Common amiga knowledge that's wrong

[desiv]

I killed my first set of WB disks 'just turning it off'.

No idea what was going on, but I shut 'er down just as I simultaneously noted the drive activity light was on.  Booted back up and...NDOS:

It was months before I had a functional set of disks again

This was the beauty of putting the on/off switch on the PSU!

When you wanted to shutdown your Amiga 500/1200, you have to reach way to the back of the desk or bend down to the floor to get to the PSU.
By the time you do, all the applications have finished.

If you thought you were smart and put everything on a power strip so you can just reach over and kill it, well then it's your own fault!

:roflmao::roflmao::roflmao:

To be honest, that can always happen with any computer, and it's always a good idea to wait, but I can't remember that happening to me...
I think I was in the habit of always waiting for drive activity lights tho.
I even remember on the DOS side when we had to use the PARK command.  :-)

I'd say it's pretty rare on the Amiga, but possible..

desiv

[bbond007]

I won't speculate on what killed Commodore the company.  BUT I have to tell you that for my friends and I who had Amiga 500s at the time, DOOM was definitely the thing that made us (I had about 7 friends with Amiga 500s) switch from playing on the old 500s to the PC.  Before that, the PC was just a boring work box.  DOOM and all the 3D games that followed were the reason that I bought tons of video boards, CPUs and RAM for my PC and why my Amiga sat in the closet until last year.   Just telling you what happened from my perspective (in my early 20s at the time), because I lived it.

I also think that MP3s had an effect maybe even the same as Doom. My 040/28 A2000 was able to play them, however you could not do much else.

[bbond007]

Or 3D  

3D literally killed my interest in video gaming and that's fine, because I was already in my mid-late 20's when it became all the rage, BUT! It's fine for driving and maybe the occasional shooter, just a shame it became the standard for almost any genre now though.

Yeah, but also before doom the Adventure games, think Lucasfilm, Sierra, etc were all starting to also get better on the PC.

[bloodline]

Common knowledge: Doom killed the amiga

Why it's wrong: Doom was released in December of 93. Commodore declared bankruptcy in April 94. There's plain not enough time for an entire platform to go from doing well to dying off, based on one game in about 4 months. (Doom was massively important in fuelling the PC as a valid games platform, but that's an entirely different story)

Doom didn't kill the Amiga, Wolfenstein did... Released in '92, it showed where computer graphics were going. And none of Commodore's Amiga offerings came close to it... The then 7 year old Amiga architecture was useless for that type of game and game developers knew it. Software quality declined, sales of Amigas declined... Doom was released, the Amiga had no hope by then... The ball was already rolling... Commodore folds, end of story.

[stefcep2]

Really? What killed my interest in videogames was the failure of the dreamcast (and to a lesser extent gamecube), and the move away from the PSX/N64/Saturn to newer systems. After those faded away, games companies went from trying to make videogames to "generic action film #145347, by an incompitent version of pixar. oh, and you have to push buttons too". I have to say that those four/five systems are probably the greatest consoles of all time.

3D didn't ruin videogames. aiming for the lowest common denominator, and people realising there was money in it did. I think there should be a "polygon ration", because the gta series always looked cack in 3D but were great games. GoW, Later NFS games, all sports titles since forever? Crap.

I never was that into Amiga games:  Deluxe Pacman, Deluxe Galaga, SWOS, and Slam Tilt were the ones i enjoyed.  The amiga 3D shooters didn't do it for me, bur for some reason I had this obsession to prove I could out-Doom Doom, and the 060 I bought for Cinema 4D came in  handy.  You'd be mad to have spent the money on an 060 card to play Alien Breed 3D or Breathless though.

The gamecube was the last console bought, and that was for my son's 10 th birthday.  But I still think the Nintendo 64 was the gaming machine i had most fun with.  The tight control of most games and the analogue stick was gaming heaven.  i think the single button joystick limited the  precision of control and may have been a factor that stymied the progression of Amiga games.

[stefcep2]

Doom didn't kill the Amiga, Wolfenstein did... Released in '92, it showed where computer graphics were going. And none of Commodore's Amiga offerings came close to it... The then 7 year old Amiga architecture was useless for that type of game and game developers knew it. Software quality declined, sales of Amigas declined... Doom was released, the Amiga had no hope by then... The ball was already rolling... Commodore folds, end of story.

The Amiga 3D games i thought were far better than wolfenstein, but you needed and '030 to do them justice.  Gloom and AB3D are pretty good technical achievements for a computer with no 3D hardware.

