@Cammy
just ignore the troll :-)
@skurk
In my opinion, one of the problems is that the Amiga is too easy to program. Compared to the C64, you don't need double interrupts to get a stable raster, and you don't need to time the hell out of a loop to open the borders or multiplex a few sprites. Coding the Amiga is in fact so easy, it's no fun making "ordinary things" on it anymore. That's one of the reasons I'm sticking to the demoscene, to push the hardware instead of just scrolling playfields and checking for sprite collisions.
That's what I was hinting about in my previous post, find a way to attract idiots like me. Introduce limitations, and I'm all in.
I don't agree with you completely. I think that making Amiga games may be easy but making high quality amiga games may be quite hard. E.g. you can count the games with AGA quarter-pixel scrolling with the fingers of one hand.
Of course you can do a smooth scroll game with a few sprites with just 4 colours that don't look pretty. Or you can do a smooth scroll with microscopic sprites. Or a jerky scroll with big sprites. But you won't see many games with smooth scroll, big and colourful sprites that take almost full screen and also move with quarter pixel scrolling.
What about colours? I don't see many games with ham8 sprites/backgrounds.
What about the frames of animation? Having decent big animations could require hundreds of different images being decompressed realtime to chipram.
What about special effects like neogeo-like zooming done with some help of blitter help perhaps (like the author of brian the lion did with the rotozoom)? And transparency? Perhaps adding some textures to the floor like streetfighterII did?
You are probably assuming the use of lo-res but why not make a hires or hires-laced game? With hi-res you could still make half pixel scrolling. You would have to be careful writting to chipram when the screen is not being drawn to gain chipmem speed and
I think that if your set quality level to 8bit standards it may be easy to make a game but making a quality amiga game can be very hard if you want to make something more than scroll a pityful small sprite jerking at 2 frames.
I think that even with a 060 accelerator you would have hard time making hires-laced games.
-making a 640x480 diablo clone. You could have basic tiles in chipram and apply a mask to make darker or lighter the sections and copy the tiles with the blitter but it would still be a challenge due to the high number of frames from the main characters.
-making a neogeo like fighting game with a decent number of colours fullscreen zooming, animated background, a texture in the floor, parallax scrolls and lots of animations would need decent coding skills. All moving with quarter pixel scrolling, not just the background.
-making a good horizontal scrolling game with lots of parallax, transparency for smoke, big sprites that take the entire screen with animation... with 256colours and/or ham8. And quarter pixel scrolling!
-making strategy games like starcraft run at 640x480 and 256colours/ham8 with smooth scrolling, fog...
I think that coding for >= 16bits requires breaking some limits. 8bit games are quite simpler than >=16bit ones and you can't content yourself making a scroll that would be hard to do on a c64 and saying "oh I have made a scroll that is hard to do on a c64 so my game is done". Making high quality amiga games takes more than a single-pixel scroll with 2 diminute 4-colour sprites jerking at 2 frames.
