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Comment by marinbala | Hacker News Reader

Loved the Amiga. Great machine.

If the argument that Doom killed the platform is valid, it can only be true for gaming (which was a very large portion of home use). After a great headstart, Amiga fell behind in many other areas: business and productivity software, networking and collaboration, multimedia and realtime-3D graphics.

And regarding gaming, let's not forget that the SNES and the Sega Megadrive/Genesis were going strong when the Amiga was fading away, and it took a while for them to get a version of Doom.

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Amiga, Megadrive and SNES were fading at about the same time (1992-1993), and they all had relatively similar hardware and games.

While technically, DOOM was published for the SNES (developed on an Amiga!), it required a SuperFX 2 chip and wasn't all that amazing, though it was playable. DOOM wasn't published for the Megadrive, but the Megadrive's bolt-on accelerator, the 32X. If you're going to allow accelerators and tiny resolution, DOOM and DOOM clones run on the Amiga too, in low resolution, with a cheap accelerator! They all run pretty terribly, and I'm not sure DOOM ever "sold" those consoles, although it may have "sold" the Atari Jaguar.

However, DOOM worked very well in 1996/1997 when it was ported to the PlayStation and Nintendo 64, both consoles designed around 3D hardware, and I'd say that DOOM definitely "sold" those consoles - as did Ridge Racer and Mario 64...

Doom was released for Super NES during its lifespan but Doom eluded the Sega Genesis until a homebrew version fairly recently.

Super Nintendo had the Super FX and FX 2 chips and even then Doom plays very poorly.

There was a 32x version of Doom though... which also ran poorly.

Makes sense. 32x added some capabilities similar to Super FX to the system.

I read somewhere that the western release of the SNES could have had the Super FX chip on the motherboard but they chose to not do it for cost reasons. Not sure how much of that is true?

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