People soemtimes forget that the Amiga architecture was not designed to make games where the CPU had to be so intimatley involved with the display.  Most games that were in vogue when the A1200 was release were 2D, and the architecture was great for smooth scrolling, parallax etc, where the custom chips handled everything

[gertsy]

Doom didn't kill the Amiga, Wolfenstein did... Released in '92, it showed where computer graphics were going. And none of Commodore's Amiga offerings came close to it... The then 7 year old Amiga architecture was useless for that type of game and game developers knew it. Software quality declined, sales of Amigas declined... Doom was released, the Amiga had no hope by then... The ball was already rolling... Commodore folds, end of story.

Agree Bloodline. There was a race game using the same technology at the same time, can't remember what it was called. But people were taking notice. Even with AGA, Amiga technology was essentially the same as it was 7 years earlier with the affordable Amiga machine only being a few times faster than the original 1000, GFX speed included. a 386 66 or 486 33 Blew it out of the water when it came to graphics crunching.

Sad but true.

gertsy

[Tempest]

Doom didn't kill the Amiga, Wolfenstein did... Released in '92, it showed where computer graphics were going. And none of Commodore's Amiga offerings came close to it... The then 7 year old Amiga architecture was useless for that type of game and game developers knew it. Software quality declined, sales of Amigas declined... Doom was released, the Amiga had no hope by then... The ball was already rolling... Commodore folds, end of story.

@bloodline
You're right, Wolfestein3D was the first game that marked the decline of the Amiga. It was the first PC game that made me interested in the PC. I used to play it on the 286 bridgeboard in my Amiga 2000, before that I mainly used the bridgeboard to decrypt Skychannel. By the time Doom was released none of my friends where using an Amiga anymore.

@all
And what about the X68000? It was released in 1987 and had much better looking games than the Amiga, more colors (65536), more sprites (128) on screen. It also made use of many custom chips. Just search for X68000 on youtube and compare that to the Amiga games of that time. The games where really arcade perfect conversions.

It had no impact on the Amiga because it was only available in Japan. If this computer would have been released in Europe I probably would have dumped my Amiga and bought an X68000.

[Karlos]

Software quality declined, sales of Amigas declined... Doom was released, the Amiga had no hope by then... The ball was already rolling... Commodore folds, end of story.

Yet, in truth, neither game has ever been beyond the reach of a modestly expanded amiga.

I always found it highly ironic that the Amiga got an official Quake port (and an unofficial one prior to that) long before Doom became available for it.

[bloodline]

Yet, in truth, neither game has ever been beyond the reach of a modestly expanded amiga.

I always found it highly ironic that the Amiga got an official Quake port (and an unofficial one prior to that) long before Doom became available for it.

Which is the problem. Commodore didn't produce a base machine that parents could go into a shop and buy, give to their child for Christmas that could run the new 3D games... The playstation et al came along and finished off the Amiga for good.

[scuzzb494]

As with everything else, there's a lot of "common knowledge" about the amiga, that I don't think holds up to proper scrutiny. Feel free to correct me though!


Common knowledge: The amiga wasn't powerful enough as a gaming machine anymore

Why it's wrong: Sure, the 68000 with 1 meg of RAM wasn't cutting it in 94 anymore. But then, we had 68060 processor cards, RTG video cards, loads of RAM etc available.
It's a travesty that virtual no games ever took advantage of this equipment but that's a shortfall of the developers, not the machine itself.

Common knowledge: Doom killed the amiga

Why it's wrong: Doom was released in December of 93. Commodore declared bankruptcy in April 94. There's plain not enough time for an entire platform to go from doing well to dying off, based on one game in about 4 months. (Doom was massively important in fuelling the PC as a valid games platform, but that's an entirely different story)

Common knowledge: You had to swap disks constantly

Why it's wrong: Yeah, psygnosis had a unreasoning fear of the external disk drive, but most games supported multiple drives (could DOS even do this without installing to a hard drive?) and virtually every large game had a hard drive installer. WHDload of course changed that game as well



Corrections or disagreements?
"common knowledge" of your own?

You say wasn`t and anymore... Do you mean in 1994 it wasn`t a gaming machine anymore cus that is totally bogus. The Amiga gaming world died cus developers gave up on the platform. The last real game for me on the Amiga was Speris Legacy which was a total flop. I caved and got a PS1 in the end. From 1993 to 1996 though we still had a healthy batch of games and they all worked brilliant on a bog standard 1200. Games like Worms, Sensible World of Soccer, Settlers, Alien Breed, etc etc.

