Atari ST isn't to blame, multiplatform development is.

[Overlord]

Originally Posted by Akira

My A600 came with a 2.5" HD already in it. So did a few A1200,s most A4000/3000 combos, etc.
I don't really get your point here. I mean, there's plenty of shit that killed the Amiga, but I don't think the PC was any better in this particular scenario. Both machines were upgradeable, and both came with or without certain things from factory.

I never bought a BRAND PC so I always built mine, meaning, EVERYTHING I put in it was optional/up to me.

Which is fine for people like us who are computer geeks. Even in 1993, the last big year for the Amiga, it's difficult to argue it wasn't falling behind. 32 bit consoles were appearing with more sophisticated games and PC's were starting to corner the market for more serious users.

Now, if Amiga had open hardware architecture and could have taken Open GL and 3dFX cards, the history could have been very different. 2Mb of RAM was starting to get a bit weedy in 1993 when PC's had twice as much and had 50Mhz processors and 40 meg 3.5 hard disks as standard, not to mention 16 bit sound.

[sokolovic]

http://www.sunnyside.homelinux.org/s...uary_1993.html

For a 486DX/50, 1.2Mb RAM and 42Mb HD, with a VGA monitor (and, apparently, no sound card), price was 1050£.

I don't find an Amiga price list on amr for february 1994 to make a comparison thought.

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

I don't find an Amiga price list on amr for february 1994 to make a comparison thought.

But you can't compare a 1200 with a 50Mhz 486DX. They are in completely different leagues.

As Overlord said, the Amiga just fell behind.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by Akira

But you can't compare a 1200 with a 50Mhz 486DX. They are in completely different leagues.

As Overlord said, the Amiga just fell behind.

Yeah, I was speaking of an expanded 1200.

So I've managed to find an old french amiga commercial from november 1993 (the magazine didn't existe before):
Price are in french francs :
http://download.abandonware.org/maga...0Page%2003.jpg

An A1200/40Mb HD + 1230 Turbo 68030/40Mhz was 880 pounds.
But, you still have to buy a monitor in case you didn't want to plug it on the TV.
And an A1200 + 68030/50Mhz + 4Mb extra ram was 1180 pounds

PC seems to be more competitive.

(I have used this website to convert money in february 1993 standards http://fxtop.com/fr/historique-taux-...btnOK=Chercher)

[donnie]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

Because the budget Amigas were mainly for playing games out of the box, they didnt want to keep spending money on hardware every year like PC users, you cant blame Amiga owners for not moving the platform forward, its like blaming Megadrive owners for all not buying a MegaCD addon so everyone can have cd audio and cheaper games on disc.

Most Amiga owners didnt care for buying an expensive hdd back then, the developers backed this up with the majority of games not being hdd installable.

Budget Amigas were meant to owned like a console, owned and played for 5-6 years and then traded in for the next model, not upgraded like a PC.

nailed it. I agree 100%

[Samurai_Crow]

Originally Posted by Akira

But you can't compare a 1200 with a 50Mhz 486DX. They are in completely different leagues.

As Overlord said, the Amiga just fell behind.

At 50 MHz it would either be a 586 or a 486DX2 depending on the memory bus. Chunky screenmodes made the difference on the PC. Either way it was a match for the 68040 though.

[CCCP alert]

Looks like this is a bit of a hot topic over the decades.

The Lotus games are the only dual development I know of that produced AAA quality development on BOTH platforms. Clearly the existence of the ST is not to blame. Talented people can make it work, most people making the games on either were not this talented.

For every Shadow of the Beast 1 there is a Lotus success story. Wrath of the Demon ST is what that game should have turned out like on the ST technically.

Gauntlet 2 is nothing more than an ST emulator.

People seem to think ST owners had it easy too, most games on both systems were not remotely high quality developments. Demand exceeded the supply of truly talented people in the 16bit computer wars era.

Neither the ST or Amiga 500 sold that much in total compared to even the VCS or combined sales of C64 and C128. Like Julian Rignall says, the 16bit computer era was niche on the world wide scale. They would have been even more niche had NEC launched the PC Engine in 1988 in PAL territiories and the USA, very niche. Somebody would notice if MegaDrive games ran at a choppy 18fps and half the possible colours were never used on screen, on the Amiga it was a storm in a teacup really.

