PC games that made the Amiga look like Shit

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by Torti-the-Smurf

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

A self-fulfilling prophecy, if ever I've seen one.

[Torti-the-Smurf]

But seriously; what good hearted Amiga lover would create a Thread with a title like that ?

Anyway; hope you all behave well.

We Smurfs are watching

Bless you all

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Torti-the-Smurf

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

There is nothing wrong with arguing or even a heated debate, as song as nobody is personally attacked. And nobody was.
(and there are way stranger threads here at the moment....)

[TCD]

The wording of the title of this thread is very poor though (to put it mildly).

[Megalomaniac]

Yep. I'd still maintain that nothing from 1991 or earlier would make me want a £2000 PC with obscure DOS commands and error messages over a £400 Amiga - especially as the Amiga kept getting good new games long after the PC of that time. Maybe if money was no object and you especially loved adventures / RPGs / sims / strategy games, you'd consider it. Or maybe if your work bought you a work-config PC and it'd cost £400 to upgrade the graphics and sound hardware - but again, not if you liked 2D action games the most.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by grond

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.

I am only interested in the period up to 1992 when AGA was released. I was thinking 256 color chunky and a 14MHz 020 would have made a big difference pre-1992, because that would match a typical PC of the time. But did typical PC games of the time look that much better? That is the question I hoped this thread would answer.

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?

I don't think Commodore could reasonably have been expected to predict texture mapped 3D before 1992. The first texture mapped games of note were Wolfenstein 3D, released in May 1992, and Ultima Underworld, released in March 1992. Wolf3D used the same rendering techniques as an earlier shareware game called Catacomb-3D which had quite dire EGA graphics.

Ultima Underworld is regarded as the first 'true' texture mapped 3D game. A prototype that only texture mapped walls was demonstrated at the Consumer Electronics Show in June 1990. This was probably the inspiration for Catacomb-3D, and the first hint that texture mapped 3D might become the next big thing. On release in 1992 the texture mapping had been extended to ceilings and floors and some in-game objects, requiring a 486 to get reasonable rendering speed despite the 3D window being less than half the screen area. At that time most PC owners didn't have a powerful enough machine to do it justice.

Ultima Underworld's 'look and feel' wasn't much different from a good pseudo-3D dungeon crawler, so a person could be forgiven for thinking the texture mapped 3D technique wasn't a game changer (which for the Ultima series it wasn't). here's a video of it being played on a 25MHz 386Sx, at about 2-3 fps.

[ Show youtube player ]

BTW on researching this I found the following interesting comment:-

Shadowstar39 said:

This couldn't have been in 1990. Not only did that game not come out until 1992, but the Sound Blaster Pro didn't come out until 1991, nor did the first CD-ROM games on PC.

Strange how our memories get corrupted over time. How many Amiga fans remember Amiga games slipping behind the PC much earlier than they did in reality?

[grond]

The thing is that 2D games got stale some time into the 90s. How many side scrollers or vertical scrollers or parallax scrollers or jump'n'runs can you play?

Oh, and I do remember Ultima Underworld, it was amazing at the time. It played well on my friend's 386SX-40. We didn't mind the framerate, it wasn't an action game. But I agree, it wasn't easy to see textured 3D as the next big thing when Commodore would have needed to start development for AGA to include any 3D stuff. Chunky 8bit pixels were much easier to see and would have meant some improved 3D capability...

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by TCD

The wording of the title of this thread is very poor though (to put it mildly).

The title wording was deliberately designed to be provocative. And it worked!

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

Yes, but up until 1991 (and perhaps later) most people - including developers - didn't know that.

Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons

In September 1990, John Carmack, a game programmer for the Gamer's Edge video game subscription service and disk magazine at Softdisk in Shreveport, Louisiana, with the aid of a copy of Michael Abrash's Power Graphics Programming, developed from scratch a way to create graphics which could smoothly scroll in any direction in a computer game. At the time, IBM-compatible general-purpose computers were not able to replicate the common feat of video game consoles such as the Nintendo Entertainment System, that of redrawing the entire screen fast enough for a smooth side-scrolling video game due to their specialized hardware. Carmack, rejecting the "clever little shortcuts" that other programmers had attempted to solve the problem, created adaptive tile refresh: a way to slide the majority of the visible screen to the side both horizontally and vertically when the player character moved as if it had not changed, and only redraw the newly-visible portions of the screen. Other scrolling computer games had previously redrawn the whole screen in chunks, or like Carmack's earlier games were limited to scrolling in one direction. He discussed the idea with coworker Tom Hall, who encouraged him to demonstrate it by recreating the first level of the recently released Super Mario Bros. 3 on a computer... The next morning, September 20, Carmack and Hall showed the resulting game, Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement, to another coworker, John Romero. Romero recognized Carmack's programming feat as a major accomplishment..

The scrolling technique did not meet Softdisk's coding guidelines as it needed at least a 16-color EGA graphics processor, and the programmers in the office who did not work on games were not as impressed as Romero.

What's strange about this is that the Amiga had been using a similar technique for years. Perhaps if Carmack had bought that Amiga he was looking at instead of a PC, he might have 'discovered' multi-directional hardware scrolling a lot earlier.

[8bitbubsy]

A 486DX2-66 with VESA local bus graphics and SB16 (or a GUS) surely kicked ass for gaming, in my opinion, and a setup like that could be bought as early as late 1992. The only thing Amiga did better at the time, in my opinion, was cleaner audio output than a Sound Blaster 16 in games. Software-mixing in 1992 was often heavily limited for speed reasons.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I don't think Commodore could reasonably have been expected to predict texture mapped 3D before 1992.

Well Trip Hawkins (EA), Dave Needle and R.J. Mical did in 91, when they founded the 3DO company.
In fact Needle already figured it out while he was working on the chipset for the Epyx/Atari Lynx years earlier:
"Sprites" on the Lynx are always BOBs, but they can be transformed in hardware into almost every shape - mirror, stretch, sheer ....
(Not that much silicon needed if you only got 160×102 pixels on screen)

The same concept was then used in the 3DO for 4x more pixels and 16bit color depths.
Its not the kind of texture mapping we got later with polygons made out of triangles, but by deforming rectangular buffers - but one can still create very convincing 3D games this way.

Did really no-one pay attention at Commodore what former Amiga employees were doing?

"Luchsenstein" on the Lynx:
[ Show youtube player ]

Doom on 3DO
[ Show youtube player ]
(with soundtrack played by a live band, because the team that did the port did not have access to the music files...)

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by grond

The thing is that 2D games got stale some time into the 90s. How many side scrollers or vertical scrollers or parallax scrollers or jump'n'runs can you play?

A good question. The Amiga had so many great 2D games that I doubt I will live long enough to find out.

But they are not the only graphic genres that were used in Amiga games. I love isometric 3D games like Head Over Heels and Cadaver, graphic adventure games where you walk your character through a landscape, car racing games with scaled objects and flight simulators with smooth shaded polygons, and 2.5D or top-down 2D games like The Faery Tale Adventure (1987), The Settlers (1993) and Dune II (ported to the Amiga in 1993). These genres were popular in the PC world too, and still are today.

I bought Quake for my A3000 in the late 90's, and quickly got bored with it. Since then the only textured mapped 3D game that really held my interest was Tomb Raider (the original series, not Crystal Dynamics' corruption of it). When I bought the PlayStation 2 I stupidly got Quake Arena and Unreal Tournament to go with it, for what reason I don't know because I barely played them. OTOH I can play Solitaire on an ancient Windows 3.1 PC for hours!

