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Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

> As a kindness to Amiga fans, I am not even going to mention Doom or Syndicate.

I played the hell out of the Syndicate demo on my Amiga, maybe you’re thinking of something else? It was a ton more playable on there than any of the Amiga attempts at Doom clones of the time, thats for sure.

There was definitely a point where PCs left the Amiga in the dust and it was around the time VGA and better started happening though. The A1000 was an amazing beast when it came out but Commodore basically sat on their ass when it came to improving the thing.

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No, definitely Syndicate! On an Amiga 500, it felt much too slow compared to the PC version. Compared to the 68000, a 1970s design, the higher clock speeds and much better architecture of the 386 and better really helped. (No, you don't have as many registers... it is still a lot more effective than the 68000!)

It also looked a lot nicer as it ran in 640xsomething mode (640x400 or 640x480 I assume).

Perhaps it was a lot better on an A1200. The 68020 is also a much better CPU than the 68000.

> There was definitely a point where PCs left the Amiga in the dust

Yes but by that time you had other home computing platforms like the Acorn Archimedes, arguably the next evolutionary step in the home computing niche. x86 hardware would've been very expensive at the time and mostly used for business purposes, not in the home.

The Acorn Archimedes was never serious competition for Commodore in that space.

I remember - as an Amiga user - cheekily pitching software upgrades to Acorn to help address the massive shortcomings we saw in RiscOS compared to AmigaOS. Even ca. 1996, a couple of years after Commodore's device, we were still smug about how much better we saw the Amiga as being.

We were willing to accept the hardware wasn't bad, but the Amiga userbase never really considered the Archimedes in the same ballpark as an overall system.

I got an Acorn A3010 to replace my Amiga 2000. It was a massive improvement! Not for games as there weren't all that many but the more serious software was amazingly good.

Impression Publisher ran rings around every DTP package on the Amiga. It was an all around better machine, for those kind of tasks. I still miss the Draw program that was included in the ROM (!) of RiscOS.

But alas, the PC made it all history. And while I'm happy with my current hardware, it sure isn't as exiting as the older era...

I'm not surprised - the A3010 was 5 years newer. The more direct competitor for the A3010 would have been the Amiga 1200, but their specs meant they certainly targeted very different markets - "nobody" bought any of the "small" Amigas for DTP.

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