What Makes The Amiga CD32 The Best Amiga?

[FOL]

Originally Posted by chip

But two machines i just tried and immediately put apart were CD32 and CDTV

Im the reverse. I prefer the CDTV and CD32 over other Amiga's. I owned A500, A600 and CD32 back in the day.
I would never give up, my CDTV or CD32. A1200 would go first, .

Thinking about it, it was 30 years ago this Christmas Eve, I got my A500 Flight Of Fantasy Pack. I was allowed to open when present early.
I picked the biggest box and then sat there until 3 or 4 am playing Escape from the planet of robot monsters.
Ah good memories.

[chip]

He he, curious

World is nice because it is various, don't you think ?

[edd_jedi]

As others have said, the CD32 hardware was fairly decent, it was the software that let it down. In fact that's not just true for the CD32, but the vast majority of Amiga games after about 1991.

As somebody else mentioned, for every good Amiga action game, there is a better console game. That's not due to superior hardware, they just had bigger and better software companies producing games. One of my all time favourite games is Shining Force CD for the Mega CD, the Amiga was more than capable of running an RPG like that, but nobody made one.

I also agree with a previous comment that Street Fighter 2 was the nail in the Amiga's coffin. It's probably the biggest game that's ever been released, and if either the Amiga or CD32 had a decent version of it (which both were perfectly capable of) the Amiga could have fended off both the SNES and Mega Drive. But alas, we got several terrible ports by incompetent sofware houses, and everyone bought a SNES instead.

My fondest memories of the Amiga are adventure games because there weren't any on the consoles, but even then the PC versions were almost always better, I just couldn't afford a PC back then. I can't think of a single Amiga action game which doesn't have a superior console port or equivalent. Was Ruff N Tumble as good as Mario or Sonic? No. Was Turrican better than Gunstar Heroes on the Mega Drive? No. Even Sensible Soccer, the staple Amiga game, was better on the Mega Drive.

So in summary, it was the software that killed it.

[FOL]

Originally Posted by edd_jedi

So in summary, it was the software that killed it.

Commodore were on their last legs by then, Im sure the games companies knew that and just banged out what they could. To give it as many titles as they could. In hopes it would help. As Commodore going under would screw them to.


People get hung up on these ports. Its all rubbish. Hands up who owns 5+ ports of games on various platforms. "holds hand up". I have lots of amiga game ports, on GOG, STEAM, PLAY etc etc. So I think its a non starter.

I bought an XBOX 360, JUST to play HALO 3, as they were never going to release it on PC. I bought CD32 JUST for Microcosm, its a great game, despite what people say. I think people hate it cause they can't workout how to play it.



Bet if some one made a CD32 Mini, everyone moaning about ports would still buy it.

[DamienD]

Originally Posted by edd_jedi

I also agree with a previous comment that Street Fighter 2 was the nail in the Amiga's coffin. It's probably the biggest game that's ever been released, and if either the Amiga or CD32 had a decent version of it (which both were perfectly capable of) the Amiga could have fended off both the SNES and Mega Drive. But alas, we got several terrible ports by incompetent sofware houses, and everyone bought a SNES instead.

That was me... being an arcade junkie I purchased a Mega Drive and then a SNES for SF2

I still used my A500 also, but less often.

[edd_jedi]

Originally Posted by FOL

People get hung up on these ports. Its all rubbish. Hands up who owns 5+ ports of games on various platforms. "holds hand up". I have lots of amiga game ports, on GOG, STEAM, PLAY etc etc. So I think its a non starter.

I think ports were and probably still are very important, because as adults we sometimes forget that children (which we all were when we had Amigas) don't want to feel left out. I was very jealous of my friends with SNES and Mega Drives playing Street Fighter 2 properly. Even if Body Blows or Elf Mania were good games, they were not Street Fighter 2, and that's what 12 year old me wanted to be playing so I could join in with my friends. The same goes for all the other popular platform, sports etc games at the time.

So although I agree the Amiga had an amazing selection of unique games, the fact that virtually all the ports were worse than the console or PC versions, or not even available at all, was a big factor in its demise IMO. And the fustrating thing is it was so unneccessary, the Amiga could easily have handled all of those games if coded properly.

