I knew a guy in middle school who was pretty obsessed with the Amiga. But I've still never used or even seen one in real life. From what I've seen it's very impressive, and it's a shame that the technology didn't gain more share of the mainstream market, instead of aging in high end obscurity while the IBM x86 world caught up.

I had a closer friend around the same time with a C64. That was a cool machine, but the load times were horrific. I think his floppy drive was faulty though, so maybe that had a lot to do with it.
Something I don't like about the C64 and many other systems of that time is that they only supported 1 joystick button. I don't consider the keyboard an acceptable substitute. Ironically the gaming-impaired IBM and Apple II machines of the era are better in that respect.

If I saw an Amiga on a street corner holding a homeless sign, I'm not sure if I'd be willing to find space for it. I think I'm more interested in the Atari 800. I have no more personal background with the A8 than I do with the Amiga, but on a technical level it feels more relevant to me.

I had an Apple IIc in those days. I have fond memories and it was a very valuable, formative experience for me, but what a bland machine that was. It was reliable though, which I guess is one thing it has over the C64.
I don't think I've ever encountered an Apple product that I thought was competitive with anything it was supposed to be competitive with, unless it's twice the price. The fact that Apple is still in business, and has been for any length of time past say ~1994, just confuses me.

A funny historical bit:
This guy was reporting on the 1984 Winter CES show for Creative Computing. The Amiga prototype 'Lorraine' was shown at that event, and although he considered it the 'hit' of the show, he had these wise words for the designers:

I have tried to emphasize to Amiga, to the very best of my ability, how important it is that the basic Lorraine system be PCjr compatible. In terms of marketing a hybrid machine, it is of paramount important to be able to say "yes, it runs everything that will run on the jr. And, running software specially designed for it, it does all these incredibly fantastic things, too."

As it stands, IBM-compatibility will require an add-on processor ROM cartridge. If Amiga is smart, they will build that circuitry into the production model Lorraine. Then they will have out-of-the-box compatibility. For, regardless of the fact that the IBM standard is a decidedly mediocre one, the jr. is bound to become the home standard. I am skittish about computers with "special capabilities," no matter how impressive those capabilities may be. We have watched powerful machines (e.g., the Atari) go by the wayside despite their impressive powers. Amiga, please don't join the sorrowful ranks that have wasted technological superiority through marketing muck-ups.

IBM compatibility would've been seen as the safe bet by the industry then, no doubt. But the PCjr, of all things 😉

95DosBox wrote:

I think the VGA and Sound Blaster combo really was what made Amiga's superior graphics and sound no longer the case.

Not sure I agree on that one.
Aside from the fact that a Sound Blaster alone was about the price of an Amiga 500, and a VGA card was as well, and a VGA monitor was (so you were looking at more than 3 times the cost for a PC gaming system), an early PC with VGA and a Sound Blaster, say a turbo XT or a 286-10 or such, is still no match for an Amiga.
VGA couldn't do proper hardware scrolling. It needed a fast CPU to provide the grunt. As for the SB... the FM synthesizer was really no match for the 4 channel digital tracker music on Amiga. In fact, later PC games started to use tracker music with software mixing. Of course this meant an even faster CPU was required.
It wasn't until 386/486 became affordable, that you could actually start to play most games as well on PC as you could on Amiga. But even then, you'd miss out on some things.
For example, take the Blues Brothers game: the Amiga version has a colourful background with thousands of colours (which change as you move up or down). The PC has a bland background: http://www.mobygames.com/game/blues-brothers/screenshots
And games like Shadow of the Beast or Agony, with all their advanced trickery, multi-layered backgrounds, parallax scrolling etc, never happened on PC.
VGA simply couldn't do that.
The Amiga chipset was far more advanced and powerful.

