I personally started looking into the Amiga about a decade ago, when I suddenly heard about it having the best versions of computer games from the '80s, preemptive multi-tasking that PCs didn't have until 1995 and Macs didn't have until 2000 (thank the Copland fiasco for that), and generally being so far ahead of its time that nobody understood it.
Then I started learning about the demoscene, the MOD format music that formed the basis of a lot of my fave DOS games (Epic MegaGames seemed to be quite fond of it from their shareware days up through Unreal Engine 1 and its UMX format), and I just couldn't help but wanted to know more, with one driving question: "How in the HELL did this computer fail where inferior IBM and Apple systems succeeded? Modern computers should've been descended from this thing!"
However, I didn't ever see one in person until 2018, when an imported German A500 landed on my doorstep from someone who sold it to me for a far saner price than most eBay listings around here. As a 1990 kid, it was my dad's PC clone build at home, and Macs at school. That was it for computers - no Amigas, not even C64s or other 8-bit computers, it was always an IBM-compatible or a Macintosh, plain and simple, unless it was one of those exotic Silicon Graphics workstations that Nintendo and Rareware kept hyping up, and which sold for the price of a brand new car.
Commodore may be an American company, but nobody here outside of retrocomputing enthusiasts knows what an Amiga is, let alone has a display that can take 15 KHz RGB (SCART does not exist here), making the Amiga very expensive to get into if you want an AGA system instead of the humble OCS A500.
Unless, of course, by some stupid chance you happen to luck into finding someone just 30 minutes away who happens to be hoarding a ton of 1080/1084 monitors and almost every Amiga system imaginable, including three A4000s and a CD32 (which wasn't officially sold here in the US). That's why I have one functional A4000 now and have been tinkering with it since, while I contemplate selling off the A500. (I haven't done so yet because I'm waiting on a replacement A1200.net case to replace the busted-up one it came with.)
I suppose it's not as bad a way to hemorrhage money as importing a Sharp X68000/X68030 or Fujitsu FM Towns, though. One of these days, I'm getting my hands on those two...
stalk3r wrote:j^aws wrote:In Japan, the Sharp X68000 rocked, although its architecture came 2 years later, circa 1987.
That's a great looking computer, but looking at the games and especially the price (it costed $3000 back in 1987), I think the Amiga was a much better deal.
https://youtu.be/TQPt69UCyIA
Yet by some accounts, the Sharp X68000 is the second best-selling computer in the world, despite its lofty price.
The world's best-seller? The NEC PC-98, basically their IBM PC, complete with substandard graphics compared to the later X68000 and FM Towns.
Sorry, Commodore 64, you'll have to settle for third place. Maybe Japan is its own world entirely if people can spare that much for a home computer to bring the arcade home.
I will say that despite the X68000 having near arcade-perfect ports where the Amiga conversions are a complete joke by comparison (there's no reason Street Fighter II and Strider should be so inferior on the Amiga), Human68k is basically MS-DOS level stuff from what I can tell, none of the GUI-driven fanciness or multitasking of the AmigaOS.
Grzyb wrote:Violett'Blossom wrote:What can they do that for instance 8088 can not ?
First and foremost, until 1992 or so, Amiga games were usually better - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cETl8PhUy_E
And games are probably the only practical use for old computers...
I'd say the turning point might've been closer to 1990. TFX and Wing Commander were noticeably better on PC graphically, which also has the benefit of an analog joystick interface that developers bothered to use, whereas Amiga developers mostly expected you to use hilariously primitive one-button Atari CX-40 joysticks or something along those lines. There are a few that claim analog joystick support using a PC joystick and a DA-15F to DE-9F pin adapter that's easy to DIY, but I haven't tested those yet.
Frontier: Elite II - a typical Amiga benchmark - looks better on PC with texture-mapped graphics, though the sound takes a hit unless you have an MT-32. Would've benefited from allowing both Sound Blaster for PCM and MT-32 for music, like Falcon 3.0 and some other games let you do.
I'm trying to remember when the likes of Lemmings, Cannon Fodder and The Chaos Engine were ported over, but I remember the VGA graphics being generally equivalent. The sound? Not so much, especially without MT-32 support. The PC really needed the Gravis Ultrasound to exist a few years earlier...
And, finally, we have Doom - a game with all sorts of official ports (I think only Lemmings compared in port quantity before then), the game that laid the groundwork for that "glorious PC gaming master race" mentality we see now because most of those ports were noticeably inferior by comparison, and the Amiga infamously never got an official port (source ports are another matter). You could say that marked the point that the Amiga was... doomed.
Gloom is more akin to Wolfenstein 3D in level complexity. Alien Breed 3D might be a closer comparison engine-wise, but it still has some framedrops on an A4000/40 with the stock A3640/25 MHz 68040 now and then. Alien Breed 3D II: The Killing Grounds is a slideshow on that same system, to the point that you might as well not bother without a 68060 or the new Vampire accelerators, presumably for the price of a PC that could've run Quake.
One of these days, though, I'm gonna do some PC vs. Mac vs. Amiga shootouts to see which platform has the definitive version of a given game, and I'm not going to arbitrarily hold back the sound to Sound Blaster like that guy did if there's an MT-32 or better option.
Even if the Amiga doesn't win, it could theoretically just emulate the other two; I have an Emplant card for the Mac side of things, and PC bridgeboards exist, though the best one I know of is 486-based. Would be cool if someone made at least a Pentium III-class one that had 3dfx onboard and tapped into the ISA slots on the A2000/3000/4000 (which exist solely for use with PC bridgeboards)...