December 31, 2010
About 3 minutes
Archives Amiga Software Games

Ye olde Amiga stuff

Software for the much-loved Commodore Amiga

The Legend

The Amiga will always have a special place in my heart. It was a marvel of hardware and software design: a full multi-tasking operating system in 256 KiB of RAM (in 1985!); a capable and innovative graphical user interface; incredible multimedia capabilities; and, famously, guru meditations. There was nothing quite like it. If you ever saw a music video from the mid 80s to the early 90s that left you overstimulated, disoriented, and shouting words like “gnarly,” then an Amiga was probably involved. If you ever caught the landmark television series Babylon 5, then an Amiga was definitely involved (several actually, networked together to render the effects scenes, though they were later replaced by PCs).

The Story

Years ago I avoided a summer of hard farm labour by convincing my parents that I could make money by writing and selling software with my friends. Surprisingly, this ploy worked. Even more surprisingly, I did make some money at it, mostly by licensing the software to disk-based magazines. Here, collected for posterity, are some of those “classic” programs:

Skirmish
Fantastic creatures fight to occupy the contested space between two villages. Kind of a cross between Archon (which I loved!) and a traditional turn-based tactical combat game. Hard to get running on an emulator.

Catapults
Two players build castles, then take turns trying to knock them down with catapults. My main memory of Catapults is that at the time I had just learned of the parmetric form of line equations and I applied it to the arc of the fired boulders. This had the nice side effect that more powerful throws, which went further, also moved across the screen. The simulation used 16-bit fixed-point arithmetic, which sometimes led to interesting glitches thanks to overflow and precision errors.

Theseus
Theseus escapes the labyrinth while evading the spirits of those who were lost in the maze before him and, of course, the minotaur. With level editor. The gameplay is odd in that none of the enemy characters move through the maze.

Theta Incident
Two starships from enemy fleets find themselves trapped in a strange fold of space-time. There is an interesting mechanic by which you can divert power between your weapons and shields. A lot of fun with two players.

Terraform
Pretty pictures of simulated terrain generated by weathering random initial states.

Universal Conquest
A turn-based strategy game of… universal conquest.

VR Duel
An experiment in 3D, this virtual sword fight with a faceless opponent was inspired by the battle between Eowyn and the Witch King in the Rankin/Bass adaptation of The Return of the King.

The Software

You’ll need to own a vintage Amiga or an Amiga emulator in order to make use of this download. To use an emulator, you will also need ROM images which at the time of this writing are not considered abandonware.

Download vintage Amiga software (709 KiB)

If you are looking for more Amiga software than you can shake a 3½ inch floppy at, the Aminet archive is your friend.