PC games that made the Amiga look like Shit

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

Ideally it would have also got an AGA update later, which realistically ought to be hard drive only but have all the music, but that's life.

That's Amiga (in the 90s) for you. Yes, and Day Of The Tentancle could have gotten a really neat (minus the speech) port on the A1200, but at that time LucasArts didn't think about it anymore.

[gimbal]

I would never think of playing MI2 on the Amiga with PC versions around. But the game is so good in its story and puzzles, even the worst version of it is still fun.

[Photon]

Originally Posted by rare_j

Hey Bruce, thanks for taking a look at SimCity. Yep, you got the right Dos version, and the higher resolution makes all the difference. Interesting about the colours, there aren't more colours on the Dos version then (I had mis-remembered), they're just (IMO) better colours. I still think the Dos version looks great.

Shame they didn't use the full available resolution for the Amiga version.

Mm... it's very dangerous to bring up the subject of bad Amiga ports, the PC was so bad for about 15 years that the worst Amiga port imaginable looks like a deluxe version next to it, even for games that an 8-bit could handle.

We spoke of limits, we could make it fairer by comparing ports run on a machine most persons could buy (not households or on-the-side business activities, PC=Personal Computer, right?) released at the year of the port or before. The Amiga would slay here.

Then there's the matter of category. We could limit that too. Only action games put a demand on hardware. Strategy/RPC/visual novels are slow and require no hw performance.

Sim City was released in 1989 so the A3000 is eligible, but PCs "only" cost $2000-$2500, so say $1400 out of budget for the same person who bought a PC that year. It's my opinion that it's quite mad to spend $2000 to play a game whose graphics are let's say less than stellar on all platforms, and equally mad to spend $400 on a console and $50 per game. Home computers were the way to freedom away from those limitations.

The PC was good only for static screen, slow paced games until the mid-90s. If there's an exception, I'd have to see it. And then it would be exceptional and not representative.

If I were devil's advocate I would try to look for some flight sim (no, not the god awful Microsoft (well purchased) efforts. Perhaps a port from Amiga around 1992-1993 to take advantage of the static screen and an (expensive) CPU upgrade.

I can tell you from personal experience it was a shock to see MS Flight Sim on a (quite beyond personal budget) CAD PC in 1989 in college. It was a slideshow. Whereas I finished F/A-18 Interceptor on Amiga and it was butter smooth in comparison. (Great game, BTW! )

I think that advocate would still have to pick and choose and then maybe the difference wasn't so big, even for static screen stuff like Quake, until Pentiums.

[TCD]

Ignorance sure is a bliss.

[stevelord]

Maybe look like shit is a strong term but 1991 PC games that looked better than the Amiga versions or equivalents to me include:

• Kings Quest V
• Midwinter II
• Bill Elliot's NASCAR
• Wing Commander II

It was definitely the year we started to see PC graphics capable of beating OCS/ECS, but not the year we got used to PC graphics beating OCS/ECS.

[lmimmfn]

Originally Posted by Tigerskunk

The stupid thing here is, in hindsight, that all the PC had were those 256 colors, its HD that was there and had to be be installed up and a bit of a faster CPU. Which the Amiga mostly didn't need in the first years, because of its blitter unit.

But that was enough for games to simply look better in screenshots in magazines back then.

With HD installs, you could push much more assets into your game, and with 256 colors these looked a lot better.

I am still convinced, that the A1200 could have beaten the PCs at that easily. They just released it two years too late.

Some screenshots of the games that wooed me unto the PC at the time (late 1991, when my friends started to switch over from the Amiga to the PC):

I remember seeing the PC screenshot of Silent Service 2 in a magazine, and feeling jealous because the PC version didn't have any visible color steps anymore.

Amiga:


PC:



As for the rest, that was basically it. i don't want to even compare too much, since after 1991 if the Amiga even got a version of a game, it looked bad or mediocre compared to those.

But most important games after that like Wizardry, Lands of Lore, Ultima Underworld and Ultima 7 just stayed on PC, and you could just jealously look over to the PC aisle in the store.

And again, the A1200 could have easily do these games in the same quality as well. Which I am sure of, since I spent some time working with it now for my new game.
Commodore just released this too late.

I agree completely, I lusted over those VGA/SVGA games back in the day, however I will say the Amiga version of that screenshot is terrible, throw on some copper effects and use more colours for the submarine and the difference would be negligible.

