Ash: Askeladden Amiga Platformer Teased for the A500
Ash is a new platformer being built for the Commodore Amiga by developer Thomas Mayer Foss, and it borrows its hero from Norwegian folklore. The early footage looks great, and the technical goals behind it are just as interesting as the fairy tale setup.
The project was spotted by Indie Retro News, which picked it up via the AMIGA 4EVER community and Walter Mamo. It's still a work in progress, but there's already plenty to talk about.
A Folk Hero Gets His Shot
Askeladden is a stock character from traditional Norwegian folk tales, usually the youngest of three brothers. Nobody expects much from him, and he tends to succeed anyway. His English name is often given as "the Ash Lad," which explains the game's short title.
Ash sticks closely to that formula. You play the overlooked youngest brother, setting out to win a princess and half a kingdom. That's about as classic a fairy tale goal as it gets, and it suits a side-scrolling platformer well.
Askeladden doesn't travel alone. Along the way he meets three companions, and you can swap between them during play:
- The Stone Eater
- The Light-Footed One
- The One of Thirteen Winters and Seven Summers
Each of them has their own abilities, and you'll need all of them to get through the game's obstacles. Foss hasn't spelled out exactly what each companion does yet. The names alone hint at strength, agility and age-old wisdom, but that's guesswork on my part until the devlogs fill in the gaps.
Five Worlds, One Troll
The journey covers five worlds. It starts in thick forests, climbs into rough mountain terrain and then heads up into the clouds. The finale takes place at the king's court and in the lair of a mountain troll.
That last part feels right. You can't really do a Norwegian folk tale without a troll somewhere at the end.
The forest is the only world shown in gameplay so far. It's bright and colorful, packed with detail, and it moves with real parallax scrolling. If you grew up with Amiga platformers, that layered background effect will probably hit you right in the nostalgia.
Built the Hard Way
This is where Ash gets impressive. Foss is aiming the game squarely at original hardware, and not a beefed-up machine either. The target is a standard Amiga 500 with the original OCS chipset, 512KB of chip RAM and 512KB of slow RAM.
For readers who didn't grow up with these machines, OCS stands for the Original Chip Set, the graphics and sound hardware in the earliest Amigas. It's the most limited of the Amiga chipsets. Many modern homebrew projects lean on later AGA machines or extra memory to get more out of the system. Ash doesn't.
The engine is custom-made and written entirely in Assembler. That's the low-level route, slow and fiddly to work with, but it's how you squeeze every last cycle out of old hardware. According to Foss, the footage runs at a smooth 50 frames per second on a real machine, not an emulator.
Foss also says no AI-generated graphics are being used. Everything you see is hand-made.
He calls Ash a hobby project, but one he's committed to finishing. That's a reassuring thing to hear, since plenty of ambitious retro projects stall after a nice-looking teaser.
What's Still Missing
The soundtrack isn't done yet, so the music is still an open question. There's also no release date or word on how the game will be distributed.
If you want to keep an eye on it, the official project page is called "Ash - a game for Amiga." Foss posts regular devlogs there, along with concept art and full previews of each world as they come together.
The reaction so far has been warm. One commenter on Indie Retro News listed the things they liked: no AI, no off-the-shelf engine, no need for fast RAM, pure Assembly code and OCS support. They called it the original Amiga spirit, and it's hard to argue with that.
Our Take
Ash fits into a busy year for Amiga homebrew. We've recently covered Castlevania AGA reaching version 1.0 and Acidbottle's Defender port entering early alpha. A lot of that activity is about bringing arcade classics to the machine. Ash stands out because it's an original game with its own setting, rooted in a culture that rarely gets the spotlight in platformers.
The choice of a bare A500 matters too. It suggests Foss wants the widest possible audience among people who still own real hardware, rather than just those with expanded or later models. It also makes the 50fps parallax footage more remarkable.
The big things to watch are how the companion swapping feels in practice, and whether the later worlds hold up as well as the forest does. The soundtrack will be another test. A hobby project with this much ambition can take a long time, so patience may be needed. Based on what's been shown so far, though, Ash looks like one to follow.