Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: runequester on March 05, 2010, 06:32:01 PM
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As with everything else, there's a lot of "common knowledge" about the amiga, that I don't think holds up to proper scrutiny. Feel free to correct me though!
Common knowledge: The amiga wasn't powerful enough as a gaming machine anymore
Why it's wrong: Sure, the 68000 with 1 meg of RAM wasn't cutting it in 94 anymore. But then, we had 68060 processor cards, RTG video cards, loads of RAM etc available.
It's a travesty that virtual no games ever took advantage of this equipment but that's a shortfall of the developers, not the machine itself.
Common knowledge: Doom killed the amiga
Why it's wrong: Doom was released in December of 93. Commodore declared bankruptcy in April 94. There's plain not enough time for an entire platform to go from doing well to dying off, based on one game in about 4 months. (Doom was massively important in fuelling the PC as a valid games platform, but that's an entirely different story)
Common knowledge: You had to swap disks constantly
Why it's wrong: Yeah, psygnosis had a unreasoning fear of the external disk drive, but most games supported multiple drives (could DOS even do this without installing to a hard drive?) and virtually every large game had a hard drive installer. WHDload of course changed that game as well
Corrections or disagreements?
"common knowledge" of your own?
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Amiga games usually had better sound, gfx, and gameplay than other versions and it just seemed to me that they were programmed more elegantly. Who knows what could have been but even if Commodore had handled things better it would've been tough for them to go up against the Bill Gates Wintel machine.
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Common Knowledge: You can turn an Amiga off at any time
Why it's wrong: Only God knows if file handles are actually closed. While writes to disk are immediate, programs may not actually make the library call after you clikc on interface buttons.
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Why it's wrong: Sure, the 68000 with 1 meg of RAM wasn't cutting it in 94 anymore. But then, we had 68060 processor cards, RTG video cards, loads of RAM etc available.
It's a travesty that virtual no games ever took advantage of this equipment but that's a shortfall of the developers, not the machine itself.
True, but most Amiga owners were people with an Amiga 500. There were no graphics upgrades for the Amiga 500 (OK, I had a HAM-E at the time and I know people who had a DCTV, but not for games really).
My option to upgrade (given financial options) was to get an Amiga 1200.
I spent more on the move from 500 to 1200 (including selling my 500 at the time), than my friends were spending on their Diamond video cards for their PCs.
Now, that being said, I preferred the games on the Amiga to the games on the PCs at the time. I played DOOM, but actually Jazz Jackrabbit was my favorite PC action game. But I wouldn't have traded my Amiga for anything gamewise. I thought it was enough power for me for games. I remember being amazed by the power of Fighter Duel Pro; a hi-res flight sim on my Amiga..
Personally, I don't know anyone (not that I've asked them all :-) who sold their Amiga to play Doom.
I moved from Amiga to PC because I started working on PCs (Foxbase mostly, and general PC support at the time). There weren't a lot of people asking for custom databases for their Amigas.
I still personally think the Amiga died because Commodore were greedy, and didn't market properly.
However, its possible that the market at the time was only going to accept 2 paths. MS and "the other" and Apple had the school market. Video (Amiga) and Music (ST) were too much of a niche to hold a market of their own. And as for games, PCs got good enough (not better yet, but good enough) to take some of that, and the consoles were cheap/good enough to take the low end.
Just some thoughts..
desiv
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Common knowledge: Doom killed the amiga
Why it's wrong: Doom was released in December of 93. Commodore declared bankruptcy in April 94. There's plain not enough time for an entire platform to go from doing well to dying off, based on one game in about 4 months. (Doom was massively important in fuelling the PC as a valid games platform, but that's an entirely different story)
Before Doom Amiga was well known as the no 1 gaming computer over here in Europe.
Then suddenly Doom came out and acted as someone knocking over the first domino brick, when Amiga users realized they could never have such games quite a lot of Amiga users left! I saw it myself back in the day. To be honest with you even I left the Amiga for a 486 to play Doom :-)
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Why it's wrong: Sure, the 68000 with 1 meg of RAM wasn't cutting it in 94 anymore. But then, we had 68060 processor cards, RTG video cards, loads of RAM etc available.
It's a travesty that virtual no games ever took advantage of this equipment but that's a shortfall of the developers, not the machine itself.
Actually even more wrong ....
The CS-MK1-manual (1st print) is from April 95, even if some units gone on sale in 94 they certainly weren't "available" in the common. If your in for a shocker, someone might even pull out an invoice from that time. I remember paying 1800DM for my Blizz2060 (must have been 96) shortly after they came out. Inflation corrected that would have been well over 1000Euro.
Sure GFX-Cards did exist, in the form of a Picasso2 at 800DM hardly a gamers-card today, and back than there was no CGX or P96, all you had was costom WB-emu and/or EGS. Pretty much useless for anything but specialized productivity SW.
Btw. RAM was really expensive back in those days, I only bought 8MB for that 2060 card and I do remember it being even worse before.
So to get a "high-end" Amiga in lets say 1996 (since 94 is to unrealistic for such specs) consisting of:
68060 with 32MB or more
A4000(T) (no point in playing games over Z2)
CV-64 (guess that should be the best non-3D card of that time)
You would easily need over 6000DM (3000Euro), to get what ?
A CPU/mobo comparable to a P90 ?
A GFX-card featuring a chip otherwise fond in bargain-bin VLB-cards ?
Or in short a 2000DM (1000Euro) PC ....
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As with everything else, there's a lot of "common knowledge" about the amiga, that I don't think holds up to proper scrutiny. Feel free to correct me though!
Common knowledge: The amiga wasn't powerful enough as a gaming machine anymore
Why it's wrong: Sure, the 68000 with 1 meg of RAM wasn't cutting it in 94 anymore. But then, we had 68060 processor cards, RTG video cards, loads of RAM etc available.
It's a travesty that virtual no games ever took advantage of this equipment but that's a shortfall of the developers, not the machine itself.
I think this is wrong. Publishers publish games to make money. To maximize profit, code to the lowest common denominator. Even when the A1200 was at its peak, a lot of software was still produced to be compatible with the A500.
Another example is the Sega CD, an add-on for the Megadrive. Sure it sold, but there werent many games produced for it, because the installed base of Megadrive consoles was greater than the installed base of Megadrive with Sega CD added on.
So even with RTG video cards, RAM, faster processors etc, publishers were still targeting the A500. I seem to remember the endless discussions on Amiga Newsgroups of why Lucasarts couldnt bring X-Wing out on the Amiga...
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we had 68060 processor cards, RTG video cards, loads of RAM etc available.
blizard 1260 was available in 1996. i bought mine in may of 96' when it was (near) just released.
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Common misconceptions about the Amiga will never change my overall opinion about the Amiga. It was, and stil is, the only home computer with a heart (so to speak), a heart which was kickstarted (:P) by it's creators (Jay and his excellent team). To this day, as a System Admin on Linux and Windows and as a common user of Windows, I have always hated it (Win32) and will remain to hate it as long as I can turn on one of my trusty Amigas.
Comparing an Amiga to any other computer is comparing apples with oranges,...no actually it's comparing a nice fruity kiwi with a rotten smelly overrated common garden bean.
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I think this is wrong. Publishers publish games to make money. To maximize profit, code to the lowest common denominator. Even when the A1200 was at its peak, a lot of software was still produced to be compatible with the A500.
While there's something to this, it doesn't always hold out.
You didn't (and don't) see PC developers develop games for the lowest common denominator. You see them develop games for the smallest minority that has high end machines.
However, in that case, they are looking at selling their games at a premium to the high end gamers. Knowing that over time, the other users will upgrade and eventually buy their games for $20 or so..
I do that with PC games. My PC is terribly outdated. At the time when Neverwinter Nights came out, I probably could have run it, but really really badly. And I doubt I would have paid new retail price. A bit later, I finally get a new (inexpensive, but decent) video card. Now(er.. the "Now" that was when I bought it :-), Neverwinter Nights is $20 and runs pretty good. (The native Linux version is still running fine on that same machine).
That couldn't have happened on the Amiga the same way. Yes, a game could have been written (some were) that ran, but just barely on an unexpanded Amiga, but much better on an expanded one. However, I paid about $40 for my PC video card. Let's say $100 even for comparison.(I am cheap even..) Now, for the Amiga to run the game better, it would either need an RTG card (not really an option for most, but) at MUCH more than $100 (no idea how much those cost at the time??) or an accelerator with RAM, and those were $300 up.
The LCD (lowest common denominator) is only in play because the upgrade options were too expensive for the Amiga.
Fact is, non-LCD did work for the 1M ram upgrade. Developers did start making games that required more than 512K on the Amiga. When games started coming out requiring 1M, people did buy upgrades to their Amigas to play them. However, an upgrade to 1M was relatively cheap (cost of a new video card today). Upgrade beyond that was the problem.
desiv
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Actually even more wrong ....
The CS-MK1-manual (1st print) is from April 95, even if some units gone on sale in 94 they certainly weren't "available" in the common. If your in for a shocker, someone might even pull out an invoice from that time. I remember paying 1800DM for my Blizz2060 (must have been 96) shortly after they came out. Inflation corrected that would have been well over 1000Euro.
Sure GFX-Cards did exist, in the form of a Picasso2 at 800DM hardly a gamers-card today, and back than there was no CGX or P96, all you had was costom WB-emu and/or EGS. Pretty much useless for anything but specialized productivity SW.
Btw. RAM was really expensive back in those days, I only bought 8MB for that 2060 card and I do remember it being even worse before.
So to get a "high-end" Amiga in lets say 1996 (since 94 is to unrealistic for such specs) consisting of:
68060 with 32MB or more
A4000(T) (no point in playing games over Z2)
CV-64 (guess that should be the best non-3D card of that time)
You would easily need over 6000DM (3000Euro), to get what ?