[Konrad]

Originally Posted by FOL;1443980)

I think people hate it cause they can't workout how to play it.

I had this game. Graphics impressed me at first, but it was just a simple rail shooter. There's not much to figure out. Not my kind of game. But everyone has a different taste.

[sokolovic]

EddJedi, you forget one thing in your comparison. The cost of any console game or a decent PC before 1993/94.
For me the Amiga was the best of the 2 worlds, every type of games, at a decent price, with cheap games, even free, and you could even do creative work on it (don't talk me about MarioPaint).. Absolutely no gaming machine at that time could offer you to play both Civilization, Sensible Soccer (better on the Amiga since you could make your team, let alone SWOS...), Mr Nutz, Cannon Fodder, Syndicate, Lionheart, Hired Guns, Turrican serie, Dune 1 and 2, Monkey Island 1 and 2, Mortal Kombat etc for the prices the Amiga was offering.
I even remember that some of my friends with MD or SNES did bought an Amiga after.
And let's not be anachronical. In early 90's shining force or Gunstar Heroes were mostly unknown by the vaste majority of teenagers. These games weren't that appealling at that time. Their fame came afterwards, like many very japanese games (including Final Fantasy for exemple, unknown of european games before the PSX version).

[edd_jedi]

It's a good point but I think price was a bit of a trade off, the Amiga computer cost at least twice as much as the 16 bit consoles did, so you would have to buy at least four or five full price games to even out that initial extra outlay. You're also right that 'free' games was a big appeal to many, including my 12 year old self, but with hindsight that was not good for the industry, and probably contributed to why so many Amiga games were of poor quality.

You're right the Amiga was a better all round computer, especially when you took word processing etc into account, but I think only a fraction of Amiga users wanted that, to most it was a gaming machine (certainly among my friends.)

And yes I agree about those two games being retrospectively popular, but the likes of Mario, Sonic etc were certainly not niche, and there simply isn't a game of comparable quality on the Amiga.

[dreadnought]

Street Fighter 2 was big, but it wasn't "the biggest game ever". It would never save the Amiga, not even Doom would do that, because there were forces at work bigger than singular games - namely the rise of the clones and end of the notion that one walled garden brand can dominate the PC market.

The only thing that could help Commodore would be releasing a strong console, one which could compete with PSX/N64, and convincing big devs that they are strong enough to survive, thus warranting a stream of quality ports. Unfortunately, CD32 wasn't that console.

And consoles have always had their killer apps, yet people still bought microcomputers (and PCs later) anyway. They simply belong to two different fields. That's why I was never jealous about people with consoles when I had my A500. They had their top action games, but I had a computer, which could do computer-y things, and my top non-action games, which was my main field of interest. I wanted to play the likes of Harpoon, Monkey Island, Elvira, Midwinter and countless others. But when I was in a mood for some purely arcade stuff, Amiga had it too: titles such as Turrican or Lotus are absolutely top notch.

[sokolovic]

Edd_jedi, the Amiga was more expensive than console but it was much more cheaper than a PC. My point was also to say that on a console you had many fantastic games but everything mouse based was at best worst than the Amiga version, at worst it wasn't available at all. And action games were better on the console but you had some very good action games on the Amiga anyway.
Best of two worlds, IMHO.

[fxgogo]

For me, my Amiga was primarily a creative tool. I also had games for sure, but learning 3D was my main thing. So the CD32 was not a serious consideration for me.

[Gilbert]

Originally Posted by Konrad

Rumours ?!? Never heard of those. Without confirmation not valid anyway.
And still, a competitive product would have succeeded. But the CD32 wasn't.

We all know the technical abilities of all three consoles. Not even on paper the CD32 stood a chance.

I could accept your argument for f.ex. SegaMegaCD Games where you first had to buy a MegaCD. But this isn't the case here:You didn't have to upgrade the SNES. You had a bog-standard SNES, bought Starfox and could play the game. So yes, these games count. (And no, the SNES wasn't just a passthrough.)


