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Has Amiga stood the test of time?

The Amiga debate ended long ago. It's been shouted as a quality gaming machine by a loud minority that are still holding on to the days where there was something arguably better than PC's, or those who really want to justify their purchases, or Europeans.

Amiga started off with no strategy, the original machines had good capabilities but they were clearly made for the time of the original Amigas release, by 1992, several years after the launch of the Genesis and over a year into the SNES, most Amiga games still had the gameplay and the visuals of games from 85-87.

Very few games took advantage of the advancement of hardware, which yes, was superior to the competition, and is why Amiga released two failed gaming consoles to see if they could use this hardware for something profitable. Of course having no vetting and single person nobody dev teams hurt overall quality as well.

The library is a mess, a lot of games are just ports from the ST, DOS, or WIN3, often worse outside of audio, and several titles had stiff controls and many were programmed by like 1 guy who decided to throw some shit together and join a publishing program that had no vetting because Commodore was trying to bury the ST in software regardless of quality since the St was selling more software at a faster rate.

The few games that took advantage of upgrades or the 1200 era were very few, and a lot of them were ports. There were some original titles but nothing that caught the attention of any large number of gamers. This explains the lack of "popular" selling games.

The ST and DOS had top selling titles that brought in many units, while most Amiga games barely could break 50k. They never had a major stand out title during their time of relevancy. We are talking about PC SPEAKER shit tier games on Dos.

The games that could have changed the game for Commodore were 3D games. 3D was a very popular thing at the time and throughout the 90's would dominate gaming talk.

However, the best versions of the 3D games it had were also on the ST or in some cases, DOS/WIN. If you didn't have some later 1200 Amigas or upgraded your machine the gap between the Amiga and ST for 3D games was drastic, and that would include most Amiga owners at the time, those that did have upgraded or later 1200 models would still find the ST version to run better and smoother but the gap was reduced somewhat. This meant that one of the main drivers to adoption at the time was superior on both competitors and are what non-enthusiast are playing those games on today, not the Amiga.

The Amiga has a very similar problem that the Genesis had, where Sega and Commodore made numerous partnerships and threw everything they could at the wall to see what would stick. The only difference is that Sega, mostly due to SOA, was able to save itself with games like Sonic, and partnerships with companies like Midway that brought in MK and Nba Jam, nothing on the Amiga really sold well in any capacity.

While there's an active scene currently among enthusiasts, the average gamer that's interest in old classic computer games and stand out titles are going back to the 64, Speccy, ST, DOS, and the old Atari 8-bit lines. There's almost zero non-enthusiast interest in anything Commodore Amiga related outside a small niche or the CD32 system.

I see more legit non-enthusiast interest in the CD-i ironically. What's funny is even that had some titles people actually brought (Burn:Cycle sold like half a million.)

But still, the Amiga was a starting point and was important, might not have really been much of anything, but it had its uses for media and did get some developers started, so it's not a complete disaster.
 

Birdo

Banned
The Amiga debate ended long ago. It's been shouted as a quality gaming machine by a loud minority that are still holding on to the days where there was something arguably better than PC's, or those who really want to justify their purchases, or Europeans.

Amiga started off with no strategy, the original machines had good capabilities but they were clearly made for the time of the original Amigas release, by 1992, several years after the launch of the Genesis and over a year into the SNES, most Amiga games still had the gameplay and the visuals of games from 85-87.

Very few games took advantage of the advancement of hardware, which yes, was superior to the competition, and is why Amiga released two failed gaming consoles to see if they could use this hardware for something profitable. Of course having no vetting and single person nobody dev teams hurt overall quality as well.

The library is a mess, a lot of games are just ports from the ST, DOS, or WIN3, often worse outside of audio, and several titles had stiff controls and many were programmed by like 1 guy who decided to throw some shit together and join a publishing program that had no vetting because Commodore was trying to bury the ST in software regardless of quality since the St was selling more software at a faster rate.

The few games that took advantage of upgrades or the 1200 era were very few, and a lot of them were ports. There were some original titles but nothing that caught the attention of any large number of gamers. This explains the lack of "popular" selling games.

The ST and DOS had top selling titles that brought in many units, while most Amiga games barely could break 50k. They never had a major stand out title during their time of relevancy. We are talking about PC SPEAKER shit tier games on Dos.

The games that could have changed the game for Commodore were 3D games. 3D was a very popular thing at the time and throughout the 90's would dominate gaming talk.

However, the best versions of the 3D games it had were also on the ST or in some cases, DOS/WIN. If you didn't have some later 1200 Amigas or upgraded your machine the gap between the Amiga and ST for 3D games was drastic, and that would include most Amiga owners at the time, those that did have upgraded or later 1200 models would still find the ST version to run better and smoother but the gap was reduced somewhat. This meant that one of the main drivers to adoption at the time was superior on both competitors and are what non-enthusiast are playing those games on today, not the Amiga.

The Amiga has a very similar problem that the Genesis had, where Sega and Commodore made numerous partnerships and threw everything they could at the wall to see what would stick. The only difference is that Sega, mostly due to SOA, was able to save itself with games like Sonic, and partnerships with companies like Midway that brought in MK and Nba Jam, nothing on the Amiga really sold well in any capacity.

While there's an active scene currently among enthusiasts, the average gamer that's interest in old classic computer games and stand out titles are going back to the 64, Speccy, ST, DOS, and the old Atari 8-bit lines. There's almost zero non-enthusiast interest in anything Commodore Amiga related outside a small niche or the CD32 system.

