English Amiga Board - View Single Post - PC games that made the Amiga look like Shit

Megalomaniac · 02 November 2022, 19:23

Pretty much all the games-only mags were guilty of being a bit myopic about what 'an Amiga' was. 060 processors went up to 75Mhz (5 times as fast as a stock A1200) and could handle up to 32Mb of memory, which is used smartly could offset some processing shortfall against a low-end Pentium. The AGA graphics hardware would have been a limiting factor (being roughly equal to VGA, not SVGA), but you could have done credible versions of just about all PC games up to about 95 or 96 on real top-end Amiga hardware, even before you consider PowerPC processors or special graphics cards.

Stuff from 1991 would have been a doddle on an A1200 with a hard drive and fast RAM -there's plenty in LemonAmiga that was designed around machines beyond a basic A1200 that proves what was possible visually, though little of it has the playability to match. Still, if more people had upgraded we could have played (just counting stuff by ex-Amiga companies) Civilization II, Command & Conquer, Syndicate Wars, Grand Prix 2, maybe Tomb Raider at a push...

Another issue as to why we didn't get some of those games is economic rather than technical - most of the first PC-but-not-Amiga games were American, and even by 1990 PCs were dominating Amigas for US sales. A game bought in the US probably saw them keep a much higher percentage of the sale price than one sold in Europe through an international distributor - meaning that 10,000 PC sales earned them a lot more than 10,000 Amiga sales would.

02 November 2022, 19:23	#43
Megalomaniac Registered User Join Date: Sep 2022 Location: Eastbourne Posts: 1,045	Pretty much all the games-only mags were guilty of being a bit myopic about what 'an Amiga' was. 060 processors went up to 75Mhz (5 times as fast as a stock A1200) and could handle up to 32Mb of memory, which is used smartly could offset some processing shortfall against a low-end Pentium. The AGA graphics hardware would have been a limiting factor (being roughly equal to VGA, not SVGA), but you could have done credible versions of just about all PC games up to about 95 or 96 on real top-end Amiga hardware, even before you consider PowerPC processors or special graphics cards. Stuff from 1991 would have been a doddle on an A1200 with a hard drive and fast RAM -there's plenty in LemonAmiga that was designed around machines beyond a basic A1200 that proves what was possible visually, though little of it has the playability to match. Still, if more people had upgraded we could have played (just counting stuff by ex-Amiga companies) Civilization II, Command & Conquer, Syndicate Wars, Grand Prix 2, maybe Tomb Raider at a push... Another issue as to why we didn't get some of those games is economic rather than technical - most of the first PC-but-not-Amiga games were American, and even by 1990 PCs were dominating Amigas for US sales. A game bought in the US probably saw them keep a much higher percentage of the sale price than one sold in Europe through an international distributor - meaning that 10,000 PC sales earned them a lot more than 10,000 Amiga sales would. Last edited by Megalomaniac; 02 November 2022 at 19:44.