Quote:
Originally Posted by James
From Wikipedia:
The first model, the PC-9801, launched in October 1982, and employed an 8086 CPU. It ran at a clock speed of 5 MHz, with two µPD7220 display controllers (one for text, the other for video graphics), and was shipped with 128 KB of RAM that could be expanded to 640 KB. Its 8-color display had a maximum resolution of 640×400 pixels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-9800_series
An 80's Amiga can be expanded to run games like Quake2.
As for that argument that the "Amiga world is replete with" - I've never heard it before in over 30 years of using an Amiga. It was always understood that there were more advanced but much more expensive pro choices. |
"An 80's Amiga can be expanded to run games like Quake2"
If you can show me evidence "An 80's Amiga can be expanded to run games like Quake2" I'd be impressed. It reads as a fantasy. It smacks of yet another common outcrop of Amiga fan reverie, the "fantasy alternative timeline". Quake 2 wasn't released until the end of 1998 so Amiga users of the 1980s were definitively Not running Quake 2. You can make exactly the same "imaginary alterative timeline" argument about literally anything. If you had sufficient technical ability you could extend a 1950s transistor radio to run "Doom: Eternal". So what? The fact is nobody then was actually doing it. PC users don't need a fantasy alternative timeline; they really were playing Quake II on their PCs by the end of 1997. I don't know the exact date Quake was ported to the Amiga but a quick look suggests no real-life Amiga version of Quake II existed for almost five years after it was released for the PC.
Meanwhile, you took only one trivial detail from a very long post with all sorts of information in it, other than the one video of that game. I'd written all I wanted to without that section of the post, which was a section I only added to point out what was written in the paragraph above: Graphics accelerated PCs, dating back to before the Commodore 64 was released, exist. In fact, I accept your point. I have since removed the video from the post because that game came rather later. The rest of the post is as it was and it changes little because that detail doesn't change the central point. The point is not "Here's a PC game...". The point is: The first accelerated 24bit graphics cards, including the Number Nine Revolution 512x32, were available for the PC before the Amiga even existed at any price.
Also, in typical Amiga-fan style, you're diverting to using GAMES as the metric here. If I wanted to play games I still wouldn't buy an Amiga, I'd buy Nintendo, like most people did. I'm a PC user. I care very little whether my PC can play games or not. The PC I have has just a few emulators installed but no modern games on it even though it's more than capable of running them. I'm a technology professional, I don't use computers to play games. When I have been interested in games I prefer the cost benefits and - by a wide margin - the software catalogue of Japanese consoles from NEC, Fujitsu, Sega and Nintendo. I actually still own an Amiga and I never use it; it doesn't have any use today. For the rare occasion I want to play games I have a collection of emulators and I use a Commodore 64 emulator, DosBOX, a SNES emulator or Mame. I also have WinUAE but I don't use it.
Most people buying the PC were not buying it for toy-purposes such as playing games, they were buying it for business and professional use, so talk of games is moot. Games are not IBMs corporate ID. The PC was sold predominantly as an office desktop for business executives. It was not really until after Doom in 1993 that the PC was ever primarily marketed as a games platform. Until then it was marketed, bought, and sold, as a platform for industrial use, and for business users and technical professionals. Games are clearly also a moot point for Most PC customers because until Doom there wasn't much of a games market for the PC, but it still massively outsold the Amiga throughout its entire life. Unlike the Amiga fan-base, obviously people were Not buying PCs mainly to run games and novelty applications, for at least the first decade of the PCs life. In fact, the PC games market had scarcely even begun until after Commodore went bankrupt so a dearth of games in its formative years was clearly not an issue either for PC users or for the PC platform itself.
Regarding: "As for that argument that the "Amiga world is replete with" - I've never heard it before in over 30 years of using an Amiga. It was always understood that there were more advanced but much more expensive pro choices", it's ironic you should say you've never heard that argument, and yet, you immediately follow the denial you've ever heard it with that self-same argument you just wrote to say you've never heard. Maybe it's more a case of refusing to notice or acknowledge it? It is again a moot point because, as Amiga fans are wont to do, it disregards the fact that not everybody buying computer hardware shares the average consumer's budgetary constraints. It also ignores the fact many if not most people buying a computer don't share the Amiga fan-base interest in novelty graphical effects of dubious value. It further disregards the fact that most of the early PC graphics cards were directed at science and technical computing professionals at a time when no consumer market existed for the PC. Therefore some of those devices were of course more expensive because they were directed at a rarefied market with bigger budgets. They expected to sell maybe a few dozen devices to technical specialists, not millions of units to consumers. At their inception the IBM PCs and compatibles were platforms exclusively directed at professional users who expected - and in many cases actively Wanted - to pay exclusive prices, to help purchase a competitive professional edge.
Meanwhile, I'd like to see evidence of a 1980s Amiga competently running Quake II.