/vr/ - Retro Games

>>6235786
Because most of /vr/ is from USA and they're still butthurt over the fact that while they were struggling with their DOS based 386 PC's most europoors already worked on a highly advanced desktop OS that could play 16 bit games

>>6235789
By the time 386s were affordable home computers, the Amiga was already near obsolete.

>>6235786
Large percentage of poor quality games and it's just memed to death by nostalgic Europeans. It was a cool hardware/software platform for the time, but if I was buying a PC then, and couldn't have afforded a Macintosh, I would have gone with an Atari ST.

Many games were less polished and joystick-driven action games suffered from only having one button available.
I have fond memories of the time, but I'm beginning to see its flaws.

LOADINGS
Is what kills it for me. But I really like its demoscene.

>>6235843
>I would have gone with a poor man's version of an Amiga

>>6235975
More like the poor man's Macintosh, which is exactly the point. The Atari was a music producer's machine, which is what I would have wanted.

>>6235786
I like the desktop colour a lot.

>>6235846
>Many games were less polished and joystick-driven action games suffered from only having one button available.
I'm not a "luv me amiger" norf britbong, I enjoyed some games, but...
>the machnie has a KEYBOARD for fuck's sake
>only one action button in games

Fuckin' why? It sucked in many games, like in Turrican - you had to hold the fire button for a while to shoot the beam around yourself. And of course the up cursor is jump, fuck...

>>6235786
>>6236027

>>6235981
>this retarded logic
You've obviously never used GemTOS before.

>>6235991
it's called blue that lad, you can get it in paint shops if you want to buy a tin

>>6236061
I have, keep seething.

Basically, a lot of people didn't grow up with it, and aside from some games like Worms or Speedball II, a few of Amiga's classics are...overrated or not that fun, not that it doesn't have great games, far from it, just that there is more of a feel of "You had to be there" for more of them than i would like.

Not just for that joystick, but because quite a few times it felt like developers were more interested in making a tech demo than an actual game, that plus different design beliefs that non-Amiga gamers aren't used to also don't help.

Let's face it, Amiga platformers or other fast paced games tend to be different than the ones that Japan made, and a lot of people just prefer Japan's style.

It's a fine computer no matter what, but i can understand why people who didn't grow up with it aren't all falling in love for it.

>>6236027
keyboards are hard

>>6235975
>>6235981
>Jack Tramiel took over Atari, bringing all his best people, with the specific aim of destroying the Amiga and getting revenge on the Canadian businessman who forced him out of Commodore

Come on, what's not to love about that

>>6235789
>struggling with their DOS based 386 PC's
A 386 PC will blow away any stock Amiga out there.
Amiga was amazing in the 80's and early 90's, but when AMD came into the market with their cheap 386 chips and drove the prices down, it was all over. AGA could not compete with VGA.

Stuff like Syndicate and Dune 2 show just how Amiga was behind at the time.

>>6236154
It's called cerulean, you incomprehensible inbred island troll.

Goddamn I wish Germany had nuked England under the fucking waves.

>>6236606
>that image
damn even before i read the filename e1m1 started playing in my head as i beheld the bottom dude

AMIGA is a great computer for audio and video design.

>>6236634
So blue then

>>6236634
Good Lord, does it really matter to you that much!?

Also, why would that have made him know that the color is celurean, were nazis as focused on the right names for colors as you are?

>>6236708
I don't want British people to know things. I want them to be extinct.

>>6236759
Why are you so easily bullied on the internet?

>>6236776
How so?

>>6236526
I don't like joysticks in home games honestly, keyboards or gamepads work better for me.

>>6235786
Because they don't know shit about it, but see that it doesn't have many japanese games and think therefore there's nothing of value on it.

American here. With an NTSC A500 (with a PAL toggle switch added). I do wish I had games like Dig-Dug for it (and not the kind of crap clones).
>>6235789
Not really that so much by the time the 386 was common. But in earlier days it was superior hardware.
>>6235843
>I would have gotten the system that's objectively worse in every way except that it has built-in MIDI
>>6235860
A hard disk fixes that, mostly.
>>6236526
>one button
Not necessarily true, since the analogue pins could be read as if digital. But the wiring wasn't guaranteed or standardized so I get your point. That was a big problem and it annoys me.
>>6236785
You can use a Sega Master System/Genesis/Mega Drive pad on the Amiga. That's what I do, anyway.

>>6235786
It had the best version of Drakkhen, lol.

>>6236780
Why are you so emotionally affected by the colour blue

>>6236823
Why are you evading the question?
Could it be because you'd a dipshit chimp who doesn't know what to do when a "u mad"-grade post doesn't accomplish what you wanted it to?

Weak attempt, retard.

>>6235786
it because to this day both PC users, MAC users and console users refuse to admit they got BTFO by AMIGA when it launched and they should have purchased and AMIGA

They sat thier on thier shitty snes 64, sega whatever

While on AMIGA you had grapjics and sound that was way way way >>>>> than anything for maybe a decade....and even then.

>>6235843
u do realise you could emulate a mac on this back then in the 90's

>>6236849
Why are you gettign so angry because of the clour blue?

>>6236860
>maybe a decade.
Closer to 3-4 years.

>>6236876
hmmm at what point could a 386 ever operate as many different programs as an amiga could at the same time and as fast.


Also you have to put in soundblaster, buttblaster 9000 and 10 other PCI cards to do the same stuff

>>6236549
That's what I'm saying, I'm team Atari here.
>>6236804
Built in MIDI makes it objectively better in the only way that matters to me.
>>6236862
Yeah, that's a huge bonus.

>>6236860
>snes 64
lol.
Snes was better than the (OCS/ECS at least, I don't have an AGA machine but that's not "when it launched") amiga for sprite-based graphics. it didn't have the 'fill rate' and flexibility with planar graphics, but it had more colors and built in support for transparency. In the realm of sound, Amiga had essentially sample-based synthesis much like the SNES, but less flexible. For one thing, stereo panning is in hardware on the SNES and you can use more channels.
Amiga does BTFO NES though, as well as all its competition in ~1985-1989. (MT-32 without an MPU-401 or PC already cost more than an Amiga in 1987).
>>6236894
You can build a MIDI interface for the amiga for $10 or less. The serial port can be clocked at midi speeds, all you need is level shifting.
That and you get sample based synthesis instead of bloop-bleep.

>>6236892
Anyone who wanted that would have done it at the time. Yes, it would have been expensive but people still pay a thousand bucks for a video card these days. I'd argue that a 386 could do the whole multitasking thing at the equivalent of an Amiga around the time Win3.x got released in 1990. By then the CPUs were faster, VGA was taking off, soundcards were outperforming anything the Amiga could do.

I'm not saying the Amiga is bad here but it's position of superiority was very short lived.

>>6236901
The one thing I will say might make the ST better musically disregarding the MIDI interface thing (a trivial fix) is that the ST is a piece of shit that can't multask.
This ironically makes it better suited for rock-solid midi timing.

>>6235786
I don't hate it, but not growing up with it I find it little more than a curiosity outside of that insect Gradius game and Turrican 2. Most of the good games are on other platforms. It's fun to load various ports into UAE, laugh, and move on though.

>>6236901
Of course, but I would absolutely not be using MIDI to control the Amiga's anemic sound-chip or the Atari's even terrible one. I would be using the ST's rock solid MIDI support to sequence synths, drum, machines and samplers. Cubase on the ST was excellent for the time, and much, much cheaper than an equivalently powerful Macintosh to do the same thing. All that said you can do this is just hypothetical, there's no reason to use vintage machines for this purpose today, besides just the the hell of it. The game selection on both machines kind of sucks, their 8-bit predecessors definitely did that better. There's no Atari 8-bit port of Maniac Mansion though and that's a huge bummer.

>>6236818
Eh, it performed better but SNES had that amazing soundtrack and doesn't require getting out or emulating weird hardware.

Talk about a hidden gem!

>>6237045
Doesn't seem very hidden.
>>6236931
If it's between DOS and Amiga, quite a few games have better versions on Amiga, many games are also considered to have a feel and look unique to this computer, of course, if the feel is worth a lot of the games not being as good as you hope depends on what you think.

I will say that fans truly love the Amiga, it, the C64 and the ZX Spectrum still get tons of homebrew games and more for a reason, people just want to keep these old computers alive no matter what.

My dad was a videographer in the early 90s so I grew up with Amigas despite being a burger. Most of the games he had were shareware games like Moonrocks or Deluxe Galaga, the latter being one of my all time favorite games. We didn't get a PC until 98 so those machines got us through.

>>6237146
Those new hardware clones/versions/whatever like the Speccy Next and Amiga Vampire are pretty interesting projects, especially the updates they've done to the sound and graphic chips.

>>6237146
As someone who didn't grow up with either one and experiencing through the convenience of emulation, I have more fun with C64 oddly enough. Though Amiga has slowly grown on me over time.

The games were shit, and Amigafags/Europoors only tolerated playing them because you could easily pirate for the thing.

>>6236892
The Amiga had preemptive multitasking on paper, in reality its 7.16Mhz CPU was too slow to actually use it.

>>6237216
>I grew up with Amigas despite being a burger
my condolences

>Pretty much all of its best games were ported to consoles, to the point most people forgot they were Amiga originals in the first place.
>Lots of shovelware and crappy arcade ports, and no reason to play the good ones anymore when you can have the real thing
>People always reccomend the same overhyped shit like Superfrog and most of the Team 17 library, but you have to dig a little harder to find a comfy, little simple thing like Gravity Force.
>Many games suffered from the Shadow of the Beast effect. Astonishing visuals and sound, mediocre gameplay. The mediocre gameplay thing also applies to many Dos games that are considered classics now, but Americans actually played those when they were kids, and they write the book on retrogaming, so they get a pass.

Mostly this. It's was a great machine to own back when it was relevant, no so much now. Digging trought its library is still comfy tho, there's a weird charm to it, and I said this as a person who didn't grow up with it.

>>6236027
Thats why you get a cheap clone controller of your choice and wire the up part of the d pad to a seperate button, works perfect for me on the atari st and I even wired up the 3rd button to space for r type but that required and extra wire to the computer. It improved bionic commando greatly and it was a completely different experience to the nes version.

>>6235786
Because they are comparing budget games to full price nes games. There are more bad than good games on the nes too. Those budget computer games were cheap enough for a parent to buy one at the supermarket sometimes where as with console you waited for christmas or bday.

Anyway, the popular game Another world has better graphics than the consoles and is the same on pc

http://fabiensanglard.net/another_world_polygons_amiga500/index.html

http://fabiensanglard.net/another_world_polygons_atariST/index.html

http://fabiensanglard.net/another_world_polygons_PC_DOS/index.html

http://fabiensanglard.net/another_world_polygons_Genesis/index.html

http://fabiensanglard.net/another_world_polygons_SNES/index.html

I don't think people really hate it but some have expected it to be better from internet hype but it was competing with nes for half of the releases.

I like amiga and atari st because it an alternate reality of games and sometimes you get cool music too.

>>6237325
Good thing there were lots of cpus to choose from.

>>6237325
Hmm. If only someone had designed some special hardware chips to offload intensive tasks. That way, maybe the slow-ish CPU would have been adequate for multitasking.
If only that had happened. Wouldn't that have been cool?

>>6238071
Sadly, we can only imagine. Too bad no one ever thought of that.

>>6237236
They are cool, just don't seem to have much of a big market, still cool and the Spectrum and the Amiga still get games, they just now have upgraded versions of those computers.

Seriously, saw Nostalgia Nerd talking about the ZX Spectrum Next and i briefly saw some games that wouldn't be possible on the old Speccy.

>>6238236
>upgraded versions
If you're talking about the PPC ones, no. Just no. Those don't even have the custom chips.
If you mean accelerators, maybe.

>>6236870
CAUSE HE'S BLUE
IF HE WERE GREEN HE WOULD DIE

>>6237268
C64 games are more simple and focus more on gameplay in my opinion, plus the SID chip gives it an unique sound and it has really good soundtracks.

The Amiga tends to have more games that feel like tech demos than anything actually trying to be fun or great in many places, probably helps that the C64 had less memory and all, so people were forced to focus more on the game aspects rather than impressive looks or animations in games that could potentially drag way too much.

>>6238081
>>6238071
Them custom chips were almost impossible to upgrade very much without breaking compatibility.

>>6238793
The same was true of PC's though. That's why people were stuck with the shitty ISA bus forever.

>>6238935
ISA was around for a long time because it was cheap. A full 32-bit bus was too expensive for consumer PCs until the mid-90s.

>>6238363
The Amiga is a much more sophisticated machine than the C64. You need a proper studio with a big budget to make anything good on it and most of the time it didn't get that.

>>6238948
>what is MCA
Oh, that's right.
It just failed because it wasn't an open standard; not because

>>6238960
*not because of difficulty to implement.
Also Zorro III in 1990. And PCMCIA around the same time.

>>6238960
MCA was expensive as fuck. In fact they did have an open standard 32-bit bus called EISA, nothing used it but servers and workstations.

>>6239002
MCA was expensive because licensing.
EISA was unused because it didn't fix the basic retardedness of the underlying ISA and nothing really needed the 32 bit yet.
Nothing to motivate migrating and breaking compatibility either.

>>6235786
AMIGAAAAAAAAAaaaahhhhh!

>>6235792 >>6236606
Those 386s don't hold a candle to even a basic Amiga.
You'd only think otherwise if you never owned an Amiga.

>>6239437
Had you ever seen the Amiga port of X-COM? It's not pretty. Almost anything made in 91 and later is going to look like garbage. Try late period LucasArts or Sierra adventures.

>32 colors when the PC had 256
>4-voice sound when PCs could have wavetable sound cards
>swap 45 floppy disks as PC users with their hard disks were laughing at you

>>6239557
>swap 45 floppy disks as PC users with their hard disks were laughing at you
Amiga can also have hard drives. Of course, they were not cheap, nor were the PC's back then.
>32 colors when the PC had 256
Only when comparing VGA with pre-AGA, and the PCs had nothing comparable to Amiga's blitter, so graphics weren't exactly smooth.
Of course, X-COM worked well for the platform.
>4-voice sound when PCs could have wavetable sound cards
And few people had these, because they were expensive. Amiga also had expansion cards of all kinds available, but few bothered because these 4 PCM voices had plenty of flexibility; Amiga was generally lauded for its audio.