A CPU/mobo comparable to a P90 ?
A GFX-card featuring a chip otherwise fond in bargain-bin VLB-cards ?
Or in short a 2000DM (1000Euro) PC ....
ah, I was wrong by 1994.
Yeah, amiga hardware was absurdly expensive (though you could get by with less than an 060 I guess. Even an 030 adds some oomph that most developers ignored), but let's say you bought a 500 and a PC in 88 or 89. By 96, how many times would you have replaced your PC by then?
Odds are at least once, propably twice. If you were a hardcore gamer, maybe three times or more. Heck, nowadays, people buy new machines just because there's a new version of windows, but nobody bats an eye at spending 800 dollars every 2 years.
You never had PC gamers declare that "PC gaming was dead" because a 286 couldn't run Doom, or because you had to buy a new machine to play Quake. We just cough up the money and go with it.
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but let's say you bought a 500 and a PC in 88 or 89. By 96, how many times would you have replaced your PC by then?
Odds are at least once, propably twice. If you were a hardcore gamer, maybe three times or more.
OK, let's see.. I got a new PC around 2000.. AMD Athlon 2000/ATI All-in-Wonder 128 Pro. 512M RAM.
Around 2002, the MB died, got a new one. Same other stuff..
Around 2003/4, got a $40 NVidia card.
Around 2005, went to 1G RAM, dual boot Linux. :-)
Around 2007, friend gave me his NVidia card since he upgraded.
Around 2009, got a 19" Widescreen LCD.
Still my main machine.. :-)
OK, I'm not a hardcore gamer, obviously.. :roflmao:
I'm probably not the target audience here...
desiv
p.s. I would upgrade the RAM to 2G, but the motherboard will only take 1G. ;-)
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but let's say you bought a 500 and a PC in 88 or 89. By 96, how many times would you have replaced your PC by then?
Hmmm lets see:
Bought an A500 in 90, replaced with an A1200 in late 92, replaced that with an A2000+A2630 in 94, upgraded that to 060 in 96, bought a GFX-card later in 96. Sums up to about 6000DM including 2 monitor (1084 and 2024).
Bought an 10Mhz-AT 91, replaced it with an 40MHz-386DX sometime in 94 bought an Pentium100 which was sold after a few weeks to pay for the Picasso2.
Money spend ? I'd say 3000DM max ;)
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Yes, but once people saw the Amiga market was shrinking they weren't going to invest any more money into there, hastening it's downfall.
People usually want to invest their money in the most powerful system they can get. The the Wintel box could provide and the speed race was fueled by AMD and Cyrix providing competing CPU's.
The sheeple who constantly upgrade to run the latest Windows are likely MS fanatics. Now that we've hit a performance ceiling you'll see a lot of 'cleaning house'.
While Escom was still kicking we got the developers to release a couple of titles aimed at a minimum 030 A1200. Had we not been starved after Escom went bankrupt there may still be a small commercial software industry for us (Productivity and games).
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You didn't (and don't) see PC developers develop games for the lowest common denominator. You see them develop games for the smallest minority that has high end machines.
I think over the last 5 years, as developing for both PC and console platforms has become more common to help offset some of the huge development costs, you DO see PC developers develop games for the lowest common denominator. In this case, it is considered to be game consoles.
If you look around at PC gaming forums you will probably find people lamenting that "PC gaming is dead" and "consoles ruined PC gaming" because many developers seem to concentrate on their console versions and do a half-ass port to the PC platform that performs poorly or has bugs and intrusive DRM. You'll see games that aren't really tailored to PC-specific control schemes--mouse support just slapped on but the UI is still geared towards a TV and gamepad control. The graphics will be the same just that sometimes you can run at higher resolutions and maybe enable antialiasing and anisotropic filtering. The textures won't be any higher detail to account for more video memory available with PCs. The geometry of the levels or models won't be any higher, either, for the more powerful PC video hardware.
And really, if you want to maximize your investment nowadays, you'd be stupid not to make sure your game can run on as weak of PC hardware as you possibly can. Games like Crysis are the exception, not the rule. The $3 000 000 000 USD game franchise Call of Duty doesn't require much hardware to run and has probably had most of its sales from its console versions (I'm too lazy to try and find NPD breakdowns to confirm). If your games now cost a few million to create you gotta make that money up somewhere.
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As with everything else, there's a lot of
Common knowledge: Doom killed the amiga
Why it's wrong: Doom was released in December of 93. Commodore declared bankruptcy in April 94. There's plain not enough time for an entire platform to go from doing well to dying off, based on one game in about 4 months. (Doom was massively important in fuelling the PC as a valid games platform, but that's an entirely different story)
I won't speculate on what killed Commodore the company. BUT I have to tell you that for my friends and I who had Amiga 500s at the time, DOOM was definitely the thing that made us (I had about 7 friends with Amiga 500s) switch from playing on the old 500s to the PC. Before that, the PC was just a boring work box. DOOM and all the 3D games that followed were the reason that I bought tons of video boards, CPUs and RAM for my PC and why my Amiga sat in the closet until last year. Just telling you what happened from my perspective (in my early 20s at the time), because I lived it.
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I won't speculate on what killed Commodore the company. BUT I have to tell you that for my friends and I who had Amiga 500s at the time, DOOM was definitely the thing that made us (I had about 7 friends with Amiga 500s) switch from playing on the old 500s to the PC. Before that, the PC was just a boring work box. DOOM and all the 3D games that followed were the reason that I bought tons of video boards, CPUs and RAM for my PC and why my Amiga sat in the closet until last year. Just telling you what happened from my perspective (in my early 20s at the time), because I lived it.
Yeah, I just don't get that. (Not denying it)
I mean, I liked Doom. It was fun. That type of game is fun. I think Redneck Rampage is my favorite, followed by Duke Nukem 3D. :-)
But, I'd play Doom for a bit, then move on to Gobliiins or Jazz Jackrabbit or Commander Keen...
I just don't get how the rest of the planet (it seemed) decided that all games had to be FPS from that point on... :confused::confused:
Different crowds, not being a hardcore gamer. I knew several people with Amiga's, and they all moved to PCs, but for them it was all about business software. We liked games, but we liked getting paid more.. :lol:
However, it was the same result.. :(
desiv
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I just don't get how the rest of the planet (it seemed) decided that all games had to be FPS from that point on... :confused::confused:
Or 3D ;)
3D literally killed my interest in video gaming and that's fine, because I was already in my mid-late 20's when it became all the rage, BUT! It's fine for driving and maybe the occasional shooter, just a shame it became the standard for almost any genre now though.
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I held on to my A1200 until the first 3DFX card was released for PC's. The incredible graphics that a Voodoo-based PC delivered was just too good to resist.
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I held on to my A1200 until the first 3DFX card was released for PC's. The incredible graphics that a Voodoo-based PC delivered was just too good to resist.
IMHO, the image 3D image quality of the voodoo 1 and 2 series was atrocious. Much preferred the output from the early ATI/nVidia boards even then. Matrox too, though 3D wasn't really their thing.
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Or 3D ;)
3D literally killed my interest in video gaming and that's fine, because I was already in my mid-late 20's when it became all the rage, BUT! It's fine for driving and maybe the occasional shooter, just a shame it became the standard for almost any genre now though.
Really? What killed my interest in videogames was the failure of the dreamcast (and to a lesser extent gamecube), and the move away from the PSX/N64/Saturn to newer systems. After those faded away, games companies went from trying to make videogames to "generic action film #145347, by an incompitent version of pixar. oh, and you have to push buttons too". I have to say that those four/five systems are probably the greatest consoles of all time.
3D didn't ruin videogames. aiming for the lowest common denominator, and people realising there was money in it did. I think there should be a "polygon ration", because the gta series always looked cack in 3D but were great games. GoW, Later NFS games, all sports titles since forever? Crap.
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IMHO, the image 3D image quality of the voodoo 1 and 2 series was atrocious. Much preferred the output from the early ATI/nVidia boards even then. Matrox too, though 3D wasn't really their thing.
I miss Matrox. :(
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Really? What killed my interest in videogames was the failure of the dreamcast
SoulReaver for the win! Dreamcast was awesome. Still got mine, still fire it up from time to time.
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The problem was developers and users decided they wanted amiga games to be like those on PC and the newer 3D consoles. An 030 card and RAM was expensive enough, and even that isn't upto much for 3D gaming.
What we should have had is 2D games refined beyond what we had seen before, rather than tons of blocky Doom clones. If you aimed at 1200 with say some fast RAM and a hard drive you could produce some great 2D games. Look at the Neo Geo, games such as Metal Slug took 2D gaming to new heights. Instead of jumping on the 3D bandwagon, devs should have played to the Amigas strengths and created great 2D games instead.
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It's not 3D that ruined their creativity, it's all the buyouts and takeovers. They can't make challenging games because occasional gamers will not buy the game. They make them mouse driven so people without a joystick can play.
Take an RTS if you play online both sides build up a small army and rush each other. The game lasts less then 2 minutes. There is no variation to this type of play. The only stand out to this Starcraft, it was designed a lot better and you can get long games happening.
More and more effort is put into 'looks'. I'm sure it impresses the execs who control the budget. You simply won't get the same quality of games nowadays unless it is done by a small developer.
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SoulReaver for the win! Dreamcast was awesome. Still got mine, still fire it up from time to time.
What's it like in comparison to the psx version, better graphics? I have a copy of it but I've never actually played it, my RF cable is knackered and I can't be arsed replacing it.
More and more effort is put into 'looks'. I'm sure it impresses the execs who control the budget. You simply won't get the same quality of games nowadays unless it is done by a small developer.
