j^aws wrote:

In Japan, the Sharp X68000 rocked, although its architecture came 2 years later, circa 1987.

That's a great looking computer, but looking at the games and especially the price (it costed $3000 back in 1987), I think the Amiga was a much better deal.
https://youtu.be/TQPt69UCyIA

In todays money....

Amiga500 with monitor today 2200 US Dollars and perhaps 100 more. Sharp X6800 in todays money is around 6700 US Dollars plus some.

Errius wrote:

What's written on the monitor post-it note?

I'd guess it's in Croatian. From what I can see, it's says:

Ne igraj se "padin" 12 sati! "mama" -> Don't play "padin" 12 hours! Mom

On the desk there is also "Moj Mikro". A Slovenian computer related magazine that was also released in Croatia in their language (back then all part of Yugoslavia). It covered Amiga, Atari, Commodore and PC at the time.

What can they do that for instance 8088 can not?

Don't want to offend all the XT/CGA fans out there, but for early 80s games PC simply was an inferior platform. Poor graphics/sound capabilities and lots of games are ports from more capable platforms. Basically, the original PC/XT would be worse than C64, let alone Amiga. PC gaming really starts to shine around 1989-1990 in my opinion.

Right, unusually for a Communist country in the Cold War, Yugoslavia had trade relations with the West, so would have had access to Amigas.

Violett'Blossom wrote:

What can they do that for instance 8088 can not ?

First and foremost, until 1992 or so, Amiga games were usually better - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cETl8PhUy_E
And games are probably the only practical use for old computers...

I agree. 1992 was the pivotal year, because that was the year (at least in North America) that 486 PCs became relatively affordable to the masses.

486 was still expensive top of the line stuff in 1992. We are talking almost $3K for SX, and >$5K for DX 50MHz. Still, even 386 (Wolfenstein 3D, Ultima Underworld) was faster than best Amiga at the time.

I personally started looking into the Amiga about a decade ago, when I suddenly heard about it having the best versions of computer games from the '80s, preemptive multi-tasking that PCs didn't have until 1995 and Macs didn't have until 2000 (thank the Copland fiasco for that), and generally being so far ahead of its time that nobody understood it.

Then I started learning about the demoscene, the MOD format music that formed the basis of a lot of my fave DOS games (Epic MegaGames seemed to be quite fond of it from their shareware days up through Unreal Engine 1 and its UMX format), and I just couldn't help but wanted to know more, with one driving question: "How in the HELL did this computer fail where inferior IBM and Apple systems succeeded? Modern computers should've been descended from this thing!"

However, I didn't ever see one in person until 2018, when an imported German A500 landed on my doorstep from someone who sold it to me for a far saner price than most eBay listings around here. As a 1990 kid, it was my dad's PC clone build at home, and Macs at school. That was it for computers - no Amigas, not even C64s or other 8-bit computers, it was always an IBM-compatible or a Macintosh, plain and simple, unless it was one of those exotic Silicon Graphics workstations that Nintendo and Rareware kept hyping up, and which sold for the price of a brand new car.

Commodore may be an American company, but nobody here outside of retrocomputing enthusiasts knows what an Amiga is, let alone has a display that can take 15 KHz RGB (SCART does not exist here), making the Amiga very expensive to get into if you want an AGA system instead of the humble OCS A500.

Unless, of course, by some stupid chance you happen to luck into finding someone just 30 minutes away who happens to be hoarding a ton of 1080/1084 monitors and almost every Amiga system imaginable, including three A4000s and a CD32 (which wasn't officially sold here in the US). That's why I have one functional A4000 now and have been tinkering with it since, while I contemplate selling off the A500. (I haven't done so yet because I'm waiting on a replacement A1200.net case to replace the busted-up one it came with.)

I suppose it's not as bad a way to hemorrhage money as importing a Sharp X68000/X68030 or Fujitsu FM Towns, though. One of these days, I'm getting my hands on those two...

stalk3r wrote:

j^aws wrote:

In Japan, the Sharp X68000 rocked, although its architecture came 2 years later, circa 1987.

That's a great looking computer, but looking at the games and especially the price (it costed $3000 back in 1987), I think the Amiga was a much better deal.
https://youtu.be/TQPt69UCyIA

Yet by some accounts, the Sharp X68000 is the second best-selling computer in the world, despite its lofty price.

The world's best-seller? The NEC PC-98, basically their IBM PC, complete with substandard graphics compared to the later X68000 and FM Towns.

