Why weren't they more successful in America?

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Anonymous Wed Jan 10 23:15:52 2018 No.4516073 [Reply] [Original]

Why weren't they more successful in America?

Anonymous Wed Jan 10 23:42:46 2018 No.4516145

The main reason being that the US market in the late 80s was decisively taken over by PC clones. PCs got cheaper faster in the US than they did in Europe.

Europe is also a huge clusterfuck of countries with varying languages, cultures, and customer preferences. Many Europeans were ok with a limited-spec computer but Americans weren't. For example, the ZX Spectrum was a huge seller in Europe but never made it to the US except in a heavily modified variant that didn't find too many takers.

For example, the Apple II is widely remembered by Americans as the platform on which PC gaming was born. To Europeans, it was an expensive business computer that nobody was going to buy a teenager for a Christmas present.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 00:54:03 2018 No.4516246

I think it had a lot to do with the culture here and also the fact that for gaming it was cheaper to buy a kid a console than to shell out for a computer. I mean honestly back then, unless you were a businessman or in a business dealing with computers, no one had them or had a use for them. You'd be lucky if a library or school had them unless it was at a university level.

They were mainly hobbies and here it never was that popular of a hobby at that stage of computer development.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 00:57:43 2018 No.4516257

The software selection on the Amiga was weak. You couldn't find a word processor or database as good as the stuff available on the 8-bit Apple II. Most of what was available were from budget software devs and lacking in features or refinement. Trying to get online with com software or transferring files from a PC compatible was also clunky and frustrating to do.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 01:04:15 2018 No.4516265

>>4516257

You know, remembering the time period, Apple II dominated in my area. I'm not sure the model, but in my grade school we had monochrome green apples that took the 5.25" discs and in Jr. High we had Apples that took 3.5".

I posted just before you, but I'd say the main reason (at least in rural iowa) was Apple was just the go to machine.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 01:06:38 2018 No.4516269

>>4516246
>mean honestly back then, unless you were a businessman or in a business dealing with computers, no one had them or had a use for them. You'd be lucky if a library or school had them unless it was at a university level.
Absolutely untrue. The C64, Apple II, and TRS-80 were huge in the US since IBM compatibles were out of many people's prices ranges. Most people who had 8-bit boxes hung onto them until the 90s when they bought a PC.

As far as 16-bit boxes like the Amiga, yeah those were really a non-presence here. The US market mostly went "8-bit computers -> PC".

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 01:14:30 2018 No.4516276

Well to be honest, the Amiga wasn't exactly a hit in the UK for its first several years of life either, not with a £500 price tag anyway. Most people had 8-bit computers or Atari STs. The turning point was when Commodore bundled Ocean's Batman game with the Amiga as a tie-in for the Batman movie in 89. Brilliant move and UK Amiga sales shot through the roof.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 02:11:23 2018 No.4516359 My dad said everyone he knew mostly had Atari 8-bits or VIC-20s/C64s. Apple and IBM gear cost $$$.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 02:18:55 2018 No.4516370 File: 13 KB, 399x370, 1512904124957-pol.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] Computer is too hard for regular Israel-slaving christcuck amerimutt

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 02:57:36 2018 No.4516419 [DELETED]

The NES really took over for arcade/action gaming in the late 80s. It was kind of embarrassing how the Amiga on paper was a much more powerful machine than the NES, but its arcade ports with few exceptions were awful. Why would you want to play those trash-tier Amiga ports of Double Dragon, Strider, Paperboy, etc when you could rent the NES version from your local Babbage's and have the game start up and run instantly without dealing with fragile floppy disks and copy protection?

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 03:07:57 2018 No.4516430 >>4516073 >Why weren't they more successful in America? >What did it mean by this? 100% of the people who needed one had one. Sometimes both.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 03:46:45 2018 No.4516462

Commodore's marketing was a joke. They didn't have a lot of money for advertisements by the late 80s anyway, most of their cash reserves had gone to acquiring the Amiga hardware in '84.

Amiga ads were very soft-shoe and seemed to be based on the assumption that you were already an informed neckbeard who knew about its capabilities. They did nothing really to sell casuals on the Amiga's features.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 15:54:07 2018 No.4517206

It's well known that the US and European markets were a lot different. For example, cassette storage persisted on computers far longer in Europe than over here. Europeans had less disposable income than Americans so computers with rubber keyboards like the Sinclairs could become major successes while Americans treated them as a bad joke.

But after the video game crash, the low end computer market in the US virtually disappeared and nothing remained but the C64 and a tiny bit of Atari 8-bit and TRS-80 CoCo market presence. Stuff like the Apple II was an expensive business computer in Europe and unknown as a home computer.

Only in the 90s did different international markets start to homogenize around the PC compatible standard.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 16:01:11 2018 No.4517221

>>4516269
Define "huge". I knew a few kids whose families had 8-bit computers back then, but way more kids had dedicated gaming consoles.

I know that they were popular in some enthusiast circles, but I wouldn't really consider that "huge". It was still fairly rare to see a home with a computer at that time in America. (at least from what I remember)

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 16:09:46 2018 No.4517237

>>4517206
One of the big advantages of the US market is that it's not only big but homogeneous unlike Europe's dozens of countries each with different wealth and HDI figures, consumer preferences, and cultural norms. A computer or game console that sold well in Germany might not sell in Spain or the Netherlands. I think Americans do tend to short-change the European computer/video game market. There's quite a few books on the history of video gaming out there, but all of them are written from the American POV. And also, in my humble opinion, the European scene was more interesting than the US one. Most of the best game coders were European and Americans IMHO made a big mistake by adopting the rubbish IBM and Nintendo boxes. Both had shit hardware and all worthwhile Nintendo games were Japanese. In terms of hardware, so many modern devices use ARM CPUs. ARM was first introduced by Acorn for their European Archimedes computer. European influence is very much there, but it may not be as present in the form of companies in the spotlight.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 16:21:49 2018 No.4517246

As for the original question why the Amiga failed, it was the same reason the ST failed. Both companies had been relegated to niche markets (the ST with musicians and the Amiga with video production) by the 90s as the PC format began to take over. Apple isn't a really good comparison to say "Well it didn't happen to everyone." Apple were indeed going down, they just had deeper pockets to last through that fall a bit longer than the others until the tools for their famous transition were in place. No matter whether people love or hate Steve Jobs, it was that transition to him and the steps he took that saved it. The Apple over the last 15 or so years has little resemblance to the one that was dying in the mid-90s.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 16:59:35 2018 No.4517289

>>4517221
At its mid-80s peak, a couple million C64s were sold. For a lot of average families, it was the only affordable computer and they were also sold in department and toy stores, while stuff like an Apple II could only be bought at an authorized dealer. You bought the computer, disk drive, joysticks, and blank floppies and let your kids go nuts trading pirated disks of Summer Games or F-15 Strike Eagle or whatever.

By the late 80s, the NES did definitely take over much of the kid market.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 17:06:43 2018 No.4517302 >>4517237 >Europeans being better coders To bad they can't seem to design a game to save their lives, all those neat, fancy effects won't help if your tech-demo game has poor gameplay.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 17:09:41 2018 No.4517304 >>4517302 I was going to say. A lot of those European computer games had terrible design/controls/playability.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 17:12:34 2018 No.4517307

The Amiga failed in the US because of the same reasons it succeeded in Europe. We had a massive crack, demo, shareware and homebrew scene. We already had the revolution of the 8-bit home computers you never really had. While the USA had the big expensive XT clones we all had cheap Sinclairs and the like. There where no big boys in the European market to compete with the multitude of the home computers we had to choose from so they had more room.