Do valve still count as small? I mean, TF2 doesn't seem to be profitable in the slightest, what with them costantly working on free content for an "old" game, nor does counter strike or any of their other less well known multiplayer games. They genuinely seem to be doing it for the fans (pretty much every game developer there is a modder valve hired, including the origional HL team). Of course, the games publishing "hobby" probably counts as a licence to print money.
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I like Team fortress.
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Actually even more wrong ....
The CS-MK1-manual (1st print) is from April 95, even if some units gone on sale in 94 they certainly weren't "available" in the common. If your in for a shocker, someone might even pull out an invoice from that time. I remember paying 1800DM for my Blizz2060 (must have been 96) shortly after they came out. Inflation corrected that would have been well over 1000Euro.
Sure GFX-Cards did exist, in the form of a Picasso2 at 800DM hardly a gamers-card today, and back than there was no CGX or P96, all you had was costom WB-emu and/or EGS. Pretty much useless for anything but specialized productivity SW.
Btw. RAM was really expensive back in those days, I only bought 8MB for that 2060 card and I do remember it being even worse before.
So to get a "high-end" Amiga in lets say 1996 (since 94 is to unrealistic for such specs) consisting of:
68060 with 32MB or more
A4000(T) (no point in playing games over Z2)
CV-64 (guess that should be the best non-3D card of that time)
You would easily need over 6000DM (3000Euro), to get what ?
A CPU/mobo comparable to a P90 ?
A GFX-card featuring a chip otherwise fond in bargain-bin VLB-cards ?
Or in short a 2000DM (1000Euro) PC ....
I spent $2000 USD for an Amiga 1200, a Blizzard 1260, the SCSI IV kit and a 64 meg 72 pin SIMM. The SIMM alone was $600 of that price. I used a SCSI drive, monitor and 16 meg SIMM I already had for a total of 80 megs - I was the envy of all my friends. This was in 1995, and PowerMacs were pretty darned new. Part of the reason I bought it was to run Mac software, and compared to a PowerMac the price wasn't bad. Plus, it was faster at running most programs than a PowerMac 8100 - I ran my machine along side of a PowerMac 8100 for quite a while.
It was definitely MUCH more useful than a Pentium 90 system and very much worth the price. Plus, it's lasted much longer than other computers. It's been in constant use since I bought it:
http://www.ziaspace.com/~john/lilith/
So I'd have to say that the comparisons to PCs aren't really fair because there are lots of things you can do with Amigas you can't do with Windows machines.
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Common Knowledge: You can turn an Amiga off at any time
Why it's wrong: Only God knows if file handles are actually closed. While writes to disk are immediate, programs may not actually make the library call after you clikc on interface buttons.
I killed my first set of WB disks 'just turning it off'.
No idea what was going on, but I shut 'er down just as I simultaneously noted the drive activity light was on. Booted back up and...NDOS:
It was months before I had a functional set of disks again :(
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I killed my first set of WB disks 'just turning it off'.
No idea what was going on, but I shut 'er down just as I simultaneously noted the drive activity light was on. Booted back up and...NDOS:
It was months before I had a functional set of disks again :(
This was the beauty of putting the on/off switch on the PSU!
When you wanted to shutdown your Amiga 500/1200, you have to reach way to the back of the desk or bend down to the floor to get to the PSU.
By the time you do, all the applications have finished.
If you thought you were smart and put everything on a power strip so you can just reach over and kill it, well then it's your own fault!
:roflmao::roflmao::roflmao:
To be honest, that can always happen with any computer, and it's always a good idea to wait, but I can't remember that happening to me...
I think I was in the habit of always waiting for drive activity lights tho.
I even remember on the DOS side when we had to use the PARK command. :-)
I'd say it's pretty rare on the Amiga, but possible..
desiv
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I won't speculate on what killed Commodore the company. BUT I have to tell you that for my friends and I who had Amiga 500s at the time, DOOM was definitely the thing that made us (I had about 7 friends with Amiga 500s) switch from playing on the old 500s to the PC. Before that, the PC was just a boring work box. DOOM and all the 3D games that followed were the reason that I bought tons of video boards, CPUs and RAM for my PC and why my Amiga sat in the closet until last year. Just telling you what happened from my perspective (in my early 20s at the time), because I lived it.
I also think that MP3s had an effect maybe even the same as Doom. My 040/28 A2000 was able to play them, however you could not do much else.
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Or 3D ;)
3D literally killed my interest in video gaming and that's fine, because I was already in my mid-late 20's when it became all the rage, BUT! It's fine for driving and maybe the occasional shooter, just a shame it became the standard for almost any genre now though.
Yeah, but also before doom the Adventure games, think Lucasfilm, Sierra, etc were all starting to also get better on the PC.
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Common knowledge: Doom killed the amiga
Why it's wrong: Doom was released in December of 93. Commodore declared bankruptcy in April 94. There's plain not enough time for an entire platform to go from doing well to dying off, based on one game in about 4 months. (Doom was massively important in fuelling the PC as a valid games platform, but that's an entirely different story)
Doom didn't kill the Amiga, Wolfenstein did... Released in '92, it showed where computer graphics were going. And none of Commodore's Amiga offerings came close to it... The then 7 year old Amiga architecture was useless for that type of game and game developers knew it. Software quality declined, sales of Amigas declined... Doom was released, the Amiga had no hope by then... The ball was already rolling... Commodore folds, end of story.
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Really? What killed my interest in videogames was the failure of the dreamcast (and to a lesser extent gamecube), and the move away from the PSX/N64/Saturn to newer systems. After those faded away, games companies went from trying to make videogames to "generic action film #145347, by an incompitent version of pixar. oh, and you have to push buttons too". I have to say that those four/five systems are probably the greatest consoles of all time.
3D didn't ruin videogames. aiming for the lowest common denominator, and people realising there was money in it did. I think there should be a "polygon ration", because the gta series always looked cack in 3D but were great games. GoW, Later NFS games, all sports titles since forever? Crap.
I never was that into Amiga games: Deluxe Pacman, Deluxe Galaga, SWOS, and Slam Tilt were the ones i enjoyed. The amiga 3D shooters didn't do it for me, bur for some reason I had this obsession to prove I could out-Doom Doom, and the 060 I bought for Cinema 4D came in handy. You'd be mad to have spent the money on an 060 card to play Alien Breed 3D or Breathless though.
The gamecube was the last console bought, and that was for my son's 10 th birthday. But I still think the Nintendo 64 was the gaming machine i had most fun with. The tight control of most games and the analogue stick was gaming heaven. i think the single button joystick limited the precision of control and may have been a factor that stymied the progression of Amiga games.
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Doom didn't kill the Amiga, Wolfenstein did... Released in '92, it showed where computer graphics were going. And none of Commodore's Amiga offerings came close to it... The then 7 year old Amiga architecture was useless for that type of game and game developers knew it. Software quality declined, sales of Amigas declined... Doom was released, the Amiga had no hope by then... The ball was already rolling... Commodore folds, end of story.
The Amiga 3D games i thought were far better than wolfenstein, but you needed and '030 to do them justice. Gloom and AB3D are pretty good technical achievements for a computer with no 3D hardware.
People soemtimes forget that the Amiga architecture was not designed to make games where the CPU had to be so intimatley involved with the display. Most games that were in vogue when the A1200 was release were 2D, and the architecture was great for smooth scrolling, parallax etc, where the custom chips handled everything
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Doom didn't kill the Amiga, Wolfenstein did... Released in '92, it showed where computer graphics were going. And none of Commodore's Amiga offerings came close to it... The then 7 year old Amiga architecture was useless for that type of game and game developers knew it. Software quality declined, sales of Amigas declined... Doom was released, the Amiga had no hope by then... The ball was already rolling... Commodore folds, end of story.
Agree Bloodline. There was a race game using the same technology at the same time, can't remember what it was called. But people were taking notice. Even with AGA, Amiga technology was essentially the same as it was 7 years earlier with the affordable Amiga machine only being a few times faster than the original 1000, GFX speed included. a 386 66 or 486 33 Blew it out of the water when it came to graphics crunching.
Sad but true.
gertsy
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Doom didn't kill the Amiga, Wolfenstein did... Released in '92, it showed where computer graphics were going. And none of Commodore's Amiga offerings came close to it... The then 7 year old Amiga architecture was useless for that type of game and game developers knew it. Software quality declined, sales of Amigas declined... Doom was released, the Amiga had no hope by then... The ball was already rolling... Commodore folds, end of story.
@bloodline
You're right, Wolfestein3D was the first game that marked the decline of the Amiga. It was the first PC game that made me interested in the PC. I used to play it on the 286 bridgeboard in my Amiga 2000, before that I mainly used the bridgeboard to decrypt Skychannel. By the time Doom was released none of my friends where using an Amiga anymore.
@all
And what about the X68000 (http://nfggames.com/games/x68k/index.shtm)? It was released in 1987 and had much better looking games than the Amiga, more colors (65536), more sprites (128) on screen. It also made use of many custom chips. Just search for X68000 on youtube and compare that to the Amiga games of that time. The games where really arcade perfect conversions.
It had no impact on the Amiga because it was only available in Japan. If this computer would have been released in Europe I probably would have dumped my Amiga and bought an X68000.
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Software quality declined, sales of Amigas declined... Doom was released, the Amiga had no hope by then... The ball was already rolling... Commodore folds, end of story.
Yet, in truth, neither game has ever been beyond the reach of a modestly expanded amiga.
I always found it highly ironic that the Amiga got an official Quake port (and an unofficial one prior to that) long before Doom became available for it.
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Yet, in truth, neither game has ever been beyond the reach of a modestly expanded amiga.
I always found it highly ironic that the Amiga got an official Quake port (and an unofficial one prior to that) long before Doom became available for it.
