Itix has covered most of this already but...
More than twenty years ago when I bought the Amiga 1200,
the most annoying thing is that the games does not work with a hard drive, because some idiots doing these games "optimized" them and read out data from floppy disk without the operating system.
Why is that being an idiot?
Reading data from a floppy disk is much faster if you know exactly what you're doing. If you're doing dynamic disk access (i.e. reading data while playing the game without interruption) it's almost a necessity.
With a well-organised disk you can just blast the data from certain tracks straight into memory - much faster than messing around with file tables, and much less memory required.
And that's not even to mention copy-protection systems which were standard at the times.
On the Amiga with floppy disk only those games were faster maybe about 1%,
Floppy access can be MUCH faster without the OS overheads on smaller chunks of data, and less memory footprint, which is very important. Plus to use the OS routines, you need the OS in memory too, which can be a very large chunk of available memory.
1% is massively understating the potential gains, in speed and memory.
but on the Amiga with a hard drive were useless because these games do not use hard disk.
The same games work better on pc because these games use hard disk.
But hardly anyone at the time actually
had a hard disk. Most of the Amigas were sold were the standard versions, and those who DID have a hard disk tended to use them for serious things which really needed them because they were so small. The A600 came with a 20MB hard disk. By the time you've installed Workbench and some serious utilities, you barely had enough room for anything else, especially a game with 1MB per disk. You could always put in another larger hard disk, but these were seriously expensive at the time.
The second of most annoying thing on the Amiga 1200,was that software does not work with VGA monitor. Because again some idiots "optimized" the software, users lost the ability to connect at low cost VGA monitor to Amiga.
You need to think about what the market was at the time. Most Amiga users were using a TV, maybe by 1992 more people had VGA-capable monitors, but those who did usually had the Commodore or Microvitec monitors which could do both anyway. Standard VGA monitors were not very much cheaper so the Commodore/Microvitec so there was little to gain by supporting VGA only, and a LOT to lose.
To support VGA - apart from the fact that the AGA chipset just doesn't have the bandwidth to do most games in VGA - would require re-engineering games to work on VGA or normal, and when 99% of the market have or have access to 15KHz monitors which would you support?
Those idiots could have gained maybe 1.5% on performance, maybe not.
Those idiots quite often knew the hardware inside-out and knew the limitations and capabilities of the machine better than most of the people here.
VGA cable to connect to the Amiga 1200 may cost 4 Euro maybe less. Users should not be forced to purchase scandoubler for 150 Euro and more because some developers are too stupid, to give up with useless "optimization".
Nobody was ever forced to buy a scandoubler, and the reason games were done in 15KHz is because they
had to be. The AGA chipset was never designed for rapid access to 31KHz screenmodes (hence why the screenmode is called "Productivity").
AGA must be differently programmed to use an ordinary monitor, and differently to use VGA monitor. It is sad but this is what Commdore did many years ago, and developers have to just accept it.
Developers had to accept the limitations of the machine, yes.
Access to the hard disk on the classic Amiga, should be made only through the system, the original IDE interface is too slow, software for classic Amiga should work with FastATA. Access to the graphics on the Amiga classic, should be made only through the system, users should be able to connect at a low cost VGA monitor to Amiga. Access to the keyboard and mouse on the Amiga classic, should be made only through the system, users should be able to use USB mouse and keyboard with USB interface only and without additional hardware.
I think you're underestimating the impact of the OS on a game. Squeezing a game into a floppy and 1MB or even 2MB could be a real challenge (remember 2MB on the A1200 sounds like more but the extra quality graphics soon makes that disappear).
There are very good reasons why these "idiots" made the choices they did. Yes, in a perfect world everything would work in 31KHz with OS-legal everything, but to get the performance out of a system like the A1200 (which was far slower and more limited in resources than the PC you compare to) developers had to sacrifice things.
This is why certain games like Colonization, Robosport and Sim City 2000 work in the OS - because they can happily work in the OS with slower disk access, and the market is people with "serious" machines - but making games like Zool run in the OS is pointless for nearly all the market they're appealing to.
