The response to 'Amiga Rescue', the first Amiga game I made available to download, encouraged me to set myself a new challenge: publish one AMOS project every month.

Not every release will be as large as 'Amiga Rescue'. Some will be smaller games, demos or experiments while I continue working on bigger projects in the background.

'X-Sector' is my October release, and the idea came from something almost every Amiga owner will remember.

Did you spend part of your childhood watching 'X-Copy''s little squares fill up while disks copied?

Disk copying wasn't exactly exciting, but there was something strangely satisfying about watching the sector grid gradually fill. The interface, the drive selectors, the flashes of colour and those familiar sounds all became part of the Amiga experience. I started wondering whether I could turn that memory into a game.

'X-Sector' turns the sector map into an endlessly replayable puzzle. The aim is to read every safe sector on a damaged disk without attempting to read a corrupt one. Each revealed sector provides a clue showing how many bad sectors are nearby. You can then use those clues to identify the dangerous sectors and mark them before continuing the recovery.

The rules are intentionally familiar and easy to understand, but presenting them as a disk-recovery operation makes them feel completely at home on the Amiga.

There are four disks to choose from, represented by DF0 to DF3, with an increasing number of bad sectors. The corruption is generated afresh each time, so every disk presents a new puzzle rather than a fixed level to memorise.

The first sector you read, along with the sectors immediately surrounding it, is always safe. This means every game gives you enough information to begin solving the puzzle rather than ending immediately through bad luck.

If you recover every readable sector, the remaining corruption is automatically marked and the disk is saved. Try to read a bad sector and the recovery fails, revealing the corruption across the disk.

The visual starting point was obviously 'X-Copy', but I also looked at D-Copy and other Amiga disk utilities. I wanted 'X-Sector' to feel instantly familiar to anyone who used those programs, without simply recreating one particular utility screen.

The numbered sector map, source and destination drive displays, chunky buttons and dense information panel all come from that world. The interface is deliberately presented like a serious disk-recovery tool.

'X-Sector' was created in AMOS Professional as a real Commodore Amiga game. The title and main interface were drawn as IFF images in Deluxe Paint. Each sector can display one of several small images: a clue from one to eight, a clean read symbol, a corruption mark or a red failure cross.

Rather than maintaining 90 active Bobs or Sprites for the complete grid, the game clears the inside of an individual sector and uses Paste Bob whenever its appearance needs to change. This keeps the grid itself in the background artwork and makes the game less demanding.

The puzzle data is stored separately from what appears on screen. AMOS generates the corrupt sectors after the player makes their first read, calculates the clues for every position and then uses a queue to spread through connected areas of clean sectors.

Testing on a slower Amiga 500 highlighted a few things that weren't obvious while developing on faster hardware. Originally, every timer update refreshed all the text in the information panel. That was unnecessary and caused visible flickering on the A500. The final version saves a small clean copy of the timer area and restores only that section once per second.

Restarting a puzzle also originally reloaded the complete game IFF from disk. The finished game now keeps the existing interface in memory, clears the sector interiors and resets the puzzle data instead. The main game image is only loaded when entering from the title screen. These are small changes, but they make the game feel much smoother on the hardware it was designed for.

Sound was an important part of recreating the disk-utility atmosphere. 'X-Sector' uses three sampled effects. When a player clicks a square in the grid, a familiar disk read sound is played simulating the sector being successfully read. When the level is completed and the disk is recovered, the game rewards players with the copy complete sound effect borrowed from 'X-Copy'. If the player hits a bad sector and fails the level, an error sound is heard.

'Amiga Rescue' was quite a large project, with 50 designed levels and several different circuit components. 'X-Sector' is intentionally smaller and more focused, but its generated puzzles also make it endlessly replayable.

That makes it a good example of what I want these monthly AMOS releases to be. Some projects will be full games, while others will explore a single idea, experiment with a style or turn a familiar piece of Amiga history into something playable.

'X-Sector' is my October release and the second project in that series.

Like 'Amiga Rescue', it was made on the Amiga, for the Amiga. It is designed to run on original hardware, is compatible with all Amigas with at least 1 MB of RAM, and can also be played using an emulator.

For the best experience, though, play it on a real Amiga - and enjoy watching those little squares fill up all over again.