Am I the only one who doesn't hate AGA?

[Linde]

It wasn't as big an upgrade as you could have expected after five years, but it's still an improvement to ECS. No need to complain about it, and "could've"s and "should've"s are just silly this far past it.

[Linde]

Its worth pointing out that there were more to computers than arcade games.

Nobody made PD games for the NES (ROM hacks I guess)

You couldn't play Civilization or Battle Isle on the master system.

Not a lot of people used their super nintendo for animation.

I never got the hang of writing a high school paper on the playstation.

I don't think comparing it to the NES, Playstation, SNES or Master system is fair. They were all "closed" and locked-out systems. It's much better to compare it with other video game/computer hybrids like the X68000 or FM-Towns series, both of which blow the Amiga away in terms of graphic and sound ability, without weird solutions like the copper, and still manage in the home computer department -- arguably not as good as the Amiga in that regard, but not far off, and definitely capable enough.

People wanting a good gaming experience were probably in majority of the Amiga market, and the sound and graphics were the unique selling point of the damn thing; there's no denying that Commodore overlooked that when they released AGA and lost the little edge they still had. If all you wanted to do was to play PD games, Civ and write school papers by 1992, you should have picked up a PC.

BTW, there are quite a few PD games for the NES (no, not only ROM hacks), and you can play Civ on a Super NES. Can you play anything like Sonic 2 on a stock A1200? Apples and oranges, IMO.

[Linde]

There was a non-Sega demo out there.  Just to prove that it *could* be done.

If this is the demo you are talking about, I can only assume that you've never actually played Sonic.

[Linde]

possibly.  Anything done on megadrive *could* be done on an A1200 and probably better.  Its a licensing limitation, not a hardware one.

No, there are a lot of things the Mega Drive can do which a stock 1200 can't, and that goes the other way around, too, of course. I'm not saying that one is necessarily better than the other, but for 2D action games like Sonic or any shoot'em up; lot's of sprites, fast and smooth scrolling tile layers, etc, the Mega Drive is definitely superior. For games requiring a lot of RAM for variables or raw CPU power, like detailed simulations or strategy games, the 1200 is obviously the better choice, but you'd never see a Thunder Force IV or a Sonic 2 on the 1200.

BtW Sonic is simply boring.

Totally besides the point, but not a surprising thing to hear from someone who knows that he's losing an argument.

[Linde]

What?

Super Stardust.  Xenon.  XP8 AGA.  Project X.  Smooth scrolling, plenty-of-sprites-on-screen shooters.

I won't say much about these games in terms of gameplay, but graphically they don't compare to Thunderforce IV, no, and sound-wise... The Mega Drive is miles ahead when it comes to game background music. With only four channels of sampled sound, while it might be the more desirable setup for many for just music production, the sound effects interrupting the music is so glaringly obvious.

The reason why a Sonic game might be smoother on the megadrive is the same reason the amiga suffered ports that were worse than on the megadrive:  the coders didn't give enough of a shit to code them properly for the Amiga, whereas a company like Sega whose mascot was Sonic would have pulled out all stops to make Sonic a flagship title: their survival depended on it.  Megadrive ports were farmed off to third parties that didn't optimize the games for Amiga.

There are no Amiga ports of Sonic 2 to compare, but right off the bat I can say that Sonic 2 wouldn't be possible on a stock Amiga 1200 because of its 10 channel crystal clear stereo sound, for example. Some will argue that 4 sample channels sound better (and I disagree) but from a technical point of view, no, the Amiga couldn't handle 10 channels of sound at that fidelity while trying to do what's happening on-screen in Sonic 2. I hate to speak in terms of number of audio channels and number of colors, but there you have it; not possible.

