Roguecraft Devs on Developing for Amiga in 2024 | Hacker News Reader

Roguecraft Devs on Developing for Amiga in 2024

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168 pointsibobev30 comments

For Commodore the computer, there is a Rust and LLVM fork for MOS:

It's able to generate binaries that are executed on C64. Tried it on the emulator, and it's pretty wild that it allows to write Rust for such old machines.

I wish Rust was available on Amigas. I know there is a Motorola 68000 backend for LLVM (although probably without the support for HUNK format), so probably a significant backend is already done, but I'm not knowledgable about the LLVM infrastructure enough to be able to wire up things together.

You don't get games with those style of graphics anymore.

The amiga graphics always had a fantasy feel, unlike IBM/Dos which had a more sharp, redefined-cold feel to them.

The 256 color dos graphics were ok, I didn't notice the coldness until they went full color, but I agree that something about the constraints of the amiga color system produced a vibe that is hard to put into words, but you know it when you see it. I bet someone could come up with a shader that would amigafy normal pixel art. The pixels for certain colors would get longer amongst other things.

That was probably mostly to do with Amigas generally being hooked up to a TV (often via RF or composite) rather than a dedicated monitor, so having much softer/slightly-blurred output.

Although if you were comparing to EGA PCs of the era, the EGA palette was fixed and horrible, whereas the Amiga could pick from a palette of 4096 colours (and change that palette per-scanline in some cases)

Until SVGA came to be, yes.

It's been a couple of years since my last deep-dive on Amiga development inside MacOS. I never did find smooth dev workflow: compile inside the emulated environment, or cross-compile from macos? Edit inside the emulated environment, or edit inside VS Studio? etc.

Has anyone found a slick and effective dev flow?

If you want to have modern C++ (for instance), you basically have to cross-compile. If only using C or older g++, I'd compile inside the Amiga, I think.

https://github.com/Slamy/m68k-elf-gcc - can generate bootable floppies!

https://github.com/bebbo/amiga-gcc - modern (gcc-13.2) C and C++ for cross-compiling from Mac/Linux/Windows. It even supports the post-Motorola 68080 Natami VHDL CPU extensions.

Thanks for the links!

But what’s this “C++” you speak of, future-man?

We must ask hackerman! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1uvr7CJazqE

First released in 1985!

Amiga and C++ are actually contemporaries. As kids they used to hang out together watching Miami Vice on TV. Then she got married to a con man named Commodore, while he moved to Seattle and got a career in big business.

There were C++ compilers available for the Amiga, even if at the time it was slowly taking off.

On Amiga I'm amazed of AmiGemini+AmiSSL, a Gemini client for an OS from 1993 (a 68030 it's requiered and a 68040 encouraged, but hey...) whlle Windows XP still lacks a native client (and compiling LibreSSL on it with w32Devkit it's a breeze). And don't even start me talking about Windows 95/98...

I do not care much about Gemini, but AmiGemini is also an excellent client for Gopher and other protocols.

>a 68030 it's requiered and a 68040 encouraged

Gopher is blazing fast on standard, 020 A1200. Probably fine on 68000 as well.

These performance requirements come from SSL, which Gemini needs.

Gemini has gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/waffle.cgi which does wonders on reading main news sites (and newspapers) without completely destroying the layout on an Amiga/simple Nix web browser, even for something like Dillo on Nix, which I tuned to avoid remote CSS files and set to send the PSP User Agent (Sony's console browser was respected from most CMS') , but even with that using News Waffle from Gemi it's far better. It cut downs the bandwith even more and the layout it's pretty much simplified and far better rendered.

>Gopher

gopher it's fast even under a 8086. It's just a step over Netcat and echo. If you can push bytes over the network and later print them, you are done.

But, as I said, from gopher I love gopher://magical.fish (portal to everything, Gopherddit, HNGopher, News, text games...) and most sites from the Bitreich Gopher Lawn. But Gemini has jewels, too.

Amiga is a broad term: what chipset etc.?

What I really highly advise is this MS Studio Code Plugin:

https://github.com/BartmanAbyss/vscode-amiga-debug

For me a revelation in ease of use. Hit compile and run - and it does in an emulator.

You can use C or Assembler.

The author is a well-known scene contributor since the 80th, and does a hell of a job with this nice IDE.

Best tool and workflow for someone like me, who only casually writes some not so leetcode Amiga 500 ECS demos these days.

There's also a fork that lets you build apps that run on AmigaOS: https://github.com/jyoberle/vscode-amiga-debug

Coincidentally, I first learned C on an Amiga 500, back in the late 80's!

Thanks for sharing this! I've been using vscode-amiga-debug for a while but have often wished it had a stdlib, if only for quick prototyping & debugging side quests.

I wrote an article about the very subject : https://www.markround.com/blog/2023/08/30/amiga-systems-prog...

Which also featured on HN at the time, with some very insightful comments and discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37389376

TL;DR is I cross-compile using VSCode & Docker from Mac/Win/Linux mainly, but if I want to develop in the Amiga environment (e.g. on native) I use VBCC on 68k.

Was there anything remotely like that back in the days ? The replayability of this genre?

Cadaver had the isometric and style but wasn’t a rogue like.

The original :)

https://www.amigalove.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=1308

Nethack, ADOM and a bunch of other classics also had their ports (though at least ADOM past 1.1.1 struggles to launch on hardware these days).

Slashem (even Slashem-up form GitHub) should compile it fine in the same machines NetHack 3.4.3 did.

Procgen (and I mean roguelike style procgen, not Elite/Frontier single fixed seed generation) AND graphics like these were pretty rare back then, best to my knowledge. There's a number of classic games that Roguecraft draws on visually, notably HeroQuest, but also, as you say, Cadaver, Shadowlands, and some others. There were also a good few near-roguelike games (DarkSpyre springs to mind...), and of course ports of the major RLs (ADOM, Moria, bands, hacks, etc.), but I think RogueCraft is the only game to hit this balance between high (for the system) visuals and roguelike gameplay.

It looks nice, even though I don't have so much ram on my Amiga 500...

It says its compatible with the A500 emulator. Maybe that would work.

Never a better time to get some RAM[0][1].

Note that the game needs 1MB chip, and thus needs an ECS (1MB chip capable) Agnus. Most Rev5 and afaik all Rev6 A500 have it. Sysinfo and/or whatamiga can identify it.

0. https://amigastore.eu/en/710-amiga-500-512kb2mb-memory-expan...

1. http://amigastore.eu/en/929-ide68k-gottago-fastram-8mb.html

Time to dust off the old machines then; in my shed I have a working A1200 and cd32, so I should be good.

Compatible with the CD32... nice.

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