Quote:
Originally Posted by Gilbert
Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?
Most Amiga users and magazines seemed to be very happy with the A1200 when it came out. I wasn't at all, and a look at the first games pretty much ended my association with Amiga gaming. I just saw the same games with more colours and a bit smoother. There was no wow factor. After that I stuck with the Amiga 500 (with half meg memory expansion) and my Super Famicom (Jap SNES).
Here's what Commodore got wrong in my opinion
1. Too much focus on creating higher-res screen modes with more colours (and also making the blitter work in these different screen modes) and not enough on enhancing gaming(8 or maybe 16 sprites when the comparitively old Megadrive and SNES could manage 64 and 128 respectively). It's a bit like the original Amiga - yes it can display 4096 colours on screen, but the majority of the games for the system were 16 colours (Albeit some had added some Copper magic) and most didn't even run at 50/60 fps. That was fine back in 1985 but 7 years(!) later you expect a significant upgrade.
2. There was a mild improvement to dual playfield mode. Great!... when the SNES had 5(?) playfields and could scale and rotate whole screens. Commodore seemed to have no sense they were competing here....
2. Sound chip needed 6 channels to get a decent track playing with sound effects. Again SNES and Megadrive have 6 channels each. Using the same sound chip from 1985 was ridiculous!
3. Like the original Amiga, if you wanted to get a good number of objects on screen with a lot of colours and scrolling, you had to spend ages using hardware tricks or specific techniques. Time = money and developers aren't going to want to spend 2 years making an arcade quality game on the A1200 when simpler systems exist....
I do have a CD32 now, but it's not very impressive from a technical point of view, even the mighty Banshee is bettered on both the SNES and Megadrive. The reason I like it is because it offers something a bit different and it's an Amiga  It's fairly obvious it had no hope of competing long term. I just find it hard to see what Commodore was thinking with the AGA architecture?? |
nope
What was killing the Amigas were the PCs not the consoles
and the Commodore enhanced to AGA to make possible 256 colors on the screen , not for the sprites
this was to compete with the PC point and click adventures and RPG games which the Amiga versions were far inferior due the lack of colors
Those type of games were the most sold on the market in the era and forced the way the Commodore proceeded
Of course there was nothing to do because the PC hardware became cheaper every year and some of the best games of the era were exclusive PC titles
The SNES have 8 audio channels not 6, of course is better for games because can mix music + sound fx in a best way, but the AMiga music chip was still superior having only 4 channels