Quote:
Originally Posted by DisposableHero
I gather that the fastest way to play Sim City 2000 on an Amiga is actually to run a (classic) Mac emulator and play the Mac version through that - proof of just how badly programmed it was
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It's not really bad programming, but bad decisions for target hardware. It was intended to run on native screenmodes and an '020, which meant it was limited to AGA and interlace if you wanted it in high resolution mode. This was, of course, slow due to the hardware itself.
The Mac version ran in a standard window, so could be resized to suit any resolution without flicker, and also took advantage of hardware graphics acceleration so wasn't held back by the Amiga chipset. It could also take advantage of Mac emulation tricks for speeding up the display, such as using the MMU to avoid unnecessary refreshing and reducing the number of colours needed (which would need to be explicitly supported in-game to work on the Amiga version). I played the Mac version, but then I had a graphics card so playing under Mac emulation was like a dream compared to the native Amiga version. Running the Mac emulation on a 256-colour interlaced screen with a 68020 probably wouldn't be much fun at all...
So it's not that it's badly programmed as such, but the Amiga and Mac versions had very different target hardware.