Common amiga knowledge that's wrong

[scuzzb494]

As with everything else, there's a lot of "common knowledge" about the amiga, that I don't think holds up to proper scrutiny. Feel free to correct me though!


Common knowledge: The amiga wasn't powerful enough as a gaming machine anymore

Why it's wrong: Sure, the 68000 with 1 meg of RAM wasn't cutting it in 94 anymore. But then, we had 68060 processor cards, RTG video cards, loads of RAM etc available.
It's a travesty that virtual no games ever took advantage of this equipment but that's a shortfall of the developers, not the machine itself.

Common knowledge: Doom killed the amiga

Why it's wrong: Doom was released in December of 93. Commodore declared bankruptcy in April 94. There's plain not enough time for an entire platform to go from doing well to dying off, based on one game in about 4 months. (Doom was massively important in fuelling the PC as a valid games platform, but that's an entirely different story)

Common knowledge: You had to swap disks constantly

Why it's wrong: Yeah, psygnosis had a unreasoning fear of the external disk drive, but most games supported multiple drives (could DOS even do this without installing to a hard drive?) and virtually every large game had a hard drive installer. WHDload of course changed that game as well



Corrections or disagreements?
"common knowledge" of your own?

You say wasn`t and anymore... Do you mean in 1994 it wasn`t a gaming machine anymore cus that is totally bogus. The Amiga gaming world died cus developers gave up on the platform. The last real game for me on the Amiga was Speris Legacy which was a total flop. I caved and got a PS1 in the end. From 1993 to 1996 though we still had a healthy batch of games and they all worked brilliant on a bog standard 1200. Games like Worms, Sensible World of Soccer, Settlers, Alien Breed, etc etc.

Trouble was the gaming world was moving over to CD and the Amiga just couldn`t get that on the A1200 in time. So the PS1 took over. If you have ever played a game on the PS1 of the period and then loaded a floppy game you wouldn`t want to use the Amiga as a games console. FIFA on the Amiga was the killer by the way not DOOM.

There were a whole load of DOOM clones post 1993, and most were absorbed into a post Commodore world and they were pretty playable. But yes the Amiga just couldn`t compete cus the developers abandoned the Amiga. They were making games for the PS1 and PC. Games like Duke Nukem were never going to work on the Amiga... It failed because of development rejection. I lived in Game at that time in the UK and the Amiga section just evaporated in a matter of months, let alone years. By 1996 it was dead... Escom had been and gone and that was that.

I got a PC to play Civilisation, Duke Nukem, Doom etc and then a PS1 to play Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy. Still played Sensible World of Soccer, Valhalla, Worms, Settlers etc on the Amiga, but sadly I just got annoyed with SimCity being so slow which I loved...

My Amiga 1200 basically always had all the classic games on HD. In fact the hard drive capacity grew as my games drawers grew. Games like Ishar, Settlers, Star Trek, Beneath a Steel Sky, SimCity etc just loaded from the HD. I even had hard drive installers for Sensi Soccer. There were one or two oddities that used the floppy more for a games piracy issues to validate.. Games like Kingpin for example. I generally only played from HD.

Most serious Amiga gamers got an A1200 or an A600. Gaming is about progression so your not gonna get lumbered with an A500 if your mates have an A1200. Same goes today, so anyone suggesting folk were stuck on the 500 were not part of the serious gaming world. Trouble is the industry was moving on. The CD32 tried but failed at the critical time Commodore went bust. The developers were generally loyal till around 1995. the last real game series for the Amiga of any worth was by Vulcan called Valhalla. God bless those guys cus they fought like mad for the Amiga...

Commodore failed and the rest just jumped in.

Sad

scuzz

[scuzzb494]

Actually most games did not have any HD installer even if it came on 10 floppies. The reason for this was because most games was not system friendly at all and had their own bootloader that bypassed amigaos afaik.

The a1200 and a4000 should have had a cdrom drive by default in my opinion. PC's that came out at that time all had cdrom.

Actually not true on both counts... Most games of a reasonable size post 93  had installers... Hired Guns, Star Trek, Beneath a Steel Sky, Settlers, Ishar, SimCity 2000, Valhalla. Even A500 games had them.. Blade of Destiny, Eye of the Beholder, Wing Commander ... I have boxes and boxes of them. Some were just a drag and drop and some came with decrunch processes like Star Trek.

As to CD drives.. I was working in an office in 1995 trying to save for a ZIP drive and the Win 3.1 machines were just getting single speed CD drives. The Amiga drives not of the A500 sidecar type were pretty crap [ like the Zappo 'thinks' ] , and there was much talk of faster speeds. Don`t forget that the CD sidecar for the A1200 was just a deconstructed CD32. And there were CD32 games. Win 95 brought the internet and CD to the masses and thats what finally clobbered the Amiga into the dust.

Games were still generally DOS based up to then like Duke Nukem. By 1996 the PC came of age though the PS1 type console was about to take the cake from the tin cans.

Had Commodore survived, the CD sidecar for the A1200 would have been a reality followed closely by internet as standard. Then Win95 would have probably been a year behind the Amiga.

