Bittboy versus Pocket Sprite
Bittboy or PocketSprite? Which is the best portable retro gaming system? Which pocket-sized retro console emulator should you buy?
Ultimate 64: Commodore 64 FPGA Motherboard Replacement/Upgrade Review
The Ultimate 64 is a direct replacement for a broken Commodore 64 motherboard, but with several upgrades to the original and much-loved C64 experience.
Keyboard Control and Character Movement: Coding a Retro Game with C Part 3
In this tutorial we will write a cross-platform, retro C program that accepts keyboard control of a text-based player character on screen.
Getting Started Programming in C: Coding a Retro Game with C Part 2
Programming in C traditionally starts with outputting “Hello World” to the text console/terminal command-line. In the previous C tutorial we looked at that code but didn’t examine it, so let’s do that now, and expand to include input from the user so we can start making useful code. We will also look at the essentials …
Coding a Retro Game: Learn C Programming by Developing Games
Learn to code in C and create your own retro games with this free multi-part C programming tutorial series. But first, why learn to program in C? TL;DR C is one of the most sought-after languages in its own right, it has spawned or inspired lots of other super popular languages, and learning C is …
Frogger – Browser-based retro game fun
As part of my development of my own Frogger-clone for the Commodore Pet (PETFrog), I wanted to refresh my memory of how Frogger originally worked. Fortunately you can play the real Frogger, online, and for free thanks to the Internet Archive! Play frogger online Even better it works right in your browser – doesn’t require …
Programming the Amiga with AMOS BASIC: A Playable “Shoot ’em up” Game
In the final (for now, at least) entry in this series, we are going to pull everything together into a playable “Shoot the Invaders from Space” game that has keyboard and joystick control, killable enemies, moving bullets, and a scrolling star field backdrop … ▶ Play the finished game in your browser Load the complete …
Programming the Amiga with AMOS BASIC: Animation & Scrolling with AMAL
There is one last popular option for scrolling the screen and covering it gives us an opportunity to introduce the special AMOS animation language, AMAL … ▶ Try this lesson in your browser Run the AMAL animation and scrolling example in our in-browser Amiga and AMOS IDE. Hit Run to see AMAL drive the scroll …
Programming the Amiga with AMOS BASIC: Better Tile Scrolling
In the previous article, we created a tile map and did a simple scrolling screen using Screen Copy. While it worked, and demonstrated some cool aspects of AMOS, it wouldn’t really be efficient for use in an action/arcade game, is there a better option? Also, can we load the map from disk? There is also …
Programming the Amiga with AMOS BASIC: Maps & Scrolling
Up until now, our AMOS BASIC programming has relied on loading quite large full-screen images as our backgrounds. That is not memory efficient, plus creating maps and levels this way would be quite cumbersome. The go-to solution is to create a tiled map. We will look at loading and drawing Icons, and how we can …
Programming the Amiga with AMOS BASIC: Bobs and Sprites
Previously we looked at how AMOS can load images and configure screens, and layered scrolling via a feature called “Dual Playfield”. If we are going to create playable games then we will also need graphics to represent the player and the enemies. Colloquially we call these sprites, but in AMOS the term sprite has a …
Programming the Amiga with AMOS BASIC: Colours, Palettes, Variables, Arrays and Scrolling
Previously we looked at how AMOS can load images and configure screens, setting up screen resolution and number of colours. I also left you with a tease about this lesson, where I mentioned that AMOS has a feature where you can have layered scrolling via a feature called “Dual Playfield”. Let’s dig into that now …