AGA hardly mattered for anything especially when 85-90% of Amiga software was designed for a basic A500 with no hard disk and local bus VGA negated any advantage they could have.

>>6239580
Did you unironically never play VGA games?
Or did you unironically never play Amiga games?
I played both. Amiga games had smooth graphics at full framerate. Those VGA 386s and 486s did blocky scroll and it was often the case you could see the graphics partially drawn.

>>6239638
It's pointless, you're arguing with zoomers that weren't around to experience anything. All they know is youtube and emulators.

For the same price as a 486 PC, you could buy an Amiga with a Golden Gate board that had an actual 486 and just emulate the PC. And yes, PC had svga cards which were ungodly expensive; you could also buy a graphics card for the Amiga, which overall was cheaper than the PC.

Of course, it's not cheaper now, because all that PC hardware turned out to be junk that nobody cares about anymore. Meanwhile, Amiga hardware is still worth something.

it cute how Amigafags need expensive accelerator cards to approach a 1994 PC's performance level. also by 93-94, good luck even finding any Amiga gear in stores. like go in CompUSA or Circuit City and ask for Amiga shit back then. they'd give you weird looks.

The ultimate failure of AGA was the retarded use of planar graphics, which should have died with the 80s.

can a 386 do this?

>>6239732
>CompUSA or Circuit City
Did you also buy a computer from Toys R Us?

or this?

??????

yikes

>>6239791
wait, didn't Toys'R'Us sell Amigas? yeah they did. my dad remembered seeing one on display there with the stupid bouncing ball demo running on it.

>>6239792
PCs were too busy getting winnuked back then.

>>6239803
>>6239797
>>6239792
The AGA Amiga came out in 92 by which time the 486 was out and soon the Pentium all with local bus video so...

>>6239809
Yes, that's the joke, Columbo.
All three were stupid places to buy a computer from.

>>6239732
That was an Amerifat problem and who really gaf about Amerifats anyway?

Consolekiddies get the rope.

>>6239571
>Amiga can also have hard drives. Of course, they were not cheap, nor were the PC's back then.
PC hard disks very much were cheaper due to scale of economics. Hard disks on an Amiga would have been expensive SCSI units.

>>6239797
>68040

Oh yes, that CPU which only shipped with the highest end Amiga4000 workstations right before Amiga ceased to exist and that cost more than PC's with 486 equivalents. During a time when Pentiums were releasing.

How come amigafags always brag about how their stock 500/1200's were so cheap and capable, yet when showing off game performance always switch to hardware and software which half the time wasn't even available to them.

>>6239813
>brand new hardware that cost 3-4 times as much as your amiga was out by that point, so your amiga was worthless from then on
Love these arguments. They make my hamster seem smart, and he likes that, too.
This is computer hardware territory, not console land. If you really want to compare PC and Amiga, compare two grand worth of PC hardware to two grand worth of Amiga hardware.

>>6240058
>How come amigafags always brag about how their stock 500/1200's were so cheap and capable, yet when showing off game performance always switch to hardware and software which half the time wasn't even available to them.
Or that almost all the games were designed for a stock 500/1200 without a hard disk and couldn't even use that A4000's capabilities anyway.

>>6239813
Even back in the days of 286s and ISA, you'd hate trying to use an Amiga for productivity with that fuzzblob 640x200 screen and no productivity software that could touch Lotus/dBase/Wordperfect.

Ever met that one Amigafag who claimed it was all the computer he'd ever need and buy thousands of dollars in accelerator cards well into the late 90s to try and vainly keep up with PCs and Macs when he could have bought a new Pentium for that money?

>>6240076
Yes and Eric is still a dick.

>>6235786
Hate is a strong word for amiga but I would opt for an tandy or even a atari st just because they had more software. But yes amiga had the better hardware and better ports when the devs didn't ignored it. I also think a nes/snes would be the better option if I just wanted to play games.

>>6240058
>that cost more than PC's with 486 equivalents
Bullshit. At release in October '92 the 040 Amiga 4000 cost about 2500 dollars. Same as a 486 with 33mhz.

>>6235786
/vr/ doesn't hate it. The only hate is from butthurt youropoors seething because contrary to their myths it was actually very popular and successful in the US. Case in point this angry little faggot >>6235789.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaejwInoRPw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kI8TWM6SY5s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ualveckK6is
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcyPvbqHjrM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKDbzqTFYF0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VD6mRUMU0S4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86ArHF1qi_0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5h1smUA4lQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cehaqXFCGE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izjfOqWsP6o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8O3inzWEKyI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-ee1x4Mnok
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMhqaQ2Bq3E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQ-sm7XAycc

Where's your god now, PeeCeefags?

>>6239732
>approach a 1994 PC's performance level
That's not exactly hard, considering a 68060@50 is faster than a pentium mmx over twice the clock speed. (released years later)
x86 was always behind 68k, until 68k ended when motorola went all-in with PowerPC.
Unironically, today's current Power is still faster than current amd64.
>expensive
To compete with your average 1994 pc cpu. the 68030 suffices. There's open hardware like the TF530, the BoM for that isn't exactly expensive.

>>6240103
>x86 was always behind 68k
The 386 came out in 1985 and it had full 32-bit memory/data bus and on-chip MMU. At that time you had 68000s with a 16-bit address bus 24-bit memory and needed an external MMU.

>>6240112
68020 was 1984, with full 32bit memory/data bus and external mmu.
Also, it was faster than 1985's 386, and had a much better and cleaner ISA.
They didn't have to bolt 32bit support in, as 68k was a 32bit ISA from the beginning (1979).

>>6240121
>They didn't have to bolt 32bit support in, as 68k was a 32bit ISA from the beginning (1979).
Not really no. It was a 16-bit chip with 32-bit internal registers much like how the Z80 was 8-bit but it has some 16-bit registers. By the early 90s also the 68k was falling well behind x86 which benefited from massive investment and Motorola knew they couldn't compete and gave up on it.

>>6240112 >>6240127
>68000s with a 16-bit address bus
This CPU memory bus has 24bit addressing and 16bit data.
68020 released before the 386, in 1984, has 32bit addressing.
But before that, the 68010 (1982), in some packages (not DIP-64 obviously) could handle 1GB address space, which is one of the reasons it was so popular in UNIX workstations, including those from SUN.
This is always flat addressing, no segment bullshit.
With an MMU you don't segments either, but proper pages in the modern sense.
>>6240127
>It was a 16-bit chip with 32-bit internal registers
From the user perspective, it's a 32bit CPU with 24bit addressing and 16bit data bus.
The 68000 is a CPU from 1979 which implements the m68k ISA (32bit). For some 32bit operations, it just does them in steps as the ALU is 16 bits, and is thus slower, but this entirely transparent to the user.
The 68020 (1984) has a 32bit ALU and 32bit memory with 32bit addressing.
The analog between 68000 and 68020 would be intel atom vs core i7.

>>6240145
>This is always flat addressing, no segment bullshit.
386 and up you have almost flat addressing (technically paged) and you never have to deal with segments except when running legacy 16-bit code.

>>6240154
>386 is very clean and non-legacy encumbered.
Fucking wish. It took until amd64 to do a partial cleanup and get rid of most of segmentation.
Refer to:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_memory_segmentation
Some excerpts...
>...In the Intel 80386 and later, protected mode retains the segmentation mechanism of 80286 protected mode, but a paging unit has been added as a second layer of address translation between the segmentation unit and the physical bus...
>...Segmentation cannot be turned off on x86-32 processors (this is true for 64-bit mode as well, but beyond the scope of discussion), so many 32-bit operating systems simulate a flat memory model by setting all segments' bases to 0 in order to make segmentation neutral to programs. For instance, the Linux kernel sets up "only" 4 general purpose segments...
>(amd64) ...For instance, Microsoft Windows on x86-64 uses the GS segment to point to the Thread Environment Block, a small data structure for each thread, which contains information about exception handling, thread-local variables, and other per-thread state. Similarly, the Linux kernel uses the GS segment to store per-CPU data...
Current operating systems, on amd64, still relying on hacks that are implemented using leftovers from segmentation, unironically.

>>6240097
Based.

>>6240097
i didnt know pcs were that shit back then. glad i had an amiga but are there any games were the pc beat the amiga say from late 80s early 90s?

>>6240097
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSsfjHCFosw
Wheres your Amiga now?

>>6240262
Isn't that just boring MIDI?
What are you trying to say?

>>6235786
You'd think /vr/ would nerd out over this thing, since the Amiga shares a lot of its library with dos machines of the day and /vr/ likes dos games. Basically using a different set of graphics and sound - not unlike using a Tandy or similar.
But some anons on /vr/ are not so much into retro games and systems and care much more about identifying with a certain group/movement. And the Amiga doesn't fit into their world view. Nothing to do with any logic or reasoning. Just good old tribalism.
Amiga is the other.

>>6239557
Actually Monkey Island 2 looks pretty okay. At first I didn't even notice the color depth difference. I'm not going to try to say 32 > 256, but it wasn't bad at all.
It had smoother scrolling, too.
And in '91 wavetable cards weren't a thing people had.
My amiga 500 has an HDD btw. (A590)

>>6239732
Found the amerilard.
I managed to buy a Commodore 1942 in america in 1993 no problem.
>>6239792
My A500 can do none of that, stop making me feel bad.

>>6240302
because the games are unplayable due to one button joysticks vs. dos games that use the whole keyboard.

>>6239897
There were IDE HDD's for amiga as well. Just not many back in the A500/A2000 times.

>>6240318
Gonna just point out that apidya on amiga lets you use a sega master system/genesis controller and get two buttons.
And amiga game programmers were allowed to use the keyboard too.
You have a funny way of saying "PC's didn't have a standard input method for joysticks."

>>6240326
>get two buttons
wow maybe you could actually play a simple platfo- Oh wait nevermind because they would still use up to jump.
>And amiga game programmers were allowed to use the keyboard too
then maybe they should've actually used it

>>6240332
>then maybe they should've actually used it
Did you ever play any Amiga games? Or any computer game for that matter?
Turrican had one button to fire and use the lightning attack, one button for energy lines and to transform into a spiked wheel and one button to fire grenades and mines. Where do you think those buttons where?
Or what about all those flight sims with more than 10 different function buttons. Where do you propose to find those, if not on the keyboard?
Grasp harder

>>6240262
doom is on amiga

>>6240263
>>6240349
Doom killed Amiga as a gaming platform.

It was only ported in the late 90's after was source code was released and you still need a heavily upgraded machine to run.

>>6240097
>better looking, but still half-ass 1-button approximations of the originals
Considering you could just emulate all those in MAME in the 90s, and my platform is still alive, my god's well and present. Where's yours?

>>6240609
MAME barely run any games in the 90s

>>6240643
Bull fucking shit. I was emulating all of those on my 400mhz Pentium II and a lot of stuff was fine on an MMX 200mhz CPU or better.

>>6240643
https://www.mamedev.org/history.html
Fucking Neogeo was basically a done deal by the end of the decade.

There's lots of great Amiga games. But very few are exclusives. If it was good, it got ported to a more accessible system.

>>6240479
I would say that it was Commodore that killed the Amiga, after it's success, it never really caught on in most of the world as Commodore just couldn't seem to sell it despite having something for anyone that would want a computer, not just games.

Add to that the lack of new great models or taking ages to add CD Drives to a point where Cinemaware abandoned the freaking Amiga at the end of their life and you start feeling like the company was managed by idiots.

Had Commodore gotten better people to manage it, we maybe could have gotten something that could have ran games like Doom much sooner, or still get more games, as it stands, the Amiga started to drag out after a few years and only a really dedicated community stuck with it.

I used to play a Snoopy game on some kind of computer that looked like this....you could plug a sega controller in the back and it worked.

No idea if it was an Amiga or what.

>>6241103
http://hol.abime.net/hol_search.php?find=snoopy

>>6240097
The fuck would anyone play inaccurate as fuck arcade ports made without the original source code? Just boot up MAME if you want Paperboy. Also the IBM port of Bubble Bobble has VGA+Adlib support, nice intentionally linking a CGA mode video.

Defender of the Crown looks pretty nice, still, the C64 has the best-programmed versions of Cinemaware titles.

I had a Tandy in 1989-90 and my wealthy roommate had an Amiga not sure what version. We were both cool with what was available on each platform.

Normally we would buy the odd titles for Amiga like Faery Tale or Defender of the Crown where the graphics were a step above PC. But normal stuff like Pirates or Wasteland or Ultima we would stick with the Tandy.

>>6241243
Wasteland wasn't on the Amiga anyway, but its Pirates! blew away the PC port.

>>6240097
Try the Amiga ports of Double Dragon or SF2 and get back to me. :^)

>>6241284
The Amiga ports of those were pants but it's not as if the PC ones were better.

why do people care about crummy home arcade ports when you could play the real thing on MAME for a good 20+ years now

>>6241524
Because they understand how MAME works?

>>6241248
It is approaching 30 years so I will defer to you as to what was available. We loved Pirates so maybe we had it for a while and didn't think of buying it again for Amiga.

Good games we had on Amiga also were original Populuos, 4th and Inches, Hacker 1 and 2. Heroes of the Lance I loved but my roommate refused to even load up.

Many good times on that machine.

where to start? the mountains of Zniggy-tier shovelware? the long load times and disk swapping? the part where 486 PCs and the Sega Mega Drive made the Amiga into a dinosaur? the fact that most of its games have never really aged very well?

>>6241829
t. amigalet

Oiy blimey, m8. That Superfrog an' that Dizzy. Those silly Ameriblobs don't know what they missed out on. They wanted to play Japcrap with some rubbish plumber in overalls instead? Imagine that.

