Thinking of jumping ship from Amos to Blitz

[roondar]

A small word of caution about the Bullfrog tutorial. It is a useful starting point, but IIRC it is not particularly good at explaining the Amiga graphics hardware. The examples I saw did not use the Blitter or Sprites and drawing using the CPU is very slow in comparison.

It also may not explain well how to code in a world with many different Amiga models (code that works fine on an A500 might easily fail on an A1200 unless you take some care), but I can't remember if they touched on that.

[Brick Nash]

Originally Posted by roondar

A small word of caution about the Bullfrog tutorial. It is a useful starting point, but IIRC it is not particularly good at explaining the Amiga graphics hardware. The examples I saw did not use the Blitter or Sprites and drawing using the CPU is very slow in comparison.

It also may not explain well how to code in a world with many different Amiga models (code that works fine on an A500 might easily fail on an A1200 unless you take some care), but I can't remember if they touched on that.

That's completely fine. All I'm looking for is a starting point to try and wrap my head around basic concepts, and more importantly - how they work together in context. It seems to do it fine. I think it'll help to get a good foundation, and then maybe I can move on to the other tutorials which seem to skip that part.

I'm not really interested in the A1200 anyway as the A600 was always my machine of choice.

[Brick Nash]

Actually, how hard would it be to tweak these tutorials to include the stuff you mentioned?

It's the first time I've looked at something like this and felt like I understood it, so to keep it within that context, but fill in any gaps would be really cool.

[roondar]

Good question. There are several tutorials on using the Amiga hardware, I'd say the one that helped me the most was Photon of Scoopex's YouTube tutorials ( [ Show youtube player ]). They're quite long, but he goes over pretty much all of the graphics stuff in quite some detail.

As for programming to work on most/all Amiga's, there's a bunch of things to keep in mind. Some of the more important things (IMHO) are:

• Don't write self modifying code - many 68K CPU's have a cache and that can cause issues
• Don't assume anything about where in memory your code will end up (could be chipmemory, could be fastmemory)
• When using the Blitter always use a proper way making sure the Blitter is done before you start setting Blitter registers. Most of the time this means using Blitter Waits.
• Don't assume the CPU takes a specific amount of time to finish well anything. If something needs timing, use either the CIA timers or the raster position to time.
• Don't assume any particular OS routine is at a particular location in memory
• On very fast machines, interrupt acknowledgement may be too slow to avoid the interrupt to fire again. This can be avoided in several ways, the easiest way is to acknowledge the interrupt twice.

[Brick Nash]

Originally Posted by roondar

Good question. There are several tutorials on using the Amiga hardware, I'd say the one that helped me the most was Photon of Scoopex's YouTube tutorials ( [ Show youtube player ]). They're quite long, but he goes over pretty much all of the graphics stuff in quite some detail.

As for programming to work on most/all Amiga's, there's a bunch of things to keep in mind. Some of the more important things (IMHO) are:

• Don't write self modifying code - many 68K CPU's have a cache and that can cause issues
• Don't assume anything about where in memory your code will end up (could be chipmemory, could be fastmemory)
• When using the Blitter always use a proper way making sure the Blitter is done before you start setting Blitter registers. Most of the time this means using Blitter Waits.
• Don't assume the CPU takes a specific amount of time to finish well anything. If something needs timing, use either the CIA timers or the raster position to time.
• Don't assume any particular OS routine is at a particular location in memory
• On very fast machines, interrupt acknowledgement may be too slow to avoid the interrupt to fire again. This can be avoided in several ways, the easiest way is to acknowledge the interrupt twice.

All that is a little advanced for me, but I'll definitely refer back to it as needed.

That's a good call about Photon! I'm sure I started his course a few years back, but I got lost as I had virtually no experience in any sort of programming. I've got some GML, Amos, and even Z80 Assembly under my belt now, so that will definitely be worth a shot.

[Silverstreak]

Sadly Earok's BB videos are no more.. however the Blitz Basic tutorial files are still available:

http://earok.net/games/earokbbtutorial.zip

[saimon69]

Earok videos are no more but Daedalus streams are here to stay hopefully...
Blitz Basic Streams