3 days of hardcore amiga gaming lead me to think....

[Amiga_Nut]

This was always the issue with the Amiga and CPU upgrades due to the whole Amiga custom chips.

Crap scrolling and slow fighters on Street Fighter 2 on MS DOS playing on your 386? Get a 486DX and everything magically improves to arcade levels of quality. On Amiga you can load up US Gold's SF2 conversion on an 060 you spent £750 on and it will still be mildly better than a £299 ST.

I also started a thread about a year ago about why the hell was Amiga basically given such bad coin-op conversions. The Amiga is capable of something close to Sonic if you look at Kid Chaos, ditto Outrun and Lotus II, Shadow Fighters and SF2 etc etc.

It is quite sad looking back just how bad many conversions were and the best software was mostly original arcade games not arcade conversions. Luckily there were 1000s of games and there are plenty that will make your jaw drop.

Add to that there were plenty of more intellectual games like the Magnetic Scrolls adventures which were just pure class and superior to the PC versions If it was out on OCS/ECS then PC version would be EGA = PANTS! :roflmao:

[Franko]

This was always the issue with the Amiga and CPU upgrades due to the whole Amiga custom chips.

Crap scrolling and slow fighters on Street Fighter 2 on MS DOS playing on your 386? Get a 486DX and everything magically improves to arcade levels of quality. On Amiga you can load up US Gold's SF2 conversion on an 060 you spent £750 on and it will still be mildly better than a £299 ST.

I also started a thread about a year ago about why the hell was Amiga basically given such bad coin-op conversions. The Amiga is capable of something close to Sonic if you look at Kid Chaos, ditto Outrun and Lotus II, Shadow Fighters and SF2 etc etc.

It is quite sad looking back just how bad many conversions were and the best software was mostly original arcade games not arcade conversions. Luckily there were 1000s of games and there are plenty that will make your jaw drop.

Add to that there were plenty of more intellectual games like the Magnetic Scrolls adventures which were just pure class and superior to the PC versions If it was out on OCS/ECS then PC version would be EGA = PANTS! :roflmao:

It's not really the upgraded processor nor the custom chips that were at fault it was more down to sloppy/ lazy conversions by the software houses in order to release the latest titles on the Amiga back in its heyday in my honest opinion...

Way back at the start of it all (the A1000 era)  it was more down to the programmers not yet understanding just what the Amiga was capable of or having yet discovered the secrets of the machine. Take some of the very first games for the Amiga "The Feary Tale Adventure", one of the best games ever written for the Amiga IMO, for it's time brilliant gfx/ music & concept but let down by some badly written scrolling routines and a simple case of the programmer not yet having discovered quite how to programme the Amiga to it's best yet...

While I was never a big fan of the beat-em-up style games, to me it was a simple case of checking them out first before actually buying the things, if it was badly coded and played like a dog the answer was simple, I wouldn't buy it just because the gfx looked good...

I could never see the the point in paying around £25 for a game that had been badly converted/ported or rushed out by the software houses in order to grab their share of the market. Games like the Lotus Trilogy , Pinball Dreams/ Fantasies etc... are prime examples of just what could be achieved on the Amiga by good programmers and those were indeed worth every penny paid for them...

[fishy_fiz]

I agree mostly with you there Franko. Although to elaborate even further the amiga was in the unfortunate position of having only 3rd party developers, plus not being an eastern based machine. The vast majority of arcade games where developed by asian developers who would more often than not help sega/nintendo/whoever with sourcecode, gfx and sound for conversions to thier machines. This seldom happened with amiga conversions. Three exceptions I know of (there's probably others) are Ghosts And Goblins, Shadow Warriors and Toki. All 3 of which were very good conversions (coincidence ?).

[stefcep2]

Well I actually bought my first Amiga (A500) thinking I would play plenty of cheap and easy to get games compared to expensive SNES cartridges.

Hardly actually played any, once I bought my first Amiga mag (Amiga Format with Real 3D and that silver 3D head cover).  And then amazing app after amazing app followed for free on yet more cover cd's.  Games on the Amiga?  What were they?  Too busy rendering, getting the most from DPaint, Scala, PPaint, ImageFX, Photogenics, Wordworth, Imagine, Drawstudio, Cinema 4D, Shapeshifter (Photoshop, MS Office 6, Quark).  This is what made me upgrade the A500 with a GVP '030, then A1200 with '030, A1200 with '040, then A4000 with '060 and CV64, and later upgraded the A1200 '040 to an '60.  None of these upgrades made any sense to play games, but the apps sure were motivation enough for me.

