badmojo wrote:VileRancour wrote:Scali wrote:I'm not sure I agree with the NES being all that much better than the C64 though, and the C64 being only good for adventure games?
In my experience they both had more or less the same type of games, and more or less the same quality, although the C64 had some more 'mature' games as well, where NES was mainly focused on games for younger children and the entire family.
I think that's more or less true. NES graphics might have been more colorful (although limited in other ways), C64 perhaps had better music capabilities (although taste is a component there)... but in general, they were more or less the same generation of hardware with similar limitations. Plus, what you said about the Amiga is true for the C64 as well: early C64 games weren't that adept in getting the most out of the machine. It took a few years for programmers to accumulate enough expertise to make it shine.
Agreed, the C64 has so many great games that I think it can rival the NES as a games machine, but loading games was always a challenge with the C64 - even with a disk drive and fast loaders. The NES has it beat for ease of use and quality control on games. But then the C64 is a real PC - pros and cons.
C64 was only limited by the 64KB of memory and a really slow floppy drive. They did have their own version of the cartridge. C64 to load gauntlet I think took almost 10 minutes. Nintendo because their games were all cartridge memory based was near instantaneous. Load times had a lot to do with popularity. C64 had very good graphics and sound at the time and could be hooked up to the TV just like the Nintendo. But when it came to which one was easier to use and best suited for kids, Nintendo won. Disks are too fragile for kids which have uncoordinated hands gripping the floppy disk on the magnetic media or bending it. Then teaching them how to type to load the game and run it. 😀 The cartridge was so simple. Insert till snug and turn it on.
But as far as titles I think C64 had more and titles were not limited due to cartridge memory so you could in theory have more and more floppy disks to expand a game to be larger than what a cartridge could hold.
If the C640 had come out and introduced 640KB memory and hard disks maybe this would have given them a leg up against the Super Nintendo. Commodore went with the newer Amiga which was also not backward compatible with C64 games which hurt them. This mirrors the Apple II to Macintosh scenario. Although Amiga had better software company gaming support which was an advantage.
The IBM PC is the only computer that retained backward compatibility as long as possible compared to other computer platforms. The only similar for consoles is the Playstation 3 Launch model which could play Playstation 1 and 2 games thereby increasing the amount of titles possible.
If you look at DOS many older DOS games still work under pure DOS even on a Z270 Kaby Lake. Prince of Persia 1 still works with the ugly PC internal speaker. 😀
Errius wrote:All non-Intel computer makers got hammered in the 1990s. Makers of PC clones enjoyed economies of scale other system makers couldn't compete with. Even Apple nearly went under.
Apple survived by catering to a niche market (creative professionals) which was willing to pay a premium for a product tailored to their needs and tastes. Could Commodore have done something similar?
Part of the reason was their own doing. They had superior games to the early IBM PCs with the Apple II and the IIGS. They made an Apple III that blew but I think it had more to do with Jobs wanting to go with the Classic Mac AIO box look but made it monochrome so the Apple III was pretty much discarded as the ugly child to be ignored. So imagine going for glorious gaming video and audio and a huge library to an incompatible monochrome box with a mouse and no real games or backward compatibility to play older Apple II titles. That's what hurt them in my opinion. This allowed the IBM PC and compatibles to breathe and later by the late 80s Sound Blaster and VGA arrived to conquer them all in one stroke. Apple has since never caught up to the market share of PCs since. I still wonder why they didn't go with an Apple Macintosh that was color or with superior color and audio than the IIGS and used their influence in their gaming market share to gain more support. It might had to do with cost but today Apple PCs are still priced higher than IBM PCs. Had they done so I think you would have seen either a 50/50 split between those two systems as gaming computers. But going to an AIO box stole had its limitations. You were confined to the small screen size while IBM PCs still enjoyed buying large CRT monitors. Yes Apple survived by catering to a small selective niche and more targeted to wealthier individuals that would pay.
As for Commodore Amiga. I think they were pretty much slightly ahead of the IBM PCs right about until VGA and Sound Blaster coincided. Then gaming took off on the PC as being superior so it was a matter of time before Amiga went under. Most of their best games ran on the older Amiga 500/1000 and the later models were less compatible with older games and eventually they were basically a fake PC in disguise and as far as the masses there were definitely more PC computer users than Amiga and even PC clones were much cheaper than the Amiga 2000+ that most would rather go with a PC. Perhaps if Amiga became a Software company instead they could have survived. Most of the best games seemed to be ported from the Amiga over to the PC. So this indicated most programmers started on the Amiga version first because they felt it was superior. I think the VGA and Sound Blaster combo really was what made Amiga's superior graphics and sound no longer the case. I remember being stunned seeing Marble Madness on the Amiga. In comparison the PC version which was bootable non DOS was CGA and inferior. The Amiga version was like the Arcade.