Some thoughts on why the Amiga didn't thrive

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Or a ... troll?

Yes, it's me. Here's the full picture for context.

Nice waterfalls!

Sorry, it's the hat that made me ask, but I've always been curious anyway.

How old are you? (sorry, always asking people's ages)

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by foebane

how old are you? (sorry, always asking people's ages)

63

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

63

I think you must be our most senior member and Amiga fan here.

[zipper]

Nope, 70 and there must be many older I guess.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by zipper

Nope, 70 and there must be many older I guess.

I DO beg your pardon, Zipper.

[Signman]

Are you a native New Zealander Bruce?

[ImmortalA1000]

The CDTV is a really amplified version of what happened with Amiga, as far as having things worth running on the hardware goes anyway.

Imagine if EVERY arcade game on the Megadrive was some choppy rubbish written in Compiled C etc and with bugger all talent, it would have flopped. Ditto with the Amiga, there are only about 10 games worth running on the Amiga if you know what an A1000 is capable of, but on the SNES/Megadrive it was like 10 that were rubbish Amiga Turbo OutRun/Powerdrift/Afterburner quality bullshit. So the problem for Amiga was 99% of people making games really shouldn't have bothered because clearly their code design and code writing skills are pathetic, below commercial quality and an embarrassment to the format.

If you look at CDTV you know it should be brilliant, Cinemaware and others already proved the Amiga was better than ANY PC with that pathetic Adlib and 8 bit soundblaster kludge and a graphics standard that can never support a hard Vsync (putting aside the fact people had to play PC games on 14 inch screens AND 320x200 VGA graphics on those monitors look like Commodore 64 fat pixel mode due to higher dot pitch and zero interlace between alternate fields). What we should have got was 500mb hard disk installs of Cinemaware type games minus whatever is needed for CDDA audio tracks added to the game (which when you add Amiga 4 channel on top just for SFX improves the pitiful dogged determination of Commodore to never improve the A1000 audio spec but the CDTV did offer an improvement on the sound channel restriction of floppy based games not just removing the requirement of very expensive Amiga hard drives (compared to PC suitable DIY HDD install prices).

What we got was pretty much 99.99% clueless morons messing about with some shit hypercard system making games where the FMV sequence is manually controlled with VCR type stop button and mouse cursors so idiotic it is a REAL CHORE just clicking on stuff.

Do you think Gradius/Nemesis done by Konami would be anything like Tinyus? Think again, go and look at the horrible NES graphics of Amiga Castlevania.

Commodore used to make their own software, International Soccer was half the price of Atarisoft cartridges for the C64 AND it was actually a brilliant soccer game that sold the system to many a European kid compared to any other 8bit footy game early-mid 80s...where was Commodore's enticing CDTV software? WTF did Cinemaware NOT do a proper CDTV version of Wings/It Came from the Desert? Why didn't all the scumbags like Ocean/US Gold/Activision spend a tiny percentage of their disgusting millions made from selling utter crap that technically is worse than Lotus II running on a 1985 ST let alone Amiga?

CDTV is the second best Amiga ever sold (and if it didn't have that shitty massive ugly A3000 keyboard in black but a keyboard garage and A1000 sized keyboard in black it would be the ultimate Amiga stylistically speaking...looks a lot nicer under my 65" 3D Plasma TV than any other Amiga, especially the really disgustingly cheap and ugly CD32 with real toilet lid hinge quality to the CD drive YUCK!

So what we could have had with CDTV while we waited for better than 32 colour games of A500/1000/2000/3000 was 4 Amiga audio channel + 2 16 bit CD quality channel audio, hard drive install type games in size and complexity without the expense of an Amiga HDD, streamed anim brushes over static backgrounds in HAM mode (looks a lot less rubbish than the PATHETIC PC Engine FMV of It Came from the Desert) whilst CDDA tracks play the audio or PAULA plays a sample in chip RAM who knows.

