The Ultimate Amiga 500 Talk [video] | Hacker News Reader

The Ultimate Amiga 500 Talk [video]

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64 pointsSwellJoe12 comments

I was actually going through a list last night of Amiga/Atari games. Lots of memories.. Beverly Hills Cop, Barbarian, Commando, Leisure Suit Larry etc.

Did any of these game developers make money from the games? All I can remember was borrowing floppy disks from friends or downloading from BBS, we barely had places that sold games in Sweden.

Check out the documentary From Bedrooms To Billions - it goes into good detail about the early home computer game development scene, well worth a watch.

Will check that out!

Sjötofta BBS, ah the memories.

They did make money, but in the later years most of them moved on to consoles where money was at.

I'm sure they made a pretty decent living, by any reasonable standard. The thing is, in the last decade or two, the bar has risen far, and people talk about "did they make money" as in "did they make 100 million or more", which is sadly way beyond what is needed to live a very good life. (I think it is sad only because the people who make 5 million over 25 years think they need to make more, and don't enjoy it as much).

I remember an interview with the developer of the Amiga port of Great Giana Sisters and he said he couldn't live from it but the paycheck was good enough for a decent car. But remember that this was obviously contract work.

On the Amiga you had an impressive range of freeware developers to commercial developers. The commercialization had already reached levels where companies had their own development teams but you also still had companies that just paid some developers to develop a game for them.

Electronic Arts made a little bit of money, I think.

It was easier to make money back then. The barrier to entry making a game was higher since to get good performance you needed to write in assembly language. You had to rtfm as there was no internet to ask questions on. So a smallish number of developers were going after a booming demand for games. My first game in the industry was on Amiga and PC and made a decent profit for the company I worked for despite that I basically taught myself to program making it.

I like how the "anomalies" of different chips in Amiga 500 are put together into a rigid intertwined system.

You mean the odd/even bus access solution?

It's far older than the Amiga, the C64 used it, and I suppose Atari 8-bit and Apple I/II did too.

Interesting to hear about the chip ram such, as i had heard the terms but never really looked into their meaning.

I guess that this setup was both the initial strength, and the Achilles heel of the Amiga vs the PC.

This in that they lived on the motherboard, in close synchronization with the CPU, and thus was not upgradeable without getting a whole new computer.

This unlike the PC where the video and audio stuff lived on expansion cards on the ISA bus.

Thus as time went on the PC gained richer audio and video, and later 3D accelerators/GPUs, without tossing the whole PC.

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