It’s BASIC, Jim, but not as we know it.
Chris Gransden, who has ported a number of emulators and games to RISC OS, has been busy again. In December, he released a test version of XAMOS [direct download], ported to RISC OS after it was suggested on the RISC OS Open forums.
Originally published by Europress Software and developed by François Lionet and Constantin Sotiropoulos, AMOS BASIC was a version of the BASIC language for the Commodore Amiga home computer, descended from STOS BASIC for the Atari ST. XAMOS is an Open Source, cross-platform C++ reimplementation of AMOS BASIC, based on jAMOS, a Java implementation.
According to Stephen Harvey-Brooks, – the developer of XAMOS, who found his way to the ROOL forums to make the suggestion – XAMOS “includes support for Amiga-style screens, bobs, sprites and rainbows using SDL, a mostly-complete interpreter for the AMOS Animation Language (an included script in AMOS), and an extended language with the beginnings of support for some simple object-orientation and concurrent routines.”
Listing the other platforms for which XAMOS currently runs, he added that a port to RISC OS
would be a show of full circle, with Acorn and Amiga machines both being revolutionary in their own way. And now we get the possibility of not only RISC OS running BBC BASIC, but AMOS BASIC as well, with extended Amiga-style screen and sprite support.
Stephen expressed his keenness to see it ported to RISC OS because of the Raspberry Pi due to its “price and educational niche.”
