When Workbench 1.2 released in the early days of the Amiga 500, there was an obscure sequence of keypresses you could do in order to bring up an easter egg containing the names of the developers, and finally the line, referring to Commodore:
As someone who successively owned an Amiga 500, 2000HD and 3000T from the late 80's to the mid-90's, and saw that message, I never understood what they meant by it at the time Workbench 1.2 came out in 1988. Perhaps they were referring to Commodore's strange advertising of the Amiga? The high price?
In retrospect, the fact Commodore went bankrupt was a major fuck up, but that hadn't happened yet when Workbench 1.2 came out.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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]
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.
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 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.
> “PC games were perhaps not yet as colorful, zippy and funky as Amiga games”
I recall the PC/VGA port of Xenon II Megablast being a revelation. That must have been 1990 or 1991.
It was as fast and colorful and excitingly busy as the Amiga version, and it ran on commodity 386 hardware that was produced by multiple vendors on every level. There was massive competition for CPUs, graphics chips, sound cards, motherboards, and everything else pushing prices down.
Meanwhile Commodore was going it alone with custom chipsets and pinching pennies. Any advantage they had left wasn’t going to last.
Today Apple is of course massively successful with that vertical integration model, but the difference is that 1) Apple has had the right executive talent for 27 years, 2) they’re willing to invest at every level to make the vertical integration benefits actually compound into the product.
In comparison Commodore was relatively broke and seemingly packed with loser MBAs.
Commodore had great engineers but terrible management. Jack Tramiel didn't even use computers until he got an iPad later in his life. Jack would have been just as successful if he had been selling bicycles.
After Jack left, Irving Gould was in charge and along with his henchman, Medhi Ali. They purposefully destroyed Commodore. Irving was getting old and it seemed he cared more about having more, expensive paintings in his home when he died than keeping Commodore going by giving their R&D any money.
Thomas Rattigan was the best COO (and potential future CEO) Commodore ever had, but Gould fired him before he could do too much good. Without him, the Amiga 500 and 2000 would not have happened and the Amiga 500 is what kept Commodore going as long as it did. Over half of Amigas sold were the 500 model.
Jack's biggest mistake was getting into a position where he needed someone like Irving Gould to invest money to keep his company from going under. In retrospect, it would have been better for Jack to go bankrupt and start over than let Gould have control.
If Commodore had survived until today, their hardware would be the same as PCs and Macs, but they would have their own OS and the custom Amiga chipset might be a contender in the GPU space today.
I loved Xenon II, but the PC music was terrible. I solved that by recording the music from a friend's Amiga, looped on two sides of a cassette tape, so I could listen to it while playing the game. It was the only game I ever bothered doing that with, but I did have a few other cassettes full of music recorded from Amiga and C64 that I listened to a lot (in the years before I had a PC with good enough sound card to listen to MOD or SID files).
The Amiga's whole architecture -- custom chips multiplexing bus access to the RAM, a common architecture for those kinds of machines in the 80s -- made no sense by the late 80s. CPUs got faster, RAM not nearly as much, and CPUs were more and more waiting on RAM and starting to build out complicated caching architectures, and none of that is friendly to the approach that Jay Miner took (with both the Amiga and the Atari 8-bits). Already by the mid-80s, Shiraz Shivji (designer of the Atari ST, and one of the designers on the C64) was pushing the timing limits of DRAM chips past their specs in order to do this sort of thing.
I sometimes wonder what would have happened in Commodore had simply directed their late 80s efforts into making ISA video cards instead. The Amiga brand might have had some cachet there, though I doubt by that point they had the engineering talent to be competitive.
Both Atari and Amiga made a push into cheaper 68k "workstation"-ish Unix machines in the early 90s -- running variants of AT&T Sys V R4 on the 68k-- with little success. In some ways they were just maybe 5-10 years too early on that type of thing, because desktop consumer-level Linux machines were a thing just a few years later and of course by the turn of the century Apple was selling a BSD-based Unix home computer to the masses. It's fun to imagine what would have happened if Commodore or Atari had just dropped their own operating systems and gone with a BSD.
Looking back it's clear to me that Tramiel exiting Commodore and starting Atari Corp in 84 was a disaster not just for Commodore but for the industry. Not because Tramiel was any kind of tech visionary, but because here was no room in the market for two platforms competing in (somewhat) the same space at that point. In North America the Atari machines weren't much of a factor, but in Europe they definitely were, and they did better in productivity and studio music sectors than the Amiga, overall. If all the software development and retailing effort had gone into just one 68k "home computer", I think things would have been just overall better. And Tramiel would have been more aggressive on Amiga pricing.
The Amiga had both chip and fast RAM, the latter was only accessed by the CPU. Not too different from GPU coprocessors today sharing unified access to some fraction of system memory. "Complicated caching architectures" use coherence protocols to ensure that things are kept consistent when required.
*nix-like systems would have come with a lot of overhead back then. Perhaps you could've had MMU-based sandboxing and virtual memory as an optional feature, so that old applications and games could still rely on bare-metal hardware access.
Sorry, I'll disappoint you. I've experience with these times PCs, with integrated video and with discrete, and must say, this was killer difference - just same card on ISA bus was magnitudes slower than integrated.
I've remembered benchmark numbers - on ISA VGA usually considered good about 16000 symbols per second, but integrated gives up to 500k. What all these means - on integrated VGA was possible to play software video on 486 PC.
Only after PCI appeared, in very short time appeared affordable PCI SVGA cards with speeds comparable to integrated and started era of computer home video.
And yes, ALL serious PC brands made their own clones of integrated VGA, beginning from 386SX (386 with 286 16-bit bus), but mostly not for speed, but because at that time it was already cheaper than discrete card at scale.
