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Author Topic: Amiga guilt and time distortion.  (Read 24011 times)

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Offline Speelgoedmannetje

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Re: Amiga guilt and time distortion.
« on: April 17, 2011, 02:31:55 PM »
Let's make a fair comparison:
There were very little amiga games that were harddisk installable, while all pc games were.
Harddisk installable amiga games ran fine from the GUI, even the more hardware-heavy games, like Lionheart and Fightin' Spirit, while the vast majority of pc games weren't until 1997.
The avarage sound card until 1995 was the Sound Blaster Pro, of which synthesizer could not match the Amiga synthesizer by a long run. I remember buying the Sound Blaster Pro for more than 200 guilders, which was a lot back then, but I desperately wanted to get rid of the beeper sounds (and many old games didn't support it to my disappointment).
Many pc games before 1992 were released in CGA or EGA while their Amiga counterparts were all VGA-ish, at worst EGA-ish. Sound blasters weren't that common back then so many games were CGA + pc beeper and I can tell you that the audiovisual experience was heaven for the die-hard masochist. The colour magenta is still burned in my retina and the shrieks of the beeper still haunts me in nightmares.
Sure, the Amiga had it's share of Guru Meditations, but it didn't cripple the machine as much as the BSODs of Windows 9x, and while the majority of BSODs were caused by Windows 95, the Guru Meditations were almost all caused by badly written software (and therefore could easier be dealt with).
« Last Edit: April 17, 2011, 03:01:57 PM by Speelgoedmannetje »
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Offline Speelgoedmannetje

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Re: Amiga guilt and time distortion.
« Reply #1 on: April 17, 2011, 03:11:14 PM »
Quote from: Digiman;632120

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!

Eh, Amiga 2000/3000/4000 owners could easily upgrade, with accellerator cards, like Newteks etcetera. Point is, game developers did not aim the high end Amiga market as I guess there were less high end Amiga users as there were high end PC users. Otherwise they would have opted more often for HD installers as well.
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Offline Speelgoedmannetje

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Re: Amiga guilt and time distortion.
« Reply #2 on: April 17, 2011, 03:14:47 PM »
Quote from: _ThEcRoW;632131
"Mouse. Shit, you had to run mouse driver before starting the game"

Ah yes, the autoexec.bat/config.sys drama. One game wanted EMM386, the other puked on it. the other game did not run until you set an obscure parameter like buffer=40 (40-what? - an anonymous math teacher). So you ended up with creating a helluva startup menu.
I remember a game magazine stating they were just unable to test the PC port of Turrican 2 as the cd rom drivers needed too much memory, let alone the sound blaster drivers.
« Last Edit: April 17, 2011, 03:17:43 PM by Speelgoedmannetje »
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Offline Speelgoedmannetje

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Re: Amiga guilt and time distortion.
« Reply #3 on: April 17, 2011, 03:22:24 PM »
Quote from: _ThEcRoW;632131
(what joystick, most of the games did not support joystick)
Eh, that's not quite true, even in the very early days joysticks were commonly supported (even more often than the arrow keys!).
You just had to have another isa card for it. (if you did not have a sound blaster). AND you had to calibrate it as these joysticks were analog and therefore mostly unusable for games designed for digital input.
« Last Edit: April 17, 2011, 03:26:22 PM by Speelgoedmannetje »
And the canary said: \'chirp\'