https://www.southwestamiga.org.uk/

Is this Saturday!

I'm taking my Amiga 1200 along with a video digitiser and dot matrix printer and Iomega Zip drive.

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And in 1991, there was Lemmings - a great game, originally made for Amiga, only later ported to PC, with certain features lacking.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.

The prices of 486s really started dropping in late 1992, and that's when I got my first PC, a 486DX-33, with 4MB, a 210MB HDD and a 14" Trinitron display for $2000USD. That was still a lot of money, but super cheap compared to what owning a well equipped PC would have cost prior to that point. Do you think my A500 saw much use after I got a PC with Windows 3.1 and 256-colour graphics at 800x600 and a hard drive? The A1200 was a good system that came out around the same time, but it probably would have been better for Commodore if that system had come out in 1990 instead.

First time that I realised that a game for both Amiga and x86/Dos were more beautiful on the x86/Dos platform was Syndicate. Around 1992 it was not only how good games looked, that the games review took notice at. Some games were deemed as having better music on one platform, and better gfx on the other platform.

EDIT:
I had to look at the old 1992 game review in a Danish magazine.....
March/April of 1992, there were not a mention of PC versions. In the August/September edition, then they had started to review PC games as well. Like monkey Island II. Same score on both platforms, yet the Amiga edition had slightly better sound and the PC had slightly better GFX.

March/April Edition
August/September Edition

Happy reading.... (Sorry, magazines are on Danish, yet review scores are in percentage)

I think it was more about capabilities, than prices.
1992 was the time when VLB was introduced, usually with graphics chipsets supporting certain operations in hardware, and probably always with true-color.
The same year there were the 16-bit sound cards: SB16, GUS.

Brand-new Amiga 1200 was still cheap, but worse than a good 486 in everything.
IIRC, A1200 was still by default sold without an HDD, which was pathetic...

brostenen wrote:

First time that I realised that a game for both Amiga and x86/Dos were more beautiful on the x86/Dos platform was Syndicate. Around 1992 it was not only how good games looked, that the games review took notice at. Some games were deemed as having better music on one platform, and better gfx on the other platform.

The painful part is that Syndicate was developed by Bullfrog, and published by Electronic Arts.
These are two legendary Amiga names, and Syndicate was considered an 'Amiga game'.
As far as I recall, the PC version used the same graphics in-game, but it supported SVGA, so you could run the game in very high resolutions. The Amiga's screen was rather 'cramped', and the game worked better in those higher resolutions.

I find the people who don't 'get' why the Amiga was so special very, very peculiar..

Anonymous Coward wrote:

The prices of 486s really started dropping in late 1992, and that's when I got my first PC, a 486DX-33, with 4MB, a 210MB HDD and a 14" Trinitron display for $2000USD. That was still a lot of money, but super cheap compared to what owning a well equipped PC would have cost prior to that point. Do you think my A500 saw much use after I got a PC with Windows 3.1 and 256-colour graphics at 800x600 and a hard drive? The A1200 was a good system that came out around the same time, but it probably would have been better for Commodore if that system had come out in 1990 instead.

This is the exact configuration I got in late 1993 for the same price (backwater country prices, etc.) but I held out for the good half of 1992 undecided on whether to get an A1200 or a 486.. In the end my dad and friends managed to convince me on the 486; I believe what actually made me give up on the A1200 was how much better Dune II, Syndicate and Fate of Atlantis looked on a PC.

Grzyb wrote:

I think it was more about capabilities, than prices.

Depended entirely on how well the economy in your country was doing. The same today. If you have lots of money, you buy a top of the line smartphone. Less money, you settle with a mid-range.

Scali wrote:

The painful part is that Syndicate was developed by Bullfrog, and published by Electronic Arts. These are two legendary Amiga na […]
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brostenen wrote:

First time that I realised that a game for both Amiga and x86/Dos were more beautiful on the x86/Dos platform was Syndicate. Around 1992 it was not only how good games looked, that the games review took notice at. Some games were deemed as having better music on one platform, and better gfx on the other platform.

The painful part is that Syndicate was developed by Bullfrog, and published by Electronic Arts.
These are two legendary Amiga names, and Syndicate was considered an 'Amiga game'.
As far as I recall, the PC version used the same graphics in-game, but it supported SVGA, so you could run the game in very high resolutions. The Amiga's screen was rather 'cramped', and the game worked better in those higher resolutions.

And on a 500/600 with 1mb of Ram, it is running painfully slow compared to a 486dx33/ISA-gfx and 4mb of Ram. 🤣

brostenen wrote:

Depended entirely on how well the economy in your country was doing. The same today. If you have lots of money, you buy a top of the line smartphone. Less money, you settle with a mid-range.

