Amiga vs console vs PC

[Linde]

Home and pro market. Seeing the Amiga as just a games console is WRONG The Amiga chipset wasn't very suitable to compete with the 16 bit consoles anyway, just look at the SNES, the Amiga chipset doesn't hold a candle to it in terms of features that where relevant to the games of that time.

Agreed! It's definitely a great computer for games, but it could not compete on the terms that the video game market had already evolved. Lacking tile graphics modes and competent sprite hardware made the games that 16-bit consoles excelled in cumbersome if not impossible to implement on something like A500, not to mention the sound hardware.

[Linde]

It's sprite handling could have been improved, but from what I've read AGA wasn't a bad chipset with 030/Fast RAM so I think the Amiga's 2D capability wasn't uncompetitive in comparison.

You have to consider cost and availability as well, I think. You'd be paying twice as much for a bare A1200 at its launch than you'd have to do years earlier (depending on launch region) for Sega MD or SNES. Add to that your fast RAM or 030 and you have a very uncompetitive piece of gaming hardware. I definitely don't think the 2D capabilities of the Amiga are bad in comparison, just that it was unsuitable to compete with consoles released at the time, and the games on them that depended on what those consoles do best: sprites and tiles. Not to mention quite limited polyphony and as save2600 mentioned, one button games.

[Linde]

Are you saying anythin bad os the amiga sound? If you like the FM sounds of console game i can understand it but no way.

I love the Paula sound but in some senses it's a lot more limited than e.g. SNES or Sega MD.

Let's start with polyphony, where Amiga was still stuck with 4 channels in 1992 while Sega MD had 10 channels of sound and SNES had 8. These leave a lot of sound channels available for both music and sound effects.

Sound on Sega/SNES is also potentially very dynamic. SNES comes with a crude DSP for reverb/chorus, and the MD has a full fledged 4 operator FM synth. To achieve the same with Amiga you will either need big samples or a really nifty play routine like AHX. Of course, ingenious composers never cease to amaze me in this area, but the MD affords a very good level of dynamic control of the timbre that isn't as trivial with short samples. The MD also has a Z80 that is practically mostly dedicated to sound.

Most importantly, by A1200, seven years had already passed since the A1000, and there were no changes to the sound hardware. SB16 had already been released and consumers were expecting more from computer sound, especially from a line of computers that had been known to excel in that area.

[Linde]

I find it kind of odd that people in this thread are saying the A1200 was too expensive compared to the Sega MD (or Genesis for us USA people).  The Genesis had more or less the same specs as an Atari ST.

No. The MD has much less RAM and a slightly slower main CPU. It also has a pretty advanced graphics chip compared to the Atari ST. They are entirely different beasts.

I think it even had very similar sound chips (though more like the STe's sound than the original ST.)

No. The MD had two sound chips, none of which are particularly similar to that of the Atari ST (YM2149). The first was a four operator FM chip of six channels (YM2612) and the second was a simple PSG that wasn't as advanced as that of the ST (less frequency resolution and range I believe). The MD also had a secondary Z80 CPU for sound and backwards compatibility with the Master System.

The SNES was released only a year before the A1200, and really for general use, the A1200 has better graphics capabilities, it's only for specific game use that the SNES is a bit better at things.

"For general use" is the key phrase here. The SNES was designed to be a cheap game machine, and as such it didn't have a lot of RAM (game data is instead in mapped ROM, and graphics is usually managed on a per-tile/per-sprite basis), so unlike on Amiga, linear bitmap graphics were unviable. It was never meant for "general use", but the point is that it excelled at what it did, at a lower price, earlier than the A1200, with a much slower CPU and much less RAM. Platform games, shooters, RPGs etc. still most look, play and sound better on the SNES in my opinion.