The Amiga did well because it was well supported here, same for the Atari ST. It was just that time the Falcon 030 the Atari was dead, Commodore were in meltdown and the home computer users started moving over to x86 machines. Then the big PC titles started to come over the Atlantic. The 3D accelerator I think that was the final nail in the coffin for home computers in Europe, none of the computers could do what the 3dfx and early video cards could do. There wasn't any point in having custom fixed hardware machines anymore. People where moving away from buying computers for kids as gaming machines too.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 17:18:45 2018 No.4517316

>>4517237
>Americans IMHO made a big mistake by adopting the rubbish IBM and Nintendo boxes.
IBM was a good choice in the long run. The hardware was generic and open, so once the BIOS was reverse-engineered, anyone could build a clone. IBM (clones) winning was basically inevitable at that point. Sure, in the beginning they lacked multimedia capabilities, but once PC gaming took off in the US they quickly caught up to and then surpassed the Amigas. By the mid '90s the 68k was an architectural dead end while the x86 chips kept getting faster and faster.
>all worthwhile Nintendo games were Japanese.
So? At the time, the Japanese were better game designers than anyone else. A console with a lot of Japanese games was a good thing. Not like the language barrier was a huge issue in the NES days, either.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 17:19:44 2018 No.4517318

>>4517307
>We had a massive crack, demo, shareware and homebrew scene
So did we. The pirate scene for the C64 and Apple II was huge.
>We already had the revolution of the 8-bit home computers you never really had
As did we. In fact we had the things several years earlier than Europe. Before the 70s were out, you could go in a Radio Shack and buy a TRS-80 with disk drives, serial ports, and other "serious" computer features while Clive Sinclair was still peddling calculator kits. Europeans didn't get computers until the early 80s and by the late 80s, we were already moving on to 16-bit machines instead of Spectrums with rubber keyboards and tape storage.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 17:31:24 2018 No.4517336

>>4517307
The Amiga didn't really fail in the US at least up until the AGA models. It was really the only significant mainstream alternative to PC-DOS machines left for several years in the latter part of the 80s and the retail support reflected that. The failure really happened once VGA/SoundBlaster machines took hold and few here transitioned to AGA machines, which offered no obvious advantages, and in fact were arguably inferior in many ways.

The price of PC compatibles in the US was also getting cheaper by the late 80s with the event of low-cost Taiwanese boxes. Like the other guy said, technology moved quicker here than it did in Europe and people expected more out of a home computer. For example, cassette software disappeared completely after 1983 and more expensive 8-bits like the Apple II enjoyed more success. Nobody in the US wanted a computer with 16k of memory, a rubber keyboard, and tape storage post-video game crash when the low-end market was completely gutted and nothing except the C64 remained in that segment.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 17:37:20 2018 No.4517348

I read CGW in the 80s and I always wondered why, in the USA, the PC took off instead on ST/Amiga.

I mean, PC 8-bit, no graphics, no color, no sound, no joystick ports, no TV screen support.

We put the disk into the Amiga, turn it on and the game was running. Great 16 bit graphics gameplay, stereo sound, joystick, etc.

My wife always said the USA is behind the rest of the world.

Of course, little did we know that 'the rest of the world' would catch up with the USA and PC gaming by the early/mid 90s.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 17:42:04 2018 No.4517350

>>4517348
The Amiga had some advanced features for the time but it didn't have good software (at least not in the US) and Commodore didn't have the ability to market it adequately. Also if you wanted color, sound, joysticks, etc you could get that on a PC particularly the Tandy 1000s which were highly popular at the time.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 17:48:22 2018 No.4517362

>>4517348
The Amiga and its custom chipset was too complex for its own good. The crude terminal-like PC hardware was more adaptable to a variety of work tasks. For example, when did you ever see an Amiga used to control CNC equipment? PCs had more in common with the Apple II and CP/M boxes, all of which could be used for utility purposes and easily modded/expanded.

Even the first Mac was simple and shared far more with the PC and Apple II. It had no graphics chip, essentially, all the functionality came from software routines. Routines that would easily scale in speed as the platform evolved. Something not possible with fixed-function custom chips. Ironic, the very thing that gave the Amiga some wows also prevented it from growing.

In short, a PC was adaptable and upgradable in a way the Amiga was not.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 18:01:16 2018 No.4517384 >>4516145 >For example, the Apple II is widely remembered by Americans as the platform on which PC gaming was born Mostly for the same reason BBC Micro/Acorn Electron is remembered in Britain: schools had them.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 18:03:32 2018 No.4517389 >>4517384 He is right though. Think how many game devs like Sierra, Origin, Sir-Tech, SSI, etc got their start on the Apple II.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 18:11:25 2018 No.4517405

In 1988, Atari decided to shift most ST production to Europe where the money and sales were, it became nearly irrelevant in the US. The ST was very popular in Europe as a productivity computer, in fact the West German government for a while heavily ran on them. It was a better office box than the Amiga for a couple reasons, one being the higher resolution display.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 18:18:35 2018 No.4517412 >>4516257 >The software selection on the Amiga was weak. It was swarming with productivity software, you're mental if you think otherwise.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 18:20:11 2018 No.4517416 >>4516073 They were. It's a common meme, sadly /vr/ is mostly people who weren't around back then, so nobody corrects them. Sure they were more popular in Europe though. Hope this clears up your misunderstanding OP.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 18:22:08 2018 No.4517418 >>4517389 Because it was _literary_ out almost 4 years before the PC was and the PC didn't even do graphics for the few first years of its life. Atari ST and Amiga came out almost 9 years after the release of the Apple II.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 18:24:53 2018 No.4517423 >>4516073 Because they're PC's. Not very many people owned PC's back then. You mostly see PC's in schools or office buildings.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 18:25:29 2018 No.4517425 >>4517418 That doesn't contradict what he said, though.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 18:28:27 2018 No.4517429 >>4517425 It's unrelated to what he said. It's about "the platform on which PC gaming was born", knowing it came much before anything else viable at the time, it's only logical.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 18:29:38 2018 No.4517431 >>4517362 >For example, when did you ever see an Amiga used to control CNC equipment? Amiga was used to project the files for the CNC machine, the PC was used to run the CNC machine.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 18:32:07 2018 No.4517435 >>4517362 >In short, a PC was adaptable and upgradable in a way the Amiga was not. No, PC was easily cloneable and profitable. It's literary why PCs succeed and not Commodore, Apple or anyone else.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 18:32:38 2018 No.4517436 >>4517418 >and the PC didn't even do graphics for the few first years of its life Huh? CGA cards were offered on the IBM PC from the very beginning.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 18:35:36 2018 No.4517440

>>4517412
He meant weak as in "shitty". There wasn't anything on the Amiga close to the great PC productivity trio of dBase, Lotus 123, and WordPerfect (there was eventually a half-baked Amiga port of WP). Most stuff you could get was low budget and short on features.

There wasn't even anything on the Amiga close to AppleWorks for that matter.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 18:38:14 2018 No.4517443

>>4517440
The Amiga wasn't meant to be a office machine, it had however plenty of office software that the home user could come by with.
Most of the productivity software however was focused on music and graphics. Deluxe Paint for example, almost every game from the mid 80's to early 90's had it's graphics done in it.

Stop being a delusional little dumbnut.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 18:38:43 2018 No.4517447 >>4517435 Apple succeeded just fine having carved out a niche in the educational and desktop publishing markets.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 18:40:33 2018 No.4517450

>>4517443
>Most of the productivity software however was focused on music and graphics. Deluxe Paint for example, almost every game from the mid 80's to early 90's had it's graphics done in it.
That's the problem. That multimedia stuff was cute but not very usable, not in the 80s anyway when there were no standard file formats and any art you made with DP stayed in the computer since printers of the time weren't really able to replicate it.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 18:40:43 2018 No.4517451 >>4517447 Apple was almost dead in the late 90's, only saved by making itself a niche in the market. Apple II didn't go anywhere except a few hardware revisions and latter just a chip in newer Apple machine for backwards compatibility.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 18:43:16 2018 No.4517454 >>4517451 Apple almost died because of retard-tier management similar to what led Commodore and Atari to their demise. Difference being that they had more money to play with and were taken more seriously as a company than Atari.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 18:44:22 2018 No.4517458

>>4516257
>Trying to get online with com software or transferring files from a PC compatible was also clunky and frustrating to do.
Is a fucking laugh. As with the Macintosh and Atari ST, support for PC files and file systems was great and so was connectivity with external systems. Transferring files from PC floppies, from a PC over serial or dialing up to a BBS to download was far easier than with DOS.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 18:44:54 2018 No.4517460 >>4517450 Yeah point well taken. The idea of a multimedia computer in 1985 was too far ahead of the times. It wasn't for another decade that that would be viable.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 18:45:41 2018 No.4517464 >>4517454 IBM is also dead in the PC market these days, yet we all use PCs. If Apple II was that good, it would have been the PC instead. Yet it wasn't. Get it?