The solution to not wasting your wages on rubbish developments, dual or otherwise, was simple, small adverts for 'disk swapping contacts'. I never had pirate games before I had an Amiga, it was a sickness by the late 80s and I was not going to spend my hard earned cash on rubbish. I bought Lotus II, didn't buy Chase HQ after seeing both for free. If less rubbish was put on the shelves fewer people would have turned to piracy. It's 100% down to the publisher's greed, nothing more.

Shaun Southern is proof dual development does not have to produce mediocre rubbish on both, it can be exceptional 'best of the best' quality on both. Writing bad code, releasing crap conversions, these exist because of greed and lack of talent being the norm for 16bit home computer games. Seeing as nobody wrote a blitter based polygon routine commercially in the A500 days (Elite runs twice as fast on a 14mhz A500 so how is that blitter based polygons?) so you can blame Commodore or the NTSC TV standard for 7mhz CPU, 8mhz <> TV standard pixel clock alignment easily.

[VladR]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

They wanted to have TFX, Inferno, Magic Carpet, Day of the Tentacle or Frontier First encounters to works smoothly on unexpanded A1200 with only floppies. This is maybe the reason those games never had been released....

Oh Yeah, Magic Carpet would totally work on A1200!

But only as a turn-based strategy

Real-time deformable terrain, 8 AI opponents casting spells left&right, hundreds of enemies (each with its own AI and pathfinding), hundred balls of mana rolling down the terrain with realistic physics (bouncing, speed, gravity, etc.)

There were levels that were so complex (I finished all 50 levels of it), they were unplayable on 486DX2-66 MHz (even though you technically could execute and somewhat play the game on 386 - just not very far) due to single-digit framedrops.

As in, you needed a Pentium to run them because of the insane carnage going on.


A1200 couldn't pull off Magic Carpet if it was 8-way 2D scrolling game in more than 1-2 fps. Just the amount of AI this game has to run is orders of magnitude above the sheer horse CPU power required. Forget about 3D deformable terrain, physics, etc....

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by CCCP alert

For every Shadow of the Beast 1 there is a Lotus success story.

Wait what was wrong with SOTB1? I loved that game.

[Megalomaniac]

I think he's talking about the ST version of Shadow of the Beast being rubbish, whereas the ST versions of the Lotus games (and ST Wrath of the Demon) aren't.

Not sure who ever thought Elite was using the blitter though? And aren't Gunship 2000 and F/A-18 Interceptor among the fastest Amiga flight sims? Considering that they didn't have ST versions, I'd imagine both used the blitter to some extent?

Magic Carpet couldn't've been done at a decent speed on an A1200, but maybe on an 040, which could have been economical if enough have sold. Day of the Tentacle is probably the only one of those I'd see running well on a stock A1200 (though even that recommends a 386 on the PC)

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

Day of the Tentacle is probably the only one of those I'd see running well on a stock A1200 (though even that recommends a 386 on the PC)

With the 256 color backgrounds I can imagine that it would have been quite unplayable without a HD. Since the game could be played (badly) on a 286 I think the other problem might be RAM (the DOS version is 4 MB minimum). But out of that list it is the one that should be doable on a stock A1200.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by CCCP alert

Looks like this is a bit of a hot topic over the decades.

The Lotus games are the only dual development I know of that produced AAA quality development on BOTH platforms. Clearly the existence of the ST is not to blame. Talented people can make it work, most people making the games on either were not this talented.

Wrong. Ocean developpement first on Amiga, and 2 weeks later started coding the ST, they converted the hardware routines to software routines.

Pand and Toki spring to mind, look how technically good they were on both machine. Giving the maximum on Amiga, and the best possible on Atari ST.

For every Shadow of the Beast 1 there is a Lotus success story. Wrath of the Demon ST is what that game should have turned out like on the ST technically.

Wrath is complex, but not as much as Beast.

Gauntlet 2 is nothing more than an ST emulator.

I don't think Richard Costello did a straight port on that one.

People seem to think ST owners had it easy too, most games on both systems were not remotely high quality developments. Demand exceeded the supply of truly talented people in the 16bit computer wars era.

The ST has much more bad softwares than the Amiga, hands up.

Neither the ST or Amiga 500 sold that much in total compared to even the VCS or combined sales of C64 and C128. Like Julian Rignall says, the 16bit computer era was niche on the world wide scale.

