AMOS BASIC is a dialect of the

BASIC BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages designed for ease of use. The original version was created by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College ...

programming language for the

Amiga Amiga is a family of personal computers introduced by Commodore in 1985. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16- or 32-bit processors, 256 KB or more of RAM, mouse-based GUIs, and significantly improved graphi ...

computer. Following on from the successful

STOS BASIC STOS BASIC is a dialect of the BASIC programming language for the Atari ST personal computer. It was designed for creating games, but the set of high-level graphics and sound commands it offers is suitable for developing multimedia software with ...

for the

Atari ST The Atari ST is a line of personal computers from Atari Corporation and the successor to the Atari 8-bit family. The initial model, the Atari 520ST, had limited release in April–June 1985 and was widely available in July. It was the first pers ...

, AMOS BASIC was written for the Amiga by

François Lionet François Lionet is a French programmer, best known for having written STOS BASIC on the Atari ST and AMOS BASIC on the Amiga (along with Constantin Sotiropoulos). He has also written several games on these platforms. In 1994, he founded C ...

with

Constantin Sotiropoulos Constantin Sotiropoulos is the co-creator (with François Lionet) of AMOS BASIC, a popular video game and multimedia programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming language ...

and published by Europress Software in 1990.

History

AMOS competed on the Amiga platform with Acid Software's Blitz BASIC. Both BASICs differed from other dialects on different platforms, in that they allowed the easy creation of fairly demanding multimedia software, with full structured code and many high-level functions to load images, animations, sounds and display them in various ways. The original AMOS was a BASIC interpreter which, whilst working fine, suffered the same disadvantages of any language being run interpretively. By all accounts, AMOS was extremely fast among interpreted languages, being speedy enough that an extension called AMOS 3D could produce playable 3D games even on plain 7 MHz 68000 Amigas. Later, an AMOS compiler was developed that further increased speed. AMOS could also run

MC68000 The Motorola 68000 (sometimes shortened to Motorola 68k or m68k and usually pronounced "sixty-eight-thousand") is a 16/32-bit complex instruction set computer (CISC) microprocessor, introduced in 1979 by Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector ...

machine code, loaded into a program's memory banks. To simplify animation of sprites, AMOS included the AMOS Animation Language (AMAL), a compiled sprite scripting language which runs independently of the main AMOS BASIC program. It was also possible to control screen and "rainbow" effects using AMAL scripts. AMAL scripts in effect created CopperLists, small routines executed by the Amiga's Agnus chip. After the original version of AMOS, Europress released a compiler (AMOS Compiler), and two other versions of the language: Easy AMOS, a simpler version for beginners, and AMOS Professional, a more advanced version with added features, such as a better integrated development environment, ARexx support, a new user interface API and new flow control constructs. Neither of these new versions was significantly more popular than the original AMOS. AMOS was used mostly to make multimedia software, video games (platformers and graphical adventures) and educational software. The language was mildly successful within the Amiga community. Its ease of use made it especially attractive to beginners. Perhaps AMOS BASIC's biggest disadvantage, stemming from its

lineage, was its incompatibility with the Amiga's operating system functions and interfaces. Instead, AMOS BASIC controlled the computer directly, which caused programs written in it to have a non-standard user interface, and also caused compatibility problems with newer versions of hardware. Today, the language has declined in popularity along with the Amiga computer for which it was written. Despite this, a small community of enthusiasts are still using it. The source code to AMOS was released around 2001 under a BSD style license by

Clickteam Clickteam is a French software development company based in Boulogne-Billancourt, Hauts-de-Seine. Founded by Francis Poulain, François Lionet and Yves Lamoureux, Clickteam is best known for the creation of Clickteam Fusion, a script-free progra ...

, a company that includes the original programmer. On the 4 April 2019,

announced the release of AMOS2 on his websit
amos2.org
AMOS2 replaces STOS and AMOS together, using JavaScript as its code interpreter, making the new development system independent and generally deployed in internet browsers. Amos 2 is now called AOZ Studio. Its website is at https://www.aoz.studio/.

Software

Software written using AMOS BASIC includes: * ''

Miggybyte ''Miggybyte'' was a free disk-based magazine for the Amiga range of computers, published by Pickled Fish Software and edited by Ben Gaunt. From 1995 to 1997 twelve issues were published all being on a single floppy disk only. The magazine was ...

'' * ''

Scorched Tanks ''Scorched Tanks'' is an artillery style game released for the Amiga platform in 1994. The game is inspired by the MS-DOS game ''Scorched Earth'' (1991). Gameplay Between two and four human and computer-controlled opponents each control one st ...

'' * Games by

Vulcan Software Vulcan Software was an independent computer games company founded in 1994 in the UK. Vulcan started creating software for the Amiga computer systems. Its first commercial game was ''Valhalla and the Lord of Infinity'', which was notable for bei ...

, amongst which was the '' Valhalla'' trilogy * Amiga version of ''

Ultimate Domain ''Ultimate Domain'', known as ''Genesia'' in Europe, is a computer game developed by Microïds and published by Mindscape initially on the Commodore Amiga in 1993 and then ported for the IBM PC in 1994. The original Amiga version is known to be ...

'' (called '' Genesia'') by Microïds * ''

Flight of the Amazon Queen ''Flight of the Amazon Queen'' is a graphical point-and-click adventure game by Interactive Binary Illusions, originally released in 1995 for Amiga and MS-DOS. The game was re-released as freeware in 2004 for use with ScummVM. In January 2022, a ...

'', by Interactive Binary Illusions * '' Extreme Violence'', included on an ''Amiga Power'' cover disk * '' Jetstrike'', a commercial game by Rasputin Software

History

Software

References

External links