Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!psuvax1!psuvm.bitnet!uh2 From: UH2@PSUVM.BITNET (Lee Sailer) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: Attention Programmers Message-ID: <89158.094143UH2@PSUVM> Date: 7 Jun 89 13:41:43 GMT References: <365@xdos.UUCP> <8895@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> Organization: Penn State University - Center for Academic Computing Lines: 30 In article <8895@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>, freidin@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Robert Freidin) says: >Amiga? I've just recently seen a sample of what this amazing computer >can do (I saw Thunder Blade, Blood Money, and Menace), and I am >wondering how difficult it would be to program games like these. I know >Pascal for the Mac very well, and would be willing to learn C and/or The Mac and the Amiga are roughly comparable in terms of difficulty. I suppose the Amiga is *more* difficult in the sense that it can do more, and has more special features, so there is more to learn. For example, the Amiga offers special support for animation that I believe is absent on the Mac. Also, on the Amiga you have to learn about handling colors. Also important, on the Amiga you have to learn some tricks about multi-tasking, that is you want your program to cooperate with other programs that might be running. To learn about the Amiga, one good book to start with is Rob Peck's Programmer's Guide to the Amiga, from Sybex. Another good place to look is on the Fish disks, advertised in many magazines, available from clubs and dealers, and even available on many mainframes. There are dozens of good games on these disks, with *source code* included! Lastly, since you are already a Pascal programmer, you might consider using Modula-2 instead of C. It is an excllent language for what you want to do, and well supported on the Amiga. The main problem with using Modula 2 is that many, many, many of the examples you will want to follow are written in C. You could probably learn enough C to read these examples and translate them into M2, since the two languages are in many ways very similar. good luck.