VileRancour wrote:

IBM compatibility would've been seen as the safe bet by the industry then, no doubt. But the PCjr, of all things 😉

Commodore did consider this... well, real PC compatibility...
The Amiga 1000 got an optional 'sidecar', which was basically an XT clone in a box: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Sidecar
They later offered similar 'bridgeboards' for the Amiga 2000.
They never became much of a success though.

What's funny is that I have a Commodore PC20-III, which is a 'regular' PC clone, and inside this PC you find many of the same parts as in the Sidecar (including a large MOS chip, which I believe houses the floppy controller among other things). The PC20-III also has a Microsoft bus-compatible mouse port, which uses an Amiga mouse.

Building to the PCjr standard would have been a money-maker as Tandy proved. That line about marketing muck-ups applies more to IBM.

Errius wrote:

Building to the PCjr standard would have been a money-maker as Tandy proved.

I think Tandy was successful because they combined PCjr compatibility with regular PC compatibility. Something IBM should have done in the first place. The PCjr failed because it couldn't run a lot of PC/DOS software.
The way Tandy did it, it was sort of best-of-both-worlds: Tandy offered a PC clone, which also had the additional graphics and sound capabilities of the PCjr.
Most other clones were successful by just offering regular PC compatibility. I don't think anyone would have gotten far with only PCjr compatibility.

Scali wrote:

VGA couldn't do proper hardware scrolling.

I don't think that's true - both EGA and VGA had a start address register (much like CGA), a PEL panning register for horizontal scrolling at pixel granularity, and a Preset Row Scan register for vertical scrolling at pixel granularity. I used the start address register myself to make a VGA maze game that was fully hardware scrolling on the family 486 in 1995. I didn't use the other two, but I'm pretty sure Keen1 used the PEL panning register to do pixel-accurate horizontal scrolling, at least. Not sure how many games used these, so it's possible that they were broken on some clone and/or SVGA cards.

Scali wrote:

The Amiga chipset was far more advanced and powerful.

No disagreement there.

reenigne wrote:

I don't think that's true - both EGA and VGA had a start address register (much like CGA), a PEL panning register for horizontal scrolling at pixel granularity, and a Preset Row Scan register for vertical scrolling at pixel granularity. I used the start address register myself to make a VGA maze game that was fully hardware scrolling on the family 486 in 1995. I didn't use the other two, but I'm pretty sure Keen1 used the PEL panning register to do pixel-accurate horizontal scrolling, at least. Not sure how many games used these, so it's possible that they were broken on some clone and/or SVGA cards.

It had 'some' scrolling ability, but only very basic.
The Amiga could scroll every scanline individually, if you wanted. You could even scroll multiple times during the same scanline (which allows you to do a sort of horizontal up/downscaling).
Another huge advantage that the Amiga had was that you could use all of the chipmem as display memory, and jump around in there however you pleased (or use the blitter to move data around as quickly as the memory allowed). VGA was limited to either 64K of mode 13h or 256k of mode X, both of which required a lot of 'massaging' by the CPU to get any decent scrolling going.
Which is my point: VGA alone doesn't give you smooth scrolling in a usable way for games. Especially for more advanced horizontal or bi-directional scrolling, you needed quite a fast CPU to do it at the full 70 Hz.
On an Amiga, scrolling at 50/60 Hz was almost effortless for the CPU. Which is what made awesome games like Superfrog possible.
A comparable game like Jazz Jackrabbit on PC needs a 386 (such a game didn't come out before 1994 because it basically wasn't feasible on mainstream PCs. Which only shows how far ahead of its time the Amiga was... Superfrog runs on the original 1985 hardware spec. That hardware pre-dates both the 386 CPU and the VGA card, not to mention the Sound Blaster).

Errius wrote:

Building to the PCjr standard would have been a money-maker as Tandy proved.

