Was America nonchalant about Amiga arcade gaming?

[Amiga_Nut]

I ask this because [sadly] most of the arcade conversions are identical on both sides of the pond, and even worse they were mostly produced by greedy UK software houses hiring the cheapest, and therefore least talented, groups to do conversions.

Notable exception I can think of is Afterburner, but other than that USA either didn't bother to port arcade games, for example Simpsons Arcade was only for PC and C64 in USA and not Amiga, or they had the same horrible versions as produced in the UK like Outrun/Chase HQ/Gauntlet II etc.

Was PC gaming where it was at  in the late 80s/early 90s then? I can only assume it was for home computing as I don't exactly see a lot of US specific produced arcade conversions for Amiga, and ST and Mac wasn't doing anything unique either. Or was it simply because in the early days kids were messing about with the NES and later on the Sega Genesis during the formative years of Amiga 86-91?

I can understand with the Genesis, quite a nice machine for the price technically and not very difficult to convert arcade games for, but still it is a shame if so little effort was put into the Amiga market that all that was on offer to Americans were the pathetic UK produced conversions of technically challenging arcade games.

A travesty, would like to know why though.

[Amiga_Nut]

Sure Streetfighter II and Mortal Kombat were going to be compromised with the 1 button Joystick, but they could have coded for Sega Genesis pads too. Lack of effort, and graphically SF2 is a half hearted effort compared to the me-too clone Shadow Fighters.

But the fact Lotus II on Amiga and Genesis look identical, but Outrun on Amiga looks like a steeming turd with steel wheels is a joke, it should have looked as good as the Genesis version or even the NEC TurboGrafx.

And the PAL problems some people had in NTSC land, here in PAL land most games had a massive stupid border on the bottom of the game due to it running in 320x200 not 320x256 PAL mode, and to make it worse still some games like Buggy Boy just used the graphics designed for the ST version, so the Amiga buggy is squashed. FAIL!

I suspected it was probably due to the NES, was very big seller in USA. In the EU it pretty much flopped, most consoles did until the Sega Genesis.

It's still a shame though, a real shame, apart from conversions of technically simple arcade games we got pretty shafted. Thank heaven for such ingenious coders as hired by people like Gremlin for things like Shadow Fighters and Lotus II These games clearly show technically the Amiga wasn't the problem causing the rubbish conversions.

Early games were much better, look at Marble Madness and Cinemaware stuff from the USA, truly beautiful efforts if not execution which you never begrudged paying 2x as much as a C64 disk game to play. Then it kinda went down hill I feel as the big boys got involved.

[Amiga_Nut]

MOST Amiga games certainly did NOT take advantage of a dual button joystick. MOST 2-button joys are actually wired to be one button - just in different positions. Usually one on the base and one up top.

Cammy is absolutely right on all counts, especially about lazy programmers.

Out of the boxes and boxes I have of just about every DB9 joystick ever made, only ONE of them is wired to be 2-buttoned. It's an extremely rare Epyx one too.

Funny thing is though the Sega Master System from the mid 80s had plenty of multi-button joysticks with the D9 connector.

And in a way companies like Competition Pro or Zipstick makers carried on using two buttons wired to the same pair of pins, which only let the problem fester.

It's a stark contrast to people like Sega who launched special 6 button joypads so people could play SF2 properly on their console. There was no reason why Commodore couldn't have made a joypad for the A1200/600 at the very least and have a quiet word with the big software companies.

I think the CD32 was a bad idea though, even the AGA chipset wasn't a match for the SNES custom chips and Commodore had no experience in this area of the market. Bad idea to make CD32 their last ditch effort, they should have stuck with the A1200 and upped the specs a bit with a small amount of Fast ram say 512kb. a HD floppy and 3.5" internal IDE HD for price reasons  and finally a 28mhz clock doubled 020 which wouldn't have cost much at all. The system bus already runs at 28mhz and divisions of it hence 14mhz and 7mhz 1200/600.

Regardless of how technically good/bad things like Sinbad/King of Chicago and Defender of the Crown were, the point was Cinemaware in conjuction with Sachs were pouring their heart and soul into making the next generation of home games, and for that I loved them

Edit: Actually I think CU Amiga magazine published the source code for reading all the buttons on the standard Sega 3 button joypad on one of their cover disks. So clearly it was an issue with a simple enough solution.