100% agree. The 16 bits were restrained by the 8 bits computers. Shame.

They would have been even more niche had NEC launched the PC Engine in 1988 in PAL territiories and the USA, very niche.

The only country were the PC engine was officially imported is France.

The company behind was SODIPENG (PC Engine distribution Company).

Somebody would notice if MegaDrive games ran at a choppy 18fps and half the possible colours were never used on screen, on the Amiga it was a storm in a teacup really.

Sure.

The solution to not wasting your wages on rubbish developments, dual or otherwise, was simple, small adverts for 'disk swapping contacts'. I never had pirate games before I had an Amiga, it was a sickness by the late 80s and I was not going to spend my hard earned cash on rubbish. I bought Lotus II, didn't buy Chase HQ after seeing both for free. If less rubbish was put on the shelves fewer people would have turned to piracy. It's 100% down to the publisher's greed, nothing more.

I agree here as well. the games were very expensive, and we had to carefully choose our softwares. I bought at that time only the best softwares.

Shaun Southern is proof dual development does not have to produce mediocre rubbish on both, it can be exceptional 'best of the best' quality on both.

Pierre Adane told me that for him shoving crap games by starting on ST and then porting on Amiga was an utter bullshit idea. Because the ST is weaker and it's way too complicated to refactor the code for the Amiga and make good use of the hardware to get better sprites and scrolling.

Parallel coding on both machine starting with the Amiga is the better way.

Writing bad code, releasing crap conversions, these exist because of greed and lack of talent being the norm for 16bit home computer games.

Not greed. Stupidity. Because by doing a correct ST version and a shit amiga version that no one wants to buy, you harmed as a publisher your sales.

It's better to make a good Amiga and ST version and sell 50.000 copies on each machine, than doing a correct ST version and a shite Amiga version, selling 20.000 copies on ST and 10-15.000 on Amiga.

Seeing as nobody wrote a blitter based polygon routine commercially in the A500 days (Elite runs twice as fast on a 14mhz A500 so how is that blitter based polygons?) so you can blame Commodore or the NTSC TV standard for 7mhz CPU, 8mhz <> TV standard pixel clock alignment easily.

Jez San told me on youtube that 98% of the 3D games use ST code running on Amiga 'straight'. But in reality the Amiga is faster for 3D than the ST.
But for this you need to program the Amiga as it was intended, not like an ST.

Look at Dread, the Amiga version has a higher frame rate, needs 1mb, while the ST version displays less colors, has a lower frame rate, and requires 2mb of ram.

[Megalomaniac]

I'm not sure what the difference between a good ST version and a 'correct' one is, but even then, did great even big-name Amiga games really sell 3-5 times as many copies as big-name bad ones, at least until after the era of ST ports? They probably cost twice as much to make, was there really twice as much profit from them, considering that the duplication / distribution / advertising etc cost the same whether you'd spent £500,000 or £5000 on making the game?

Indeed, did games that were badly converted to the ST from the Amiga (eg Robocod, where the screen window is so small that the look-down feature doesn't look down far enough for you to see the spikes, as it's designed to do!) sell less on the ST than contemporary well-made conversions to that system, or games which originated on it?

Publisher economics with shareholders to pay were involved, rather than purely the developer's creative desire to produce the best possible games. And, of course, a lot of the developers given big-name conversion projects were inexperienced, under-supported or just relatively untalented.

I'm not sure the 8-bit computers negatively impacted the quality of 16-bit software. Most great 16-bit games were made by developers who started commercial development on the 16-bits, or who had moved purely onto 16-bit development by 1988 at the latest (Sensible being a rare exception). 16-bit computers were expensive, £400 in 1988-1992 was roughly £1000 in today's money, they were never going to take over overnight, especially with increased competition from consoles, which were cheaper upfront even if the games cost more and they were less versatile.

By the way, the fact that neither Elite nor Gauntlet II had even been mentioned on this thread before they were raised in a confrontational 'you're wrong' kind of way by CCCP Alert makes that post's argument slightly confusing.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Overlord

if Amiga had open hardware architecture and could have taken Open GL and 3dFX cards, the history could have been very different.

Amiga did have open hardware architecture.

The Voodoo1 was released 1996. It was an expensive addon card that only did 3d and nothing else, so only attractive to rich 'serious' gamers.

