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That's because PCs were at the heart of the business world. The Amiga was mostly a machine for entertainment and hobby use. Due to this fact, piracy on the Ami

That's because PCs were at the heart of the business world. The Amiga was mostly a machine for entertainment and hobby use. Due to this fact, piracy on the Amiga had a much larger impact on the platform than on the PC. The final nail in the Amiga's coffin, of course, was the arrival of 3D: the Amiga couldn't play Doom (at that time), and so it quickly became the inferior gaming machine.

toyg 7y ago
Most PCs couldn’t play Doom either, but they could be extended pretty cheaply with a better graphics card. That is what made the difference on the gaming side. The Amiga was kneecapped by mismanagement of its commercial side, including substantial opposition to third-party add-ons at a time when the PC side had standardized and unleashed the taiwanese. In the pro market, Commodore didn’t even know how to play - they treated their machines like toys. Despite this, for a period, if you wanted to make music you bought Atari, if you wanted to do publishing you bought Apple, but if you wanted to do TV and FX you bought Amiga. Piracy was really, really not a factor at all.
- T-hawk 7y ago
  That first part isn't right. Doom was entirely CPU-bound software rendering, and 3d rendering cards didn't exist yet. You couldn't upgrade a 386 or 486 PC to play Doom better, short of replacing the entire motherboard with a new CPU platform. What you're saying was fairly true by the time of QuakeGL and Quake 2 around 1997, but not Doom in 1993.
  - toyg 7y ago
    You could still add ram and better HDs, which would have helped. It was much more difficult and expensive to do that with the Amiga.
    - rasz 7y ago
      No amount of VGA, ram or HD upgrade would help with Doom. The difference between absolutely the worst 8bit ISA VGA cards (Realtek, RTG) and one of the fastest 16bit ones (ET4000) was 1-2fps on 386DX40, a whooping 10-30% of overall unplayable unless you are really stubborn <10fps performance. The way you made Doom playable was swapping motherboard/cpu/ram/vga for a 40-66MHz 486/localbus ones at a cost of multiple A1200s, not exactly what one would call 'extended pretty cheaply'.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > You couldn't upgrade a 386 or 486 PC to play Doom better, short of replacing the entire motherboard with a new CPU platform. Yes, you could; CPU+chipset (and, in some cases, + RAM, IIRC) processor upgrades which plugged into an expansion card (to power some of the support hardware) and the processor socket existed.

toyg 7y ago

Most PCs couldn’t play Doom either, but they could be extended pretty cheaply with a better graphics card. That is what made the difference on the gaming side. The Amiga was kneecapped by mismanagement of its commercial side, including substantial opposition to third-party add-ons at a time when the PC side had standardized and unleashed the taiwanese. In the pro market, Commodore didn’t even know how to play - they treated their machines like toys. Despite this, for a period, if you wanted to make music you bought Atari, if you wanted to do publishing you bought Apple, but if you wanted to do TV and FX you bought Amiga. Piracy was really, really not a factor at all.

T-hawk 7y ago
That first part isn't right. Doom was entirely CPU-bound software rendering, and 3d rendering cards didn't exist yet. You couldn't upgrade a 386 or 486 PC to play Doom better, short of replacing the entire motherboard with a new CPU platform. What you're saying was fairly true by the time of QuakeGL and Quake 2 around 1997, but not Doom in 1993.
- toyg 7y ago
  You could still add ram and better HDs, which would have helped. It was much more difficult and expensive to do that with the Amiga.
  - rasz 7y ago
    No amount of VGA, ram or HD upgrade would help with Doom. The difference between absolutely the worst 8bit ISA VGA cards (Realtek, RTG) and one of the fastest 16bit ones (ET4000) was 1-2fps on 386DX40, a whooping 10-30% of overall unplayable unless you are really stubborn <10fps performance. The way you made Doom playable was swapping motherboard/cpu/ram/vga for a 40-66MHz 486/localbus ones at a cost of multiple A1200s, not exactly what one would call 'extended pretty cheaply'.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > You couldn't upgrade a 386 or 486 PC to play Doom better, short of replacing the entire motherboard with a new CPU platform. Yes, you could; CPU+chipset (and, in some cases, + RAM, IIRC) processor upgrades which plugged into an expansion card (to power some of the support hardware) and the processor socket existed.