How much pirated Amiga software did you have?

[Amiga_Nut]

15 a year more like! Why? Simple, after seeing what a hash most coin-op conversions were and all the ST ports shoved in our faces for 5 bucks more than the ST version I was not impressed.

However, Cinemaware ALWAYS got my hard earned cash, as did some of the other original games programmers like Sword of Sodan and Hybris/Battlesquadron group (Discovery) and a few others like Lotus II/Kid Chaos by Magnetic Fields/Gremlin.

Another thing that really annoyed me was magazine reviews, they would wax lyrical about pathetic conversions like Gauntlet II when everyone here with an IQ in even double figures knows Amiga Gauntlet should have looked and played identically to the arcade. So....there were jiffy bags full of disks arriving weekly, and most got formatted or traded back to others.

What made me laugh was people like Ocean/US Gold claiming how bad piracy was but they never admitted just how horrible things like Chase HQ/Outrun really was. Had these companies made the effort to even use 75% of the potential of the Amiga chipset perhaps people would pirate less I never changed my attitude, unless a demo disk showed me just how awesome a game was I played it first on pirate. Last full price game I gladly handed over a wedge of cash for was Super Stardust AGA, if everyone put that much technical effort into their productions I would have bought a lot more....simple as that.

On a side note, Microsoft NEVER deserve a penny of my money until the day the US courts grow a pair and smash them into tiny little companies a la IBM for all their dirty scummy tactics in keeping Windows on 95% market share! And it was the same with my ST also, Gauntlet 1 and Magnetic Scrolls beautiful adventures got my cash without regret.

The software companies have themselves to blame for piracy levels. there was no excuse for crap like Outrun/Chase HQ....especially when Lotus II Turbo Challenge showed the Amiga world just what they should have looked like.

[Amiga_Nut]

Its obvious that software piracy on the Amiga was HUGE, probably as high as 90% of all software being used was not purchased.  

I've always maintained that for all of Commodores mismanagement, software piracy played the decisive move in killing the Amiga eventually.  Which programmer in his right mind would spend countless hours of his professional time and then not get paid, and then make MORE software?  No software=dead platform eventually

I don't agree. Back then the software companies did everything to make their software look better than the competition. Amiga fell behind in price/performance. They also tolerated piracy because it was free advertising.

Yes in a way piracy and the ease of locating any game from your local friendly market stall holder for next to nothing did certainly help the sales of A500s grow sure.

I don't buy that it killed the Amiga market though, because from the way the software companies were talking around the launch of the A1200 you would think there was no PC piracy at all and Amiga users were much more prolific in the art of parrot balancing on the shoulder. Well sorry to burst that bubble but even my university lecturer was cracking original PC games, he did Lemmings for one, and then trained it and copied me the disk! It was all just an excuse to save a tiny amount of money and any effort to port a game to Amiga after PC. Within the first week of owning my PC I had everything I wanted, hell I spent more on blank HD disk bulk purchases for PC games than on the Amiga....and some were actually competently coded like Super SF2 for PC with VGA and 16bit audio.

The PC games market growing beyond the pathetic boring gaudy coloured experience that it was in the 80s is entirely Commodore's fault. People were crying out for the type of games that needed more colours/better sound/faster CPU. People weren't stupid, they played various coin-ops and wanted the same quality at home. But Commodore sat on it's ass and let their golden egg laying goose that was the Amiga chipset go rotten through lack of development. Truth is AGA was two years too late and at least a 16mhz A500 should have been the norm for 1990 onwards.

So software companies only have themselves to blame after making PC games ALL hard disk installable and on standard format floppy disks AND for making such pathetic versions of technically sophisticated coin ops like Powerdrift and Turbo Outrun. Even Team 17 finally gave up on Commodore and put some resource into World Rally Fever, an excellent Powerdrift clone that ran as good as a Sega arcade even with the cheapest 486SX and ISA graphics card.

