[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

But were the CATS team capable of writing Lotus Turbo 2.5D quality routines, Beast 1 overland/intro level parallax scrolling routines that race the beam? This is the sort of level of coding talent and developer support the A500 needed to match the little PC Engine of 1987.

Commodore's software engineers weren't writing hardware banging games, they were doing OS stuff. The idea that they should have built up the expertise in house and spoon-feed it to clueless developers who would cut and paste it into their code is ridiculous. No other home computer developers expected that kind of support.

Books are of zero use unless the coder is already as talented as Martin Edmondson et al

I disagree. Any competent coder should have had no problem getting to grips with the Amiga's hardware. I had a copy of the hardware reference manual in 1986, a year before I purchased an A1000. Had I wanted to develop a game it wouldn't have taken much to get into it, and I am just an average coder.

They needed something like Sony's Playstation1 Analyser used by Namco to write Ridge Racer IV for something as complex as the Amiga chipset+68000 combo used to get its pixel pushing grunt.

Why? Poking Color00 will tell you most of what you need to know.

Amiga != C64 simple to hack and push type hardware, you need genuine multiprocessor coding skills to make it do bugger all remotely jaw dropping IMO.

There's your problem. A good game doesn't necessarily need 'jaw dropping' coding skills, just a competent game engine. The hard work is in all the other stuff.

I think Commodore development team members need to accept that as their failing as much as the coders who weren't ever up to Martin/Shaun standards of OCS coding genius etc

It wasn't Commodore's job to make up for developers' poor coding skills. They did provide support where it was needed, particularly on the OS side which was quite complex.

I was a registered CDTV developer, which only cost US$25 per year and had few strings attached. Unlike other Amiga models you had to submit your product to Commodore for quality control before it could be released. They tested our title and asked how I was able to get the loading so fast. I pointed out that I just used the technique they suggested in the CDTV developer notes!

As I said before I am just an average coder. I have never tried to make a hardware banging game engine for the Amiga. But for the stuff we needed I found the OS functions did the job fine. Many games do not require 'pulling out all the stops' to get the desired effect. Most stand or fall on the game design, artistry and playability, not frame rate and size/number of objects moving around.

A good game will not try to be 'jaw dropping' at the expense of other factors. Shadow of the Beast is a good example of a game that failed there. Some others such as Outrun should never have been released if they couldn't make it fun to play.