appiah4 wrote on 2024-04-19, 14:02:

Shagittarius wrote on 2024-04-19, 13:57:

appiah4 wrote on 2024-04-19, 07:30:

A1000 has color composite out.

I did not know this. I did a little research and it seems not all 1000s have color composite, there is a lot of discussion about this. However I did find something else I didn't know which is the 600 and 1200 had color composite out.

If you had an Amiga monitor though there was no reason to run composite video, anything you would have seen would have been rgb out on those from an amiga.

It kind of mattered if you did not own a monitor though, color composite was still lightyears better than color RF.. That said, for an A500 you needed the A520 regardless, which also has color composite out. It was a strange design decision for the A500/2000 that I will never understand. I suppose it was probably done to allow using monochrome monitors at high resolutions. I mean, the A500 has particularly sharp Composite output even though it is B&W. I would think it would look very crisp and sharp in 640x400 interlaced mode on such a monitor, so you could do coding or word processing with it. The issue is, neither the A500 nor the A2000 were marketed as such machines...

Absolutely I wasn't saying that no one used the composite that didn't have a monitor, just that for the topic of this thread discussing monitors, if you saw an amiga with an era appropriate commodore monitor it wasn't running through the composite.

Further about the A520 it might also depend if your A1000 had the appropriate Agnus to do EHB mode, otherwise you would get B&W also through that device, which seems really weird to me but I just saw a discussion on that as well, though I don't have the ability to verify any of it.

.. to give an idea about which type of vintage 14" VGA monitors I was thinking about.

1980s monitors (1987):
- PACOM CVP-5468 LR (0.4mm?)
Members of that era are hard to identify

Early 1990s monitors (1994 or before):
- AOC CM-325 (0.28mm, made 1990?)
- Highscreen SV 28/3 (0.28mm)
- Compaq Presario 425 (0.28mm)
- Amstrad Mega PC Monitor (0.28mm)
Re: Amstrad Mega PC

^Edit: My bad, the advertisement with the original Mega PC monitor can be seen here.

Still love that lovely image of Gateway, though! 😁

The 0.28mm models are almost 0.3mm already.
Much less pixelated than 0.21mm to 0.24mm models, I'd say.

Quick update. Found an old ad about different dot pitch sizes.
It's from this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m79HxULt3O8

It describes an Standard VGA monitor as having 0.39 mm dot pitch.

So I'm not making things up or imaging things (phew!).
It may didn't last very long, but there was a time when VGA monitors were more blurry than EGA or CGA TTL monitors.

Late to the party, but anyway.... There were pre-PC computers in various places I worked and studied (this is the UK), but in 1986 in a major Government department we had IBM XTs with CGA monitors. When the upgrade to IBM ATs with EGA came along, it was very welcome. No more blurry vision at the end of the day for one thing. Personally I preferred the XT keyboard but I got used to the AT one pretty quickly. I came across Amstrad PC1512/1640 on course, they were awful and seemed to be CGA or worse - terrible blurry displays.

In the end, whatever happened, I feel that DOS overtook Amiga.

For instance, Amiga couldn't keep up with DOS's 256-color VGA graphics with Roland MT-32 sounds in games like King's Quest V.

I always see this as the benchmark that killed Amiga.

Still, the Amigas always have been part of gaming history, which initially left DOS gaming far behind.

Malik wrote on 2024-05-30, 15:26:

For instance, Amiga couldn't keep up with DOS's 256-color VGA graphics with Roland MT-32 sounds in games like King's Quest V.
I always see this as the benchmark that killed Amiga.

I think not yet...
Yes, KQ5 was originally for PC, Amiga port was later and worse - but at that time it was still exception rather than rule.
I don't think KQ5 was popular enough to convince gamers to choose PC over Amiga.
Especially that hardly anybody could afford an MT-32.

About the same time there was Lemmings - originally for Amiga, with later PC port lacking some features.

256-color graphics eventually came to Amiga as well - A1200 was perfectly ready for games like KQ5.

BUT!
Suddenly, Wolfenstein 3D appeared - and the brand new A1200 wasn't up to it.
And the following year brought Doom...

