6 ms·

A lot of words there. But the word ‘console’ is there exactly once. Games consoles killed the Amiga, just like they did all other home computers that were prim

by louthy 1y ago

A lot of words there. But the word ‘console’ is there exactly once. Games consoles killed the Amiga, just like they did all other home computers that were primarily used for games. I don’t know anyone that used the Amiga for anything other than games. PCs survived because they were genuinely used for business, not just games.

zozbot234 1y ago
The Amiga platform was originally built on game-console hardware. Incidentally, so was the Raspberry Pi, which is why the first Raspberry Pi models were comparatively very cheap.
- louthy 1y ago
  The platform is irrelevant. They were more expensive than games consoles. So they lost, just like all other true personal computer manufacturers. They had too many components and couldn’t compete.
  - actionfromafar 1y ago
    I think it was lack of vision and financial mismanagement that killed them more than anything technical. Edit: an interesting take with the games consoles, I never really thought about it from that angle before. But it makes a lot of sense. Console makers get a cut of the revenue stream of the games. Commodore never saw a cent of that and the only commercial niche they briefly owned was low-budget TV production, like cable channels and such.
    - zozbot234 1y ago
      The end of the Motorola MC68000 architecture killed a whole lot of platforms around that same time. Amiga was just one of them among many, but the fact that Atari ST also died, NeXT was ported to x86, the Mac was ported to PowerPC, Sun Microsystems went SPARC etc. etc. all pretty much simultaneously, is not a coincidence.
  - mrits 1y ago
    Were they? I bought my Amiga 500 around 1992 for $200 USD at Software Etc. I think the Nintendo was around $100 USD and the games were often much more expensive. Not to mention most games were just the cost of a floppy disk if you had Amiga friends.
    - louthy 1y ago
      $100 < $200
      - Retric 1y ago
        A console without games isn’t useful.
        louthy 1y ago
        And a printer without ink doesn’t print. Yet we all continue to fall for this initial low price bait.
        Retric 1y ago
        In 1985 the NES launched in the US at $179.99 and didn’t include a game. So while I’m sure somebody came home with a useless object, in general people where forced to but at least one. In 1996 the first hit became free.
        firesteelrain 1y ago
        Video rental was huge. It's the only way I could afford to play games.
        Retric 1y ago
        In 1985? That didn’t take off where I was until PS1 days.
        1y ago
  - rasz 1y ago
    Piracy made Amiga cheaper. SNES and two cartridges/Genesis with three was more expensive than Amiga 500.
- wlll 1y ago
  Were they? I had an Amiga 1200, a friend a 500, both of which were around long before games consoles became mainstream.
samastur 1y ago
I did (but also for games). That wasn't the problem. The problem was computers built on closed architecture didn't have a future even if company didn't went to shit like Commodore did.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- louthy 1y ago
  > computers built on closed architecture Do you honestly think that the general public gave two shits about closed architectures? The vast majority of people, who were using computers, were using them to play games. People completely misremember how little interest the general public had in computers (for serious tasks) at the time. The only exception to that really was the IBM PC. It didn’t have an open architecture either. For a long time it was the case that if you didn’t buy an IBM branded PC, you couldn’t guarantee that any software would actually work on it.
  - badc0ffee 1y ago
    > For a long time it was the case that if you didn’t buy an IBM branded PC, you couldn’t guarantee that any software would actually work on it. I don't know if it was a long time. The PC came out in 1981, and by 1984 you had the fully compatible Tandy 1000 and Compaq Deskpro. Except for the BIOS ROMs, which companies like Compaq rewrote themselves, the PC did have an open architecture.
    - louthy 1y ago
      I didn’t buy a pc until much later (I was an Acorn user), so you may be right, but the lore around that lasted a reasonable amount of time if my memory serves me correctly. Well into the late 80s. I’d still argue nobody cared about architectures, they cared about where the type of computer was primarily used. PCs were for the office. Acorn was for education. Atari, Commodore, Sinclair were for games and therefore vulnerable to games consoles. I seem to remember that PCs had quite a poor rep for games, even during the Wolfenstein -> Doom -> Quake era. Only really shaking that off when the first graphics cards arrived
FireBeyond 1y ago
> I don’t know anyone that used the Amiga for anything other than games. I mean TV studios and media houses, but admittedly, that's not exactly a huge market.
blackhaz 1y ago
In my part of the woods all those consoles were frowned upon, back in the days when we had 386s, 486s and Pentiums. Yes, PS1 could display some interesting games, but you couldn't do anything creative on it. As to what killed Amiga - I think it's in the article - the lagging behind the x86 performance, especially when 386DX-40 came about, and please allow me to propose one additional, if not the primary, factor - that our fathers suddenly began to require Word and Excel to do their work at home.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
