Grzyb wrote:Well, there were good PC games in 1990, but not good enough to justify purchase of a PC just for gaming.
And in 1991, there was […]
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NamelessPlayer wrote:I'd say the turning point might've been closer to 1990.
Well, there were good PC games in 1990, but not good enough to justify purchase of a PC just for gaming.
And in 1991, there was Lemmings - a great game, originally made for Amiga, only later ported to PC, with certain features lacking.
But in 1992, there was Wolfenstein 3D - not available for Amiga at all.
And Links 386 Pro, with its beautiful SVGA graphics, appealing even to those not interested in golf - again, no Amiga version.
So I choose 1992 as the breakthru year - since then, the hottest new games were originally for PC, while Amiga users had to wait for ports or poor imitations.
Lemmings was one of my childhood faves, and one of those iconic games I thought everyone played... but sure enough, I played the DOS version first.
It wasn't until I learned about its Amiga origins that I went "Wait, there's a two-player mode all the official ports dropped, and the Amiga lets you use TWO mice?" Thankfully, I have two tank mice lying around - perfect for Lemmings, Hired Guns, or anything else mouse-oriented. (Oh, hey, speaking of Hired Guns, that apparently has a DOS version; definitely considering that one for an Amiga vs. PC shootout if I can find said DOS version.)
Wolfenstein 3D was definitely one of the turning points, since it got id Software noticed in a way that Hovertank 3D and Catacomb 3D didn't to the point that people mistakenly cite Wolf3D as their first FPS. It took the Amiga scene years to offer something comparable in the form of Gloom, and by then, people expected more than perfectly square rooms and 90-degree corners.
Links 386 Pro is something that would've been off my radar (it's a golf game), but it apparently was quite a killer app that pushed people to upgrade back in the day - something the PC would be known for repeatedly in the '90s as hardware got exponentially faster, and game engines eager to take advantage of it.
1992 also happens to be the year that Frontier: Elite II was released, though my understanding is that the DOS version was released the following year, with improved texture-mapped graphics and analog joystick support, albeit worse sound for those without MT-32s. Funnily enough, said DOS version never seems to come up on YouTube; you're far more likely to find footage of the Amiga version, maybe because all the PC gamers were too busy playing Wing Commander instead (itself one of those PC killer apps where the Amiga version was noticeably degraded).
Scali wrote:Back in my early Amiga years, I only knew of one friend who had an A2000. Everyone else had an A500, A600 or A1200.
I don't know anyone who had an accelerator for any classic Amiga. Only for A1200s.
So in my experience, accelerators weren't a thing until the (late) A1200 days. We're talking 1995+.
This is a stark contrast to my experience here in the US, where I've seen more big-box A2000/A3000/A4000 systems in person than A500s or A1200s (never an A600).
I suspect that's because most of those were former Video Toaster systems - the one niche where the Amiga had any particular relevance in the US. In fact, my local friend with all the Amiga gear has one A4000 with a Video Toaster 4000 in it, and another A4000 I haven't seen yet that supposedly has a Video Toaster Flyer and a bunch of SCSI drives to go with it.
Even my own A2000, a VCFSE 2018 consignment find, had a Video Toaster loaded in it, though I've never had the chance to test it since said A2000 was Vartakilled and I have yet to get it back up and running again.
Scali wrote:In the demoscene, an A1200 with 060@50 accelerator became the 'gold standard'. It was much cheaper than an A4000, and you had wh […]
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In the demoscene, an A1200 with 060@50 accelerator became the 'gold standard'. It was much cheaper than an A4000, and you had what you wanted: the AGA chipset, a fast CPU, enough fastram, and a HDD.
Ever since the late 90s, most AGA-targeted demos are written specifically for the 060 (as in: hand-optimized assembly routines that are specifically written against the dual pipeline architecture (pOEP and sOEP). If they run at all on an 030 or 040 system, they are way too slow to fully experience the demo as intended).
