AGA Hyperdrive Engine

AGA Hyperdrive Engine is a new-from-scratch Amiga AGA effects engine aiming for state-of-the-art PAL Amiga 1200/4000 visuals while staying original, reproducible and hardware-conscious.

The current revision is a complete Amiga-first AGA effects engine: real 68k runtime motion, AGA chipset probing, deterministic full-screen art, generated hardware sprites, generated music, raw Paula playback, 24-bit AGA Copper colour motion, bitplane scroll/warp, blitter-maintained scratch space, a persistent frame loop, sprite/orb state, tunnel/plasma/floor layers, validation tooling and a classic hunk build path.

FS-UAE test run

Design goals

• Maximise AGA capability with 24-bit Copper gradients, palette banking, sprite layers and blitter/vector workloads.
• Keep the CPU path 68000-compatible where practical, with a clear route for 68020/A1200 optimisations.
• Make every generated asset reproducible from source.
• Build a reusable effect graph rather than one-off scene code.
• Keep music in-repo: generated ProTracker-compatible module data with bass, lead, glass, kick, snare and hat instruments.
• Play a generated signed 8-bit Paula loop directly from the runtime so the bootable target has sound without external files.
• Validate structure, assets and release manifests on the host.

Engine layers

Layer	Purpose	Current state
Startup	AGA gate, OS-safe entry/exit	isolated gate and clean structure
Copper	Display setup and AGA colour slots	32 live 24-bit slots plus generated gradients
Warp	Hardware bitplane scroll/shear	runtime BPLCON1 modulation
Bitmap	Four-plane 320×256 screen storage	deterministic full-screen planar art
Sprites	Eight hardware orbiters	generated sprite images plus runtime control words
Blitter	Hardware-maintained scratch plane	real blitter clear workload for vector expansion
Art/GFX	Logo, plasma band, tunnel ribs, status panel and floor	generated assets/screen.raw and preview PNG
Plasma	256-colour 24-bit AGA ramp	generated binary table
Tunnel	Reciprocal camera/projection table	generated binary table
Music	Four-channel MOD data plus runtime Paula loop	generated assets/hyperdrive.mod and assets/audio_loop.raw
Validation	Asset/source/manifest sanity	make validate, reproducibility, manifest

Build

make validate
make verify-repro
make
make floppy-turbo

The full executable build requires vasmm68k_mot on PATH or at tools/bin/vasmm68k_mot.

Output:

build/aga_hyperdrive_engine
build/floppy_turbo/
build/aga_hyperdrive_turbo.adf   # optional, only when xdftool exists

Generate assets

make assets
python3 tools/generate_assets.py
python3 tools/gen_tables.py plasma_palette
python3 tools/gen_tables.py copper_gradient
python3 tools/gen_tables.py tunnel

Generated assets:

• assets/logo.raw
• assets/logo_preview.png
• assets/screen.raw
• assets/screen_preview.png
• assets/audio_loop.raw
• assets/sprite_orbs.bin
• assets/sprite_path.bin
• assets/hyperdrive.mod
• assets/plasma_palette.bin
• assets/copper_gradient.bin
• assets/tunnel.bin

Run target

Use FS-UAE/WinUAE/Amiberry with an A1200 or A4000 AGA PAL configuration. The executable reads the chipset ID before takeover, displays generated full-screen planar art through real Copper bitplane pointers, runs live AGA colour-slot updates, modulates BPLCON1, moves eight hardware sprite orbiters, performs a recurring blitter clear workload, advances tunnel/scene/music state every frame, starts Paula channel 0 playback from assets/audio_loop.raw, and stays running until the left mouse button is pressed.

Validation

make validate
python3 tools/verify_repro.py
python3 tools/make_manifest.py
shasum -a 256 -c MANIFEST.sha256

Implemented effects

• Hyperdrive plasma lattice: per-line AGA colour writes plus sub-frame palette phase modulation.
• Tunnel layer: reciprocal-table camera/depth modulation plus static wire ribs in the generated screen layer.
• Energy orbs: generated shaded hardware sprite images plus live sprite control-word orbit paths.
• Morphing logo material: Copper glint, per-row scroll and dynamic colour-bank swaps.
• Music-reactive scene graph: row/tick-style event pulses drive plasma intensity, tunnel speed and sprite bursts.
• Bitplane warp: runtime BPLCON1 scroll/shear motion over the planar display.
• Blitter vector surface: hardware clear path for dynamic line/fill expansion.
• Full-screen generated art: logo, aurora/plasma band, tunnel ribs, orb art, status panel and floor bars.

License

GPL-3.0-or-later. See LICENSE.