6 ms·

I remember the profound disappointment when I finally "upgraded" to a PC (early Pentium or 686 from memory) from my Amiga 500, the graphics and sound were worse

by flukus 9y ago

I remember the profound disappointment when I finally "upgraded" to a PC (early Pentium or 686 from memory) from my Amiga 500, the graphics and sound were worse than the now decade old machine that it replaced and ease of use had taken I giant step backward. It was then that I realized just how ahead of it's time the Amiga was. Getting the same out of the PC would have required more expensive expansion cards but whther your software would work with them was a crapshoot (no openGL equivalent at the time). Eventually I accepted the new machine because it did have some things our Amiga lacked (and were impossible to purchase by then), like a hard drive, a CDROM, and 8MB of RAM which opened up some new capabilities but it was never the huge upgrade I'd imagined.

Keyframe 9y ago
Those later PCs, like 486 and up had what Amiga didn't. Interactive CD-based games (like Myst, Rebel Assault, etc) and could run faster (Doom anyone?). Still lacked "something", even though some of the software started to migrate over with the advent of Windows NT (Lightwave for example). Earlier machines, 386s and Quadras were a joke compared to Amigas (1200 and 4000).
- DerekL 9y ago
  I just looked it up. It turns out that Myst was ported to the Amiga, like I thought it would have been, but not until 1997!
- wowtip 9y ago
  I still think Wolfenstein 3D / Doom was what put the final nail in Amiga's coffin. Not so much Amiga wasn't as fast as PC at the time, but rather something with the bitplane based graphics system not being suited for the psuedo 3D kind of games.
  - kiksy 9y ago
    From a gaming point of view Doom, really hit the Amiga hard. Gloom and Alien Breed 3D were poor attempts at replicating Doom (at least on standard Amiga hardware). This was at a time when it seemed every other game release was a Doom clone and where the hype was. It's a shame as the Amiga had so much more to offer.
  - Annatar 9y ago
    Amiga uses the planar system to display graphics, which gives her natural blending capabilities but is computationally expensive for 3D texture mapping because each pixel has to be manipulated up to eight times on every bitplane and then OR’ed with the rest of the bits up to eight times again, as opposed to the VGA where one pixel is one byte, which is easy to manipulate. However, doing alpha blending on a VGA was a nightmare - good luck with that! Amiga coders compensated for this with very fast, insanely optimized assembler code. They were so good that a multiple times computationally slower Motorola processor would run a Doom clone at the speed comparable to a contemporary PC bucket.
    - yason 9y ago
      They were so good that a multiple times computationally slower Motorola processor would run a Doom clone at the speed comparable to a contemporary PC bucket. Never. You just could not get a VGA-on-i486 level rendering performance out of 256-color AGA fullscreen, even with Motorola 68040 on the Amiga 4000. All the fast 3D demos and games I saw were partial-screen, with 2x2 pixels, or both. Good-looking ones were slow. An example with at least some commercial success was Alien Breed 3D. Check the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksQG8vnvlpg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksQG8vnvlpg Because it was so hard to do per-pixel rendering on Amiga all these 3D graphics demos and games on Amiga basically concentrated on delivering the graphics only, with shallow content and amateur-grade playability. Doom had a lot else going on despite the smooth graphics, and that actually made Doom a good game.
    - jacobush 9y ago
      You still needed a faster than stock CPU. Which Great Valley Computers gladly provided. Which put them in the weird position of making more on Amiga upgrades and accessories than Commodore did, by a long shot. One example of many where Commodore left money on the table.
  - jacobush 9y ago
    Final nail maybe, but she was firmly in place in the coffin and the death vigil had begun.
  - ekianjo 9y ago
    Final nail yes but the first nail was certainly with wing commander, much faster and better looking on the PC. Doom was much later.
- yason 9y ago
