3 days of hardcore amiga gaming lead me to think....

[Amiga_Nut]

This was always the issue with the Amiga and CPU upgrades due to the whole Amiga custom chips.

Crap scrolling and slow fighters on Street Fighter 2 on MS DOS playing on your 386? Get a 486DX and everything magically improves to arcade levels of quality. On Amiga you can load up US Gold's SF2 conversion on an 060 you spent £750 on and it will still be mildly better than a £299 ST.

I also started a thread about a year ago about why the hell was Amiga basically given such bad coin-op conversions. The Amiga is capable of something close to Sonic if you look at Kid Chaos, ditto Outrun and Lotus II, Shadow Fighters and SF2 etc etc.

It is quite sad looking back just how bad many conversions were and the best software was mostly original arcade games not arcade conversions. Luckily there were 1000s of games and there are plenty that will make your jaw drop.

Add to that there were plenty of more intellectual games like the Magnetic Scrolls adventures which were just pure class and superior to the PC versions If it was out on OCS/ECS then PC version would be EGA = PANTS! :roflmao:

[Amiga_Nut]

It's not really the upgraded processor nor the custom chips that were at fault it was more down to sloppy/ lazy conversions by the software houses in order to release the latest titles on the Amiga back in its heyday in my honest opinion...

Way back at the start of it all (the A1000 era)  it was more down to the programmers not yet understanding just what the Amiga was capable of or having yet discovered the secrets of the machine. Take some of the very first games for the Amiga "The Feary Tale Adventure", one of the best games ever written for the Amiga IMO, for it's time brilliant gfx/ music & concept but let down by some badly written scrolling routines and a simple case of the programmer not yet having discovered quite how to programme the Amiga to it's best yet...

While I was never a big fan of the beat-em-up style games, to me it was a simple case of checking them out first before actually buying the things, if it was badly coded and played like a dog the answer was simple, I wouldn't buy it just because the gfx looked good...

And yes it is 100% down to the programmers, the Japanese did even better things with the even more complex/restricting Sharp X68000 so it's a western world greed based thing not a lack of coding talent at the time. Blame the software houses and blame the ST (where too much of the code design came from for 99% of conversions)

I could never see the the point in paying around £25 for a game that had been badly converted/ported or rushed out by the software houses in order to grab their share of the market. Games like the Lotus Trilogy , Pinball Dreams/ Fantasies etc... are prime examples of just what could be achieved on the Amiga by good programmers and those were indeed worth every penny paid for them...

The point was Amiga users get zero benefit from paying more for £/performance on their CPU upgrades on all but the most basic 3D polygon games. PC users got a boost in quality with every machine/CPU upgrade regardless of if it was Zool/SF2 etc etc that's all.

And if SF2 is ported badly it doesn't matter whether I buy it or not for Amiga, the point is it was coded terribly and I can't play it without buying a SNES/Megadrive/3DO which all had excellent versions etc. And in the end that means I abandon Amiga theoretically and the Amiga brand is diminished to a minority platform where even worse games by rubbish programmers are released (witness the downturn in quality of Amiga games in the mid 90s as the best programmers 'moved on' to PC and consoles). Ditto Lotus II is a great game but also would be nice if Outrun which is very playable was done right.

The Amiga is great, the hardware is way ahead of it's time but the games were rarely up to the standard of what is technically achievable. TFF Shadow of the Beast in 512k.

[Amiga_Nut]

Well I actually bought my first Amiga (A500) thinking I would play plenty of cheap and easy to get games compared to expensive SNES cartridges.

Hardly actually played any, once I bought my first Amiga mag (Amiga Format with Real 3D and that silver 3D head cover).  And then amazing app after amazing app followed for free on yet more cover cd's.  Games on the Amiga?  What were they?  Too busy rendering, getting the most from DPaint, Scala, PPaint, ImageFX, Photogenics, Wordworth, Imagine, Drawstudio, Cinema 4D, Shapeshifter (Photoshop, MS Office 6, Quark).  This is what made me upgrade the A500 with a GVP '030, then A1200 with '030, A1200 with '040, then A4000 with '060 and CV64, and later upgraded the A1200 '040 to an '60.  None of these upgrades made any sense to play games, but the apps sure were motivation enough for me.

I hear you, I spent a lot of time doing creative things too on Dpaint and Digi-view and samplers for MOD instruments etc. It is fantastic I agree and Amiga did it best in the 80s. But I do like games too.

[Amiga_Nut]

Commodore would have gone bust a lot quicker if there were no decent games for the Amiga and A500 was never dropped to £399. It's that simple. Dpaint sold a lot of machines, Cinemaware sold a lot more though.

Amiga was the best of both sides, which was the reason the A1000 was the best machine in the world you could buy. Best creative, corporate and leisure software running on the best desktop OS.

I think we are getting off topic though, why were games like Lotus II technically so good and yet all the driving game coin-op conversions barely acceptable at best and downright crap at worst. Greed is the answer greed and incompetence with people like US Gold and Ocean.

PS I would like to see which arcade style games improved with a CPU upgrade.