Comment by Keyframe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Keyframe | Hacker News Reader

Younger (hehe) generation might not know this, but Amiga was so ahead of its time. PCs, Macs and others (yes, there were other systems) were nowhere near multimedia capabilities Amiga had. Not for the price a kid could afford or bought for (such as an SGI machine). Vivid colors, fast graphics, great sound, all in a small box. Whereas PCs and Macs seemed like several generations behind it.

What made it special was that every kid (and an older person) that used it dabbled with games, programming, music, everything it had to offer. You can still see that core foundation Amiga enabled those users in their everyday work they do today. It's not something that has happened before or since. I wish kids today have something like it. On paper they do. Computers today are beyond imagination a few decades ago, but something is lacking. Maybe the abundance of power? Back then, graphics, sound, interactive storytelling and interactivity were just coming at full force to home users and they were exploring. Today it's taken for granted, so maybe not many care (everything looks the same feeling).

I remember the profound disappointment when I finally "upgraded" to a PC (early Pentium or 686 from memory) from my Amiga 500, the graphics and sound were worse than the now decade old machine that it replaced and ease of use had taken I giant step backward. It was then that I realized just how ahead of it's time the Amiga was. Getting the same out of the PC would have required more expensive expansion cards but whther your software would work with them was a crapshoot (no openGL equivalent at the time). Eventually I accepted the new machine because it did have some things our Amiga lacked (and were impossible to purchase by then), like a hard drive, a CDROM, and 8MB of RAM which opened up some new capabilities but it was never the huge upgrade I'd imagined.

Those later PCs, like 486 and up had what Amiga didn't. Interactive CD-based games (like Myst, Rebel Assault, etc) and could run faster (Doom anyone?). Still lacked "something", even though some of the software started to migrate over with the advent of Windows NT (Lightwave for example).

Earlier machines, 386s and Quadras were a joke compared to Amigas (1200 and 4000).

I just looked it up. It turns out that Myst was ported to the Amiga, like I thought it would have been, but not until 1997!

I still think Wolfenstein 3D / Doom was what put the final nail in Amiga's coffin.

Not so much Amiga wasn't as fast as PC at the time, but rather something with the bitplane based graphics system not being suited for the psuedo 3D kind of games.

From a gaming point of view Doom, really hit the Amiga hard. Gloom and Alien Breed 3D were poor attempts at replicating Doom (at least on standard Amiga hardware). This was at a time when it seemed every other game release was a Doom clone and where the hype was. It's a shame as the Amiga had so much more to offer.

Amiga uses the planar system to display graphics, which gives her natural blending capabilities but is computationally expensive for 3D texture mapping because each pixel has to be manipulated up to eight times on every bitplane and then OR’ed with the rest of the bits up to eight times again, as opposed to the VGA where one pixel is one byte, which is easy to manipulate. However, doing alpha blending on a VGA was a nightmare - good luck with that!

Amiga coders compensated for this with very fast, insanely optimized assembler code. They were so good that a multiple times computationally slower Motorola processor would run a Doom clone at the speed comparable to a contemporary PC bucket.

They were so good that a multiple times computationally slower Motorola processor would run a Doom clone at the speed comparable to a contemporary PC bucket.

Never.

You just could not get a VGA-on-i486 level rendering performance out of 256-color AGA fullscreen, even with Motorola 68040 on the Amiga 4000.

All the fast 3D demos and games I saw were partial-screen, with 2x2 pixels, or both. Good-looking ones were slow. An example with at least some commercial success was Alien Breed 3D. Check the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksQG8vnvlpg

Because it was so hard to do per-pixel rendering on Amiga all these 3D graphics demos and games on Amiga basically concentrated on delivering the graphics only, with shallow content and amateur-grade playability. Doom had a lot else going on despite the smooth graphics, and that actually made Doom a good game.

You still needed a faster than stock CPU. Which Great Valley Computers gladly provided. Which put them in the weird position of making more on Amiga upgrades and accessories than Commodore did, by a long shot. One example of many where Commodore left money on the table.

Final nail maybe, but she was firmly in place in the coffin and the death vigil had begun.

Final nail yes but the first nail was certainly with wing commander, much faster and better looking on the PC. Doom was much later.

The big problem tended to culminate in per-pixel rendering which was really slow on Amiga (with planar bitmaps) and really fast on VGA (writing one byte per pixel).

Theoretically there was no difference as you could, ideally, just rewrite your renderer to render in planar modes directly instead of rendering to chunky (per-pixel) modes and then converting to planar. And chunky-to-planar converters eventually became quite fast but it was too late and nevertheless an overhead.

Amiga did quite fine until 3D graphics. "Modern" games like Dune 2, Syndicate, UFO: Enemy Unknown, Settlers, etc. were hugely popular but still complex games, yet playable, and no less good looking on Amiga than on PC. But then Wolfenstein, Doom, Descent, and others with full-screen 3D graphics with texture mapping happened and Amiga just couldn't even start the race.