>it had more bad games than good games
every platform ever
>old technology is limited
duh
>newer hardware was faster
o rly
>old games are not like new games
tell me more
>productivity software was better on other systems
which is THE most important thing for retro gaming
>the stock machines are the only ones that ever existed, so their problems are eternal. Upgrades don't exist, neither do workarounds
Just like PCs, which never evolved from IBM 5150s onward.
>it was popular with people that don't belong to my group of people
Nobody is to tell him that games are played all over the world. He'll stop playing games altogether

Love these threads. These arguments are peak intelligence and so original. I have never heard them before.
Ever.

>>6242016
>SEETHING

Most console games were made on a much higher budget than the typical Amiga game. I defy you to find an Amiga game like DQ4 where an entire year was spent just working on the AI. It was more like they'd hire some 18 year old for a summer job and tell him to finish a game in two months.

>>6242016
>Just like PCs, which never evolved from IBM 5150s onward
In that sense the Amiga never really did evolve past the OCS machines, at least not in terms of something that was ever viable or had widespread support and marketplace acceptance.

it's just...idk, man. Amigafags would always act like it was this groundbreaking supercomputer years ahead of its time and then when you'd actually play its games, you were left really disappointed.

>>6235981
Bruh.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jph0gxzL3UI

>>6242016
>productivity software was better on other systems
>which is THE most important thing for retro gaming
No but it was a strike against the Amiga back in the day for a lot of potential customers.

>1987
>dude comes in store
>sees Amiga bouncing ball demo
>"Cool, can it run dBase?"
>"Nope."
>"Oh well never mind."

>>6243456
The Atari can do that too.

>>6243504
>dBase
Who cares, literally.
We had plenty of Amiga specific productivity software which made use of AmigaOS and hardware.

>>6239557
>>4-voice sound when PCs could have wavetable sound cards

uh, yeah, no. Pre Windows the only cards to do that were the Gravis Ultrasound cards, which no game supported, only the demoscene. Games all used OPL2 + single audio channel for occasional voices, and the GUS failed because it had poor emulation for that.

Some games used multichannel sampled sound in software. Pinball Fantasies and Illusions did, iirc.

By the time modern multichannel PCM was common in PC games, Commodore was already long bankrupt, and most games just did it in software thanks to the newly available DirectX which made it easier to get it working on multiple sound cards (before that, you had to setup the proper soundcard type, port, IRQ, etc, for every game).

>>6240085
>I also think a nes/snes would be the better option if I just wanted to play games.

Not if you lived in Europe, though. Which is where most Commodore fans hail from.

>>6240262
Doom did not sound like that unless you had a $700 external half-rack midi box.

In the actual PCs that most people owned, it sounded like a cacophony of farts:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMvzyLv2k-U

MEANWHILE ON A STOCK AMIGA 500:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rm0eTagViU

>>6241117
>The fuck would anyone play inaccurate as fuck arcade ports made without the original source code? Just boot up MAME if you want Paperboy.

OK, now do that in 1992.

>>6243608
>MEANWHILE ON A STOCK AMIGA 500:
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rm0eTagViU

Big deal, a Mega Drive could do that and it had 7 voice sound while OCS Amigas had 4-voice sound.

>>6243524
That was a dealbreaker for a lot of people. You can't run Lotus/dBase/Wordperfect and you weren't going to sell many machines. That aside most Amiga productivity software was low budget and nowhere near as good as those anyway.

Plus the little matter of the fuzzy 640x200 screen while an Atari ST, Mac, and PC could all have crisp high res monochrome.

>>6243617
Console arcade ports were more accurate most of the time since they were usually made with access to the original source code and art assets and actual professionals were programming them not some teenager given two months.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrteNdRcfiE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucTL8AZkPFI

I rest my case.

>>6243617
Okay. If you're going to play a lousy approximation, which was all that you had at the time for most arcade games, you were better off with the far more economical and accurate Genesis version. Then you waited til '98 for PC and MAME to get half-decent.

>>6243646
>dBase
SuperBase, Softwood File II..
>Lotus 123
FinalCalc, Turbocalc. Both better.
>Wordperfect
Prowrite, Kindwords, WordsWorth, Final Writer.
Or wordperfect itself if for some silly reason you really liked it. The alternatives were all better.
https://winworldpc.com/product/wordperfect/41-amiga

>>6243653
>Or wordperfect itself if for some silly reason you really liked it.
It did have WP but a phoned-in port. Also there was one really shitty port of MS Works on the Amiga.

>>6243656
>ms works
Why oh why.
Seriously, I had access to PCs at the time and was familiar with their shitty productivity software.
Turbocalc and Prowrite where my preferred spreadsheet and word processor back then. Preferred over the peecee alternatives.

>>6243661
then why did every office in America use Lotus et al if the Amiga programs were so much better?

>>6243667
The Commodore badge on the side was one reason.

Back in the late 80s Microsoft put more effort into their Mac software than the PC stuff. Bill Gates was totally obsessed with Macs back then, Excel was born on the Mac and later migrated to the PC.

>>6243672
^This. Commodore was a grossly incompetent and retarded company and nobody was going to trust their vital data to their machines. You couldn't really upgrade an Amiga anyway, the A500 was like a bigger C64 with no expansion slots or anything.

Apple had actual tech support and a real vision as a company, Commodore and Atari didn't beyond making a quarterly profit for their shareholders.

>>6243667
Because Amiga was popular in EU thanks to David Pleasance and friends in EU CBM marketing team.
It was not popular at all in the US, as there the marketing team was clueless, to the point where companies were buying 8086 PCs with monochrome screens because they thought that seemed more serious and business friendly.

>>6243695
>to the point where companies were buying 8086 PCs with monochrome screens because they thought that seemed more serious and business friendly.
It was. 640x200 color displays are fucking eye rape. That was why even the Atari ST had monochrome mode for work stuff. The ST was also very commonly used in Germany as an office machine, but I don't think any amount of marketing could convince companies to put a Commodore or Atari machine in an American office. They were always going to be those silly video game computers sold at Toys'R'Us on top of both companies being run by Eastern European mob boss types like Captain Jack and Irving Gould.

>>6243646
>Amiga productivity software was nowhere near as good
No, it was generally much better. Having an Amiga back then was awesome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_productivity_software
>Plus the little matter of the fuzzy 640x200 screen
... not fuzzy at all, at 16 arbitrary colors. And palette could be changed midraster yielding mode.
And that resolution is the most basic hires mode with no overscan nor interlace.
>while an Atari ST, Mac, and PC could all have crisp high res monochrome.
Basic Amiga could do 702x576 at 16 color.
Interlace would look alright with a flickerfixer. ECS productivity modes gave those resolutions but non-interlaced, and a further super high res that gave 1280 width as base.
Any Amiga with an A2024, a special screen for workstations, could do 1024x1024 4 grey shades.

>>6243703
>That was why even the Atari ST had monochrome mode for work stuff.
Yeah, because of course you couldn't do monochrome on an Amiga /s.

>>6243653
Now compare a PC and its crispy monochrome display to that blue and orange eyesore.

>>6243841
>Blue and Orange eyesore
I agree the original default set of colors is unfortunate, but it is ultimately a setting.
No Amiga user I knew back then used the original default colors.
The grey background and black foreground scheme was popular and very comfortable to work with.

>>6243849
The fact that they picked those as the default colors does prove how amateurish Commodore was when you compare the polish and attention to detail in the Mac OS. In fact one reason color was not used on the early Macs was that they couldn't figure out a color scheme that didn't look like Bozo the Clown.

>>6243850
The colors made sense back in the day. They weren't picked at random, but out of some research done by some third party on ideal such colors.
Just turned out to be unfortunate. This got people very creative, and lots of color schemes were used.
See funky screenshot for instance.
>In fact one reason color was not used on the early Macs was that they couldn't figure out a color scheme that didn't look like Bozo the Clown.
Early macs were monochrome, in the one bit sense.
They were basically a 68k cpu with minimal peripheral circuitry and large price tag. CPU did all the drawing.
Today's macs are a little faster, but they are still massively overpriced.

>>6243841
Never dismiss subjective aesthetics. American computer users in the 80s tended to prefer their personal computers to look like a mini-mainframe with a really serious-looking gray or beige case and a display that looked like a terminal. The Atari ST was real popular in some parts of Europe as a business machine but I think it was just too cute for American offices and universities back then. Europeans were more accepting of cute, colorful things.

If you've seen the movie Hackers, it will explain a lot about American computer culture in the 80s. The Cold War played a large part in shaping it.

If you've seen the movie WarGames, it will explain a lot about American computer culture in the 80s. The Cold War played a large part in shaping it.

>>6243718
>Yeah, because of course you couldn't do monochrome on an Amiga /s.

You couldn't read IBM formatted floppys on Amigas, which was pretty fucking important in an office environment among other

>>6244202
Wut? It's the other way around.
PC's controller can't into Amiga floppies.

>>6244202
There were dedicated tools to read and write to PC floppies with FAT filesystem since very early in Amiga's history, and there also were tools to mount these floppies and use them normally on AmigaOS.
Amigaos 2.1 even had such support bundled.
Emulators like pc transformer (very old) and pc task (newer and fancier) were also able to use PC formatted floppies and hard disks directly.

>>6243608
And Doom did not even run on Stock Amiga 500. Or 1200. Or 3000.
Barely on 4000, if well upgraded, in 1998.

And on the Audio front, PCs got CD audio:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdLATb2cj9k

Lack of hardware from Commodore killed Amiga in the early 90's and it could not keep up with the competition.

>>6244209
Or you could just pop it inside a cheaper ST and work on it w/o any special tools.

>>6235786
Only the americans because they wern't very popular compared to the PC and crapintosh.
The eurotrash liked them alot especially the limeys.
>>6244215
No, shitty corporate managment killed Amiga.

>>6244219
>No, shitty corporate managment killed Amiga.
That's what I said. AGA was nowhere near enough of what Amiga needed to keep up and Commodore didn't care.

>>6244215 >>6244238
It's more complicated than that. The original team finished a new chipset (Ranger) and left. That chipset was awesome and much ahead of everything else. But it never saw the light of day, because commodore management discarded it because "Too expensive", as if economics of scale weren't a thing or being first to market had no value.
They also, again, discarded another ahead of everything else chipset, near ready, and literally forbid the engineers, which wanted to work on it and finish it, from doing so. Same excuses, too expensive. AGA was done in a hurry instead.
Even so, AGA was still awesome when it released in 1992, and they could have followed up with something awesome, but guess what happened? Management got involved again.
David Pleasance's book "Amiga: The insider story" covers the corrupt/incompetent management in much more detail if you're curious about it.
Amiga used to be an independent company, but it ran out of money and got bought by Commodore. It would be a much different world today if this never happened, and some investor lent them money instead.

>>6244215
Could PC from 1987 or 1992 run doom?

>>6244215
>Doom did not even run on a 10+ year old computer in 1998
>I didn't even know about the Amiga 1000 in 2020
Zoom much?

>>6244282
>Could PC from 1987 or 1992 run doom?

>1987
A high end 386, if the settings are low enough, Yes.
>1992
Yes

>>6244215
>PC has cd audio
Because no Amiga owner ever had a CD drive /s.

>>6244285
>Doom did not even run on a 10+ year old computer in 1998
My point is, Amiga was far away from running Doom when it launched and it took forever to catch up. It was outdated in early 90's.

>I didn't even know about the Amiga 1000 in 2020
>Zoom much?
Didn't mention the launch model barely anyone owned, therefore Zoomer?

>>6244252
>That chipset was awesome and much ahead of everything else.
What were its planned features?

>>6244296
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Ranger_Chipset
Is what would have been released 1987. Up to this point, all was fine with the Amiga except for poor marketing outside of Europe. But here, management scrapped Ranger. Thereon, everything is to be blamed on Commodore management, as the original Amiga team left commodore, and held what's known as the "Amiga Wake" party.
ECS, which was released much later, was also sabotaged by management.
Particularly, the chipset as envisioned had a DSP on it, but management scrapped it and developers were forbidden to work on the prototype boards that had the DSP.
AGA was also never meant to exist, they moved people away from AAA to work on it, which lead to AAA not being anywhere near ready when it would have made an impact. Management then scrapped AAA. Then management scrapped AA+. Then scrapped Hombre. They basically scrapped everything, didn't let their engineers actually finish any of their projects, and it all went to hell by the end.
Fucking management. Insanity, all of it.

>>6243687
>You couldn't really upgrade an Amiga anyway
>the A500 was like a bigger C64 with no expansion slots
The average anon is very smart. Much inside knowledge about computers.

>>6244323
>Amiga
>unexpandable
>unironically

>>6244291
And my point is your "point" is just zoomer cope. If you know about the 1000 then why didn't you mention it? A pathetic attempt to get another 2 years for your cope?
You don't honest expect to come here and compare an Amiga sold in 87 that has the same performance as the 85 model to a high end 87 PC by running a game designed for the PC and not get seriously laughed at, do you?

>>6243710
>No, it was generally much better. Having an Amiga back then was awesome.
it doesn't really matter since the people who wanted that kind of stuff usually were looking to do their work at home and for that they wanted a PC. Amiga wasn't better or cheaper for that kind of stuff.
>>6244312
While their management was indeed horrendous just remember that commodore was desperately out of money during that time (around 86). Increasing the cost of their machines just wasn't a good idea.

>>6244579
>You don't honest expect to come here and compare an Amiga sold in 87 that has the same performance as the 85 model to a high end 87 PC by running a game designed for the PC and not get seriously laughed at, do you?

My point is that Amiga was never properly advanced beyond the 80's. It received only incremental upgrades from Commodore, was a dinosaur in the 90's and could not compete with PC, with Doom being an example.

This fact won't change no matter how much you cry and cope.

>>6244712
t. amigalet

>>6243608
>In the actual PCs that most people owned, it sounded different based on the sound card: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXFYWJ7dbz0
>MEANWHILE DOOM ON A STOCK AMIGA 500:
Fixed that for you, nigger.

