Amos or Blitz

[bloodline]

Hi,

So I fancy doing a bit of old school basic programming on the miggy.  I used blitz a bit in the past and on the PC and always thought it was pretty powerful.  
Is blitz the best one to go with?  I want to use aga features if at all possible , do both have extra libs for AGA ?

Thanks

Use Blitz, it's faster, has proper data structures, a real debugger, works properly with the operating system and doesn't need any extra libs to work with AGA.

The inline assembler is also a god send if you want to optimise an inner loop.

Also it gives full access to the interrupts, the most useful is the VBL interrupt... Which Amos "sort of" works with when you use the limited version (synchro on) of AMAL... But that is a bit of a pain to do anything serious with.

I could go on... Simply put Blitz is the more modern of the two.

[bloodline]

Thanks.  You had me at proper data structures

In Amos, you ended up having lots and lots of arrays... And a mess of variables.

To make a large game in Amos you had little choice but to use the software version of Amal (synchro off), just to stop the code becoming a mess.

[bloodline]

That made no scence Amal was just to allow beingers to Animate stuff who couldnt write there own routine.

No, Amal was to allow asynchronous operation. Essentially multithreading.

The hardware variant used the vertical blanking interrupt, the software version ran the threads with a timer.

But since each Amal program was self contained, it allowed you to encapsulate your onscreen objects and was the nearest you could get to a structured design in Amos.

Amal was not for beginners, it was tricky to use and was excluded from "Easy Amos", the beginner's variant of Amos.

[bloodline]

Sorry I dont see what this has to do with the size of the code?

Nothing. I was talking about structure. Amos lacks proper data structures so your code ended up as a big mess of Arrays and variables. By using Amal, you could encapsulate the variables related to each screen object into it's own Amal program, which made for neater code.

If you write a good routine it probably quite poratable between all basics and other languages and Amos wouldnt take any more lines of code than any other basic. Eazy Amos left out other things that would have made life easier.

Without proper data structures, writing good code (readable and maintainable) is very difficult.

I just thought it a bit misleading thats all.

Most Amos books etc describes Amal as an easy way to dispaly Animation and I agree.

Without using Amal, you would have to handle all your animation code as part of your main loop, in a primarily interpreted language like Amos, that made it very difficult to do anything close to 50fps. Amal eased that problem.