drivers99 1y ago
> I don’t know anyone that used the Amiga for anything other than games. My Amiga friends used it for playing games and for creative things: writing music, pixel/digital art, some coding, making games (at least, in shoot-em-up-construction-kit), as well as dialing up BBSes and the text-based Internet (like me on my PC).
- tjr 1y ago
  I used my Amiga 3000 for a lot of video production and graphics work, along with some word processing / desktop publishing, and a bit of programming. And games! In my observation of other Amiga users at the time, this was typical. Besides random individual users doing these sorts of things, Amigas were used in local broadcast television studios as video switchers and graphics layover systems, and even in more major media production outlets for video editing and 3D animation. They were seen as a more economical solution to more expensive hardware built specifically for television or graphics, but could pull of the work on a comparable level.
vidarh 1y ago
Most of my circle used the Amiga primarily for other things than games. None of us replaced them with consoles. While the use in business was of course important, that the PC survives is just as much down to the open platform and the clone market that prevented its future from being tied to a single company - in this case a wildly dysfunctional one.
- louthy 1y ago
  > Most of my circle used the Amiga primarily for other things than games. Are you claiming your circle is representative of the computer buying masses of the time? (whether the computers were consoles or not)
  - vidarh 1y ago
    No, I'm pointing out that your anecdote doesn't mean much. Lots of people used it for other things. In fact, the US Amiga gaming market, for example, was extremely lackluster because unlike in Europe, in the US the sale was geared much more toward professional use, which was also reflected in e.g. US Amiga magazines like Amiga World, as well as in models like the Amiga 2500 which was aimed at the professional market and mostly sold in the US and Canada. The profile varied extensively by country - Germany as well had a market where Commodore was big in the business market, and while that was mostly PC's, it was also the reason for much of the success of the Amiga 2000, which also largely aimed at non-gaming users. Commodore UK meanwhile, did fit your "profile" for the Amiga and was very much focused on games. But Commodore UK was the subsidiary that remained most successful despite competition from consoles. In fact Commodore UK survived the bankruptcy of Commodore International and did well enough that management tried to put together a buyout offer (but had to throw in the towel after Dell and Escom entered the process). In other words, while you're right that competition from consoles and PC's of course mattered a lot, it was a lot more nuanced than that. E.g. in the US, Commodore had burned its relationships to the ground, and so failed to get the low-end Amiga's out there as gaming machines too, and were nowhere near as successful as some of the subsidiaries like Commodore UK, and Commodore B.V (Netherlands; also briefly survived bankruptcy). Where Commodore did best, it did okay in both the game market and in various professional niches, but that meant actually working the game market hard. E.g. Commodore UK did a "famous" bundle with the game for the 1989 Batman movie which drove relatively-speaking huge sales. Had the rest of the subsidiaries done close to as well as Commodore UK, the company as a whole would've at least weathered the cash crunch that killed it in '94. Whether that'd have let them rebuild (e.g. by completing their next chipsets) or if it'd have just made them linger on in a zombie state another year, is an open question.
evaneykelen 1y ago
> I don’t know anyone that used the Amiga for anything other than games. The Amiga was used worldwide by TV stations for CGI and titling effects, for digital signage eg arrivals/departures at airports, and video walls, besides being a tool for countless digital artists. I know because I wrote digital signage software for the Amiga and sold it to customers in 21 countries.
- louthy 1y ago
  Just to be clear, because there have been a number of similar responses, I am not claiming the Amiga couldn’t do anything else, nor that it wasn’t used for anything other than games. But, the vast majority of people who bought Amigas did so because it was a great machine for games and had lots of high quality titles. When the majority of your market disappears and moves to cheaper options; and all you have left is video walls in departure lounges, you’re fucked.
  - vidarh 1y ago
    But as I pointed out elsewhere: The subsidiary that survived the longest did so on the continued strength of sales driven by games - that market continued to do well for the Amiga until the end in the markets where the subsidiaries actually focused on gaming bundles.
- FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
  The Video Toaster was the first successful competitor to the horribly expensive Avid system ($100k+) for non-linear video editing, titling, SMTPE code syncing, etc. and ran on an Amiga 2000 as a double card. I think it was $3k. It was used to make the first 3 seasons of Babylon 5 and all of the sub graphics for Sealquest DSV. As an aside, Dana Carveys brother was one of the lead designers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster
District5524 1y ago
