Meet the Machine

What this is

Not a game — a bridge. Meet the Machine moves you from a high-level mental model into the Amiga's own, one small idea at a time, so that when you build your first game nothing feels like magic.

Short units, each teaching exactly one thing and showing it on screen the moment it runs: a screen that fills with colour, a value that moves between registers, a gradient the Copper paints by itself, a block the Blitter shifts in a single sweep. By the end you can read the 68000's registers and memory, paint a bitmap, drive the Copper, build an IF from compare-and-branch, read the player, loop, call a subroutine, set the Blitter going, and — most importantly — debug a machine you took away from its operating system, which does exactly what you said even when you were wrong.

Who it's for

You've met variables, loops, conditionals and subroutines somewhere — General Programming, our BASIC course, or any language. New to programming entirely? Start with General Programming first; this track assumes those foundations.

Come from one of the 8-bit Primers (Spectrum, C64 or NES)? You're ready — but expect more to be new here than transferred. The Amiga is a 16/32-bit machine with a wholly different CPU (the Motorola 68000, not the 6502 or Z80) and a family of custom chips that do the heavy lifting. The thinking carries over; almost none of the instructions do.

The shape

• What the machine is — the build-run loop, MOVE, data sizes, the register file, memory, the bitmap screen, colour and the Copper.
• What it can do — decisions, the vertical blank, input, pointers, counted loops, subroutines.
• Rounding out — arithmetic and bit manipulation on the 68000.
• The custom chips — the Blitter, hardware sprites, and Paula's sampled sound: the family that makes an Amiga an Amiga.
• The mindset — there's no operating system underneath you and no safety net; you debug by observing, not by reading errors.

You won't have built a game yet — that's the point. You'll have built the understanding a game needs.