And Commodore also only have themselves to blame. 14 mhz and zero 3D/texture mapping hardware assistance in 1994 for 400 smackers? We all knew it was coming, bad conversions and mediocre hardware upgrade = gravy train derailed! 8bit sound and low density disk drives were just the cherry ontop of the $hit sundae let's face it. Hell even a lack of 512k of fast ram on A1200 meant 3D games were running 50% the potential speed of the already compromised CPU speed decision they made. It's laughable really....except I wasn't laughing being an devoted Amiga fan who desperately didn't want to have to find an alternative to an overpriced A4000/040.

But I still buy a game if it is worth it, simple as that. Unfortunately the last PC game I felt like owning was from 2005....Sony has consistently built PC killing consoles 3x in a row now. Killzone 2 just isn't possible even now on a £250 PC. Crazy world!

[Amiga_Nut]

All good opinions, especially about the hardware not keeping up, but fact is software drives hardware.  

A 50 mhz '030 will play Doom on an AGA machine just fine.  But where was id's port of Doom for Amiga to push people to buy that '030?  And the more people that bought one to play that 3D game, the cheaper it would be to upgrade the hardware further: next step an 060, and 3d cards for Zorro machines, and so on.  

Instead pirated software consumers stuck with their stock 1 meg A500's beacsue they were too tight to upgrade, I mean hell their games were for free, they weren't gonna pay to  upgrade, until developer after developer left.

At its height the Amiga was the most pirated platform there was.  Make no mistake. I went to the Amiga user groups (AFTER C= went broke in 94) where we would get 250 plus people, all happily copying anything and everything, but no-one would say so in the open.  You think losing 90% of their sales due to piracy would have no impact on a software developer's decision to look elsewhere?  As software sales dwindle, less software is made, and software is a platform's lifeblood.

Of course the other side of the coin is...

1. Launch price of stock A1200 + 50mhz 030 + extra RAM + slow slow 2.5" IDE drive = more than cost of Doom capable PC. Commodore should have shipped an A1200+ with 28mhz 020 (practically identical performance to a 28mhz 030 but a lot cheaper) and made sure it had 1mb of fast ram to ensure 100% speed of operation AND AGA should have had Akiko functionality in there already. This was required as a distinct machine out of the box on store shelves software companies at least could see official sales figures and put in an "A1200+" option. The problem was high street chains, the forerunners of places like PC World, had nothing to sell that would just work out of the box....mass market PC purchasers did not tinker with their machines, it's unreasonable to expect people to buy an A1200 in a regular well known shop, look in magazines for 030 accelerators and then make a mail order purchase and wait. Alarm bells should have been ringing.  Instead we got the OTT A4000/030 which was too expensive and not suitable as a mass market replacement for the next generation of Amiga gamers(which in turn was due to the overpriced 4000/040).

Why did they need to do this? OK well imagine you bought a Ford Escort in 1992 (EU not USA type), a basic model that couldn't pull the skin off a custard, for erm £9,999. Now you spend £30,000 adding a turbo charger and 4 wheel drive and beefier gearbox and wild bodykit etc creating something as fast as a Group C rally car. Guess what? it's worth only 110% of the used price of a standard unmodified Escort and at best 20% of the value of the Escort Cosworth you just replicated with your £40,000. People knew full well that adding this and that was a waste of money when it came to selling gear later. It's all down to bad decisions at Commodore in just having the A1200 -/+ hard drive, there was no such thing as a machine for every regular person, clearly the A1200 set the bar too low (well they were trying to make huge profits again 1991 A500 style) and they paid the price because people looking in regular shop windows with PCs only saw this strange keyboard with no CD, only 2mb of RAM and only 14mhz. The hard drives were twice the price of PC 3.5" drives and half the speed for no good reason...why did we need 2.5" drives in a desktop machine? Stupid idea, and probably extreme penny pinching on the side of the power supply. I'm talking about sales to the general public in regular high street stores where PCs were also sold not the Amiga faithful.