I see more legit non-enthusiast interest in the CD-i ironically. What's funny is even that had some titles people actually brought (Burn:Cycle sold like half a million.)

But still, the Amiga was a starting point and was important, might not have really been much of anything, but it had its uses for media and did get some developers started, so it's not a complete disaster.

Ah, the old ST fanboy in denial.

I haven't seen one of those since the 90's! Thanks for the nostalgia :messenger_smiling_with_eyes:
 
Ah, the old ST fanboy in denial.

I haven't seen one of those since the 90's! Thanks for the nostalgia :messenger_smiling_with_eyes:

You clearly didn't actually take the time to read the post since it just went up, it seems all you did was see the word St and dismiss it. Feel free to actually read the post, then you would figure out I'm not an ST "fanboy" and you might learn some better reading comprehension in return, a win-win.
 

Birdo

Banned
You clearly didn't actually take the time to read the post since it just went up, it seems all you did was see the word St and dismiss it. Feel free to actually read the post, then you would figure out I'm not an ST "fanboy" and you might learn some better reading comprehension in return, a win-win.

I read pretty fast. You reeealy oversold the ST. Amiga versions of multiplat games were always better than the ST version, outside of a few 3D ones that you could count on one hand.
 
I read pretty fast. You reeealy oversold the ST. Amiga versions of multiplat games were always better than the ST version, outside of a few 3D ones that you could count on one hand.

No they were not. Also your basically omitting almost all my post and focusing on the ST ignoring DOS/Win and other things I mentioned.

Certain titles by established dems were better, but your ignoring full library comparisons where a large portion of the Amigas pre-1200 library were St ports or developers that didn't know how to use the hardware and gave the Amiga bad ports. That part of the library doesn't vanish because a lot of commonly sites big games in many cases (2D) were better than the St.

Your overselling 3D as well, it wasn't a few gmaes it was most 3D games, yeah the gap wasn't that large outside a few games, but the issue that you're ignoring is that most Amiga owners didn't have upgraded machines or 1200+ era machines and those 3D games run on those older models made that gap really big.

The Amiga was 1985-mid 90's and people seem to forget that when comparing libraries and how many Amiga owners had which machines at which times on average. PC ended up clobbering most after a slow start in 1990. Both ST and Amiga did a poor job future proofing their consoles while maintaining BC, instead they both let BC overwhelm the last years of their life spans with only few developers taking advantage of both specs post ST2/E/Amiga 1200 era which was too little too late and in some cases alienated previous owners.

Amiga had this issue before the ST did, and Dos never had that problem. Shame, if Atari and Commodore got their shit together maybe they could have stopped PC being the only major computer by the late 90's.
 
The Amiga even in its first years was a much stronger system than the home consoles.

CD storage
Superior Audio
Better Sprite technology by default (Genesis couldn't touch it, SNES needed chips in the cartridges in match)
14mhz
2MB Ram.

it was a better machine from the get-go. I like the ST and PC systems as well, but if we are comparing computers to consoles the Amiga was the only real competition.
 
The Amiga even in its first years was a much stronger system than the home consoles.

CD storage
Superior Audio
Better Sprite technology by default (Genesis couldn't touch it, SNES needed chips in the cartridges in match)
14mhz
2MB Ram.

it was a better machine from the get-go. I like the ST and PC systems as well, but if we are comparing computers to consoles the Amiga was the only real competition.

The first Amiga computers didn't even have CD-drives. Hell if I recall correctly the first CD Amiga was the CDTV and then almost all future Amiga computers had CD-drives pre-installed af

The Amiga didn't have 14mhz or 2MB of ram until the 1200. Old school Amigas had 500KB of ram and 5-7mhx processors.

Old Amigas could only place 32 colors on screen while the SNES could place 256.

The average size was 1MB for games while the SNES had 2-3MB games within its first full year. The 1200+ era did see increases once more developers moved to CD, but the first two waves of CD games early on where just enhanced ports of existing Amiga games with a higher color count and CD audio.

The 1200 didn't come out until 1992 which was also the year that CD was becoming a standard for Amiga games, but it took almost two years for there to be a moderate number of games that took advantage of the new technology, and by 1994 Amiga was way behind, the 3DO and Jaguar were on the market for the year, the Saturn and PSX just came out in Japan and announced they would launch within a year in America and Europe, The Atari Falcon was rumored to be a super machine, and Windows was so far ahead some retailers though the Amiga 1200 was cancelled only two years into the market and thought Commodores "new gaming computer line" was going to quickly replace it.

Amiga had tons of games due to lack of quality control and the desperation by Commodore to flood the markets and bury the ST and windows IBM PC's. Piracy was rampant but most games were insanely cheap still making the software business lucrative and inviting all kinds of trash developers to the platform.

This was never resolved until 1994 when the money well started to dry up and there became increasing costs to develop for the more powerful Amiga models and costs for actually using the CD medium for something other than higher colors and Audio.

The CD32 game console doesn't have too many games but even that has some trash quickly put together garbage slapped on to a CD from nobodies.

Commodore was confused, they wanted to be a game company without actually doing what game companies needed to do to be competitive in the industry.

it's clear the Amiga ended up being an accident. Yes, it was made with games in mind, but not to be a serious competitor in the industry. The Amiga had become a gaming opportunity that they never took advantage of.

