/vr/ - Retro Games

>1993
>I'm gonna buy a PC because it's so retro
Whaaa...

>>5291446
If I went back in time and had the choice to play only on a Pentium III emachine or own one of each major console at the time (which would equal together about the price of the PC) I would take the consoles every time.

>>5291462
if I lived today and had the choice between fucking anything and a good pc guess what I would pick

>>5291462
are you fucking kidding me?

Console resolution was SHIT compared to PC and TVs blurred the picture even more. Playing exclusively on console also meant no FPS, no RTS, not any management game... Nowadays everything gets ported to consoles, but back then PC exclusives were absolutely essential.

>>5291446
Wait a sec...is this trolling?

Until the mid-90s they were a joke and Amiga ran rings around them.

>>5291446
Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?

>>5291446
No. They were for writing book reports and making spreadsheets.

Seriously, until doom, quake, tfc/counter strike, there was no reason to own a pc.

>>5291446
>Needed an expensive super-fast Intel CPU to do anything.
>Video cards were just a simple framebuffer and a DAC, the CPU did everything such as sprites and (if you had a lot of cycles to spare) scrolling.
>Garbage color options, limited 16-color EGA graphics when Genesis/Mega Drive was a thing and the SNES was around the corner. Most PC games in the mid-90s were still doing 256 color graphics while consoles were already pushing 16-bit color.
>Limited audio choices, PC speaker, FM audio, maybe 1 PCM channel unless you feel like having the already busy CPU do audio mixing.
>3D acceleration came after the N64, PC cards didn't get all the features the N64 had like hardware T&L until ~2000.
>A basic rig that cost well over 3x a console would be obsolete within 6 months to a year.

No the IBM PC was not the best retro gaming console.

'90s DOS gaming was pretty comfy desu lads.

>>5291446
Nah, only for WRPGS

>>5291478
>if I lived today
Are you a time traveler or a ghost?

>>5291757
i'll never forget playing commander keen in cga colours, jarpigs btfo

>>5291478

Does hell have electricity?

>>5291771
He is a vampire and

>>5291671
This. Had to buy a Pentium in late 94 anyways to get anywhere with my renderings.

>>5291446
3rd and 4th gen: consoles>pc
5th gen: pc>consoles

>>5291706
>Seriously, until doom, quake, tfc/counter strike, there was no reason to own a pc.
Sierra adventures.

>>5291706
>No. They were for writing book reports and making spreadsheets.

But even there, Macs did that stuff better.

>>5291739
>Garbage color options, limited 16-color EGA graphics when Genesis/Mega Drive was a thing and the SNES was around the corner.
EGA had stopped being a thing by the time the Genesis was out. I don't think any PCs sold after 88 had an EGA card.

The one and only thing PCs had over 680x0 machines was expandability and cheap, abundant hardware.

>>5291706
Wing Commander, you pleb.

>>5292003
For triple the price

>>5291446
Yes.

>>5291671
>Amiga
Enjoy your one-button controllers, music cutting out sound effects (or vice versa), and giant stack of floppies, Eurocuck.

>>5293915
That only really became an issue in the 90s though. Most 80s Amiga stuff used 1-2 disks.

PC in the '90s was pretty much like what Sony is like today.

If you're a big fan of cinematics and Western devs, you're going to have a good time.

If you wanted fun, easy-to-learn difficult-to-master games - you would be better served with more arcadey consoles.

>>5291994

I disagree. The N64's RCP which was co-developed with Silicon Graphics was ahead of its time being able to perform hardware 3D transform, clipping, and lighting, which the PC wouldn't get outside of the niche workstations and cards until the GeForce 256 from Nvidia in 1999, 3 years after the N64 released. The Playstation GTE and VDP1/2 were weaker but still had 3-D accelerated functions like bilinear filtering, fogging, antialiasing. The ATi Rage, Matrox Mystique, S3 ViRGE was nowhere near that or barely equivalent.

