Amiga cartridge games?!

[BippyM]

What a lot of people fail to realise is that the Amiga was released in 1985, with some minor adjustments to hardware for the a500 (Ram etc). The Megadrive/Genesis was released in 1989 (1990 Europe) and as such Sega had time to improve upon the Amiga's already 2-4yr old hardware.

Either way this is for a different subject

Games on cartridge would not have worked, as has already been mentioned (Piracy and cost).. Although almost immediate loading of games could have possibly been a feature a very few minority would have liked, again due to the comparatively small size of games a HD was almost instant anyway!

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

maybe a better way to put it... Amiga had worse games... we had a lot of bad budget titles because parents wouldn't shell out for full price titles very often. There was no quality control and even the big-box titles often had a sort of amateurish feel to them.

but hardware wise, A500 was no match for Megadrive hardware when it comes to fast scrolling games of the sort that were popular around that time. AND the consoles themselves were about half the price. Nevertheless Amiga game development, or at least quality Amiga game development, seems to have reached its peak in the mid '90s. Piracy didn't kill it. Eventually i think the PC killed it because everyone wanted to play games like Quake.

[ReadOnlyCat]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

I dont...the Amiga was and is what it is because of being floppy based, like it or not piracy goes hand in hand in any industry but it also drives it along to a certain degree, the Nintendo DS was so successful because of piracy too.

Being floppy based is the result of being a computer, which requires easy input of new programs and data and that would not have gone away with the introduction of cartridges by game developers. The Amiga huge PD library of sources and programs would still have made it a valuable platform even with cartridge based games. Reducing the machine to games is simplistic, as Mrs Beanbag said, the market for Amiga games was very small. This was not because the machine was not widespread: its sales followed the Macintosh very closely for many years and by many measures, just the ECS machines were very successful (less than the C64 but it reached a different, more mature public).

There is no obstacle to floppy/HD based tools/programs/sources/games and pro-level cartridge games at the same time. This would not have made the Amiga any less flexible.

Also, the Nintendo DS is not a reliable indicator as more money was made on the software than on the hardware itself. Piracy helped sell more of it, maybe. But it did not help Nintendo make more money, on the contrary. Hardware sales are always secondary in the console market.

Originally Posted by Amigajay

A cartridge Amiga would have decreased the lifespan of the machine, putting in direct competition with the md and snes, plus who wants £50 games!?

On the basis of which mechanism? The MD arrived 4 years after the Amiga and targeted a different public: poorer and less computer savvy, looking for pure entertainment compared to the complex environment of a 16 bit computer.

As I said, this poorer public paid more than £50 for its games. And they sold more than on the Amiga. Not just "a bit" more, "orders of magnitude" more.

I persist to think that cartridge based games on the Amiga were financially viable for developers. This would have made the Amiga ecosystem richer, not poorer.
And this would not have prevented small but talented developers to keep using floppies.

Originally Posted by Amigajay

The same was true of the 8-bit market esp in europe where the Amiga had most its sales, computers outsold consoles many times over, a cartridge based Amiga would have fell flat on its face.

This is too complex of a market to just reduce its success to a single explanation and the market for consoles was very tumultuous with a lot of previous failures (cf video games crash on wikipedia) which made customers uneasy. Also, the NES outsold even the C64 without breaking a sweat, really.

Originally Posted by Amigajay

I found it funny that piracy on the md and snes copied games back on to floppy disks!

This proves nothing because this was much more impractical than using cartridges. Sure, if you were willing to pay for the required kit and invest learning time and elbow grease you could play free games but which percentage of these consoles market did this represent? Not enough to prevent the games to sell 100 times more than on the Amiga. Which is what matters.

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

There would have been no protection for cartridges on Amiga, i can assure you that the likes of Fairlight, Paradox, Prestige et al, would have gone all out to defeat a cartridge Amiga game, and would have wanted the kudos of being the first to do it as well.

MSX cartridges were successfully ripped to disk, Megadrive and SNES were succesfully ripped to disk, it wouldnt have stopped piracy, it would simply have set us all a new challenge

Absolutely, I am sure you would have all succeeded but availability of cracks is not the single factor.

