1992 386DX Beating Amiga?

[redblade]

Advert for Amiga 4000. I'm trying to find price of hard drives in pc magazines at the time but I can't find PC Format magazine for December 1992. Does any one know any other popular PC magazines in 1992 so I can scan the adverts.

Thanks

[sandruzzo]

Back in the day, you needed 486 processor to run Wolf3D games like...Which was a lot more expensive than A1200. It had to much flaws, that could had been fixed very fast, whitout too much cost.

[Hewitson]

Originally Posted by sandruzzo

Back in the day, you needed 486 processor to run Wolf3D games like...Which was a lot more expensive than A1200. It had to much flaws, that could had been fixed very fast, whitout too much cost.

Nope. Wolf3D ran perfectly on a 286.

[Octopus66]

286 10 Mhz playing Wolf3D

[ Show youtube player ]

[005AGIMA]

Wolf 3D ran on anything.

"But can it play Doom?" was the mantra of the day back then.

Could my 386 DX play Doom? Well yes....badly.

But my quest for a PC back then (to pull this thread back on track) was not to play Doom. Doom came out AFTER I got my 386 (or I became aware of it after).

My quest back then was for better faster flight sims.

So I guess, I could look at what Amiga would play the Flight Sims of the time "as good as" a 386DX.

Accelerating an A500 with parts from the time may get me some way toward that.

Using an A1200 or 4000 (the latter being cost prohibitive then AND now) may actually be realistic, given both these and a 386DX were 32 Bit bus I believe? (DX not SX)

[AmigaHope]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

Nope. Wolf3D ran perfectly on a 286.

I wouldn't call it "perfect". Just "playable". For actual smooth Wolf3D you needed a 386. Remember the 80286 was an ugly hack of a CPU and was basically just a super overengineered 8086/80186 with extended segmented memory modes. Its performance-per-clock was slightly worse than the 68000 in some ways.

But yeah Wolf3D was *not* a very CPU intensive game, meaning it could run on slow processors just fine. A 68020 can run a properly-optimized Wolf3D. This is why I mentioned that this is the one case where chunky pixels would have actually significantly helped the Amiga -- low-CPU games that relied on algorithms that output chunky pixels. (Wolf3D, Wing Commander). Even then the framerate would ultimately be limited by slow-ass chip ram copy speed once you got to faster 33Mhz+ 020s/030s.

Commodore needed a less-crippled low-end system (A1200 but slightly better specs and AGA on a faster bus), and a mid-end system that could compete for the rich-kids market that spent $1500 on nicer 80386/486 boxes, but they couldn't make the mid-end because they needed the video professional money on their high-end boxes.

A good mid-end compromise would've been a desktop case with a few Z3 slots, no ISA slots, NO VIDEO SLOT (i.e. locking out video toasters and internal genlocks, so the high-end systems would still sell), but still having a CPU slot.

[AmigaHope]

Originally Posted by 005AGIMA

Using an A1200 or 4000 (the latter being cost prohibitive then AND now) may actually be realistic, given both these and a 386DX were 32 Bit bus I believe? (DX not SX)

The 68020 and 68030 (which are very similar to each other in performance, the 030 slightly better mostly due to added data cache) were actually noticeably faster than earlier 386DX systems.

However one of the main reasons for this was that the 386DX had no L1 cache on-chip, but it *DID* have lines to support an external L1 cache. Over time 386 motherboards were released with more and more local cache up to 256k, which pushed the 386's performance ahead, whereas every single Amiga 68020/030 card was limited to the faster-but-tiny onboard 256-byte L1 caches. Later 3rd-party 386 clones from folks like AMD added on-chip L1 caches and these were quite fast.

[sandruzzo]

We have take into account how much Amiga was priced compared to 386dx to run same games

[AmigaHope]

Originally Posted by sandruzzo

We have take into account how much Amiga was priced compared to 386dx to run same games

That's the thing, there was no price equivalent for the Amiga to 386 (and later 486 and Pentium) systems. Either you got the low-end A1200 (or garbage end A600), or you had the A4000 that was priced for professional use. Nothing in between, and in all cases you were held back by the ancient AGA chipset because improving the A/V hardware on the Amiga was not promoted.

