Am I the only one who doesn't hate AGA?

[runequester]

It's funny. I realize that we probably needed something more like super VGA, and it'd have been nice if we had gotten a more significant upgrade than what AGA was.
And we've all wondered about the AA prototype stuff Haynie showed in the Deathbed Vigil video.


But am I the only person on the planet, who doesn't think AGA was all that bad?

People sing the praises of VGA, but when I grew up, rather than in hindsight, plenty of VGA games looked similar or worse than even OCS/ECS games, let alone AGA. Games like Virocop and Banshee looked amazing, compared to similar offerings on the PC.

Sure, FPS games didn't run so good, but how much of that was processing power? When I see videos of people running Doom on an 040 it runs pretty slick. Memory glosses things over, but Doom was pretty choppy on a 386 back in the day. There's a few videos on youtube to remind you.


So eh. I know it's one of those things where you are supposed to hate it, but I think AGA was pretty cool

[Kesa]

For me it's a matter of worshipping mediocrity. I seem to find that really hard to do. Everytime i think about AGA all i can wonder is what could have been and what they gave us :rolleyes:

I agree that Banshee was amazing to look at and i also agree that the AGA games looked better than our IBM counterparts. My friend showed me what he thought was amazing graphics - Prince of persia. It was crap!      :confused:

OK i know this might be more PC vs ECS/OCS and not AGA but i still think this is relevant to your point. Games always looked better on Amiga's than on PCs. Personally i think the beige box is partly responsible. Ugly looking case ugly graphics period.

But i disagree that Doom looked good because it didn't. I hate the fuzzy pixels and i hate the chunky looking feel of the game. Even today with Freedom i feel this way. There were far superior looking games than Doom. Please note i'm talking about the graphics not the gameplay. Doom is ugly.

I agree with you that AGA is good despite it's shortcomings in that i appreciate the Amiga's uniqueness compared to everyone else.

[commodorejohn]

I don't hate it, though I do think that 8bpp is the point where planar bitmaps become officially Not Worth It. My problem with AGA is less with the thing itself and more with the way it's become the de facto minimum standard for most Amiga homebrew - some of us don't have an AGA machine, durnit!

[runequester]

For me it's a matter of worshipping mediocrity. I seem to find that really hard to do. Everytime i think about AGA all i can wonder is what could have been and what they gave us :rolleyes:

I agree that Banshee was amazing to look at and i also agree that the AGA games looked better than our IBM counterparts. My friend showed me what he thought was amazing graphics - Prince of persia. It was crap!      :confused:

OK i know this might be more PC vs ECS/OCS and not AGA but i still think this is relevant to your point. Games always looked better on Amiga's than on PCs. Personally i think the beige box is partly responsible. Ugly looking case ugly graphics period.

But i disagree that Doom looked good because it didn't. I hate the fuzzy pixels and i hate the chunky looking feel of the game. Even today with Freedom i feel this way. There were far superior looking games than Doom. Please note i'm talking about the graphics not the gameplay. Doom is ugly.

I agree with you that AGA is good despite it's shortcomings in that i appreciate the Amiga's uniqueness compared to everyone else.

yeah, Doom did look fuzzy. What I meant was more in regards to speed. I personally think Breathless looked as good, if not better, though it required equivalent gear to run.

A lot of people get fussed over "You need an expensive amiga to run Doom!"
My original PC ran Doom okay'ish and cost some 1500 US dollars in the very late 90's. Thats pretty damn expensive


I think we're on the same page though. It could have been a ton more than it was, but what it was wasn't a bad thing. Given Commodore's self-destruction at the time, I guess we were lucky we actually got a new graphics chip at all :madashell:

[Kesa]

I don't hate it, though I do think that 8bpp is the point where planar bitmaps become officially Not Worth It. My problem with AGA is less with the thing itself and more with the way it's become the de facto minimum standard for most Amiga homebrew - some of us don't have an AGA machine, durnit!