Tandy carefully avoided marketing the 1000 as PCjr-compatible, as soon as the jr. turned out to be a commercial flop that didn't catch on. The 1000 sold well on its other merits - PC (not jr) compatibility, low prices, and very wide distribution and support courtesy of Radio Shack. The PCjr features were cool for games, yes, but games simply weren't a factor in driving sales of PC-compatibles until the very late '80s.

kode54 wrote:

Steve Jobs hated the Apple II series. He hated the fact that it was an open system. He wanted a closed system with a walled garden for the software.

Yeah but that's made Apple Apple. Not that boxed up closed system gray rectangular computer with no eject button for the microfloppy and needed a paperclip.

gdjacobs wrote:

Cutting R&D was one of the moves he made to extract cash from the business in the form of big payouts to himself and Irving Gould. This was to the detriment of other shareholders, employees, and customers. There was no business strategy to it beyond short term greed.

With competent leadership, Amiga would have been challenged to compete with IBM, Apple, and the other players in the market. With Ali at the helm, there really was no chance.

They should have fired him. How long was this guy helming the drowning ship? So you think prior to him Amiga was not already on its way out? It did leave America but was still quite popular in Europe.

shamino wrote:

I had a closer friend around the same time with a C64. That was a cool machine, but the load times were horrific. I think his […]
Show full quote

I had a closer friend around the same time with a C64. That was a cool machine, but the load times were horrific. I think his floppy drive was faulty though, so maybe that had a lot to do with it.
Something I don't like about the C64 and many other systems of that time is that they only supported 1 joystick button. I don't consider the keyboard an acceptable substitute. Ironically the gaming-impaired IBM and Apple II machines of the era are better in that respect.

If I saw an Amiga on a street corner holding a homeless sign, I'm not sure if I'd be willing to find space for it. I think I'm more interested in the Atari 800. I have no more personal background with the A8 than I do with the Amiga, but on a technical level it feels more relevant to me.

I had an Apple IIc in those days. I have fond memories and it was a very valuable, formative experience for me, but what a bland machine that was. It was reliable though, which I guess is one thing it has over the C64.
I don't think I've ever encountered an Apple product that I thought was competitive with anything it was supposed to be competitive with, unless it's twice the price. The fact that Apple is still in business, and has been for any length of time past say ~1994, just confuses me.

The C64 was a great machine for its time. It just needed a faster floppy drive seek time and more internal memory. 64KB needed to be 640KB to really compete with a PC. What they had going for no need to buy monitor using your TV, better graphics and sound and that huge library of games.

The C64 only had one joystick button? I thought it had two. I do know it had two game ports ready and the Atari 800 had 4 game ports ready which was very nice for having friends over. There was some cartridge adapter for the C64 that could add another 2 game ports I think so that might have evened the playing field. There was a game called M.U.L.E. that had 4 player support.

I have an Atari 800 also but my first was the 400. The 800 had more memory which helped but the Atari ST was actually a nice machine. If only they didn't make it a proprietary monitor output and made it VGA compatible or was as flexible as the Amiga or earlier Atari models with composite outputs it might have done better.

Well the IIc if memory serves me was a bit uglier and possibly the ugliest of the Apple IIs. I don't own one of those models so I can't comment how it compares to the IIe or IIGS.

Scali wrote:

Not sure I agree on that one. Aside from the fact that a Sound Blaster alone was about the price of an Amiga 500, and a VGA card […]
Show full quote

95DosBox wrote:

I think the VGA and Sound Blaster combo really was what made Amiga's superior graphics and sound no longer the case.

