Vapourware Amiga Rage Thread

[Jarpie]

It's true that a great deal of the amiga software was technically inferior, but there are reasons for it besides the the obvious. The default computer model had few available memory, and games were made for running on floppies and floppy speed lead to all the lags, interrupts when playing music etc because games were made to stream from floppy into small buffers, ie: lesser common denominator bullshit.

There are workarounds, which are pretty amazing. For example this section of this tutorial shows the different between a WHDLoad prepared game with a 'precache' setting (hacked to run on amiga hd and to not copy to buffer) vs the floppy:

I used to be amiga user for ages since 1991, I know all that, geeze. Amiga 1200 and 4000 etc had lot more memory and they already had accelerator cards in early-ish 90s which had 68030 processors...oh, and they also had HDs. Commodore did fucking shit job pushing A1200 to the developers and to make people buy them. Games utilizing more powerful CPUs and more memory came too late to make anykind of difference. Amiga already had JSTLoad and WHDLoad back in the late 90s IIRC.

 

[SCO]

I just posted a video literally showing the interruption when changing screens of the music (because it was loading something else). I mean, sure, it's in uae, but what do you even want. I know the amiga has a scheduler with multitasking (thankfully) but this sort of thing where one part is loading from the disk and another needs to load will interrupt the first due to the limiting factor being I/O speed, that can't be multitasked (with that hardware/software anyway).

Fancy multiplexing I/O interleaving tricks hadn't been standardized at the library level as nowadays (it's actually still pretty uncommon for the average dev to notice he needs it, helped by the tremendous speed of current I/O and huge available memory to preload things compared). This is not a criticism, just a observation that software engineering available toolset has grown.

 

[Lilura]

I just posted a video literally showing the interruption when changing screens of the music (because it was loading something else).

Truth is, it wasn't an issue back in the day. The music and loadscreens were designed to accommodate the loading sequences. I don't remember ANYONE complaining about that back in the day. The vid also uses an example from 1986, one of the very first games to come out. The vast majority of tracks didn't "interrupt" during the game-play. Only when loading a lvl or something (which might even play their own track). This is true of many current gen games on PC.

 

[SCO]

Darkmere (the next example in the video) is from 1993 and you can clearly see it. Actually it was flashing not music interruption, i dunno what's the deal with that.

 

[Lilura]

I used to be amiga user for ages since 1991, I know all that, geeze.

Welcome to the Codex, where a few cretinous churls think they know anything about the Amiga.

 

[Lilura]

Darkmere (the next example in the video) is from 1993 and you can clearly see it ( a less interruption sure).

Yeah, saw that, too. Again, it's an exception. WHDLoad actually fucks up the feel of quite a lot of games due to its accelerated loading.

 

[SCO]

Well, purists can be purists if they want, but i really admire the project. I'll only emulate Amiga games with it, even with the occasional bug. Amazing they're still working on it, 20 years later.

To me, long loading every level or floppy changes belong in the dustbin of history, if there is a alternative. I won't say no to the occasional bug fix either.

 

[Jarpie]

Yeah, WHDLoad and JST fucks up things sometimes, but I agree, they are great utilities. I used them a lot when I still had my amiga.

 

[Lilura]

Well, purists can be purists if they want, but i really admire the project. I'll only emulate Amiga games with it, even with the occasional bug. Amazing they're still working on it, 20 years later.

To me, long loading every level or floppy changes belong in the dustbin of history, if there is a alternative. I won't say no to the occasional bug fix either.

I've used WHDLoad on WinUAE for over a decade and I'm quite aware of its multiple merits. I'm just making a point that aural "interrupts" were never an issue. The music even faded and changed with loading sequences. It was an artform, too.

 

[Lilura]

Amazing they're still working on it, 20 years later.

Since you ed-linked to this, I filed a lil' report for Pool of Radiance and it was addressed promptly.

 

[octavius]

the Codex, where a few cretinous churls think they know anything about the Amiga.

Indeed.

 

[SCO]

Eh, incredible. To more 20 years. They did +3300 games over the years, full support for every published and some unpublished games eventually is not a dream.

 

[Kev Inkline]

I used to be amiga user for ages since 1991, I know all that, geeze.

Welcome to the Codex, where a few cretinous churls think they know anything about the Amiga.

You sure haven't been part of demoscene, it's apparent.

Otherwise you'd know better to use correct terms instead of some internet slang, non-existent back in the day.

 

[Lilura]

Indeed.

Cretinous churl of all chimes in.

 

[octavius]

Indeed.

Cretinous churl of all chimes in.

You make the newbie mistake of thinking anyone not agreeing with you are "cretinous churls think they know anything about the Amiga". I've never claimed to be an expert. That's your domain.

 

[Daemongar]

I was fortunate to have an Amiga 500 in (around) '87. It was seeing ads for Dungeon Master that made me buy one, also finding out there wouldn't be 10 tons of disk swapping in Ultima V caught my attention.There *were* good rpgs for the Amiga, but there was a tendency to create games that looked good rather than games that played well (the start of a long struggle) or reskins of C64 games.

The games I completed on the Amiga, but might as well have played on the C64:
* Secret of the Silver Blades
* Dark Pools of Radiance
* Buck Rodgers: Countdown to Doomsday
* Demon's Winter

Some that were unique for the Amiga and used it capabilities:
* Black Crypt
* Dungeon Master & Chaos Strikes Back
* Ultima V and VI
* Eye of the Beholder 1 & 2

By the time I gave up the Amiga, i had an additional 3 1/4 drive and the 512K expansion. The killer for me/writing on the wall was Ultima VII for the PC. That looked amazing. Think a hard drive add on for the Amiga at the time was astronomical in price, and PC's weren't cheap either.

