Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: Amiga_Nut on May 17, 2010, 04:23:28 PM
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I ask this because [sadly] most of the arcade conversions are identical on both sides of the pond, and even worse they were mostly produced by greedy UK software houses hiring the cheapest, and therefore least talented, groups to do conversions.
Notable exception I can think of is Afterburner, but other than that USA either didn't bother to port arcade games, for example Simpsons Arcade was only for PC and C64 in USA and not Amiga, or they had the same horrible versions as produced in the UK like Outrun/Chase HQ/Gauntlet II etc.
Was PC gaming where it was at in the late 80s/early 90s then? I can only assume it was for home computing as I don't exactly see a lot of US specific produced arcade conversions for Amiga, and ST and Mac wasn't doing anything unique either. Or was it simply because in the early days kids were messing about with the NES and later on the Sega Genesis during the formative years of Amiga 86-91?
I can understand with the Genesis, quite a nice machine for the price technically and not very difficult to convert arcade games for, but still it is a shame if so little effort was put into the Amiga market that all that was on offer to Americans were the pathetic UK produced conversions of technically challenging arcade games.
A travesty, would like to know why though.
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Americans played Nintendo and other consoles back when we played Amiga games. In the beginning, most of the quality Amiga games came from the US, but nearer to the 90s it was Europe in the lead and USA had confined the Amiga to be a host to the video toaster card.
Look at any "top 100 games since 1970" lists in US based blogs and that wretched Mario is on top of each one.
The world is full of fine platformers, Mario is not one of them. ;-)
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wretched?
Any product that sells millions and millions of copies and spawns multiple successors can't be that bad, it might not be your cup of tea...
such as my disdain for all "hardcore" games
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I wonder if the fact that natively, the Amiga, having only a single buttoned mindset had anything to do with it. Most of the arcade games at the time utilized 2-3 or more buttons next to their joysticks. Or Overscan. Dedicated consoles have this way of filling up the entire screen. Many of the arcade conversions on the Amiga had you playing with an invisible border .75" thick it seemed. Another attribute that's not very "arcade" like :(
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I think it was mainly due to the uncommonness of the Amiga in many areas, and then another subset (geek) of people on top of THAT. You could go to the Sears or local box store and buy a console that was simple and just worked. I had the luck of being a friend of a kid whose uncle ran an amiga store, so we spent a lot of time on his A500 playing the crap out of whatever games we could get our hands on. I also had a nintendo, and played the crap out of it too.
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I hated amiga "Gaming" by and large. That whole "boot off a floppy disk, don't have an expanded machine, no this won't install on that $500 10mb HD you just bought, oh and it runs in PAL so expect difficulties there, too" was just crap. Utter, utter crap. I wanted a general purpose computer that had games available for it. I think the A500 with a half meg of fast half meg of chip scene crippled Amiga development as much as penny-pinching by money siphoning upper management.
Flight sims? Yeah, loved those on the Amiga. RPGs, too.
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Sure Streetfighter II and Mortal Kombat were going to be compromised with the 1 button Joystick, but they could have coded for Sega Genesis pads too. Lack of effort, and graphically SF2 is a half hearted effort compared to the me-too clone Shadow Fighters.
But the fact Lotus II on Amiga and Genesis look identical, but Outrun on Amiga looks like a steeming turd with steel wheels is a joke, it should have looked as good as the Genesis version or even the NEC TurboGrafx.
And the PAL problems some people had in NTSC land, here in PAL land most games had a massive stupid border on the bottom of the game due to it running in 320x200 not 320x256 PAL mode, and to make it worse still some games like Buggy Boy just used the graphics designed for the ST version, so the Amiga buggy is squashed. FAIL! :)
I suspected it was probably due to the NES, was very big seller in USA. In the EU it pretty much flopped, most consoles did until the Sega Genesis.
It's still a shame though, a real shame, apart from conversions of technically simple arcade games we got pretty shafted. Thank heaven for such ingenious coders as hired by people like Gremlin for things like Shadow Fighters and Lotus II :) These games clearly show technically the Amiga wasn't the problem causing the rubbish conversions.
Early games were much better, look at Marble Madness and Cinemaware stuff from the USA, truly beautiful efforts if not execution which you never begrudged paying 2x as much as a C64 disk game to play. Then it kinda went down hill I feel as the big boys got involved.
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Amiga was damned if it did and damned if it didn't.
Great repuation for games...
But then no one took it seriously becuase of the Commodore association with cheap game computers. Retailers wanted a plug in replacement for the Commodore 64 a refresh item. The Amiga was too expensive in comparison... the Amiga 500 needed to be a $200 item with backwards compatiblity to C-64 titles... Including a cartridge slot would have gained support from publishers due to the hacking issues with floppies.
Great Graphics for Productivity
Yet...I remember PC trade show folks saying stupid things like "who need 4096 colors and sound.. it's a toy"
PC caught on because Work PCs were all IBM then folks got home IBM PC's beucase they could bring software home.
Just a lot of weird bad energy towards the Amiga machine and their makers.
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Also most American game companies were PC based. So when the Amiga offered more colors and sound not all of then used the advanced capabilities.
You have to realized that consoles had the benefit of a cartridge format. If they NEEDED to they could add more features into the console. Nintendo and it's Super FX chip was a good example of this. Also... the load times were faster on the carts.
Anyone remember sawpping floppies... I got 3 disk drives only to realize many games didn't support multiple drives... or how about getting to disk 3 of your game and realizing it's corrupted..?
I bought my games but when Who Frammed Roger Rabit had a faulty disk I was accused of being an Amiga Pirate at Software Etc. becuase I wanted an exchange.
Meanwhile I don't know one mac or Pc person that has EVER purchased software unless they had to... even then they do so kicking and screaming.
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That cartridge/disk relationship was befuddling. The perception of value that is. IMO, gaming companies should have never asked $50+ for their software on diskette. It was just absurd back then. Especially when you knew damn well they saved themselves TONS of money by not purchasing and producing expensive chips, circuit boards and cases. So that scenario did always kind of loom in the back of a lot of peoples minds here.
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I think the home computer crash and susequent rise of the pc affected us more quickly than Europe too. By the end of the 80's it was consoles and pcs. Atari and Commodore limped into the 90's as far a popularity here.
I had my 8-bit ataris and commodores but what I really wanted at the time was a TG-16, I had a Genesis and my brothers had an nes and snes. I only remember a couple of ads and articles on the Amiga, and I wanted one but I had to wait till I got my 1st a1000 with 2.5megs of ram. I liked the others, I loved the Amiga!
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Had the CDTV actually been CD32 spec device released in late 91 instead of 93... well it makes you think. What a difference just 2 years could make.
I think C= did a good job on the CD32, just a bit too late. It got good reviews in the jaded US game mags (not an easy thing, then ornow) CD32 was touted as offering the best value for dollar. something Sega should have looked at when developing MegaCD and hinting at expansions that allow tapping into the hug floppy library...
you'd have had folks buying cd32's and turning them into A1200's.
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I wonder if the fact that natively, the Amiga, having only a single buttoned mindset had anything to do with it. Most of the arcade games at the time utilized 2-3 or more buttons next to their joysticks. Or Overscan. Dedicated consoles have this way of filling up the entire screen. Many of the arcade conversions on the Amiga had you playing with an invisible border .75" thick it seemed. Another attribute that's not very "arcade" like :(
Only the idiot programmers of the time had this "Amiga only has one fire button" mindset. Anyone with a hint of curiosity would have plugged in a Sega control pad, seeing that the plugs look the same as Amiga ones, and discovered that the second fire button on those pads is exactly the same as the Amiga's Right Mouse Button, therefor ALL Amiga games from the very start were capable of using two buttons. Many games have the option to use a controller with 2-buttons.
There was never an official Amiga joystick. Commodore released the machine with 2/3 button capability, but it was the third party programmers and peripheral manufacturers who were lazy and didn't take advantage of this fact.
Commodore DID release an official control pad, the CDTV pad, and it did have two fire buttons. They later released the CD32 pad with six fire buttons so from 1993-onwards there was no excuse not to include support for extra button control pads in games.
Because of these lazy or oblivious programmers and peripheral manufacturers, yes many Amiga games were ruined and plenty of console owners laughed at these poor attempts to simplify the gameplay to use a single button.