Which is the problem. Commodore didn't produce a base machine that parents could go into a shop and buy, give to their child for Christmas that could run the new 3D games... The playstation et al came along and finished off the Amiga for good.
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As with everything else, there's a lot of "common knowledge" about the amiga, that I don't think holds up to proper scrutiny. Feel free to correct me though!
Common knowledge: The amiga wasn't powerful enough as a gaming machine anymore
Why it's wrong: Sure, the 68000 with 1 meg of RAM wasn't cutting it in 94 anymore. But then, we had 68060 processor cards, RTG video cards, loads of RAM etc available.
It's a travesty that virtual no games ever took advantage of this equipment but that's a shortfall of the developers, not the machine itself.
Common knowledge: Doom killed the amiga
Why it's wrong: Doom was released in December of 93. Commodore declared bankruptcy in April 94. There's plain not enough time for an entire platform to go from doing well to dying off, based on one game in about 4 months. (Doom was massively important in fuelling the PC as a valid games platform, but that's an entirely different story)
Common knowledge: You had to swap disks constantly
Why it's wrong: Yeah, psygnosis had a unreasoning fear of the external disk drive, but most games supported multiple drives (could DOS even do this without installing to a hard drive?) and virtually every large game had a hard drive installer. WHDload of course changed that game as well
Corrections or disagreements?
"common knowledge" of your own?
You say wasn`t and anymore... Do you mean in 1994 it wasn`t a gaming machine anymore cus that is totally bogus. The Amiga gaming world died cus developers gave up on the platform. The last real game for me on the Amiga was Speris Legacy which was a total flop. I caved and got a PS1 in the end. From 1993 to 1996 though we still had a healthy batch of games and they all worked brilliant on a bog standard 1200. Games like Worms, Sensible World of Soccer, Settlers, Alien Breed, etc etc.
Trouble was the gaming world was moving over to CD and the Amiga just couldn`t get that on the A1200 in time. So the PS1 took over. If you have ever played a game on the PS1 of the period and then loaded a floppy game you wouldn`t want to use the Amiga as a games console. FIFA on the Amiga was the killer by the way not DOOM.
There were a whole load of DOOM clones post 1993, and most were absorbed into a post Commodore world and they were pretty playable. But yes the Amiga just couldn`t compete cus the developers abandoned the Amiga. They were making games for the PS1 and PC. Games like Duke Nukem were never going to work on the Amiga... It failed because of development rejection. I lived in Game at that time in the UK and the Amiga section just evaporated in a matter of months, let alone years. By 1996 it was dead... Escom had been and gone and that was that.
I got a PC to play Civilisation, Duke Nukem, Doom etc and then a PS1 to play Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy. Still played Sensible World of Soccer, Valhalla, Worms, Settlers etc on the Amiga, but sadly I just got annoyed with SimCity being so slow which I loved...
My Amiga 1200 basically always had all the classic games on HD. In fact the hard drive capacity grew as my games drawers grew. Games like Ishar, Settlers, Star Trek, Beneath a Steel Sky, SimCity etc just loaded from the HD. I even had hard drive installers for Sensi Soccer. There were one or two oddities that used the floppy more for a games piracy issues to validate.. Games like Kingpin for example. I generally only played from HD.
Most serious Amiga gamers got an A1200 or an A600. Gaming is about progression so your not gonna get lumbered with an A500 if your mates have an A1200. Same goes today, so anyone suggesting folk were stuck on the 500 were not part of the serious gaming world. Trouble is the industry was moving on. The CD32 tried but failed at the critical time Commodore went bust. The developers were generally loyal till around 1995. the last real game series for the Amiga of any worth was by Vulcan called Valhalla. God bless those guys cus they fought like mad for the Amiga...
Commodore failed and the rest just jumped in.
Sad
scuzz
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But, do you remember going into the computer store and the walls were chock full of games, mostly Amiga games. Nowadays half the shelf space is for console accessories and the games offerings are limited to new releases or budget re-releases of the big titles.
I miss the good ol days.
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It's not 3D that ruined their creativity, it's all the buyouts and takeovers. They can't make challenging games because occasional gamers will not buy the game. They make them mouse driven so people without a joystick can play.
Take an RTS if you play online both sides build up a small army and rush each other. The game lasts less then 2 minutes. There is no variation to this type of play. The only stand out to this Starcraft, it was designed a lot better and you can get long games happening.
More and more effort is put into 'looks'. I'm sure it impresses the execs who control the budget. You simply won't get the same quality of games nowadays unless it is done by a small developer.
It's all to do with the price of development, each new generation of console requires between one third and one half extra staff, and also extra development time, yet the cost of a game at retail, and the profit made, have not gone up anywhere near as much.
So it takes a massive investment to create a AAA product, which only the biggest can manage. Hence all the mergers and lack of risk taking. Lots of games make no money at all.
To my mind, the really creative stuff is happening on the console indie market, and PC flash and java games. They can afford to take a few more risks there.
As for the demise of the Amiga market...before I got into game dev, I worked in games retail, and many Amiga owners came in asking if Wolfenstein, wing commander, Ultima Underworld, and eye of the beholder 3 were coming out on the Amiga.
Another problem was PC versions being better: such as Frontier Elite 2 being texture mapped, A lot of adventure games being talkies, and having more colours, with less disk swapping etc.
Also, being squeezed by the console at the low end.
Looking back, I think the A500+ wasn't enough of a step up, and nor was (my baby!) the A1200.
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Doom didn't kill the Amiga, Wolfenstein did...
Couldn't agree more.
When I saw Wolfenstein that was the first time I knew my Amiga couldn't match it.
Didn't matter that I thought it was a bad game (and I think so about Doom too btw), but PC owners were lapping it up like it was delivered by the proverbial Jobs himself. Even more so with Doom. And suddenly pseudo-3D was the only thing that counted and PC gaming was cool.
A case of brute force winning over elegance and finesse. 50fps has been dead ever since. I guess we have to be happy that it lasted as long as it did.
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Wolf-3d was cool but it was Doom that gave us multiplayer over a LAN. That totally redefined gaming for me. Getting the initial DOS networking set up in those days was black magic.
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Common knowledge: The amiga is dead.
Why it's wrong: Were still here!!
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Doom didn't kill the Amiga, Wolfenstein did... Released in '92, it showed where computer graphics were going.
Of course, that's why all the game devs started making Wolf 3D clones.. :)
Except, they didn't.. The market follows success, and Wolf 3D was a moderate success and had some moderate followings.
So did Myst released a bit after that (and 7th Guest a bit before, I believe). All were possible directions at the time..
The market isn't looking for the "next great technology", as Wolf 3D was. (or so people think and the world followed..)
The market is looking for the last huge success, as Doom was.
Doom took it to another level that the market jumped all over.
That said, I still think the Amiga was dying for "bad business" reasons before that. It just lined up like that. By the time the doom-alikes were gaining steam, Commodore was already dying, not because..
IMHO..
desiv
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Common knowledge: You had to swap disks constantly
Why it's wrong: Yeah, psygnosis had a unreasoning fear of the external disk drive, but most games supported multiple drives (could DOS even do this without installing to a hard drive?) and virtually every large game had a hard drive installer. WHDload of course changed that game as well
Actually most games did not have any HD installer even if it came on 10 floppies. The reason for this was because most games was not system friendly at all and had their own bootloader that bypassed amigaos afaik.
The a1200 and a4000 should have had a cdrom drive by default in my opinion. PC's that came out at that time all had cdrom.
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Actually most games did not have any HD installer even if it came on 10 floppies. The reason for this was because most games was not system friendly at all and had their own bootloader that bypassed amigaos afaik.
The a1200 and a4000 should have had a cdrom drive by default in my opinion. PC's that came out at that time all had cdrom.
I remember back in like 1993 getting a sound blaster pro and scsi single speed caddy CDROM drive for the 386 at the time and it was expensive as hell. There would have been no way to sell an a1200 when it came out for a reasonable price with a cdrom. Back then we were all pimping walkmans and rocking cassette tapes, cd players were for folks with money.
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Actually most games did not have any HD installer even if it came on 10 floppies.
Oh? :confused:
Which 10 floppy game was that?
I know Dragon's Lair (which was an early many floppy game) had 6 disks and couldn't be installed on a HD. (Wasn't there something about installing it onto a bernoulli(sp?) disk or something????)
However, by the time Escape from Singe's Castle came out, more people had HDs and that let you install it AND Dragon's Lair to your HD. (And multitasked btw.. nice bit of code there..)
The largest game I remember was Willy Beamish, and it definitely let you install to HD.
desiv
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WTF ??
Audio-CD-players were cheap, portables not (but you wouldn't need them for an PC)
CDTV was a bit overpriced, CD32 (released in 93) were cheap.
SCSI was never cheap.
CD-ROMs with bastardized IDE interface (like the early Mitsumis) were affordable, ordering and building them into an A1200CD in masses would have driven the prices down.
A naked A1200 (without HD) was 800DM, adding a CD as standard would still have kept the price below 1000DM, way lower than the A500 when it was introduced (1400DM afaik).
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Actually most games did not have any HD installer even if it came on 10 floppies. The reason for this was because most games was not system friendly at all and had their own bootloader that bypassed amigaos afaik.
The a1200 and a4000 should have had a cdrom drive by default in my opinion. PC's that came out at that time all had cdrom.
Actually not true on both counts... Most games of a reasonable size post 93 had installers... Hired Guns, Star Trek, Beneath a Steel Sky, Settlers, Ishar, SimCity 2000, Valhalla. Even A500 games had them.. Blade of Destiny, Eye of the Beholder, Wing Commander ... I have boxes and boxes of them. Some were just a drag and drop and some came with decrunch processes like Star Trek.
