PC games that made the Amiga look like Shit

[sandruzzo]

Come on! we are all grown adults, that should be only for fun...

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by saimon69

You are talking to broken heart people, that is why

True to some point - Amiga was the first love

But of course it is also about understanding history - how and why events took place as they did. And what all this tells us for the present and future.

Originally Posted by sandruzzo

Come on! we are all grown adults, that should be only for fun...

I think it still is.
Sorry, if some find it offensive or annoying - that was not intended.

[grond]

Originally Posted by Gorf

I really really struggle to see how a more gaming centered approach could have helped Commodore. I mean it is not that C64 and Amiga were known as productivity computers anyways ... how focusing even less on productivity could have done any good, is somehow beyond me.

The view society had on video gaming changed drastically between 1990 and about 1995. The Amiga was ridiculed as a games computer, now turning PCs into "multimedia" computers or playing console games became socially accepted. If Commodore had survived into that time and had welcomed the stigma of a gaming computer building a reputation, perhaps they could have played a role in the gaming market. Serious computing was already taken.

[sandruzzo]

Originally Posted by Gorf

I think it still is.
Sorry, if some find it offensive or annoying - that was not intended.

Never meant like that, I just wanted to get it real! We are here for fun, isn't?

[gimbal]

Jebus, what walls of text. You lot have too much time on the weekends

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by grond

The view society had on video gaming changed drastically between 1990 and about 1995. The Amiga was ridiculed as a games computer, now turning PCs into "multimedia" computers or playing console games became socially accepted. If Commodore had survived into that time and had welcomed the stigma of a gaming computer building a reputation, perhaps they could have played a role in the gaming market. Serious computing was already taken.

I remember the time very well. And I thought to myself back then:
"Really? Just now they are getting it?"
Yes, the birth of the so called "Multimedia PC" was funny and a bit frustrating to watch ... they could have gone for the real thing much earlier.

Yes, the Amiga actually defined "multimedia" from the very start on, when Andy Warhol was coloring Debbie Harry with Graphicraft on the A1000.

But while mid 90s the PC was going "multimedia" and more into gaming, the latter was very different from the 80s or 16bit consoles.
Platformers and shooters were no longer "in".
And the place was not any longer the living room TV set or the proverbial bedroom...
It was a dedicated desk and a dedicated monitor and keyboard and mouse.
So while the stigma may have vanished and "gaming" no longer only for kids ... it was certainly not a gap an Amiga with more sprites or a tiling mode would have filled!

It would have needed something like AAA and beyond to stay attractive.

And yes: all this would have needed change already in the 80s ... the demise in the 90s was inevitable without prior change.

Originally Posted by gimbal

Jebus,...

Hebrew: ??????? Yebus, "trampled place"
Biblical name for Jerusalem before the conquest of Joshua.

... what walls of text. You lot have too much time on the weekends

And you get all this precious and insightful content for free!
A little bit more gratitude please!

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by Gorf

Hebrew: ??????? Yebus, "trampled place"

Nope, just self-censorship by pretending to have a cold.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Gorf

It would have needed something like AAA and beyond to stay attractive.

What 'AAA and beyond' features would have been needed for the Amiga to stay attractive?

And yes: all this would have needed change already in the 80s ... the demise in the 90s was inevitable without prior change.

What 'prior change' was needed in the 80's?

[grond]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

What 'AAA and beyond' features would have been needed for the Amiga to stay attractive?

Chunky pixels and generally faster hardware would only have lasted until the mid-nineties when 3D acceleration became available and thus not really much further than AGA did.

The more interesting question thus is: what attitude towards their market and perhaps even actual implemented processes would it have needed to identify "the next big thing" and at what time would it have been possible to predict that textured 3D would be it? Could Commodore have made it in time (i.e. release a competitive console at the same time the PS1 hit the market or ideally earlier)?

[ImmortalA1000]

My experiences are based on owning a 486 in late summer 1992 and acquiring a UK A1200 on launch day in October 1992. I also had an Amiga 1000 from early 1988 and a C64 from early 1984 (and an ST from early 1986 and Megadrive soon after Japanese launch). I also got a Pentium 120 and a friend got a Pentium 133 in 1994 or 95 (don't remember, don't care to remember).