It seems like Commodore took the growing interest in Amiga gaming and though that their brand name alone, along with flooding the market, would be enough to become a gaming giant. Which failed.

The CD32 should had been what the CDTV was. It took Commodore way too long to take the game industry seriously. The CDTV should have only been a modified computer with most ports and unnecessary features removed except the CD-drive. They could have sold it for $399 or less. Instead they put a console shell over an upgraded fully featured Amiga that can transform into a home computer for over $1000 with games.

It was one of the most poorly run divisions I've seen for any major company even today. They had SO MUCH TIME and so much data yet they did nothing about the gaming

The CD32 was popular, it gained interest, it sold out nearly all shipments it had, it got developers on board that actually took it seriously, they actually tried marketing games, and so much more.

But it was released in 1993, the year the 3DO and the Jaguar would come out, the 3D support was extremely limited because the CD32 was a modified 1200. PSX/Sat releasing the following year.

It took them nearly 8 years to say "maybe we should actually stop being dumb and make our gaming machine and actual gaming machine and market it like a gaming machine and partner with companies like it's a gaming machine around 2.5 years from bankruptcy."
 

T8SC

Member
Amiga (A500)



ST




What the companies did, that's another matter. The fact is, the Amiga was a superb machine for its time. Whilst we're also considering the Amiga Vs Consoles (Snes for example). A lot of sound effects were missing on the SNES version of Cannon Fodder, such as the river flow noise, whereas it was present on the Amiga (A500). I know this because I had both. Yes its only one example but lets not pretend the Amiga was a pale immitation with its version of games.
 

sunnysideup

Banned
Freedom gates tldr posts are nothing but gibberish.

Amiga was and is an European phenomena. What happened in America is completely irrelevant. Amiga was huge where it mattered. Predominately In Germany, Scandinavia and the UK and elsewhere in europe.. Comparable to any console and pc at the time. And today id say only c64 has a more viberant scene in terms of demos and games.
 

Neff

Member
The Amiga was nice for tech demos, music and general software, but as far as games go it was never really that good imo. It certainly didn't have anything to rival the best of console gaming at the time.
 

molasar

Banned
The Amiga was nice for tech demos, music and general software, but as far as games go it was never really that good imo. It certainly didn't have anything to rival the best of console gaming at the time.
Yeah, especially in western RPG and point'n'click adventure categories, SMH. BTW, I had Mega Drive, SNES and various Amiga computers.
 
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OldBoyGamer

Banned
The Amiga debate ended long ago. It's been shouted as a quality gaming machine by a loud minority that are still holding on to the days where there was something arguably better than PC's, or those who really want to justify their purchases, or Europeans.

Amiga started off with no strategy, the original machines had good capabilities but they were clearly made for the time of the original Amigas release, by 1992, several years after the launch of the Genesis and over a year into the SNES, most Amiga games still had the gameplay and the visuals of games from 85-87.

Very few games took advantage of the advancement of hardware, which yes, was superior to the competition, and is why Amiga released two failed gaming consoles to see if they could use this hardware for something profitable. Of course having no vetting and single person nobody dev teams hurt overall quality as well.

The library is a mess, a lot of games are just ports from the ST, DOS, or WIN3, often worse outside of audio, and several titles had stiff controls and many were programmed by like 1 guy who decided to throw some shit together and join a publishing program that had no vetting because Commodore was trying to bury the ST in software regardless of quality since the St was selling more software at a faster rate.

The few games that took advantage of upgrades or the 1200 era were very few, and a lot of them were ports. There were some original titles but nothing that caught the attention of any large number of gamers. This explains the lack of "popular" selling games.

The ST and DOS had top selling titles that brought in many units, while most Amiga games barely could break 50k. They never had a major stand out title during their time of relevancy. We are talking about PC SPEAKER shit tier games on Dos.

The games that could have changed the game for Commodore were 3D games. 3D was a very popular thing at the time and throughout the 90's would dominate gaming talk.

However, the best versions of the 3D games it had were also on the ST or in some cases, DOS/WIN. If you didn't have some later 1200 Amigas or upgraded your machine the gap between the Amiga and ST for 3D games was drastic, and that would include most Amiga owners at the time, those that did have upgraded or later 1200 models would still find the ST version to run better and smoother but the gap was reduced somewhat. This meant that one of the main drivers to adoption at the time was superior on both competitors and are what non-enthusiast are playing those games on today, not the Amiga.

The Amiga has a very similar problem that the Genesis had, where Sega and Commodore made numerous partnerships and threw everything they could at the wall to see what would stick. The only difference is that Sega, mostly due to SOA, was able to save itself with games like Sonic, and partnerships with companies like Midway that brought in MK and Nba Jam, nothing on the Amiga really sold well in any capacity.

While there's an active scene currently among enthusiasts, the average gamer that's interest in old classic computer games and stand out titles are going back to the 64, Speccy, ST, DOS, and the old Atari 8-bit lines. There's almost zero non-enthusiast interest in anything Commodore Amiga related outside a small niche or the CD32 system.

I see more legit non-enthusiast interest in the CD-i ironically. What's funny is even that had some titles people actually brought (Burn:Cycle sold like half a million.)

But still, the Amiga was a starting point and was important, might not have really been much of anything, but it had its uses for media and did get some developers started, so it's not a complete disaster.

I think it’s good that you took time and effort to offer a different opinion. I wish you hadn’t phrased your post so matter of fact because much of it is just opinion other bits are spun and some of it is just plain nonsense. Which is all fine. We all have our own versions of reality.

