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#41 | |
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Location: Marseille / France
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WeaselFierce, that's right. And even Amiga magazines were blaming games for being too much demanding. Amiga Power slashed Star Trek 25th for being 8 disks and HD mandatory. What did they expects ? By 1994, every Amiga games should have been HD mandatory... |
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#42 | |
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#43 |
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Pretty much all the games-only mags were guilty of being a bit myopic about what 'an Amiga' was. 060 processors went up to 75Mhz (5 times as fast as a stock A1200) and could handle up to 32Mb of memory, which is used smartly could offset some processing shortfall against a low-end Pentium. The AGA graphics hardware would have been a limiting factor (being roughly equal to VGA, not SVGA), but you could have done credible versions of just about all PC games up to about 95 or 96 on real top-end Amiga hardware, even before you consider PowerPC processors or special graphics cards.
Stuff from 1991 would have been a doddle on an A1200 with a hard drive and fast RAM -there's plenty in LemonAmiga that was designed around machines beyond a basic A1200 that proves what was possible visually, though little of it has the playability to match. Still, if more people had upgraded we could have played (just counting stuff by ex-Amiga companies) Civilization II, Command & Conquer, Syndicate Wars, Grand Prix 2, maybe Tomb Raider at a push... Another issue as to why we didn't get some of those games is economic rather than technical - most of the first PC-but-not-Amiga games were American, and even by 1990 PCs were dominating Amigas for US sales. A game bought in the US probably saw them keep a much higher percentage of the sale price than one sold in Europe through an international distributor - meaning that 10,000 PC sales earned them a lot more than 10,000 Amiga sales would. Last edited by Megalomaniac; 02 November 2022 at 19:44. |
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#44 |
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Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: London
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Sim City for Dos was a lot better than the Amiga version. We had it on a family member's PC in the holidays, they went back to uni and took the PC with them, so I got the Amiga version to continue playing. But after playing the Dos version I just couldn't get into it. With the extra resolution and colours there was no competition.
It's worth mentioning that on the same PC was Duke Nukem (not 3d) which was laughably poor compared to Amiga stuff. |
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#45 |
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Location: Austria
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For me pc games really took over with
1994 System Shock 1995 Descent 1996 Tomb Raider 1998 Incoming 1998 Half-Life (I remember installing CS as a mod for HL) But that was much later than 1991. And (at least for the later games) you needed to buy 3d cards, which were quite expensive. And - jeezus - every 12 months your 3d card would be old and new cards would be 3 times as fast... |
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#46 |
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The sheer cost of PCs, and the need to upgrade so often, always put me off them too Nightshift. If you spent £500 on an A500 in 1987, £100 on a half-meg RAM upgrade in 1989 and £70 on a second drive in 1991 (and even that was inessential if you mostly played action games, though with hindsight probably worth what amounted to the cost of 2 or 3 games), you still got good new games for seven years. Even if you also spent £600 on an A1200 and hard drive in 1992 it was still a much cheaper way to go. You'd have to spend the same on a PC at least 2-3 times in 7 years to keep up with PC games (and I think it's much the same today).
Last edited by Megalomaniac; 08 November 2023 at 10:22. |
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#47 | |
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Generally US made games on the Amiga were all HD friendly and would greatly benefits of enhanced hardware. |
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#48 | |
Going nowhere
Join Date: Oct 2001
Location: United Kingdom
Age: 50
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Is that clear enough for you now? |
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#49 | |
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#50 |
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Join Date: Nov 2004
Location: Eksjö / Sweden
Posts: 5,756
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Don't agree with shit, Amiga had talented artists the PC lacked.
