Was the Atari ST to blame for badly ported games?

[sparhawk]

When I read the retro magazines, they often say that the Amiga just received the same game ported from the Atari ST, so I wondered if the Amiga was not so optimally used as the C64 because the developers didn't go to the effort to write a port which makes better use of the hardware?

[Retro-Nerd]

The Atari ST isn't to blame. It was the main developer platform for 16bit Computer games before/til 1990. The lousy Amiga ports were (mostly) probably done within weeks. All a question of costs. It was a lot cheaper that way for the software houses.

[Galahad/FLT]

Yes the ST was to blame, and the UK's ridiculous way of developing, where one dev was meant to cater for 8 different formats.

If the ST didnt exist, we would have gotten a lot less 16 colour games, there would have been more incentive to write for Amiga using its hardware because there was no other 16bit competitor that had to use its cpu for virtually everything, so it would have made no sense to not use the hardware.

The fact is, the Amiga got short changed for the best part of 2-3 years because of porting from the ST.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

Yes the ST was to blame, and the UK's ridiculous way of developing, where one dev was meant to cater for 8 different formats.

The downside to the 1980s UK home computer market: a lot of quantity, not much quality.

If the ST didnt exist, we would have gotten a lot less 16 colour games, there would have been more incentive to write for Amiga using its hardware because there was no other 16bit competitor that had to use its cpu for virtually everything, so it would have made no sense to not use the hardware.

The fact is, the Amiga got short changed for the best part of 2-3 years because of porting from the ST.

Galahad is absolutely correct. I'm sure Amiga hardware sales as well as software sales suffered because of the ST ports, too:

Imagine someone wanting to buy an ST or an Amiga in the late 80s, and they look at demo machines, if any are available. All they'll see is what looks like identical visuals, except for more subtle colours on the Amiga (unless the programmers have simply made them identical to the ST) or the odd sampled sound (unless programmers have actually sampled the ST sound effects, as happened in a lot of games). Most of the time, the hardware buyers will decide the extra colours and sampled sound aren't worth it and go for the cheaper option. So it wasn't just poor ST ports the Amiga suffered from, but from reduced sales because most buyers didn't see the difference, and I bet in particular, in the UK, they would've been put off by the graphics being at the top of the screen rather than the middle, or filling it outright.

[TjLaZer]

I wouldn't say the Atari ST is entirely to blame but the developers were looking for a quick way to expand their platform base and found porting the game over was very easy since both were 16-bit machines. This happened I think because the ST was release before the Amiga so it had a jump start in the markets. I would say it was the ultimately the developer's fault due to laziness, etc. No excuses! Psygnosis is an example of a company that did NOT do this practice.

[Keops/Equinox]

Originally Posted by TjLaZer

I would say it was the ultimately the developer's fault due to laziness, etc. No excuses!

The lazy devs argument is simplistic, I read it too often.

When you make games for a living, you have to keep something in mind: your game must make more money than it cost, or you simply go bankrupt and out of business very quickly, which basically means no salary.

Try to count the number of VG companies that survived since the 80s and the ones that went bankrupt. Making video games is everything but easy and certainly not something for lazy people who seek a relaxing job.

Strangely enough, most people seem to forget that gamedevs are people, who eat, who have a family and a rent or mortgage to pay.

It was true back then and it's still true nowadays:
If you choose to make a game on one platform only, you take a big risk, your game might not sell enough to make enough money to cover the cost and you might lose your company or your job.
If you choose to make a port fully using the hardware, who will pay for the additional development time and the cost of basically redoing all the graphics? The additional sales due to an improved port? Not sure the additional money will cover the cost.

Nowadays, exclusives on consoles specifically and fully using the hardware are rare and they are all 1st party games financed by MS / Sony / Nintendo on their respective machines (or they are part of a deal which of course involves money)

The reason why Amiga games were identical to ST games for years is exactly the same reason why PS3 games were identical to Xbox 360 games for most of the PS3 era: because the additional development time and cost was not worth it, especially considering the complexity of the PS3's hardware compared to the 360's, the same way the A500 was different from the ST. The only games that actually used the horsepower of the PS3 were 1st party games from studios owned by Sony, because they had to spend that money to make the PS3 attractive (Naughty Dog with the Uncharted series, or Sony Santa Monica with God Of War 3) or they were part of a deal involving Sony giving money to a third party studio.

