PC games that made the Amiga look like Shit

[TCD]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

So Commodore was really stuck between rock and a hard place. Imo releasing HDD-only A1200 would be suicidal. And talking about how they should release improved A1200 in 1991 is easy now, but I guess that if they could they probably would. But you don't just conjure chips out of thin air and their R&D clearly wasn't up to the task, justifably or no - who knows.

Would be good to know how much money it cost Commodore to release both the A500+ and the A600 compared to just keep producing the A500 until the A1200 was ready.

It's quite funny to mention that releasing the A1200 HD only would have been suicidal given the outcome of not doing so. Would it have meant a few months less? Even not releasing the CD32? Would that really matter?

[TCD]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

TCD, Yep, I cannot stand this constant criticism of the Amiga gameplay. By 2023 people that wants to play with a one button playability on the Amiga make it on purpose. They cannot argue then that this is an inherent flaw a of the Amiga gaming (and it wasn't that black then either).

Agreed on 2023, a bit less so about back in the day. It certainly wasn't a deal breaker for people that had an Amiga in the 80s and 90s.

[Megalomaniac]

Part of the issue is that the serious games and light productivity market, competing with low-end PCs, needed a hard drive and fast RAM, and ideally something faster than 14Mhz. The arcade games market, competing with the SNES and Megadrive, needed an affordable system with lots of chip RAM for big sprites, maybe ideally multi-button controllers as standard. Which type of games did people buy Amigas for? Which type of games did Amiga owners buy?

American developers of adventures and RPGs may have asked for a hard drive (did Commodore ask them?) but European developers of shoot 'em ups and platformers will have felt it wasn't worth the extra cost - remember that hard drive installable games have to be system-legal, which limits potential hardware trickery and makes copy protection more difficult. It wasn't possible to completely please both markets, in the way the A500 was able to do five years earlier, when you had the NES and Master System on one side and 8Mhz EGA from floppies on the other.

What might have helped, with the benefit of hindsight, would have been to make the A1200 a mid-range machine earlier. They'd've really had something in 1991 or even mid-1992 for maybe £6-700, with a hard drive and perhaps more RAM or a better processor (or a 68000 as a co-processor, for more backwards compatibility and a potential 40-50% speed boost with tailored software). That way you can allow the price to come down gradually - potentially reaching £500 by mid-1993, which is what an A1200 plus hard drive really cost by then, and would be competitive with the PCs of the time.

That would have meant accepting that the AAA chipset wasn't going to be workable quickly enough and parking it for now - perhaps going back to it afterwards for a theoretical A1800 in 1994.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by TCD

Agreed on 2023, a bit less so about back in the day. It certainly wasn't a deal breaker for people that had an Amiga in the 80s and 90s.

The decisive word being ‘had’ an Amiga, unfortunately Commodore were a hardware based company that had to sell an increasing number of units every year just to break even.

Going back to fighting games that were increasingly popular and system sellers back in 92/93, and before the internet word of mouth was key, i’m not sure of everyone’s ages but the Amiga was starting to become the laughing stock in the school playground after games like SFII then MK came out, the latter not so much in terms of a halve decent port, but the fact it was extra hard to pull off the moves even with a 2 button stick.

Again, people with Amiga’s, myself included just got on with it, making best of a not ideal situation, but new buyers wanting such games can see them on TV shows and magazines boasting 6 button controls.

It certainly didn’t help the reputation of the Amiga in a time it had to pull out all the stops to survive against the onslaught of the consoles from 1992 onwards.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

It certainly didn’t help the reputation of the Amiga in a time it had to pull out all the stops to survive against the onslaught of the consoles from 1992 onwards.

I think that was a main problem back then. You just couldn't compete with the 150 pound SNES and the MegaDrive was even cheaper than that by 1992. Commodore wanted to place the Amiga as an affordable machine that could compete with both the consoles and the PC and it failed at both.

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

Dreadnought, History proves that releasing the A1200 without an HDD wasn't a clever move.

How so? Nobody can "prove" that and it seems highly unlikely from a realistic point of view (see the price comparisons).

So, being in a "what if?" hypothesis, thinking that it would have been a clever move releasing it with a HDD doesn't seems absurd to me, especially when reading testimony of developpers saying that the biggest flaw of the A1200 was it lacks of HDD in standard. (Which is the reason of this what if discussion)

My "what if" was referring to grond's remark about 2.5 vs 3.5 HDDs, not the whole discussion. And as I said, even if A1200 used cheaper HDDs it would still not be enough to compete with PCs price.