The thick black borders around many Amiga arcade conversions are a result of quick and nasty ST-to-Amiga ports where none of the extra hardware in the Amiga is taken advantage of, and we're stuck with this 16 colour, restricted view area game instead of a true Amiga port that takes up the full screen or uses overscan, has dual playfields or 32/64 colours and super fast, smooth scrolling like the Amiga was capable of.
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I'm getting confused...
Every Amiga joystick that I've owned had TWO buttons on it as well as every game use TWO buttons. Why does everyone keep talkiong about single-buttoness? That was the C-64 & Atari...
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MOST Amiga games certainly did NOT take advantage of a dual button joystick. MOST 2-button joys are actually wired to be one button - just in different positions. Usually one on the base and one up top.
Cammy is absolutely right on all counts, especially about lazy programmers.
Out of the boxes and boxes I have of just about every DB9 joystick ever made, only ONE of them is wired to be 2-buttoned. It's an extremely rare Epyx one too.
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Where have you been shopping?
Most of them are one button, unless you're counting the Wico sticks with two buttons that are actually the same button.
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Ive had plenty of 2 button sticks, as well as plenty of "two buttons but wired as one" sticks. Quite a few games took advantage of a proper two button stick.
The CD32 had 3 buttons didn't it ?
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Quite a few games took advantage of a proper two button stick.
Name 5
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MOST Amiga games certainly did NOT take advantage of a dual button joystick. MOST 2-button joys are actually wired to be one button - just in different positions. Usually one on the base and one up top.
Cammy is absolutely right on all counts, especially about lazy programmers.
Out of the boxes and boxes I have of just about every DB9 joystick ever made, only ONE of them is wired to be 2-buttoned. It's an extremely rare Epyx one too.
Funny thing is though the Sega Master System from the mid 80s had plenty of multi-button joysticks with the D9 connector.
And in a way companies like Competition Pro or Zipstick makers carried on using two buttons wired to the same pair of pins, which only let the problem fester.
It's a stark contrast to people like Sega who launched special 6 button joypads so people could play SF2 properly on their console. There was no reason why Commodore couldn't have made a joypad for the A1200/600 at the very least and have a quiet word with the big software companies.
I think the CD32 was a bad idea though, even the AGA chipset wasn't a match for the SNES custom chips and Commodore had no experience in this area of the market. Bad idea to make CD32 their last ditch effort, they should have stuck with the A1200 and upped the specs a bit with a small amount of Fast ram say 512kb. a HD floppy and 3.5" internal IDE HD for price reasons and finally a 28mhz clock doubled 020 which wouldn't have cost much at all. The system bus already runs at 28mhz and divisions of it hence 14mhz and 7mhz 1200/600.
Regardless of how technically good/bad things like Sinbad/King of Chicago and Defender of the Crown were, the point was Cinemaware in conjuction with Sachs were pouring their heart and soul into making the next generation of home games, and for that I loved them :)
Edit: Actually I think CU Amiga magazine published the source code for reading all the buttons on the standard Sega 3 button joypad on one of their cover disks. So clearly it was an issue with a simple enough solution.
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The Amiga didn't offer much in the way of home-arcade action due to the Joystick debacle and it's price. Compared to a Sega Genesis, NES, or Turbo Grafx in the USA.......
Also, the audio, while great/sampled/whatever, wasn't as flexible as the genesis or turbo grafx. Both these systems have more channels and resemble the arcade machines more than the Amiga as far as sounds go.
Graphics wise, it depends who did the art. Moot point here.
You also couldn't go rent an Amiga game for the weekend, and trading with your friends wasn't as simple as tossing them your sega cart for a week.
Amiga did what it did really good though. It was more of a PC game competitor than a console competitor if you ask me.
I prefer to compare Amiga to the IBM games of the time. (IBM sucked at arcade games too). games like M&M, Ultima, and all that.
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Name 5
The turrican and alien breed games, a few of the fighting games (fighting spirit and shadow fighter both do, I believe).
There's a few platformers that do it too (the second button would be jump)
On the remainder of the topic.. the amiga was not a console, it was a computer. Consoles beat everything at the time. They were made to play games.
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Arkhan, in your area, maybe you couldn't rent Amiga games, but I could..... For a brief 6 months I was actually renting Amiga games, albeit by mail order (think of the great-grandfather of NetFlix :) ) Anyway, I get a flyer in the mail advertising a by-the-week game rental place. I call and ask if they rent Amiga games.... to my suprise, they said yes. I can only remember renting Turrican3 and D/Generation...
Cool for while it lasted....
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wow, hmmmm. I'm not getting what your saying because the Joysticks that I can remember had an "A" and "B" button like all the quick fires series or the ubber-cool Bug!
The games I remember are like Lion Heart (I do recall you could choose from one button or two button, which I always thought was very odd), T-Zero, Zee Wolf, etc. Maybe I just lucked out and only got good games, I donno...
Now there were games that only needed one button like Road Warrior (I think that's what it is called) where all need to do is stear and shoot. Once I'm oved into my house and get my A4000T setup I'll start going through my games...
But all that aside, how lazy is not programing for the second button??!? It's like disabling the turbo in a brand new street car...
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Arkhan, in your area, maybe you couldn't rent Amiga games, but I could..... For a brief 6 months I was actually renting Amiga games, albeit by mail order (think of the great-grandfather of NetFlix :) ) Anyway, I get a flyer in the mail advertising a by-the-week game rental place. I call and ask if they rent Amiga games.... to my suprise, they said yes. I can only remember renting Turrican3 and D/Generation...
Cool for while it lasted....
Shit that is pretty cool actually haha.
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These are a couple of 2-button joysticks I have for my Amigas. The good thing is the Python can be switched between 2 and 1 button mode, so you can use both buttons as the main fire button in 1-button games. Also, here are some of the 2-button control pads made for the Amiga market:
http://www.thosewerethedays.de/items/joysticks/spectravideo_quickshot_professional_qs-130f_620x660.JPG
http://www.thosewerethedays.de/items/joysticks/quickshot_proefessional_2-player_board_qs-128f_620x660.JPG
http://www.thosewerethedays.de/items/joysticks/quickjoy_amiga_hyperpad_sv_136.jpg
http://www.thosewerethedays.de/items/joysticks/action_pad_am_logic3.JPG
As for games that take advantage of 2-button controllers, let me just quickly think off the top of my head:
Agony
Joe & Mac: Caveman Ninja
Desert Strike
Lionheart
Aladdin
Yo! Joe
Street Fighter II
Hired Guns
Mortal Kombat II
Fightin' Spirit
Banshee
Zeewolf
Flashback
Super Street Fighter II
Alien Breed: Tower Assault
Super Skidmarks
Snow Bros.
Virocop
XTreme Racing
Bubble and Squeak
Speris Legacy
Exile
The Lion King
Skeleton Krew
Arabian Nights
BC Kid
There are plenty more but it would take me ages to think of them all. Maybe we need to make a permanent list of games that support 2-buttons controllers?
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That reminds me, two of the best arcade ports ever made on the Amiga never even came out! Snow Bros. and Liquid Kids.
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I've never heard of the Amiga only have one button joysticks?? We always had 2 button joysticks and used them for different functions.
The C64c I had, had only one button joysticks/paddles... I do remember that.
As for games I had 100's of games for the Amiga, too many to remember what I had. There were new games coming out all the time.
The only thing that annoyed me back then was not being able to afford the hardware upgrades being a kid money came via pocket money :D
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It's because Americans are responsible for everything "bad" in the world, even the Amiga's demise. Just ask Mr. Ahmadinejad or Mr. Chavez...or Mr. Obama.
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I remember when I finally got my first Amiga in the mid 90's.
On the one hand I was seriously disappointed in many of the Arcade to Amiga conversions in comparison to their Sega Master System, NES, Genesis, and SNES counter parts.
It never failed that the Amiga got the short end of the stick in that territory considering that the Japanese were only in the business of Consoles in the American market.
As for U.S. programmers, they seemed to stick primarily with the 8-Bit Machines, and PC during the 80's, though there were a few exceptions.
Another thing that always irritated me about the Amiga as well as the Atari 8-bit Computer was the fact that they were one button centric. I HATE having to reach out and press the space bar for my second button. Too bad a Joyhack was never made that could resolve that.
(thankx for the list Cammy, I didn't realize there were so many)
Now back to the US Consoles, I always felt like their ports were lacking, or that they neglected to port some of the best titles. It wasn't until the Sega CD version of Forgotten Worlds came out that I finally played an Arcade port that seemed PERFECT to it's Arcade original on any system. Though now thankfully we have MAME which has satisfied me with all of my Arcade lust with the exception of Star Wars Trilogy Arcade. Drooooolllll!
