I got PCTask (2.2 I think - if there ever was such a beast!) so I could play Mechwarrior (the original, programmed by Dynamix and published by Activision). I loooooved me some Battletech and the idea of a 'mech sim was exciting.
I got a copy of MW and fired up PC-Task on my AdSpeed powered A500. Whoa boy, disappointing doesn't even begin to tell the tale. First, I thought there was something wrong. After I'd fired up DOS and started the game, the screen went blank and my Amiga was just making this DEERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR noise. I killed PCTask and tried again. Same thing. Tried a third time and said "Okay, maybe it's taking a while to load." so I grabbed a shower and when I came back - ta-da! The main screen! Woo! So I started trying to move around the menu and could see the pixels slowly redraw as I highlighted each menu item to try to get to "new game".
Finally I got to it and clicked start. It was agonizingly slow. Each screen redraw was like watching Vista render. Once I'd slogged through the process of getting a mission I was ready to hit planetside...the loading took so long I was able to grab a bite to eat. When I came back the cockpit screen was there and the terrain outside consisted of a green sky and an orange plane. I could see something moving in the distance, like it was coming closer...but it turned out to be the game drawing polygons for distant terrain features.
I let it go for another hour, I read, watched some TV, came back and pressed a control and watched it draw one scanline at a time as it moved everything over one degree of FOV.
The real pisser was, I could've gotten a used '386 with 2mb RAM and a 256k EGA card capable of handling the game for what I paid for it and PCTask! x-(
I don't blame PCTask though, or Mechwarrior, or my Amiga (or DOS or Bill Gates or any other hair-brained thing). It was a high poly-count game (for the day) running on wholly emulated hardware on a low-CPU power machine: I was simply asking too much of the entire assembly of hardware and software. Looking back, had my needs been word processing, an accounting or spreadsheet app or text-based adventure game or something like that, PCTask would've been quite adequate.
I sold it with my A500 to finance the purchase of my A1200 which before I got rid of it had a 28mhz 030 and 4mb Fast RAM. I wonder what the performance would've been like under those circumstances? I almost (almost!) wish I'd kept up with the Amiga and run ShapeShifter for mac emulation; the software library (games!) for the Mac was pretty rich, too.
At the time didn't Jim Drew of Utilities Unlimited (which promised various hardware-only emulation solutions including as-fast-as-native '486 and Mac emulation) threaten legal action against the SS guys because (in his assessment) if it worked that well it must've been because they stole UU's source code and hacked it together? Or something like that? I remember Drama, but it's been close to 20 years ago now...
EDIT:
Well, here's Jim Drew telling his side of the story...
