Common amiga knowledge that's wrong

[AmigaNG]

Common knowledge:  The amiga is dead.

Why it's wrong: Were still here!!

[desiv]

Doom didn't kill the Amiga, Wolfenstein did... Released in '92, it showed where computer graphics were going.

Of course, that's why all the game devs started making Wolf 3D clones..

Except, they didn't..  The market follows success, and Wolf 3D was a moderate success and had some moderate followings.
So did Myst released a bit after that (and 7th Guest a bit before, I believe).  All were possible directions at the time..

The market isn't looking for the "next great technology", as Wolf 3D was. (or so people think and the world followed..)
The market is looking for the last huge success, as Doom was.

Doom took it to another level that the market jumped all over.

That said, I still think the Amiga was dying for "bad business" reasons before that.  It just lined up like that.  By the time the doom-alikes were gaining steam, Commodore was already dying, not because..

IMHO..

desiv

[Tomas]

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

Actually most games did not have any HD installer even if it came on 10 floppies. The reason for this was because most games was not system friendly at all and had their own bootloader that bypassed amigaos afaik.

The a1200 and a4000 should have had a cdrom drive by default in my opinion. PC's that came out at that time all had cdrom.

[koaftder]

Actually most games did not have any HD installer even if it came on 10 floppies. The reason for this was because most games was not system friendly at all and had their own bootloader that bypassed amigaos afaik.

The a1200 and a4000 should have had a cdrom drive by default in my opinion. PC's that came out at that time all had cdrom.

I remember back in like 1993 getting a sound blaster pro and scsi single speed caddy CDROM drive for the 386 at the time and it was expensive as hell. There would have been no way to sell an a1200 when it came out for a reasonable price with a cdrom. Back then we were all pimping walkmans and rocking cassette tapes, cd players were for folks with money.

[desiv]

Actually most games did not have any HD installer even if it came on 10 floppies.

Oh?  :confused:
Which 10 floppy game was that?  

I know Dragon's Lair (which was an early many floppy game) had 6 disks and couldn't be installed on a HD.  (Wasn't there something about installing it onto a bernoulli(sp?) disk or something?)
However, by the time Escape from Singe's Castle came out, more people had HDs and that let you install it AND Dragon's Lair to your HD.   (And multitasked btw.. nice bit of code there..)

The largest game I remember was Willy Beamish, and it definitely let you install to HD.

desiv

[Kronos]

WTF ??

Audio-CD-players were cheap, portables not (but you wouldn't need them for an PC)

CDTV was a bit overpriced, CD32 (released in 93) were cheap.
SCSI was never cheap.
CD-ROMs with bastardized IDE interface (like the early Mitsumis) were affordable, ordering and building them into an A1200CD in masses would have driven the prices down.

A naked A1200 (without HD) was 800DM, adding a CD as standard would still have kept the price below 1000DM, way lower than the A500 when it was introduced (1400DM afaik).

[scuzzb494]

Actually most games did not have any HD installer even if it came on 10 floppies. The reason for this was because most games was not system friendly at all and had their own bootloader that bypassed amigaos afaik.

The a1200 and a4000 should have had a cdrom drive by default in my opinion. PC's that came out at that time all had cdrom.

Actually not true on both counts... Most games of a reasonable size post 93  had installers... Hired Guns, Star Trek, Beneath a Steel Sky, Settlers, Ishar, SimCity 2000, Valhalla. Even A500 games had them.. Blade of Destiny, Eye of the Beholder, Wing Commander ... I have boxes and boxes of them. Some were just a drag and drop and some came with decrunch processes like Star Trek.

As to CD drives.. I was working in an office in 1995 trying to save for a ZIP drive and the Win 3.1 machines were just getting single speed CD drives. The Amiga drives not of the A500 sidecar type were pretty crap [ like the Zappo 'thinks' ] , and there was much talk of faster speeds. Don`t forget that the CD sidecar for the A1200 was just a deconstructed CD32. And there were CD32 games. Win 95 brought the internet and CD to the masses and thats what finally clobbered the Amiga into the dust.

Games were still generally DOS based up to then like Duke Nukem. By 1996 the PC came of age though the PS1 type console was about to take the cake from the tin cans.

Had Commodore survived, the CD sidecar for the A1200 would have been a reality followed closely by internet as standard. Then Win95 would have probably been a year behind the Amiga.

..... and by the way... ' I have been searching for a certain artifact ' Guess what. Its on the website. Never find one though.

scuzz
http://www.commodore-amiga-retro.com

[koaftder]

A lot of this has to do with what era of the Amiga we spent most of our time in. In the early days, we didn't have harddrives and everything was on floppies. Back in the day, I never had a harddrive for my A1K, it was only until after 2003 untill I got my hands on a more capable amiga.

[Hell Labs]

..... and by the way... ' I have been searching for a certain artifact ' Guess what. Its on the website. Never find one though.

the commodore made 1200 cdrom drive? The one that looks like a cd32 with bits sawn off?

