Common amiga knowledge that's wrong

[runequester]

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?

[runequester]

Actually even more wrong ....

The CS-MK1-manual (1st print) is from April 95, even if some units gone on sale in 94 they certainly weren't "available" in the common. If your in for a shocker, someone might even pull out an invoice from that time. I remember paying 1800DM for my Blizz2060 (must have been 96) shortly after they came out. Inflation corrected that would have been well over 1000Euro.

Sure GFX-Cards did exist, in the form of a Picasso2 at 800DM hardly a gamers-card today, and back than there was no CGX or P96, all you had was costom WB-emu and/or EGS. Pretty much useless for anything but specialized productivity SW.

Btw. RAM was really expensive back in those days, I only bought 8MB for that 2060 card and I do remember it being even worse before.

So to get a "high-end" Amiga in lets say 1996 (since 94 is to unrealistic for such specs) consisting of:
68060 with 32MB or more
A4000(T) (no point in playing games over Z2)
CV-64 (guess that should be the best non-3D card of that time)

You would easily need over 6000DM (3000Euro), to get what ?

A CPU/mobo comparable to a P90 ?
A GFX-card featuring a chip otherwise fond in bargain-bin VLB-cards ?

Or in short a 2000DM (1000Euro) PC ....

ah, I was wrong by 1994.
Yeah, amiga hardware was absurdly expensive (though you could get by with less than an 060 I guess. Even an 030 adds some oomph that most developers ignored), but let's say you bought a 500 and a PC in 88 or 89. By 96, how many times would you have replaced your PC by then?

Odds are at least once, propably twice. If you were a hardcore gamer, maybe three times or more. Heck, nowadays, people buy new machines just because there's a new version of windows, but nobody bats an eye at spending 800 dollars every 2 years.

You never had PC gamers declare that "PC gaming was dead" because a 286 couldn't run Doom, or because you had to buy a new machine to play Quake. We just cough up the money and go with it.

[runequester]

So a bit of numbers and analysis:

Searching for releases by year on lemonamiga, I show the following releases by year

1988 - 358 games
1989 - 495 games
1990 - 488 games
1991 - 485 games
1992 - 370 games
1993 - 295 games
1994 - 306 games
1995 - 186 games
1996 - 92 games

If there were multiple versions (OCS, AGA, CD32) they'd be counted multiple times, but that's not an awful large amount.

So amiga game publishing picks up in 89, then tapers off in 92, stays steady until 95, the year after Commodore's bankruptcy and pretty dies by 96 as we know.

If we look at "games per day", we go from 1.3 at the height to 0.8 in 94 (doom is out, and no more amigas being built)

1995, the playstation is out (when did this really become common in Europe?), Escom is selling 1200's for more than Commodore had in 93 and the games start disappearing.

Even then, you'd still have a new game every second day

[runequester]

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.

Im hard pressed to think of a game on more than 5 floppies that were not hard drive installable. Examples ?

[runequester]

I 100% agree. If you read the book "on the Edge", you will see that after Jack left, there was really no leadership at all at Commodore. All the top brass at Commodore were so busy milking every last cent out of it, the Amiga was kind of doomed from the start. If they were at all watching the market, and the engineer's had put out what they wanted to, the Amiga may have had a chance. Anyone at that time could see that CD-Roms were the future, and if Hombre had ever got out, there would be no debate over graphics (remember HP wanted to use Hombre in their High end workstations also). So, one can say that a collaboration with HP could have resulted in a totally different situation, mix it the fact that Epson wanted to market the Amiga in Japan, but Ali, messed it up TWICE (I believe it was EPSON) after it was suposibly a done deal, shows just how much Commodore's "Higher Ups" went out of their way to kill it.

yeah, Commodore did more to kill the amiga than Doom could ever have done

Even with the platform taking a step back as a gaming platform (and with the Playstation showing up, the seeds were laid for consoles to slowly but surely take over gaming from computers completely), there was still room for a cheap productivity computer, but that requires product to actually be sold by the company, which past 94 is largely gone.

I remember us paying 3 times as much for our first PC as my 1200, and it was a piece of shit.

[runequester]

Wrong. You're talking about an Amiga that existed in *theory*. In practice, they were horribly expensive, and you could get a higher spec PC for less cash than a high spec Amiga.

As mentioned upthread, there were plenty of other expansion possibilities that were cheaper, and given that almost everyone I know expanded their 1200's, there was obviously a market for this, that game developers could have aimed at.

Wrong. Doom in itself didn't kill the Amiga, but the technology it used did. Playfields, copper and sprites was hot 1985, but 100% useless when texture mapped 3D games became mainstream.

You really believe this was a bigger factor than the fact that there were no new amiga's to buy all of a sudden due to commodore not being around?

This is going back to the same notion that the only amiga that ever existed was a base, unexpanded machine. Had commodore been around past 94, they'd have updated the graphics, as they were in the process of, just like everyone else did.
Nobody considers nintendo a failure because the NES couldn't run Doom.
Nobody considers the PC a failure because a 286 couldn't run Doom.
But everybody considers the Amiga to have failed because the A500 couldn't run Doom.

[runequester]

btw, and Im not trying to be sarcastic here...

everyone posting is aware that Doom, Hexen and Quake were all ported to the amiga, once the source code was released, right?

[runequester]

Your figures are meaningless without sales figures... That's the thing. Do you think there were as many sales in 91 as in 95 for example ? That would show where the market was... No matter how many games were released.

Sales figures from all these companies are going to be impossible to find unfortunately.

[runequester]

The fact that some (and only some) games supported multiple drives doesn't change the fact that you had to swap disks (since games came in 3+ disks), that it was slow, noisy, and unreliable when compared to HD.

WHDLoad didn't change anything since again it came way too late.

Common knowledge: A1200 should have come with a hard drive, and CBM should have made publishers use it...

And it's true.

But it was probably already too late by that time anyway.

You love the Amiga, fine. You're nostalgic, fine. But not admitting all these flaws: what's the point ?

The point of the thread is that a lot of the accepted flaws weren't in fact real. I've talked to people who griped that Fate of Atlantis came on 14 disks or whatever, and you had to swap constantly, completely ignorant of the fact that it was HD installable.