AMOS (programming language)

AMOS BASIC is a dialect of the

The language was notable for its focus on media and game development capabilities, allowing users to easily create demanding multimedia software and games. It featured full structured code and numerous high-level functions for loading and manipulating images, animations, and sounds. These capabilities made it a popular choice among Amiga enthusiasts, particularly beginners, for creating video games (especially platformers and graphical adventures), multimedia applications, and educational software.

AMOS competed on the Amiga platform with Acid Software's Blitz BASIC. Both BASICs differed from other dialects on different platforms, in that they allowed the easy creation of fairly demanding multimedia software, with full structured code and many high-level functions to load images, animations, sounds and display them in various ways.

The original AMOS was a

To simplify animation of sprites, AMOS included the AMOS Animation Language (AMAL), a compiled sprite scripting language which runs independently of the main AMOS BASIC program.[2] It was also possible to control screen and "rainbow" effects using AMAL scripts. AMAL scripts in effect created CopperLists, small routines executed by the Amiga's Agnus chip.

After the original version of AMOS, Europress released a compiler (AMOS Compiler), and two other versions of the language: Easy AMOS, a simpler version for beginners, and AMOS Professional, a more advanced version with added features, such as a better integrated development environment, ARexx support, a new user interface API and new flow control constructs. Neither of these new versions was significantly more popular than the original AMOS.^{[citation needed]}

AMOS was used mostly to make multimedia software, video games (platformers and graphical adventures) and educational software.

The language was mildly successful within the Amiga community. Its ease of use made it especially attractive to beginners.

One of AMOS BASIC's disadvantages, stemming from its Atari ST lineage, was its incompatibility with the Amiga's operating system functions and interfaces. Instead, AMOS BASIC controlled the computer directly, which caused programs written in it to have a non-standard user interface, and also caused compatibility problems with newer versions of hardware.

Today, the language has declined in popularity along with the Amiga computer for which it was written. Despite this, a small community of enthusiasts are still using it. The source code to AMOS was released around 2001 under a BSD style license by Clickteam, a company that includes the original programmer.^[3][4]

Software written using AMOS BASIC includes:

• AQUABYSS by Aged Code, is a 2022 strategy trading game for the Amiga^[5]
• Miggybyte
• Scorched Tanks
• Games by Vulcan Software, amongst which was the Valhalla trilogy
• Amiga version of
  Microïds
• Flight of the Amazon Queen, by Interactive Binary Illusions^[6]
• Extreme Violence, included on an Amiga Power cover disk
• Jetstrike, a commercial game by Rasputin Software
• Black Dawn, a 1993 game for the Amiga personal computer^[7]

External links

Wikiversity has learning resources about AMOS programming language

• Source code for AMOS and STOS
• The AMOS Factory (an AMOS support/community site)
• History of STOS and AMOS: how they came to be published in the UK