59 ms·

How Doom didn't kill the Amiga

177 points by zdw 3y ago

LeoPanthera 3y ago
When Workbench 1.2 released in the early days of the Amiga 500, there was an obscure sequence of keypresses you could do in order to bring up an easter egg containing the names of the developers, and finally the line, referring to Commodore: "We made Amiga, They fucked it up" This was the truth.
- ptek 3y ago
  Yep, I saw the text when using Raw Copy 1.3 and it had a hex dump of the Amiga Memory and you could scroll through the ROM area. They got in a trouble with that and it was removed from future releases.
- timbit42 3y ago
  As someone who successively owned an Amiga 500, 2000HD and 3000T from the late 80's to the mid-90's, and saw that message, I never understood what they meant by it at the time Workbench 1.2 came out in 1988. Perhaps they were referring to Commodore's strange advertising of the Amiga? The high price? In retrospect, the fact Commodore went bankrupt was a major fuck up, but that hadn't happened yet when Workbench 1.2 came out.
hota_mazi 3y ago
It kinda did, though. The Amiga with its revolutionary coprocessors (Denise, Agnus, Paula) was a game changer. However, id Software taught the world that the important part of the software revolution was not in these coprocessors but in fast 3D code. And the Amiga architecture was simply not ready to face that challenge. Now to be fair, I don't think DOOM killed the Amiga, but I am reasonably confident Windows 95 did.
- karlgkk 3y ago
  How revolutionary can something be if its impact is relatively limited, it was released for a style of game that was being supplanted by 3d, and all of its major titles were rereleased within years for commodity x86 hardware (due to the rapid advancements in cpu technology)? The Amiga, as a general purpose computer, was a bright vision in a world that was already leaving it behind.
  - tadfisher 3y ago
    The Amiga shipped in 1985, a year after the black & white Macintosh. The world took the better part of a decade catching up to it.
    - technothrasher 3y ago
      Eh. When I saw the Macintosh II demoed in 1987 compared to my Amiga 2000 which was released at basically the same time, I already knew the Amiga was screwed.
      - ekianjo 3y ago
        the mac 2 was like ten times the price of the Amiga.
      - tdeck 3y ago
        Looking at the UIs for early Macintosh vs. Amiga Workbench it feels like Amiga didn't put much thought into aesthetics. Just look at the color scheme they chose for the desktop UI: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/amigaos10 https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/amigaos10 It seems they had at least 64 colors to choose from and they went with... Orange and white on blue? They also decided icons should be able to be arbitrary sizes for some reason, a feature I haven't seen in other GUIs. Here's workbench 2.0, which is better but still pretty unappealing. https://theamigamuseum.com/amiga-kickstart-workbench-os/workbench/workbench-2-0/ https://theamigamuseum.com/amiga-kickstart-workbench-os/work... Scrolling through I thought "wait, that one doesn't look too bad" and then realized I was looking at a screenshot from Windows.
        zozbot234 3y ago
        That color scheme was allegedly picked for visibility on very low-end TV sets. (The Amiga palette colors could be chosen arbitrarily from 4-bits per channel RGB, so that wasn't a constraint.) (The icons weren't just arbitrary sized, they could have different pictures for the selected and unselected state. You see this with the open vs. closed drawer icons (drawers are like "folders" in other OS's) but many app icons also used this effect.)
- tadfisher 3y ago
  If anything, id proved to the world that Intel killed and buried the 68000. But Commodore was in its death throes anyway, so I didn't think there's much of a lesson to learn here.
  - KerrAvon 3y ago
    Nope. Marathon was higher resolution than Doom and it ran on 68020 Macs. Nothing to do with processor architecture.
    - Zardoz84 3y ago
      There is an actual Doom clone game that runs in a A1200 and has equal or better graphics than the original Doom. And, I say game. Not a demo.
      - badpun 3y ago
        What's it called?
        logicprog 3y ago
        I think they probably mean Dread? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UE4nOYc0RkA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UE4nOYc0RkA
        badpun 3y ago
        This looks like a much worse Wolfenstein clone... No 3D as far as I see (all rooms are of the same height, the map is just a 2d maze), no textures on floors on ceilings. Not to mention much lower resolution than wolf3d - the graphics are barely legible.
        tialaramex 3y ago
        Wolf3D is just (a 3D view onto) a simple grid shape. So this is doing a bunch of stuff Wolf3D can't do. The linked video talks about (but does not demonstrate) full variable heights which would be even closer to Doom, but this is already able to provide a sense of space and visual variety absent from Wolf3D.
- hakfoo 3y ago
  Isn't this the classic Wheel-of-Reincarnation cycle? The Amiga's dedicated coprocessors let it do things an IBM AT or Mac 512k couldn't do easily. But the AT evolved into the 386 and 486, and suddenly you no longer needed coprocessors to do the heavy lifting. So you end up with two issues: 1. Did the Amiga market keep pace CPU-wise? I can see the 3000 and 4000 shipped with better CPUs, but how much was the software ecosystem defined by the 500/600/1200? I wonder if this created a tarpit for developers: the Amiga might have been able to do the same tricks as a faster PC, but the development effort was much higher than just recompiling brute-force x86 code to 68000. 2. Where were the custom coprocessors going? The original Amiga chipset was good, and I'm sure the ECS/AGA stuff was even better, but it seems like it was close to "at par" to a PC with a SoundBlaster and a basic Super-VGA chipset by the early 1990s. What could they use to create a new defensible territory? I could imagine a 3-D coprocessor, but designing something that both impressed today and didn't immediately obsolesce is hard-- see the corpses of a dozen early accelerator vendors.
  - icedchai 3y ago
    The Amiga stagnated for years. The custom chips barely changed from 1985 until late 1992. ECS barely added anything over OCS (it had a couple new video modes nobody used.) As I mentioned in another thread, AGA was too little, too late. By the time AGA was out, 386 systems with SVGA and SoundBlasters were cheap and plentiful.
    - ekianjo 3y ago
      Hardware designers had a better version than AGA in the works but Commodore scrapped it and instead went for the minor upgrade than AGA was
    - flomo 3y ago
      I remember someone saying "There was no market for 'Amiga games', there was a market for Amiga 500 games." If you look at it that way, it had a nice long run as a game machine, while failing in most other segments.
      - 3y ago
- throwaway09223 3y ago
  The Amiga was dead a few years before Win95. The VGA chipset and the soundblaster killed the Amiga. In the late 1980s I wanted an Amiga so badly. But by the early 90s I had a 486 with VGA and a sb16 and it was all over. The Amiga had a mere fraction of the PC's power by then.
  - Keyframe 3y ago
    Indeed. Commodore killed itself and Amiga, and breakneck speed of PC advancement didn't help. Doom was just a side effect of it all. It left a trauma on Amiga community though, you can still see the community mentioning Doom to this day (see, it can run Doom?). Doom-envy is omnipresent to this day. There was another, rarely mentioned, which is nintendo-envy. NES and then SNES in particular had killer games where Amiga never came through in such capacity (platformers, it shined in other genres). Amiga was poor man's SGI at the time. It was great, fun, relatively cheap for what it offered. It could've been so much more if Commodore had a sense of direction and focus. Alas, here we are lamenting decades after on its fate. Cachet it left is still strong. I recently (over few years back) tried to get ahold of Amiga again. I just wanted one endgame A1200.. now I have three A1200 - one with Blizzard 1230/030+fpu which is the best general purpose IMO, one with Blizzard 1260/060rev6 for demos (not that great compatibility for general purpose), and one with TF1260/060rev6.. and then two A600 (one stock, one with Furia030) and A500+, indivision addins etc., and a whole bunch of Commodore 1084s monitors. It was supposed to be only one A1200, damnit. Take it as a warning from a friend if you want to get one, they multiply fast.
  - megablast 3y ago
    Sure, but at a fraction of the price too. $500 compares to $2,000 at least.
    - throwaway09223 3y ago
      Nah. The Amiga 1200 debuted in 1992 for $600. 2MB RAM and a 14Mhz 68020. No monitor. In 1992 you could get a 486dx 33MHz with 4MB for like $800 (a two year old chip) with similar peripherals. Way more than double the power for a marginal increase in cost. The Pentium arrived a year later in 1993 and by 1994 we had the 486dx4/100MHz and Pentium/586 at similar clock speeds. This is around when doom arrived and Amiga was long since toast.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jhbadger 3y ago
  Windows 95 also came close to killing the Mac. Before then the difference between Windows and MacOS was so striking that it was obvious that anyone who really wanted a GUI interface would go for a Mac. But then the advantage became much less strong. If Jobs hadn't come back and brought NextStep, which becane OSX, I think the Mac would have gone the way of the Amiga.
  - jandrese 3y ago
    It is also notable that the Mac was stagnating just like the Amiga around that time. The successor to OS 9 was delayed for years and years before being cancelled. The hardware was getting more expensive but with only small incremental improvements in speed or capacity. The Centris and early Performa lines were just so mediocre. The 68k architecture was stalling out just as Intel was blowing everyone's doors off with x86. Jobs made a bad bet with PPC, but it was still way better than 68k and gave them enough breathing room to keep up with PCs for a bit.
