The Official EAB Top 100 Amiga Games - Voting Closed

This is a quick post to remind you that closing date has now passed for you to get your nominations in for the Official EAB Top 100 Amiga Games 2012.

In the early hours of this morning, EAB Global Moderator and chart compiler, Graham Humphrey, posted the following to The English Amiga Board;

"And that's that!

A bit disappointed to come home and find only one more vote has been posted but never mind - that's 69 in total.

Again thanks to everybody who took part. Now for the small matter of writing up the results It will be a while but I will, of course, let everyone know when it's ready".

As soon as the results start to appear I'll post a heads-up on the blog.

Dangermouse Adventure - Progress Update

Regular readers to this blog may recall that earlier this month I reported on a new Dangermouse game, which was now in development.

Since then, author Christian Clarke, has been hard at work on the the game (titled "Dangermouse Adventure - Greenback's House of Torture"), and on Monday he posted the following project status update to his web site, amigapd.com

"Have now completed 386 out of 400 location descriptions. The remaining descriptions relate to the end sequence.

The attention now will move to the luck / fear and combat routines.

After that images will be added and location titles will be added.

Will also try to add a save routine to make game testing easier.

Overall probably still about 5 months of work to go".

I didn't expect to hear anything more from Christian for at least another week or two, but yesterday he commented on Facebook that;

"Have now got the combat routine working - need to add some more varied descriptions - first task is to enter all stats for enemies encountered and get graphics for them too".

Christian was also kind enough to upload some new footage showing the combat in action.



As soon as I hear anything further about the project I'll post it here in due course. In the meantime, you may like to check out the official project development pages over at AmigaPD.com.

Time Running Out to Vote For Your Top Amiga Games

As mentioned in last Thursday's blog post, English Amiga Board forumite, Graham Humphrey, is after a list of your top 10 Amiga games, and also the one you rank the worst.

The voting window closes at midnight tonight (UK time), so if you've not yet cast your votes and want to, you'll need to get your skates on!

Graham will compile all your submissions, and once collated, this will form the English Amiga Board Top 100 Games of 2012.

For more information, either read through the blog I posted up last Thursday, or go straight to the EAB forum thread to vote.

Well, what are you waiting for? Get voting!

Programming in AMOS - Part.1 - Setting Up

(Note: These irregular AMOS programming posts won't be going into any depth. I'm simply giving a very brief overview of the package, detailing where it can be download from, and what resources are available)

If the steady trickle of new Amiga titles has made you think about having a go at putting your own game together, you may be wondering where to start.

There's a whole host of programming languages available for the Amiga, ranging from C and Assembler to Blitz BASIC and AMOS.

For the purpose of these articles I'll be covering AMOS. I know it's nowhere near as advanced as Blitz BASIC, but after much rummaging around the internet I've found that this seems to be the Amiga language with the best support and ease of access when it comes to obtaining documentation.

Originally released for the Atari ST as STOS, AMOS finally made its way over to the Amiga in 1990. Over the years numerous versions of the language were released, including Easy AMOS, AMOS 3D and AMOS Professional.

Over the past 18 months I've been tinkering around with AMOS Pro, and as it seems to be the best supported of the AMOS releases, it's the one I'd recommend you use.

If you're thinking about giving AMOS a go, then your first port of call has to be the excellent AMOS Factory Forums. Here you'll find not only a friendly bunch of people, but individuals who are keen to help, swap tips, and even put together routines to help you out.

Once signed-up to the forum you may want to submit a quick post in the AMOS Professional folder to let others know you're on board. Perhaps at the same time, explain what project you're hoping to work on or simply what you're hoping to learn.

With that done, get yourself off to the downloads section, and grab yourself a copy of AMOS Pro and the manual to go with it. Having the manual in PDF form is an absolute godsend as you can quickly search on keywords as opposed to the time consuming method of searching through the contents of the printed version of the book.

With the AMOS ZIP archive downloaded you'll need to extract the 6 ADF files contained within, get them put onto disk (or inserted as disk images if you're using an emulator) and install the suite of programs.

You'll also need to install a few updates, so once you've completed the above download and install update 2.0. Please note that the disks contained in this archive need to be installed in the following order: 3 of 3, 1 of 3, and 2 of 3.

The above should keep you busy for a while, so this seems like a good point to end part 1.

Allister Brimble Kickstarter to go Live on 31st Oct

Allister Brimble must surely rank as one of the most prolific Amiga musicians, having churned out tracks for companies such as Codemasters, Team 17 and Audiogenic, to name but a few.

With a catalogue of tracks as long as your arm, Allister recently announced, via Facebook, that he was thinking about putting together and releasing a double CD album of his most famous Amiga compositions.

Here's Allister...

"The idea for my new album is "Allister Brimble - The Amiga works", spread across 2 CD's. Rico Holmes will make the cover artwork. All tracks would be the very best quality remakes and remixes with my current studio technology.

