Amiga VS PC question

[NovaCoder]

My gaming history goes likes this:

ZX81->Plus4->Atari STFM->PC 386SX

So for me I'd have to answer 386.

Currently with my retro FPGA MiSTer I find myself splitting my retro gaming between a 486 a Genesis and an Amiga AGA machine

On my TODO list is to get into some C64 games next.

I revisited the Atari ST but couldn't really get into it.

[meynaf]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

LOL

You must choose captain Picard!
There's no escaping the fate.

May I choose captain Janeway instead ?

Else it's A500. A lot more friendly for coding.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by meynaf

May I choose captain Janeway instead ?

I dunno, I think Sisko is a great middle ground.

[Amiinno]

Voted for the 386 because at least it can double as a boat anchor.

[robinsonb5]

I chose A500 for the simple reason that I, personally, would have more fun with it. Had the scenario included the need to do anything productive I might have answered differently.

[dreadnought]

That kinda depends on what year it is, but all in all, knowing what I know now - 386DX.

I'd tell you why, but what'd be the point? At the end of that other thread I saw people crapping on the likes of Ultima Underworld & Wolfenstein, so I'm sure here discussion would be also totally reasonable and unbiased

[Weaselrama]

A500, hands-down. In reality, I owned an Amiga 1000.

I bought the Amiga 1000 either in late 1990 or early 1991. I upgraded it with the Insider II and Kwikstart II boards for the 2.04 ROM and RAM expansion. It might have been floppy-only, but I had 2MB of RAM which made the experience all the more wonderful.

In 1993 I bought a 386 SX so I had a machine I could run Lotus for the pricing sheets we used where I worked as a construction estimator. I'd used GeoWrite for real-world work on the C64 and that 386 came with GeoWorks Ensemble installed and I got a lot of use out of it. At the time, I had not yet acquired Excellence! for the Amiga. I really didn't do all that much with the 386 except, armed with the DOS manual, learned MS-DOS commands as I had with Amiga-DOS.

Meanwhile, my Amiga was the machine on which I worked with multimedia. I have said ad nauseam that the Amiga was the coolest computer I ever owned, no matter how much I liked Mac OS or Win 7 or any of the window managers I used when I used Linux, which I left behind around 2002.

My Amiga was connected to my sound system from the stereo out plugs. I had Octamed 4 up all the time and I had disks full of Mods and tried my hand at writing my own. Since the Amiga keyboard could read multiple keys at once, it made for a polyphonic keyboard and I had the keys marked for white and black keys. I had a blast.

The Amiga was the machine I viewed all the pics and artworks I collected. I was into amateur astronomy at the time and I used Voyager and Distant Suns but preferred the former. I had tons of cover disks and just had a blast. I never used the 386 for what I used the Amiga although it had the capability. I had a couple of picture viewers. I really didn't get into the PC to really learn it until 1995 when I bought one of those packaged 486 SX machines. That was the computer with which I got on the Internet with a UNIX shell account with a 2,400 baud modem, first played Doom, loaded Chicago (it came with 3.1) and installed Slackware Linux with the DOS file system it supported at the time instead of re-partioning it with e2fs.

Still, I kept my Amiga running. All in all, I guess with the funds I had available I made a good decision to go with the 486 instead of buying the A1200 I wanted. I credit the Amiga with my IT career which started in 1997. My experience on the Amiga and the plethora of Workbench disks I created for various purposes with apps crunched with powerpacker made Linux a breeze to install and learn and I learned how to manipulate Chicago and then Win95. It taught me marketable skills and I started in IT on the Help Desk and quickly ascended to Desktop Support, PC and Mac.

That Amiga 1000 beat the crap out of the 386, not that i really explored the 386' capabilities. I wasn't a huge game player and when I got Excellence! I stopped using GeoWrite and installed Win3.1 on that 386 and started to learn it. Someone here likened the 386 to a boat anchor and I concur. I will always be impressed with the litany of things the Amiga did and did very well, even running from floppies. I didn't realize until later that if I had been a gamer, the 386 w/ SVGA would have had much better looking games than the Amiga did but who cares? I had a blast with AmigaVision and Octamed and I loved running demos.

Someone on another thread claimed that you couldn't "prove" objectively that the Amiga was a better computer than a x286 or x386 and that you simply loved the computer you used at home. I vehemently disagree with that. From 1985 to at least 1991, the PC simply and objectively couldn't accomplish what the Amiga did in an all-in-one package, thanks to the combination of the 68k processor with custom chips like Paula.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

I'd tell you why, but what'd be the point? At the end of that other thread I saw people crapping on the likes of Ultima Underworld & Wolfenstein, so I'm sure here discussion would be also totally reasonable and unbiased

Why not just say my name? And I did try them both, I just didn't like them. I tried UU on my PC in the 1990s a year or so after I got it, and Wolf3D we played on the college PCs (yes, we were naughty), so I have had experience in playing them, I just didn't like them.

