| STOS BASIC | |
|---|---|
 Loading screen | |
| Developer | François Lionet,Constantin Sotiropoulos |
| First appeared | 1988; 38 years ago (1988) |
| Influenced by | |
| BASIC | |
| Influenced | |
| AMOS | |
STOS BASIC is a dialect of theBASIC programming language for theAtari ST personal computer. It was designed for creating games, but the set of high-level graphics and sound commands it offers is suitable for developing multimedia software without knowledge of the internals of the Atari ST.
STOS BASIC was developed by Jawx–François Lionet,[1] andConstantin Sotiropoulos–and published byMandarin Software (now known asEuropress Software).
Although the first version ofSTOS to be released in theUK (version 2.3) was released in late 1988 byMandarin Software, a version had been released earlier inFrance.
Version 2.3 was bundled with three complete games (Orbit,Zoltar andBullet Train), and many accessories and utilities (such assprite and music editors). Initially implemented as aBASIC interpreter, acompiler was soon released that enabled the user to compile theSTOS Basic program into an executable file that ran a lot faster because it wascompiled rather thaninterpreted. In order to be compatible with the compiler, STOS needed to be upgraded to version 2.4 (which came with the compiler). STOS 2.4 also fixed a few bugs and had fasterfloating point mathematics code, but the floating point numbers had a smaller range.
STOS 2.5 was released to make STOS run on Atari STEs withTOS 1.06 (1.6), and then STOS 2.6 was needed to make STOS run on Atari STEs with TOS 1.62. STOS 2.7 was a compiler-only upgrade that made programs with the STOStracker extension (used to playMOD music) compile.
There was a 3rd-party hack called STOS 2.07 designed to makeSTOS run on even more TOS versions, and behave on theAtari Falcon.
Around 2001François Lionet released via theClickteam website thesource code of STOS BASIC.[2]
On the 4th of April, 2019François Lionet announced the release of AMOS2 on his websiteAmos2.techArchived 2020-09-23 at theWayback Machine. AMOS2 replaces STOS and AMOS together, usingJavaScript as its code interpreter, making the new development system independent and generally deployed in web browsers.
AMOS2 is now known as AOZ Studio.[3]
It was possible to extend the functionality ofSTOS by adding extensions which added more commands to the language and increased the functionality. The first such extension to be released wasSTOS Maestro which added the ability to play sampled sounds.STOS Maestro plus wasSTOS Maestro bundled with a sound-samplercartridge. Other extensions includedTOME,STOS 3D,STE extension,Misty,The Missing Link,Control extension,Extra andNinja Tracker. These extensions keptSTOS alive for many years after its release.
While giving programmers the ability to rapidly create a game without knowing the internals,STOS was criticised for being slow (especially when intensively using the non-high-level commands), and for not allowing the user to program in a structured manner.
In 1990,AMOS BASIC was released for theAmiga. It was originally meant to shortly follow the release ofSTOS on theAtari ST.AMOS was released about two years after theUK release ofSTOS. But this turned out to be a blessing in disguise for theAmiga community thanks to the extra development time. Not only didAMOS take advantage of the extraAmiga hardware and have more commands thanSTOS, but the style ofBASIC was completely different - it had no line-numbers, and there were manystructured programming constructs (at one time, theSTOS Club Newsletter published a program that allowed the reader to programSTOS using that style). While it was often possible to directly convertSTOS BASIC programs that did not heavily rely on extensions toAMOS BASIC, the reverse was not usually true.
A version forIBM PC compatibles calledPCOS was once mentioned, but that never materialised. Instead, the publishersMandarin Software renamed themselvesEuropress Software. One of the developers in Jawx,Francois Lionet, was later to formClickteam withYves Lamoureux and went on to release theKlik (click) series of games-creation tools (which were dissimilar toSTOS as they use a primarily mouse-driven interface without the need for traditional code).Klik & Play,The Games Factory,Multimedia Fusion andMultimedia Fusion 2 have been released in this series.