Doomed to the PC? - Amiga Pro, July 1994

[MigaTech]

Originally Posted by CodyJarrett

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

Yeah, but Alien 3D was disappointing, Gloom was excellent and also friendly to your specifications.

Doom runs good on Blizzard MKIV 030 @ 50MHz and even better on an 040 Accelerator. Shame I cannot get my PPC to run it, would be good to see that against PC version. Going by how good the PPC runs Quake, it would probably blow the PC into outer space!

Just like all of you, I hated the fall of Commodore and I would defend the Amiga back in the 1990's, relentlessly. Only to be laughed out by Dark side owners!! I too was sucked in by the PC in 1998 and was on-line to the world wide web in 1999. I admit it was a whole new computer experience with many benefits over the Amiga experience. Yet, it still didn't offer the class, memories and sheer soul the Amiga gave us! We original Amiga users all have something in common, we experienced an amazing computer in a time, that shall never come again.

Yes the PC dominated commercially, but never completely, Amiga shall always be the better platform, specially when it comes to passion and desire!

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by CodyJarrett

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.

This excellent video explains the history of Amiga FPS quite well, I think.

[ Show youtube player ]

In fact, all of this guy's videos are great!

[ExiE]

Originally Posted by MigaTech

Yeah, but Alien 3D was disappointing, Gloom was excellent and also friendly to your specifications.

Alien3D had great game play and level design, maybe even better then first Doom, only graphics was targeted for lowend Amigas.

[-Acid-]

I've been trying to resist posting on this thread because it still boils my piss to this day that id refused to give the Amiga a Doom port. It's not that I liked the game (I still think it's rubbish) but the fact that lots of people did own 030's and could have ran it reasonably well at the time. It would have drove hardware sales we all know that but publishers back then were obsessed with shit having to run on 1mb A500's.... it's not like the latest games of 1994 were expected to work with 1mb of ram on PC's. Carmack must've felt like a right bell end after saying it couldn't run on an Amiga only for it to ported the same day as the source was released by bedroom programmers.... I think he was either paid to not port it (con theory for you) or wasn't capable so made his excuses.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by -Acid-

I've been trying to resist posting on this thread because it still boils my piss to this day that id refused to give the Amiga a Doom port. It's not that I liked the game (I still think it's rubbish) but the fact that lots of people did own 030's and could have ran it reasonably well at the time. It would have drove hardware sales we all know that but publishers back then were obsessed with shit having to run on 1mb A500's.... it's not like the latest games of 1994 were expected to work with 1mb of ram on PC's. Carmack must've felt like a right bell end after saying it couldn't run on an Amiga only for it to ported the same day as the source was released by bedroom programmers.... I think he was either paid to not port it (con theory for you) or wasn't capable so made his excuses.

Well if the game wasnt going to run on stock hardware you can hardly blame Id for not supporting the system, most console manufacters had a hand in paying Id to get a port made for their system, so we come back to Commodore....

What solid facts do you have to say enough owners had a 030+ CPU Amiga to drive sales? Commodore didnt sell enough A1200 units let alone people 3rd party CPU upgrades to entice Id or for anyone to even buy the license to make it, the sales for such an idea wouldnt have been there at that time.

Plus blaming publishers for supporting the Amiga with the biggest market is kinda strange!? AGA Amigas never really took off, so its no surprise they stayed where the money was, they are after all companies trying to make money.

[lordofchaos]

@Acid.

I get the impression the Amiga was treated like a diseased leper by most of the large studios by then. Like it was some embarrassing uncle they had to visit every so often.. Also, and perhaps ironically, the Amiga was only really embraced in Europe, so maybe US devs were less bothered.

[Glen M]

The hole point of blame really is with commodore. Yeah it was a budget machine compared to the big box IBMs but for its time it was so far in advance of the IBM in terms of graphics and sound. Commodore just rode this far to long. Amiga was king, then amiga was on power, then amiga was falling behind at which point AGA or AAA should have been released but no Amiga just continued to slip. AGA arrived but that was still behind and commodore fell to bits. The Amiga was a revolution and it should have been invested into and it should have stayed well ahead of the competition.

