Amiga in Japan

[gulliver]

Going through the code there is some Commodore developments from late 1992 and the first half of 1993 that include a console and may system tools to support only pure JIS (JIS X 9051).

So there is official CBM work regarding Japanese.

I assume the project had been shelved due Commodore's financial troubles while persuing cutting down costs. Remember they were not a healthy company at that time, financially speaking.

As a side note: there was also some Chinese work too.

[dlfrsilver]

Just to illustrate, here is a picture taken very recently in Japan, where the japanese amiga users had to show themselves by red points :

[James]

Susumu Hirasawa used to use Amigas to create/perform his music:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susumu_Hirasawa

nittamituaki is a member here, and has a website dedicated to to retro games:

http://nitta.sakura.ne.jp/index.html

[saimon69]

Nitta is well known here, is been a while that i don't see him publishing new stuff; someone should get in touch with him and show him the Amiga 500 doom

[saimon69]

I said it several times would like to see someone port 68k AROS on the x68000, japanese might like multitasking on that machine

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

Just to illustrate, here is a picture taken very recently in Japan, where the japanese amiga users had to show themselves by red points :

At least we're not the bottom of the heap, the Apple Mac users are. HAHAHA!

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by chb

The X68000 is a very capable game machine, without question, but the operating system is rather primitive (Human68k is an MS-DOS look-alike), and while the hardware supports very high resolutions thanks to the use of VRAM, there isn't anything that assists in drawing graphical user interfaces (like the blitter does), so those need to be drawn completely by the CPU and tend to be rather slow. According to this page, every pixel takes two bytes regardless of the screen depth (even if only 4bpp), which is nice for adressing single pixels and chunky type effects, but very ineffective when copying larger blocks around with the CPU. I'm not sure if there was a GUI computer at the Amiga's/ST's price point in Japan during that time, so yes, could be a missed opportunity.

Yep, the X68000 comes across as a very "brute force" machine.

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by Steril707

Yep, the X68000 comes across as a very "brute force" machine.

Considered it was used as mid end graphic workstation and dev machine for arcades too indeed - to me seems not too different from a 68k high end mac* that however is also capable of low res and has a soundblaster-like audio card - but came before it

* it is not, of course, but the reliance on brute force seems similar

[AmigaHope]

Originally Posted by Steril707

Yep, the X68000 comes across as a very "brute force" machine.

Not really. Yeah it had to bruteforce its bitmaps, but it supported tilemapping in hardware and had a killer sprite engine, all at color depths that blew the Amiga away.

So for 2D scrolling/sprite based stuff it crushed the Amiga, because it could do tile modes and hardware sprites that outstripped anything the Amiga blitter could do.

The Amiga had some advantages in 3D solid-polygon stuff since the Amiga could leverage the blitter for that, but once CPUs got faster the superior VRAM-based truecolor display of the X68000 meant that it could easily outperform the Amiga in the same way MS-DOS machines could.

Where the X68000 fell down was its garbage OS.

EDIT: Now granted, the X68k came out 2 years later (1987), so it did have some extra time to develop vs. OCS, but IMHO the X68k capabilities plus a blitter/copper are what ECS should have been.

[Tigerskunk]

AGA around 1990 would have been enough as well, imo.

[khph_re]

The X68000 very powerful, but it would have cost about $3000 dollars, or
about £2500 in my currency. My mum bought her first house for £18,000 in 1987! No way we where going to get anything other than a Atari ST new (and I was thankful for that). Would have needed a re-mortgage for the sharp!

[AmigaHope]

Originally Posted by Steril707

AGA around 1990 would have been enough as well, imo.

Even the 1987 X68000 was better than AGA (though AGA could win in displaying static HAM8 images).

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by AmigaHope

Even the 1987 X68000 was better than AGA (though AGA could win in displaying static HAM8 images).

If you think at the price range difference then Amiga for its time was REALLY something

[AmigaHope]

Originally Posted by saimon69

If you think at the price range difference then Amiga for its time was REALLY something

Yup. C= was a rare company at the time in that they pursued low margins. Almost every other computer company at the time took far higher profit margins in order to have more of a war chest for things like marketing and customer support. Jack took that with him to Atari after he left Commodore, and a few European producers like Sinclair also pushed this model, but by in large the big players kept much healthier profit margins in order to fund other aspects of the business.

The computer market as a whole didn't adopt the low margin model until the mid-90's.

[Torti-the-Smurf]

Fumito Ueda loved AMIGA

There are numerous Reports & Interviews with the Father of

ICO
Shadow of the Colossus (Wanda to Kyoz?)
The Last Guardian (Hito Kui no Oowashi Toriko)

how the Amiga, the Demoscene and games like Another World, Lemmings and those early 3D games inspired him.

You can see the influence of Another World basically in all his games and a bit of Lemmings in ICO.
I really love his games so much; words cant explain

and thanks to ICO,
Hidetaka Miyazaki created Demons Souls, and the "Souls Borne" Genre.

Always fascinating, how much impact the Amiga really had on Art, Music & VideoGames.

Anyway, here is just one example of an Fumito Ueda Interview:

[ Show youtube player ]

and the first thing he does is, talking about the Amiga

Here is a also nice Read about:
Shadow Of The Colossus and The Connection To The Amiga.

https://blog.amigaguru.com/shadow-of...tion-to-amiga/

Greetings,
Torti

[CCCP alert]

Not sure what the anti competitive import taxes on electronics imported into Japan were in the time of A500 but in the time of VCS vs Famicom the VCS was 2-3x more expensive. The Max Machine console also. If the A500 is more than the already non impulse purchase price of £520 vs the awesome FM Towns and X68000 or even budget option of NEC PC XT clone + PC Engine probably would be less.

Not sure why USA/EU didn't do the same to Japan imports.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by CCCP alert

Not sure what the anti competitive import taxes on electronics imported into Japan were in the time of A500 but in the time of VCS vs Famicom the VCS was 2-3x more expensive. The Max Machine console also. If the A500 is more than the already non impulse purchase price of £520 vs the awesome FM Towns and X68000 or even budget option of NEC PC XT clone + PC Engine probably would be less.

Not sure why USA/EU didn't do the same to Japan imports.

Regarding the x68000, the machine was so powerful that it was at this time subject to restriction on exportation outside Japan !

[copse]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

Just to illustrate, here is a picture taken very recently in Japan, where the japanese amiga users had to show themselves by red points :

Denis, do you happen to know what the green dots meant?

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by copse

Denis, do you happen to know what the green dots meant?

i have no idea of what it's supposed to mean compared to the red dots.

[copse]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

i have no idea of what it's supposed to mean compared to the red dots.

Thanks, that's a great answer for me. I appreciate it.