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Doom Didn't Kill the Amiga (2024)

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

#91

Post by tetrisgm »

Long time PC gamer here. I didn’t own an Amiga so I definitely have another POV.

1994?! Every single PC gaming store was flooded with PC CD demos.

Day of the Tentacle. Loom. Monkey Island. Rebel Assault. Myst. 7th Guest.

Every “AAA” release at the time was getting a “talkie” version with added FMV or cd audio.

Plus Doom, and then Doom 2.

I actually think the 93-96 period is basically the most hype I’ve ever seen the PC market, ever.

I’m sure Amiga had a lot of cool stuff still. The demo scene, the various Psygnosis games. But I never got on my radar beyond “this doesn’t need config.sys and it has more colors”.

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

#92

Post by aruggirello »

blakespot wrote: post #62
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.

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…

My experience mirrors yours, I got my first Amiga 500 in 1986, and besides gaming, it was my home programming rig until 1994. I was studying informatics and while everybody was stuck on monochrome 640Kb MS-DOS equipped PS/2 programming a few hundred lines of Turbo Pascal at most, I had the joy of venturing into a modern OS with multitasking, GUI, a complex file system, writing stuff in AmigaBASIC, compiling my first programs with AC-Basic. Then I started learning C and Intuition, and built several GUI programs. I finally spent a couple years writing like, 300K SLOC of Motorola 68000 assembly, which resulted in a basic, but very fast text editor, and two fractal generators capable of almost matching the performance of FractInt on a PC. My knowledge of C and GUIs finally landed me my very first job as junior developer in august 1994, thanks to my Amiga! Literally a dream come true in Italy. My very first paycheck was spent buying an A4000, but by then I realized the Amiga had lost, and sadly returned it to the seller in exchange for an ugly stupid Pentium PC with Microsoft Windows 3.1, which had far superior graphics, sound, memory, disk and computing power, though it was soulless. The Commodore Amiga OTOH will always have a little place in my heart.

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

#93

Post by spankibalt »

zozbot234 wrote: post #80
spankibalt wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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…

> "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 level, by 1992-94."

Amigas never saw the light against IBM and compatibles in a lot of ways, and that already before 1992. Two famous titles I already mentioned; one had no Amiga port (Silpheed, 1989) AFAIK, the other (Wing Commander, 1990) came out later as a technically inferior, albeit atmospheric, hand-me-down. When people reminisce about the graphics capabilities of home computers, especially Amigas, they often forget whole, shall we say "inconvenient", genres. Et cetera.

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

#94

Post by firesteelrain »

Retric wrote: post #90
firesteelrain wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yea, 1985-1987 is when a lot of the VHS places started stocking video games. It’s the only way I was able to play. My best friend across the street had the console and I didn’t (I had Atari 2600). So I would rent and we would play together. I eventually got my own in maybe 1987-1988. PS1 kicked off in 1995 and we had rentals for a long time by that point. I never owned a PS1 but same friend did. I ended up going f…

Interesting, of the 3 rental places near me only one started carrying video games in 1994 with the others soon following.

This is in Florida too and not a major metropolitan area. I just assumed it was everywhere

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

#95

Post by runjake »

aruggirello wrote: post #92
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…

My experience mirrors yours, I got my first Amiga 500 in 1986, and besides gaming, it was my home programming rig until 1994. I was studying informatics and while everybody was stuck on monochrome 640Kb MS-DOS equipped PS/2 programming a few hundred lines of Turbo Pascal at most, I had the joy of venturing into a modern OS with multitasking, GUI, a complex file system, writing stuff in AmigaBASIC, compiling my first…

Minor correction: The Amiga 500 came out in ~May-October 1987, depending on your country.

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

#96

Post by aruggirello »

runjake wrote: post #95
aruggirello wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience mirrors yours, I got my first Amiga 500 in 1986, and besides gaming, it was my home programming rig until 1994. I was studying informatics and while everybody was stuck on monochrome 640Kb MS-DOS equipped PS/2 programming a few hundred lines of Turbo Pascal at most, I had the joy of venturing into a modern OS with multitasking, GUI, a complex file system, writing stuff in AmigaBASIC, compiling my first…

Minor correction: The Amiga 500 came out in ~May-October 1987, depending on your country.

You're right, it was probably summer 1987.

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

#97

Post by blakespot »

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.

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 parents to cover the different. I was very lucky in that! (The link shared shows actual scans of the newspaper ads I ran, selling some of the systems back in the '80s.)

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

#98

Post by leoc »

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.

> 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 it came to games like point-and-click adventures, Lemmings, Populous, the Freescape games, or XCOM, when those even received a 16-bit console port at all. The Amiga was in actual use mostly a games system, yes, but to a large extent the successful, beloved games were the kind of thing we now think of as PC games. That's also probably a big part of why finally losing pace with the PC over DOOM was such a bitter blow. The 32-bit consoles only started to take off in Europe with the release of the PlayStation there, well into 1995 when it seems the Amiga's goose was mostly already cooked, and even those systems weren't a great place to have a PC-like gaming experience. Then there's the awkward issue of downloading a car: famously, many Amiga users were piracy-happy, and would not have welcomed the game prices and relatively successful copy protection of '90s consoles.

(Data mostly from Wikipedia. I'm not an expert on the Amiga's commercial history, and it's a complicated topic.)

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

#99

Post by louthy »

vidarh wrote: post #54
louthy wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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”

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

#100

Post by snvzz »

leoc wrote: post #98
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.

> 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/

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