[Amiga_Nut]

Thing is consoles have always been cheaper than computers, fact of life. Even today you wont get a PC tower for $200 able to play Gears of War in DX10 like the 360 runs it. Also console games were always expensive. Sony were the only people to make an effort by cutting 20% off the list price for their own 1st party titles. But in 1988 or whenever Genesis games here were double the price and the machine was 200 bucks. So...after 10 game purchases your Sega Megadrive here works out more expensive in the long run. I think the NES was something like 40 bucks a game here, compared to 10 bucks for a C64 game, and the unit was only about 50 bucks less. No wonder Nintendo UK failed with the NES, the games were nothing special apart from a few 1st party franchises.

I don't see how lending someone a couple of disks to boot up in an A500 was harder than lending someone a cartridge. It's not like a PC where you need to mess about with himem or xms/ems and config.sys etc. Pop the disk in the drive, plug joystick in, play game. Not really sure how anyone who has experience with a Amigas can make such a crazy comment.

Sound wise there is a radical difference between the FM chips in a Genesis/TG to the 'do whatever you like' 4 channel DACs on Amiga. Sure you get more sound channels, but it is a trade off. You wont get anything as exquisite and unique sounding with the diversity of the MOD archives compared to stuff which always sounds like the FM sounds of a Genesis.

It just seemed that companies in the USA lost interest somewhere between the high priced A1000 launch and the revised A500 two years later. There seemed a lot of initial enthusiasm  which waned after time. I think that is down to Commodore in some ways, the A1000 probably wasn't the right machine to launch as a sole product, the A500 should have been first out the blocks for about the same price as an ST with mono monitor of $799. This would have been discounted down to about $700 or less and is not far off the 1987 price of an A500 anyway. Perhaps then interest would not have waned in the first 3 years in the USA.

I'm going to check out the games Cammy mentioned, never even heard of one of them!

edit :  I would be interested to see sales figures for the Sharp x68000 machine compared to NES/Megadrive sales. The x68000 is pretty much the Amiga for Japan, a computer with console quality games. So I wonder how well that high priced machine sold compared to cheap and cheerful console for 1/4 of the price.

[Amiga_Nut]

Very interesting, both games are from Ocean software. Can also see why 64 colour games were so rare, if you're designing sprites on an in house ST package in 16 colours. Kind of makes you angry when Dpaint III would have been a better choice and there was even an ST format so file formats are not an issue.

I wonder why they would start the game [Liquid Kids] without securing the licence, 1991 is still the peak of A500 popularity in the EU so there must have been a problem with the licence from Taito. Price? Maybe Ocean were hoping the price would go down if they showed a finished product at the negotiations? David Ward, the original co-founder of Ocean UK, would never have let this happen.

Good to see both games are released in full and never charged for

[Amiga_Nut]

The Sharp X68000 was a great machine. Check out the Emulators out there. This machine had pixel perfect conversions. I liked the dual tower case design with the handle.

Been using the emulator since around late 90s in my lunch break, back when the internet was full of game roms blatantly available for download Took a while to work out some games won't finish booting without 2mb on the Japanese emulator too!

I never understood why Chase HQ was looking iffy on it, but just about every other game on the machine was handled in house and arcade quality. Technically it has no blitter, just 128 16x16 pixel sprites, so a bit more powerful than the Genesis, but would have cost a lot more so was interested in how well it sold. The x68000 is Japan's A1000 vs Genesis battle.

It's a shame Amiga never got that level of support from the original arcade makers, recording arcade footage on blurry video and approximating it in Dpaint was the norm, but in Japan raw graphics data and music was donated frequently. Tragedy! Even Atari/Tengen were just as bad, Gauntlet II on ST/Amiga had the arcade music recorded to tape and then sampled using some budget sampler. What a joke!

[Amiga_Nut]

Lending to a friend who'll take care of them is one thing, but renting out floppies is a bad idea, what with how easily they're destroyed, unless the rental place has license to make copies.

Yep I meant swapping games between friends, cartridges are not required. Swapping tape games and VCS carts with school chums for a weekend was normal in my youth.

I think we used to rent VCS carts sometimes from the small time video store round the corner from us. Technically it's just as easy to ruin a video tape as a 3.5" floppy disk, and I guess the last person to rent it before it is reported as 'not loading' gets stung for the cost or banned in the same way as when someone reports a chewed up VHS tape on returning the movie rental. Same pitfalls really.