Imagine if in 1993 the only system that was sold in a store for a reasonable price was a 386SX with ISA EGA card ON THE MOTHERBOARD.

[Turrican_3]

Originally Posted by mcgeezer

There's quite a few reasons to have ~8 bit planes over byte-per-pixel graphics, thankfully (for me) I'd rather explain them to someone who isn't a fully paid up idiot like your good self.

I will definitely be interested if you are willing to!

Though I'm not sure this would the right thread. But that's up to the moderators I guess.

[DamienD]

Yeah, not really for this thread...

It's already gone sideways a few time due to a certain 386 fanboy; who is really on the wrong forum.

[redblade]

Originally Posted by Octopus66

286 10 Mhz playing Wolf3D

[ Show youtube player ]

But was that a 286 from the 80s or one from the 90s. Didn't Bruce mention something that the cheap computers with VGA only had a 8bit bus?!?!

Originally Posted by 005AGIMA

Wolf 3D ran on anything.

"But can it play Doom?" was the mantra of the day back then.

Could my 386 DX play Doom? Well yes....badly.

But my quest for a PC back then (to pull this thread back on track) was not to play Doom. Doom came out AFTER I got my 386 (or I became aware of it after).

My quest back then was for better faster flight sims.

So I guess, I could look at what Amiga would play the Flight Sims of the time "as good as" a 386DX.

Accelerating an A500 with parts from the time may get me some way toward that.

Using an A1200 or 4000 (the latter being cost prohibitive then AND now) may actually be realistic, given both these and a 386DX were 32 Bit bus I believe? (DX not SX)

My father got our first pc in March 1995, . 486 DX66 with 8mb RAM. I found Doom easier to play because it had DOS4GW. Just type install and you were ready to run. Wolf3D I had troubles with because of the whole EMS, XMS RAM thing, but once I read the DOS box and found out what to I could finally play the shareware Wolf 3D .

But.. The 386SX should be cheaper because of supply and demand, more available and you could scrap parts together SIMM RAM on the motherboard. Also 3.5" IDE hard drives were cheaper on the PC compared to the 2.5" IDE hard drives on the Amiga.

But I don't know how much Win3.11 and Dos 5.0 would have cost back then maybe the price for the OS could be the game changer.

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by 005AGIMA

"But can it play Doom?" was the mantra of the day back then.

This still puzzles me.
What people saw in Doom, I will never understand.
For me, it was pretty ugly from the start. Back in the day (and now), I always appreciated more clean un-textured flat shaded polygons like in Frontier, then any low ugly res repetitive texture thrown on the walls.
Yet, all the time I hear "amazing graphics for it's time".
It had an inconsistent graphics! You had semi realistic wall, with cartoonish ceiling, or floor... monsters were like from other game. Total mess if you ask me.
Ultima Underworld (that maybe, even was released sooner), for me, had a much better graphics. Well, even Wolf 3D cartoonish graphics was more consistent, imho.
I agree that Doom had great gameplay, and that is not small thing. But to become this overrated legend , I never expected.

Sorry for of topic.

As to answer to OP question:
386DX beating Amiga?
Hah...

Only after Win98, and after SVGA was very cheap, then the PC started to catch up with the Amiga in terms of "easy of use", and smart. And that is when "started"... it ended maybe in 2005, when PC could easely done anything Amiga could do decade(s) a go.
I love my tint rose glasses, but even if I throw them away, I remember myself at 2003. trying to do something very simple with PS, that could have been done in Deluxe Paint by seconds, and not doing it.
People that speak of "rose tinted glasses" tend to forget how Amiga, above all, was easy to understand, and use, no matter how weak hardware was underneath.
Actually, when I think of it... It's not that I am so much big Amiga fan (even I am), but I rather don't like the way PC computer works. For example, I never worked on Mac, but I guess, if I did, I would appreciate it way above the PC.
The PC is the cheapest, slowest, stupid pile of crap (even today), that majority of us are forced to work with.

[sandruzzo]

@d4rk3lf

Amen! Today Games and HW seems a Race to show How they are good to reproduce Reality!