I disagree with Guarding being much better on the CD32. Controls, yes.
Never really liked and played banshee, what is "maybe" better there ?


Music is in fact what in my opinion was mostly better on Amiga in comparison to consoles.
And that many games suffer from just Music of Sound is lazyness IMO.
Play titles like Turrican 1-3 f.ex. where you can enjoy very good music and sound together.
Yes, CD32 could play cdaudio. Which is cool, don't get me wrong. But not much of a needed or extravagant feature.


HD's do count as most Amiga 1200's came standard with harddrive. And the mentioned titles were also disk releases. So you could buy the disk-versions, startup your standard A1200HD and install the games.


Your initial statement was simply "What makes the Amiga CD32 the best Amiga ?". You weren't talking money. And besides the X68000 not being available in Europe it also is no Amiga , so doesn't make sense to mention here.
Thus I stand to my opinion: The best Amiga in my opinion is still A4000. If we're talking money the A1200(HD).


Indeed. A "crippled" A1200. With an obsolete Akiko. And if the cd-drive gives up at some point most people can't repair or change it themselves, as opposed to A1200 and A4000 being able to buy generic cdroms or even cdburners.


I don't see those great improvements.


No :P

The Atari/Sega legal agreement is officially documented. They obviously wouldn't document the Commodore part.

The CD32 was selling very well until the shipments to the US were cancelled because of the cursor patent violation. More sales would have meant more developers spending more time making decent games.

Most console launch games weren't amazing either. We forget when we got consoles here in the UK they had been out in Japan often for over a year. In Japan the SNES literally had 2(!) games available at launch

The guy who coded Doom for the SNES did say it was pretty much a video passthrough. The SNES just took inputs from controls, basic stuff like that

Standard A1200s did not come with a HD.

I think you are minimizing the impact of multi-button controller and the ability to play music and sound effects, and no disk-swapping. All of these put together clearly make the CD32 the best Amiga. The CD32 is obviously an upgraded A1200

[Gilbert]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

?Generally, when someone begin to speak about the X68000 and blaming the Amiga to don't be technically on par with it without mentioning that it wasn't available in western countries and cost 3000$ in his home country at that time, you know that the topic will be a dead end.

You were too lazy to understand the context in which I mentioned it. The guy I was talking to picked the most expensive Amiga system - A4000. So I was saying well if you are going to spend that kind of money - why not on an Arcade quality system like the X68000.

The other point I was making was that the A4000 for all it's impressive specs still only has 16 sprites. Sprites really don't cost a lot of money do they? Literally 80% of Amiga coders like to move as many objects around as they can on the screen - so why not help them out with a basic hardware feature? It's like spending a load of money on an expensive PC and then giving it a low-end graphic card

[Gilbert]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

EddJedi, you forget one thing in your comparison. The cost of any console game or a decent PC before 1993/94.
For me the Amiga was the best of the 2 worlds, every type of games, at a decent price, with cheap games, even free, and you could even do creative work on it (don't talk me about MarioPaint).. Absolutely no gaming machine at that time could offer you to play both Civilization, Sensible Soccer (better on the Amiga since you could make your team, let alone SWOS...), Mr Nutz, Cannon Fodder, Syndicate, Lionheart, Hired Guns, Turrican serie, Dune 1 and 2, Monkey Island 1 and 2, Mortal Kombat etc for the prices the Amiga was offering.
I even remember that some of my friends with MD or SNES did bought an Amiga after.
And let's not be anachronical. In early 90's shining force or Gunstar Heroes were mostly unknown by the vaste majority of teenagers. These games weren't that appealling at that time. Their fame came afterwards, like many very japanese games (including Final Fantasy for exemple, unknown of european games before the PSX version).

I had an A500 (my brother's) and a Jap SNES (mine). It didn't have to one or the other. When I got the SNES we did buy less Amiga games but we still bought some and used the Amiga for creativity etc. The SNES was mainly good for arcade style games, e.g. Contra, F-Zero, SF2, Final Fight (a great port at the time, despite people being picky now)

That's true about Gunstar heroes. No one cared about it back then. I like it now but it is incredibly intense. I generally prefer games with more downtime

The SNES did actually have a great version of Sim City. In some ways Nintnedo made it better - the way you had your own house etc

[Gilbert]

Originally Posted by Steril707

The problem wasn't the amount of sprites, since you can easily multiplex and get tons of sprites.

