r/amiga

Link to Walmart listing

Wishlist on Steam here via this link.

I’m learning an awful lot while making this game, and honestly, I’m very aware that I still have a long way to go. I’m sorry if some of the influences feel obvious at this stage, but I’m trying to absorb, learn from, and honour the things that first made me fall in love with this kind of work.

The story takes huge inspiration from the sparks of William Gibson’s 80s imagination, the social paranoia running through Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, the brilliant design thinking of Zachtronics, and old-school favourites like Uplink, alongside more recent games such as Grey Hack and Hacknet.

I’m trying to take those influences with humility, learn as much as I can, and slowly shape them into something that feels personal and new.

This is AmiGalaga, a port of Galaga for a stock Amiga 500 (PAL). It runs at 50 frames a second on that machine, with no fast RAM. Currently I have no hardware to test on, but this is on a cycle-exact emulator (best I can do).

I made this port because I missed coding for the Amiga like I used to do back in the old scene-days. The goal was to make a game that would play exactly like the arcade game from my childhood. I was in no small part inspired by reassembler's work on Outrun and Sonic (genius level coding imho).

Now to be honest I had Claude Code to assist me in this port. I brought in all my old knowledge of the hardware, bus timings, copper tricks, sprites etc. and Claude helped me dismantle the ROM, write much of code, and in general compressed the work into something I could do in my spare time.

This is no slop half-finished port, you can play the entire game, all levels, all waves and all bonuses.

Where the Amiga version shines:

• The copper allowed for a smoother twinkling starfield
• Hardware sprites with reuse allows for more player missiles than the original arcade
• Highscores are saved to disk on exit
• Options are available for various modes, lives and shots
• The blitter is doing all the heavy lifting and it really rocks
• Can be launched from workbench and safely returns

Where a few compromises had to be made:

• The playfield is vertically a bit smaller than the arcade
• Scores are moved to the side to give more height
• Some of the last levels will drop a single frame or two if using 4 missiles
• I felt 2 player never made much sense, so I dropped it.

If you want to play it:

• Source only, bring your own ROM. Nothing of Namco's is in the repository. The build reads the graphics and data from your own galaga.zip (MAME's set, Namco rev. B). There is no ADF to download.
• Building needs vasm, vlink, amitools and Python. The README walks through it.
• It has only been run in emulation so far. If you have a real A500 and try it, I would love to hear how it goes.

JOTD's Galaga500 already exists and is a great piece of work; this is a different approach to the same game, aimed at full speed on an unexpanded machine.

Get the source: https://github.com/mwulffn/AmiGalaga

See even higher quality on youtube:

[https://youtu.be/S2yhd7DB09k]

Edit: Attempted to clean up line breaks.

I'd better call Kevin and see if he still wants his Captive disc back.

Here’s an export of the session so you can watch.

And screenshots.

https://youtu.be/sGjkO6HkKHs?is=GZEIkc5e0mKTXwBl