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Although I used to be a huge Amiga fan, I think that Amigas of the time lagged behind other systems for gaming. PC's having chunky display formats (as opposed t

Although I used to be a huge Amiga fan, I think that Amigas of the time lagged behind other systems for gaming. PC's having chunky display formats (as opposed to plainer (planer?) on the Amiga) meant that PC's could do far more 3D graphics than a equivalently powered Amiga, and Amigas were often underpowered anyway. The Amiga kicked ass at 2D games, but could not hack it in 3D. At the end of the day, had the Amiga been a viable business, $10M in patent fines would not have killed them off.

brudgers 16y ago
In 1988 there was nothing like Calagari on the PC side for 3d graphics - at least not at an accessible price running on accessible hardware (1meg A500/M68000) from floppy disk - e.g. Autdesk's AutoShade was $1000 without a modeler and views could not be updated interactively as they could with Calagari. In other words, Autoshade was in the same price range as the entire Calagari system (sans monitor) and required several thousand dollars in additional software resources. Considering the the cost of the 80287 math coprocessors required by the modeler (ACAD) and the costs of VGA adapters in 1987, the cost of doing 3D graphics on a PC was substantially more than the Amiga.
- al_james 16y ago
  Sorry, I was talking more about 3D games, in particular those that became popular around the time Doom came out (1993) which is the same year the CD32 was released. The Amiga was great for 3D production graphics. Software such as Lightwave and Imagine 3D punched way above its weight (and cost) for a while.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
psykotic 16y ago
> plainer (planer?) Planar. Bitplaned graphics was definitely an impediment to efficient rasterization. But when you look at what demo sceners have done with 3D on the Amiga, it's hard to argue that was its main downfall. What killed the Amiga was stagnation in both technology and marketing. It also never had much of a foothold as a non-gaming machine in the home. The IBM-compatible PC was the focus of innovation from many different companies. It wasn't a one-vendor platform like the Amiga. That is the ultimate cause of its demise. If the fate of the PC had stayed tied to IBM, it would have suffered the same end. Apple had a similar problem with the Macintosh in the 1990s and it almost killed them. If Apple's stewardship ever wavers, that is sure to happen again. It will take a lot more before it can become an immortal (undead?) platform like the PC.
- al_james 16y ago
  > Planar Thanks.
eftpotrm 16y ago
The planar mode graphics had been a benefit in the more memory restricted days before; it was starting to become a problem but still, at that point Amigas tended to play the games of the day better than PCs costing 3x as much until Doom pushed 3D to the forefront. There were enough 3D games on Amigas, but Doom was a level beyond them for a while. Still, I did enjoy Acid Software's Gloom which wasn't that far behind. As a hardware platform, it was more closely tied to the individual chips but that was rapidly fading, with OS abstraction APIs for sound and graphics coming in around then. As a software platform, while it lacked MMU-dependent features, in other ways it had major benefits. Small, fast, pretty tidy, modular, customisable. Quite frankly I'd still like something to replace the Amiga's Datatypes concept, 20 years later. A sad loss to computing. To this day I'm baffled how Commodore managed to lose the not-PC slot to Apple in spite of having cheaper harder with more features and a vastly more capable operating system. I've said before here; if Commodore had done their job properly, we'd be saying Steve Who?
- psykotic 16y ago
  I loved the C64 and the Amiga. They were my first and second computer. But it's painfully clear in retrospect that Commodore never stood a chance. Jack Tramiel ran the show like a cigar-puffing industrialist straight out of a Dickens novel. There was none of Gates's vision of computing or Jobs's sense of quality from the top of the company. The Amiga line was developed almost entirely outside Commodore and then bought up and brought in house.
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    I wouldn't blame Tramiel for Commodore's demise either. The Amiga was a very fine platform and Tramiel is also behind the ST line (called, at that time, "Jackintosh") after departing to Atari. The ST line was truer to the Commodore of the VIC and 64 era in that it was simple (much simpler than the Amiga), powerful (somewhat less than the Amiga) and inexpensive. At that time, nobody was predicting the collapse of the PC market around the IBM PCs (which were much more expensive than the home computers of the mid-to-late 80's and much clunkier).
- jerf 16y ago
kenjackson 16y ago
Realistically the Amiga and CD32 were dead by the time 3D PC gaming came out (although it was still my main machine at the time, but I knew I was on a dead platform).
neild 16y ago
The Amiga kicked ass at 2D games, but could not hack it in 3D. The Amiga was effectively dead before 3D games became notable.

