PC games that made the Amiga look like Shit

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

That's not surprising considering that the Amiga 4000/030 was only equivalent to a 25MHz 386DX. Doom didn't run very well on that either. But the biggest problem was that you couldn't run Doom on any Amiga no matter powerful it might be, since ID refused to port it. We had to wait until they released the source code in 1997.

It still doesn’t run as well on my A4000/040 as on a contemporary 486.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

Talented for sure but who knows if it wouldn't have been made at that time if it was made by a professionnal team supported by Commodore enginners with some budget and not hobbyists ?

Since when have »profesional teams« or Commodore support beat the efforts of the demo scene? Why should this even be necessary if the Amiga is such a capable platform?

Gloom was released in 1995 and it does have a C2P routine IIRC and ADoom was released very quickly after Id Software released the source code.

In the meantime, numerous FPS games were released on the PC without access to Doom source code. Why were we Amiga users just waiting for a source code release instead of just making our own Doom killers?

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by Karlos

I don't think the number of amiga machines capable of running a reasonable port of actual Doom in 1994 was that great.

IIRC, Doom needs about 4MB. DoomAttack020+ was perfectly playable on my Apollo1240 25MHz on AGA. I tried it on a stock machine with an 8MB memory board and it was slow even at a small screen size. It might have fared better on CD32, but I've never had the pleasure.

So. How many people would have had the spec in 94? Unless you had an A4000 you were probably out of luck.

I got a Blizzard 1220 (020/28 MHz) in 1994–5 when a friend upgraded to a 1230/50 (or 1230/40). I don’t think I was behind or before the curve in that respect.

But you can’t play an FPS on a 020, regardless of clock speed.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by idrougge

It still doesn’t run as well on my A4000/040 as on a contemporary 486.

thandor.net - Doom benchmark
OTI 067 512KB ISA(DX2/66) 4.69 fps
SpeedSTAR 24 1MB ISA(DX2/66) 6.27 fps
1H10AD -VLB 1MB VLB(DX2/66) 10.02 fps
CL-GD5428 80QC-A 1MB VLB(DX2/66) 10.3 fps
GW201A 1MB VLB(DX2/66) 10.34 fps

What frame rate do you get on your A4000/040?

[TCD]

Looks like a 2 MB VLB card speeds up things quite a bit: [ Show youtube player ]

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by idrougge

In the meantime, numerous FPS games were released on the PC without access to Doom source code. Why were we Amiga users just waiting for a source code release instead of just making our own Doom killers?

Because making a good game is hard work.

Doom

The team agreed to pursue the Doom concept, and development began in November 1992. The initial development team was composed of five people: programmers John Carmack and Romero, artists Adrian Carmack and Kevin Cloud, and designer Hall. They moved operations to a dark office building...

The team planned to release Doom in the third quarter of 1993 but ultimately needed more time. By December 1993, the team was working non-stop, with several employees sleeping at the office.

But numerous 3D 'FPS' games were released on the Amiga before the Doom source was released on December 23 1997, including:-

Legends Of Valour 1993
Robinson's Requiem 1994
Alien Breed 3D 1995
Breathless 1995
Citadel 1995
Gloom 1995
Fears 1995
UBEK 1995
Project Battlefield 1995
Project Intercalaris 1996
Nemac IV 1996
Trapped 1996
Trapped II 1997
Testament 1997

Considering that by mid 1994 Commodore was gone and the user base would only shrink, it's hardly surprising that no 'Doom killers' appeared for the Amiga. Nevertheless some of the titles that did appear were good games in their own right. We had plenty of stuff to keep ourselves amused while waiting for Doom.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by TCD

Looks like a 2 MB VLB card speeds up things quite a bit: [ Show youtube player ]

...and PCI was even better. But in 1992 the VL bus was just being introduced, and most 486s didn't have it. The cheap clones that everybody compares favorably to the Amiga generally only had ISA bus and a cheap crappy graphics card. But the adverts didn't tell you that - because it wasn't important. You were only going to run text-based business apps on it anyway, so why would you care about what speed it ran Doom?

Actually in 1992 most people weren't buying 486s at all. Most home PC buyers went for a 386 (SX or DX) - then a year later were shocked to discover that Doom ran slowly on it. "Oh well", they sighed, "guess I will just have to buy another new computer!".

[Megalomaniac]

Doom, and other PC games inspired by it (Heretic, Duke Nukem 3D, Rise of the Triad), were mostly written by established professional teams, as was Ultima Underworld previously. Most similar Amiga titles were developed by ex-demo coders working independently in their bedrooms, with no technical support or financial backing until late in the project. Gloom aside, they were almost all done by first-time professional coders. Combine that with people always assessing PC games on brand new top-end machines with the right components, and Amiga games on the minimum supported spec that cost a fraction of the price, and it's no wonder that people overestimated the advantage PCs had on 3D games.

Having stayed with Amigas late enough that CD-ROMs had fully taken over on PCs by then, I've never installed a floppy disk PC game in my life, so I'm not 100% sure how big a rigmarole installing them to hard drive was, presumably not every disk had to be inserted during the process as so many different graphics / sound cards were supported with different data files for each? How many disks was something like Monkey Island 2 on for the PC, and how long did it take to install, compared to the Amiga version?

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

Doom, and other PC games inspired by it (Heretic, Duke Nukem 3D, Rise of the Triad), were mostly written by established professional teams, as was Ultima Underworld previously.

