So I finally got around to trying the E-UAE emulator on Mac OSX. I got up it up and running pretty quickly and there’s a nice front-end out there called Hi-Toro which helps immensely with configuration. It’s pretty quick too, and there is an intel version of the emulator available. So of course this meant I had to try out some things. I have yet to try one of my favorite games – Datastorm, but I did figure out how to get my fruit machine game up and running. I had to duplicate the Workbench 1.3 disk so that it was writeable, then remove some fonts to make space, and then copy the amos.library into the libs folder. Then booting from that disk allowed me to run the superfruits game from a virtual harddisk, which is basically a folder on the mac with normal files in it. Easy.
SuperFruits starts out with a very simple title screen animation, which I did in the fabulous Deluxe Paint 3 on the Amiga – it’s a whole bunch of `move` animations, which basically means I split up the title image into a grid of tiles and then animate each tile separately. They all sort or wind their way into place and merge together to form the logo. I had to do it in 2 colors because, being written in Amos Basic, it wasn’t fast enough at displaying it full-screen at full speed on the lowly Amiga 500. So instead, I used a copperlist rainbow, which is like a hardware trick to change the colors as the display is being updated.
Then after a couple of very simple menu’s where you enter your names and how much money to play with etc, you enter the game proper …. all the way from 1993, I present to you, in full 32-color technicolor, and complete with British spellings, it’s SuperFruits!
In this screenshot I have just matched two watermelons next to each other, so it then drops down into a gamble feature. In the gamble feature you get to try to increase your winnings and to access a variety of bonus features, which is where much of the fun is. There’s lots of flashing lights and special features and even a cheat mode for when nudging. Three 7’s gives you a jackpot, although you can also gamble your way up to it. The gambling is done by trying to stop the lights flashing on the number 3, out of 3 lights/sounds, which is not too easy, and actually a bit hard for the lower-value levels. I did get one jackpot so far! The green goes crazy with flashing lights and *color cycling*, woo woo!
Pardon me!