Also, if you read the article again you will see that the most important requirement those devs/publishers had (quite logically) was the installed user base. What do you think would happen to that if you ramped up the price by a huge margin?

Of course, it would have probably changed nothing. But in your hypothetic world the Amiga was doomed anyway so I can understand why any hypothesis seems a dead end for you.

Umm, yes, Amiga was doomed (pun unitneded?) but not in a hypothetical world, but the real one. It's what has actually happened, after all

The situation was what it was, and you have to look at the bigger picture. The microcomputers were on their way out, plain and simple. Therefore looking for more magic bullets which would save the day is a bit pointless.

Although I can agree some things could be done in a better way and slightly increase Amiga's lifespan. Mandatory hdds are not one of these things, but using 3.5 hdds and other improvements to AGA or whatnot could be.

[Megalomaniac]

The other thing is, SNES Street Fighter II cost £65 (and, like it or not, it WAS worth it, as long as you had someone to play against) but even if Commodore had got US Gold and (say) Gravis to collaborate on a special six-button controller for Street Fighter 2, and had done a properly coded (not an ST port made in a rush by a newcomer programmer) conversion, buying the game plus two of them would cost about £65. This would still have the limitations of disks, unless you spent extra to develop the parallel-port cartridge System 3 were working on for Putty, and with a controller that potentially had no other uses (until other BEU developers used it, at least).

Maybe Commodore had no choice but to hope that one-on-one beat 'em ups like that would be a fad, or felt that the Amiga's extra strength in most other categories of games (not to mention educational, creative and productive tasks) would make up for it. I guess what Commodore really needed was Dhalsim's long arms, so they could simultaneously punch down against the consoles and up against the PCs?

Also, when I pondered "Which type of games did people buy Amigas for? Which type of games did Amiga owners buy?" above, my suspicion is that the former answer is action games, but the latter answer is sims/strategy/adventure, with action games being much more commonly pirated. This further shows the difficulty of knowing who to concentrate on pleasing.

[petran]

Originally Posted by VladR

I had 386DX40 while playing Doom1.


When my friend bought 486SX, I vividly recall that it was smoother, just not cost effective (e.g. too little performance for the price,but 4 months later price dropped,so it was ok then)

But it was smoother. I don't recall if it was 486SX 25 or 33 MHz.

Since I finished Room on 395DX40, I don't see why it would be hard on 486SX...

Even 485DX2-66 had framedrops. Few, but it still wasn't a framedrop-free experience, especially in Doom2...

It also mattered which video card you used. The computer I played had a 486sx25 but unfortunately the vga card was a crappy Cirrus Logic with 512kb and I think it was integrated.



As a result Doom became choppy at high resolution settings, while it run fine at 320 resolutions.



Other games were also choppy because of this at resolutions 640 and above.


My friend's PC was a 486dx66 with 1 MB VGA card and majority of games had smooth fps.

[Megalomaniac]

That was (and probably still is) the eternal issue with buying PCs - two systems which look identical on paper can have very different performance on practice. I think graphics card quality was often where cheaper machines cut corners, which probably made no difference for spreadsheets and little difference for multimedia, but a huge difference for 3D gaming.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

How so? Nobody can "prove" that and it seems highly unlikely from a realistic point of view (see the price comparisons).

Well yes, it is fairly easy to prove that the A1200 without HDD didn't met the same fate the C64 or the A500 had.

I agree with most of your other points though.

[Promilus]

Originally Posted by petran

It also mattered which video card you used. The computer I played had a 486sx25 but unfortunately the vga card was a crappy Cirrus Logic with 512kb and I think it was integrated.

With ISA bottleneck every card except the biggest crappies ones had virtually identical results. That's because even though CPU could've compute more frames it was impossible to push them through ISA bus. So even though VGA was capable of displaying 256 (or - at that time - even more) colors @ 640x480 and with e.g. 50Hz refresh rate framebuffer wasn't updated nearly that often...

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

Well yes, it is fairly easy to prove that the A1200 without HDD didn't met the same fate the C64 or the A500 had.

Sorry, but I just don't get how you can prove that making A1200 as a HD-only model would improve its sales (if that's the idea we're discussing - sorry, it's quite easy to get lost in these mega-threads. I've only just seen that's the same thing TCD is saying).

I mean, you can of course speculate that it would be so, but "prove" is a strong word.