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Americans played Nintendo and other consoles back when we played Amiga games. In the beginning, most of the quality Amiga games came from the US, but nearer to the 90s it was Europe in the lead and USA had confined the Amiga to be a host to the video toaster card.
Look at any "top 100 games since 1970" lists in US based blogs and that wretched Mario is on top of each one.
The world is full of fine platformers, Mario is not one of them. ;-)
Mario is not a fine platformer. Ummm ok
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Thing is consoles have always been cheaper than computers, fact of life. Even today you wont get a PC tower for $200 able to play Gears of War in DX10 like the 360 runs it. Also console games were always expensive. Sony were the only people to make an effort by cutting 20% off the list price for their own 1st party titles. But in 1988 or whenever Genesis games here were double the price and the machine was 200 bucks. So...after 10 game purchases your Sega Megadrive here works out more expensive in the long run. I think the NES was something like 40 bucks a game here, compared to 10 bucks for a C64 game, and the unit was only about 50 bucks less. No wonder Nintendo UK failed with the NES, the games were nothing special apart from a few 1st party franchises.
I don't see how lending someone a couple of disks to boot up in an A500 was harder than lending someone a cartridge. It's not like a PC where you need to mess about with himem or xms/ems and config.sys etc. Pop the disk in the drive, plug joystick in, play game. Not really sure how anyone who has experience with a Amigas can make such a crazy comment.
Sound wise there is a radical difference between the FM chips in a Genesis/TG to the 'do whatever you like' 4 channel DACs on Amiga. Sure you get more sound channels, but it is a trade off. You wont get anything as exquisite and unique sounding with the diversity of the MOD archives compared to stuff which always sounds like the FM sounds of a Genesis.
It just seemed that companies in the USA lost interest somewhere between the high priced A1000 launch and the revised A500 two years later. There seemed a lot of initial enthusiasm which waned after time. I think that is down to Commodore in some ways, the A1000 probably wasn't the right machine to launch as a sole product, the A500 should have been first out the blocks for about the same price as an ST with mono monitor of $799. This would have been discounted down to about $700 or less and is not far off the 1987 price of an A500 anyway. Perhaps then interest would not have waned in the first 3 years in the USA.
I'm going to check out the games Cammy mentioned, never even heard of one of them!
edit : I would be interested to see sales figures for the Sharp x68000 machine compared to NES/Megadrive sales. The x68000 is pretty much the Amiga for Japan, a computer with console quality games. So I wonder how well that high priced machine sold compared to cheap and cheerful console for 1/4 of the price.
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Mario is not a fine platformer. Ummm ok
Actually I never liked Mario either... I loved New Zeland Story though :)
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Well superfrog, brillaint game, runined by jump being up on the joystick
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Actually I never liked Mario either... I loved New Zeland Story though :)
I was not fussed on the earlier versions. But super mario world and yoshi's island on the snes or two of my fav games of all time.
Much prefer them to sonic.
I always thought that platform games on the amiga were on the whole very dissapointing compared to the console platformers.
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The Sharp X68000 was a great machine. Check out the Emulators out there. This machine had pixel perfect conversions. I liked the dual tower case design with the handle.
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Very interesting, both games are from Ocean software. Can also see why 64 colour games were so rare, if you're designing sprites on an in house ST package in 16 colours. Kind of makes you angry when Dpaint III would have been a better choice and there was even an ST format so file formats are not an issue.
I wonder why they would start the game [Liquid Kids] without securing the licence, 1991 is still the peak of A500 popularity in the EU so there must have been a problem with the licence from Taito. Price? Maybe Ocean were hoping the price would go down if they showed a finished product at the negotiations? David Ward, the original co-founder of Ocean UK, would never have let this happen.
Good to see both games are released in full and never charged for :)
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(thankx for the list Cammy, I didn't realize there were so many)
Yes, thank you! And yeah, it would be great to have a permanent list maintained. So... these 2-button games, when you choose that feature, is that stupid 'up' to jump function disabled or is it still there? I remember some games, even though they might have taken advantage of a second button, you could still accidentally jump by moving the joystick even up-diagonal :(
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I can not believe there are people out there that don't like Mario.
I mean seriously, have you played through New Super Mario Bros. Wii?!
That is hands down the most complex and most fun platformer I have ever played in my life, and I can't say any of the previous titles were a let down either. Not ever the Marioified Doku Doku Panic!
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I don't see how lending someone a couple of disks to boot up in an A500 was harder than lending someone a cartridge.
Lending to a friend who'll take care of them is one thing, but renting out floppies is a bad idea, what with how easily they're destroyed, unless the rental place has license to make copies.
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The Sharp X68000 was a great machine. Check out the Emulators out there. This machine had pixel perfect conversions. I liked the dual tower case design with the handle.
Been using the emulator since around late 90s in my lunch break, back when the internet was full of game roms blatantly available for download :) Took a while to work out some games won't finish booting without 2mb on the Japanese emulator too!
I never understood why Chase HQ was looking iffy on it, but just about every other game on the machine was handled in house and arcade quality. Technically it has no blitter, just 128 16x16 pixel sprites, so a bit more powerful than the Genesis, but would have cost a lot more so was interested in how well it sold. The x68000 is Japan's A1000 vs Genesis battle.
It's a shame Amiga never got that level of support from the original arcade makers, recording arcade footage on blurry video and approximating it in Dpaint was the norm, but in Japan raw graphics data and music was donated frequently. Tragedy! Even Atari/Tengen were just as bad, Gauntlet II on ST/Amiga had the arcade music recorded to tape and then sampled using some budget sampler. What a joke!
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Lending to a friend who'll take care of them is one thing, but renting out floppies is a bad idea, what with how easily they're destroyed, unless the rental place has license to make copies.
Yep I meant swapping games between friends, cartridges are not required. Swapping tape games and VCS carts with school chums for a weekend was normal in my youth.
I think we used to rent VCS carts sometimes from the small time video store round the corner from us. Technically it's just as easy to ruin a video tape as a 3.5" floppy disk, and I guess the last person to rent it before it is reported as 'not loading' gets stung for the cost or banned in the same way as when someone reports a chewed up VHS tape on returning the movie rental. Same pitfalls really.
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I'd argue VHS tapes are a bit more resilient, one bad bit on a floppy and you could be screwed.
...not to mention VHS tapes aren't likely to get virii!
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Yes, thank you! And yeah, it would be great to have a permanent list maintained. So... these 2-button games, when you choose that feature, is that stupid 'up' to jump function disabled or is it still there? I remember some games, even though they might have taken advantage of a second button, you could still accidentally jump by moving the joystick even up-diagonal :(
I remember using up to jump in Turrican with my one-button joystick. I had to get a special microswitch joystick so it would be precise enough that I could jump precisely. Then I'd have to reach over to the keyboard to take advantage of the bombs and power-lines and other stuff that my joystick couldn't access with its one button.
In the arcade I didn't like playing Street Fighter 2 because it had 6 buttons but only 4 fingers and one thumb to press them with. At home it was even worse: One button joystick. I think I still have SF2 for the Amiga but there's really no point in playing it.
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I'd argue VHS tapes are a bit more resilient, one bad bit on a floppy and you could be screwed.
...not to mention VHS tapes aren't likely to get virii!
2bits actually, the MFM encoding on the floppy disk actually stores each data bit as two physical bits on the disk... Hmmm but I don't think MFM supported error correction... So maybe one bit error would kill the data... Piru, help... ;)
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I remember when Street Fighter 2 (first one) came out on my Amiga. We would play 2 player, but you had to switch floppies constantly!!
My friend got it for his SNES and we stopped playing the Amiga one for obvious reasons.
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Exactly. I had a fella try to sell me an A500 game setup when the SNES hit the scene. He was sick of swapping.
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I remember using up to jump in Turrican with my one-button joystick.
What we did was take a Sega Genesis controllers and then solder two wires from the UP connectors to the the third "C" button it had that Amiga didn't use.
Up still worked as normal, but pressing "C" was now a "Jump" button too.
This made most all Amiga games way more playable.
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Most amigas here in the states used one button joysticks, and even if you had a two button that was pitiful compared to any console. The nes had 2 action buttons plus select and start. The genesis had a,b,c and start for the 3 button.
I saw an article in Amiga Format once about how amiga users were shooting themselves in the foot by not upgrading, with hard drives etc.etc. and said something about the "wobbly old one-button joysticks" from the early '80s still being used.
