My Amiga Rant !!!

Just reading the above posts, i'd like to say i too don't think piracy killed the amiga. amiga games that came out while the amiga was still being made where using the existing hardware to a quite a high amount of its potential, realisticly, there where many many many games, and simply the only way to appropriately compete with the pc at the time would have been to have pc-beating 3d games.... now it is possible to run 3d games on the amiga as we all know, but to have beaten the pc, the amiga definitly needed better original from the factory hardware. even if the "walker" project had been released, i'm sure that would have sold a few more amiga's, but realisticly, the hardware was starting to lag behind pc's. hell, if piracy killed the amiga, what are we all doing on this board, discussing the amiga, programming the amiga, emulating the amiga, porting aros, downloading demos/games from back2roots etc etc. admittedly a large number of software houses dumped the amiga citing "software piracy" but at the end of the day, if you are in business, and your market is shrinking, you move to an expanding market. the amiga market didnt just shrink, it became absolutely stationary. for years. i', just glad there are still companies supporting the classic amiga, but i think the old business model of OS tied to proprietry hardware has gone.
Additionally, almost EVERYONE knows playstation1/2 titles can be pirated with suitable chip / yaroze, and lo-and-behold, the new Grand Theft Auto has just become the fastest selling game in history. which reminds me i need to fix my ps2, i cant get my emulator working......

Please don't use direct signature in your post, configure your UserCP instead. Thanks.

[synchro]

You make a very good point about the expanding market and the Amiga stood still in the end which aided greatly in its downfall....I can remember letters in magazines SCREAMING for cd support. Commodore didnt want to know for some reason? ( Truth is they couldnt get the gateways working properly and gave up ) They made a prototype and denied the future of games was in any way cd related.

The CD32 was an easier way out of the problem but mostly only existing games were ported across there were very few new games released so that killed that one off pretty quickly.
Its a shame as the PC at the time was a pretty poor games machine but it was cheaper and expandable.
Commodore got to cockey for its own good. They got to comfortable in their success and forgot about what the gamers wanted and the whole point to what they were in the market for.

Once Doom or 3D sims arrived along with SVGA on the PC it was all over for the Amiga as it stood at the time

Or you could say there were no games left to copy

[synchro]

BTW!!!!
Pirates arent the only ripp off merchants....I watched my lad a while ago playing TARZAN on SNES and boy was he good!!! ( Jumping....diving he looked really cool and he was only 7. I couldnt last 2 minutes i thought......UNTIL I DID NOTHING BUT PUSH THE LEFT PAD BUTTON!!!
And simply walked through the first few levels

I then found it was actually hard to get killed and this is a ploy in the gaming industry. They make games look hard with lots going on but in reality its made so kids finish it quick and then its Daddy can i have another one !!!! I found many games like this for consoles Especially Platforms. at £30 odd quid a cart didnt they do well !!!!

So ripp off joe public .....no probs !!!
Ripp them off.....Tantrums

[alewis]

Maybe a bit late to coment, but in the end two things killed Amiga.

1. Management - or rather mis-management - as has been touched on before. The technology was allowed to stand still, and then lack of finances forced C= to being to market the immature (and not really advanced) technologies in the AGA machines. And as for mass storage, well, C= could have made the CD market, even with the CDTV and Cd32, but not with the 1.3 interface. Risking a digression tho, 2.0/3.x I feel was a better "family" interface than Media Center is today, or a better framework for TV-friendly display than windows.

2. Apathy. Apathy on the side of software houses that developed for the lowest common denominator - a single drive 1/2mb A500. The platform was never pushed. It took years before 1mb games became common-place, when they should have been the norm.

In some ways the hardware was before its time, after all memory and hard disks were hideously expensive, but we could have done better. Heck, by 1990 PC's came with 1mb and a hard disk as standard. By 1992/3 when the 486 was entranched, C= could have competed in the PC market, using the Amiga had they made the base machine HD as standard, and pushed developers. Would it have worked? Well, the PC was proving it could play games, (Day of the Tentacle, X-wing, and Wing Commander for example) and had the added advantage that business software was available (Word Perfect and Supercalc) which was never really there for the Miggy... well it was, but look at the problem of trying to develop a WP to run on the base machine. Yeah, business software for PC came on floppy, but it was never epxected to seriously run from floppy!

Ah well...

[lloyd]

Anybody ever noticed that all Microsoft OS disks are not copy protected? From the days of DOS, to the Windows 3.1 floppies, all the way up the Windows XP CD ROM. I wonder if it was so that when asked, Joe public would say Microsoft DOS or Windows rather than some competing OS. There were a few around at the time, I remember C/PM and DrDOS.

Basically, rather that try and prevent piracy and pump millions of dollars into protection systems, I think MS have accepted the fact that the pirates will crack ANYTHING eventually, and have simply used a bad thing (piracy) for their own ends (getting a Microsoft product onto virtually every PC in the World). Now that's business genius and a reason why Bill Gates is the richest bloke in the World (or as near as makes no odds).

[alewis]

I've yet to see any copy protected OS.... tends to be kill sales if you cant even install the OS needed to install the protected application :-)

That said, ever notice that copy protected commercial applications are the exception, and not the norm. Go back to the 80's, and many were, but these started to become rarer by the 90's... I guess developers realised that the cost of licencing protection outweighed the benefit (especially in a low volume market), key disk could be duplicted on a different computer (mig was good for that <grin>), and sector referencing was often buggered by defraggers (tho BT was still using it a couple years ago). Arise, Sir Dongle (until they were cracked or the app source code was compromised), and serials --- arise s2k :-)

yet still publishing houses licence secureROM, safedisk, et al... at god knows what cost per title... despite the popularity of -nocd and -fixedexe from gamecopyworld....