Nowadays, it's somehow easier to target the faster machine and downgrade the game on lower hardware, because thanks to GPUs, a lot of things are scalable (not all though, especially CPU stuff like gameplay) but most games use a common denominator target for all platforms, then slightly scale features to fit on each console, using tricks like dynamic resolution, changing LOD distances, or simply running at 720p instead of 1080p.
Gameplay / AI / streaming code usually targets the less powerful console to make sure the game will run fine on all consoles. You end up with idle time on your threads on the most powerful console, the same way Amiga's hardware was not fully used. Customers don't see it, however they notice graphics differences, which are easier to handle and scale up and down, so that part is taken care of nowadays.
Also, as soon as you improve things other than just cosmetic features, you start impacting gameplay and timings, which means more development, more testing, more bugs, more debugging, more problems and of course more people and money.

On Amiga and ST, it was another story, you could not really do that, or if you tried, you started to significantly impact the budget of your project. So no, it was not laziness, it was survival.

Psygnosis probably could afford the cost and risk because they had a few hits that brought a lot of money in (like Lemmings), but if you check carefully, most (not all) games before Lemmings were almost identical on ST and Amiga, probably for the same reasons listed above.
By the way, Lemmings was identical on both machines if I remember correctly, not that it needed additional stuff but who knows, maybe it could have been even more amazing on Amiga had it used its hardware fully, we will never know. However, I doubt it would have sold significantly more overall with hardware specific improvements

Now, we could also have fun and blame piracy. Most friends around me did not buy any game on ST or Amiga. So, when most games end up being cracked and not paid for, how do make money? Surely not by limiting your game to one platform, suddenly losing another 50% of your customer base, or by doing specific expensive ports that will bust the budget of your game. Instead, you release it on as many computers as possible using a common denominator, especially when you had to pay crazy licensing fees for an arcade game or an intellectual property.

Then we could enter the piracy / quality debate: which one is the egg, which one is the chicken? Would sales have increased significantly had piracy not existed? We will never know. Is piracy a consequence of bad games? I seriously doubt it, it's just human nature to not want to pay for stuff or to bypass the system. Would sales have increased significantly if Amiga ports had used the hardware properly? We will never know. However, something tells me that piracy surely did not help sales, I can't even name one single friend at school who bought games back then and yet most played games every evening (I bought around 5 games on ST and 0 on Amiga over 5 years). Without piracy, there might have been more good exclusives back then, but we don't know that for sure. I think it would have been the case, but that's just my opinion.

So no, it's not "lazy developers!", it's much more complicated than that. It's the way capitalism works, it's the way WE consume goods that shapes the market.

And finally, go talk to people who made games back then, most will tell you the same story: they signed a contract to deliver a game within the next XX months, they got some money for it (usually not a lot) and worked 6 to 7 days a week for months to deliver the final game and hope to get the rest of the money promised in the contract.

[dlfrsilver]

I did some researches here an there, talked with developers, with journalists from the day.

What i discovered was absolutely not the single excuse "lazy developers". It's just one aspect of the whole story.

To make things shorts here are the conclusions :

* The ST was not generating enough money on its own, the piracy was way too high on this machine. Therefore, the publishers were forced to release the games on Amiga to counterbalance the losses, otherwise they would have gone bankrupt.

Developing on Amiga as plus toward the ST was mandatory, a necessity. (around 1988/89, Publishers noticed that the Amiga software sales even with piracy were higher than on the ST, and things went further in the years that followed).

This reason is the 1st fact related to straight ST ports not using the Amiga at all. the publishers simply considered the Amiga like a patch to close the money loss on ST games sales.

* The use of Generic Hardware Development system. I know 2 publishers that used these industrial systems (they were more expensive and more complicated that SNASM or the PDS dev system), Palace Software in UK, and Operasoft in Spain.

