Who else was enchanted with their A1200?

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by TCD

But... but Doom has Lost Souls.

As much as I loved doom and quake, it wasn't enough to jump over. I spent far more time making music, messing around with graphics packages and coding and the whole PC scene for me was dreary and boring AF. It only got more interesting when UAE and Amthlon turned up. I mean that's not to say they didn't have a lot of advantages by then just nothing that made me want to sway.

Doom and Quake turned up eventually anyway. I mean, I can't be the only person to have, erm, evaluated the quake source leak and had a version running that you didn't dare tell anyone about except a few trusted friends, lol. That was the day the BlizzPPC really came into its own. I learned a lot on avoiding context switching...

I need to get an old hard drive recovered, there might even be the unfinished Warp3D port. That's right, a Warp3D direct version of the non-gl version. It was faster than the eventual glquake port because it didn't depend on the more indirect OpenGL T&L pipeline that was all software on the Amiga anyway. Used the original software transform and clipping and rasterized using W3D.

[TCD]

Right. I just find the 'soul' argument a bit silly. No machine has a soul. If anything I would want a funk machine anyway.

[Karlos]

From the good old days ... https://photos.app.goo.gl/vMYFSoS2yiNRqDka6

The last time I dare turn it on
https://photos.app.goo.gl/K9tR24dNh7gWvTy19

[minator]

I remember reading various rumours from magazines but being rather disappointed when the A4000 came out.

However, I was very happy with the A1200. A bigger leap over the A500+ than it had been over the A1000, The A1200 had more memory and I fitted an internal 60MB drive. I later added an 030 and a SCSI Zip and eventually a Jaz drive. I also had a digi-view and numerous MIDI and audio interfaces.

I could never figure out trackers but I loved playing mods and messing around with samples, graphics, 3D etc. Those were the days.
I later moved to Windows 95 which I was not greatly impressed with, and Win 98 which I was even less impressed with. I later got BeOS and that brought back the feeling.

Still got the A1200 to this day and many of the other bits. Didn't power up last time I tried though :-/

[Karlos]

Maybe I was naive about what was expected by existing long time users in 1992, but for me the 1200 was a great upgrade over the 600. It wasn't too expensive and very expandable.

I did have some criticisms at the time, chiefly around the lack of fast ram by default. I still stand by that. The upgrade from 68000 7MHz to a full speed 68020 14MHz would've been much more impactful. You get more chip ram freed up for games etc and you can do twice as much processing per unit time. This has been thrashed to death elsewhere and became moot as soon as I accelerated the machine.

[Lilura]

Originally Posted by Karlos

As much as I loved doom and quake, it wasn't enough to jump over. I spent far more time making music, messing around with graphics packages and coding and the whole PC scene for me was dreary and boring AF.

That's great, but some of us are only computer-gamers. I am a life-time computer-gamer. Sad, I know.

It's not just Doom of 1993: VGA games began smashing Amiga games to pieces in 1991. The Amiga only had 4 years to shine. 4 great years, that is. Best computer-game memories I have. But the A1200 AGA years were not the Golden Age of Amiga gaming.

I only mentioned Doom because that was the Killer App of 1993 that most people know about.

But IBM PC was getting GOAT games before Doom. Consider:

M1 Tank Platoon 1989: Best on PC.
MechWarrior 1989: Not on Amiga.
Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon 1990: Best on PC.
Red Baron 1990: Best on PC.
Sid Meier's Civilization 1991: Best on PC.
Dune 2 1992: Best on PC.
Street Fighter 2 1992: Best on PC.
Ultima Underworld 1992: Not on Amiga.
Wolfenstein 3D 1992: Best on PC.
Mortal Kombat 1-3 1993-95: Best on PC.
Strike Commander 1993: Best on PC.
IndyCar Racing 1993: Best on PC.
Master of Orion 1993: Not on Amiga.

Are these games "as dreary and boring AF" to you? That is a small sample of a massive list that could be posted.

After Doom and pre-Quake:

WarCraft 1994: Best on PC.
X-COM UFO Defense 1994: Best on PC.
NASCAR Racing 1994: Best on PC.
System Shock 1994: Not on Amiga.
Master of Magic 1994: Not on Amiga.
Command & Conquer 1995: Not on Amiga.
Sid Meier's Colonization 1994: Best on PC.

Again, small sample. A very small sample.

I won't post a sample list of PC games of the Quake-era... it isn't fair because... the Amiga was not a frontrunner any more.

Quake came out in 1996: shifted around several thousand Gouraud-shaded polygons while maintaining 40 FPS at 640x480 resolution on Pentium 100s with 16 megs of RAM.

I am ignorant of Quake on the Amiga because by that time I had largely moved on from the Amiga. Can you tell me how Quake performed on the Amiga in 1996? Or what year it was that Quake was better on Amiga than on PC?

[Karlos]

Well, that rather depends. The official quake release needed the fastest 060 you could get your hands on to be playable. RTG v AGA was not as big a deal as you might expect there simply because the engine was so compute bound. In fact, there were examples where AGA outperformed RTG where the graphics card bus (e.g. older Zorro 2) was slower than chip ram for writes.

However if you had a PPC equipped accelerator, things were a bit different. There were a few unofficial quake ports for both PowerUp and WarpUp. I was able to run quake at around 30+ fps on AGA with those. With a BVisionPPC, CVisionPPC or the GRexx and a PCI whatever-you-want-but-usually-voodoo graphics card, you got the benefit of much faster video ram access. And as soon as the quake sources became officially available, there were GL versions in pretty short order. Ironically they were slower at lower resolution but the difference was you could crank up the resolution ans have your filtering and what not.

