new amiga 500 doom like !

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Karlos

The NeXT machine that Carmack developed the Doom engine on had an 040 but even with the hardware it had, he is on record as saying it took the full power of the CPU to run it. The stock A4000/040 was an absolutely terrible implementation by comparison, riddled with bottlenecks and compromises and not many people had one.

I still think his assessment was correct at the time.

I'm not sure which Nextstation Carmack had but it was probably a 33MHz 040. It probably wasn't that fast at rendering to a window on its high resolution screen via the operating system.

General consensus seems to be that Doom needed a 66Mhz 486 minimum, but one original manual I found for the shareware version just said 'a' 386 and 4MB was needed, and 'a' 486 was recommended. So millions of PC gamers would run this game thinking they were OK with a 386DX-40 or 486SX-25. From personal experience I can say that both these machines ran it OK, but the 486 was much smoother. Perhaps Carmack thought his customers shouldn't have been running it on such 'low spec' PCs, but that's what most people had at the time.

The A4000 has bottlenecks for sure, but so did most PCs of the time. I bet Carmack just assumed it would be too slow based on his Nextstation's performance, which probably had its own bottlenecks. He never even tried it on the A4000 so how would he know? And even if it only performed about the same as a 386DX-40, why would that be a deal-breaker? The real reason is simple. As you say, the market was too small for him to bother with.

[Karlos]

I distinctly recall playing the shareware Doom just fine on a 486/25 SX in 1993. It wasn't totally fluid, but it was perfectly playable.

The DX2/66 was just what everyone had by the mid 90s it seems, and with Doom 2 and Duke 3D being out by then, I think it's just the Mandela effect. Doom 1 ran perfectly well on a 486 and was also playable on a 386.

The DOS version had a number of assembler improvements that I highly doubt the NeXT version had any equivalent for since what wasn't their target market.

[Adropac2]

I would suppose that those with a 68030 to have been fairly small comparatively. I had one but I think most wont have considering the price and a stock Amiga doing just fine with most games. Having Doom though would have helped growth there of course but by how much and so I guess that's why it was never a thing

[Megalomaniac]

People paid £99 for A501s to play Dungeon Master, and that was a conversion from the ST with only slightly better graphics and sound. If they didn't get one then, they did when Beholder and Monkey did - and if those games weren't your thing, you got one for Alien Breed. Accelerators cost more than RAM upgrades, but with the right game to inspire the purchase, maybe people would have done. Plenty of pre-AGA games were improved by a faster processor and/or hard drive too, from Red Baron to Links to most adventures.

As for Grind, it's phenomenal so far. More than fast enough, and lots of detail. Only the floor and ceiling give any clue that it's on an A500 rather than an AGA 020 with fast RAM.

[BSzili]

Put a fork in this thread, because it's done.

[TEG]

Originally Posted by Karlos

The DX2/66 was just what everyone had by the mid 90s it seems

I can confirm this is what we had then on top of the A1200. We had a 386 before if I remember well. The point being that the PC was flexible compared to the Amiga. We replaced the mother board/cpu by the 486 and kept the HD/memory/CD player/Sound card/Floppy drive.

[DisasterIncarna]

My uncle had an amazing 486, the case of his pc had a turbo button that somehow slowed everything down when you turned it on.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by DisasterIncarna

My uncle had an amazing 486, the case of his pc had a turbo button that somehow slowed everything down when you turned it on.

I remember that too Here's an explanation: https://www.howtogeek.com/678617/why...pc-in-the-90s/

[DisasterIncarna]

Originally Posted by TCD

I remember that too Here's an explanation: https://www.howtogeek.com/678617/why...pc-in-the-90s/

didnt even think to search for that, no idea it was a common thing, at the time he just thought something was wrong with his machine and kinda just ignored it after seeing his doom/outpost games slow to a crawl nice find, good read.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Amiga was ripe for porting from the day Doom was released, if not before. Doom was developed on a 68k machine and had optimized code ready to go. The A4000 had the grunt, but Carmack didn't know about C2P so he didn't realize it. Perhaps not many A4000s were out there at the time, but so what? A shareware release wouldn't cost them much and would get the ball rolling. Would have been a huge encouragement for Amiga fans to upgrade.

In 1994 there were several accelerator cards for the A1200 that would be suitable, as well as 030/040 cards for the A2000, A3000, and A4000. Also several RTG cards had been available since 1993, such as the Picasso II which I had in my A3000. The sad thing is that by the time Doom was available for the Amiga (in 1997 when id released the Linux source) most of us had already played it on the PC and weren't that interested in an Amiga version.

The Sega Mega Drive couldn't get Doom until late November 1994 when the 32X was released. Even then, a lot of work was needed to squash it into the Mega Drive. Doom was ported to the Amiga a mere two days after the Linux source was released, which shows how easy it was.

Anyhow, Dread/Grind proves that we could have have had a Wolf3D/Doom style game in 1987! If only someone had thought of it. Imagine what that would done for the Amiga! I'm going to pretend it's 1988 again and I just got a 2MB RAM expansion for my A1000...

John Carmack was complaining Amiga 68040 RTG install base.

PC has a large "gaming PC" install base with 4 million Doom 1 and Doom 2 PC sales and another IDsoftware estimated 15 million "floating" copies.

Other Doom official ports have platform vendor's subsidies.

Prove A2000/A3000 030 RTG has a 1 million install base. Doom in 1997 would have passed ROI requirements and the revenue focus is on Quake.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by TEG

I can confirm this is what we had then on top of the A1200. We had a 386 before if I remember well. The point being that the PC was flexible compared to the Amiga. We replaced the mother board/cpu by the 486 and kept the HD/memory/CD player/Sound card/Floppy drive.

Dave Haynie wanted AGA motherboard upgrades for existing A3000 owners, but Commodore management didn't allow it. Commodore wasn't selling Amiga chipsets and motherboard reference designs for the Amiga clone market.

AMD and Intel are selling motherboard chipsets for the PC clone market. AMD's X670E has two X670 chips for double $$$.

In 1992, AMD has $1.6 billion USD revenues which is larger than Commodore's $1 billion peak.