  The big problem tended to culminate in per-pixel rendering which was really slow on Amiga (with planar bitmaps) and really fast on VGA (writing one byte per pixel). Theoretically there was no difference as you could, ideally, just rewrite your renderer to render in planar modes directly instead of rendering to chunky (per-pixel) modes and then converting to planar. And chunky-to-planar converters eventually became quite fast but it was too late and nevertheless an overhead. Amiga did quite fine until 3D graphics. "Modern" games like Dune 2, Syndicate, UFO: Enemy Unknown, Settlers, etc. were hugely popular but still complex games, yet playable, and no less good looking on Amiga than on PC. But then Wolfenstein, Doom, Descent, and others with full-screen 3D graphics with texture mapping happened and Amiga just couldn't even start the race. If Amiga had had a chunky graphics mode it would've certainly had a few more years until complete technical obsolence. Commodore basically had that chance with Amiga 1200 with the new AGA graphics chip but they chose to extend bitmap planes instead. For anything else, Amiga was competitive despite the lack of cpu power. I remember the last years of my personal Amiga use. Productivity software, editors, programming etc were still snappier and a much more friendly experience on the Amiga even if PCs at the time had 10x the cpu speed and Windows software was maturing up (and subsequently getting bloated beyond all usability).
  - whywhywhywhy 9y ago
    I went from the Amiga 500 to a 486, yeah Doom and Wolf3D were very impressive in terms of graphical detail but some little known gems on the Amiga really pushed boundaries in scale that wouldn't really be repeated till the likes of GTA 3 or Daggerfall "Hunter"[1] which was flat shaded 3D, had a very large play area of multiple islands and had multiple drivable vehicles, you could ride bikes, row boats, gunboats, jeeps, tanks, helicopters, surf boards, hovercrafts. All on an Amiga 500, all on 1 floppy disk. "Mercenary 3" [2] also flat shaded, had a fully simulated solar system with day/night cycles. You could go in buildings, go in taxis, get on a space ship fly up to orbit, go to another planet, land in the city go in a building. The scale of this game is insane for the time. [1] https://i.ytimg.com/vi/MzByYlnvaN0/hqdefault.jpg https://i.ytimg.com/vi/MzByYlnvaN0/hqdefault.jpg [2] https://www.myabandonware.com/media/screenshots/m/mercenary-iii-the-dion-crisis-aus/mercenary-iii-the-dion-crisis_3.gif https://www.myabandonware.com/media/screenshots/m/mercenary-...
function_seven 9y ago
Same story here. I had an Amiga 1000 from 1985 all the way through 1995. Never with a hard drive or modem either. I was still disappointed by the 486DX2 (4MB!) that replaced it. It was better in every "bullet point" way, but lacking in a hard-to-describe way.
- gmueckl 9y ago
  Could it be that your "hard to describe way" was simply the difference between an exceptionally well designed system (hardware and software) and a stack of weird kludges that was the PC at that time?
  - TomMarius 9y ago
    > was I actually think it's way worse now. It's only tolerable because computers are faster.
    - gmueckl 9y ago
      Is it really that much worse? If PC hardware wouldn't require obscure old hardware features for software compatibility, the resulting architecture based on the newer stuff only (e.g. PCI) is way better. The cores of the available operating systems also improved a lot over the years. Windows now has a rather decent kernel at its core, for example. The whole package is far from perfect, but it is better than what would have resulted from continued engineering at the level that we had in the 80s and 90s.
      - jacobush 9y ago
        Not sure... maybe I’m old, but the current system is alive, but not in a beautiful way. Instead, it’s like metastasis of cancer, runtime after runtime of duplicated and slightly different versions of Nodejs, .Net and who knows what, and not in perfect harmony. It’s chaotic.
- mhd 9y ago
  I remember my Amiga buddies having the same issues (I myself went from a C64 to a 286 earlier than they). Main complaints were the OS (i.e. Windows, whether it's 3.11 or 95), and a general lack of smoothness (again, OS and multi-tasking, smooth scrolling not being something you get for free with a VGA). Also, the PC, assuming VGA and at least SoundBlaster, had fewer limitations there, compared to e.g. the Amiga's half-bright modes. It was way easier to get something more garish. (I felt a bit like that regarding the C64's SID sounds to the more generic-feeling samples of the Amiga. Especially when the latter veered towards Eurodance)
gaius 9y ago
The Future Was Here: https://www.amazon.com/The-Future-Was-Here-Commodore/dp/0262017202/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1331311090&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/The-Future-Was-Here-Commodore/dp/0262...

