AMOS & STOS Basic - Retrospective and Rebirth 

Gotta love the enthusiastic Frenchman :-)

I wrote some of the demo games that shipped with AMOS Pro and Easy AMOS, along with parts of Fun School 4, which was written entirely in AMOS. I never met Francois or any of the team at Mandarin / Europress, but would receive regular packages of disks in the post with pre-release versions, which I found incredibly exciting. But the real killer was seeing something you'd made on sale in the shops. That was the real power of AMOS. It let people like me - who had ideas, but weren't necessary great programmers - create things both for fun, and commercially. Might need to go back and update some of my old games for AMOS 2!

This was a seriously awesome video Dan. More please!

I can probably thank AMOS and Francois for my career. It's what really set me on a course to become a professional programmer.

Great to be involved with this project again, I wrote articles for Totally Amos disk magazine back in the day and I was one of the original bug testers for AMOS, when I saw that Francois was making AMOS2 I knew I had to get involved again and have been bug testing this new version. It's been fun writing in AMOS once again.

Seems to be a really nice guy. He's active on the Facebook AMOS group and is always friendly and kind hearted. Also appears to have a gravity defying cat :-) (17.00) I hope he has some success with AMOS2. There's definitely a place for it in the software market.

Extraordinary ! Thank you Dan for the fantastic interview with the Amos creator ! Amazing guy !

I had AMOS, AMOS Pro and AMOS Pro Compiler, they contributed to make me the programmer I am now. Thank you Francois, it's a pleasure to see your face after over 20 years!

holy crap, AMOS is what got me into programming and is the reason for my whole career. Really nice to see Francois, what a dude.

happy memories of coding Amos BASIC and Bliz's Basic back in the day. Amos2 sounds good.

Ahh fond memories of staying up late at night coding in AMOS. One of the good things was it came with quite a few examples to tweak and learn (steal!) from. I suspect my time in AMOS helped influence me to become a programmer as my career, up until then I had picked Biology as my degree subject.

That guy taught me programming, through the excellent AMOS manual.

Absolutely loved Amos back in the early 90's!! Still use it these days sometimes on my A2000 for basic RS232 debugging etc.

Thanks for making this video. I had great times working with Francois with STOS, AMOS, Klik & Play, Click & Create (later renamed Multimedia Fusion). I can still remember finding the section of STOS that was the Basic bit. Up to that point I was wondering why users would want a version of DOS on their PC and then this Basic loaded up and sprites zipped across the screen in just a few commands. I reported back to the development manager and said the only part that had potential was the Basic. And from that we started the whole STOS and AMOS side to the business. Back then Francois was coding versions and sending the floppy disks in the post from France to Cheshire. I would load them up, test them and report my findings. Modems were not really an option at the start of it all. Eventually we began download, 1,200 baud rate, then 1,400 and then some crazy fast speed that I can't remember now. I went on to work on Rally Championship after it all and then started a dev team with Lee Bamber where we made Dark BASIC, The 3D Gamemaker, FPS Creator and more recently AppGameKit and our most recent title GameGuru MAX. I'm looking forward to meeting up with Francois in the future, it's been far too long since we had a pint!

I used AMOS briefly in the 90's, but mainly used BASIC on my speccy or MS DOS as I didn't have an Amiga of my own at that point. Watching this, especially François' enthusiasm, made me seek out an original copy. I was lucky enough to get one with a manual and guide book which is nice, really looking forward to working on my highly neglected programming skills!

Always great to listen to master François! Cat jumps on 16:55... had to say it.

Nice to actually SEE the man at last. I was always a bit dubious when mags owned by Europress would give good reviews to AMOS, which was also published by Europress.

Great interview!!! I wrote a game for the Amiga, made it to all the mainstream Amiga magazines… and was written in AMOS :-)

STOS was my first foray into programming as a young teenager - I guess it is technically what set me on the path to a good career! I got a really good book on how to program all types of games using STOS and I managed to use this to also write games in Quick Basic when I moved onto a PC later - even got as far as a wire-frame 3D engine all based on this STOS programming guide!

SCORCHED EARTH!!! Oh my that game was WONDERFUL

I've never had an Amiga. If I ever knew about AMOS at the time, that would've been different. It looks amazing!

Great to finally see the face behind AMOS. Still got that good old AMOS Pro manual here - one of the few books I'm never gonna give away. :-) Just wish I still had kept all those source code files from back then. Thank you for that video, Dan! :)

Wow, great video. I used AMOS for a university project (early 90's), where we had to demonstrate RS-232 communication, so my buddy and I wrote a great game on two A-500's so that you could play 'multiplayer'. Aah, the memories.