That's what made Amiga no longer attractive as a gaming platform.

Grzyb wrote on 2024-05-30, 16:13:

I think not yet... Yes, KQ5 was originally for PC, Amiga port was later and worse - but at that time it was still exception rath […]
Show full quote

Malik wrote on 2024-05-30, 15:26:

For instance, Amiga couldn't keep up with DOS's 256-color VGA graphics with Roland MT-32 sounds in games like King's Quest V.
I always see this as the benchmark that killed Amiga.

I think not yet...
Yes, KQ5 was originally for PC, Amiga port was later and worse - but at that time it was still exception rather than rule.
I don't think KQ5 was popular enough to convince gamers to choose PC over Amiga.
Especially that hardly anybody could afford an MT-32.

About the same time there was Lemmings - originally for Amiga, with later PC port lacking some features.

256-color graphics eventually came to Amiga as well - A1200 was perfectly ready for games like KQ5.

BUT!
Suddenly, Wolfenstein 3D appeared - and the brand new A1200 wasn't up to it.
And the following year brought Doom...

That's what made Amiga no longer attractive as a gaming platform.

That's something I never understood, by the way: Where did that, uh, "love" for shooter games come from?

Back in the day I was happy playing Jump&runs/platformers, arcade games and adventures.
But suddenly there was a virtual "blood bath", everyone was into killing people and creatures and things.

Previously, my friends and me were playing on the Super Nintendo some Mario Kart (also Donkey Kong Country, StarWing, Mario Allstars etc).
Then in a blink of an eye, the Playstation was out and people played killer games.
Or sports games, along with their alcoholic dads, not sure.

I'm still trying to figure out what went wrong back then, why things went so dark.
In school, later, my friends were into playing Counter Strike and Unreal Tournament.

No one seemingly played platformers, adventures or arcade games anymore.
I've felt so depressed and gave up on gaming, essentially.

Except for the GBA and Nintendo DS, where I could enjoy games that I grew up with.
Together with my sister, I've casually played titles like Mario Kart DS, Pokémon Mystery Dungeon etc.

That's when I think I've lost some touch with current PC development, gaming wise.
Still cared about development of processors, Windows, Linux and Macs, though.

But GPUs in general lost my interest, because the majority of games were first-person shooters with their 3D engines.

That's when I've suddenly learned about Caiman.us site in the 2000s.
It made me aware of the indie development scene and games made with Klik&Play (and its succesors).

I've also noticed that Japanese devs had continued to program puzzle games and platformers for plain Win32/GDI,
in a time somewhat being dominated by DirectX and 3D graphics in the western world.

I've also learned about Sonic fan games (SRB2 mainly) and games like Cave Story, Tower of Heaven and Undertale.

Recently, I've also learned about the many games on places like itch.io, were various strange genres of games have found a home.

Jo22 wrote on 2024-05-30, 16:48:

That's something I never understood, by the way: Where did that, uh, "love" for shooter games come from? […]
Show full quote

Grzyb wrote on 2024-05-30, 16:13:

I think not yet... Yes, KQ5 was originally for PC, Amiga port was later and worse - but at that time it was still exception rath […]
Show full quote

Malik wrote on 2024-05-30, 15:26:

For instance, Amiga couldn't keep up with DOS's 256-color VGA graphics with Roland MT-32 sounds in games like King's Quest V.
I always see this as the benchmark that killed Amiga.

I think not yet...
Yes, KQ5 was originally for PC, Amiga port was later and worse - but at that time it was still exception rather than rule.
I don't think KQ5 was popular enough to convince gamers to choose PC over Amiga.
Especially that hardly anybody could afford an MT-32.

About the same time there was Lemmings - originally for Amiga, with later PC port lacking some features.

256-color graphics eventually came to Amiga as well - A1200 was perfectly ready for games like KQ5.

BUT!
Suddenly, Wolfenstein 3D appeared - and the brand new A1200 wasn't up to it.
And the following year brought Doom...

That's what made Amiga no longer attractive as a gaming platform.

