PC games that made the Amiga look like Shit

[Megalomaniac]

At almost any time in the Amiga's life, you could buy (or at least build) an Amiga that was a match in performance to a PC of the same price point, aside from the time between 256 colour VGA graphics establishing themselves and Commodore releasing AGA. And the Amiga was easier to use, had more of a community feel, games were cheaper, and the hardware had a longer shelf life of being able to run exciting new games. I avoided getting on the PC treadmill for as long as it was realistically possible, and I still have no love for the things.

Off-topic, but you've only got to compare Spectrum and Amiga versions of Chase HQ and Renegade to realise that an Amiga game (well, an ST game in those two cases really) wasn't automatically better than a Spectrum one. Good game design, controls, difficulty curve etc can overcome bad graphics and sound.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by Karlos

Thread title is trigger clickbait nonsense. Games that made the Amiga look shit? How about Half Life? Crysis, Far Cry? Dead Space? Fallout? Doom reboot? Cyberpunk? Any game released since the mid 1990s onwards?

I think the intention, especially in the timeline specified in the OP was to prove that before 1991 no PC games made the Amiga look like shit.
But I agree with you, this is a clickbait title, especially on an Amiga forum.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Karlos

Thread title is trigger clickbait nonsense. Games that made the Amiga look shit? How about Half Life? Crysis, Far Cry? Dead Space? Fallout? Doom reboot? Cyberpunk? Any game released since the mid 1990s onwards?

Unfair comparison? Well it's fair according to the title.

Clickbait? Sure, that's what a good title is meant to be. But before going off half-cocked you might want to read the OP.

No PC games made the Amiga "look shit". Ever. Not one. Only poor ports did that, or games intended for wildly different hardware level specification that had to be completely stripped to run on a basic configuration. The Amiga was left behind when PC games began to make use of either brute force software rendering and later hardware 3D. That's a given, but you aren't making a valid comparison any more.

That's right, which is why I limited the time frame to before 1992, when PC games were not all brute force rendered 3D.

In case you can't be bothered reading earlier posts in the thread, here's the gist...

In 1987 IBM released VGA. From that time on PCs could theoretically beat the Amiga in number of colors on screen (not counting copper list effects and HAM mode). PCs were also getting greater processing power, more RAM, hard drives and hires displays that the A500 didn't. Amiga fans complained about the lack of improvements made to the Amiga to catch up. By 1991 many fans had given up waiting and jumped to the PC, which they assert had much better games by this time that did indeed make the Amiga look like shit. But was it true, and if so to what extent?

How much better did a PC game have to be, and how many of them did it take to convince an Amiga fan to become a PC fan? Was comparing an unexpanded A500 to a much more expensive 386 or 486 PC fair? Or was the cost irrelevant and only the result mattered? Finally, will Amiga fans continue arguing their positions to this day, despite mountains of hard evidence to the contrary? (answer:- yes).

To be clear though, what I am interested in is not so much getting an objective measurement of how shitty the Amiga actually was compared to the PC (or vice versa), but to understand why fans perceived it to be so.

The number and variety of opinions expressed here shows that the subject is quite subjective, and also controversial. Thus the 'clickbait' nature of the title is appropriate. It was meant to bring out the diversity of opinion on the subject, and it did.

You might as well talk about Amiga games that made the zx spectrum look shit.

Well, they did.

But some Spectrum games can hold their own surprisingly well. I enjoy playing Spectrum games on my A1200 via emulation. With composite output to TV they look practically identical to a real ZX Spectrum, and I can imagine being back on the old speccy again. One reason I do this is convenience, but also because some good Spectrum games were never ported to the Amiga, while some that were lost their essence.

But in general the Amiga does indeed make the Spectrum look like shit, and that is a perfectly valid comparison when done contemporaneously. When I moved house a few years ago I thew away all my old home computer junk and only kept the A1200 (big mistake - yeah, I know). Then I got the retro computing bug after seeing all those old machines going cheap on eBay. I bought a Spectrum +3B (produced until 1992) thinking that this was the ultimate Speccy that I would have had if they were available in New Zealand.

But guess what? It turned out to be a frustrating machine to use and I never got past that. Same went for the Ataris, C64 and Plus 4, MSX, Acorns, Ti99/4A and Tandy Color Computers that I bought. I thought I would be enthused by finally getting a chance to become familiar with these home computers I never had 'back in the day', but in reality I just couldn't get into them. Why? Because the Amiga was just so much better that I couldn't bear to waste time trying to like those inferior machines.

To claim that no 'true' scotsman Amiga game was ever shit is just not being honest. Of course the Amiga had some shit games, even ones that were native. So did the PC. But one person's shit game may be another's gem. People complained about how shitty Sierra's adventure game ports to the Amiga were, when they were just as shitty on the PC - and yet very enjoyable to play. Until you have actually played the same game on both platforms you can't say that one is shitty compared to the other.

