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Doom Didn't Kill the Amiga (2024)

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Re: Doom Didn't Kill the Amiga (2024)

#101

Post by leoc »

snvzz wrote: post #100
leoc wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Games consoles killed the Amiga, just like they did all other home computers that were primarily used for games. Wait, which games, and which consoles? Arcadey sprite-based action games were popular on the Amiga, and there the consoles caught up to it by about 1990 (the Sega Master System) or 1992 (the SNES) in the European market. But 16-bit consoles would have been a depressingly bad substitute for the Amiga when…

>1990 (the Sega Master System) Probably meant 1988 (Sega Mega Drive). >I'm not an expert on the Amiga's commercial history, and it's a complicated topic. For anybody curious, the Amiga Documents[0]. 0. https://sites.google.com/site/amigadocuments/

> Probably meant 1988 (Sega Mega Drive)

Yes, I meant the Mega Drive, but the PAL Mega Drive, the really relevant one here, didn’t come out until well into 1990 (if the easiest Internet sources are to be believed).

Re: Doom Didn't Kill the Amiga (2024)

#102

Post by TheAmazingRace »

blakespot wrote: post #97
TheAmazingRace wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blake, I have to say you had to have had a VERY cool childhood growing up with your mom helping you get some then cutting edge tech like that in the mid 80s. I have to wonder what a typical 80s kid's exposure to computers was like back then and the discoverability of it all, because computers of any kind in the states were generally very niche in family homes back then, let alone Amiga computers.

Yep, I was lucky. We were a middle-class family and my mom and dad did support my extreme passion in computers. I went through a huge amount of systems. Here's the list: https://bytecellar.com/the-list I would buy one, love it, read about another and finally put the first in the newspaper for sale ( https://bytecellar.com/2019/05/08/computer-classifieds-datin... ) and move to the next, with funds added in by my paren…

Thank you for sharing your story and experience Blake. I was born in the late 80s, and my very first introduction to computers was via my dad’s white-box homemade 486 DX/33 PC running MS-DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1 (which from what I understand was pretty hot stuff for 1992 when he built it) and I believe we were the only household on our street that had any kind of PC at that point. My dad even dabbled in BBSes of the day and DOS games, in addition to his usual productivity stuff with WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3.

Sadly, I missed out on the more fun era of computers from the 80s, as PCs became quite the tour-de-force by the time the 90s rolled in. So I made it my mission to procure some classic computers from time to time and use them for awhile before selling them. My current retro system of choice is a modded Atari 520ST with 1 MB of RAM via a Marpet XTRA-RAM expansion.

Re: Doom Didn't Kill the Amiga (2024)

#103

Post by ilkke »

louthy wrote: post #99
vidarh wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I'm pointing out that your anecdote doesn't mean much. Lots of people used it for other things. In fact, the US Amiga gaming market, for example, was extremely lackluster because unlike in Europe, in the US the sale was geared much more toward professional use, which was also reflected in e.g. US Amiga magazines like Amiga World, as well as in models like the Amiga 2500 which was aimed at the professional market…

> No, I'm pointing out that your anecdote doesn't mean much Neither does yours, at least I have the evidence of the extremely large and vibrant Amiga games industry. Your anecdote is “not me or my friends”

And your anecdote is "not me or people I know of".

When you say the Amiga games industry is "extremely" large and vibrant, what contemporary platform are you comparing it to?

If there is an "extremely large and vibrant" aspect that makes the Amiga stand out, it is the demo scene.

Re: Doom Didn't Kill the Amiga (2024)

#104

Post by vidarh »

louthy wrote: post #99
vidarh wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I'm pointing out that your anecdote doesn't mean much. Lots of people used it for other things. In fact, the US Amiga gaming market, for example, was extremely lackluster because unlike in Europe, in the US the sale was geared much more toward professional use, which was also reflected in e.g. US Amiga magazines like Amiga World, as well as in models like the Amiga 2500 which was aimed at the professional market…

> No, I'm pointing out that your anecdote doesn't mean much Neither does yours, at least I have the evidence of the extremely large and vibrant Amiga games industry. Your anecdote is “not me or my friends”

It wasn't meant to mean more than showing that yours was just "just me and my friends", and it did that.

> at least I have the evidence of the extremely large and vibrant Amiga games industry.

And for the business use we have the evidence of the sales of the bigger models that were totally unattractive for games, the multiple magazines targeting business use, and the number of businesses built exclusively on selling solutions that were for a long time only available for the Amiga, like the Video Toaster.

Nobody has argued with you that games weren't important for the Amiga (but your thesis that the Amiga failed due to consoles falls apart when we consider that the Commodore subsidiaries that focused more on selling it as a games computer survived longer when Commodore failed), but that it was not nearly as singularly sold as a games machine. Even Commodore UK, which was perhaps the most gaming focused of the Commodore subsidiaries also got significant revenue from business use.