There were some games of course that used two, but the fact that it was an option, and almost all games defaulted to the one button says something.
I hated up for jump...
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I can't stand using a button to jump :)
Besides, how did nintendo's do with a game like Civilization ..
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It's a shame Amiga never got that level of support from the original arcade makers, recording arcade footage on blurry video and approximating it in Dpaint was the norm,
Tell me about it. I work in toys and we wroekd on the first round of Marvel Vs. Capcom figure. We got a vhs tape off the coin op. By the second wave we had a PS1 with a Snappy frame grabber. Later on a flyer to do FMV caps.
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ppl in the states must have been delt the short end of the stick, excuse my pun... we had joysticks like the Competition Pro which was 2 button and the Quickshot with two buttons.. although the Quickshot tend to snap after awhile.
The CD32 controller was good to, it had 4 or 5 buttons from what I can remember that could be used or assigned. Was great for playing SF2 or Body Blows.
I miss the software get together weekends were we went through 2 to 3 boxes of blank disks making "backups" :D and watching demo's... what the Amiga was really good at.
Hmm, starting to want to buy one again, must resist.
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Give in to temptation.
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Did the Amiga ever get any software like AROS, and Windows has where you can assign Keyboard (and or mouse strokes) to your joystick? Or I wonder if the WHDLoad project could work in virtual second button support into games with certain pads. I.E. my Sega Master System game pad.
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What we did was take a Sega Genesis controllers and then solder two wires from the UP connectors to the the third "C" button it had that Amiga didn't use.
Up still worked as normal, but pressing "C" was now a "Jump" button too.
This made most all Amiga games way more playable.
i did that recently, you can still buy new old stock genesis controllers on ebay for about $5. Platformers in particular are more playable this way, for me anyway, as are driving games (where up on the joystick is forward)-as you don't end up with an arthritic wrist.
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A travesty, would like to know why though.
This is a good observation. Hadn't really thought about it before. But I wonder if it could have something to do with how Commodore didn't have any connection to the arcade market, while the competition -- Atari and Sega -- both had a leading presence there. This could be why those companies would have to have the "flagship" versions of their arcade games on their own home machines.
In the 1980s, companies like Atari would make inferior versions of their own games for competing systems, to make those competing systems look bad. I wonder if that practice has some connection to why those god-awful Domark conversions came around in the 1990s :). Which, remember, were horrible on *every* platform ... C64, Amiga, PC...
I guess I was spoiled because I had a Lynx growing up, and there were some very good arcade conversions on that platform... best home conversions of STUN Runner and A.P.B... plus the Shadowsoft classics like Robotron: 2084, Joust, etc. All *developed* on the Amiga, just released on another platform :)
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Give in to temptation.
Very very tempted :)
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Every Amiga joystick/pad I ever bought had AT LEAST two buttons and I made damn sure of it. Now, if UAE would support my 12-button + 2-analogue + D-Pad USB joysticks... Frontier would be AWESOME!
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Thing is consoles have always been cheaper than computers, fact of life. Even today you wont get a PC tower for $200 able to play Gears of War in DX10 like the 360 runs it. Also console games were always expensive. Sony were the only people to make an effort by cutting 20% off the list price for their own 1st party titles. But in 1988 or whenever Genesis games here were double the price and the machine was 200 bucks. So...after 10 game purchases your Sega Megadrive here works out more expensive in the long run. I think the NES was something like 40 bucks a game here, compared to 10 bucks for a C64 game, and the unit was only about 50 bucks less. No wonder Nintendo UK failed with the NES, the games were nothing special apart from a few 1st party franchises.
Ultima VII: PC DOS game: 69.95$
etc. etc.
PC Games that didn't suck were just as expensive as console games....
The majority of "budget" C64 games were all piles of crap, as compared to games like Castlevania, Contra (the C64 version is a travesty to all of mankind)...... the games were definitely better....
I don't see how lending someone a couple of disks to boot up in an A500 was harder than lending someone a cartridge. It's not like a PC where you need to mess about with himem or xms/ems and config.sys etc. Pop the disk in the drive, plug joystick in, play game. Not really sure how anyone who has experience with a Amigas can make such a crazy comment.
Its simple, loaning out say 3-4 floppies to your friend opens up worlds of possibilities of problems. "Oops, I dropped them", "oops, spilled shit on it"
"Oops saved over it", "Oops, I crunched it in my bag", etc. etc.
Cartridges, you have to be pretty stupid to damage. Floppies, kind of flimsy.
It has nothing to do with ease-of-use.
Sound wise there is a radical difference between the FM chips in a Genesis/TG to the 'do whatever you like' 4 channel DACs on Amiga. Sure you get more sound channels, but it is a trade off. You wont get anything as exquisite and unique sounding with the diversity of the MOD archives compared to stuff which always sounds like the FM sounds of a Genesis.
First, there is no FM chip in the TG. You should listen to more FM stuff. Alot of it is pretty smooth, and often even sounds cleaner than sampled stuff. Add in the nicely blended sound effects, and you also have a better arcade-like experience over all :).
It just seemed that companies in the USA lost interest somewhere between the high priced A1000 launch and the revised A500 two years later. There seemed a lot of initial enthusiasm which waned after time. I think that is down to Commodore in some ways, the A1000 probably wasn't the right machine to launch as a sole product, the A500 should have been first out the blocks for about the same price as an ST with mono monitor of $799. This would have been discounted down to about $700 or less and is not far off the 1987 price of an A500 anyway. Perhaps then interest would not have waned in the first 3 years in the USA.
What happened is, IBM took over businesses, working folks got used to them, IBM ended up in the home, DOS had some nice games.... shareware ensued, Windows happened, VGA went wild, DOOM appeared, etc. etc.
edit : I would be interested to see sales figures for the Sharp x68000 machine compared to NES/Megadrive sales. The x68000 is pretty much the Amiga for Japan, a computer with console quality games. So I wonder how well that high priced machine sold compared to cheap and cheerful console for 1/4 of the price.
It sold amazingly well, largely in part to the fact that it is also a computer, and as such you should compare its figures to the PC-98 or MSX instead of a video game machine.
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A few years back at a JavaOne conference SUN was pushing java gaming and so I got to meet a lot of game programmers. One individual (wish I could remember his name - he probably a member here) was an "old timer" who talked about when he started game programming and actually worked on Commodore 64 and Amiga games. So being an Amiga nut, I spoke with him after his presentation on the Amiga. I asked why was the best machine for building great games during its heyday got so many bad ports, no hardware addon like PC did with flightsticks, etc?
Well, he told me it came down simply to the money. They where given X amount of time to code the port and could not go over no matter what unless they wanted to work for free! The management rational is that no matter how good or bad, most games at least sold Y copies so to insure profit they need to make sure their budget was no more than X.
So you took short cuts and never tried to do anything too original - that just took too much time.
He also told me the best Amiga games where always the originals and from studios who focused on Amiga/Commodore first then other systems. I said you mean like Cinemaware or Psygnosis and he was 'yes, they were companies who cared about their games on the Amiga!' It was why the Amiga version graphics where usually on the box art because they wanted PC/Apple/C64 people to really see the difference.
So I think with all things money does the talking and especially when it came to the Amiga. Also, as popular the Amiga was for us, it still was never a "mainstream" machine. I only knew one other person with an Amiga - my cousin - back in the day yet ALL of my friends has Atari/NES.
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Can I just offer some advice to those people modifying their Sega pads to work on Amigas.
DO NOT USE THE C BUTTON!!! This is Fire 2 on the Amiga and is used by many games! If you are going to assign a button to be used as the UP direction for your games, please use A! It's unused and not connected for use on Amigas, so changing it won't effect any Amiga games, but changing C will make all those great games that already were designed for 2-button pads to not work properly! The B button as we all know is Fire 1 on Amigas.
You can modify a Sega pad so that all seven buttons (on a 6-button+Start pad) will work with Amiga games that support such a modified Sega pad. Some Amiga games make use of a modified 3-button pad (so A,B,C and Start work) and at least one game supports all the buttons.
There was a thread started about control pad and joystick modification here but it went nowhere, please feel free to bump it and continue the conversation because we need to spread awareness about Amiga control methods, especially as old joysticks become harder to find but we can still get Sega pads brand new.