Not /vr/ but I would say PC was about even with consoles during the release of Gen 6 where GPUs were directly used from the PC space that were already out like the Gamecube Flipper and Xbox's NV2A and then PC outpaced consoles in CPU/GPU advancements as the generation progressed and the maturation of DirectX and OpenGL even though they abstracted a lot and you loss performance as a result, it was more than enough to beat what consoles could do. However, it was really in Gen 7 that Steam really started to take off and multiplatform games became the normal thing for game developers to do, where IPs were one of PC's weakest points up until that point.

>>5294006
Console hardware was specifically fine-tuned and optimized for action games at the expense of screen resolution, memory, and keyboard input. Trying to do PC-style games on a console was usually a bad idea as the PS1 Civ2 proved.

>>5291485
>muh resolution
Wrong board to be whining about that shit on.
>>>/v/
>>>/g/
>no FPS
true
>no RTS
meh
>not any management """game"""
So PCs really are indeed mainly for work, good to know.

>>5291485
>muh resolution
Wrong board to be whining about that shit on.
>>>/v/
>>>/g/
>no FPS
true
>no RTS
meh
>not any management """game"""
So PCs really are indeed mainly for work, good to know.

>>5291446
N E V E R O B S O L E T E

>>5291446
>PC
>console
The absolute state of peasantry

>>5291485
No sitting on the couch playing Sonic, Mario, or Mortal Kombat in front of the TV. PCs just don't have the games back then.

It depends at what point you're talking about (a DOS game from '80s probably won't be anywhere close to the quality of the games from the '90s) and what types of games you're into. The PC is the platform to have for strategy and FPS games.

Also,
>implying PCs are consoles

>>5294786
Nothing would stop you from playing your PC from the couch on the TV (tv-out cards existed, or just use the monitor) and by 1999 you could play those three games on PC.

>Sonic
Old games playable via emulation, as well as PC releases.
>Mario
Super Mario 64 playable via emulator, old games via emulator. However, Dreamcast emulation was yet to come.
>Mortal Kombat
Released on PC, I believe it was around 1999 that it was added to MAME.

Still, I would choose to own a N64, PlayStation, Saturn, and Dreamcast over a PC in 1999 due to ease of use and exclusives, poor quality of emulation, and easy access to piracy via burning CDs on two of the four systems (with Dreamcast piracy right around the corner).

>>5291485
>no FPS
This is simply false. There were a myriad of FPS released on consoles by 1999. Whether you like them or not is your opinion but it is a fact that Goldeneye was out, as well as various ports of PC FPS.

>>5295096
>article covering legality of emulation
>saltzman

>>5291706
Good fucking luck trying to run Ultima Underworld or Magic Carpet on the SNES.

>>5296904
The console Ultimas were already mutilated as it was.

>>5291446
Not really. PC gaming and console gaming were so vastly different back then they were basically two separate markets. The kinds of games you would find across were so different. PC was still ahead hardware wise though and PC games ported to consoles often had compromises made to work or were sometimes practically a new game. It was definitely worth owning a PC and console though as console ports to PC were often really shitty and sometimes ended up inferior to the console versions.

>>5296796

>implying they don't own both sides of every given discussion

PCs were ok for some arcade games, stuff like Arkanoid worked ok because it was single screen and had mostly black backgrounds. Anything with scrolling or full background graphics was way too hard to pull off with the CPU having to do all the work.

>>5296942
Which is why VESA graphics cards were so impactful. You could offload all that resource-hungry shit away from the CPU, and do it at an actually reasonable speed.

>>5291446
I don't know, but every fucking game you installed back then was a fucking chore to get properly working, you were missing floppy disk #4 of 10, you needed the manual for pirate-security questions, "why the fuck is it not reognizing soundblaster", bluescreens, game suddely runs at different speed, lots of troubleshooting, no internet for the most part, investing in new parts like RAM and Cd-slot and installing them (as a kid it was more difficult)...

Playing games back then had some fun memories, but I think you often forget how tedious it was at times as well. A console just worked out of the box, bootet up instantly ("you got 20 minutes to play and then back to homework"....windows boots already for 4 minutes), and the cultural schoolyard acceptance of consolegames was much more manifested if you had a friend come over to play with you.

