Getting this off my chest: unbalanced content

[CraigGrannell]

I agree—it's a bit odd to harbour such old grudges. Also, the dominance of certain companies means they're both the Big Bad and Big Good, depending on your viewpoint. People cheerlead Google being 'open', yet Android is a mess and Google's happily wrecking net neutrality and web video, because all it cards about is ad revenue. Apple's closed/evil/nasty, but provide a system that's great for typical users and amazing for the disabled, because it cares about profits and shifting hardware. And so on.

As for the Amiga, Commodore was undone by its own incompetence—it was certainly not down to Microsoft. In fact, the main hardware company in the field that could stand to have major grievances against Microsoft is Apple, given what Microsoft did in the 1990s, but look at Apple now.

It's all about the games.

Quite. I never got anti-this and anti-that. Why block access to an entire section of gaming, because you have some weird grudge against a company? It's just bonkers.

[necronom]

In a similar way, I can't understand why anyone who had an Amiga would ever buy anything by M$. It's like sleeping with the enemy/buying a console off Hitler if I was Jewish/wearing another football teams shirt/etc.

I find this strange considering the timescale we are discussing. Did you really feel that way back in '92?

I'm not sure exactly, but at that time I was heavily into the Amiga (I'd had my A500 five years by then), and the new A1200 was on its way, so I won't have been even thinking about PC gaming at all in those days as the Amiga was in full flow.

[slacey1070]

I cant believe people get so upset about computers ! I mean we all moved on from our beloved Speccys/C64's/Amstrads onto the Amiga or ST but we didnt 'hate' them for messing up the 8 bit world.

When i had an Amiga i loved that, it served its purpose, then just like the Speccy before it, consoles/PC's arrived and the Amiga was obsolete.

I love the Speccy but do i get angy when people mention the Amiga or 16 bits which caused the end of my little 8 bit world ! Nope !!!

Stunned how people get so upset by all of this. I mean theres loving your machine and then theres OTT love and hating Microsoft as it was their fault PC's were popular which meant the Amiga disappeared. Come on !

Agree completely. I enjoy reading about all machines. Never had a Spectrum but the mag & this forum inspired me to download an emulator and enjoy some very good games.

But I'll read about anything, because I enjoy gaming as a whole . . . 8 bit, 16 bit, whatever bit . .

[Fred83]

Commodore might had being saved if they stuck to the pc end,last pc they made was in 1993.

[necronom]

I mean we all moved on from our beloved Speccys/C64's/Amstrads onto the Amiga or ST but we didnt 'hate' them for messing up the 8 bit world.

To me there is a big difference.

When I went from the Vic-20 to the C64 to the Amiga, there was a big improvement each time to the way the machines worked. I was excited by the updates. When the Amiga was swamped by the PC and that ended up winning, it was a step backwards as far as I was concerned.

[CraigGrannell]

Commodore might had being saved if they stuck to the pc end,last pc they made was in 1993.

They'd have been saved if they'd had some focus. They practically shot the C64 dead when it was still selling well, to crap out the 'console' version, and there were loads of Amiga models that had incompatibilities. A smaller line-up would have helped those models last longer. And given the quality of the system at the time, there's really no reason to think that the Amiga couldn't have held its own in the subsequent battles. I doubt it would have held the primary share of the market, but if it could have grabbed a niche sector (in the way Apple secured its survival by utterly owning the DTP and graphic design markets for years), it could have settled into a nice profitable minority market-share.

[pforson]

it was a step backwards as far as I was concerned.

It really wasn't.

Bigger hard drives, more expandability, more ram, higher resolutions afforded by better graphics processors. It was no wonder that many Amiga devs moved onto developing for the PC.

A lot of systems have their 'day in the sun' as it were.

The Atari ST took over from the 8bits, that was then superseded by the Amiga (sorry ST fans, but it's true) and the Amiga was then bested by the emerging PC scene.

I had my Amiga 500 about 4 years and it was brilliant, best computer at the time and I have very fond memories of the system (I'm actually trying to get a full set of Amiga CD32 games at the moment). I have a Mac setup which dual boots into XP and Amiga Workbench (via a completely hidden Winuae). I'm definitely an Amiga fan.

The A1200 was too little too late and the CD32 was ill conceived and poorly supported. Sure the A1200 had some specific AGA software, but Commodore really needed to offer a machine that was pushing the boundaries and the A1200 was not that machine. Perhaps they should have gone all out on the specs and forgotten about backward compatibility?

Ta,
Pete

[merman]

From a reader's perspective, I would say the Amstrad has not had undue preference (except perhaps in Darran's choice of Retrorevival), and in fact I'd like to see some more features on the Amstrad machines concentrating on how their version was different/badly converted from the Spectrum Z80 code.

From a writer' perspective, it's more about who you can get in touch with that determines what features you can pitch/write. I pitched a PC making of a while back, which now looks like it will be going into gamesTM as a Behind the Scenes feature.

