Lugaru comes to the Amiga

One of the awesome results of releasing the source code to Lugaru in the Humble Indie Bundle is that Lugaru now runs on AmigaOS 4 and AROS!

An early AmigaOS 4 Lugaru build, courtesy of MickJT.

If you're not familiar with the Amiga, make sure to read up on it on Wikipedia, and then read the AmigaOS 4 page.

MickJT did most of the work for getting it to run on AmigaOS 4. I asked him if he would mind sharing some technical details of the Amiga port. Read on for his his thoughts below:

I actually suggest signing up to amigans.net, which has the largest collection of AmigaOS 4 users. Amigaworld.net has more members, including everyone from amigans.net too, but not quite as OS4 centric.

I just want to start off that though I compiled Lugaru, I infact know pratically nothing when it comes to any language other than AREXX.

It's copy/paste, trial and error, "sh", "configure" and "Make" for me, and just my general intuition and problem solving skills that can help me to fix any problems.

I have about the knowledge of "Spot's porting for dummies guide", which is here on os4depot.net

It's in AmigaGuide format, but you can read it on a PC and extract the .lha with WinRAR or "lha" on Linux; You'll just end up seeing the AmigaGuide formatting codes.

Our OpenGL and SDL implementation is quite advanced, but not yet complete, and as such, the texture blending, though supported, doesn't seem to work as it should and causes the surfaces/ground to be transparent. You can see the bottom of the Skybox image through the ground.

Likewise, I decided it's best to comment out the blending of the terrains. It looks a lot better now, but of course, the rocky parts of Challenge Mode level 1 are not covered in snow.

The modified source code is on OS4Depot.net, search for "Lugaru".

Instead of properly adding #ifdef's, I have merely commented out the portions of problematic code, and changed a few things regarding to Amiga-style paths.

According to testers, it seems to work decently on the latest Amiga hardware, but it's not flawless. However, A-EON Technology's AmigaOne X1000 and ACube Systems' SAM460ex are both launching soon and it should easily handle Lugaru.

Some AmigaOne X1000 marketing material.

I mentioned that Lugaru was also ported to AROS, which is closely related to the AmigaOS. According to Wikipedia, it is an "an almost 'feature complete' implementation of AmigaOS" designed to be run on a wider range of hardware. Yannick Erb is responsible for adapting MickJT's Amiga port for the AROS port -- you can get it on Yannick's website.

Manu on the AROS-Exec forums made an awesome video of it running:

To find out more about the Amiga, be sure to join the community at Amiga.org, Amiga World, and / or Amigans.net. Thanks again to MickJT for porting Lugaru to AmigaOS 4 and Yannick for the AROS build.