As to CD drives.. I was working in an office in 1995 trying to save for a ZIP drive and the Win 3.1 machines were just getting single speed CD drives. The Amiga drives not of the A500 sidecar type were pretty crap [ like the Zappo 'thinks' ] , and there was much talk of faster speeds. Don`t forget that the CD sidecar for the A1200 was just a deconstructed CD32. And there were CD32 games. Win 95 brought the internet and CD to the masses and thats what finally clobbered the Amiga into the dust.
Games were still generally DOS based up to then like Duke Nukem. By 1996 the PC came of age though the PS1 type console was about to take the cake from the tin cans.
Had Commodore survived, the CD sidecar for the A1200 would have been a reality followed closely by internet as standard. Then Win95 would have probably been a year behind the Amiga.
..... and by the way... ' I have been searching for a certain artifact ' Guess what. Its on the website. Never find one though.
scuzz
http://www.commodore-amiga-retro.com
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A lot of this has to do with what era of the Amiga we spent most of our time in. In the early days, we didn't have harddrives and everything was on floppies. Back in the day, I never had a harddrive for my A1K, it was only until after 2003 untill I got my hands on a more capable amiga.
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..... and by the way... ' I have been searching for a certain artifact ' Guess what. Its on the website. Never find one though.
the commodore made 1200 cdrom drive? The one that looks like a cd32 with bits sawn off?
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So a bit of numbers and analysis:
Searching for releases by year on lemonamiga, I show the following releases by year
1988 - 358 games
1989 - 495 games
1990 - 488 games
1991 - 485 games
1992 - 370 games
1993 - 295 games
1994 - 306 games
1995 - 186 games
1996 - 92 games
If there were multiple versions (OCS, AGA, CD32) they'd be counted multiple times, but that's not an awful large amount.
So amiga game publishing picks up in 89, then tapers off in 92, stays steady until 95, the year after Commodore's bankruptcy and pretty dies by 96 as we know.
If we look at "games per day", we go from 1.3 at the height to 0.8 in 94 (doom is out, and no more amigas being built)
1995, the playstation is out (when did this really become common in Europe?), Escom is selling 1200's for more than Commodore had in 93 and the games start disappearing.
Even then, you'd still have a new game every second day :)
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Actually most games did not have any HD installer even if it came on 10 floppies. The reason for this was because most games was not system friendly at all and had their own bootloader that bypassed amigaos afaik.
The a1200 and a4000 should have had a cdrom drive by default in my opinion. PC's that came out at that time all had cdrom.
Im hard pressed to think of a game on more than 5 floppies that were not hard drive installable. Examples ?
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WTF ??
Audio-CD-players were cheap, portables not (but you wouldn't need them for an PC)
CDTV was a bit overpriced, CD32 (released in 93) were cheap.
SCSI was never cheap.
CD-ROMs with bastardized IDE interface (like the early Mitsumis) were affordable, ordering and building them into an A1200CD in masses would have driven the prices down.
A naked A1200 (without HD) was 800DM, adding a CD as standard would still have kept the price below 1000DM, way lower than the A500 when it was introduced (1400DM afaik).
CDROM or CD-Players cheap in 93? No way dude. I couldn't afford that crap back then. I worked two months at taco bell to get my single speed CDROM/ sb pro combo. Thems were the days. Two years years earlier 1mb 32 pin sims cost $100 a piece. I like the hardware prices today.
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CDROM or CD-Players cheap in 93? No way dude. I couldn't afford that crap back then. I worked two months at taco bell to get my single speed CDROM/ sb pro combo. Thems were the days. Two years years earlier 1mb 32 pin sims cost $100 a piece. I like the hardware prices today.
True, I can't remember how much it cost, but I remember my first 1x CDROM.
I remember I played a lot of Gobliiins with that. :-)
Also, later, I played a lot of 7th Guest. Loved the puzzles, although my 1X never synced audio quite right, but it was close enough. :-)
I still maintain, it wasn't CDRoms or Doom that killed the Amiga, it was Commodore.
Runequester's numbers show that the number of games was still increasing until CBM called it quits..
Now, you can argue what might have happened had a strong Commodore been around to battle the Doom variants.
Would the world have been happy with better 2D games?
Would some type of cheaper accessory/AAA chipset allowed the Amiga line to keep up?
Would people have just ponied up more money to upgrade Amigas to play 3D type games (as Mac users with Marathon and the like)?
Who knows...
desiv
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Doom didn't kill the Amiga, Wolfenstein did
I've read where a number of people are referencing Doom but the truth is that Wolf3D set everything into motion.
I remember seeing that game and *knowing* that was the future of gaming. Just like the first time I saw the Amiga in 1985 and knowing multitasking was the future.
Wolf3D put multiple companies/games into 3D mode and look how many games started to come out after that. Doom did give us LAN ability and Quake tied it all together with real 3D but Wolf set the stage.
I remember thinking -at the time- that I wished the Amiga could do Chunky Pixel easily given how cool these games were.
-P
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I still maintain, it wasn't CDRoms or Doom that killed the Amiga, it was Commodore.
desiv
I 100% agree. If you read the book "on the Edge", you will see that after Jack left, there was really no leadership at all at Commodore. All the top brass at Commodore were so busy milking every last cent out of it, the Amiga was kind of doomed from the start. If they were at all watching the market, and the engineer's had put out what they wanted to, the Amiga may have had a chance. Anyone at that time could see that CD-Roms were the future, and if Hombre had ever got out, there would be no debate over graphics (remember HP wanted to use Hombre in their High end workstations also). So, one can say that a collaboration with HP could have resulted in a totally different situation, mix it the fact that Epson wanted to market the Amiga in Japan, but Ali, messed it up TWICE (I believe it was EPSON) after it was suposibly a done deal, shows just how much Commodore's "Higher Ups" went out of their way to kill it.
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the commodore made 1200 cdrom drive? The one that looks like a cd32 with bits sawn off?
There use to be a link on Ian's Big Book of Hardware [ not the new site ] to a site where a guy had pictures of one. I could never work out whether it was just the case from the description. It was black. There was much hype in Amiga Format at the time, and it kinda made me hang on in there. There was a problem with them cus they used the trapdoor slot if I recall. All the same I so wanted one.
PS: Do you know where the line ' I have been searching for a certain artifact ' comes from ?
scuzz
http://www.commodore-amiga-retro.com
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True, I can't remember how much it cost, but I remember my first 1x CDROM.
I remember I played a lot of Gobliiins with that. :-)
Also, later, I played a lot of 7th Guest. Loved the puzzles, although my 1X never synced audio quite right, but it was close enough. :-)
I still maintain, it wasn't CDRoms or Doom that killed the Amiga, it was Commodore.
Runequester's numbers show that the number of games was still increasing until CBM called it quits..
Now, you can argue what might have happened had a strong Commodore been around to battle the Doom variants.
Would the world have been happy with better 2D games?
Would some type of cheaper accessory/AAA chipset allowed the Amiga line to keep up?
Would people have just ponied up more money to upgrade Amigas to play 3D type games (as Mac users with Marathon and the like)?
Who knows...
desiv
I think what was discussed was the reason for seriously dumping the Amiga as a games machine in the early nineties. I could never get my head round the very poor image quality of Amiga Doom clones, when compared to a game strictly produced for the Amiga of the time. The Vulcan series of games were the last games to exploit the Amiga. We waited an age for Speris Legacy and Sensible Golf and Robinsons Requiem just to discover they were utterly crap. FIFA was the killer cus it was just unplayable... And then Win95 hit, with CDRoms in all new machines and Duke Nukem and Civilisation looked very tempting. Add then the PS1 and the Amiga was being pounded. All this while some tried to clone Doom onto an Amiga base machine [ which is what your average Amiga gamer had ]. Seriously, compared to say Duke on the PC they were terrible.
Without the development there really wasn`t going to be any interest from the serious gamer.
Yes Commodore killed the Amiga. Saying that, there was still a massive amount of interest in the platform and the community and remaining die hards created some mini wonders during the nineties. Hell, were still here. That is why I say had the Amiga gotten to the CD and internet first, the computing world 'may' have been a much more pleasant place.
scuzz
http://www.commodore-amiga-retro.com
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PS: Do you know where the line ' I have been searching for a certain artifact ' comes from ?
nope.
How much of a difference do you think it would have made, if commdodore didn't make the 500 and 1200 in keyboard cases? I'm not so sure the toy-computer look was great for the amigas image.
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nope.
How much of a difference do you think it would have made, if commdodore didn't make the 500 and 1200 in keyboard cases? I'm not so sure the toy-computer look was great for the amigas image.
Lara.....
Personally I would swap a tin can for an A1200 working as a tin can any day. I just loved having everything on the desktop... Gamers play games and they care little about the machine or console as they tend to focus on the screen. Never been a TV gamer, and most I talk to are dedicated players in bedrooms. They play at their PC mostly so having the computer in the keyboard isn`t a problem. We will never know how the Amiga would have developed, but personally the Amiga was everything to me as a computer, both as a dedicated PC and games machine. Now I have to swivel on this chair and look at another screen to play on the PS3... I just wish I didn`t. I also hate the tin box.. Its archaic.. Scuse spelling.
The A1200 was a dream computer, still is. Chuck in half the technology they have in mobile phones, laptops, etc and the A1200 would fly in the current case design. With the slender DVD drives and flash hard drives it just gets easier. For me the computer should be the keyboard. Then I could get rid of this annoying dinosaur of a tin box. Nothing changes sadly. We need folk like those that developed the Amiga to show the world what a real computer could look, feel and operate like.
We have given in far too easy to the grown ups... Boring. Not the world of computing that I grew up in sadly. The last ten to fifteen years have changed emphasis from a serious computer interest to internet cruise junkie activities...
