QA: Amos Kittens

Olaf Schönweiß and Jens Christian Ingvartsen Thomsen asked me few questions about Amos Kittens and Amos Pro, I think I should clarify.

Question: Where do find Amos Professional.


Answer: 

There number place you talk about Amos, and find help, many of places host Amos professional.
and can help you find what your looking, Amos Pro is no longer on sale, so no way you buy it today.

You can go to “Amos Coding” on Facebook.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/AmosPro

there is also the STOS group there also friendly.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/stoscoders/

EAB has forum about AMOS Professional.

https://eab.abime.net/forumdisplay.php?f=119

Amos Kittens is hosted on GitHub.

https://github.com/khval/AmosKittens



Exotica is also good resource of information.

https://www.exotica.org.uk/wiki/AMOS_extensions

There used be a site called “AMOS Forum at Ultimate Amiga”,
today that sites looks like is not working.

Question: Does Amos Kittens compile the code. 

Answer:
No Amos kittens make no attempt to translate token to native code, 
the interpreter read the token in .amos file and execute the Amos program/game as it is, 
in its pure form.

Question: how is it distributed? With a run-time interpreter?


A: Well you have few options how to distribute it.

  • You bundle your .amos game /program with interpreter. you can use start script, or you can include icon with default tool Amos Kittens.
  • Or you can distribute .amos file only with icon, you can use start script, or you can include icon with default tool Amos Kittens.
  • You are allowed to modify the interpreter, so you can convert your .amos file into a C/C++ tabel / binrary and compile into the interpreter. Maybe add some encryption.



Question: But I really, really want to convert my Amos games/programs to C.


Answer:

there is program on Aminet, Amos2C,

http://aminet.net/package/dev/amos/Amos2C


if you need to convert your token .amos files to asc files, you can use Amos2asc

https://github.com/khval/Amos2AscII


You can also export to asc from
Amos Professional


Amos2c it will not generate code you can compile, but it should help you do the translation, C does not have commands you need to execute program, you need a support library, Amos Kittens was written as interpreter, with stack engine, the format of the commands is there for not organized so be easy to use, in this way, there is a project that tries to make it possible. have a look at “AmOS4.library” project. The last news was from 30.08.2016, I do not know if there is any work being done on it.

http://sharynn.free.fr/

Question: AMOS is not the right language for me what other languages can use, that is cross platform.


Answer:

Well you have Hollywood Designer, it’s not so great on slower computers.
https://www.hollywood-mal.com/designer.html

"Free Pascal" often codiered easier to learn then C, work on MorphOS and AmigaOS and Linux.

Python pygames, Phyton is extremely popular, its used almost everywhere this days, it’s a interpreted language, so its not as fast as C/C++. (AmigaOS 4.1 use Phyton for the installation scripts.)



Protable E
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Aros/Developer/Docs/E