Not sure I agree on that one.
Aside from the fact that a Sound Blaster alone was about the price of an Amiga 500, and a VGA card was as well, and a VGA monitor was (so you were looking at more than 3 times the cost for a PC gaming system), an early PC with VGA and a Sound Blaster, say a turbo XT or a 286-10 or such, is still no match for an Amiga.
VGA couldn't do proper hardware scrolling. It needed a fast CPU to provide the grunt. As for the SB... the FM synthesizer was really no match for the 4 channel digital tracker music on Amiga. In fact, later PC games started to use tracker music with software mixing. Of course this meant an even faster CPU was required.
It wasn't until 386/486 became affordable, that you could actually start to play most games as well on PC as you could on Amiga. But even then, you'd miss out on some things.
For example, take the Blues Brothers game: the Amiga version has a colourful background with thousands of colours (which change as you move up or down). The PC has a bland background: http://www.mobygames.com/game/blues-brothers/screenshots
And games like Shadow of the Beast or Agony, with all their advanced trickery, multi-layered backgrounds, parallax scrolling etc, never happened on PC.
VGA simply couldn't do that.
The Amiga chipset was far more advanced and powerful.

Not sure what the prices were of the Amigas then but I'm doing a comparison of a 486 33MHz with VGA and Sound Blaster. But even back then I do recall Amigas being quite expensive to own were they not? Only a C64 was more affordable. Also the supply limitations of Amigas was they were not easily found in stores? I don't recall seeing Amigas sold at your nearby Sears store or at a Radio Shack whereas Tandy computers were.

But going from the year Sound Blaster came about around late 89. I would say by 1991 most people were using Sound Blaster and VGA cards. So going from memory I believe most people would be using a 486 system by then not a 286 which was more like 1986-87.

As for scrolling I agree the PC graphics were still behind as far as frame rates and smoothness that the Amiga 500/1000 had. That's why I was blown away by the Amiga in the early days seeing it at a computer show. But when VGA 256 colors and Sound Blaster merged and became the de facto game standard for PCs thinks took off. Then combine the optical drive that came out we were starting to see real FMV in games not just snippets like in Mortal Kombat.

But without these two hurdles I don't think the PC would have became a gaming machine no matter how much it cost in comparison to an Amiga. Also you forget the Roland MT-32 was another thing that advanced the sound quality for the rich. I didn't own one of these back in the day but got one a decade ago and if I had knew how good the games sounded with one I might have saved up for one.

But you're correct most of the graphics cards even at that time period couldn't compare to the Amiga graphics but the feat from jumping from 16 colors to 256 colors really opened the door to near realistic pictures. And the Amigas were powerful enough to run CGI on Babylon 5 which no PC computer could do on the same budget at the time.

A lot of Amiga games were ported to the PC. Some were bad ports but I knew when I saw Marble Madness on the Amiga vs the PC version that the Amiga had superior graphics but the sound was finally challenged by the Sound Blaster. You got to remember it was mainly the damn PC internal speaker tweeter or no sounds which in some cases was "preferable". Another game was Test Drive for the Amiga which I believe had the best version.

Thanks for the "Blues Brothers" recommendation. I don't think I have this for the Amiga. But if it based on the comedic movie this might be worth checking out on Youtube as someone most likely has uploaded it by now.

Found a link to the Blue Brothers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUvjnSPMT8w

Spy Hunter theme song?

Checking here it seems the Amiga 500 only had 32 colors on screen at once but could fake 64 colors using 32 colors at half brightness. So this might indicate VGA 256 colors did in fact have an edge on the Amiga finally. But checking out the Blue Brothers the graphics are definitely smoother than one would find on a PC at that time. But I think once the video cards became more powerful they would have been able to do the same with 256 real colors.

http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/amiga500/

This is why I prefer owning a bunch of these vintage machines so I can experience the "best" version of each game as each computer platform had its own unique style.

Scali wrote:

I think Tandy was successful because they combined PCjr compatibility with regular PC compatibility. Something IBM should have d […]
Show full quote

Errius wrote:

Building to the PCjr standard would have been a money-maker as Tandy proved.

I think Tandy was successful because they combined PCjr compatibility with regular PC compatibility. Something IBM should have done in the first place. The PCjr failed because it couldn't run a lot of PC/DOS software.
The way Tandy did it, it was sort of best-of-both-worlds: Tandy offered a PC clone, which also had the additional graphics and sound capabilities of the PCjr.
Most other clones were successful by just offering regular PC compatibility. I don't think anyone would have gotten far with only PCjr compatibility.