First, there could have been some amount of hardware protection which would have made your job harder and longer, giving time for games to sell before they were successfully copied, then adapted to floppies.
Second, the floppy based copies would be lesser versions of the games:
- much longer loading times.
- no possible hardware assistance (that served as a kind of protection on the NES as well)
- likely problems with fitting everything in memory smoothly because the cartridge games can copy MBs of data from ROM to chip RAM around under a few frames while a floppy equivalent swap would requires minutes and gymnastics would be needed to allow quick swapping between sounds and sprites for example.

It would have been possible for you to crack the games, adapt them for floppies and make them run okay-ish but with just a minimal amount of work for the developers this would have made your job much harder, longer, and with a result notably inferior to the experience provided by an original.

And, this difference matters because more time between release and cracking and less nice game means more originals sold. (Dungeon Master has proven that pretty clearly.)
So, yes, the games would have been pirated, but they would probably still have sold much more than on floppies.

Originally Posted by Leffmann

It would've been a very comfortable format for developers, especially with the Amiga's flat memory map. All code could just sit where it was, and you'd only have to copy video and audio data from the ROM to chipmem when needed. No disk-swapping or long loading sequences.

Yup, and with many loading tricks available: swap large portions of level data well in under one frame, which would be impossible to emulate quickly with floppies. Hardware assistance for often used functions (fast divide, flip sprites, etc.) and so on.

Not having to bother with floppy loading routines would likely have saved some development time too.

Originally Posted by Amigajay

The profit margins for cartridge would have been alot lower than selling a floppy disks, even with piracy i think publishers would still pick floppys, they simply couldnt afford to sell on carts, and if they did the games would be £40-£50, double the floppy prices with no chance of budget releases.
Cartridges were already outdated by the size of the game, console games were cutting parts out esp on the music front to squeeze it in, esp if the publishers tell the dev the rom size, a 2meg cart is what 2.5 floppys? Imagine how many Amiga games wouldnt fit onto that!? Yes later rom games used compression hence loading, but still not big enough.

The console markets show that these arguments do not work: they sold more games and their best games were more polished than the ones we got thanks to the captive market. The higher production costs were never a threat to their success because they also guaranteed sales. These same factors would have worked too in the Amiga market.

Originally Posted by idrougge

The fact that you can't map cartridge ROM into chip memory makes cartridges less appealing on the Amiga.

This is a minor issue which is easily fixed by a simple DMA copy function from ROM to chip which would require only a few dozen gates, nothing complicated enough to increase the cost significantly. The MegaDrive had the exact same issue since all graphics had to go from ROM to VRAM before being usable. It was even recommended to copy them to RAM first to get the optimum RAM to ROM transfer speed.

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

yep... for as long as Amigas came with floppy drives, ripping a cartridge would be no harder than cracking a floppy-based game. Or for as long as they were still able to support an external drive, which were already commonplace.

This seems true on first thought but the advantages brought by bus-access to data are impossible to emulate with a distinct loss of quality on floppy as long as the developers are just moderately smart.
Even if the game can be hacked, one cannot replace instant loading of half the game memory under a few frames by a smooth experience.

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

It wasn't really piracy that did the Amiga in the end, this is discussed elsewhere, but if you just wanted to play games, Mega Drive, SNES et al, let's face it, they just had better games... Amiga was so much more than just a console though, that was its appeal to me.

Well, this is a complex topic but one could argue that the small size of the Amiga market for games contributed to the lower quality and the drying up of the offer compared to platforms with a wider market such as PCs (ripe with piracy but hugely wider market which compensated for it) or consoles.

The appeal of the Amiga was that it was a computer I concur but this was not incompatible with cartridge based games.

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

Nevertheless Amiga game development, or at least quality Amiga game development, seems to have reached its peak in the mid '90s. Piracy didn't kill it. Eventually i think the PC killed it because everyone wanted to play games like Quake.

I am not sure this is what happened and I would love to have reliable (even if approximate) bi-yearly sales figures for all Amiga models but I feel the Amiga decline started much before Quake or Doom arrived. By the early 90s, the writing was already on the wall and it was clear that developers were already migrating to consoles en masse.

Originally Posted by Amigajay

The consoles may have been cheaper but the games were £40-£60 depending on console, which in today's money is crazy prices, i think Virtua Racing worked out at £105 in todays money!
I had a MD and loved it, used to rent games out because i couldn't afford many a year, but given all its good games i'd still rather the Amiga for its games, the variation and originality of its games, alot of multi-format games hit the Amiga before the consoles and that's not taking into account the other computer aspects of the Amiga.

Well, the reason why the consoles made money is because they sold way hundred times more games than on the Amiga despite these prices. Not everyone paid the games and rented, but even more did really pay.

High prices did not deter poorer (relatively) people to buy more games. It is a fact and one which strongly supports the idea that cartridge based games would have worked on the Amiga.

Originally Posted by Amigajay

If i could go back, i would picked an Amiga every-time over the other 16-bit consoles.

Me too, but the main reason I bought an Amiga was not the games.
It being the best, fastest, more powerful, computer on the market with the best operating system of the time, was my reason for buying it. The "free" games were a nice bonus but I would have asked my parents for an Amiga even if it had had zero games.

Originally Posted by Amigajay

Finally no console or other computer killed the Amiga, only Commodore did that by itself...

Indeed. But I never argued that piracy alone killed the Amiga.
I think piracy hurt the Amiga much more than Amiga-era gamers tend to believe but it could not have killed it alone because the Amiga market was bigger than just games.

I am just arguing that the Amiga games market could have been bigger and better (at a cost for us, obviously).

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

Also i think there is a bit of rose-tinted spectacles going on. Early Amiga games were really not that good, when Amiga was competing only with 8-bit platforms and the Atari ST, even though the Amiga was light years ahead of the NES technically, Giana Sisters wasn't better than Mario Brothers. Add to that, the fact that the 8 bit home computers were still popular up until the early '90s, and in order to make business viable (or at least to maximise sales) games were often developed for all systems, so we got a lot of 1:1 ST ports and games with near-identical C64 and Amstrad versions. If there had been enough commercial interest in pure Amiga games from the beginning things could have been different, but there was not a big enough market for it. OCS was already 6 or 7 years old before the games developers found their feet, by then things had moved on, but at least having to compete with the 16-bit consoles improved the quality.

Which supports my thesis that having guaranteed higher sales would have helped.

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

Cartridge-based games would have done nothing for the Amiga at all. Optical media was the obvious way to go, with vastly more storage for mere pennies to produce, and it was the way everybody else went in the end. We'd have been jumping on a sinking ship. CD32 was the right idea, just done badly.

Optical media was not economically viable until the mid 90s. By then the writing had already been on the wall for a few years already for the Amiga.

Cartridges made sense in the late 80s to early 90s. Guaranteeing higher sales by way of higher quality (instant loading/streaming, cf my replies above) cannot not have helped. Maybe not enough to reach console-level sales but high enough in my opinion to incite developers to invest more in quality.

Originally Posted by bippym

What a lot of people fail to realise is that the Amiga was released in 1985, with some minor adjustments to hardware for the a500 (Ram etc). The Megadrive/Genesis was released in 1989 (1990 Europe) and as such Sega had time to improve upon the Amiga's already 2-4yr old hardware.

Either way this is for a different subject

I think this is very relevant actually.
Cartridges would have given the machine an edge on other computers in terms of loading time and quality, also in convincing developers to invest in the machine.

Originally Posted by bippym

Games on cartridge would not have worked, as has already been mentioned (Piracy and cost).. Although almost immediate loading of games could have possibly been a feature a very few minority would have liked, again due to the comparatively small size of games a HD was almost instant anyway!

These "already mentioned" arguments are all ignoring the vast quality difference between floppy based games and cartridge ones and the much longer times between release and availability of the crack. People buy music in iTunes not because they like to waste money but because it is simpler and more practical than torrenting. This would have worked here too.

And HD costed an arm an a leg at that time. Not exactly available to everyone.
I was only able to afford one years after acquiring my Amiga and it costed a very large fraction of the cost of my Amiga.

[ReadOnlyCat]

One thing though: the article is from 1991 and clearly at that time cartridges would not have helped the Amiga, it was too late.

My thesis is that they would have helped if they had been used when the Amiga got released in 1985.

[Amigajay]

Wow a detailed reply to many questions! Some i agree with, some not, but since its late i have no inkling to get into more discussion, i will just remind you, that whilst in theory a cartridge machine MAY have succeeded (likely not as with with Commodores failures with its other cartridge attempts) it would have still been released by Commodore, which we all know had many many more failures than successes!