Check here for more details - http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=50705
Of course there's still the Competition Pro, a joystick with four buttons on it that all do the same thing (Fire 1). But that's okay, because it has a switch on it to disable two of the buttons. (???????????) These are still in production and are great for Commodore 64s and 1-button Amiga games.
Now, WHDLoad! It already has the ability to remap keystrokes to button presses, but it's not global, it depends on the slave author to add the extra code to the install. Many WHDLoad games already have 2-button/CD32 pad patches applied, and you can now use a jump button in games like Ruff 'n' Tumble and New Zealand Story, as well as activate special weapons from a button rather than a key in Golden Axe and Battle Squadron, among other games. If there's a game that you think needs to have the keys remapped to 2-button or CD32 pads, let the author of the slave know and they might update it for you!
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DO NOT USE THE C BUTTON!!! This is Fire 2 on the Amiga and is used by many games! If you are going to assign a button to be used as the UP direction for your games, please use A!
Maybe it was A. Still have the joystick (it's a Quickshot for the Genesis) but haven't used it in a long time.
But, yeah, A was "jump", B and C were Fire1 and Fire2 or how ever it worked out. Yeah, modding "UP" to a Fire button would be bad!! :-) Well it might be interesting anyway.
I always remember having the 2 normal fire buttons though on my joystick/pads. People that were using 1 button controllers must had those left over from their C64's ;-)
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Every Amiga joystick/pad I ever bought had AT LEAST two buttons and I made damn sure of it. Now, if UAE would support my 12-button + 2-analogue + D-Pad USB joysticks... Frontier would be AWESOME!
You can kinda get there, if you use software to map keyboard presses to gamepad/joysticks buttons.
When using UAE I usually map things like p and space to the gamepad to avoid having to reach for the keyboard.
With a bit of work, I've even gotten Alien breed 3D and Breathless to play as "left stick to move, right stick to aim" :)
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@ Arkhan and a couple of others
x68000 vs Genesis, the point of the comparison is to compare how well Amiga/PC vs Genesis sold in the states compared to x68000 vs Megadrive in Japan. My reason for being curious about it was the fact that in the USA consoles were first to grab the mass market from gaming and hence affected possibly the adoption of Amiga as a gaming platform in the US was my reason. As the Sharp X68000 vs Megadrive is an identical situation I was keen to know how the sales figures stack up in the tech spec hungry Japanese territory.
PCs for home gaming
You mention Doom, which wasn't even an issue until the waning days of AGA in the mid 90s period, after which much of the damage to the Amiga brand through lack of chipset development for 8 years had already affected EU sales. Doom also is a 100% designed for PC thing, powerful CPU used to do everything and no custom chips, total opposite of Amiga and SNES/Sega consoles.
You also mention VGA but a default VGA graphics option in PC arcade games certainly didn't happen until the early 90s circa 1991/92, hell even Cinemaware didn't support them before that, very few games were VGA. EGA (ie C64 look-a-like colour palette graphics) games where the PC norm for the entire 80s. And in the days of C64/Atari XL vs PC the DOS games were again inferior CGA...try loading up some Atarisoft classics like Donkey Kong or Zaxxon/Buck Rogers from Sega. DOS classics didn't really exist until the early 90s at best.
Cost is the difference, in the USA PCs cost half the price they did in the EU, and if people already needed to do some work at home with Lotus 123 or other such industry standards then they got some sort of cheap clone PC. You can't sell a man an A1000 if he has just spent $1500 on an EGA PC, and that's just a fact of life.
I am never going to defend either the lack of any development of the A1000/500/2000 chipset OR the mistakes and omissions of AGA 8 years later, these two things combined to kill the Amiga slowly and it was all around this time that PC arcade gaming started to take off. Lack of chipset development was like a cancer eating away at its future. By 1990 the Amiga needed at least 64 if not 128 colour modes, with a much more flexible parallax mode a la Sega's 16bit console, and at least a 200% increase in blitter bandwidth on the chipset if not some very powerful hardware sprites, which 2/3 of the original chipset designers did in the late 80s for the Epyx Handy/Atari Lynx.
FM sounds vs 8bit DAC
You're missing the point, with the TG or Genesis soundchip (and every other computer and console of the time) you are stuck with the specific sound producing capabilities to produce your music in the style of that chip. So you have a unique 'style' of sound whether you like it or not. You can't play piano sounds on an acoustic guitar, but you can play both sounds on a Sinclavia or Fairlight sampling synthesizer of the early/mid 80s, this was the reason for utilising 4 8bit DACs as your sound chip in 1982/83 when the design was being drawn up and prototyped.
Taking your argument even further....an Intel i7 at maximum production CPU speed sold by Intel can not replicate perfectly the sound of a C64 sound chip, it doesn't matter. You were missing the point, the Amiga had 4 channels of 'make any kind of sound you like and do whatever you want with it volume and frequency wise'. So my point was simply that the Amiga sound system only had one down side compared to say the Genesis FM chip, and that was total number of sound channels. If you actually want those kind of basic fixed waveform sounds of Genesis/TG/NES then great, but if you want to replicate some of the MOD tunes from Amiga like the Revelations slideshow demo by Cryptoburners though then forget it, unless you happen to have that 'instrument' built in on the bespoke sound chip. But you don't because you can't compete with a sampler+stack of CDs for versatility, no sound chip in the world could. That was the down side of every other machine.
This brings me back to my point of lack of chipset development, in 1984 when Amiga should have been released, legal dramas between Atari and Commodore and lack of funds at Amiga Computers not withstanding, 4 sound channels was about right in the console/computer/arcade world. But this should always have been just a starting point, and how much would it really have cost Commodore to re-tool Paula into two units on a single chip by 1989 or to redesign the A500 m/b to utilise two Paula chips to create an 8 channel setup?
Rental feasibility, Cart vs 3.5" floppy I doubt you would snap a 3.5" disk in half by accident, and it's not going to get damaged by accident. To be honest 3.5" floppy disks are very sturdy as a piece of plastic design unlike 5.25" disks like on the x68000, certainly sturdy enough to be dropped from standing up height sure. And dropping a disk in a mug of water/soup is no less a problem than dropping a cart in it. So magnetic destruction is the only real issue and even leaving disks on PSUs and large hifi speakers I have never lost a disk like that, only had bad disks if I bought unbranded crap disks for peanuts.
Virus? Simple, remove the write enable tab from the disks leaving them permanently wite protected, it's not like there were any arcade games that wrote back to the disk as a requirement and it's no different technically to the tab being broken on rental tapes to stop dumdums recording over a film with the superbowl!
I suspect the reason blockbusters didn't rent Amiga games was due to a smaller market, and possibly as they would need to get an individual legal agreement with every single software company that sold Amiga games they wanted to rent out. It's not as simple as when they just did a single deal with Sega and Nintendo.
And usability certainly isn't the issue, if you are too stupid to pop 'Disk 1' in your A500, out of a maximum of 2 or 3 on average for Amiga arcade games, and flick the switch on the PSU you then evolution dictates you shouldn't even be allowed to procreate! We are not talking about epic arcade point and click adventures from Lucas Arts on 12 disks here!
Off-topic personal opinions about game comparisons
For every NES game you show that is worse as a C64 conversion I can show you 1 of superior conversion. If you are a Mario fanboy then you have to own a Nintendo. How many games did NES have? 750? That's between 5-10% of the C64/Amiga catalogue. And as Angry Video Game Nerd frequently shows there was plenty of crap costing 50 bucks on the NES console too, losing 8 or 10 bucks is nothing on a C64 full price game, 50 bucks though in mid 80s was a lot. There are plenty of games superior on the C64 anyway, like the entire Cinemaware catalogue. And computer games aren't censored with silly Nintendo "no blood" policy to protect their pre-teen market.
Also since when is Ultima an arcade conversion? I am asking why there were so many crap arcade conversions in the USA for Amiga present due to simply importing the rubbish UK versions, what happened to making their own like with the superior version of US Afterburner to the UK claptrap sold. I don't think anyone playing Outrun for DOS would have been happy either.
Anyway we are talking about Amiga, NOT C64 games, which were 6x cheaper than the tiny and repetitive catalogue of the NES. Let's take two 16bit arcade games to compare. And anyway some budget C64 games were pretty good, and many full price games were re-released as budget price of 2 or 3 bucks. That 25x cheaper than your average NES cart here.
Genesis struggled to produce a superior version of Lotus challenge II compared to Amiga BUT Lotus II on Genesis is not really that different in speed and quality of animation to Genesis version of Outrun, so you can't go crying about one game being badly coded. So therefore clearly the Amiga version of Outrun should have been pretty damned close to the Genesis version which is really nice rather than that steaming turd US Gold produced.
