Did piracy kill the amiga?

[idrougge]

Read AP2 about the Amiga's death sentence in 1993.
http://theweekly.co.uk/ap2/bad/summit.html

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by 4mat_

Not really, look how expensive writable media was in the early '90s. no, it was just a void of mostly embarassing catch-up titles after '92. ("Doom but on the amiga, sonic but on the amiga" etc) Shame but that's progress.

I don't agree at all, the 16-bit consoles died in a sea of boring repetitive platform games, the Amiga had plenty of original great games through 94 at least, even 95 had some corkers, sure it had copycat games but so did every system. If you look at consoles today, i can count on two hands how many games i want each year per system, it didnt get to that stage until 96 for the Amiga imo.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

...it didnt get to that stage until 96 for the Amiga imo.

Could you name 10 games from 1995 for the Amiga that were really worth getting?

[ransom1122]

ATR, Pinball Illusions. Super Skidmarks. I did have to double check they were , 95 though lol

[TCD]

Yep, all three 1995 and two of them Amiga exclusive Let's see if we can find another 8/7 contenders

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by TCD

Could you name 10 games from 1995 for the Amiga that were really worth getting?

Sensible World Of Soccer
Super Skidmarks
Flight of the Amazon Queen
Virocop
Mortal Kombat II
Colonization
Dungeon Master II
Odyssey
All new world of Lemmings
Pinball Illusions
Gloom
Worms
Zeewolf 2
Shadow Fighter
Xtreme Racing
Flink
ATR

[Galahad/FLT]

From my perspective, software companies really didn't do themselves any favours whatsoever.

They 'predicted' that the likes of the Megadrive and SNES would last until 1998 as profitable machines, so put more efforts into those machines..... needless to say, they died quite a bit sooner than that with the advent of the Playstation.

And i'm not quite sure how some of them got caught out either. Yes, Psygnosis were privvy to a lot of what was going on, but the software industry is the very worst place to try and keep a bloody secret!

Sure, Sony were pretty new to the hardware game, but I remember quite vividly, everyone and anyone who discussed doing Playstation stuff, couldn't be happier with the way Sony were helping them and treating them.

On the other hand, I lost count of the amount of times people complained that Sega were no help at all, that their various libraries to write effects and get the Saturn to do whatever it needed to do was woeful, one of the programmers from Gremlin rewrote a particular library for Slipstream 5000, and as a result, the Saturn version was the same as the Playstation version, but he received no help from Sega to achieve it.

This was also the advent of C++ programming. Take a PC title, and in a couple of days/weeks, have something up and running on a Playstation and Saturn, massively reducing development time.

Before that, it was ASM programming for different processors, different hardware, different musicians needed for different machines.

The Amiga was partly on the industries hitlist because it was never going to work as part of this new ethos of easier development.

The pretence that an Amiga game couldn't sell very well was destroyed by the likes of Mortal Kombat, which according to the programmer, he did very handsomely out of MK2.... in 1995.... on the Amiga!!!!

How many years did the likes of EA, Gremlin, Ocean, US Gold take to actually produce a REAL Amiga game?

Some might argue that EA really didn't get it right, Gremlin took a long time, in fact they all took their sweet time until the Atari ST died, and then there really was NO reason left to do an ST port, when the ST wasn't getting a version anyway.

Ok, so we're all enjoying the ST ports that the Amiga didn't get back in the day (oh the irony!), but back then, it REALLY wasn't much fun to boot up your Amiga version of something that originated on the ST and realise compromises had been made.

I've just done another ST conversion, it took me from start to finish, 2 HOURS to have the game fully up and running on the Amiga where I could play it, and I don't have the source code.

You can see how it was, they did the ST version first because it was the least capable, get a version running on that that was acceptable, and then once all the bugs were ironed out, knock out the Amiga version quickly, add a couple of bells and whistles if you're lucky and charge an extra £5 for it.

So for me, the biggest problem the Amiga had was always the influence of the Atari ST, because if that machine didn't exist or failed sooner, programmers would have been more keen to utilise the Amiga better and get more from it.

Personally speaking, the Amiga had a run of 10 years which not many machines get close to, so it did well, I just think we all realise that had Commodore been a little more savvy, the Amiga in some form could have either still be going as a machine in its own right, or lasted into the millenium.

And whilst I moan about the Atari ST doing more damage to the Amiga, I think had the Amiga been in Ataris hands, it would probably have been safer, certainly the A1200 would have been more Falcon like with a DSP and that really could have been something.

Great software sells, but if you're phoning your shit in, don't be surprised when people aint buying it.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

Sensible World Of Soccer
Super Skidmarks
Flight of the Amazon Queen
Virocop
Mortal Kombat II
Colonization
Dungeon Master II
Odyssey
All new world of Lemmings
Pinball Illusions
Gloom
Worms
Zeewolf 2
Shadow Fighter
Xtreme Racing
Flink
ATR

Thanks Most of those are available on other platforms (PC DOS mainly), but it's a valid list of 1995 games to get on the Amiga. Both the Genesis and the SNES were replaced with newer systems (which worked out more or less well) in 1995/1996. However, I'm rather sure that most of those boring repetitive platform games sold a lot better in 1994 and onwards on consoles than the Amiga exclusive titles.

