Wing Commander on the 500 (video)

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by copse

Maybe the problem was your friend :-) I ordered from the outfit that had many hundreds of titles and advertised in the national papers for years on end at $5 a disk. I never got a virus from them.

One would expect commercial thieves to be more careful. However swapping pirated disks with your mates was a risky business.

According to Wikipedia, the SCA virus was:-

...the first computer virus created for the Amiga and one of the first to gain public notoriety...

The "Mega-Mighty SCA" produced the first Amiga virus checker which killed the SCA virus. This may well have been in response to estimates that approximately 40% of all Amiga users had SCA in their disk collection somewhere, due to rampant piracy.

[Arc Angel]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

no, it's november 2023 and you're ranting about something that you have zero clue about.



These dos horror stories are a nice cope for the more extremely-minded "amiga fan", but any actual nineties pc gamer would laugh you out of the room upon reading such dramatization.

+1

[Konrad]

We started "late" in the PC era with a DX2-66 (my father bought it for us). The only ache we had in the beginning was the memory management of MSDOS, having no experience with this and needing someone to initially explaining this to us. Leading to have a boot menu which let us choose the memory configuration and the problem being gone. After that we never, no exaggeration, NEVER had any serious problems with the PC or playing games. And I can't think of any friend of mine having hdd crashes on the PC or similar horror stories.
(In the opposite I had one or the other hard drive corruption on my amigas, A2000 and A4000. Nothing bad, the system ran a check-over, but still. Other than that no problems ever.)

I was not a fan of command-line starting games via MSDOS, and I liked the Workbench much more than the early Windows versions. But everything worked. Simple as that.

I still used the A4000 as my main machine when my brother already had his Pentium 133. By that time I didn't have any(!) person in my friends circle still owning one. But I held on to it as long as I could justify.

Still I'm with dreadnought here. I have the impression that here are very biased opinions which are tried to be sold as facts, wanting to make the PC back then worse than it was.

[Megalomaniac]

My first PC (Pentium, Windows 95 but when most games still ran from DOS, from a small shop near me) did have plenty of issues. I needed a complete reformat after about 3 months (can't remember exactly why but probably some noob error on my part) which the retailer did but without bothering to reinstall the free no-disks-provided software, grrr. Then it needed reformatting again when I tried to install Freeserve (a no-signup-costs ISP from the retailer Dixon's) which apparently loads of people had problems with. My first PC joystick and joypad lasted about 9 months between them, though both were quite cheapo. The only game I couldn't get to work was an old budget title (and old Amiga game I never got around to buying, actually) that I should've been above bothering with.

Thinking about it, my mistake was treating a £1000 serious computer as if it was a £400 toy. Was I alone though?

Issues like this were rare on the Amiga, and I can only remember one Amiga game that had to go back, the requirements on the box were, to put it kindly, ambiguous.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by Konrad

Still I'm with dreadnought here. I have the impression that here are very biased opinions which are tried to be sold as facts, wanting to make the PC back then worse than it was.

That's funny because I have the exact opposite impression here, wanting to make the Amiga back then much worse than it was.

[petran]

Originally Posted by Konrad

Still I'm with dreadnought here. I have the impression that here are very biased opinions which are tried to be sold as facts, wanting to make the PC back then worse than it was.

DOS era was fine and Windows up to 3.1 was rudimentary but stable. Our old Compaq Presario lasted almost 10 years, used only for Office without any issues.
Macs were even better in that regard.

But with Windows 95 every time you installed a major application you had to prey not to reinstall the os. integrating windows Explorer and Internet Explorer caused many crashes. That os survived due to piracy, unofficially endorsed by Microsoft to stiff the competition

[TCD]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

That's funny because I have the exact opposite impression here, wanting to make the Amiga back then much worse than it was.