I'm sure that was an important reason for the US and UK markets. I don't know much about the Swedish market, but in the Eastern European markets, game consoles were not popular at all until the very late 1990s. Gamers in the early 1990s used Commodore (and less affluents ZX Spectrums and clones), and later, as the article says, more and more PCs. In these parts, people were very short of money, which caused piracy to grow HUGE. Computers were also preferred due to being multipurpose. And console games were difficult to copy, so if you wanted to be a serious gamer, you had to have a PC. Even if you had the money to buy games, you couldn't really do that, because nobody really was selling actual games in these markets. With different currencies and limitations on hard currency exchange, you didn't spend those limited funds on games, even if you travelled abroad. Probably also as a consequence, playing on consoles was considered to be lame. It was for kids only. Hah, for those born in the 1990s only! So that was a bit different over here.
blakespot 1y ago
Most of my friends were gaming on consoles at the time. I very much preferred the Amiga (I also had Atari STs during this time) to consoles perhaps mainly due to the ability to use RGB monitors with a proper RGB signal. It was at best composite back then on the consoles of the era - in the states anyway (we didn't have SCART as an option). I know I'm odd here, but that was a major factor -- but also the fact that I used the Amiga for much more than gaming. I BBSed heavily, generated hundreds of images with paint programs, programmed on it, and then there was enjoying scenedemos as a huge part of my use. Most people in the user group I was in back then (ALFA - Amigoid Life Form Association) were NASA engineers who used them as cheap and capable alternatives to the UNIX workstations they worked with at NASA (which was local, Hampton, VA). Many of these guys were older and didn't game at all.
- TheAmazingRace 1y ago
  I heard NASA used their Amiga systems clear up to 2006, which is a rather unusually long lifespan for the application they intended them for. But I suppose commodity PC hardware and the software they needed just wasn't really there at a price point that made sense, plus, I guess as the old adage goes... if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
  - sillywalk 1y ago
    > I heard NASA used their Amiga systems Yes. "Amigas take in all the telemetry data from the spacecraft, scale it by applying coefficients of up to fifth order polynomials and convert the data back to engineering units for display to the engineers working the launch."[1] [0] https://hackaday.com/2021/08/16/retrotechtacular-amiga-pips-the-pc-for-mission-critical-computing-at-nasa/ https://hackaday.com/2021/08/16/retrotechtacular-amiga-pips-... [1] http://obligement.free.fr/articles_traduction/amiganasa_en.php http://obligement.free.fr/articles_traduction/amiganasa_en.p... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAPD9HA8Unw&t=1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAPD9HA8Unw&t=1s
  - drewp 1y ago
    https://www.modd3d.com/articles/item/waterworld-show-control-retrofit https://www.modd3d.com/articles/item/waterworld-show-control... The document is sadly 404 now, but this was an awesome nerdy writeup of the conversion of the Universal Studios Waterworld from Amigas in 2007.
nsxwolf 1y ago
I had consoles and a PC and so did all of my friends. They offered very different experiences in the 90s. Amiga could offer the PC experiences too, and did, until it ran into hardware limitations. Then it was suddenly competing with the Genesis and Super Nintendo, but with inferior European side scrolling games, with their single button controls, “sound or music not both”, etc.
leoc 1y ago
> Games consoles killed the Amiga, just like they did all other home computers that were primarily used for games. Wait, which games, and which consoles? Arcadey sprite-based action games were popular on the Amiga, and there the consoles caught up to it by about 1990 (the Sega Master System) or 1992 (the SNES) in the European market. But 16-bit consoles would have been a depressingly bad substitute for the Amiga when it came to games like point-and-click adventures, Lemmings, Populous, the Freescape games, or XCOM, when those even received a 16-bit console port at all. The Amiga was in actual use mostly a games system, yes, but to a large extent the successful, beloved games were the kind of thing we now think of as PC games. That's also probably a big part of why finally losing pace with the PC over DOOM was such a bitter blow. The 32-bit consoles only started to take off in Europe with the release of the PlayStation there, well into 1995 when it seems the Amiga's goose was mostly already cooked, and even those systems weren't a great place to have a PC-like gaming experience. Then there's the awkward issue of downloading a car: famously, many Amiga users were piracy-happy, and would not have welcomed the game prices and relatively successful copy protection of '90s consoles. (Data mostly from Wikipedia. I'm not an expert on the Amiga's commercial history, and it's a complicated topic.)
- snvzz 1y ago
  >1990 (the Sega Master System) Probably meant 1988 (Sega Mega Drive). >I'm not an expert on the Amiga's commercial history, and it's a complicated topic. For anybody curious, the Amiga Documents[0]. 0. https://sites.google.com/site/amigadocuments/ https://sites.google.com/site/amigadocuments/
  - leoc 1y ago
    > Probably meant 1988 (Sega Mega Drive) Yes, I meant the Mega Drive, but the PAL Mega Drive, the really relevant one here, didn’t come out until well into 1990 (if the easiest Internet sources are to be believed).