And no, I don't think the programmers were lazy, but they were crippled by the fact that to display more than 8 sprites, all with a single palette, they had to muck about a lot with the copper, and to have parallax scrolling background planes, they had to use a lot of tricks (hogging a lot of CPU), ending up with inflexible results in all practical cases. Getting 80 sprites on screen on a multi-layer multi-directional scrolling background on the Mega Drive is a breeze compared to the Amiga, meaning that developers could focus more on game logic than on getting stuff on the screen through seemingly magic tricks.

What?  It was all the stuff Amiga custom chips did with very little CPU power that set the Amiga apart.

That wasn't at all unique for home computers at the time (and it was something game consoles had already been doing for quite some time). What set set the Amiga apart IMO was that it was able to compete with and even surpass game console/arcade hardware at the time of its release, while still being a usable personal computer. By the release of AGA, this edge was long lost, and AGA itself did very little to take it back.

And you'll never see Super Mario Bros on the megadrive, either.

While it's besides the point again, it's funny that you should mention it.

You implied that Sonic's absence on the Amiga due to AGA's technical inferiority was a  contributor to AGA's failure.

I didn't say anything about technical inferiority. I said that a game like Sonic 2 isn't possible on a stock Amiga 1200 as a reply to runequester's list of fallacious "You can't do X on Y" arguments, which doesn't mean to say that I think that the Amiga is inferor. There are things that can be done on the Amiga that the Mega Drive could only dream of. It was an odd move for Commodore, though, not to add features similar or even comparable to those of contemporary game consoles like the MD or the SNES, since most of their user base obviously wanted a machine to play games on.

I can honestly say I don't recall anyone saying:  "If Amiga only had Sonic..."  Doom, yes.  Mario, maybe.  Sonic, meh...It was a boring game

Your anecdotal recollection of the past doesn't mean anything in this discussion, and neither does your opinion of Sonic 2. The fact remains that Mega Drives/Genesis systems are still being produced, and Sonic 2 is almost always near the top in "all time best" charts along with Doom and some Mario games.

[Linde]

IF only the Amiga had "blast processing" to go along with AGA  :lol:

Sonic does suck though. Not much of a game there at all. Let's see how fast we can blow through a level, while trying to nab as many coins as possible. Yay. Yawn.

Surely, you can come up with some better excuse to evade my actual point. Whether it sucks or not, I'm talking about Sonic not as a game, but as a technical display of things that stock 1200's can't do.

In my personal opinion, Sonic 2 is better than any game on the Amiga except maybe some of the Lucasfilm adventures. Not that it matters in this discussion, which, since the beginning, has been about technicalities. If it was about the general quality of games, we wouldn't even have a discussion; SNES, Mega Drive, TG-16, maybe even MSX would win hands down.

[Linde]

(you cant just judge sound on the number of audio channels, in nearly every other department the amigas sound wins hands down when compared to megadrive).

I'm off for a long train ride in a few minutes, but I have some time to reply to this. In terms of musical ability on a system as limited in memory as a stock 1200, polyphony makes all the difference. The Megadrive sound is mostly synthesized by a couple of sound chips, and in no memory at all you can have a full and beautiful musical arrangement. The difference it makes musically should be evident from the difference in music quality between for example Sonic 2 and Kid Chaos, the latter being really horrible.

[Linde]

Internet on board!

As far as Sonic having 10 channels of sound - whoopee. The sound out of a Genesis/Megadrive is heavily distorted and offends anyway. There's no denying though that being forced to choose either sound effects or music, is lame. I like what someone said a while back about Paula needing another channel or two. Would have been nice!

Yes, a few more channels on the Paula would have done it good, or a secondary soundchip, even just a simple PSG for sound effects.

As for the Mega Drive sound being heavily distorted, I think that this was a problem on some model 2 mega drives (as in dynamic distortion), but on the models that don't have this bug, the sound is excellent, and similar sound chips were used in professional grade Yamaha synthesizers like the FB-01 and the TX81z. While the Paula is definitely better at reproducing recorded sound (which I argue isn't priority #1 in action games), I'd argue that the YM2612 is more musically dynamic in a low-RAM setup like the A1200 or the Mega Drive. Amiga music often sounds stale and empty in comparison. I suggest you listen to this, which was produced for and recorded from a Mega Drive, before you make any assumptions about its sound capabilities.