The Atari was way ahead of the Amiga when the first Amigas rolled out. By the end of that generation, the ST was dead at the hands of the Amiga.

And then a couple of years later, the Amiga was killed by a combination of the SNES and Megadrive and the squandering of millions of pounds on the ill fated cd-i.

Had Commodore made better choices for their future plans, things may have been different. As it was, they died shortly afterwards.
 

sunnysideup

Banned
Consoles offered a much more limitied palette of games. Yes often more polished. But at the same time less risk taking.

Amiga gave us games like another world, lemmings, moonstone. Games completely different from your average console fare.
 

RAIDEN1

Member
I'd argue that had the Sharp X68000 come out in the west circa 1987 it would have challenged the Amiga much more than the ST EVER did....that machine could do arcade perfect conversions better than the Amiga I think...and its true that whenever there were multi-platform games out the Amiga version wouldn't look as good as compared to the console conversions...ie CoolSpot, Lost Vikings, Mortal Kombat, Streetfighter 2, to name but a few.....and the CD32 should have had the kind of catalogue the 3DO had, which truly did show the 32 bit difference...(from a graphics point of view..) otherwise the CD32 was no better than the Mega CD....(aside from OK better looking FMV.)
 
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Collz69

Member
I can’t understand why all this PC is superior to Amiga crap always comes up.
In the UK (& Europe for that matter) the Amiga 500 wasn’t a PC rival, it was an relatively cheap all in one computer.
I swapped a NES and some games for mine in the early 90’s at the time I only knew one person that owned a PC (& that was his parents) & one person that owned an ST, the whole point was that we could copy each other’s games, (FREE GAMES) if nobody else had the machine you couldn’t copy anything, so we all had amigas.
Years later (around 1997) I got a PC, it cost me close to £1000 & Yes it was more powerful than my Amiga, but It was 5 years later & cost me a ridiculous amount of money!
 

silentstorm

Member
Sadly didn't grow up with an Amiga despite being european, i actually had a PC, but looking at videos, oh boy, for quite a few years, the Amiga wrecked DOS PC's in terms of capabilities, and i have fond memories of playing quite a few of the games that are shared between Amiga and DOS.

I just have never actually owned an Amiga, i just know it was an influential computer that was the start of a few great developers and it has many classic games in it, i don't need to play Amiga's version of the Monkey Island games to know they are great for example.

It's just...i haven't actually felt the need to play Amiga games or their versions, i do know about games like Alien Breed, Chaos Engine and others, they just never actually looked good enough to start thinking about playing an Amiga.

But the fact it has such dedicated fans, a homebrew scene and it's influence is still felt on gaming today makes me believe it must have stood the test of time even if i have no experience with it.
 
H

hariseldon

Unconfirmed Member
Only really as nostalgia for those of us who had them. I don't think other people would see the appeal, since Amiga games didn't have an "Identity", like Sega or Nintendo.
Not strictly true. The Amiga was in many ways the precursor to what we think of today as PC gaming, with its rich variety, being home to things that just don’t work well on consoles like Civilisation, Sim City, Populous, Powermonger, Championship Manager, Monkey Island, Operation Stealth, Future Wars, Damocles, Castle Master, Dungeon Master, Cadaver, etc as well as more traditional fare.
 
H

hariseldon

Unconfirmed Member
Hell yeah it has. The Amiga was a significant part of my gaming experience growing up, and its library is has plenty of great 16-bit era titles to offer.


I honestly thought I was the only person who ever played it! It’s honestly one of very few things I ever had any kind of bond with my Dad over. Hours spent trying to figure out that’s you needed fucking cereal to go into space...
 
H

hariseldon

Unconfirmed Member
Ah, the old ST fanboy in denial.

I haven't seen one of those since the 90's! Thanks for the nostalgia :messenger_smiling_with_eyes:

I had an ST and later the Amiga. Both wonderful machines. On the 3D thing he’s full of crap. The ST ran at 8mhz vs the Amiga at 7 so yeah in theory 3D games ran faster on the ST but not by much, and for 2D the Amiga was better with its blitter (the ST didn’t get one till the STE but it was too late at that point and assorted custom chips which the ST lacked. The ST was my machine for years and I loved it, especially for MIDI and writing games, but the Amiga was a better computer.
 

petran79

Banned
I'd argue that had the Sharp X68000 come out in the west circa 1987 it would have challenged the Amiga much more than the ST EVER did....that machine could do arcade perfect conversions better than the Amiga I think...and its true that whenever there were multi-platform games out the Amiga version wouldn't look as good as compared to the console conversions...ie CoolSpot, Lost Vikings, Mortal Kombat, Streetfighter 2, to name but a few.....and the CD32 should have had the kind of catalogue the 3DO had, which truly did show the 32 bit difference...(from a graphics point of view..) otherwise the CD32 was no better than the Mega CD....(aside from OK better looking FMV.)

I had asked the same question in an Amiga board and except the arcade conversions, Amiga was superior as a computer and operating system. Sharp was more expensive but with that money you could buy an Amiga 2000 and accelerator card expansion and it would beat the Sharp in performance
 

Fuchalmania

Member
Consoles offered a much more limitied palette of games. Yes often more polished. But at the same time less risk taking.

Amiga gave us games like another world, lemmings, moonstone. Games completely different from your average console fare.

Great point that's lost on those who need to have a winner between consoles and the Amiga/ST.

