Amiga

This website is a random collection of technical information about the amazing Commodore Amiga computer. I have interviewed some great programmers, disassembled many copperlists to see how some famous games achieved their amazing effects, and also added a section on hidden messages in various games. I will soon add all the technical documentation from the old Action website here aswell. Enjoy!

Recently Published Articles

Dave Semmens

08/01/2013

Dave worked on a large variety of Amiga games as a one-man programming team. His most famous title was undoubtedly The Lion King, which was converted from the Megadrive version in only 2 months!

Ned Langman

15/11/2012

The graphics artist responsible for many of Random Access/The Sales Curve's greatest titles, Ned Langman had an amazing ability to draw using a very limited 16 colour palette as he showed in the Amiga versions of Silkworm, SWIV and Rodland!

Marc Djan

30/10/2012

Ocean France created some of the most polished coin-op conversions for the Amiga. Marc Djan was the head of Ocean France, and kindly answers some questions about the company including why so many of their games were never released!

Bobby Earl

19/10/2012

Bobby Earl worked on 4 diverse Amiga games during the 1990s, writing the split screen Flip-it & Magnose: Water Carriers from Mars, the driving sections of Total Recall, designing and programming Hook for Ocean software, and worked on Amiga code for Dune 2 while working for Westwood in the USA.

John Croudy

30/05/2012

John was one half of the formidable Random Access/Sales Curve programming team that worked on some of the Amiga's most fondly remembered games. His first 16-bit game was the Atari ST version of Silkworm, although some code was shared with Ron Pieket's Amiga version. He helped on Ninja Warriors, SWIV and Rodland, and wrote Saint Dragon and Indy Heat.

Interviews

Back in the glory period of the Amiga (1988-1993), I found the most interesting thing in the magazines were the interviews with programmers. All too often they asked very generic questions that could relate to almost any game. Now thanks to the internet, it's possible to contact some of my childhood heroes and ask them the technical details behind their creations!

Sprite tricks

The Amiga sprites were often overlooked by programmers that didn't think you could do much with 8 sixteen-pixel wide sprites in 3 colours, or 4 sprites in 15 colours. But several games showed off some technical wizardry and accomplished some amazing effects!

Startup-Sequences

Richard Aplin was the king of the startup-sequence. If the company that wrote the game he was converting prohibited credits being added, he would add a long message to the startup-sequence file. Here are 2 of his most famous: