DOOM 3 on AROS

Nick Andrews, one of our senior developers is ironing out the final bugs on it's DOOM3 code.

NEXUIZ the first port by BSzili

The new developer in town (regarding aros) is on a porting rampage and its second port was well received by AROS gaming community.

Aquaria - A magic journey...

Aquaria is the most beautiful game ever and it's available for AROS.

Retro fun on AROS....

Insane Jump and Run Game with Puzzle elements... Really hard retro game action with knobs on!

AROS Playground Wallpapers

Some Desktop Wallpapers with AROS Gaming inspiration, done specially by our resident artists...

Friday, June 15, 2012

Alien VS Predator - Old acid still burns...

This is a port of 1999 Rebellion game Aliens vs. Predator, an FPS developed by Rebellion Developments and based on the Alien and Predator movie franchises.

This game sets up three separate campaigns, each playable as a separate species: Alien, Predator, or human Colonial Marine.
Each player character has different objectives, abilities, and weapons. The single-player campaign presents the player with a conventional series of levels to progress through that are designed around the abilities of each character.
AROS Port was done by Szilárd Biró, and seems he's willing to port every open-source FPS available - we wish him good luck!

Download at: AROS-ARCHIVES

There are two executables included, avp for AvP Gold and avp_alien_demo for the Alien Demo.


To play it you need AvP Gold Edition or the AvP Classic 2000 Edition. You have to copy the avp_huds, avp_rifs and fastfile directories, and the language.txt file. The FMV's use the proprietary Bink and Smacker codecs, which aren't supported.

Alternatively you can download the Alien Demo here:
http://www.fileplanet.com/10556/10000/fileinfo/Aliens-vs.-Predator-%28Alien-Demo%29

Don't forget to overwrite the aenglish.txt with the one in aenglish.lha, otherwise the menu options will be messed up in the demo. The Gold Version doesn't needs this.

AROS-specific commands:
- ALT-ENTER for fullscreen
- CTRL-G for mouse grab
- PRTSCN for screenshot

This port is based on avpmp: https://github.com/mbait/avpmp

Monday, June 4, 2012

Interview with Mazze

  We start a series of interviews with one of the oldest, best known AROS developer and with multiple AROS game ports under his belt - Matthias Rustler (aka Mazze)!

Some of the ports include:
PushOver 
Crimson Fields
Abuse
Kobo Deluxe
And many more...


AROS Playground: Hi Matthias - can you tell us a little about yourself?
Mathias Rustler: I'm a 45 year old male who lives in a small town in Germany. I'm working as engineer. Computers are my main hobby. I'm playing table tennis in a local club.

A.P.: Could you give us a history of how you became interested in Amiga's?
 Did you possess any classic Amiga's or still own?
M.R: When I still had a VIC-20 I had read about the wonder machine Amiga in various magazines. I couldn't effort one at that time. In 1987, when I earned some money as an apprentice, I bought an Amiga 500. It was my only "real" Amiga. I've used it till 1998. Till I've joined AROS I've fought the withdrawal syndrome with Win-UAE. 

A.P.: In the old days 8/16 bit computer times, did gaming take a big part of your life?
M.R: I had owned some games for the VIC-20 but I was more interested in writing stupid BASIC programs for it.

A.P.: In what form you came to be involved with AROS and how long have you been involved with it?
M.R: I had already written/ported some Open Source applications to AmigaOS3.
I found out about AROS and originally I only wanted to port some of my work to that OS, too. Somehow I was hooked. In 2005 I got access to the Subversion repository. I started with overhauling the documentation. Later I became more courageous and added some source code. A big step forward was when I found out about how to use the debugger. The lines of source I added to AROS aren't that much but my bug reports and sometimes fixes helped a lot to make AROS more stable.

A.P.:  Have you any idea how many game ports have you worked on?
M.R:I think I have ported about 15 games. Most of them are quite simple, though. More important are my application ports like YAM, SimpleMail, Scalos, Scout etc.