    - DerekL 3y ago
      Apple switched to PowerPC a few years before the NeXT acquisition and Steve Jobs' return.
      - jprival 3y ago
        Yeah the Power Macintosh line, as the name suggests, introduced PowerPC in 1994. There were Performa versions of those as well. Jobs’ return as CEO roughly coincided with the beginning of the G3 era (calling them that instead of PowerPC 740 is already pretty Jobs-ian).
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      Your history is way off. The PPC line came out in 1994 and was talked about as early as 1993. This wasn’t a rumor. This was Apple’s announce pipeline. Jobs came back in 1997 and stayed with the PPC line until 2005. By then Apple was far from “beleaguered” thanks to the iMac, PowerBooks and iPod
    - 3y ago
- jboy55 3y ago
  I really think that the Amiga 3000 killed the Amiga. When it was released, instead of move another decade ahead graphics wise, it was 3-4 years behind. 640x512x16colors?!? The 3000 needed to be released with AGA, on a card. Comparisons. In October 1990. For $3999, you had the Amiga 3000 with 640x512x16colors. It did have a '030 25Mhz, 40mb Hard drive and 2mb. Monitor was extra. For $3860, you could get a 386/33, 4mb, 512k SVGA (800x600 8bit), 160MB Hard drive AND you got the 14" Monitor.
  - timbit42 3y ago
    It wasn't the Amiga 3000 that killed the Amiga. It was the fact that the Amiga 3000 didn't have AGA or AAA that killed the Amiga. Technically, it was the CD32 that killed Commodore but it was only the straw that broke the camel's back.
    - snvzz 3y ago
      ... or a DSP. The developers were forbidden by non-technical management to use the DSP-enabled boards they already had. Likewise, entire already designed chipsets like Ranger were discarded just like that, on management whims.
- Lio 3y ago
  Nah, I still think the author has it right. The combination of cheaper, faster processors and a market that wanted to constantly upgrade is what killed the Amiga. As mentioned by an earlier commentor, who your market was really counted back then. Businesses have upgrade cycles every 3 years as they right off liabilities. That subsidises the next generation of improvements. Even if Commodore had access a single generation capable of fast 3D code it wouldn't have saved them. For example, the Acorn Archimedes had access to much better processors[1] and a chunky 256 colour mode at launch in '87. That still didn't save Acorn[1] because they lacked those business upgrade cycles sales. I don't think an '87 Archimedes had enough umph to run Doom back then but it could have run something Doom like that the Amiga A500 couldn't if really pushed. It still wouldn't have interested the business users that really made the PC successful and by '93 Intel would still have been ahead. 1. 12Mhz 32 bit ARM2 was at least 7x faster than an 8MHz 68000 in 1987 and twice as fast as a 16MHz 386 using Drystone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture_family#ARM2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture_family#ARM2 2. Although thankfully Arm did pretty well all things considered.
  - alexisread 3y ago
    I couldn't resist :) this video is doom 2, 12mhz arm but running on a vga monitor (crt is faster), so I'm guessing the frame rate would be about this or a little faster on an 8mhz arm. https://youtu.be/jXo6BtmuZkc https://youtu.be/jXo6BtmuZkc An a3000 running Dread (https://youtu.be/vj-GVCcd4yo?si=X_R_f0TEnPHqOvVv https://youtu.be/vj-GVCcd4yo?si=X_R_f0TEnPHqOvVv) would be quite something! What I'd love to see would be an Atari ST + T212 combo running doom (my electronics skills are not that good). Also take a look at quake on the gba - 16mhz arm with cache. https://youtu.be/R43k-p9XdIk?si=yDycN7I3I4NWvEgU https://youtu.be/R43k-p9XdIk?si=yDycN7I3I4NWvEgU
  - rasz 3y ago
    Living in central Europe I didnt even know at the time a company named Acorn existed despite reading tons of computer literature. Acorn had no retail/dealer network, no marketing and zero presence outside Commonwealth (UK and I think Australia), or even narrower outside UK/AU educational market buying Acorns due to BBC Micro Computer Literacy Project program inertia. Acorn was run so bad they didnt even have money to pay BBC for this absolutely fantastic and cheap marketing! Part of the reason for sale to Olivetti was to gain retail channels and pay back BBC royalties. In the end BBC was forced to write off last couple payments.
shon 3y ago
No, Doom didn’t kill the Amiga. Wing Commander did.
- miffe 3y ago
  Second Reality certainly put the nail in the coffin. https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=63 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=63
- richardjdare 3y ago
  Yeah, I distinctly remember the exact issue of the magazine that previewed it. ACE Magazine issue 35, August 1990 [1]. It featured Wing Commander and several of the upcoming new VGA graphic adventures with scanned, painted artwork and quality art direction. It was like a new door had opened up to new experiences. However I didn't get a PC until 1996 as they were so expensive. I grew up in rural working class England, and there were a whole bunch of us kids who got into computers and programming thanks to cheap home computers. Suddenly we couldn't afford to participate anymore, it was a really hard time to be a nerd. [1] https://archive.org/details/ace-magazine-35 https://archive.org/details/ace-magazine-35
scheeseman486 3y ago
By 1994 you could get a clone 486 for cheap that could run Doom just fine and the games market rapidly shifted to developing for PC first. The hype for Windows 95 was spinning up, RAM prices were dropping and Pentiums were becoming more affordable. Once Doom released, there was little reason to get an Amiga for games, it's not unfair to say it killed it. Amiga maybe had a couple final years of relevance as a super budget workstation in 1993/94, but Doom was developed on fancy NeXT workstations. Then id's follow-up, one of the most technically cutting edge games of it's generation, was developed on Windows 95. That kinda says it all about the PC's rapid ascent during the 90s.
- epcoa 3y ago
  > Then id's follow-up, one of the most technically cutting edge games of its generation, was developed on Windows 95. If you’re implying Quake was developed on Windows 95, that’s false. Windows 95 and early DirectX sucked and was only released a few months before Quake. DOS remained the dominant target for years. The original QuakeEd is written in objective C because ID was using NeXTcubes for workstations. They also used some DEC Alphas for level compilation. WinQuake didn’t come out until nearly a year after initial release. You could launch Quake from Windows 95 but that’s neither here nor there. https://www.gamers.org/dEngine/quake/QuakeEd/source.html https://www.gamers.org/dEngine/quake/QuakeEd/source.html
  - scheeseman486 3y ago
    You're right, I was a game early. They largely switched to Windows during Quake 2's development, NT instead of 95. DOS remained the primary target through 1995-96 but by 97 the bottom fell out and by 98, everything was releasing on Windows.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - epcoa 3y ago
      As NeXTStep became obsolete SGI IRIX was considered for a successor but Carmack was not a fan and moved on to NT as you state (also calling early on that commercial Unix was fucked).
andrewstuart 3y ago
The most interesting thing is how hard the true believers find it to let go of the past. I bought one of the first Amigas - I own 2 Amiga 1000's and several others. But for me they are nothing but items in a curiosity cabinet. Other people seem to deeply engage emotionally with some sort of alternate fictional future in which technology X or technology Y was recognised for its true destiny and never defeated by IBM/Microsoft whoever. Computing moved on an other systems became much better. Don't waste your life living in the past. Just drop that dead technology and move on and stop investing yourself in a fantasy world.
- zozbot234 3y ago
  It's not a fantasy, the Amiga was a real platform. It was also one of the last systems that could be just about simple enough to be comprehensively documented and understood, making for a kind of openness-focused DevX that's quite unparalleled even to this day. For that matter, there's plenty of "dead" technology out there that still retains quite a bit of educational value if nothing else.
- bruce511 3y ago
  I'm no psychologist, but itcseems yo be a very common theme in the human condition. First we find a "tribe", maybe it's a sports team, or a computer, or a political party, or a brand of beer. Anything that lets me bond with my peers and lets us be "me and mine", versus "you and yours". The longer I'm in this group, the more the cycle feeds back, the harder it is to break out. At some point it's no longer about the common factor. it's about belonging to the tribe. Maybe we got together when say Mercedes was the pinicle of cars. I become a "Mercedes driver". I join a Mercedes club, we do fun runs on Sunday, they're my tribe. Even if (and I'm not saying it is) Mercedes turns into junk, our tribe is still our tribe. Not wanting to pick a side, but you see this in politics now. For lots of people now it doesn't matter who is running, or what the policies are, it only matters what tribe I'm in. And my tribe is better, the other tribe is rubbish. Those in neither tribe can't understand, because to them both tribes are terrible (perhaps in different ways.) In the 80s and 90s, the computer platform you chose -was- your identity. Switching from one to another was hard, and socially suicidal. Ideally the switch was done -for- you, not -by- you. My dad's office changed from Apple 2 to PC. Since I couldn't buy my own PC, I got what they got. But if I had invested my had earned cash in say Apple, it would have been a next to impossible option to just scrap that investment and start over. Amiga was once way out on top of the pile. By -all- metrics. They were the tribe on top. But it's hard to fall from there and not need to blame someone, or something. It's not the product that failed. It's the people.
