PC games that made the Amiga look like Shit

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by TCD

Here's a non-brand offer from PC Magazine 8/1993:


Building your own PC in 1993 was hard work it seems. There were only RAM 'upgrades' advertised. You pretty much had to buy a pre-built PC if you went retail.

The fact that some no-brand shop charged high prices is a surprise? It's always been like that, that doesn't mean everyone did though.

Here's an ad from PC Zone (April 1993). Even if you factor in the 17% VAT the prices are much lower already (eg ~720 for 386 DX40). 5 months later they would be even lower. And I'm sure you could find other no-brand shops with even smaller profit margins if you looked hard or had a time machine.




And if you look around more you will find all kinds of ads offering upgrades and selling individual compoinents. I mean, come on, there's no need to actually look for it - it's common sense. People were putting together and TRS kits back in 70s already and a clone PC had modularity and upgradeability built into its DNA. That's what allowed for countless small businesses to thrive and total amateurs such as myself and countless others to "build" them too.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

And if you look around more you will find all kinds of ads offering upgrades and selling individual compoinents.

I did in that magazine (https://archive.org/details/PCZone001) and I can't find any.

Those are indeed quite low prices, but those machines come with 1 MB RAM:


They don't even offer a RAM upgrade (if I'm not completely blind).

[grond]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Adverts in Amiga World Nov 1993:-

November 1993 is a full year after the introduction of the A1200. And two years after it should have been introduced. But anyway, how are prices from an Amiga magazine even representative of market prices for what mainly was a PC component?

40MB 2.5" drive for A600/1200 was US$139/140
40MB 3.5" IDE drive was $130

Probably because such small-volume 3.5" harddisks had gone out of production by that time with only stock remaining to be sold off cheaply. There was a MB-race happening at the same time as the MHz-race.

[grond]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

@all regarding the HDD debacle it really seems bizarre that so many people are convinced that a mandatory HDD with a hefty price premium would be a good idea. A1200 managed to sell some units at all because of a) brand loyalty b) people who really couldn't afford even a slight premium to get a PC but still wanted some sort of computer

Um, I wanted an Amiga because the bits of it that were technically superior to the PC were those that were interesting TO ME. If you wanted PC software, you had to put up with a lot of stoneage stuff on the PC I couldn't bear with. Obviously, if more of that desirable PC software had been available for Amiga, fewer people would have left the platform. I only bought a PC when Linux offered me the kind of software I wanted. I knew a lot of Amigans at university that were in the same situation and either chose Linux on PC or a Macintosh.

It seems logical to me that if you raised the price to what similar PC model went for (always with a monitor, a huge boon) the b) group would shrink substantially.

Chicken and egg. With a mandatory harddisk, better software would have been available making the platform as a whole more desirable. After all, there was a market for 030, 040 and 060 accelerators, Amiga-specific RTG graphics cards etc. Was it there because nobody could afford an extra 100$ for a base configuration that would have included a harddisk? As already mentioned, Commodore sold all A1200s they could produce. With that high demand (relative to their production volume), they could have made harddisks mandatory even if that had reduced demand from the poorest buyers (which instead bought a more expensive PC, you remember?). This would even have had a positive influence on the kind of available games when the CD32 was launched because the AGA platform would have got more storage space intensive games from the start.

[Megalomaniac]

£810 in mid-1993 for a DX-40 with SVGA monitor, DOS and Windows is good (not much more than an A1200 with fast RAM, monitor and hard drive added), but how impressive was the graphics card, and 44Mb is a small hard drive considering these size of Windows and many PC games. And, as mentioned, for 2D action game, and for sound pre-multimedia, an A1200 was more capable than any PC of the day - tasks for which a hard drive was a luxury rather than a near-essential as it increasingly was for point 'n' click adventures or texture-mapped 3D games.

The Birdland systems look okay, I'd be thinking the 14" SVGA 102Mb combination for just under £800, but they'd surely be crippled by only having 1Mb of memory - Strike Commander from that time needed 4Mb!

Confusing that one of them was called the Falcon - should Atari have sued?

How did 100Mb (say) 2.5" and 3.5" hard drive prices compare? Presumably there was a bgiger gap than the fairly trivial gap for 40Mb ones

[grond]

Does any of those Birdland computers include a soundcard?

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

How did 100Mb (say) 2.5" and 3.5" hard drive prices compare? Presumably there was a bgiger gap than the fairly trivial gap for 40Mb ones

I've looked at 3 different UK PC magazines from 1993 and couldn't find any HD prices Hopefully somebody else has better luck (or eyes ).

[TCD]

Originally Posted by grond

Does any of those Birdland computers include a soundcard?

Nope. You can check the 'full specs' in my post above.

