Hi everyone, thanks for the encouragement and support.
To those who have offered to help out with the Amiga Disk Swapping Network, thank you, perhaps I'll start a new thread for it where we can discuss the idea more and gather volunteers.
If anyone would like to help us with making or testing games, for now I'd suggest you join the
Game Creator's Corner group until we can get a proper development forum set up.
We would like to move and avoid having cables on the ground eventually but for now we just lift our feet when we walk around.
We do plan on supporting the Natami and OS4 platforms, but we don't have the hardware so the porting would have to be taken care of by someone with the right systems. For now we're focusing mainly on classic Amigas for our games, although our ultimate goal is to make the engines open source and port everything to run on Aros and MorphOS, and maybe some games for Linux too. It all depends on the type of game. Since WinUAE comes with a working Kickstart replacement ROM now we should be able to bundle all classic Amiga games with WinUAE without any legal problems for easily installed and executed Windows versions of the games. To the end user they won't even notice the emulation once they've installed it, the game will just run from an icon and play.
Gilthanez, well spotted. In fact it's the high resolution version of Theme Park running through Shapeshifter!
I don't think there's much of a chance we'll be able to pick up abandoned games and finish them, although that is a lovely dream. I myself am only a beginner programmer, in fact before I started learning AmigaE late last year I had never had a single programming lesson or any experience coding before other than writing web pages in HTML. It would take an experienced programmer who knows a mainstream language like Assembly or C to help us to finish or port games, and unfortunately there just don't seem to be any people out there with the skills and the free time to help. For example, there is a very good one-on-one fighting game for the PC called
Sango Fighter. The current rights holders of the game have been in need of an Amiga programmer to port it to the A1200 and CD32 for several years, yet no one has ever stepped up to help them. The entire game is finished, but coded in x86 Assembly, so it would be quite a tough one to port, but it is a high quality commercial game.
All our Amigas are PAL. We tried to win an NTSC CD32 locally on eBay recently but some collector grabbed it (and relisted it at double the price he paid within a week of course). It would have been good to have a native NTSC system for testing purposes.
We don't have any A3000s or A4000s because we can't afford them, these are just three people's Amiga collections from our childhoods 'til now combined together in one room, and all of the towered PCs were built from parts found on the side of the road during a junk collection. Other computers, consoles and hardware components have been donated to me over the years which I have put to work here, including my Efika which was given to me to develop software for MorphOS. There are two dead A2000s here who had their batteries explode inside, some day we hope to afford to get them fixed if the damage isn't too bad.
Most of the monitors in here have multiple inputs, so two or more systems can be hooked up to each one using a variety of cords and adapters.
I don't know what our first product will be yet because there are a few projects going on at once. Perhaps it will be my text adventure, or maybe it will be a simple shoot em up or platform game. Our intention is to open-source all our code, but the graphics and sound will be copyrighted or protected since they're our own intellectual property. Some of our projects will be collaborative efforts with completely royalty-free graphics and sound too, so anyone would be welcome to modify them and contribute back. The games will generally be free downloads, but with the option to donate back to our developers, and we'd like to set up a system where people who donate over a certain amount receive a boxed, printed copy of the game in the mail, giving collectors more incentive to donate a little extra.
I'd like to show you my most recent investment, although I really should not have impulse-bought this with my part of the rent money. I just hope I can sell something on eBay by the end of the month to get it back, but it was such a good deal for only $249. They sold out of their stock of 120 units within about half an hour of opening the store, lucky I waited outside for an hour before the store opened, there ended up being hundreds of people lined up behind me.
I hope to make some better demonstration videos for
YouTube now that I have a decent sized monitor to show.