[dlfrsilver]

Here is the result of my own research about the video games and video game period of 1985-1995 :

in UK, even in 1990 the games on tapes where still big, on Amstrad CPC, but also on Spectrum and also C64.

The Amiga market share in february 1991 was 19% in UK, and 12% for the Atari ST.
The leading machines were the C64 and the Speccy there, with both with 40% of the whole market, far beyond all the other machines, nevermind the consoles and 16 bits computers.

In France, it was the other way, the CPC had 60% of the software market, the C64 and Speccy commercially dead here (non even representative, with no french publisher making games for these computers), the Amiga and ST sharing each 10%, the PC 5% and the remaining (consoles) 7% of the video games market.

This makes me go to the conclusion that the publishers lied to us, (since they never release the sales figures because it was highly confidential), the 8 bits machines were still too strong in 1990, when while you look back, you would have thought the 16 bits machines were going strong.

The horrible truth is that it's not the case at all. The ST computers were literally plagued with piracy, in volumes never achieved on the Amiga. The Amiga had piracy but not THAT much.

Both markets (ST and Amiga) were very fragile, hence the companies saying we can't develop on Amiga only, we must code also on ST to recoup the dev costs. And since the ST was the lead machine at this time, the Amiga got the nuggets.

So in this matter, all the things are coherent. In fact the worm was in the fruit from the start.

The 16 bits machines collapsed mostly because the sales of software were too low, because the ST and Amiga were used at the same time to make money, because the 8 bits machines were still too strong, even in 1991. The companies went toward the consoles because the computer market was too weak and was too troublesome.
The coders had to quit the ST because of the massive piracy, the fact that it got squeezed to its best by the coders, and from then, a lot of users passed on the Amiga because it was the computer with a future. Unfortunately, the piracy, plus the advanced abilities of the consoles and the huge amount of PC computers available on the market, was the nail in the coffin for the amiga.

The Amiga was great, but alas the technology got oldish, and the consoles were a sure way to get the cash flowing in the bank accounts of the publishers.

The Amiga died due to that. The companies could choose to dev on SNES or MEGADRIVE, either way they would make tons of money. No more ties to dev on both computers (ST and Amiga) in a mandatory way to recoup the developement cost.......

I find that it's all in all very disappointing.

[ReadOnlyCat]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

Wow a detailed reply to many questions! Some i agree with, some not, but since its late i have no inkling to get into more discussion, i will just remind you, that whilst in theory a cartridge machine MAY have succeeded (likely not as with with Commodores failures with its other cartridge attempts) it would have still been released by Commodore, which we all know had many many more failures than successes!

Note that I am not suggesting a different machine.
The A500 supports cartridges straight out of the box with its left side extension connector. It has access to all the needed signals to take over the machine and ensure smooth operation of the machine under the cartridge control.

Why nobody ever thought early on of using it for games remains a compete mystery for me. When I looked at the schematics shipped with the A500 back in the day and at the corresponding Hardware Reference Manual pages, a cartridge extension was one of the first thing I thought about...

[Amigajay]

Another major factor, is the main markets the Amiga did the best in was Europe, consoles never took off here big time until the Megadrive and Sonic a year after its launch in 1991, the NES sold badly in the UK, computers ruled gaming in Europe, so i still beg to differ a cartridge machine even if launched in 1985 or 1987 would still have failed or have limited success, game prices were the big issue the Gx4000 and C64GS, NES etc were testiment to this.

[ovale]

While Jay Miner's team had surely designed the cartridge option in '83, I think Commodore never designed A500 for it.

A cartridge system requires a robust female connector on the motherboard. A male connector has traces consumed by the repeated cartridge insertion and extraction. Even the Atari 2600 had one.

Assuming cheap adapters were available or people just didn't care about ruin the side connector, we can start to imagine how it would have been.

Consoles with their tile systems and palettes are able to use memory more effectively. Amiga cannot remap colors or hflip gfx at no cost. This means Amiga needs to decompres gfx from ROM to chip RAM.

This is not a disadvantage after all. Also Megadrive and SNES need to copy gfx from ROM to VRAM and the A500 had 512KB of RAM instead of 64KB. We can imagine similar performance thanks to more space for caching gfx on the Amiga.