dissent 3y ago
I realised the Amiga had had its day when I played Dune 2 on the PC. It was a great game on the Amiga releasing to rave reviews. But the PC version on a 486 with a soundblaster absolutely sang. It made the Amiga look an entire generation behind. The Amiga version ran very slowly in realtime and in FPS, had a fraction of the digitised sounds, essentially no music, and for most people it involved swapping floppies to save your game. Experiencing the PC version made the Amiga version unplayable. So I told my Amiga-loving friend at high school the the PC version was far better. He was deeply offended of course, but got his first PC less than a year later.
- megablast 3y ago
  Sure, but the amiga was $500, and the PC equivalent was around $2,000 right?
  - dissent 3y ago
    It was more where I lived, but you are right a good PC was probably 2-3 times more expensive. But it wasn't possible to get that gaming experience on the Amiga at any price. This was a year or two before Doom.
  - bruce511 3y ago
    Sure, but it's worth pointing out that it's market that matters, not price. PCs were aimed at business. They were a cost-saver. You could iterate fast because businesses have cash, and are eolljng to spend it. Show them that spending on PC saves money, and you can ship fast enough. The churn was insane, but it didn't matter. (And I was fortunately on the receiving end of discarded hardware.) I understood this point when I inherited a "broken" dot matrix printer. I took the head apart cleaned it all up, put it together and it worked. But j already had a printer, so i offered to return it. I wad told "no thanks, the person now has an inkjet, they don't want rhe for matrix back. Being "broken" was an excuse to get an upgrade. Turns out the home market didn't want a new one each year. They didn't want new generations of hardware and software every 5 minutes. Amigas (and Apple 2s) were sold only slightly improved for almost a decade after first release. PCs won because its easier to sell to business than the home. It wasn't Doom that killed Amiga it was Lotus 123.
KingOfCoders 3y ago
Had an Amiga 500 and later a 4000/040retina and for me Doon did it. I exactly know when: Amiga show in Cologne, Commodore didn't present anything new at a time when everyone jumped to PC.
- timbit42 3y ago
  That's what happens when your R&D gets cut years before. Eventually you have nothing new.
zubairq 3y ago
I would say that the PC won over the Amiga as it had a huge library of old CPM business and productivity software that was easily ported to it. See Joel Spolky’s post on chicken and egg problems: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/24/strategy-letter-ii-chicken-and-egg-problems/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/24/strategy-letter-ii...
beautron 3y ago
I grew up with a C64, which I loved. But my Dad would tell me stories about the Amiga, and we'd go look at one in the neighborhood computer store (Software Etc.—loved that place!). The store clerk was more than happy to show off the machine to us. And we'd dream about how someday we'd get one. But by the time that day came, the writing was on the wall, and we bought an IBM 486 25mhz from Sears. I feel like we dodged a bullet. But, at the same time, I get a sort of warm, fuzzy nostalgia every time the Amiga comes up. It was my future dream computer. I love reading articles like this. It's a window into a path I was almost on. And I really loved my C64. It's sad somehow that the PC won... In the mid 80s, the PC was so uninspiring compared to the other home systems, at least to a kid who liked colorful games and wild sounds.
- thanatos519 3y ago
  I started with the original IBM PC 5150 at home when schools were full of C=64s. That experience set me up for life but I still want to get my kid a real C=64.
- squarefoot 3y ago
  You missed a lot. When I think of what happened to the Amiga because of their incompetent management I get angry, however if the journey is the reward, then it paid a lot just by letting me become part of that era. Amiga has been the true "think different" many years before someone else would make it their motto, and I'm thankful I could own some of those machines, with all their shortcomings; they cost me the equivalent of many thousand $$$, and became essentially door stoppers when I sold off them a few years later, but their real value was letting me live a wonderful experience that I could never regret.
  - lttlrck 3y ago
    I had an Atari 520ST in about 1998 and was always envious of friend's Amigas. In 1992 I switched to an A600, the Amiga was waning and I knew it but I loved owning it for that short period. I am glad I was a part of the community as much as I enjoyed playing the games and applications. In retrospect instead of switching to PC next, I wish I had switched to an Acorn RISC PC.
pjmlp 3y ago
Defender of the Crown was my first PC game, played at the high school computer club, on a PC 1512. Those "beautiful" CGA graphics were nothing like that Amiga experience. https://youtu.be/sb_H9Nn7Z1o?si=TCsFDEh9HbLwafxG https://youtu.be/sb_H9Nn7Z1o?si=TCsFDEh9HbLwafxG
l33tman 3y ago
I sold my 6 months old Amiga 4000 when I realized the PC VGA cards coming out around then were cheap, had 1024x768 resolution, blazing DOS pixel writes and nothing of value had happened with the Amiga chipset from 1985 to 1992.. Remember TSENG LABS? :) I also think I saw Ultima Underworld or some of the variants on PC before this, rendering full free-view 3D in a sub-window at least. Was really blown away by that, this was before Doom came out.
- timbit42 3y ago
  You don't remember AGA? It could do those resolutions and all versions of the Amiga chipsets had blazing pixel writes. The article even mentions this. You obviously didn't read the article and weren't in the Amiga community.
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    AGA was much too little, too late. The premier AGA model, the A1200, even shipped without even a sliver of FASTRAM, making all programs compete for cycles with the graphics chipset. An Amiga games with even, say, 64 kbytes of FASTRAM could have put compute code in there at twice the speed and even made use of the (rudimentary) instruction cache of the 68020. The A1200 was welcome and I loved it but it was a half-assed attempt and it showed.
    - timbit42 3y ago
      Which model wasn't the premier AGA model? The A4000? The A500 didn't have any fast RAM either. In fact, when you added the A501 RAM, that was slow RAM. So it doesn't surprise me the A1200 was the same.
      - actionfromafar 3y ago
        It's not surprising, but very sad. For very little cost they could have doubled the CPU speed of the 1200. For the A500 it made more sense to not have fast RAM, because the CPU itself was kind of slow. But the 68020 was noticeably slowed down by slow RAM wait states. Either the A1200 should have shipped with some (even miniscule) fast RAM, or AGA should have had higher bandwidth so the CPU wouldn't have had to wait for the RAM. A vanilla A1200 was an unbalanced machine. ...rant over. :-D Yeah, the A4000 is the "other" model. It's really neat, but alas it never sold in any numbers. It showed in that some AGA software I tried (demos? some game?) didn't work right on my A4000.
krystianantoni 3y ago
It was just a last nail to the coffin… I was there 30 years ago :)
pavlov 3y ago
> “PC games were perhaps not yet as colorful, zippy and funky as Amiga games” I recall the PC/VGA port of Xenon II Megablast being a revelation. That must have been 1990 or 1991. It was as fast and colorful and excitingly busy as the Amiga version, and it ran on commodity 386 hardware that was produced by multiple vendors on every level. There was massive competition for CPUs, graphics chips, sound cards, motherboards, and everything else pushing prices down. Meanwhile Commodore was going it alone with custom chipsets and pinching pennies. Any advantage they had left wasn’t going to last. Today Apple is of course massively successful with that vertical integration model, but the difference is that 1) Apple has had the right executive talent for 27 years, 2) they’re willing to invest at every level to make the vertical integration benefits actually compound into the product. In comparison Commodore was relatively broke and seemingly packed with loser MBAs.
- timbit42 3y ago
  Commodore had great engineers but terrible management. Jack Tramiel didn't even use computers until he got an iPad later in his life. Jack would have been just as successful if he had been selling bicycles. After Jack left, Irving Gould was in charge and along with his henchman, Medhi Ali. They purposefully destroyed Commodore. Irving was getting old and it seemed he cared more about having more, expensive paintings in his home when he died than keeping Commodore going by giving their R&D any money. Thomas Rattigan was the best COO (and potential future CEO) Commodore ever had, but Gould fired him before he could do too much good. Without him, the Amiga 500 and 2000 would not have happened and the Amiga 500 is what kept Commodore going as long as it did. Over half of Amigas sold were the 500 model. Jack's biggest mistake was getting into a position where he needed someone like Irving Gould to invest money to keep his company from going under. In retrospect, it would have been better for Jack to go bankrupt and start over than let Gould have control. If Commodore had survived until today, their hardware would be the same as PCs and Macs, but they would have their own OS and the custom Amiga chipset might be a contender in the GPU space today.
- livrem 3y ago
  I loved Xenon II, but the PC music was terrible. I solved that by recording the music from a friend's Amiga, looped on two sides of a cassette tape, so I could listen to it while playing the game. It was the only game I ever bothered doing that with, but I did have a few other cassettes full of music recorded from Amiga and C64 that I listened to a lot (in the years before I had a PC with good enough sound card to listen to MOD or SID files).