Trouble was the gaming world was moving over to CD and the Amiga just couldn`t get that on the A1200 in time. So the PS1 took over. If you have ever played a game on the PS1 of the period and then loaded a floppy game you wouldn`t want to use the Amiga as a games console. FIFA on the Amiga was the killer by the way not DOOM.

There were a whole load of DOOM clones post 1993, and most were absorbed into a post Commodore world and they were pretty playable. But yes the Amiga just couldn`t compete cus the developers abandoned the Amiga. They were making games for the PS1 and PC. Games like Duke Nukem were never going to work on the Amiga... It failed because of development rejection. I lived in Game at that time in the UK and the Amiga section just evaporated in a matter of months, let alone years. By 1996 it was dead... Escom had been and gone and that was that.

I got a PC to play Civilisation, Duke Nukem, Doom etc and then a PS1 to play Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy. Still played Sensible World of Soccer, Valhalla, Worms, Settlers etc on the Amiga, but sadly I just got annoyed with SimCity being so slow which I loved...

My Amiga 1200 basically always had all the classic games on HD. In fact the hard drive capacity grew as my games drawers grew. Games like Ishar, Settlers, Star Trek, Beneath a Steel Sky, SimCity etc just loaded from the HD. I even had hard drive installers for Sensi Soccer. There were one or two oddities that used the floppy more for a games piracy issues to validate.. Games like Kingpin for example. I generally only played from HD.

Most serious Amiga gamers got an A1200 or an A600. Gaming is about progression so your not gonna get lumbered with an A500 if your mates have an A1200. Same goes today, so anyone suggesting folk were stuck on the 500 were not part of the serious gaming world. Trouble is the industry was moving on. The CD32 tried but failed at the critical time Commodore went bust. The developers were generally loyal till around 1995. the last real game series for the Amiga of any worth was by Vulcan called Valhalla. God bless those guys cus they fought like mad for the Amiga...

Commodore failed and the rest just jumped in.

Sad

scuzz

[ElPolloDiabl]

But, do you remember going into the computer store and the walls were chock full of games, mostly Amiga games. Nowadays half the shelf space is for console accessories and the games offerings are limited to new releases or budget re-releases of the big titles.
I miss the good ol days.

[Khephren]

It's not 3D that ruined their creativity, it's all the buyouts and takeovers. They can't make challenging games because occasional gamers will not buy the game. They make them mouse driven so people without a joystick can play.

Take an RTS if you play online both sides build up a small army and rush each other. The game lasts less then 2 minutes. There is no variation to this type of play. The only stand out to this Starcraft, it was designed a lot better and you can get long games happening.

More and more effort is put into 'looks'. I'm sure it impresses the execs who control the budget. You simply won't get the same quality of games nowadays unless it is done by a small developer.

It's all to do with the price of development, each new generation of console requires between one third and one half extra staff, and also extra development time, yet the cost of a game at retail, and the profit made, have not gone up anywhere near as much.

So it takes a massive investment to create a AAA product, which only the biggest can manage. Hence all the mergers and lack of risk taking. Lots of games make no money at all.

To my mind, the really creative stuff is happening on the console indie market, and PC flash and java games. They can afford to take a few more risks there.

As for the demise of the Amiga market...before I got into game dev, I worked in games retail, and many Amiga owners came in asking if Wolfenstein, wing commander, Ultima Underworld, and eye of the beholder 3 were coming out on the Amiga.
     Another problem was PC versions being better: such as Frontier Elite 2 being texture mapped, A lot of adventure games being talkies, and having more colours, with less disk swapping etc.

Also, being squeezed by the console at the low end.

Looking back, I think the A500+ wasn't enough of a step up, and nor was (my baby!) the A1200.

[NorthWay]

Doom didn't kill the Amiga, Wolfenstein did...

Couldn't agree more.

When I saw Wolfenstein that was the first time I knew my Amiga couldn't match it.

Didn't matter that I thought it was a bad game (and I think so about Doom too btw), but PC owners were lapping it up like it was delivered by the proverbial Jobs himself. Even more so with Doom. And suddenly pseudo-3D was the only thing that counted and PC gaming was cool.

A case of brute force winning over elegance and finesse. 50fps has been dead ever since. I guess we have to be happy that it lasted as long as it did.

[Moto]

Wolf-3d was cool but it was Doom that gave us multiplayer over a LAN.  That totally redefined gaming for me.  Getting the initial DOS networking set up in those days was black magic.

[AmigaNG]

Common knowledge:  The amiga is dead.

Why it's wrong: Were still here!!