But bear in mind, that the PC era also marked the start of bigger and bigger teams. So unless you can track down the main designer/lead developer, it can be tricky to get a decent overview of how a game was developed.

[Fred83]

The A1200 was too little too late and the CD32 was ill conceived and poorly supported. Sure the A1200 had some specific AGA software, but Commodore really needed to offer a machine that was pushing the boundaries and the A1200 was not that machine. Perhaps they should have gone all out on the specs and forgotten about backward compatibility?

They where both shoite tbh,and their money woes made alot of decisions on amigas,instance A4000 was launched with 040 first then 93 models where fitted with 030 and dreadful short term capacitors,an A3000+ was in the planned with an AGA chipset but was pulled at last moment,another famous story is the CD32 developers being sent an early CD32 board that was nailed to a piece of wood,when wb 3.1 was released people where forced to pirate because there wasn't enough official disks to go around.!

[thevulture]

The ST got it's arsed well and truly kicked by the Amiga towards the end-I was an ST owner, think Robocop 3 was last game i bought and it was touch n go if that even made it to the ST, things were that bad.

As for Commodore, well C64GS, CDTV, C16, Plus 4, CD 32-Just goes to show they were as bad as Atari when it came to hardware in many cases.

Tony Crowther when interviewed on making of Liberation for CD32 spoke volumes about Commodores approach to the hardware (it was a mess) and indeed as Fred says, the development kit Tony recived was indeed a circuit board nailed to some wood.

[Fred83]

Tony Crowther when interviewed on making of Liberation for CD32 spoke volumes about Commodores approach to the hardware (it was a mess) and indeed as Fred says, the development kit Tony recived was indeed a circuit board nailed to some wood.

I wonder is it one like this!- http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/amiwest.php

[NorthWay]

I hate M$ with a vengeance. Given any chance I'd push them off a cliff even if they'd pull me down with them.

And no, the Amiga was not the answer for the 90s and onward, lovely machine it was though.
(There is no current OS to my liking. If events had unfolded fairly we would have been gravitating towards something pretty much Unix based by the end of the 80s and taken it from there. I run OpenSUSE on this pc hw box for lack of some better OS and HW.)


But enough about that - I thought the "PC" was a current platform so how do you rate sw running (natively) on it as retro? Genuinely curious.

[TMR]

But enough about that - I thought the "PC" was a current platform so how do you rate sw running (natively) on it as retro? Genuinely curious.

It evolved over time into what we have today and those earlier stages of evolution can be considered retro in the same way their contemporaries are.

[Matt_B]

But enough about that - I thought the "PC" was a current platform so how do you rate sw running (natively) on it as retro? Genuinely curious.

It evolved over time into what we have today and those earlier stages of evolution can be considered retro in the same way their contemporaries are.

Plus you've usually got to resort to emulation to get an old game running on a new machine, so it's hardly native either.

[necronom]

it was a step backwards as far as I was concerned.

It really wasn't.

Bigger hard drives, more expandability, more ram, higher resolutions afforded by better graphics processors. It was no wonder that many Amiga devs moved onto developing for the PC.

An Amiga can have a 2Tb drive (I have a 3Gb in my A1200 and its more than I need), 256Mb of Fast RAM (I couldn't use up all the 32Mb at once in my A1200 when I tried, as it was much more efficient), processor upgrades, graphics cards to ramp up the resolution, had proper multi-tasking, proper plug and play, hardware sprites, quick boot up, no messing with IRQs/config files etc. to run programs, multiple resolutions on the same screen, immediate response to clicks in Workbench (that XP still can't do, same with drawing the contents of windows), multiple screen handling (virtual screens, not physical), the ability to output to TVs and have genlocks for video work, CD drives, printers, scanners, joysticks, zip drives, etc. I'm not sure what other expandibility you would need. Of course it can be in a tower case, too, instead of spread all over the desk like mine is

The 2Mb of Chip is a seriously low limit, and the processor speeds didn't increase fast enough, so 3D games were MUCH slower than the PC, and that's the worst I can think of.

Overall I think that is a FAR superior computer than the PC. There is no way I would have swapped my Amiga for 5 PCs, never mind 1. The Amiga was MUCH better to me than a PC.

The reason the PC won, was of the overwhelming number of the things compared to the Amiga. If the PC wasn't there, I'm sure things would have been very different.

When it got to 2000, the Amiga was pretty much dead, so I didn't have much choice if I wanted to play modern games and run modern applications. That's when I got a PC.

I don't see why when I give an opinion on what I actually saw with my own eyes, I'm "making ridiculous statements", but you can say something that sound like a factual statement "PC was brilliant in the early 90's and anyone who says otherwise is a fool" and "It really wasn't" when I say I thought the PC was a step backwards. I don't accuse you or anyone else of anything, as it's your opinion and we are all entitled to them.

After reading about how good the PC was in the early '90s I found a vid on YouTube called "Amiga vs PC 2", and the Amiga games were better (though they were circa 1989/90). A few years later they may have been better on the PC, I don't know.

I think I'll leave it there. We've just have to disagree on this.