Amiga is my favourite computer to use in general of all time (A1000 specifically but in general too) BUT as a games machine it was pretty shit due to lack of talent and lack of quality control. Lotus 1 and 2 are the ONLT arcade/console quality Amiga racing games, Turrican 3 is the ONLY platform shooter that can rival

The problem is not Amiga, it is 100% idiots with C compilers or no talent. You can't even blame the ST because Lotus II on an ST is a lot better than Batman on Amiga...and yet suspiciously VERY similar to Batman on a stock 8mhz STFM hmmm and yet people keep going on about how brilliant it is...well clearly Batman driving section with a workstation class blitter equipped clock doubled memory/system bus Amiga should be a hell of a lot more like Batman II on Mega CD.

Piracy is the excuse, I can see that sure, so why didn't they just go all in with the 1991 unpirateable CDTV scene...because software houses were greedy scumbags. Most of the so called great Amiga games are 16 colours...whoopee doo. CDTV was the last chance for scumbag big publishers to put some of their dirty profits back into Amiga with some PROPERLY written games 3 or 4 times larger than the FDD release and preferably bought out Cinemare when they went tits up after their bet on PC Engine CD format...in the USA of all places LOL idiots, serves them right Wings was boring with only 3 mini-games....Wings needed 10 mini-games for a game that long...boring as hell after you've seen all 3 (and 2 of them run/look crappy).

Reality caught up with Amiga as soon as the console conversions came up....instead of raving about how great the music is on Ghouls and Ghosts Amiga people should have been saying "what clueless ass wipes did this utterly shit conversion that looks like an 8 bit piece of shit, who cares about the f^$king musc?" but nope most were like millennials that will buy any old crap with little excuse to do so but why put up with it and play a game of chances with your wages or hardly be able to get an actual arcade quality Amiga game. Even Project X is nothing special....I expect blitter tested to destruction software parallax improvements Shaun Southern style thank you...but hey in Amiga Format issue that reviewed Shadow of the Beast 1 some nobhead in AF gave Amiga Deluxe Scrabble 20% higher rating and it only cost 8 quid less. Shadow of the Beast 1 is a brilliant Rodney Mathews stylized Rastan Saga type arcade quality game...and pricks left right and centre in magazines wanted puzzles? What a bunch of assholes, THIS was the problem and this is why Amiga was always doomed to fail. Amiga 1200 hasn't got a single arcade quality game like Turrican 3 or Lotus 2 (except Lotus III on A1200 runs as smooth as Lotus II on A1000 thankfully but other than that nothing new came out worth a shit)

You can only play Turrican 3 so many times before you need something else that good...ie "Amiga quality" most Amiga games weren't even ST quality in visuals or game coding technically. Sega did OutRun themselves for Megadrive....Probe did Turbo OutRun.....guess which one is better? lol

Most of my time was spent on Digi-view/Digi-paint/Vlab/Dpaint 3/Blitz (serious application not game coding!) games were really as and when something worth buying turned up. Money I saved on games I spent on a 2mb Zorro side expansion for my A1000 lol a whopping 600 quid I think. PC games were getting better (SF2), console games were always arcade quality pretty much, Amiga games....were getting worse lol the only arcade quality racing game on A1200 is Lotus AGAIN (2/3 of which also run 50/60fps on A1000 anyway) and people wonder why clueless coders and idiots who fell out of 'art college' on Dpaint didn't take over the world LOL 100% LOL

[redblade]

ImortalA1000: CDTV wasn't the only flop at the time, also was the Philips CDi with similar specs

[Foebane]

I think Immortal is correct, having looked at videos on YouTube that show gameplay from every Amiga game ever made, most of them are complete shit and look just as bad as ST or worse! Is it any wonder I'm jaded by them?

Forget the "diamond in the rough" or the "wheat from the chaff" or a reasonable ratio of good to bad, the Amiga games market is like trying to find a single needle in a DOZEN haystacks, large ones at that!

[Minuous]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

in Amiga Format issue that reviewed Shadow of the Beast 1 some nobhead in AF gave Amiga Deluxe Scrabble 20% higher rating and it only cost 8 quid less.

There are no reviews of any Scrabble games in that issue.

[nivam]

Originally Posted by zipper

Nope, 70 and there must be many older I guess.