[Amiga_Nut]

@ Arkhan and a couple of others

x68000 vs Genesis, the point of the comparison is to compare how well Amiga/PC vs Genesis sold in the states compared to x68000 vs Megadrive in Japan. My reason for being curious about it was the fact that in the USA consoles were first to grab the mass market from gaming and hence affected possibly the adoption of Amiga as a gaming platform in the US was my reason. As the Sharp X68000 vs Megadrive is an identical situation I was keen to know how the sales figures stack up in the tech spec hungry Japanese territory.

PCs for home gaming
You mention Doom, which wasn't even an issue until the waning days of AGA in the mid 90s period, after which much of the damage to the Amiga brand through lack of chipset development for 8 years had already affected EU sales. Doom also is a 100% designed for PC thing, powerful CPU used to do everything and no custom chips, total opposite of Amiga and SNES/Sega consoles.
You also mention VGA but a default VGA graphics option in PC arcade games certainly didn't happen until the early 90s circa 1991/92, hell even Cinemaware didn't support them before that, very few games were VGA. EGA (ie C64 look-a-like colour palette graphics) games where the PC norm for the entire 80s. And in the days of C64/Atari XL vs PC the DOS games were again inferior CGA...try loading up some Atarisoft classics like Donkey Kong or Zaxxon/Buck Rogers from Sega. DOS classics didn't really exist until the early 90s at best.
Cost is the difference, in the USA PCs cost half the price they did in the EU, and if people already needed to do some work at home with Lotus 123 or other such industry standards then they got some sort of cheap clone PC. You can't sell a man an A1000 if he has just spent $1500 on an EGA PC, and that's just a fact of life.

I am never going to defend either the lack of any development of the A1000/500/2000 chipset OR the mistakes and omissions of AGA 8 years later, these two things combined to kill the Amiga slowly and it was all around this time that PC arcade gaming started to take off. Lack of chipset development was like a cancer eating away at its future. By 1990 the Amiga needed at least 64 if not 128 colour modes, with a much more flexible parallax mode a la Sega's 16bit console, and at least a 200% increase in blitter bandwidth on the chipset if not some very powerful hardware sprites, which 2/3 of the original chipset designers did in the late 80s for the Epyx Handy/Atari Lynx.

FM sounds vs 8bit DAC
You're missing the point, with the TG or Genesis soundchip (and every other computer and console of the time) you are stuck with the specific sound producing capabilities to produce your music in the style of that chip. So you have a unique 'style' of sound whether you like it or not. You can't play piano sounds on an acoustic guitar, but you can play both sounds on a Sinclavia or Fairlight sampling synthesizer of the early/mid 80s, this was the reason for utilising 4 8bit DACs as your sound chip in 1982/83 when the design was being drawn up and prototyped.

Taking your argument even further....an Intel i7 at maximum production CPU speed sold by Intel can not replicate perfectly the sound of a C64 sound chip, it doesn't matter. You were missing the point, the Amiga had 4 channels of 'make any kind of sound you like and do whatever you want with it volume and frequency wise'. So my point was simply that the Amiga sound system only had one down side compared to say the Genesis FM chip, and that was total number of sound channels. If you actually want those kind of basic fixed waveform sounds of Genesis/TG/NES then great, but if you want to replicate some of the MOD tunes from Amiga like the Revelations slideshow demo by Cryptoburners though then forget it, unless you happen to have that 'instrument' built in on the bespoke sound chip. But you don't because you can't compete with a sampler+stack of CDs for versatility, no sound chip in the world could. That was the down side of every other machine.

This brings me back to my point of lack of chipset development, in 1984 when Amiga should have been released, legal dramas between Atari and Commodore and lack of funds at Amiga Computers not withstanding,  4 sound channels was about right in the console/computer/arcade world. But this should always have been just a starting point, and how much would it really have cost Commodore to re-tool Paula into two units on a single chip by 1989 or to redesign the A500 m/b to utilise two Paula chips to create an 8 channel setup?

Rental feasibility, Cart vs 3.5" floppy I doubt you would snap a 3.5" disk in half by accident, and it's not going to get damaged by accident. To be honest 3.5" floppy disks are very sturdy as a piece of plastic design unlike 5.25" disks like on the x68000, certainly sturdy enough to be dropped from standing up height sure. And dropping a disk in a mug of water/soup is no less a problem than dropping a cart in it. So magnetic destruction is the only real issue and even leaving disks on PSUs and large hifi speakers I have never lost a disk like that, only had bad disks if I bought unbranded crap disks for peanuts.