That's something I never understood, by the way: Where did that, uh, "love" for shooter games come from?

Back in the day I was happy playing Jump&runs/platformers, arcade games and adventures.
But suddenly there was a virtual "blood bath", everyone was into killing people and creatures and things.

Previously, my friends and me were playing on the Super Nintendo some Mario Kart (also Donkey Kong Country, StarWing, Mario Allstars etc).
Then in a blink of an eye, the Playstation was out and people played killer games.
Or sports games, along with their alcoholic dads, not sure.

I'm still trying to figure out what went wrong back then, why things went so dark.
In school, later, my friends were into playing Counter Strike and Unreal Tournament.

No one seemingly played platformers, adventures or arcade games anymore.
I've felt so depressed and gave up on gaming, essentially.

Except for the GBA and Nintendo DS, where I could enjoy games that I grew up with.
Together with my sister, I've casually played titles like Mario Kart DS, Pokémon Mystery Dungeon etc.

That's when I think I've lost some touch with current PC development, gaming wise.
Still cared about development of processors, Windows, Linux and Macs, though.

But GPUs in general lost my interest, because the majority of games were first-person shooters with their 3D engines.

That's when I've suddenly learned about Caiman.us site in the 2000s.
It made me aware of the indie development scene and games made with Klik&Play (and its succesors).

I've also noticed that Japanese devs had continued to program puzzle games and platformers for plain Win32/GDI,
in a time somewhat being dominated by DirectX and 3D graphics in the western world.

I've also learned about Sonic fan games (SRB2 mainly) and games like Cave Story, Tower of Heaven and Undertale.

Recently, I've also learned about the many games on places like itch.io, were various strange genres of games have found a home.

A game where you kill "people creatures and things" is just another game design. People don't play those games for the act of simulated killing, they play them for the strategies and gameplay that translates more directly with a familiar perspective. Aside from that though the reason everyone switched to those is the same reason everyone switched from text adventures to graphic adventures, from turn based combat to realtime combat, from platformers to 3d platformers...Technical improvement allows for new experiences that in some ways are more appealing to the wider audience. Things are new and people are interested in new instead of the same old same old.

I may think that the Model-T was the best car ever but progress stops for no man.

^Maybe, though the experience with my classmates was different, sadly.
They thought killing was cool. When that Iraq war was current in 2000s, they had showed little to no empathy and instead enjoyed talking about guns and killing and stuff.
They didn't really differentiate games (CS 1.6 etc) from reality.
To me it always felt like those type of games stimulate humans' lowest desires and made them numb. It wasn't my beer and I still struggle to see any advancements in gaming here.
It's more like a dystopia becoming true. To me, at least, I mean. 😢

Edit: Perhaps it's just me. Millions of flies flying around a pile of sh.. can't be wrong, after all. 😉
No seriously, I wonder where all the destructive energy suddenly came from back then.
I enjoyed playing both text and graphics adventures, but I never had to "kill" someone in one.
I wouldn't have done that, even if it was just text. To me it was a no-go. It's against social rules in human society and it simply feels wrong. 🤷‍♂️
Playing, say, Leisure Suit Larry also didn't trigger such emotions.

Edit: It also felt kind of weird how many of my fellow countrymen enjoyed playing Wolf3D.
It's a game about killing solders of the nazi regime.
I always wondered if they ever had been caught by their parents shooting the brains out of "grandpa's" head. Very grotesque situation.
I've also didn't understand the morals here. Nazis were the bad guys, alright. That's no question. But enjoying killing them? How can this be morally superior? I don't get this.
I didn't get it back then, even.

I mean, in the early 90s, my grandma and my family were so glad that cold war had ended, that better times were upon all of us (on earth).
The 2000s were in sight, as well. Good sight!
And then.. Killer games were suddenly on the move. Death, blood, gore. Again!
And everything was looking so promising before! People peacefully had played flight simulators, Lucars Arts adventures, Super Mario and Tetris.