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 18:47:15 2018 No.4517465

>>4517450
It was used and mostly the only affordable option for many people and companies. It worked well and did what they wanted.
Nobody is saying a computer with great multimedia capabilities should have been in every home. You're forgetting that at the time, people rarely had PCs in their homes. Most of the PC and Apple market share from the time comes from office use.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 18:47:44 2018 No.4517471

>>4517458
My cousin had an Amiga and he complained that the modem/comm software for it was not very good, not even as good as the stuff available for the Apple II. He said it was very difficult to migrate his work stuff from his Apple II to the Amiga. A lot of the office and scientific software available on the Apple II just wasn't on the Amiga, while you could get anything of that nature you wanted for a PC.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 18:50:58 2018 No.4517472

>>4517465
>You're forgetting that at the time, people rarely had PCs in their homes
In the first couple years of the IBM PC, this was true but by the late 80s, PC hardware was getting cheaper and home machines steadily more common. The real turning point were those low cost Taiwanese brands like Acer and Leading Edge, they could run all PC software at half the price of IBM or Compaq iron, so unless you needed a Mac for desktop publishing, there was no real reason by 1988 to have alternative architectures.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 18:51:56 2018 No.4517475

>>4517471
Apple II was an educational and scientific machine, no wonder about the scientific software though.
But >>4517458
>support for PC files and file systems was great and so was connectivity with external systems. Transferring files from PC floppies, from a PC over serial or dialing up to a BBS to download was far easier than with DOS.
Is true. You even had a GUI for that, while you didn't for most things on the competitive systems.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 18:52:43 2018 No.4517478 >>4517472 Even Commodore made IBM compatibles.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 18:53:09 2018 No.4517479 >>4517472 Indeed. I already mentioned, PC's biggest advantage was how easy it was to clone and profit from it.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 18:54:19 2018 No.4517481 >>4517479 Apple II clones existed as well.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 18:55:00 2018 No.4517484 >>4517481 Yes, "existed" being the key word here.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 18:55:15 2018 No.4517485 >>4517464 It wasn't about being "good" or not. It was about being easy to clone. IBMs used no custom chips and ran a third-party OS, making them a prime candidate for cheap clones.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 18:56:01 2018 No.4517486

>>4517479
Plus the fact that the bare-bones hardware was adaptable and could do work tasks that the Amiga's custom chipset could not.

>>4517478
They did, but the things bombed and were a waste of valuable company resources that could have been put to better use.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 18:56:41 2018 No.4517489 >>4517485 Now you're getting it. Congrats.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 18:57:52 2018 No.4517491

You have to understand that in the 80s, there was still a stigma against computers with color graphics, they were widely seen as toys and that serious machines had green monochrome text. The Mac's monochrome display was an asset here, it looked more professional than the Amiga's blue and white GUI colors or the Atari ST's lime green.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 18:59:24 2018 No.4517495 >>4517489 I've been saying that this entire thread. You must have me confused for someone else.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 19:00:08 2018 No.4517497

>>4517486
>Plus the fact that the bare-bones hardware was adaptable and could do work tasks that the Amiga's custom chipset could not.
This is entirely depending on what you want to accomplish. For example, the Amigos floppy controller was dumb and entirely software driven, it could read almost any floppy you threw at it, even when you needed to change the drive.
On a bare-bones level, you didn't need anything from the chipset of the Amiga, you could do everything entirely in software, just like on the PC, the PC just lacked options to do anything more.

Amiga bare bones already included good sound and graphics capabilities you could use if wanted.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 19:01:16 2018 No.4517498 >>4517491 Reportedly the Mac team wanted to have color graphics but they couldn't come up with a color scheme for the GUI that didn't look eye-searing, so they just went with monochrome.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 19:01:41 2018 No.4517501 >>4517491 There's a reason for that. Steve Jobs was famously against color displays because color printers were expensive and rare at the time. A monochrome display made much more sense for publishing.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 19:02:19 2018 No.4517503 >>4517498 Sure it wasn't Jobs himself wanting a crisp and clear GUI? He was all about hires antialiased fonts and shit. With monochrome that easier to accomplish that than in color.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 19:04:16 2018 No.4517508

>>4517486
>Plus the fact that the bare-bones hardware was adaptable and could do work tasks that the Amiga's custom chipset could not.
A simple act like writing text to the screen was much clunkier on the Amiga than the PC thanks to all those layers of hardware. You couldn't just write a character value into VRAM and have the letter X appear on the screen like you could on a PC or Apple II.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 19:05:44 2018 No.4517510 >>4517491 idk, but the Atari ST was a very popular office computer in Germany. the green OS colors didn't bother anyone. is this an American thing? I'm confused.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 19:08:07 2018 No.4517518 they say Doom was what killed the Amiga because its planar video hardware wasn't able to handle that game

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 19:11:04 2018 No.4517524 >>4517518 I kind of agree. Planar video modes made sense in the 80s due to the technical limitations of that time but by the 90s it was no longer necessary.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 19:11:46 2018 No.4517525 >>4517518 Doom was a big part of it for sure, but more generally the Amiga's architecture was simply falling behind by then. PCs were getting more and more powerful while Amigas were stagnant.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 19:12:47 2018 No.4517528

>>4517510
It was and you do have to factor in cultural differences. Europeans and Japanese like cutesy things, Americans don't. That's why they designed the NES to look like a slab of granite because the Famicom was seen as too cute and toy-like for American tastes.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 19:15:39 2018 No.4517530

>>4517518
This wasn't even as much of a hardware problem than just marketing. Even a stock A4000 with just a memory upgrade could play Doom fine as we latter found out.
Commodore was dead in the water, Amiga R&D was on halt and there was nothing to hope for even when better hardware existed on paper.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 19:16:05 2018 No.4517532

>>4517465
>It was used and mostly the only affordable option for many people and companies
The only productivity task the Amiga found much use for in the US was video editing, and the market for that was small compared to the vast demand for Lotus and WordPerfect.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 19:16:23 2018 No.4517534 >>4517491 The highres mode was B/W. An office would leave it there I'm sure.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 19:17:02 2018 No.4517535 >>4517532 Nobody said it was not. There was just not as much of demand for such things at the time.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 19:18:26 2018 No.4517539

>>4517525
In the late 80s, PCs couldn't possibly compete for sound, graphics, or fluid animation. The early 90s wasn't much better, first-generation SVGA cards were slow and there was little standardization. By 1994 however, local bus video and VESA standardization totally eliminated any performance advantage the Amiga had.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 19:20:39 2018 No.4517542 [DELETED]

>>4517534
>The highres mode was B/W. An office would leave it there I'm sure.
Huh? It is color unless you used the composite output which nobody actually did anyway. Remember that the Amiga either has 320x200x32 or 640x200x16 with the total colors available being 4096.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 19:21:38 2018 No.4517545 >>4517539 Yep. Doom was the turning point mostly because it was the first big, popular game to take full advantage of the newer hardware.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 19:22:25 2018 No.4517549 Yeah my dad had some clients who worked for the government back then and he struggled to explain to them anything useful they could do on an Amiga. Most of them would just be like "What good is this thing? I can't run dBase on it."

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 19:22:34 2018 No.4517551 >>4517542 Sorry, I'm talking about the ST.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 19:23:59 2018 No.4517556
File: 164 KB, 1200x932, 1200px-Amiga500_system.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>4517534
>The highres mode was B/W. An office would leave it there I'm sure.
Huh? It is color unless you used the composite output which nobody actually did anyway. Remember that the Amiga either has 320x200x32 or 640x200x16 with the total colors available being 4096.

Apparently they offered an RF modulator in Europe as well, that was never available on US models. Not like you'd ever want to try that anyway.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 19:27:21 2018 No.4517562 The lack of a hard disk on the Amiga was also a deficiency since by the late 80s, they were becoming increasingly common and most people using a computer for any serious work expected to have one.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 19:29:24 2018 No.4517565 >>4517539 >>4517545 Ever seen that Amiga port of X-COM? Aside from better music, it looks terrible compared to the PC, is missing some graphics elements, and required a horrible amount of disk swapping.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 19:33:01 2018 No.4517571

>>4517565
It was reportedly difficult to develop since putting a game designed for a 32-bit PC onto a 16-bit Amiga was a bitch. Why they insisted on supporting the OCS Amigas I don't know. You think by the time X-COM was out, they would have just made the game for the AGA and been done with it.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 19:34:36 2018 No.4517576 >>4517571 Probably the same retardation that led to Atari 8-bit devs still putting out 48k games in 1986.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 19:35:41 2018 No.4517579 >>4517571 They targeted the OCS b/c it had a better install base than the AGA Amigas. Not a lot of people had an AGA Amiga.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 19:37:14 2018 No.4517580

>>4517237
>There's quite a few books on the history of video gaming out there, but all of them are written from the American POV. And also, in my humble opinion, the European scene was more interesting than the US one.
You just answered your own question. Europe has a load of different countries/markets so trying to write a history of computers/vidya in the European market would be difficult because you'd have to write about the UK, France, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Spain, Italy, and more, all different countries where different platforms were popular.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 19:41:45 2018 No.4517589 >>4516462 Who really was responsible for sinking Commodore anyway? It seems that after Jack Tramiel left, the company was run by anonymous gray suits. At least with Atari, we know who to throw rocks at.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 19:44:32 2018 No.4517592 >>4517571 This was a problem generally, nobody supported newer chipsets or even CPUs, as most people had an unexpanded (or memory expanded) Amiga 500. This got real old when you try to port games from early 90's onto mid 80's hardware.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 19:46:29 2018 No.4517594 >>4517589 Yup, gray suits who only wanted to milk quick bucks. Looking back, you can see so many stupid things they did. This was a problem early on, even old Amiga OS releases had easter eggs with text like "We Made Amiga, They Fucked It Up" inside.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 19:46:45 2018 No.4517595 >>4517589 >Who really was responsible for sinking Commodore anyway? Mostly Irving Gould.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 19:49:41 2018 No.4517602

