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Doom Didn't Kill the Amiga (2024)

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

#41

Post by vidarh »

louthy wrote: post #8

A lot of words there. But the word ‘console’ is there exactly once. Games consoles killed the Amiga, just like they did all other home computers that were primarily used for games. I don’t know anyone that used the Amiga for anything other than games. PCs survived because they were genuinely used for business, not just games.

Most of my circle used the Amiga primarily for other things than games.

None of us replaced them with consoles.

While the use in business was of course important, that the PC survives is just as much down to the open platform and the clone market that prevented its future from being tied to a single company - in this case a wildly dysfunctional one.

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

#42

Post by bregma »

TheAmazingRace wrote: post #6
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #2

Yeah if your secret sauce is a chip, with very particular timing and memory behaviour... you've just built in obsolescence. There's no abstracted API for doing the fancy graphics (at least not one used by games, etc), and the whole system is built around sharing the memory bus between CPU and VDP (not going to fly once memory & bus speeds became a fraction of the CPU speed and once cache was a serious thing)... it's…

Did you ever use MiNT on your Atari ST when it was relevant? I understand that for some folks, MiNT was kind of the gateway drug that often led users to Linux on PC shortly afterwards.

MiNT and a 16 GB hard drive with all the GNU tools installed. It was just like the Unix at work.

Linux came later after also going through AIX, HP/UX, A/UX, AT&T SVr4, SunOS, Solaris, OSF/1, ISC, ...

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

#43

Post by louthy »

badc0ffee wrote: post #37
louthy wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> computers built on closed architecture Do you honestly think that the general public gave two shits about closed architectures? The vast majority of people, who were using computers, were using them to play games. People completely misremember how little interest the general public had in computers (for serious tasks) at the time. The only exception to that really was the IBM PC. It didn’t have an open architecture…

> For a long time it was the case that if you didn’t buy an IBM branded PC, you couldn’t guarantee that any software would actually work on it. I don't know if it was a long time. The PC came out in 1981, and by 1984 you had the fully compatible Tandy 1000 and Compaq Deskpro. Except for the BIOS ROMs, which companies like Compaq rewrote themselves, the PC did have an open architecture.

I didn’t buy a pc until much later (I was an Acorn user), so you may be right, but the lore around that lasted a reasonable amount of time if my memory serves me correctly. Well into the late 80s.

I’d still argue nobody cared about architectures, they cared about where the type of computer was primarily used. PCs were for the office. Acorn was for education. Atari, Commodore, Sinclair were for games and therefore vulnerable to games consoles.

I seem to remember that PCs had quite a poor rep for games, even during the Wolfenstein -> Doom -> Quake era. Only really shaking that off when the first graphics cards arrived

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

#44

Post by vidarh »

louthy wrote: post #29
samastur wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did (but also for games). That wasn't the problem. The problem was computers built on closed architecture didn't have a future even if company didn't went to shit like Commodore did.

> computers built on closed architecture Do you honestly think that the general public gave two shits about closed architectures? The vast majority of people, who were using computers, were using them to play games. People completely misremember how little interest the general public had in computers (for serious tasks) at the time. The only exception to that really was the IBM PC. It didn’t have an open architecture…

They gave lots of shits about access to cheaper clones, though, and to access to cheaper peripherals.

> It didn’t have an open architecture either.

It was open enough that the closed parts could be reverse engineered, and so the market was already full of clones by the time the Amiga was even released.

Meanwhile, the Amiga was tied to custom chips only manufactured by Commodore, and didn't get anything resembling a clone until Commodore was already bankrupt (DraCo, which ditched a lot of backwards compatibility)

> For a long time it was the case that if you didn’t buy an IBM branded PC, you couldn’t guarantee that any software would actually work on it

By the time the Amiga died, this hadn't been an issue for many years.

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

#45

Post by bhlkjlkjcd »

> Ever since I saw an Amiga 500 at a friend's house in what was probably late 1988, I wanted one for myself. Back then, computers were uncommon, especially at home. Even though I went to a school in a fairly affluent neighborhood, few kids had home computers or video games.

This may be true in the US and Japan, the rest of the world were mainly using 8-bit (and increasingly 16-bit) computers in this era, so this scans really oddly outside the US.

