I genuinely wonder what's the profile of those people who find the time to write games on the Amiga! but I suspect younger people aren't interested in such old computers, and people who grew up with them are busy with family and professional obligations. And if they're not, they are so many projects to work on which are equally fun, which you could use to keep up to date for instance.
In any case, it's very cool, so thanks for sharing.
I've always wondered what Japanese console style games would look like on the Amiga and whether it was underpowered or I just didn't like the design of most of it's games.
Bonk got a fab conversion by Factor 5 but they were wizards.
> A run-of-the-mill Amiga 500 has 512kb of "Chip RAM" and 512kb of expansion RAM
Nitpick: a stock A500 had just the 512kB Chip RAM. Many users opted to add the A501 RAM expansion with an additional 512kB Fast RAM which was not directly accessible by the graphics hardware. Although labelled as Fast RAM, it was slower than actual Fast RAM due to the expansion architecture.
I think there is something about coding within these constraints that is just incredibly appealing.
Wassup IE happy to see you around delving into some Amiga!
(aside: I feel like people played on a different Amiga than I did. It had great looking games, for sure, but so did by Nintendo NES and I don't look back on either of them so fondly.)
Still, very cool to show how these animations were made
"Racing the beam" — omg I know exactly what you mean. We used to set the beam to different color at the beginning and the end of our vsync'd routine to figure out how many scan lines worth of CPU time per frame we could afford to use. I remember the address $dff180 for this purpose (color palette 0, which would always show on the edges of the screen outside of the bitmapped area). We didn't have the Internet to teach us that trick either, all word of mouth! Didn't know there were people still trying to squeeze more out of that chipset nowadays.