Having said that, if I had to decide between a NES and it's best games (Super Mario, Zelda, etc.), and some of the bizzare, dark and stupid games from the Amiga, I'd take the latter. It's like chosing a safe, reliable, well made but rather plain car over a loud, fast, obnoqious clanger that can kill you but is such a thrill to experience.
 
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Not strictly true. The Amiga was in many ways the precursor to what we think of today as PC gaming, with its rich variety, being home to things that just don’t work well on consoles like Civilisation, Sim City, Populous, Powermonger, Championship Manager, Monkey Island, Operation Stealth, Future Wars, Damocles, Castle Master, Dungeon Master, Cadaver, etc as well as more traditional fare.

So you mean the same games that were on DOS and the ST?

I think it’s good that you took time and effort to offer a different opinion. I wish you hadn’t phrased your post so matter of fact because much of it is just opinion other bits are spun and some of it is just plain nonsense. Which is all fine. We all have our own versions of reality.

The Atari was way ahead of the Amiga when the first Amigas rolled out. By the end of that generation, the ST was dead at the hands of the Amiga.

And then a couple of years later, the Amiga was killed by a combination of the SNES and Megadrive and the squandering of millions of pounds on the ill fated cd-i.

Had Commodore made better choices for their future plans, things may have been different. As it was, they died shortly afterwards.

Your fanboyism may be scrambling your mind, Commodore has nothing to do with the CD-i that was Philips, and considering it was on the market for nearly 8 years it wasmore relevant in the industry than the Amiga and also had games that actually sold units that could be called a "Killer app"

I had an ST and later the Amiga. Both wonderful machines. On the 3D thing he’s full of crap. The ST ran at 8mhz vs the Amiga at 7 so yeah in theory 3D games ran faster on the ST but not by much,

Lol

For one you basically tried to attack me by supporting my argument. I already said if you had upgraded or post 1200 era hardware the gap wasn;'t big, but most Amiga users din't have 1200+ era Amigas, they had the older generations and they could barely run No Second Prize without studdering and choking as polygons filled the screen.

It wasn't just running fast either some Amiga versions had objects missing.
 
I'd argue that had the Sharp X68000 come out in the west circa 1987 it would have challenged the Amiga much more than the ST EVER did....that machine could do arcade perfect conversions better than the Amiga I think...and its true that whenever there were multi-platform games out the Amiga version wouldn't look as good as compared to the console conversions...ie CoolSpot, Lost Vikings, Mortal Kombat, Streetfighter 2, to name but a few.....and the CD32 should have had the kind of catalogue the 3DO had, which truly did show the 32 bit difference...(from a graphics point of view..) otherwise the CD32 was no better than the Mega CD....(aside from OK better looking FMV.)

There was nothing they could have done with the CD32 to improve it's situation the CD32 should have launched when the 1200 came out or shortly after, it took Commodore way to long to take gaming seriously and it crumbled their foothold and cost them the company.

The Cd32 was a medium-powered 1200, so regardless of library it wouldn't even touch the Jaguar, and that console had a severe bottle neck that made it impossible to see its full potential.

I've hear people saying that it could have gotten some more attention if it was an Amiga 2000+ upgraded in a console shell but that still wouldn't really match the Jaguar except for 2D games and the 3Do would demolish either. Not to mention Commodore had a bad track record of getting devs to take advantage of new technology when it came to Amiga upgrades.

HOWEVER, the CD32 was better than the Mega Cd, the Amiga 1200 was a pretty big gap from the mega drive, and all the Mega CD did was add cutscenes and audio. Amiga 1200 had built in 3D performance better than the 500, more colors, faster processor by nearly double the old Amiga. Several CD32 games show a big leap from anything the Genesis could put out until the 32X which was stronger than the 1200 but weaker than the last generation of Amiga arguably.

The issue with the CD32, and the 1200 series, was that several small or no name devs flooded the library with lazy ports, that's why several CD32 games look like they belong on a CD-i.

Freedom gates tldr posts are nothing but gibberish.

Amiga was and is an European phenomena. What happened in America is completely irrelevant. Amiga was huge where it mattered. Predominately In Germany, Scandinavia and the UK and elsewhere in europe.. Comparable to any console and pc at the time. And today id say only c64 has a more viberant scene in terms of demos and games.

It was such a phenomenon that they made no money and went bankrupt selling less than half their predecessor with only 25% of the market penetration and only 4-5 million disputed units SOLD IN.

It really wasn't anywhere as big as people think, PC+PC clones were already over 50% marketshare by 1991 while Commodore was still trying to figure out if they wanted to sell a game machine or not. It's great that Amiga sold decent in Europe and ok in America but when your predecessor sold triple the software and more than double the hardware with MORE competition for its time that's not really good.

Revising history to pretend Amiga was dominating PC is a bit silly. I suppose in Scandanavia is did until the 90's I guess i can give you one place, but let's not go over board and act like the Amiga was some second coming of the c64, it wasn't.

Consoles offered a much more limitied palette of games. Yes often more polished. But at the same time less risk taking.

Amiga gave us games like another world, lemmings, moonstone. Games completely different from your average console fare.
First two games were on the SNES and CD-i iirc.
 

molasar

Banned
Freedom Gate Co. Freedom Gate Co.
To be honest you would not convince me to purchase CD-i over Amiga based on games in early 90s. And PCs were too expensive. So IMO Amiga, Genesis and SNES were the best options until Jaguar, PS1, Saturn, N64 hit the market and PCs prices started going down.
 
