The AMOS Professional package comes complete with an invaluable range of accessory programs, allowing the serious programmer to generate all of the requirements needed to produce commercial quality products. We have provided as much material as is possible on disc, but there is a finite limit to the disc space available. To be blunt, we do not have the magnetic resources to cover every possibility for creative AMOS Professional programming. The system has been designed to be infinitely accommodating, and it is our intention to expand and improve the core system to meet all of your requirements.
After using AMOS Professional, you may well identify an area which has scope for a new accessory. Perhaps you have a special interest in a music editor, or sound effects, or speech synthesis, graphic tweening, DTP, in fact any aspects of enhancing the AMOS system. We are always very interested in making contact with creative, innovative talent, that can take the AMOS Professional system to its next phase of evolution. In other words, if you feel that you can create an important new AMOS Professional accessory, you should submit it to us on disc, along with all relevant documentation.
But...
Before you can create such a vital accessory, you must understand the internal structure of the
various AMOS Professional memory banks. This will allow you to generate such banks directly
from your AMOS Professional programs.
Much of the information in this Appendix is very technical, and it is likely to prove heavy going for anyone who is not an experienced programmer. In order to exploit it successfully, you are going to have to explore the Amiga's memory very carefully. There will only be one major warning in this Appendix: if you make a mistake in the realms of memory bank manipulation, you will crash your computer!
For those genuine professional programmers who are about to persevere with innovation and exploitation of the AMOS Professional system, you should be able to generate some amazing accessories by analysing this information. Go ahead. Make our day!
General Information
Each AMOS Professional program can have its own unique list of associated memory banks.
All banks are introduced by a standard memory header.
In the original AMOS package, the memory banks were represented using an internal array of just fifteen addresses. These were used to hold the current memory location of each bank assigned to a standard AMOS program. The evolved AMOS Professional package uses a much more flexible system, allowing as many memory banks as you need.
Memory banks are now stored using a "linked list", which works like a chain, with each header containing a "pointer" to the next header in the Amiga's memory. AMOS Professional is able to search through this list of headers to find the address of any bank in memory. It starts from the top, and works downwards until it finds the required bank number. At the end of the chain, the address is terminated with a value of zero.