When did PC gaming start to make an impact in Europe?

[TCD]

Originally Posted by grond

I only knew one arcade in Berlin. When some of my class mates were 18 and we were a mixed group of 18 and 17 year-olds, we would sometimes get half an hour of gaming before we would get asked for our IDs and eventually asked to leave.

We had a 'fast food' joint that was packed with arcade machines in our small town. There was no age restriction and often students would go there after school for some fries and whatever the game of the month was.

[grond]

Originally Posted by TCD

We had a 'fast food' joint that was packed with arcade machines in our small town. There was no age restriction and often students would go there after school for some fries and whatever the game of the month was.

Perhaps the reason for the different treatment was that the arcade I was speaking of also had slot machines (but in a different section) and thus may have been more likely to get controlled.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by grond

Perhaps the reason for the different treatment was that the arcade I was speaking of also had slot machines (but in a different section) and thus may have been more likely to get controlled.

Yep, those with slot machines were also 18+ in my town.

Edit: Just remembered the name for those 18+ places: Spielothek. Heh, what a misnomer.

[CCCP alert]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

It's Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat being 7Mhz A500 games rather than 14Mhz A1200 games that I was referring to, rather than F1GP. Actua Soccer is impossible on a 25Mhz 486 as well, in fairness.

Ooops, my mistake.

I checked Actua Soccer and google says DX2-66 and 1995, doesn't mention minimum or recommended. All I can say is I had a pre-release crack of Actua Soccer, didn't run great, something like 15 or 16 fps but it did run. It was enough to see the way things would go in the future I guess was my impression at the time. I did max out the ISA bus options in the BIOS on my PC too.

With OutRun, I always knew an 8mhz 68000 was capable of better pixel pushing performance even on the ST (which is the version I got first) and it was slow and looked nothing like the arcade either, which I did some mockups for on Neochrome on my ST. I used to come home from the arcades and mock up screens from the games on my machines at home, like Popeye on my C64 etc or Salamander on Neochrome. Looking at Lotus II on the ST I reckon you could get a pretty decent version of OutRun on it and my 16 colour mockups looked much closer to the arcade too so that was really the disappointment with that game. Apart from some ugly pixel art here and there and the fact the road and the ground are the same colour the C64 port is not that bad really.

From 1984 I used to read stuff like Byte magazine, the 68000 was a really good CPU, then PCW would say stuff like the addition of a blitter to the Amiga's 68000 probably adds 4x the raw pixel pushing power. OutRun is not great on DOS PC either, doesn't really look much like the arcade from what I remember (EGA only IIRC).

But yeah, the ST was fine for stuff like Virus and Carrier Command, Mirrorsoft(?) Falcon for the ST also had software samples for SFX and so did a few other games I had in the early days (Dungeon Master, Gauntlet 1 etc) so it's not too bad as a second system to the 64....plus the A1000 PAL model only launched in the UK (£1250-1500) a month before I got my ST in the summer of 86 so it wasn't even an option financially, plus there wasn't much to play on the Amiga 1000 in 86.

I remember arcade machines being everywhere in the early-mid 80s, they were in the airport lounges waiting for arrivals (plenty of overseas relatives visited lol and our national airline wasn't that punctual so many 10 pences were saved up in advance), they were in the kebab and fish and chips takeaways, they were outside the confectioners shop too so you could get a sweets/drinks whilst playing the games. Every shopping centre seemed to have a seedy dimly lit arcade too but I stopped going there when I got mugged for my pound coin placed on the machine to reserve the next go at knife point lol but that place stank, pretty nasty place but when you're young you don't expect crap like that. Also the arcade operator wasn't particularly pleasant to deal with when machines locked up and you lost credits.

I never really investigated what arcade conversions were coming out for PC DOS in the early-mid 80s at the time, stuff like Zaxxon on PC looked shockingly bad in the age of the internet I discovered, certainly not as good as the best VIC-20 arcade games (Star Battle Galaxian illegal port, Jelly Monsters, Anirog Skramble) or Fortress on the Acorn BBC Micro let alone on Coleco or C64. I think VGA is the first time PCs actually made it to the top level, although the Archimedes does do 256 colour screens they are not all user controlled any colour they are like 16 shades of 16 colours you pick or something like that and VGA had a much larger palette than the 4096 colours of the Archimedes/Amiga too. 486SX was a nice budget CPU for gamers at the time and eventually you had a viable system to play stuff like Super Street Fighter 2 (the game I played on my 486 PC in 93 when US Gold churned out their garbage SSF2 OCS/AGA ports that looked a bit MSX2 lol).

[CCCP alert]

Originally Posted by TCD

That is if you can ignore the awful sound of the ST for that long

Wildly off topic...Sure the YM chip in the ST wasn't great but then there were only 2 sound chips in major home systems that were better, excluding the awesome sound chips inside the Konami MSX cartridges.

I remember in 1985 the SID was a real thorn in the side of the ST really, it's one of the reasons that put off buyers, in conjunction with lack of hardware scrolling and a screen location register that could only be specified in 16bit words and not even a single byte that made it tough for smooth horizontal scrolling. Some Atari 8bit owners felt cheated too as the POKEY was more sophisticated and it also did hardware scrolling and kept track of the electron gun in hardware for you etc.

If you had a BBC/Electron, CPC or 128k Spectrum before a 520STFM it probably wouldn't bug you at all. Especially as 3/4 of those machines output sound from a crap quality speaker inside the case anyway and not the TV speaker like the ST did.

Not sure I would have been happy if I had to sell my C64 to fund the ST in 86. But, when you're playing new 16bit games like Carrier Command or Dungeon Master it's fine and as a C64 owner I would always choose to play Gauntlet on my ST over the crappy looking C64 port with smooth scrolling and nice title tune and much less slow down.

[Megalomaniac]

I'm surprised that Actua was as fast as 15Fps on a 25Mhz machine actually.

As for ST sound, it was definitely a limitation of the machine, especially when compared to the earlier-generation C64. Still, the ability to play samples for title music, sound effects or even speech (though this was crackly compared to the Amiga's) did compensate somewhat. Besides, if you had a C64 as well, most of the genres you'd primarily want the ST for were genres where ST-style sound wasn't a major disadvantage. When you factor in everything else an ST offered, for half the price of an A1000 and 2 years before an A500, maybe it was an acceptable limitation for a 1985 8mhz 512k WIMP system? Then again, I suspect, if Atari had their time again, they'd consider creating a newer chip, even if it added £100 to the price and delayed the launch by a few months (given that it would still massively undercut the Amiga in both areas).