Game resolution, fps and all that shit didn't matter much back then, you were happy when it worked. How many times did you play the game in the crappy pink graphics and onboard music... it still was fun.

On the other hand you could share a lot games with friends if you had some floppies laying around, so there is that. And you could use it for other shit, like printing out pictures of pamela anderson or something... for research...

>>5296942
I'm still impressed that they got this good of a framerate out of Double Dragon although limiting the number of enemies on screen to two probably helped.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLbSnnVeY_g

>>5296972
>Playing games back then had some fun memories, but I think you often forget how tedious it was at times as well. A console just worked out of the box, bootet up instantly

Or a C64 for that matter.

>insert disk
>type LOAD"*",8,1

Except the game took about 20 minutes to load instead of instantly like on a console. That aside, it was 100% plug and play.

>>5296972
The fiddling part is true, however once you set up your rig properly, you didn't need to tweak it further. After rejigging my autoexec and config files to free about 590 kB of conventional memory (for those annoying '91/'92 games which screamed their figurative heads off if you had less than 585 kB free), all I needed to do was occasionally switch from '-noems' to '-ram' when playing a game which wanted expanded instead of extended memory.
The toughest battle I had with my '90s rig was changing the IRQ for the SB16, since, again, some '91/'92 games didn't recognize sound cards above IRQ 7 (mine came by default at 10).

Ultimate Football '95 was the most brutal installation I ever did, other than that I never had too many major problems.

>>5291446
how do you even sleep with a VGA cable tense like that?

Would buy that setup by the way

>>5296979
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cehaqXFCGE

Bad Dudes tries to get 6-7 enemies going and falls apart. They should have limited it to 2-3 enemies like most of the 8-bit ports. The arcade game had a 68000 running at 10Mhz, an 8086 PC with no graphics acceleration wasn't going to be able to match it.

No

>>5297012
Did you know actually Double Dragon has less advanced hardware, it uses a pair of 6809s so is still 8-bit.

>>5296972
Glorious Amiga master race never had to worry about such things as pink graphics and CONFIG.SYS files.

Feels good man.

Yes. PC has always been a step ahead of consoles.
t. lifelong consolefag.

>>5297107
And yet you still didn't escape copy protection bullshit and missing disk 6 out of 8 so you couldn't run the game.

>>5297110
No 80's pc games were garbage.

No. Before the late 90s, PCs did not get any Japanese games, took forever to load, had primitive graphics and sound in the 80s, and could have massive incompatibility problems.

Was gaming on a PC worthwhile? Absolutely, you got games you could not play on console. Did it replace consoles? Absolutely not.

>>5297159
Sierra adventures were the one substantial thing they had over the Atari 8-bit, C64, and Amiga.

>>5297168
>Before the late 90s, PCs did not get any Japanese games
Do all those shitty arcade ports count? :^)
>took forever to load
I don't think you know what "took forever to load" means until you've used a C64.

>>5297168
You forgot: Shit analog joysticks and also joystick ports were an extra-cost option.

>>5291485
PC EXCLUSIVES!? Are you shitting me? I grew up with PC gaming and I was jealous of consoles. Look at all those amazing titles the NES or SNES has. All those retro classics people still love.

All we had were Apogee games. Look how fondly people look back on Apogee games. Oh wait they don't. We didn't even have proper scrolling for ages.
We also had Prince of Persia and - this was actually pretty good: the incredible machine and of course a lot of Lucas and Sierra adventure games. That's all you had on a PC. Not bad, it shaped who I am but I would always prefer consoles if I ever had the choice and could go back and my parents would allow one (hint: they didn't. I've used the PC my father was given from work).

>>5297170
But you're comparing a PC computer to other computers there, not consoles.

>>5297191
Who gives a shit about Apogee? Nobody bought a PC for arcade action, you used them to play grognard RPGs and autistic sim games.

The thing to remember about PC before the late 90s is that the PC is not designed to play games like a console is. Something that the Sega Genesis (1988) is designed to do from the ground up: display many sprites over several independently moving background layers requires incredibly amounts of processing power from a PC to the point where the Genesis is better at it than an early 90s PC despite having way worse specs on paper. How many parallax heavy PC platformers do you see?