[grond]

Originally Posted by TCD

Nope. You can check the 'full specs' in my post above.

I was pretty sure it didn't which made my question mostly rhetoric by nature. If you really wanted "superior" PC technology, you needed a soundcard which added to the price. But then again: why expect a matching Amiga setup to be cheaper than mass-produced technology? The Amiga had everything integrated into a functional package, was elegantly designed and very capable in some usecases. Trying to stay cheaper than mass-produced technology couldn't end well because it would inevitably mean that the cheaper alternative technology would have to be MUCH less capable than the mass-produced technology. Of course, you could just be happy like Bruce Abbot that the new product was more capable than the old product and disregard the ever increasing performance gap when comparing to the other product...

[dreadnought]

Sigh...no soundcard, something something Strike Commander, 1MB only, personal anecdotes, Linux, etc, etc. The art of extreme rationalization is alive and well, I see (no great surprise, seeing as we're on teh intehnets and it's page 50+ of a thread founded on a disingenious premise anyway).

As it is, all you need is step away from the micro-level hair splitting, digging through old ads, wishful thinking, and so on, to see the bigger picture. PCs market share in 1991 was already ~80%, Amiga's ~3%. It's really not a great mystery to see why publishers were writing off Amiga, despite some diplomatic magazine musings about "watching the situation closely". PCs were selling ~20-30 mil a year in this period, A1200 had 30k units at launch. Nuff' said. Sure, you can believe tweaking some parameters could improve the situation somewhat but whatever happened would still be an insignificant drop in a bucket. A few more games and a HDD wouldn't really make much difference in the grand scheme of things.

Ok, I'll bow out now, since as I said before playing along in these threads is extremely time consuming, and ultimately rather pointless, even if fun for a while. Maybe see you again in 20-30 pages

[TCD]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

A few more games and a HDD wouldn't really make much difference in the grand scheme of things.

Hehe, true. I know why I didn't get an A1200 and it wasn't a missing HD But I do see that sticking to 'needs to be cheap so people buy it' attitude as one of the problems why the Amiga eventually vanished with the other home computers. If anything looking at the PC magazines of 1993 tells the real story: PC mainly sold because businesses adopted them. That you could also play games on them was an afterthought. Like mobile phones today.

[VladR]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

Ok, I'll bow out now, since as I said before playing along in these threads is extremely time consuming, and ultimately rather pointless, even if fun for a while. Maybe see you again in 20-30 pages

That's the smartest thing you can actually do, because you (just like me) have lived in a very different world in a post-communist country, going through the brutal transformation to a capitalism. That's a very different world compared to West Germany.

Over the course of my life, I have tried to have this kind of conversation with great many different nationalities (both Europe, Asia). Now I go through this in 'Murrica, as that's where I choose to live now.

Only people that grew up under the scythe and the hammer have the personal relatable experience.


No amount of IQ, PHd, Master's Degrees can compensate for lack of that life experience. It's merely describable, not transferrable.

[VladR]

Originally Posted by TCD

I did in that magazine (https://archive.org/details/PCZone001) and I can't find any.

Those are indeed quite low prices, but those machines come with 1 MB RAM:


They don't even offer a RAM upgrade (if I'm not completely blind).

PC-Zone is a UK mag ? That's Great Britain. Quite a different world

I can't speak for GB, as I only visited it few times in early 2000's, but in Slovakia (and parts of Poland and Czech and Hungary I visited), the market handled 10-20% of the stores as brand-name, and remaining 80-90% were small shops where you could at any time come with your PC, and get an upgrade done the same day, whether it was RAM, HDD, CPU).

The store I used to buy stuff from, they were paying one guy, doing just upgrades, another guy building configs as per customer's specs.

All prices were about 5-7% margin over wholesale prices.

You could literally grab a wholesale price list, add 5% and know this is your final price, didn't even have to go personally and do price negotiating.



There's always been people who had more money than common sense, and the market merely reflects that.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

256 colour PC games almost always look better than a non-AGA Amiga game, so with hindsight it would ideally have been in the A3000 and the A1200 released when the 600 was, but otherwise it does depend what you mean by 'the Amiga'.

Irrelevant to the topic. Each machine was released when it was released, with the games released for that machine.

Comparing PC sim / strategy / adventure games designed for 386s with hard drive with how they run on an A500 with floppies isn't always reasonable, as that type of game was usually hard drive installable, and often made use of faster processors, and sometimes of extra memory.

One cannot install VGA graphics on any hard drive.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

All Amigas apart from a few early A1000s can do 64 colors in EHB. For static screens they could have used HAM and looked better than the PC! HAM might even have worked on the in game screens too if they used masked sprites. But Sierra obviously wasn't interested in making full use of the Amiga's capabilities. Too much work, just like it was too much work for them to draw the VGA images by hand.

