Blitz BASIC

Blitz BASIC is a programming language (BASIC dialect) for the Amiga computer, originally made by Acid Software from New Zealand.

The popular video game Worms was originally written in this language.

Blitz BASIC competed on the Amiga platform with Europress Software's AMOS. Both BASICs differed from other dialects on different platforms, in that they allowed the easy creation of fairly demanding multimedia software.

More recently, a Blitz BASIC compiler has been developed for the PC, coming in two forms - BlitzPlus and Blitz3D. BlitzPlus is a fast and easy 2D language (utilising DirectX 1 for graphics and FMOD for sound). Blitz3D is a user-friendly 3D language (utilising DirectX 7 for graphics and sound), including most of the BlitzPlus commands.

The next update to the Blitz line of products, BlitzMAX, was released by Blitz Research in December 2004. It is a cross-platform compiler which supports Microsoft Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Whereas earlier Blitz Research products used DirectX as the graphics API, BlitzMAX uses OpenGL instead, owing to the lack of cross-platform support for DirectX. The previous versions of Blitz were exclusively procedural. BlitzMAX adds simple object-orientated concepts such as inheritance and polymorphism. BlitzMAX is also better suited to large projects than previous Blitz languages because projects can be divided up into separate modules which can then be compiled and linked together. Blitz Research also provided complete source code for the modules which come with BlitzMAX "out of the box", for instance, file input output, audio, 2d gfx, easy opengl use, and compression.

Blitz Basic example code

External links

• FMOD
• Blitz Research
• Blitzcoder