PC games that made the Amiga look like Shit

[CCCP alert]

Surprised they converted down so well, and on top of it you can add a nice copperlist for the sky too.

32 colour Amiga left, Arcade right, no dithering added.

[Arne]

Originally Posted by Luca underdog

21 colors, the result is very nice

Mine should be 16 with the copper sky gradient counting as a single colour.

32 colours opens up a lot of possibilities and is quite sufficient for most games I feel* (some indices can be reserved for regional objects if needed). The extra bitplane eats into chipmem though, and slows down blits too I guess. Additionally, some games probably letterboxed to 200px because they needed the space for processing... I remember doing it myself despite being in PAL land.

* Though it has to be said that 32 colours in not enough for later arcade games (wide gamut, big objects) at all... you'd definitely get banding. However, many of the early DOS VGA games didn't really do much with the 256 colours aside from adding pillow shading and little subtle gradients with little payoff, so there the 32 colours can still compete with a little care.

[Luca underdog]

Originally Posted by CCCP alert

Surprised they converted down so well, and on top of it you can add a nice copperlist for the sky too.

32 colour Amiga left, Arcade right, no dithering added.

32colors is a more than a lux, above average

Originally Posted by Arne

Mine should be 16 with the copper sky gradient counting as a single colour.

32 colours opens up a lot of possibilities and is quite sufficient for most games I feel* (some indices can be reserved for regional objects if needed). The extra bitplane eats into chipmem though, and slows down blits too I guess. Additionally, some games probably letterboxed to 200px because they needed the space for processing... I remember doing it myself despite being in PAL land.

* Though it has to be said that 32 colours in not enough for later arcade games (wide gamut, big objects) at all... you'd definitely get banding. However, many of the early DOS VGA games didn't really do much with the 256 colours aside from adding pillow shading and little subtle gradients with little payoff, so there the 32 colours can still compete with a little care.

yes, 16 without gradient the limited colors its just a little amiga problem, the games can be also interpreted to have not only a conversion but an ad hoc exclusive title... look at spectrum games for example

[Arne]

Yeah, it's neat when ports just go and do their own thing and become exclusive, like Rygar on the NES. Archimedes Elite? Sadly the Amiga rarely got to shine and show off, due to the nature and budget of ports... and like I've said earlier, making assets back then was a lot harder than it is now.

Ruff 'n' Tumble did pull of some nice 32 colour action. 320x217 (less considering the separate top stat screen).
https://www.mobygames.com/game/14517...s/amiga/86221/

[CCCP alert]

But it started out well with EA's superlative Marble Madness A1000 port. Marble Madness and Defender of the Crown was a powerful combination for the desire to own an Amiga before the A500.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Arne

Ruff 'n' Tumble did pull of some nice 32 colour action. 320x217 (less considering the separate top stat screen).
https://www.mobygames.com/game/14517...s/amiga/86221/

This game was developed starting in 1993, and released in 1994. I watched a 'longplay' video and it's amazing! Hard to believe it only needs an A500 with 1MB ChipRAM.

[ Show youtube player ]

This game illustrates the biggest gripe I had about the home computer market throughout the 80's and 90's - the technology was changing so rapidly that developers didn't have time to fully exploit most platforms. The Amiga was the 'worst' example because it was capable of so much. Fans complain about Commodore not updating the hardware to match the PC, but this game (and others released late in the Amiga's life) shows that wasn't the real issue. The real problem was having to rush stuff out before the 'next big thing' arrived.

Few developers gained the skills and knowledge required to produce games of this quality, and that wouldn't have changed much if Commodore had brought out more powerful machines sooner. As we saw with AGA, having twice as much CPU power, graphics and memory didn't make up for a lack of time and talent. A lot of time was wasted in lackluster game design and bad ports. A game of this quality could have run on any Amiga since 1987 (perhaps slightly limited by not having 1MB ChipRAM before 1991) so what prevented it from happening sooner? Not the hardware.

Commodore gets regularly excoriated for producing the same tired old chipset with no changes in 7 years, and then being too little too late with AGA - yet the number and quality of A500 games produced after 1992 shows that it wasn't as tired as fans believe. Furthermore ECS wasn't a 'nothing-burger', as the extra ChipRAM really did allow games like this to do more.

But what makes this game really stand out isn't how many pixels it can throw around the screen, its the well designed graphics and animation. No fancy parallax scrolling that taxes the machine and distracts the player, just nice muted backgrounds that provide atmosphere without competing against the foreground. The main character's movements are realistic, there's not too much going on at once, and due to not trying to do too much its all silky smooth with no annoying slow downs.

