Known Bad Software Practices (Blacklist)

Amiga Technologies seeded a public "black list" of software relying on hacks that "mostly work by accident or compatibility patches." The stated reason: such software may become unsupportable on future Amiga models. The list on the CD (DevInfo/BlackList/BadSoftware) is explicitly marked "[To be filled in]" — it is a starter sample, not exhaustive. Software named may still run fine today; the warning is about future compatibility.

General category warning

Note that "hardware banging" games will most likely no longer work at all on future Amiga models.

Named examples (CD seed list)

Games

  • Wayne Gretzky Hockey — causes reboots and passes values in reserved memory areas across the reboot.

Applications

  • Word Perfect 4.1 — expects results of certain dos.library functions in CPU register D1, instead of D0. (The documented AmigaOS calling convention returns library function results in D0; depending on D1 is exactly the kind of register-level assumption that breaks across CPU/OS changes.)

Why this matters

Both examples illustrate the cardinal AmigaOS sin from the philosophy docs: depending on undocumented, empirical, or implementation-defined behaviour. Passing data through reserved memory across reboots assumes memory contents survive reset; reading a non-documented register for a return value assumes a specific ABI detail. Neither survives OS restructuring.

See Also

Sources: Heinz Wrobel, Amiga Technologies, "BadSoftware" blacklist (1996). Raw: raw/conventions/bad-software-blacklist.md Updated: 2026-08-04