Would a port of Doom helped to drive innovation. NOT A CHANCE. Yeah it probably would have sold a new extra accelerators but let me ask this. How many accelerators, 030 / 040 are made by commodore? Not that many, if any and that my friends tells the story. Without the support and development of the parent manufacturer there was no hope. ID new Amiga was aging hardware and new there was no interest from commodore to improve things so why waste time porting Doom which will run terrible and likely get poor reviews and thus poor sales. They didn't even bother with Wolf 3D which should have run better. You may counter argue that Akiko was a step by commodore to improve things for the CD32 but I ask have you tried playing gloom on a stock CD32? It runs fine so long as you play it in a small screen. Doom with the TF328 expansion still runs at less than 10fps unless you play it on a postage stamp screen.

In short you cannot blame software for the downfall of hardware.

[-Acid-]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

Well if the game wasnt going to run on stock hardware you can hardly blame Id for not supporting the system, most console manufacters had a hand in paying Id to get a port made for their system, so we come back to Commodore....

Years later clickboom thought it was viable to license and convert Quake and the requirements were as far from stock (or even common upgrades) as it could get.

Originally Posted by Amigajay

What solid facts do you have to say enough owners had a 030+ CPU Amiga to drive sales? Commodore didnt sell enough A1200 units let alone people 3rd party CPU upgrades to entice Id or for anyone to even buy the license to make it, the sales for such an idea wouldnt have been there at that time.

I didn't say there was enough 030's to sell the game, I said the game would have driven the sales of 030's the same way it got PC users upgrading. If you look back I doubt more than 10% of PC owners had the hardware to run Doom at high frame rates and full screen with the hardware they owned when the game was released. But by 1995 loads of people owned 030's and other upgrades proving people would have spent the money if they had of had a reason to. You just have to look at the amount of 030, 040 and 060 cards that go on ebay these days.... someone had to have been buying them in the mid 90s for so many to own them now.

Originally Posted by Amigajay

Plus blaming publishers for supporting the Amiga with the biggest market is kinda strange!? AGA Amigas never really took off, so its no surprise they stayed where the money was, they are after all companies trying to make money.

All they ever did was complain of low sales and piracy... but it was clear what was being supplied was not what people wanted to pay for.... they all wanted to pay for Doom and the 3D games that were following it. To me it makes perfect sense to supply what is in demand.

[-Acid-]

Originally Posted by lordofchaos

@Acid.

I get the impression the Amiga was treated like a diseased leper by most of the large studios by then. Like it was some embarrassing uncle they had to visit every so often.. Also, and perhaps ironically, the Amiga was only really embraced in Europe, so maybe US devs were less bothered.

It reminds me of the way studios treat Nintendo's consoles now, the GameCube especially was on par with the other consoles at the time but it seemed as if the devs/publishers wanted it to fail by not supporting it.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by -Acid-

Years later clickboom thought it was viable to license and convert Quake and the requirements were as far from stock (or even common upgrades) as it could get.

The big difference was 1994 vs 1998 when alot of people upgraded their Amiga's after they knew no new hardware was coming, i doubt even 5% of A1200 owners by the end of 1994 had faster CPU's, and 5% of whatever the A1200 sold (guesstimates are 250-350k units) which isn't alot compared to 6m+ OCS/ECS machines, piracy or not that paled in comparison, its no wonder companies didn't support AGA more, let alone AGA only games.

Originally Posted by -Acid-

I didn't say there was enough 030's to sell the game, I said the game would have driven the sales of 030's the same way it got PC users upgrading. If you look back I doubt more than 10% of PC owners had the hardware to run Doom at high frame rates and full screen with the hardware they owned when the game was released. But by 1995 loads of people owned 030's and other upgrades proving people would have spent the money if they had of had a reason to. You just have to look at the amount of 030, 040 and 060 cards that go on ebay these days.... someone had to have been buying them in the mid 90s for so many to own them now.

I still think thats very debatable, how much was a 030 with a decent clock back in 1994, not cheap i bet? It may have driven a few thousand at tops, nowhere near enough to make a dent.
Oh i know most PC owners didn't have the hardware to run Doom properly, despite 99% of them gloat they did which we all know was BS.
Again even in the latter years, most CPU upgrades were for A1200 which had a smaller user base than even the A600!, even if you generously say 10% of people upgraded over the years, that's still only 30k units in 20 years, there's no way that number was that high in the mid 90's, only demo scene guys really bought them and the odd person wanted to speed up gfx packages, why spend all that money when a tiny % of games really used them, people just didn't.