It is interesting to note that ROM is accessed like fast RAM so the 68000 can execute ROM code without competing on the Chip RAM bus.

This potentially opens the door to optimizations and speed ups. This is an interesting choice for the developers because the effort makes the code not compatible with a possible floppy release.

If we leave our fantasy go wild then we can even imagine cartridges with small amounts of SRAM mapped as fast RAM and simple circuitry to mirror ROM horizontally flipped to another address.

With these two features I think Amiga can start to compete with the Megadrive at least.

Anyway, we can return to planet Earth just noticing that no copy protection hardware exists built-in on the A500.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by ovale

While Jay Miner's team had surely designed the cartridge option in '83, I think Commodore never designed A500 for it.

A cartridge system requires a robust female connector on the motherboard. A male connector has traces consumed by the repeated cartridge insertion and extraction. Even the Atari 2600 had one.

Assuming cheap adapters were available or people just didn't care about ruin the side connector, we can start to imagine how it would have been.

Consoles with their tile systems and palettes are able to use memory more effectively. Amiga cannot remap colors or hflip gfx at no cost. This means Amiga needs to decompres gfx from ROM to chip RAM.

This is not a disadvantage after all. Also Megadrive and SNES need to copy gfx from ROM to VRAM and the A500 had 512KB of RAM instead of 64KB. We can imagine similar performance thanks to more space for caching gfx on the Amiga.

It is interesting to note that ROM is accessed like fast RAM so the 68000 can execute ROM code without competing on the Chip RAM bus.

This potentially opens the door to optimizations and speed ups. This is an interesting choice for the developers because the effort makes the code not compatible with a possible floppy release.

If we leave our fantasy go wild then we can even imagine cartridges with small amounts of SRAM mapped as fast RAM and simple circuitry to mirror ROM horizontally flipped to another address.

With these two features I think Amiga can start to compete with the Megadrive at least.

Anyway, we can return to planet Earth just noticing that no copy protection hardware exists built-in on the A500.

The 512 kb of ram of the miggy cannot be compared to the specialized RAM used on the megadrive.

In those 512kb of ram, you're storing the game code, the music, and the graphics stored as bitmap (means big).

the 64kb is a memory used by the Megadrive VDP, where you 1 byte correspond to 1 tile (that's more or less the system).

To do the same on Amiga, you'd need more ram than 512kb, something like 2 up to 4mb of chip (for the biggest games).

Bitmap and tile systems cannot be compared on this matter, they are too different.

[ovale]

I agree that the megadrive HW is more powerful being conceived years later. Vram is an example of the evolution happened in the meantime.

So, while not claiming that an Amiga can beat a megadrive, I'm sure the superiority is not so overwhelming.

To your points.

Code is on the ROM not in Chip Ram, in this case.

Compare samples with FM synth would be not fair. A Chip tune requires few kilobytes even on Amiga.

A typical game Amiga uses 16 colors. This is 4 bit per pixel like on the megadrive. Tiles a sprite gfx must be on the vram. AFAIK megadrive cannot access gfx directly from the ROM.

The megadrive can hflip tiles an sprites. Amiga cannot so it requires up to twice the space.

Tilemaps on Amiga are software concepts. Nothing blocks you from implement a tilemap with 1 byte per tile. Anyway, I think tilemaps on megadrive require 2 bytes per cell.

So, superior but not on another space.

[idrougge]

VRAM is not an example of evolution happening in the meantime, it's a matter of parallel evolution. The Megadrive's VDP is inspired by that in the Master System, which had VRAM, which in turn was based on the TMS9918, which also had VRAM. In 1979.
The Amiga's heritage can also be traced backed to 1979, but to Atari computers which had unified RAM. If Jay Miner had worked at Texas Instruments instead of Atari, the Amiga would also have had VRAM.

[Shatterhand]

Just some food for thought.

The MSX was a computer with Cartridge, tapes and floppies support (the 3.5 floppies were invented to be used with the MSX). On Japan, at the start of MSX life, all big companies were releasing games on cartridges. On Europe, the smaller teams were releasing games on tapes, sometimes (very rare) on floppies. Yet bigger guys like Konami were bringing their Japanese games on cartridges to Europe.

