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Doom Didn't Kill the Amiga (2024)

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

#71

Post by TheAmazingRace »

blakespot wrote: post #63
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 friends were gaming on consoles at the time. I very much preferred the Amiga (I also had Atari STs during this time) to consoles perhaps mainly due to the ability to use RGB monitors with a proper RGB signal. It was at best composite back then on the consoles of the era - in the states anyway (we didn't have SCART as an option). I know I'm odd here, but that was a major factor -- but also the fact that I u…

I heard NASA used their Amiga systems clear up to 2006, which is a rather unusually long lifespan for the application they intended them for. But I suppose commodity PC hardware and the software they needed just wasn't really there at a price point that made sense, plus, I guess as the old adage goes... if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

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

#72

Post by Retric »

firesteelrain wrote: post #67
Retric wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Video rental was huge. It's the only way I could afford to play games.

In 1985? That didn’t take off where I was until PS1 days.

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

#73

Post by TheAmazingRace »

bregma wrote: post #42
TheAmazingRace wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, ...

I presume you mean MB and not GB? On native Atari hardware at least, you could only address up to 1 GB partitions on the very last TOS 4.04 based systems like the Falcon.

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

#74

Post by tjr »

drivers99 wrote: post #38
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. My Amiga friends used it for playing games and for creative things: writing music, pixel/digital art, some coding, making games (at least, in shoot-em-up-construction-kit), as well as dialing up BBSes and the text-based Internet (like me on my PC).

I used my Amiga 3000 for a lot of video production and graphics work, along with some word processing / desktop publishing, and a bit of programming. And games! In my observation of other Amiga users at the time, this was typical.

Besides random individual users doing these sorts of things, Amigas were used in local broadcast television studios as video switchers and graphics layover systems, and even in more major media production outlets for video editing and 3D animation. They were seen as a more economical solution to more expensive hardware built specifically for television or graphics, but could pull of the work on a comparable level.

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

#75

Post by spankibalt »

badc0ffee wrote: post #55
louthy wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, a…

> "PCs were definitely at a disadvantage for anything involving a lot of motion, [...]."

Not on a strictly technical level, especially not in the world of 3D. 2D arcade games à la Silpheed came out for the PC in 1989, running maxed-out on machines that were already a possibility, with VGA graphics and Adlib or MT-32 sound, from late 1987 onwards, roughly the same time the A500 was released in the United States. The notion that PCs had "a bad rep for games" after the release of titles such as Wing Commander doesn't really hold much water.

It was mostly economical factors and some specific usecases that made home computers an excellent, and often superior, choice for many of its future users.

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

#76

Post by TheAmazingRace »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #31
actionfromafar wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Memory protection was basically impossible or at least "Research Level Hard" on the Amiga, because of how the OS was designed with linked lists and message passing of pointers. This was what made it so fast, but at a cost. (They would have needed something like Rust to balance that.) Everything could have been fixed with the March of Moore. The OS could have gotten a hypervisor and been running each program in its ow…

Later iterations of OS extensions on the ST got memory protection support, albeit a bit inconistently and with likely backwards compat problems. FreeMiNT I think supports MMU + protection on 030 machines. Achilles heel for classic MacOS, too. Sins of our fathers.

Pretty sure MultiTOS (which was derived from MiNT IIRC) fully supported preemptive multitasking back in 1992 or so when it came out. This, plus the fancier graphics support, a proper 68030 instead of the rather cut down 68EC020, and addition of a Motorola 56K DSP, meant the Atari Falcon was superior to the Amiga A1200, at least on paper. I certainly adored mine when I owned it not that long ago as a part of my small collection.

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

#77

Post by blakespot »

jl6 wrote: post #64
sandworm101 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wing Commander was released for the Amiga! It just ran absurdly slowly.

Yep, one of the first games that really needed a chunky pixel video memory layout (which the Amiga lacked). Amiga's planar arrangement was perfect for platformers, which was the target of the Amiga gfx hardware design.

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

#78

Post by Sleaker »

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.

Born in 84 myself, first major introduction to computing was in '89 or '90, my grade school had received about 20 Apple 2e with various edutainment titles.

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

#79

Post by gpderetta »

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…

3000 and 4000 were "high end". The 1200 was the 500/600 replacement with AGA and sold relatively well.

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

#80

Post by zozbot234 »

spankibalt wrote: post #75
badc0ffee wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, a…

> "PCs were definitely at a disadvantage for anything involving a lot of motion, [...]." Not on a strictly technical level, especially not in the world of 3D. 2D arcade games à la Silpheed came out for the PC in 1989, running maxed-out on machines that were already a possibility, with VGA graphics and Adlib or MT-32 sound, from late 1987 onwards, roughly the same time the A500 was released in the United States. The n…

> 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 and color depth you were running.

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