Virus? Simple, remove the write enable tab from the disks leaving them permanently wite protected, it's not like there were any arcade games that wrote back to the disk as a requirement and it's no different technically to the tab being broken on rental tapes to stop dumdums recording over a film with the superbowl!

I suspect the reason blockbusters didn't rent Amiga games was due to a smaller market, and possibly as they would need to get an individual legal agreement with every single software company that sold Amiga games they wanted to rent out. It's not as simple as when they just did a single deal with Sega and Nintendo.

And usability certainly isn't the issue, if you are too stupid to pop 'Disk 1' in your A500, out of a maximum of 2 or 3 on average for Amiga arcade games, and flick the switch on the PSU you then evolution dictates you shouldn't even be allowed to procreate! We are not talking about epic arcade point and click adventures from Lucas Arts on 12 disks here!

Off-topic personal opinions about game comparisons
For every NES game you show that is worse as a C64 conversion I can show you 1 of superior conversion. If you are a Mario fanboy then you have to own a Nintendo. How many games did NES have? 750? That's between 5-10% of the C64/Amiga catalogue. And as Angry Video Game Nerd frequently shows there was plenty of crap costing 50 bucks on the NES console too, losing 8 or 10 bucks is nothing on a C64 full price game, 50 bucks though in mid 80s was a lot. There are plenty of games superior on the C64 anyway, like the entire Cinemaware catalogue. And computer games aren't censored with silly Nintendo "no blood" policy to protect their pre-teen market.

Also since when is Ultima an arcade conversion? I am asking why there were so many crap arcade conversions in the USA for Amiga present due to simply importing the rubbish UK versions, what happened to making their own like with the superior version of US Afterburner to the UK claptrap sold. I don't think anyone playing Outrun for DOS would have been happy either.

Anyway we are talking about Amiga, NOT C64 games, which were 6x cheaper than the tiny and repetitive catalogue of the NES. Let's take two 16bit arcade games to compare. And anyway some budget C64 games were pretty good, and many full price games were re-released as budget price of 2 or 3 bucks. That 25x cheaper than your average NES cart here.

Genesis struggled to produce a superior version of Lotus challenge II compared to Amiga BUT Lotus II on Genesis is not really that different in speed and quality of animation to Genesis version of Outrun, so you can't go crying about one game being badly coded. So therefore clearly the Amiga version of Outrun should have been pretty damned close to the Genesis version which is really nice rather than that steaming turd US Gold produced.

And I guess after 3 pages that basically it is because between workaholic home PC users and NES owning kids in the 80s the Amiga had a very hard time convincing arcade games producing companies to invest in it in the USA except for some notable exceptions from Discovery Software.  So they bought them from the UK companies and imported the same dross from the EU. Very sad.

The Doom/Wing Commander era is just down to Commodore penny pinching on development of the Amiga between OCS and AGA and A1200 being too little too late. These games were at the end of the active life of Amiga even in the EU. Atari Jaguar had a 68000 and non 3D custom chips and this did a better version of Doom than your average $1500 486 PC at the time too. But Doom was designed around PC architecture, just like Shadow of the Beast was designed around the Amiga OCS chipset. Both games only work well on the intended target machine, but this is 100% off topic and not really relevant to the discussion anyway.

[Amiga_Nut]

THIS IS A THREAD ABOUT THE LACK OF AMIGA ARCADE GAME CONVERSIONS BY US DEVELOPERS AND THE REASON WHY SUB STANDARD UK COIN-OP CONVERSIONS WERE IMPORTED FROM THE UK TO THE USA.

Please keep this in mind everyone


For the final time for Arkhan.....

1. Lotus II and Outrun on Genesis are using pretty much an identical game engine. Lotus II on Amiga looks pretty much the same as on Genesis. Outrun on Amiga (and PC) looks pathetic full stop. Simple enough point about lack of effort for arcade conversions, hence the thread title.

2. What home computer or console became the dominant market leader by hoping to be sold as a second purchase to your competing products? None. A1000 was not a 2nd computer, the price put it fairly and squarely as the main computer purchase for the house not an idle second purchase. Remember I am talking about the A1000 vs PC and any impact this had on the games market by failing to get a foothold in the those first 30 months of sale for the A1000.

3. PC-Engine/Turbografix CD SotB has a CD soundtrack, so that is nothing to do with internal sound hardware. And amazingly it still sounds worse than David Whittaker's finest.