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Collz69

Member
By the time CD32 arrived we all had Playstation’s.
I don’t know anyone that bought one, years later I bought a CD32 from ebay & I was relieved I didn’t waste my money on one originally, terrible build quality and an awful controller.
 
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Freedom Gate Co. Freedom Gate Co.
To be honest you would not convince me to purchase CD-i over Amiga based on games in early 90s. And PCs were too expensive. So IMO Amiga, Genesis and SNES were the best options until Jaguar, PS1, Saturn, N64 hit the market and PCs prices started going down.

Your opinion is invalid.

I never said the CD-I was better or not when compared to the Amiga, I said that the CD-I had games that sold and would have games considered "killer apps" the Amiga had virtually none.

That's not a subjective statement that's a fact, and it's one of the reasons why it didn't succeed as a gaming device. If Commodore to the time to actual push big games than it could have helped their bottom line but they didn't they sad there and let a mountain of developers poor games on the shelves and inside bargin bins.

Sega had the same problem, they only had a few, which hurt them compared to the SNES and later PS1/PS1/GCN/Xbox.

The SNES has several million selling titles 1st and 3rd part, several games that sold hundreds of thousands. Dos had million sellers and games selling hundreds of thousands. The ST had games selling hundreds of thousands. How many games on the Amiga sold hundreds of thousands?

Can't think of one.
 
By the time CD32 arrived we all had Playstation’s.
I don’t know anyone that bought one, years later I bought a CD32 from ebay & I was relieved I didn’t waste my money on one originally, terrible build quality and an awful controller.


It was a very half-assed attempt, instead of trying the CDTV again at a lower price and the base being a modified Amiga 2000+ they went with a gimped CD32. Initially it sold ok then faltered. Commodore just released the CD32, and a bunch of games with varying quality and called it a day.

No Retailer relations

No 1st party studios

No third party partnerships

No in house dev tool developer to make development easier.

No software contracts

No internal gaming management division

No real dev kits

No gaming hardware team for controllers, parts etc.

No attempt to bring in third-party accessories and blocking most out but a few.

They basically did nothing. Can you imagine if the CD32 released in 1991 the same year as the SNES and as Sonic on the Genesis, it would have been considered the biggest act of Hubris in gaming.

Commodore was given the gaming machine label for free on a silver platter and did nothing with it. Absolutely astounding.
 

molasar

Banned
Your opinion is invalid.

I never said the CD-I was better or not when compared to the Amiga, I said that the CD-I had games that sold and would have games considered "killer apps" the Amiga had virtually none.

That's not a subjective statement that's a fact, and it's one of the reasons why it didn't succeed as a gaming device. If Commodore to the time to actual push big games than it could have helped their bottom line but they didn't they sad there and let a mountain of developers poor games on the shelves and inside bargin bins.

Sega had the same problem, they only had a few, which hurt them compared to the SNES and later PS1/PS1/GCN/Xbox.

The SNES has several million selling titles 1st and 3rd part, several games that sold hundreds of thousands. Dos had million sellers and games selling hundreds of thousands. The ST had games selling hundreds of thousands. How many games on the Amiga sold hundreds of thousands?

Can't think of one.
My opinion is based on my own gamer experience, not as a businessman. I was curious about FMV games at the beginning but was never really sold on them if we treat them as "killer apps".
Nevertheless I agree Commodore as a company was run badly.
Do you consider sale numbers as a main factor if something stood the test of time? For example Justin Beber sold gazillion of records (I guess) but I was never interested in listening to his music, nor I am now. Has his music stood the test of time?
 
The Amiga 1200 could run a decent copy of quake:



No matter id you like it or not, if you were purely a gaming fanatic between 1987-1993 and wanted a computer the Amiga was the best choice for most games until Windows 95.

With enhancements it even beat the X68000 after the 80's. These days it's cheaper to buy TV shells of Amiga computers so you have more of a plug & play experience so it's not as expensive today as it was back then.
 

silentstorm

Member
Regarding the CD32, at least it was better than the Commodore 64 console as it didn't come with a game you couldn't play at all.

And it still did better than Amstrad's console and quite a few others, it just came at a bad time and wasn't what people wanted and expected, then again, every time i hear about Commodore in videos or read about them, i seem to hear about some baffling decision they made.

To a point where i believe they made such beloved computers as the Vic-20, Commodore 64 and the Amiga despite Commodore itself rather than because of it.

Also, seeing when it came out and comparing it to PC's at the time it's quite a staggering difference, but it didn't sell well outside of Europe as far as i can tell.
 
My opinion is based on my own gamer experience, not as a businessman. I was curious about FMV games at the beginning but was never really sold on them if we treat them as "killer apps".
Nevertheless I agree Commodore as a company was run badly.
Do you consider sale numbers as a main factor if something stood the test of time? For example Justin Beber sold gazillion of records (I guess) but I was never interested in listening to his music, nor I am now. Has his music stood the test of time?


CD-i had more than FMV games but ok.

Your bieber example doesn't apply here, people are exaggerating the Amigas presence and success, an all I did was show them reality, it wasn't that popular, and Commodore who used to be a major name, had their successor sell more than 2x less than the C64 and the C64 had more competition.

That's bad no matter how you slice it. Deflection to popularity just show an attempt to move the goal post. The St sold less (arguably) than the Amiga, it's not about sales, it's about a market failure, st least the St beat the 8-bit line and made money off the ST, At least IBM still managed to make profit on PC for a bit longer despite the clones, Commodore made zero cash, did worse than its predecessor, screwed up in the market, and crashed.