[runequester]

So a bit of numbers and analysis:

Searching for releases by year on lemonamiga, I show the following releases by year

1988 - 358 games
1989 - 495 games
1990 - 488 games
1991 - 485 games
1992 - 370 games
1993 - 295 games
1994 - 306 games
1995 - 186 games
1996 - 92 games

If there were multiple versions (OCS, AGA, CD32) they'd be counted multiple times, but that's not an awful large amount.

So amiga game publishing picks up in 89, then tapers off in 92, stays steady until 95, the year after Commodore's bankruptcy and pretty dies by 96 as we know.

If we look at "games per day", we go from 1.3 at the height to 0.8 in 94 (doom is out, and no more amigas being built)

1995, the playstation is out (when did this really become common in Europe?), Escom is selling 1200's for more than Commodore had in 93 and the games start disappearing.

Even then, you'd still have a new game every second day

[runequester]

Actually most games did not have any HD installer even if it came on 10 floppies. The reason for this was because most games was not system friendly at all and had their own bootloader that bypassed amigaos afaik.

The a1200 and a4000 should have had a cdrom drive by default in my opinion. PC's that came out at that time all had cdrom.

Im hard pressed to think of a game on more than 5 floppies that were not hard drive installable. Examples ?

[koaftder]

WTF ??

Audio-CD-players were cheap, portables not (but you wouldn't need them for an PC)

CDTV was a bit overpriced, CD32 (released in 93) were cheap.
SCSI was never cheap.
CD-ROMs with bastardized IDE interface (like the early Mitsumis) were affordable, ordering and building them into an A1200CD in masses would have driven the prices down.

A naked A1200 (without HD) was 800DM, adding a CD as standard would still have kept the price below 1000DM, way lower than the A500 when it was introduced (1400DM afaik).

CDROM or CD-Players cheap in 93? No way dude. I couldn't afford that crap back then. I worked two months at taco bell to get my single speed CDROM/ sb pro combo. Thems were the days. Two years years earlier 1mb 32 pin sims cost $100 a piece. I like the hardware prices today.

[desiv]

CDROM or CD-Players cheap in 93? No way dude. I couldn't afford that crap back then. I worked two months at taco bell to get my single speed CDROM/ sb pro combo. Thems were the days. Two years years earlier 1mb 32 pin sims cost $100 a piece. I like the hardware prices today.

True, I can't remember how much it cost, but I remember my first 1x CDROM.
I remember I played a lot of Gobliiins with that.  :-)
Also, later, I played a lot of 7th Guest.  Loved the puzzles, although my 1X never synced audio quite right, but it was close enough. :-)

I still maintain, it wasn't CDRoms or Doom that killed the Amiga, it was Commodore.

Runequester's numbers show that the number of games was still increasing until CBM called it quits..

Now, you can argue what might have happened had a strong Commodore been around to battle the Doom variants.  
Would the world have been happy with better 2D games?
Would some type of cheaper accessory/AAA chipset allowed the Amiga line to keep up?
Would people have just ponied up more money to upgrade Amigas to play 3D type games (as Mac users with Marathon and the like)?

Who knows...

desiv

[Pentad]

Doom didn't kill the Amiga, Wolfenstein did

I've read where a number of people are referencing Doom but the truth is that Wolf3D set everything into motion.

I remember seeing that game and *knowing* that was the future of gaming.  Just like the first time I saw the Amiga in 1985 and knowing multitasking was the future.

Wolf3D put multiple companies/games into 3D mode and look how many games started to come out after that.  Doom did give us LAN ability and Quake tied it all together with real 3D but Wolf set the stage.

I remember thinking -at the time- that I wished the Amiga could do Chunky Pixel easily given how cool these games were.

-P

[quarkx]

I still maintain, it wasn't CDRoms or Doom that killed the Amiga, it was Commodore.

desiv

I 100% agree. If you read the book "on the Edge", you will see that after Jack left, there was really no leadership at all at Commodore. All the top brass at Commodore were so busy milking every last cent out of it, the Amiga was kind of doomed from the start. If they were at all watching the market, and the engineer's had put out what they wanted to, the Amiga may have had a chance. Anyone at that time could see that CD-Roms were the future, and if Hombre had ever got out, there would be no debate over graphics (remember HP wanted to use Hombre in their High end workstations also). So, one can say that a collaboration with HP could have resulted in a totally different situation, mix it the fact that Epson wanted to market the Amiga in Japan, but Ali, messed it up TWICE (I believe it was EPSON) after it was suposibly a done deal, shows just how much Commodore's "Higher Ups" went out of their way to kill it.

[scuzzb494]

the commodore made 1200 cdrom drive? The one that looks like a cd32 with bits sawn off?

There use to be a link on Ian's Big Book of Hardware [ not the new site ] to a site where a guy had pictures of one. I could never work out whether it was just the case from the description. It was black. There was much hype in Amiga Format at the time, and it kinda made me hang on in there. There was a problem with them cus they used the trapdoor slot if I recall. All the same I so wanted one.

PS: Do you know where the line ' I have been searching for a certain artifact ' comes from ?

scuzz
http://www.commodore-amiga-retro.com