[Weasel Fierce]

Originally Posted by TCD

That's Amiga (in the 90s) for you. Yes, and Day Of The Tentancle could have gotten a really neat (minus the speech) port on the A1200, but at that time LucasArts didn't think about it anymore.

Day of the Tentacle runs fine in the AGA version of SCUMMVM (at least on my 030) so it was definitely possible. Ditto for Sam & Max.

[Megalomaniac]

I nearly mentioned SCUMMVM, as both evidence that it could have been done back in the day, and as consolation that it can be done now, but it's little consolation if you had an A1200 in 1993

[sokolovic]

DOTT sold not so well on the PC/Mac worldwide. (80 000 copies by 2009 aparently). That make the choice of not releasing an Amiga version, at least AGA purely a political choice because no doubt an AGA version would have sold well considering the user base was craving for AGA dedicated games (and piracy was less a problem on AGA machines IIRC)
I won't be surprised either if MonkeyIsland1&2 sold better on the Amiga VS PC/Mac, at least in Europe.
Same thing for Frontier Developpements that didn't release First Encounters on AGA but released the same year an obscure 32x game (Darkxide) which sold something like 500 copies !

[Marce]

another lame and incomplete Amiga game was "curse of echantia"
the Amiga version not even have music, just sound fx
while the PC version features better gfx + intro+music+sound fx and support the MT32 which in this game sounds fantastic

this is rare because this game was developed by core and core generally did good Amiga releases

[Marce]

DOTT never was done on the Amiga because was so big for 1993 ,a game with big and complex animations that should have come in 11 or 12 disks , then was not very viable

DOTT is a buggy and bored gfx adventure btw, so I don't care

[Weasel Fierce]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

I nearly mentioned SCUMMVM, as both evidence that it could have been done back in the day, and as consolation that it can be done now, but it's little consolation if you had an A1200 in 1993

yeah, there is what was done and what could be done, the former usually falling well behind the latter

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

In 1987 IBM released VGA, with 256 colors and hardware scrolling. Super VGA arrived soon afterwards, with 256 colors in 640x480.

To be more specific:

The VGA standard introduced 1987 by IBM with its PS/2 line of PCs, was 640×480 in 16 colours and 320×200 in 256 colours.

SVGA is no official standard but usually refers to a resolution of 800×600 - colour-depth may vary.

SVGA was not widely supported by software until the VESA group started to introduce the VBE (VESA BIOS Extensions) to provide a common API.
This was 1990 - five years after the A1000.

Sadly Commodore did not understand the need of constant progress, and had only managed to develop ECS, with almost no improvements over OCS, in these five years...

[No.3]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

It's worse than that. The Amiga version only has 16 colors!

I loaded the jpg image into Art Dept Pro on the Amiga, scaled it down to the original 320x180, reduced colors to 32 and added 15% ordered dithering. Here's the result (scaled up x 2 for viewing on modern hires screens).

Still not as good as the 256 color PC image of course, but would have looked a lot better in a magazine review! It could have so much better with a little extra work, but I guess we are lucky to have this title on the Amiga at all.

correctly done, the Amiga could make the PC version look like shit. I just say Copper ... !

[jizmo]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

It's worse than that. The Amiga version only has 16 colors!

You're right, they've only used 16 colors. I assumed 32 colors due to them clearly using 12-bit Amiga palette

Ok so I guess you can get gradients this bad on Amiga if you just put some effort into it

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by jizmo

In this case that's almost entirely on the developers though for not knowing how to dither properly with the limited palette, as this 1-minute pass shows:



But I totally share your pain. I did lust after those seemingly stepless gradients with MCGA and they were the first thing for me to recreate as I got my first AGA amiga.

Is this within a 12-bit-colorspace?

That higher color space did some wonders as well for games looking better on VGA (and then AGA as well).

[jizmo]

Originally Posted by Tigerskunk

Is this within a 12-bit-colorspace?

That higher color space did some wonders as well for games looking better on VGA (and then AGA as well).

This was literally a one minute test so I did not check specifically for 12-bit color space. BUT if I was to do a similar smooth gradient from scratch and had 32 Amiga colors to spare, I'd first find the values that allow me to have a optimal amount of tones in 12-bit (maybe going from slight dark cyan/blue to lighter green, which is also more satisfying to the eye) and only then perform the gradient slide.

But this game wasn't made by someone who wanted or had the skills to optimise its look for Amiga, resulting in this crude conversion.

[Megalomaniac]

Originally Posted by Gorf

Sadly Commodore did not understand the need of constant progress, and had only managed to develop ECS, with almost no improvements over OCS, in these five years...