[Amiga_Nut]

It's not really the upgraded processor nor the custom chips that were at fault it was more down to sloppy/ lazy conversions by the software houses in order to release the latest titles on the Amiga back in its heyday in my honest opinion...

Way back at the start of it all (the A1000 era)  it was more down to the programmers not yet understanding just what the Amiga was capable of or having yet discovered the secrets of the machine. Take some of the very first games for the Amiga "The Feary Tale Adventure", one of the best games ever written for the Amiga IMO, for it's time brilliant gfx/ music & concept but let down by some badly written scrolling routines and a simple case of the programmer not yet having discovered quite how to programme the Amiga to it's best yet...

While I was never a big fan of the beat-em-up style games, to me it was a simple case of checking them out first before actually buying the things, if it was badly coded and played like a dog the answer was simple, I wouldn't buy it just because the gfx looked good...

And yes it is 100% down to the programmers, the Japanese did even better things with the even more complex/restricting Sharp X68000 so it's a western world greed based thing not a lack of coding talent at the time. Blame the software houses and blame the ST (where too much of the code design came from for 99% of conversions)

I could never see the the point in paying around £25 for a game that had been badly converted/ported or rushed out by the software houses in order to grab their share of the market. Games like the Lotus Trilogy , Pinball Dreams/ Fantasies etc... are prime examples of just what could be achieved on the Amiga by good programmers and those were indeed worth every penny paid for them...

The point was Amiga users get zero benefit from paying more for £/performance on their CPU upgrades on all but the most basic 3D polygon games. PC users got a boost in quality with every machine/CPU upgrade regardless of if it was Zool/SF2 etc etc that's all.

And if SF2 is ported badly it doesn't matter whether I buy it or not for Amiga, the point is it was coded terribly and I can't play it without buying a SNES/Megadrive/3DO which all had excellent versions etc. And in the end that means I abandon Amiga theoretically and the Amiga brand is diminished to a minority platform where even worse games by rubbish programmers are released (witness the downturn in quality of Amiga games in the mid 90s as the best programmers 'moved on' to PC and consoles). Ditto Lotus II is a great game but also would be nice if Outrun which is very playable was done right.

The Amiga is great, the hardware is way ahead of it's time but the games were rarely up to the standard of what is technically achievable. TFF Shadow of the Beast in 512k.

[Amiga_Nut]

Well I actually bought my first Amiga (A500) thinking I would play plenty of cheap and easy to get games compared to expensive SNES cartridges.

Hardly actually played any, once I bought my first Amiga mag (Amiga Format with Real 3D and that silver 3D head cover).  And then amazing app after amazing app followed for free on yet more cover cd's.  Games on the Amiga?  What were they?  Too busy rendering, getting the most from DPaint, Scala, PPaint, ImageFX, Photogenics, Wordworth, Imagine, Drawstudio, Cinema 4D, Shapeshifter (Photoshop, MS Office 6, Quark).  This is what made me upgrade the A500 with a GVP '030, then A1200 with '030, A1200 with '040, then A4000 with '060 and CV64, and later upgraded the A1200 '040 to an '60.  None of these upgrades made any sense to play games, but the apps sure were motivation enough for me.

I hear you, I spent a lot of time doing creative things too on Dpaint and Digi-view and samplers for MOD instruments etc. It is fantastic I agree and Amiga did it best in the 80s. But I do like games too.

[Franko]

The point was Amiga users get zero benefit from paying more for £/performance on their CPU upgrades on all but the most basic 3D polygon games. PC users got a boost in quality with every machine/CPU upgrade regardless of if it was Zool/SF2 etc etc that's all.

I never saw the Amiga as a "games machine" I've always seen it as a computer that allowed you to do more creative things like music/ graphics/ videos/ D.T.P etc..., in an environment that was far more user friendly than PCs or Macs had to offer at the time (and still is for me to this very day)...

So to me the need and usefulness of expanding the Amiga to it's max was and still is always a priority (regardless of cost), games to me were really just a side benefit of owning such a great machine and never played a part in my choice to upgrade my Amigas...

[ChaosLord]

The point was Amiga users get zero benefit from paying more for £/performance on their CPU upgrades on all but the most basic 3D polygon games.

There are plenty of Amiga 2D games that benefit from a faster CPU.

[motrucker]

I was always partial to Alien Bash 2.

This was/is an excellent game! No doubt the best free game ever. I still have a copy that sees much use.
Others along this line, such as Chaos Engine are also damn good.
It's almost like the Amiga was a test bed for gaming ideas. Who would ever have thought It came from the Desert  (or other Cinemaware titles) would have caught on. They are odd games to say the least - but excellent!
It's frustrating how hard it is to find some old Amiga games.