EDIT: I'd also add that there isn't like there haven't been extensive analysis on this, such as Brian Bagnall's book series on Commodore, or Jimmy Maher's "The Future Was Here". We know a lot about Commodore's internal issues and their finances that was not public knowledge at the time. Commodore was horribly mismanaged more than anything else, and there are many competing reasons that contributed to the fall of Commodore, and while the consoles certainly contributed too, there's not much evidence it was anywhere near the only, or main, reason.

Re: Doom Didn't Kill the Amiga (2024)

#105

Post by vidarh »

Someone wrote: post #65
fulafel wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It lasted pretty long, especially considering the rate of evolution in those days. It debuted already in 1985, and there were some incremental improvements along the way (first the A3000 and then AGA A4000/A1200 in 1992). After the biggest lead in graphics started to shrink you still had a big user and software user base, multitasking desktop that was far ahead at least until W95, great CLI environment compared to PC…

> and there were some incremental improvements along the way (first the A3000 and then AGA A4000/A1200 in 1992) About the A3000 Wikipedia says “The machine is reported to have sold 14,380 units in Germany (including Amiga 3000T sales)” , and about the A4000 “The machine is reported to have sold 11,300 units in Germany” . Both were on sale for about 2 years. In comparison, the A2000 sold 124,500 units in Germany, agai…

The A3000 was more than twice as expensive. The A4000 even more expensive. They were not mass market machines.

Variants of the A2000 continued in the market after the A3000 was released, such as the A2500, so people who didn't need the upgrades - or could make use of them (e.g. the VideoToaster didn't fit in the A3000 case without modifications) would continue to buy cheaper models.

Re: Doom Didn't Kill the Amiga (2024)

#106

Post by spankibalt »

TheAmazingRace wrote: post #70
blakespot wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, I got my first Amiga in October 1985 - I believe it was the first Amiga sold in Virginia (U.S.) and one of the first ever sold - period. https://bytecellar.com/2020/10/27/looking-back-on-35-years-a... I remember those extremely early days, which were filled with slow releases, I must say - but it was a singular experience, playing with that hardware. I left and came back with an Amiga 2000 in 1988 and that wa…

Blake, I have to say you had to have had a VERY cool childhood growing up with your mom helping you get some then cutting edge tech like that in the mid 80s. I have to wonder what a typical 80s kid's exposure to computers was like back then and the discoverability of it all, because computers of any kind in the states were generally very niche in family homes back then, let alone Amiga computers.

> I have to wonder what a typical 80s kid's exposure to computers was like back then and the discoverability of it all, because computers of any kind in the states were generally very niche in family homes back then, let alone Amiga computers.

Platform studies as an interdisplinary discipline should, and usually does, pay attention to the subtleties of different markets; many an enthusiast's dabblings in history do not, thereby often enough mimicking the sort of Ereignisgeschichte ("event history") from other fields hobbyists gravitate to, e. g. military history.

I, for my part, value Datagubbe's account as an interesting meditation on personal computing realities, and therefore choices, in the Sweden of the late 80s to early 90s.

Re: Doom Didn't Kill the Amiga (2024)

#107

Post by vidarh »

spankibalt wrote: post #93
zozbot234 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not on a strictly technical level Yes, there were strictly technical limitations. Memory throughput to the video framebuffer did not allow for arbitrary full-screen updates at native frame rate, and there were no hardware sprites or other display hacks to cope with this limitation - the framebuffer was all you had. These limitations became gradually less important throughout the 1990s, depending on what resolution…

> "Yes, there were strictly technical limitations." Precision, friend. I never disputed that there were no (strictly) technical limitations for PCs. I only argued against the notion, emphasis mine, that "PCs were definitely at a disadvantage for anything involving a lot of motion, like arcade-style games, platformers, shoot em ups, fighting, and racing games. [...] That disadvantage was gone, at least on a technical…

It's not that we forget "inconvenient" genres, but that at the peak of the Amiga popularity, while high end PC's could compete, the vast majority of people did not have those high-end PC's with the requisite graphics and sound cards. We continued to laugh at people with PC's pretty much until Doom, because most of the PC's our friends had were still low end, and lacked expensive graphics- and sound cards, while at the same time, certainly there was a mounting concern over what was trickling down for PC's from the high-end.

With respect to Silpheed, the original version is a graphically primitive 8-bit game and the 1989 version was ported to Apple II-GS - it was hardly performance that was the reason it didn't get an Amiga release. Even the 1993 Sega CD version doesn't contain much that'd be difficult to do on an Amiga (you'd "cheat" and pre-render more version of the ships and rely on the blitter to compensate for the expense of polygons, and possibly use dual playfields and copper lists to allow for the updating background).

Wing Commander, I agree with. The AGA version is nice, but too late.

