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Comment by erickhill | Hacker News Reader

It sincerely pleases me to see the Amiga so rightfully discussed in this article. In the 1980s, Amiga was a magical computer years ahead of so many of its peers (including the PC by miles). Sadly, the video capabilities that made it so special eventually became its Achilles heel.

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>Sadly, the video capabilities that made it so special eventually became its Achilles heel.

How weird: I was browsing YouTube last night (with the SmartTube app) and somehow stumbled on a video that discussed this exact thing, basically making the case that Wolfenstein 3D killed the Amiga and discussing how the unique video capabilities it had which were great for 2D side-scrollers made it so difficult to make a FPS shooter work well on it, because apparently the Amiga didn't have direct framebuffer access the way PCs did with VGA mode 0x13.

It certainly has direct framebuffer access. But the bitplane representation where the bits of each pixel's value are spread out across multiple bytes can make certain kinds of updates very time consuming.

Yeah, that's what the video was discussing. Sorry, I got the terminology wrong.

It didn't exactly kill it. Wolfenstein being feasible on the PC and not the Amiga, was just a symptom of stagnation. The Amiga (as a promising commercial venture!) had doom (pun intended) written all over it even before Wolfenstein. Commodore ignored the Amiga for years and years.

Edit: I just recalled something - the Amiga recquired either a TV or increasingly rare monitors with PAL/NTSC frequencies. You couldn't just walk in to a computer shop and buy an Amiga and a VGA compatible monitor. It was a flickery and low-resolution monitor or a TV. Not exactly endearing to professionals. I mean, I loved the Amiga maybe too much, it was always the underdog, but it was increasingly also the losing underdog.

I used a VGA monitor with my Amiga 1200 (with an adapter). It was not flickery at all and was full resolution.

Yes, I know. I had that setup myself. :)

I posit though, that by the time Amiga 1200 was out, Amiga as a commercial venture was already dead in the water. The 1200 was a last ditch effort. Still loved it, of course.

I remember that there was some sort of shareware with a 40 day trial that my brother ran, but it stayed at 40 days. They had removed the clock as a cost saving measure on the A1200.

Yup, pretty desperate.

A1200 and A4000 could be hooked into a VGA monitor for the flickerless experience. The caveat was that the flicker-free display modes were added on top of old ones, which meant that, while you could run Workbench and most applications on the VGA monitor, all games ran in the obsolete PAL modes your VGA display couldn’t handle. This created a market for niche dual-mode displays, which solved the problem, but were a bit pricey.

It might have had a rocky transition, but it was also very badly mismanaged by Commodore.

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