And I guess after 3 pages that basically it is because between workaholic home PC users and NES owning kids in the 80s the Amiga had a very hard time convincing arcade games producing companies to invest in it in the USA except for some notable exceptions from Discovery Software. So they bought them from the UK companies and imported the same dross from the EU. Very sad.
The Doom/Wing Commander era is just down to Commodore penny pinching on development of the Amiga between OCS and AGA and A1200 being too little too late. These games were at the end of the active life of Amiga even in the EU. Atari Jaguar had a 68000 and non 3D custom chips and this did a better version of Doom than your average $1500 486 PC at the time too. But Doom was designed around PC architecture, just like Shadow of the Beast was designed around the Amiga OCS chipset. Both games only work well on the intended target machine, but this is 100% off topic and not really relevant to the discussion anyway.
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Cammy, your a sexy wellspring of information.
So I presume the Master System control pad's secondary button is useless as is? I was trying it with Aladin, but it didn't seem to do anything.
Can I just offer some advice to those people modifying their Sega pads to work on Amigas.
DO NOT USE THE C BUTTON!!! This is Fire 2 on the Amiga and is used by many games! If you are going to assign a button to be used as the UP direction for your games, please use A! It's unused and not connected for use on Amigas, so changing it won't effect any Amiga games, but changing C will make all those great games that already were designed for 2-button pads to not work properly! The B button as we all know is Fire 1 on Amigas.
You can modify a Sega pad so that all seven buttons (on a 6-button+Start pad) will work with Amiga games that support such a modified Sega pad. Some Amiga games make use of a modified 3-button pad (so A,B,C and Start work) and at least one game supports all the buttons.
There was a thread started about control pad and joystick modification here but it went nowhere, please feel free to bump it and continue the conversation because we need to spread awareness about Amiga control methods, especially as old joysticks become harder to find but we can still get Sega pads brand new.
Check here for more details - http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=50705
Of course there's still the Competition Pro, a joystick with four buttons on it that all do the same thing (Fire 1). But that's okay, because it has a switch on it to disable two of the buttons. (???????????) These are still in production and are great for Commodore 64s and 1-button Amiga games.
Now, WHDLoad! It already has the ability to remap keystrokes to button presses, but it's not global, it depends on the slave author to add the extra code to the install. Many WHDLoad games already have 2-button/CD32 pad patches applied, and you can now use a jump button in games like Ruff 'n' Tumble and New Zealand Story, as well as activate special weapons from a button rather than a key in Golden Axe and Battle Squadron, among other games. If there's a game that you think needs to have the keys remapped to 2-button or CD32 pads, let the author of the slave know and they might update it for you!
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When using UAE I usually map things like p and space to the gamepad to avoid having to reach for the keyboard.
I'm clearly missing some configuration steps... Details?! (NB. WinUAE or [E-|P]UAE?)
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Rental feasibility, Cart vs 3.5" floppy I doubt you would snap a 3.5" disk in half by accident, and it's not going to get damaged by accident.
Ridiculous. All it takes is a bit of weight in the wrong spot on a floppy disk and you can damage the moving parts (you know, like the little metal door?) Also, heat/liquid/dirt are much more likely to damage a disk than a cartridge, the cartridge will generally dry out and work fine if it gets wet. Floppies are inherently more fragile than cartridges, and rental items generally see abuse, end of story.
Write protection is good enough protection against accidental transmission of a virus, but some nasty renter might think it's fun to stick a piece of tape over that hole and put a virus on the disk just for kicks.
edit: not to say the media is the biggest reason games weren't rented out on a large scale. Consoles just sold way more units, creating a bigger market for rentals.
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PCs for home gaming
You mention Doom, which wasn't even an issue until the waning days of AGA in the mid 90s period, after which much of the damage to the Amiga brand through lack of chipset development for 8 years had already affected EU sales. Doom also is a 100% designed for PC thing, powerful CPU used to do everything and no custom chips, total opposite of Amiga and SNES/Sega consoles.
That's because the PC had access to a powerful CPU, and the ability to upgrade them.
You can't really upgrade your sega's CPU. That's why DOOM for sega 32x blew.
You also mention VGA but a default VGA graphics option in PC arcade games certainly didn't happen until the early 90s circa 1991/92, hell even Cinemaware didn't support them before that, very few games were VGA. EGA (ie C64 look-a-like colour palette graphics) games where the PC norm for the entire 80s.
The early 90s is when Amiga started to lose its footing, isn't it? :) No more dopey Atari DOS games with bleepblooping and crapass colors (which played perfectly fine to be honest)! There were plenty of DOS classics. What planet are you on here dude?
Anyway, in the 90s You'd have access to stuff like Doom, Wing Commander, Duke Nukem, World of Xeen, and Ultima VII... and Soundblaster, Adlib? MT-32..... mmmm :D. To think VGA wasn't part of the success of the PC would be clueless.
You can't sell a man an A1000 if he has just spent $1500 on an EGA PC, and that's just a fact of life.
Sure you can. Ask my Uncle. he had 2 Amigas, and a few PCs.
FM sounds vs 8bit DAC
You're missing the point, with the TG or Genesis soundchip (and every other computer and console of the time) you are stuck with the specific sound producing capabilities to produce your music in the style of that chip. So you have a unique 'style' of sound whether you like it or not. You can't play piano sounds on an acoustic guitar, but you can play both sounds on a Sinclavia or Fairlight sampling synthesizer of the early/mid 80s, this was the reason for utilising 4 8bit DACs as your sound chip in 1982/83 when the design was being drawn up and prototyped.
I don't think you even have a point. You can sample on the Turbo Grafx. 6 Channels of sampled sound. That is more than the Amiga. The thing also has stereo panning, which makes it even better than the Amiga, right?
Someone was even batshit crazy enough to make it play MOD and XMs. You can sample on the Genesis too.
Though this doesn't really matter, because even a standardized sound chip when used right can produce some nice music, and when you are looking for an arcade experience, you'll find that FM/PSG more accurately recreates it, seeing as that's whats in the arcades...
Also, for the record, sampled guitars blow. I would take 32-byte PSG music over corny sampled guitars like in Menace on Amiga...
Taking your argument even further....an Intel i7 at maximum production CPU speed sold by Intel can not replicate perfectly the sound of a C64 sound chip, it doesn't matter. You were missing the point, the Amiga had 4 channels of 'make any kind of sound you like and do whatever you want with it volume and frequency wise'. So my point was simply that the Amiga sound system only had one down side compared to say the Genesis FM chip, and that was total number of sound channels. If you actually want those kind of basic fixed waveform sounds of Genesis/TG/NES then great, but if you want to replicate some of the MOD tunes from Amiga like the Revelations slideshow demo by Cryptoburners though then forget it, unless you happen to have that 'instrument' built in on the bespoke sound chip. But you don't because you can't compete with a sampler+stack of CDs for versatility, no sound chip in the world could. That was the down side of every other machine.
All of the old sound chips are emulated good enough today that you can't really tell the difference. If you say you can, I say you're lying and being a spaz.
Like I said, sampling is able to be done on the TG and the Genesis, rendering alot of this argument useless.
Not to mention, another nice little thing is the Turbo Grafx CD, and the Sega CD. No amount of "make it sound like you want" sampling setup can cope with redbook audio. ;)
Rental feasibility, Cart vs 3.5" floppy I doubt you would snap a 3.5" disk in half by accident, and it's not going to get damaged by accident. To be honest 3.5" floppy disks are very sturdy as a piece of plastic design unlike 5.25" disks like on the x68000, certainly sturdy enough to be dropped from standing up height sure. And dropping a disk in a mug of water/soup is no less a problem than dropping a cart in it. So magnetic destruction is the only real issue and even leaving disks on PSUs and large hifi speakers I have never lost a disk like that, only had bad disks if I bought unbranded crap disks for peanuts.
Christ you are dense. I can take a 3.5" floppy and crack it to pieces with one hand. Try doing that to a sega game. Not gonna work unless you're Lou Ferrigno.
And, you can get cartridges wet and they still work. as long as you let them dry out and they don't corrode, you're fine. Disks, not so much.
Virus? Simple, remove the write enable tab from the disks leaving them permanently wite protected, it's not like there were any arcade games that wrote back to the disk as a requirement and it's no different technically to the tab being broken on rental tapes to stop dumdums recording over a film with the superbowl!