I was 15 years of age when I created 2 AMOS games and had them published, It was such a buzz to see my games listed in the computer magazines PD listings, I sold around 300 copies and received £1 per sale...I still have my boxed AMOS and my own games on disk. This definitely led me to my successful professional programming career, so big thanks Francois...cant wait for AMOS 2

I was in love with STOS at the time! I wrote several games with it including an RPG, a poker game featuring Star Trek TNG, a puzzle game similar to Chips Challenge, a platform game, and even a baseball statistics program. Shoot, I still have the STOS boxes right there on shelf! Thanks for the memories I might have to fire it up again soon!

You just took me back years. My Best Friends Cousin used to program in AMOS he was really good and older than us. We used to sit with him having input into the game. What cracked me up though was we used to reference Amos from Emmerdale Farm too when we used AMOS. Nay Nay Mr Wilkes, then it went to we actually made a game in AMOS called AMOS's Mole because Amos in Emmerdale had a mad one on his face. Lol We were mad back then I'm 43 now and it still cracks me up now.

AMOS got me started with programming and I loved every minute of it :) even got a few things included on a cover disk.

AMOS definitely is responsible for making me interested in coding. Great times!

François is a great guy. I used STOS and AMOS back in the day. I also used ARexx on the Amiga and ended up working at IBM coding in OS/2's version of Rexx.

Fantastic , Loved using AMOS on the Amiga

Damn! LOVED STOS, back at the day! Though to really make it fly, one had to use 3rd party extensions. Though I used them, I never was so advanced at programming. But I still made a couple of simple games and (lame) demos ;) AMOS was very much more able, than STOS was. But I never had an Amiga back then... I'll have to check AMOS 2 out sometime. If I have the time... A lot going on at the life, at the moment! ;D Absolutely amazing to see Francois still going at it! That man seems to be full of life and so enthusiastic still! I tip my hat of to you, Sir! Amazing!

I made at least five pieces of software, 3 games and 2 utilities, on AMOS with the Compiler, and a few of them have survived to this day. AMOS really was a great development tool, and with AMOS 2 coming out like this, I'm kicking myself that I didn't keep the source code and assets of my software!

Brings back happy memories, i used to program demos using Stos and released a few into the public domain, even had a screen on the Stos megademo. Miss those days of programming

Using the serial ports and a cobbled together cable, me and a friend wrote a multi user dungeon in Amos Pro. Awesome language! The editor was fantastic. Expanding and collapsing procedures, took visual studio ages to introduce that.

The AMOS-professional edition was excellent! I wrote three quite good looking games for it as a teenager. The GUI and the integrated libraries for graphics, blitter, sprites, memory and IO were nice and easy to use, there were hideable procedures, no damn line numbers and crap, and with the compiler it ran an acceptable speed to make a usable game.

Q: What do we want? A: AMOS for the Raspberry Pi and clones! Q: When do we want it? A: Now!

I love how enthusiastic Francois is

I loved AMOS and I had the AMOS Pro (I recognised the white and gold box). I wrote some stuff in the early 90's which was used by the video producers of the local EFL team. It was meant to be a full sports video titling system for small clubs, but I realised that it was a limited market and most of them had no money to spend on this type of software. The video crew of the football club only ever used the clock function for the manager so he could make match notes, but I was very proud of the system as it was instant so could be used for live video. As I was watching the start of this video, I thought "if only there was something like AMOS now", so I was jumping up and down in my seat when I saw that it was being released for modern systems! :) Bonne courage Francois!!

I really liked this episode - and I can totally relate. I grew up with a Vic 20 and C64 - and programming those machines was what I did when i couldn't afford to buy games. When I eventually worked in a shop between study, I managed to scrape enough cash together to buy a second-hand Amiga 500. I was blown away by what I'd seen on the Amiga but wanted to program it. The journey in programming my Amiga was difficult. Back in those days the Internet was unheard of and I ended up buying one of the ROM Kernel Ref manuals - the only Amiga book I could find in Waterstones. It was full of something called C and I eventually found a C compiler called North C on a 1 UKP PD disk.. But that wouldn't run half of the code in the RKM manual... which was also for WB2.0 when I had WB1.3. And then you needed these "include" files.. Eventually I did round to programming in C but this was all OS/Intuition programming. What about these fast moving Bob, Copper bars etc? Oh no.. you had to learn 68000 assembler for that.. and you needed an assembler.. OMG. It wasn't until I got my copy of Devpac 2 on an Amiga format mag that I was finally able to start tinkering. Eventually I discovered the Amiga Hardware Reference Manual and I struggled and struggled.. I think the most exciting thing I achieved was getting 2 Polo mint shaped Bobs to pass over each other without "blocking" the other one out - masking in other words. The lack of available support, lack of peer interest (my mates only wanted to play games) and the lack of Internet killed Amiga programming for me. When I did finally get hold of AMOS I was too busy studying or working nights and weekends. Even though I bought all of the AMOS series with high hopes and dreams of doing something useful.. they never got used. :-( Sadly my programming didn't continue until I started doing it full-time as a job. I wish I could go back to that time, knowing what I know now.. and take the Internet with me.. there was so much fun to be had.. if you had the time and the tools!