I had no difficulty finishing quake on that 1200.

[Amigajay]

Don’t feed the my PC that i have to update every year will beat your system from xx year troll Karlos, otherwise you will have another A1200 thread with Hammer bearing down on it!

[Lilura]

Yes, but what year was that? Also, my benchmarks are based on the original software-rendered Quake of 1996, not hardware-accelerated GLQuake.

[Lilura]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

Don’t feed the my PC that i have to update every year will beat your system from xx year troll Karlos, otherwise you will have another A1200 thread with Hammer bearing down on it!

And yet, the Amiga that runs his Quake is an upgraded one. Seems you might be the troll.

[Karlos]

I said the PC scene was dreary and boring AF to me, not that it didn't have plenty of quality games* but primarily gaming was not my interest. PCs, in those days, were just not fun to use. Everything felt like a massive pain in the arse. I did try the early version of OctaMED for windows but the latency was just shocking.

*In part, I wasn't a huge fan of the endless slew of always "bigger and better gfx but never different" games that was the precambrian explosion of FPS in the middle to late 90s. A few standout exceptions were Duke 3D, MDK and Half Life.

I enjoyed quake a lot, in part because it was so moddable and hacking around in QuakeC was as much fun as playing it.

[grond]

Originally Posted by Lilura

That's great, but some of us are only computer-gamers. I am a life-time computer-gamer. Sad, I know.

Not sad if you are aware of the fact.

Also not much of a loss for the Amiga back in the day. The Amiga's future would have been in the power computing audience, not in the A500-floppy booting audience.

It's not just Doom of 1993: VGA games began smashing Amiga games to pieces in 1991.

We have the "Which PC games made the Amiga look like SHIT in 1992?"-thread for that. I point all this out while agreeing with you that the PC was the more attractive gaming platform starting from about 1991/92 (if you had very all-standard PC hardware and didn't have to tweak MSDOS startup files for a game to run).

[Lilura]

Originally Posted by Karlos

PCs, in those days, were just not fun to use. Everything felt like a massive pain in the arse.

I can agree with that 100%.

*In part, I wasn't a huge fan of the endless slew of always "bigger and better gfx but never different" games that was the precambrian explosion of FPS in the middle to late 90s. A few standout exceptions were Duke 3D, MDK and Half Life.

I'd say Half-Life didn't break rock-hard ground like Quake did. It was just tilling the soil and cinematizing.

I wasn't a fan of the FPS-era either, which is why I quoted a slew of PC games from different genre, with which the A1200 could not compete. The VGA PC was even getting platformers and shoot 'em ups as early as 1991 that were competing with Amiga variants.

In respect to Amiga software and OS, I do miss those days. Only got WinUAE to relive them.

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by Lilura

Yes, but what year was that? Also, my benchmarks are based on the original software-rendered Quake of 1996, not hardware-accelerated GLQuake.

Well, I'm pretty sure I was playing my own *cough* 68K build in 1997 (slideshow extreme on 040) and then on PPC in 1998. These were software rendered.

Later, I am not exactly sure when, I had the BVisionPPC graphics card and an early version of Warp3D. I started a version that used the pure software pipeline except for the rasterization stage. I think that was based on the official GPL code release though, so it must've been around 1999.

[Karlos]

I'd say Half-Life didn't break rock-hard ground like Quake did. It was just tilling the soil and cinematizing.

Quake was a technically ground breaking (and Half Life wouldn't exist without it) engine with the full 6DOF (but, was this before or after descent?), but the game itself wasn't that special. It was Doom but slower and with fewer things to kill. I know it was intended to be something completely different originally but development was fraught and tore id apart by the end of it. Ironically, I do enjoy the jarring end result with the different dimension themes.

The separation of engine and game was pretty special especially with the scriptability, but equally Duke had been there and done that too.

Half Life, in my opinion, was a much better game because of the immersive experience, puzzles and a decent storyline. Too many games at that time didn't put much thought into this.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Karlos

Quake was a technically ground breaking (and Half Life wouldn't exist without it) engine with the full 6DOF (but, was this before or after descent?)

Descent was 1995, so after Descent.

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by Lilura

And yet, the Amiga that runs his Quake is an upgraded one. Seems you might be the troll.

I think this is a fair comment - no unexpanded classic Amiga could hope to run Quake anyway. Equally, no 386 PC could either.

I think the minimum specs for the official Clickboom release were 8MB fast RAM, 68020, 68882 and AGA - e.g. a bare minimum trapdoor expansion with FPU. There's no question that is an utterly unplayable configuration anyway.

To actually *play* the game, you needed a 68060, preferably overclocked and significantly more RAM to avoid having to stream assets into memory during play. I'd say 32MB or 64MB is a realistic minimum to that end.

The official version was far too slow on my 68040 at any resolution/pixelmode.

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by TCD

Descent was 1995, so after Descent.

Thanks. I thought so, but you know, I'm getting old.

[StevenJGore]

Absolutely loved my A1200 and CD32 at the time, and still do. Amazing machines, jawdropping for me at the time of release. I quickly upgraded my A1200 with an Apollo 1220 (full 28Mhz 68020 and 4MB Fast RAM) and a 120MB hard drive, and my CD32 with an FMV module.

My A1200 lasted as my main machine until 1999 when the practicalities of university coursework (I needed to use AutoCAD for my engineering degree) and seeing Half-Life made me move over to the PC.

Now, my CM4 has reinvigorated it (plus snazzy new black A1200.net case and keys) and I still regularly use it. I just don't understand any negativity towards it.

[HornBeamSoft]

enchanted? ye three months. after that DOOM come.