A.P.: What were your favorite ports? Would you suggest one for us?
M.R:Perhaps Rocks'n'diamonds, Kobo-DL, Abuse.



A.P.: What were your most difficult ports?
M.R:The spread sheet Ignition. It isn't finished because I was fed up at some point. Regarding games: I can't remember. Those which were built from "configure" scripts caused the most hassle.

A.P.: Would you like to revisit some of the ports and redo them in another fashion or taking advantage of new features in AROS?
M.R: If SDL is available as shared library I'll probably port some games again.

A.P.: Some of your older ones are still being played nowadays, does that gives you a feeling of job achieved?
M.R: I had that feeling some time ago. In the meantime others have done more advanced ports.

A.P.: What operating system do you use for developing?
M.R: I have currently Ubuntu Linux 10.04 LTS. I'm usually building AROS from the source code with full debugging support. That helps a lot in finding the reason for crashes.

A.P.: Is it more easy to develop for AROS in general and in the gaming porting area currently?
M.R: Yes, of course. When I started in 2005 there was no SFS, no OpenGL, no Autotools, and some parts were buggy as hell.

A.P.:  Gallium 3D was probably the latest most known achievement on the development side. What are your thoughts about it?
M.R: That's really a milestone. Krzysztof did an impressive job.

A.P.: Do you feel that AROS would gain from games that were not ports?
M.R: There is no market for all Amiga-like systems together. No serious company will release a commercial game for AROS only. "BOH" was only possible because it was written for SDL so that it could be easily ported. I don't want to prevent a developer to create a game and release it for free or low budget but I don't expect that this gives AROS any significant gain.

A.P.: How do you feel about AROS game panorama nowadays?

M.R: I'm impressed. A lot of advanced games have been ported to AROS recently.



A.P.: Is there a particular game/gaming tool you would like to see available for AROS?
M.R: Some games which need the Boost library like Battle for Wesnoth are missing. IIRC BSzili wants to port a game editor to AROS.

A.P.: What general features and applications do you think AROS really needs right now?

M.R: I'm doing most computing under Linux. If I'd have to survive with AROS only I'd first miss some developing tools:
- editor like "Scite"
- Subversion
- debugger
- GUI builder (MUIBuilder is too limited)

Office:
- spread sheet (Ignition is half done)

Graphics:
- paint application (If I had more time I would write a libCairo based
one)

Regarding features:
- Zune fixed
- ABIv1 done
- support for multi-core processors

A.P.: Any near future plans regarding AROS?
M.R: The problem is: whenever I make plans I'm soon doing something else. I want to finish the "R" clone I've started recently. I could continue with translating some static libraries into shared ones, like libpng, libjpg. There are other unfinished things like a Palette Preferences editor. The Autodoc grepping script needs and overhaul. Last not least I should look if I can do something for ABIv1. I don't have plans to make more game ports. There are currently some guys which are quite good in
that task.

A.P.: Is there anything we did not cover or that you would like to add?
M.R: My wishes:
- more developers
- less wish lists
- more Open Source releases of native Amiga software
- bug reports which are no guessing games



A.P.: Thanks a lot!
M.R.: Regards


Sunday, June 3, 2012

Welcome to Hurrican!



Hurrican is a freeware jump and shoot game that is based on the Turrican game series. Blast your way through nine action-packed levels filled with different enemies and power-ups.
This awesome game went on to the 3rd Indie Game Showcase contest and won the second place in September of 2008!

Georg Steger port of Hurrican is based on Pickle's SDL port. 

And it can be downloaded here: AROS ARCHIVES

This archive contains the EXE only. You need the game's data files from hurrican-data.zip or somewhere else (like a Windows install of the game).
C0eck it at:
AROS ARCHIVES - Data files
http://www.poke53280.de
http://sourceforge.net/projects/hurrican

Go check it out and blast away!