This is true to a point, but SVGA didn't become routine in games until 5 years after VGA - based on MobyGames info again, barely 5% of 1992 PC games supported it, let alone requiring it. More 1991 games supported EGA than VGA...

Also, the era of Amigas as 'home' computers that were affordable for the masses started in 1987 (the original A1000 wasn't intended as a home system, and was marketed very separately from the C64 and C128), and AGA was only just over 5 years after that.

Amigas doubled in memory and halved in price before that, but ECS and the Fatter Angus were more use for 'serious' use than games, but it was dwarfed by the extent to which PCs increased in power and dropped in price by then.

As for Enchantia, I guess they left the music out as they wanted to limit disk swaps?

[jizmo]

For the record, for Silent Service this is how far 16 colors would've gone with just a little effort:



If the full effort was done and 32 colors were used, there would've been more than enough room in the palette to have the submarine and bg in slightly different tones for example (or, more gradient steps in the background)

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Marce

DOTT never was done on the Amiga because was so big for 1993 ,a game with big and complex animations that should have come in 11 or 12 disks , then was not very viable

DOTT is a buggy and bored gfx adventure btw, so I don't care

Interesting. I haven't played it, but this game is often mentioned as one of those that pulled Amiga fans over to the PC. Perhaps - like Shadow of the Beast - it was case of being wowed by the graphics, shame about the game? Even so it would still qualify for making the Amiga look like shit, except that it was released in 1993 when it would have looked just as good on the A1200 and A4000.

However this does bring up another issue, the lack of CDROM drives on Amigas. Commodore tried, but they got sucked in by the 'interactive multimedia device' hype surrounding the Sony/Philips CD-I introduced to the consumer market in 1991. Commodore managed to beat Philips by 9 months with the CDTV, even though they came in from behind (Philips produced their first professional CD-i player in 1998). This could have been a huge seller for Commodore if the market was receptive to the idea. Unfortunately it wasn't, for Commodore or Philips.

In 1992 Commodore belatedly released the A570 CDROM drive for the A500. Unlike the CDTV this had a slot to take 2MB of FastRAM. It had an introductory price of US$795, $50 more than the A590 hard drive when released.

This wasn't a case of Commodore sitting on their hands so much as misreading the market. The first Multimedia PC standard, supported by Microsoft, was announced in 1991. Had Commodore brought out their own 'multimedia' kit for all Amigas as well as (or instead of) the CDTV, they could have capitalized on the hype and attracted far more interest in the Amiga as a CDROM gaming platform. The Sega Mega CD was released in December 1991, so if Commodore had gotten the A570 out in April 1991 they would have stolen its thunder too!

Wikipedia says:-

CD-ROM drives were just coming to market in 1990, and it was difficult to concisely communicate to a consumer all the hardware requirements for using "multimedia software", which mostly meant "displaying video synced with audio on a PC via a CD-ROM drive". The MPC standard was supposed to communicate this concisely, so a consumer buying hardware or software could simply look for the MPC logo and be assured of compatibility.

The MPC program had mixed results primarily because of the vast number of PCs sold under different brands

These were the days before ATAPI CDROM drives, when each manufacturer had their own proprietary interface. It got so bad that sound cards would come with 3 or 4 connectors to suit different manufacturer's CDROM drives, and you had to install a different device driver for each one. This was on top of the usual I/O conflicts and driver problems that DOS PCs had.

Commodore had a perfect opportunity to promote their CDROM drive as the true 'plug-and-play' solution that PCs lacked. Developers would have loved it because they didn't have to deal with a million different configurations, the storage capacity was mind-boggling and performance staggering compared to floppies, and it would mean the end of piracy so they could afford to develop awesome titles!

If the A570 had been released in 1991 the take up would have been much higher, especially once developers and users saw what it could do for games. Commodore might then have been able to keep A500 sales going longer and make more profit, enabling them to develop new hardware faster. If they had also released AGA at around the same time the Amiga might have been a viable 'not shit' alternative to PCs for quite a while longer.

IMO Commodore's big mistake before 1992 was not that they did too little to improve the A500 itself (having a well-defined hardware platform was good), but that they took the existing userbase for granted and mostly chased the high end. The A3000, AAA chipset and CDTV were all attempts to service the high end of their respective markets. The development resources sunk into those failures could have been much more effectively used to design better low-end models and addons for users to upgrade their existing machines.