The goal of these machines was to start from a game let's say made for ST, and then this system makes a real time conversion of all the game data : source code of the main program, from 68000 to X86, 6502 to Z80, etc, and then convert all the graphics in the target machine format or include on the fly conversion routine in the source code converted line by line, and the sound. Basically, these systems took 20 minutes to fork out a single game on ST, on something working on Amiga, PC, CPC, C64, Spectrum.

The huge advantage, is that the machine works very quickly compared to manual conversion from the devs themselves. The gain of money in term of output is incredible, you pay the original devs for 6 months of coding, and then the hardware system shits out the other versions !

The drawback is that the target machines are running unoptimised code, possibly with shit or crappy converted graphics. The end user experience is then completely rubbish.

* Next, let's talk about the development on Atari ST. This machine is not made for action games coming from Coin-op. Not sprites, no chipset, 16 colors palette, average sound chip : you cannot have something good in the end, OR you need to maximize the development time, which was causing a serious risk to fail the schedule, and then the money generated in the end.

Let's illustrate with a game from U.S.Gold, that got a nasty dev story : Crack Down from Sega.

Instead of starting on Amiga, the most capable machine for this game, they enforced the ST as lead machine with the following facts :

* - Arc Developments losed time to contact SEGA because they were stopped by the encrypted 68000 CPU.
- Sega politely told'em to Fuck off.
- They spent 8 months to develop the game on ST (it's more difficult to do on ST than
Amiga)
- They got stuck by the schedule : They simply did a sloppy 3 weeks job on the Amiga,
fucked the mastering of the game, passed the game on 1 disk instead of 2.

All these errors cumulated are not tied to money making. It's tied to decisions taking against good sense.

Just to illustrate, when i talked to Pierre Adane (Pang, Snow Bros), who was one of the best Amiga coders, and a guy who got this good because he was exchanging with Jean-Charles Meyrignac (Toki), i told him about the english devs work plan about the ST and Amiga, and explained that the guys simply said that making the game on Atari ST first and on Amiga, simply converting the I/O, keeping the remaining of the source code, with the software routines and not using the chipset was the quickest way to develop for both machines.

His answer as engineer was simple : The goal to maximise the money on game selling is to make the BEST possible versions on BOTH machines. The only way and the easiest path for that is to start with the amiga version, you do the best version with 16-64 colors, great sound, use of the chipset, and then you parallely code the ST version and you reduce the assets palette to 16 colors, and then you replace the chipset/hardware routines by software routines. And in the end, you get the best of both world.

He cited me Pang and Snow Bros : Snow Bros is a 25.000 lines of assembler 68000 game, that took 4 months and a half to be made on Amiga. The ST version took only 1 month to do, by simply adapting the code source parts.

You see my point ? ST first, 8 months of coding, falling out of schedule, then Amiga version fucked up, master fucked up.

An ocean developer even told me what a releave it was when the ST was kicked out of the way, to simply make games on the Amiga, which was more powerful.

He then explained that when making a game that had to be released on ST and Amiga, you could not push to the maximum the game, otherwise it would pose too much problem when doing the ST version.

[Foebane]

What about when different development teams are involved in a conversion?

Shadow of the Beast was originally developed for the Amiga by Reflections, yet later on the ST conversion was done by Eldritch the Cat, and it was markedly inferior. And yet I wonder how good (or bad) EtC was as a development team?

[Retro1234]

they could of put more effort in to both Amiga and ST ports.

ports i.e. arcade ports were done in a way that had been going on since the Spectrum and C64 they weren't great practices like employed in Japan etc

something like earok's scorpion engine should of been developed in house for the use in ports or in-house code examples for developers.

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by Foebane

The downside to the 1980s UK home computer market: a lot of quantity, not much quality.

We had the Spectrum. There was quality in spades dude.

[kamelito]

Originally Posted by Foebane

What about when different development teams are involved in a conversion?

