Amiga vs console vs PC

[Everblue]

A lot of PC Engine games are way better than Amiga ports.... and that was an 8-bit machine.

[ddniUK]

I always thought the Amiga CD32 should have had at least 1MB of 32-bit Fast Memory.

Project?

[warpdesign]

Some of the SNES cartridges had an extra co-processor (like StarFox) that your standard Amiga couldn't match

Even without extra processors, the Amiga's chipset was no match to the SNES: look at Street Fighter 2,..

SNES had scaling, rotation, transparency, 4 background layers with independant scrolling, 128 (8/16 color) sprites (32 max on scanline), mode 7 with matrix perspective...

Of course, when optimizing, the Amiga could output nice things, but that most of the time looked more like technical demos than real games since the gameplay was limited because of these tricks (eg. Beast,...).

[ElPolloDiabl]

Forget about a tired graphics chip, slow RAM, little to no RAM and 8-bit sound by the 90's!

Two incredibly sorry things killed the Amiga gaming wise:

#1) Single button games.

Those kind of things could have easiliy been fixed. They were probably planning it for the next system, especially if the CD32 had it.

[warpdesign]

Those kind of things could have easiliy been fixed. They were probably planning it for the next system, especially if the CD32 had it.

Could have been easy, but it took way too much time: even the NES had more buttons... Since there was no official support/push for more buttons, we had to wait 1993 for the CD 32.

[Minuous]

The two platforms which have survived from then and still dominate today were business machines. Commodore should have striven harder for the US business market. Eg. the A2000 should have had better specifications (eg. faster CPU) and/or been more competitively priced.

[Thorham]

It's always about the games Amigas aren't game computers

[ElPolloDiabl]

The two platforms which have survived from then and still dominate today were business machines. Commodore should have striven harder for the US business market. Eg. the A2000 should have had better specifications (eg. faster CPU) and/or been more competitively priced.

The A2000 was okay when it first came out. One year later it came with 020 and hard drive as standard (price for me was $2000). One year later again the PC was dropping in price and increasing in power.

They probably would have got beaten thoroughly by the PC. If by 96 you had a min spec 060 and 8Megs of RAM for maybe $1500 (plus the badly needed sound DSP).

[_ThEcRoW]

It's always about the games Amigas aren't game computers

Jay Miner envisioned it as a games machine.

[KimmoK]

A2000 stuff etc...

In y1989 I got A2000 with 3MB RAM and HDD etc.
In y1990 it was still far superior to normal PCs that people were buying.
In y1993 or so the 7Mhz speed was clearly not fun enough. (I got A3k/030/25 as a loaned HW)
In y1994 040 was still good to use (but more expensive than vanilla 486). (I got 4k/040)
In y1996 060 was compareable to P1 in performance. (I had also P1/75HW and got 060 for 4k)

Then x86 was too far ahead to really compare.
Untill y1999 A4k was my main system at home.

[Linde]

It's sprite handling could have been improved, but from what I've read AGA wasn't a bad chipset with 030/Fast RAM so I think the Amiga's 2D capability wasn't uncompetitive in comparison.

You have to consider cost and availability as well, I think. You'd be paying twice as much for a bare A1200 at its launch than you'd have to do years earlier (depending on launch region) for Sega MD or SNES. Add to that your fast RAM or 030 and you have a very uncompetitive piece of gaming hardware. I definitely don't think the 2D capabilities of the Amiga are bad in comparison, just that it was unsuitable to compete with consoles released at the time, and the games on them that depended on what those consoles do best: sprites and tiles. Not to mention quite limited polyphony and as save2600 mentioned, one button games.

[Thorham]

Jay Miner envisioned it as a games machine.

Yes, and thank goodness it didn't turn out to be a one. What a damned waste that would've been.

and as save2600 mentioned, one button games.

Which is utterly absurd, because Amigas support no less than THREE buttons directly. Why on earth anyone thought it was a good idea to only use one button is completely beyond me.

[psxphill]

It's sprite handling could have been improved, but from what I've read AGA wasn't a bad chipset with 030/Fast RAM so I think the Amiga's 2D capability wasn't uncompetitive in comparison.

AGA was better than ECS, but it was rushed and there were a lot of compromises. Games hardly ever supported optional peripherals, some games started making use of accelerators but that was mostly after commodore had disappeared & most developers had jumped ship anyway.

[kickstart]

Forget about a tired graphics chip, slow RAM, little to no RAM and 8-bit sound by the 90's!

Are you saying anythin bad os the amiga sound? If you like the FM sounds of console game i can understand it but no way.

[Duce]

Once Doom came out on the PC the final nail went into the Amiga as a gaming platform, imo.

I was a die hard Amiga fanboy one day, 2 Amiga's sitting here, both extremely kitted out and one running a massive BBS.  The other I used for a bit of gaming, rendering, etc.

A friend picked up a complete built PC which cost less than the '060 card I had in my A4000 and showed me Doom.  All my love for the Amiga, I couldn't get past what I'd seen and the writing was on the wall.  I was sitting there, thinking Lemmings was one hell of a fun game on the PC, then I saw Doom - was simply no going back, even as much as I hated DOS and early Windows.

[psxphill]

Once Doom came out on the PC the final nail went into the Amiga as a gaming platform, imo.

Doom is commonly given as the reason. I started playing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_X-Wing at work, which predates Doom by a long way.

There were still c64, Amiga & arcade games I would play, but there was nothing like x-wing. Wing commander was as close as it got and the Amiga version of that was too slow.