Simple he says! You act like virus-spreaders are braindead and not crafty at all.
Hell I wouldn't be surprised if someone somewhere dismantled a floppy disk, put a new one in place that loaded up some porno on your Amiga, and then re assembled it and sold it to some little kid.
I suspect the reason blockbusters didn't rent Amiga games was due to a smaller market, and possibly as they would need to get an individual legal agreement with every single software company that sold Amiga games they wanted to rent out. It's not as simple as when they just did a single deal with Sega and Nintendo.
I suspect it is because giving floppies out to the general public and expecting them to come back in 1 piece every time is mental. You never know a floppy game is borked til you try to load the borked part.
And usability certainly isn't the issue, if you are too stupid to pop 'Disk 1' in your A500, out of a maximum of 2 or 3 on average for Amiga arcade games, and flick the switch on the PSU you then evolution dictates you shouldn't even be allowed to procreate! We are not talking about epic arcade point and click adventures from Lucas Arts on 12 disks here!
Why arent we talking about them? Do you think rental places only rent out durpy arcade games? :)
Useability is an issue. For one, what if the game requires something that you are unsure if your Amiga has? What if your parents aren't computer experts and you're like, 10.
It's easier to go "MMM SONIC" and grab it off the shelf and go home, knowing it will work in your Sega. a genesis is a genesis. They are all the same. No chip ram expansions, or crap like that.
Off-topic personal opinions about game comparisons
For every NES game you show that is worse as a C64 conversion I can show you 1 of superior conversion. If you are a Mario fanboy then you have to own a Nintendo. How many games did NES have? 750? That's between 5-10% of the C64/Amiga catalogue.
Do it. I can't wait to see what biased nonsense occurs. :) Are you going to tell me the Salamander for C64 is better? That will be funny.
Anyway we are talking about Amiga, NOT C64 games, which were 6x cheaper than the tiny and repetitive catalogue of the NES.
Then why are we talking about NES? It holds nothing to the Amiga. Duh.
Genesis struggled to produce a superior version of Lotus challenge II compared to Amiga BUT Lotus II on Genesis is not really that different in speed and quality of animation to Genesis version of Outrun, so you can't go crying about one game being badly coded. So therefore clearly the Amiga version of Outrun should have been pretty damned close to the Genesis version which is really nice rather than that steaming turd US Gold produced.
Lotus Challenge 2 sucks, so its ok.
and, the rest of that quote makes no sense. It's too full of attempted higher English. So, thus, therefore clearly rather I got bored reading it. :roflmao:
was designed around PC architecture, just like Shadow of the Beast was designed around the Amiga OCS chipset. Both games only work well on the intended target machine, but this is 100% off topic and not really relevant to the discussion anyway.
The PCE CD version of Shadow of the Beast plays and sounds better than the Amiga one.
Just sayin.
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About the floppy weaknesses and cart durability, I know it doesn't directly relate but several of my kids GBA games went through the clothes washer and dryer, one of them twice, and they still work perfectly.
Try that with a floppy:)
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You know, this kind of comes back full circle to why aren't we seeing more cart based systems again? 16G on a chip is darn near blu-ray storage. Is it that everyone wants network distributed everything now, or is it that DVD's and game discs get scratched all up necessitating the purchase of another game later on? I suppose there is considerable more money tied up in a cart than a DVD, but at 60 bucks a pop isn't there room to profit? And to think-you can't just stamp out a cart! DRM wins!
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I'm clearly missing some configuration steps... Details?! (NB. WinUAE or [E-|P]UAE?)
You'll need an external program for this. Im not sure what there is for windows. On Linux I used rejoystick.
Basically you need an app that lets you map keyboard presses to a gamepad.
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You know, this kind of comes back full circle to why aren't we seeing more cart based systems again? 16G on a chip is darn near blu-ray storage. Is it that everyone wants network distributed everything now, or is it that DVD's and game discs get scratched all up necessitating the purchase of another game later on? I suppose there is considerable more money tied up in a cart than a DVD, but at 60 bucks a pop isn't there room to profit? And to think-you can't just stamp out a cart! DRM wins!
I am hoping we can get the hell rid of cd's soon. I hate the damn things
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I am hoping we can get the hell rid of cd's soon. I hate the damn things
Yeah-I want to be able to blow on my cartridges again to get them to work :lol:
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I am hoping we can get the hell rid of cd's soon. I hate the damn things
whats wrong with them?
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Yeah-I want to be able to blow on my cartridges again to get them to work :lol:
USB Flash sticks for the win. Tiny little solid state drives :)
whats wrong with them?
They are big, they get scratched up, the cd drives are noisy, they are slow to load. Basically just an oversized floppy disk with all the resultant drawbacks.
For modern computing, I am well and ready to move on to flash/thumb drives and the interwebs.
I have a hard time thinking of anything a CD actually does better
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Exactly. DVD size thumbdrives are under 10 bucks. Add content and make them read only and sell them for 25-50 (whatever your margin price is). Boom! Insta-cart with off the shelf components.
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That would be interesting if consoles started being run off USB sticks. one for each game.
though, CD's if properly taken care of, last forever, store rather nicely, and, I think they are still cheaper to produce than even USB sticks and stuff right now.
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That would be interesting if consoles started being run off USB sticks. one for each game.
though, CD's if properly taken care of, last forever, store rather nicely, and, I think they are still cheaper to produce than even USB sticks and stuff right now.
absurdly cheap, like in the pennies (US).
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I think Nintendo and other consoles beat out Amigas because you didn't need to know anything about computers,and thus it was less confusing to Mom and POP when buying holiday presents.
The best idea in the world still must be marketed.
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THIS IS A THREAD ABOUT THE LACK OF AMIGA ARCADE GAME CONVERSIONS BY US DEVELOPERS AND THE REASON WHY SUB STANDARD UK COIN-OP CONVERSIONS WERE IMPORTED FROM THE UK TO THE USA.
Please keep this in mind everyone :)
For the final time for Arkhan.....
1. Lotus II and Outrun on Genesis are using pretty much an identical game engine. Lotus II on Amiga looks pretty much the same as on Genesis. Outrun on Amiga (and PC) looks pathetic full stop. Simple enough point about lack of effort for arcade conversions, hence the thread title.
2. What home computer or console became the dominant market leader by hoping to be sold as a second purchase to your competing products? None. A1000 was not a 2nd computer, the price put it fairly and squarely as the main computer purchase for the house not an idle second purchase. Remember I am talking about the A1000 vs PC and any impact this had on the games market by failing to get a foothold in the those first 30 months of sale for the A1000.
3. PC-Engine/Turbografix CD SotB has a CD soundtrack, so that is nothing to do with internal sound hardware. And amazingly it still sounds worse than David Whittaker's finest.
4. The TG/PC-E has 6 channel 5 bit wavetable unit with an effective lock of around 7khz for those 5 bit samples to playback during your average game being executed. I've heard the XM player on PC-E and it sounds worse compared to Octamed 8 software channel MOD playback mode. I've also got SF2 for PC-E and the samples are scratchy.
5. And by comparison Sega Genesis has two sound chips, one is a 70s Texas Instruments TI99/4A computer's soundchip from SMS. Second one a 6 channel FM YM2162 chip from Yamaha, which can be configured for 5 channel FM + 1 rough 8-bit sample channel.
TurboGrafx 5 bit 6 channel sound is about as rough as a C64. And if you want to make a song that sounds like it's on a YM2162 then Genesis is the one. If you want to have those pan pipes from Amiga SotB as an instrument then I guess you are screwed. So like I said, sample playback instead of being limited to artificial waveforms generated by oscillators is good, Amiga being stuck at 4 channels from 85 to 95 very bad. As my original comment was the only limitation was 4 sound channels for the life of Amiga.....pick up your glasses before replying to my posts again ;)
6. Doom was released in the middle of December 1993 so 1994 onwards, show me 10 arcade games from 1985-1990ish that were superior to either the Genesis or an Amiga. I remember going through arcade conversions on Home of the Underdogs by year and 1991 was about the time these types of games were ALL in VGA not EGA.
There were plenty of classic DOS games like adventures/strategy and RPGs etc, can't really think of a single arcade conversion worth a crap on DOS before around mid 90s at best.