2. Commodore could have quite easily offered ID or anyone else a sum of money to make sure Doom made it onto a suitable Amiga (14mhz A1200 with 2mb chip is not suitable). Doesn't have to be Doom, the outcome would have been things like Gloom and AB 3D would have had a suitable platform and not artificially dated the look of Amiga games to potential new 1st time purchasers. To add insult to injury Commodore added Akiko chunky<>planar converter to CD32 BUT made it impossible to add the required fast ram to a CD32 to get full CPU speed as opposed to 50%....how much would it have cost that idiot Medhi Ali to approve a single SIMM slot for 1/2mb capability? Exactly. Commodore were totally clueless at this time and the only good outcome we could have hoped for would have been the management buyout of Commodore UK (who were all making the same arguments as me and had similar plans). Why cripple the CD32 to chip ram only but spend 100,000s on Akiko development to fix a problem that AGA overlooked in the first place (stupid 8 bitplane 256 colour mode not byte/pixel). The whole point of Akiko was to help Doom type games...and those games need maximum CPU and nothing else (which the PC had in abundance)

I do not have any bad feeling about pirating stuff, for me it was a case of try before you buy. Because if you bought a turkey like Outrun or Chase HQ that was 25 bucks down the toilet as no shop would take it back no matter how bad it was, that was a stupid law. And when magazines said they were quite good/acceptable when I wouldn't even use them for a doorstop it meant your only choice was to check it out before investing a penny. 95% of the stuff I had was wiped within minutes because it was such a lame piece of coding.

If a game was good I did buy it, like I said for me Cinemaware ALWAYS got my money no questions asked...and look what happened to them...they invested in the wrong console and went bankrupt (CD Turbo-Grafx). In fact there is only one Cinemaware game produced that I don't own, TV Sports Boxing. I have all the others even to this day, and all are full priced editions bar Sinbad. That's a lot of investment for a pirate like me, so clearly the issue was crap output from 95% of software houses in the UK. Think of the poor Japanese companies who did flawless conversions of games on the Sharp x68000 and still had to deal with piracy.

Put it this way, if legally I could take back any rubbish game from Ocean/US Gold/Activision etc for a full refund AND the software company not the shop had to foot the bill then if nobody pirated I bet you a million bucks those companies selling pure dross like that would have made just as few sales and even more of a loss to dispose of returned stock. The impact on the industry in real terms is nothing like the Oceans/US Golds make out. We got screwed as Amiga users, we hardly ever got quality conversions anything like the Amiga was capable of, and even some games were never coded like Nemesis/Gradius or Lifeforce/Salamander etc. Why? Greed is why!

And why did we all have to have stupid disk formats meaning you couldn't run the games from a multitasking wonder computer like Amiga but all PC games came on a standard DOS format and all were hard disk installable (manual or otherwise). PC piracy was just as rife and all this did was annoy people by treating Amigans differently to the snotty PC users of the 80s/90s. It's the same argument today with the MPAA and RIAA mouthing off about theft and piracy, and they fail to notice it is they who are in the wrong and they who have caused the problem by treating their customers with ill-regard (MP3 DRM, overpriced Blu-Ray/DVD...forced zoning of movies....forced wait for people who don't wish to go to some twittering fool infested cinema for the 'ultimate experience' etc). Fact is they all got stung for incompetence and lack of value for money...hence all the scaremongering and laws to punish people.

[Amiga_Nut]

I'm not arguing for piracy, neither am I championing civil liberties infringing laws forced onto ISPs/Governments by OTT media moguls. Neither am I championing unfair non return policies on games. All three have to change, and using the stick/stick approach isn't going to solve anything. Quadrupling the price of petrol and pocketing the tax will not make an environmentally conscious person out of a muscle car driver, ditto with all the fuss and draconian nazi like laws introduced to try and prevent downloads.

Funny thing is when I owned a C64 I had 99% originals, and the copies I did have were Turbotape64 dumps of slow load games, maybe 5 or 6 and 100+ original games. So I don't think age has anything to do with it. It's all down to ease of access.

