3 ms·

Ah, that AMOS screenshot brings back memories.

• mrec 11y ago
  And Blitz Basic was a blast. It supported embedded assembler, which was hugely fun and educational to mess around with.
  • sp8 11y ago
    This. It might seem odd to some to combine BASIC and assembler but a programmer friend of mine used that ability to start playing with assembler (which he'd never done before) and experimented with replacing some BASIC routines in his games with assembler. As a relative newbie his socks were blown off at the speed-up he could achieve, I feel sure that it spurred him on in his programming career. (Ironically he is now a contract programmer writing corporate software in Java, but there you go...!)
  • richardjdare 11y ago
    I loved Blitz Basic. It was great how it gave you access to the whole Amiga. You could use the built-in commands, write inline assembly, and easily use operating system functions/structures. Modern "game BASICs", even the latest iterations of Blitz are limited sandboxes in comparison. Mainstream Amiga programming in C or assembly language was very expensive compared to today. As a teen I couldn't afford Devpac, or the Hardware Reference Manual, but Blitz gave me what I needed to make real progress as a programmer. One of my friends even got texture-mapped 3d going, although it wasn't quick!
    • bwldrbst 11y ago
      I've recently got back into messing around with Amigas and Blitz is still fun, though a little weird for someone used to C#. It's amazing how much more accessible all the documentation and tools are now. HTML versions of the RKMs are available on the web and for C there's a cross-compiling toolchain available on github (https://github.com/cahirwpz/amigaos-cross-toolchain https://github.com/cahirwpz/amigaos-cross-toolchain)