[Zetr0]

For Amiga programming in 2013 here is my suggestion

WinUAE + ClassicWB + GadTool + Storm C++ V3.0 or higher


This will get you in the door - opening graphics windows, learning disk routines for loading / saving of data.

While C/C++ are high level languages - in time, when you are confident, you can compile to assembly (as opposed to object code) and then optimize the assembly before continuing to compile to object code and then linking onto executable code.

The thing with ASM - while very VERY powerful it can lead to some problems, its very easy to learn, but will take years to master and most notably system dependencies that may not be on every Amiga platform thus breaking compatibility

This is something you need to consider before you plum for this approach.


IMHO, get to grips with C/C++ and the Amiga DOS environment, and then move onto ASM to tighten and speed up critical routines. When coding on the Amiga this is what I do, irony is at the moment I am coding on the 8bit spectrum, and I write my ASM into C routine wrappers as it really speeds up development (as opposed to writing native Z80 ASM)

I would suggest to choose a very simple first project (like a maze / dungeon crawler) - dont worry about enemies, just get maze-map to image translations, learn double buffering and some of the eccentricities of how the Planar Graphics on the Amiga works. You will need to learn a bit on how AmigaDOS works as well as loading / saving - including file types like IFF / TIF and BMP and with some of these you will learn encoding - namely RLE (Run Length Encoding) which is still used a lot today!

This will be more than enough to keep you busy for the next few months. Then move onto more stuff like adding enemies to catch you. with just these very few components your program will become VERY big very quickly.