I wonder if there are any demographics

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

the problem for Amiga was 99% of people making games really shouldn't have bothered because clearly their code design and code writing skills are pathetic, below commercial quality and an embarrassment to the format.

But you pirated them anyway, right?

If you look at CDTV you know it should be brilliant... What we should have got was 500mb hard disk installs of Cinemaware type games minus whatever is needed for CDDA audio tracks added to the game...

Yes, it should. But it's not so easy when you only have a slow 68000 with 1MB ChipRAM and nothing else. Then you have to consider the effort (and cost) required to produce hundreds of Megabytes of hand-drawn graphics, and even more importantly - the time.

When the CDTV was released it should have had a basket of impressive titles ready to go. But who was willing to spend millions of dollars developing games for an unknown quantity, when they could just shovel stuff onto the A500 and get guaranteed sales?

What we got was pretty much 99.99% clueless morons messing about with some shit hypercard system making games where the FMV sequence is manually controlled with VCR type stop button and mouse cursors so idiotic it is a REAL CHORE just clicking on stuff.

Commodore promoted the CDTV as a multimedia box, not a games console. So naturally it attracted that type of media.

Theoretically the CDTV could have had some killer games. In reality that would have required pouring serious money (many millions of dollars) into developing titles that would be ready on launch - and the backer would have to be Commodore because nobody else would take the risk. But Commodore was primarily a hardware company, not a software developer - so of course it didn't happen. What actually happened was it attracted developers who wanted to do multimedia stuff, which at the time was thought to be the 'next big thing'.

WTF did Cinemaware NOT do a proper CDTV version of Wings/It Came from the Desert? Why didn't all the scumbags like Ocean/US Gold/Activision spend a tiny percentage of their disgusting millions made from selling utter crap that technically is worse than Lotus II running on a 1985 ST let alone Amiga?

Why do you think? Because they couldn't see how it would make money for them - and they were right. They correctly predicted that sales would be abysmal because the market the CDTV was designed for would never eventuate.

CDTV is the second best Amiga ever sold (and if it didn't have that shitty massive ugly A3000 keyboard in black but a keyboard garage and A1000 sized keyboard in black it would be the ultimate Amiga stylistically speaking...looks a lot nicer under my 65" 3D Plasma TV than any other Amiga, especially the really disgustingly cheap and ugly CD32 with real toilet lid hinge quality to the CD drive YUCK!

The CDTV was a beautiful looking design. But people don't generally buy a computer for its looks (if they did the IBM PC would have bombed for sure). As for the 'toilet lid hinge', cd players of that style and quality sold in the millions. What the consumer really wanted was cheap, and the CD32 provided it. The CDTV had excellent build quality, but was too expensive for what it offered.

Amiga is my favourite computer to use in general of all time (A1000 specifically but in general too) BUT as a games machine it was pretty shit due to lack of talent and lack of quality control.

That lack of 'quality control' allowed amateurs to play around with it and produce innovative stuff that never would have happened otherwise. This was in the tradition of home computers and one reason for the laudable diversity of Amiga games compared to consoles.

However you will be pleased to know that Commodore did enforce quality control standards for CDTV titles (though they might not have met your standards).

The problem is not Amiga, it is 100% idiots with C compilers or no talent.

You are right about no talent, but many excellent games have been written in C (or mostly C). It's not so much the language that matters as the design and implementation of the game. You might see amazing demos put out by pirate groups and think "if only they had used that talent to make games!" but in reality they would probably be abysmal. Anyone can code, but it takes real talent and a lot more hard work to design and produce a good game.

You can't even blame the ST because Lotus II on an ST is a lot better than Batman on Amiga...and yet suspiciously VERY similar to Batman on a stock 8mhz STFM hmmm

A lot of 'Amiga' games were actually straight ports from other platforms. That's not necessarily a bad thing even if they are slightly worse, because it allows Amiga users to play them. The alternative was to make the effort to enhance the Amiga version, which some did. But that takes time and money, which are precious resources when your market is rapidly shrinking due to rampant piracy and competition from PCs.