marinbala 3y ago
Loved the Amiga. Great machine. If the argument that Doom killed the platform is valid, it can only be true for gaming (which was a very large portion of home use). After a great headstart, Amiga fell behind in many other areas: business and productivity software, networking and collaboration, multimedia and realtime-3D graphics. And regarding gaming, let's not forget that the SNES and the Sega Megadrive/Genesis were going strong when the Amiga was fading away, and it took a while for them to get a version of Doom.
- mattl 3y ago
  Doom was released for Super NES during its lifespan but Doom eluded the Sega Genesis until a homebrew version fairly recently. Super Nintendo had the Super FX and FX 2 chips and even then Doom plays very poorly.
  - aquova 3y ago
    There was a 32x version of Doom though... which also ran poorly.
    - mattl 3y ago
      Makes sense. 32x added some capabilities similar to Super FX to the system. I read somewhere that the western release of the SNES could have had the Super FX chip on the motherboard but they chose to not do it for cost reasons. Not sure how much of that is true?
- amiga386 3y ago
  Amiga, Megadrive and SNES were fading at about the same time (1992-1993), and they all had relatively similar hardware and games. While technically, DOOM was published for the SNES (developed on an Amiga!), it required a SuperFX 2 chip and wasn't all that amazing, though it was playable. DOOM wasn't published for the Megadrive, but the Megadrive's bolt-on accelerator, the 32X. If you're going to allow accelerators and tiny resolution, DOOM and DOOM clones run on the Amiga too, in low resolution, with a cheap accelerator! They all run pretty terribly, and I'm not sure DOOM ever "sold" those consoles, although it may have "sold" the Atari Jaguar. However, DOOM worked very well in 1996/1997 when it was ported to the PlayStation and Nintendo 64, both consoles designed around 3D hardware, and I'd say that DOOM definitely "sold" those consoles - as did Ridge Racer and Mario 64...
daneel_w 3y ago
"Expanded or extended memory? Or maybe just conventional? Choose wisely, or you won't be able to fully maximize _the incredible potential of running a single program at a time._" xD Back then we really had a lot of good reasons to pity MS-DOS users.
iforgotpassword 3y ago
Great post. Was a little worried this is gonna be salty fanboy retrospective, but it wasn't. Great mix of anecdotes and memories from growing up with that machine, and at the same time realistic about why the platform failed and why you didn't want it to be true. > Spending that kind of money will get you a computer mostly useful for finding out why you don't want to run outdated ports of Linux software on an operating system without memory protection. That actually made me LOL.
livrem 3y ago
> Linux was nice for surfing the net, but it lacked all of the fun software I craved: games, demos (as in the demo scene), graphics programs, tracker music. Anecdotally it was bit of a negative feedback loop at the time, sadly, since just the people that would have been perfect to help make Linux thrive in those areas did not want to use Linux because it lacked those things.
- thih9 3y ago
  An instance of the chicken-and-egg problem. No community - people don’t join; people don’t join - no community.
freediver 3y ago
I went through the same experience as the author. What put the nail in the coffin of my 1200 cca 1995 was not Doom, but Comanche [1] The incredible 3D graphics were just too much and I caved in. PCs were getting faster while my 1200 could not keep up. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q--FbZZlUvM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q--FbZZlUvM
yoyoinbog 3y ago
[dead]
ZFH 3y ago
Those prices are not what I remember from back then, at least in Europe. Comparable 386 and 486 PCs cost way, way more than an Amiga 500 or later 1200 respectively. The filfre.net Digital Antiquarian articles on the Commodore/Amiga history are incredibly well researched, and paint a more comprehensive, nuanced version of the usual 'mismanaged to death' narrative. There is a very cogent insight that I first read there, that roughly goes as this: the Amiga architecture of a 2D oriented console-style custom chipset was badly suited for the gradual transition from coding to the bare metal to having an OS managing the hardware, accessed through APIs. Keeping up would've meant a complete reinvention of the platform and its ethos, with a much bigger push on OS development, not only the next hot chipset. Commodity, standardized hardware running Windows ultimately got good enough and won. And as someone else remarked, +1 on Wing Commander, and later the golden era Lucasarts adventures, being the actual beginning of the end.
- rasz 3y ago
  >Those prices are not what I remember from back the You most likely remember bare Amiga 500 price versus loaded brand name system. Here a comparison from 1994: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37851056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37851056 : >Commodore didnt bother to build fast ram memory controller into the thing. You couldnt just slap some simms or ram chips on a card, you needed additional logic. Cheapest contemporary Fast Ram cards were ~100 pounds + ~30 pounds a meg, half the cost of 270 pound Amiga A1200 in 1994. >A1200 bare system £276 https://archive.org/details/cuamiga-magazine-050/page/n28/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/cuamiga-magazine-050/page/n28/mo... >4-8MB fast ram £200-400 https://archive.org/details/cuamiga-magazine-050/page/n49/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/cuamiga-magazine-050/page/n49/mo... >340MB £380 pounds https://archive.org/details/cuamiga-magazine-050/page/n28/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/cuamiga-magazine-050/page/n28/mo... >14 multisync monitor ~£320 https://archive.org/details/cuamiga-magazine-050/page/n52/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/cuamiga-magazine-050/page/n52/mo... >~£1200-1400. 1994 £/$ exchange rate 1.55 = $1860-2170. >Now compare to 1994 PC https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/7235w0/the_specs_of_my_1800_dollar_pc_in_1994_amazing/ https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/7235w0/the_sp... >486dx2-66mhz, 256KB cache, 8MB, 1.44MB fdd, 350MB HDD, SVGA monitor/card, keyboard/mouse. $1840
DrNosferatu 3y ago
Looking back with 20/20 vision, I regret I didn’t get to enjoy the Amiga 500 during its sweet spot time: a bridge between 8bit cassette computers and a Doom-capable PC. - One specific point really peaks my interest: How widespread / readily available was (software or otherwise) Mac emulation on the Amiga 500, *before* Doom/Win95? A closely read subscription of Amiga Format would be enough to master the ins and outs of it (minus the Mac ROM image, obviously), or was something that really only became feasible and readily available after, say, Win95?
- dansalvato 3y ago
  I do some Amiga collecting, and I recently bought an Amiga 2000 that came with a ReadySoft A-Max, and even Mac networking hardware: https://amiga.resource.cx/exp/amax https://amiga.resource.cx/exp/amax This tells me there must have been decent interest in Mac emulation as early as 1989, when the A-Max released. And it didn't plug into the expansion slot, so it evidently would have worked fine on an A500. The A2000 primarily focused on PC compatibility, though. Commodore shipped "bridgeboards", which were x86 CPU cards that plugged into the A2000's expansion slot. Not only did this let you run DOS in a window on your Amiga, but it could virtualize hard disks and printers, and you could even expand it using the A2000's built-in ISA slots for that very purpose. Pretty dang cool, and maybe a good value proposition for offices mainly running DOS but wanted something better for desktop publishing or anything graphics/video-related.
dean2432 3y ago
well written article. can so relate to this. i also held onto amiga for a looong time myself. what was a bit paradoxical, as the author mentions, was the lack of backwards-compatibility after you had pimped your amiga with an accelerator-card, RTG graphics and a 16-bits soundcard ++. it had become more of a PC in a way, but it was still running amigaOS. system-friendly apps that ran in workbench worked fine for the most part, but stuff that did trickery with the original/AGA chipset and was coded on AmigaDOS1.x/68000 would not work (which was a lot of games and demos). at one point i had a separate A1200 for this. i miss my old workbench environment with CED, ProTracker, SnoopDos, amIRC, Directory Opus and more. it was fun times and i am grateful for being part of the ride.
Tourniquet 3y ago
I enjoyed this read. It mirrored my own experiences closely, growing up in the 80s/90s in the UK. My first home computer being the C64, then A500, and later an A1200 with 6MB RAM, HDD, squirrel SCSI with various optical media and a 1084ST (originally bought second hand, stuffed full of lowres porn...). I too chased the ultimate desktop - MagicWB, newicons, MUI (licensed!), heavily configured DOpus, various file format plugins, alt disk formats etc. 97 or so was when I had an old 386 handoff, and 98 when I first installed Linux. I triple booted into BeOS for a while. Coming back from Uni in '98-'02 and using the Amiga less and less, until I finally got rid of it after a trace on the keyboard burned out and the HDD gave up. I have continued to play with emus over the years, CAPS with the IPF for.at was an interesting project for someone who didn't care for 'cracktros' and respected the physical copy protections lf the day. Lately, AmigaVision running on FPGA 'emulation' is my choice. Don't chase the upgrades - the Amiga was a machine of it's eta - when hw tricks got you a long way, and it wasn't pure cpu cycles and blitting.