>>6244712
Again, your only point is cope. You're literally comparing an 85 Amiga to 90's PCs. I appreciate you weren't alive back then so don't understand that even a few years produced yuge advances in technology. But it's a well known fact and no matter how much you cry and cope you're just embarrassing yourself with ridiculous comparisons. Also, your projecting level is >9000.

>>6245030
>Again, your only point is cope. You're literally comparing an 85 Amiga to 90's PCs
An OCS Amiga would easily beat an 80s PC for gaming, nobody's questioning that. Still wouldn't beat an 80s PC or a Mac as a productivity machine. Problem was, the Amiga world right to the end continued to be mostly based around OCS machines without a hard disk.

>>6244629
>Amiga wasn't better or cheaper for that kind of stuff
What was the price of an A500 against an IBM PS/2? You would pay like 1k USD for the Amiga against like 3k USD for the IBM and software like FinalCalc was as good as Lotus 123.

>>6245319
The Amiga had none of the software, hardware, or tech support of the PC. You think Commodore could provide the same level of support as IBM? Say you wanted to connect to an IBM minicomputer or network an office. Good luck doing that on an A500.

The Amiga was mostly useful for video editing which was a niche market back then.

>>6244312
Atari released the falcon which had the same dsp that next cube had, it was incredibly powerful but it was not completely compatible so it split users a bit. It was dropped because they could see pc gaining traction and couldn't afford to support it.

>>6244323
There was a limit to upgrading pc's too, at some point it better to just get a whole new one. If you upgrade from a 286 to 486 you would barely keep anything

>>6244330
Heres a pc video from 1991 for $500 https://youtu.be/CKf7Oc60fVM?list=PLR6RS8PTcoXQU4tx89dL2AyEkaOO3FBp8&t=683

>>6244215
If they had of stayed around they would need a way to use 3dfx and pcs were doubling in power every 2 years but its still a waste that they never got to do something in the mid 90s, they could have been the ps1 of home computing if they had some updated hardware.

The reason amiga fell behind is that in about 1991 the pc market decided that multimedia was the ticket and so shops offered cheaper vga 386 and 486 pcs. An advantage of amiga and atari is that everyone has the same hardware to you can do intense optimization so a new amiga for the 90s could have kept up with powerful pcs.

The problem with getting a 486 in the 90s was that developers moved onto pentium too soon and then not long after that they moved onto 3d acceleration. I really like the software look games had on 486 and early pentium but it wasn't long before pentium 2 was the mimimum. It would have been good to see more games optimized for 486 and pentium as they often used clever trick and had a certain visual style. With a home style amiga that was as powerful as a pentium this could have happened.

What if commdore did a computer with hardware acceleratioin and all the euro playstaion developers stayed with amiga, it could have happened.

>>6245404
>they could have been the ps1 of home computing
there's a wipeout 2097 port for amiga

>>6245404
>There was a limit to upgrading pc's too, at some point it better to just get a whole new one. If you upgrade from a 286 to 486 you would barely keep anything
The PC architecture was easy to expand on since there was no custom chips. Every new Amiga model to come out broke compatibility with its predecessor which was why in the end everyone just ended up making stuff for a base A500 with no hard disk.

So get a 486 and most of your 286 software would still work, probably most peripherals too while loads of A500 stuff broke on AGA machines.

>>6239638
We're have smooth scrolling since EGA on PC thanks to John Carmack:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_tile_refresh

>>6240061
Amiga 4000 launched at US $3,699.
A fully-loaded 486 at that time cost about $2600-$3000.

Love how this thread became one about the capabilities and non-game software of the Amiga for the most part in a retro gaming board!

Because Amiga fans truly love that computer, i was recently going through some issues of Retro Gamer, and there was a letter from a guy that once his wife got him an Amiga 500 like he used to have, he pratically took his son's PS4 away to have him play real games and the guy's friends would appear to play classics like Chaos Engine and Alien Breed, with the guy all excited and even saying he doubts anyone will feel nostalgia for the PS4, there's no way kids will miss it as much as he missed the Amiga.

That's the level of love many people hold for the Amiga and it's games, though it's true that it's library seems one that is strangely hard to like for people who didn't grow up with an Amiga, they are far more willing to point out a lot of games aren't exclusives and even if they are, not every Amiga exclusive ends up being beloved by all.

>>6240086
>Bullshit. At release in October '92 the 040 Amiga 4000 cost about 2500 dollars. Same as a 486 with 33mhz.
http://oldcomputers.net/amiga4000.html
Released: September 1992
Price: US $3,699

>>6245505
>he pratically took his son's PS4 away to have him play real games and the guy's friends would appear to play classics like Chaos Engine and Alien Breed
nice

>>6245514
>>6245505

>>6245556
What a jerk, also, i am the guy who made that post about the Retro Gamer letter, the reason it stuck in my mind was that the guy sounded like a bit of an asshole talking about shoving an Amiga in his kid's face and all to show true games.

Also the arrogant and annoying comment about doubting the PS4 could ever be as loved, i was actually expecting the Retro Gamer staff to talk back in their answer letter, but they just asked if the kid learned to love true games.

Hey, the Amiga has some fun games, heck father and son could play some games of Worms and what not, but i am pretty sure the kid would rather play his PS4 instead, even if it was just for Fortnite so he could play with his friends...yes, awful, but i imagine that's what happened.

>>6245404
>Atari Falcon
Few were made. They were expensive. Despite 68030 it was slow, due to lack of the fast/chip ram split the Amiga has. Otherwise, the featureset was very cool, and the DSP did allow for cool shit. See 3d engine from Genode's Feske.
>>6245441
The Amiga was actually easier to expand thanks to being bus oriented. The chipset was like onboard graphics/sound today: it defines the baseline, but you don't have to use it. See The Amiga Book of Hardware for some information on available expansions. See the powerpc accelboard ecosystem. See RTG graphics. See PCI bridgeboards, and just using PC hardware seamlessly, like ISA bridgeboards previously.
Personally, I have one of those FPGA-based Vampire boards on my A500. It gives me a superfast 68060-compatible cpu, RTG graphics and digital audio through HDMI.
>pc video 1991
The average PC was trash even against an A500 in 1991, with fat price tag.
>Amiga fell behind
Commodore management to blame 100%. Due to cancelling every effort by the engineers, even designs that were ready, Amiga only got AGA (which was still awesome, but not vs cancelled alt). This was in 1992. Then Commodore died. Yet the Amiga was still the best overall experience you could have for years still.
I had access to Amiga, Mac and PC, and only around 1997 the hardware got fast enough to compensate for the inferior architecture, and not to look sad next to a basic A1200 in actual user experience + the amount of software available made it worth having. Pentium II (1997) left 68060 (1994) behind by sheer MHz, and as Motorola had abandoned 68k for PowerPC we didn't see faster 68k until today's FPGA efforts. Of course we had PowerPC accelboards on the Amiga, but with Commodore dead, it was all already a niche market. Amiga users moved on due to software alone.
Personally, I only starting using a PC as main in 2000, at which point I had a Windows 2000 + Debian + BeOS4 triple boot. I do still use my Amiga hardware today, just not as much.

>>6245592
yeah sorry but I don't want to live in a world where no one knows what superfrog is

>>6245618
>The average PC was trash even against an A500 in 1991
Average PC in 91 was a 25Mhz 386 with VGA a standard hard disk and high density floppies while A500 had 32 colors no hard disk 880k floppies a 7.16Mhz CPU and no expansion slots.

>cites a bunch of rare and pricey add-ons that didn't exist until the Amiga's commercial lifespan was over while any computer store in the early 90s had all the PC cards and peripherals you could ever ask for

>>6243850
The Atari ST and Amiga both had very low-rent, hacky looking GUIs compared with the Mac OS.

>inb4 mmuh preemptive multitasking
Not on a 7.16Mhz CPU you're not. Have more than two windows open and everything slows to an absolute crawl.

>>6245618
>Amiga was still the best overall experience you could have for years still.

Please explain that Amiga Strider against the Mega Drive port.

>>6245634 >>6245647
>A500
>32 colors
Wrong.
>No expansion slots
Wrong.
>No hard disk
Wrong. It just didn't ship with one.
>880KB floppies
Accurate.
>1991
Wrong. That's your average 1987 A500. You'd have to be really poor to have an unexpanded A500 in 1991.
>386 25MHz
Slow clunky piece of shit next to 68k+OCS working in parallel.

That's how I know you're a zoomer. You didn't use PC, Mac, Atari or Amiga back then. You weren't even born. That's why you stated so many wrongs as fact for basic Amiga specs.

>Such a PC being "Awesome"
Real Amiga owner in 1991 perspective: A 25MHz 386 with VGA was *trash*.
- It had no software
-- Windows 3.0 with its cooperative multitasking was basically a toy when compared to AmigaOS 2.
-- Productivity software available for DOS and Windows was pathetic next to what we used on the Amiga.
-- Games had shitty graphics and you could see the CPU draw. They weren't smooth in any way.
- Sound was a bunch of beeps, except for that guy with a sound blaster 2, which was actual sound yet still worse than Paula. Look up sb2's specs. Seriously..
- Hard disks were slow, and used that shitty FAT filesystem, which back then still had the 8+3 limitation. What a joke.
>unexpanded A500 in 1991
I had expansions. So did most people I knew.

It's clear to most of us here that you have no idea what the experience with each system was back then, and why.

>>6245691
>It had no software

>>6245656
>>inb4 mmuh preemptive multitasking
>Not on a 7.16Mhz CPU you're not. Have more than two windows open and everything slows to an absolute crawl.
In two sentences, you've revealed to us that you're clueless. You've told us:
1. You believe you can derive the whole experience from your limited understanding of "multitasking" and "MHz".
2. You don't know the first thing about AmigaOS. Your knowledge is limited to having seen screenshots and read it has preemptive multitasking.
3. You are ignorant of the features of the 68000 ISA and its implementation in 68000.
4. You're clueless about how much work the CPU does relative to the whole Amiga.

>>6245691
>32 colors
>Wrong
OCS Amiga has 4096 colors and 32 on screen at once, VGA was like 256k colors with 256 on screen at once.

All those Amiga expansions are so cute when nothing could actually use them, many weren't available until like 1997 which is a day late and a dollar short, and like anon said go into CompUSA in 1992 and count how much Amiga stuff was in there versus PC stuff.

>yeah I can just barely run Doom on my Amiga with this 68060 board which didn't come out until the late 90s

>>6245691
>Productivity software available for DOS and Windows was pathetic next to what we used on the Amiga
Every office in America used the Lotus/dBase/WP trio back in the day nobody used this shit >>6243653

>>6245740
>>6245730
>CompUSA
>in America
In Europe you could find all the Amiga stuff you needed at any store. Who gaf about Murrilards?

>>6245712
>OCS Amiga has 4096 colors and 32 on screen at once
You got the 4096 colors part right. That's something. Too bad the "32 at once" part is completely wrong, but it's not uncommon for armchair Amiga experts who haven't used one.
What OCS has is a 32 entry color LUT implemented as hardware registers.
Here's some ways you could get more than 32 colors:
- Sprites have their own color registers
- Use EHB mode, giving you 64 colors. The second half of the palette is the first half at half brightness. This is very powerful.
- HAM (Hold and Modify) mode allows for 4096 colors. Each pixel either sets the full color from the color registers, or modifies previous pixel in either R, G or B channel.
- Changing the color registers while the screen is drawn. This was easy to do thanks to the copper, and heavily used by all of AmigaOS, software and games.

>VGA was like 256k colors with 256 on screen at once.
VGA was basically a framebuffer. You'd draw to it with the CPU.
If you had a relatively fast CPU (i.e. a Pentium) you could even draw things to it fast, and make smooth 2d games and low fps but impressive 3d ones.
If you had a 286 or 386, tough luck.
On the Amiga, the chipset did most of the heavy lifting, leaving the CPU free to run non-graphics related code. AmigaOS, with its preemptive multitasking with priorities and RTOS features did make good use of it, providing a low latency user experience.

If you're at all technical and curious enough about how it all did fit together, coppershade is a good place to start. This article is a nice quick intro: http://coppershade.org/articles/Code/Articles/1._Starting_to_Dream_in_Code/

>>6245740
>In America
In Europe, we did look down on Lotus/dBase/WP trio (which we knew), as it was outright bad relative to Amiga productivity software.

>>6245301
According to the zoomennial bible productivity software includes "digital paintings, electronic music and digital video". An 85 Amiga would beat an early 90's PC at any of that without breaking a sweat. I don't necessarily agree with that definition as I think most people equate the term with "office" software. And I'm not saying the Amiga was useful for much outside that niche or even good for gaming once VGA became a thing. Just that the comparison used was ridiculous.

>>6245760
>If you had a relatively fast CPU (i.e. a Pentium) you could even draw things to it fast, and make smooth 2d games and low fps but impressive 3d ones.
And PCs kept getting faster and faster and by the time there was local bus video, well, there was Doom and goodbye Amiga. Meanwhile Amiga users were using a 1985 machine with a 7.16Mhz CPU and no hard disk so they had to swap 150 floppies by the time you get into early 90s games like Fate of Atlantis.

Sure you had AGA Amigas which could just barely run Doom with an expensive 68060 expansion board but were mostly glorified paperweights since Amiga software devs didn't really support anything but an unexpanded A500.

>>6245779
>bye bye Amiga
>anywhere before Pentium + Windows 95 + 3d acceleration card.
Ignorant fool.

Lotus/WP whatever were pricey as hell. Why would you expect us to use those over cheaper Amiga or ST applications? The typical European doesn't have the disposable income of Americans, not then or now.

>>6245760
>HAM (Hold and Modify) mode allows for 4096 colors. Each pixel either sets the full color from the color registers, or modifies previous pixel in either R, G or B channel.
That's only useful for static screens, you can't use it in the middle of a game and it was a leftover feature from a prototype of the Amiga chipset they never completely implemented, but just left on the chip die anyway.

>>6245760
>VGA was basically a framebuffer. You'd draw to it with the CPU.