Piracy is the excuse, I can see that sure, so why didn't they just go all in with the 1991 unpirateable CDTV scene...

That was a big drawcard of CDs for sure, but Commodore messed up by initially producing the CDTV instead of a CD drive addon or gaming console like the CD32. What they should have done was release the A570 first (with 2MB RAM pre-installed, but no SCSI port) and perhaps an upgraded version of the A1000 with CDROM drive. That could have kick-started the development of CDROM games for the Amiga at a time when it was still relevant. Imagine if we already had that before the crappy Multimedia PC standard was introduced in 1991!

because software houses were greedy scumbags.

The only reason for business is to make money. You can't blame them for that. And they were the ones sticking their necks out spending millions to develop games only to have their market ripped to shreds by pirates.

Most of the so called great Amiga games are 16 colours...whoopee doo.

That's right, and some games work well with even less colors. I've seen 'enhanced' versions of ZX Spectrum games that look worse than the original!

CDTV was the last chance for scumbag big publishers to put some of their dirty profits back into Amiga with some PROPERLY written games 3 or 4 times larger than the FDD release

Yes, and if only Commodore had marketed it as enhanced Amiga (instead of a piece of hifi equipment) they might have done it too.

Reality caught up with Amiga as soon as the console conversions came up....instead of raving about how great the music is on Ghouls and Ghosts Amiga people should have been saying "what clueless ass wipes did this utterly shit conversion that looks like an 8 bit piece of shit, who cares about the f^$king musc?" but nope most were like millennials that will buy any old crap with little excuse to do so but why put up with it and play a game of chances with your wages or hardly be able to get an actual arcade quality Amiga game.

I well remember the first ZX Spectrum game I bought. Having seen a good review of it in a magazine I plonked my money down only to find it was a piece of shit written in BASIC!

But I had given up playing actual arcade games many years ago because the gameplay was always the same - insert 20 cents, die , insert another 20 cents... The Spectrum might have have had awful colors and shit sound, but I could play a game on it for hours without draining my bank account. As a result the actual gameplay became more satisfying, despite being technically inferior.

THIS was the problem and this is why Amiga was always doomed to fail. Amiga 1200 hasn't got a single arcade quality game like Turrican 3 or Lotus 2 (except Lotus III on A1200 runs as smooth as Lotus II on A1000 thankfully but other than that nothing new came out worth a shit)...

'Arcade quality' means arcade style, but that's not the only style worth playing. The A1200 had the extra speed, memory and storage space required for more sophisticated games. What really doomed it to fail was that PCs had the same (plus a hugely greater userbase of paying customers).

You can only play Turrican 3 so many times before you need something else that good...

I've never played Turrican and probably never will - not my style of game. The Amiga is not defined by how well it can reproduce arcade games, which themselves are not the pinnacle of gaming.

and people wonder why clueless coders and idiots who fell out of 'art college' on Dpaint didn't take over the world LOL

Except they did. The 'clueless coders' and 'art college idiots on DPaint' moved to PCs and got paid big bucks to produce games for a machine that didn't care how clueless you were. Can't code for shit? No problem when you have a GHz speed CPU. Haven't a clue about optimal use of palettes? No worries, we got 16.7 million colors!

[nivam]

I have read this thread very carefully and all I can say is that no matter what that computer eco system called Amiga is still huge, 30 years after. However we all, who lived that age and still support it by maintaining these old computers and buying new things we do it for nostalgia reasons. I dont think that our sons will ever look at Amigas or find them interesting.

[redblade]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

people don't generally buy a computer for its looks (if they did the IBM PC would have bombed for sure). As for the 'toilet lid hinge', cd players of that style and quality sold in the millions. What the consumer really wanted was [
That was a big drawcard of CDs for sure, but Commodore messed up by initially producing the CDTV instead of a CD drive addon or gaming console like the CD32. What they should have done was release the A570 first (with 2MB RAM pre-installed, but no SCSI port) and perhaps an upgraded version of the A1000 with CDROM drive. That could have kick-started the development of CDROM games for the Amiga at a time when it was still relevant. Imagine if we already had that before the crappy Multimedia PC standard was introduced in 1991!

