phg@cl.cam.ac.uk (Philip Gladwin) (02/23/91)
This seems to have sparked a little discussion: here's the
summary of the stuff I received by email, for those of you
who are interested. I would like to find out more about the
user groups, PD fixes, libraries etc, as it certainly
looks like I will be buying it in the near future.
(ie tomorrow)
Thanks to all those of you who took the time to write -
you will probablybe hearing from me as soon as I get into
trouble with the thang. :)
phg@uk.ac.cam.cl
phg@cl.cam.ac.uk
Here are the comments I got. See for yourself...
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AMOS disables most multitasking, and runs outwith Intuition.
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GFA BASIC v3.51 is superb, even before compilation. Wouldn't
recommend AMOS for anything other than demo-ish messing
about.
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It is definately not a toy, I have it and makes game programming many
times easier. As for applications, you
could do some very good stuff, but it would be mostly
stand-alone. (Ie, don't expect to be able to integrate all
your OS utilities into such an application. It is very OS
independent and very hardware dependent.
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(Mandarin claims lots of productivity stuff has been written
in AMOS in Europe but I have yet to see anything arrive
here.)
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One of the nice things about AMOS is its ability to store
all the data the program needs (sprites, sounds, machine
code, compressed screens(!)), as part of the interpreted
code. This means you could create an application that
has only one file - the program itself
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It is a VERY comprehensive BASIC language...Just about every
command you could ever want is in there...Line numbers are
not needed (but allowed), and has all the optional
"structured" BASIC stuff. It has integers as well as
floating point (single precision) Machine code is easy to
make part of a BASIC program.
No structured data types (ala "C") are present. :-(
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AMOS only uses the OS for I/O...everything except Exec &
DOS gets punted when you run it. (See why it only has
limited application value) Interestingly, it DOES
multitask - CLI, Workbench, and other programs still
run in the background. AMOS just takes over the screen
completely, and you press L-Amiga-A to get back to the
"OS-created" screens. (AMOS programs can also be running
when you are using the Workbench, etc.)
Since it punts Intuition, it has its own window and gadget
routines, which are not as good as Commodore's. It also
has its own pull-down menu code, something the author went
overboard with - it has different styles of menus (pull
down, pop-up,etc.) and you can do weird things like
attatch Bob animation sequences to menu items...
You can make system library calls directly, so you can open
Intuition screens and windows, but since they are
incompatible with all of AMOS' animation commands, it isn't
all that useful. You could add an AREXX port if you really
wanted to by using this facility.
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The only thing I know for sure is it doesn't seem to work
with the A3000 - probably uses the CIAB timer for something
- I have a A2630 installed in my A2000 and have no problems
with it.
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>AMOS disables most multitasking, and runs outwith
Intuition.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
This isn't true. AMOS multitasks. The first version had a
busy wait that clobbered all other tasks, but this has been
fixed.
It is true that AMOS doesn't use intuition.
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