It was but also a completely linear one and very fast to draw to. The Amiga had clunky planar graphics which were still in the AGA, absolutely inexcusable by that point. On a PC or Mac you could just increase the CPU speed, you could not do that on an Amiga because the custom chips not the CPU control the bus and everything is very tightly coupled together. And that's why custom chips were ultimately an outdated idea and a rudiment of early 80s home computer design.

show us the video of Doom or Wolf 3D running on a stock A500. remember, that's what 85% of Amiga owners had not an A4000 with an accelerator card

Technology was advancing quickly back then. The Mega Drive came out only three years after the OCS Amiga and try and do Sonic on an Amiga.

>>6245784
>Pentium + Windows 95 + 3d acceleration card
I had that. I played games on it sometimes. I still spent most of the time with my A1200/030.
This is true until I upgraded to Athlon in 2000 and started using Linux full time.
>>6245790
We pirated our PC software like we pirated our Amiga software, who are you kidding. We used Amiga software because we did not like Lotus/WP whatever.
>>6245795
HAM is used by games, intros and demos. Some even used blitter objects.
>in the middle of...
Do remember switching video modes in Amiga was almost free, it could be done by the copper, and it could be done several times midscreen.

>>6245850
>try and do Sonic on an Amiga
Kid Chaos

>>6245815
>Very fast to draw to
With a fast CPU, and remember the CPU had other things to do than draw graphics.
>planar graphics
Are less simple than chunky, yes. One of many design decisions that made the Amiga fast. Just not great for 3d. The CD32 had extra hardware to solve that problem.
AGA could have used chunky graphics, but we made up with fast chunky2planar routines until we got RTG (retargettable graphics).
Still, AGA was amazing when it was released (1992). It was much more than "256 colors". It was much more than high resolutions on par to pentium-era SVGAs.
We also got HAM8, and we got revamped 2d acceleration that made it smooth with no cpu help, basically as amazing to 1992 as OCS was to 1985.
It's just... it could have been earlier and better, if cbm didn't fuck up by overruling engineers.
>On a PC or Mac you could just increase the CPU speed
So could we on the Amiga. Accelboards were a thing, and every A1200 owner had one.
>you could not do that on an Amiga because the custom chips not the CPU control the bus
The CPU has direct access to the Zorro bus, which is at the core an extended 68000 bus. And a card in the Zorro bus can even replace the onboard CPU with simple, standard 68k bus negotiation.
>everything is very tightly coupled together.
Amiga is a bus oriented design. The chipset is coupled together, but from the CPU perspective it is just one card in the bus. 2MB of addressing space for the chipram + a further small mmio register area.
CPU can access fast ram directly, without any arbitration from the chipset. AmigaOS will place program code and data in fast while available, unless programs explicitly request chip.
>And that's why custom chips outdated rudiment of early 80s
We still do custom chips today. In fact, this is why your current laptop and cellphone are so fast.
>>6245850
>try and do Sonic on an Amiga
There's a bunch of similarly fluid platformers. I recommend Mr. Nutz. Runs on any Amiga, probably 1mb ram.

>>6245850
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLJyij5Olw0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WN66EpVdxsk

Mr. Nutz is fucking garbage, it's Yet Another Poor Attempt At A Cartoony Platformer Made By Demosceners (TM)

I mean, look at that sprite. He looks like he has Down's Syndrome. It's not all that fluid either and the music is bland and generic as fuck, probably the usual Soundtracker default envelope shit.

Kid Chaos is shit too, for a supposed Sonic clone the character doesn't convey any feeling of motion and it has more bland Protracker music.

>>6245905
>poor attempt
I played it back in the day. It was fun back then. It still is when I play it now.
>it's not all that fluid.
That's the video. Amiga is frame perfect.
>I mean, look at that sprite.
The squirrel is super adoracute. It drove me nuts how cute it was when I was little, and I still love it now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIjDBmz9ndU

What the hell is this mess?

I rest my case.

>>6245951
And you had to swap them an average of every three screens and take about 7 seconds for the next screen to load.

For a while in the late 80s the Amiga had a small if fairly solid US following but the ECS/AGA machines never caught on here. By that time the PC had clearly won the race and only Eric Schwartz and a few delusion Yuropoors cared about the AGA machines. But no matter how big the Amiga was in Europe, it was doomed to lose the war to PCs eventually since Commodore had neither the resources or the business savvy to keep it going as a viable platform.

>>6245958
people actually played it like that? I would hope everyone had hard drives by then.

>>6245972
As a home computer, it should have better gaming facilities. At least 3 buttons on the joystick (which would have been compatible with the pinout), tile-based graphics, and smaller but more plentiful & hardware multiplexed sprites were what won out for 2D gaming. The blitter was insufficient for really dynamic gaming, and palette-per-playfield is much more limited than palette-per-tile.

Non-interlaced VGA should have become standard.

But really, the failure of the Amiga was Commodore's executives just cashing out and not caring about future success.

Commodore fucked over their relationship with distributors due to Captain Jack's determination to punish Texas Instruments. They started selling computers in department and toy stores beginning with the VIC-20 which was good for short term sales and undercutting TI, bad for their long term image and sales prospects.

The A1000 came out but was too pricey for Toys'R'Us who wouldn't stock it and dedicated computer stores had already disowned Commodore and would not sell their products.

On top of that, the Amiga created a rift between the C64 people and the Amiga people. Since Commodore didn't design the Amiga themselves but merely purchased it, it had nothing in common with the 8-bit machines. No way to use C64 peripherals on an Amiga or read its disks.

In Amiga magazines there would be editorial columns about how the C64 was a outdated relic and Commodore should drop it and put all their resources into the Amiga. In C64 magazines you would read complaints about Amiga user snobbery.

>>6245995
I don't see why the typical Amiga user would have expected to be able to retain anything from his C64 outside the joysticks.

>>6245998
If you read contemporary magazines you'd see it otherwise. The C64 and Amiga communities were not friends by any stretch and Commodore didn't do anything to convince C64 users to upgrade. At minimum it was certainly a deal breaker that you couldn't use any C64 peripherals on an Amiga or read 1541 disks on it.

didn't that also happen with the Mac vs Apple IIgs?

>>6246008
Steve Jobs went out of his way to denigrate the Apple II people, yes, but I don't think it was quite as bad because the IIgs and Mac really didn't have a lot of overlap in their market segment or userbase. On top of that they could share peripherals and read each other's disks.

PCs had a true character/text mode, the Amiga didn't. So you could move text around very quickly. On the Amiga you had a complex bitmap screen with a custom chipset that resulted in a lot of latency. Even with the Mac it wasn't this bad because there weren't any custom chips in there and the graphics screen was a very simple 1-bit bitmap setup. You just write to the screen buffer to turn pixels on and off instead of going through layers of register writes with Agnus and Denise.

With a PC, you would have to change one byte to display the letter A on screen. With an Amiga if you had 8x8 text you would need to manipulate eight bytes. The blitter was also not that fast at trying to move around a 640x200 screen.

A lot of the stuff the Amiga tried to do was asking too much of mid-1980s technology. Preemptive multitasking wasn't very workable with a 7.16Mhz CPU and 512k-1MB of memory. It also didn't have the bandwidth to move around 640x200 graphics at an acceptable clip.

>>6246026
While I agree, one must understand the mid-80s computer marketplace. At that time, GUIs were very futuristic and cool while text mode was seen as a rudiment of the 70s. It didn't matter that the Amiga or those early Macs were more toys than something you could use practically, it was just the whole idea of having a GUI.

Bill Gates was totally awed by the Mac back then which was why Excel started out there. He said (paraphrasing) "We made a mistake by putting out all those 8-bit versions of Multiplan when we should have been looking ahead to 16-bit machines, to GUIs. We decided 'We'll let [Lotus] have the character-based spreadsheet market on the PC while we'll be making a graphical-based spreadsheet instead and be five steps ahead of them.'" Except nobody thought PCs would catch up and do the same for less cost.

Custom chips definitely prove a liability as you can't upgrade or modify them very much and they also make it more tedious and annoying to design accelerator cards since the accelerator can only go as fast as the custom chipset is willing to go.

>>6245995
Commodore never had much of a long-term vision or product planning, nothing more than being able to report a quarterly profit to their shareholders. The engineers had to figure out what to make next, they were given no direction. No Steve Jobs telling them this is what I want you to do.

>>6246036
As anon said earlier, the lack of adequate productivity software on the Amiga or Atari ST was a huge liability. The major application packages of the day either didn't get ported at all or had 1-2 phoned in releases that were full of bugs or not properly optimized.

Neither Commodore or Atari had the willingness or resources to try and convince Lotus, Borland, etc to port anything to their machines. They also couldn't match Apple or IBM for tech support, nor did Apple and IBM have an image attached to them as being a toy computer for playing games on.

>>6245958 >>6245951 >>6245976
It came with an HDD installer. It was in either the first or second floppy.

yeah good point. the A1000 was launched in summer 1985 and it didn't have anything resembling a usable word processor until late in 86. TextCraft, and GraphiCraft, Transformer, etc. (we referred to the first two as TextCrap and GraphiCrap) that were used to show off the system were unfinished. Some version of TextCraft did sell, but it still had issues. They should have given away those titles with the machine as a starter pack, it's not like people could do much with the machine without them when it was introduced.

anon was not kidding when he said how in the late 80s, the first thing a customer would do was ask you "Can that thing run Lotus, dBase, WP, Aldus PageMaker?" I'm not sure if all of them even knew what that software was, they just heard the names at work or saw them in a magazine and knew they had to have them.

>>6245823
While it's more of a mix of Doom and Wolf 3D as far as engine capabilities go and is something that's only being worked on in the past few months, there's this which runs on stock A500 with trapdoor RAM:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wu66Qs579o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeaNb5QzoU0

>>6245981
>The blitter was insufficient
If anything, it was overkill.
http://amigadev.elowar.com/read/ADCD_2.1/Hardware_Manual_guide/node0118.html
>>6246003
You could read 1571/etc disks with Amiga 5.25" drives connected to the external floppy port. You could also use the drives directly with a cable from the Amiga's parallel port.
Many of us had both C64 and Amiga.
>>6246062
When they released the A1000, the OS wasn't even ready, thus as you'd expect there was little third party software. They called 1.0 but quality wise it was pre-alpha and crashed a lot. 1.1 fixed most of it, released 2 months later and bundled with A1000s sold past that. Thanks to kickstart being in "WORM" back then (RAM with a write-protect latch after boot) and being loaded from a floppy on power up, this wasn't much of an issue for users. Software exploded after that.
>usable word processor
A lot were released in 1986.
This site has a bunch of interesting categories:
http://www.classicamiga.com/component/option,com_jreviews/Itemid,175/url,Software/Software/Office-Word-Processing_c224_m175/
Just be very aware that they do list the latest version of each program, rather than the first one, when considering the release dates listed.
>>6246063
Super cool.

>>6246059
how common were hard drives on the amiga?

>>6246036
I don't quite agree that GUIs are easier to use necessarily. Especially back in the 80s-90s when they were a new concept, they took some getting used to and people often felt that clicking on an abstract icon to start a program was not as intuitive as typing "123" at the DOS prompt to start Lotus 123.

But today someone would say that a command like COPY *.TXT C:\DOCS makes no fucking sense, why can't I just drag the icon over to the folder to copy it?

>>6246026
>with an Amiga if you had 8x8 text you would need to manipulate eight bytes.
Text rendering was hardware accelerated and very fast.
>Even with the Mac it wasn't this bad because there weren't any custom chips in there and the graphics screen was a very simple 1-bit bitmap setup. You just write to the screen buffer to turn pixels on and off instead of going through layers of register writes with Agnus and Denise.
The Mac is an horrible example, because when the Amiga emulated a Mac, it was faster than the actual Mac. The CPU was of course the same, the advantage manifested on doing the actual drawing.
>you had a complex bitmap screen with a custom chipset that resulted in a lot of latency.
The "complex bitmap screen" (it's called bitplanes) was an optimization which allowed the system to have lightning fast 2d graphics.
>Preemptive multitasking wasn't very workable with a 7.16Mhz CPU and 512k-1MB of memory.
Like contemporary RTOSs, TripOS and AmigaOS did have very workable multitasking. Not just really workable, but actually legendary. Bards still sing songs today about Amiga as the computer that did multitasking right.
>blah blah agnus denise
You throw chip names around to try and sound smart, but otherwise you have no clue about the Amiga.

>>6246074
My elderly grandpa had a real hard time figuring out how to look up how his stocks were doing and get the weekly weather report on Yahoo, yet he used to work on mainframes in the 60s-70s where you typed cryptic commands into a terminal. he would have figured out something like "cat://root -> 1. View stocks. 2. View weather forecast" easily.

>>6246092
>>6246080
Nowadays everyone and their grandma is used to using a computer, it's just another household appliance like a microwave oven. I've never seen 70 year olds flustered by an iPhone the way I remember 45 year olds being flustered by Windows 95. Back then computers were still pretty new and really scared a lot of people, like they were afraid it would break if they did something wrong. And forget about trying to get someone to use a Mac, they'd say "But I only know Windows!"

>>6246074
You could get hard disks but they were expensive SCSI ones and Commodore of course didn't really support them (or support anything for that matter), it was pretty much of a hack. Some games supported hard disk installation, others didn't (often due to copy protection) and you ended up swapping 15 disks.

>>6246074
The Amiga themselves were very cheap but came without HDDs except for some configurations of the big box models, which were mostly used by business.
Working with just floppies was very feasible and comfy, so, early, poor people with an A500 would only get the 512KB expansion.
By 1990, half of my Amiga-owning friends had hard disk + fast ram solutions attached to the left slot. Having any FAST RAM at all made the Amiga 30% faster and made using Full DMA for graphics in AmigaOS possible without the slowdown you'd otherwise get after 4 channels.
By 1992, pretty much everybody had either an A600 or an A1200, and everybody had an IDE HDD attached to them. I was still on A500 without HDD and on 1.3, so I upgraded to A1200+hdd,
My A500 still works and currently has a CF card on it with ide68k+ram68k. I also replaced cpu with a 68010, as they're less than $10 these days.
>>6246036 >>6246080
We had both with AmigaShell and Workbench.
And yet, I used the likes of DirMaster, Directory Opus to move files around most of the time. Shell otherwise. Workbench almost never, particularly until the A1200 and AmigaOS 3.1.
Workbench 1.x wouldn't show all files, only those with a .info file, which was a major handicap.