Which PC/DOS software didn't work on the PCjr? I own one so I'm curious about this. The only thing I can think of is maybe the DOS programs didn't have sufficient memory. But there were addon memory sidecarts modules to increase the memory to 640KB which should allow it to run any DOS program if it required that much memory. Also at the time I think it was made mainly to run on DOS 2.10 which used a minimal amount of memory. As for the internal memory I think it was just 64KB on the standard IBM PCjr model which really hurt it.

Scali wrote:

I think Tandy was successful because they combined PCjr compatibility with regular PC compatibility. Something IBM should have d […]
Show full quote

Errius wrote:

Building to the PCjr standard would have been a money-maker as Tandy proved.

I think Tandy was successful because they combined PCjr compatibility with regular PC compatibility. Something IBM should have done in the first place. The PCjr failed because it couldn't run a lot of PC/DOS software.
The way Tandy did it, it was sort of best-of-both-worlds: Tandy offered a PC clone, which also had the additional graphics and sound capabilities of the PCjr.
Most other clones were successful by just offering regular PC compatibility. I don't think anyone would have gotten far with only PCjr compatibility.

Well a Tandy 1000 was basically an IBM Compatible with 640KB and had IBM PCjr 3 voice sound compatibility. If IBM themselves decided to release the IBM XT and PS/2 with that same sound compatibility I do wonder if more people would have bought true IBMs over the clones. Once Creative Labs unleashed the Sound Blaster it was pretty much game over for IBM or any one other company to compete once they got backing from Sierra, Origin, Broderbund, Activision, and many other top companies to support their sound card for all their games. And IBM did release their own sound card but it was a dud. I own one but never bothered to try it out. There weren't really any mainstream games that supported it and even Adlib which had the initial footing couldn't compete with Sound Blaster which emulated the Adlib. Adlib should have copied the Sound Blaster back when they created the Adlib Gold. Instead they had no digitized voice capability again which was a dumb move.

95DosBox wrote:

Checking here it seems the Amiga 500 only had 32 colors on screen at once but could fake 64 colors using 32 colors at half brightness.

True, but Amiga had a huge palette to choose from, 4096 colors, and VGA did not. So depending on the game, there were titles that looked better on the Amiga. Also, remember, the Amiga 500 is based on 1985 tech which was waaaay ahead of its time on release and it took the PC a few years to catch up. Commodore's AGA mode that came later was too little too late and then SVGA put an end to it. By 1992 the PC and the Amiga 4000 were almost running neck to neck IMO. The Video Toaster kept it alive for many years after that, but mostly niche markets. My two cents anyway. I thought the 90s were a VERY exciting time for the PC and that is why I switched over from the Amiga for good.

liqmat wrote:

95DosBox wrote:

Checking here it seems the Amiga 500 only had 32 colors on screen at once but could fake 64 colors using 32 colors at half brightness.

True, but Amiga had a huge palette to choose from, 4096 colors, and VGA did not. So depending on the game, there were titles that looked better on the Amiga. Also, remember, the Amiga 500 is based on 1985 tech which was waaaay ahead of its time on release and it took the PC a few years to catch up. Commodore's AGA mode that came later was too little too late and then SVGA put an end to it. By 1992 the PC and the Amiga 4000 were almost running neck to neck IMO. The Video Toaster kept it alive for many years after that, but mostly niche markets. My two cents anyway. I thought the 90s were a VERY exciting time for the PC and that is why I switched over from the Amiga for good.

Interesting a traitor to the Amiga. Joking. 😀

The palette size was larger but being able to display more colors was more important I would think. In actuality 32 colors vs 256 colors is 8 times more without trickery. But the VGA color palette if this link is correct was 262,144 colors which outclasses the 4096 by a factor of 64 times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Graphics_ … y#Color_palette

The advancement to 1MB of VGA memory from 256KB did help get it to 1024x768 instead of the original 320x240 resolution.

