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I realised the Amiga had had its day when I played Dune 2 on the PC. It was a great game on the Amiga releasing to rave reviews. But the PC version on a 486 with a soundblaster absolutely sang. It made the Amiga look an entire generation behind. The Amiga version ran very slowly in realtime and in FPS, had a fraction of the digitised sounds, essentially no music, and for most people it involved swapping floppies to save your game. Experiencing the PC version made the Amiga version unplayable.

So I told my Amiga-loving friend at high school the the PC version was far better. He was deeply offended of course, but got his first PC less than a year later.

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These are the details that sorely need documenting in the emulation space.

With so many games that were ported across systems with a lot of varying capabilities, and quality of programming, we need good insight into what versions of the classics are best represented on what platform.

I stumbled across /v/s gaming recommendations and they are chock full of little tidbits like this that I can't find anywhere else.

Anyway, I was looking at amiga emulation and what is worthwhile pursuing on it (since home computer ports often involve the disk swapping and other headaches), and there wasn't a lot of info out there. You'd think a community as allegedly passionate as the Amiga people would have a lot of details on things like this.

Instead the last time I looked the recommendation was "Turrican II" which doesn't blow my doors off.

I don't know if it's possible to appreciate Turrican 2 if you didn't play it back in the day, but it was really good at the time and I remember it fondly. In this instance, it was on several platforms but the Amiga version was the definitive one by a mile. The inflection point was probably 1992, anything after that is likely better on other platforms. Much higher clock speeds and more memory become unbeatable once VGA and Soundblaster became the norm. Also check out Final Fight and Street Fighter 2 on the Amiga and compare to the SNES, it's embarrassing. And I loved the Amiga dearly...

My friend and I both had Amigas in the 90s and they did feel special at the time.

A few years ago we felt nostalgic and emulated a bunch of games, and while it was nice to play them again some of that magic had been lost.

Some time later we were round at a friend's house and he had a real Amiga 500 hooked up to an Amiga monitor and a joystick. He loaded up Turrican 2.

All I can say is playing the game on real hardware was a far more satisfying experience than playing on an emulator. My friend played it for about half an hour and was hooked!

I can't really define why it is that real hardware feels better. It's probably placebo but that's not the whole story.

Amiga emulators often don't do the music correctly, Amiga had very special sound hardware. Turrican 2 has really good music using their own homemade audio code, getting a bad quality version of that just doesn't feel the same.

Modern computers can easily get the same sound of course, but it is hard to emulate that sound based on the original game data.

Final Fight was aimed at 512K Amiga with disk drive read access. Also SNES version of Final Fight didn't have 2 player, had a smaller screen resolution and ROM access and had the original developers (CAPCOM) do the game, a big difference from a single programmer who had to do both the Atari ST and Amiga version.

Yes the Amiga releases could have been better

While the Amiga CPUs were likely slower than a 486, I don't see why the Amiga version would have had a fraction of digitized sounds and essentially no music when almost every other Amiga game had those in spades. It sounds like Dune 2 was a lazy port by programmers new to the system and didn't understand how to make use of its power.

What graphics acceleration did Dune 2 support or did it only support un-accelerated VGA or SVGA? If it was un-accelerated, as was common on the 486, the Amiga's GPU should have helped the Amiga's slower CPU keep up as the CPU wouldn't have to handle the graphics work.

As for swapping floppies, was the game not installable to a hard drive? I'm sure the PC version would have required lots of floppy swapping as well if it even supported that option.

It really sounds to me like Dune 2 was a lazy port.

90% or more of commercial Amiga games targeted an A500 with 1 megabyte of RAM. A large fraction of commercial Amiga games targeted an A500 with 0.5 megabyte of RAM.

Unfortunately, greater, better tricked out Amigas never sold in the numbers required to make them a commercial target. By 1992, it was apparent that things were not only tough, but a disaster. (Saying that as a die-hard fan.)

The Amiga 1200 was certainly a gaming target and it was out for 2 years before they went bankrupt. There are quite a few AGA games for it.

Doom released about 1 year after the A1200.

Then it seemed that most of the top Amiga development talent focused their efforts on trying to imitate Doom on the Amiga, with minimal success, rather than making the most of what AGA Amigas were actually capable of.

There are quite a few, but by the time A1200 came out, some developing houses like Electronic Arts were already abandoning the Amiga.

I wouldn't be surprised if EA abandoned the Amiga more because Trip Hawkins left in 1991 than because developing houses were abandoning the Amiga.

The largest number of Amiga games was in 1990 when it nearly tied with DOS, which was 4 years older than the Amiga and the Amiga games didn't really get rolling until the Amiga 500 in 1988.

7MHz for the 68000 on the Amiga vs 33MHz on the 486. I also saw it running on 386s at the time and it really wasn't quite enough, so CPU was certainly a factor.

But the killer was RAM no doubt. 1MB on the Amiga, while my PC had 4MB. Under DOS you absolutely had to make sure the RAM was available to the game if you wanted all the digitized sounds and music.