Shadow of the Beast was originally developed for the Amiga by Reflections, yet later on the ST conversion was done by Eldritch the Cat, and it was markedly inferior. And yet I wonder how good (or bad) EtC was as a development team?

This I can give you a pretty good answer by Dbug game dev and Atari ST scener.

https://blog.defence-force.org/index...cles&ref=ART62

[jizmo]

For a forum about Amiga EAB seems to revolve quite intensively around Atari ST lately

This same topic got some heated replies over in that other Atari ST thread just one week ago. I can still stand behind what I stated there.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by kamelito

This I can give you a pretty good answer by Dbug game dev and Atari ST scener.

https://blog.defence-force.org/index...cles&ref=ART62

Thanks for the link, Kamelito. Very fascinating read.

I know the Atari ST is capable of better, I've seen several demoscene productions and they look nice and smooth. This ST SOTB code looks very rushed and inefficient.

[T_hairy_bootson]

Originally Posted by Dunny

We had the Spectrum. There was quality in spades dude.

Was the spectrum the reason the cpc464 got so many lazy ports?

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by T_hairy_bootson

Was the spectrum the reason the cpc464 got so many lazy ports?

More that the games needed the resolution but the 464 couldn't handle colours at that resolution. I mean, every colourful game on the Amstrads looks like it's made of lego blocks for a reason.

[sparhawk]

Originally Posted by Keops/Equinox

Now, we could also have fun and blame piracy. Most friends around me did not buy any game on ST or Amiga. So, when most games end up being cracked and not paid for, how do make money? Surely not by limiting your game to one platform, suddenly losing another 50% of your customer base, or by doing specific expensive ports that will bust the budget of your game. Instead, you release it on as many computers as possible using a common denominator, especially when you had to pay crazy licensing fees for an arcade game or an intellectual property.

I can easily understand the argument from a developers point of view maximizing their profit. Even though it seems a better approach to make the betetr game first and then downgrade, instead of the other way around.
I'm not so sure about the piracy though. Good games always got their sales, despite of piracy, so this never was the real big problem. I can understand why companies blame pirates though, because that's an easy execuse.


I read an article in a mag a few weeks ago, where an indidev was interviewed. Het complained that he spent so much time and love for his game, but the sales on steam are still bad, due to the short attention span and other games taking away customers attention because he doesn't get enough exposure. Since the game was rather cheap, I bought it an gave it a try, and guess what. I didn't really like the game, because the graphics turned me off and other things as well. I found it boring to play, which is NOT just about graphics.
So maybe, the game didn't sell well because other factors were blocking it's success, but rather the game didn't sell well, because it simply was not so good as the dev thought.


Nowadays I think piracy is not such a big problem anymore like it was back then, but you still see lot's of games where the dev can not live from.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by sparhawk

Good games always got their sales, despite of piracy, so this never was the real big problem.

Id Software can attest to that, as their shareware model meant they sent the full version of the game out to paying customers with no anti-piracy protection at all, and trusted them not to copy it en masse with a simple written plea. Even if they did, Id still made millions from the sales of Doom.

A bit OT, but the principle still stands.

[gimbal]

id had something that most other game development studios at the time couldn't even dream of: fans that treated them like rockstars. That kind of atmosphere really opens wallets.

[rabidgerry]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

Yes the ST was to blame, and the UK's ridiculous way of developing, where one dev was meant to cater for 8 different formats.

If the ST didnt exist, we would have gotten a lot less 16 colour games, there would have been more incentive to write for Amiga using its hardware because there was no other 16bit competitor that had to use its cpu for virtually everything, so it would have made no sense to not use the hardware.

The fact is, the Amiga got short changed for the best part of 2-3 years because of porting from the ST.

This is f**ked up but makes sense entirely, another couple of years would have been fantastic on the life span of the Amiga has this not happened.

Have read the rest of the replies I see that a lot of other factors where at play other than just lazy developers, it was the schedule, the money making being better to develop on both platforms at same time etc. Real shame.

[Phantasm]

Highest quality product doesn't always equate to the most profit. The publishers (and developers) are a business and want to make profit at the end of the day.