The thing is, the Amiga probably wouldn't have even happened without Captain Jack's expulsion since he had no interest in buying the hardware from its original designers. I also think his business tactics were ill-suited to the higher end computer market. Price cutting and selling computers at K-Mart worked with the VIC-20 and C64, it didn't work for anything above that market rung.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 19:52:41 2018 No.4517607 >>4517595 Irv Gould was the guy who kept all his money in Cayman Islands bank accounts and avoided setting foot in the US as much as possible to avoid being taxed.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 19:54:41 2018 No.4517612

>>4517518
id Software didn't put Doom on the Amiga because the only viable Amiga markets were the UK, Germany, and Eastern Europe. Brits only had A500s with no hard disk, Germany had content restrictions on vidya, and Eastern Europe it would get pirated.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 19:57:49 2018 No.4517618

>>4517594
It was that way under Tramiel as well. If the FTC or the SEC had ever investigated ol' Jack, he would have been doing 10-15 in a Federal prison. There was a very good reason why both Commodore and Atari under Tramiel blew up. No one could quite explain where all the money went. Which is why Jack tried so hard to keep all power, and information, within the family. And why it all eventually fell apart.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 20:00:40 2018 No.4517625

>>4517618
Jack was a douchebag and a cutthroat, but the computer industry was in its infancy back then and any new industry always has pirate entrepreneurs who don't necessarily play by the rules. It was no different than Henry Ford in his day, the automobile industry only grew up and became professionally managed after WWII.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 20:03:23 2018 No.4517629 >>4517556 The interface looked like a beaten rats all on purpose, as it was mainly designed to be workable on normal TVs and it did that well.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 20:06:40 2018 No.4517638

>>4517625
He reportedly had a great deal of admiration for the Yakuza. Since he'd survived the Holocaust, he felt he'd earned the right to screw over the rest of the world. There are an abundance of stories about how he screwed many rival manufacturers without remorse. In fact, he boasted of his triumphs.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 20:11:43 2018 No.4517647

>>4517625
There's a lot of comparison between him and Steve Jobs in that both were egomaniacs who had a single-minded vision and worked their employees to death to get it. The difference is that Jobs believed in computers as art, he wanted them to be as graceful and elegant as possible. Tramiel wanted computers that offered a lot of features for a low price. Unlike Jobs, he seemed to not be too concerned about whether the machine worked or not once the consumer got it. The C64's features to price ratio was impressive, but quality control for the first year was quite bad and the computers had a high failure/return rate.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 20:28:58 2018 No.4517668 >>4517475 >Apple II was an educational and scientific machine, no wonder about the scientific software though. It was also a popular office/productivity machine until PC compatibles took over.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 20:34:49 2018 No.4517679 >>4517668 in the US

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 20:40:06 2018 No.4517686 >>4517679 In the UK as well, but nobody in their right mind had an Apple II at home, it was strictly a business computer and a pricey one at that.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 20:44:29 2018 No.4517697 >>4517686 >he thinks the entire world is the US and England

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 20:47:57 2018 No.4517702

Apple never seriously targeted the low end market, the Apple II was not cheap. Its sound and graphics were limited compared to Commodore and Atari, but it was expandable while the others weren't.

AppleWorks was a fantastic productivity package well above anything else available on an 8-bit machine and as some people have noted already, superior to any productivity software on the Amiga.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 20:52:14 2018 No.4517710

That's one thing about the Apple II that a lot of people don't get. It was expensive because it had a lot of value added. Great documentation, ROM, case, slots, device cards, etc... It was serious, and expandable, and that made it very capable. Games were not as good as what you'd get on a C64, but on business/productivity/academic, Apples were very good. The other 8-bitters really didn't compare.

Those things don't happen with a lower end machine.

Apple would have only lost with a lower price offering.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 20:55:46 2018 No.4517716

>>4517491
there was so much snobbishness at the time, people who brought pc's paid so much for them that they would trash the other home computers, also many people didn't know anything about computers so they just assumed that the ibm was the best because it came in a big metal case and was expensive

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 20:55:48 2018 No.4517718

>>4517710
This. The IBM PC was popular for the exact same reason. Expandability, legendary documentation, support from a large and trusted company. You can knock its gaming capabilities all you want, but that didn't matter to the people it was targeted to.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 20:56:41 2018 No.4517719 >>4517710 >Games were not as good as what you'd get on a C64 The Apple II was more than capable of gaming during the first half of the 80s. By the second half of the decade, yeah, it was getting old and couldn't handle NES scroller shit.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 20:59:28 2018 No.4517723 >>4517647 Steve Jobs never really liked the Apple II either. It wasn't an elegant computer, at least not his idea of elegant. He favored one-configuration appliance computers with no expansion capabilities that you could plug in and turn on the power.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 21:02:00 2018 No.4517724

>>4517723
Jobs was a guy who really had little to no nostalgia for the past, he wanted to move onto the next big thing as quickly as possible. Yet in the early days of the personal computer industry, this mentality was widespread, companies wanted to sell the next big thing and gave relatively little concern to backwards compatibility even though it had a longstanding precedent in the mainframe/minicomputer industry.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 21:03:28 2018 No.4517726 >>4517718 Plus IBM marketing.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 21:04:22 2018 No.4517728 >>4517724 >>4517718 >>4517508 >>4517485 I agree that PC compatibles picked up where the Apple II left off. A lot of utility stuff done with Apple IIs like controlling machinery or engineering/scientific applications was easily adapted to the PCs.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 21:06:42 2018 No.4517734 As I mentioned in another thread, Atari originally intended for the 400/800 to compete with the Apple II. In fact the engineers even wanted them to have expansion slots, but management rejected that idea.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 21:06:48 2018 No.4517735 >>4516073 All that matters now, is that muh games were still better on the ST and Amiga than any other microcomputer at the time.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 21:09:13 2018 No.4517741 >>4517734 One of the many reasons why Jay Miner also left Atari to make the Amiga after working on the 400/800, Atari didn't care about the future.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 21:09:15 2018 No.4517742 >>4517723 And Steve Wozniak didn't care for the Apple III either. He also thought the Lisa/Mac were a mistake and Apple should develop a GUI for the Apple II line, but that was rejected.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 21:11:40 2018 No.4517746

>>4517735
>All that matters now, is that muh games were still better on the ST and Amiga than any other microcomputer at the time.
I question that idea. Although some devs like Microprose did excellent games on the Amiga, a lot of it were phoned-in ports of PC or C64 stuff or European shovelware or awful arcade ports.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1i8SpE6cIc

I mean, what the fuck is this? All that impressive sound capability and it has a couple of bleeps.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 21:13:34 2018 No.4517748 >>4517742 It's interesting to think about what might have happened if Woz had gotten his way. Ultimately I don't think Apple could have weathered the tide of cheap IBM clones, but they might have put up a good fight.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 21:14:36 2018 No.4517749 >>4517746 Lol, are you trying to prove that PC and C64 had better games at the time by cherry picking shittily ported games? Arcade games are a console things in the first place. Try keyboard and mouse.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 21:14:51 2018 No.4517750

>>4517724
Backwards compatibility was not at all unheard of. Commodore machines all had at least partial compatibility in that the BASIC was the same and most peripherals were interchangeable. Atari machines could still run 16k software up to the end in the early 90s. The TRS-80 line all had varying amounts of backwards compatibility.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 21:16:18 2018 No.4517753 >>4517748 The Apple II line was kinda fucked from the standpoint that keeping it up to date was bothersome. By the time of the 68k, it would have needed several specially designed chips already to be backwards compatible with the II and IIgs.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 21:18:08 2018 No.4517756 >>4517749 >Try keyboard and mouse https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3KWDEtV1Cw Ok, here's Police Quest. Again, you mean to tell me this was the best audio the Amiga was capable of? It sounds like an Atari 2600.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 21:19:59 2018 No.4517757 >>4517756 See >>4517749 >cherry picking shittily ported games? Nice try though.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 21:20:16 2018 No.4517758 >>4517749 The point was more that the Amiga should have been able to do much better games than the PC and C64 which makes stuff like that Double Dragon port inexcusable.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 21:21:44 2018 No.4517762 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oIHDudFegk One of the worst.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 21:22:08 2018 No.4517763 >>4517758 But even the shitty ports are better than what the PC and C64 had. The good ports and original games are just much better.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 21:24:51 2018 No.4517773

>>4517742
hat I found interesting was that AppleWorks was originally written for the /// series computer. And then re-worked slightly for the //e and //c with MouseText. I believe it was Woz that pushed that issue.

