I now have time to answer this.
Games like Kid Chaos and some of the stuff in Mr. Nutz (for 2 examples) show quite clearly that an aga machine would be capable of Sonic, especially being that theyre only ocs/ecs games and have similar speed scrolling with lots of parallax (more than sonic).
..and animated backgrounds and foregrounds (not only by palette cycling), tons of animated pickups, 15 ring sprites bouncing around? Did you ever consider these technicalities when playing Sonic? Most of them are made possible with that humble CPU by using a tile-based graphics mode with 80 (?) discrete sprites.
While conversions where often better for the megadrive, when the amiga was used properly it's a superior experience in my opinion.
I respect your opinion but I think that it's biased. So is mine, probably, so let's stick to technicalities, shall we?
Movement is usually somewhat slicker in a well coded amiga game and sound is superior
Usually slicker? Most Mega Drive games run at full framerate AFAIK, just like Amiga games. If you're talking about character movement, I can only disagree with you and laugh.
Sword of Sodan was infinately better on the amiga for example,.. sprites had to be shrunk for the megadrive version due to technical restrictions,..... just one example of a decently made amiga game.
Wow, a single game port is better pulled off on the Amiga than on the Mega Drive... Just goes to prove your point, eh?
As for being "crippled" by the amigas hardware, it's hardware is what it's hardware is.
Did you bother reading the whole message? The Amiga displays 8 3-color sprites without help from the copper. I'm not saying that it's impossible to display more (or even particularly hard), but to quickly move around a lot of sprites on the screen requires either careful copper programming or fake BOB sprites, as far as I understand, which by comparison to the Mega Drive (where you have a whole bunch of colorful sprites, all with according x/y registers) is a lot of work (and in the case of BOBs, also CPU hogging). I'm not saying that the chipset is crippled, but
developers are crippled by it if they try at more sprites. Time and effort spent simply putting things on the screen could be used to develop better games.
To get the best results out of it you have to program specifically for it, buch like any machine. Would you begrudge a megadrive game developer for using its sprites and other custom hardware ?
No, why would I? Of course you have to program according to the specifications of the machine, and in that regard, the Mega Drive is far superior when it comes to tile-based action games like Kid Chaos and Sonic.
It's hardly crippling and inflexible either,... the very nature of the amigas custom hardware makes it flexible and no-one can really say what it can and cant do due to that flexibility.
Again, I get the feeling that you didn't read most of what I wrote. I never said that the hardware is inflexible. I said that parallax scrolling layers, when pulled off on the Amiga at a decent enough speed to run a game engine on top, it's usually very inflexible (as evident from Kid Chaos, where it's just a very narrow repeating background pattern divided in vertical strips that scroll at different speed) I agree with you that OCS, ECS and AGA are all
very flexible -- and that is their strength. The Mega Drive has very specific-purpose hardware which makes it better for scrolling tile-based games (which were quite a big share of the game market in the early 90s). AGA surpasses it in many other areas (for example you can have multiple transparent playfields simply by the bitplane paradigm, although you still have to copy a lot of data around to scroll them about), but for this type of game it's comparably awkward.
My original point -- you won't be able to port Sonic 2 to a stock A1200 -- can only be disproved in one way (and boy, do I hope someone does).