And we reached it again: [ Show youtube player ]

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by TCD

And we reached it again: [ Show youtube player ]

[Seiya]

Originally Posted by petran

But with Windows 95 every time you installed a major application you had to prey not to reinstall the os. integrating windows Explorer and Internet Explorer caused many crashes.

true true. Plug and Prey

[gimbal]

Didn't have much trouble with software. It's just that I was reinstalling maybe every 6 months to keep Win95 from taking forever to boot up and there I include the time where the OS is functional but keeps rapidly accessing the harddrive which slowed everything down to a crawl. This kept being true all the way up to Windows 8.1 and the introduction of SSDs, that was the OS version where I thankfully could let go of the reinstall ritual.

It was unnecessarily painful to run Windows, but the games were just too sweet to pass up.

[Boulder]

Funny how I don't remember the game being a slideshow back then, playing it on my bog standard A500 with 512k chip and 512k fast RAM.

No, I won't try it on WinUAE to ruin my memories

[Seiya]

i finished the game with my Amiga 500.

[sokolovic]

We surely had much lower exigences back then. I've spent countless hours on Frontier Elite 2 on a stock A600 or on Indy 4 or Beneath a Steel Sky without any HDD on the same machine.

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

I've spent countless hours on Frontier Elite 2 on a stock A600

I've spent countless hours on my stock A1200, and let me tell you, traveling above surface of the planet were not very smooth, even on A1200
So I just kept myself around orbital stations.

Ahhh.. the famous Frontier...
If David Braben only added 2 stuff, I think it would be (to this day) my favorite game of all time:
1) Dogfight (Elite style) combat (that could be optional)
2) Campaign... even if campaign is pretty much like default missions (but tied in interesting story)... and of course.. not easy campaign... very very hard campaign... and last mission, some big fight with Aliens (Targroids)
----------------

@All PC defenders

I think you all missing one important point.
It's not that we are praising Amiga over PC (I mean we do (and even you appreciate the Amiga), it's about that we are praising ANYTHING over PC.

I never had any Atari comp.
But if I did, and after Atari I switched to PC, I am pretty sure I will be disappointed in similar way like I was after switching from Amiga.
I am pretty sure similar would be with Mac.

What the heck... believe me.. if I wouldn't use 3DS Max for my living, or 3DS Max could work on a Mac, I would switch right now. There is already Phostoshop and After Effects on Mac, so it would be perfect.
Oh yeah.. Unreal.. does it work on Mac too?
It seems it does:
[ Show youtube player ]

[petran]

after the home computer collapse, players split and moved to either consoles or PC which created even greater tensions over which is better platform for gaming.
You can see it even in the computer press where the focus moved from general topics to more specialist topics. Or whenever there was room for other platforms, it was only as a showcase to demonstrate superiority, eg PS1 magazines.

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by petran

But with Windows 95 every time you installed a major application you had to prey not to reinstall the os. integrating windows Explorer and Internet Explorer caused many crashes. That os survived due to piracy, unofficially endorsed by Microsoft to stiff the competition

That's a massive exaggeration. For one, IE wasn't really "integrated" with Windows Explorer in '95 (IE4 did eventually bring some of the integration but it was paper thin until Windows '98). And installing applications rarely broke things. Uninstalling them later on was a somewhat more chaotic process, especially when they were originally written for older versions.

[copse]

Sorry to interrupt the OS talk past each other fest :-D

Using modern graphics tricks would it be possible to reverse and modify Wing Commander to get to a better frame rate on the Amiga 500? Perhaps altering the 3D view in ways that can give better framerates (consider Doom for the Spectrum as an illustration of one way this has been done).

How fast do you think it could be gotten?

[ Show youtube player ]

[A500]

May I just say that there is a difference between the words 'prey' and 'pray', and in the context of Wing Commander, "Plug and Prey" seems entirely appropriate

[petran]

Originally Posted by AestheticDebris

That's a massive exaggeration. For one, IE wasn't really "integrated" with Windows Explorer in '95 (IE4 did eventually bring some of the integration but it was paper thin until Windows '98). And installing applications rarely broke things. Uninstalling them later on was a somewhat more chaotic process, especially when they were originally written for older versions.

installing many fonts for example, an option some applications had available, was guaranteed to break Windows Explorer main font and text and menus would be unreadable.
One reason I always avoided this.