In 1990, there was Tetris on the Gameboy. A peaceful puzzle game, a continuation of the Rubrik's Cube.
Now fast-forward to the mid-90s, and murder games are all the rage. The bloodier, the better. Brain parts on the wall, body parts on the ground.
And I previously had naively thought Hugo's House of Horrors or The Last Half of Darkness had been scary enough, already. 🤣

Jo22 wrote on 2024-05-30, 19:26:

^Maybe, though the experience with my classmates was different, sadly. They thought killing was cool. When that Iraq war was cur […]
Show full quote

^Maybe, though the experience with my classmates was different, sadly.
They thought killing was cool. When that Iraq war was current in 2000s, they had showed little to no empathy and instead enjoyed talking about guns and killing and stuff.
They didn't really differentiate games (CS 1.6 etc) from reality.
To me it always felt like those type of games stimulate humans' lowest desires and made them numb. It wasn't my beer and I still struggle to see any advancements in gaming here.
It's more like a dystopia becoming true. To me, at least, I mean. 😢

Edit: Perhaps it's just me. Millions of flies flying around a pile of sh.. can't be wrong, after all. 😉
No seriously, I wonder where all the destructive energy suddenly came from back then.
I enjoyed playing both text and graphics adventures, but I never had to "kill" someone in one.
I wouldn't have done that, even if it was just text. To me it was a no-go. It's against social rules in human society and it simply feels wrong. 🤷‍♂️
Playing, say, Leisure Suit Larry also didn't trigger such emotions.

Edit: It also felt kind of weird how many of my fellow countrymen enjoyed playing Wolf3D.
It's a game about killing solders of the nazi regime.
I always wondered if they ever had been caught by their parents shooting the brains out of "grandpa's" head. Very grotesque situation.
I've also didn't understand the morals here. Nazis were the bad guys, alright. That's no question. But enjoying killing them? How can this be morally superior? I don't get this.
I didn't get it back then, even.

I mean, in the early 90s, my grandma and my family were so glad that cold war had ended, that better times were upon all of us (on earth).
The 2000s were in sight, as well. Good sight!
And then.. Killer games were suddenly on the move. Death, blood, gore.
And everything was looking so promising before! People peacefully had played flight simulators, Lucars Arts adventures, Super Mario and Tetris.

In 1990, there was Tetris on the Gameboy. A peaceful puzzle game, a continuation of the Rubrik's Cube.
Now fast-forward to the mid-90s, and murder games are all the rage. The bloodier, the better. Brain parts on the wall, body parts on the ground.
And I previously had naively thought Hugo's House of Horrors or The Last Darkness had been scary enough, already. 🤣

Quite an interesting subject.
My guess is that we as people have some natural curiosity on our own mortality... blood, guts, death... in a controlled environment (i.e. a game) those things may bring some kind of "rush". Thats's why horror movies and games are still a thing: We somehow do enjoy being shocked/scared if there is no actual danger or feeling of guilt involved.
Also, video games with more realistic violence were scarce until the mid 90s, both for technological and cultural reasons, which made them even more interesting back then. And there is another reason I think which was the taboo itself, drawing even more attention specially from kids who wanted to have access to "grown up stuff".

The arrival of SVGA gaming on PCs also spelt doom (pun not intended) for the Amigas.

Amiga wasn't popular in Asia back then. But somehow my cousin had Amstrad CPC at that time. Not sure where he got it from, since that wasn't popular here too. All we had were IBM PC Compatibles everywhere.

All games those days looked good not because of worse monitors, but games were designed to look good in those lower resolutions.

I remember when I upgraded to a SVGA monitor, suddenly the grass and trees in Quest for Glory IV looked blocky and ugly, compared to my previous VGA monitor. That's when I missed the older monitor.

I think this may be true for the Amiga scene too.

Malik wrote on 2024-05-31, 00:36:

The arrival of SVGA gaming on PCs also spelt doom (pun not intended) for the Amigas.

Yes, that also was a factor, though not critical.
AGA was late, but possibly not too late: 1992, same as the first commercial SVGA game - Links 386 Pro.
SimCity 2000 was a proof that SVGA gaming is possible on Amiga as well.

