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Amiga PetMate. Yes, THAT PetMate !

Post date
Sun, 03/22/2026 - 10:44
krabob
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And here it is ! A complete Amiga App that really is usefull (Well... for a few people I know) , coded "100% The Amiga way".. or almost. Open-source, MIT license, so it is a considerable amount of examples of things to do (or not) with BOOPSI. Compilable with a cross compiler , but also there's a makefile for good old GCC2.95 ( Iike the ADE version on aminet)

.. This is the proof that I wasn't annoying everyone in this forum for month without a reason. https://github.com/krabobmkd/amigapetmate/releases/tag/v0.8.2

Hey guys ! Also the first app I do with an installer ... and locale !

the .lha with installer and exe is at the bottom of the github release page (like with all github release pages)

🌸 Amiga PetMate

The birds are back. The flowers are waking up. And somewhere, on a Motorola 68020, a little program is drawing tiny pixel characters in sixteen glorious colors.

What is this?

Amiga PetMate is a native Amiga port of PetMate, the beloved C64 PETSCII art editor — rewritten from scratch in C89, speaking fluent Amiga APIs, running on any 68020 or better Amiga with AmigaOS 3.x.

No JavaScript. No Electron. No 47-megabyte runtime. Just your Amiga, your imagination, and 256 characters from the good old Commodore character ROM.

The original TypeScript soul lives on in two places — go thank them:

This fork is a parallel reimplementation: same spirit, same file format (.petmate JSON), new body made entirely of C and Amiga magic.

Features

  • Draw, colorize, paint with brushes, type text — the full PETSCII experience
  • Load and save .petmate project files (compatible with the original)
  • Export to ASM, BASIC, PRG (standalone C64 executable), GIF, IFF/ILBM
  • Import from images (PNG, GIF, BMP…) — auto-detects borders and character alignment
  • Import from ASM-export PRG files — reads the 6510 machine code to locate the data
  • Localized interface: English, Français, Deutsch, Español, Italiano, Dansk, Polski
  • Multiple screens per project, undo/redo, full-screen mode, custom palettes
  • Runs beautifully on a real Amiga or your favourite emulator

Licence

MIT. Do whatever you want with it. See the LICENSE file. It is short. It is friendly. It smells faintly of spring.

For Developers — How to Build

Cross-compilation on Linux/Mac (recommended for mortals)

The project uses CMake with a cross-compilation toolchain for AmigaOS 3.x:

cd src
cmake -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=your-m68k-toolchain.cmake .
make

src/CMakeLists.txt handles all sources, BOOPSI gadget classes, giflib, cJSON, and the various export/import modules. Point it at your cross-compiler and it does the rest.

Native compilation on the Amiga itself

If you are the proud owner of an Amiga with GCC 2.95 installed — for instance via the ADE package on Aminet — you can compile natively:

cd src
make -f makefile

src/makefile is written for the Amiga GCC 2.95 / ADE environment. Put on some music. Make a coffee. The Amiga compiles at its own pace, and it is a dignified pace.

Building the installer package

Once the binary is built:

cd Installer
make

This assembles everything into ram:PetMate/ — binary, icon, guide, catalogs, readme, licence — ready to be archived and shipped. Double-click Install to run the standard Amiga Installer script and deploy to your chosen drawer.

The Philosophical Corner

This project exists for two reasons beyond the obvious:

  1. To explore BOOPSI private gadget classes — the canvas, the color picker, the character selector, the screen carousel are all hand-rolled BOOPSI classes. If you ever wondered how to build a non-trivial Amiga application using nothing but the system's own object model, here it is, warts and all.

  2. To prove that you can write a real, usable application using only Amiga APIs, no third-party UI toolkit, no cross-platform abstraction layer. Just Intuition, GadTools, DataTypes, Locale, AmigaGuide, and a deep breath.

Spring is coming. The trees are going green. Somewhere a C64 is booting. Everything is going to be alright.

Bugs? Missing features? Opinions?

Yes, please. Open an issue:

👉 https://github.com/krabobmkd/amigapetmate/issues

Polite bug reports, wild feature requests, and haiku about PETSCII are all welcome.