Did piracy kill the amiga?

[laser]

we' re on the 2008-21 century and you guys discussing if piracy kill the miggy? or if was doom or if was windows95 or if was a demon

[viddi]

Originally Posted by laser

we' re on the 2008-21 century and you guys discussing if piracy kill the miggy? or if was doom or if was windows95 or if was a demon

...this is not the 21 century Vista forum.

[kriz]

I dont think so The reason I bough the Amiga in the first place was that i knew people i could get all games from..(besides best gfx and sound ofcourse )

Dont have money for 100s of games lol...

And all the mess with Commodore, A500+ and A600 shoudl have been scrapped and then only 1200 and 4000....

[BippyM]

Originally Posted by laser

we' re on the 2008-21 century and you guys discussing if piracy kill the miggy? or if was doom or if was windows95 or if was a demon

We are discussing if piracy DID kill the Amiga (like back in 1993 onwards) not if piracy is killing the Amiga!

One is past tense one is current!

[Hewitson]

Motorola Inside: why on earth was software shop selling pirated games?

[oneshotdead]

laser, perhaps retro-forums aren't for you, troll?

[Motorola Inside]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

Motorola Inside: why on earth was software shop selling pirated games?

'cause in Italy laws against piracy on softare (and music and video) didn't exist or were not applied till 90's years.
In particular software market was almost totally pirate.

[mrbob2]

Aaaaaaaaaanyways, just to reply to my origonal thread, piracy HASNT killed the amiga as you can still buy games for it, machines still in use and there is still an active forum of loyal fans

To be honest, i dont think piracy kills anything, remember the famous 80s slogan "HOME TAPING IN KILLING THE MUSIC INDUSTRY" ????

Even with todays p2p and warez sites where you can get any music in seconds, the music (and film) industry has never been bigger!!!

[watertonian]

Hello alll. been lurking here a bit, figured I'd give my opinion as well. Piracy didnn't kill the Amiga outright, but was a number of smaller issues that did, as well as the C= management (Or lack of). The th¡ngs that spelled doom for Amiga were, well, doom for one. anyway,
1) Cheaper/ generic hardware of comparable ability.
(Several ppl switched to PC when VGA came out with 256 color gfx, and Amiga was stuck with 32/64 ECS/EHB and 4096HAM (almost useless with games))
2) Software support was rampant for PC. I remember being amazed in '97 while vacationing in Europe, I walked into an Electronics Boutique in Newcastle, UK, and finding an Amiga section. (I've never been amazed at a windows/dos/macintosh section for games) I had to travel well over 6,000 miles to find such a store. (Probably didn't have to, but I didn't see any stateside, even Safe Harbor computers stopped Amiga software support, and they were the closest @ 40 miles from my home) This is probably due in small part to piracy, but not to an extent that actually happened.
3) 3D games.... The whole chunky/planar gfx battle, while most Amiga enthusiasts felt it was possible to texture map on an Amiga, there was about a year or 2 where nobody really made it work well. (There was progress, but nobody figured out the trick just yet) Even with the hardware the CD32 used for C2P conversions. Did any games even use that? (thinking about it, I think Gloom did)
4) After the texture mapping stuff was figured out, the pc side of things had already improved their methods. The Amiga was playing catch-up in this area, and would be until chunky gfx cards were more popular. (PCI boards and other expansions that make standard hardware Amiga compatible.. I use IDE CD-Roms, a wireless usb/ps/2 mouse, sega game pads, pc floppys with scotch tape over the second hole in case I need to x-fer something that way, etc) These methods of making standard hardware work on my 1200 are the only way I've been able to make this a viable machine capable of even writing this post. (I have broadband access, and have a 3com etherlink PCMCIA network card attached to my 1200) After so much converting and tweaking and futzing with the hardware, I've had friends/family ask me why I still use a 15 year old machine instead of run an emulator on something modern? All I've been able to reply is that I'm stubborn, I hate Microsoft, and know more about Amiga than the alternatives. And I have yet to find that elusive "Amiga" feel with anything else, including Linux. (Though I'm not too experienced with linux, having just put DSL on a PII laptop not too long ago)
EDIT: had to run and take care of my kid....
5) Commodore/Escom/Gateway/A inc management... From failing to adjust the hardware and predict where the industry was heading to being money hungary sons of #$%#@!!!, whatever company held/leased the IP rights seems to have been/ is being run by drunken coked up gorillas.. From the A600 even being considered as a console (wouldn't be bad if it had 3.0, AGA, and a 020, with a bit more expandability, but then you just have a 1200 without a keypad.. Could have been a good laptop idea, though) to the A.inc/Hyperion lawsuit that seems designed to kill OS4 so they can go ahead with A. Inc's OS5/Amiga anywhere crap...

6) Even with all this, the Amiga isn't dead so much as just fragmented (classic, ppc, OS4, Aros, MorphOS, UAE, etc..) and leaderless (forgot about A inc for a second. Easy to do when in denial.. oops..), with no really new (commercial) stuff, and as such is reduced to a hobbyist machine, that is good for serious work if you are one hardcore, stubborn, nostalgia addicted S.O.B. (Which I admit to being completely )

[DeAdLy_cOoKiE]

Commodore killed the amiga, trying to compete with Sega and other consoles with that ugly CD32.