Frankie said ' We are living in a world where sex and horror are the new gods '
Frankie now says ' We are living in a world where YouTube and Twitter are the new gods '
You can have it. That's why I collect retro.
scuzz
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I 100% agree. If you read the book "on the Edge", you will see that after Jack left, there was really no leadership at all at Commodore. All the top brass at Commodore were so busy milking every last cent out of it, the Amiga was kind of doomed from the start. If they were at all watching the market, and the engineer's had put out what they wanted to, the Amiga may have had a chance. Anyone at that time could see that CD-Roms were the future, and if Hombre had ever got out, there would be no debate over graphics (remember HP wanted to use Hombre in their High end workstations also). So, one can say that a collaboration with HP could have resulted in a totally different situation, mix it the fact that Epson wanted to market the Amiga in Japan, but Ali, messed it up TWICE (I believe it was EPSON) after it was suposibly a done deal, shows just how much Commodore's "Higher Ups" went out of their way to kill it.
yeah, Commodore did more to kill the amiga than Doom could ever have done
Even with the platform taking a step back as a gaming platform (and with the Playstation showing up, the seeds were laid for consoles to slowly but surely take over gaming from computers completely), there was still room for a cheap productivity computer, but that requires product to actually be sold by the company, which past 94 is largely gone.
I remember us paying 3 times as much for our first PC as my 1200, and it was a piece of shit.
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Lara.....
Personally I would swap a tin can for an A1200 working as a tin can any day. I just loved having everything on the desktop... Gamers play games and they care little about the machine or console as they tend to focus on the screen. Never been a TV gamer, and most I talk to are dedicated players in bedrooms. They play at their PC mostly so having the computer in the keyboard isn`t a problem. We will never know how the Amiga would have developed, but personally the Amiga was everything to me as a computer, both as a dedicated PC and games machine. Now I have to swivel on this chair and look at another screen to play on the PS3... I just wish I didn`t. I also hate the tin box.. Its archaic.. Scuse spelling.
The A1200 was a dream computer, still is. Chuck in half the technology they have in mobile phones, laptops, etc and the A1200 would fly in the current case design. With the slender DVD drives and flash hard drives it just gets easier. For me the computer should be the keyboard. Then I could get rid of this annoying dinosaur of a tin box. Nothing changes sadly. We need folk like those that developed the Amiga to show the world what a real computer could look, feel and operate like.
We have given in far too easy to the grown ups... Boring. Not the world of computing that I grew up in sadly. The last ten to fifteen years have changed emphasis from a serious computer interest to internet cruise junkie activities...
Frankie said ' We are living in a world where sex and horror are the new gods '
Frankie now says ' We are living in a world where YouTube and Twitter are the new gods '
You can have it. That's why I collect retro.
scuzz
Yeah, but only toy computers have colour graphics and sounds. Only toy computers have a space saving design. "real" computers cost a load more, and since its for "serious work" you get 80 lines of text, the colour green, and a beep. "real computers" need to store all their parts in a low grade steel box, with a shitty peice of badly styled plastic glued to the front.
Nobody got fired for buying IBM. It's all about perception.
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And in the end, MS got colour and sound and a multitasking windowing environment. Innovators never dominate and their survival odds aren't that good either.
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The incredible graphics that a Voodoo-based PC delivered was just too good to resist.
I agree - the Voodoo4 really delivers excellent graphics - even in my A4k PPC with Mediator PCI busboard...
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I killed my first set of WB disks 'just turning it off'.
No idea what was going on, but I shut 'er down just as I simultaneously noted the drive activity light was on. Booted back up and...NDOS:
It was months before I had a functional set of disks again :(
Didn't you know what backups are good for back then?
I never used the original disks - aside from making backups from them for every days usage.
:-P
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@bloodline
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By the time Doom was released none of my friends where using an Amiga anymore.
...
What's "Doom"?
;-)
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The a1200 and a4000 should have had a cdrom drive by default in my opinion. PC's that came out at that time all had cdrom.
Hmmmmm - IIRC Amiga had the first computer that came with a CD-ROM: the CDTV.
Didn't they have a patent on using a CD drive for computing?
If so, I don't understand that they didn't earn enough money from the licenses from all the other manufacturers that subsequently started to fit CD-ROMs into their computers...
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Im hard pressed to think of a game on more than 5 floppies that were not hard drive installable. Examples ?
Mario Brothers?
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yeah, Commodore did more to kill the amiga than Doom could ever have done
Even with the platform taking a step back as a gaming platform (and with the Playstation showing up, the seeds were laid for consoles to slowly but surely take over gaming from computers completely), there was still room for a cheap productivity computer, but that requires product to actually be sold by the company, which past 94 is largely gone.
I remember us paying 3 times as much for our first PC as my 1200, and it was a piece of shit.
You also have to take in the fact, that Commodore itself was itself, the ultimate Company, and ultimately it's own downfall. Let me explain.
Today, not one company has everything. A computer Company now, probably has a few design teams of engineers and then sends off the designs to a 3rd party to get the chips fabed, then sends those off to another company to get the motherboards fabricated and so on, Ultimately ending up at an Assembly plant somewhere in China, that slaps "Brand X" and "Brand Y" on it and so on. A few years back (2003, 2004), there was only 3 Laptop factories in the world, and all laptops came out of those plants. It was funny because you could get an HP laptop for x amount of dollars, and find the exact same laptop branded ECS for $100 Cheaper. HP then got wise and started custom designing the case, so ECS could not just re-brand them and sell them for cheaper.
Thanks to Jack's vision (and cheapness) Commodore had EVERYthing. It was the oly company (other than TI) to have it's own chip manufacturing facility, making the turnaround time for hardware developers, next to nothing. Commodore had the ONLY LCD manufacturing facility and Company in North America. If they would have actually made the Commodore LCD laptop- which was designed and had thousands of pre-orders, Commodore would have created and dominated the mobile market back before there even was a mobile market.Sure Tandy had the T-100 laptop out, but Commodore's Laptop was under $500 and had a built in modem and everything.
Commodore had some of the best engineer's in the world beging to work for them. The team of Bil Herd and Dave Haynie dominated every project Commodore had before the Amiga. Bil left and wanted to come back, but management said "No". If Bil had come back when he wanted to the C65 would have been done at least 1 or 2 years earlier and who knows what he would have done for the Amiga.
Commodore also had WORLDWIDE distribution and brand recognition. Not one company can really claim that today. Sure HP and Dell are maybe close to it, but HP and Dell do not have manufacturing plants across Europe.
It is truly, very hard to grasp the whole picture of Commodore, Remember that also, at the time of Commodore's peek, Commodore Canada was STILL making Office furniture, desks and file cabinets in 1986. It is hard too say, but they probably were still cranking out a few calculators at that time also. In Germany, Commodore was THE Company and the products to own. The closest thing today to the fever of CBM in Germany, is the way people HAVE to have an ipod. It was that kind of vibe there. There is a story in the book on the PET JET was over Germany carrying a few engineers, and it ran out of fuel and had to make an emergency landing in a small airport. The engineers had been welcomed by a marching band and the mayor and the whole town came out to welcome them, because they had thought Jack was on the plane. That is the kind of celeberty status that Commodore had. Once Jack left, Gould, sold off Commodore a bit at a time, ever pumping up the stock price, so they could milk every last cent out of Commodore. Instead of investing in the future of the company, Every CEO Gould brought in had only one agenda. To squeeze every last cent out of Commodore, until the well was dry. The Amiga was just one of the tools and consequently the corpse that was lelt behind in its wake. By 1994, the Amiga was the only thing left at Commodore. The 8bit age was a distant memory of days gone by.
If Jack would have stayed, the Amiga would never have been a Commodore product. Jack's own vision probably would have put Commodore under by 1994 also, because he would had an "off the shelf" version of a 68000 machine (exactly the same as he did at Atari). He MAY have put the resources into the Commodore PC line, but that is hard to say.
Jack did not know the big secret in Business, hire and surround people smarter than you, and grow with their Ideas. That is why he left in the first place, it was either his way or the highway.
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Frankie said ' We are living in a world where sex and horror are the new gods '
Frankie now says ' We are living in a world where YouTube and Twitter are the new gods '
You can have it. That's why I collect retro.
scuzz
i'm pretty sure I know how old you are based on the Frankie goes to Hollywood quotes.. :)
Frankie says relax!
I was a die hard from 87-95. Sometime around 94 or so, I recall using my Amiga with a 14.4k modem connected to a local unix dialup ISP, with the CSLIP->TCP/IP app and looking at one of the first websites in the US (I believe the browser was Mosaic), the Franklin Institute website in Philadelphia, PA.
it was difficult enough finding support in the US during that time period (I remember drooling over my Amiga Format mags and the the great hardware in the UK). Once 1995 hit, I jumped ship for a home built Pentium 100 (or 120 was it?) with 16 megs of ram, a soundblaster 16, 2x cdrom and found a PC version of lightware 4.0 (my favorite amiga app).
It was hard to look back, the Amiga seemed a bit antiquated even at that time. I think it was the 1024x768 High color desktop on what was then a big screen (17" CRT).
I do recall wolfenstein and Doom being the talk of the town and once Duke Hit with network support over IPX (plenty of Novell network in the mid 90's saw the IPX traffic peaking). as mentioned, then the PS1 came on strong and the Amiga wasn't quite as compelling with diminishing resources.
For some reason, I just can't forget this great computer (The Amiga 1000 is my alltime favorite) and have been collecting them for years now.
some favorites:
KGB Demo
9 fingers
Lightwave
DCTV (saw the first hires / hicolor photos at the time)
GVP A530 turbo (one of the coolest products for the A500)
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War Hide yourself
Being a frankie fan doesn't really show how old someone is. I wasn't even alive when they released that album.
