You are a perfect example for what he is pointing at. I had PC in the early 1990. My PC was Turbo and it had a Turbo button for a reason. Most of the old games were unplayable on faster machines, because they were tied to the slow processors. The sync with the videobeam was non existant on early PC games. I still have a magazine with source code for slowdowner that runs resident in DOS. A PC lamer told me in 1994 that the new games were undependable of CPU speed. So you can even run games on 4 MHz I asked him? He proudly answered yes.....
But the speed was not the only problem that sucked for the reasonable PC gaming, except for turn based strategies like Civilisation that was hit on the PC, while most Amiga gamers thought it sucked as a game. For every game before you start it you had to choose - type of Video controller (Hercules, CGA, EGA, VGA, SVGA), Type of Sound card (AdLib, SoundBlaster, SoundBlasterPro), Turbo or Normal version, JoyStick (what joystick, most of the games did not support joystick), Mouse. Shit, you had to run mouse driver before starting the game. Some games did not allow save of config, that was helping the PC gamers become DOS experts, because it was more interesting to type stupid scripts in DOS than to play actual games. Starting games from Windows was nightmare too, and even after Windows 95 appeared that put end of the configuration hell, people were still loving DOS because it was better for gaming.
The consoles were selling pretty well back in 1994-1995 for a reason - the Amiga and the Atari were no more, the PC sucked as a gaming machine and the PS1 was getting all the nicest games, that took the PC 3 years (late 1997) to catch up with the quality of the graphics and sound.
I beg to differ,
PC comments-whilst I started with a 486SX friends had 386SX and 386DX machines. The only times PC games were affected by CPU speed making them unplayable was running C64 quality simple EGA games from mid80s intended for 8086 CPU.
These were excluded from my comments for a good reason. ALL VGA arcade games were playable on even early Pentiums, many scrolling games sold in 386/486 era around 91/92 would not be as smooth as an Amiga 1200 or even 500.
So playing 8086 CGA/EGA 80s games on Pentium MMX is irrelevant to the discussion as weare talking Wing Commander VGA and onwards. Before this you wouldn't consider an EGA or 286 12mhz PC in the UK for gaming.
Console comments=More Atari 2600 VCS consoles were sold than all Atari AND C= 8 bit home computers combined.
NES outsold Amiga + Atari ST combined
Megadrive outsold Amiga + Atari ST combined
Of those 3 examples only Sega Megadrive was superior in some ways to competition on it's launch day. VCS inferior to Atari 400, NES inferior to A500 but 300% lower cost was the advantage. Console sales and home use computer sales are not connected.If you need ed a computer there was no advantage in getting a Playstation. PS1 was a revolution and Sony's marketing combined to quadruple console market size. Had nothing to do with specs of Amigas and PCs available or whether those machines could even run Ridge Racer on launch day.
Ultimately I have given the generally accepted reasons most people in the industry see why, and when the breakpoint was, for when Wintel would secure a future no matter what C= or Atari did. A machine which has no custom chips can run games better/smoother. You will either agree or not but taken in context it is fact. As is whatever you think of Win95 for 95% of the world it was good enough for Wintel to make serious inroads in the UK into the home computer market.
PC SF2 bit choppy and sounding scratchy? Get a faster CPU and Gravis wavetable card. WTF choices did we have if an arcade conversion was botched? None! If SF2 PC was not produced in VGA but EGA however PC users would be stuck same as Amga users......get it? This is why Outrun PC is a waste of time and before the cut-off point. Needing touse moslow on a 200mhz PC to make a 1984 CGA version of Zaxxon playable is not related to the topic
CGA era = C64 versions of games better and EGA era = Amiga versions of games better....this is all about 1991/92 introduction of AGA fighting off rise of the home Wintel PC sales. AGA was fine for a couple of years but as Dave Haynie pointed out Commodore's AAA/Hombre was financial and technical suicide compared to off the shelf PC sound/Video/3D cards anyway.