Sorry, Commodore 64, you'll have to settle for third place. Maybe Japan is its own world entirely if people can spare that much for a home computer to bring the arcade home.

I will say that despite the X68000 having near arcade-perfect ports where the Amiga conversions are a complete joke by comparison (there's no reason Street Fighter II and Strider should be so inferior on the Amiga), Human68k is basically MS-DOS level stuff from what I can tell, none of the GUI-driven fanciness or multitasking of the AmigaOS.

Grzyb wrote:

Violett'Blossom wrote:

What can they do that for instance 8088 can not ?

First and foremost, until 1992 or so, Amiga games were usually better - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cETl8PhUy_E
And games are probably the only practical use for old computers...

I'd say the turning point might've been closer to 1990. TFX and Wing Commander were noticeably better on PC graphically, which also has the benefit of an analog joystick interface that developers bothered to use, whereas Amiga developers mostly expected you to use hilariously primitive one-button Atari CX-40 joysticks or something along those lines. There are a few that claim analog joystick support using a PC joystick and a DA-15F to DE-9F pin adapter that's easy to DIY, but I haven't tested those yet.

Frontier: Elite II - a typical Amiga benchmark - looks better on PC with texture-mapped graphics, though the sound takes a hit unless you have an MT-32. Would've benefited from allowing both Sound Blaster for PCM and MT-32 for music, like Falcon 3.0 and some other games let you do.

I'm trying to remember when the likes of Lemmings, Cannon Fodder and The Chaos Engine were ported over, but I remember the VGA graphics being generally equivalent. The sound? Not so much, especially without MT-32 support. The PC really needed the Gravis Ultrasound to exist a few years earlier...

And, finally, we have Doom - a game with all sorts of official ports (I think only Lemmings compared in port quantity before then), the game that laid the groundwork for that "glorious PC gaming master race" mentality we see now because most of those ports were noticeably inferior by comparison, and the Amiga infamously never got an official port (source ports are another matter). You could say that marked the point that the Amiga was... doomed.

Gloom is more akin to Wolfenstein 3D in level complexity. Alien Breed 3D might be a closer comparison engine-wise, but it still has some framedrops on an A4000/40 with the stock A3640/25 MHz 68040 now and then. Alien Breed 3D II: The Killing Grounds is a slideshow on that same system, to the point that you might as well not bother without a 68060 or the new Vampire accelerators, presumably for the price of a PC that could've run Quake.

One of these days, though, I'm gonna do some PC vs. Mac vs. Amiga shootouts to see which platform has the definitive version of a given game, and I'm not going to arbitrarily hold back the sound to Sound Blaster like that guy did if there's an MT-32 or better option.

Even if the Amiga doesn't win, it could theoretically just emulate the other two; I have an Emplant card for the Mac side of things, and PC bridgeboards exist, though the best one I know of is 486-based. Would be cool if someone made at least a Pentium III-class one that had 3dfx onboard and tapped into the ISA slots on the A2000/3000/4000 (which exist solely for use with PC bridgeboards)...

jheronimus wrote:

PC gaming really starts to shine around 1989-1990 in my opinion.

Funny, I'd say the golden age of Amiga games is around 1988-1993.
Early Amiga games were generally quite poor, sometimes even worse than their C64 counterparts, because developers were not familiar with the machine yet, and tools were not very mature. Many early Amiga games are also Atari ST ports, not making use of any special Amiga features.
Around 1988, Amiga games had matured to the point that the Amiga version of a game was usually best-in-class.
Games were still mainly 2d, often involving scrolling, sprites and such (platformers, shoot-em-ups), things with which the PC struggled because of hardware deficiencies.
It wasn't until 486es and VESA localbus arrived, that you could actually play a game like Jazz Jackrabbit, with perfectly smooth scrolling using 256 colours.
Then Wolfenstein 3D happened, and PC really start to take off as a gaming platform, it finally had its own 'killer app'.

Mind you, a few weeks ago, Dekadence released a preview of Cyberwolf on the Amiga 500: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icesght9CiI
So with what we know today, Wolfenstein 3D would have been possible on an Amiga 500, let alone the Amiga 1200 that was available by then.
It could have stretched the Amiga's life 1 or 2 years... DOOM would definitely have killed it off.

NamelessPlayer wrote:

I'm trying to remember when the likes of Lemmings, Cannon Fodder and The Chaos Engine were ported over, but I remember the VGA graphics being generally equivalent.

With Lemmings, the most awesome feature on the Amiga was the two-player mode. The PC didn't have that mode, nor did most other ports.

