Speaking of AGA, why were so few AGA licensed conversions produced?

[TCD]

Just interesting that the second best selling platform doesn't have one top-selling game in that year. The Game Gear cost about twice as much as the GameBoy so not really a surprise there.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by TCD

Just interesting that the second best selling platform doesn't have one top-selling game in that year. The Game Gear cost about twice as much as the GameBoy so not really a surprise there.

Sales were probably spread over multiple titles, just because its not one big hitter like Doom, you could have 3 Amiga games selling 20,000 each, whilst Doom sells 40,000 for that month, whilst Sensible Soccer International could have sold 80,000 another month, but that same month FIFA Soccer sold 100k so it won't appear as a top seller.

The Gameboy sold multiple times more than the Lynx and Game Gear was battery life and software library, the retail price was only £30 difference (£69 vs £99).

[Calabazam]

I must say the best AGA upgrade version of any game i have seen so far came more than 20 years after the A1200 : Eye of the Beholder 1 and 2 by CFou!

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by TCD

Just interesting that the second best selling platform doesn't have one top-selling game in that year. The Game Gear cost about twice as much as the GameBoy so not really a surprise there.

Well it is a ranking made by one store chain. It gives a tendancy but that isn't as definitive as wikipedia present it.
Remember that on the same site Amiga hardware sales were presented with a nice table listing only the german sales estimations (in the french WP at least).

The most significative indication of good sales was the publishers support. And it was still quite good at that time, even for the A1200 and the CD32.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

The Gameboy sold multiple times more than the Lynx and Game Gear was battery life and software library, the retail price was only £30 difference (£69 vs £99).

From the German magazine Video Games (creative name ) 11/1993:


Battery life was certainly a selling point for the GameBoy though.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

The most significative indication of good sales was the publishers support. And it was still quite good at that time, even for the A1200 and the CD32.

This is from Power Play magazine January 1994:

This is not representative, but about 40-50% of the games weren't ported to Amiga anymore at that point (of course there were still Amiga exclusive games that weren't on that list). The real drop happened in 1995, but by 1994 the support by at least big publishers was reducing.

[Galahad/FLT]

It was simple economics, there were more OCS/ECS Amigas than AGA. Write your game for OCS/ECS and it will run on AGA as well, write a specific AGA version, and its only AGA it will work on.

Sure, those early Zool AGA type releases were disappointing because they didn't really harness the power of AGA, but they were easy to code up, probably took a week to do, and could be released as cheaply as possible, utilising older stock of OCS/ECS boxes, and at least in screenshot you could see what was added.

I think overall, considering how small the user base for AGA was, majority of major publishers supported it from the start.

The problem of course still was that there was no official cheap CD solution for A1200 which would have meant AGA versions could have been done alongside PC version, or even existed on the same CD.

[Megalomaniac]

I think this overstates the difference - no Cannon Fodder, Superfrog, Zool 2 or The Settlers on there, for a start, and a definite leaning towards sims/adventure/strategy/RPG, which presumably were bigger for computers in Germany than action games by then.

I suspect if you split that list into American and European developed titles it'll be mostly the US stuff that wasn't getting Amiga versions anymore. From looking at it quickly that seems to be the pattern. Looks like Westwood were promising more Amiga games at that time, truthfully or not - Lands of Lore, Kyrandia II and Beholder III all look to have been planned. In Europe, the Amiga was still very viable.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by TCD

From the German magazine Video Games (creative name ) 11/1993:

Well my comparison was obviously UK based, but interesting to know the price was double in Germany, you either got one machine really cheap or were being ripped off on the other

Edit: just noticed that was 1993, i just checked the Gameboy was reduced to £40 in the UK by that point, and the Game Gear was £70, certainly the prices got closer than they were at launch.

Shame hardware never gets these prices reductions on today's hardware!

[Megalomaniac]

That is (if my GCSE Grade C German from many years ago is holding up) a Gameboy without a game, so you'd need another 60DM to get started, which reduces the gap (provided you wanted to play Columns, of course). Surely Tetris didn't fall foul of the BPjS????

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

I

The problem of course still was that there was no official cheap CD solution for A1200 which would have meant AGA versions could have been done alongside PC version, or even existed on the same CD.

I don't understand why they didn't made multi support CD games. It would have cost virtually nothing for LucasArts to release Monkey Island 1 and 2 and Indy 4 on CD with the same packaging for PC Mac and Amiga.

[desiv]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

The problem of course still was that there was no official cheap CD solution for A1200 which would have meant AGA versions could have been done alongside PC version, or even existed on the same CD.