[Linde]

I now have time to answer this.

Games like Kid Chaos and some of the stuff in Mr. Nutz (for 2 examples) show quite clearly that an aga machine would be capable of Sonic, especially being that theyre only ocs/ecs games and have similar speed scrolling with lots of parallax (more than sonic).

..and animated backgrounds and foregrounds (not only by palette cycling), tons of animated pickups, 15 ring sprites bouncing around? Did you ever consider these technicalities when playing Sonic? Most of them are made possible with that humble CPU by using a tile-based graphics mode with 80 (?) discrete sprites.

While conversions where often better for the megadrive, when the amiga was used properly it's a superior experience in my opinion.

I respect your opinion but I think that it's biased. So is mine, probably, so let's stick to technicalities, shall we?

Movement is usually somewhat slicker in a well coded amiga game and sound is superior

Usually slicker? Most Mega Drive games run at full framerate AFAIK, just like Amiga games. If you're talking about character movement, I can only disagree with you and laugh.

Sword of Sodan was infinately better on the amiga for example,.. sprites had to be shrunk for the megadrive version due to technical restrictions,..... just one example of a decently made amiga game.

Wow, a single game port is better pulled off on the Amiga than on the Mega Drive... Just goes to prove your point, eh?

As for being "crippled" by the amigas hardware, it's hardware is what it's hardware is.

Did you bother reading the whole message? The Amiga displays 8 3-color sprites without help from the copper. I'm not saying that it's impossible to display more (or even particularly hard), but to quickly move around a lot of sprites on the screen requires either careful copper programming or fake BOB sprites, as far as I understand, which by comparison to the Mega Drive (where you have a whole bunch of colorful sprites, all with according x/y registers) is a lot of work (and in the case of BOBs, also CPU hogging). I'm not saying that the chipset is crippled, but developers are crippled by it if they try at more sprites. Time and effort spent simply putting things on the screen could be used to develop better games.

To get the best results out of it you have to program specifically for it, buch like any machine. Would you begrudge a megadrive game developer for using its sprites and other custom hardware ?

No, why would I? Of course you have to program according to the specifications of the machine, and in that regard, the Mega Drive is far superior when it comes to tile-based action games like Kid Chaos and Sonic.

It's hardly crippling and inflexible either,... the very nature of the amigas custom hardware makes it flexible and no-one can really say what it can and cant do due to that flexibility.

Again, I get the feeling that you didn't read most of what I wrote. I never said that the hardware is inflexible. I said that parallax scrolling layers, when pulled off on the Amiga at a decent enough speed to run a game engine on top, it's usually very inflexible (as evident from Kid Chaos, where it's just a very narrow repeating background pattern divided in vertical strips that scroll at different speed) I agree with you that OCS, ECS and AGA are all very flexible -- and that is their strength. The Mega Drive has very specific-purpose hardware which makes it better for scrolling tile-based games (which were quite a big share of the game market in the early 90s). AGA surpasses it in many other areas (for example you can have multiple transparent playfields simply by the bitplane paradigm, although you still have to copy a  lot of data around to scroll them about), but for this type of game it's comparably awkward.

My original point -- you won't be able to port Sonic 2 to a stock A1200 -- can only be disproved in one way (and boy, do I hope someone does).

[Linde]

Plans for tomorrow: Re-play OCS games looking for colour cycling

It's easy to spot The copper can change the color palette every scanline without keeping the CPU busy. It makes for beautiful gradients and quite flexible colors. I think Lionheart is the prime example, but the game itself is not so fun IMO. Had much more fun with Fire & Ice

[Linde]

I'm pretty sure that's the "color cycling" Speelgoedmannetje was talking about, though.