by flukus 9y ago

Keyframe 9y ago

Those later PCs, like 486 and up had what Amiga didn't. Interactive CD-based games (like Myst, Rebel Assault, etc) and could run faster (Doom anyone?). Still lacked "something", even though some of the software started to migrate over with the advent of Windows NT (Lightwave for example). Earlier machines, 386s and Quadras were a joke compared to Amigas (1200 and 4000).

DerekL 9y ago
I just looked it up. It turns out that Myst was ported to the Amiga, like I thought it would have been, but not until 1997!
wowtip 9y ago
I still think Wolfenstein 3D / Doom was what put the final nail in Amiga's coffin. Not so much Amiga wasn't as fast as PC at the time, but rather something with the bitplane based graphics system not being suited for the psuedo 3D kind of games.
- kiksy 9y ago
  From a gaming point of view Doom, really hit the Amiga hard. Gloom and Alien Breed 3D were poor attempts at replicating Doom (at least on standard Amiga hardware). This was at a time when it seemed every other game release was a Doom clone and where the hype was. It's a shame as the Amiga had so much more to offer.
- Annatar 9y ago
  Amiga uses the planar system to display graphics, which gives her natural blending capabilities but is computationally expensive for 3D texture mapping because each pixel has to be manipulated up to eight times on every bitplane and then OR’ed with the rest of the bits up to eight times again, as opposed to the VGA where one pixel is one byte, which is easy to manipulate. However, doing alpha blending on a VGA was a nightmare - good luck with that! Amiga coders compensated for this with very fast, insanely optimized assembler code. They were so good that a multiple times computationally slower Motorola processor would run a Doom clone at the speed comparable to a contemporary PC bucket.
  - yason 9y ago
    They were so good that a multiple times computationally slower Motorola processor would run a Doom clone at the speed comparable to a contemporary PC bucket. Never. You just could not get a VGA-on-i486 level rendering performance out of 256-color AGA fullscreen, even with Motorola 68040 on the Amiga 4000. All the fast 3D demos and games I saw were partial-screen, with 2x2 pixels, or both. Good-looking ones were slow. An example with at least some commercial success was Alien Breed 3D. Check the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksQG8vnvlpg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksQG8vnvlpg Because it was so hard to do per-pixel rendering on Amiga all these 3D graphics demos and games on Amiga basically concentrated on delivering the graphics only, with shallow content and amateur-grade playability. Doom had a lot else going on despite the smooth graphics, and that actually made Doom a good game.
  - jacobush 9y ago
    You still needed a faster than stock CPU. Which Great Valley Computers gladly provided. Which put them in the weird position of making more on Amiga upgrades and accessories than Commodore did, by a long shot. One example of many where Commodore left money on the table.
- jacobush 9y ago
  Final nail maybe, but she was firmly in place in the coffin and the death vigil had begun.
- ekianjo 9y ago
  Final nail yes but the first nail was certainly with wing commander, much faster and better looking on the PC. Doom was much later.
yason 9y ago
The big problem tended to culminate in per-pixel rendering which was really slow on Amiga (with planar bitmaps) and really fast on VGA (writing one byte per pixel). Theoretically there was no difference as you could, ideally, just rewrite your renderer to render in planar modes directly instead of rendering to chunky (per-pixel) modes and then converting to planar. And chunky-to-planar converters eventually became quite fast but it was too late and nevertheless an overhead. Amiga did quite fine until 3D graphics. "Modern" games like Dune 2, Syndicate, UFO: Enemy Unknown, Settlers, etc. were hugely popular but still complex games, yet playable, and no less good looking on Amiga than on PC. But then Wolfenstein, Doom, Descent, and others with full-screen 3D graphics with texture mapping happened and Amiga just couldn't even start the race. If Amiga had had a chunky graphics mode it would've certainly had a few more years until complete technical obsolence. Commodore basically had that chance with Amiga 1200 with the new AGA graphics chip but they chose to extend bitmap planes instead. For anything else, Amiga was competitive despite the lack of cpu power. I remember the last years of my personal Amiga use. Productivity software, editors, programming etc were still snappier and a much more friendly experience on the Amiga even if PCs at the time had 10x the cpu speed and Windows software was maturing up (and subsequently getting bloated beyond all usability).
- whywhywhywhy 9y ago
  I went from the Amiga 500 to a 486, yeah Doom and Wolf3D were very impressive in terms of graphical detail but some little known gems on the Amiga really pushed boundaries in scale that wouldn't really be repeated till the likes of GTA 3 or Daggerfall "Hunter"[1] which was flat shaded 3D, had a very large play area of multiple islands and had multiple drivable vehicles, you could ride bikes, row boats, gunboats, jeeps, tanks, helicopters, surf boards, hovercrafts. All on an Amiga 500, all on 1 floppy disk. "Mercenary 3" [2] also flat shaded, had a fully simulated solar system with day/night cycles. You could go in buildings, go in taxis, get on a space ship fly up to orbit, go to another planet, land in the city go in a building. The scale of this game is insane for the time. [1] https://i.ytimg.com/vi/MzByYlnvaN0/hqdefault.jpg https://i.ytimg.com/vi/MzByYlnvaN0/hqdefault.jpg [2] https://www.myabandonware.com/media/screenshots/m/mercenary-iii-the-dion-crisis-aus/mercenary-iii-the-dion-crisis_3.gif https://www.myabandonware.com/media/screenshots/m/mercenary-...