by louthy 1y ago

zozbot234 1y ago

The Amiga platform was originally built on game-console hardware. Incidentally, so was the Raspberry Pi, which is why the first Raspberry Pi models were comparatively very cheap.

louthy 1y ago
The platform is irrelevant. They were more expensive than games consoles. So they lost, just like all other true personal computer manufacturers. They had too many components and couldn’t compete.
- actionfromafar 1y ago
  I think it was lack of vision and financial mismanagement that killed them more than anything technical. Edit: an interesting take with the games consoles, I never really thought about it from that angle before. But it makes a lot of sense. Console makers get a cut of the revenue stream of the games. Commodore never saw a cent of that and the only commercial niche they briefly owned was low-budget TV production, like cable channels and such.
  - zozbot234 1y ago
    The end of the Motorola MC68000 architecture killed a whole lot of platforms around that same time. Amiga was just one of them among many, but the fact that Atari ST also died, NeXT was ported to x86, the Mac was ported to PowerPC, Sun Microsystems went SPARC etc. etc. all pretty much simultaneously, is not a coincidence.
- mrits 1y ago
  Were they? I bought my Amiga 500 around 1992 for $200 USD at Software Etc. I think the Nintendo was around $100 USD and the games were often much more expensive. Not to mention most games were just the cost of a floppy disk if you had Amiga friends.
  - louthy 1y ago
    $100 < $200
    - Retric 1y ago
      A console without games isn’t useful.
      - louthy 1y ago
        And a printer without ink doesn’t print. Yet we all continue to fall for this initial low price bait.
        Retric 1y ago
        In 1985 the NES launched in the US at $179.99 and didn’t include a game. So while I’m sure somebody came home with a useless object, in general people where forced to but at least one. In 1996 the first hit became free.
        firesteelrain 1y ago
        Video rental was huge. It's the only way I could afford to play games.
        Retric 1y ago
        In 1985? That didn’t take off where I was until PS1 days.
        1y ago
- rasz 1y ago
  Piracy made Amiga cheaper. SNES and two cartridges/Genesis with three was more expensive than Amiga 500.
wlll 1y ago
Were they? I had an Amiga 1200, a friend a 500, both of which were around long before games consoles became mainstream.