As for how it'd be "suicidal", it is a bit of hyperbole, but overall my opinion is that it'd be then too expensive and more people would either go for a PC or console. As it is, it did manage to shift some units after all, and wasn't it a stock shortage that actually prevented people from buying more? Eg it was launched in October 1992 but I only found ads in mags from early 1993.

And then most of these ads do have HDD as an add on config option so it was quite available should anybody wish to get these options - but no need to make it mandatory.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

Sorry, but I just don't get how you can prove that making A1200 as a HD-only model would improve its sales (if that's the idea we're discussing - sorry, it's quite easy to get lost in these mega-threads. I've only just seen that's the same thing TCD is saying).

I mean, you can of course speculate that it would be so, but "prove" is a strong word.

As for how it'd be "suicidal", it is a bit of hyperbole, but overall my opinion is that it'd be then too expensive and more people would either go for a PC or console. As it is, it did manage to shift some units after all, and wasn't it a stock shortage that actually prevented people from buying more? Eg it was launched in October 1992 but I only found ads in mags from early 1993.

And then most of these ads do have HDD as an add on config option so it was quite available should anybody wish to get these options - but no need to make it mandatory.

Nope I was saying the contrary. Releasing the A1200 without an HDD as a basic system ended up not quite well for Commodore. The proof is the following of the History as we all knows.
I didn't said that an HDD only A1200 would have saved Commodore. Probably not in fact, but we'll never knows.
But it is probably possible that english not being my native language I expressed myself a bit confusely. (Apologies for everyone. ).

[oscar_ates]

Amiga needed a significant upgrade because of the competition. Even HD upgrade would make a difference as base configuration. In my opinion it needed more like fast ram, faster processor, chunky 256 color display mode and HD floppy drive. I read in one of the eab threads that the A1200 cost commodore 200$ and they sold it for 400$. 1984 release year 68020 cpu cost was 20$. They could easily cut the profit by few tens of dollars to have a proper 68030 cpu and put some fast ram and increase the price by 50-100$. It might have saved them. But the management had no technology knowledge and very short sighted. They only thought about their 2-3 million$ dollar yearly salary. I liked my A500 and A1200 machines in those times. Would be good if Amiga had gone further

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by grond

And let's not forget that the harddisk was a 2.5" harddisk and thus twice as expensive as a 3.5" harddisk would have been.

Twice as expensive and generally slower. It really was a problem not having space for a full sized hard drive at the time, let alone not including one by default.

But it was certainly the poor performance with sprite based games like Street Fighter 2 that was the final nail in the coffin. Until then, the Amiga had been seen as the platform for such games but it became obvious that the consoles had just eaten that market.

The only real move to keep gamers interested was to move towards the kinda of games that had been more successful on the PC, strategy, adventure and Sims. But all of them lent themselves better to having a hard drive to avoid endless disc swapping and allow persistent storage of progress. And then Doom came along and proved the PC has reached the point where it was the premium platform for gaming.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by grond

And let's not forget that the harddisk was a 2.5" harddisk and thus twice as expensive as a 3.5" harddisk would have been.

Not true. Firstly 2.5" drives were not twice the price. Then when you factor in the larger case and power supply required the price difference gets even less. Finally, the A1200 didn't need a large hard drive because the OS was in ROM and most games didn't use it.

So a 40MB drive in the A1200 would be equivalent to at least a 60MB drive in a PC (since DOS and Windows used up close to 20MB), and the system cost would be similar to or cheaper than a machine with 3.5" drive.

The A1200 was designed to be compact for portability and ease of use in a home environment. Using a 3.5" drive would compromise that. I'm glad Commodore didn't go the 3.5" way, as I wouldn't be able to put my A1200 on the coffee table in front of the TV.

[Megalomaniac]

Elfmania, Shadow Fighter and Fightin' Spirit prove that the A500 hardware was capable of doing SFII-style beat 'em ups to a decent technical quality, control and disk-swapping issues notwithstanding (beat 'em ups were about the only kind of action game which really could benefit from hard drives, and even 2 buttons wasn't really enough), and A1200-level hardware was certainly capable. And that's just one genre of game - did the SNES really outperform the A1200 overall?

On the sim/adventure/strategy side, an A1200 was capable. Even if you add a hard drive and fast RAM, an A1200 was still a lot cheaper than a 386 PC of equivalent spec, and a basic 386 was adequate for most 1993 PC games (not Doom, or Strike Commander or Alone in the Dark 2). The issue was that someone buying a PC could play Monkey Island 2 and Civilization in 256 colours, they could play Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe and Wing Commander 2, and they could already play Dune 2 which wasn't out for the Amiga yet. As it proved, none of Origin, Lucasfilm, Access, Sierra or Westwood ever did any AGA games, if they did any more Amiga games at all. Had AGA launched at least six months earlier, maybe that loss of momentum could have been prevented?

