PC games that made the Amiga look like Shit

[Zak]

Ok, I found magazines from after 1994 in a box, obviously I bought them. But none of them had downgrading your Amiga as topic.
From images I see online, the 030 board that I had should be a Blizzard 4030, but I didn't find it anymore here.
I tried to make an image of my chips in the A4000T, but I think my camera has seen it's best days, they're all blurry. Most of the chips hide unerneath the processor board anyway and you would totally need to disassemble the machine to see them.

I can totally game on a Hercules monochrome PC with PC speaker though and did that at my dad's office sometimes. Anything computer was fun in the 80's and I didn't care for VGA at that time. They had a golf simulator with digitized sound for the PC speaker. You could hear birds singing at the main screen.

[grond]

Originally Posted by Zak

Ok, I found magazines from after 1994 in a box, obviously I bought them. But none of them had downgrading your Amiga as topic.

Solutions were available, yet no magazine had downgrading your Amiga as a topic. What does this tell us? It wasn't a hot issue, the problem wasn't big and the solutions were widely known to those interested.

From images I see online, the 030 board that I had should be a Blizzard 4030, but I didn't find it anymore here.
I tried to make an image of my chips in the A4000T, but I think my camera has seen it's best days, they're all blurry. Most of the chips hide unerneath the processor board anyway and you would totally need to disassemble the machine to see them.

Please make sure that your A4000T is preserved (recap and such). It is a valuable and very rare piece of hardware.

I can totally game on a Hercules monochrome PC with PC speaker though and did that at my dad's office sometimes. Anything computer was fun in the 80's and I didn't care for VGA at that time. They had a golf simulator with digitized sound for the PC speaker. You could hear birds singing at the main screen.

Yes, sure. I found PC speaker stuff hard to bear but we endured a lot of low-spec technology in the 80s and had fun with it nonetheless. I remember seeing some guy play "Prince of Persia" on his DOS monochrome laptop in a Greyhound bus some time at the beginning of the 90s. That surely was something no Amiga could give you. And even in monochrome and sound turned off (or none available in a laptop of the time, I don't know) it was a fun game. But it didn't make Amiga look bad (OP).

[Weasel Fierce]

From my readings on Commodore, they were already doomed by 93.

[sandruzzo]

they were doomed with aga...

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by Zak

But who had accelerated Amigas anyway in 1991

Not me but a friend of mine that was into 3D did buy an 030+FPU accelerator for its Amiga 500 in 1992, so accelerating was not for games, rather for more noble purposes also because, honestly, accelerators were NEVER cheap on Amiga

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by TCD

Doom released in December 1993.
Commodore went bankrupt in May 1994.

Exactly - and Commodore was already in serious trouble in 93.
Not being allowed to release the CD32 in USA was certainly a big setback ... but even with the CD32 sales they probably would not have survived.
Gould and Ali had no clue about computers and/or consoles...

Doom had nothing to do with it.
Nor other PC games for that matter, but Commodores failure to attract more professional users.

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by Gorf

Doom had nothing to do with it.
Nor other PC games for that matter, but Commodores failure to attract more professional users.

Well if Amiga HAD doom at the time amigans would have bought bigger ones or accelerators to play it - mostly amigans hardcore but they would have; so maybe not too much new blood

[Zak]

I remember that by 1993 "Rebel Assault" was a game that many got a new DOS PC with CD-Rom for.

[Megalomaniac]

http://www.dosdays.co.uk/topics/1993.php suggests that £1000 would get you a low-end 486 (maybe DX) with 4Mb and a 100Mbish hard drive, perhaps plus some serious software, and that would run Doom very nicely, though you'd still need a CD-ROM drive ideally (my hatred of 'games' like Rebel Assault aside, some decent stuff started making use of the storage space too), and by 1995 it'd be outdated. Considering that an A1200 plus hard drive plus accelerator plus extra RAM plus monitor would cost about the same, I'm not sure even a perfect version of Doom released alongside the PC version would have been enough for existing A1200 owners to upgrade purely for that, let alone A500 owners. Obviously buying a PC back then meant hassle with DOS commands, boot disks and a hundred different configs, but it was probably still a better buy than a souped up Amiga. A £400 A1200 still had plenty to offer, but if you had £1000 to spend, by then a PC was probably a better idea, much as it pains me to think that.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Zak

From images I see online, the 030 board that I had should be a Blizzard , but I didn't find it anymore here.
I tried to make an image of my chips in the A4000T, but I think my camera has seen it's best days, they're all blurry. Most of the chips hide unerneath the processor board anyway and you would totally need to disassemble the machine to see them.

Can you tell us about the 060 board that is in your A4000T now? What manufacturer?

It is a rather strange thing they sold you the computer with a Blizzard 4030 card in that store.
That card has no on board RAM so at 50MHz it is probably slowed down by the on-board FastRAM.

[Zak]

Originally Posted by Gorf

Can you tell us about the 060 board that is in your A4000T now? What manufacturer?

It is a rather strange thing they sold you the computer with a Blizzard 4030 card in that store.
That card has no on board RAM so at 50MHz it is probably slowed down by the on-board FastRAM.

The original CPU boards that usually come with the Amiga 4000 also don't have memory on board.

The board I have built in now is a Cybervision PowerPC board, except it has no PowerPC, but only the additional 68060. They made dual processor boards with 68k and PowerPC. But mine misses the PowerPC. It has RAM onboard and 50 Mhz. It was called differently though. Ima search the manual.