As we all know AppleWorks was one of the premier applications at the time and Woz was concerned that the ///'s reliability would put a bad image to a stellar piece of software.

It was technical decisions like that which made Woz famous, aside from his frugality when working with IC components and yet still producing amazingly versatile circuitry that could be prodded to do much more than it was originally intended. All Woz wanted was a computer to play Breakout on, yet people adapted the Apple II to everything from gaming to office work to scientific work to running machinery. You don't see many engineers that have that style today, either when working with hardware or software.

As for Radio Shack, the TRS-80 line was fairly popular as a business computer and even to an extent in the scientific and engineering markets. It was also a favorite of amateur radio operators.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 21:26:09 2018 No.4517775 As an aside, why were Amiga arcade ports so fucking bad anyway? Like the other guy said, the hardware should have been capable of better than >>4517746

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 21:29:03 2018 No.4517780 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZF90Z0CY6c Ultima IV. Again a very underwhelming port with Atari 2600-tier music.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 21:29:40 2018 No.4517781

>>4517775
Hardware wasn't the problem, even the Amiga 500 could use a 6 button controller if the developers would have wanted to for excellent arcade ports.
Bad developers were the main problem, lots of bedroom coders and dirty "ports" to make a quick buck. Look at games like Another World or Chaos Engine or related though. Kind of makes me think that most of the more serious user base also wasn't that into arcade games than actual computer games.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 21:30:47 2018 No.4517783

>>4517773
>As for Radio Shack, the TRS-80 line was fairly popular as a business computer and even to an extent in the scientific and engineering markets. It was also a favorite of amateur radio operators.
Having more 6809 based machines in general would have been neat (I wonder if IBM ever considered that when developing the PC). Then again, there were a lot of cheaper (if not more cost effective performance-wise) alternatives on the market; similar to how the 6800 wasn't as popular as cheaper contemporaries with reasonably comparable performance. (of course, Motorola didn't ever push hard for competitive pricing with the Z80 or 6502, so that was a major factor)

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 21:31:22 2018 No.4517785 >>4517780 Has mouse support though, making it one of the better ports together with the x68k one. Not fully utilizing the hardware does not mean it's a bad port, it's just not that much better than the alternatives.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 21:31:59 2018 No.4517786 >>4517775 Most of them were made by low budget Eastern European developers. Compare NES ports done professionally by top-tier programmers with a year of time to work on them.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 21:33:12 2018 No.4517787 >>4517781 >Bad developers were the main problem, lots of bedroom coders and dirty "ports" to make a quick buck Ocean were the worst for this. They wanted to grab as many licences as they could and make shoddy games with them.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 21:33:45 2018 No.4517790 >>4517783 The whole point of the 6502 was to make a cheaper but better 6800.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 21:34:17 2018 No.4517792 >>4517786 >Most of them were made by low budget Eastern European developers That Amiga Castlevania was literally done by some guys from Hungary.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 21:34:48 2018 No.4517793 >>4517787 Ocean made many great games too though. I think you're thinking about their console games.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 21:36:40 2018 No.4517795

>>4517790
>>4517783
AFAIK Tandy got a special pricing deal on 6809s. Thomson sold a 6809 machine in France, they were the only other major company to do it. They were a 2nd source for the 6809 for military applications so it was an obvious choice for them.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 21:37:44 2018 No.4517798 >>4517790 The 6502 was supposed to be binary compatible at first with the 6800, but was changed for obvious licensing issues.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 21:38:04 2018 No.4517801 >>4517793 You wouldn't say that if you saw their C64, Spectrum, and Amstrad games. 80% of them were total rubbish.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 21:39:21 2018 No.4517803

>>4517798
Actually this isn't what happened. You can't copyright an instruction set on a CPU. What did happen is that MOS initially produced a chip called the 6501 which had an identical pinout to the 6800. They got sued and had to quickly change the pinout, thus creating the 6502.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 21:41:11 2018 No.4517807

>>4517783
If anything they would have gone with a 68k, not a 6809. In the end they went with the 8088 because it was cheap, available with the timing and quantities they needed, and easy to port 8080 software to. Legend has it they also wanted to avoid Motorola for corporate bureaucracy reasons, because IBM already had an established business relationship with them.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 21:42:54 2018 No.4517809

The Apple II was amazingly powerful and flexible for an 8-bit box, it could do a lot of things and it's too bad Apple didn't evolve it further.

Jobs really was ahead of the tech, and his own fetish cost a lot of money then. Those issues cost users, and he knew that and was perfectly willing to exploit them.

Now with tech at a state where elegant can be realized, Apple makes very good margins on its hardware. The II could have stunted the PC growth, perhaps getting Apple farther along, earlier than they achieved otherwise, and the userbase would have seen more value for their investment, and they were the real losers in that mess.

Both Woz and Jobs are interesting people to me. Woz wanted it to work, and to be built upon, and generally made trade-offs that software could account for. I believe strongly in that idea, and it still often plays out well in the embedded space. Doing the most in software isn't always as sexy, but it is very robust, and robust is worth quite a bit in general purpose computing.

Jobs valued things differently, and his inability to leverage both, for fear that "good enough" would trump "elegant" led him to do what he did.

Toda, Apple enjoys considerable margin, and has a lot of money in the bank despite never reaching a dominant share. Jobs was spot-on about the value of things, and the most interesting observation to me is that users, who value their time, are perfectly willing to be exploited in return for value added that saves them that time. There will always be a sizable, but not dominant fraction of us, who will value things "elegant", and they will pay for that.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 21:45:50 2018 No.4517810

>>4517809
Reportedly iPhone sales account for almost half of Apple's profits now. What Jobs really wanted all along were gadgets with elegance, form, and function. Unfortunately, this wasn't possible yet in the 80s and as Bill Gates said once in an interview back then, "I still wouldn't give one of these machines to my mother."

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 21:48:32 2018 No.4517813 >>4517702 Commodore targeted the low end market, sold a bazillion machines, but ended up going under while Apple is still with us.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 21:50:56 2018 No.4517815 >>4517813 Not sure that's an entirely fair comparison. Commodore went under entirely due to poor management decisions (as Apple nearly did as well). If Commodore had been better managed, they might still be with us. Who knows?

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 21:51:03 2018 No.4517816

>>4517813
Commodore didn't do what I was suggesting either, and they had horrible management problems as well (possibly worse than Apple, or Apple was luckier). If you look at Commodore from 1981-84 compared with Apple in that timeframe, I'd suspect CBM was making a lot more (taking investment spending into account of course -ie money CBM was using to build up capital rather than retain it as liquid assets). The biggest caveat would be the brief period where CBM was selling at a loss (at least after rebates) in 1983, but I doubt that was enough to make it up, especially if you take Europe into account. (again, one of Apple's gaping weak points that a low-cost model could have corrected)

After Jack Tramiel left, they made one stupid move after another that ended in the company folding in 1994. After the PET, they lost the educational/business market, made a mess with a bunch of unnecessary and overlapping products, brought in the Amiga, and finally had a broad range of compatible/expandable machines with the later gen Amiga line, but that took some 5 years after the Amiga's launch (the Amiga's marketing and market positioning was pretty screwed up too)

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 21:52:46 2018 No.4517818 For getting into C64 gaming, is the 128 a better choice (128 is supposed to be 100% backwards compatible, correct?)

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 21:53:13 2018 No.4517819

>>4517809
>Jobs really was ahead of the tech, and his own fetish cost a lot of money then. Those issues cost users, and he knew that and was perfectly willing to exploit them.

I think Jobs mostly got lucky. If at first you don't succeed...

Also the guy was great at PR/manipulation. Just like his mentor Nolan Bushnell.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 21:54:15 2018 No.4517820 >>4517818 No because only a few games support the C128 natively, its main advantage over the C64 is superior ability at running productivity software.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 21:56:29 2018 No.4517827 >>4517723 >>4517810 Ray Kassar did same with the Atari 8-bit line, he envisioned a series of plug and play appliance computers and even thought about selling different-colored cases including pink to appeal to women.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 21:57:39 2018 No.4517828 >>4517820 Right on. Thanks.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 21:59:31 2018 No.4517830

>>4517819
Jobs was lucky because of Woz's vision. Nobody else in the nascent personal computer industry managed the same balance of a machine that was practical for both work and entertainment.