That would be interesting, A2500 And A3000 with CD Drive, I guess the Media (videotoaster crew) still would have brought them and BBS owners and would each development studio would then have access to them.

[malko]

@nivam: more than nostalgia, I would say it's more a question of "pleasure". I mean: my mini-Godzillas discovered the Amiga with point's click adventure games. Now, they come back to it in a regular fashion, for games, DPaint, to learn coding (slowly), etc. Not much, not less games than with modern consoles/mobile phone games that they also have. I don't know if they will still use the Amiga/UAE in 5 years, but it's not the most important. Age of a computer or prettiness of the gfx/sound are not what makes it usable. Only the pleasure you get out of it's use is important. And for now when they see what can be achieved (ex: scorpion engine, etc.) it give them a positive interest in computing.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by redblade

That would be interesting, A2500 And A3000 with CD Drive, I guess the Media (videotoaster crew) still would have brought them and BBS owners and would each development studio would then have access to them.

In my shop we ran a BBS on an A2000 with a CDROM changer full of Amiga public domain CDs.

A had an A3000 myself, partly because of the case styling. But it couldn't take an internal CDROM drive. I should have ignored the aesthetics and bought an A2000 rather than the A1000 and A3000, as it would have been easier to expand and cheaper in the long run.

It's funny how things develop. In 1981 the PC was a big ugly box with 2 full height floppy drive bays because that's the size 5.25" drives were back then. Then 'half-height' drives were developed and suddenly the PC had 4 drive bays - but was still a big ugly box. When 3.5" drives were introduced the need for large drive bays was diminished, but most PCs kept them for compatibility. That made them suitable for taking an internal CDROM drive, while nicer looking 'slimline' machines designed for the smaller 3.5" drives weren't.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Signman

Are you a native New Zealander Bruce?

Yes. I was born in New Zealand and lived here my whole life (never been to a foreign country).

[grond]

Originally Posted by nivam

I dont think that our sons will ever look at Amigas or find them interesting.

Two of my children actually do look at my Amigas and find them interesting. They even like to play games. One interesting thing is that my son played some games on his buddy's PS4 and still also likes playing Amiga games. Some days ago he played some Space Invaders game on the Amiga. When we watched Star Wars he commented on a space combat scene with lots of space ship that it was just like that Amiga game. I guess he still has a good amount of fantasy and mega-polygons per second don't matter all that much to him...

[defor]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

The CDTV is a really amplified version of what happened with Amiga, as far as having things worth running on the hardware goes anyway..........

So many harsh words.
IMHO Commodore had no chance in a video-game segment. The company had no expertise like arcade ones (Atari, Nintendo, Sega, Capcom, Taito, ...) nor marketing channels. Commodore had no "entertainment software" department like them and therefore couldn't produce any exclusive game which would sell their platform. Well, Commodore didn't produce much of any software in general It was just a computer manufacturer. It worked well in late 70s and early 80s. It didn't work later and, as one can easily see, it especially doesn't work nowadays (i.e. Google and its Stadia attempt to penetrate the gaming world ).
To put things into a context: 1985 - Amiga 1000 (Nintendo and Sega entered US market with NES and Master System, respectively), 1987 - Amiga 2000, Amiga 500 (Super Mario Bros. craze in full swing, TurboGraph-16 released in Japan, a year later Sega introduces MegaDrive in Japan, in 1988/1989 console war escalates). Did Commodore had a chance? No way when the most accessible product was Amiga 500. A typical gamer didn't want to pay for keyboard, input/output ports, floppy drive and OS when all he wanted was just insert the game, push the start button and play.
"But sir, PC games were plenty!". Yes, with a quality even below those on ST and Amiga. Only later, when number of PCs at homes sky rocketed (+ gfx/sound capabilities improved), high budgets were possible.
Comparing Amiga to any arcade hardware or video-game console (with their specific game-development processes and marketing) is rather unfair. Amiga was a personal computer - an open platform.

[gimbal]

Which is why the CDTV was steered far away from computer games until it had already proven a failure. Alas, the market wasn't ready for a multimedia device.