Once you get to the 3d acceleration era, that's when PCs started to be beastly gaming boxes.

But in terms of actual games, strategy games, flight sims, RPGs were all great on PC. Even without 3d acceleration, a PC could put a playable 3d game better than an SNES or Genesis, because those systems weren't designed to do it.

>>5297229
Even the Amiga can't touch the MD as an arcade games machine.

>>5294006
Eh this post isn't quite right. GTE and VDP1/2 aren't equivalents to each other. The latter is a vector unit, the latter are pixel drawing units. Neither the PS1 or Saturn support anti-aliasing (well Saturn has an "anti-aliasing" feature but it's really just a very basic thing that covers up holes which are sometimes awkwardly positioned in strips of quads) nor support bilinear filtering. They can both do fog but not per-pixel like the N64 can.

Many older PC cards like the S3 Virge had a wide range of features like bilinear filtering. They were just dog-slow at it (IIRC the S3 Virge needs 8 cycles to bilinear filter a texture, the N64 can do it in 1 cycle). Though you are right no PC card had hardware T&L until GeForce 256 or programmable T&L until GeForce 3. But the N64 overall had lower performance than even the first 3dfx Voodoo card due to significantly lower memory bandwidth.

>>5294006
Eh this post isn't quite right. GTE and VDP1/2 aren't equivalents to each other. The former is a vector unit, the latter are pixel drawing units. Neither the PS1 or Saturn support anti-aliasing (well Saturn has an "anti-aliasing" feature but it's really just a very basic thing that covers up holes which are sometimes awkwardly positioned in strips of quads) nor support bilinear filtering. They can both do fog but not per-pixel like the N64 can.

Many older PC cards like the S3 Virge had a wide range of features like bilinear filtering. They were just dog-slow at it (IIRC the S3 Virge needs 8 cycles to bilinear filter a texture, the N64 can do it in 1 cycle). Though you are right no PC card had hardware T&L until GeForce 256 or programmable T&L until GeForce 3. But the N64 overall had lower performance than even the first 3dfx Voodoo card due to significantly lower memory bandwidth.

>>5297229
>But in terms of actual games, strategy games, flight sims, RPGs were all great on PC. Even without 3d acceleration, a PC could put a playable 3d game better than an SNES or Genesis, because those systems weren't designed to do it.

Flight sims were one category where the PC had an advantage b/c analog joysticks--playing them on an Amiga wasn't very nice. Otherwise the Amiga was better at all that stuff until about 1991 when VGA was universally supported and games started to use like a dozen floppies with no way to install them on a hard disk. Even then, the PCs couldn't match the Amiga for fluidity of animation until VESA.

>>5297257
>But the N64 overall had lower performance than even the first 3dfx Voodoo card due to significantly lower memory bandwidth.
Consoles had limited memory space which made it difficult to do things like strategy games that are memory-hungry.

>>5297247
Well no, the OCS Amiga is three years older and the MD was explicitly designed with arcade games in mind. The ECS Amigas were better but still not quite as good.

Also OCS Amigas had 1MB of memory most of the time and MD games could use ROMs as big as 4MB before needing bank switching.

>>5297247
It's not a gaming machine, unless you mean those godawful crippled 500s and 1200s.

>>5297263
They're probably more CPU hungry than anything. Consoles don't have much memory but they also don't need as much without the OS bloat.

The fact is that consoles don't usually have much "general" CPU performance because they are specialized pieces of hardware. N64's CPU is basically equivalent to a turbo-clocked 486 rather than a Pentium ... but it's not really an issue because the T&L shit that your Pentium would be cranking out is offloaded to a dedicated piece of hardware called RSP on the N64.

As for memory bandwidth... the Voodoo 1 has almost double what the N64 had and that was dedicated just to the GPU ... N64 had to share that across the whole system and it was shitty single channel RDRAM at that so real-world bandwidth was even lower.