Here are my initial proposed options on kickstarter:

$20.00 or more download the finished (2 CD equivalent) album as high quality mp3s, including a digital PDF booklet.
$40.00 or more - You get the limited edition album 2 CD Box set, numbered and signed.
$50.00 or more - All of the above and a poster of the cover artwork by Rico Holmes

I would guess add $10.00 for postage to outside the UK like Chris Huelsbeck did.

Feedback welcome before I actually put it up".

Feedback from the fanbase came thick and fast, with people not only suggesting what tracks they'd like to see featured, but also requesting high quality FLAC downloads, and an introduction from Team 17's Martyn Brown and Andreas Tadic.

In fact, such was the response from fans, that it looks like Allister will be getting this project underway very shortly...

"The kickstarter project will go up on October 31st which is when UK kickstarter projects are first allowed".

I'll be posting further developments relating to this project right here on this blog. However, if you'd like to follow the progress yourself you may want to follow Allister over on Facebook.

(Blog thumbnail image taken from the Allister Brimble entry on the ExoticA web site)

Blokop / Ice Dungeon / Mlink - Available to Download

Seeing as new versions of three puzzlers, Blokop (see screenshot to the left), Ice Dungeon and MLink had just been uploaded to the Aminet I decided to take the trusty A1200 online, get them downloaded and installed, ready for further investigation.

All created by French Amiga coder, Charles-N. Jacob, the three titles are small games that run in a Workbench window, and will apparently run on systems with Workbench 1.3 or later.

First-up is Blokop, a simple puzzle game, where the goal is to move your block from the starting point, all the way to the exit on the other side of the board. Clicking a blank space moves either your "character" or one of the other blocks into that space.

With a large playing area, and blocks that are more than one block in size, it's a slightly more advanced version of those block-sliding puzzles you used to play when you were a kid. Unfortunately, it's just as boring.

Talking of block-sliding puzzles you used to play as a kid, if we move on the Mlink, this is exactly what you get. Here you have a small grid where the object is to move the blocks around to complete the pattern.

I don't know if I was doing something wrong in this game, but I'm sure on occasions I was clicking on blank spaces in an effort to move a tile, but absolutely nothing happened. Poor coding or user (me) error? I'll let you decide! Another game to play for only a minute or two before moving on.

The final game in this puzzle series is Ice Dungeon, and it's the most advanced out of the three titles.

The game is a VERY basic Dungeon Master clone, where the object is to collect the talisman on each of the 7 levels, and then reach the exit before you freeze to death.

Movement is made using the simple GUI, which you click, first to choose the direction you wish to face, before clicking the MOVE button to move in that direction.

The map window (which sadly can't be used at the same time as moving) helps to keep a track of where you've travelled on the current floor, but with every part of the level looking so similar even with the map you'll be getting lost and frustrated.

So, are these games worth your time? Well, I have to say that at present, even the best of these three titles, Ice Dungeon, is just too basic to keep you entertained for more than a minute or two.

The two sliding puzzle games, Blokop and Mlink, could be improved with some nice tunes playing in the background, and perhaps a few more colours. Time limits would also make the games much more exciting to play, as at present there's just no challenge.

Ice Dungeon has the basic building blocks for what could be a fun, lighthearted dungeon romp. If the graphics were given some more variety, sound effects and enemies were added, and if you were given ability to fight back, this could be worth more than a passing glance

If these titles receive updates I'll certainly take another look at them. In the meantime, if you'd like to download and try the games for yourself, you can find them here:

http://aminet.net/game/wb/Blokop.lha
http://aminet.net/game/wb/Ice_Dungeon.lha
http://aminet.net/game/wb/Mlink.lha

Have fun!

Amiga Port of Paganitzu Under Development

Paganitzu was a tile-based arcade adventure/puzzle games originally released for the PC by Apogee Software, way back in 1991. (PC screenshot to the left)

Similar to Chips Challenge and Boxxle, the game requires you to shift rocks or other items around the screen so that all diamonds and keys can be collected, enabling you to move on to the next level.

With no Amiga version to speak of, English Amiga Board member, CarasGhant, has decided to convert this over to Commodore's humble 16-bit format.

CarasGhant tells us that the project is still "early days", but looking at the footage of the game below, it would seem that things are already pretty advanced.


This looks like it's going to be a real fun game. Here's hoping a completed version sees the light of day.

UPDATE: Since I originally posted this, the author has been tinkering around some more, and not only has he now got it up and running on his Amiga 600, the following additions/alterations (in the programmer's own words) have been made.

- Horrifically lame animated death.
- New pipe tiles that seamlessly blend.
- Spiders with completely wrong AI. (Also look terrible).
- Optimised HUD with no more flickering.

Check it out below...