Wait, what? id was a 'established professional team'? Granted they made games before, but you should really read/watch more about the history (especially the bit when they went to Sierra to sell the company and how that didn't happen) of that company. Same goes for Apogee/3D Realms. Those were punk rock kids of games development.

[Captain_ Kal]

Sadly, there is no WHD version, I don't know why.

A Whdload installation for "Shadow of the Third Moon" and "Starfighter D' Yamen's Revenge" would go a long way to make these games playable at last!!!

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by TCD

Wait, what? id was a 'established professional team'? Granted they made games before, but you should really read/watch more about the history (especially the bit when they went to Sierra to sell the company and how that didn't happen) of that company. Same goes for Apogee/3D Realms. Those were punk rock kids of games development.

So they were definitely established, and they were a team - but were they professional? Generally the word 'professional' means an activity involving specific talents and standards that is done for money rather than just for fun. By that definition the iD Software team was definitely 'professional'.

Between the 70's and 90's it was common for programmers to be part of the 'hippy' culture, while also being highly skilled programmers working in professional jobs. In the same way the producers of 'punk rock' were generally professional musicians (whether self-taught or formally trained). 'Punk' is a musical style, not an income category.

BTW you may not know that the word 'punk' was originally an informal name for prostitute in the 16th to 18th centuries, and we all know that prostitution is 'the World's oldest profession'.

[sokolovic]

Plus the AB3D Engine was made by a student in his bedroom who send it to Team17.
Nothing established or professional there.

[petran]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

Having stayed with Amigas late enough that CD-ROMs had fully taken over on PCs by then, I've never installed a floppy disk PC game in my life, so I'm not 100% sure how big a rigmarole installing them to hard drive was, presumably not every disk had to be inserted during the process as so many different graphics / sound cards were supported with different data files for each? How many disks was something like Monkey Island 2 on for the PC, and how long did it take to install, compared to the Amiga version?

I remember a computer shop where they had a full catalog of pirated games and they'd use X-Copy to provide you with the game's official setup file, not the pre-compressed full game like in today's abandonware of floppy games. You could even bring your own floppies or pay extra and buy them brand new from the shop.

I often chose the latter because there was less risk of corrupt disks, which would mean having to revisit the shop again. Corrupt disks were often an issue when I would copy games from friends, usually the fully installed game in arj files split into floppies.



Installation was not that long actually. I had bought Monkey Island 2 this way and full installation to hard disk would take less than 15 minutes. It was a linear installation, meaning you had to insert every floppy for full decompression of data.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

Having stayed with Amigas late enough that CD-ROMs had fully taken over on PCs by then, I've never installed a floppy disk PC game in my life, so I'm not 100% sure how big a rigmarole installing them to hard drive was, presumably not every disk had to be inserted during the process

Generally every disk was used in the installation process, as the files would be compressed to save space with archives possibly spanning multiple disks - which was ok because the game would not be run direct from disk as it would on the Amiga. The only catch was that the PC didn't know when a disk was inserted - so you had to 'press a key' each time, and you better insert the right disk or it might screw up (good installations had a way to tell which disk was inserted which by eg. having a small identification file that was unique to each disk).

The real problems occurred after installation, when the game often would not run due to lack of conventional memory or misconfigured drivers. A typical DOS PC would need to have the config.sys and autoexec.bat files edited to remove or reconfigure drivers for more conventional memory. You might also have to go into the BIOS setup to maximize extended memory. Sound cards and CDROM drives could be problem too, as they needed drivers set up for the specific hardware including interrupts and I//O addresses.

The worst thing was that one setup often didn't suit everything. To maximize memory you would have smartdrive turned off, no disk buffers added, and the BIOS set to not shadow the BIOS and video card ROMs, all of which could dramatically slow down the computer in normal operation. Most of this could be avoided by using a custom boot disk, but most PC users didn't want to do that!

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

So they were definitely established, and they were a team - but were they professional? Generally the word 'professional' means an activity involving specific talents and standards that is done for money rather than just for fun. By that definition the iD Software team was definitely 'professional'.

Yes, and by that definition every demo group is an 'established team' that goes 'professional' as soon as money for a game is involved.

[Megalomaniac]

To me, a team is 'professional' if they're working on a game on a full time basis with the intention of making enough money from it to have no other source of income. That seems to fit iD and Apogee by the time they did Doom or Duke 3D, but not Andrew Clitheroe on AB3D or the developers of Fears (none of whom seem to have any previous programming credits), let alone the later ones. To extend the analogy, punk musicians are professional musicians once they have a record deal, but not when they're mates rehearsing in a garage while at school, or while doing the odd gig at a dive pub alongside day jobs.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by TCD

Yes, and by that definition every demo group is an 'established team' that goes 'professional' as soon as money for a game is involved.

Yes. Like DICE or Terramarque or Bloodhouse.

And their games were ground breaking games in the 2D fields of Amiga games.

[lmimmfn]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

Plus the AB3D Engine was made by a student in his bedroom who send it to Team17.
Nothing established or professional there.

Do you have any links regarding that? I find that fascinating if true.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by lmimmfn

Do you have any links regarding that? I find that fascinating if true.

Pp 122/123 of this magazine
https://amr.abime.net/issue_522

[Captain_ Kal]

Most of this could be avoided by using a custom boot disk, but most PC users didn't want to do that!

The art of making a boot disk!!!!

Although to be fair, for gaming you only needed to have one or two different boot disk configurations.

I mostly used, the boot disk created from the "TIE Fighter" game, for my gaming needs. It was very efficient!!