The Mighty Amiga

My first computer was the mighty Amiga. At that time the IBM compatibles were markedly inferior (and still are in some respects). In those days I was working as a part-time cleaner and I had plenty of time to teach myself programming.

I bought the Amiga 500 in the afternoon, and by early evening I had assembled it. The computer came with two 3.5 inch disks, one called 'Workbench' and the other called 'Extras'. On the Extras disk I discovered a program called AmigaBasic. That very night I wrote my first AmigaBasic program using just 3 commands: PRINT, GOTO and STOP. The program was a text adventure game The text was divided into paragraphs. Each paragraph started with a description followed by numbered choices for the player. This was done with PRINT statements, followed by a STOP command. The player would select which paragraph he would progress to by entering GOTO 22 (or whatever the paragraph number was.) in the Immediate window.

My text adventure was inspired by 'Colossal Cave' which I had played years earlier on a mainframe and 'Mystery House' which I had played on a friend's Apple IIe. Colossal Cave was one of the earliest well-known text adventure games. The Colossal Caves are real caves in the USA, and many of the rooms in the game are named after real caves. Mystery House used text input and output, but additionally had vector line drawings. Drawings were very crude, for example crosses were used to represent eyes. Both games can be found on the net. An Apple IIe emulator is need to play Mystery House.

Within a week I had bought some blank disks, learned how to format them and copy files from one disk to another. Copying AmigaBasic to a disk allowed one to create programs.

The AmigaBasic manual was, as one Amiga user put it, about as useful to a novice programmer as someone put it as 'tits are to a bull.' I perserevered with it though, and within just 2 weeks created what Tim Strachan, editor of Megadisk described as a 'fully fledged shareware program' and the program 'Chess Tutor' was accepted as part of the vaunted Fred Fish public domain collection. A few months later I purchased a Basic compiler.

Over the next 12 months or so, I released dozens of programs as shareware, I joined the local Amiga Users group, read most of the available books on the Amiga, and read the digital articles in the Megadisk magazines. Later I joined the Melbourne Amiga Users Bulletin board which was a kind of pre-Internet Internet. I became familiar with AmigaDos which I later found was very like Unix.

Two of my PD games were reviewed in the glossy 'Amiga Format' magazine and one of my games received a PD game of the month award.

Some of my programs were written at high speed, one game I wrote in 8 hours and I once wrote 2 programs in one evening (though they needed some polish). A card playing program 'Solo Whist' was written in 3 sittings. Solo Whist is a card game which is something like 500 or bridge.

Amigabasic had major limitations, even when compiled and when Amos Basic arrived it was a dream come true. Amos included a lot of support for graphics, sound and animation that AmigaBasic did not. Unfortunately, early versions were full of bugs as was the first version of Blitz Basic, a rival program. Both programs later released improved versions with Blitz Basic being the best. BB later became available on the PC and included a lot of support for 3-D programming.

Nonetheless over the next 4 years I created quite a few games and educational programs written in Amos, a few of which were released as LicenceWare in the UK and received a couple of grand for. One of my programs was the very first program in the catalogue. I sold a number of my chess educational software (about 5 programs) privately.