harddisk games difference with Amiga and PC(dos)

[Seiya]

i was thinking to make a special in my fanzine about the subject of this topic. I have already done difference from floppy and Harddisk, but i notice that the the same games (amiga and PC) installed on hdd have difference of quantity.

80 years dogfight on PC you have nice intro animation and no with Amiga.
Both are installed on harddisk (with microprose installer), but why they decide to cut this animation on Amiga side.
The only things i can think is that PC version is on hd floppy and Amiga in dd floppy.
But if they put installer on Amiga side the number of disks are not important because at the end, those have Amiga with HDD can have full game.

i i'm looking for these games

[Seiya]

i found also Subware 2050 with another incredible cut from Microprose.

Both Amiga and PC have their installer by Microprose so no floppy disk space problems/limitsì, but:

• PC version has full of texure on terrain and object with option to disable texture and trasform every things in "plain" for PC with not enough power.
  
• Amiga version has no texture and no option to enable/disable texure
  
• CD32 version with 650 MB CD-ROM (so many space for texture) has no texture and no option to enable/disable.

[Seiya]

ok, i found everything i need and written this special

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Seiya

Both Amiga and PC have their installer by Microprose so no floppy disk space problems/limitsì, but:...

I suspect the reason is that Microprose produced these games for the PC first and then ported them to the Amiga. With Amiga floppy disks only having 61% of the capacity of 1.44MB PC disks they probably thought too many disks would be needed to include the extras. The CD32 version was probably ported from the A1200 version rather than directly from the PC, so it also lost the extras.

A pity, but at least they did produce Amiga versions of many of their games until being absorbed by Spectrum HoloByte in 1996.

[Seiya]

There is also Innocent Until Cauth that on Amiga are 10 disks. DOS floppy version has intro sequence with rendered graphics.
I think this game with 12 disk could not be a problem as there are games like Monkey Island 2 and Indy 4 with 11 disk playbale from floppy disk with frustrating disk swap.
With DOS version of this game in che title screen there are Amiga credit. So this game is released in the same time.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Seiya

There is also Innocent Until Cauth that on Amiga are 10 disks. DOS floppy version has intro sequence with rendered graphics...

I think this game with 12 disk could not be a problem as there are games like Monkey Island 2 and Indy 4 with 11 disk playbale from floppy disk with frustrating disk swap.

And Beneath a Steel Sky had 14 disks. Definitely a problem. Disks cost money, duplication costs money, and the more disks the more chance of errors and product returns. And that constant disk swapping really was a pain!

But more importantly most Amigas did not have a hard drive, so games had to run from floppies. That meant either having different code for playing the intro when installed on a hard drive, or simply dropping it and saving some disk space. Furthermore in the 1990's most Amigas had slower CPUs than typical PCs, so a quick port of the animation code might not be satisfactory. Again the easiest solution is to simply drop the intro.

Personally I don't think it was any great loss. A good intro is fine to watch once, but after that you just want to play the game. I don't want my hard drive cluttered up with intros that I will never play again.

With DOS version of this game in che title screen there are Amiga credit. So this game is released in the same time.

Games released on multiple platforms at the same time often have the same codebase. But that doesn't mean the same features will be implemented on every platform. The Amiga version might be able to run from floppies, while the PC version wouldn't. The PC version might have highly optimized x86/VGA animation code and matching data format that would take a lot of work to optimize for the Amiga (and so gets dropped off the feature list).

We should be thankful that Microprose produced Amiga versions at all, and did a reasonable job of them. Some others did a worse job, in some cases converting CGA or EGA graphics 'on-the-fly' during the game, resulting in slow performance on a stock 68000. So we got sluggish games with worse graphics than the Amiga was capable of - but at least we could play them without having to buy a PC.