4. The TG/PC-E has 6 channel 5 bit wavetable unit with an effective lock of around 7khz for those 5 bit samples to playback during your average game being executed. I've heard the XM player on PC-E and it sounds worse compared to Octamed 8 software channel MOD playback mode. I've also got SF2 for PC-E and the samples are scratchy.

5. And by comparison Sega Genesis has two sound chips, one is a 70s Texas Instruments TI99/4A computer's soundchip from SMS. Second one a 6 channel FM YM2162 chip from Yamaha, which can be configured for 5 channel FM + 1 rough 8-bit sample channel.

TurboGrafx 5 bit 6 channel sound is about as rough as a C64. And if you want to make a song that sounds like it's on a YM2162 then Genesis is the one. If you want to have those pan pipes from Amiga SotB as an instrument then I guess you are screwed. So like I said, sample playback instead of being limited to artificial waveforms generated by oscillators is good, Amiga being stuck at 4 channels from 85 to 95 very bad. As my original comment was the only limitation was 4 sound channels for the life of Amiga.....pick up your glasses before replying to my posts again

6. Doom was released in the middle of December 1993 so 1994 onwards, show me 10 arcade games from 1985-1990ish that were superior to either the Genesis or an Amiga. I remember going through arcade conversions on Home of the Underdogs by year and 1991 was about the time these types of games were ALL in VGA not EGA.

There were plenty of classic DOS games like adventures/strategy and RPGs etc, can't really think of a single arcade conversion worth a crap on DOS before around mid 90s at best.

7. Clearly you can do Doom on a 68000, the Atari Jaguar console proves this with just a DSP,blitter and a 13mhz 68000. There were rumours that Commodore would stick a DSP in the A1200, it was supposed to be a massive upgrade to Agnus and it had an 020 @ 14mhz. So clearly if AGA wasn't too little too late Doom was quite possible regardless of CPU speed. Which again was my original point, plus the fact it came out when Amiga was more or less screwed anyway after 9 years of minimal development.

7. Spending $3000 on a PC to play arcade games is a bit dumb. A Roland MT32 was about 350 bucks here, so basically you are spending more on a general midi sound module than an A1200? Yeah kind of stupid and not the actions of people making up a mass market.

As to the fascination with unrelated issue to the thread topic of the Amiga rental market others seem to have a problem dropping...

Breaking off the metal slider doesn't kill a disk, and if you aren't ham fisted you can put it back on...say from another blank that cost 10p.

All I said was in normal conditions...if you are going to drop them out of your bedroom window/run them over with a monster truck/leave them in a glass jar facing the sun for a week yada yada then you are a moron. The point is I never had a problem with floppy disks in general, if you treat stuff with a modicum of respect and don't act like an idiot then disks are sturdy enough for their purpose.

And if you can rent tape games out to 8bit computer users successfully for years then magnetic stability of data stored on 3.5" disks is a no-brainer, unless you do something stupid like wave it in front of a set of massive speakers at Live Aid concerts that is

Drop it now and get back on bloody topic. Rental market had nothing to do with USA not doing any home grown coin-op conversions, the issue at hand.

I am genuinely interested to know why Amiga got the same rubbish games developed here in the UK and Afterburner USA was the exception to the rule. OK if the UK arcade conversions were any good, but to buy the rights to import such badly programmed drivel like Outrun is worrying.

[Amiga_Nut]

absurdly cheap, like in the pennies (US).

CDs cost more to produce than DVDs tpday I think, 1p difference between them though probably

[Amiga_Nut]

I think Nintendo and other consoles beat out Amigas because you didn't need to  know anything about computers,and thus it was less confusing to Mom and POP when buying  holiday presents.

 The best idea in the world still must be marketed.

This is quite an interesting point, I think that's probably due to people's experience of PCs at work or older 8 bit micros. As far as running a game went it wasn't really any more difficult than inserting a cart in an NES and flicking the power switch. However as it was a computer with a keyboard I guess it is daunting. Probably more to do with an Amiga being 250% the price of a NES though really, and NES having a smaller lighter box to carry home.

What's interesting is if you constantly need to be within reach of the machine to swap disks (remembering most games software locks out any extra disk drives so everyone had to swap disks) then you can't really use it in the living in front of the TV. It becomes more of a PC like experience on a desk rather than simply plugging into the lounge TV and sitting on the couch to play your games.