>>5297264
Memory was another category where PCs were a crippled mess. Only 640k carved up into 64k chunks and ridiculous programming gymnastics were needed to access more memory. The Amiga and 16-bit consoles had 1MB or more of completely linear memory that was immediately accessible on power-on with no programming gymnastics.

>>5297272
Take a NES with its little 1Mhz 6502 and it easily outperforms your hulking 286 PC at arcade games simply because the CPU doesn't have to do all the work.

>>5297247
I've always felt that the Mega Drive's VDP chip is MASSIVELY underrated. People tend to shit on it for the low color count but like...

...correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't it the first cheap piece of gaming hardware to have more than one *hardware* background layer?

>>5297281
It is essentially arcade hardware. The one thing it lacks is sprite scaling which had to be omitted for lack of space on the chip die.

>>5297229
>to the point where the Genesis is better at it than an early 90s PC despite having way worse specs on paper.

Even putting aside the specialized graphics hardware, the Genesis used a 68000 which smoked PCs for performance until you got into protected mode 386 programming.

>>5297272
>N64's CPU is basically equivalent to a turbo-clocked 486 rather than a Pentium
The PS1 has a 33Mhz CPU, it's a pretty puny chip by itself and comparable to a circa 1993 PC.

>>5297290
>until you got into protected mode 386 programming
Indeed a 386 in protected mode owns all, but you have to get there first and that involves painfully awful setting up from the older 16-bit operating modes.

>>5297280
Yeah that's a good point. To be fair as well, the 6502 shouldn't be underrated. It's really good at some things. Algorithmic speed is very low, but shifting bits around? Pretty fucking fast. It literally has the lowest interrupt latency of any CPU *ever*. This means that machines like the Apple 2 and the NES have theoretically lower input lag than modern computers.

Oh and a final interesting comment about the N64. If the N64's GPU (RCP) had the same amount of dedicated bandwidth as the Voodoo 1 it would actually be slightly faster than it. Pretty amusing to think that if Nintendo hadn't gimped the memory their console would literally be blowing PCs away for a year or two.

>>5297281
>I've always felt that the Mega Drive's VDP chip is MASSIVELY underrated. People tend to shit on it for the low color count but like...
512 colors and can get 64 on screen at once. The OCS Amiga trades off in the reverse direction--4096 colors but only 32 on screen.

>>5297301
The 6502 is good for "chase the beam" programming like the Atari 2600 used, although that was mostly irrelevant on the NES since its architecture doesn't really let you do raster effects anyway. The NES could have used a Z80 perfectly fine, but the 6502 was chosen strictly for cost reasons.

Pre-VESA PCs were more like the Apple II in that as long as you're limiting yourself to single screens with black backgrounds, arcade games are doable, but anything more complex than that is too much for them and you'll mostly just have to stick to Might & Magic and Wasteland.

>>5297293
Same CPU that was used in some entry-level SGI workstations(Personal IRIS and Indigo), but there it was often paired with a R3010 for more whoomph.

Potent little chip.

>>5297293
>>5297332
Not really. The PS1's CPU was on the slow side even for its time. It had GTE as a co-processor, and that's the thing that actually made it powerful for 3D, the actual main core was mediocre for 1994.

SGI used MIPS processors because they owned or partially owned the company that made them. Just like in consoles, MIPS workstations used the CPU as a fairly slow mule which was surrounded by specialized speed demons helping it out.

>>5297343
Wrong.

>>5291446
PC better then all consoles since 1990.

>>5297353
By the time the PS1 came out you could already get Pentiums and 100 MHz 486 CPUs for PC. On top of that, they were actually capable of floating point operations.

>>5297367
Why does it start in 1988?

>>5297375
Just f*cking around. I had a SGI Indigo on loan but by mid 94 I drank the kool-aid and got a Pentium. Still, the old Indigo easily ran circles around my first Pentium machine.

>>5297386
PCs were bloody envious of the monster 3D chips that the SGI machines had though.

>>5297392
Yeah, but all at a premium...a common 'joke' among SGI users; you either own a house or a workstation.
It took the PC some time to catch up, but it got there around 2000. Still, doing 3D or video editing on a NT workstation ca. 95-98 was really jarring in comparison.