My friends had a 386DX33 and 486-33+Vesa Local Bus.

Many high street family budget PCs were 8086-286, lowest spec VGA, Adlib for double the price of an A1200 in 1992/93. You can't play Doom on that, and even if you could the SNES port of Doom would be better so it's the consoles that really fucked the PC, unless you had utterly shit taste in games.

Common myths and drawbacks people forget...

1992 486 ISA PC can't scroll shit never mind the top of the range branded 386SX 'high street PC'.
Adlib+Soundblaster above 'high street PC' spec is still shit compared to a 6581 based C64
Polygon type 3D games before 3DO looked like cock. Alone in the Dark was unplayable on top of that.
Most PC games worth playing needed you to either buy QEMM386 or manually faff about with assignments in config.sys/autoexec.bat
You had no choice but to play Doom/Wolf3D on the shit SVGA small goldfish bowl monitors, probably 15" max and generally 14". You couldn't play Doom on your

I wasn't heartbroken lol, I was just to cultured and experienced with just about every system worth mentioning from 1977 to 1997 to ever be in awe of PC gaming.

And as somebody with an interest in pixel art etc, first PC CD-ROM I bought was a Boris Valejo archive of pics, PC wasn't great for that either. VGA is not that great, the problem is the sandal wearing C compiling tossers who published most PC DOS VGA games also were the kind of tossers who had no clue how to make a decent Amiga game anyway.

Budokan looks like some 1986 Atari ST wank....that would have got a shit score in a magazine review. YMMV if you have shit taste in games. Point and click games are for limp wristed gamers

A nice video to bust some VGA vs A1000 pixel art myths for that important 1992/93 period (ignoring the fact no high street had a 486 PC to sell you that cost less than a used example of the god of all 1992 cars, the BMW 325i Sport lol)

[ Show youtube player ]

[TCD]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

1992 486 ISA PC can't scroll shit never mind the top of the range branded 386SX 'high street PC'.

Yeah, talking about myths... 1990 PCs could scroll shit. Look it up.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by Ras Voja

Where to start? Xwing, Wing Commander 2 and 3, Civ 2 and 3, Alpha Centaury, TFD and almost every continuation of Amiga titles.
Frontier FE! Not to mention Doom, Quake, Shadow Warrior, Heretic, Duke ...

You should read the first post as your aswer is a little off subject. He was referring on games on both system and before 1991.
PC games that dont have Amiga counterpart are excluded.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

What 'AAA and beyond' features would have been needed for the Amiga to stay attractive?

I think the Vampire FPGA shows what could have been a natural path

What 'prior change' was needed in the 80's?

Not pausing the development after the release in 85.
By 87 ECS with its bug-fixes and small improvements should have been ready.
(No more slowRAM in the A500 but up to 1 MB ChipRAM with expansion)
By 89 "16bit-AGA" (double CAS mode, 256 colors, 68000 with 14MHz turbo-mode ...)
AAA by 91.

More active software development, OS, dev kit, or like Balmer said: developer developers, developers...

I could write another wall of text with small and big improvements during the first 5 years, to bring Commodore and the Amiga in a much better position and give it a chance to survive the 90s.

[Megalomaniac]

Could "16bit-AGA" (which sounds like it'd offer about 2/3 of the extra power of an A1200 compared to an A500?) have been made affordably to directly replace the standard A500 by 1989? Commodore had financial problems not long after that - would selling hardware that cost £50 a time more to make for the same price not have accelerated those issues? Considering that the ST was still a big rival in many markets, with (in the UK at least) that huge bundle of included games effectively making it cheaper? Or are you thinking they could have kept selling the standard A500 at £400 and introduced the new model at say £700? Or would this faster pace of upgrade have helped to fend off PCs in the US for longer, which would undoubtedly have benefitted longer-term?