..... and by the way... ' I have been searching for a certain artifact ' Guess what. Its on the website. Never find one though.

scuzz
http://www.commodore-amiga-retro.com

[scuzzb494]

the commodore made 1200 cdrom drive? The one that looks like a cd32 with bits sawn off?

There use to be a link on Ian's Big Book of Hardware [ not the new site ] to a site where a guy had pictures of one. I could never work out whether it was just the case from the description. It was black. There was much hype in Amiga Format at the time, and it kinda made me hang on in there. There was a problem with them cus they used the trapdoor slot if I recall. All the same I so wanted one.

PS: Do you know where the line ' I have been searching for a certain artifact ' comes from ?

scuzz
http://www.commodore-amiga-retro.com

[scuzzb494]

True, I can't remember how much it cost, but I remember my first 1x CDROM.
I remember I played a lot of Gobliiins with that.  :-)
Also, later, I played a lot of 7th Guest.  Loved the puzzles, although my 1X never synced audio quite right, but it was close enough. :-)

I still maintain, it wasn't CDRoms or Doom that killed the Amiga, it was Commodore.

Runequester's numbers show that the number of games was still increasing until CBM called it quits..

Now, you can argue what might have happened had a strong Commodore been around to battle the Doom variants.  
Would the world have been happy with better 2D games?
Would some type of cheaper accessory/AAA chipset allowed the Amiga line to keep up?
Would people have just ponied up more money to upgrade Amigas to play 3D type games (as Mac users with Marathon and the like)?

Who knows...

desiv

I think what was discussed was the reason for seriously dumping the Amiga as a games machine in the early nineties. I could never get my head round the very poor image quality of Amiga Doom clones, when compared to a game strictly produced for the Amiga of the time. The Vulcan series of games were the last games to exploit the Amiga. We waited an age for Speris Legacy and Sensible Golf and Robinsons Requiem just to discover they were utterly crap. FIFA was the killer cus it was just unplayable... And then Win95 hit, with CDRoms in all new machines and Duke Nukem and Civilisation looked very tempting. Add then the PS1 and the Amiga was being pounded. All this while some tried to clone Doom onto an Amiga base machine [ which is what your average Amiga gamer had ]. Seriously, compared to say Duke on the PC they were terrible.

Without the development there really wasn`t going to be any interest from the serious gamer.

Yes Commodore killed the Amiga. Saying that, there was still a massive amount of interest in the platform and the community and remaining die hards created some mini wonders during the nineties. Hell, were still here. That is why I say had the Amiga gotten to the CD and internet first, the computing world  'may' have been a much more pleasant place.

scuzz
http://www.commodore-amiga-retro.com

[scuzzb494]

nope.


How much of a difference do you think it would have made, if commdodore didn't make the 500 and 1200 in keyboard cases? I'm not so sure the toy-computer look was great for the amigas image.

Lara.....

Personally I would swap a tin can for an A1200 working as a tin can any day. I just loved having everything on the desktop... Gamers play games and they care little about the machine or console as they tend to focus on the screen. Never been a TV gamer, and most I talk to are dedicated players in bedrooms. They play at their PC mostly so having the computer in the keyboard isn`t a problem. We will never know how the Amiga would have developed, but personally the Amiga was everything to me as a computer, both as a dedicated PC and games machine. Now I have to swivel on this chair and look at another screen to play on the PS3... I just wish I didn`t. I also hate the tin box.. Its archaic.. Scuse spelling.

The A1200 was a dream computer, still is. Chuck in half the technology they have in mobile phones, laptops, etc and the A1200 would fly in the current case design. With the slender DVD drives and flash hard drives it just gets easier. For me the computer should be the keyboard. Then I could get rid of this annoying dinosaur of a tin box. Nothing changes sadly. We need folk like those that developed the Amiga to show the world what a real computer could look, feel and operate like.

We have given in far too easy to the grown ups... Boring. Not the world of computing that I grew up in sadly. The last ten to fifteen years have changed emphasis from a serious computer interest to internet cruise junkie activities...

Frankie said ' We are living in a world where sex and horror are the new gods '
Frankie now says ' We are living in a world where YouTube and Twitter are the new gods '

You can have it. That's why I collect retro.

scuzz

[scuzzb494]

War Hide yourself

Being a frankie fan doesn't really show how old someone is. I wasn't even alive when they released that album.

' Relax.... '

Hate to say it but I remember seeing the Beatles the first time they were on TV... Though I am not in anyway old at heart. My favourite band is Linkin Park, the last album I bought was The E.N.D by the Black Eyed Peas and tomorrow I am going to Game to pick up Final Fantasy XIII. Add to that I have 8 Level 80s in World of Warcraft and Thursday I travel north to collect a car full of Amiga kit... Goodness me who wants to ever grow old.

Frankie was classic though. The summer of 84 when everyone had a 'T shirt' with Frankie says something or other on it. Two Tribes was in the charts for ever... They would have had the Christmas number one here had it not been for Band Aid. .. ' Feed the World '

Better go to bed... Hate having to stop playing, but hey. That guy out of Journey to the Centre of the Earth best summed up sleep as 'little snatches of death'. The joy of a slowly clicking Amiga floppy drive in the otherwise still of the night. Like a heart beat.. Classic.

scuzz