Just like the title says I have hit a wall with my "infinite" 8 way tile scroller in AMOSPro. Having recently fixed the last few glitches I had posted the code in ASCII to the AMOS facebook group but I have since marked my account to be closed. (I am sick of the almighty algorithm suggestions of politics / bot pages / p*rn in my feed that I report and facebook claims aren't p*rn. I am not a prude or even easily offended, I just have young kids who sometimes look over a shoulder or come into the office while I am scrolling and reading. No amount of block/hide/report seems to do anything with FB but I digress...
Having solved the glitches I moved on to optimizing and trying to up the performance. My normal machine is an A500 with a V2 and with my player bob on screen (~64x72px) and scrolling all over it is able to solidly hold 60fps so I feel good that I have some room to begin trying to implement level collisions. Moving to my '020 equipped A500 or with the V2 in slow "turtle mode" this drops to ~32-35fps. (Same with an emulated A500 with an 020) I've avoided floats and division as much as possible since the beginning and use a pre-calculated array for necessary mod values. There are no procedures being used in the main loop. Over the course of the last week I have gone so far as to rem out whole sections or put in GOTOs to jump over sections of code and with nothing else going on, no tile drawing, no bobs, just scrolling the screen I can get as high as 42fps. Compiled isn't much better. Since I am in NTSC I know I can squeeze some more performance by going to PAL but I don't think it will be enough to do any kind of game logic on top of rendering a level. I didn't think AMOSPro's code was really that slow even when you start doing just a few things.
When I was 16 or so, I bought Blitz 2 and moved from AMOS Pro when I got an A4000. I am a better programmer now than I was then so when I got back into the Amiga a while ago I wanted to go back to AMOS where I was more comfortable and thinking I would be able to make better design decisions. Blitz was always quirky and prone to crashing and I never really loved it other than its speed. I've kept an install of Blitz 2.1 and AmiBlitz3 on my systems for a while and I keep checking AmiBlitz periodically. AmiBlitz's built in tools, syntax highlighting, etc all seem awesome so I tried AmiBlitz 3.9.10 (latest) for the last couple days and was disappointed to find that it is essentially unusable as compiling will cause a crash in three or four attempts in most cases. Moving the cursor or selecting text can cause a crash. Changing preferences can cause a crash. (I am also building quite the list of non-crashing bugs with the editor.) I tried Blitz 2.1 again and it seems only slightly more stable but has its own editor weirdness that I had forgotten about.
So, for the veteran Amiga users still on here I have a few questions... Given that I am more nostalgic for OCS/ECS Amiga's and want my game to run there:
1. Would you stick with AMOS Pro, finish the project, and just target high CPU spec Amiga's? (Maybe even grant myself the 2mb chipram I have even though I have been limiting myself to 1mb?) I see this similar to modern retro inspired games on a PC with a modern language and game library/API... way more CPU power than is what is needed but it is about doing the project not necessarily being true to the past hardware.
2. Port to Blitz or AmiBlitz keeping a lower CPU target (around the 14mhz '020 range) and try to find a more stable system configuration for them? (I am happy to setup a dedicated install with nothing else but Blitz or AmiBlitz if somebody can recommend a configuration.) This I see as a more "pure" experience but probably brings a whole bunch of problems I haven't even considered besides just working in the constraints and issues of the tools.
I am sorry to say I just don't have the energy or will to try to learn 68k asm for the Amiga at this point and I have nothing but a loathing for C like languages. I am just more into the art and design end of things than I am a hard-core programmer.
Thanks for any input.
