AMOS Professional can be run at the same time as totally separate programs and utilities such as DPaint III. This allows the creation and testing of original AMOS Professional programs while drawing on the resources of your favourite audio, graphical and utility items.
Provided that your system has at least one megabyte, multi-tasking is activated by pressing [Amiga]+[A] to flick between AMOS Professional and the CLI or Workbench environments.
To make effective multi-tasking programs, most of the processing time should not be grabbed, leaving only a limited amount of processing power for other tasks, and the following command is provided to solve this problem.
MULTI WAIT
instruction: force a multi-task wait vbl
Multi Wait
The MULTI WAIT instruction should be used in the main loop of an AMOS Professional program. It forces a multi-task WAIT VBL for situations such as waiting for a menu item to be selected.
This command should not be used to achieve accurate screen synchronisation, as it has been specifically provided for multi-tasking and may skip several vertical blank periods, depending on the number of tasks being run simultaneously.
The following simple commands are provided to allow complete control over multi-tasking facilities.
AMOS TO BACK
instruction: hide AMOS Professional and reveal the Workbench
Amos To Back
This instruction allows other programs to be accessed, by bringing forward the Workbench display and hiding AMOS Professional from view.
AMOS TO FRONT
instruction: hide the Workbench and reveal AMOS Professional
Amos To Front
Similarly, this instruction forces AMOS Professional back onto the display, leaving the Workbench environment hidden.
AMOS LOCK
instruction: disable [Amiga]+[A] toggle
Amos Lock
The AMOS LOCK command disables the facility to toggle between AMOS Professional and the Workbench by pressing [Amiga]+[A]. This can be used to prevent other users from discovering how your program was written!