Having AGA or VGA graphics wouldn't make much difference, and might even make it worse if the coder and artist decoded to max out the hardware. Who needs 256 colors when you can do this much with 32?

[Aardvark]

Ruff 'n' Tumble requires 512k+512k, not 1MB Chip.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Aardvark

Ruff 'n' Tumble requires 512k+512k, not 1MB Chip.

Even better! (that'll teach me for trusting the description on a YouTube video )

Anyhoo, in this interview with the programmer (Jason Perkins) in TheOne Magazine, he said they decided to use 32 colors and 'static parallax' to get the speed and playability they wanted - a very wise decision IMO. He said,

"We did begin developing a parallax scrolling background, in 16 colors, but then Robin created some screens in 32 colors with no parallax... To add a 3 dimensional aspect to it, ... we blur some of the things that are supposed to be further away, to create the impression of depth".

This is what good game design is about, focusing on the things that matter (gameplay, and graphics that look nice without detracting from it) rather than showcasing technical effects. The fact that this game works as well as it does in 32 colors with full-screen multi-directional scrolling and plenty of animation shows that the Amiga's hardware was up to the task right from the start. But it took nearly a decade for the software to catch up - not because the hardware was that difficult to program (Ruff 'n' Tumble doesn't do anything that 'tricky') but because few were willing to put the effort in (or had the skills) to produce a really well designed game.

It's unfortunate that many of the best Amiga games came out after most fans had decided that the platform had no more to offer, and that the PC - with it's 256 colors, more powerful CPU and synthesized music - was the way forward. AGA might have slowed that exodus if it had been introduced earlier, but not if it would take as long to be fully exploited with well designed (as apposed to just technically superior) games.

We needed more games like Ruff 'n' Tumble before 1992, more than we needed souped up hardware. What really made the Amiga look like shit compared to the PC were all the lackluster ports and amateurish games which were shoveled onto it. PCs got a lot of that too in the early days, which is understandable considering how hard it was to get acceptable results from CGA graphics and 'PC speaker' sound on a 4.77MHz 8088. But then VGA and sound cards and faster CPUs encouraged developers to max out their creative kills to make the games look as good as possible.

Take Doom for example. The 3D effect wasn't what really made it such a hit - it was the excellent gameplay, nice textures, well animated enemies and interesting levels that made it enjoyable. Most 3D Amiga games were uninspiring because the developers concentrated on getting the 3D effect working, with actual game design being an afterthought. That's why the best 'Doom clone' on the Amiga is... Doom!

[NovaCoder]

Originally Posted by CCCP alert

You can't do 1989 Shadow of the Beast 1 as well as a 1985 Amiga running it on any 1991 PC at any price with any video/sound cards, even if you were Bill Gates.

That SCUMM VM ECS video with Sam and Max is interesting, as it is doing all that on the fly 256>64EHB conversion real-time I guess there is a massive CPU overhead to make that happen?

.

Yep real-time and very slow

[Megalomaniac]

For sims, strategy games and adventures, the A500 was starting to get outdated by 1992 - the 7Mhz clock speed just wasn't as fast as a decent PC, no amount of custom hardware could overcome that, and most users not having hard drives was also a bottleneck. Add the fact that PC games were increasingly 256 colours only, meaning that you'd have the work of downgrading the graphics to 32 colours or the semi-fixed 64 colours of EHB, and you can see why the A1200 was needed for that market. Losing the keypad and (at least at the time) acceleratability from the A600 must have angered companies making sims especially too. And then came 3D action games, where even a 286 arguably beat an A500.

For 2D action games, different story. The most technically impressive A500 action games mostly came after the A1200 was released - Ruff N Tumble is one, Elfmania, Brian the Lion, Stardust, Mega Typhoon, Kid Chaos, we can go on (all except Mega Typhoon I believe run on 512 chip +512 fast configs). Sadly many don't have the same design quality as equivalent SNES or Megadrive games, but it at least shows that the potential was still there.

The A1200 offered more for the first of those categories than the second. With hindsight I wonder if the A1200 should have been a higher-spec £700ish mid-range model (with a hard drive and some fast RAM as standard), ideally released 6-12 months earlier while the biggest PC publishers were still fully into the Amiga, as an aspirational model for 'heavy' games and 'light' productivity, to have a bigger gap between it and the A600.

[grond]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Take Doom for example. The 3D effect wasn't what really made it such a hit - it was the excellent gameplay, nice textures, well animated enemies and interesting levels that made it enjoyable. Most 3D Amiga games were uninspiring because the developers concentrated on getting the 3D effect working, with actual game design being an afterthought. That's why the best 'Doom clone' on the Amiga is... Doom!