The problem with the OCS sprites was that they are 16 pixels wide only, and that you only have 4 of them if you want them to be in 16 colors like the rest of the graphics.

What would be great is 16 colour sprites and 32 pixels wide.

And on your second point, just more sprites wouldn't have made the Amiga much easier to code for.

It's a difficult machine. Difficult to set up, difficult to work with or around the OS, Amiga sprites are weird, getting BOBs and blitting running is hard, it's difficult to do stuff that's easy on any other machine that I have worked with.

I can understand why man preferred the ST back in the day to code games for, especially british coders that were familiar with coding games for the Spectrum and CPC.

I played around with the Neo Geo recently ( just in C. I am not a good coder) and all that machine has are sprites. It has no bitmaps, no playfields (apart from a static score/status overlay). It's probably the easiest machine ever to program for. Backgrounds are made up of 20 sprites linked together side by side ( Similar to Amiga sprites they are 16 pixels wide and 512 pixels high). Having only sprites makes it very simple and elegant to code for

So I think giving the Amiga 64 sprites or even 32 would have made a big difference to quality of games.

The CD32 can probably stream data off the CD to make game levels have more enemies and animation - console-style. So this makes it more of an arcade quality console. Fighting Spirit on CD32 is close to a Neo Geo versus fighter. Maybe one like Fatal Fury or Fatal Fury Special

[PortuguesePilot]

You know you're going to end up alone talking about this, don't you? People expressed their opinions, they're not changing it just because they read an obvious uber-fanboi expressing why he thinks that some brittle little plastic thing is the best thing ever...

And try to moderate your aggression level (calling people lazy and whatnot). We're all entitled to our opinion and to disagree. You're not - or shouldn't be - on any evangelizing mission. No-one is bashing your head for loving the CD32 so much, so reciprocate and don't bash other people for not doing so.

[Gilbert]

Originally Posted by edd_jedi

I think ports were and probably still are very important, because as adults we sometimes forget that children (which we all were when we had Amigas) don't want to feel left out. I was very jealous of my friends with SNES and Mega Drives playing Street Fighter 2 properly. Even if Body Blows or Elf Mania were good games, they were not Street Fighter 2, and that's what 12 year old me wanted to be playing so I could join in with my friends. The same goes for all the other popular platform, sports etc games at the time.

So although I agree the Amiga had an amazing selection of unique games, the fact that virtually all the ports were worse than the console or PC versions, or not even available at all, was a big factor in its demise IMO. And the fustrating thing is it was so unneccessary, the Amiga could easily have handled all of those games if coded properly.

Yes I think you are right. SF2 sold many SNES's. Doom sold many graphics cards. Back in the day games like Defender of the Crown and Shadow of the Beast were helping sell Amiga. I think more than a few people did buy a CD32 to play Microcosm for sure.

[Gilbert]

Originally Posted by PortuguesePilot

You know you're going to end up alone talking about this, don't you? People expressed their opinions, they're not changing it just because they read an obvious uber-fanboi expressing why he thinks that some brittle little plastic thing is the best thing ever...

And try to moderate your aggression level (calling people lazy and whatnot). We're all entitled to our opinion and to disagree. You're not not - or shouldn't be - on any evangelizing mission. No-one is bashing your head for loving the CD32 so much, so reciprocate and don't bash other people for not doing so.

I wasn't insulting him. He was being lazy. Please read what he said in context. I was just responding to it. I don't think I have been aggressive?? I don't have any ill feeling towards that guy. He is an Amiga fan like me.

I'm just responding to people's points. That's why discussion forums are for in my opinion. I don't believe I have insulted anyone here.

[Konrad]

I wholeheartedly disagree with you. I don't find your arguments convincing.
One can clearly see that you're a big fan of the CD32 and I stand to my opinion that you wear rose-tinted glasses ?.