7. Clearly you can do Doom on a 68000, the Atari Jaguar console proves this with just a DSP,blitter and a 13mhz 68000. There were rumours that Commodore would stick a DSP in the A1200, it was supposed to be a massive upgrade to Agnus and it had an 020 @ 14mhz. So clearly if AGA wasn't too little too late Doom was quite possible regardless of CPU speed. Which again was my original point, plus the fact it came out when Amiga was more or less screwed anyway after 9 years of minimal development.
7. Spending $3000 on a PC to play arcade games is a bit dumb. A Roland MT32 was about 350 bucks here, so basically you are spending more on a general midi sound module than an A1200? Yeah kind of stupid and not the actions of people making up a mass market.
As to the fascination with unrelated issue to the thread topic of the Amiga rental market others seem to have a problem dropping...
Breaking off the metal slider doesn't kill a disk, and if you aren't ham fisted you can put it back on...say from another blank that cost 10p.
All I said was in normal conditions...if you are going to drop them out of your bedroom window/run them over with a monster truck/leave them in a glass jar facing the sun for a week yada yada then you are a moron. The point is I never had a problem with floppy disks in general, if you treat stuff with a modicum of respect and don't act like an idiot then disks are sturdy enough for their purpose.
And if you can rent tape games out to 8bit computer users successfully for years then magnetic stability of data stored on 3.5" disks is a no-brainer, unless you do something stupid like wave it in front of a set of massive speakers at Live Aid concerts that is ;)
Drop it now and get back on bloody topic. Rental market had nothing to do with USA not doing any home grown coin-op conversions, the issue at hand.
I am genuinely interested to know why Amiga got the same rubbish games developed here in the UK and Afterburner USA was the exception to the rule. OK if the UK arcade conversions were any good, but to buy the rights to import such badly programmed drivel like Outrun is worrying.
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absurdly cheap, like in the pennies (US).
CDs cost more to produce than DVDs tpday I think, 1p difference between them though probably :)
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I think Nintendo and other consoles beat out Amigas because you didn't need to know anything about computers,and thus it was less confusing to Mom and POP when buying holiday presents.
The best idea in the world still must be marketed.
This is quite an interesting point, I think that's probably due to people's experience of PCs at work or older 8 bit micros. As far as running a game went it wasn't really any more difficult than inserting a cart in an NES and flicking the power switch. However as it was a computer with a keyboard I guess it is daunting. Probably more to do with an Amiga being 250% the price of a NES though really, and NES having a smaller lighter box to carry home.
What's interesting is if you constantly need to be within reach of the machine to swap disks (remembering most games software locks out any extra disk drives so everyone had to swap disks) then you can't really use it in the living in front of the TV. It becomes more of a PC like experience on a desk rather than simply plugging into the lounge TV and sitting on the couch to play your games.
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3. PC-Engine/Turbografix CD SotB has a CD soundtrack, so that is nothing to do with internal sound hardware. And amazingly it still sounds worse than David Whittaker's finest.
You are high and being a biased amigatard.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FH1hTSwHirc
I think Whitaker would have killed for the possibilities of the percussion in that version. The rest of the soundtrack doesn't disappoint either.
4. The TG/PC-E has 6 channel 5 bit wavetable unit with an effective lock of around 7khz for those 5 bit samples to playback during your average game being executed. I've heard the XM player on PC-E and it sounds worse compared to Octamed 8 software channel MOD playback mode. I've also got SF2 for PC-E and the samples are scratchy.
Yeah uh you don't need to lecture me on PCE hardware. Kinda published a game for it and wrote two different sound engines, lol. Quoting hardware specs doesn't mean you actually know what you are saying you know.
When did you hear the XM player? It is fairly recent, and changing constantly. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PILAjbkItJw
Sounds pretty good to me
5. And by comparison Sega Genesis has two sound chips, one is a 70s Texas Instruments TI99/4A computer's soundchip from SMS. Second one a 6 channel FM YM2162 chip from Yamaha, which can be configured for 5 channel FM + 1 rough 8-bit sample channel.
Thats nice, glad you can quote wikipedia specs, what is your point.
TurboGrafx 5 bit 6 channel sound is about as rough as a C64. And if you want to make a song that sounds like it's on a YM2162 then Genesis is the one. If you want to have those pan pipes from Amiga SotB as an instrument then I guess you are screwed. So like I said, sample playback instead of being limited to artificial waveforms generated by oscillators is good, Amiga being stuck at 4 channels from 85 to 95 very bad. As my original comment was the only limitation was 4 sound channels for the life of Amiga.....
You want those pan pipes on the TG? Sample them. derurhrhrh. Splatterhouse samples in a friggin pipe organ.
Saying the PCE is as rough as the SID is mental.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tvc0HYg0CZE
Much smoother and arcade like. No blaring disastrous SFX overtaking the music. No omission of SFX.
Sampling is not always better. Alot of the time it makes the games sound corny. R-Type on the Amiga sounds stupid. The music is done better on the MSX w/ a 3 channel PSG. and the SFX don't blare out over the poorly attempted music.
pick up your glasses before replying to my posts again ;)
Sorry. I lose interest about halfway through reading your master theses every time, especially since they are worded goony half the time.
6. Doom was released in the middle of December 1993 so 1994 onwards, show me 10 arcade games from 1985-1990ish that were superior to either the Genesis or an Amiga. I remember going through arcade conversions on Home of the Underdogs by year and 1991 was about the time these types of games were ALL in VGA not EGA.
Nah. I asked you to do the same for C64/NES and you didn't (read: couldn't). Go look at HotU again. There are plenty of good action/arcade games for DOS that are comparable to the Genesis, etc.
There were plenty of classic DOS games like adventures/strategy and RPGs etc, can't really think of a single arcade conversion worth a crap on DOS before around mid 90s at best.
That's because you are a biased flid.
7. Clearly you can do Doom on a 68000, the Atari Jaguar console proves this with just a DSP,blitter and a 13mhz 68000. There were rumours that Commodore would stick a DSP in the A1200, it was supposed to be a massive upgrade to Agnus and it had an 020 @ 14mhz. So clearly if AGA wasn't too little too late Doom was quite possible regardless of CPU speed. Which again was my original point, plus the fact it came out when Amiga was more or less screwed anyway after 9 years of minimal development.
Doesn't matter if it CAN do DOOM, it matters if it DID do DOOM. Ever read up on the DOOM phenomenon that took place in workplaces etc? Really good stuff.
Also the Amiga Doom when it finally came out, didnt even have the right music. What is it with Amiga games and changing the entire soundtrack?
7. Spending $3000 on a PC to play arcade games is a bit dumb. A Roland MT32 was about 350 bucks here, so basically you are spending more on a general midi sound module than an A1200? Yeah kind of stupid and not the actions of people making up a mass market.
If all you do with a PC is play games, it is dumb. But if that is all you bought a computer for, you probably are dumb. Smart people by the computer to do alot of things besides fiddle with games all day. PCs were work machines too.
Who said you had to have an MT-32? Sound Blaster did just fine. The MT-32 was nice for people who already had it for music making. It's always nice to have the option to hook your games up to your instruments.
Breaking off the metal slider doesn't kill a disk, and if you aren't ham fisted you can put it back on...say from another blank that cost 10p.
Little kids are typically hamfisted.
All I said was in normal conditions...if you are going to drop them out of your bedroom window/run them over with a monster truck/leave them in a glass jar facing the sun for a week yada yada then you are a moron. The point is I never had a problem with floppy disks in general, if you treat stuff with a modicum of respect and don't act like an idiot then disks are sturdy enough for their purpose.
Little kids often don't know any better, and they were/are the backbone of the rental market.
Drop it now and get back on bloody topic. Rental market had nothing to do with USA not doing any home grown coin-op conversions, the issue at hand.
How do you know? Maybe it did.
Also, why do you get to decide when to get back on topic? :) You're the one typing 38 page off topic replies.
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You are high and being a biased amigatard.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FH1hTSwHirc
I think Whitaker would have killed for the possibilities of the percussion in that version. The rest of the soundtrack doesn't disappoint either.
yeah, that's damn good. Wish the Amiga version could have rocked out like that.
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Video stores could rent Nintendo cartidges but could not by law rent computer disks in the U.S. so there is that availability thing again.
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And "on topic";software houses run by investors and accountants care NOTHING for improved graphics,neat programming tricks or anything else but maximizing profit;therefore they would likely hire the cheapest programmers to port anything that would sell.And if sales are disappointing,the accountant types will be slow to recognize it is because of poor quality;they will just advise dropping unprofitable lines such as Amiga.