English Amiga Board - View Single Post - Perhaps this is why the Sinclair computers were crushed by Commodore early in the UK?

ImmortalA1000 · 14 May 2023, 04:25

The Amiga 1000 was the most beautiful hardware ever to make it to market, I will forever be grateful I had one in those early days, even before there was bugger all games beyond Defender of the Crown and Marble Madness.

As a complete system it was perfect, hardware and OS together with build quality beyond $5000 rivals. A machine everybody should have fallen in love with IMO.

The doctor who sold me his A1000 was under the illusion the A500 would be more powerful and that's how I got my A1000 for £275 in 1987/88. I was working with UNIX based systems and it was scary how much closer A1000 was to those than the DOS PC compatibles in education I used whilst owning an A1000.

But as an early adopter of the C64 I just never saw the same sort of progress with Amiga games back then, the system was just too complex to leave it up to developers/software houses to crack the secrets of 'arcade perfect' game engines. If the Amiga was sprite based in its power like consoles/C64 then fine but it wasn't, it took some real genius to bypass Kickstart routines and write your own, this was a highly complex architecture.

I doubt Atari would have done any better really though. It's not an Irving 'the financial vampire' vs Tramiel issue here, it's a complexity of design necessary to get midway between SNES and Megadrive performance on a 1984 prototype computer.

14 May 2023, 04:25	#89
ImmortalA1000 Registered User Join Date: Feb 2009 Location: london/england Posts: 1,347	The Amiga 1000 was the most beautiful hardware ever to make it to market, I will forever be grateful I had one in those early days, even before there was bugger all games beyond Defender of the Crown and Marble Madness. As a complete system it was perfect, hardware and OS together with build quality beyond $5000 rivals. A machine everybody should have fallen in love with IMO. The doctor who sold me his A1000 was under the illusion the A500 would be more powerful and that's how I got my A1000 for £275 in 1987/88. I was working with UNIX based systems and it was scary how much closer A1000 was to those than the DOS PC compatibles in education I used whilst owning an A1000. But as an early adopter of the C64 I just never saw the same sort of progress with Amiga games back then, the system was just too complex to leave it up to developers/software houses to crack the secrets of 'arcade perfect' game engines. If the Amiga was sprite based in its power like consoles/C64 then fine but it wasn't, it took some real genius to bypass Kickstart routines and write your own, this was a highly complex architecture. I doubt Atari would have done any better really though. It's not an Irving 'the financial vampire' vs Tramiel issue here, it's a complexity of design necessary to get midway between SNES and Megadrive performance on a 1984 prototype computer.