In these days it would have been entirely software rendering. The Amiga had 32 colours available, while I'm sure Dune 2 ran VGA on the PC. I remember them both looking quite similar though as the sandy theme was forgiving.

The DOS version had no floppy option as a HDD was expected. Few people were lucky enough to own a HDD on the Amiga.

By the time enough people had a 486 to play games, Amigas were faster than a 7 MHz 68000 and had more RAM as well. You are unfairly comparing a 1988 computer to a 1993 PC, you might as well be comparing C64 to a PS5. Apples and oranges. A 1988 PC couldn't do it as well as a 1993 PC either.

Amigas by then also had the AGA chipset which could do 256 colours from a palette of 16.7 million colors. Your memories seem to be out of sync.

Lots of Amigas in 1993 had hard drives. Your comment is a really poorly researched.

The Amiga had a GPU which could throw pixels around without the CPU needing to do much, but for 3D games, lots of floating point calculations had to be made. The Motorola CPUs often didn't have FPUs while the 486 had it built into every one. The 486 came out at just the right time for Doom to be workable.

Commodore failed to get the AAA chipset done because Irving Gould defunded the R&D department years before.

Comment about the HDDs wasn't poorly researched - it wasn't researched at all. It's from personal experience. I'm not saying PCs were "better computers" than Amigas, or trying to frame a fair comparison. The post is about what happened to the Amiga, and the fact is it wasn't able to compete with the pace of IBM compatibles as they caught up with it in graphics and sound capabilities. It is indeed a lot like comparing the Amiga to the C64.

Maybe in Europe. Not in North America. The article even discusses Amiga hard drive use.

Nitpick: the 486 had versions without FPUs, or which had them disabled. I had a 486 SX 25Mhz.

"Because Doom was written to run on early 386 and 486 processors which often lacked a floating-point unit entirely, and its use was slow even when present, the game was written to exclusively use fixed point math." [0]

[0] https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Approximate_distance

Yes, production failures.

That was the rumour, but apparently inaccurate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I486SX

http://www.os2museum.com/wp/lies-damn-lies-and-wikipedia/

Suppose that a group of people are crazy enough to try to create the "Amiga of 2024". How would that computer be like to be as revolutionary as the original Amiga was back in the day? Would that be kind of like a XBOX X/PS5 with a keyboard and no DRM?

A fully documented RISC-V based manycore system (plus standardized extensions for graphics and DSP, probably leveraging "V" compute support) that's roughly as compact and powerful as the Mac Studio is today, but selling for a fraction of the price. That's actually not that far-off as a goal, the issue is that the software ecosystem today is very different from what it was like back then. The Amiga had no equivalent to today's AAA games or apps, pretty much everything was "indie" by current standards. So DevX and openness were key considerations that would actually make a difference to the commercial success of a platform. RISC-V today is popular with academics but has yet to see any kind of real adoption.

Hard to tell. In the early eighties, home computers were starkly limited by hardware. Truly just crude machines only kids and nerds could love. It's hard to overemphasize how breathtakingly impressive the Amiga was on release. Today personal computers application are chiefly limited by developers' and users' imagination.

It would have a custom GPU that will remain conspiciously better than anything available for less than $1000 for three years. You could imagine an in-house "NVidia game console" that does this, perhaps? But surely a terrible business plan for whatever it has in its technology pipeline.

It would have to be extremely better too, or people wouldn't notice the difference. Socially computing has changed so much, with mobile and everything, so it's hard to imagine what a spiritual successor to an Amiga would be today.

It was also very simple to understand and well documented, and small and responsive. I think if a computer was made today where everything was treated with the utmost care for latency, that could make a difference.

Imagine a user interface which had effectively zero latency, and no loading times at all.

> It would have to be extremely better too

You see these things happening today with things like the Apple VR headset and its custom real-time compute co-processor. VR requires a kind of low-latency operation that was par for the course w/ home computers, including the Amiga itself (partly because analog CRT displays were themselves very low latency compared to current garden-variety LCD's) but is seen as very high-end today.

Sure, but the amiga was $500, and the PC equivalent was around $2,000 right?

Sure, but it's worth pointing out that it's market that matters, not price.

PCs were aimed at business. They were a cost-saver. You could iterate fast because businesses have cash, and are eolljng to spend it. Show them that spending on PC saves money, and you can ship fast enough. The churn was insane, but it didn't matter. (And I was fortunately on the receiving end of discarded hardware.)

I understood this point when I inherited a "broken" dot matrix printer. I took the head apart cleaned it all up, put it together and it worked. But j already had a printer, so i offered to return it. I wad told "no thanks, the person now has an inkjet, they don't want rhe for matrix back. Being "broken" was an excuse to get an upgrade.

Turns out the home market didn't want a new one each year. They didn't want new generations of hardware and software every 5 minutes. Amigas (and Apple 2s) were sold only slightly improved for almost a decade after first release.

PCs won because its easier to sell to business than the home. It wasn't Doom that killed Amiga it was Lotus 123.

It was more where I lived, but you are right a good PC was probably 2-3 times more expensive. But it wasn't possible to get that gaming experience on the Amiga at any price. This was a year or two before Doom.

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