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Hmmmmm - IIRC Amiga had the first computer that came with a CD-ROM: the CDTV.
Didn't they have a patent on using a CD drive for computing?
!!!!!
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War Hide yourself
Being a frankie fan doesn't really show how old someone is. I wasn't even alive when they released that album.
' Relax.... '
Hate to say it but I remember seeing the Beatles the first time they were on TV... Though I am not in anyway old at heart. My favourite band is Linkin Park, the last album I bought was The E.N.D by the Black Eyed Peas and tomorrow I am going to Game to pick up Final Fantasy XIII. Add to that I have 8 Level 80s in World of Warcraft and Thursday I travel north to collect a car full of Amiga kit... Goodness me who wants to ever grow old.
Frankie was classic though. The summer of 84 when everyone had a 'T shirt' with Frankie says something or other on it. Two Tribes was in the charts for ever... They would have had the Christmas number one here had it not been for Band Aid. .. ' Feed the World '
Better go to bed... Hate having to stop playing, but hey. That guy out of Journey to the Centre of the Earth best summed up sleep as 'little snatches of death'. The joy of a slowly clicking Amiga floppy drive in the otherwise still of the night. Like a heart beat.. Classic.
scuzz
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Oh, hey, I've got one!
Common knowledge: Amiga OS was the first home computer OS that had preemptive multitasking.
Why its wrong: OS9 was available on the Tandy Color Computer, as well as the UK-produced Dragon, both of which premiered prior to the Amiga.
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Common knowledge: The CD32 didn't sell well.
Why it's wrong: They couldn't meet the demand for the console. If they could, Commodore would've been around for longer.
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Common knowledge: The CD32 didn't sell well.
Why it's wrong: They couldn't meet the demand for the console. If they could, Commodore would've been around for longer.
Bit of truth to that - I called a game shop here in FL (this being before the dominance of EB and GameStop here in the US) and asked if they'd carry it. The owner told me "Hey, if I could get them in, I'd carry 'em."
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Oh, hey, I've got one!
Common knowledge: Amiga OS was the first home computer OS that had preemptive multitasking.
Why its wrong: OS9 was available on the Tandy Color Computer, as well as the UK-produced Dragon, both of which premiered prior to the Amiga.
But OS9 was not really User friendly. It had no real GUI (other than Multi-vue, and that was a real "FUN" time to actually get to run). It took me almost a week to get it up and running, because you had to actually do some programing to get it to run, and the manual had a few misprints, so if you actually followed the manual, it would NOT run. Multi-Vue was a real joke to run too, it was just a real basic GUI. Tandy's deskmate3 was only fractional better. I have a full review here on my old CoCo website. OS-9 was not really for the average home user, where as the Amiga actually was easy for someone just starting in computing.
http://www.thecocolounge.com/editorial-october.htm
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I just don't get how the rest of the planet (it seemed) decided that all games had to be FPS from that point on... :confused::confused:
And that's why I gave up playing computer games at all. Doom was fun, Duke Nukem 3D had its moments but by Quake, I'd had enough. As far as I was concerned, it was just the same game again and again.
I got very bored of the "Ooh, look how good the graphics are!" every time a new game came out. Personally, I think games were better when the machines were more limited and programmers had to work with what was available, they pushed the hardware as much as they could, then spent the rest of the time on gameplay. Whatever happened to gameplay, eh?
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But OS9 was not really User friendly. It had no real GUI (other than Multi-vue, and that was a real "FUN" time to actually get to run). It took me almost a week to get it up and running, because you had to actually do some programing to get it to run, and the manual had a few misprints, so if you actually followed the manual, it would NOT run. Multi-Vue was a real joke to run too, it was just a real basic GUI. Tandy's deskmate3 was only fractional better. I have a full review here on my old CoCo website. OS-9 was not really for the average home user, where as the Amiga actually was easy for someone just starting in computing.
http://www.thecocolounge.com/editorial-october.htm
None of which detracts from the fact that it came first.
Besides, most Amiga users were putting a trackloader game in DF0: and booting up, not playing with the OS :)
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And that's why I gave up playing computer games at all. Doom was fun, Duke Nukem 3D had its moments but by Quake, I'd had enough. As far as I was concerned, it was just the same game again and again.
I got very bored of the "Ooh, look how good the graphics are!" every time a new game came out. Personally, I think games were better when the machines were more limited and programmers had to work with what was available, they pushed the hardware as much as they could, then spent the rest of the time on gameplay. Whatever happened to gameplay, eh?
It's still there, you just choose to ignore it.
Long before you "gave up", there were innovations in gameplay in first person shooters. Ultima Underworld (which predates DOOM) and Ultima Underworld 2 were both fantastic RPGs which melded the RPG and FPS genre. System Shock took it to an even higher level, both graphically and gameplay wise. Yes, there was a drought between Quake and Quake 2, but then came Half Life with its rich story-telling. Deus Ex, the Elder Scrolls games from Bethsoft, again, upping the RPG ante, and in '04, Half Life 2 with its incredible physics engine (not to mention the even deeper story). And if you missed Portal (and the upcoming Portal 2) you probably missed the game of the decade.
There's plenty of fun and innovation to be found in first person games. Not all of them are made by iD, and not all of them involve running from one room to another picking up ammo boxes. Although done right that's plenty of fun as well.
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It's still there, you just choose to ignore it.
Long before you "gave up", there were innovations in gameplay in first person shooters. Ultima Underworld (which predates DOOM) and Ultima Underworld 2 were both fantastic RPGs which melded the RPG and FPS genre. System Shock took it to an even higher level, both graphically and gameplay wise. Yes, there was a drought between Quake and Quake 2, but then came Half Life with its rich story-telling. Deus Ex, the Elder Scrolls games from Bethsoft, again, upping the RPG ante, and in '04, Half Life 2 with its incredible physics engine (not to mention the even deeper story). And if you missed Portal (and the upcoming Portal 2) you probably missed the game of the decade.
There's plenty of fun and innovation to be found in first person games. Not all of them are made by iD, and not all of them involve running from one room to another picking up ammo boxes. Although done right that's plenty of fun as well.
To be honest, it's just not my kind of game. I didn't get anything out of Half Life or Unreal Tournament, they were just samey to me. Clearly lots of people like FPSes, and that's cool, I just wish there was more variety in game genres.
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HL1 - oooooverrated !!! :D
System Shocks, Deus Exs (I maintain DE2 is better), Stalkers, Bioshocks - awesome...
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None of which detracts from the fact that it came first.
Besides, most Amiga users were putting a trackloader game in DF0: and booting up, not playing with the OS :)
Oh, I am not arguing that point, but OS9 was not really meant for home users, the Amiga OS was defiantly a whole lot easier to use for a home user. The cool thing is that Microware is still around, OS9 is still supported and sold by Microware for a variety of platforms, and as for OS9 for the CoCo, its now NirtrOS 09.
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To be honest, it's just not my kind of game. I didn't get anything out of Half Life or Unreal Tournament, they were just samey to me. Clearly lots of people like FPSes, and that's cool, I just wish there was more variety in game genres.
Okay. This proves my point that opinions can be wrong.
Half-Life, a game that completely revolutionised storytelling in videogames with an extremely strong singleplayer.
Unreal Tournament. A multiplayer game.
"samey". Yeah, they have a lot in common. Loads in fact. I always thought it was a bit uncanny how they both needed electricity in your house to work. And they needed computers too! Thats just not creative!
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To be honest, it's just not my kind of game. I didn't get anything out of Half Life or Unreal Tournament, they were just samey to me. Clearly lots of people like FPSes, and that's cool, I just wish there was more variety in game genres.
Same here, although there are a few out there, they are just hard to find.
There's a company in the U.K. called Introversion. "The last of the bedroom programmers." :-)
I like their games quite a lot. (And it doesn't hurt that they have Linux ports for almost all of them. :-)
I remember seeing something about a Playstation game (mind just went blank on the name) where it was all B/W. Line drawn character walking on a line, and there were things in the line as you walked (like loops, bumps, etc) that you had to get over/under/though whatever. I believe that the game play was based on the music, and you could even use your own CD music.. (Still blank, sorry)..
Had a Vectrexxy look to it..
I thought it was very original sounding..
Never made it to the States I believe..
Not that I have/had a Playstation, but that's not the point. :-)
Aha!! Vib Ribbon!! Looked great. Very creative..
We didn't get it.. We got lots more FPS games tho.. :(
desiv
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Okay. This proves my point that opinions can be wrong.
Half-Life, a game that completely revolutionised storytelling in videogames with an extremely strong singleplayer.
Unreal Tournament. A multiplayer game.
"samey". Yeah, they have a lot in common. Loads in fact. I always thought it was a bit uncanny how they both needed electricity in your house to work. And they needed computers too! Thats just not creative!
:confused:
Think you phrased that a bit off....
Just because they aren't the same doesn't mean that he couldn't have thought they were..
Opinions aren't wrong. They are opinions.
They can be based on misconceptions, but that doesn't mean they are wrong.
Also, he said they were similar.
Let's see..
Half Life.. First person.. Walking around shooting..
Unreal.. First person.. Walking around shooting..
Actually, I think I agree with his (wrong) opinion.
I'm just saying.. :-)
desiv
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It's still there, you just choose to ignore it.
Long before you "gave up", there were innovations in gameplay in first person shooters. Ultima Underworld (which predates DOOM) and Ultima Underworld 2 were both fantastic RPGs which melded the RPG and FPS genre. System Shock took it to an even higher level, both graphically and gameplay wise. Yes, there was a drought between Quake and Quake 2, but then came Half Life with its rich story-telling. Deus Ex, the Elder Scrolls games from Bethsoft, again, upping the RPG ante, and in '04, Half Life 2 with its incredible physics engine (not to mention the even deeper story). And if you missed Portal (and the upcoming Portal 2) you probably missed the game of the decade.
