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

[InTheSand]

Duke Nuke'Em 3D was what swung it for me! Running that on a friend's Pentium-based PC with 16-bit Soundblaster soundcard finally made me move on from my A1200 (which I still have and still use now occasionally).

The A1200 had done a fair job until that point (1996), and I'd had a work '486 laptop in the couple of years prior, which ran Win95 well enough once it was released, beginning the end of really bad Microsoft OSs that finally stopped with the release of Win2K.

Running those early releases of UAE used to make me chuckle but the writing was already on the wall, especially after the bankruptcy of Commodore. On an early Linux release running on a 486DX2/66, UAE used to be very slow - but it already pointed towards the future.

 -Ali

[stefcep2]

In about 1999.  i needed to download and fill in some PDF/Word documents that I couldn't open in Shapeshifter/Fusion running MacOS 8.

Other than that, i could do everything else I needed to, even web browse on my A4000.

Never thought much of Win 95 and win 98.  In fact MS didn't offer a decent OS until Win 2000

[dougal]

For me it was around 1995 .

I saw a pc running VESA games like Little Big Adventure , then of course it was all the CD-ROM based games with speech like indiana jones & fate of Atlantis , plus the FPS's .

I realised my old standard A500 plus was over the hill and i bought a 486DX2/66Mhz with 4mb Ram , 420mb HD and SB16 .

2 Years later i regretted selling my Amiga and bought 2 broken A500's and used them to make 1 working one :-)

Luckily i still had nearly all my Amiga games & software and even my Action Replay III

[itix]

For me it was when 386+VGA was selling like hot cakes but finally when Windows 95 was released.

[wawrzon]

i havnt realized it up till now.  :-o

[Khephren]

When these games came out, I realised the writing was on the wall. We either had inferior versions, or no version at all.

TFX (1993)
magic carpet (1994)
terror from the deep (1995)
subwar (1993) -amiga untextured
frontier (1993) -Amiga untextured
Doom (1993)

If the 1200 had been given akiko, fast ram (which would also have doubled the processor speed) and a high density floppy, maybe things would have been different. And Paula not being upgraded in 8 years? criminal.

When I bought the A1200 I was really excited, but it did not have the power or memory to make use of it's colour palette.

[mdv2000]

It was the summer of 1994.  My Amiga 500 had died due to a misplaced glass of tea.  I started looking at my options to replace my A500.

Also, at this time I was preparing to go off to college.  All the schools I was interested in were used DOS/Windows 3.11 and taught PC Pascal and/or C.  

(Odd thought, was at college I actually came across more Amiga users than Mac users back then).

So I bought a 486-DX2 66 Packard Bell at Circuit City.  I had VESA Graphics, 8 MB of RAM, 120 MB HD, Soundblaster 16, 16" Color Monitor and could easily do 800x600x16bit.

It got me into DOS/Windows 3.11 Programming and I haven't looked back ever since.  As for stability of an OS, it wasn't until Windows 2000 I really liked Windows.  

I still love my Amiga - recently getting me an A2000 to play some of my favorite games - but in 94, for what you got in a clone, an Amiga was too expensive!

Late,

[jutrem]

When I saw a friend play Wing Commander on his 486 PC and it looked so cool...

Was'nt the Amiga version of Wing Commander from Origin delayed for some reason?

When it finally came out the colors where reduced to make it fit (an playable)on floppys for the A500 users. The Amiga 256 color version came later but if the original release was written for a A3000 (90's equiv of 486) instead of a A500 would have looked way better.

[Darrin]

I knew it had caught up games-wise when I saw the PC version of Elite Frontier and X-Wing.  Interface-wise it took Windows 95 for me to say "neary there" and Win98 to say "OK, close enough".  The reason I bought my first PC was because they had Civilization 2 and we didn't.

[Karlos]

What, when did this happen? Why was I not informed?

 :lol:

[hardlink]

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

For me, it was when I was able to boot a non-HD machine from a floppy and use a pre-emptive real time operating system with a full GUI to do everything I needed to do.
Uh, wait, come to think of it, that was an Amiga.

Damn.
brian

[cv643d]

Surprised so many of you say Win95.

For me it was Doom.

[RMK305]

I'll let you know when it happens.

[guest3110]

Racetrack announcer: "..and it's Amiga, still in the lead--all of its arms tied behind its back. Boy, they don't make 'em like this anymore. It's been through a lot, edged to bankruptcy, died more times than Jason Voorhees and--wait, PC is gaining, this is gonna be close, folks... Whoah, Amiga has died again, and is lurching like a zombie, but it's still out in front by a rotted nose..."  :lol:

[hardlink]

RMK305 wrote:
I'll let you know when it happens.

What, your Micro$hit Shista run floppy is bad

[amigaksi]

by orb85750 on 2009/5/5 21:00:38

>Have they? OK, yes. However, I find Wintel machines to be very powerful, but very bloated and inefficient too -- the GM Hummers of the computer world.

The way you put it, it looks like you just decided.

They haven't caught up ALL the way.  For most things they have.  They still use inferior joystick interface and programming techniques (non-cycle exact).  Wave the hand and hope it will finish within that time frame.  And given the nonstandard hardware being driven at driver level, it looks like the Amiga style of writing directly to hardware registers and taking over the machine is a retro-machine monopoly.