Furthermore one person's idea of shitty may not align with another's (eg. I think Doom is perfectly playable at 10 fps, while some aren't satisfied with anything less than 60 fps). However many Amiga fans seem to have made their minds up based on screens shots in a magazine or someone playing the game on YouTube (probably in an emulator that doesn't match the performance of real vintage hardware). In the end it's playabilty that matters, not technical specs like how many colors are on screen or what the frame rate is. But technically minded fans love to quote that stuff, which tends to make Amiga fans jealous when the PC comes out on top. Back in 1991 that was a serious problem for Commodore and for Amiga fans who were trying to defend the machine they loved.

[rare_j]

In 1991 those fans who jumped ship must have had much deeper pockets than your average A500 owner.
I don't know much about PC gaming 87-91. But maybe there were strategy or sim games (vehicle or sport) which were better served on very high end PC of the time. Was online gaming a thing around then?
In 1991 I was a child... these people who abandoned Amiga for PC 1991 and before would have been older gentlemen, with cash and spare time and different gaming tastes to your average teenager, I'm not sure you'll find your answer on EAB.

[rothers]

Originally Posted by TCD

I know the answer to that one: All of them

/me ducks

The Spectrum has some recent games which are amazing. 'Nothing', 'Super Mario Bros' etc.


I think the best way to play super mario bros. is on the Spectrum, there is no decent Amiga version which I know of.


Also take a look at 'Nothing' it's better than most Amiga platformers.


[ Show youtube player ]

[Karlos]

Let's face it. 1993 got rolled and a wild Doom appeared. It was super effective in convincing people that the PC was the way forward for gaming, even though the writing was on the wall (no puns intended) with Wolf3D. The best the Amiga could do within 2 years were chunky copper screen based clones that, with the single exception of Alien Breed 3D (IMHO) all struggled to match Doom's technical capabilities. It's fair to say that in a number of ways, AB3D exceeded them. Which is a shame, because things like 2 player splitscreen Gloom was a blast and deserve more credit for their playability than they get.

By the time "comparable" FPS games arrived, the PC had already moved on several iterations and it wasn't until the source code release of those original PC FPS games that it became clear that the platform was capable in retrospect but generally required expanded systems to be feasible. Which ironically, were probably the only systems people had by then because everyone else had left.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Karlos

By the time "comparable" FPS games arrived, the PC had already moved on several iterations and it wasn't until the source code release of those original PC FPS games that it became clear that the platform was capable in retrospect but generally required expanded systems to be feasible. Which ironically, were probably the only systems people had by then because everyone else had left.

Commodore was bankrupt at that time too. Two years were a long time in the nineties.

[Keops/Equinox]

I don't remember a specific PC game that made the Amiga look "like shit" back then, but when I saw games like Wolfenstein 3D (1992) and Alone In The Dark (1992), I felt that a shift was happening.

In case I still had doubts, the Crystal Dream 2 demo by Triton and Doom made it clear once and for all when I saw them at a friend's the followin year. I was more interested in CD2 than Doom though

It's probably around that time that I decided to get a PC.

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by Karlos

Thread title is trigger clickbait nonsense. Games that made the Amiga look shit? How about Half Life? Crysis, Far Cry? Dead Space? Fallout? Doom reboot? Cyberpunk? Any game released since the mid 1990s onwards?

This is why it was restricted until 1991, but there ain't no restricting EAB. You ask for your favorite game, you go from people posting their favorite game to top three favorite games. To the top 5. To top 10. To top 20. Derailment is inevitable the further away you get from the first page of responses.

[oscar_ates]

Correct me if I am wrong but no fast AGA games (might be even static adventure games) could use full 256 colors because of the crippled CPU speed and memory bandwidth. All were still using 32 colors of so. PC VGA surpassed Amiga in this arena earlier

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by oscar_ates

Correct me if I am wrong but no fast AGA games (might be even static adventure games) could use full 256 colors because of the crippled CPU speed and memory bandwidth. All were still using 32 colors of so. PC VGA surpassed Amiga in this arena earlier

I think Fightin'Spirit use full 256 colors mode (even if probably not using all the 256 cols, as many VGA games did at that era).
Slamtilt (even in Hi Res !), Pinball Fantasies, Illusion also.
Also PGA Euro in AGA seems greatly enhanced. Not sure if it was 256col palette or copper magic but it is definitively much better than ECS, Megadrive or SNES.

Platform games or side scrollers generally used AGA dual Playfield mode, because it was much easier to have a free parallax (and with the copper you could have much more than 256 colors at once on screen anyway).