Originally Posted by -Acid-

All they ever did was complain of low sales and piracy... but it was clear what was being supplied was not what people wanted to pay for.... they all wanted to pay for Doom and the 3D games that were following it. To me it makes perfect sense to supply what is in demand.

Well they complained, but they kepted on making games even after Commodore went under, new companies like Team 17 sprung up when they knew about piracy, its always a poor excuse when it was there since most of the companies came to the Amiga, piracy sold hardware, the more hardware the bigger the overall sales of software regardless.
Not quite sure what you mean with the last part? they want to pay for Doom, what license it? I think only Team 17 tried to license it didn't they?

Originally Posted by -Acid-

It reminds me of the way studios treat Nintendo's consoles now, the GameCube especially was on par with the other consoles at the time but it seemed as if the devs/publishers wanted it to fail by not supporting it.

I don't think that's true, alot more developers support the Gamecube than the previous console the N64, then it dropped massively again for the Wii and Wii U, they tried to support them, but most sales were driven from Nintendo first party games, if they wanted big sales they had to go elsewhere, it wasn't a case of wanting anything to fail.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by lordofchaos

@Acid.

I get the impression the Amiga was treated like a diseased leper by most of the large studios by then. Like it was some embarrassing uncle they had to visit every so often.. Also, and perhaps ironically, the Amiga was only really embraced in Europe, so maybe US devs were less bothered.

That's down to Commodore (once again...!)

From the start, the head honchos on the US side were pushing the Amiga as a business machine, which was obviously not its natural place. Unfortunately, the (established) C64 was there for the games and so was Nintendo, and the business side was dominated by IBM PCs. If Commodore had pushed for the games side (unlikely from a bunch of geriatric old farts) then they would've blown the crappy NES and superceded the C64.

I guess it was a no-win situation for the Amiga, to have such dunderheads in charge of it.

[Marle]

Things may have changed since 1999 when I left the Amiga, but my recollection was that to play Doom on an AGA Amiga you really needed a 68040 25MHz minimum to run full screen with sound and no slow down. Sure a 68030 50MHz could run it, but not with sound (which is what gave Doom so much of its atmosphere) and some Doom levels would have slow down when things got hectic. A 68040 40MHz was even better.

(I had a 50MHz 030 Viper , then an Apollo 1240/40, finally a Blizzard PPC603-160/040-25)

Of course, much easier to just bung Doom into the PS1, which had a fantastic port. I still play it to this day every now and then.

Looking at an Amiga magazine from April 1994 (Amiga Format issue 58) a 4MB RAM only A1200 card was £200, 2/3rds of the RRP of an A1200. A 50MHz 68030 from Indi Direct with 4MB was £475.99 (£912 in today's money.....)- quite a squeeze for Doom some would say, so the 8MB variant was £709.99...

In all honesty, not hard to see why someone would say, time to get a 486...

By 1997 prices were more reasonable, £179 at World of Amiga 1997 in Hammersmith for a Viper V with DMA SCSI, 030/50, 882/50 and 8MB RAM. (The very card I had)

The bottom line is Commodore really needed AGA Amigas out by late 1990 and a chunky graphics Amiga (AAA?) or something bearing its name by 1992 to have a hope of competing. And we all know how that ended. Even if Bill Sydnes hadn't of been in charge of engineering, and Medhi Ali wasn't a thing, the A3000+ was still only a Spring 1992 Amiga. A better machine than the A4000, but still not enough to hold back the incoming tide....

All that said though...
Full respect for those who did the ports of Doom and Quake to the Amiga. They did some seriously good optimisation, and I have many happy memories of playing Doom on my Amiga, and my Pentium 133 owning friend of the time who was very dismissive of the Amiga had a blast too. Of course he hated it if I brought up that actually I owned and paid for my Amiga out of my paper round jobs I had and 'his' PC was not his at all

[-Acid-]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

Not quite sure what you mean with the last part? they want to pay for Doom, what license it? I think only Team 17 tried to license it didn't they?

I meant Amiga users wanted to pay to play Doom... if it had of been available on the Amiga it would have sold in my opinion.