177 points by zdw 3y ago

When Workbench 1.2 released in the early days of the Amiga 500, there was an obscure sequence of keypresses you could do in order to bring up an easter egg containing the names of the developers, and finally the line, referring to Commodore: "We made Amiga, They fucked it up" This was the truth.

ptek 3y ago
Yep, I saw the text when using Raw Copy 1.3 and it had a hex dump of the Amiga Memory and you could scroll through the ROM area. They got in a trouble with that and it was removed from future releases.
timbit42 3y ago
As someone who successively owned an Amiga 500, 2000HD and 3000T from the late 80's to the mid-90's, and saw that message, I never understood what they meant by it at the time Workbench 1.2 came out in 1988. Perhaps they were referring to Commodore's strange advertising of the Amiga? The high price? In retrospect, the fact Commodore went bankrupt was a major fuck up, but that hadn't happened yet when Workbench 1.2 came out.

hota_mazi 3y ago

It kinda did, though. The Amiga with its revolutionary coprocessors (Denise, Agnus, Paula) was a game changer. However, id Software taught the world that the important part of the software revolution was not in these coprocessors but in fast 3D code. And the Amiga architecture was simply not ready to face that challenge. Now to be fair, I don't think DOOM killed the Amiga, but I am reasonably confident Windows 95 did.

karlgkk 3y ago
How revolutionary can something be if its impact is relatively limited, it was released for a style of game that was being supplanted by 3d, and all of its major titles were rereleased within years for commodity x86 hardware (due to the rapid advancements in cpu technology)? The Amiga, as a general purpose computer, was a bright vision in a world that was already leaving it behind.
- tadfisher 3y ago
  The Amiga shipped in 1985, a year after the black & white Macintosh. The world took the better part of a decade catching up to it.
  - technothrasher 3y ago
    Eh. When I saw the Macintosh II demoed in 1987 compared to my Amiga 2000 which was released at basically the same time, I already knew the Amiga was screwed.
    - ekianjo 3y ago
      the mac 2 was like ten times the price of the Amiga.
    - tdeck 3y ago
      Looking at the UIs for early Macintosh vs. Amiga Workbench it feels like Amiga didn't put much thought into aesthetics. Just look at the color scheme they chose for the desktop UI: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/amigaos10 https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/amigaos10 It seems they had at least 64 colors to choose from and they went with... Orange and white on blue? They also decided icons should be able to be arbitrary sizes for some reason, a feature I haven't seen in other GUIs. Here's workbench 2.0, which is better but still pretty unappealing. https://theamigamuseum.com/amiga-kickstart-workbench-os/workbench/workbench-2-0/ https://theamigamuseum.com/amiga-kickstart-workbench-os/work... Scrolling through I thought "wait, that one doesn't look too bad" and then realized I was looking at a screenshot from Windows.
      - zozbot234 3y ago
        That color scheme was allegedly picked for visibility on very low-end TV sets. (The Amiga palette colors could be chosen arbitrarily from 4-bits per channel RGB, so that wasn't a constraint.) (The icons weren't just arbitrary sized, they could have different pictures for the selected and unselected state. You see this with the open vs. closed drawer icons (drawers are like "folders" in other OS's) but many app icons also used this effect.)
tadfisher 3y ago
If anything, id proved to the world that Intel killed and buried the 68000. But Commodore was in its death throes anyway, so I didn't think there's much of a lesson to learn here.
- KerrAvon 3y ago
  Nope. Marathon was higher resolution than Doom and it ran on 68020 Macs. Nothing to do with processor architecture.
  - Zardoz84 3y ago
    There is an actual Doom clone game that runs in a A1200 and has equal or better graphics than the original Doom. And, I say game. Not a demo.
    - badpun 3y ago
      What's it called?
      - logicprog 3y ago
        I think they probably mean Dread? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UE4nOYc0RkA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UE4nOYc0RkA
        badpun 3y ago
        This looks like a much worse Wolfenstein clone... No 3D as far as I see (all rooms are of the same height, the map is just a 2d maze), no textures on floors on ceilings. Not to mention much lower resolution than wolf3d - the graphics are barely legible.
        tialaramex 3y ago
        Wolf3D is just (a 3D view onto) a simple grid shape. So this is doing a bunch of stuff Wolf3D can't do. The linked video talks about (but does not demonstrate) full variable heights which would be even closer to Doom, but this is already able to provide a sense of space and visual variety absent from Wolf3D.
hakfoo 3y ago
Isn't this the classic Wheel-of-Reincarnation cycle? The Amiga's dedicated coprocessors let it do things an IBM AT or Mac 512k couldn't do easily. But the AT evolved into the 386 and 486, and suddenly you no longer needed coprocessors to do the heavy lifting. So you end up with two issues: 1. Did the Amiga market keep pace CPU-wise? I can see the 3000 and 4000 shipped with better CPUs, but how much was the software ecosystem defined by the 500/600/1200? I wonder if this created a tarpit for developers: the Amiga might have been able to do the same tricks as a faster PC, but the development effort was much higher than just recompiling brute-force x86 code to 68000. 2. Where were the custom coprocessors going? The original Amiga chipset was good, and I'm sure the ECS/AGA stuff was even better, but it seems like it was close to "at par" to a PC with a SoundBlaster and a basic Super-VGA chipset by the early 1990s. What could they use to create a new defensible territory? I could imagine a 3-D coprocessor, but designing something that both impressed today and didn't immediately obsolesce is hard-- see the corpses of a dozen early accelerator vendors.
- icedchai 3y ago
  The Amiga stagnated for years. The custom chips barely changed from 1985 until late 1992. ECS barely added anything over OCS (it had a couple new video modes nobody used.) As I mentioned in another thread, AGA was too little, too late. By the time AGA was out, 386 systems with SVGA and SoundBlasters were cheap and plentiful.
  - ekianjo 3y ago
    Hardware designers had a better version than AGA in the works but Commodore scrapped it and instead went for the minor upgrade than AGA was
  - flomo 3y ago
    I remember someone saying "There was no market for 'Amiga games', there was a market for Amiga 500 games." If you look at it that way, it had a nice long run as a game machine, while failing in most other segments.
    - 3y ago
throwaway09223 3y ago
The Amiga was dead a few years before Win95. The VGA chipset and the soundblaster killed the Amiga. In the late 1980s I wanted an Amiga so badly. But by the early 90s I had a 486 with VGA and a sb16 and it was all over. The Amiga had a mere fraction of the PC's power by then.
- Keyframe 3y ago
  Indeed. Commodore killed itself and Amiga, and breakneck speed of PC advancement didn't help. Doom was just a side effect of it all. It left a trauma on Amiga community though, you can still see the community mentioning Doom to this day (see, it can run Doom?). Doom-envy is omnipresent to this day. There was another, rarely mentioned, which is nintendo-envy. NES and then SNES in particular had killer games where Amiga never came through in such capacity (platformers, it shined in other genres). Amiga was poor man's SGI at the time. It was great, fun, relatively cheap for what it offered. It could've been so much more if Commodore had a sense of direction and focus. Alas, here we are lamenting decades after on its fate. Cachet it left is still strong. I recently (over few years back) tried to get ahold of Amiga again. I just wanted one endgame A1200.. now I have three A1200 - one with Blizzard 1230/030+fpu which is the best general purpose IMO, one with Blizzard 1260/060rev6 for demos (not that great compatibility for general purpose), and one with TF1260/060rev6.. and then two A600 (one stock, one with Furia030) and A500+, indivision addins etc., and a whole bunch of Commodore 1084s monitors. It was supposed to be only one A1200, damnit. Take it as a warning from a friend if you want to get one, they multiply fast.
- megablast 3y ago
  Sure, but at a fraction of the price too. $500 compares to $2,000 at least.
  - throwaway09223 3y ago
    Nah. The Amiga 1200 debuted in 1992 for $600. 2MB RAM and a 14Mhz 68020. No monitor. In 1992 you could get a 486dx 33MHz with 4MB for like $800 (a two year old chip) with similar peripherals. Way more than double the power for a marginal increase in cost. The Pentium arrived a year later in 1993 and by 1994 we had the 486dx4/100MHz and Pentium/586 at similar clock speeds. This is around when doom arrived and Amiga was long since toast.
deleted 3y ago
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jhbadger 3y ago
Windows 95 also came close to killing the Mac. Before then the difference between Windows and MacOS was so striking that it was obvious that anyone who really wanted a GUI interface would go for a Mac. But then the advantage became much less strong. If Jobs hadn't come back and brought NextStep, which becane OSX, I think the Mac would have gone the way of the Amiga.
- jandrese 3y ago
  It is also notable that the Mac was stagnating just like the Amiga around that time. The successor to OS 9 was delayed for years and years before being cancelled. The hardware was getting more expensive but with only small incremental improvements in speed or capacity. The Centris and early Performa lines were just so mediocre. The 68k architecture was stalling out just as Intel was blowing everyone's doors off with x86. Jobs made a bad bet with PPC, but it was still way better than 68k and gave them enough breathing room to keep up with PCs for a bit.
  - DerekL 3y ago
    Apple switched to PowerPC a few years before the NeXT acquisition and Steve Jobs' return.
    - jprival 3y ago
      Yeah the Power Macintosh line, as the name suggests, introduced PowerPC in 1994. There were Performa versions of those as well. Jobs’ return as CEO roughly coincided with the beginning of the G3 era (calling them that instead of PowerPC 740 is already pretty Jobs-ian).
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    Your history is way off. The PPC line came out in 1994 and was talked about as early as 1993. This wasn’t a rumor. This was Apple’s announce pipeline. Jobs came back in 1997 and stayed with the PPC line until 2005. By then Apple was far from “beleaguered” thanks to the iMac, PowerBooks and iPod
  - 3y ago
jboy55 3y ago
I really think that the Amiga 3000 killed the Amiga. When it was released, instead of move another decade ahead graphics wise, it was 3-4 years behind. 640x512x16colors?!? The 3000 needed to be released with AGA, on a card. Comparisons. In October 1990. For $3999, you had the Amiga 3000 with 640x512x16colors. It did have a '030 25Mhz, 40mb Hard drive and 2mb. Monitor was extra. For $3860, you could get a 386/33, 4mb, 512k SVGA (800x600 8bit), 160MB Hard drive AND you got the 14" Monitor.
- timbit42 3y ago
  It wasn't the Amiga 3000 that killed the Amiga. It was the fact that the Amiga 3000 didn't have AGA or AAA that killed the Amiga. Technically, it was the CD32 that killed Commodore but it was only the straw that broke the camel's back.
  - snvzz 3y ago
    ... or a DSP. The developers were forbidden by non-technical management to use the DSP-enabled boards they already had. Likewise, entire already designed chipsets like Ranger were discarded just like that, on management whims.
Lio 3y ago
Nah, I still think the author has it right. The combination of cheaper, faster processors and a market that wanted to constantly upgrade is what killed the Amiga. As mentioned by an earlier commentor, who your market was really counted back then. Businesses have upgrade cycles every 3 years as they right off liabilities. That subsidises the next generation of improvements. Even if Commodore had access a single generation capable of fast 3D code it wouldn't have saved them. For example, the Acorn Archimedes had access to much better processors[1] and a chunky 256 colour mode at launch in '87. That still didn't save Acorn[1] because they lacked those business upgrade cycles sales. I don't think an '87 Archimedes had enough umph to run Doom back then but it could have run something Doom like that the Amiga A500 couldn't if really pushed. It still wouldn't have interested the business users that really made the PC successful and by '93 Intel would still have been ahead. 1. 12Mhz 32 bit ARM2 was at least 7x faster than an 8MHz 68000 in 1987 and twice as fast as a 16MHz 386 using Drystone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture_family#ARM2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture_family#ARM2 2. Although thankfully Arm did pretty well all things considered.
- alexisread 3y ago
  I couldn't resist :) this video is doom 2, 12mhz arm but running on a vga monitor (crt is faster), so I'm guessing the frame rate would be about this or a little faster on an 8mhz arm. https://youtu.be/jXo6BtmuZkc https://youtu.be/jXo6BtmuZkc An a3000 running Dread (https://youtu.be/vj-GVCcd4yo?si=X_R_f0TEnPHqOvVv https://youtu.be/vj-GVCcd4yo?si=X_R_f0TEnPHqOvVv) would be quite something! What I'd love to see would be an Atari ST + T212 combo running doom (my electronics skills are not that good). Also take a look at quake on the gba - 16mhz arm with cache. https://youtu.be/R43k-p9XdIk?si=yDycN7I3I4NWvEgU https://youtu.be/R43k-p9XdIk?si=yDycN7I3I4NWvEgU
- rasz 3y ago
  Living in central Europe I didnt even know at the time a company named Acorn existed despite reading tons of computer literature. Acorn had no retail/dealer network, no marketing and zero presence outside Commonwealth (UK and I think Australia), or even narrower outside UK/AU educational market buying Acorns due to BBC Micro Computer Literacy Project program inertia. Acorn was run so bad they didnt even have money to pay BBC for this absolutely fantastic and cheap marketing! Part of the reason for sale to Olivetti was to gain retail channels and pay back BBC royalties. In the end BBC was forced to write off last couple payments.