samastur 1y ago

I did (but also for games). That wasn't the problem. The problem was computers built on closed architecture didn't have a future even if company didn't went to shit like Commodore did.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
louthy 1y ago
> computers built on closed architecture Do you honestly think that the general public gave two shits about closed architectures? The vast majority of people, who were using computers, were using them to play games. People completely misremember how little interest the general public had in computers (for serious tasks) at the time. The only exception to that really was the IBM PC. It didn’t have an open architecture either. For a long time it was the case that if you didn’t buy an IBM branded PC, you couldn’t guarantee that any software would actually work on it.
- badc0ffee 1y ago
  > For a long time it was the case that if you didn’t buy an IBM branded PC, you couldn’t guarantee that any software would actually work on it. I don't know if it was a long time. The PC came out in 1981, and by 1984 you had the fully compatible Tandy 1000 and Compaq Deskpro. Except for the BIOS ROMs, which companies like Compaq rewrote themselves, the PC did have an open architecture.
  - louthy 1y ago
    I didn’t buy a pc until much later (I was an Acorn user), so you may be right, but the lore around that lasted a reasonable amount of time if my memory serves me correctly. Well into the late 80s. I’d still argue nobody cared about architectures, they cared about where the type of computer was primarily used. PCs were for the office. Acorn was for education. Atari, Commodore, Sinclair were for games and therefore vulnerable to games consoles. I seem to remember that PCs had quite a poor rep for games, even during the Wolfenstein -> Doom -> Quake era. Only really shaking that off when the first graphics cards arrived

FireBeyond 1y ago

> I don’t know anyone that used the Amiga for anything other than games. I mean TV studios and media houses, but admittedly, that's not exactly a huge market.

blackhaz 1y ago

In my part of the woods all those consoles were frowned upon, back in the days when we had 386s, 486s and Pentiums. Yes, PS1 could display some interesting games, but you couldn't do anything creative on it. As to what killed Amiga - I think it's in the article - the lagging behind the x86 performance, especially when 386DX-40 came about, and please allow me to propose one additional, if not the primary, factor - that our fathers suddenly began to require Word and Excel to do their work at home.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

drivers99 1y ago

> I don’t know anyone that used the Amiga for anything other than games. My Amiga friends used it for playing games and for creative things: writing music, pixel/digital art, some coding, making games (at least, in shoot-em-up-construction-kit), as well as dialing up BBSes and the text-based Internet (like me on my PC).

tjr 1y ago
I used my Amiga 3000 for a lot of video production and graphics work, along with some word processing / desktop publishing, and a bit of programming. And games! In my observation of other Amiga users at the time, this was typical. Besides random individual users doing these sorts of things, Amigas were used in local broadcast television studios as video switchers and graphics layover systems, and even in more major media production outlets for video editing and 3D animation. They were seen as a more economical solution to more expensive hardware built specifically for television or graphics, but could pull of the work on a comparable level.

vidarh 1y ago

Most of my circle used the Amiga primarily for other things than games. None of us replaced them with consoles. While the use in business was of course important, that the PC survives is just as much down to the open platform and the clone market that prevented its future from being tied to a single company - in this case a wildly dysfunctional one.

