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

[blanning]

For me it was when a friend of mine played a mod through a sound blaster board.

brian

[persia]

When I first save Vegas demonstrated...

[Sandman]

When I saw a friend play Wing Commander on his 486 PC and it looked so cool. I knew I would have to branch out to that platform. I finally gave up the Amiga vs. PC fight then and yielded to the dark side.:-(

-Tim

[toca180]

When the PC could emulate the Amiga at "full" speed. :-(

Robert

[Belial6]

For me it was when Windows 95 was released.

[StevenJGore]

For me, it was when my friend showed me Quake. Seeing Doom II had got me worried, but Quake finally made me realise that the Amiga had lost.

[Plaz]

Windows OS did not catch up to the AOS until XP. Win 95 was a crashy bloated bit of junk. 98 and 98SE were improvements but still couldn't reliably run professional multi-media apps with out trashing or loosing data. Only by constantly backing up data and rebooting or recovering from crashes could you proceed. Even Mac was far superior than win. When XP arrived, it finally had enough guts to do the job. That's when windows "caught up".


Now, when did I know Amiga "had lost"? That was in 1993 when windows 3.11 for workgroups was released. The writting was on the wall. Amiga had a short time to respond and couldn't. Instead, by the time win 95 was released they were well on their way to bankruptcy.

Plaz

[save2600]

486/Pentium I, Win95/98, cheap cost of HD's, modems and the various graphics/sound cards made my 020/4mb A1200 seem pretty outdated. Didn't help at all that the few stores left that carried Amiga stuff did not have the software support the IBM had. That was around the time all the Amiga mags were spelling certain doom for Commodore and I went to the dark side. A few years after that, I was totally sick of the headache that is the IBM/Micro$oft platform and went back to the Amiga. Perfect timing really, because by then, we had awesome graphics cards, (expensive as always) CPU cards, etc. that now made and continue to make a PeeCee seem like the overly out_of_date platform that it is (to me anyway).

[redrumloa]

Yeah, probably XP SP1 era. PC hardware had passed it much earlier, but Windows up to 98ME was a nightmare.

I must say, Hyperion's AmigaOS 4.X (and MOS1.5) is starting to look pretty good, but it is still in the hobby arena due to lack of 3rd party software support.

[Ilwrath]

Eh, I'd say it was the release of Windows 95, too.  

I was one of the early users to get an early upgrade from Win 3.11 to 95 at work, mostly because I was quite animated about how terrible Win 3.11 was to work with...  I was begging for a Mac, old SUN box, or anything else they had available.  I was fortunate that I could sometimes use an older SGI Indigo (original) the engineering guys kept as a demo system, or else I think I'd have gone insane...  I was due for an upgrade, and actually tried to requisition an SGI Indigo2 like the engineers were using, but my management wasn't real happy with someone who was basically an intern at the time asking for a big $$$ engineering workstation...  Go figure.  So Windows 95 was thrown at me, instead.  And I was told I would use that.  

Well, anyhow, after about a week of using 95, I started realizing Amiga was in SERIOUS trouble.  Windows 95 was really the first Microsoft OS that really could be called a complete OS, and was good enough to use on a regular basis.  Sure, it still had it's share of quirks and problems, but that was the turning point, where a Microsoft OS was "good enough" to get your work done with a minimum of hassle.  

[amiga92570]

Actually I have used DOS since Version 1.0. I think PC DOS 1.0 was a complete OS. The Graphical User interface later helped but IBM compatibles had taken over well before that happened. I think when the IBM in the late 80's came out with VGA, soundcards, etc. it was down hill for the Amiga ever since.

[jupo42]

1997. I was going off to college, and didn't think my A2000 was up to the task even with a 68040/40. My parents were willing to buy me what I needed.

I was still devoted to the Amiga, I started pricing upgrades for my favorite system. A 68060 card for starters... $1200. RTG graphics... New SCSI HD... more RAM... Ethernet...

Or I could pick up a complete PC with a 200MHz Pentium-MMX, 64MB RAM, PermediaNT 24-bit 1600x1284 graphics, AWE64 sound, and a 5GB HD, dual-booting Win95 and NT4, for about $1500. And it could play X-Wing vs Tie Fighter, Quake, and every other modern game that was worth playing.

I fretted over it for a month, but that was when I realized it was over. Sadly, I have not spent more than $25 on my Amigas since then... While prices eventually go down, the comparative value has gone down faster. I can't justify spending, for example, $169 for a brand new 15 year old EGS Spectrum. Used '060s go for $300 or more, while a complete PC that can run UAE faster than a 68060 costs less. So I continue to get by with what I can find as a freebie or trade spare parts for, which isn't very much.

[amiga1084]

Hello All,

I knew the Amiga was doomed when I first saw VGA display back in 1991, When AGA came out year later I knew the Amiga has lost the fight.

Thanks in advance,
Merv Stent :-?

[Nlandas]

    I have to say about 1996, When their CPU/GPU combo of brute force could finally run the games that the elegant hardware design of the Amiga made possible in 1985.

    Of course for me the way that AmigaOS feels has never been duplicated for me. I'm not just talking about warm sentimental feelings but something about the way that it responds to the user vs. other OSs be it Windows, Linux or BSD-Mac.

     for one wish so BADLY that the OS will be Open Sourced. I wish some rich old Amiga user would buy the rights to the classic OS and Open Source it. I'd love to see what we could do if we had the source code and could do it as a Open Source project.

[adz]

Wolfenstein 3D caught my attention, Doom and Strike Commander sealed Amiga's fate for me.