Atari vs Amiga article

[itix]

The internal representation of a world and the way it's visualized are two different things. You could make a three dimensional world and represent it in the form of purely text based descriptions.

Dungeon Master is a two dimensional game, because the dungeons are flat maps that are connected via pits and stairs. Hired Guns has a three dimensional world.

Dungeon Master is a first person shooter. It is made to look like it is 3D but it is actually just 2D with an advanced line of sight. It is 2D game from different angle.

Hired Guns has a three dimensional world but you could say it is just stacked 2D maps. Difference to Dungeon Master is just that you can see what is going on another 2D map down or above you.

I would, because it's not three dimensional in any way at all. The maps are flat in the sense that you can't have things like rooms above each other, that's why you can actually see everything on the auto map, which would be impossible if the maps were three dimensional.

I dont think that matters. Modern 3D engines have their own limitations too which of course are not so visible. However...

Then there's the graphics engine which is completely fake 3D. So no, Doom isn't three dimensional.

I agree, almost. I would just it is yet more advanced form of line of sight in a 2D game. But you can also utilize Z direction to some extent which isnt possible in Wolfenstein 3D. Or in Hired Guns.

But back to the original point...

The problem was that nobody at commodore had the vision that cheap crappy 3d rendering would be such a big deal.

The deal with cheap crappy 3D rendering is that it allows making games from new perspective without game looking ultimately crappy. There were times when filled polygons were the state of art of 3D rendering...

[itix]

Reading the article and it seems that both Amiga 1200 and Atari Falcon 030 shared the same attribute: lack of raw CPU performance. Falcon due to its 16-bit bus and A1200 due to lack of fast RAM on stock machine. If compared by hardware features in stock machine neither can outweigh another.

The software support did.

[itix]

AAA, and then Hombre, are you all still sure Dave Haynie was some kind of genius?
For crying out loud, couldn't they just get their act together and release some kind of upgrade?

They did ECS :-)

Hardware wise Commodore was in difficult position with Amiga. They could not replace hardware because it would not be backwards compatible and AmigaOS didnt have enough hardware abstraction for real hardware independent software development.