Re: Doom Didn't Kill the Amiga (2024)

#108

Post by zozbot234 »

vidarh wrote: post #107
spankibalt wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Yes, there were strictly technical limitations." Precision, friend. I never disputed that there were no (strictly) technical limitations for PCs. I only argued against the notion, emphasis mine, that "PCs were definitely at a disadvantage for anything involving a lot of motion, like arcade-style games, platformers, shoot em ups, fighting, and racing games. [...] That disadvantage was gone, at least on a technical…

It's not that we forget "inconvenient" genres, but that at the peak of the Amiga popularity, while high end PC's could compete, the vast majority of people did not have those high-end PC's with the requisite graphics and sound cards. We continued to laugh at people with PC's pretty much until Doom, because most of the PC's our friends had were still low end, and lacked expensive graphics- and sound cards, while at th…

High-end PC's were also extremely costly prior to the mid-1990s or so (the "Multimedia PC" era). You could've bought an Acorn Archimedes home computer that would have run rings around the Amiga on a pure CPU compute basis and given you the same emerging multimedia (graphics+sound) capabilities, for less than the cost of a high-end IBM-compatible PC.

Re: Doom Didn't Kill the Amiga (2024)

#109

Post by spankibalt »

vidarh wrote: post #107
spankibalt wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Yes, there were strictly technical limitations." Precision, friend. I never disputed that there were no (strictly) technical limitations for PCs. I only argued against the notion, emphasis mine, that "PCs were definitely at a disadvantage for anything involving a lot of motion, like arcade-style games, platformers, shoot em ups, fighting, and racing games. [...] That disadvantage was gone, at least on a technical…

It's not that we forget "inconvenient" genres, but that at the peak of the Amiga popularity, while high end PC's could compete, the vast majority of people did not have those high-end PC's with the requisite graphics and sound cards. We continued to laugh at people with PC's pretty much until Doom, because most of the PC's our friends had were still low end, and lacked expensive graphics- and sound cards, while at th…

> "It's not that we forget "inconvenient" genres, [...]"

I beg to differ; in my experience, the Amiga who doesn't forget is an outlier. ;)

> "[...] the vast majority of people did not have those high-end PC's with the requisite graphics and sound cards."

Once again: The context was the strictly technical, which was brought up by another poster. I am also well aware of the economical, and for specific usecases corresponding technical, realities. But that is best served by (comparative) market analysis and not just anecdotes. Which brings me to...

> "We continued to laugh at people with PC's pretty much until Doom, because most of the PC's our friends had were still low end, and lacked expensive graphics- and sound cards, while at the same time, certainly there was a mounting concern over what was trickling down for PC's from the high-end."

In my little corner of East Germany, I didn't feel the same about Amiga users. For you simply were not relevant; I didn't know anyone with an Amiga until much, much later (2007!).

> "With respect to Silpheed, the original version is a graphically primitive 8-bit game and the 1989 version was ported to Apple II-GS - it was hardly performance that was the reason it didn't get an Amiga release."

It serves as an example of an arcade game with good production values, and many supported graphics and sound modes ("expandability"), for a PC of the era, i. e. the outgoing 80s.

Re: Doom Didn't Kill the Amiga (2024)

#110

Post by spankibalt »

zozbot234 wrote: post #108
vidarh wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that we forget "inconvenient" genres, but that at the peak of the Amiga popularity, while high end PC's could compete, the vast majority of people did not have those high-end PC's with the requisite graphics and sound cards. We continued to laugh at people with PC's pretty much until Doom, because most of the PC's our friends had were still low end, and lacked expensive graphics- and sound cards, while at th…

High-end PC's were also extremely costly prior to the mid-1990s or so (the "Multimedia PC" era). You could've bought an Acorn Archimedes home computer that would have run rings around the Amiga on a pure CPU compute basis and given you the same emerging multimedia (graphics+sound) capabilities, for less than the cost of a high-end IBM-compatible PC.

> High-end PC's were also extremely costly prior to the mid-1990s or so (the "Multimedia PC" era).

I saw the first PCs starting to appear in East German households in 1990. Typically a VGA-capable 286 machine, 16 MHz, 1 MB RAM, two HD FDDs (one 1.44 MB 3.5", one 1.2 MB 5.25"), one 20 to 40 MB hard disk. No sound card. Without monitor, in early 1991, such a machine cost new about 1,500 DM.

At the same time, a new Amiga 500 with 512 kB memory extension cost about 900 bucks, the A590 external 20 MB hard disk an additional 700 DM, for a grand total of 1,600 DM. In other words, we roughly on equal footing here.

A barebones A2000 without hard disk and 1 MB of RAM cost also about 1,600 DM in the same time period. The costs racked-up even quicker to furnish out that bird.

Coincidentally, 1,500 DM is the same price I payed in early 1993 for a well-cared for second-hand 386DX-25 (387 FPU included) graphics workstation.

And the Acorn Archimedes? That machine was essentially a unicorn where I'm from; the Amigas had at least some visibility here.

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