Legality aside, Microsoft doesn't deserve a penny of my money EVER and if you disagree you are in the wrong forum brother, Microsoft ruined home computing for everyone in the world with that pathetic OS and their less than legal tactics. Argue with me all you like about movies/games/music but M$ are not getting a penny of my money and it's a damn shame the whole world doesn't pirate their stuff so they will just die and GTFO of my face.

The fact is though that pirates have done more to put everything you love into the digital age and into digital formats than all the media and games companies combined for the last 10 years. If it weren't for people like AXXO and FXG and Secretmyth spending years perfecting the coding process we would probably still be on blocky first generation Mpeg2 transcodes of rubbish sources. Music industry still hasn't got a clue what the problem is, ie nobody wants all the fake talentless crap shoved in our faces via American Idol except a few gormless twats. Album is a dead concept, charging the same for 10 MP3s as a physical product that costs 3x as much to produce/distribute is also bordering on insanity. Most of these big companies are bastards and they have screwed you for decades, now that they lost control they want to fix it so they can screw you again. MKV is more impressive than Blu-Ray, that is a simple fact, you don't need Quadcore CPUs or 40gb discs to watch something at 1080p, but if the public realised what a con the entire industry is and all the non-essential 'upgrades' of tech forced onto you as 'essential purchases' they might see it differently.

Yes it is a stolen product, but it is not comparable to stealing a car or causing physical damage to break into a house and rob someone. Neither does it fund terrorism. Aren't you people bored of all the bullshit these governments throw at you, first knock off cigarettes funded human trafficking and terrorism, now it's little John using bittorrent to watch some movies for free who is going to cause the end of the world apparently. People really believe this crap too I bet.

That is all I really have to say on the subject. Judge as you will, but at the time it was right for the reasons I have given, and it is still right today especially when the US supreme court refuses to grow a pair and M$ are still unpunished for 20 years of their mafia tactics. Nor am I going to mend my ways until the media companies fix the problems they have created from their own ignorance and inability to embrace the digital age even now as I type this. Watching TV shows in super shitty Flash-blur-o-vision is a load of crap. Nobody wants it after half a decade of pristine AVI rips at ridiculously low CPU requirements and compact file sizes being the norm.

Enjoy the rest of your day everyone, and peace. Everyone has their own opinion, laws are only rules approved by government, none of which has the interests of the ordinary man at heart in a capitalist world. A law is just a thought written on a piece of paper, given the right amount of arm twisting anything can become law even if the majority of the voting public disagree with it 100%. Think on that issue for the rest of the day while your emails are being read without your consent.

[Amiga_Nut]

It's all illegal, and so was recording music onto audio tapes from radio or video tape from TV in the 80s. Technically it is the same downloading a TV show as it was recording it on video tape and lending it to your friend who missed that show, doesn't have that channel. The difference is technology now enables larger scale piracy AND draconian civil liberties infringing laws.

Downloading any ROM or disk/tape image on any emulator, even for a TI99/4A, is illegal unless the copyright holder has specifically released it into the public domain. Abandonware is not recognised as a legal term, it's a made up term from all the rom sites.

The point is if you take something like Hollywood's output, if a film was crap and I bought it then it goes straight back to the shop for a refund under the "duplicate gift" policy. I don't suffer full price drivel gladly. But the key here is no sale either through torrent or shop refund, and rightly so as crap is crap. Personally the biggest moaner especially, the music industry, produces 99.99999999% crap from talentless me-too puppets, so the figures about billions lost in sales are for clueless idiots lapping up their vitriol and is far from the truth. The reality is for some movies/albums the sales are pretty much all they would get in reality. There is a lot of rubbish in the mainstream that can't support a full price release fact.

It's sour grapes on both sides. What's illegal here is legal in another country, and in the 80s when cassette games for 8bit micros were 10 bucks, in Spain they were sold legally for 3 bucks. So why was it not 3 bucks here in the UK?

Piracy moans are like politics, when some media mogul is up on the stand ranting and raving remember to engage brain and common sense for maximum benefit. At the same time, The Pirate Bay are not your soulmates, they do it for the money....and the site creators have plenty of money from advertising revenue.