ECS wasn't a big improvement from a games point of view, but I think it was on the serious side, so it would have probably taken more than 2 years to evolve from the base A1000 to that, especially as the A500 and A2000 and all their redesigned expansion ports came along in that time.

Probably agreed about AAA though, AGA was ultimately a cutdown version of what they were working on, that was probably a year too late to make its full potential impact

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

Could "16bit-AGA" (which sounds like it'd offer about 2/3 of the extra power of an A1200 compared to an A500?) have been made affordably to directly replace the standard A500 by 1989? Commodore had financial problems not long after that - would selling hardware that cost £50 a time more to make for the same price not have accelerated those issues?

AFAIK in 88 the financial turnaround was done an C= was making good profits again, no?
89 and 90 were an unexpected windfall for C= (and Atari) due to the fall of the iron curtain.
The design would still be 16-bit so the board design would have been almost the same. Just faster RAM (which was easily available at the time at least in Europe) and a slightly enhanced fetch mode for Denise.

Considering that the ST was still a big rival in many markets, with (in the UK at least) that huge bundle of included games effectively making it cheaper?

I think exactly because the ST was still a big rival, this step would make sense, to push he Amiga further in front.

Or are you thinking they could have kept selling the standard A500 at £400
and introduced the new model at say £700?

That would have been one way ... at least selling of the stock of old models ...
On the other hand: it would have been important to increase the share of better models so game developers really take advantage of the new features and not just ignore it.

Or would this faster pace of upgrade have helped to fend off PCs in the US for longer, which would undoubtedly have benefitted longer-term?

That was my thinking here.

ECS wasn't a big improvement from a games point of view, but I think it was on the serious side, so it would have probably taken more than 2 years to evolve from the base A1000 to that, especially as the A500 and A2000 and all their redesigned expansion ports came along in that time.

The A500 and A2000 design took way too long - even Commodore planed the release for 86 initially. They are not that different ... I mean it took only one guy in Australia (Greg Gibbs) to develop the A1000 Rejuvenator board - a replacement motherboard for the A1000 with ECS.
Many 3rd party turbo boards and other expansions from the late 80s are also quite sophisticated and were done by small teams in short time ..

Also ECS and 1MB ChipRAM support do not really interfere much with the rest of the board.

Atari users were always bragging about the HighRes monochrome display mode, that was "needed" for anything serious. And in deed the ST sold in Germany quite well as a low-cost Mac replacement for DTP and stuff like that.
So giving the A500 and A2000 ECS from the start, would have made a difference.

(Also putting in midi ports and getting rid of the useless (?) monochrome composite instead, would have been a good idea)

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Gorf

AFAIK in 88 the financial turnaround was done an C= was making good profits again, no?
89 and 90 were an unexpected windfall for C= (and Atari) due to the fall of the iron curtain.

The design would still be 16-bit so the board design would have been almost the same. Just faster RAM (which was easily available at the time at least in Europe) and a slightly enhanced fetch mode for Denise.

Thee A500 and A2000 design took way too long - even Commodore planed the release for 86 initially.

Perhaps you are not aware of the DRAM shortage in 1988? Of course faster RAM by itself wouldn't help. The custom chips would have to be redesigned to make use of the faster speed, which would affect all the timing etc. Not so simple.

IBM debuted the PC in 1981. The XT, which was barely different (same case design etc.) arrived in 1983. Somehow this didn't hurt sales.

Yes, by 1988 Commodore's sales were turning around, but in 1986 they weren't. The A1000 was selling very poorly. Considering that Kickstart was still in development, did it even make sense to release a new model that would still need a WCS or a ROM upgrade soon after?

They are not that different ... I mean it took only one guy in Australia (Greg Gibbs) to develop the A1000 Rejuvenator board - a replacement motherboard for the A1000 with ECS.

There's a world of difference between laying out a PCB and designing and producing new custom chips etc.

Many 3rd party turbo boards and other expansions from the late 80s are also quite sophisticated and were done by small teams in short time ..

But many weren't sophisticated, and they took their time reaching the market too. Quite a few didn't make it because they were too sophisticated.