[Nekoniaow]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

From my perspective, software companies really didn't do themselves any favours whatsoever.
They 'predicted' that the likes of the Megadrive and SNES would last until 1998 as profitable machines, so put more efforts into those machines..... needless to say, they died quite a bit sooner than that with the advent of the Playstation.

It's a repeating problem. They completely missed the Facebook game wave, then the mobile one, they will soon miss the (small IMO) VR one, etc.
The video games industry is terribly conservative: we don't do any real research, we copy something when it has been proven to work, we would rather issues sequels than take risks developing new IPs and original gameplay.

What surprises me though is how this was true even in the early decades of "home gaming". You would expect a lot of wild innovation and risk taking in the early phases of a new market but what happened was tamer than for other industries. I sometimes think that the high-volume-low-quality producers such as US Gold, EA and such are responsible for killing the risk taking willingness of early developers and forcing them to be more conservative. US Gold alone almost sterilized the market by capturing an enormous portion of the arcade licenses and flooding stores with horribly low quality games. (Sorry Richard, yes Final Fight was an achievement given the constraints but it was also a sub par game because of these constraints.)

On the other hand, I lost count of the amount of times people complained that Sega were no help at all, that their various libraries to write effects and get the Saturn to do whatever it needed to do was woeful, one of the programmers from Gremlin rewrote a particular library for Slipstream 5000, and as a result, the Saturn version was the same as the Playstation version, but he received no help from Sega to achieve it.

That's probably true, but I would be willing to bet that the reason the Saturn was not liked by developers was the same one that they used to develop bad ports for the Amiga: more complex than just "draw these pixels". During the era of assembly coding there was little room for libraries and frameworks flexible enough to accommodate several games, especially given the crazy crunch times. (I entered the industry in 98 and even at that time this was still crazy so imagine how worse the 90s and late 80s were!). So any machine which looked like it required preliminary analysis and proper abstraction of the hardware was frowned upon. Hell, the Saturn is not complex at all if you take time to look at it carefully: the PS2 was way worse but by that time the industry had learned that they needed some code reuse to move forward so abstracting the hardware didn't seem so scary anymore.

This was also the advent of C++ programming. Take a PC title, and in a couple of days/weeks, have something up and running on a Playstation and Saturn, massively reducing development time.

Let me stop you immediately here.
Unless it was a very low resources PC games, fitting in inside a PS1 was almost always a challenge: 2M of RAM, 1 of which for the frame buffer, textures and palettes and very slow IO via the CD meant that enormous work was usually needed to 1) make it run smoothly, 2) fit everything inside without incurring long loading times.
Moreover usually the code was so shitty (even in C/C++) and all modules all coupled together that just isolating the hardware dependent parts would take time.
The adaptation of Heart of Darkness on PS1 is a work of art by itself and took several very intense months of work. If you ever can interview Philippe Paquet (the guy who did it) and ask him to list all the tricks he used, by all means do it, it's both a harrowing and fascinating story.

It's true however that the attractiveness of c++ made the Amiga look a bit more foreign to many big companies but there were plenty of good c/c++ games on the Amiga. Dungeon Master is almost full C for example.
I don't think assembly is useful for the entirety of an Amiga game. As usual, you only need 20% of your code to be optimized: the tight inner loops which are repeated thousands of time per frame. But your main loop and once in a frame code are fine if coded in c/c++.

Before that, it was ASM programming for different processors, different hardware, different musicians needed for different machines.

The Amiga was partly on the industries hitlist because it was never going to work as part of this new ethos of easier development.

This is probably true but only because coders as a group were too stupid to realize and communicate that you could code most of your game in c++ on the Amiga and still have it run fast as long as the code was modular enough. What I mean is that this fact only reflect the lack of technical analysis in the industry, not that the Amiga was not capable of going through that transition.

The pretence that an Amiga game couldn't sell very well was destroyed by the likes of Mortal Kombat, which according to the programmer, he did very handsomely out of MK2.... in 1995.... on the Amiga!!!!

How many years did the likes of EA, Gremlin, Ocean, US Gold take to actually produce a REAL Amiga game?

I cry every time I think of it.

I've just done another ST conversion, it took me from start to finish, 2 HOURS to have the game fully up and running on the Amiga where I could play it, and I don't have the source code.

Experience is a fantastic tool!
Tell me again why you aren't coding *new* games for the Amiga instead of just converting existing ones?

So for me, the biggest problem the Amiga had was always the influence of the Atari ST, because if that machine didn't exist or failed sooner, programmers would have been more keen to utilise the Amiga better and get more from it.

I agree 100%. The ST was a enormous splinter in the foot of the Amiga for half of its career. If only Commodore had not fucked up with the A1000 and released the A500 immediately the sales curves would have been massively different.

Personally speaking, the Amiga had a run of 10 years which not many machines get close to, so it did well, I just think we all realise that had Commodore been a little more savvy, the Amiga in some form could have either still be going as a machine in its own right, or lasted into the millenium.

The Amiga should have been what the Mac is now becoming. And frankly when you look at the evolution of OS X it's very Amiga like in its use of the hardware to do very practical stuff (moving screens, natural trackpad gestures, etc.). The Amiga could have been it 15 years earlier but Commodore lacked the vision of Steve Jobs (among many other things).

And whilst I moan about the Atari ST doing more damage to the Amiga, I think had the Amiga been in Ataris hands, it would probably have been safer, certainly the A1200 would have been more Falcon like with a DSP and that really could have been something.

I don't know about that. The STE is a demonstration that Atari either did not have good enough hardware engineering and/or very bad market understanding, the machine is riddled with original ST issues and the blitter does not even add much to the table given how constraining its use is, moreover it's still less powerful than the A500's!

Great software sells, but if you're phoning your shit in, don't be surprised when people aint buying it.

Absolutely. Software is the great differentiator. Apple proved it when they released the iPhone: 0% hardware innovation, but in a completely integrated software package and good UI -> hotcakes.

[Nekoniaow]

Holy kangaroo, that reply of mine is way too long to be considered reasonable in any known measuring scale.

Please allow me to apologize for this wall of text, I'll take my pills before writing next time!

[Hewitson]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

I don't think so! I'm talking about the 95% of Amiga's sold i.e the budget range, if a game had A500/A1200 or whatever compatibility sticker on the front then it would work on those machines

If they were stock standard, yes. As soon as an accelerator is added those stickers are meaningless.

Originally Posted by Amigajay

You can't go expecting a 1986 game to work on an A4000 with no problems

Of course you can. The main reason the AGA machines sold so poorly is because f**k all actually worked on the things.

A 286 game works on a Pentium, the Amiga shouldn't have been any different.

[jbenam]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

A 286 game works on a Pentium, the Amiga shouldn't have been any different.

But many required MoSlo as they ran too fast, and the (in)famous Turbo button on many IBM-clones was needed because quite a bit of software were expecting 8086 speeds and would break if ran on a newer CPU

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by TCD

Thanks Most of those are available on other platforms (PC DOS mainly), but it's a valid list of 1995 games to get on the Amiga. Both the Genesis and the SNES were replaced with newer systems (which worked out more or less well) in 1995/1996. However, I'm rather sure that most of those boring repetitive platform games sold a lot better in 1994 and onwards on consoles than the Amiga exclusive titles.

A few maybe, but the fact is, out of the 17 below, only 2 were on the pc before the amiga, yes some of the others came on the pc, but the Amiga was always about new original games, if successful they got ported to other platforms. Yes you could get GTA on xbox a couple of years after PS2, but why wait?

Sensible World Of Soccer - amiga first
Super Skidmarks - amiga first
Flight of the Amazon Queen - amiga first
Virocop - exclusive
Mortal Kombat II - arcade port
Colonization - pc port
Dungeon Master II - fm towns port
Odyssey - exclusive
All new world of Lemmings - released after pc
Pinball Illusions - amiga first
Gloom - exclusive
Worms - amiga first
Zeewolf 2 - exclusive
Shadow Fighter - exclusive
Xtreme Racing - exclusive
Flink - md port
ATR - exclusive

Anyway will stop in this thread, massively off topic now!

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

A few maybe, but the fact is, out of the 17 below, only 2 were on the pc before the amiga, yes some of the others came on the pc, but the Amiga was always about new original games, if successful they got ported to other platforms.

Sorry, I didn't say that I think that the originality and quality of games didn't have a real influence on the lifespan of the Amiga either. As much as piracy wasn't the reason to end its life, good games didn't save it. Maybe they did for a year or two, but if you look at the games released in 1994 and then 1995 it's almost half the number. In 1994 C= went bankrupt. I don't think that's a coincidence

[Vot]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

Of course you can. The main reason the AGA machines sold so poorly is because f**k all actually worked on the things. .

It wasn't that bad, boot with ocs mode and turn off caches and a lot worked. Use relokick and a lot more worked.

[Hewitson]

Originally Posted by Vot

It wasn't that bad, boot with ocs mode and turn off caches and a lot worked. Use relokick and a lot more worked.

OCS mode did increase the compatibility but I would say that at least half the games still didn't work.

In my experience the kickstart causes very few issues.

[Vot]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

OCS mode did increase the compatibility but I would say that at least half the games still didn't work.

In my experience the kickstart causes very few issues.

Lol you obviously didn't play enough older games then

[brett71]

Originally Posted by Vot

Lol you obviously didn't play enough older games then

In my experience, the only times Kickstart versions were an issue was with cracked games, usually the cracktro or trainer.

[Mrs Beanbag]

Little Computer People didn't work on original A500 with Fast RAM installed.

No. It didn't help for publisher support, but it did not kill the brand commercially.

For that i hold Commodore alone responsible. They refused to see the fact that the Amiga was a valid machine for more things than games and marketed it as a toy while trying to sell their PC clones to business users but failing miserably.

Also Commodore refused to upgrade the hardware or pay for fresh minds to get in on the projects surrounding the next gen Amigas (A1200/A4000) because they actually were a horribly greedy company, to whom profit margins could always be increased, no matter what the result.