When did you realize that the wintel machines had caught up to the amiga?

[amigaksi]

For those who agreed wintel machines caught up to Amiga, just letting you know you are dead wrong.  In order to come up to that conclusion, you would have to take into account every aspect of computing on Amiga and show that it's doable on PC.  Experimentally, that would take a very long time to prove.  Logically, I already pointed out a few things undoable on modern PC that are doable on Amiga.  So I suggest those who agreed wintel machines caught up to Amiga to retract their remarks unless they were just expressing their opinion or just basing their remarks on "looks" and not anything substantial from the engineering/useage perspective.

[save2600]

Somebody buy this man a drink, quick! Okay... I will   :pint:

[adz]

Don't you think he's already had enough :lol:


TAXI!!!

[hooligan]

1993

[bloodline]

Hmmm, harware wise... Probably in 1996... When I was playing a real time strategy game (either knights and merchents or command and conqure or something) on my friend's PC... Actually one that had been thrown away by a local college... And I was wondering how I would program something similar on my A1200 and realizing that the Amiga harware offered no advantage at all... In fact it would cause more problems than help me...

I think Win2000 was when the Wintel OS started to piss all over AmigaOS...

[Khephren]

ami_junki wrote:
heheh hasn`t happened to me yet, maybe im too simple but i still find my lovely amiga useful to me ... sure i have my mac for some other things but it always feels like the amiga was made to do things the way i wanted them done.

I'm not saying I don't find it usefull. I think if it had survived to go onto for one more generation with commodore, web browsing/3D/MP3/AVI/RTG sound and graphics etc - which it just missed out on, it would be comparable to what my vista machine can do now (obviously not HD films etc, but you know what I mean, basic functionality for the future would have been in place).
But with much lower processor and memory needs -and probably better.

I still love the OS, it's works well, is fast and frugal, and I understand whats it's doing. It isn't just a monolithic registry, and mess of exe and DLL's. Which every PC iv'e owned is, straight from boot up for the first time.

[jutrem]

Unlike most Amiga users I had a PC before I bought an Amiga.
I had a 286 before I picked up a 500. The 500 was better than the 286 at most things but it had no hard drive (HD). The 286 recieved many OS upgrades of MS DOS until MS Windows 3, while I never upgraded the 500's OS. Both got RAM upgrades.  

 As my interests increased (programming, art and video) the 500 became restrictive, so I moved to a 2000HD (great for games with HD support) and a better experience overall. I did upgrade the 2000 with more RAM,SCSI CD ROM, ethernet, Scan Doubler,Amiga OS 3 and a video card (GVP Spectrum). By 1990 even Commodore had included a standard Graphics card in the Amiga 3000UX model. If the Software publishers had taken advantage of the features my expanded 2000 the games would be similar to the Dell 486 I had at that time. In fact the 2000 setup might even play Doom since better it had more RAM than the 486 and equivalent video cards. Of course when simm memory prices dropped I maxed out the memory on the 486 and installed windows 95.

I bought a 4000 (for AGA and IDE) and moved some of the 2000's Zorro expansions to it, so it was never stock. The 486 got replaced by a Pentium,then a PII, P3 an P4.  By now the Amiga software market had dried up but the few new releases were finally taking advantage of the Amiga 4000's video card, HD and RAM. A4000 upgraded to Cyberstorm 060, 146 MB RAM (w. chip mem) up to 154MB with GVP scsi card  installed. Algor USB, 40 GB HD, DVD ROM, OS 3.9, Mediator Di, and PCI Voodoo 3000 GFx.

 The PC hardware might have passed my 4000 in about the late 90's with the intel/AMD Mhz war and AGP, but until XP came out in 2001 it was'nt as nice to use.

[jutrem]

bloodline wrote:
Hmmm, harware wise... Probably in 1996... When I was playing a real time strategy game (either knights and merchents or command and conqure or something) on my friend's PC... Actually one that had been thrown away by a local college... And I was wondering how I would program something similar on my A1200 and realizing that the Amiga harware offered no advantage at all... In fact it would cause more problems than help me...

 There were other Amiga's not just the A500 and A1200. Any game from 1995/95 would be playable on an Amiga 3000/4000 with the same specs (RAM/HD) as the PC you were playing it on, or even an expanded 1200.


It wasn't as expensive to upgrade the larger Amiga models since you could just use PC parts (RAM, IDE or SCSI HD or CD ROMS).

[jutrem]

I would not use games to determine when PC's passed the Amiga. The quality of games rely on many things including the abilities of the coders. The PC passed the Amiga much later than the quality of games indicate.

The Games on PC started to look better in the early 90's for many reasons including...

1. Amiga users that stuck with Amiga 500's/1200's and never upgraded, PC users had to get a GFX card ,sound blaster (to run anything)

2. Game developers that wrote software for the lowest spec Amiga, while the PC version of the same title required the highest spec PC.(in the 1990's of course). This encouraged PC users to upgrade to run the latest games properly while the Amiga 500/1200 users did n't catch on. You can't compare a game written for a average 486 spec to a conversion to a Amiga 500/1200 spec. A proper conversion would need a Amiga 3000/4000 030 spec machine.


3. Bad Game conversions. eg. The PC version and Amiga conversion of Dune 2 were great. The orginal Amiga conversion of Wing Commander was bad  compared to the original. They reduced graphic quality to fit on floppys,  for those Amiga users that still did n't have a Hard Drive in the 1992. (Sounds funny now doesn't it.) The requirements for Wing Commander should have been "Amiga 14mhz 1mB RAM and HD required!, Video card optional" and it would have been better. The PC requirements where "IBM PC or compat., 12+ MHz x86 CPU, 640 KB RAM, dual FDD or HDD, 256-color VGA/MCGA or EGA/Tandy, optional sound card (opt. General MIDI)".

 The later Amiga conversions we got from ClickBoom, Hyperion and others of popular games Quake, QII,QIII,Doom, and Myst, shows how conversions could have been done years earlier when you support Amiga's with the right specs.