Is the Amiga hard to program?

[AF2013]

Is Amiga Hard to Program? I have to say yes but it depend what you making.

[phx]

Originally Posted by mcgeezer

Let's say you want to do a full screen horizontal scrolling game on the Amiga and on the ST at 50hz.... (a pretty standard thing for games to do).

Which platform do you think that can be achieved on the easiest?

Ok, I see what you mean. Is calculating pre-shifted tiles more difficult than writing to hardware registers? Don't know. I'm no ST expert.
Is it even possible to reach 50fps on the ST? Maybe there are really complex tricks to achieve that...?

I guess you can always find a specific example to prove one or the other. For example you can imagine something which the Amiga can do easily, but requires a lot of effort on the C64. Then the C64 is harder to program?

[saimon69]

I miss a 'programming amiga for dummies' book where basics of Assembly and C programming are explained - yup am one of those that still read paper books

[mcgeezer]

Originally Posted by phx

Ok, I see what you mean. Is calculating pre-shifted tiles more difficult than writing to hardware registers? Don't know. I'm no ST expert.

Come on buddy, are you being serious? One is a hell of alot more involved than the other.... writing to hardware registers is usually one instruction.

Originally Posted by phx

Is it even possible to reach 50fps on the ST? Maybe there are really complex tricks to achieve that...?

A few games did it, Steve Bak was pretty good at doing it but the techniques usually all involved pre-shifting. Enchanted Land is different as in the history of the ST demo scene a technique called Sync scrolling was found which enables the machine to scroll horizontally in steps of 4 pixels (it may be 2).... the coders of The Care Bears group used this in Enchanted Land.

Originally Posted by phx

I guess you can always find a specific example to prove one or the other. For example you can imagine something which the Amiga can do easily, but requires a lot of effort on the C64. Then the C64 is harder to program?

On the subject of the ST I don't think specific examples can be used, the Amiga beats it in every department. Cookie cutting on the Amiga is simple because you can use the Blitter to do it, on the ST you need to use the CPU to do all of that. Say you want to change colour regs on the vertical beam positions? Amiga has the COPPER, on the ST it's a pain in the neck and you gotta use what can be akin to a CIA timer to do it (MFP I think the chip was called).

The only thing the ST has going for it over an Amiga is the slightly faster CPU and maybe... the sound chip, and I say that only because you can make tunes in much less memory.

[AmigaHope]

Originally Posted by mcgeezer

The only thing the ST has going for it over an Amiga is the slightly faster CPU and maybe... the sound chip, and I say that only because you can make tunes in much less memory.

I know I'm stretching but... high res monochrome games that don't flicker (at least not until ECS). Not much used it but some stuff like a good Asteroids port, and of course it was great for text adventures. Potentially could have been great for ports of native monochrome Mac games but that didn't happen much.

Roland MT-32 support in games. While you could easily add MIDI to the Amiga with a simple adapter made with a few bucks worth of passive components, having it built into the ST meant there were a few extra games that supported it. (On Amiga it was pretty much just the Sierra ports)

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by AmigaHope

I know I'm stretching but... high res monochrome games that don't flicker...

Roland MT-32 support in games.

Two things that need expensive extra hardware. OK if you already have it, but otherwise...

On the down side - no multitasking. We are so used to it now that we may have forgotten how frustrating it was creating and debugging code in a non-multitasking environment. The Amiga does it even better because you can open a custom screen and flip between it and your editor and debugger etc., or drag it down to see a bit of each. And unlike a modern PC you can get away with hitting the hardware direct for a lot of stuff while the OS is still up.

[coder76]

Using most of the Amiga features is not that hard, as there are a lot of examples around. And you can program the Amiga like it was an Atari ST (no blitter, no copper, no sprites, no hardware scroll, no dual playfield usage), but then you get your slow and poor looking games, like on Atari ST. This was actually done by some programmers, who made some cheap game ports from Atari ST to Amiga. The Amiga hardware is surely not meant to make the programming harder, but to give more performance.

The C64 is a simple machine, but its 8-bit CPU is really awkward and slow to make more complicated programs with. Since the CPU of the C64 is so slow and it doesnt have a blitter, you can mostly only use sprites, or use sequences of prerendered tile graphics to get animation and movement on screen at 50 FPS.

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by AF2013

Is Amiga Hard to Program? I have to say yes but it depend what you making.

And also who does the making, I certainly wouldn't get much of anywhere I like min/maxing in games but in programming I very much enjoy having oodles of resources available to me, all wrapped in a nice tidy pile of abstraction layers.

Respect to the people who did it back in the day, even more respect to the people who still do it today.