As cool as the Atari 8-bits and Commodores were, they lacked a lot of features that would have been beneficial for word processing or other productivity tasks.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 22:01:58 2018 No.4517835

>>4517830
I agree, Atari missed out on most of their chance to challenge Apple when they didn't put expansion slots in the A8 line, tried to keep tech information on the computers a guarded secret, and failed to provide any worthwhile application software the way Apple did with AppleWorks.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 22:04:06 2018 No.4517837 File: 91 KB, 1361x740, amiga.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 22:09:44 2018 No.4517845 >>4517827 >including pink to appeal to women. Tech companies used to try this all the time, but has it ever worked even once?

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 22:12:00 2018 No.4517850

>>4517837
Yeah good points. Back in the day, if you needed to do something on your 286 PC, you went to the store, explained your problem to the clerk, and he usually could offer you a solution. "I need to interface this printer to my PC" or "I need to run a cash register with my PC" and so forth. There was usually always some dongle or expansion board for the job.

Try doing this with an Amiga and you got a puzzled, almost quizzical expression from people.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 22:13:43 2018 No.4517853 File: 70 KB, 650x433, dodge-la-femme-i2.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>4517845 Nope.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 22:15:21 2018 No.4517857 >>4517850 That goes back to IBM's documentation and general openness. They didn't really have a "vision" for the PC; they gave you all the tools you needed to tailor it to your specific needs, whatever those happened to be.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 22:20:52 2018 No.4517862

>>4517816
I think it's fairly safe to assume Apple were making more profits in the early 80s than any other microcomputer company. Never mind that the Apple II dated back to 1977 and didn't have color text, interrupts, lowercase letters, or a host of other features.

What really matter was that they were taken seriously by people who had serious money to spend and Apple never seriously bothered with the low end market. It didn't hurt that they managed to work scams in several state, including CA under Jerry Brown (I can't believe this guy is governor again) to give computers to schools in exchange for tacx credits of value far greater than the cost of the donation to Apple, as the valuation was based on the retail price of the donation. Apple would then pretend to be discounting that while still being well ahead on the actual cost.

By the mid-80s, Jobs actively wanted the Apple II to go away. He actively sought to kill the GS before launch and managed to forced crippling engineering choices. The worst being the fixed 16k video RAM. This made it painful to do the simple page flipping that was the staple of animation and scrolling on the Apple II. The audio processor was very advanced for the era but implemented on the board in such a way as to be cripplingly constrained. This was fixed somewhat in a later revision that gave it a good-sized chunk of its own RAM, relative to the era. Everybody working with the prototype Courtland boards knew this was a serious problem.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 22:22:35 2018 No.4517864 >>4517830 Often, I wonder about the 8 bitters being static, and I think that's a big part of why.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 23:03:52 2018 No.4517927

Custom chipsets worked just fine on the C64 because it was a low-end computer you bought at K-Mart and nobody expected to do a lot more than play games on it. The Amiga was a lot more sophisticated machine which is why the custom chipset became a liability. People expected more out of a computer like that, and the architecture limited what you could use it for.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 23:09:00 2018 No.4517941 >>4517746 And then you just went "fuck it" and rented Castlevania or Paperboy for your NES from the local Funcoland all without having to deal with copy protection and fragile floppy disks.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 23:12:27 2018 No.4517947 >>4517786 Those ports of Police Quest and Ultima were made by reputable companies, not Wlodislaw Game Works out of some guy's commieblock apartment in Krakow.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 11 23:18:29 2018 No.4517958 >>4517947 Sierra didn't care enough about the Amiga to make decent ports for it, and I'm not even sure if Origin did that Ultima port in-house. It could have been outsourced to Wlodislaw for all I know.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 23:23:49 2018 No.4517968
File: 92 KB, 500x312, Tandy 1000 EX.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>4516269
>As far as 16-bit boxes like the Amiga, yeah those were really a non-presence here

That market niche (16-bit home computers) was primarily owned by the Tandy 1000 which had better sound and graphics than a normal PC and was mostly IBM compatible.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 23:51:26 2018 No.4518014

Atari also had a long reputation as a gaming company in the USA. From the early 1970s, anyone who went to a bar, an arcade, a vacation spot, corner grocery store, was exposed to a game with an Atari logo on it.

As time went on and Atari ventured into computers, many US consumers and certainly businesses never took Atari seriously as a viable platform for serious work. IBM was the business machine. Shit, the company is International Business Machines and nobody was ever fired for buying IBM.

Apple had the reputation of starting the home and small business computing market, so again people had a level of comfort here in the USA with Apple products.

Some of us, myself included, bought Atari machines. When we'd go to stores to buy software there was occasionally slim pickings or more likely no pickings to be had. The 8-bit Atari era was challenging in that regard, but during the ST era it was damn near impossible to find anything locally. Mail order was the only real option for many of us.

Anonymous Thu Jan 11 23:55:13 2018 No.4518020

>>4518014
that is very true, atari, amiga and mac really didnt have the straightforward business software companies were looking for. and if people used a pc in the office they wanted one at home too, so they could run the same software. the atari and amiga were gamers computers, just like the mac was for desktop publishing. and the Amiga had video editing, and the ST was great with music editing. but yes totally niche market.

Anonymous Fri Jan 12 00:05:19 2018 No.4518030

>>4518014
I read on a former Atari employee blog that one of the biggest issue in the US, after of course being named Atari and having to compete with IBM and Apple, was that the strategy "power without the price", did not allow to have a sufficient margin for distributors. Compared to other brands, US distributors and resellers were not earning enough money to invest time and of course money behind Atari. I will have to dig into my links to find the source, but I find this information interesting and quite logical indeed.

As others have noted, the European computer market was less mature than the US one, there were a lot of small companies and competing brands and you could still profitably sell ZX Spectrum-class machines. It was easier for a smaller company like Atari to get into Europe and compete.

Anonymous Fri Jan 12 00:11:25 2018 No.4518040

Home computers largely subbed for game consoles in Europe because we didn't really have any homegrown consoles like the US and Japan. The only options for gaming were arcades or home computers. The cassette format did stick around here a lot longer than the US, although if you wanted to do word processing, you pretty much needed a disk drive.

Even after consoles like the Mega Drive became available, the games were still pricey which was why people preferred computers. A lot of Amiga games were just garbage ports of already badly-made ST games, reminds me of how a lot of European MSX and CPC titles were ports of Sinclair Spectrum games and a lot of them where just rush jobs to market to get a few £££s.

It really wasn't until Windows 95 that PC compatibles completely took over Europe. By that point, Atari were already dead and Amiga was on its last legs.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jan 12 00:15:14 2018 No.4518049 >>4517405 The Atari ST was definitely quite huge in FRG, German computer shows at that time would have large ST sections. Search for ST stuff on German Ebay and you'll pull up loads of results.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jan 12 00:19:31 2018 No.4518054 I remember the Amiga being fairly popular in the US and software for it was easily obtainable. It stayed viable until about 1992. Now the Atari ST, damn if I ever saw one of those or its software IRL.

Anonymous Fri Jan 12 00:23:57 2018 No.4518065

>>4518054
A local flea market of mine used to have a dealer with a ton of computer crap and there were a few bona-fide Amigas there and even some boxes of Amiga floppies. So I can say that that I have seen US-model Amigas in the flesh and they're not a mythical entity.

Atari ST though? Nope, never seen any except in pictures.

Anonymous Fri Jan 12 00:27:21 2018 No.4518075

>>4518054
Yeah, they were definitely around. My uncle had one and it was pretty cool back in the day. But most people went for the IBM clones or Macs because they had more software for Getting Shit Done™, which is what Americans used computers for back then.

Anonymous Fri Jan 12 00:27:24 2018 No.4518076

The Amiga was marketed wrong, being hyped-up as some futuristic multimedia monster with game being downplayed. The ST was a modest success with the monochrome monitor making it a cheap Macintosh alternative, but developers were convinced it was a piracy haven and started turning away from it.

In both cases they were being trounced by IBM clones from Taiwan and Korea tanking the price of DOS machines which while invaluable for business and education were very shitty at gaming until the '90s.

Anonymous Fri Jan 12 00:27:32 2018 No.4518078

>>4518054
You could obtain Atari ST stuff from most major retailers and computer stores up to 1989 or so. After that, only at specialty stores or retailers, or as European imports. ven if it was a game from an American software company. For example, my Atari ST copies of Silent Service and F-15 Strike Eagle were published by Microprose USA, but by the time Silent Service II and F-15 Strike Eagle II came out, they were published by Microprose UK and imported into the US.