>>6245030
>Again, your only point is cope. You're literally comparing an 85 Amiga to 90's PCs

Because >>6243608 responded with a post comparing a stock 500 Amiga. Does it really have to be pointed out for you, nigger?

All those Amiga upgrades like accelerator boards and hard disks were also ungodly expensive because they didn't benefit from scale of economics like PC peripherals. I knew a fellow who spent over £800 on a 68040 accelerator board that also added SCSI and 16MB of RAM, yet the performance boost he got from it was disappointing.

>>6246109
>Working with just floppies was very feasible and comfy,
It was ok in 1988 when most games were on 1-2 disks, it was not ok by the time of >>6245951

I doubt Commodore could have done anything to save the Amiga. The sound and graphics were great for the time, but it was really a console made into a computer and not a computer that happened to be good at games. The main computer market simply was not looking for what Amiga was offering.

They might have been able to give Amiga a chance had they released the 3000 earlier with some better stuff. It should have had networking built in and a better graphics card that could run in high resolution without flickering. Can you imagine staring at an Amiga for 8 hours while trying to do actual work on it? I know there were workarounds some of this stuff, but they were workarounds.

>>6246104
>and you ended up swapping 15 disks.
There's no 10+ floppy game with no HDD installer, that I am aware of. Most games with 3+ floppies bundled one, especially if released after 1990.
Whdload and its predecessors have been around for a long time. It was how we ran OCS/ECS games on AGA with aga fixes.
>>6246113
010/020 boards for A500 and 030 boards for A1200 didn't cost all that much and did provide a massive boost.
If you got A1200+HDD+030 expansion, it was still far cheaper than the PCs of the time, which were much worse in every regard. This still holds if you went for an A4000. Getting a PC back then was perceived by Amiga users about as stupid as buying a Mac looks to those of us who build PCs from components today.
I ended up getting a PC in 1996 and only used it for 3d and pc-exclusive games, as it sucked so much otherwise. A1200 and that PC carried me to 2000.
>>6246116
I finished MI2, 11 floppy, with a single floppy drive and 1MB of RAM. I had fun.
AmigaOS's volumes/assigns/mounts and general nonbloatness of Amiga software kept it very usable with only floppies. A HDD was seen as a luxury, in no way necessary, but by 1990-92 it was a very affordable one.

>>6246119
Yeah it was too much of a video game console with a keyboard. The Amiga and ST were too expensive for a mere video game machine but not good enough to be office machines. Even the form factor was bad (though the 2000 and 3000 lines were better), particularly for an office. They were too pricey for department stores. Jack Tramiel was just retarded enough to think he could sell Atari STs at Sears the way he'd sold VIC-20s and then not provide any proper tech support for them. Commodore didn't provide any decent tech or developer support.

Lots of people have brought up how the Amiga's custom chipset was an impediment and prevented it from being updated or improved in any meaningful way.

>>6243608
>MEANWHILE ON A STOCK AMIGA 500:
>chuck rock title

Christ, at least post a decent Amiga rock mod:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BFqf096ybY

>>6246128
This is a little different than what I was talking about. Being able to emulate an IBM terminal on a Token Ring network was very important in those days and the Amiga couldn't do it. Even small companies would often have at least one PC with an terminal emulator card in it. The ability to network was very important too. OS/2 was absolutely awesome in this regard. There were a few years where it looked like OS/2 was going to crush Microsoft in the corporate world. IBM sold some pretty amazing stuff for dealing with a large environment with a mainframe and all the legacy stuff that went with it, like Token Ring networking and the ability to treat your local printer like it were a mainframe printer. Later on, especially with Windows NT 3 and 4, you could do most of it with MS, though there were specialized stuff I've never seen again to this day.

A friend of mine used to work at an accounting firm which had a giant collection of Compaq Deskpro 386s, like a thousand of them all networked with Ethernet cards. They had loads of different laptops of various vintages and brands. They had an outfit called Decision One to provide tech support and repairs which included genuine replacement parts, even for obsolete machines. Without this professional support, the company wouldn't have been able to operate.

Shit, back then you could drive to Commodore's HQ faster than you could drive to a store that carried Amiga gear. In a big city like Philadelphia even, you had to search under a rock to find Amiga software or hardware.

>>6246119
It was perfectly possible to advance the Amiga, as AGA, RTG and PPC boards demonstrated.
It was perfectly possible, too, to release the Ranger and AA they cancelled instead of ECS and AGA respectively.
It was also perfectly possible to release the ECS A3000 with the DSP the engineers wanted in it and management overruled.
But EVEN WITH ALL THESE MISTAKES, Amiga was still the better choice.
Unfortunately, Commodore's failures extended to Marketing. In murika and the rest of the world, Amiga never got any significant market share. They failed to market Amiga's superior CPU, graphics, sound and AmigaOS's intuition and solid preemptive, realtime, low-latency multitasking experience. They failed to market Amiga as the creativity enabling system it was. They failed to market it as the business monster it was. People used the likes of workperfect in expensive, extremely slow PCs instead of Kind Words, TurboCalc and friends. Business thought Amiga was a toy for games and that 14MHz 286 were unironically better for business than an Amiga because "they had more MHz of course it's faster". This wasn't even true when comparing just a 68000@7MHz directly with a 286@14, mind you.
Only Commodore UK understood the machine's value and marketed it semi-decently, and thanks to that it was popular as fuck in Europe. Everybody had an Amiga here. Everybody. The shift to PCs happened in the second half of the 90s, after commodore's demise, hope was lost. Some held longer than others, but by 2000 nearly everybody already got a PC.

>>6246142
We had networking, too. We even had TCP/IP stacks quite early. Third party, of course.
Commodore themselves sold some network cards, even for the A500, but they failed to market them or provide anything useful to do with them themselves. Everything meaningful to do with networks was third party.
Companies using Amiga would be aware of them and use them. But most companies outside of Europe did not even consider the Amiga, because Commodore failed to market it to them.

Yeah the contemporary press coverage of Commodore was pretty bad. Not for their machines but for the way they were run. Mehdi Ali and Irving Gould were complete idiots interested in nothing but spending company money to buy new beach homes and sports cars. The Amiga 600 which was supposed to be cheaper to manufacture and sell, it ended up being more expensive to manufacture and sold for more than the A500 whilst it offered users less and subsequently canceled the A500 which was Commodore's flag ship and the most popular selling machine at the time, this was the first time Commodore had ever discontinued a product that was still selling extremely well. A way to shoot yourself in the foot..

It seems the only serious market the Amiga found was A3000s with Video Toaster.

>>6246062
>anon was not kidding when he said how in the late 80s, the first thing a customer would do was ask you "Can that thing run Lotus, dBase, WP, Aldus PageMaker?" I'm not sure if all of them even knew what that software was, they just heard the names at work or saw them in a magazine and knew they had to have them.

^This. PCs and Macs had the AAA application packages everyone wanted. Amigas and STs had spreadsheets, databases, etc but usually by small companies and they weren't as polished or had as many features as Lotus or WP because those companies didn't have big budgets. TurboCalc or whatever >>6246143 mentions didn't have IBM's money behind it the way Lotus 123 was backed.

Back in the 80s was also the golden age of 680x0 Unix workstations. No idea about the Amiga, but the ST sort of had MiNT although it was hard to set up and use and wouldn't pass any Unix certifications.

>>6246148
>The Amiga 600 which was supposed to be cheaper to manufacture and sell
And it was also meant to be called Amiga 300. PCMCIA and IDE were very nice, but It was deliberately made unexpandable cpu-wise, as they removed the zorro slot and didn't provide an alternative. This didn't actually stop expansions, as everything necessary was in the CPU socket anyways. But it discouraged purchasing A600, as it looked at first to people not aware of that that it'd never get expansions. The quality of the keyboard was also much lower than A500's.
>subsequently canceled the A500 which was Commodore's flag ship and the most popular selling machine at the time, this was the first time Commodore had ever discontinued a product that was still selling extremely well. A way to shoot yourself in the foot..
The A500+ sold well for the short amount of time it was available. It's my main Amiga today, as I'm mainly doing 68k asm dev with it, with asmtwo.
>Mehdi Ali and Irving Gould
*kill intent*. Damn clowns.
>>6246156 >>6246163
If you ignore word processing (prowrite, kindwords, wordsworth), spreadsheets (turbocalc, final calc), databases (SuperBase, Final Data), music (deluxe music, octamed, bars and pipes), CAD (microcad, caligary), 3D (Sculpt 4D, Lightwave 3d (now you know as blender) and so on and so on which were used all over Europe and preferred over its PC alternatives due to their superiority.
See for yourself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_productivity_software
>IBM's money behind it
Throwing more money and developers at something doesn't necessarily make it better. Amiga productivity software put PCs to shame.
>Back in the 80s was also the golden age of 680x0 Unix workstations. No idea about the Amiga...
We had AMIX, which A3000UX bundled. That was commodore's Amiga-based UNIX workstation. Of course they also failed to market it.
We also got FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and Linux ports around them, besides MINIX 1.5.x we already had from the 80s.

>>6239743
No less than Jay Miner himself warned at the end of the 80s that planar graphics were passe and linear frame buffers were the way forward. He also said of course Commodore ignored his warning.

>>6246163
I can tell you that every time I've ever been in a public library or a place that had used computer books from the 80s-early 90s, I'd see stuff like "Using Lotus 123", "Mastering Lotus 123", "Advanced dBase", "Networking With Token Ring", "Getting Started with PageMaker", "Introduction to MS-DOS", etc. I've never seen a single book called "Mastering Final Writer", "Getting Started in Workbench", or "How to Become a TurboCalc Pro in Six Weeks". In fact I've literally never seen one book about the Amiga or Amiga software. Ever.

>>6246172 >>6239743
>the retarded use of planar graphics
It was actually smart use of planar graphics.
>which should have died with the 80s.
Not really. Remember they're a performance hack. They allow for much higher memory bandwidth with the same RAM chips. Think about it like using Dual Channel RAM today instead of Single Channel. And the chipset does all the 2d drawing work, so it's not any more complicated from a programmer perspective. As long as you're only doing 2d. Bitplanes are a valuable speed hack up until the point you stop using color palettes altogether, and go with packed RGB, YV12 and the like.
What REALLY was retarded was not supporting Chucky modes at all. Which they could and should have done. In indexed palette world, this is only a problem when you have to draw with something else than the blitter. With you would have to for textured 3d graphics. In this case, you'd draw with the CPU, because retarded CBM didn't allow the engineers to have the DSP they wanted, which could have been used for 3d acceleration among a myriad of other tasks.
>He also said of course Commodore ignored his warning.
They did ignore it. AGA released without planar modes.
Of course, at the end (CD32 release) they admitted Jay Miner was right, by including chucky2planar in the AKIKO chip.

>>6246180
What country is this? We had Amiga books in our local library. We even had books about C programming.
There were a lot of Amiga magazines running, available for purchase everywhere, all over Europe.
Technical bookstores had plenty of Amiga books for sale.

>>6246169
Blender isn't Lightwave.

>>6246180
My cousin worked at a computer repair store back then and they didn't service Amigas or Atari STs and never got any in for repairs that he could remember. It seems most people went straight from 8-bit machines to a PC or Mac. Good luck finding an Amiga or Atari ST to buy anyway, it wasn't like a C64 or Atari 800XL that were sold at K-Mart.

>>6246180
>Getting Started in Workbench
Amiga came with such a book. Early Amiga even got a tutorial floppy.
Besides the introduction book, there was a book documenting Workbench and the CLI, all the commands and their syntax. Think of it as manpages in actual printed paper.
PC had a lot of such books because it sucked, and those books were very necessary. MSDOS did at some point bundle the HELP program providing documentation, but too little too late.
>How to Become a TurboCalc Pro in Six Weeks
This sort of book wasn't popular in Amiga, because programs were easy to use and often had builtin documentation. Try pressing the Help key.
We also had AmigaGuide, which was an HyperText documentation format which quickly became very popular once introduced: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaGuide
For programming, floppies with the NDKs circulated aplenty. The NDKs are the Amiga SDKs, they came with excellent documentation.

>>6246194
>Blender isn't Lightwave.
Typo. Meant to say that of Traces. At the end I never wrote Traces.
Refer to: http://zgodzinski.com/blender-prehistory/
Lightwave 3d is very good and was extremely popular well into the 2000s, but it has nothing to do with Blender, other than similarities in interface and support for importing lightwave formats in blender.

>>6246197
I saw one once at Toys-R-Us. Saw it momentarily out of the corner of my eye on my way to check out Mega Drive games.

A large part of the Amiga's lack of acceptance in the US was because the OCS machines had TV resolution color displays with 8x8 text unlike the hi-res monochrome of the PCs and Macs and that programs like Lotus, DBase, Excel, and Word were never ported to it. Yes, the Amiga had alternatives, but it's hard to convince an office worker that their spreadsheet or database files can be easily read on an Amiga. And yes there was a PC compatibility option for the Amiga, but that was too much extra cost and 'hassle' for a lot of customers to consider. They'd just as soon buy a cheap PC and stay compatible with what was at the office.

AGA was too little too late. It had the professional-level monitor output but didn't do full SVGA-equivalent graphics modes. And of course, there was the 8-bit sound issue.

>>6246247
>>6246197
>>6246180
>>6246142
>>6244202
1. Ignore the weeb avatarfag
2. Some of these posts leave me absolutely bewildered. In the UK, the Amiga was a mass market machine. Software and hardware was available everywhere, everyone had the things or knew someone that did, and it had tons of books and magazines. I just find it hard to fathom that it was almost a non-factor in the US the way you describe.

