collector wrote:

Some of the Amiga games, like many or the Sierra games, were just very poor ports of PC games.

Not at all! See this page for more details:
http://sarien.sourceforge.net/screenshots/

To me, the fine line of an available Amiga being superior over the DOS version stops at the month of November, 1988. After that it's DOS for me...

Jorpho wrote:

collector wrote:

Some of the Amiga games, like many or the Sierra games, were just very poor ports of PC games.

Not at all! See this page for more details:
http://sarien.sourceforge.net/screenshots/

You're kidding, right? You are making a case based on Sarien not PC vs Amiga. Yes, Sarien tried to mimic the Amiga pallet (not very accurately), but they did a number of things to try to enhance the graphics that lead to some undesirable things like artifacting. Even the pallet was off and had some unpredictable results. And let's not even get into how off Sarien's sound is. It is too bad that ScummVM merged Sarien instead of NAGI.

But, all of this aside, I was not referring to the AGI games, where Sierra gave more consideration to portability. I was thinking of the SCI games where Sierra got lazy with their ports with quick and dirty pallet conversions and other shortcuts that made for a far lower quality than the PC original.

Amiga Kings Quest V

PC Kings Quest V

This is not slam on any platform, but an acknowledgment that there were many factors that went into the production of a game beyond the capability of the hardware or OS. Hence my statement that the answer to the question depends on which game.

collector wrote:

You're kidding, right? You are making a case based on Sarien not PC vs Amiga. Yes, Sarien tried to mimic the Amiga pallet (not v […]
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Jorpho wrote:

collector wrote:

Some of the Amiga games, like many or the Sierra games, were just very poor ports of PC games.

Not at all! See this page for more details:
http://sarien.sourceforge.net/screenshots/

You're kidding, right? You are making a case based on Sarien not PC vs Amiga. Yes, Sarien tried to mimic the Amiga pallet (not very accurately), but they did a number of things to try to enhance the graphics that lead to some undesirable things like artifacting. Even the pallet was off and had some unpredictable results. And let's not even get into how off Sarien's sound is. It is too bad that ScummVM merged Sarien instead of NAGI.

But, all of this aside, I was not referring to the AGI games, where Sierra gave more consideration to portability. I was thinking of the SCI games where Sierra got lazy with their ports with quick and dirty pallet conversions and other shortcuts that made for a far lower quality than the PC original.

Amiga Kings Quest V

PC Kings Quest V

This is not slam on any platform, but an acknowledgment that there were many factors that went into the production of a game beyond the capability of the hardware or OS. Hence my statement that the answer to the question depends on which game.

It's a known fact 256 colour VGA games look better on the PC....even starting in 1991 the PC games started to take some advantage of the PC hardware...just look at Monoey Island 2 for example...the PC version had moving scenery background for example...
If the AGA Amiga's (A1200, A4000) had been released earlier then we might have seen more beefy 256 colour games and better

well..let's not make this thread into something else than the creator wanted.. 😉

That's how KQ V should have looked on Amiga with a correct 32 colours palette.

This one is using a K-Means method + Error Diffusion to generate palette

And this one is using ScolorQ method:

The water is better on this one.

Mind you, I never had an Amiga, this is what I gleaned from searching, so correct as needed:

1985 was the first Amiga, 1000, 320x200 32 colors, there was a 4k mode that wasn't usable for anything other than a backdrop, used by a game here and there.
1987 Amiga 2000 added a not as often used 64 color mode called halfbrite, 87' is the year VGA is released, also adlib and mt-32.
1990 is the next Amiga spec bump with the 3000, and 1992 the Amiga 4000, but it's already pretty much over with VGA games hitting their stride in late 88' as leileilol pointed out/early 89, with exceptions here and there. By 90' sound blaster has been out for a year, and sb1.5 has been released, by 92' the whole cadre well known of PC sound cards had come out.

Eye of the Beholder on the Amiga had a proper ending at least. The PC version just had a one line congratulatory message then dropped you to DOS. After spending so many hours to complete the game it had to have been one of the worst game endings I have ever experienced. The Amiga version was much improved. I read that that to put the final cutscene on the PC version that it would have required another disc so they left it off to save costs since they figured that very few people would even make it down that far to see it.

Amiga EOB Ending

But vGA 256 colour graphics were better. And Adlib sound wasn't bad either.

eL_PuSHeR wrote:

But vGA 256 colour graphics were better. And Adlib sound wasn't bad either.

Agree about VGa 256 col. but imho the guys who composed the adlib stuff could have taken more advantage of the chip...just hear how awesome the adlib's "cousin" chip sounds in the Sega Megadrive for example...the adlib stuff on the PC mostly sound cheesy

Speaking of music, how many Amiga games using .MOD music format? MOD definitely sounds better than FM, and still sounds better than crappy GM (like Waveblaster, for example).