Yet we have people here saying it was some kind of massive giant when it wasn't. It's like we are in a Dreamcast thread.

One of the biggest reason why the Amiga crashed is because it didn't have any games that attracted a large number of gamers and casuals. There was no Sonic, No SFII, no MK, no Metroid. PC and ST did however have several big titles, you need titles to drive adoption of your gaming system, something Commodore did not have, and they never even advertised the titles that could have been big.
 

molasar

Banned
The Amiga 1200 could run a decent copy of quake:



No matter id you like it or not, if you were purely a gaming fanatic between 1987-1993 and wanted a computer the Amiga was the best choice for most games until Windows 95.

With enhancements it even beat the X68000 after the 80's. These days it's cheaper to buy TV shells of Amiga computers so you have more of a plug & play experience so it's not as expensive today as it was back then.

Yes, but not the naked one.
 
Regarding the CD32, at least it was better than the Commodore 64 console as it didn't come with a game you couldn't play at all.

And it still did better than Amstrad's console and quite a few others, it just came at a bad time and wasn't what people wanted and expected, then again, every time i hear about Commodore in videos or read about them, i seem to hear about some baffling decision they made.

To a point where i believe they made such beloved computers as the Vic-20, Commodore 64 and the Amiga despite Commodore itself rather than because of it.

Also, seeing when it came out and comparing it to PC's at the time it's quite a staggering difference, but it didn't sell well outside of Europe as far as i can tell.

Funny enough the designers of the VIC and C64 were on the Atari side, and the people that were behind the Atari 8-bit line ended up on the Amiga side, so you can't even really think of the Amiga Commodore as the same guys who did the VIC and C64.

I will give some credit to Amiga, in the 80's PC was trash, and early dos was pretty bad. Didn't really improve until he late 80's, that's when PC started widening the gap in its favor.
 

molasar

Banned
CD-i had more than FMV games but ok.

Your bieber example doesn't apply here, people are exaggerating the Amigas presence and success, an all I did was show them reality, it wasn't that popular, and Commodore who used to be a major name, had their successor sell more than 2x less than the C64 and the C64 had more competition.

That's bad no matter how you slice it. Deflection to popularity just show an attempt to move the goal post. The St sold less (arguably) than the Amiga, it's not about sales, it's about a market failure, st least the St beat the 8-bit line and made money off the ST, At least IBM still managed to make profit on PC for a bit longer despite the clones, Commodore made zero cash, did worse than its predecessor, screwed up in the market, and crashed.

Yet we have people here saying it was some kind of massive giant when it wasn't. It's like we are in a Dreamcast thread.

One of the biggest reason why the Amiga crashed is because it didn't have any games that attracted a large number of gamers and casuals. There was no Sonic, No SFII, no MK, no Metroid. PC and ST did however have several big titles, you need titles to drive adoption of your gaming system, something Commodore did not have, and they never even advertised the titles that could have been big.
At that time I was still a kid so was not bothered with a business side of the industry. However Amiga got its MK, MK2 and various SFII ports. Not to mention Rise of the Robots and Primal Rage. Yes, I know they were nothing in comparison to 16-bit console ports gameplaywise mainly.
 
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I will give some credit to Amiga, in the 80's PC was trash, and early dos was pretty bad. Didn't really improve until he late 80's, that's when PC started widening the gap in its favor.
Nah, it took until 1995 (Pentium/3Dfx/Windows 95) for PCs to become somewhat respectable.

Blitter was way ahead of its time. Some people consider it the precursor to unified shader GPUs. Motorola 68k was nothing special, it's a late 70s CPU. Custom chipsets did all the magic.

"What if" scenarios are always fun to discuss, but unfortunately Amiga didn't capitalize on it.
 
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At that time I was still a kid so was not bothered with a business side of the industry. However Amiga got its MK, MK2 and various SFII ports.

It got ports but they didn't attract anybody to the machine. SFII on SNES was a big deal and even a little but on the genny.

Nah, it took until 1995 (Pentium/3Dfx/Windows 95) for PCs to become somewhat respectable.

Blitter was way ahead of its time. Some people consider it the precursor to unified shader GPUs. Motorola 68k was nothing special, it's a late 70s CPU. Custom chipsets did all the magic.

"What if" scenarios are always fun to discuss, but unfortunately Amiga didn't capitalize on it.

Pre 1200 model Amigas were the best selling models and those weren't running most 1992-1993 3D PC games, it did hold on until 2D though for awhile longer but 3D was talk of the town.

Jaguar had only a 68k with no custom chips and ran circles on the Amiga with 2D unless you had a 2000+Upgrade and the 5 games that supported it.

I do agree that Commodore didn't capitalize anything, they could have put a team together to make sure devs took advantage of 1200 hardware in the early 90's and helped move devs to CD.

Amiga became known as the gaming computer out of nowhere and the reputation was given to them for free and they had basically gave the plate back tot he waiter ans said, "I'll pay for this meal but I won't eat it.".
 