Apparently, any developer wasn’t interested in making full use of the Amiga’s capabilities considering the three-or-so HAM games ever released.

It’s almost as if there was a technical reason as well.

However KQV is good example of how the PC was perceived as making the Amiga look like shit even if it wasn't. PC gamers looked at the scanned 256 color VGA images compared to EGA and thought 'wow', while the same images scrunched down to 32 colors didn't look so good. But if they had worked in 32 colors to start with for the Amiga version it could also have looked much better than EGA. The really annoying part is that when they scrunched the colors down for the EGA version they then touched the images up to compensate, but not for the Amiga version.

Irrelevant to the topic. Could have, might have. Neither you nor I decide what Sierra prioritised in their games. We are talking about a studio that drew their graphics in 160x200 to the bloody end, but in the end, that doesn’t change the fact that 256 colours look better than 32 colours.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Well we know that the game was written for the PC first then and ported to the Amiga. I bet they didn't make much effort to optimize it. Still the Amiga version is very playable on an 1200 with FastRAM (which is similar to a 12 MHz 286) and doesn't look much different.

Considering the price of an A1200 with fast RAM compared to a 286 at the same date, this comparison really hurts.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

But that's the thing. The 3D doesn't add to the game over a standard dungeon crawler. The 3D is unconvincing and the low frame rate on a 386SX makes it worse.

Sour grapes. It still makes the Amiga look »like shit« simply because it couldn’t do anything similar.

Actually Doom didn't really do it for me either, due to the fixed viewing position. Tomb Raider was the first 3D game I played where it actually felt like I was 'in' the game. Interestingly Doom Attack on the Amiga has the same feeling, only better because you can look all around as well as move and open doors etc. using just the mouse. I never fully appreciated Doom until playing Doom Attack!

Sour grapes. Remaining Amiga users lusted after something comparable (and would have elevated it to the skies had it appeared) but it wasn’t possible. Doom Attack was released when Quake was already out. And it’s not as though Doom was the only FPS game either — on the PC.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

People always make the mistake of comparing £400 Amigas with later £1000 PCs and then criticising the performance gap, when most games in the genres where the PC is considered to win in that era (sims, strategy, adventures) are enhanced by faster processors or hard drives on the Amiga. At least by the end of 1993, spending £1000 on Amiga kit would get you something just as powerful as a PC of the same price, just with less games to fully exploit it. And even before that, once the GVP A530 range launched you could buy an A500+ and that and end up with something which, colour level of graphics aside, outperformed a PC of a similar cost.

How many games are actually better on an 8Mhz 286 than on an A500? Or, if there's a specific A1200 version, better on a 2Mb 16Mhz 386 than on an A1200 with hard drive? Notwithstanding how much cheaper the Amiga option was as well.

This thread is about PC games which made the Amiga look like shit, not PC games which ran on a PC with an A500 price tag or what games would have looked like on an accelerated Amiga which nobody could afford.

Keep in mind that the Amiga was a teenager computer. There were grownup Amiga users as well, but they were probably rather disappointed that there were so few games making use of their expensive Amiga hardware, and equally disappointed that many games couldn’t be installed to their expensive hard drives or couldn’t even be played because of their expensive hardware, be it 030 CPUs, hard drives or Kickstart 2.0.

Once again, keep in mind that the Amiga was a teenager computer. One had to pay for it out of one’s own pocket money.

Meanwhile, the PC was a grown-up computer, so it was paid for by your father so that he could run Lotus 1-2-3 or MS Access. Your father had a lot more disposable income, so any argument about price is irrelevant. It’s his money, not yours. If you had your own 386 PC at 15 in 1991, you were Ferris Bueller.

Do also keep in mind, that due to the economies of scale, adding a hard drive, a high-resolution monitor and an accelerator to your Amiga would cost more than any comparable PC — even if your father wasn’t paying the bill.

[lmimmfn]

Surely those SCUMM games like Monkey Island 2 would have been possible in HAM using sprites for the characters snd sprites fir huding artifacts on scrolling if they took the time

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by lmimmfn

Surely those SCUMM games like Monkey Island 2 would have been possible in HAM using sprites for the characters snd sprites fir huding artifacts on scrolling if they took the time

Perhaps, but that would mean a lot of work - probably too much. A better idea might have been to use EHB in 64 colors, but apparently they didn't know about that mode.

But was Monkey Island 2 on the Amiga that bad? Sure it didn't have quite as many colors, but it still looked pretty good IMO. Here's an example (PC VGA first, then Amiga).



I wouldn't call that 'shit'.

Another comparison of Monkey Island 1 on various platforms (Amiga at 21:17):-

[ Show youtube player ]