Games Master System 0.8B

TITLE

Games Master System (GMS)

VERSION

0.8B (Released September 1997)

AUTHOR

Paul Manias (paul@ethos.co.nz)

DESCRIPTION

The Games Master System is a developers kit that is aimed at enhancing the functionality of the Amiga OS, with emphasis on games programming. It is based on the Amiga shared library standard, so will work with any programming language such as C, Assembler, E, Basic etc.

The system can be ported across to other platforms besides the Amiga, and in future GMS programs could be run on other platforms without recompilation (CPU's must match or they have to be emulated).

Here are just a few of the GMS features:

- Object Oriented kernel design.
- Fast blitter functions, including CPU assisted blitting.
- Full sprite support.
- In-built proportional fading functions.
- Sound support, includes intelligent channel play-back.
- Support for raster/copperlists with built-in special FX.
- External structure and object pre-processing, allows user editing of program data.
- Dynamic resource allocation.
- Support for all kinds of input devices (joysticks, joypads etc)
- An official system debugger is provided.
- A preference program that allows editing of things such as default screen dimensions, resolutions, mode promotion etc.
- Multi-tasking and screen-switching is supported.

The system has a very modern design and includes full resource tracking and safe task destruction features. A debugger has been included which GMS functions co-operate with, so there is no need for special patches or debugging tools. Functions are written with garbage protection features and where possible, software based memory protection. GMS can recover from many programming errors that usually result in software failures.

Full documentation and 285k of example source in C, Assembler and E is included within the developer archive.

NEW FEATURES

Some of the new features present in V0.8B are:
- Complete object orientation, making GMS the first low-level OO system to appear on the Amiga.
- Lots of smaller changes and bug fixes.
- Dice C support.
- Revised documentation.

SPECIAL REQUIREMENTS

GMS will take up 1.5 megs of space on your hard-drive and runs in less than 90k of memory. There are no must-have requirements, but an AGA Amiga is necessary for about 5% of the demos. KingCON or any other enhanced shell with a scroll back buffer is desirable for running IceBreaker.

AVAILABILITY

GMS is available on all up to date Aminet sites, for example:

ftp://ftp.wustl.edu/pub/aminet/dev/misc/gms_dev.lha (420k)
ftp://ftp.wustl.edu/pub/aminet/dev/misc/gms_user.lha (190k)

Developers will need both archives, Users will only need the second archive.

PRICE

This beta version is free.

DISTRIBUTAILITY

The distribution of the Games Master System is limited to Aminet and may not be redistributed without permission from the Author. The Games Master System is (c) Copyright 1996-1997 Paul Manias / DreamWorld Productions.

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