shon 3y ago

No, Doom didn’t kill the Amiga. Wing Commander did.

miffe 3y ago
Second Reality certainly put the nail in the coffin. https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=63 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=63
richardjdare 3y ago
Yeah, I distinctly remember the exact issue of the magazine that previewed it. ACE Magazine issue 35, August 1990 [1]. It featured Wing Commander and several of the upcoming new VGA graphic adventures with scanned, painted artwork and quality art direction. It was like a new door had opened up to new experiences. However I didn't get a PC until 1996 as they were so expensive. I grew up in rural working class England, and there were a whole bunch of us kids who got into computers and programming thanks to cheap home computers. Suddenly we couldn't afford to participate anymore, it was a really hard time to be a nerd. [1] https://archive.org/details/ace-magazine-35 https://archive.org/details/ace-magazine-35

scheeseman486 3y ago

By 1994 you could get a clone 486 for cheap that could run Doom just fine and the games market rapidly shifted to developing for PC first. The hype for Windows 95 was spinning up, RAM prices were dropping and Pentiums were becoming more affordable. Once Doom released, there was little reason to get an Amiga for games, it's not unfair to say it killed it. Amiga maybe had a couple final years of relevance as a super budget workstation in 1993/94, but Doom was developed on fancy NeXT workstations. Then id's follow-up, one of the most technically cutting edge games of it's generation, was developed on Windows 95. That kinda says it all about the PC's rapid ascent during the 90s.

epcoa 3y ago
> Then id's follow-up, one of the most technically cutting edge games of its generation, was developed on Windows 95. If you’re implying Quake was developed on Windows 95, that’s false. Windows 95 and early DirectX sucked and was only released a few months before Quake. DOS remained the dominant target for years. The original QuakeEd is written in objective C because ID was using NeXTcubes for workstations. They also used some DEC Alphas for level compilation. WinQuake didn’t come out until nearly a year after initial release. You could launch Quake from Windows 95 but that’s neither here nor there. https://www.gamers.org/dEngine/quake/QuakeEd/source.html https://www.gamers.org/dEngine/quake/QuakeEd/source.html
- scheeseman486 3y ago
  You're right, I was a game early. They largely switched to Windows during Quake 2's development, NT instead of 95. DOS remained the primary target through 1995-96 but by 97 the bottom fell out and by 98, everything was releasing on Windows.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - epcoa 3y ago
    As NeXTStep became obsolete SGI IRIX was considered for a successor but Carmack was not a fan and moved on to NT as you state (also calling early on that commercial Unix was fucked).

andrewstuart 3y ago

The most interesting thing is how hard the true believers find it to let go of the past. I bought one of the first Amigas - I own 2 Amiga 1000's and several others. But for me they are nothing but items in a curiosity cabinet. Other people seem to deeply engage emotionally with some sort of alternate fictional future in which technology X or technology Y was recognised for its true destiny and never defeated by IBM/Microsoft whoever. Computing moved on an other systems became much better. Don't waste your life living in the past. Just drop that dead technology and move on and stop investing yourself in a fantasy world.

zozbot234 3y ago
It's not a fantasy, the Amiga was a real platform. It was also one of the last systems that could be just about simple enough to be comprehensively documented and understood, making for a kind of openness-focused DevX that's quite unparalleled even to this day. For that matter, there's plenty of "dead" technology out there that still retains quite a bit of educational value if nothing else.
bruce511 3y ago
I'm no psychologist, but itcseems yo be a very common theme in the human condition. First we find a "tribe", maybe it's a sports team, or a computer, or a political party, or a brand of beer. Anything that lets me bond with my peers and lets us be "me and mine", versus "you and yours". The longer I'm in this group, the more the cycle feeds back, the harder it is to break out. At some point it's no longer about the common factor. it's about belonging to the tribe. Maybe we got together when say Mercedes was the pinicle of cars. I become a "Mercedes driver". I join a Mercedes club, we do fun runs on Sunday, they're my tribe. Even if (and I'm not saying it is) Mercedes turns into junk, our tribe is still our tribe. Not wanting to pick a side, but you see this in politics now. For lots of people now it doesn't matter who is running, or what the policies are, it only matters what tribe I'm in. And my tribe is better, the other tribe is rubbish. Those in neither tribe can't understand, because to them both tribes are terrible (perhaps in different ways.) In the 80s and 90s, the computer platform you chose -was- your identity. Switching from one to another was hard, and socially suicidal. Ideally the switch was done -for- you, not -by- you. My dad's office changed from Apple 2 to PC. Since I couldn't buy my own PC, I got what they got. But if I had invested my had earned cash in say Apple, it would have been a next to impossible option to just scrap that investment and start over. Amiga was once way out on top of the pile. By -all- metrics. They were the tribe on top. But it's hard to fall from there and not need to blame someone, or something. It's not the product that failed. It's the people.

