PC games that made the Amiga look like Shit

[Samurai_Crow]

Originally Posted by lmimmfn

Even 1.5Meg chip and .5 meg fast would have sufficed and to make ram/accelerator cards expand so chip ram and fast ram become contiguous blocks(I realise that may not have been straightforward but should have been possible)

All the glue logic to split off a second bank of RAM would have dwarfed the cost of the additional memory. Also, if it were all contiguous and in the same memory address space, it's likely that Commodore would have made it Ranger memory like the A500 belly slot RAM. Ranger memory is as slow as Chip RAM and therefore has no bandwidth advantage over actual Chip RAM.

[Karlos]

Ah the armchair engineer. Sure, yes, I'm not a hardware engineer. That immediately disqualifies any opinion gleaned with hindsight, right?

I wonder which engineer foresaw that wasting space on the motherboard for an FPU that would never be fitted was a better use of the available space than memory which even in 1991 was on already on a steep downwards trajectory in price. If, by the time you go into mass production, memory is cheap enough, you could fit it, or release a 1200+ model later. Clearly the system would benefit far more from fitting an FPU than it would uncontended memory for the CPU, given the huge corpus of FPU dependent software in 1991. No wait, the other thing.

I don't think these decisions were necessarily made by engineers. Management, more likely.

[van_dammesque]

Originally Posted by TCD

10 Years of PC DOS Gaming Part 4: 1991 [ Show youtube player ]

I do not think anyone has commented on this video shown, there are a few that stand out in this video:


[ Show youtube player ] Chuck Yeager's Air Combat


[ Show youtube player ] Falcon 3.0


[ Show youtube player ] The Killing Cloud


[ Show youtube player ] Martian Memorandum


[ Show youtube player ] MiG-29M Super Fulcrum


[ Show youtube player ] The Rocketeer

I do not why the timestamp shortcut isn't working.

[stevsurv]

This comparison should be called --
Amiga games that made PC games look like shite.

PC version -
[ Show youtube player ]

Amiga version -
[ Show youtube player ]

A classic Amiga game.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by van_dammesque

I do not think anyone has commented on this video shown, there are a few that stand out in this video:

I do not why the timestamp shortcut isn't working.

If you just want to watch the timestamped parts then go to YouTube and read the description, which has links to each game. I didn't see that at first and so watched the whole thing.

Overall impression:- not many stood out. Several looked strangely familiar (Lemmings, Blue Brothers, Prehistorik...) Duke Nukem had smooth scrolling? Not here. Some games were going way too fast - obviously not running on period hardware!

Most interesting commentary:- "Falcon 3 when it came out listed 286 as the minimum spec... technically that is correct, as it could be run in a glorified slideshow mode.. even on low detail mode it was a nightmare on anything slower than 386DX, and to comfortably play it in so-called high fidelity mode 486DX with a math coprocessor is a bare minimum".

Looked awesome though - definitely one that made the Amiga look like shit in 1991!

Or did it? Although Wikipedia says it was released in 1991, the earliest magazine review listed was in Jan 1992. So I'm guessing it was released in late 1991, perhaps December. Few Amiga fans would have known what it looked like before 1992.

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Most interesting commentary:- "Falcon 3....
Looked awesome though - definitely one that made the Amiga look like shit in 1991!

Ummm...
had a quick look on youtube, and don't see anything better looking then FA18/Interceptor that could be played on any Amiga (and with nice speed)
FA18 might look even better maybe, because I really dislike these early low resolution textures in first 3D games, and I think a lot's of games could look better without it (including this one).

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

Ummm...
had a quick look on youtube, and don't see anything better looking then FA18/Interceptor that could be played on any Amiga (and with nice speed)
FA18 might look even better maybe, because I really dislike these early low resolution textures in first 3D games, and I think a lot's of games could look better without it (including this one).

I agree. In low res the clean look of flat shaded 3D is much better for simulators. For some games like Doom and Tomb Raider the 'grittiness' of the textures work well, but in simulators it just looks messy.

VGA (and AGA) had enough colors to do smooth graduations in the sky etc., which looks great in demos but just gets in the way when playing the simulation. Muted shades and blurry textures might be more 'realistic', but that's not what you want when the target might only be a single dot on the screen.

FA18/Interceptor was a ground breaking flight sim. Produced for the Amiga first and only in 1988, it made excellent use of the limited CPU and graphics. The other great thing about it was the sound - real jet engines rumbling along all the time, unlike those PC flight simulators which only made the occasional beep. This gave it an atmosphere that was missing in many other flight sims.

On a 1MB machine you got extra detail and music. The theme music was a variation on the Top Gun movie and sounded fantastic - I could listen to it for hours! The title screen looked great too, setting the tone for the game.

But you didn't discover its true beauty until you played the game. PC flight sims that used all those VGA colors looked much better in magazine screen shots, consuming Amiga fans with envy because their A500s could only show 16 flat colors at a few frames per second. Never mind playability, it's the look that sells games! (and PCs).

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

The other great thing about it was the sound - real jet engines rumbling along all the time

Yeah man.. I am still, to this day, very impressed with the sound of the engines, and indeed, it gave a tremendous bonus to atmosphere in the game.

[Etze]

So, talking about Interceptor: What about Jetfighter II (also from Bob Dinnerman)? I never played it but looking at youtube, I think it looks great (and much smoother than Interceptor) for a 1990 flight sim. Only the sound is pathetic.

The same is true for Knights of the sky.

Though, to be fair: I don't think that they made the Amiga "look like shit".