BUT!
Readiness for SVGA graphics wasn't all about the graphics chipset.
It also required more RAM and disk space.
SimCity 2000 demanded 4 MB of RAM, and HDD - in 1993/94 already common in new PCs, but still rare in new Amigas.

A1200 in its basic form was cheap.
To run stuff like SimCity 2000, however, it needed upgrades - in effect not so cheap, and still no Wolfenstein nor Doom.
Earlier Amiga users sometimes did the upgrades, but it wasn't attractive for newcomers.

Amiga 1200's formfactor absolutely fucked it over. It shared design philosophy with the Amiga 500, which was in public perception a computer you would buy and use as is except for a memory upgrade. The sidecar hard drive expansions and sophisticated accelerators, to 99% of the owners, were not an option and in some cases not even known.

When the Amiga 1200 launched as another wedgie, the expectation was that it would be a box you would buy and use as is for 3-4 years like a console to play games. That couldn't be farther from the truth as it was both underpowered and underequipped out of the box to handle contemporary games.

That lead to Amiga having no games, and it died.

Amiga 1200 should have been a big box A2000 replacement with better specs and proper expansion slots, not an A500 replacement.

Apple II(/gs) was a great big wedgie that had expansion slots.

The only thing that really held commodore amiga back from a more upgradable design around Zorro-II or nubus, was corporate inertia and a lack of vision.

wierd_w wrote on 2024-05-31, 05:51:

Apple II(/gs) was a great big wedgie that had expansion slots.

The only thing that really held commodore amiga back from a more upgradable design around Zorro-II or nubus, was corporate inertia and a lack of vision.

Apple II was not a follow up to a (mostly) unexpandable home computer like A500 that set the expectations for it.

appiah4 wrote on 2024-05-31, 05:40:

Amiga 1200's formfactor absolutely fucked it over. It shared design philosophy with the Amiga 500, which was in public percepti […]
Show full quote

Amiga 1200's formfactor absolutely fucked it over. It shared design philosophy with the Amiga 500, which was in public perception a computer you would buy and use as is except for a memory upgrade. The sidecar hard drive expansions and sophisticated accelerators, to 99% of the owners, were not an option and in some cases not even known.

When the Amiga 1200 launched as another wedgie, the expectation was that it would be a box you would buy and use as is for 3-4 years like a console to play games. That couldn't be farther from the truth as it was both underpowered and underequipped out of the box to handle contemporary games.

That lead to Amiga having no games, and it died.

Amiga 1200 should have been a big box A2000 replacement with better specs and proper expansion slots, not an A500 replacement.

I mean the Playstation was a little box with a cd on top and it did some crazy stuff game wise , I think the reason the amiga 1200 was a flop was due to commodores management being a joke coupled with its fabs being hugely under equipped to make more integrated chips and a huge cash shortage which spelt its demise.

All computers need killer applications to be successful, or to fill a niche well.

You could do real, ordinary work on a PC or an Apple, so your family might have one, even take one home from work, and businesses, education and government would buy them droves. Spreadsheets and word processing back then were killer applications pushing PC sales especially. Amiga and Atari always seemed more niche though they had a go at desktop publishing I guess, Apple were there too. The Amstrad PCW had been a successful z80-based word processor before PCs - cheap and commercially attractive - thatmarket shifted to the PC mostly. The BBC had been successful in education in the UK, but it's replacement the Acorn ARM/Archimedes although cool technology struggled and died (the chip technology lived on of course) - because by then PCs ruled, nobody needed yet another GUI and cross-platform compatibility issues.

Consoles were often efficient spacewise, and easy to use (especially for parents to set up). I tried an A1200 a few years ago and the size, cables, floppy disks were all endlessly annoying to deal with. It seemed good as neither a console nor a computer, but in between, plus the operating system seemed unfriendly to a DOS/Windows/Apple user. There comes a point when interfaces and operating methods have to largely converge so that the market can focus on the next area of innovation.

PCW came to the game later than you'd think given it's specs. 1985 release, it's main aim was to be the cheapest complete wordprocessing solution with printer included. Just about arrived before the clones started at least driving XT prices down.