fork of the emulator that has DAP support so you can use VS Code's built-in debugger.

I personally use Neovim and a couple plugins for syntax highlighting and DAP support. As part of my build process, I run Python scripts which convert images and SFX to Amiga-friendly formats and assemble them into a custom binary file. I can't imagine how long that would have taken me to set up in an Amiga-only environment—Python is just too convenient.

I think a lot of what you see possible on Amiga today is thanks to modern tools allowing for very rapid iteration as well as some crazy preprocessing for effects that depend on lookup tables, etc.

FreePascal still has official support for creating Amiga binaries. I never tried it since I have no idea about how Amiga development works in general, but I tried FreePascal a bit for other systems and it seems pretty good (underrated?) (both the language and the compiler; fast, low on bloat, mostly safe memory, huge standard library).

If I was doing it (as an ex demo coder) I would do as much as I could in emulator to make my life easier and then test it on the hardware and hope for the best. Demo coding is one of those annoying things where real hardware is absolutely essential because you are often doing things which aren't properly emulated.

This demo didn't impress me that much, I was actually hoping for more. Maybe I've just forgotten how underpowered the Amiga OCS was for things like this? Second Reality by Future Crew on the PC is still my #1.

The Amiga 500 is extremely well emulated by now though.

A 33 MHz 486 CPU (the recommended spec for Second Reality to run smoothly) is MUCH more powerful than the 7 MHz 68000 of the A500... It's not just nearly 5 times faster, the 486 is way more cycle efficient, not to mention having a nice byte-addressable bitmap screen to draw into (vs 2-6 separate bitplanes).

So yeah you forgot how underpowered OCS Amigas are :)

That's just the CPU though. The Amiga has a bunch of custom chips for doing things you would have to do on the CPU in a PC.

For this Amiga demo it's mostly just the sound mixing the hardware handles. On a PC, mixing a couple of sound channels is pretty quick.

The Amiga hardware doesn't really help much with 3D effects, which the demo is loaded with. Audio is a big help for a 68000 but a 486 can mix 8 PCM channels and not even notice.

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