I "played" Myst (written in some ported scripting language so you had to Click Left Arrow instead of pressing left arrow...) and like the rendered pictures (not rendered on PC IIRC). Comanche ran decently in low res. So did Quake after I got a Pentium in ... 1997? All other games on PC looked like shit. |
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#51 | |
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![]() I'm joking (barely, please do it !) but this is one of the game that make me think that it was beginning to be difficult for the Amiga. One of my friend especially bought an HD for this game, waiting for its release which never came although an Amiga version was announcied everywhere, by Westwood themselves, and even commercials mentioning it were made. |
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#52 |
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#53 | |
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#54 | |
cheeky scoundrel
Join Date: Nov 2004
Location: Spijkenisse/Netherlands
Age: 43
Posts: 7,105
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Quote:
![]() Unfortunately with an upper limit of 1991, there aren't really any games that I can think of myself. The Amiga kicked enough ass that my PC-owning friends and classmates were banging on my door to come play games they liked with better sound. The loading times didn't matter (didn't have a harddrive...). In fact they found it user friendly that you could just boot the games directly from floppy instead of having to go through a setup procedure. edit: well... maybe some racing games. Stunts is from 1990, I'll play the PC version over any other version any day. |
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#55 | ||
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Location: Hastings, New Zealand
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SimCity was originally developed on the C64 starting in 1985, but the first release versions in 1989 ran in 320x200 with 16 colors on the Amiga and 512×342 with 2 colors on the Mac. Later that year it was ported to the PC in EGA 320x200 and 640x350 both with 16 colors. Various revisions followed. In 1991 V1.2 for the Amiga upgraded the graphics to 64 colors (EHB). This was much more colorful than the PC, but with lower resolution than EGA. The Amiga version also put stats on a separate screen that could be dragged up and down over the main screen. So which is better, higher resolution or more colors? I tried both and couldn't decide. The colors in EGA are a bit garish, but the higher detail sort of makes up for it. I actually prefer the less colorful build selection buttons to the Amiga ones, which are a bit too fancy for my tastes. OTOH the monochrome buttons on the original Amiga version were a bit spartan. 32 colors probably would have been plenty enough, along with the Amiga's much nicer palette of 4096 colors vs 64. Quote:
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#56 |
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Join Date: Nov 2004
Location: Spijkenisse/Netherlands
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In the case of Sim City higher resolution I guess, it's not exactly a game made to be beautiful. It more looks "cool" than anything else.
I'm not actually so sure that most PCs had VGA mid 1991. Most NEW PCs surely yes, but the ones that were already parked inside people's homes... |
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#57 |
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Judging by https://www.mobygames.com/browse/games/dos/1991/, most PC games at that time had EGA AND VGA support - about half still offered CGA, as did about a quarter from 1992. Not all games have the tech-specs entered, but the ones that do show the pattern. Of course the screenshots on the box were all VGA, and reviewers barely considered what it looked like on a PC more than (at the most) 18 months old, but that was the real experience of PC ownership back then - your £1000 machine needed a big extra spend on it within 2 years or you'd miss out on new games. Meanwhile a 1987 A500 needed only a memory upgrade to play plenty of good 1994 games, and a C64 from 1982 still got a few good games in 1992. I'm repeating myself a bit, but I'm glad I avoided getting onto that treadmill for as long as I could, even if many PC games did look (and often play) better than Amiga ones by 1992 at the latest.
Apogee were a small scale shareware developer originally, so maybe their games were EGA only as they didn't have a VGA PC to develop them on? It looks like the later physical compilation of the three episodes of Duke Nukem 1 did add VGA though. |
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#58 | |
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#59 |
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As I said before, Maxis games were perfectly converted on the Amiga, with a low end version for basic Amiga users and an high end for people with buffed up machines.
Too bad the only game they didn't bothered to give a choice between a low system version and an high end one was probably their best. A low res 64 colors EHB version of Sim City 2000 would have been infinitively better than the rushed Q&D port we had. (And an HiRes 64 colors version for AGA users would have been largely enough). Funny enough, there is a thread on usenet where Maxis ask Amiga users about the SC2000 conversion and many response was give us the full HiRes 256 colors version... https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys...HmRKLdLs?pli=1 Last edited by sokolovic; 03 November 2022 at 20:28. |
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#60 |
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Location: United Kingdom
Age: 50
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Sim City on CDTV looked alright as I recall and that version also works on A500 1 meg chip ram.machines
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