The point PC was viable future winner for UK computer gamers was mass adoption by software houses of VGA graphics as standard. Why?
386 VGA/SBLASTER owner buys SF2....pretty slow and unplayable. 18 months later sells it and gets 486DX66 +GRAVIS etc....suddenly old unplayable game is arcade quality. Had 256 colours but is faster and sounds better automatically.
A500 owner buyss SF2...32 colour slow rubbish....3 years later he gets a 4000/030 and loads SF2....STILL rubbish (same speed, 32 colours, SFX/music). Has to pray a good AGA version is released and buy a 2nd copy if it is ever made! No reward for his £999 investment!
And that my friends is the problem, in 1990 most arcade games on PC had 256 colour graphics like Super Nintendo and their old PC games bought before upgrading to better PC automatically improved without the need for a single line of game code to improve. VGA mass adoption was the key. EGA Cinemaware games will forever be inferior to Amiga versions even on an running on Intel i7 920 PC today. After VGA though it was game over. 256 colours was enough even for 3D games like Doom or Screamer Rally comparedto PS1 RidgeRacer/Doom.
Big problem for AGA AND Atari Falcon potential purchasers no?
You are a perfect example for what he is pointing at. I had PC in the early 1990. My PC was Turbo and it had a Turbo button for a reason. Most of the old games were unplayable on faster machines, because they were tied to the slow processors. The sync with the videobeam was non existant on early PC games. I still have a magazine with source code for slowdowner that runs resident in DOS. A PC lamer told me in 1994 that the new games were undependable of CPU speed. So you can even run games on 4 MHz I asked him? He proudly answered yes.....
But the speed was not the only problem that sucked for the reasonable PC gaming, except for turn based strategies like Civilisation that was hit on the PC, while most Amiga gamers thought it sucked as a game. For every game before you start it you had to choose - type of Video controller (Hercules, CGA, EGA, VGA, SVGA), Type of Sound card (AdLib, SoundBlaster, SoundBlasterPro), Turbo or Normal version, JoyStick (what joystick, most of the games did not support joystick), Mouse. Shit, you had to run mouse driver before starting the game. Some games did not allow save of config, that was helping the PC gamers become DOS experts, because it was more interesting to type stupid scripts in DOS than to play actual games. Starting games from Windows was nightmare too, and even after Windows 95 appeared that put end of the configuration hell, people were still loving DOS because it was better for gaming.
The consoles were selling pretty well back in 1994-1995 for a reason - the Amiga and the Atari were no more, the PC sucked as a gaming machine and the PS1 was getting all the nicest games, that took the PC 3 years (late 1997) to catch up with the quality of the graphics and sound.
