Closest console to the Amiga.

[Fred the Fop]

I think everyone here knows that many MegaDrive games were developed on the Amiga. Hence my idea that the Amiga and MD were close friends. They shared the same chip. But We also know the MD had horrid sound, whilst the SNES sound chip was very Amiga-like, in beauty of the sound, if not architecture.

[s2325]

Some MSX2 games have graphics & atmosphere similar to Amiga games.

[Charlie]

The CD32

[Graham Humphrey]

Beat me to it. Why I oughta...

[TCD]

Well both the megadrive and the SNES are somehow close to the Amiga, yet they both have a completly different sound. So I would go with Charlie on that matter

[Leffmann]

Megadrive IMO, since the SNES is WAY different than the Amiga in all hardware aspects, graphics most notably with its accelerated layers of tile maps, pixelization and Mode 7.

There was one hockey game for the MD I played at a friend's once as a kid which crashed and brought up something similiar to a Guru Mediation, with the game screen offset down with details of an unwanted exception printed out at the top inside a frame. When I saw that I actually thought they were the same under the casing.

[Mick_AKA]

I too will have to say the Amiga CD32 is the closest console to an Amiga, as it is both a console, and an Amiga

[Fred the Fop]

Originally Posted by Leffmann

Megadrive IMO, since the SNES is WAY different than the Amiga in all hardware aspects, graphics most notably with its accelerated layers of tile maps, pixelization and Mode 7.

There was one hockey game for the MD I played at a friend's once as a kid which crashed and brought up something similiar to a Guru Mediation, with the game screen offset down with details of an unwanted exception printed out at the top inside a frame. When I saw that I actually thought they were the same under the casing.

Was it EA Hockey? I know those were developed on Amiga.

[StrategyGamer]

The CDTV

[T_hairy_bootson]

The Atari Lynx was very amiga like.

[Fred the Fop]

Originally Posted by T_hairy_bootson

The Atari Lynx was very amiga like.

It sure was cool. I think there were some hardware commonalities, if I am correct. Someone else better qualified can say so.

[rkauer]

Neogeo was too similar to Amiga and have better graphics than the CD32.

Good console, BTW.

[Avanze]

Originally Posted by Fred the Fop

But We also know the MD had horrid sound...

I think there exists some fine examples of what can be achieved using the YM2612, all of which do not sound terrible to my ears. Crappy composers can ruin the sound of the greatest sound chip in the world.

...whilst the SNES sound chip was very Amiga-like, in beauty of the sound, if not architecture.

As for the SPC700 chip, it had major help from the DSP, and in this case really has a unique sound as opposed to the MOS8364. Probably more advanced too for its time.

[TCD]

I complety agree with you Avanze. The MD had some really nice music, but also there were a lot of tunes somehow 'converted' for the chip, which sounded quite bad. The SNES chip was a very great synthesizer and some of the sounds I will never forget (Secret of Mana for example).
The Amiga use of samples made it so different that it's hard to compare the music/sound to these both consoles.
As for the NeoGeo : Yes, maybe that the closest thing to a Amiga (I hate to say it, but it's even 'a little bit' better [just GFX and sound] ).

[blade002]

Originally Posted by T_hairy_bootson

The Atari Lynx was very amiga like.

I heard or read somewhere once that some of the creators of the Amiga were also responsible for creating the Lynx, so that might just be why there are similarities

Someone feel free to correct me if i am wrong !?

[Fred the Fop]

Ok Cyberbbuttock and Avanze, yes, I have heard nice sounds out of the Sega MD. But too often, the games had these burpy, muted, crappy, weird, sound effects that truly was ASS. I suppose not every game can be a Road Rash or Shadow of the Beast. Those were few and far between. Oh and there was this really great Japanese (translated by Nebelwerfer HQ to English) WW 2 sim game that was the inspiration to Panzer General called Advanced Daisenryaku. That game has great tunes and effects.

[Zetr0]

Amiga Console Equivalents

• A500 - Sega Genesis/MegaDrive
  A lot of techniques that are found in the Amiga are found in the Sega G/MD from Blitters and Co-Processors to dedicated Sound processors and Shared Bus Memory.
  The GPU's are about equivilant in performance and power if at either end of the scale a great 16 bit companion me thinks and they used the same CPU, thats nice and cute
  
• A1200 - Atari Jaguar
  Again using a collection of chips forming a set to achieve multiple task, now a lot of people are going to biatch about the jag being 64 bits and the A1200 32, well sorry to burst your bubble the Jag is a multiple bit machine, the developer states its ONLY 64bits when it needs to be... hence video calculation, the main controller in the JAG is an MC68000.. this is 16 bit... there are more 32 bit chips in the Jag than either 16bit or 64 bit. now thats outa the way.
  
  although the Jag was very short lived, it had the same feel in a lot of ways as an A1200 both in games and just ease of use.

[TCD]

@Fred : I said 'but also there were a lot of tunes somehow 'converted' for the chip, which sounded quite bad'. But since the discussion with Akira and Ian I simply say it's 'different'

@Zetro : Ever played 'Tempest 2000' on the Jaguar? Never got so addicted to such a nice simple gameplay again

[Leffmann]

Originally Posted by Fred the Fop

Was it EA Hockey? I know those were developed on Amiga.

Early 90's, can't recall anything else really.

[FromWithin]

Originally Posted by blade002

I heard or read somewhere once that some of the creators of the Amiga were also responsible for creating the Lynx, so that might just be why there are similarities

Someone feel free to correct me if i am wrong !?

You're right. Designed by Dave Needle and the legendary RJ Mical.

Originally Posted by Avance

As for the SPC700 chip, it had major help from the DSP, and in this case really has a unique sound as opposed to the MOS8364. Probably more advanced too for its time.

The SPC700 is the DSP. You're getting confused with the built-in delay on the chip. And a pile of crap it is too. Not even remotely advanced. It's not a synthesizer at all, it's just a straight-forward sample player with a single delay unit. 8 channels with 64k of RAM. It's only good feature is the ADPCM compression in hardware, effectively pushing that RAM up to about 227k.

But not really.

You see, if you use the delay line, you need to use some of the uncompressed RAM. The more RAM, the bigger the delays, and the less room you have to put your samples. Also, the music player code and music data sits in the same 64k space.

So the player code would probably take up about 5k, the music data itself another 5-10k. Let's say 10k. If you put on the delay for that echoey faux-reverb, that probably uses around 8k. That means available sample space is down to a mere 41k. With the ADPCM compression, that effectively gives you around 140k for 16-bit samples (you can't save space by using 8-bit samples as they have to upsampled to 16-bit before converting to ADPCM).

That ends up being the equivalent of 70k on the Amiga using 8-bit samples, so it's basically the Amiga with 8 channels and a delay.

So anyway, I was unimpressed. Not as unimpressed as with the Mega-CD, however, which had 8 channels and, once again, a weedy 64k for samples, but no hardware compression. We just converted a mod player to run on it and I wrote everything in 4-channels under 64k in Protracker.

I was also unimpressed when I got Playstation development audio board. It's basically just the SNES chip with 24 channels and 512k. And the PS2 is two PS1 chips welded together.