All these alternatives to texture-mapped 3D have one thing in common - nicely drawn bitmap graphics. This isn't so important with today's ultra-high screen resolutions, but when you only had 320x200 pixels and 256 colors to play with it was hard to make texture mapping look good. Most of those early textured mapped 3D games looked dire. Tomb Raider took advantage of the 'graininess' to create nice looking rock textures etc. On higher resolution displays I turn off bilinear filtering to preserve it.

Nicely done textures on well designed 3D objects can look very nice, but IMO nothing beats the look of a hand-crafted 2D screen where every pixel counts. Some are real works of art!

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by 8bitbubsy

A 486DX2-66 with VESA local bus graphics and SB16 (or a GUS) surely kicked ass for gaming, in my opinion, and a setup like that could be bought as early as late 1992. The only thing Amiga did better at the time, in my opinion, was cleaner audio output than a Sound Blaster 16 in games. Software-mixing in 1992 was often heavily limited for speed reasons.

the 1992 price for such a setup was US$3000.
but people bought it ...

That is my argument: C= should have had some equally beefy hardware in that higher priced segment, but the A4000 did not offer enough benefit over a A1200 with turbo card ... same old problem as with the A2000 and the A500.

a AA3000 with AGA,DSP and SCSI on the other hand ...

But of course Commodore would have needed to show more effort in the "workstation" range much earlier, as said before...

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

OTOH I can play Solitaire on an ancient Windows 3.1 PC for hours!

Well, that is actually really a game that looked better on a PC.

https://www.lemonamiga.com/games/details.php?id=3757

[Adropac2]

maybe I'm remember wrongly but I do recall at least early on with flight sims particularly as I used to enjoy these most, the ones on PC had a lower resolution compared. I like playing the Amiga sims like F117a because they do look rather nice even with reduction in colours. The pc versions were a little chucky I recall

[Aardvark]

Originally Posted by Adropac2

maybe I'm remember wrongly but I do recall at least early on with flight sims particularly as I used to enjoy these most, the ones on PC had a lower resolution compared. I like playing the Amiga sims like F117a because they do look rather nice even with reduction in colours. The pc versions were a little chucky I recall

F-117's game graphics is exactly same 320x200 on both versions. The only flight sim which the amiga version had higher resolution is Tornado AGA, which used PAL overscan.

[8bitbubsy]

Originally Posted by Gorf

the 1992 price for such a setup was US$3000.
but people bought it ...

Very good point, I forgot that. Amiga was much more affordable!

[Aardvark]

Originally Posted by Aardvark

F-117's game graphics is exactly same 320x200 on both versions. The only flight sim which the amiga version had higher resolution is Tornado AGA, which used PAL overscan.

Sorry i have to correct myself. Following flight sims also made use of 256 height overscan on amiga, while the DOS version was only 200.
A320 Airbus https://hol.abime.net/3173
MiG-29 Fulcrum https://hol.abime.net/2471
MiG-29M Super Fulcrum https://hol.abime.net/2473

[Megalomaniac]

Not 'overscan' as such, but using the higher resolution of PAL mode on European TVs. Means they will have only been playable in North America if you had 1Meg Chip RAM, but it meant a better product for European (and Australiasian) users, who by even Mig-29s release date in early 1991 were probably 90% of active Amiga users.

[Korban]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

Nope. Pure Mode7, rotating and scaling 2D objects. That's why everything seems flat.

Frontier was cancelled because it needed an extra chip to works on the SNES making the game too expensive. Not everyone had the financial capacities of Nintendo

Sorry, but that's not true.
Pilotwings absolutely has a dsp in the cart.
Its used as a math co-processor, not for graphics.

Look at the sources of snes emulators for proof of this. Or just do some browsing.
Its pretty well known even despite this though.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by Korban

Sorry, but that's not true.
Pilotwings absolutely has a dsp in the cart.
Its used as a math co-processor, not for graphics.

Look at the sources of snes emulators for proof of this. Or just do some browsing.
Its pretty well known even despite this though.

It's seems that you are absolutely right.

The SNES was much more underpowered than I thought if they had to put a special chip on one of the first game released on it