I will say it would have been nice at the time if there was an Amiga 500/1000 emulator for the PC then you could of had the best of both worlds in gaming.

The original Amiga's 1000/500 had 32 colors on screen at once out of 4096 colors for games, excluding HAM mode which could not be used for anything useful other than stills. In the early days of VGA I remember many games just used the default 256 color palette and could look very drab and ugly if not used properly. I do laugh nowadays when these reviews and articles compare PS4, Xbox One and even PC screenshots. They look exactly the same to me, but back in the 80s and 90s you could really tell the difference between platforms and their capabilities.

liqmat wrote:

The original Amiga's 1000/500 had 32 colors on screen at once out of 4096 colors for games, excluding HAM mode which could not be used for anything useful other than stills. In the early days of VGA I remember many games just used the default 256 color palette and could look very drab and ugly if not used properly. I do laugh nowadays when these reviews and articles compare PS4, Xbox One and even PC screenshots. They look exactly the same to me, but back in the 80s and 90s you could really tell the difference between platforms and their capabilities.

Updated to 32. I guess it was the 64 colors trickery but really 32 colors. But if the color palette was static I'm not sure. I didn't program the games but was there a change from VGA to SVGA that allowed a dynamic color palette?

But considering prior to 256 Color VGA there was only 16 Color EGA or 16 Color trickery on 4 Color CGA which a few games could do. This was on par with the Nintendo but sound was stuck on the nasty internal PC speaker for a long time. Once the VGA hit with Sound Blaster games really took off on the PC side. Amiga was probably prior to VGA and SB laughing at how pathetic the PC games were then all of a sudden early 90s things suddenly caught up and now PC machines became gaming machines not just the "International Business Machines" their original purpose.

Yes I agree the PS4, Xbox1 and PC screenshots these days are pretty much the same. Curious if audio quality on all three are just as identical? They all use HDMI for video and audio output. I'm not sure if HDMI 2.0 has elevated Sound Quality over HDMI 1.4 and that affects games in any way.

There was the TurboGrafx-16 which was revolutionary at the time letting you play on the console or a handheld for your games. Too bad it died. The old days of Atari, Sega, Nintendo, Sony, and TurboGrafx trying to compete for the home game console market was once exciting but they did cause the downfall of the Arcades.

Ah, yes, the arcades. They live on in large metro areas as barcades now with full liquor licenses. I don't consider Dave & Buster's an arcade as it is way too modern and bright inside. It has to be dark and full of neon like the 80s arcades were.

Some I have visited. Ground Kontrol is probably my favorite. It has two floors and is very dark inside. Pure awesome.

http://groundkontrol.com/ - Portland, OR

http://www.gameover-arcade.com/ - Lincoln City, OR

http://www.updowndsm.com/ - Des Moines, IA

liqmat wrote:

Ah, yes, the arcades. They live on in large metro areas as barcades now with full liquor licenses. I don't consider Dave & Buste […]
Show full quote

Ah, yes, the arcades. They live on in large metro areas as barcades now with full liquor licenses. I don't consider Dave & Buster's an arcade as it is way too modern and bright inside. It has to be dark and full of neon like the 80s arcades were.

Some I have visited. Ground Kontrol is probably my favorite. It has two floors and is very dark inside. Pure awesome.

http://groundkontrol.com/ - Portland, OR

http://www.gameover-arcade.com/ - Lincoln City, OR

http://www.updowndsm.com/ - Des Moines, IA

On the subject of Arcades here's one that happens in California which I assume if you are located in Oregon or close by it shouldn't be too far.

The next one is coming up this Saturday July the 29th. Huge selection of arcades machines set on free play. Just pay the $40 entrance free and you play till the day's over. It's not a permanent location which makes it a special annual event.