brudgers 16y ago

In 1988 there was nothing like Calagari on the PC side for 3d graphics - at least not at an accessible price running on accessible hardware (1meg A500/M68000) from floppy disk - e.g. Autdesk's AutoShade was $1000 without a modeler and views could not be updated interactively as they could with Calagari. In other words, Autoshade was in the same price range as the entire Calagari system (sans monitor) and required several thousand dollars in additional software resources. Considering the the cost of the 80287 math coprocessors required by the modeler (ACAD) and the costs of VGA adapters in 1987, the cost of doing 3D graphics on a PC was substantially more than the Amiga.

al_james 16y ago
Sorry, I was talking more about 3D games, in particular those that became popular around the time Doom came out (1993) which is the same year the CD32 was released. The Amiga was great for 3D production graphics. Software such as Lightwave and Imagine 3D punched way above its weight (and cost) for a while.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]

psykotic 16y ago

> plainer (planer?) Planar. Bitplaned graphics was definitely an impediment to efficient rasterization. But when you look at what demo sceners have done with 3D on the Amiga, it's hard to argue that was its main downfall. What killed the Amiga was stagnation in both technology and marketing. It also never had much of a foothold as a non-gaming machine in the home. The IBM-compatible PC was the focus of innovation from many different companies. It wasn't a one-vendor platform like the Amiga. That is the ultimate cause of its demise. If the fate of the PC had stayed tied to IBM, it would have suffered the same end. Apple had a similar problem with the Macintosh in the 1990s and it almost killed them. If Apple's stewardship ever wavers, that is sure to happen again. It will take a lot more before it can become an immortal (undead?) platform like the PC.

al_james 16y ago
> Planar Thanks.

eftpotrm 16y ago

The planar mode graphics had been a benefit in the more memory restricted days before; it was starting to become a problem but still, at that point Amigas tended to play the games of the day better than PCs costing 3x as much until Doom pushed 3D to the forefront. There were enough 3D games on Amigas, but Doom was a level beyond them for a while. Still, I did enjoy Acid Software's Gloom which wasn't that far behind. As a hardware platform, it was more closely tied to the individual chips but that was rapidly fading, with OS abstraction APIs for sound and graphics coming in around then. As a software platform, while it lacked MMU-dependent features, in other ways it had major benefits. Small, fast, pretty tidy, modular, customisable. Quite frankly I'd still like something to replace the Amiga's Datatypes concept, 20 years later. A sad loss to computing. To this day I'm baffled how Commodore managed to lose the not-PC slot to Apple in spite of having cheaper harder with more features and a vastly more capable operating system. I've said before here; if Commodore had done their job properly, we'd be saying Steve Who?

psykotic 16y ago
I loved the C64 and the Amiga. They were my first and second computer. But it's painfully clear in retrospect that Commodore never stood a chance. Jack Tramiel ran the show like a cigar-puffing industrialist straight out of a Dickens novel. There was none of Gates's vision of computing or Jobs's sense of quality from the top of the company. The Amiga line was developed almost entirely outside Commodore and then bought up and brought in house.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  I wouldn't blame Tramiel for Commodore's demise either. The Amiga was a very fine platform and Tramiel is also behind the ST line (called, at that time, "Jackintosh") after departing to Atari. The ST line was truer to the Commodore of the VIC and 64 era in that it was simple (much simpler than the Amiga), powerful (somewhat less than the Amiga) and inexpensive. At that time, nobody was predicting the collapse of the PC market around the IBM PCs (which were much more expensive than the home computers of the mid-to-late 80's and much clunkier).
jerf 16y ago

kenjackson 16y ago

Realistically the Amiga and CD32 were dead by the time 3D PC gaming came out (although it was still my main machine at the time, but I knew I was on a dead platform).

neild 16y ago

The Amiga kicked ass at 2D games, but could not hack it in 3D. The Amiga was effectively dead before 3D games became notable.