dissent 3y ago

I realised the Amiga had had its day when I played Dune 2 on the PC. It was a great game on the Amiga releasing to rave reviews. But the PC version on a 486 with a soundblaster absolutely sang. It made the Amiga look an entire generation behind. The Amiga version ran very slowly in realtime and in FPS, had a fraction of the digitised sounds, essentially no music, and for most people it involved swapping floppies to save your game. Experiencing the PC version made the Amiga version unplayable. So I told my Amiga-loving friend at high school the the PC version was far better. He was deeply offended of course, but got his first PC less than a year later.

megablast 3y ago
Sure, but the amiga was $500, and the PC equivalent was around $2,000 right?
- dissent 3y ago
  It was more where I lived, but you are right a good PC was probably 2-3 times more expensive. But it wasn't possible to get that gaming experience on the Amiga at any price. This was a year or two before Doom.
- bruce511 3y ago
  Sure, but it's worth pointing out that it's market that matters, not price. PCs were aimed at business. They were a cost-saver. You could iterate fast because businesses have cash, and are eolljng to spend it. Show them that spending on PC saves money, and you can ship fast enough. The churn was insane, but it didn't matter. (And I was fortunately on the receiving end of discarded hardware.) I understood this point when I inherited a "broken" dot matrix printer. I took the head apart cleaned it all up, put it together and it worked. But j already had a printer, so i offered to return it. I wad told "no thanks, the person now has an inkjet, they don't want rhe for matrix back. Being "broken" was an excuse to get an upgrade. Turns out the home market didn't want a new one each year. They didn't want new generations of hardware and software every 5 minutes. Amigas (and Apple 2s) were sold only slightly improved for almost a decade after first release. PCs won because its easier to sell to business than the home. It wasn't Doom that killed Amiga it was Lotus 123.

KingOfCoders 3y ago

Had an Amiga 500 and later a 4000/040retina and for me Doon did it. I exactly know when: Amiga show in Cologne, Commodore didn't present anything new at a time when everyone jumped to PC.

timbit42 3y ago
That's what happens when your R&D gets cut years before. Eventually you have nothing new.

zubairq 3y ago

I would say that the PC won over the Amiga as it had a huge library of old CPM business and productivity software that was easily ported to it. See Joel Spolky’s post on chicken and egg problems: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/24/strategy-letter-ii-chicken-and-egg-problems/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/24/strategy-letter-ii...

beautron 3y ago

I grew up with a C64, which I loved. But my Dad would tell me stories about the Amiga, and we'd go look at one in the neighborhood computer store (Software Etc.—loved that place!). The store clerk was more than happy to show off the machine to us. And we'd dream about how someday we'd get one. But by the time that day came, the writing was on the wall, and we bought an IBM 486 25mhz from Sears. I feel like we dodged a bullet. But, at the same time, I get a sort of warm, fuzzy nostalgia every time the Amiga comes up. It was my future dream computer. I love reading articles like this. It's a window into a path I was almost on. And I really loved my C64. It's sad somehow that the PC won... In the mid 80s, the PC was so uninspiring compared to the other home systems, at least to a kid who liked colorful games and wild sounds.

thanatos519 3y ago
I started with the original IBM PC 5150 at home when schools were full of C=64s. That experience set me up for life but I still want to get my kid a real C=64.
squarefoot 3y ago
You missed a lot. When I think of what happened to the Amiga because of their incompetent management I get angry, however if the journey is the reward, then it paid a lot just by letting me become part of that era. Amiga has been the true "think different" many years before someone else would make it their motto, and I'm thankful I could own some of those machines, with all their shortcomings; they cost me the equivalent of many thousand $$$, and became essentially door stoppers when I sold off them a few years later, but their real value was letting me live a wonderful experience that I could never regret.
- lttlrck 3y ago
  I had an Atari 520ST in about 1998 and was always envious of friend's Amigas. In 1992 I switched to an A600, the Amiga was waning and I knew it but I loved owning it for that short period. I am glad I was a part of the community as much as I enjoyed playing the games and applications. In retrospect instead of switching to PC next, I wish I had switched to an Acorn RISC PC.

pjmlp 3y ago

Defender of the Crown was my first PC game, played at the high school computer club, on a PC 1512. Those "beautiful" CGA graphics were nothing like that Amiga experience. https://youtu.be/sb_H9Nn7Z1o?si=TCsFDEh9HbLwafxG https://youtu.be/sb_H9Nn7Z1o?si=TCsFDEh9HbLwafxG

l33tman 3y ago

I sold my 6 months old Amiga 4000 when I realized the PC VGA cards coming out around then were cheap, had 1024x768 resolution, blazing DOS pixel writes and nothing of value had happened with the Amiga chipset from 1985 to 1992.. Remember TSENG LABS? :) I also think I saw Ultima Underworld or some of the variants on PC before this, rendering full free-view 3D in a sub-window at least. Was really blown away by that, this was before Doom came out.

timbit42 3y ago
You don't remember AGA? It could do those resolutions and all versions of the Amiga chipsets had blazing pixel writes. The article even mentions this. You obviously didn't read the article and weren't in the Amiga community.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  AGA was much too little, too late. The premier AGA model, the A1200, even shipped without even a sliver of FASTRAM, making all programs compete for cycles with the graphics chipset. An Amiga games with even, say, 64 kbytes of FASTRAM could have put compute code in there at twice the speed and even made use of the (rudimentary) instruction cache of the 68020. The A1200 was welcome and I loved it but it was a half-assed attempt and it showed.
  - timbit42 3y ago
    Which model wasn't the premier AGA model? The A4000? The A500 didn't have any fast RAM either. In fact, when you added the A501 RAM, that was slow RAM. So it doesn't surprise me the A1200 was the same.
    - actionfromafar 3y ago
      It's not surprising, but very sad. For very little cost they could have doubled the CPU speed of the 1200. For the A500 it made more sense to not have fast RAM, because the CPU itself was kind of slow. But the 68020 was noticeably slowed down by slow RAM wait states. Either the A1200 should have shipped with some (even miniscule) fast RAM, or AGA should have had higher bandwidth so the CPU wouldn't have had to wait for the RAM. A vanilla A1200 was an unbalanced machine. ...rant over. :-D Yeah, the A4000 is the "other" model. It's really neat, but alas it never sold in any numbers. It showed in that some AGA software I tried (demos? some game?) didn't work right on my A4000.

krystianantoni 3y ago

It was just a last nail to the coffin… I was there 30 years ago :)

pavlov 3y ago

> “PC games were perhaps not yet as colorful, zippy and funky as Amiga games” I recall the PC/VGA port of Xenon II Megablast being a revelation. That must have been 1990 or 1991. It was as fast and colorful and excitingly busy as the Amiga version, and it ran on commodity 386 hardware that was produced by multiple vendors on every level. There was massive competition for CPUs, graphics chips, sound cards, motherboards, and everything else pushing prices down. Meanwhile Commodore was going it alone with custom chipsets and pinching pennies. Any advantage they had left wasn’t going to last. Today Apple is of course massively successful with that vertical integration model, but the difference is that 1) Apple has had the right executive talent for 27 years, 2) they’re willing to invest at every level to make the vertical integration benefits actually compound into the product. In comparison Commodore was relatively broke and seemingly packed with loser MBAs.

timbit42 3y ago
Commodore had great engineers but terrible management. Jack Tramiel didn't even use computers until he got an iPad later in his life. Jack would have been just as successful if he had been selling bicycles. After Jack left, Irving Gould was in charge and along with his henchman, Medhi Ali. They purposefully destroyed Commodore. Irving was getting old and it seemed he cared more about having more, expensive paintings in his home when he died than keeping Commodore going by giving their R&D any money. Thomas Rattigan was the best COO (and potential future CEO) Commodore ever had, but Gould fired him before he could do too much good. Without him, the Amiga 500 and 2000 would not have happened and the Amiga 500 is what kept Commodore going as long as it did. Over half of Amigas sold were the 500 model. Jack's biggest mistake was getting into a position where he needed someone like Irving Gould to invest money to keep his company from going under. In retrospect, it would have been better for Jack to go bankrupt and start over than let Gould have control. If Commodore had survived until today, their hardware would be the same as PCs and Macs, but they would have their own OS and the custom Amiga chipset might be a contender in the GPU space today.
livrem 3y ago
I loved Xenon II, but the PC music was terrible. I solved that by recording the music from a friend's Amiga, looped on two sides of a cassette tape, so I could listen to it while playing the game. It was the only game I ever bothered doing that with, but I did have a few other cassettes full of music recorded from Amiga and C64 that I listened to a lot (in the years before I had a PC with good enough sound card to listen to MOD or SID files).