Anonymous Fri Jan 12 00:30:05 2018 No.4518080

>>4518075
>But most people went for the IBM clones or Macs because they had more software for Getting Shit Done™, which is what Americans used computers for back then

As far as gaming was concerned, by the Amiga era, you could just get a NES if you wanted arcade games and the strategy/sim stuff you could just play on a PC, preferably a Tandy 1000 since it had better sound and graphics than standard PCs.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jan 12 00:32:01 2018 No.4518089 According to one account, the only reason they even bothered selling the Atari ST in North America was that it had a Mac emulator and you could run some Mac software on it at a lower price than the real thing.

Anonymous Fri Jan 12 00:35:28 2018 No.4518095

>>4518049
One of its big pluses in Europe is that they sold them with appropriate regional keyboards like the AZERTY layout in France and umalaut symbols in Germany and Scandinavia. Before that time, only CP/M machines and other professional computers had keyboards like this.

Anonymous Fri Jan 12 00:38:38 2018 No.4518104

The Atari ST was less overtly game-focused than the Amiga since it had higher resolution graphics, no sprites, and more limited sound. This meant that it could be taken more seriously as a productivity machine. At least in Europe. Not much chance in the US to break IBM and Apple's stranglehold.

Anonymous Fri Jan 12 00:41:24 2018 No.4518107

>>4518104
This is partially true. The ST is more PC/Apple-like in its design philosophy than the Amiga is. Since it didn't have hardware sprites or scrolling, you needed a good programmer to get fluid animation out of it, although the CPU was faster than the Amiga's. The Amiga's sound is more advanced but also eats more memory.

And funny thing is that there is number of games made better for ST than Amiga: try Star Wars on ST and then on Amiga. Amiga version is almost unplayable, and sound is weak.

Anonymous Fri Jan 12 00:46:49 2018 No.4518114

>>4518107
Much of the Amiga library is comprised of terrible ST ports that can't even scroll properly and have no improvements beyond sound. The ST was the lowest common denominator, therefor most Euro devs preferred to make that version first and then copy/paste it to the Amiga. It's exactly like all the terrible ZX Spectrum ports on the C64. Are you going to argue against this?

>>	Anonymous Fri Jan 12 00:49:16 2018 No.4518119 >>4518114 Yes, at first, but after the Amiga Batman pack and the Shadow of the Beast game, the tables turned, games appeared on Amiga first and then on ST, later, not at all anymore.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jan 12 00:51:29 2018 No.4518124 Ignore the troll.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jan 12 00:53:14 2018 No.4518125 >>4518124 How is this trolling? The ST was far behind the Amiga as a game machine. But the ST was cheaper and sold more for a while, so devs chose to make games for it first, then port to the Amiga with no optimizations.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jan 12 00:57:28 2018 No.4518129 The ST was marketed as a color Mac for half the price, it even had an emulator that let you run Mac application software. That was a thing you couldn't do on the Amiga with its complicated custom chipset.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jan 12 01:00:53 2018 No.4518134 >>4518114 Sometimes this was true, other times the game was properly coded/optimized for the Amiga.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jan 12 01:08:39 2018 No.4518142 Fun fact: IBM at one point considered buying Atari and having them produce their PC. We almost had a world dominated by Atari clones.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jan 12 01:19:06 2018 No.4518158 >>4518119 The Amiga Batman pack was clever and sold a lot of them in Europe but I don't think it would have succeeded in the US because by 1989, you'd just buy NES games if you wanted this kind of thing.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jan 12 01:48:12 2018 No.4518193 >>4517716 The IBM PC wasn't even the only x86 machine at the time, there were many others often with superior hardware and usually running a custom version of PC-DOS or CP/M-86.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jan 12 01:51:28 2018 No.4518197 >>4517539 I remember store demos of King's Quest V and VI with their hand-painted VGA graphics that looked incredible, even though the animation still wasn't as smooth as the Amiga.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jan 12 01:55:26 2018 No.4518203 >>4518193 PC-DOS was IBM's version of MS-DOS.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jan 12 05:07:20 2018 No.4518449 >>4517803 >You can't copyright an instruction set on a CPU. What? Why did AMD have to licence x86 from Intel than and Intel had to licence AMD64 from AMD?

>>	Anonymous Fri Jan 12 05:09:45 2018 No.4518456 >>4518449 Patents.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jan 12 05:10:12 2018 No.4518458 >>4518114 >Much of the Amiga library is comprised of terrible ST ports Some* Mostly developers made Amiga games and had to make lackluster ports to the ST because lacking hardware.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jan 12 05:11:28 2018 No.4518459 >>4518456 So, the original post was right. It was a licensing issue. You licence patents. Don't know where the copyright idea came from.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jan 12 05:12:31 2018 No.4518460 >>4518193 Somewhat right, somewhat true. HP had smart terminals that used the x86 instruction set.

Anonymous Fri Jan 12 05:18:18 2018 No.4518464

>>4518114
>It's exactly like all the terrible ZX Spectrum ports on the C64

The Amiga and Atari ST share a CPU so it's not as bad as converting Spectrum games to the C64 where the two computers had completely different CPUs.

A lot of Spectrum games they would just copypaste the graphics into the C64's hi-res mode and even worse, programmers would take the original source code listing and just convert every Z80 instruction to its 6502 equivalent. Unfortunately, the two CPUs are a lot different so you'd end up with a game that ran like molasses.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jan 12 16:53:54 2018 No.4519327 >>4517348 I think people were doing less gaming on PC's in the americas back in the 80's and were more interested in fucking around on BBS' and playing rudimentary text games on their apple II's / C64's etc.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jan 12 16:58:13 2018 No.4519337 >>4519327 You're pretty badly misinformed then.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jan 12 17:02:01 2018 No.4519343 >>4519327 As much as i love text adventures, they were never the most popular games.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jan 12 19:20:26 2018 No.4519568 >>4517837 >us retrogamers

Anonymous Fri Jan 12 19:32:17 2018 No.4519580

>>4519327
For Americans in the mid-late '80s, if you wanted games you bought an NES. Computers were more expensive, so you only bought those if you needed one for Real Work, and for that IBM was king. Sure, PC games existed, but they were never the primary concern for computer buyers.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jan 12 19:57:52 2018 No.4519618 >>4519580 >For Americans in the mid-late '80s, if you wanted games you bought an NES Arcade games, you had a computer if you wanted to play flight sims, war games, and dungeon crawlers.

>>	Anonymous Sat Jan 13 07:59:45 2018 No.4520520 There is no reason to own an ST if you already have an Amiga (for games). Literary 99% of the multiplats that both have are better on Amiga.

Anonymous Sat Jan 13 08:03:28 2018 No.4520523

>>4518129
>The ST was marketed as a color Mac for half the price, it even had an emulator that let you run Mac application software. That was a thing you couldn't do on the Amiga with its complicated custom chipset.
Why would you lie on the internet? Amiga did 68k Macintosh way better just thanks to the custom chipset. There are more Macintosh emulators for Amiga than the ST and this is something we actually used back in the day.
"The fastest 68k Mac is an Amiga" is a saying that's decades old already.

>inb4 fell for bait
I'm pretty sure he's just a retard either way.

>>	Anonymous Sat Jan 13 18:11:04 2018 No.4521349 >>4518129 is this true?

>>	Anonymous Sat Jan 13 20:22:46 2018 No.4521594 >>4516073 America had emergent online culture and after C64 PC was commonplace and more cheap. Europe always had huge taxes on PCs and they cost a fortune back then but in US it was much cheaper.

>>	Anonymous Sat Jan 13 20:47:16 2018 No.4521634 >>4521594 lol, not that particularly true

>>	Anonymous Sat Jan 13 20:49:17 2018 No.4521639 >>4521594 >Europe always had huge taxes on PCs and they cost a fortune back then Europe is not a country, it's many countries with differing costs of living and tax systems.

>>	Anonymous Sat Jan 13 20:50:18 2018 No.4521641 >>4521639 Americans, I know several who think that Europe actually is a country and the actual countries are states...

>>	Anonymous Sun Jan 14 01:36:03 2018 No.4522067 >>4521641 >i pretend i know others retarded as me

>>	Anonymous Sun Jan 14 01:58:39 2018 No.4522085 >>4521641 Implying Europe will not end up like that some day thanks to the European Union.

>>	Anonymous Sun Jan 14 02:04:41 2018 No.4522092 >>4522085 That's the idea but it takes a long way. For retro times you have to remember the EC was transformed into the EU in 1993.

Anonymous Sun Jan 14 12:16:57 2018 No.4522886

>>4516257
I unironically used an unaccelerated Amiga 1200 almost exclusively with productive software until 2008 before switching to a Mac.
Spreadsheet: TurboCalc
Word processing: Wordworth

Also transferring files from a PC was pretty easy, since you just needed CrossDOS or better MessyDOS to read FAT-formated or Mac discs. Those floppy controllers of the Amiga in contrast to the limited ones in PCs were very flexible in that case. As long as the file format wasn't to exotic you could read it without problems on an Amiga and even on an Amiga 500 (which of course required external drives, since all Amigas only had DD drives).