Sure, eg. Poland in the early 90s was poor, very slowly recovering from the communism - so Amigas lived on here for a few years more.
However, Poland was irrelevant for the overall situation - vast majority of computers was selling in the USA and western Europe, and apparently for them 486s were affordable.

Grzyb wrote:

brostenen wrote:

Depended entirely on how well the economy in your country was doing. The same today. If you have lots of money, you buy a top of the line smartphone. Less money, you settle with a mid-range.

Sure, eg. Poland in the early 90s was poor, very slowly recovering from the communism - so Amigas lived on here for a few years more.
However, Poland was irrelevant for the overall situation - vast majority of computers was selling in the USA and western Europe, and apparently for them 486s were affordable.

Indeed. There was practically no "home computer" market here in the east at this time. Over here in Lithuania it was the occasional Spectrum clone for hobbyists and some Atari ST's running the traffic lights. When computers started getting into homes by the late 90's it was all x86.

Grzyb wrote:

brostenen wrote:

Depended entirely on how well the economy in your country was doing. The same today. If you have lots of money, you buy a top of the line smartphone. Less money, you settle with a mid-range.

Sure, eg. Poland in the early 90s was poor, very slowly recovering from the communism - so Amigas lived on here for a few years more.
However, Poland was irrelevant for the overall situation - vast majority of computers was selling in the USA and western Europe, and apparently for them 486s were affordable.

Heh.... The 80's are known as the poor-80's here in Denmark. So it was not until after the mid-90's that people began to buy computers in a big way here. I think it was 97/98 in were it really took off. Before that, those that had a computer, used it till it was utterly and completely worn out. Most that had a machine, had bought it in the late-80's. Like Amiga500's or even as old as Commodore64.

Denmark was poor at some point? Even in relative terms, that's hard to believe.

appiah4 wrote:

Denmark was poor at some point? Even in relative terms, that's hard to believe.

Well.... The 80's were no dance on roses. The working class lost a lot of jobs, taxes and prices went up. Inflation and homes went on foreclosure in big waves. Foreclosure was like a big thing in the news. My father was lucky. He was a teacher at one of the local high school's and my mother was lucky, as she worked as a powerplant were she designed high voltage power lines and transformer stations. Though some 25% of those I went to school with, had parents that lost their job. Tons of fishermen had their ships go on foreclosure as well. And farmers lost so much money, because sending pigs to the slaughterhouse gave them less than they had paid for raising pigs.

Yup.... Denmark had a major economic setback in the 1980's.

It was well beyond 1992 that decent platform games technical-wise appeared on PC. Vlb and high end vga cards were useless since no one really took advantage of them. Sure adventures and strategy games looked better on PC but compare any platform of the era to it's Amiga counterpart and the difference was still huge. Turrican 2 pc and jazz jackrabbit where the point for me that showed that pcs could do things better all around. Still copper effects, scanline tricks etc never made it to pc just like 3d games never were good on Amigas.
But even though many games were impressive on Amiga they play like cr#p 🤣 in the other hand an Amiga user of back then would tell you commander keen is mediocre 🤣
The trick is to own all 😉

keropi wrote:

It was well beyond 1992 that decent platform games technical-wise appeared on PC.

You may be right, but in the era of Wolfenstein and Doom people ceased to care about platform games.

^ nah.... 🤣
DOOM was sure a shock and everyone wanted to play it and made a huge impact but still platforms were relevant back then

keropi wrote:

commander keen is mediocre 🤣

I liked Commander Keen when it was new, yet Giana was still the king of platform if we look at Amiga/PC only.
Regarding the ultimate platform game, then I think that Mario all stars for SNES is the absolute best that can be bought.
Second place still belongs to Giana Sisters and third must be Jackrabbit. Those three are miles ahead of Keen.

I could say that in the time I have been playing PC games (1989 till today) the only PC platformer that I actually enjoyed was Alley Cat. If you can call it that. The genre on the PC was almost universally lame.

Grzyb wrote:

keropi wrote:

It was well beyond 1992 that decent platform games technical-wise appeared on PC.

You may be right, but in the era of Wolfenstein and Doom people ceased to care about platform games.

We are talking about the era where people cared about platform games. Note that "eras" back then went by pretty fast. PCs did actually double (or more) in speed every 18 months back then. The first Amiga (the 1000) was released in 1985. The 500 in 1987. Wolfenstein 3D came out in 1992.