Amiga guilt and time distortion.

[Hammer]

I'd like to discuss a phenomenom that I've observed in the past year or so.

Amiga guilt, and by relation, time distortion.


The subject is plagued by feelings of guilt about having used an amiga. This may come from insecurities of having made a "wrong choice" and a burning need to correct others misconceptions.


Various symptoms may manifest themselves, such as feeling a need to post in as many conversations as possible with any of the following:

How much commodore sucked

How much PPC sucked

How terrible the amiga was compared to the PC

How much every amiga model past the 500/1000/2000 was awful and terrible

How much better Turrican 2 was on the C64

That x86 solves everything

How terrible AGA was

That the X1000 is super expensive, in case you hadn't heard

In doing so, they hope they can somehow dispel the illusion other users had of having an interesting discussion about amiga's, by reminding them of things every person on the planet is already aware of.

This is often accompanied by Time Distortion. In this particular illness, the subject mentally transposes the PC market of today to the 80's and early 90's, imagining a world where PC's are reasonably priced and can run for hours without crashing, compared to an unexpanded 512 kb amiga 500.
All thoughts of 2000 dollar PC's running windows 3.1 while vomiting out PC speaker bleeps are banished, and the world is made of microsoft flowers and intel bunnies dancing in the meadows.

The cure for both illnesses is to go have a wank, and is thus easily accomplished. If you still suffer from either afterwards, you obviously didn't wank it enough.

1993 DOOM's release accelerated gaming PC's rise.

I still have my PC Format and Amiga Format mags e.g. I have 386DX33+SVGA box and Amiga 3000/030/25Mhz between 1992-to-1993. Sometime late in 1996, I switch to Pentium Classic 150Mhz (overclocked to 166Mhz) and sold my Amiga 3000.

[Hammer]

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?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTvr_Q3bkTY
AMD AM386SX processor @25MHz + Street Fighter 2 Gameplay. SF2 was playable on AMD 386SX @25Mhz. PC version SF2 was moving 256 color graphics.

To run it smooth, one would need 386DX33(with proper 32bit FSB) with fast SVGA.
PS; IBM PS2/ Model 55SX(386SX 16Mhz)'s VGA was slow.