Even in 1998 I bet Amiga users would still have been willing to pay for a commercial release of Doom but the source was released the year before making it a bit late by then. But if you look at it, how much would it have cost them? Next to nothing in the grand scheme of things when you consider the ports use the original wads so it's basically just an Amiga compiled binary in extra work. It would have taken 1 programmer who knew what they were doing a few weeks or something at worst (didn't working ports appear for the Amiga on the same day as the source as released?). The cost would have been minuscule, I bet one of the guys who did port the source would have done it for free.

[van_dammesque]

I remember something similar, it actually inspired me to get an 040 and tower-up my A1200.
I then played alien breed 3d, gloom and doom.
I only then after years got a PS1. Only in 2000 did I get a PC.

Although what this doesn't show was a price comparison, a PC that ran doom was circa £1.5k!

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by Marle

Things may have changed since 1999 when I left the Amiga, but my recollection was that to play Doom on an AGA Amiga you really needed a 68040 25MHz minimum to run full screen with sound and no slow down. Sure a 68030 50MHz could run it, but not with sound (which is what gave Doom so much of its atmosphere) and some Doom levels would have slow down when things got hectic. A 68040 40MHz was even better.

Wasn't a 68040 at 40MHz equivalent to the fastest 486? That's the impression I got. And when PCs got the Pentium (at least a version that wasn't buggy) then that was definitely it for the Amiga.

And who would play Doom on a console, or a platform that was NOT the original for the game? The only time in my life I had a console (an original PlayStation) I HATED it. I could only play games on it, and choosing a game, with the high costs of them, was extremely difficult. Ironically, most of the time, I settled for the PC games I had had, like Command & Conquer and yes, Doom, but I hated Doom for the PlayStation. I found it ugly and different and LIMITED compared to the genuine experience I got on the PC.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by Foebane

And who would play Doom on a console, or a platform that was NOT the original for the game? The only time in my life I had a console (an original PlayStation) I HATED it. I could only play games on it, and choosing a game, with the high costs of them, was extremely difficult. Ironically, most of the time, I settled for the PC games I had had, like Command & Conquer and yes, Doom, but I hated Doom for the PlayStation. I found it ugly and different and LIMITED compared to the genuine experience I got on the PC.

Many people and enjoy it alot more than playing on a PC! I loved Doom on the PS1 the controls were fine (its normally people who cant use a joypad that moan about the controls!) awesome conversion, i even linked up with my mate with only 1 copy of the game!

[Marle]

Originally Posted by Foebane

Wasn't a 68040 at 40MHz equivalent to the fastest 486? That's the impression I got. And when PCs got the Pentium (at least a version that wasn't buggy) then that was definitely it for the Amiga.

I don't know tbh if a 40mhz 68040 equalled say a 486 DX100 but just my recollection and the 040 was also handling C2P as I only had aga then.

And who would play Doom on a console

Me

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

Many people and enjoy it alot more than playing on a PC! I loved Doom on the PS1 the controls were fine (its normally people who cant use a joypad that moan about the controls!) awesome conversion, i even linked up with my mate with only 1 copy of the game!

Nothing beats the mouse and keyboard combo. No-thing.

And who would play ANYTHING on a console

Not me

There, fixed your quote for myself.

[Valken]

I wanted to ask if anyone with an HW accelerated Amiga probably can run Doom at 60 FPS, default resolution? I believe the 040/60 were nearly 1:1 or faster at Integer math with 486DX at the same clock speeds, but the 486 and Pentium FPU were much faster.

It would be interesting to benchmark 040/060 and even PPC powered Amigas to see where they are today.

For now, I'm playing Brutal Doom or Project Brutality in OpenGL on the PC for better speed and performance!

[MigaTech]

Originally Posted by Valken

For now, I'm playing Brutal Doom or Project Brutality in OpenGL on the PC for better speed and performance!

You seriously need to change this set-up to an actual Amiga rapid!

I own 3 Amiga systems, that could run Doom quite adequately.

Contender Number 1
A1200 Blizzard MKIV 030 @ 50MHz FPU @ 50MHz 32MB. (OK so FPU is useless!) Flicker fixer I built myself using an SVGA board from China.

Contender Number 2
A2000 GVP 030 @ 50 MHz 8MB. Indivision ECS Internal scan doubler/Flicker fixer.

Contender Number 3 (my personal Amiga set-up)
A1200 Customised Tower Blizzard PPC 603e @ 240MHz / 68040 @ 25MHz 256MB. RTG Voodoo 3, 16MB.

Now then, which do you think would win?