There's plenty of fun and innovation to be found in first person games. Not all of them are made by iD, and not all of them involve running from one room to another picking up ammo boxes. Although done right that's plenty of fun as well.
RPG's. meh. I'll fantasize I'm an elf/soldier/warrior/armed forces commander. For days. Weeks. Months. Sorry, lifes too short. Quick fix games are my cip of tea. Give me PES anyday.
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:confused:
Think you phrased that a bit off....
Just because they aren't the same doesn't mean that he couldn't have thought they were..
Opinions aren't wrong. They are opinions.
They can be based on misconceptions, but that doesn't mean they are wrong.
Also, he said they were similar.
Let's see..
Half Life.. First person.. Walking around shooting..
Unreal.. First person.. Walking around shooting..
Actually, I think I agree with his (wrong) opinion.
I'm just saying.. :-)
desiv
What? Yes an opinion can be wrong. An opinion is something the owner of the opinion thinks is a fact. If it is not actually a fact, it is wrong.
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What? Yes an opinion can be wrong. An opinion is something the owner of the opinion thinks is a fact. If it is not actually a fact, it is wrong.
no, an opinion is an opinion, a fact is a fact, an opinion is not a fact. IMO.
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Common knowledge: The amiga wasn't powerful enough as a gaming machine anymore
Why it's wrong: Sure, the 68000 with 1 meg of RAM wasn't cutting it in 94 anymore. But then, we had 68060 processor cards, RTG video cards, loads of RAM etc available.
It's a travesty that virtual no games ever took advantage of this equipment but that's a shortfall of the developers, not the machine itself.
Wrong. You're talking about an Amiga that existed in *theory*. In practice, they were horribly expensive, and you could get a higher spec PC for less cash than a high spec Amiga.
Common knowledge: Doom killed the amiga
Why it's wrong: Doom was released in December of 93. Commodore declared bankruptcy in April 94. There's plain not enough time for an entire platform to go from doing well to dying off, based on one game in about 4 months. (Doom was massively important in fuelling the PC as a valid games platform, but that's an entirely different story)
Wrong. Doom in itself didn't kill the Amiga, but the technology it used did. Playfields, copper and sprites was hot 1985, but 100% useless when texture mapped 3D games became mainstream.
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Common Knowledge: Amiga had pre-emptive multitasking before Microsoft.
False!
Yes, MS Windows didn't have pre-emptive multitasking until 1994, but that isn't the statement. In 1979 Microsoft obtained a license for ATT Unix System 7 in 1979 and sold it as Microsoft Xenix. One of the first computers I used in studying for my BSc was a PDP-11 running Microsoft Xenix. Tandy sold Microsoft Xenix based computers as TRS-Xenix a full two years before Amiga.
A side note here, anyone who owned a Sinclair QL (I did) realises that QDOS had pre-emptive multitasking a full year before Amiga, QDOS of course has nothing to do with Microsoft but I thought I'd show some of my geek credentials here :)
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^Sinclair! It burns usss... I don't know about the QL but the spectrums were bad at everything.
no, an opinion is an opinion, a fact is a fact, an opinion is not a fact. IMO.
You misunderstand me, or are else you are just trying to annoy me. It's simple:
If you have an opinion, you believe it to be the truth. I.E, factual. If it is not the truth, it is not factual, and is in fact wrong. No exceptions.
Just because it's in a persons head, doesn't mean it's exempt from criticism.
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^Sinclair! It burns usss... I don't know about the QL but the spectrums were bad at everything.
You misunderstand me, or are else you are just trying to annoy me. It's simple:
If you have an opinion, you believe it to be the truth. I.E, factual. If it is not the truth, it is not factual, and is in fact wrong. No exceptions.
Just because it's in a persons head, doesn't mean it's exempt from criticism.
Ok, this is a pet peeve of mine. If you have an opinion that you believe to be fact, the opinion isn't wrong. The fact that you believe it is a fact is wrong. If you believe a fact that is wrong, then your fact is wrong.
Opinions are never wrong. Only facts facts can be wrong.
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You misunderstand me, or are else you are just trying to annoy me. It's simple:
No, we understand you. We just disagree with you. :lol:
desiv
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Wrong. You're talking about an Amiga that existed in *theory*. In practice, they were horribly expensive, and you could get a higher spec PC for less cash than a high spec Amiga.
As mentioned upthread, there were plenty of other expansion possibilities that were cheaper, and given that almost everyone I know expanded their 1200's, there was obviously a market for this, that game developers could have aimed at.
Wrong. Doom in itself didn't kill the Amiga, but the technology it used did. Playfields, copper and sprites was hot 1985, but 100% useless when texture mapped 3D games became mainstream.
You really believe this was a bigger factor than the fact that there were no new amiga's to buy all of a sudden due to commodore not being around?
This is going back to the same notion that the only amiga that ever existed was a base, unexpanded machine. Had commodore been around past 94, they'd have updated the graphics, as they were in the process of, just like everyone else did.
Nobody considers nintendo a failure because the NES couldn't run Doom.
Nobody considers the PC a failure because a 286 couldn't run Doom.
But everybody considers the Amiga to have failed because the A500 couldn't run Doom.
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btw, and Im not trying to be sarcastic here...
everyone posting is aware that Doom, Hexen and Quake were all ported to the amiga, once the source code was released, right?
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Ok, this is a pet peeve of mine. If you have an opinion that you believe to be fact, the opinion isn't wrong. The fact that you believe it is a fact is wrong. If you believe a fact that is wrong, then your fact is wrong.
Opinions are never wrong. Only facts facts can be wrong.
Exactly. Opinions are a point of view expressed on the basis of real or perceived fact, and the individually different weighting of one fact over another.
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btw, and Im not trying to be sarcastic here...
everyone posting is aware that Doom, Hexen and Quake were all ported to the amiga, once the source code was released, right?
yep but......too little too late.
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All the old Commodore 64 and A500 users either went for a console or a PC, that was the games market gone. The one's who stayed were interested in the productivity side of the Amiga. We then had the handful of games the PC users were previously accustomed too.
I'm thinking that most people buying computers were in their teens or twenties and games would have been the deciding factor.
I was really impressed by the CD32, too bad they didn't put more effort into it.
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The popular Amiga 500 lacked easy internal expandabilty.
It was great when it first came out but couldn't be improved as easily as the nice big roomy boxy IBM-compatible.
And Commodore rather foolishly squeezed the 3000 and 4000 into a non-standard sized case necessitating more board development costs in a small market.
Commodore also itself tried to grab the IBM-compatible market,trying to have its feet in both camps.
Commodore might have been better to have devoted all its energies to one OR the other and we'd still be buying new Commodores.
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Common knowledge: You had to swap disks constantly
Why it's wrong: Yeah, psygnosis had a unreasoning fear of the external disk drive, but most games supported multiple drives (could DOS even do this without installing to a hard drive?) and virtually every large game had a hard drive installer. WHDload of course changed that game as well
The fact that some (and only some) games supported multiple drives doesn't change the fact that you had to swap disks (since games came in 3+ disks), that it was slow, noisy, and unreliable when compared to HD.
WHDLoad didn't change anything since again it came way too late.
Common knowledge: A1200 should have come with a hard drive, and CBM should have made publishers use it...
And it's true.
But it was probably already too late by that time anyway.
You love the Amiga, fine. You're nostalgic, fine. But not admitting all these flaws: what's the point ?
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Besides, most Amiga users were putting a trackloader game in DF0: and booting up, not playing with the OS
So true... Only when the lack of new disk games started people decided to play with the OS.
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If we look at "games per day", we go from 1.3 at the height to 0.8 in 94 (doom is out, and no more amigas being built)
Your figures are meaningless without sales figures... That's the thing. Do you think there were as many sales in 91 as in 95 for example ? That would show where the market was... No matter how many games were released.
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Common knowledge: A1200 should have come with a hard drive, and CBM should have made publishers use it...
And it's true.
:confused:
Um.. It did come with a HD. Everyone I know who bought a 1200 got one with a HD.
Yes, you could buy one without. You could buy a PC at the time without if you wanted.
Maybe overseas, it was different, but I didn't see an Amiga 1200 without a HD over here..
desiv
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Your figures are meaningless without sales figures... That's the thing. Do you think there were as many sales in 91 as in 95 for example ? That would show where the market was... No matter how many games were released.
Sales figures from all these companies are going to be impossible to find unfortunately.
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The fact that some (and only some) games supported multiple drives doesn't change the fact that you had to swap disks (since games came in 3+ disks), that it was slow, noisy, and unreliable when compared to HD.
WHDLoad didn't change anything since again it came way too late.
Common knowledge: A1200 should have come with a hard drive, and CBM should have made publishers use it...
And it's true.
But it was probably already too late by that time anyway.
You love the Amiga, fine. You're nostalgic, fine. But not admitting all these flaws: what's the point ?
The point of the thread is that a lot of the accepted flaws weren't in fact real. I've talked to people who griped that Fate of Atlantis came on 14 disks or whatever, and you had to swap constantly, completely ignorant of the fact that it was HD installable.
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Monkey Island is 11 disks! Just about shit myself when I opened that box. Haven't tried it yet but please god be installable.
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So true... Only when the lack of new disk games started people decided to play with the OS.
The developers didn't want people playing games on workbench or to be HD installable because they wrongly perceived it would make piracy easier. As it was, the Amiga at its height was the most pirated games platform of its day, anyway. TBH thats why I bought an a500: for $400 Aus I got an A500, two joysticks, a 1084s and a ton of games-most pirated- and easy access to whatever game I wanted for a few dollars. Who could afford a SNES or Megadrive with the absurdly high price of cartridges, when such much was on offer for next to nothing?