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by oscar_ates

Correct me if I am wrong but no fast AGA games (might be even static adventure games) could use full 256 colors because of the crippled CPU speed and memory bandwidth. All were still using 32 colors of so. PC VGA surpassed Amiga in this arena earlier

I've said it before and I'll say it again. The base specification for AGA should've mandated the inclusion of fast ram. Even if it was just 1MB, it would've increased the cost by about 30 dollars in 1993 (that's end user price for a memory stick, so less if soldered to the board). It was clear that the 020 which was selected as the minimum CPU for AGA could access memory every cycle and that the original interleaved custom chip/CPU memory access that was the hallmark of the OCS/68000 design was no longer viable. Having the game code and whatever other non-media resources in fast memory would have freed up more of the 2MB for graphics and sound and the whole thing would've ran much faster.

[Samurai_Crow]

@Karlos
Replacing the buster chip with an external cache controller would have made just as much difference and added the potential for faster chipset features.

One way or another, AGA was bandwidth hobbled. I agree to that extent.

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by Samurai_Crow

@Karlos
Replacing the buster chip with an external cache controller would have made just as much difference and added the potential for faster chipset features.

One way or another, AGA was bandwidth hobbled. I agree to that extent.

My point is the MVP. Incorporating a baseline amount of CPU only fast ram in the design required no changes to the chipset / design they already had.

The A1200 was an incomplete machine. You had to buy ram for it to finish it off. If there was a "disappointment with the A1200", to refer to the other thread, this was it.

[sandruzzo]

With fastram, how much faster A1200 can be?

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by sandruzzo

With fastram, how much faster A1200 can be?

For CPU bound code, around 2x typically. That's about 4x faster than a base A500 configuration.

[Daedalus]

The problem with having extra fast RAM on the motherboard was that it wasn't designed in 1993, it was 1991, and memory was much more expensive. The 2MB that the A1200 came with was the most expensive line on the A1200 BOM. It was designed as a 1MB or possibly 2MB machine, with the foresight to allow vastly more as a relatively simple expansion card. And, of course, price increases don't work in such a linear fashion - you can't say that if a part is $10 for example, that it will increase the sales price by $10, because that's simply not true. The A1200 was already an expensive machine out of the price range of many kids - adding £40 or 50 to that would have been just too far for many.

It's worth bearing in mind that dual playfield games using 16+16 colours are shifting around the same number of bitplanes as a single-playfield 256-colour display, so while it's indeed held back, the speed isn't as bad as some seem to think. And that's a massive improvement for dual playfield games over ECS, which is just 8+8 colours.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

It's worth bearing in mind that dual playfield games using 16+16 colours are shifting around the same number of bitplanes as a single-playfield 256-colour display, so while it's indeed held back, the speed isn't as bad as some seem to think. And that's a massive improvement for dual playfield games over ECS, which is just 8+8 colours.

Right.
And there is games in 256 colours mode that doesn't have any speed problem. Slamtilt is a good example, even switching between low res and high res on the fly.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

The problem with having extra fast RAM on the motherboard was that it wasn't designed in 1993, it was 1991, and memory was much more expensive... you can't say that if a part is $10 for example, that it will increase the sales price by $10

Yes, armchair engineers rarely consider these factors. From concept to production ready design could take several years back then, and there were only so many changes you could do mid-stream to incorporate new developments.

The A1200 was already an expensive machine out of the price range of many kids - adding £40 or 50 to that would have been just too far for many.

Exactly. It was supposed to be a replacement for the A500, but more powerful and much more upgradable. Even without fast RAM it was a massive improvement. The CPU is twice as fast running 68000 code, and even faster using 68020 instructions. Due to lower DMA contention the blitter is up to 70% faster and the CPU doesn't slow down at all even on hires screens with lots of colors (A500 maxed out at 16 colors in hires with CPU and blitter contention over the entire active display time). 64 bit wide sprites with more color choices make graphics faster and more flexible, HAM8 mode displays true photographic quality images, 6 bitplanes have a full 64 color palette etc.

By leaving fast RAM to the trapdoor expansion, owners didn't have pay for stuff on the motherboard they didn't need, and upgrades were free to take advantage of the latest (better/cheaper) technology. It also improved compatibility with older titles (a big concern back then), many of which malfunctioned with fast RAM. For example my Blizzard 1230-IV can be completely disabled by pressing the '2' key on boot, then the machine becomes a stock A1200 and is able to run many games that otherwise play up even when CPU caches are turned off and 'original' chipset is chosen.

If only Commodore had gotten this out in 1990-1991 (when a typical PC was a low-end 386SX) Amiga fans might have agreed on how much better it was. However this wasn't to be because the engineers were stuck on making it even more powerful - but couldn't do it. The A3000 was almost there, and would have sold much better with AGA. It would still be far too expensive to reach the wider market of the A500, but might have become the Amiga equivalent of early 486 PCs, the gaming machine poor PC owners dreamed of having. Unfortunately the actual A3000 offered little extra for gamers apart from a faster CPU, while significantly reducing compatibility.

[lmimmfn]

Even 1.5Meg chip and .5 meg fast would have sufficed and to make ram/accelerator cards expand so chip ram and fast ram become contiguous blocks(I realise that may not have been straightforward but should have been possible)