Edit: It's called Cyberstorm MkIII

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

I think the 4Mb RAM 120Mb hard drive model (£1050 including VAT) here would probably be enough to play Doom, though Cyrix processors don't have a great reputation, ...

The TI/Cyrix 486slc fits in the 386sx socket - it therefore only has a 16bit data bus.
It was probably the fastest you could go with an old 16bit motherboard design, but far from good for Doom or any fast gfx-operations!

[Megalomaniac]

Apparently the Mega PC Plus that I did use as an example link previously was never released (according to Wikipedia at least), hence why I've replaced that link with a more general one. Honestly I didn't really consider buying a PC that early, and nor did my main friends, so it's a knowledge gap for me.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Zak

The original CPU boards that usually come with the Amiga 4000 also don't have memory on board.

That is only true for the 040 cards. But the 040 itself has larger first level cache build in ...

The original 060 card in the Escom A4000T/060 has on board memory (up to 128 MB EDO RAM)

Cyberstorm MkIII

Good card if you use the onboard RAM.
But also not what Escom used ...

I wonder what your dealer was doing here - repackaging an A4000T this way.
....

But as someone already said:
take good care of this hardware! It is rare.
And if you think you are not going to use it anymore, you can archive a really good price for it right now!

[d4rk3lf]

This thread should be renamed to: "Zak's A4000 troubleshooting in the '90 era"
(don't get me wrong, I don't mind it, just find it funny)

Originally Posted by saimon69

Well if Amiga HAD doom at the time amigans would have bought bigger ones or accelerators to play it - mostly amigans hardcore but they would have; so maybe not too much new blood

Dunoo bro.
It seems that lot's of our Amiga friends have this weird logic where, when you have an Amiga, investing in it is considered like burning money, while on PC, they didn't mind investing large sums every year.

Maybe it's because of that widespread tale that Amiga is toy computer, while PC is serious business machine (I'd say: serious pile of trash), and nobody wanted to invest on toys, while investing on PC make them believe they invested in machine that could potently return an investment, but in reality, they purchase it because of new 3D games.

And all that aside, and the fact that Amiga computer is not at all created for the likes of Doom, it still managed to keep the pace amazingly well (with piece of software that is totally not designed for it), and you could play it already on 030, and on 040 was pretty smooth.

[TCD]

Even if it is quite pointless to have this discussion on an Amiga forum, but you don't have to look at Doom to see why people got a PC in 1993/94. Most games by then didn't get an Amiga release anymore. That the Amiga could with accelerators and extra RAM and CD-ROM drives kept up with the PC is maybe not the point. It simply wasn't getting the support by publishers anymore. I don't know about UK or US magazines, but in German Amiga magazines you could read about it in 1993 a lot.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by Gorf

I wonder what your dealer was doing here - repackaging an A4000T this way.
....

I think we have our final explaination of Zak's desastrous journey with its A4000. Probably it was due to the dealer who sold him an underpowered refurbished A4000T and didn't want to help him adressing issues if he wasn't paying something to have access to free software that may have enhanced his experience.

One can understand he had bad memories about that time.

The good news is that this machine probably worth much more than the price he paid it at that time.

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

The good news is that this machine probably worth much more than the price he paid it at that time.

My thoughts exactly.

@Zak
Keep the machine bro, and the recapping, and everything good people advice you here.
OR...
Sufficient to say, I wouldn't be angry at all if you decide to give it to me as a present. I wouldn't be offended at all. Don't worry about that.
After all, maybe it's the machine that brings you bad luck.
Get rid of this pile of OCS incompatible metal junk, and I'd be willing to sacrifice myself and use it.

[Megalomaniac]

If there's a hell, hopefully the guy who sold Zak that alleged Amiga will be there ASAP.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by saimon69

Well if Amiga HAD doom at the time amigans would have bought bigger ones or accelerators to play it - mostly amigans hardcore but they would have; so maybe not too much new blood

Maybe not Doom (too late anyway) but other games and more software supporting accelerated Amiga earlier on: yes.

Commodore sold way too few big box Amigas.
The A2000 was ridiculously overpriced compared to the A500. So much so, that is was way cheaper to buy a 3rd party box like the orig. Checkmate and and expansion board and so on ...
Only very late and only in UK Commodore did recognize this and released the "A1500" as an more reasonable priced A2000.

Users of big box Amigas are usually more invested in the machine and would have kept upgrading it longer and kept ist much longer compared to the A500 gaming crowd - not pushing big box Amigas more aggressively was one major mistake of C=. One of many.
(besides the obvious lack in development, missing software quality control, and so on...)

There definitely was a big market for big box machines ... almost all PCs went this way. And there was a big market for >1000$ machines as well, but these were expected to offer more power than the low cost model - something the A2000 sadly did not.

Many dislike or disapprove C='s initial attempt to position the A1000 as a more professional system. But I think they had the right idea - they only botched it in true C= fashion....

They initially had invested in good software like Textcraft and Graphicraft but suddenly stopped the effort instead of creating a full office suite that could have shown the potential of a multitasking OS for business users...

And so we can finally come back to the original question:

It were certainly not PC games before 1991, that made the Amiga look like shit - not at all.
It was the lack of business and office software, the lack of attracting more professional users and so on, that made the Amiga look like a toy instead of a serious and useful computer platform.