Luckily, I was exposed to Doom on a friend's PC, and I was sucked in immediately. If I hadn't liked it, I probably would've continued on my Amiga path for a few years, but Doom was enough of a killer app to make me jump ship.

[Weaselrama]

Originally Posted by Foebane

Why not just say my name? And I did try them both, I just didn't like them. I tried UU on my PC in the 1990s a year or so after I got it, and Wolf3D we played on the college PCs (yes, we were naughty), so I have had experience in playing them, I just didn't like them.

Luckily, I was exposed to Doom on a friend's PC, and I was sucked in immediately. If I hadn't liked it, I probably would've continued on my Amiga path for a few years, but Doom was enough of a killer app to make me jump ship.

I feel the same. I wasn't a "gamer" until Doom. While I thought Wolf3d was interesting, it was too maze-like and there was no thrill of discovering cool rooms and areas. It just didn't give the feel of walking around a virtual world. I too was sucked in by Doom and wrote my own wads for it with WinDEU (which crashed a lot).

Honestly, I didn't start appreciating Amiga games (other than the Doom/DoomII, Duke, and Quake ports) until I started playing these great vertical and horizontal scrollers like Disposable Hero, Banshee, and Battle Squadron and multi-directionals like Turrican 3 (my current favorite I'm trying to play - my hand/eye coordination at 59 ain't what it used to be) until I built my Amiga via FS-UAE. The graphics in these games are brilliant. However -
They will never take the place of FPS games like Doom to me. I need to grab the GZDoom port of Alien Breed 3D. I've tried to play these Doom-like games on the Amiga like Alien Breed 3D and Genetic Species and they are far more frustrating than fun IMHO.

[dreadnought]

@Foebane, @Weaselrama - name dropping as requested.

The point I was making is that these kind of discussions are not about personal likes/dislikes but about recognising wider significance of things.

Nobody tells you to like this or that, and it's perfectly fine to have a personal opinion stating that these games are crap/boring/etc. But if you participate in a bigger argument then this simply won't do. These titles were groundbreaking and it really isn't just my opinion.

For example, I don't really like pure platformers, and have never really played nor liked a Super Mario game. But you won't see me using this as an argument in some vs debate.

[Lord Aga]

I would take an A500 all the way up to a Pentium and Win95.
Crappy MS DOS is just in no way a match for Workbench.
And even though I know that 486 DX2s are pretty powerful, and you can have some really good games (and programs) run on them, it is not really worth the complete clunky DOS experience with no multitasking and that awesome Amiga software.

386 I wouldn't consider even for a second.

[Weaselrama]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

@Foebane, @Weaselrama - name dropping as requested.

The point I was making is that these kind of discussions are not about personal likes/dislikes but about recognising wider significance of things.

Nobody tells you to like this or that, and it's perfectly fine to have a personal opinion stating that these games are crap/boring/etc. But if you participate in a bigger argument then this simply won't do. These titles were groundbreaking and it really isn't just my opinion.

For example, I don't really like pure platformers, and have never really played nor liked a Super Mario game. But you won't see me using this as an argument in some vs debate.

I agree, more or less. Read my previous post above about why I would choose the A500 (I owned an Amiga 1000 and ran it all through the 90s) hands-down over a 386, which I also owned and for only 2 purposes: Word Processing, until I found Excellence!, and to run Lotus for my job. That was it. My Amiga 1000 beat it in terms of capabilities with graphics and sound.

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

I'd tell you why, but what'd be the point? At the end of that other thread I saw people crapping on the likes of Ultima Underworld & Wolfenstein, so I'm sure here discussion would be also totally reasonable and unbiased

Well, both Wolf and Doom didn't really impressed me back then, or now.
But Ultima Underworld is a nice example.
Yeah.

How does Ultima Underwold compares, to let's say, Legends of Valour on A500?
I know graphics on Ultima is way better, but what about gameplay?
I just quickly tried both, so I can't compare.
----------

Few more games examples where 386 version would run much better would be Civilizasion, Wing Commander, Dune 2, Frontier... etc... some very nice games actually.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

The point I was making is that these kind of discussions are not about personal likes/dislikes but about recognising wider significance of things.

I do agree, but I also feel that recognizing the wider significance of things should also include recognizing such when the Amiga has such things going for it and in fairness, it seems to me this side is sometimes lacking in any arguments in VS threads (note that this isn't really aimed at you).