>>6246256
In 85-90 there was a modest Amiga following in the US mostly among artists and gamers. After 90, the Amiga totally disappeared from this side of the Atlantic and we never really saw the AGA machines.

The moment I saw Chuck Yeager's Air Combat running on a 386 PC with Soundblaster and VGA I knew the jig was up and the Amiga was done.

Apparently at least one American used an Amiga for word processing because I got an A500 as part of a lot a few years ago (this was in the Seattle area fwiw). It had an external hard disk and on there I found a bunch of McDonalds employee information including how long you're allowed to take for your lunch break, what constitutes a sandwich, beverage, and side, etc. It was written with Pen Pal.

>inb4 snooping at people's personal files
Ok at least there was nothing in there talking about the dude's masturbation habits.

>>6235786
Amiga games are pretty terrible and only a few could benefit from the better graphics and sound from it anyway. Why tf would anyone want to play zool or mr nutz instead of sonic?

Also this >>6245951 and this >>6240479. Oh, and this >>6241829.

Nobody, just nobody had a PC as a home computer in the UK in the 80s. They were hideously expensive and you would only ever see them in an office or in a laboratory, at universities, etc. The Amstrad PC1512 was the first PC that one could realistically afford to have in their home.

>>6246274
>Why tf would anyone want to play zool or mr nutz instead of sonic?

The avatarfag defended Mr. Nutz because he played it as a child. (^:

One market the ST stayed ahead of the Amiga in Europe was in the business/productivity field. Its high resolution display which had a higher resolution and faster refresh rate made it attractive for business people because it was easy on the eyes which allowed more/better productivity than the Amiga's color screen (worse in interlaced mode). Lots of AAA productivity software often rivaling Lotus 123 or dBase came from Germany and were often seen in offices around Europe. At one point most of the West German government was ST based.

Here everyone had C64 and Amiga as home computers. The ST was an office machine and Germans are a bit puzzled to hear it had games in other markets.

How fast was technology moving in the 80s? Consider that the C64 was launched in August 1982 and the Amiga debuted July 1985. That's just about three years during which time computing had moved an entire generation forward. The Mega Drive debuted in Japan in October 1988 which was three years and three months after the Amiga, another whole generation forward.

Mehdi Ali and Irving Gould, aside from robbing Commodore's coffers to buy beach homes and sports cars for themselves, also hired the guy who designed the PCjr as head of engineering. You may as well have hired Jerry Sandusky to head a Boy Scout troop.

>>6245795
>parrots bullshit
You're the same kid who jumps into every C64 thread and screams that it can't do scrolling, aren't you?

Sure, the Amiga was marketed well in Europe which it was not in the US and it had success there that it didn't here, but in the end it was still doomed because it was attached to a corrupted, dysfunctional company.

>>6246109
>working with floppies were comfy
No they weren't and I own and love my Amiga. I switched to a gotek as soon as I was able.

>>6245508
http://cbmmuseum.kuto.de/amiga_4000.html
Here it is listed at 4000,- german marks. At exchange rates from 1992 that's 2560 dollars. So, which one is right? Was the US version simply highly overpriced? Someone got other sources?

>>6245618
>only around 1997 the hardware got fast enough to compensate for the inferior architecture, and not to look sad next to a basic A1200

This is what Amigafags actually believe

>>6246367
Now I have a gotek, but I use it externally.
Having 2 floppy drives is so much better than one.
I have an ide68k, but haven't bothered to set it up. I like the dev flow I have with two floppies, internal with asmtwo+tools and gotek with sources.
>>6246429
Fuck off, clueless zoomer.

>>6246429
The Amiga couldn't even keep up with a Mega Drive. Boot up Sonic 1 and see what I mean. The speed of the game is greater than what an Amiga can muster since the MD has port-mapped video memory that doesn't steal CPU cycles and tile graphics instead of bitmaps. Later on when MD games started exceeding 1MB ROM size, it gets even worse since the typical Amiga setup was 512k-1MB. For example Phantasy Star 4 is on a 3MB cartridge. To do that on the Amiga, you would need at least four disks and have to put up with awful load times and a lot of disk swapping.

>>6246471
>the MD has port-mapped video memory that doesn't steal CPU cycles
What is FAST RAM.
>and tile graphics instead of bitmaps
Tile graphics are more useful in a console.
>To do that on the Amiga, you would need at least four disks and have to put up with awful load times and a lot of disk swapping.
Generally, compression wasn't used in cartridges, as consoles don't have much RAM and instead map and use the cartridge ROM directly.

>>6246471
Ditto the MD having 80 16x16 sprites while the Amiga has only eight sprites and they're just eight pixels wide (though as tall as the entire screen) and hardware parallax scrolling. You could do Sonic on the Amiga, you'd end up with something more like the Master System Sonics, which makes sense since the Amiga is more of a SMS contemporary than a MD contemporary.

And then later on one of the really big nails in the Amiga's coffin was Street Fighter 2. Literally everyone wanted to get a SNES to play that. On the Amiga...oh dear.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8K-yQDShzxA

>>6245505
>guy that once his wife got him an Amiga 500 like he used to have, he pratically took his son's PS4 away
>wife got him an Amiga 500
>he pratically took his son's PS4 away
What a fucking mockery of a human being, holy shit.

>>6246497
>the Amiga has only eight sprites
But it has a copper which can reconfigure them mid raster.
>and they're only 8 pixel wide
In non attached mode.
>Street Fighter 2.
Shit port. That's all it was. The main issue with it were the controls. Terrible controls.

>>6246501
It was hyperbole, let me transcribe the actual letter from Retro Gamer 199:
"Dear Retro Gamer, Time flies when you're having fun...one Christmas 30 odd years ago, my brother got an Amiga 500 and proudly showed off the Bart VS The Space Mutants cutscene which blew my Amstrad CPC 464 away- I simply couldn't believe a computer could produce these graphics.
After reading your magazine and mentioning this briefly to my wife, she gave me the best Christmas present i could receive, a (yellowing) Amiga 500. I promptly gave it pride of place over the PS4 to teach our 8 years old son the true meaning of proper games.
Since then i have had a steady stream of my 35 years old mates and colleagues exclaiming "Oh my god, you got a Amiga 500!" and asking if they can "come around and play" like it was 1990 all over again. True classics such as Chaos Engine and Alien Breed still stand out today. The ex-workers of Commodore should be truly proud that 30 years after it was built, it's still doing what it was designed to do-bring pure enjoyment. I wonder, will the PS4 be doing the same in 2049?"

>>6246568
>will the PS4 be...
No.
PS2 and PS3 definitely will, as they had an entirely custom design and the Cell, respectively.
PS4 is simply soulless. Just a PC with some pieces removed and custom firmware.

>>6246497
Do you get off by spreading misinformation?
>8 sprites
Quote: Sprite DMA channels can be reused several times within the same display field. Thus, you are not limited to having only eight sprites on the screen at the same time.
>and only 8 pixels wide.
Quote: Basic sprites are 16 pixels wide and any number of lines high.
Source: http://amigadev.elowar.com/read/ADCD_2.1/Hardware_Manual_guide/node00AF.html
KYS. zoomer.

>>6246615
>>6246304
All this misinformation and lies crop up every Amiga thread (well, ok - not just Amiga). And no matter how much you debunk, it crops up the next thread as well.
Duuude, It's like totally information warfare, man.

>>6246615
>>6246791
I don't know why anyone would care about specs. Just play the game and see for yourself which one is better. Numbers alone won't tell you if it's worth it or not or if you can notice a difference at all.

>>6235786
Because these emulator fags can't afford one. Which they are getting to be more expensive than their worth, but not all of us were poor fags during the last ten years .I have six Amigas right now.
A A1200 with an 030 accelerator. Another A1200 that was refurbished, but needs its caps replaced, A A2000 that needs a ton of work due to a f'n battery. A A500 that works fantastic. Another A500 that I bought for parts or restoration. And an A600 that needs recapped.
Not all of them work, but I plan on getting most of them working and then selling the ones I don't need.

>>6246896
>A A2000 that needs a ton of work due to a f'n battery
Curse them barrel fuckers.
>got 6
I only got 5. I guess I'm slightly less autistic.
1200, 600, 500+, 500r6 2x.
Got a Vampire V500v2 , ide68k+ram68k, and a blizzard 1230mkIV.
The SMD ones do need recap.

>>6246409
That doesn't include German VAT at 14%.
Also, the currency exchange for DEM to USD was $1.41
It would have been $3200 in 1992.
So, yes, it was priced a little higher in the US, probably because it wasn't as popular.

That said, for $2800, you could have gotten a DX2/66 486 with 16MB of memory, a 2GB hard drive, a good VLB video card, and a sound blaster of some kind and used DOS and Windows 3.1 and would have been able to play Doom.

>>6246983
>That doesn't include German VAT at 14%
I'm afraid that is wrong. It is included, as was regular practice in Germany and still is.
Also Check out this page: https://www.kultmags.com/mags.php?folder=QW1pZ2EgTWFnYXppbi8xOTky
If you can read German, get the November issue and go to page 34. If you can't go here:https://archive.org/details/computermagazines
>Also, the currency exchange for DEM to USD was $1.41
Also does not seem to be true, see here: https://freecurrencyrates.com/en/exchange-rate-history/DEM-USD/1992/cbr
Here too: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/312004/umfrage/wechselkurs-des-us-dollars-gegenueber-der-d-mark/https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/312004/umfrage/wechselkurs-des-us-dollars-gegenueber-der-d-mark
And here: http://marcuse.faculty.history.ucsb.edu/projects/currency.htm
>That said, for $2800, you could have gotten a DX2/66 486 with 16MB of memory, a 2GB hard drive, a good VLB video card, and a sound blaster
This here says otherwise: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1992-09/page/n41/mode/2up

Somehow everything you say does not check out. Care to give some of YOUR sources? If the Amiga really was a whole grand more than in Europe, that would explain at least some things.

>>6246112
Well, you can try to "point out" that he's as retarded as you but I won't believe you

>>6246507
>Shit port. That's all it was. The main issue with it were the controls. Terrible controls.
granted but why would you expect a 1v1 port of a CPS-2 game on a 7 year old machine? do you know how fast technology was advancing back then?

Actually, Zool, Mr. Nutz, and James Pond all got console ports which were vastly better than the crap on the Amiga.

test

it's interesting but EA's port of Marble Madness all the way back in the beginning of the Amiga was excellently done, it had what's basically a C compiled emulation of the arcade game. it makes it all the more lame that British software houses were doing these pathetic conversions in six weeks often by copypasting the Atari ST port onto the Amiga.

>>6247432
Ok, still, Marble Madness was a 1984 arcade game not a 1991 arcade game like SF2. Big fucking difference and besides when the Amiga was first launched, Commodore contracted with EA to produce games for it as essentially tech demos so EA had the time, money, and motivation to get it right.

>>6235786
/vr/ here I don't hate this at all

The reasons you describe + the tiles based video engine which is an advantage for platform games, also the MegaDrive could display 80 16x16 masked sprites and 2 independent playfields with a palette of 64 (3 bit like the ST) colors at full frame rate, that was the fixed specs of the machine, programmers had to play around this and didn't have to waste time with raster/copper tricks but could, for example, focus on programming proper physics engine like in Sonic. Also they could move big blocks on the screen made of these 80 sprites and make the background more interactive which was impossible on Amiga.

On Amiga there was no real fixed specs: a lot depended on the program's optimization and the programmers smartness, of course the time spent on optimizing wasn't spent on improving the gameplay and it showed in many Amiga games which were dashed off in term of gameplay (even if they looked and sounded rather good).

i'm pretty convinced that a stock A500 with 1MB of memory was not going to be able to recreate Sonic accurately

>>6247467
Remember that a MegaDrive can output 320 pixels of 16 colour non repeating sprites per scanline without CPU intervention or DMA cost. Its dual playfield mode has double the colours than that of the Amiga and also comes for free without any DMA penalties. Really good games can even exhaust the sprite list mid screen and send a new one via DMA in order to draw even more sprites on screen (ala copper). A game that really exploits well the hardware is simply impossible to convert 1:1 on OCS, and possibly doable but hard on AGA.

>>6245632
Superfrog is an awful game riddled with gameplay problems, the physics and controls are a joke. It's just a pretty-looking smooth scroller, if anything at all.

Why do people pay so much attention to the parallax scroll? I really don't get why the technicalities are always the focus of people when they discus the possibility of a game like this.

>>6245404
>An advantage of amiga and atari is that everyone has the same hardware to you can do intense optimization
That's a disadvantage, because you can't upgrade. Even the relatively minor upgrade of the Amiga 1200 was incompatible with a lot of Amiga 500 games.

>>6247483
I think it is more than just coders who care about whether the Amiga can do things its rivals could, and Sonic is an especially sore point, just as Doom was when PCs started to enter the gaming scene. All of the Amiga fanboys desperately wanted to prove that it could do Sonic but instead you just ended up with low quality knockoffs like Kid Chaos. People are still so sore from those old playground arguments that they still want to prove that the Amiga can do Sonic to this day; that is, prove it on a technical level, I'm not even sure anyone would care much about actually playing it.

>>6245481
>smooth scrolling
It's only 35fps, not smooth.

>>6247489
But don't just look at the moving objects, look at all screen updates. The background in KC is updated a lot, and all that costs blitter time on the Amiga while it is basically free on the Mega Drive.

>>6247419
(X) doubt.

>>6247483
Yeah, Amiga platformers don't seem to have aged the best, with rare exceptions, even games that got ported to consoles such as Zool are left forgotten or were never as popular.

And attempts at bringing Amiga platformers to recent generations have failed, hey, they brought back Putty which was popular on the Amiga and no one cared when it came back in the same style, hey, did you know there is a remastered version of Gods that also allows you to play the old game?

Likely not, because no one seemed to care about that, heck Superfrog HD was a thing...that Team 17 removed because of low sales and bad reviews, i mean, yeah, different graphics that aren't as charming, but the main complaints were that the old platformer style of the Amiga is boring and really not that fun to anyone who didn't grow up with it.