AlienBreed3D is a much better game than Doom in my opinion.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

With hindsight I wonder if the A1200 should have been a higher-spec £700ish mid-range model (with a hard drive and some fast RAM as standard), ideally released 6-12 months earlier while the biggest PC publishers were still fully into the Amiga, as an aspirational model for 'heavy' games and 'light' productivity, to have a bigger gap between it and the A600.

I think with hindsight that’s imo an even worse move than what Commodore did with all due respect! To sell a computer at £700 in 1991 to the masses, we aren’t talking A3000 numbers here are we!?

It would have to be a full-on computer with complete suite of programs and probably bundled printer, Amstrad had the sub £500 sector covered with the PCW market and that included monitor too, so if Commodore went that route, we are talking closer to £1000 to include printer and monitor, then it’s out of the reach time again for the masses.

That’s the predicament, there were plenty of market sectors in the home computing market (despite what some PC fanboys like to think), by 1991 the only one left for Commodore was the budget multimedia/gaming computer. They did everything right with the A1200 for the market it was in…..bar upgrade the custom processors enough so people saw the difference from the get go

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by grond

AlienBreed3D is a much better game than Doom in my opinion.

I don't think it's better, it's just different. One of the mistakes people make is in thinking that all FPS games, especially from that era, are basically just the same. Doom is an arcade ego trip, where you are massively powerful compared to most ot the denizens. You actually run faster than your own rockets.

AB3D is closer to the stealthier generation that came out later. Limited supplies, tense and death always just behind the next door.

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

I think with hindsight that’s imo an even worse move than what Commodore did with all due respect! To sell a computer at £700 in 1991 to the masses, we aren’t talking A3000 numbers here are we!?

I think the goal would be to have AGA class hardware as an aspirational model, ideally around the 89/90 period. So people would still be buying the affordable A500, which was still better than the competition. You didn't really need to sell many of them, just make it clear that better things were on the horizon and so jumping off the Amiga wasn't necessary. It's really the same strategy that kept the C64 on sale while the A500 was eating into it's market.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

That’s the predicament, there were plenty of market sectors in the home computing market (despite what some PC fanboys like to think), by 1991 the only one left for Commodore was the budget multimedia/gaming computer. They did everything right with the A1200 for the market it was in…..bar upgrade the custom processors enough so people saw the difference from the get go

You mean the market that was completely gone by 1994?

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by AestheticDebris

I think the goal would be to have AGA class hardware as an aspirational model, ideally around the 89/90 period. So people would still be buying the affordable A500, which was still better than the competition. You didn't really need to sell many of them, just make it clear that better things were on the horizon and so jumping off the Amiga wasn't necessary. It's really the same strategy that kept the C64 on sale while the A500 was eating into it's market.

People were buying the A500 with OCS in 1991, AGA was not needed until 1992 (if at all in its current form), but it was needed with a much bigger technical improvements, both in sprite and chunky capabilities.

Originally Posted by TCD

You mean the market that was completely gone by 1994?

It was completely gone because Commodore let it slip through it’s fingers, who is to say the market couldn’t have continued with a decent enough product?

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

It was completely gone because Commodore let it slip through it’s fingers, who is to say the market couldn’t have continued with a decent enough product?

I agree. The only question is if a 'decent enough' machine would have been possible for 400 pound.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by TCD

I agree. The only question is if a 'decent enough' machine would have been possible for 400 pound.

Well they were aiming the ‘CD64’ Hombre machine as a console, i would guessed the same £300 as the CD32, (no £400+ console has ever succeeded in selling well), so there would be just as many reasons to think a £400 computer would have come from it the following year.

It’s all if’s and but’s of course, but if a Hombre computer could play SF2, Doom and EA games like next gen Road Rash, Need For Speed then there would be decent enough market to support such a machine.

[grond]

Guys, there are (several) threads dedicated to "what-ifs". This thread is about actual games from the era...

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

People were buying the A500 with OCS in 1991, AGA was not needed until 1992 (if at all in its current form), but it was needed with a much bigger technical improvements, both in sprite and chunky capabilities.

If a high end Amiga had AGA level hardware around ~1990 then by '92 that could have made it into the lower cost model. And the higher end model refreshed with higher spec hardware. Instead Commodore had higher end machines stuck with the same graphics capabilities as the low end model and at a.very high price that wasn't really competitive with PC hardware.

Plenty of people would be happy with the low end spec and those that weren't would've been happier if they could see the advantages of stumping up for higher end hardware. The value proposition for buying an A4000 over an A1200, if you were a games player, just wasn't there. The same can't be said for the PC market, where spending more money typically got very obvious improvements to the hardware.