Also ECS and 1MB ChipRAM support do not really interfere much with the rest of the board.

True. 1MB chip was was easy to implement and well worth doing.

Atari users were always bragging about the HighRes monochrome display mode, that was "needed" for anything serious. And in deed the ST sold in Germany quite well as a low-cost Mac replacement for DTP and stuff like that.

It was only mono though. Productivity in mono only would have been OK, except that Workbench was optimized for 4 colors and looked real ugly in 2 colors. OS 2 didn't fix that.

So giving the A500 and A2000 ECS from the start, would have made a difference.

For sure. But the original A500 and A2000 was supposed to simply be the original design finalized (the A1000 was more a concept/developer's model).

(Also putting in midi ports and getting rid of the useless (?) monochrome composite instead, would have been a good idea)

MIDI could have provided by simply including a cable - but they should have fixed the serial receive overrun issue first. Monochrome composite was very cheap to add, and wasn't completely useless (I have used it myself when not having an RGB monitor handy) but might have been more useful if Workbench had a proper mono mode.

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

You should read the first post as your aswer is a little off subject.

What kind of grinds my gears is that you need to even say that. Nobody is that short on time.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Perhaps you are not aware of the DRAM shortage in 1988?

That was a pure US tariff problem under Reagan.
That is why I wrote "in Europe".
Commodore produced in Scotland and Germany for the the European market.

Atari made even money out of this situation by fully population boards with RAM, but declaring is as a computer ... and selling off the RAM in the US later.
There was a federal investigation about this, but nothing came of it..

Of course faster RAM by itself wouldn't help. The custom chips would have to be redesigned to make use of the faster speed, which would affect all the timing etc. Not so simple.

I addressed this problem and pointed to the solution....

IBM debuted the PC in 1981. The XT, which was barely different (same case design etc.) arrived in 1983. Somehow this didn't hurt sales.

And in 83 the C64 outsold the PC ..
And the Apple II was also still the same configuration ...

But in mach 83 "Compaq Portable" came out ... one of the very first clones and the first that sold in numbers that made IBM worry.

Just one year later IBM released the "AT", going from 8bit bus to 16bit.

Yes, by 1988 Commodore's sales were turning around, but in 1986 they weren't. The A1000 was selling very poorly. Considering that Kickstart was still in development, did it even make sense to release a new model that would still need a WCS or a ROM upgrade soon after?

And whose foult is that?
C= took too long to get its act together...

There's a world of difference between laying out a PCB and designing and producing new custom chips etc.

This would be only modifying and bug fixing an existing design.
Before 86 C= released brand new chips almost every year.
And the Amiga team needed about 6 month to transfer the breadboard Lorraine into the custom chips ... doing it by hand!
But an overhaul a year later is suddenly impossible?

True. 1MB chip was was easy to implement and well worth doing.

It was only mono though. Productivity in mono only would have been OK, except that Workbench was optimized for 4 colors and looked real ugly in 2 colors. OS 2 didn't fix that.

True, but also really not an impossible task to solve ...

MIDI could have provided by simply including a cable - but they should have fixed the serial receive overrun issue first.

With the right drivers in ROM this could have been mitigated

Monochrome composite was very cheap to add, and wasn't completely useless (I have used it myself when not having an RGB monitor handy) but might have been more useful if Workbench had a proper mono mode.

My point was only: if something else has to go to add midi, this would be it.

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by donnie

Amiga could never ever compete going forward in the 90s.

There is just no possibility.

Well it is not entirely true...

Commodore could simply create single IC with AGA functionality and expose video data trough PCI bus into regular PCI graphic card to be overlayed on top of the video generated by graphic card. This will provide possibility to reuse standard components and provide Amiga software compatibility giving possibility to create new Amiga generation that could work parallel to PC world same as Apple only without insane Apple prices.

But i agree, at some point or Commodore will follow Apple way (so permanent transition in CPU ISA) or simply give up...

[Torti-the-Smurf]

A malicious Thread that could easily lead to arguing and fighting each other.

(some) People are Strange