6 ms·

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 la

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-...

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-...