>>5296979
This port was made by UK-based Arcadia Software and is surprising not bad despite the shit hardware. Consider that the Amiga DD is total trash on a much more capable machine.

>>5297623
I once killed a keyboard playing Double Dragon because I bludgeoned the space bar too much (if you play it you'll see what I mean).

>>5297367
It's easier to argue the consoles were better due to what always gets the spotlight on /vr/eddit & elsewhere since anything PC-related has to be dug out of an abyss.

>>5297623
Binary Designs fucked every DD port with a giant vibrator.

>>5297732
>since anything PC-related has to be dug out of an abyss
Granted, most of you don't know as much about shit 80s home computer arcade ports as I do.

>>5297273
That layout made PC compilers a nightmare to write.

>>5296972
>and the cultural schoolyard acceptance of consolegames was much more manifested if you had a friend come over to play with you.
Is like "Hey, wanna come over to my house and play Might & Magic?" "Wait, what?"

>>5297367
Up until circa 1991, consoles were ahead of PCs, however past mid-late-92, PCs started pulling ahead strongly.

Compare the sad chop job of the SNES or Genesis Syndicate ports to the PC, or even Amiga versions.

SNES: https://www.mobygames.com/game/snes/syndicate__/screenshots/gameShotId,83123/
Genesis: https://www.mobygames.com/game/genesis/syndicate__/screenshots/gameShotId,93953/
Amiga: https://www.mobygames.com/game/amiga/syndicate/screenshots/gameShotId,680232/
DOS: https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/syndicate/screenshots/gameShotId,1174/

Heck, even 1992's Ultima VII looked worse on SNES compared to the PC. By 1995, with its Mechwarrior 2, Descent, NFS, Crusader, Terminal Velocity, Heroes of Might & Magic etc. the consoles were painfully outclassed. The consoles did fight back with technical innovations, but they were too narrow in scope, and too limited in application. The only console that could have run 2000's Homeworld Cataclysm or Sacrifice without exploding was the Xbox, and that one came out two years later (and was basically a SFF gaming PC with a Coppermine Celeron and a Geforce 3).

>>5298445
Load times were brutal on PC. Its easy to forget this when you play the games it had on a system with effectively unlimited power.

>>5298445
Load times were brutal on PC. Its easy to forget this when you play the games it had on a system with effectively unlimited power. I was fortunately enough to have a 486 PC as a kid; I didn't consider it a superior gaming experience to the SNES at all. Just a different one.

a wierd thing about pc's in the 90s is that in about 1995 playstation ports would run fine on a pentium 100 such as need for speed but when need for speed 3, vrally and colin mcrae launched the requirements increased by lot so it was no longer playable on the pentium 100 while the playstation would run them fine. I remember a screamer 2 review in pc gamer in 1997 saying that you need a powerful pc to be able to have graphics comparable to the ps1.

>>5291478
Your nose?

>>5298740
It's not that weird at all. The PS1 has GTE (vector unit) and a GPU to help it render graphics. Most PCs at the time just had a CPU which had to do all of the work.

>>5291446
not even the x68000 had the amount of games to compete with a PC Engine

vga has hardware scrolling built in so a 286 with vga is capable of competing with the amiga or beating it sometimes but barely any software took advantage of it. If it did you would have 256 colours with smooth scrolling which would be enough to do arcade games of the time.

>>5291446
No. And it's entirely subjective of available library tastes as most effective emulators didn't arrive until the late 90's.
PC games between 88 and 98 appealed more artistically to my tastes, but I would have to be in a situation where I weigh the price of a computer and the price of a console and games. I was fortunate to own a SNES and a PC throughout the 90's, along with a PlayStation. I had the most fun with consoles.

this shows that ega is capable of smooth graphics, why anyone gave a crap about commander keen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YuFQbghCBM

commander keen is also capable of running pc's from 1984 smoothly, would have been impressive even by console standards

>>5298768
>vga has hardware scrolling built in so

>>5298796
>commander keen is also capable of running pc's from 1984 smoothly

http://www.vcfed.org/forum/archive/index.php/t-58113.html

>>5298768
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxwRQKmin-E

Is that what's used here?

