For full copyright information see here
This was my first attempt at a game for classic Amiga.
The goal was a game that would run on a 68000 Amiga with only 512kb of ram.
In order to actually get something finished in a reasonable timeframe, I banned refactoring unless the frame rate fell below 50fps or the code compromised the game. This rule has resulted in some quite hard to understand routines :-) but I did get something finished in a reasonable timeframe. In around 8 weeks of working a handful of hours a week a basic game was ready.
This game uses lots of Amiga hardware features:
- Independently scrolling dual playfields.
- The blitter is used everywhere (probably in some cases where it should not be)
- The copper is used extensively. In the main game screen it switches screen modes mid screen and changes the palette 6 times.
- Sprites are used for all of the items on the board.
- 3 audio channels are used for the music soundtrack and 1 channel is used for SFX.
- A hardware track loader (thanks to Photon/Scoopex) is used to load data directly from the floppy.
Veteran 68000 programmers will be able to tell that my 68000 experience is limited. For the most part I was able to write this game using only a small subset of available 68000 instructions.
The game was cross developed on a mac using vasm and vlink as well as a handful of custom tools that I wrote for preparing Amiga data.
I made extensive use of my hacked version of FS-UAE that allowed me to use the FS-UAE debugger with access to my programs symbols even after booting from the bootblock.
For details on setting up the cross development environment see here