Such as the demos from The Black Lotus: http://www.pouet.net/prod_nfo.php?which=16337&font=4
https://youtu.be/m1kw4otknuQ
Good luck finding an affordable 68060 accelerator for either the A1200 or A4000 nowadays, though. The closest I can think of is the A3660 board - a modified A3640 that still inherits a bunch of the A3640's flaws like no on-board RAM - and those still cost hundreds of dollars fully-built!
With time, though, the cost differential between the A1200 and A4000 has minimized to the point that you might as well step up to the big box workstation with Zorro III and a factory '030/'040 for a little more, since the prices on an A1200 with any sort of accelerator often exceed the A4000/40, especially here in the US with what people are willing to spend on eBay.
Of course, that may all no longer be necessary now that the Apollo Vampire exists, which even brings AGA to the OCS systems when flashed with a GOLD3 core.
Scali wrote:Which doesn't say too much.
There were floppy disk systems for Nintendo as well, yet most people used Nintendo with cartridges o […]
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Grzyb wrote:On the other hand, I'm absolutely sure that the majority of Amiga users still used low-end A500 floppy-only machines in the mid-90s.
Which doesn't say too much.
There were floppy disk systems for Nintendo as well, yet most people used Nintendo with cartridges only.
You have to see things in perspective here: Because the Amiga never quite took off as an office machine, there wasn't really a need for a HDD to store your applications and data.
Most games and applications fit on one or two disks, so just an Amiga with an extra drive worked fine. You did see many people with an extra drive by the way. I'd say that it was more common to see Amigas with 2 or more floppy drives, than it was for PCs.
I admit that floppy drive loading times took me aback quite a bit, and that I quickly became very grateful for getting this A4000 that I can just use WHDLoad with.
There's a lot of Amiga games where the hard drive installers are either missing or just weirdly broken, or they don't even offer the option. It's so weird because pretty much every PC and Mac I touched, even as a kid, had a hard drive installed.
I mean, let this sink in: HDDs were standard on Macs since roughly the SE and Mac II, and I was only forced to go single-floppy on the IIcx I had for a bit because of some issues with the internal HDD (factory 20 MB SCSI, may have needed a recap). Having to swap floppies all the time sucked, to say the least.
Also on that note: I've noticed that most of the comparison in here is between IBM-compatibles and Amigas, never Macs and Amigas. Perhaps it's because you can just emulate a Mac on an Amiga, same 68k CPU and all, but nobody ever mentions color 640x480 being the standard on Mac ever since the Mac II brought color and NuBus to the platform. There's even games like Prince of Persia that look better on Mac than both the PC and Amiga versions because of this.
brostenen wrote:You needed a serious fast x86 machine, in order to compete against the Amiga arcitecture. There were no such thing as a superiour x86 machine in the 1980's and well into 1992/93. And if you found something that beated the Amiga, then it would only beat on certain levels and not all. And you would have to have tons of money. Like silicon graphics machines.
X86 machines used brute force from the CPU alone compared to the Amiga that used different controllers and processors for indevidual tasks. Like the difference between single and multitasking. Try moving bitmap gfx on a 1987 x86 machine, formatting a floppy, playing sampled music and writing a letter at the same time and not using the CPU as the only chip for data processing inside the machine. Try that on a 386dx40 with ISA only cards. How about having 8 programs open at the same time, on MS Dos 5.0 or 6.22.
If we're including 1989 through 1993 or so in that timeline, then do I have a nasty wake-up call for you...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM_Towns
The Fujitsu FM Towns - a PC that isn't quite IBM-compatible, but offers amazing graphics and sound for the time as standard equipment , built to compete with the Sharp X68000. It even had a factory standard CD-ROM drive that was bootable, too.
If it just had a preemptive multitasking OS, I think it could go toe to toe with a typical Amiga and win quite handily. Same for the X68000/X68030. Nobody's really gone into much detail on their respective custom chips, though.