If Amiga had had a chunky graphics mode it would've certainly had a few more years until complete technical obsolence. Commodore basically had that chance with Amiga 1200 with the new AGA graphics chip but they chose to extend bitmap planes instead.

For anything else, Amiga was competitive despite the lack of cpu power. I remember the last years of my personal Amiga use. Productivity software, editors, programming etc were still snappier and a much more friendly experience on the Amiga even if PCs at the time had 10x the cpu speed and Windows software was maturing up (and subsequently getting bloated beyond all usability).

I went from the Amiga 500 to a 486, yeah Doom and Wolf3D were very impressive in terms of graphical detail but some little known gems on the Amiga really pushed boundaries in scale that wouldn't really be repeated till the likes of GTA 3 or Daggerfall

"Hunter"[1] which was flat shaded 3D, had a very large play area of multiple islands and had multiple drivable vehicles, you could ride bikes, row boats, gunboats, jeeps, tanks, helicopters, surf boards, hovercrafts. All on an Amiga 500, all on 1 floppy disk.

"Mercenary 3" [2] also flat shaded, had a fully simulated solar system with day/night cycles. You could go in buildings, go in taxis, get on a space ship fly up to orbit, go to another planet, land in the city go in a building. The scale of this game is insane for the time.

[1] https://i.ytimg.com/vi/MzByYlnvaN0/hqdefault.jpg

[2] https://www.myabandonware.com/media/screenshots/m/mercenary-...

Oh my, Hunter was so captivating! I played it a lot even if I never made much progress, at least as in how they maybe officially intended!

Amiga could certainly do vector graphics but without texturing. The Blitter chip could easily fill large areas with the same color.

Hunter was an older game still but for example Frontier (Elite II) was also more than playable on Amiga and it was a "late" game, around the time where texture mapping was already getting common on PCs. A bit earlier F1GP offered very competitive detail at the time, again with non-shaded polygons only (you would get some textures in the PC version).

Same story here. I had an Amiga 1000 from 1985 all the way through 1995. Never with a hard drive or modem either. I was still disappointed by the 486DX2 (4MB!) that replaced it. It was better in every "bullet point" way, but lacking in a hard-to-describe way.

Could it be that your "hard to describe way" was simply the difference between an exceptionally well designed system (hardware and software) and a stack of weird kludges that was the PC at that time?

> was

I actually think it's way worse now. It's only tolerable because computers are faster.

Is it really that much worse? If PC hardware wouldn't require obscure old hardware features for software compatibility, the resulting architecture based on the newer stuff only (e.g. PCI) is way better. The cores of the available operating systems also improved a lot over the years. Windows now has a rather decent kernel at its core, for example.

The whole package is far from perfect, but it is better than what would have resulted from continued engineering at the level that we had in the 80s and 90s.

Not sure... maybe I’m old, but the current system is alive, but not in a beautiful way. Instead, it’s like metastasis of cancer, runtime after runtime of duplicated and slightly different versions of Nodejs, .Net and who knows what, and not in perfect harmony. It’s chaotic.

I remember my Amiga buddies having the same issues (I myself went from a C64 to a 286 earlier than they). Main complaints were the OS (i.e. Windows, whether it's 3.11 or 95), and a general lack of smoothness (again, OS and multi-tasking, smooth scrolling not being something you get for free with a VGA).

Also, the PC, assuming VGA and at least SoundBlaster, had fewer limitations there, compared to e.g. the Amiga's half-bright modes. It was way easier to get something more garish.

(I felt a bit like that regarding the C64's SID sounds to the more generic-feeling samples of the Amiga. Especially when the latter veered towards Eurodance)

It took me until around 1995 to realise how great and ahead of its time Workbench was. Win95 still felt like it was behind Workbench 3 (even 2.0) in so many ways.

That’s because it was, in every capability imaginable.

The Future Was Here: https://www.amazon.com/The-Future-Was-Here-Commodore/dp/0262...

Yep. I had and own many different computers, and the only one which ever came close to my Amiga 1200 in terms of multimedia and multitasking capabilities was a (then) $60,000 USD sgi Indigo2 R10000, which was my main workstation for a while. Meanwhile, my (then) brand new Amiga 1200 cost 800,- DM (Deutschmarks for non-Europeans), which is 400,- €. Later on, I had 34 MB of RAM in it - one couldn’t run out of memory no matter what one did. And the system boots in under three seconds.

Been there, done that at a UK Telco Research Lab back in the mid 90's. Now those _were_ the good old days. I miss my Amigas (I had 4 over the years, now all gone. sob).

I've collected all the Amigas I've lusted after as a child now I have more means to afford them. A500, A500+, A600 and A1200 to date. Looking for other to add to the collection. Would love to get a 2000.

34MB!

One feature I loved in Workbench was the RAM disk. I only had 2MB so was a little limited what I could do with it, but "installing" simple apps or games into RAM they were so quick!

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