A wonderful retrospective - not having an Amiga during the era, I can only remember the adverts for AMOS, and unsurprisingly, it was the box art for AMOS 3D which stood out the most. Great to see it in action, and see there's room for more immediate mode stuff out there (I use Unity heavily, but as much as I love it, there is a weight to it when prototyping) - especially at a lower scale.

Love AMOS. It is what I use my A500 most for these days actually.

Thanks so much, Dan. I'm now a 20 year IT veteran, fueled as a 13 year old on Commodore 64 BASIC, and then AMOS. The funny thing is ... I never really knew how to use AMOS. I was just a little too young with no internet searching available while living in a caravan with a generator in country Victoria (Australia). I've gone on to develop games and applications across varied programming languages, and now live in Malaysia working as the Enterprise Architect in a big local company. You've brought the memories back for me, and I really enjoyed your professional presentation (and love your podcast).

Very cool. I used to use STOS, rather than AMOS, but had lots of fun with it. Didn't do much coding but did play wit the sprites a lot.

Great video thanks Dan. Also amazed you find time between podcasts! Thank you.

I did quite a bit of AMOS programming a long time ago. He is right about the lost simplicity of programming. Kids get some of that back with Python now, but indeed AMOS is much simpler and it is easier to achieve visually cool results. I wish him a lot of success!

I remember the competition gamesmaster ran on channel 4 for people to design their own game using AMOS, completely over my head at the time! :)

I think this is your best video! Brilliant editing and great to see "old stuff" joining up with new stuff! Also, his enthusiasm is infectious.

That guy definitely changed my life. Started on STOS and then AMOS. Been a professional dev now for 25 years

Great video, I am going to try AMOS on my A1200. The ARM based Acorn machines that were contemporary to the Amiga and Atari ST gave a BBC Basic prompt after pressing Control-F12, and BBC Basic is still an integral part of the RISCOS operating system running on a Raspberry Pi.

Love the work, Dan. Keep it up buddy!

Really interesting video. Always amazed by home many people are passionate about our hobby. Can't wait to see the future developments of AMOS2 and how we can use it to inspire the next generation of programmers

Great video Dan! I have a lot of good memories of hours spent fiddling with AMOS Pro. I love how animated Francois is, he really gets you excited! Also I can't believe you (correctly) referenced Emmerdale 😂

I heard Chuck Rock was written in AMOS as well.

I remember using GFA Basic on the Atari ST. It was a sort of mix between Pascal and Basic, but it was more popular on the Atari ST than STOS was.

Wow Amos. A true blast from the past. I worked in a computer shop back in the day and we used to sell Amos and was a steady seller. So good to see it again..

I swear that pic at the start of you as a kid in front of an Amiga 500 looks exactly like me in front of my Amiga 500 at pretty much the same age.

a friend and i have been reciting those valhalla samples for the last 25 years

I'm one of the people who wrote to him :) So loved using AMOS Pro...! Moving to PC I was forced to be left with this big void in my life.

Thank you for this! I owned Amos on the Amiga back in the day. Now I plan on getting Amos 2!

0:56 That pages from Input!!

Fantastic video Dan :) Loved it, I just dug my copy of AMOS 1.3 + Compiler out of the loft, glad I have a boxed copy with the manual, time to give it a crack I guess! (I was always more in Blitz BASIC and C back in the 90s)

I had AMOS Pro with that lovely heavy block of a printed user manual :-) Also bought the compiler for it. I never really explored it to its full potential, just messed about with, but I still have fond memories of it. In fact switching to PC based programming languages was disappointing after AMOS, because it provided such a nice environment to work in by comparison. I remember seeing Visual Basic for the first time and being happy that I had an immediate command mode back like I did in AMOS.

What a lovely guy. I tried programming but couldn’t get into it. If only we had you tube videos back then.