DrCheese

Member
I can’t understand why all this PC is superior to Amiga crap always comes up.
In the UK (& Europe for that matter) the Amiga 500 wasn’t a PC rival, it was an relatively cheap all in one computer.
I swapped a NES and some games for mine in the early 90’s at the time I only knew one person that owned a PC (& that was his parents) & one person that owned an ST, the whole point was that we could copy each other’s games, (FREE GAMES) if nobody else had the machine you couldn’t copy anything, so we all had amigas.
Years later (around 1997) I got a PC, it cost me close to £1000 & Yes it was more powerful than my Amiga, but It was 5 years later & cost me a ridiculous amount of money!

Pretty much. PC Versions of games at the time I owned an Amiga (1991ish) were utter hot garbage. To get the same experience on a PC you had to spend insane amounts of cash only to end up faffing about with autoexec.bat files & screwing about with IRQ settings. They also looked like crap most of the time & sometimes you had to just put up with the PC speaker for audio.
 

theclaw135

Banned
Technical specs versus lasting impact paints two entirely different pictures of the Amiga.

Amiga games in large part did not sell well in America, and they're barely recognized by gamer culture on that side of the pond today.
 

petran79

Banned
Technical specs versus lasting impact paints two entirely different pictures of the Amiga.

Amiga games in large part did not sell well in America, and they're barely recognized by gamer culture on that side of the pond today.

Al Lowe of Leisure Suite Larry fame mentioned in the interview that Ken Williams at Sierra succeeded because he targeted users of IBM PCs that had the cash to buy many games, instead of cheaper mini-computers users like C64. If they spent 5000$ on hardware, they'd have the money for software.
So while from a technical point, games looked and sounded better on mini-computers, from a business viewpoint it was IBM and clones that brought profit.
 
H

hariseldon

Unconfirmed Member
So you mean the same games that were on DOS and the ST?



Your fanboyism may be scrambling your mind, Commodore has nothing to do with the CD-i that was Philips, and considering it was on the market for nearly 8 years it wasmore relevant in the industry than the Amiga and also had games that actually sold units that could be called a "Killer app"



Lol

For one you basically tried to attack me by supporting my argument. I already said if you had upgraded or post 1200 era hardware the gap wasn;'t big, but most Amiga users din't have 1200+ era Amigas, they had the older generations and they could barely run No Second Prize without studdering and choking as polygons filled the screen.

It wasn't just running fast either some Amiga versions had objects missing.
You literally can’t read. Take your console warring somewhere else.
 

Cato

Banned
25 years later, these are the Amiga games I still remember as classics that I put the most hours into:

Speedball 2
Wings
Neuromancer
Dune 2
Pinball Fantasies
Megalomania
Sensible Soccer

Stunt Car Racer. With a NULL-modem cable to my brothers Amiga.
Those were the days.
 

nkarafo

Member
I'd argue that had the Sharp X68000 come out in the west circa 1987 it would have challenged the Amiga much more than the ST EVER did....that machine could do arcade perfect conversions better than the Amiga I think
You bet.

I played a few X68000 arcade ports and compared to the Amiga they are night and day. Some of them are so close to the arcade versions that i could be fooled i'm playing on MAME instead of a X68000 emulator. Take Bubble Bobble for instance. It's a 1:1 arcade perfect port, only difference being the sound having even better quality on the X68000 i think. Meanwhile, the Amiga version is an inferior port that has no place in a 16bit machine, i mean even the Master System version was better. And Street Fighter 2? Yeah, i don't even want to mention how bad this port is on the Amiga. X86000 is graphically almost perfect, though the sound is a bit lacking.

And it's not like the Amiga wasn't capable of good arcade ports. It did have a superb port of Toki for instance. I think the Amiga was just plagued by many janky, low production values, small team developers handling ports.
 
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OldBoyGamer

Banned
Your fanboyism may be scrambling your mind, Commodore has nothing to do with the CD-i that was Philips, and considering it was on the market for nearly 8 years it wasmore relevant in the industry than the Amiga and also had games that actually sold units that could be called a "Killer app"
I meant the CDTV. Despite my mistake, you're still full of shit.
 

OldBoyGamer

Banned
I'd argue that had the Sharp X68000 come out in the west circa 1987 it would have challenged the Amiga much more than the ST EVER did....that machine could do arcade perfect conversions better than the Amiga I think...and its true that whenever there were multi-platform games out the Amiga version wouldn't look as good as compared to the console conversions...ie CoolSpot, Lost Vikings, Mortal Kombat, Streetfighter 2, to name but a few.....and the CD32 should have had the kind of catalogue the 3DO had, which truly did show the 32 bit difference...(from a graphics point of view..) otherwise the CD32 was no better than the Mega CD....(aside from OK better looking FMV.)
Never even heard of it as a games machine. Just looked up some of its games and yeah they look amazing for the time,

How much was it back then? And how the hell did you get your hands on one considering they were only released in Japan?.
 

nkarafo

Member
The Amiga even in its first years was a much stronger system than the home consoles.

CD storage
Superior Audio
Better Sprite technology by default (Genesis couldn't touch it, SNES needed chips in the cartridges in match)
14mhz
2MB Ram.

it was a better machine from the get-go. I like the ST and PC systems as well, but if we are comparing computers to consoles the Amiga was the only real competition.
It was a 8Mhz machine.

It had 512 MB of RAM.

There was no CD...

Better sprite tech than the Genesis? No way.

You are probably describing the Amiga 1200 here...

The Amiga 1200 could run a decent copy of quake:
Not the stock machine.

You had to upgrade the shit out of it, ending up with a system that costs 3 times more.

Stock 1200 couldn't even run it's crappy Doom clones (Gloom/Fears) at more than 15fps.
 
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