>>5298740
Games were evolving quickly. The first generation PS1 stuff was fairly primitive but by the time you get to the turn of the millenium, a P100 couldn't handle that stuff. A typical 2000 PC was a P3 around 700-800Mhz, it was a LOT faster than a machine from 5 years earlier.

>>5298768
>vga has hardware scrolling built in so a 286 with vga is capable of competing with the amiga or beating it sometimes but barely any software took advantage of it. If it did you would have 256 colours with smooth scrolling which would be enough to do arcade games of the time.
Hardware scrolling would help of course although you still have to do sprites in software on a CPU that isn't as powerful as the 68000 in the Amiga and which has a gimped memory layout.

Now a 386 in protected mode more than matches an Amiga.

>>5299105
>disassembling the code reveals that the game's internal timers use multiples of 70Hz
Told you so. The CK games were really designed for VGA and they used EGA graphics strictly for performance reasons.

>>5298796
>Beverly Hills Cop
This game was made by a British dev and they did love their demo effects.

>>5299105
Dude's right. EGA was expensive in its day, especially if you wanted it with a 350 line monitor.

>>5298768
Are you sure it had usable hardware scrolling? I remember that there was an offset register so you could shimmy the display by 8 pixels but there was no off screen area so you couldn't spend those 8 pixels drawing the oncoming region. Plus there was no hardware sprites or such so you'd have to "dirty rectangles" anything that was animated or moving.
tl;dr it wasn't useful or even close to what made the amiga a graphical powerhouse.

>>5292006
Probably if you were rich enough to buy new. Everyone I knew who had a PC in the early 90s were a middle class family whose dad got one FROM work FOR work. VGA was a luxury due to the hand-me-down nature of such expensive hardware.

>>5293915
>music cutting out sound effects (or vice versa),
Never understood why that was a thing. The NES and gameboy mixed music and sound effects despite having FAR FAR more limitations than the amiga sound hardware. I refuse to believe they were ALL *that* lazy. There had to be a reason.

>>5299407
Amiga has fewer sound channels than the NES

>>5299407
>Never understood why that was a thing. The NES and gameboy mixed music and sound effects despite having FAR FAR more limitations than the amiga sound hardware. I refuse to believe they were ALL *that* lazy. There had to be a reason.

The C64 had 3-voice sound so you generally had to choose between music and sfx. When C64 coders wrote Amiga stuff, they simply went and coded the sound routines the same way because that was what they were used to.

>>5299414
4 voices. It would still be possible to use three for music and one for sfx.

>>5295096
Since we're talking about the 90s, then TV-out was either stupid expensive or really bad. Ask anyone who had to use the damn things for presentations. Later cards like the ATI all in wonder had component output that would get you something good and usable but that was kinda specialised.
It's like telling people that PCs are cheaper than consoles then only talking about how amazing the 2080Ti is.
Everyone else made do with dog shit DACs that smashed the 31khz into an NTSC carrier.

And you wouldn't be playing mortal kombat in MAME on even a 1999 PC. Emulating Midway hardware was always hard going. It would suffer frame drops on a P4.

>>5298558
>Load times were brutal on PC
Really? Off a hard disk?

>>5299423
NES has 5. Granted, only one is capable of PCM playback, but it's still more than the Amiga has.

IDK, there's still a lot of NES games where the music cuts out (try SMB where taking a coin causes this to happen).

>>5291446
There's going to be a day where computers will be able to emulate every console perfectly, so I would not say it WAS the best, but it is GOING TO be the best.

>>5299376
The Amiga does still have any number of annoying limitations especially in only eight sprites which are just 16 pixels wide (when even the C64 had 24 pixel wide sprites).

>>5297367
Man, that's a lot of shit games.