I grew up on an 80s UK council estate (surrounded by poverty) and practically every kid had a computer, mainly Commodore 64, 16, +4, Sinclair Spectrum, or an Amstrad CPC (maybe a few BBC Micros dotted around, and some other oddities)

Lots of people had the early Atari consoles in the early 80s, but after that I didn't see a console until the Megadrive. Everyone, and I do mean EVERYONE had computers in the mid-late 80s to early 90s where I was growing up.

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

#46

Post by spankibalt »

louthy wrote: post #29
samastur wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did (but also for games). That wasn't the problem. The problem was computers built on closed architecture didn't have a future even if company didn't went to shit like Commodore did.

> computers built on closed architecture Do you honestly think that the general public gave two shits about closed architectures? The vast majority of people, who were using computers, were using them to play games. People completely misremember how little interest the general public had in computers (for serious tasks) at the time. The only exception to that really was the IBM PC. It didn’t have an open architecture…

> Do you honestly think that the general public gave two shits about closed architectures?

First, this specific argument is about the computer-buying public, not the general public. Furthermore, yes, many people also bought into the IBM-PC & Compatibles eco-system because it was much more open. Many young(er) urban professionals of the time took their work home, to be continued on computers. I think financial mobility, supply, as well as culture (incl. generational divides) are more much important factors.

> The vast majority of people, who were using computers, were using them to play games.

Do you have data to back that up? Because where I'm from (East Germany), strictly based on my observations, this didn't track; many PCs were used as intended: general-purpose computing. That means work and play.

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

#47

Post by evaneykelen »

louthy wrote: post #8

A lot of words there. But the word ‘console’ is there exactly once. Games consoles killed the Amiga, just like they did all other home computers that were primarily used for games. I don’t know anyone that used the Amiga for anything other than games. PCs survived because they were genuinely used for business, not just games.

> I don’t know anyone that used the Amiga for anything other than games.

The Amiga was used worldwide by TV stations for CGI and titling effects, for digital signage eg arrivals/departures at airports, and video walls, besides being a tool for countless digital artists. I know because I wrote digital signage software for the Amiga and sold it to customers in 21 countries.

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

#48

Post by louthy »

vidarh wrote: post #41
louthy wrote: post #8

A lot of words there. But the word ‘console’ is there exactly once. Games consoles killed the Amiga, just like they did all other home computers that were primarily used for games. I don’t know anyone that used the Amiga for anything other than games. PCs survived because they were genuinely used for business, not just games.

Most of my circle used the Amiga primarily for other things than games. None of us replaced them with consoles. While the use in business was of course important, that the PC survives is just as much down to the open platform and the clone market that prevented its future from being tied to a single company - in this case a wildly dysfunctional one.

> Most of my circle used the Amiga primarily for other things than games.

Are you claiming your circle is representative of the computer buying masses of the time? (whether the computers were consoles or not)

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

#49

Post by dragonwriter »

bhlkjlkjcd wrote: post #45

> Ever since I saw an Amiga 500 at a friend's house in what was probably late 1988, I wanted one for myself. Back then, computers were uncommon, especially at home. Even though I went to a school in a fairly affluent neighborhood, few kids had home computers or video games. This may be true in the US and Japan, the rest of the world were mainly using 8-bit (and increasingly 16-bit) computers in this era, so this scan…

> This was may be true in the US

In 1989, the closest year I can find stats, home computer penetration was 15% of households in the US, but that wasn't uniformly distributed, so some people will have grown up with the experience of it being VERY common for people around them to have computers (I did), while others will have known no one with one.

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

#50

Post by mattl »

bhlkjlkjcd wrote: post #45

> Ever since I saw an Amiga 500 at a friend's house in what was probably late 1988, I wanted one for myself. Back then, computers were uncommon, especially at home. Even though I went to a school in a fairly affluent neighborhood, few kids had home computers or video games. This may be true in the US and Japan, the rest of the world were mainly using 8-bit (and increasingly 16-bit) computers in this era, so this scan…

Yeah, virtually everyone I knew circa 1990 had a home computer. Mostly Spectrum and CPC. A few years later it was a few Amiga 500 too. The only “console” I had seen was the Atari VCS or a dedicated Pong machine. A few people got Game Boys a little later circa 1992. A single friend who had a Master System and one kid with divorced parents who got a SNES as a result.

It was in this environment that I would discover programming and the internet.

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