Anonymous Sun Jan 14 12:23:11 2018 No.4522897

>>4522886
Impressive!

Didn't Workbench 3.1 already support FAT formatted floppies without CrossDOS? I guess you weren't using 3.1?

>Those floppy controllers of the Amiga in contrast to the limited ones in PCs were very flexible in that case.
This is true, not specifically related to your case, but you can even wire up 5.25" or 8" drives if you want to and with the right filesystem driver read and write them fine, the MFM.device driver and fully software configurable controller was really good for that.

Anonymous Sun Jan 14 12:45:21 2018 No.4522926

>>4522897
>Didn't Workbench 3.1 already support FAT formatted floppies without CrossDOS? I guess you weren't using 3.1?
I'm not sure if this worked out of the box with 3.1, but I found MessyDos more reliable than CrossDos. But I'm sure that it was at least included in OS3.9.

>http://aminet.net/package/disk/misc/MSH-1.58
But they fucked something up with the last release of the classic OS3.9 so that many of those file system drivers failed to work. But you could fix that with some setpatch options, I guess (but my memories are a bit blurry in that case). But I still know about some of the more questionable drivers like DiskSpare that sacrificed error protection and accessed those usually unused floppy sectors to fit more data onto a floppy (like around 1.8 MB instead of 1.44 on a HD-floppy).
>http://aminet.net/package/disk/misc/Diskspr3

>>	Anonymous Sun Jan 14 18:39:00 2018 No.4523559 I take it no one hear has ever actually tried to play an amiga game or the reason would be obvious

>>	Anonymous Sun Jan 14 18:42:04 2018 No.4523565 File: 1.71 MB, 500x500, 1440672010729.gif [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>4523559 >bad grammar >thinking PC or Macintosh did offer better at the time (You)

Anonymous Mon Jan 15 17:05:31 2018 No.4525285

They were, it's just that by the early 90s, the PC got better, soundcards cheaper, and by 1992, Amiga and Atari ST couldn't play Wolf 3D, and by 1993, neither could officially play Doom.
Don't forget that most businesses had PCs or macs, so chances are at home, you (Or your parents if you're a child of the time) were going to have a PC or Mac compatible if some kind to keep productive with their job.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 15 17:27:36 2018 No.4525313 >>4525285 They could play Wolf3D and higher end models even Doom, just they didn't receive any ports until years later

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 15 17:44:53 2018 No.4525338 >>4525313 Yeah, but by then, Amigas were hobbyist shit.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 15 17:54:42 2018 No.4525348 >>4525338 They still are, but better hobbyist shit than many other shit platforms from the time Also I wasn't just talking about Amiga

Anonymous Mon Jan 15 18:12:07 2018 No.4525375

>>4525348
Sure, but if you wanted to do computer games back in the mid to late 90s, you were better off getting a PC and Windows "That just works", instead of busting your ass trying to find Amiga versions and practically hacking around to get them working, just so they can sort of be playable

Anonymous Mon Jan 15 18:19:50 2018 No.4525387

>>4525375
No, we are talking about he late 80's and early 90's when Amiga was relevant, this was totally the opposite
Games where plentiful and cheap, even when it was mostly pricary that in the end helped to kill it

Don't know about America though as they where more NES/SNES people

Anonymous Mon Jan 15 20:01:37 2018 No.4525584

I was in an 8088/640k/CGA house until late 1996. Went straight to a 200Mhz Pentium with 32MB RAM. I wasn't completely in the dark as school went from IIes to Performas with some SE 30s thrown in between, and friends exposed me to 486s, but it still felt a bit like a revalation

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 15 20:47:11 2018 No.4525706 >>4525387 >even when it was mostly pricary that in the end helped to kill it Meme put out by software companies when the real reason they didn't want to develop for the Amiga was that the userbase wasn't big enough.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 15 20:49:10 2018 No.4525710 >>4525584 What Youtube comment section was this copypasted from?

Anonymous Mon Jan 15 20:51:15 2018 No.4525714

>>4525706
Nope, it was a serious problem at the time, I didn't drop a penny on a non bootleg game because every weekend I could get them all for a pack of smokes and a blank floppy from a bloke at the party and so did everyone else

Also, user base wasn't big enough? What are you smoking

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 15 21:01:53 2018 No.4525740 >>4525714 Commodore 64 and Apple II software was also pirated to a ridiculous degree but it didn't stop software devs from actively supporting them, because there were a fuckton more C64s and Apple IIs around than Amigas.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 15 21:06:59 2018 No.4525753 File: 31 KB, 754x556, Amiga sales figures.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>4525714 >Also, user base wasn't big enough? An estimated 700,000 US models isn't that big.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 15 21:12:55 2018 No.4525769 >>4525753 I'm not American though.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 15 21:13:11 2018 No.4525771 >>4525740 Obviously, if 1 million people of a 3 million user base system pirate your game is still way better than 1 million people of a 2 million user base for the developer. >>4525753 >US As I said, I don't know much about you guys.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 15 21:16:37 2018 No.4525776 >>4516073 First Apple II series. Then PC clones.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 15 21:19:01 2018 No.4525780 >>4525771 Think proportions. If there were 2 million of something, then 700,000 copies (say) would be pirated. They used this excuse to justify not developing Atari 8-bit software in the mid 80s as well when the market for them was shrinking.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 15 21:25:25 2018 No.4525790 >>4525780 What did I just tell you than? But this is not the same as "no user base".

Anonymous Mon Jan 15 21:27:34 2018 No.4525793
File: 52 KB, 1361x657, copy protection.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

I always felt that piracy was less of a problem than software devs claimed it to be, but at the same time a lot of piracy was their own damn fault for making absurdly overdone copy protections that damaged disk drives.

Anonymous Mon Jan 15 21:36:22 2018 No.4525806

>>4525793
I think it depends where and when, I didn't have a single original Amiga game until Amiga was already dead but I pretty much had hundreds of them, while I had the money to buy original games, I blew it more on hardware, booze and parting instead.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 15 21:45:33 2018 No.4525817 >>4517491 Maybe among the sperg lords. Everyone I knew would have LOVED a crisp color display, but they were sub par and then prohibitively expensive.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 15 21:47:51 2018 No.4525824 >>4525817 This is the difference between people who where 40 in the 80's and people who where 14.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 15 22:58:25 2018 No.4525917 >>4516073 Because we had actual video games to play rather than poor imitations of them.

Anonymous Tue Jan 16 11:18:03 2018 No.4527047
File: 95 KB, 1364x572, realfloppyfix_2_big.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>4525793
The Amiga btw is a very good example of questionable copy protection methods. When Commodore was finished and the Escom company produced Amigas for a short while, they changed the internal floppy drives of the Amiga 1200 to another brand... and you guessed it, many old games didn't work since they were using a copy protection method that was based on an undocumented feature of the old floppy drives. Fuck, there were even some kind of mod chip solutions around to (partially) fix that problem with the A1200 that also had some other negative effects.

I never bothered buying such flawed extension just to get my old games to work again.
> http://www.bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/product.aspx?id=389

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 16 11:51:20 2018 No.4527110 >>4522085 The EU will collapse before that happens. Good riddance.

Anonymous Tue Jan 16 11:54:20 2018 No.4527118

>>4527047
>The Amiga btw is a very good example of questionable copy protection methods

Apple II and Commodore games all had absurd copy protections because the drives allowed things that weren't possible on the more limited Shugart-standard IBM compatible disk controllers.

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 16 13:47:16 2018 No.4527297 >>4527047 Thank God WHDLoad came out in the 90's.

>>	Brucewayne5150 Tue Jan 16 19:43:55 2018 No.4527934 >>4527118 Apple II games had either no copy protection or it was easy to break. I had piles of copied Apple II games as a teen.

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 16 19:50:48 2018 No.4527950 >>4527934 >or it was easy to break. I had piles of copied Apple II games as a teen. Same about Amiga, this has nothing to do with them having it. You realize Apple II cracking was a thing because copy protection?

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 16 22:08:26 2018 No.4528129 >>4527934 The Apple II disk drives are so simple and low-level that it's impossible to make a copy protection the user can't break.

Anonymous Tue Jan 16 22:15:26 2018 No.4528154

>>4528129
That's kind of like copy protection on Amiga was.
The floppy drive controller was fully software controlled so copy protection could easily be reverse engineered.
Simpler copy protection could even by duplicated without any hardware tools but just with a low level copy of that floppy.

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/vr/ - Retro Games