Really?

According to the poll "Choose your main / most used Amiga" 50% of us use AGA based Amiga's as our most used Amiga's     :rtfm:

[motorollin]

I don't hate it in itself, and I think some AGA games look amazing (Ruff 'n' Tumble springs to mind as an example).

I think what a lot of people resent is that it was too little too late, and that AGA was so quickly overtaken by other platforms' graphics hardware with no hope of an update from Commodore

[AndyFC]

I don't hate it.

I was in awe of it when it first came out (I was 15). Yes, it could have been better and we know where corners were cut but that meant it was affordable!

(By comparison, look at modern graphics cards. You can buy the super-duper latest card for £600, or the 'ultra cut down version, don't bother cos it'll be slower than what you already have' for £100 - the only problem with AGA is that we were only given a cost-saving version, not the super duper version.)

[runequester]

I don't hate it.

I was in awe of it when it first came out (I was 15). Yes, it could have been better and we know where corners were cut but that meant it was affordable!

(By comparison, look at modern graphics cards. You can buy the super-duper latest card for £600, or the 'ultra cut down version, don't bother cos it'll be slower than what you already have' for £100 - the only problem with AGA is that we were only given a cost-saving version, not the super duper version.)

Heck, I remember seeing VGA cards for 300+ dollars, and that was after they'd been out for a while.

I remember seeing an old add for the IBM EGA card from 1985 or thereabouts. It was 600 dollars, and you needed a special monitor on top of that

[yssing]

Breathless made my jaw drop and I still love the game.

I think AGA was great, althoug, in the clear light of hinsigt, it did ofcourse have some lacks. But nothing that a scandoubler couldnt fix.

And yes, all this talk about expensive amiga gear, really makes me laugh, sort of, because a great PC also cost an arm and a leg. And especially in the 80/90s.

[motorollin]

Yeah Breathless was amazing. It looked fantastic and ran really fast even on an 030. The only thing I wish is that the enemies weren't all robots. Robots aren't scary

[runequester]

Breathless made my jaw drop and I still love the game.

I think AGA was great, althoug, in the clear light of hinsigt, it did ofcourse have some lacks. But nothing that a scandoubler couldnt fix.

And yes, all this talk about expensive amiga gear, really makes me laugh, sort of, because a great PC also cost an arm and a leg. And especially in the 80/90s.

yeah, our first PC was 1500 dollars, and was shite. A proper "gaming PC" was easily 2000 or more. This was very late 90's

Almost everyone I know who had PC's in the early 90's or late 80's paid 2000+ dollars for their machine, often having to add sound cards (and late 80's sometimes VGA) on top of that cost.

So when people complain that "amiga upgrading was expensive" I tend to laugh. Even if an 030 card was a thousand dollars, you'd still have money left over for software, extra joystick and a printer

People tend to assume that PC's always cost what they do now, where 500 bucks will get you a decent machine.

[yssing]

I wish I could find a level editor for Breathless.. And if the code for it were to be released.. well then...

[Belial6]

I can say that I don't hate AGA, but then I never really met it.  The 600 was the system that put the final nail in the coffin for the Amiga along the Norther coast of California.  Within a couple of months of it's release, I could only find 1 store between San Francisco and the Oregon border that sold anything Amiga.  That was in San Francisco, and it wasn't really a computer store so much as a video production house that happen to sell a little bit of Amiga stuff on the side.

[Franko]

I love AGA, that's why I only have A1200s left in my collection these days, never understood why anyone who went from an A500 to an A1200 wasn't impressed at the time with AGA to me the difference was amazing...

[Xanxi]

AGA is very fine to me.
Fast Workbench in 256 colors with the good patches, good JPEG pictures rendering in HAM6 with Visage, perfect VGA rendering in shapeshifter emulation with MUVED external driver.
All that from a 1993 chipset!
ECS is useless slow crap compared to AGA.
Would be cool though to have more than 2MB of chip RAM.