And perhaps a bit more to the point: I don't really agree the wider significance is how we really look at this on these forums. These debates ultimately are far more about how we remember systems rather than anything else. If we really only care about significance and cultural impact then both the Amiga and PC are effectively pointless (from a gaming standpoint). The real sales (and thus significance) was always on the side of the consoles

Even Doom apparently sold a significant fraction of it's strangely low total sales (about 2 million units across all platforms as of 2005) on consoles rather than on PC.

[grond]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

How does Ultima Underwold compares, to let's say, Legends of Valour on A500?
I know graphics on Ultima is way better, but what about gameplay?

I didn't play Legends of Valour much but I think it was overly ambitious. It seemed to me more of an precursor to open-world RPG games because you could walk around the city and there didn't seem to be a tightly knit plot. Ultima Underworld, on the other hand, is set in a cave and the structure of the cave makes sure that you solve one quest after the other and only meet opponents you are supposed to be able to deal with at that point in time.

Ultima Underworld had a very nice atmosphere. I think it was a superb game and that probably was the first time I envied my PC friend.

Few more games examples where 386 version would run much better would be Civilizasion, Wing Commander, Dune 2, Frontier... etc... some very nice games actually.

I actually chose the 386 because of this sort of games. I don't care much for any 2D scroller games or jump'n'runs anymore. And I know quite a few of the good Amiga 500 games while there would probably be quite a lot to explore for me in PC land. When I finally made the step to the PC, I didn't play much any more.

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by roondar

I do agree, but I also feel that recognizing the wider significance of things should also include recognizing such when the Amiga has such things going for it and in fairness, it seems to me this side is sometimes lacking in any arguments in VS threads (note that this isn't really aimed at you).

I was talking about the last few recent threads. You can't really say there was a lack of recognition for Amiga in these, in fact it was more of an idolisation. I'm not of course counting the troll and his bone-headed rubbish.

Originally Posted by roondar

If we really only care about significance and cultural impact then both the Amiga and PC are effectively pointless (from a gaming standpoint). The real sales (and thus significance) was always on the side of the consoles

Please Sales are in no way the one and only indicator of how influential a system was, this counts for all the platforms from ZX Spectrum to Dreamcast. It also isn't an idicator of influence on gaming itself, since platforms are just hardware. If you look at the style of most popular games dominant these days it's clear that they have originated on home computers, where Amiga and PC were leading the way during the golden era of 1985-1995.

Anyway, I wouldn't mind discussing that with you and a few other reasonable people here, but the truth is these discussions tend to end up in flames one way or another, when tribal instincts take over, to wit in these recent threads. I actually agree with what Akira said in that other one, that it creates a toxic atmosphere and is reminiscent of our teenage flame wars (which, to be honest were nowhere near as hostile as can be seen when we are older, funny that).

A function of that is people starting to turtle up and use gung-ho arguments, just to prove that "my platform is better." Hence the constant piling on DOS (which was nowhere near as bad as presented here), undervaluing certain games and whatever else other sticks, real or imaginary, might be found to bash the PC with.

Like I said elsewhere, I love all the computers and am a bit tired of the strong fanboyism tint present in these recent narratives, so I will take a break from these "vs" threads...for some time at least

[Weaselrama]

Originally Posted by roondar

Even Doom apparently sold a significant fraction of it's strangely low total sales (about 2 million units across all platforms as of 2005) on consoles rather than on PC.

I hate to say it but I have to wonder how many copies of Doom were copied and pirated to PCs during the 90s. I can't imagine the huge number of PC ports, ZDoom, GZDoom, CDoom, etc., and the unbelievable number of brilliant wads/levels and total conversions like the number of Blood clones as a single example, not to mention the graphic enhancements of the original game being in existance while actual sales of the PC version out of 2 million might have been a couple of hundred-thousand, just a guess from the figures you gave.

Let's face it, sales of games is never and was never an accurate gauge of any game's popularity. Piracy in the 90s was rampant and it existed on the Amiga side too. Some contributors have waxed nostalgic about getting together with friends in the 80s and 90s and having copy parties thanks to X-Copy and its clones and it wasn't cover disks they were copying.

Doom was HUGE on the PC - it was, pardon the term, a monster and its popularity over the years only grew, rather than diminish with age. The same can be said for Duke and Quake, and Blood to a lesser degree.

[gimbal]

Won't be able to play either on a deserted island because no power, so I'll pick the 386 as decoration. An Amiga would be a waste to let it deteriorate in such an environment.

[Weaselrama]

Originally Posted by gimbal

Won't be able to play either on a deserted island because no power, so I'll pick the 386 as decoration. An Amiga would be a waste to let it deteriorate in such an environment.

You sir, win the Internet today. The runner-up is the guy that said the 386 would make a fine boat-anchor.

[Pyromania]

386 never excited me.