Um, all of them? The Amiga sound chip is just a four channel DAC as far as I know.

Apparently the game "Civilization" is best on the PC, as I have read Amiga reviews that stated the Amiga version plays quite a bit slower (and I assume there's not a lot of difference in the graphics, although not sure).

digitaldoofus wrote:

Apparently the game "Civilization" is best on the PC, as I have read Amiga reviews that stated the Amiga version plays quite a bit slower (and I assume there's not a lot of difference in the graphics, although not sure).

Yeah, they are pretty darn close in graphics but it does seem that Civ on the Amiga runs slow, almost like you had that classic old XT Turbo machine where the Turbo button never worked on your box and you were stuck at 4.77MHz 😉

However, I quickly got a GVP A530 Turbo expansion device to make it a 30MHz 68030EC machine, it made games like this zip along quite nicely 😁

I remember being very frustrated that my old 486 didn't have enough power to play MOD music and do anything else at the same time.

collector wrote:

Jorpho wrote:

collector wrote:

Some of the Amiga games, like many or the Sierra games, were just very poor ports of PC games.

Not at all! See this page for more details:
http://sarien.sourceforge.net/screenshots/

You're kidding, right? You are making a case based on Sarien not PC vs Amiga.

I was referring to the commentary as to why the programmers tried to make Sarien's interpretation mimic the Amiga ports more than the PC ports.

BigBodZod wrote:

digitaldoofus wrote:

Apparently the game "Civilization" is best on the PC, as I have read Amiga reviews that stated the Amiga version plays quite a bit slower (and I assume there's not a lot of difference in the graphics, although not sure).

Yeah, they are pretty darn close in graphics but it does seem that Civ on the Amiga runs slow, almost like you had that classic old XT Turbo machine where the Turbo button never worked on your box and you were stuck at 4.77MHz 😉

However, I quickly got a GVP A530 Turbo expansion device to make it a 30MHz 68030EC machine, it made games like this zip along quite nicely 😁

You mean a 40mhz 68030EC machine 😉 that was the stock cpu in these now mega rare expansion for the A500
I've stuffed a real 68030 cpu in mine with a working MMU 😀

Amigaz wrote:

BigBodZod wrote:

digitaldoofus wrote:

Apparently the game "Civilization" is best on the PC, as I have read Amiga reviews that stated the Amiga version plays quite a bit slower (and I assume there's not a lot of difference in the graphics, although not sure).

Yeah, they are pretty darn close in graphics but it does seem that Civ on the Amiga runs slow, almost like you had that classic old XT Turbo machine where the Turbo button never worked on your box and you were stuck at 4.77MHz 😉

However, I quickly got a GVP A530 Turbo expansion device to make it a 30MHz 68030EC machine, it made games like this zip along quite nicely 😁

You mean a 40mhz 68030EC machine 😉 that was the stock cpu in these now mega rare expansion for the A500
I've stuffed a real 68030 cpu in mine with a working MMU 😀

My old A500 has got a GVP HD8+ hard drive expansion with an extra 8mb fast ram 😀 and my A1200 has got a nice 40mhz Magnum 030 accelerator with 32mb installed.... games run nice and smooth 😁

Yeah sorry about that, I meant 40MHz, regardless it was still plenty fast with the additional FAST memory installed, but man were those simm's expensive....

BigBodZod wrote:

Yeah sorry about that, I meant 40MHz, regardless it was still plenty fast with the additional FAST memory installed, but man were those simm's expensive....

Yep, 8 meg sure is enough when it comes to OCS/ECS games 😀
Those GVP ram sticks still cost you an arm or a leg

Amigaz wrote:

imho the guys who composed the adlib stuff could have taken more advantage of the chip...just hear how awesome the adlib's "cousin" chip sounds in the Sega Megadrive for example...the adlib stuff on the PC mostly sound cheesy

Agreed. The problem I think was that many PC developers were viewing the adlib as a cheap MIDI synth, especially once the MT-32 and other proper synths became common.

Jorpho wrote:

I remember being very frustrated that my old 486 didn't have enough power to play MOD music and do anything else at the same time.

You were probably trying to use the PC speaker as an output device. The PC speaker just makes a single sine wave, and it took an enormous amount of processing time to throttle it in a way it wasn't intended in order to use it as an extremely poor multichannel DAC.

Even the Sound Blaster cards only had a single-channel DAC, so all the mixing had to happen in software. Doom was one of the first games I know of to do software mixing of multiple sounds at once.

I think the Gravis Ultrasound was pretty much the only DOS-era sound card that could mix multiple sounds in hardware, which is why it was so popular with the demo scene.

I thought the Ensoniq Soundscape could do that too, maybe I'm mistaken....

Of course I bought it due to the teriffic wave table sound for music 😉