This never stopped piracy. I live in Brazil, I had more than 1000 MSX pirated games. I don't know how they would get to Brazil, but people would dump the cartridges to floppies and code simple loaders for them in Basic. I actually got a lot of games that were only oficially released on Japan pirated here in Brazil, at the other side of the world.

When Konami released its first game that was bigger than 32 kb ( Gradius/Nemesis with 128 kb) and it wasn't possible to just dump and load the game on the MSX 64kb ram, people first coded loaders that would load parts of the game midgame, and then a brazilian developed a cartridge called "Megaram" that made possible to load those bigger games from floppy to this cartridge.

At a later point of the MSX life, when games got bigger, the bigger companies dropped the cartridge and released games on floppies.. floppies meant games could go way beyond the usual 256 kb of a rom (The biggest game on a cartridge for the MSX has 1mb.. yet with just 3 floppies you could easily reach 2mb)

Again, none of this stopped piracy, and quality of the game had nothing to do if it was on Carts, Floppies or Tapes.

[ReadOnlyCat]

Originally Posted by ovale

It is interesting to note that ROM is accessed like fast RAM so the 68000 can execute ROM code without competing on the Chip RAM bus.

This potentially opens the door to optimizations and speed ups. This is an interesting choice for the developers because the effort makes the code not compatible with a possible floppy release.

If we leave our fantasy go wild then we can even imagine cartridges with small amounts of SRAM mapped as fast RAM and simple circuitry to mirror ROM horizontally flipped to another address.

With these two features I think Amiga can start to compete with the Megadrive at least.

Anyway, we can return to planet Earth just noticing that no copy protection hardware exists built-in on the A500.

I did not think of using the ROM as fast RAM but indeed, not having to compete with the blitter and display for memory access would allow way more ambitious games than on chip/slow RAM.

Regarding protection, it does not have to be complex to be efficient, the flip circuitry you mentioned is already some form of protection since emulating it on floppy requires either slowing down the game to do flips by hand or finding a way to store flipped data in RAM. When the games depend on data being nanoseconds away (in ROM) with limited RAM, crackers would have had a very hard time making the games work normally without that same ROM, possibly requiring equivalent (or more, cf flipping) of expensive fast RAM.

These issues are solvable: add loading times, require fast RAM, etc. but they make the cracked version less interesting than the original and delay its introduction "on the market" leaving more time for the originals without pirate competition.

Also one very useful and simple circuit I think would bring a nice advantage to cartridges would be some form of "blit list" which would intercept blitter-finished interrupts, steal the bus from the 68k and program the blitter registers for the next blit, then give control again to the 68k, and so on until the blit list is exhausted. This is relatively simple to implement even without an ASIC and would save an enormous amount of cycles compared to classic interrupt driven blitter coding.

Even if crackers could emulate that, the resulting performance would be much lower since this hardware would not be present.

[ovale]

@idrougge
With VRAM I meant real VRAM: dual port RAM witch avoids bus contention.

The VRAM of early TMS chips was just SRAM or DRAM not dual ported.

According to Wikipedia VRAM was introduced in 86 and this is indeed when Jay Miner designed the successor of the OCS (that was never produced by Commodore) which was VRAM based. 86 is also the introduction year for the x68000 which was VRAM based. Megadrive is 88.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by ovale

@idrougge
With VRAM I meant real VRAM: dual port RAM witch avoids bus contention.

The VRAM of early TMS chips was just SRAM or DRAM not dual ported.

According to Wikipedia VRAM was introduced in 86 and this is indeed when Jay Miner designed the successor of the OCS (that was never produced by Commodore) which was VRAM based. 86 is also the introduction year for the x68000 which was VRAM based. Megadrive is 88.

X68000 came out in 1987, but the price equivalent you could buy 6xA500 at the time!

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by ovale

@idrougge
With VRAM I meant real VRAM: dual port RAM witch avoids bus contention.

I stand corrected.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by ReadOnlyCat

Regarding protection, it does not have to be complex to be efficient, the flip circuitry you mentioned is already some form of protection since emulating it on floppy requires either slowing down the game to do flips by hand or finding a way to store flipped data in RAM. When the games depend on data being nanoseconds away (in ROM) with limited RAM, crackers would have had a very hard time making the games work normally without that same ROM, possibly requiring equivalent (or more, cf flipping) of expensive fast RAM.