 

[Bumvelcrow]

* Ultima V and VI
* Eye of the Beholder 1 & 2

Interesting you mention these games, since to me they signalled that the PC was taking over and the Amiga's day was done. Certainly Ultima VI on the Amiga was a PC conversion with watered down graphics, and by the time Eye of the Beholder came out, the PC version was in 256 colour VGA compared to the Amiga's 32 colours. Ultima V was an odd one - the PC was still in EGA era and I think the Amiga version was a straight port, but it wasn't a very good one and I remember the massive logo along the bottom of the screen standing out like a sore thumb.

Dungeon Master was a straight Atari ST port, other than added stereo sound, except it needed 1MB of memory, so I couldn't play it for a long time. The ST version only needed 512K.

I agree about Amiga games being made to look good, which is why, other than a few notable exceptions, RPGs on the Amiga (as the main platform) were pretty disappointing.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

The Amiga and PC comparison of Eye of the Beholder isn't so straightforward. While the PC has more colors and the game played smoother, the Amiga has better sound.

 

[Jarpie]

Amiga port of Ultima 6 was so fucking horrible, very lazily done and horribly optimized, it was just so unbelievably horrible port. Even Wing Commander port on A500 was better, I'm actually surprised there wasn't Amiga 1200 version of Wing Commander as they made AGA-port to CD32.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

you're all newfags to me. owned from the a1000 to an a4000/040, severely overclocked, external fpu, 18 mb ram, 3.1 gb hd, high definition monitor which didn't tremble at interlaced resolutions. i worked on 3d graphics renderings (holy shit, it took longer than 2 months to render something i brought to a fair, not counting when the cpu snapped in half during a hot summer between imagine, lightwave, vista and scenery animator) and the first thoughts of virtual reality. i didn't buy a 060 because of stability issues, unfortunately the amiga was dying already.

even old amigas with ecs chipset were able to reach 4096 colours in low resolution (320x240), only 16 in 640x480 (yup, it was pal, not this ntsc crap), but still veeeeery few games made use of this. and i clearly remember that my 33 mhz a4000 (with the help of an extra hardware piece) was shown as a 486/66 during emulation. the hardware could have been old, but we'll never see such a display of technology again.

 

[Mortmal]

Ultima 6 wasnt that bad of a port it had ton of disk swapping although. I still have the original box moonstone and map ,oddly 25 years later the floppies and save disk still load...I switched to pc for origin games too , might and magic and wizardry. Really depressing those great companies disapeared.

 

[Kev Inkline]

even old amigas with ecs chipset were able to reach 4096 colours in low resolution (320x240), only 16 in 640x480 (yup, it was pal, not this ntsc crap), but still veeeeery few games made use of this. and i clearly remember that my 33 mhz a4000 (with the help of an extra hardware piece) was shown as a 486/66 during emulation. the hardware could have been old, but we'll never see such a display of technology again.

IIRC HAM put some restrictions on to how the image was handled and thus things requring fast processing or moving images, like games, could not easily make full use of that mode.

 

[Bumvelcrow]

IIRC HAM put some restrictions on to how the image was handled and thus things requring fast processing or moving images, like games, could not easily make full use of that mode.

Hold-and-Modify, so to change to a completely new colour took a couple of pixels and you tended to get fringing like a super-colourful Apple 2 display. There was also extra-halfbright mode, which gave you 64 colours, with the second set at half the intensity, like a super-colourful Sinclair Spectrum, and I think the odd game did use that.

It's unfortunate that here in the UK the Amiga was second in popularity to the Atari ST for quite a long time, so a very large proportion of Amiga games were direct ports in 16 colours that made no effort to use the Amiga's fancy hardware. In some cases they looked worse and were less smooth than the equivalent C64 or PC port! So we tended to look to US imports for games that took advantage of the Amiga, or the odd money-hating monacled Amiga fan developers.

 

[octavius]

My relationship with my Amiga had its ups and downs.

There were some excellent versions of CRPGs developed on other machines, like Bard's Tale 1, Ultima IV (loved the music) and some of the Gold Box games.
There were a few CRPGs made for the Amiga, like Faery Tale, Black Crypt and Abandoned Places, but overall too much emphasis on how the game looked instead of how it played. Games made for the Apple just had better gameplay on average.

I was very disappointed by the Amiga version of Civilization, since the random maps were not random. The same parameters would always generate the same map.

The final nail in the coffine which made me dump my Amiga was Ultima Underworld, in many ways my dream game, being PC only.

In retrospect the Amiga was too much like a console, and the most unique games for the Amiga were in genres that I didn't care much for.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Last month I had the pleasure of interacting with an Amiga 500 for the first time, for about an hour or so. Yes, I've read about and listened to lots of stuff about the computer for 30 years, but it's only now that I get a chance to see it first-hand.

The machine was a little rickety (monitor image would flicker if you as much as looked at the cable) but I could see the obvious charm of it.

Didn't change the fact that the little bugger was possessed. I've used dozens of floppy drives, but never one that sounded like it was raging at the world while in use. The keyboard would stop receiving input at times and I felt that the case got too hot after just 5 minutes of being turned on.

Hopefully I'll get more time with this machine in the future, but first hands-on impressions are interesting.