Again, the Amiga has some great games in it, but platformers aren't it's strong point.

>>6247446
>1991
Games from early Amiga days in 80s didn't really use the Amiga as it was a new machine and a very peculiar one.
By 1989-ish, people knew how to program the Amiga hardware. Thus SF2 was a disappointing release. I bought it back in the day, I still have the box. It was a bit meh but still cool graphically, but it was unplayable because it used a single button and poorly, at a time where most Amiga users had 2 button joysticks already.

>>6247518
>superfrog HD
Is way worse than the Amiga version. After playing some HD and being disgusted at it, I booted the original up on the Amiga to verify if my memories were wrong. The Amiga game is still awesome. Port is poorly made and soulless.

American here. I love my Amiga. I modded mine to play pal games.

>>6247419
That's a lie. Zool was never good on any system.

>>6247552
I've played zool on RISC OS. It is okay, not great.

>>6247525
Actually the point was more like it's a lot easier to try and port a 1984 arcade game to the Amiga than a 1991 arcade game. Arcade technology wasn't exactly standing still during that time, you know.

>>6247530
>The Amiga game is still awesome.
LOLno it's not.

>shit physics
>almost impossible difficulty/controls
>screen starts scrolling the moment you push the joystick instead of your character being able to move a few pixels before it starts
>press up to jump
>very boring gameplay and bleh level design

>>6247606
>press up to jump
That was because games were made for single button controllers and you had to map jump to something. Attack was already being used with the fire button.

>>6237045
These weird weeaboo fake-japanese euro games were the funniest damn thing.

>>6246284
There was an earlier example of this with the Commodore PET. The business models of the PET never really caught on in the US as they weren't Z80 machines that could run CP/M, so Commodore ended up shifting most production to Europe.

>>6247590
My point was that the devs that did the port sucked. Most Amiga devs knew to do better in 1991.

>>6247753
The best programmer in the world couldn't make a 1v1 port of SF2 on 1985 hardware.

>>6247757
You probably meant 1:1, and nobody expects 1:1 ports, particularly not in that era with all the hardware quirks of each platform.
It's just... the SF2 port doesn't really use the target platform well.

Fuck you US Gold and Tiertex.

>>6235786
Ignorance. They try 1 or 2 shit games like shadow of the beast and superfrog, they play it emulated and not set up correctly so the scrolling is jerky etc. Then they give up.

>>6247862
>They try 1 or 2 shit games like shadow of the beast and superfrog
it would help if those shit games would stop appearing in Amiga rec lists when the guy making the list clearly hasn't played them since he was 13 so he can't remember how shitty they are.

>>6247862
Super Frog is actually fun

>>6247952
Was covered in >>6247518

>>6240332
You can do more than two as well. There's two analogue input lines you can use as digital inputs in addition to the normal digital one.

>>6246896
whats the 030 accelerator used for, most games look like they run perfectly fine on the a500 apart from alien breed 3d and about 10 others, for 3d raycasters and early 90s 3d games I just use a pentium 1.

>>6247483
the graphics look a bit like master system graphics, lots of way better looking games on amiga

>>6247530
I played zool in the 90s and it was a lot of fun
on pc, try playing mario world on a pc keyboard is not very good. Zool works better on a keyboard.

>>6247473
Amiga has some nice tricks with the copper backgrounds it can do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wd1p2UmoE-Y
even captain planet which is considered a cheap game has nice looking background effects, there are lots of hidden amiga games with lots of surprises.

And super skidmarks is better on amiga than megadrive but still really good for megadrive

>>6243421
as an amiga owner and enthusiast this hurts me a little bit, but it's kind of true.
Sometimes I wish the Amiga had been released initially as a console (as was the initial plan for the Lorraine) rather than a desktop computer. Maybe it'd have seen more games made with care (maybe). It'd have been awesome to have had some Japanese adoption, too, but that's asking a lot for a foreign device.

>>6243850
>The fact that they picked those as the default colors does prove how amateurish Commodore was when you compare the polish and attention to detail in the Mac OS
Mac OS was a fucking joke.
Also, the colors were specifically chosen because they were found to be the highest contrast on even the very worst television sets. There was a good reason for it, as unlike with the mac Amigas were meant to:
1) have color.
2) use external screens that might not be made by the parent company.

>>6243642
>actually comparing FM synthesis to sample synthesis

>>6248061
Tying the Amiga to NTSC was a bad idea because it prevented it from having hi-res monochrome like the Atari ST that would have made it better for productivity software. Bil Herd said something like "The Amiga was designed to look good on a TV, but this was at a time when computers were starting to move to the use of monitors."

>>6243687
>You couldn't really upgrade an Amiga anyway
Uh huh.
>the A500 was like a bigger C64 with no expansion slots or anything.
Just a quick question, how many chromosomes do you have?

>>6244202
Yes, yes you could read IBM floppies on amigas. You couldn't read Amiga floppies on an IBM.
I can read Mac floppies on my Amiga, too.

>>6245335
>Say you wanted to connect to an IBM minicomputer
I have done that.
You literally just use the serial port and a null modem cable.

>>6248080
>You couldn't read Amiga floppies on an IBM
Wasn't that because the Amiga used some fucked variation of MFM? And no, an Amiga normally cannot read Mac 800k disks because those disks were variable speed GCR.

>>6248086
if you had a big box Amiga with a Catweasel board you could

>>6248061
>Mac OS was a fucking joke.
Explain.

>>6248101
It couldn't play his childhood games.

>>6248101
>black and white display
>pc speaker
>more expensive than a Atari ST or Amiga

>>6248106
yeah and it was mostly a business machine used for desktop publishing, not playing Eurojank platformers. your point?

>>6248101
https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1986-09/1986_09_BYTE_11-09_The_68000_Family#page/n259/mode/2up
Read the section on multitasking and memory management particularly closely.
The 'multitasking' implementation of Mac OS in particular was a complete joke.
>the only thing worse than supporting a desk accessory is being one.

While I still dislike Apple stuff, from a technical standpoint modern Mac OS is much better because it shares almost nothing at all with "classic" Mac OS.

>>6248108
The earliest Mac OSes were single tasking, then they had concurrent until OS X. The preemptive multitasking on the Amiga sounds nice on paper but it was too far ahead of 80s technology to actually work. Where Apple did go awry was not adequately updating the Mac OS to include preemptive multitasking or memory protection and kept using an 80s OS architecture long after they should have stopped.

>>6248118
This is largely correct information, just missing the point of the actual article I linked.

The entire article in the end boils down to the early Mac being absolute hell to write software for, multitasking or not. It's an inferior design. The author states it much less "opinionatedly," though (he goes into details about why, and how the differences matter in the real world as much as on paper).
Worth a read.

>>6248106
>more expensive than a Atari ST or Amiga
A lot of what you were paying for was Apple's tech support which is not something anyone ever accused Commodore of supplying much of.

>>6248121
true, but on the other hand every A500 came with complete schematics in the manual.

>>6248108
keep in mind that this was from the very early days of the A1000 and Mac 512/Plus. by 1990 the Amiga was getting pretty outdated because like PCs, Macs kept evolving and getting more powerful during that time while the Amiga was still using 1985 hardware.

>>6248078
>replying to the apple tard
Pic related.
>internal gotek
Eww. I use a DF0 switch on the CIA and run it externally.
>no NMI switch
That's how I know you're not a dev.

>>6248129
Oh hey, guessing it's you again.
>Internal gotek
Because the original is scratching disks and I don't have any spares handy. Also I'm a university student.
>no nmi switch
Only vital if you are writing ASM. And I usually do that in an emulator because I'm not a masochist.

>>6248138
(should specify, university student in America, which means that I'm necessarily poor)
>replying to macfag
OK, you got me there.

>>6248138
I like pic related on my A500+. Assembler (launched by startup-sequence) and bunch of tools (zshell, lha, uartrecv, amigaterm...) on DF0, sources in DF1 (gotek).

>>6248143
Neat.
On the hardware side, I still need a Super Denise to finish my ECS upgrades (to get closer to an A500+).

I also have an Epson RTC-72421 real-time clock already on hand (to replace the MSM62421 RTC that was on my highly-damaged A501 board with a leaky battery).
That chip is getting EOLed now (meaning this month), so I grabbed it a month or two ago while I still could to avoid needing to use their surface-mount equivalent (which is still being produced). It contains a crystal on-board unlike the original chip, which makes things a lot easier for me. Just going to use a couple diodes so I can power it with a non-rechargeable coin cell battery, and make my own trapdoor card with an old IDE connector (I only need to connect a few of the pins so it's okay).

Already have 1MB chip set up on the mainboard though, so I'm on my way. Probably should buy some more DRAM to max out the A590 fast RAM as well.

>>6235789
Burgers caused the video game crash while eurochads saved it with their wallets and chinks produced superior consoles.

>>6248158
>Already have 1MB chip set up on the mainboard though
Yeah, that's criminal not to do on a rev6, considering how trivial it is.
>(to replace the MSM62421 RTC that was on my highly-damaged A501 board with a leaky battery).
That's imo very not worth bothering with. I would get a modern 1mb expansion, like the OSHW one from SukkoPera, and do the rev6 -> rev8 mod with whatever chip stolen from A3000.
I ended up leaving my A500s as-is and grabbing an A500+ which became my main.

>>6248163
No, because that agnus chip costs non-zero money and again I'm a university student and I already have a 1MB ECS agnus.

Also, that one's not hardware PAL/NTSC toggle-able iirc.
Also I'm in NTSC-land so A500+'s barely exist (basically only a few very late A500's which were not sold as A500+ models).

>>6248163 >>6248158
>mod to a500+
Apologies. I remember this is _not_ how it was done. I just can't find the procedure now for the life of me :/
Besides replacing agnus and denise, it involved soldering bigger ram chips directly on the motherboard in a very specific way.
>>6248170
>I'm in NTSC-land
Ow.
>University student
Ow. But kudos to you for messing with Amiga. I'm 35 so I grew up with it, but if you're in university I guess you're younger.

The hardest part of adding the extra RAM was clearing out the vias which all had solder in them from the factory. Those ground planes are hell (no thermal reliefs for some stupid reason) and provided enough motivation for me to fix my pace desoldering station (electric vacuum iron thing).

>>6248173
>I guess you're younger.
Yeah, I'm 23 now. I also repair CRT's and other 2D-era computers/consoles as a sort of hobby.
I also wanted to learn to program for the NES years and years ago, and I found a VIC-20 around 2011 or 2012 that I used to teach myself 6502 assembly. That was my introduction to programming.
I'm happy with just 1MB chip and 2MB fast for the moment.
Before I worry about trying to get 2MB chip I'll probably worry about getting/making an EPROM writer so I can use Kickstart 3.x and not pay Cloanto a dime (they don't deserve to continue to leech off of CBM's corpse IMO).

>>6248186
>23
What reason do you have poking around old hardware and consoles, you weren't around when they came out.

@6248207
Welp, this thread is going full-out Reddit now. Too bad.

>>6248186
>Amiga
What got you interested in the platform?
>I'll probably worry about getting/making an EPROM writer so I can use Kickstart 3.x and not pay Cloanto a dime
TL866 +27C400 adapter for it and a bunch of such roms. This is all very cheap to get in china. If your socket is bigger than the current rom, you can also get 27C800 for 1MB. I don't remember which Amiga supported that, but the A500+ and A600 do for sure.
Absolutely do not use the official tools (pic related), as they do FTDI-like shenanigans to fight clones and to fight open source (literally).
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/repair/minipro-tl866-firmware-upgraded-and-broken-fake-device/
So just get it on china and use the open source programmer software:
https://gitlab.com/DavidGriffith/minipro/
I used this software and my TL866 to burn Amiga EPROMs successfully.
Just remember to test rom on emulator (burned a bad rom once!) and to swab the bytes before burning. dd conv=swab will do that for you.

There are certain select Amiga games which are worth playing, these generally have the words "Microprose", "EA", or "Cinemaware" on the box. Avoid Euro platformers/shmups, with very few exceptions they're all shit.

>go on LemonAmiga
>look up Earl Weaver Baseball
>comment section is full of "lyl I don't know anything about American sports I guess this game is ok if you're into baseball"
:^)

>>6248186
>re: roms
Oh, and also consider the A500Flash, A500Flash1M and Romulator as alternatives.
Re: A500Flash, that's a commercial name, but afaik it's based on or similar to some OSHW design, so you could make your own, if you can make the PCB cheaply and solder smd.

I'd found some figures which stated that a total of 4 million Amigas (all models) were sold from 1985 to 94. The largest Amiga market was Germany, followed by the UK. North American Amiga sales were around 700k units which actually still makes it the third largest market.

>>6248353
we never hear a lot about the German Amiga scene if it was the biggest market. you'd think Amiga software was literally nothing but British shovelware.

>>6243642
>Big deal, a Mega Drive could do that and it had 7 voice sound while OCS Amigas had 4-voice sound.

And yet the Megadrive version of the same song is kind of a joke.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krCnJe-HbTY

>>6243646
>amiga didn't have productivity blah blah blah

bitch, it had genlock. Maybe it was not used in offices, but it was used in TV stations to handle graphic overlays to the broadcasts, render shit to music videos, etc. fucking NASA had Amigas regularly used till the end of the century.

>>6244215
>And on the Audio front, PCs got CD audio:
Amiga also got CDs, they just weren't used much because it was an upgrade that not everyone had, and because the MOD music was already great. CD32 ports often got CD audio.

And by the time cd audio games were common, Commodore was bankrupt.

>>6248186
>Burning kickstart with tl866 and minipro
minipro -p "AM27C4096 @DIP40" -w 16bit.bin -y
Save that somewhere.

>>6245404
>What if commdore did a computer with hardware acceleratioin and all the euro playstaion developers stayed with amiga, it could have happened.

The Hombre chipset was pretty much that, was supposed to be as strong as a PSX. Could've brought hardware acceleration to PCs sooner, since they planned to run Windows NT on it.