In the future, I'd like to do a tile based game like Hilt, so I figure this will be a good starting point.
Do you have opinion on the different versions of amos (normal, easy, pro) and what to go with?
Thanks for the encouragement!
If you're sure you want to go with an Amos flavor, you may as well go with Pro. The only advantage of Amos the Creator is that some extensions work with it that don't work with AmosPro. Realistically the extensions for AmosPro are better to work with anyway. You can download AmosPro for free from
the Amos Factory website and others.
Personally, I think AmigaE would be a lot more flexible for the kind of work that a text-based game would be. The only thing that would be better in AmosPro would be the graphics handling if you want to keep it in ECS screen resolutions. AmigaE works with AGA the same way as C and unlike C, has enough syntactic sugar to do object-oriented programming.
Hilt II was written in Blitz Basic if I'm not mistaken, but if your tile game is not action-oriented any of the above langauges will work.
I started writing a graphic adventure in AmosPro to test the memory bank capabilities but since there is a serious bug in the memory allocation of Data banks, I had to switch to another language. I chose C++ since I was looking at taking on an artist that could do truecolor cartoon images and didn't need backward compatibility for the classics. When my artist bailed out I quit the project.
Hopefully PortablE will make it possible to port AmigaE programs to other platforms like the next-gen Amigas among others. AmosPro is forever doomed to be run in emulators on non-classic Amigas and the AmosPro compiler generates code that is far from optimal.