NamelessPlayer wrote:

the Amiga infamously never got an official port (source ports are another matter). You could say that marked the point that the Amiga was... doomed.

The Amiga architecture didn't lend itself very well to 'chunky' graphics like that, texturemapping and such. This was trivial however on VGA, which had a native chunky display mode.
You could say the tables were turned: where the Amiga outclassed all its competitors in 2D with clever scrolling, sprites, bobs and such, the PC outclassed everyone with texture-mapped 3D, because of its native chunky framebuffer and a huge advantage in raw CPU power.
Basically there was no stock Amiga that could do DOOM adequately, not even the fastest Amiga 4000 models. So a port would be pointless.
The ports that now exist, require the fastest aftermarket CPU/memory upgrades you can find: a 68060 at 50+ MHz. The potential market for that would be too small to warrant a commercial port.

The only thing that could have saved the Amiga was an updated chipset, one with a native chunky mode, to compete with VGA. But since Commodore had shut down its research and development department, there was no chance of that ever happening.

NamelessPlayer wrote:

As a 1990 kid, it was my dad's PC clone build at home, and Macs at school. That was it for computers - no Amigas, not even C64s or other 8-bit computers, it was always an IBM-compatible or a Macintosh, plain and simple, unless it was one of those exotic Silicon Graphics workstations that Nintendo and Rareware kept hyping up, and which sold for the price of a brand new car.

That is pretty much the story of Apple computers here. Nobody saw them in the wild here until around 1993. They were extremely rare, and only a handful of people have even heard about them in 1993. Sure they were used somewere, yet that was for corporate use, like image processing for add's or magazines. I remember a field trip that my first primaery school did, were we visited a big place were they printed a newspaper. And they still used decades old computers. No mac's. I was old enough to remember some of it, yet it was before the summer of 1991, as I switched school in the summer of 1991. I started in 8'th grade at that new school.

Amiga was early on the 16-bit scene while also incorporating more capable graphics and sound, and a multitasking GUI. So when it launched it was basically at par or ahead of everything else.

Even in Japan, several computers launched in 1985 with upgraded gfx and sound, like MSX2, PC-88mkIIsr, and FM-77AV. BUT those were all still 8-bit. PC-9801 was 16-bit but the gfx wasn't much different than EGA and sound was still limited to PC-speaker style beeping. Of course, none of them had the multitasking GUI either.

The highly integrated design of the Amiga proved difficult to scale and the platform was allowed to fall behind over the years. But it's still interesting for having a broad software/hardware ecosystem while being different than a Windows/*nix PC.

Its closest parallel would be a 386SX, I think. 32-bit internal registers, 16-bit data bus, 24-bit address bus for a 16-MiB address space. Totally a 386SX.

And this 68000 was basically a contemporary to the 8088.

The 68000 is much slower than any 386SX, and notably lacking an MMU, which was ultimately detrimental to Amiga OS (that's a whole different discussion). And let's also not forget that 8088 was just a cheap version of the 8086, whereas the 68000 also had a similarly cheap/slow version: the 68008.

Human68k is basically MS-DOS level stuff from what I can tell, none of the GUI-driven fanciness or multitasking of the AmigaOS.

Human68k 2.0+ actually has support for multithreading. It could at least do basic stuff like run a music player in the background while using some other application. Not sure about task switching.

Amiga500 with monitor today 2200 US Dollars and perhaps 100 more. Sharp X6800 in todays money is around 6700 US Dollars plus some.

X68 came in a tower case initially (later there were also desktop) with two floppy drives and internal expansion slots. I'd say it's more comparable to a big box Amiga than an A500.

Basically there was no stock Amiga that could do DOOM adequately, not even the fastest Amiga 4000 models. So a port would be pointless.

That's a fair statement, although when I eventually discovered BlazeWCP I was shocked by the performance that could be achieved with chunky-to-planar conversion. So in retrospect, maybe DOOM would have been OK on an A4000 anyway (certainly better than eg. the Sega 32X port)

I will say that the turning point for the Amiga Vs. x86 in gaming, were between 1991 and 1993. It was a slow process. Well relative fast in real time, yet in terms of how fast things moved in the tech industry at that time, it was relatively slow. I clearly remember how first one game were better, then one more. It was a slow process. I think that was why people kept on to their Amiga500, well into the first half of the 1990's. Sure they saw Wolf3D and they wanted that, yet x86/Dos prices were just too steep to buy a whole new computer at a high price. It was just stupidity to do that, because we had a mindset of wanting one computer to do the most at the lowest price. Aaaaand.... Then came Doom. Then people saw that the x86/Dos platform delivered more than the Amiga platform. Still higher price though. So people might have switched as late as 1994 or 1995. I think the two factors that ultimately killed the Amiga in the end, here in Denmark at least, were Doom and then Windows95.