There was a short window between 1992-1994 where some highly integrated companies like IBM/PackardBell/HP/DELL shipped computers with local bus capable VGA, but offered only ISA slots for expandability. There were custom pre VLB implementations like OPTi Local bus, Gigabyte had its own, ECS another, etc https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=460575#p460575
There was also this one off 1991, pre VESA VLB standardization, Intel/Dell joined experiment called JAWS. Dell PowerLine 450DE/2 DGX Graphics Workstation. Instead of using proper VGA chip it incorporated dumb Inmos G332 framebuffer straight on CPU bus.
- Andy Grove himself (Intel CEO!) together with DELL VP Charlie Sauer demonstrating at Comdex '91 (October) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwvOeKqXv18&t=292s how 486DX/50 CPU video rendering is faster than any contemporary accelerator.
- blog of Charlie Sauer, aforementioned DELL VP (of Advanced Development. May 1989 - October 1993) who showed this computer at Comdex 91 with Intel CEO
ISA was not an option for VIDEO card at early 90s.
VESA (VLB) was not an option, because it was LOCAL bus, closely tied to CPU architecture, so 486 VLB was not compatible with machines with ANY other CPUs even if them exist (PCI have drawbacks, but it nearly complete independent from CPU bus).
>ISA was not an option for VIDEO card at early 90s.
Not sure what you mean when >99% of all Video cards shipped in 1990 were ISA. Alternative were just released EISA and failed MCA. Do you mean not viable performance wise? I dont see how ISA capable of ~5MB/s write speed is a bottleneck when updating 320x200@60 takes less than 4MB/s.
Even ignoring fancy ISA 2D video accelerators like 8514 or TIGA, here is this https://github.com/mills32/Little-Game-Engine-for-VGA-EGA running on 8MHz 8088 XT equipped with ordinary ISA VGA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t98OKbYonQI&t=273 @11:10 shows Turbo off 4.7MHz.
>VESA (VLB) was not an option, because it was LOCAL bus, closely tied to CPU architecture, so 486 VLB was not compatible with machines with ANY other CPUs
This theory said, to have sustained performance of Y you must have capacity at least 4*Y (and in cases of small systems could be not 4 but 10 or even more).
If you don't have free capacity, you will periodically suffer bottlenecks.
When Amiga appear, it does not have bottlenecks, it was perfect balanced machine for that time. When appear 386 and even 486, and corresponding 68k CPUs, the more and more architecture become bottleneck, but it was not very obvious. But after started shipping of Pentium machines and drop prices on RAM, so 2M or more become affordable, and people seen 700p screen resolution, it was just too late.
I dont see Zorro in the supported Bus type. VL-Bus is not some special custom Intel 486 CPU bus, its a name for an industry standardized way of attaching memory mapped peripherals. There are even 386SX motherboards with _16bit_ VL-Bus slot https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/alaris-leopard-486slc...
Well, I seen many times, when one people lie to other people. You are very special case, you lie to yourself. Sure, in democracy you have right to do so, as you wish.
I dont know what your deal is. You state things that are undeniably not true (ISA not an option), then call me a liar when faced with evidence to the opposite.
> In democracy you sure have rights for such comparing
the what now? This isnt going anywhere productive :)
I grew up with a C64, which I loved. But my Dad would tell me stories about the Amiga, and we'd go look at one in the neighborhood computer store (Software Etc.—loved that place!). The store clerk was more than happy to show off the machine to us. And we'd dream about how someday we'd get one.
But by the time that day came, the writing was on the wall, and we bought an IBM 486 25mhz from Sears.
I feel like we dodged a bullet. But, at the same time, I get a sort of warm, fuzzy nostalgia every time the Amiga comes up. It was my future dream computer.
I love reading articles like this. It's a window into a path I was almost on.
And I really loved my C64. It's sad somehow that the PC won... In the mid 80s, the PC was so uninspiring compared to the other home systems, at least to a kid who liked colorful games and wild sounds.
I started with the original IBM PC 5150 at home when schools were full of C=64s. That experience set me up for life but I still want to get my kid a real C=64.
You missed a lot. When I think of what happened to the Amiga because of their incompetent management I get angry, however if the journey is the reward, then it paid a lot just by letting me become part of that era. Amiga has been the true "think different" many years before someone else would make it their motto, and I'm thankful I could own some of those machines, with all their shortcomings; they cost me the equivalent of many thousand $$$, and became essentially door stoppers when I sold off them a few years later, but their real value was letting me live a wonderful experience that I could never regret.
I had an Atari 520ST in about 1998 and was always envious of friend's Amigas.
In 1992 I switched to an A600, the Amiga was waning and I knew it but I loved owning it for that short period. I am glad I was a part of the community as much as I enjoyed playing the games and applications.
In retrospect instead of switching to PC next, I wish I had switched to an Acorn RISC PC.
The most interesting thing is how hard the true believers find it to let go of the past.
I bought one of the first Amigas - I own 2 Amiga 1000's and several others.
But for me they are nothing but items in a curiosity cabinet. Other people seem to deeply engage emotionally with some sort of alternate fictional future in which technology X or technology Y was recognised for its true destiny and never defeated by IBM/Microsoft whoever.
Computing moved on an other systems became much better. Don't waste your life living in the past. Just drop that dead technology and move on and stop investing yourself in a fantasy world.
I'm no psychologist, but itcseems yo be a very common theme in the human condition.
First we find a "tribe", maybe it's a sports team, or a computer, or a political party, or a brand of beer. Anything that lets me bond with my peers and lets us be "me and mine", versus "you and yours".
The longer I'm in this group, the more the cycle feeds back, the harder it is to break out.
At some point it's no longer about the common factor. it's about belonging to the tribe. Maybe we got together when say Mercedes was the pinicle of cars. I become a "Mercedes driver". I join a Mercedes club, we do fun runs on Sunday, they're my tribe. Even if (and I'm not saying it is) Mercedes turns into junk, our tribe is still our tribe.
Not wanting to pick a side, but you see this in politics now. For lots of people now it doesn't matter who is running, or what the policies are, it only matters what tribe I'm in. And my tribe is better, the other tribe is rubbish. Those in neither tribe can't understand, because to them both tribes are terrible (perhaps in different ways.)
In the 80s and 90s, the computer platform you chose -was- your identity. Switching from one to another was hard, and socially suicidal. Ideally the switch was done -for- you, not -by- you. My dad's office changed from Apple 2 to PC. Since I couldn't buy my own PC, I got what they got.
But if I had invested my had earned cash in say Apple, it would have been a next to impossible option to just scrap that investment and start over.
Amiga was once way out on top of the pile. By -all- metrics. They were the tribe on top. But it's hard to fall from there and not need to blame someone, or something. It's not the product that failed. It's the people.
It's not a fantasy, the Amiga was a real platform. It was also one of the last systems that could be just about simple enough to be comprehensively documented and understood, making for a kind of openness-focused DevX that's quite unparalleled even to this day. For that matter, there's plenty of "dead" technology out there that still retains quite a bit of educational value if nothing else.
Personally, there were many things going on with the Amiga that I really enjoyed, things that have diminished or been left by the wayside as computers developed. I don't just mean technical stuff, I mean ergonomic and social aspects too. So I spend time on my Amiga to connect with those things and figure out how we can revive them today.
The Amiga was special and magical. There was never a computer so far advanced than anything else on the market, that existed before, or since. It took the IBM PC many years to catch up to the Amiga's power and some of its abilities. There are still powerful features of the Amiga hardware and software that systems today do not have and Amiga owners still pine for. It's something someone who never owned an Amiga or owned one but never understood its power, won't understand. The fact there are still so many Amiga fans keeping the community alive is a testament to how great the Amiga was and could have been if its life was not cut off by people who cared only for short-term gains and didn't appreciate what it was and what it could have been.
It’s not the past though when it’s a computer that actually exists. Are you also gonna tell me not to grow my own vegetables bc we have agriculture? It’s fine to enjoy old things, there’s no reason to throw it all out just because a new thing comes out
maybe you haven't seen the amiga community, it's pretty weird. they still make new hardware for it like expensive Holy Shit accelerator cards with HD graphics, hundreds of megabytes of ram, and hundreds of MHz CPUs and people buy them so its not always about being retro.
well not really an issue with it spend your money how you like etc but I don't really get why you would replace most of the components in an amiga with something like 50x more powerful and act like its the same thing. it still runs amigaos so i guess it kind of is an amiga, but still, why would you do that.. I guess i just don't get it. And the amiga is like the only community where people do this
The Amiga with its revolutionary coprocessors (Denise, Agnus, Paula) was a game changer.
However, id Software taught the world that the important part of the software revolution was not in these coprocessors but in fast 3D code. And the Amiga architecture was simply not ready to face that challenge.
Now to be fair, I don't think DOOM killed the Amiga, but I am reasonably confident Windows 95 did.
Isn't this the classic Wheel-of-Reincarnation cycle?
The Amiga's dedicated coprocessors let it do things an IBM AT or Mac 512k couldn't do easily.
But the AT evolved into the 386 and 486, and suddenly you no longer needed coprocessors to do the heavy lifting.
So you end up with two issues:
1. Did the Amiga market keep pace CPU-wise? I can see the 3000 and 4000 shipped with better CPUs, but how much was the software ecosystem defined by the 500/600/1200? I wonder if this created a tarpit for developers: the Amiga might have been able to do the same tricks as a faster PC, but the development effort was much higher than just recompiling brute-force x86 code to 68000.
2. Where were the custom coprocessors going? The original Amiga chipset was good, and I'm sure the ECS/AGA stuff was even better, but it seems like it was close to "at par" to a PC with a SoundBlaster and a basic Super-VGA chipset by the early 1990s. What could they use to create a new defensible territory? I could imagine a 3-D coprocessor, but designing something that both impressed today and didn't immediately obsolesce is hard-- see the corpses of a dozen early accelerator vendors.
The Amiga stagnated for years. The custom chips barely changed from 1985 until late 1992. ECS barely added anything over OCS (it had a couple new video modes nobody used.) As I mentioned in another thread, AGA was too little, too late. By the time AGA was out, 386 systems with SVGA and SoundBlasters were cheap and plentiful.
Yes, if Commodore wanted to compete, the Amiga chips needed to keep up with Moore's Law. Every 18 to 24 months, the processing and display power should double or more. In 1988, the Amiga 500 and 2000 should have had something like AGA.
The article correctly points out that 68k chips fell behind the x86 series. Yes, chunky pixels are useful, and the display hardware should support them. But if the game requires the CPU to draw each pixel one by one, the hardware has already failed. Instead, there should be some specialized processors that do the work. In fact, that's what happened in PCs. Doing all of the drawing with the CPU lasted only about five to seven years, then everyone had GPUs.
Yes! What killed the Amiga was that Commodore effectively stopped R&D on the chips in the mid-1980’s, and by the time they restarted they had already lost too much time.
(It’s possible to argue Steve Jobs was right when he dismissed the Amiga because it was too much hardware. He knew it would be difficult to keep evolving such an architecture. It’s also possible he was wrong because he didn’t account for Commodore’s chip design and manufacturing processes.)
In any case, by 1992, there were Macs capable of 24-bit color, and the 68040 was certainly capable of pushing enough pixels quickly to run Doom / Marathon / Duke 3D without hardware acceleration.
I remember someone saying "There was no market for 'Amiga games', there was a market for Amiga 500 games." If you look at it that way, it had a nice long run as a game machine, while failing in most other segments.
That makes total sense. The A500 was the most popular machine, with a 68000, 512K RAM. If your game required 1 meg, you'd lose a decent number of potential customers. (My A500, circa 1989, was souped up! 3 megs of RAM and a hard drive!)
Meanwhile, there was a market for high-end PC games. If you bought a better PC, you could show it off. That was important to the type of person who owned an Amiga (they always wanted to show you).
The early "3D coprocessors" weren't very 3D at all, they basically accelerated triangle rendering in screen pixel coordinates. So "2.5D" at most. I could definitely see some version of the Amiga shipping with something like that, leading to something not too unlike Sony-PS1 level graphics or so. But the real problem for the Amiga (and its nearest competitor, the Atari ST/TT) was that the 68k architecture was ultimately abandoned by Motorola, and at the time (with Moore's law in full swing, and thermal constraints not too important just yet) the PowerPC looked like the best alternative. Of course ARM was a thing already, and it even got used in a high-level game system (the 3DO). So you could surmise that we could've gotten an ARM based Amiga/Archimedes mix instead which would've kept some kind of "cheap home computer" market going for some time, trying to disrupt the costly PC and Apple Mac platforms at the low end.
I would say that hardware which helps rasterize triangles in screen coordinates is squarely 3D if it does Z-buffering (or any other hidden pixel removal).
The 68k architecture still had some runway by the time Commodore’s fate was sealed, though. Commodore really needed to be taping out the next generation chipset no later than 1990, and arguably 1988 would have been better.
I wonder if Motorola lost faith in the 68k because of a diminishing number of signature customers.
When Apple went for the PowerPC instead of continuing on to the 68060, the remaining audiences for high-end 68k were not going to move anywhere the same numbers.
If Commodore and Atari had remained competitive longer, there might have been more demand (and conversely, enough R&D effort to tide 68k over until we got to modern "everything is RISC after the decode stages" design paradigms.
Stupid question: why didn't they replace the 6800 with the newer Intel chips? Was it "just" (huge understatement, I know) because they'd need to port or break software due to the new arch? I guess my question is if their multi coprocessor architecture could've worked with a better, stronger main processor like Intel's?
Commodore did have a line of IBM PC clones if that's what you're suggesting. Adopting x86 without the other elements of the PC architecture would've been pointless. The 386 would've made programming just about bearable for devs used to the m68k's flat address space and elegant from-scratch ISA design. It would not have been very successful.
When Commodore died, Motorola's 680x0 series of CPUs were still competitive with Intel's x86, but Commodore would use the previous generation (or two) model to keep the price low. If you wanted the latest, fastest CPU, you had to buy an accelerator (eg. GVP). They should have had the top of the line processors available for those who needed or wanted them and could afford them.
A few years later, Motorola was failing to keep up, which is why Apple switched the Mac to PowerPC.
> Commodore would use the previous generation (or two)
Reason for picking 68000 was bargaining power you had when owning a chip Fab.
"Live with Dave Haynie - Commodore Business Machines C128, Plus4, Amiga" - BilHerd https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZT209i-3Lo Dave reveals Commodore was paying $2.5 per 68000 Hitachi CPU compared to Apple $8 from Motorola.
I really think that the Amiga 3000 killed the Amiga. When it was released, instead of move another decade ahead graphics wise, it was 3-4 years behind. 640x512x16colors?!? The 3000 needed to be released with AGA, on a card.
Comparisons. In October 1990.
For $3999, you had the Amiga 3000 with 640x512x16colors. It did have a '030 25Mhz, 40mb Hard drive and 2mb. Monitor was extra.
For $3860, you could get a 386/33, 4mb, 512k SVGA (800x600 8bit), 160MB Hard drive AND you got the 14" Monitor.
The Amiga was dead a few years before Win95. The VGA chipset and the soundblaster killed the Amiga.
In the late 1980s I wanted an Amiga so badly. But by the early 90s I had a 486 with VGA and a sb16 and it was all over. The Amiga had a mere fraction of the PC's power by then.
Indeed. Commodore killed itself and Amiga, and breakneck speed of PC advancement didn't help. Doom was just a side effect of it all. It left a trauma on Amiga community though, you can still see the community mentioning Doom to this day (see, it can run Doom?). Doom-envy is omnipresent to this day. There was another, rarely mentioned, which is nintendo-envy. NES and then SNES in particular had killer games where Amiga never came through in such capacity (platformers, it shined in other genres). Amiga was poor man's SGI at the time. It was great, fun, relatively cheap for what it offered. It could've been so much more if Commodore had a sense of direction and focus. Alas, here we are lamenting decades after on its fate.
Cachet it left is still strong. I recently (over few years back) tried to get ahold of Amiga again. I just wanted one endgame A1200.. now I have three A1200 - one with Blizzard 1230/030+fpu which is the best general purpose IMO, one with Blizzard 1260/060rev6 for demos (not that great compatibility for general purpose), and one with TF1260/060rev6.. and then two A600 (one stock, one with Furia030) and A500+, indivision addins etc., and a whole bunch of Commodore 1084s monitors. It was supposed to be only one A1200, damnit. Take it as a warning from a friend if you want to get one, they multiply fast.
Nah. The Amiga 1200 debuted in 1992 for $600. 2MB RAM and a 14Mhz 68020. No monitor.
In 1992 you could get a 486dx 33MHz with 4MB for like $800 (a two year old chip) with similar peripherals. Way more than double the power for a marginal increase in cost.
The Pentium arrived a year later in 1993 and by 1994 we had the 486dx4/100MHz and Pentium/586 at similar clock speeds. This is around when doom arrived and Amiga was long since toast.
The combination of cheaper, faster processors and a market that wanted to constantly upgrade is what killed the Amiga.
As mentioned by an earlier commentor, who your market was really counted back then. Businesses have upgrade cycles every 3 years as they right off liabilities. That subsidises the next generation of improvements.
Even if Commodore had access a single generation capable of fast 3D code it wouldn't have saved them.
For example, the Acorn Archimedes had access to much better processors[1] and a chunky 256 colour mode at launch in '87.
That still didn't save Acorn[1] because they lacked those business upgrade cycles sales.
I don't think an '87 Archimedes had enough umph to run Doom back then but it could have run something Doom like that the Amiga A500 couldn't if really pushed.
It still wouldn't have interested the business users that really made the PC successful and by '93 Intel would still have been ahead.
1. 12Mhz 32 bit ARM2 was at least 7x faster than an 8MHz 68000 in 1987 and twice as fast as a 16MHz 386 using Drystone.
I couldn't resist :) this video is doom 2, 12mhz arm but running on a vga monitor (crt is faster), so I'm guessing the frame rate would be about this or a little faster on an 8mhz arm.
https://youtu.be/jXo6BtmuZkc
Living in central Europe I didnt even know at the time a company named Acorn existed despite reading tons of computer literature.
Acorn had no retail/dealer network, no marketing and zero presence outside Commonwealth (UK and I think Australia), or even narrower outside UK/AU educational market buying Acorns due to BBC Micro Computer Literacy Project program inertia. Acorn was run so bad they didnt even have money to pay BBC for this absolutely fantastic and cheap marketing! Part of the reason for sale to Olivetti was to gain retail channels and pay back BBC royalties. In the end BBC was forced to write off last couple payments.
Windows 95 also came close to killing the Mac. Before then the difference between Windows and MacOS was so striking that it was obvious that anyone who really wanted a GUI interface would go for a Mac. But then the advantage became much less strong. If Jobs hadn't come back and brought NextStep, which becane OSX, I think the Mac would have gone the way of the Amiga.
The reason why Apple didn't go bankrupt is not because Jobs brought NeXTStep, but because Bill Gates gave them money months away from having to shut down.
That was certainly important in the the short term (obviously Gates wasn't doing that to be nice but because having Apple die would look bad in the then ongoing antitrust investigations into Microsoft; it's the same reason Google sends money to Firefox today -- having a competitor is a great defense against accusations of monopoly).
But Jobs didn't just run a marginal company but turned it into a company which is comparable in worth (and often worth more than) Microsoft.
TLDR: Apple was stealing with help of Intel, both companies scared by QuickTime positioning Apple as the leader in Multimedia (1991 Adobe Premiere build by ex Quicktime engineer on Mac platform, 1991 Avid ported from Apollo $workstations$ to Mac). When Jobs came back in 1996 he didnt like (or couldnt afford) all the litigation and promptly settled for $ and Microsoft support commitment (Office, IE) in exchange for letting MS save face.
"David Boies, attorney for the DoJ, noted that John Warden, for Microsoft, had omitted to quote part of a handwritten note by Fred Anderson, Apple's CFO, in which Anderson wrote that "the [QuickTime] patent dispute was resolved with cross-licence and significant payment to Apple." The payment was $150 million."
"Microsoft and Intel had been shocked to find that Apple's QuickTime product made digital video on Windows seem like continuous motion, and was far in advance of anything that either of them had, even in a planning stage. The speed was achieved by bypassing Windows' Graphics Display Interface and enabling the application to write directly to the video card. The result was a significant improvement over the choppy, 'slide-show' quality of Microsoft's own efforts. Apple's intention was to establish the driver as a standard for multimedia video imaging, so that Mac developers could sell their applications on the Windows and Mac platforms. Microsoft requested a free licence from Apple for QuickTime for Windows in June 1993, and was refused. In July 1993, the San Francisco Canyon Company entered into an agreement with Intel to deliver a program (codenamed Mario) that would enable Intel to accelerate Video for Windows' processing of video images."
"Intel gave this code to Microsoft as part of a joint development program called Display Control Interface."
"Canyon admitted that it had copied to Intel code developed for and assigned to Apple. In September 1994, Apple's software was distributed by Microsoft in its developer kits, and in Microsoft's Video for Windows version 1.1d."
It is also notable that the Mac was stagnating just like the Amiga around that time. The successor to OS 9 was delayed for years and years before being cancelled. The hardware was getting more expensive but with only small incremental improvements in speed or capacity. The Centris and early Performa lines were just so mediocre. The 68k architecture was stalling out just as Intel was blowing everyone's doors off with x86. Jobs made a bad bet with PPC, but it was still way better than 68k and gave them enough breathing room to keep up with PCs for a bit.
No, the 68k lineup was competitive or better with x86 for the entire duration of Amiga’s viable lifetime. Apple’s troubles came later, after they had already successfully transitioned to PowerPC.
Yeah the Power Macintosh line, as the name suggests, introduced PowerPC in 1994. There were Performa versions of those as well. Jobs’ return as CEO roughly coincided with the beginning of the G3 era (calling them that instead of PowerPC 740 is already pretty Jobs-ian).
If anything, id proved to the world that Intel killed and buried the 68000. But Commodore was in its death throes anyway, so I didn't think there's much of a lesson to learn here.
This looks like a much worse Wolfenstein clone... No 3D as far as I see (all rooms are of the same height, the map is just a 2d maze), no textures on floors on ceilings. Not to mention much lower resolution than wolf3d - the graphics are barely legible.
Wolf3D is just (a 3D view onto) a simple grid shape. So this is doing a bunch of stuff Wolf3D can't do. The linked video talks about (but does not demonstrate) full variable heights which would be even closer to Doom, but this is already able to provide a sense of space and visual variety absent from Wolf3D.
How revolutionary can something be if its impact is relatively limited, it was released for a style of game that was being supplanted by 3d, and all of its major titles were rereleased within years for commodity x86 hardware (due to the rapid advancements in cpu technology)?
The Amiga, as a general purpose computer, was a bright vision in a world that was already leaving it behind.
Most Amiga users - at least the home computing/gaming enthusiasts - never saw a big-box Amiga back in the day. To most users, 'The Amiga' was the A500, which released in '87 and reached peak popularity in the very late 80s/early 90s.
And to most Amiga gamers, Doom was where it became clear the PC had overtaken. Amiga game developers also got obsessed with trying to build a Doom clone for the Amiga, repeatedly showing how futile that effort was* , and much talent was wasted in that pursuit rather than making more good 2D games.
But by the time Doom arrived, the SNES had already been out for a couple of years, too, and despite a weak CPU it absolutely destroyed the Amiga in terms of 2D graphics performance (multi-layer parallax, loads of sprites, loads of colours, and 'Mode 7' effects)
(*ok, maybe not entirely futile if you've seen Dread/Grind which are super-impressive, but it took until the 2020s to pull it off, with an engine that seems about halfway between Wolf3D and Doom in terms of capabilities)
Eh. When I saw the Macintosh II demoed in 1987 compared to my Amiga 2000 which was released at basically the same time, I already knew the Amiga was screwed.
Looking at the UIs for early Macintosh vs. Amiga Workbench it feels like Amiga didn't put much thought into aesthetics. Just look at the color scheme they chose for the desktop UI:
It seems they had at least 64 colors to choose from and they went with... Orange and white on blue? They also decided icons should be able to be arbitrary sizes for some reason, a feature I haven't seen in other GUIs.
Here's workbench 2.0, which is better but still pretty unappealing.
That color scheme was allegedly picked for visibility on very low-end TV sets. (The Amiga palette colors could be chosen arbitrarily from 4-bits per channel RGB, so that wasn't a constraint.)
(The icons weren't just arbitrary sized, they could have different pictures for the selected and unselected state. You see this with the open vs. closed drawer icons (drawers are like "folders" in other OS's) but many app icons also used this effect.)
Be that as it may, if you look at C64 GEOS which ran on consumer TV sets and with comparatively primitive hardware, the UI looks so much nicer in GEOS to my eye. Even the Apple II GEOS makes Workbench look like a hot mess.
There weren't any 'default' icons, so the workbench didn't show you everything on the disk, only programs with ".info" files which had the icon. You had to drop to the command line to do most low level things. Of course, Workbench didn't really matter when you were playing games.
There was an option to show everything - with default icons. (Not very useful ones since notions of document ("project") file types were not used all that much, so every file showed as some sort of executable. But the option was absolutely there even though it wasn't the default.)
At the time though it didn't seem any worse than the Mac though, and it had colors - even if the defaults weren't great, any colors seemed better than none.
Or at least that was how tasteless teenage me saw it.
The Mac barely survived Wintel, so its not that apt of a comparison. If Microsoft didn't port Word/Excel over, I don't think we'd have many options now.
The Amiga got completely creamed by x86 and was a footnote by 1994, when it was cancelled. It's best titles were ported to other platforms or forgotten. The people who succeeded the strongest on it moved on to other platforms, but its architecture really didn't live on in any mainstream descendants.
By 1994 you could get a clone 486 for cheap that could run Doom just fine and the games market rapidly shifted to developing for PC first. The hype for Windows 95 was spinning up, RAM prices were dropping and Pentiums were becoming more affordable. Once Doom released, there was little reason to get an Amiga for games, it's not unfair to say it killed it.
Amiga maybe had a couple final years of relevance as a super budget workstation in 1993/94, but Doom was developed on fancy NeXT workstations. Then id's follow-up, one of the most technically cutting edge games of it's generation, was developed on Windows 95.
That kinda says it all about the PC's rapid ascent during the 90s.
> Then id's follow-up, one of the most technically cutting edge games of its generation, was developed on Windows 95.
If you’re implying Quake was developed on Windows 95, that’s false. Windows 95 and early DirectX sucked and was only released a few months before Quake. DOS remained the dominant target for years.
The original QuakeEd is written in objective C because ID was using NeXTcubes for workstations. They also used some DEC Alphas for level compilation.
WinQuake didn’t come out until nearly a year after initial release. You could launch Quake from Windows 95 but that’s neither here nor there.
In 97 I was still regularly booting to DOS to play all kind of games. I'd use Windows 9x for internet (Netscape) but Windows for gaming? Nah. Space Cadet Pinball maybe.
Dune 2, C&C, WC2, Duke3D (the nemesis of Quake), Twilight, Crazy Bytes.
And MSDOS was relatively stable, quick to boot. Windows 95 wasn't. OSR2 was better. Windows 98 SE was OK, ME was not. NT didn't become dominant for home users until XP. Which was when Windows got reliable for home users. Although 2000 was also very stable.
1997 had:
Quake 2
Age of Empires
Jedi Knight
Total Annihilation
Diablo
All Windows. Granted there were still a few DOS games trickling out, but most of them also shipped with Windows versions (Carmageddon comes to mind).
I was still dropping to DOS when I absolutely had to but it was getting annoying fast thanks to the internet. I wasn't just using Netscape, I was downloading stuff. If I launch games under Windows then sure they might not run as good, but at least that download keeps crawling along.
Stability was also an annoyance admittedly, I was an early adopter of Windows 2000 because of that. That came with it's own caveats though.
True, Quake 2 with Lithium mod I did play on Windows. Because I never got my winmodem (which I had in the beginning) working in DOS.
Never played orig. Diablo (I'm sure I'd have loved it).
Wacky Wheels. Tomb Raider. Settlers 2. Battle Isle 2, 3. Command & Conquer: Red Alert. Duke Nukem 3D. Most of these are from '96.
At some point DOS games also worked kind of OK in Windows. Though NT regressed on it.
But let me tell you this: I've never been a sucker for needing the latest and the greatest game at launch. So I lagged behind. And some games I could replay and replay.
And I came from OS/2. Which couldn't run DOS games well.
PS: Carmageddon I remember playing on MSDOS, too. But I also remember that (I guess Carmageddon 2?) was also optically quite nice on Windows with 3D / GPU.
Wacky Wheels was 94. Tomb Raider was DOS, but it's sequel was Windows-only. Red Alert was enhanced on Windows (4x resolution, DOS was stuck on 320x200). Duke3D and the rest of the Build engine pack got left behind on DOS but they also ran acceptably well under Windows in spite of that. Carmageddon had both DOS and Windows executables, Carmageddon 2 was Windows-only.
It simply became impractical to drop to DOS by the late 90s. Once I got broadband in 2000, DOS was a memory.
As NeXTStep became obsolete SGI IRIX was considered for a successor but Carmack was not a fan and moved on to NT as you state (also calling early on that commercial Unix was fucked).
ID was going to develop on a Cray 6400 series supercomputer, and they got cray to sell them one for $500k if they'd put cray computers into the game. SGI bought Cray, and the deal fell through.
I wondered where I got the idea that they developed on Windows 95 and I think it's from this article, but prior to Carmack's correction in the comments.
I’ll even proclaim that years is an unqualified correct descriptor of 2 to 2.5 years.
Especially when things are moving that quickly.
Look, it’s not like Windows 95 came out and there were a bevy of games people wanted to play that Christmas, and I was correcting a comment that suggested it was mere months before the platform was a serious target. Oh, and not even for ‘96 either!
In October of 1995, Bill Gates is literally in Doom implying you need Windows for gaming. As far as I see it, it was just over 2 years, ie years, before that really meant anything. That short period of overlap time where releases were both DOS and Windows crucially didn’t help Microsoft’s bottom line the way they were aiming for.
You seem hell bent on convincing yourself that nothing of interest happened in 96 and 97 on the gaming front. Yes the period of time may not have been that long, but the flip side is 96 alone was a hell of year.
> As far as I see it, it was just over 2 years, ie years, before that really meant anything
You miss the forest.
Back then the typical development time was around a year. Win95 GA was in August 1995 and less than year and half Diablo came out to retail in January 1997. Not just gone to the dev, not just announced, but actually released, stamped, printed and delivered to the retail stores, ie it was finished a month before that.
Sure, there were releases what still targeted the DOS only (most notably the games on the Build engine) but for the most part it was just not feasible to spend even more time to do a rewrite to have a native Windows support.
But by the start of 1997 almost all new releases, ie games which went into development in late 1995/early 1996 were targeting Windows or a mixed release and not exclusively DOS.
Just compare Mobygames stats for DOS (which includes the mixed releases and a compilation rereleases, like Wolf3D in 1998):
726 DOS games released in the year 1995.
671 DOS games released in the year 1996 (118 compilations, 17%)
409 DOS games released in the year 1997 (93 compilations, 22%)
185 DOS games released in the year 1998 (70 compilations, 37%)
Compare it to the games with Windows platform (includes mixed releases too, of course):
262 Windows games released in the year 1995
617 Windows games released in the year 1996.
884 Windows games released in the year 1997.
1,010 Windows games released in the year 1998.
In 1996 there were a comparable amount of releases targeting Windows (108% of DOS releases), almost two times more in 1997 (46%) and 5 times more in 1998 (18%).
> You seem hell bent on convincing yourself that nothing of interest happened in 96 and 97 on the gaming front
... Did you even read the comment I gave link to? Please read it and make notice on who wrote it.
The PlayStation also had an effect. The Amiga was easier to use than MS-DOS (or even Windows 95) in a console kind of way (just put in the disk you want to play and turn it on).
I remember a couple of kids at school going from Amiga to PlayStation because of the hype around that at the time.
> Linux was nice for surfing the net, but it lacked all of the fun software I craved: games, demos (as in the demo scene), graphics programs, tracker music.
Anecdotally it was bit of a negative feedback loop at the time, sadly, since just the people that would have been perfect to help make Linux thrive in those areas did not want to use Linux because it lacked those things.
Yeah, I distinctly remember the exact issue of the magazine that previewed it. ACE Magazine issue 35, August 1990 [1]. It featured Wing Commander and several of the upcoming new VGA graphic adventures with scanned, painted artwork and quality art direction. It was like a new door had opened up to new experiences.
However I didn't get a PC until 1996 as they were so expensive. I grew up in rural working class England, and there were a whole bunch of us kids who got into computers and programming thanks to cheap home computers. Suddenly we couldn't afford to participate anymore, it was a really hard time to be a nerd.
I sold my 6 months old Amiga 4000 when I realized the PC VGA cards coming out around then were cheap, had 1024x768 resolution, blazing DOS pixel writes and nothing of value had happened with the Amiga chipset from 1985 to 1992..
Remember TSENG LABS? :)
I also think I saw Ultima Underworld or some of the variants on PC before this, rendering full free-view 3D in a sub-window at least. Was really blown away by that, this was before Doom came out.
You don't remember AGA? It could do those resolutions and all versions of the Amiga chipsets had blazing pixel writes. The article even mentions this. You obviously didn't read the article and weren't in the Amiga community.
AGA was much too little, too late. The premier AGA model, the A1200, even shipped without even a sliver of FASTRAM, making all programs compete for cycles with the graphics chipset. An Amiga games with even, say, 64 kbytes of FASTRAM could have put compute code in there at twice the speed and even made use of the (rudimentary) instruction cache of the 68020. The A1200 was welcome and I loved it but it was a half-assed attempt and it showed.
It's not surprising, but very sad. For very little cost they could have doubled the CPU speed of the 1200. For the A500 it made more sense to not have fast RAM, because the CPU itself was kind of slow. But the 68020 was noticeably slowed down by slow RAM wait states. Either the A1200 should have shipped with some (even miniscule) fast RAM, or AGA should have had higher bandwidth so the CPU wouldn't have had to wait for the RAM. A vanilla A1200 was an unbalanced machine.
...rant over. :-D
Yeah, the A4000 is the "other" model. It's really neat, but alas it never sold in any numbers. It showed in that some AGA software I tried (demos? some game?) didn't work right on my A4000.
I hand coded asm demos and music trackers for Amiga since 1986, and there is no need to be rude on HN.. keep that to reddit :)
This was ages ago, but as far as I can recall, the main obvious limitation of the AGA chipset compared to the PC cards was 1 byte-per-pixel modes (I think they call it "chunky" modes now) so the simple texture-mapping 3D loops you could hand-code on the x86 were a pain on the Amiga. I'm sure now 30 years later people have figured out cool hacks to do this better but back then it didn't work, and adding to this was the fact that the PC cards were improved like every 6 months. Commodore went bankrupt 1 year after I bailed, and I didn't look back.. (though I did miss AmigaDOS real multitasking for some PC/Mac generations after :).
