Another - where to start thread

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MartinW

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Well, kind of!

Can anyone recommend me a PDF that I can download and have a read of that will get me going with some basic graphics coding on my 4000 please? I'm looking for a platform to try out some game coding and I want to concentrate on aspects other than graphics. From what I can see the Amiga is actually quite a nice simple move to X,Y, draw kind of setup once you have the window creation and setup out of the way so it sounds perfect.

The crunch is:

  • I don't need pages and pages on C - I already know C
  • Needs to be up to date with WB3.1 (though I am on KS3.0)
  • Therefore not a 3.5, 3.9 or 4.0 resource
  • Not a really old A500 resource where all the examples need changing!

I could do with suggestions on compiler and editor too really though I realise that's a bit of an open book, can of worms! I downloaded VBCC but it's compiled against 3.9 so while it works I have a suspicion I may run into problems in the future as I start to do more - it's also terribly slow, but that could just be the 68030/25 chugging away! I'd also like an editor with syntax highlighting. I tried "Annotate" but I'm struggling with expat.library

I can live without syntax highlighting if I have to.

Any tips gratefully received :)
 
@Martin

Hello there,

The Amiga native graphics are Planar not Chunky (Bitmap) you can create a routine for converting between one and the other, but this will take some CPU time.

I would suggest that you hit up AmiNet for standard IFF (planar) held image files for the Amiga - there are plenty of documents on how to read these files and setup a screen under C/C++ - I should mention that IFF files are RLE (Run Length Encoded) so it might be wise to have a little brush up on how to parse that information from disk store to memory.

I was pretty grass routes back in the day and used DICE which is based on a Lattice C compiler and CLI based, and comming from a Borland Turbo C++ V2.1 from the PC I need context and text highlighting etc... I was so deseperate at one point I actually wrote a text environment for this on the Amiga, however after a couple of days and nearly completing it, my friend came over and showed me how to use Gold ED instead which allowed for context and keyword highlighting.

I was both relieved and some what annoyed at the same time!

A year and a bit later on purchased Storm C/C++ 3.0 and that is quite the Daddy I have to admit and more like today's IDE's - it also has support for Warp3D (OpenGL) which can take advantage of the CPU rendering and or any 3D accelerated Hardware like a Voodoo or Cyberstorm 3D equipped Amiga.
 
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Hmm, I thought I read that I could open an intuition window and then do simple move commands and draw simple lines, dots etc.?

That's really all the extent of what I need at the moment. What I'm really working on is a Vectrex game and I wanted a platform to be able to try out some of the stuff like making objects move - for instance when a Galaxian swoops in a given projectory, that kind of stuff. It might sound like madness to try this on some other retro platform, however to do so in OS X or Windows is not that straightforward as you have to deal with modern graphics libs, and to do it on the Vectrex itself means 6809 assembler.

I could do it with something like Python but firstly I wanted to make it as transferrable as possible, so thought I'd go with C and secondly, hell, I've got an A4000 sat here so figured it would be nice to try and use it pretty much for the hell of it.

So for now I don't care if I'm literally moving a single dot, or a square or something :lol:

Regarding Gold ED. I keep hearing about it, but so far I've not found it. It appears to have been consumed up into Cubic IDE now and is 3.5+ only
 
Drawing in an intuition screen is quite simple if you are versed in C

I would recommend GadTools (Gadtoolsbox) as you have a GUI to create the screen / window that you want save that out as C source and you can then start implementing your screen drawing code.

I have some old reference programs that I wrote I would be happy to send you to get the gist of putting dots, plots, lines and poly's to the screen.

I would suggest a read up on intuition library abit and note IDCMP_Handler, A_PEN and O_PEN - its been a while so the names might be slightly different.

Hit me up in PM with your email address =)
 
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Nice one - I will do later thanks.

Right now I need to crack on with some work. I have the delights of batch files to cope with that I've not tackled for years and years which means nothing is fresh in my memory :(

Oh, actually, my web address is in my profile and my email is just martin@<domain name> if that helps :)
 
Ugh, lost a long reply by pressing the wrong key!! :picard

Long story short. SAS/C 6.5 installed, will experiment over the weekend, wow it's slow, can't find Gold Ed anywhere due to oddball licensing that (certainly for v5) permitted sharing with friends, but not re-distribution on cover disks or online!
 
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