BlitzMax on Commodore OS Vision v2

BlitzMax is a strongly-typed, garbage-collected, open-source programming language with built-in support for advanced 2D graphics, sound, unicode and is ideally suited to making all kinds of apps and games. BlitzMax was discontinued several years ago by Blitz Research, but it was open sourced and is now freely available.

BlitzMax primarily targets the main three desktop platforms - Windows, Linux and macOS - but also supports building native binaries for Android, iOS, Raspberry Pi and NX (Switch homebrew).

Back in the day, the Commodore Amiga was the initial platform for the BlitzBasic programming language. BlitzMax is a newer version and has continued its development since those early days of BlitzBasic on the Commodore Amiga. 

Creating a Command Line or Terminal app is as simple as:

 Print "Hello, World"

And creating a Graphics app is almost as simple with the following code:

SuperStrict

Graphics 640,480

Repeat
    DrawText "Hello, Commodore OS Vision World!", 200,150
    DrawText "Click Mouse to exit" , 200 , 200
    Flip
Until WaitMouse()

BlitzMax Setup in Commodore OS Vision

Setting up BlitzMax on Commodore OS Vision 2 was fairly straight-forward. Browse to https://blitzmax.org/downloads/. Then scroll down and find the Linux x64 listing and click on the link to download the compressed file. 

Once the file is downloaded, open the compressed file in the Downloads folder with the Archive Manager. Extract the file to the default BlitzMax folder. Note it is important to ensure the extracted folder name matches as when running the executable is dependent upon the folder name (including case sensitivity).


After the files are extracted, browse to the newly created BlitzMax folder, and double click on the MaxIDE file. You'll be prompted to build the documentation, so click Yes/Ok to do so.

You can learn the language and find a language reference on the Blitzmax.org website. There is also a manual installed in the doc folder of the extracted BlitzMax folder. Those who used BlitzBasic on the Commodore Amiga will find many commands familiar and find many new, modern commands as well.

This is a great tool for revisiting nostalgia feelings from the days of using the Commodore Amiga as well as using an updated BlitzBasic programming language to create modern applications on a modern Operating System. 

Now, by default, Commodore OS Vision does not contain the necessary development libraries to compile the sample apps included with BlitzMax. So if you try to compile some of the apps, such as Tempest or Breakout, then you'll get Build errors.


To install the extra development tools, open the CLI Terminal (located under Applications > System Tools). Once open, copy these commands into the terminal and run them to install the base development tools:

sudo apt install g++ libglu1-mesa-dev libasound2-dev libfreetype6-dev libxpm-dev libxft-dev libxxf86vm-dev libpulse-dev libopenal-dev libwebkit2gtk-4.0-dev libgtk-3-dev

Once these are installed, then run the following to get the SDL development tools:

sudo apt install libx11-dev libxext-dev libxrandr-dev libxcursor-dev libxi-dev libxinerama-dev libxss-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libdbus-1-dev libudev-dev libaudio-dev

After these are installed, you should be able to Build the Tempest and Breakout sample programs and run them. 


 

Happy computing!


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