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Garden (Amiga)
Garden is the earliest Amiga game done by me. First working version was made back in 1994 in AmigaBASIC. The idea is taken from the game Happening in the
garden, published as type-in list in the only Bulgarian computer magazine in the 1980s - "Computer for You", which in turn is based on the Digger game, widely popular among the Pravetz 16 (Bulgarian IBM PC XT clone). The game was for the Bulgarian Oric Atmos clone - Pravetz-8D,
which I had in the early 1990s. The AmigaBASIC port used the same concept as the original Pravetz-8D game, which utilized redefined characters for the game graphics. For sound the built-in Oric BASIC
audio commands - PING and EXPLODE were used, which are not available in AmigaBASIC, so the sound was originally cut. The first working playable version used almost the same BASIC
commands as the original Oric BASIC, even the BASIC line numbers were kept. BASIC lines numbers are not obligatory for AmigaBASIC, but were preserved for authenicity. The game play was fast enough even with the interpreted AmigaBASIC
version, but after getting used to the Amiga C compilers I ported it to C, added screen mode requester, sound and made the executable small and fast. Later I improved it with sound, faster routines and title screen.
The graphics are in 8 colors, enriched to the original Pravetz-8D version, which used only 2 colors - white ink on black paper. On the Pravetz-8D (Oric) is available 8 color palette but it has
some limitations of the usage. For example, you can not make green grass and next to it yellow player, because you must have at least 1 character space left, for the control code of the next color.
This is not an issue on the Amiga version. The screen dimensions are kept the same respective to the original, despite having much wider space on the Amiga. The status text for the score and
high score are kept almost intact from the original, only using the small letters, which are not normally present in the Pravetz-8D charset, but easy to redefine. The Amiga sound differs as well from
the original, having some 8 bit samples. All sound and graphics - done by special font are included in the main executable file. At first start the game opens requester for screen mode which is saved on the exit, along
with the high score. As a plus to the Amiga version there is a funny story in the readme file. The game is playable on any Amiga model, including AmigaOne and other PPC machines. Garden also have versions for Apple 2, Sinclair and Oric, each of them having peculiarities related to the respective platform.
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