louthy 1y ago
> Most of my circle used the Amiga primarily for other things than games. Are you claiming your circle is representative of the computer buying masses of the time? (whether the computers were consoles or not)
- vidarh 1y ago
  No, I'm pointing out that your anecdote doesn't mean much. Lots of people used it for other things. In fact, the US Amiga gaming market, for example, was extremely lackluster because unlike in Europe, in the US the sale was geared much more toward professional use, which was also reflected in e.g. US Amiga magazines like Amiga World, as well as in models like the Amiga 2500 which was aimed at the professional market and mostly sold in the US and Canada. The profile varied extensively by country - Germany as well had a market where Commodore was big in the business market, and while that was mostly PC's, it was also the reason for much of the success of the Amiga 2000, which also largely aimed at non-gaming users. Commodore UK meanwhile, did fit your "profile" for the Amiga and was very much focused on games. But Commodore UK was the subsidiary that remained most successful despite competition from consoles. In fact Commodore UK survived the bankruptcy of Commodore International and did well enough that management tried to put together a buyout offer (but had to throw in the towel after Dell and Escom entered the process). In other words, while you're right that competition from consoles and PC's of course mattered a lot, it was a lot more nuanced than that. E.g. in the US, Commodore had burned its relationships to the ground, and so failed to get the low-end Amiga's out there as gaming machines too, and were nowhere near as successful as some of the subsidiaries like Commodore UK, and Commodore B.V (Netherlands; also briefly survived bankruptcy). Where Commodore did best, it did okay in both the game market and in various professional niches, but that meant actually working the game market hard. E.g. Commodore UK did a "famous" bundle with the game for the 1989 Batman movie which drove relatively-speaking huge sales. Had the rest of the subsidiaries done close to as well as Commodore UK, the company as a whole would've at least weathered the cash crunch that killed it in '94. Whether that'd have let them rebuild (e.g. by completing their next chipsets) or if it'd have just made them linger on in a zombie state another year, is an open question.

evaneykelen 1y ago

> I don’t know anyone that used the Amiga for anything other than games. The Amiga was used worldwide by TV stations for CGI and titling effects, for digital signage eg arrivals/departures at airports, and video walls, besides being a tool for countless digital artists. I know because I wrote digital signage software for the Amiga and sold it to customers in 21 countries.

louthy 1y ago
Just to be clear, because there have been a number of similar responses, I am not claiming the Amiga couldn’t do anything else, nor that it wasn’t used for anything other than games. But, the vast majority of people who bought Amigas did so because it was a great machine for games and had lots of high quality titles. When the majority of your market disappears and moves to cheaper options; and all you have left is video walls in departure lounges, you’re fucked.
- vidarh 1y ago
  But as I pointed out elsewhere: The subsidiary that survived the longest did so on the continued strength of sales driven by games - that market continued to do well for the Amiga until the end in the markets where the subsidiaries actually focused on gaming bundles.
FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
The Video Toaster was the first successful competitor to the horribly expensive Avid system ($100k+) for non-linear video editing, titling, SMTPE code syncing, etc. and ran on an Amiga 2000 as a double card. I think it was $3k. It was used to make the first 3 seasons of Babylon 5 and all of the sub graphics for Sealquest DSV. As an aside, Dana Carveys brother was one of the lead designers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster

District5524 1y ago

I'm sure that was an important reason for the US and UK markets. I don't know much about the Swedish market, but in the Eastern European markets, game consoles were not popular at all until the very late 1990s. Gamers in the early 1990s used Commodore (and less affluents ZX Spectrums and clones), and later, as the article says, more and more PCs. In these parts, people were very short of money, which caused piracy to grow HUGE. Computers were also preferred due to being multipurpose. And console games were difficult to copy, so if you wanted to be a serious gamer, you had to have a PC. Even if you had the money to buy games, you couldn't really do that, because nobody really was selling actual games in these markets. With different currencies and limitations on hard currency exchange, you didn't spend those limited funds on games, even if you travelled abroad. Probably also as a consequence, playing on consoles was considered to be lame. It was for kids only. Hah, for those born in the 1990s only! So that was a bit different over here.

blakespot 1y ago

Most of my friends were gaming on consoles at the time. I very much preferred the Amiga (I also had Atari STs during this time) to consoles perhaps mainly due to the ability to use RGB monitors with a proper RGB signal. It was at best composite back then on the consoles of the era - in the states anyway (we didn't have SCART as an option). I know I'm odd here, but that was a major factor -- but also the fact that I used the Amiga for much more than gaming. I BBSed heavily, generated hundreds of images with paint programs, programmed on it, and then there was enjoying scenedemos as a huge part of my use. Most people in the user group I was in back then (ALFA - Amigoid Life Form Association) were NASA engineers who used them as cheap and capable alternatives to the UNIX workstations they worked with at NASA (which was local, Hampton, VA). Many of these guys were older and didn't game at all.