The Amiga was able to use the Voodoo and other 3D cards with a PCI slot expansion, but nobody bothered to make one until 2000. by this time 3DFX was bankrupt.

I don't think history would have been much different if the Amiga got Voodoo class 3D in 1996. By this time it was only surviving on inertia, with a rapidly shrinking user base and virtually no interest from software houses. Game developers weren't going to flock back to the Amiga when the market was tiny and they already had their hands full doing stuff for the PC.

2Mb of RAM was starting to get a bit weedy in 1993 when PC's had twice as much and had 50Mhz processors and 40 meg 3.5 hard disks as standard, not to mention 16 bit sound.

PCs that had twice as much cost twice as much.

Despite what some Amiga fans seem to think, Commodore didn't have the magical ability to make the same stuff for the half the price anyone else could. The Amiga 1200 was only cheaper because it had less in it.

Not sure why you brought up 16 bit sound. 8 bit sound was plenty good enough for games, and the Amiga had twice as many channels. If you were talking about the ST you might have a point - its sound was weedy compared to both the Amiga and a PC with Sound Blaster.

[freehand]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Amiga did have open hardware architecture.

The Voodoo1 was released 1996. It was an expensive addon card that only did 3d and nothing else, so only attractive to rich 'serious' gamers.

Only 3D lol your kidding right ? & I was most definitely not rich.

Did you live in a shoe box ?

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by freehand

Only 3D lol your kidding right

I had one, so I should know.

Voodoo Graphics PCI

A typical Voodoo Graphics PCI expansion card consisted of a DAC, a frame buffer processor and a texture mapping unit, along with 4 MB of EDO DRAM. The RAM and graphics processors operated at 50 MHz. It provided only 3D acceleration and as such the computer also needed a traditional video controller for conventional 2D software. A pass-through VGA cable daisy-chained the video controller to the Voodoo, which was itself connected to the monitor.

I forgot to mention that it didn't support Open GL either. Not sure what this would mean for the Amiga, but a lot of effort would have been required to produce drivers for it. This would probably delay it's introduction until 1997 at the earliest if the Amiga had PCI bus.

[Captain_ Kal]

The Voodoo1 was released 1996. It was an expensive addon card that only did 3d and nothing else, so only attractive to rich 'serious' gamers.

It was expensive in 1996, but affordable in 97 - 98!! (Incidentally, that's the time period I switched from Amiga to PC).

But the difference in 3D rendering was phenomenal at the time!! Check the following links:

The Next Generation in Graphics, Part 2: Three Dimensions in Hardware

The Next Generation in Graphics, Part 3: Software Meets Hardware

[freehand]

In todays money would buy you a midrange pc card so..

I was working and coming from the amiga to the pc you could earn money for old rope from PC users struggling setting up the home PC simple stuff memory management e.t.c

Was a nice toy for sure but no difference from todays GFX cards.

[Megalomaniac]

3Dfx cards were always a luxury item that only serious gamers bought. The first one went down to $149 later in its life (probably not long before Voodoo2 came out), that's still $300 in today's money. Maybe that was the start of the 'arms race' where you had to keep spending money to get higher FPS on the PC, affecting multiplayer online games to the point that a good player on a poor PC would often lose an online game to an inferior player with a top-of-the-range PC. And the Voodoo1 was a pure 3D card, a few others like the VoodooRush were 'compromise' cards that did both 2D and 3D (though not as well as good dedicated 2D or 3D cards) but the first ones, and the majority, were 3D only. Claiming otherwise is factually false.

[freehand]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

3Dfx cards were always a luxury item that only serious gamers bought. The first one went down to $149 later in its life (probably not long before Voodoo2 came out), that's still $300 in today's money. Maybe that was the start of the 'arms race' where you had to keep spending money to get higher FPS on the PC, affecting multiplayer online games to the point that a good player on a poor PC would often lose an online game to an inferior player with a top-of-the-range PC. And the Voodoo1 was a pure 3D card, a few others like the VoodooRush were 'compromise' cards that did both 2D and 3D (though not as well as good dedicated 2D or 3D cards) but the first ones, and the majority, were 3D only. Claiming otherwise is factually false.

And who is Claiming they done anything else ?

My remark regarding saying "just 3D" back then it was HUGE step forward.