Unfortunately, the MSX example proves that cartridges don't serve as an efficient protection mechanism on disk-based systems. Market demand would lead to a quick proliferation of functionally equivalent RAM cartridges.

Even on consoles, Amiga crackers (and others) quickly moved into the pirating business, both offering SNES and Sega games on their BBSes and importing and selling "backup" units.

Due to the nature of the console market, such units were both rare and costly – but with computers, you have most of your "backup unit" already for free and all you need is sufficient RAM to upload a cartridge image into.

[Shatterhand]

Just to let you know, I also had a dozen of Mega Drive pirated cartridges. It wasn't as easy or cheap as pirating Amiga games, but they were there too.

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

in UK, even in 1990 the games on tapes where still big, on Amstrad CPC, but also on Spectrum and also C64.

This all tallies with what i thought...

Maybe we forget how privileged we were to have Amigas, most people i knew had old 8-bit machines or consoles, only the richer kids had Amigas, they were considered something of a luxury product. Most parents just didn't want to shell out that much for their kids just to play games on. In the early 80s home computers were marketed as useful for all sorts of things besides games: business, educational use &c but i don't think it really fooled anybody, even though Amiga could do all these things it's not why most people bought them. My family wasn't rich but my dad was a bit of a technology enthusiast so he bought all the fancy stuff anyway...

Consoles were cheap. And we all got games for birthdays and Christmas presents, you can hardly give someone a pirated game for Christmas, my brother had a Megadrive and i had an Amiga, we had plenty of bought games for each, and by brother rented them from Blockbusters, too.

How anyone can think that a cartridge port would have done anything either to increase sales, or to improve the quality of the games, i don't understand. But as said previously, it would have had to be there from the start, and then if we had a disk drive anyway we've already got the equipment the console pirates had to shell out extra for... and then the A1200 would have came out and it would need a different cartridge port because the bus would be different so we wouldn't be able to play all our old games, and compatibility was a big enough complaint as it is but at least a disk-based system is platform-agnostic enough in principle to allow it. Sega did well to make the Megadrive able to play Master System games with an adapter (i don't know what it did, exactly)... imagine though, if Amiga could have played C64 games.

Also how could you market a computer with a cartridge port? It would mark it out immediately as a games console, making it a difficult sell as anything else despite its pricepoint and its capability.

The only person i knew at school who had a PC, had one with a monochrome display and just the beeper for sound, because his dad used it for business. When i went to Uni though, so many people had PCs, and they were playing games like Quake and Descent... of course it's easy enough for a student from a well-off family to convince their parents to get them a PC for University, even if it costs 3 times as much as an Amiga (although my A1200 got me through my degree just fine). Then there was the Playstation. There was no way the Amiga was going to compete anymore, on any level.

The real shame of it all is that we never found out just how good the Amiga was until it was getting quite old. If games had been becoming right off the bat, if we'd seen a slew of Shadow of the Beasts with good gameplay back in 1987, we might have stood a chance. But what did we get? A conversion of Wizball that wasn't as good as the C64 version, and a half-baked copy of Super Mario Brothers with graphics the NES could easily have pulled off.

[Shatterhand]

Sega did well to make the Megadrive able to play Master System games with an adapter (i don't know what it did, exactly)

Sega built the Mega-Drive to be basically an upggraded Master System. It has the same PSG chip (plus a FM Synth), with a Z80 controlling the sound (same master CPU from the Master SYstem), and its VDP is the same VDP as the SMS one but with new screen modes (It's actually a direct evolution from the SMS VDP). If they had kept screen modes 0, 1, 2 and 3, the Mega Drive would also be 100% compatible with the SG1000 (I don't know if it made the chip cheaper.. I think it's a shame they removed it, since nowadays we would be able to play even SG-1000 games with a flash cart). I am pretty sure they kept the same PSG (instead of going for something better) just to keep SMS backwards compatibility.

Also how could you market a computer with a cartridge port? It would mark it out immediately as a games console, making it a difficult sell as anything else despite its pricepoint and its capability.

The MSX had 2 catridge ports, it was used for a shitload of things: Expansion cards, interface cards (for Floppy, SCSI and IDE), 80 Columns cartridges, Modems... There was even an expansion cartridge so you could plug 4 cartridges in one single slot.

Not uncommon to se an MSX like that: