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Comment by deepsummer | Hacker News Reader

The Amiga was a great computer when it came out, but it was not 10 years ahead of anything. Things progressed incredibly fast back then.

The graphics were not 10 years ahead, not even 3 years. First SVGA cards came out in 1987, with a 320x200 in 256 color mode that was far more practical than Amiga's 4096 color mode, and with resolutions of up to 800x600. By 1995, resolutions of 1280x1024 with 256 colors were widely available, and Nvidia released their first graphics accelerator.

The first SoundBlaster cards came out in the late 80s. The SoundBlaster 32 released in 1995 was far superior to the Amiga.

And the state-of-the-art CPU in 1995 was the Pentium 133, faster than a 7Mhz 68k by orders of magnitude.

The Amiga 1000 was an awesome computer. But technically obsolete by 1990.

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The early Soundblaster cards sucked. Even the SB16. The first real comparable product to the Amiga was the Gravis Ultrasound in 1992.

Don't even mention SVGA, with it's pre-VESA non-standardised chaos, and abysmal high res performance. OK, the 320x200(240)x256 was actually quite usable for games, quick enough to run Doom in 93. But for video editing, there wasn't really anything on the PC that even compared to the Genlock, at least not for that price.

And to top it off, AmigaOS had preemptive multitasking (in 1985!), Windows 95 was the first real OS to do that (not counting OS/2 and NT) with graphics (not counting Linux or any unixes), yay, that's 10 years for you.

In 91 I sold my Commodore 16, and got an XT with Hercules graphics and the built-in PC Speaker. Not even on the same planet as the Amiga.

In 92 or 93 I got my first 386, with VGA but no sound card for a while, though I secretly wanted an Amiga 500 instead, but it wasn't my call. However around 92/93 PC gaming and the demoscene (!) really took off, so I got a soundcard as soon as I could, and life was very swell after that.

I think the Gravis Ultrasound is in the same category as the Apple IIGS sound card, which came out in 1986. And I put the Apple IIGS sound card much further ahead than the Amiga Paula.

The IIgs had the Ensoniq DOC (ES5503): 32 oscillators allowing for ~16 stereo voices at the same time. But it only had 64K of sound RAM.

The GUS (that kickstarted alsa on linux) is based on the DOC II (ES5504), which is more or less a 16-bit version of the DOC that could address 1MB of sound sample RAM.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NTrYGFlImQM

VCF East: The Story of Ensoniq – Al Charpentier, Bill Mauchly, Joe Friel: When Bruce Crockett, Bob Yannes, Charles Winterble and Albert Charpentier left Commodore in late 1982, they named the company Peripheral Visions.

Listen as Albert & Bill will tell their tangled story of how they become Ensoniq.

> By 1995, resolutions of 1280x1024 with 256 colors were widely available, and Nvidia released their first graphics accelerator.

You're mentioning a lot of technologies from 1995 which were goundbreaking no doubt, but lets not forget that that is indeed 10 years later than the A1000, and that Commodore went out of business entirely a year before that.

A VGA card was not in every aspect better than the Amiga custom chipset, otherwise Doom would have happened much earlier. The 256 color mode only really made sense when coupled with a powerful enough CPU which had enough oompfh to update each pixel each frame (for instance Doom's recommended spec was a 486). For some 2D graphical effects, the Amiga could do much more with much less hardware power and for a much lower price.

But where the Amiga really was ahead was in software, it took the PC until Win95 (arguably, until NT4) to implement 'proper' multithreading and to finally get a desktop UI that wasn't a complete joke, and the Mac only got preemptive multitasking with OSX in 2001. Amiga was basically the poor man's UNIX-like workstation when you couldn't afford to shell out somewhere between 10k and 100k for a NeXT, Sun or SGI workstation.

> Amiga was basically the poor man's UNIX-like workstation when you couldn't afford to shell out somewhere between 10k and 100k for a NeXT, Sun or SGI workstation.

Or 6K (1.5K used in 92/93) for a well-specced 386 that can actually run UNIX, multiple DOS versions (including preemptive multitaskers), OS/2, Windows (3.x/NT). And that's just the surface of the mainstream.

> But where the Amiga really was ahead was in software, [...].

You confuse "software" for your specific preferences in GUIs. And software? The PC software catalog in DOS alone towers over Amigas, with a couple of notable outliers (the odd exclusive here and there, especially in cost-effective video production).

> The 256 color mode only really made sense when coupled with a powerful enough CPU which had enough oompfh to update each pixel each frame (for instance Doom's recommended spec was a 486).

Yeah, like 2D platformer Stormlord (VGA version released in 1989) or Red Baron (1990). Played the latter first in VGA on a 286. Ran smooth. Amiga 500? Stutterfest. The game that allegedly sold more 386 machines than any other? Wing Commander. 1990. The late OCS port was technically inferior. Yeah, yeah, I know. 2.5D only counts when one invokes Doom.

And how long did apps & games take to make full USE of SVGA/SBlaster on DOS vs Windows?

The FULL experience of Wintel was definitely 10 years behind the full experience of an out-of-the-box Amiga.

Wintel is still waiting for the interlace flicker experience of an out-of-the-box Amiga.

The Mac II (1987) had 640x480 256 color non-interlaced graphics. Multiple display support (which I don't think the Amiga ever had). And square pixels!

Much more expensive than the Amiga 1000 of course, but those capabilities had moved way down the Mac line by 1990-1991. And by that time the high-end had 24-bit color, much higher resolutions, accelerated graphics, and laptops (something else the Amiga never had).

The software had moved on too (eg TrueType, QuickTime, AppleTalk).

It was obsolete as soon as the 486 was released, pushing 386 (especially 386SX) systems with SVGA into a lower price tier. Commodore's answer, the Amiga 1200, was released too late with too little (late 1992 with AGA graphics and no changes to the sound, plus no fast RAM?)

I stuck with the Amiga platform until 1994, then I got a cheap 486 after the Pentium was released.

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