>>5298561
It depends what *specifically* you had in the machine. If it was a barebones machine without a graphics card and just 4 MB RAM, yes, it wouldn't have been superior.
If, however, you had a 486 DX2, or better DX4, with 8 MB RAM, a 2 MB video card (S3, Cirrus Logic, Tseng Labs), something like a Gravis Ultrasound with the full 1 MB RAM, it would have blown the SNES clean out of the water. The guy I was getting my pirated games from had a DX2-66 with roughly that set-up.
Loading times were an issue only during the period when PCs didn't come standard with hard drives. And, honestly, loading times matter only if you can load whatever you're trying to play in the first place. A SNES would've self-destructed trying to digest Ultima Underworld's code.

>>5299504
the SNES was never a particularly powerful system. End of the day system power has never really mattered in any meaningful way. Quality of a platform always came down to the games made for it. PC basically had none while its "competitors" on console (lets face it, it's not a competition when over 99% of games worth playing aren't on your system) had hundreds of games.

>>5299513
>99% of PC games weren't worth playing
If you are under the age of 18 please discontinue using this website.

>>5299517
99% of PC games aren't worth playing. Bad ports, non-game genres and mediocre RPGs and bad action games make up almost the entirety of the platform. If it upsets you, argue against it. I remember being your age and thinking the PC had some legendary library of undiscovered gold. Turns out it was all forgotten shit instead clung to by hipsters.

>>5299437
That's true. Despite that it's only for a short period so it's a little harder to notice than on say a Commodore 64.
Even later consoles like the SNES had that issue sometimes because of how the sound channels were programmed even if it had more than the NES (for example, try listening to the sound effects and the music when you push the brake button in Top Gear 2).

>>5299520
>Bad ports, non-game genres and mediocre RPGs and bad action games make up almost the entirety of the platform

Wait, I didn't know the PC was the Amiga.

>>5299520
>non-game genres
What is a "non-game" genre?

>>5299525
point & click adventures

>>5299523
it might be worse.

>>5299513
>PC basically had none
lolwut

>>5299531
>point & click adventures
Oh, it's one of these guys. Into the trash it goes.

>>5299540
non-games are okay if they're PC games
gone home isn't a game either

>>5299540
I won my bet that he was one of those "Hrrpf if it's not button mashing, it's not a game" types.

>>5299552
>the intellectual point & click adventurer starring disney cartoon characters, featuring freddi fish and pajama sam.

>>5299568
>>5299552
>>5299545
>>5299540
>>5299537
>>5299531
>>5299525
>>5299523
>>5299520
Is there an actual way to prove though that a given game genre is objectively bad or is all subjective opinion?

>>5299579
Don't bother. The whole thing just sounds like a repasted version of PC vs console flamewar threads from 90s Usenet.

>>5299520
>and mediocre RPGs

This too. Looks like a triggered jarpigfag.

>>5299586
>PC vs console flamewar threads from 90s Usenet.
Except there literally weren't any because you had to have a PC to participate in them.

>>5299603
>Except there literally weren't any because

>>5299607
Look at the dates idiot.

>>5299424
They were not that expensive for something that would be considered a premium item, and composite video output was fine for the era. Just being able to play a PC game or emulator on a 32" TV was amazing by itself.

>It's like telling people that PCs are cheaper than consoles then only talking about how amazing the 2080Ti is.
No it's not because I haven't made any such argument. Your statement here is irrelevant and nonsensical to the discussion.
>Everyone else made do with dog shit DACs that smashed the 31khz into an NTSC carrier.
which was again, fine for the era. Advancemame had only been out for a year, very very few people cared about getting native resolution output for emulators.

>And you wouldn't be playing mortal kombat in MAME on even a 1999 PC
I mentioned it had been released for PC. The DOS version is quite good.

Mortal Kombat was added to MAME in version 0.34 in 1998
https://www.mamedev.org/releases/whatsnew_034rc2.txt

I've played Mortal Kombat on a Pentium III through MAME and it runs just fine 90% of the time. There are some little stutters here and there but frame skipping can mostly fix that. Which at the time period was acceptable practice. Just being able to play the game was the miracle, not playing it 100% perfectly. And it wasn't the top of the line 1.2ghz version either.