brostenen wrote:

NamelessPlayer wrote:

As a 1990 kid, it was my dad's PC clone build at home, and Macs at school. That was it for computers - no Amigas, not even C64s or other 8-bit computers, it was always an IBM-compatible or a Macintosh, plain and simple, unless it was one of those exotic Silicon Graphics workstations that Nintendo and Rareware kept hyping up, and which sold for the price of a brand new car.

Commodore was everything here, anyone who owned a home computer between 1983 and 1990(ish), owned a Commodore, period. (mostly C64, the lucky few Amigas). They were smuggled from Germany and Austria through the border of the Eastern bloc in order to circumvent the Soviet embargo on western goods. Most people including me actually thought that Commodore was a German company. There was huge base of users around here.

Errius wrote:

Right, unusually for a Communist country in the Cold War, Yugoslavia had trade relations with the West, so would have had access to Amigas.

Tito had a completely different mindset than other Communist leaders, and that may have been the key. It was one of the worlds fastest growing economy during his lifetime, and of course the legacy of his economy lived on well into the 1980's. I clearly remember that here we saw communist countries differently. Russia was something we stayed away from, and because we saw them as agressor's at that time, then countries like Hungary and Yugoslavia were favored and looked at as something we needed to have a kind of trade relations with. Just to help them, help them self, to build a better and stronger economy and ultimately they would have a better society for the average Joe.

It was a way different time back then.... Not saying it was a better time, just that it was different. Well... Something were better, yet that is how it will always be. Something becomes better and other things get worse. That is just how things work.

stalk3r wrote:

Commodore was everything here, everybody who owned a home computer between 1983 and 1990(ish), owned a Commodore, period. (mostly C64, the lucky few Amigas). They were smuggled from Germany and Austria through the border of the Eastern bloc in order to circumvent the Soviet embargo on western goods. Most people including me actually thought that Commodore was a German company. There was huge base of users around here.

Heh... Yup. I remember that. There were an article in a Danish computer magazine, about computer-users and computer hobbyists on the "other" side of the iron curtain. I personally wanted to know more about these people, yet getting there in the 80's was something you just did not do. It was extremely hard to enter, yet it was possible to do it. Yet reading about 20 people sharing an Commodore 64 in a computer club in the middle of east Berlin, was somewhat exotic reading. It was like how we did it as well. Visiting friends, and sitting 4 to 8 people around that persons computer. I guess the only thing that differed, were how easy you were able to get your hands on computer technology. 😁

stalk3r wrote:

Most people including me actually thought that Commodore was a German company.

It kind of was.
That is, Commodore had a big department in Germany, which is where the Amiga 500 and 2000 were developed. A lot of Commodores were also manufactured in Germany, I believe my C64 also came from there.
The German division was also responsible for the Commodore PC-compatibles, and the bridgeboards for Amiga.

Scali wrote:

It kind of was. That is, Commodore had a big department in Germany, which is where the Amiga 500 and 2000 were developed. A lot […]
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stalk3r wrote:

Most people including me actually thought that Commodore was a German company.

It kind of was.
That is, Commodore had a big department in Germany, which is where the Amiga 500 and 2000 were developed. A lot of Commodores were also manufactured in Germany, I believe my C64 also came from there.
The German division was also responsible for the Commodore PC-compatibles, and the bridgeboards for Amiga.

David Haynie took over the Amiga2000 project from German engineers, and did a whole new machine that Commodore sold. The version we see today, was the creation of David alone. Single handed and one person. Of course he seeked help and input from others. Yet the Amiga2000 is like his masterpiece from the second half of the 1980's.

A lot of Commodores were also manufactured in Germany

Yup, and all the units that we could get our hands on had German localisation (packaging, manual). Also it was written on sticker underneath "Made in W-Germany".

Yet reading about 20 people sharing an Commodore 64 in a computer club in the middle of east Berlin was somewhat exotic reading.

I remember when VHS was the big thing, unfortunately the supply was rather low, so families were sharing a single VCR unit. I remember waiting for our turn, suddenly the VCR arrived and stayed at our place for couple of days. We were watching it days and nights before we handed over to the next family in line.