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Doom Didn't Kill the Amiga (2024)

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

#51

Post by louthy »

evaneykelen wrote: post #47
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.

Just to be clear, because there have been a number of similar responses, I am not claiming the Amiga couldn’t do anything else, nor that it wasn’t used for anything other than games.

But, the vast majority of people who bought Amigas did so because it was a great machine for games and had lots of high quality titles.

When the majority of your market disappears and moves to cheaper options; and all you have left is video walls in departure lounges, you’re fucked.

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

#52

Post by vidarh »

actionfromafar wrote: post #11
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…

Commodore operations were very, very poor, too. If they had been smarter with money, I'm sure they could have innovated in many many ways without giving up on backwards compatilibity. Sony put a PS1 inside the PS2. The Sony MSX2 contained an MSX1-on-a-chip. Amiga could easily have had a PCI bus for external video chips. And I'm not even going into the more crazy PS3-like ideas like "so, memory and bus speed are just…

The last iteration of the Amiga chipset Commodore worked on when they went bankrupt (Hombre)[1] was intended to be a 2-chip system providing a 64-bit 3D chipset with a PA-RISC CPU on-die in the in one of them that'd break compatibility, and be used for both standalone computers, set-top boxes and for a high-end graphics card.

To sort out compatibility, the idea was for an "AGA Amiga on a chip".

I'm not convinced Amiga-users would've been all too happy with all of this - or that PA RISC was a good choice, given what we know now -, but it certainly would've been a massive upgrade.

(What Commodore was close to completing when they went bankrupt, though, was AAA[2] - which would've seen far more modest but still significant upgrades, like wider buses, support for chunky graphics modes, higher resolutions, far higher video bandwidth; AAA was in testing when Commodore failed)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Amiga_Architecture_ch...

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

#53

Post by wlll »

zozbot234 wrote: post #13
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.

The Amiga platform was originally built on game-console hardware. Incidentally, so was the Raspberry Pi, which is why the first Raspberry Pi models were comparatively very cheap.

Were they? I had an Amiga 1200, a friend a 500, both of which were around long before games consoles became mainstream.

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

#54

Post by vidarh »

louthy wrote: post #48
vidarh wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

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 and mostly sold in the US and Canada.

The profile varied extensively by country - Germany as well had a market where Commodore was big in the business market, and while that was mostly PC's, it was also the reason for much of the success of the Amiga 2000, which also largely aimed at non-gaming users.

Commodore UK meanwhile, did fit your "profile" for the Amiga and was very much focused on games.

But Commodore UK was the subsidiary that remained most successful despite competition from consoles.

In fact Commodore UK survived the bankruptcy of Commodore International and did well enough that management tried to put together a buyout offer (but had to throw in the towel after Dell and Escom entered the process).

In other words, while you're right that competition from consoles and PC's of course mattered a lot, it was a lot more nuanced than that.

E.g. in the US, Commodore had burned its relationships to the ground, and so failed to get the low-end Amiga's out there as gaming machines too, and were nowhere near as successful as some of the subsidiaries like Commodore UK, and Commodore B.V (Netherlands; also briefly survived bankruptcy).

Where Commodore did best, it did okay in both the game market and in various professional niches, but that meant actually working the game market hard. E.g. Commodore UK did a "famous" bundle with the game for the 1989 Batman movie which drove relatively-speaking huge sales.

Had the rest of the subsidiaries done close to as well as Commodore UK, the company as a whole would've at least weathered the cash crunch that killed it in '94. Whether that'd have let them rebuild (e.g. by completing their next chipsets) or if it'd have just made them linger on in a zombie state another year, is an open question.

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

#55

Post by badc0ffee »

louthy wrote: post #43
badc0ffee wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 vul…

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. But the PC did do well at puzzle games like Lemmings, text+graphics games like King's Quest, and sims like SimCity. That disadvantage was gone, at least on a technical level, by 1992-94.

I think PC graphics had two major leaps forward in this era: VGA in 1987, and VLB graphics (on 486 machines) in 1992. The former brought an expanded colour palette, and the latter brought enough memory bandwidth that you didn't need dedicated blitter/sprite chips.

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

#56

Post by sandworm101 »

runjake wrote: post #5

In 1992, I went from Amiga to a PC solely because of Wolfenstein 3D. I already felt like I was clinging to the Amiga platform. Most of my other friends in the Amiga world had moved on to other platforms. Doom came out about a year later, near Christmas 1993, IIRC. The author bought their Amiga 500 in early 1992! It was already a "classic" by then.

Ya, the author's timeline doesnt mesh with mine. In my memory the amiga was dead long before 1995. Wing commander was 91/92, which blew away anything on amiga. The great microprose simulations also started in 91/92 when the best Amiga could barely run the original civilization.

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

#57

Post by Retric »

louthy wrote: post #34
Retric wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A console without games isn’t useful.

And a printer without ink doesn’t print. Yet we all continue to fall for this initial low price bait.

In 1985 the NES launched in the US at $179.99 and didn’t include a game. So while I’m sure somebody came home with a useless object, in general people where forced to but at least one.

In 1996 the first hit became free.

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

#59

Post by District5524 »

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'm sure that was an important reason for the US and UK markets. I don't know much about the Swedish market, but in the Eastern European markets, game consoles were not popular at all until the very late 1990s. Gamers in the early 1990s used Commodore (and less affluents ZX Spectrums and clones), and later, as the article says, more and more PCs. In these parts, people were very short of money, which caused piracy to grow HUGE. Computers were also preferred due to being multipurpose. And console games were difficult to copy, so if you wanted to be a serious gamer, you had to have a PC. Even if you had the money to buy games, you couldn't really do that, because nobody really was selling actual games in these markets. With different currencies and limitations on hard currency exchange, you didn't spend those limited funds on games, even if you travelled abroad. Probably also as a consequence, playing on consoles was considered to be lame. It was for kids only. Hah, for those born in the 1990s only! So that was a bit different over here.

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

#60

Post by vidarh »

louthy wrote: post #51
evaneykelen wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Just to be clear, because there have been a number of similar responses, I am not claiming the Amiga couldn’t do anything else, nor that it wasn’t used for anything other than games. But, the vast majority of people who bought Amigas did so because it was a great machine for games and had lots of high quality titles. When the majority of your market disappears and moves to cheaper options; and all you have left is vi…

But as I pointed out elsewhere: The subsidiary that survived the longest did so on the continued strength of sales driven by games - that market continued to do well for the Amiga until the end in the markets where the subsidiaries actually focused on gaming bundles.
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