July 29-30, 2017

Hours: Sat - 11 am to 2 am
Sun - 11 am to 9 pm

http://www.caextreme.org/

The only thing that sucks is they don't have Mortal Kombat. 😈

Ohh... looks like they just sneaked in Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 last minute. Damn I wanted MK ][.

95DosBox wrote:

"International Business Machines" their original purpose.

Same as Amiga. When I got mine it was marketed CBM Amiga (given the C == Commodore, you can probably guess what the B & M standard for o.0).

the Bandito wrote:

In a few years, no doubt, you'll be able to buy a computer, software and operating system that will match the capabilities of yo […]
Show full quote

In a few years, no doubt, you'll be able to buy a computer,
software and operating system that will match the capabilities
of your current Amiga at about the price you paid for the
Amiga way back when. But you can smile to yourself, knowing
that you were touching the future years before the rest of
the world. And that other computers and operating systems
will do with brute force what the Amiga did years before with
grace, elegance and style.

Bandito knows best 😀

95DosBox wrote:

Not sure what the prices were of the Amigas then but I'm doing a comparison of a 486 33MHz with VGA and Sound Blaster. But even back then I do recall Amigas being quite expensive to own were they not?

Amigas expensive? Not at all.
The Amiga 500 was the 16-bit successor to the C64 basically, so a low-cost computer aimed at home use. More or less in the same price range as the Atari ST.
PCs were horribly expensive compared to an Amiga 500.

95DosBox wrote:

But going from the year Sound Blaster came about around late 89. I would say by 1991 most people were using Sound Blaster and VGA cards. So going from memory I believe most people would be using a 486 system by then not a 286 which was more like 1986-87.

No way. I got my Sound Blaster Pro either in 1991 or 1992, and I was VERY early. I think i was the first in my entire school who had a sound card.
This was still on a 386SX-16. Didn't get a 486 until 1993 or 1994, and again I was one of the early ones. They were expensive.
In 1986-87, PCs weren't much of a 'thing' yet here. People mostly used C64s. If you did have a PC back then, it would likely be an 8088, because again, 286 was super-expensive. Even 8088 machines were, but not quite as extreme as 286.
I got my first PC in 1988, which was a Commodore PC10-III, an 8088 at 9.54 MHz, with Hercules monochrome. It cost about 2000, where an Amiga 500 would go for around 800 in those days I believe.

95DosBox wrote:

Spy Hunter theme song?

It's actually the theme song of Peter Gunn, a 1950s spy series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Gunn_%28song%29

95DosBox wrote:

Checking here it seems the Amiga 500 only had 32 colors on screen at once but could fake 64 colors using 32 colors at half brightness. So this might indicate VGA 256 colors did in fact have an edge on the Amiga finally. But checking out the Blue Brothers the graphics are definitely smoother than one would find on a PC at that time. But I think once the video cards became more powerful they would have been able to do the same with 256 real colors.

Firstly, the Amiga also has a 'Hold-and-modify' mode, which allows you to use all 4096 colours on screen. Not that useful for games, but it's great for photorealistic images.
Secondly, the Amiga's powerful chipset allows you to change the colours anywhere on the screen. So you can use 32 (or 64) colours at a time. But you can change these colours multiple times per scanline if you want, by programming a 'copper list' for the copper chip.
The background of the Blues Brothers changes colours at every scanline to give a smooth gradient. This means that the background alone can use as many colours as you have scanlines (which can be more than 256 already, in overscan). And that is using only one of the 64 colours. So the other 63 can all be used by the rest of the game. So such games often show more than 256 colours on screen at a time, and may use thousands of colours over the entire level.
On VGA there is no special hardware to do this, so you'd have to do it with tightly timed code on the CPU, which was too difficult to do while also doing a realtime scrolling action game, so the VGA version doesn't have the colourful background.

It's not always as simple as looking at the specs on paper.
Here's a nice demo showing advanced copper effects with lots of colours on Amiga: https://youtu.be/h3FLdtkToBU