TheAmazingRace 1y ago
I heard NASA used their Amiga systems clear up to 2006, which is a rather unusually long lifespan for the application they intended them for. But I suppose commodity PC hardware and the software they needed just wasn't really there at a price point that made sense, plus, I guess as the old adage goes... if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
- sillywalk 1y ago
  > I heard NASA used their Amiga systems Yes. "Amigas take in all the telemetry data from the spacecraft, scale it by applying coefficients of up to fifth order polynomials and convert the data back to engineering units for display to the engineers working the launch."[1] [0] https://hackaday.com/2021/08/16/retrotechtacular-amiga-pips-the-pc-for-mission-critical-computing-at-nasa/ https://hackaday.com/2021/08/16/retrotechtacular-amiga-pips-... [1] http://obligement.free.fr/articles_traduction/amiganasa_en.php http://obligement.free.fr/articles_traduction/amiganasa_en.p... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAPD9HA8Unw&t=1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAPD9HA8Unw&t=1s
- drewp 1y ago
  https://www.modd3d.com/articles/item/waterworld-show-control-retrofit https://www.modd3d.com/articles/item/waterworld-show-control... The document is sadly 404 now, but this was an awesome nerdy writeup of the conversion of the Universal Studios Waterworld from Amigas in 2007.

nsxwolf 1y ago

I had consoles and a PC and so did all of my friends. They offered very different experiences in the 90s. Amiga could offer the PC experiences too, and did, until it ran into hardware limitations. Then it was suddenly competing with the Genesis and Super Nintendo, but with inferior European side scrolling games, with their single button controls, “sound or music not both”, etc.

leoc 1y ago

> Games consoles killed the Amiga, just like they did all other home computers that were primarily used for games. Wait, which games, and which consoles? Arcadey sprite-based action games were popular on the Amiga, and there the consoles caught up to it by about 1990 (the Sega Master System) or 1992 (the SNES) in the European market. But 16-bit consoles would have been a depressingly bad substitute for the Amiga when it came to games like point-and-click adventures, Lemmings, Populous, the Freescape games, or XCOM, when those even received a 16-bit console port at all. The Amiga was in actual use mostly a games system, yes, but to a large extent the successful, beloved games were the kind of thing we now think of as PC games. That's also probably a big part of why finally losing pace with the PC over DOOM was such a bitter blow. The 32-bit consoles only started to take off in Europe with the release of the PlayStation there, well into 1995 when it seems the Amiga's goose was mostly already cooked, and even those systems weren't a great place to have a PC-like gaming experience. Then there's the awkward issue of downloading a car: famously, many Amiga users were piracy-happy, and would not have welcomed the game prices and relatively successful copy protection of '90s consoles. (Data mostly from Wikipedia. I'm not an expert on the Amiga's commercial history, and it's a complicated topic.)

snvzz 1y ago
>1990 (the Sega Master System) Probably meant 1988 (Sega Mega Drive). >I'm not an expert on the Amiga's commercial history, and it's a complicated topic. For anybody curious, the Amiga Documents[0]. 0. https://sites.google.com/site/amigadocuments/ https://sites.google.com/site/amigadocuments/
- leoc 1y ago
  > Probably meant 1988 (Sega Mega Drive) Yes, I meant the Mega Drive, but the PAL Mega Drive, the really relevant one here, didn’t come out until well into 1990 (if the easiest Internet sources are to be believed).