The A1000 I had was a great machine in 1987-1990 but somewhere after that the whole Amiga concept started to feel dated (IMO). The PC architecture won because it was essentially hardware open-source, and hundreds of vendors could add features to the platform together. Commodore would have had to do every single decision spot on correct for years in order to stay competitive as a single company. Look at what happened when IBM tried to tame the beast and released the PS/2 that was "closed source"..
The Amiga CD32 featured hw-accelerated chunky-planar conversion. And yes, the PC was an open system but this also meant that every MS-DOS game had to implement its own hardware-specific routines targeting multiple types of graphics and sound hardware. The Amiga approach came with the benefit of having a single, uniform target which encouraged more optimized coding.
I didn't know that! However the CD32 was at that point in history (1993) a blip, it was far too little far too late. It sold 125,000 units, while the PC clone market was shipping 37 million units in 1993.
I agree fully with the OS issues, but for the purposes of gaming, it turned out to not be an issue really I guess..
Those prices are not what I remember from back then, at least in Europe. Comparable 386 and 486 PCs cost way, way more than an Amiga 500 or later 1200 respectively.
The filfre.net Digital Antiquarian articles on the Commodore/Amiga history are incredibly well researched, and paint a more comprehensive, nuanced version of the usual 'mismanaged to death' narrative. There is a very cogent insight that I first read there, that roughly goes as this:
the Amiga architecture of a 2D oriented console-style custom chipset was badly suited for the gradual transition from coding to the bare metal to having an OS managing the hardware, accessed through APIs.
Keeping up would've meant a complete reinvention of the platform and its ethos, with a much bigger push on OS development, not only the next hot chipset. Commodity, standardized hardware running Windows ultimately got good enough and won.
And as someone else remarked, +1 on Wing Commander, and later the golden era Lucasarts adventures, being the actual beginning of the end.
>Commodore didnt bother to build fast ram memory controller into the thing. You couldnt just slap some simms or ram chips on a card, you needed additional logic. Cheapest contemporary Fast Ram cards were ~100 pounds + ~30 pounds a meg, half the cost of 270 pound Amiga A1200 in 1994.
"Expanded or extended memory? Or maybe just conventional? Choose wisely, or you won't be able to fully maximize _the incredible potential of running a single program at a time._" xD
Back then we really had a lot of good reasons to pity MS-DOS users.
Had an Amiga 500 and later a 4000/040retina and for me Doon did it. I exactly know when: Amiga show in Cologne, Commodore didn't present anything new at a time when everyone jumped to PC.
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.
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...
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?
I enjoyed this read. It mirrored my own experiences closely, growing up in the 80s/90s in the UK. My first home computer being the C64, then A500, and later an A1200 with 6MB RAM, HDD, squirrel SCSI with various optical media and a 1084ST (originally bought second hand, stuffed full of lowres porn...). I too chased the ultimate desktop - MagicWB, newicons, MUI (licensed!), heavily configured DOpus, various file format plugins, alt disk formats
etc.
97 or so was when I had an old 386 handoff, and 98 when I first installed Linux. I triple booted into BeOS for a while. Coming back from Uni in '98-'02 and using the Amiga less and less, until I finally got rid of it after a trace on the keyboard burned out and the HDD gave up.
I have continued to play with emus over the years, CAPS with the IPF for.at was an interesting project for someone who didn't care for 'cracktros' and respected the physical copy protections lf the day. Lately, AmigaVision running on FPGA 'emulation' is my choice. Don't chase the upgrades - the Amiga was a machine of it's eta - when hw tricks got you a long way, and it wasn't pure cpu cycles and blitting.
well written article. can so relate to this. i also held onto amiga for a looong time myself. what was a bit paradoxical, as the author mentions, was the lack of backwards-compatibility after you had pimped your amiga with an accelerator-card, RTG graphics and a 16-bits soundcard ++. it had become more of a PC in a way, but it was still running amigaOS. system-friendly apps that ran in workbench worked fine for the most part, but stuff that did trickery with the original/AGA chipset and was coded on AmigaDOS1.x/68000 would not work (which was a lot of games and demos). at one point i had a separate A1200 for this. i miss my old workbench environment with CED, ProTracker, SnoopDos, amIRC, Directory Opus and more. it was fun times and i am grateful for being part of the ride.
Looking back with 20/20 vision, I regret I didn’t get to enjoy the Amiga 500 during its sweet spot time: a bridge between 8bit cassette computers and a Doom-capable PC.
- One specific point really peaks my interest:
How widespread / readily available was (software or otherwise) Mac emulation on the Amiga 500, *before* Doom/Win95?
A closely read subscription of Amiga Format would be enough to master the ins and outs of it (minus the Mac ROM image, obviously), or was something that really only became feasible and readily available after, say, Win95?
I do some Amiga collecting, and I recently bought an Amiga 2000 that came with a ReadySoft A-Max, and even Mac networking hardware: https://amiga.resource.cx/exp/amax
This tells me there must have been decent interest in Mac emulation as early as 1989, when the A-Max released. And it didn't plug into the expansion slot, so it evidently would have worked fine on an A500.
The A2000 primarily focused on PC compatibility, though. Commodore shipped "bridgeboards", which were x86 CPU cards that plugged into the A2000's expansion slot. Not only did this let you run DOS in a window on your Amiga, but it could virtualize hard disks and printers, and you could even expand it using the A2000's built-in ISA slots for that very purpose. Pretty dang cool, and maybe a good value proposition for offices mainly running DOS but wanted something better for desktop publishing or anything graphics/video-related.
Great post. Was a little worried this is gonna be salty fanboy retrospective, but it wasn't. Great mix of anecdotes and memories from growing up with that machine, and at the same time realistic about why the platform failed and why you didn't want it to be true.
> Spending that kind of money will get you a computer mostly useful for finding out why you don't want to run outdated ports of Linux software on an operating system without memory protection.
"We made Amiga, They fucked it up"
This was the truth.