Amiga had a large userbase of graphic artists and musicians, it was more than just a games machine and it was cheap compared to a PC.

Had they opted for a 32bit Amiga 1200 version with Harddisk and CD, and midi out/in, they would have stand a better chance.

Piracy didn't kill the amiga at all, that only hurt software developers.

Poor marketing decisions..

[Zetr0]

@DeAdLy_cOoKiE

would you be the cookie that made the

• Hard 'n Heavy
• Alien Breed
• Shadow of the Beast2

to name but a few remixes ?

<--- fan!!!

some f*cking great work!!!

my Mp3 player would not be the same without them.

[DeAdLy_cOoKiE]

Thx. I need to go back to making music (I'm pretty advanced at playing piano/guitar nowadays, in fact I'm pretty good to be honest).. I also bought some new equipment and PC, downloaded latest cubase and VST plugins/instruments.. Maybe soon, have to set my mind to it..

[Zetr0]

@DeAdLy_cOoKiE

my sincerest thanks for your arrangements! I do hope you find your zone for some more work


*Ahem, now that i got that little bit of slobbering fandom out.

indeed the Amiga was killed by incompetence, impotence, ignorance and willfull dishonesty of a lot of execs.

The shame really is that some scum sucking muppets bought the name and decided to release an upgraded OS (3.5) which was nothing more than 3.1 with added PD software pre-configured. And as far as anyone is truely concerned OS3.9 isn't an OS its a nightmare! (OS4 need not apply)

since commodores demise the thieving fucktards took over, and well... stole the lot, hood-winked the community and then robbed them..

The real truth is that piracy is a cop-out for a lot of distributer's to claim that their (over priced, under-performing ) product sales are under-performing when simply people wont buy it.

[xArtx]

Directed here from the other thread, what a cracker, wish I got to post in it.

It’s Fairlight’s fault the Amiga is dead because they’re responsible for everyone else’s crimes
Followed close behind by blank floppy manufacturers, Xcopy and disk drives

Those guys and the virus writers bless them are the types that hopefully go on to do more productive things later in life,
and it’s just a step that was needed.

[Mrs Beanbag]

well it really is an odd thing to say, "piracy killed the Amiga," because how could the Amiga have been harmed by it? People didn't pirate the hardware, people bought the hardware partly *because* they could then get so much software for next to nothing. Plus the Amiga actually outlived its parent company by a few years, which is really something...

Actually nothing killed the Amiga, you can't kill the Amiga. So silly question, really!

[Gzegzolka]

Piracy? Well, I think they do little to average harm, but they were not a biggest nail to amiga coffin. It's very hard to estimate if there was no piracy - will more people buy original games? You know it's like trying to make prophecy, past was made already and nothing can change it. I'm sure that some people would buy in few cases original software, but also some ones wouldn't - there's lot of different factors like high price of games, not comfortable protection system that require to look into manual each time You start game, some games could be not available in shops, some could have not enough on stock, etc. etc.

[mrbob2]

Did piracy kill the spectrum? bbcmicro? amstrad? c64? Dragon32? megadrive? snes? zx81? atari st? oric atmos?

All these machine had a lifespan, even if the devs kept making games, 100 new amiga games every day... people wanted to play tomb raider, gran turismo, doom, quake, wipeout 2097.

To get the amiga to do doom quality games i needed to spend £400+ on an 060 card.

people owned the amiga 500. It was the most popular and had virtually no expansion capabilities.

factor in the pc in which virtually everything can be upgraded, the amiga stood no chance.

No computer which had all its guts in the keyboard ever stood a chance with "the future"

What made the amiga special was the fact it was the best computer in the late 80s and early 90s.

It was never going to last any longer.

If we could go back in time and everything went perfectly, the amiga would just be a PC with an amiga badge.

Piracy was MASSIVE on the psx, everyone i knew had a chipped console and it was one of the most popular consoles of all time.

Even if there was no piracy on the psx, it would not be still going now would it? technology accelerates at a seemingly never ending rate and hardware wont last forever.

Psx became the ps2, the pc just got better components added and the amiga still lives on in our hearts, emulation and working amiga hardware.

[Mrs Beanbag]

indeed... and look at how many people use illegal copies of Photoshop

or Windows for that matter

[TCD]

Originally Posted by mrbob2

Piracy was MASSIVE on the psx, everyone i knew had a chipped console and it was one of the most popular consoles of all time.

One could argue it was one of the most popular consoles of all time because of piracy. Same for Amiga, C64, PC etc.

[Vot]

Originally Posted by TCD

One could argue it was one of the most popular consoles of all time because of piracy. Same for Amiga, C64, PC etc.

Agreed.. It increased the machines appeal and drove sales in my opinion.

3 fundamental things killed the amiga

1) The initial engineering effort that went into the chipset design was never reproduced.

ECS and AGA certainly didn't reproduce the initial engineering efforts.
(Too little too late)

2) The amiga never penetrated the business sector where pc compatibles dominated.

3) Commodore failed at marketing the machine in both the business and gaming markets. While popular it never reached the mass appeal of the c64.