[Dandy]

I never saw the Amiga as a "games machine" I've always seen it as a computer that allowed you to do more creative things like music/ graphics/ videos/ D.T.P etc..., in an environment that was far more user friendly than PCs or Macs had to offer at the time (and still is for me to this very day)...

So to me the need and usefulness of expanding the Amiga to it's max was and still is always a priority (regardless of cost), games to me were really just a side benefit of owning such a great machine and never played a part in my choice to upgrade my Amigas...

I agree wholeheartedly...

[Amiga_Nut]

Commodore would have gone bust a lot quicker if there were no decent games for the Amiga and A500 was never dropped to £399. It's that simple. Dpaint sold a lot of machines, Cinemaware sold a lot more though.

Amiga was the best of both sides, which was the reason the A1000 was the best machine in the world you could buy. Best creative, corporate and leisure software running on the best desktop OS.

I think we are getting off topic though, why were games like Lotus II technically so good and yet all the driving game coin-op conversions barely acceptable at best and downright crap at worst. Greed is the answer greed and incompetence with people like US Gold and Ocean.

PS I would like to see which arcade style games improved with a CPU upgrade.

[fishy_fiz]

Actually in some ways I think that's actually quite relevant. Part of the "problem" in my opinion is that the Amiga was so impressive for it's day with the default/cheap configurations that I think people expected it to just keep shining without the need to upgrade this "magical beast". To a degree the exception to this idea I guess is applications, where people who had heavy type software requirements become well aware of the need for more grunt. Again though for it's day the Amiga also had some real standout applications that ran on "default" type machines, so apart from small niches there was never an upgrade type mentality. This of course changed with time, but unfortunately a little too late, as other options had caught up and in some ways surpassed the "glitz" the a500 and so on could provide so the big commercial developers mostly went sniffing where the buzz/money had gone. The lowest common denominator spec wise eventually grew, but there was simply no real money to spend the time/money/effort required to make games to take advantage of the superior hardware.

In some ways the Amiga being so far ahead when it was introduced was a bit of a curse, people simply expected it to do it all because theyd never seen a machine do things it could do.

[DavidF215]

@fishy_fiz (Original post)

Maybe you're comparing old Amiga games to modern games. It's hard for me to play some of the old games (on any platform) because they seem so simple and boring now compared to what games are like today. The games were great when I played them at the time, but time aged them.

I liked ProjectX. It was a good classic scroller arcade with good, smooth graphics. Then I discovered BlitzBasic, and I got addicted to coding.

[stefcep2]

Commodore would have gone bust a lot quicker if there were no decent games for the Amiga and A500 was never dropped to £399. It's that simple. Dpaint sold a lot of machines, Cinemaware sold a lot more though.

Amiga was the best of both sides, which was the reason the A1000 was the best machine in the world you could buy. Best creative, corporate and leisure software running on the best desktop OS.

I think we are getting off topic though, why were games like Lotus II technically so good and yet all the driving game coin-op conversions barely acceptable at best and downright crap at worst. Greed is the answer greed and incompetence with people like US Gold and Ocean.

PS I would like to see which arcade style games improved with a CPU upgrade.

One racing game that benefits from a faster cpu is Nigel Mansell World Championship.  I only noticed that when I tried to play it on a 1meg A500.  The frame rate dropped a lot compared to the 68040 A1200 I was running it on.  I have this game on the SNES as well, and the Amiga version on a faster CPU is smoother, has better parallax scrolling, and more background details, and better sound.  It really is an under-rated racing game on the Amiga.  Its my favourite Amiga racer.

[fishy_fiz]

@DavidF215

Im sure part of it is that, but some games stand the test of time, and I was surprised to see so many amiga games dated badly. By comparison I think a lot of games on the c64 (for example) stood the test of time a little better. Perhaps Im judging a little more harshly against the amiga being that I know what it's capable of in the right hands (which is also true of the c64, but the gap between best and worst doesnt stand out as much these days on the c64.)
I still think the amiga has plenty of good games, but on the whole I was a little underwhelmed. I think as much as anything I was hoping to find some games that are more of a match for an upgraded AGA machine (even though I sort of knew there wasnt a lot) and that played a big part in my being a bit underwhelmed.

At the end of the day I dont think it matters too much. By sheer weight of numbers there's still more than enough good stuff to keep a person entertained for a long, long time, and the classic amigas are still, and probably always will be my favorite computers