Great vid! Thanks for reminding me of Scorched earth, me and my mate battered that back in day, great times. I'll be playing it in 5 mins ;)

I wish I had spent more time learning AMOS and less time playing Lemmings and SimCity. Ok maybe not, those were great games.

I hope this has the success it deserves. I used AMOS and STOS back in the day, it was the BEST!

Excellent video Dan, thanks

Great video mate, very informative

I used gfa basic on the st and much preferred it to stos. I actually made money from an art package i wrote called artist freehand. There was a version of gfa basic for the pc but it wasn't the same and i switched to visual basic 6 which is what i still use. Still great to see this trip down memory lane :) hope he does well with it.

Absolutely wonderful video and brilliant news that Francois is making a new version of AMOS.

Nice video. Good to to see that François is just as effervescent as French Champagne.

And Francois then went on to make Klik'n'Play which then became The Games Factory and finally Clickteam fusion so if the graphics tool for Amos/Stos seems familiar, that's why.

Francois si tu me lit j'ai passé des centaine d'heure sur amos et amos 3d ! j'aitais a 2 doigt de sortir un jeux professionnel qui ressemblé a "another world" mais en 94 ct deja trop tard le pc prenais de l'empleur et ct la fin du l'amiga... tu aurais du sortir l'amos 4 ans avant .merci pour ce bonheur j'etais programeur sur C64 avant

wow, beautiful video. Thank you.!!!

Great video as always Dan. I had the exact same issue. Cut my teeth on BBC Basic on the Acorn Electron. By the end of my Spectrum +3 ownership, I was using Spectrum Basic to create my own demo / welcome disk including a drawing program I'd written myself. (Sure it was probably crap but it worked....unless you draw a circle that went outside the screen border which would crash it, and you couldn't save your drawings anyway, but moving on......), and I never got into Programming on the Amiga because...well....I never really found it flowed on from what I already knew. Didn't touch programming anymore until I studied GCSE and A Level computer science, which covered QBasic, Pascal, and Cobal. I failed the A level because....Girls and Laser Quest :D Zero regrets!

I had all the versions! I loved Amos! It made the programming fun :) Instant gratification.

Great video and great news!

Loved Amos. Never finished making my shoot-em-up. Might do that on today’s game engines. Or maybe the new Amos.

2:57 OMG I had that exact same colour Powerplay Cruiser joystick, and I had totally forgotten about it until I saw it here just now.

Watch out for the UFO at 16:54.

I remember using Amos on the amiga 500 plus back in the day. I was always confused back then how to make good looking playable games with sprites and all lol. I think I didn't do much more than I did on the zx spectrum and get it running primitive ascii character games instead lol.

Thnx for this great video...

Loved AMOS. Wish i had the internet back then to teach me more about programming.

Totally had that Ecto-3 on your monitor when I was a kid. I just remember be horribly disappointed that it didn't come with the Egon shown on the box.

Francois could not be more French if he tried. Brilliant !!

The passion and joy from the dev is fantastic

WOW ! So interesting. Gotta give this a try finally. I put it off too long, and I think that the new compiler makes this new ver worth the time investment.

My brother worked at Europress in the late 80's as a YTS, but he was more interested in raiding the coffee machine when it was on free-vend than doing any 'real work', so he didn't last long. :D

Fantastic stuff

Wow. I never knew BASIC's had compilers available to make them run faster. I wish I had subscribed to magazines back in the day - this would have been great for some of the Atari 8bit and later ST Programs I wrote. Thank you for this video!

I remember that horrid brown screen used to appear at the start of every program written in AMOS, unless you knew how to disable it (and it wasn't obvious!)

Francois is awesome!

I remember AMOS being advertised and covered loads at the time but never tried it, I used to mess about with the Red Sector demo maker but that was about it. AMOS seems very flexible though!

Skid Marks (AGA) was a commercial game written in Blitz Basic.

Thank you! 🌟

AMOS was one of the few software packages which I actually bought for my Amiga back in the day. And I really liked it.

I didn’t go into IT (doh) but used Amos and Amos pro quite a bit back then. Never released anything and always stalled into learning it instead of just trying stuff. :) Currently trying to do it again but in opposite order, learn, code something, learn

Amos meant also something in France. There was a beer brewery in the east of France with that name. They went bancrupt in the '80s. Young people may not know them anymore but at the time of STOS and AMOS it was still somewhat in the minds of people (at least in the Lorraine region).

great story and outstanding video! I wish I had this for the TRS-80 Model 1. I wound up coding in BASIC with z-80 assembly subroutines for speed. But the graphics couldn't compare! All good wishes.