For very small companies however piracy would be crippling I agree, but small companies generally don't make crap, that's the difference. I bought Super Stardust AGA, I checked out Turbo Outrun on pirate (and wiped it within 2 minutes of play for pathetic coding)

And where do you draw the line? I own some TV shows on DVD but also have the same shows I own as downloaded DVD/TV rips. This is purely for convenience....I could legally rip every DVD I own that is my right, but why would I spend months doing that when someone else has done this already for me anyway? Seems like a dumb thing not to have my legally owned DVDs stored on my 2TB hard drive to cure boredom and is far more convenient than hunting for a disc in the bookshelves.

Never mind all the horseshit about 'would you download a car' if you paid a painter to paint your walls and he did a terrible job would you let him keep the money or demand a refund? Same thing with a film, if it is not entertaining it goes back to the shop for refund. Torrents just cut out the refund from shop and burning of petrol stage of the same outcome 9/10. And I've not heard a single musical production in the last 3 years I would want to own, so clearly the record industry needs to sort their stock out before complaining about thieves in the wharehouse. It's a bit like leaving the keys in a rubbish car hopping it will get stolen with some of the albums being pimped for 10 bucks in the shops these days,

[Amiga_Nut]

Well you see things like downloading a game onto a hard drive is not a solution.

1. You don't actually own anything physical and there are issues with storage/data corruption.
2. Cost is too similar, companies again are trying to INCREASE profits on products which are overpriced already (hence mass piracy)
3. You have to purchase enough secondary storage to host it all. So on an Xbox360...get the KY Jelly ready before looking for a half terrabyte 360 hard drive

First point is the biggest problem though, because if I buy a game on disc for 360/PS3 and I complete it fast (like 1 day for Colin McRea Dirt 2) then it goes straight onto ebay as a mint used once copy and I get back most of my 50 bucks. Secondly as crappy Microcock Winblows is the default majority OS and fails frequently who is going to foot the bills for re-downloading what you own? Is it more difficult than the life of a pirate and his bittorrent client just re-downloading it again? Probably.

If they want to sell me a digital copy of the same game it can not cost more than my loss from buying and selling it a week later second hand. So about 10 to 15 bucks. Also it needs to be installable on multiple machines for a single purchase for PC games and a VERY helpful and friendly service to help you out when a problem with your digital purchase's source files are shafted thanks to Winblows.

Another reason why people pirated Amiga games was the ability to back up their collection. Spend £35 on Shadow of the Beast in 1989 and you have no way to back it up to protect your sizeable investment unless you get a cracked copy you can copy at will via X-Copy.

Media companies created a need for Napster/WinMX/Shareazza/Bittorrent, the way piracy is fought in countries where they have no bent politicians to pass civil liberty infringing laws is via a very attractive sale price. Clearly then if a company can sell an album for 3 bucks or a game for 10 bucks abroad they can do it here, screw the suits....they brought this all on themselves from the day the first rubbish Amiga 'ST ports' were being sold for more than the ST version.

Ditto did CDs ever come down in price in the 80s? Nope. Despite the fact vinyl records cost much more to mass produce they just kept the price of CDs at 10 bucks and increased the price of vinyl to distract you. Ditto with VHS tapes and DVDs. DVD still costs pence to produce, most titles are around 12 bucks with some useless extra crap on a 2nd DVD. Fantastic. We have a choice now, it is called "I will decide for myself for free via bittorrent thanks"

And their answer is to introduce Nazi-like laws to impinge on your freedoms and civil liberties, good move to win public support. There will always be a way to pirate things easily, it's the digital age. The media companies need to address the reasons people do it rather than just assuming everyone is a cheapskate who wouldn't buy it anyway. Mass downloaders of MP3s statistically spend more money on actual purchases of MP3s anyway.....maybe the dumb dumbs need a good smack on the head with an ACME mallet to see common sense! Pass draconian laws and they will not bother doing stage two "I like this tune, I will buy it on iTunes because the artist deserves it" just to spite the media companies cock measuring with the lawyers and politicians at the expense of the free world.