marinbala 3y ago

Loved the Amiga. Great machine. If the argument that Doom killed the platform is valid, it can only be true for gaming (which was a very large portion of home use). After a great headstart, Amiga fell behind in many other areas: business and productivity software, networking and collaboration, multimedia and realtime-3D graphics. And regarding gaming, let's not forget that the SNES and the Sega Megadrive/Genesis were going strong when the Amiga was fading away, and it took a while for them to get a version of Doom.

mattl 3y ago
Doom was released for Super NES during its lifespan but Doom eluded the Sega Genesis until a homebrew version fairly recently. Super Nintendo had the Super FX and FX 2 chips and even then Doom plays very poorly.
- aquova 3y ago
  There was a 32x version of Doom though... which also ran poorly.
  - mattl 3y ago
    Makes sense. 32x added some capabilities similar to Super FX to the system. I read somewhere that the western release of the SNES could have had the Super FX chip on the motherboard but they chose to not do it for cost reasons. Not sure how much of that is true?
amiga386 3y ago
Amiga, Megadrive and SNES were fading at about the same time (1992-1993), and they all had relatively similar hardware and games. While technically, DOOM was published for the SNES (developed on an Amiga!), it required a SuperFX 2 chip and wasn't all that amazing, though it was playable. DOOM wasn't published for the Megadrive, but the Megadrive's bolt-on accelerator, the 32X. If you're going to allow accelerators and tiny resolution, DOOM and DOOM clones run on the Amiga too, in low resolution, with a cheap accelerator! They all run pretty terribly, and I'm not sure DOOM ever "sold" those consoles, although it may have "sold" the Atari Jaguar. However, DOOM worked very well in 1996/1997 when it was ported to the PlayStation and Nintendo 64, both consoles designed around 3D hardware, and I'd say that DOOM definitely "sold" those consoles - as did Ridge Racer and Mario 64...

daneel_w 3y ago

"Expanded or extended memory? Or maybe just conventional? Choose wisely, or you won't be able to fully maximize _the incredible potential of running a single program at a time._" xD Back then we really had a lot of good reasons to pity MS-DOS users.

iforgotpassword 3y ago

Great post. Was a little worried this is gonna be salty fanboy retrospective, but it wasn't. Great mix of anecdotes and memories from growing up with that machine, and at the same time realistic about why the platform failed and why you didn't want it to be true. > Spending that kind of money will get you a computer mostly useful for finding out why you don't want to run outdated ports of Linux software on an operating system without memory protection. That actually made me LOL.

livrem 3y ago

> Linux was nice for surfing the net, but it lacked all of the fun software I craved: games, demos (as in the demo scene), graphics programs, tracker music. Anecdotally it was bit of a negative feedback loop at the time, sadly, since just the people that would have been perfect to help make Linux thrive in those areas did not want to use Linux because it lacked those things.

thih9 3y ago
An instance of the chicken-and-egg problem. No community - people don’t join; people don’t join - no community.

freediver 3y ago

I went through the same experience as the author. What put the nail in the coffin of my 1200 cca 1995 was not Doom, but Comanche [1] The incredible 3D graphics were just too much and I caved in. PCs were getting faster while my 1200 could not keep up. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q--FbZZlUvM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q--FbZZlUvM

yoyoinbog 3y ago

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ZFH 3y ago

Those prices are not what I remember from back then, at least in Europe. Comparable 386 and 486 PCs cost way, way more than an Amiga 500 or later 1200 respectively. The filfre.net Digital Antiquarian articles on the Commodore/Amiga history are incredibly well researched, and paint a more comprehensive, nuanced version of the usual 'mismanaged to death' narrative. There is a very cogent insight that I first read there, that roughly goes as this: the Amiga architecture of a 2D oriented console-style custom chipset was badly suited for the gradual transition from coding to the bare metal to having an OS managing the hardware, accessed through APIs. Keeping up would've meant a complete reinvention of the platform and its ethos, with a much bigger push on OS development, not only the next hot chipset. Commodity, standardized hardware running Windows ultimately got good enough and won. And as someone else remarked, +1 on Wing Commander, and later the golden era Lucasarts adventures, being the actual beginning of the end.

rasz 3y ago
>Those prices are not what I remember from back the You most likely remember bare Amiga 500 price versus loaded brand name system. Here a comparison from 1994: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37851056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37851056 : >Commodore didnt bother to build fast ram memory controller into the thing. You couldnt just slap some simms or ram chips on a card, you needed additional logic. Cheapest contemporary Fast Ram cards were ~100 pounds + ~30 pounds a meg, half the cost of 270 pound Amiga A1200 in 1994. >A1200 bare system £276 https://archive.org/details/cuamiga-magazine-050/page/n28/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/cuamiga-magazine-050/page/n28/mo... >4-8MB fast ram £200-400 https://archive.org/details/cuamiga-magazine-050/page/n49/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/cuamiga-magazine-050/page/n49/mo... >340MB £380 pounds https://archive.org/details/cuamiga-magazine-050/page/n28/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/cuamiga-magazine-050/page/n28/mo... >14 multisync monitor ~£320 https://archive.org/details/cuamiga-magazine-050/page/n52/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/cuamiga-magazine-050/page/n52/mo... >~£1200-1400. 1994 £/$ exchange rate 1.55 = $1860-2170. >Now compare to 1994 PC https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/7235w0/the_specs_of_my_1800_dollar_pc_in_1994_amazing/ https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/7235w0/the_sp... >486dx2-66mhz, 256KB cache, 8MB, 1.44MB fdd, 350MB HDD, SVGA monitor/card, keyboard/mouse. $1840

DrNosferatu 3y ago

Looking back with 20/20 vision, I regret I didn’t get to enjoy the Amiga 500 during its sweet spot time: a bridge between 8bit cassette computers and a Doom-capable PC. - One specific point really peaks my interest: How widespread / readily available was (software or otherwise) Mac emulation on the Amiga 500, *before* Doom/Win95? A closely read subscription of Amiga Format would be enough to master the ins and outs of it (minus the Mac ROM image, obviously), or was something that really only became feasible and readily available after, say, Win95?

dansalvato 3y ago
I do some Amiga collecting, and I recently bought an Amiga 2000 that came with a ReadySoft A-Max, and even Mac networking hardware: https://amiga.resource.cx/exp/amax https://amiga.resource.cx/exp/amax This tells me there must have been decent interest in Mac emulation as early as 1989, when the A-Max released. And it didn't plug into the expansion slot, so it evidently would have worked fine on an A500. The A2000 primarily focused on PC compatibility, though. Commodore shipped "bridgeboards", which were x86 CPU cards that plugged into the A2000's expansion slot. Not only did this let you run DOS in a window on your Amiga, but it could virtualize hard disks and printers, and you could even expand it using the A2000's built-in ISA slots for that very purpose. Pretty dang cool, and maybe a good value proposition for offices mainly running DOS but wanted something better for desktop publishing or anything graphics/video-related.

dean2432 3y ago

well written article. can so relate to this. i also held onto amiga for a looong time myself. what was a bit paradoxical, as the author mentions, was the lack of backwards-compatibility after you had pimped your amiga with an accelerator-card, RTG graphics and a 16-bits soundcard ++. it had become more of a PC in a way, but it was still running amigaOS. system-friendly apps that ran in workbench worked fine for the most part, but stuff that did trickery with the original/AGA chipset and was coded on AmigaDOS1.x/68000 would not work (which was a lot of games and demos). at one point i had a separate A1200 for this. i miss my old workbench environment with CED, ProTracker, SnoopDos, amIRC, Directory Opus and more. it was fun times and i am grateful for being part of the ride.

Tourniquet 3y ago

I enjoyed this read. It mirrored my own experiences closely, growing up in the 80s/90s in the UK. My first home computer being the C64, then A500, and later an A1200 with 6MB RAM, HDD, squirrel SCSI with various optical media and a 1084ST (originally bought second hand, stuffed full of lowres porn...). I too chased the ultimate desktop - MagicWB, newicons, MUI (licensed!), heavily configured DOpus, various file format plugins, alt disk formats etc. 97 or so was when I had an old 386 handoff, and 98 when I first installed Linux. I triple booted into BeOS for a while. Coming back from Uni in '98-'02 and using the Amiga less and less, until I finally got rid of it after a trace on the keyboard burned out and the HDD gave up. I have continued to play with emus over the years, CAPS with the IPF for.at was an interesting project for someone who didn't care for 'cracktros' and respected the physical copy protections lf the day. Lately, AmigaVision running on FPGA 'emulation' is my choice. Don't chase the upgrades - the Amiga was a machine of it's eta - when hw tricks got you a long way, and it wasn't pure cpu cycles and blitting.