Meet AMOS

What this is

Not a game — a bridge. AMOS is a language built on the Amiga for making games, and Meet AMOS walks you into it one small idea at a time, so that by the end making a game feels like something you can just sit down and do.

Short units, each teaching exactly one thing and showing it on screen the moment it runs: a word you print, a colour you choose, a shape you draw, a sprite you push around with the joystick, a sound you fire. The hard things other machines make you fight for — moving graphics, smooth animation, sampled sound — AMOS hands you as a single keyword each. By the end you can open a screen, draw on it, put a moving object on it, steer it with the player’s hand, bump it into things, and make it sing.

Who it’s for

You’ve met variables, loops, conditionals and subroutines somewhere — the Foundations modules, our BASIC courses, or any language. New to programming entirely? Start with The Basics first, then come back; AMOS is a lovely second step, but it builds on those foundations.

You don’t need to know anything about the Amiga’s hardware, and you don’t need any assembly language — AMOS is a complete path into making Amiga games on its own. (There is a deeper level, where you drive the Amiga’s chips by hand in assembly; if you ever get curious, it’s there. But you’ll build real, finished things long before you need it.)

The shape

• The editor and first words — type a program, run it, print to the screen, and store values in variables.
• Choosing and repeating — decisions with If, repetition with loops, and your own named jobs with procedures.
• The screen is yours — open a display, set its colours, and draw shapes and text on it.
• Things that move — put a bob on screen, move it smoothly every frame, steer it with the joystick, let AMOS animate it for you, and detect when it bumps into something.
• Sound, keeping, and the AMOS way — make a noise, save your work, and look back at everything AMOS just did for you.

You won’t have built a whole game yet — that’s the point. You’ll have built the understanding, and the feel, that a game needs.