function_seven 9y ago

Same story here. I had an Amiga 1000 from 1985 all the way through 1995. Never with a hard drive or modem either. I was still disappointed by the 486DX2 (4MB!) that replaced it. It was better in every "bullet point" way, but lacking in a hard-to-describe way.

gmueckl 9y ago
Could it be that your "hard to describe way" was simply the difference between an exceptionally well designed system (hardware and software) and a stack of weird kludges that was the PC at that time?
- TomMarius 9y ago
  > was I actually think it's way worse now. It's only tolerable because computers are faster.
  - gmueckl 9y ago
    Is it really that much worse? If PC hardware wouldn't require obscure old hardware features for software compatibility, the resulting architecture based on the newer stuff only (e.g. PCI) is way better. The cores of the available operating systems also improved a lot over the years. Windows now has a rather decent kernel at its core, for example. The whole package is far from perfect, but it is better than what would have resulted from continued engineering at the level that we had in the 80s and 90s.
    - jacobush 9y ago
      Not sure... maybe I’m old, but the current system is alive, but not in a beautiful way. Instead, it’s like metastasis of cancer, runtime after runtime of duplicated and slightly different versions of Nodejs, .Net and who knows what, and not in perfect harmony. It’s chaotic.
mhd 9y ago
I remember my Amiga buddies having the same issues (I myself went from a C64 to a 286 earlier than they). Main complaints were the OS (i.e. Windows, whether it's 3.11 or 95), and a general lack of smoothness (again, OS and multi-tasking, smooth scrolling not being something you get for free with a VGA). Also, the PC, assuming VGA and at least SoundBlaster, had fewer limitations there, compared to e.g. the Amiga's half-bright modes. It was way easier to get something more garish. (I felt a bit like that regarding the C64's SID sounds to the more generic-feeling samples of the Amiga. Especially when the latter veered towards Eurodance)

gaius 9y ago

The Future Was Here: https://www.amazon.com/The-Future-Was-Here-Commodore/dp/0262017202/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1331311090&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/The-Future-Was-Here-Commodore/dp/0262...