Yeah.
I know I picked up a Surf Squirrel PCMCIA SCSI card for my 1200 a few years ago, and it's neat to have... (And I already have an Apple External SCSI CDROM).
But I was thinking... SCSI external CDROMs were always kind of expensive...
I never would have bought one back in the day, and no idea how much the Squirrel card cost at the time.
It's another thing that I think cost cutting and not thinking ahead hurt the 1200.
I always thought they should have included some SIMM slots for easy adding of FAST RAM, and if they would have added a header for another IDE channel, then adding an external IDE CDROM would have been a breeze.
Yeah, it would have added a bit to the cost, but probably not much...
I remember how simple it was to add a cheap CD ROM to my 486 back in the day...
I never considered trying to do that for my 1200...

And to think, maybe I could have played Gobliiins from CD on my 1200 in that other universe!
(Yes, Gobliiins on CD for the PC was one of the first PC CDROM games I had. ;-)

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by desiv

Yeah.
I know I picked up a Surf Squirrel PCMCIA SCSI card for my 1200 a few years ago, and it's neat to have... (And I already have an Apple External SCSI CDROM).

Had one too, very good high speed serial but unfortunately my viper RAM allocation did conflict with the PCMCIA and so everytime i tried to use SCSI the system hanged up - and i did need the extra RAM for what the SCSI was meant for (mac emulation, zip drive and scanner) so was a deal breaker

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

I don't understand why they didn't made multi support CD games. It would have cost virtually nothing for LucasArts to release Monkey Island 1 and 2 and Indy 4 on CD with the same packaging for PC Mac and Amiga.

But then you would get 3 games for the price of one! = less $ for the publisher.

But seriously, to do that they would need to have each version ready at the same time, and make sure the disc worked on each platform. It was hard enough trying to get everything right for one platform, and this was before the internet which allowed you to release buggy programs and fix them with downloadable patches.

[Megalomaniac]

Those LucasArts games were released on floppies before CD though, so in that rare case where all three versions already existed before there was a CD-ROM release it may have been feasible. But was there a big enough Amiga CD market to make it worthwhile? Not having a CD-ROM drive officially available for the A1200 (let alone A600) was a mistake from Commodore, at the very least it had to be ready by Christmas 1993 to make real inroads.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by desiv

I remember how simple it was to add a cheap CD ROM to my 486 back in the day...

I remember how difficult it was. There were several proprietary interfaces which needed the right adapter card and drivers. In typical PC fashion this was done to get the price down rather than stick to a standard (SCSI). Before long interface adapters and sound cards were coming out with up to 4 pin headers on them for different drives - better make sure you plug into the right one! (and the right way around). The Windows 95 installation CD came with a boot disk with numerous drivers on it, hopefully including the one for your drive.

I never considered trying to do that for my 1200...

In 1994 Archos released a cheap external CDROM drive with PCMCIA interface. It had a proprietary Mitsumi drive in it. BSC also had a PCMCIA interface that worked with Mitsumi drives. Before that in 1993 they had a card for 'big box' Amigas which supported Mitsumi drives as well as IDE and ATAPI (which wasn't a thing until 1995).

[desiv]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I remember how difficult it was..

Yeah, I remember that too, but it didn't last long.
Once IDE became the standard, it was dead simple and cheap...

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

I don't understand why they didn't made multi support CD games. It would have cost virtually nothing for LucasArts to release Monkey Island 1 and 2 and Indy 4 on CD with the same packaging for PC Mac and Amiga.

They did i.e the Animated Pixel and Coktel Vision CDTV releases were dual format as early CD-ROM releases, pretty sure there were plenty of dual PC/Mac releases later on too, but certainly could have been more widespread, but as mentioned would have made things more complicated for sure.

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by desiv

Yeah, I remember that too, but it didn't last long.
Once IDE became the standard, it was dead simple and cheap...

Indeed, my first CD-ROM drive had a 34-pin connector and could only be connected to a certain model of ISA sound card. IDE solved all of that, and the A600 and A1200 already had it. They didn't have the drive bays of course, but that's the price you paid for getting a cheap, compact computer in the "home computer" style.

[ImmortalA1000]

Never understood why Commodore did the 64GS turkey of a machine doomed to fail and not a handheld C64. Law of the West would have been a cool game to play on the train to work. I made a portable C64 using a Toshiba Libretto, it's about the same size and looks when closed as the Nintendo DS Lite. I ran it with C64S DOS emulator written by the author of SIDplayer for the Amiga.

My first CD-ROM drive I bought for my 486, in 1993 I think, came with a bespoke ISA card interface.

Where I worked in 1997 an engineer friend of mine would schedule downloads of Playstation ISOs on the T1 network (about the same as my broadband I have at home now) and then come in really early to burn them all to CD-Rs before the rest of the management started work. He had a side business of installing chips in PS1s on his lunch hour for 40 quid and would throw in 4 CD-Rs of your choice lol. I had a mk1 PS1 so I just did the CD swap trick. I even had one PS1 game with a cracktro like an Amiga game before the game booted!