[redblade]

Originally Posted by AestheticDebris

But it was certainly the poor performance with sprite based games like Street Fighter 2 that was the final nail in the coffin. Until then, the Amiga had been seen as the platform for such games but it became obvious that the consoles had just eaten that market.

Would you have paid 60GBP for a A500 ZoroII Cartridge of SF2? Or would you be the pirate and waited for the Warez groups to put out the floppy disk version even if it was 4-6 disks?

You would also have pay an extra 20GBP for a control pad, the CD32 did come with a 6 button control pad but that was a bit too late and they should have shipped it with the 1200.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Not true. Firstly 2.5" drives were not twice the price. Then when you factor in the larger case and power supply required the price difference gets even less. Finally, the A1200 didn't need a large hard drive because the OS was in ROM and most games didn't use it.

The prices looked cheaper in the magazines but that is because it didn't come with GVP or A520HD Case, and those 2.5" internal IDE HDD adapters for the A500 were a bit late.

Originally Posted by oscar_ates

Amiga needed a significant upgrade because of the competition. Even HD upgrade would make a difference as base configuration. In my opinion it needed more like fast ram, faster processor, chunky 256 color display mode and HD floppy drive. I read in one of the eab threads that the A1200 cost commodore 200$ and they sold it for 400$. 1984 release year 68020 cpu cost was 20$. They could easily cut the profit by few tens of dollars to have a proper 68030 cpu and put some fast ram and increase the price by 50-100$. It might have saved them. But the management had no technology knowledge and very short sighted. They only thought about their 2-3 million$ dollar yearly salary. I liked my A500 and A1200 machines in those times. Would be good if Amiga had gone further

Yeah the price difference in 92 was only $2USD for the 68EC020FG16 and 68EC020FG25 in quantities of 1,000, I posted that in the Amiga 1200 thread. (It was under $20USD)

If they went with Chunky display then maybe all the old software wouldn't be compatible because it wasn't OS friendly and people were returning their A500+ and that wasn't Commodores fault, that was the software developers.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

Maybe Commodore had no choice but to hope that one-on-one beat 'em ups like that would be a fad, or felt that the Amiga's extra strength in most other categories of games (not to mention educational, creative and productive tasks) would make up for it.

Yes, and it did. There was so much more you could with the Amiga than any gaming console.

Here are results of an analysis of video game sales by genre from 1980 to 2016. These numbers are heavily skewed towards consoles because they had by far the largest user base (and virtually no piracy). Even so, note that while fighting games reached peak popularity in 1992, they were still only 20% of the total. IOW, 80% were not fighting games. On computer platforms the other genres were probably even more dominant.



Fighting games were generally more popular with the younger set, while adults tended to prefer other genres such as strategy, simulation, puzzle and adventure games. I don't know about the UK etc., but in New Zealand kids didn't buy computers, their parents did. And most weren't just buying a toy to keep the kids out of their hair - that's what gaming consoles were for.

Also, when I pondered "Which type of games did people buy Amigas for? Which type of games did Amiga owners buy?" above, my suspicion is that the former answer is action games, but the latter answer is sims/strategy/adventure, with action games being much more commonly pirated. This further shows the difficulty of knowing who to concentrate on pleasing.

The people to please were those with the chequebook. Adults would be looking for something that did more than just play arcade style games, and parents would want something the kids could learn useful skills on, do their homework etc. as as for themselves.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

Elfmania, Shadow Fighter and Fightin' Spirit prove that the A500 hardware was capable of doing SFII-style beat 'em ups to a decent technical quality... and A1200-level hardware was certainly capable.

Exactly. Even the A500 did a pretty good job in the hands of competent developers. And even if those games didn't match the SNES or arcade machine in graphics or frame rate, that didn't mean they weren't enjoyable to play. The A1200 could easily take that up another notch.

Take Street Fighter II for example. It was released in 1992 on the PC, Amiga, ST, C64 and ZX Spectrum. here are screenshots of it in that order:-



The Amiga's graphics look pretty good for a chipset released in 1985. The A1200 could of course look identical the PC or even better. The ST is noticably worse. The C64 and ZX Spectrum versions are a joke, yet people still bought those games and played them!