Doomed to the PC? - Amiga Pro, July 1994
 

I kept this article for posterity as I believe it influenced my decision to get a PC, and I haven't heard about the article from anywhere else on the internet, so here it is in all its glory!

Enjoy and comment!

Part 1/2

Cool. Makes for a very sobering read, this really highlights the huge gulf between the machines, gaming at a cross roads, with the Amiga still dragging its feet.
Too little too late...

Have to admire the sheer naivety of commodore for thinking the Amiga could fart out a decent clone, on it's very modest hardware..

Didnt really bother me at the time, yeah Doom would have been nice, but anyone with any sense knew we had budget gaming computers in the Amiga, we had fun playing on lesser spec games just like console gamers were, PCs were expensive and awkward to use machines, all this hindsight stuff wouldnt have changed a thing for me, perfectly fine waiting until i got Doom on my PS1 in 1995 for a fraction of even thinking about buying a PC to play it.

The irony is, we DID eventually get Doom on the Amiga, even if it was unofficial, because that nice John Carmack released the source code, like the philanthropist he is.

Another thing that bothers me is why an Akiko add-on card couldn't have been developed for the A1200, as mentioned in the article?

Looks like an interesting article, but i'm finding it difficult to read in this chopped up format as attachments to a forum post. What magazine is it from?

Amiga Pro, I already said. It's a very rare magazine that didn't last long, and I only have those two pages.

I only took the pictures that way as I don't have a scanner and my camera is not MP enough for full pages, and trust me, you won't find this scan anywhere else, but prove me wrong if you like. :)

Well it was produced after the silicon had been made for the A1200, the CD drive from Commdore would have included it had it been released in 1994.

I had the first 3 issues of Amiga Pro, only bought it for the 32 supplement games mag that came with it.

Yes I see it now, in the topic title. I'm sure that you are right and I won't find this scan elsewhere.

Any chance you could scan your copies for AMR Amigajay, if youstill have them?

Sorry long gone with hundreds of other Amiga mags around 1999 in a house move.

The Graffiti card, released in 1996, offers chunky-to-planar support.

http://www.bigbookofamigahardware.co...ct.aspx?id=498

I remember buying Amiga Pro 1 & 4. It had high production values and a unique approach to covering the platform, but came out at the wrong time. I got the impression it was aimed at high-end and professional users who were looking for a more serious version of Amiga Shopper.

Doom should have been released officially not long after the pc release if only for the Big box Amigas. Give Amiga owners a reason to spend a few grand on their machine like the pc users did in order to play the game at its best. Even if the game was gfx card only, so be it. Considering there was a Mac 68k port (which runs really well under mac emu) it wouldn't have been a huge hardship to make an Amiga executable even if there wouldn't have been many Amiga big box owners to sell it to at the time.

Something the PC or MAC have never had is a soul.

The Amiga has something special and I don't mean nostalgia. I've never felt the same relationship with any other computer since Christmas 1990.

You can have the most powerful Xeon in the world and I'll still love 68000 ever more.

Perhaps I should turn this into a poem :lol

Not sure what the fuzz was about. I was playing Quake on my Towered Amiga 1200 PPC in 1998. It walked Doom on the PC.

Incidentally, I still have my copy of Amiga Format 136 with its disc still in the holder on the front of the magazine. I never took it out, it has been there since I bought it back in the day. So it has never been in another system since they put it there, back in 2000.

I just couldn't bring myself to do it. Wanted to preserve something special to Amiga and myself. Amiga Format was IMHO the best of all the magazines.

I was working in a small computer shop in the years when Doom, Quake and what seemed like the explosion of the home PC for gaming and entertainment. I had various good (for the time) PCs myself, being in the trade I needed to keep up with things so I could understand what I was selling and advise accordingly. "See that Matrox Mystique mate? For your needs, ore like a Mistaque..." and so on.

But, I still used and loved my Amigas. It was obvious they were being left behind, technologically speaking. Commodore had gone, Escom floundered and died, yada yada yada but.. I didn't care.

Using a PC was a bit of a chore, using an Amiga was a joy. It wasn't just the user experience either, it was the social experience too. There was a camaraderie around the Amiga (similar to the older 80s Speccy/C64/Acorn for the posh kids scene) that PCs just lacked back then and seem to lack even now.

The PC might have the brains and the brawn, but to me at least it'll never have soul and that's one thing the Amiga has by the bucketload.


OK. It does not do well with Doom. Who cares? Not me. Plenty of other stuff to keep me amused that I much prefer on the Amiga even now to the PC. FIFA/PES might be the bees' knees in visual effects and so forth but it can't hold a candle to the sheer fun and playability of Kick Off 2 or Sensi Soccer.

This post says it all really, PCs have always been a chore to use, no matter how much money you chucked at the things, all my best memories have come from computers or consoles that had the vibe and excitement at the time (Spectrum, Amiga, Megadrive, PS1) than any of my PCs since 1997 have ever had.

As I remember it the bankruptcy of Commodore didn't really register with me when it happened. I don't think I even had a Amiga Magazine (Swedish) subscription anymore so it took probably longer for me to even find out in the first place.

I think it was late 1993 (or maybe Jan 94) I started playing Wolfenstein 3D and X-Wing on my father's AST PowerExcec Laptop and I remember browsing the Amiga mags in 1993 for any sign of release of X-Wing for the Amiga.
Once I realised X-Wing and other PC games I enjoyed wasn't coming to the Amiga I mentally went over to the Dark Side..AKA PC. Of course when I finally got my hands on "Doom" it was all but settled.

I didn't get my own PC until Jan 96 and I used my fathers laptop during that time but I remember obsessing about getting my own PC and "saddling up" for PC gaming and I had all but written off the Amiga when Commodore went belly up in 94. In other words it didn't really affect me all that much.
I still kept my Amiga though. :)

Just for the trivia-value: Here is the AST PowerExcec Laptop I more or less stole from my dad. It was a good little machine. 25 MHz I think. No soundcard though...
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3385/...b8020146e6.jpg

All I can say for sure is that I do NOT miss MS-DOS. Ugh. I really wanted to play Doom so much, but despite having 4Mb, the hassle that I had in trying to get the memory allocation to work was a nightmare. You had to have the most minimal drivers for graphics, mouse and sound card, so that there'd be enough of the right type of memory for the game itself. It made the whole issue of Chip/Fast RAM and so forth look very simple indeed.

When I got Windows 95, it was a step in the right direction, but I will not want to remember the above hassle I had just getting games to run before then.

What stands out, when you mentioned memory, is the whole XMS & EMS mess. Trying to get it to work properly made me want to punch a puppy!

The side effect of not having Doom on the Amiga was the efforts of programmers to create their own versions of it within the particular limitations of our machine.

They achieved their technical and gameplay aims to varying degrees but today I think that these engines and games are interesting and unique.

The Amiga was eventually able to run Doom directly but the Amiga was the only platform with Alien Breed 3D and Gloom.