There's a certain method of programming where you take over the OS in a "friendly" way but a lot of games did not use this. The OS and how you were supposed to use it was another point I'd always hate about the Amiga: practically you had to hardware-bang instead of using the OS to reach the maximum capabilities, but then you'd run into incompatibility on the later or expanded models. Suddenly, on Amiga you had access to sampled sound, but a lot of games were released with very bad quality sound effects and/or the same SoundTracker ST-01 samples in the music. With sound it was much of the same: on 8bits you could use the sound synthesis hardware, which did require skill, but you didn't have to, or couldn't, record real sound sources. Games that had good graphics, utilized the hardware, and didn't forget the gameplay were quite rare. To add insult to injury, don't use the hardware directly but the OS graphics routines, possibly reducing framerate even below 25fpsĢ) Use the graphics hardware to the maximum, hand-pixel your graphics to the maximum. On Amiga you could use more colors, and even take steps toward photo quality, so two "bad" scenarios could happen:ġ) Just slap more colors on the graphics, add some ugly generated dither fill instead of taking your time to hand-pixel carefully. On C64 and other 8bits you didn't need (or couldn't) use much colors or resolution, so you'd often concentrate on using the limited graphics potential to the maximum, and/or focused on gameplay. The hardware sprite capability I don't see as a problem, as the majority of games used blitter to draw onto the screen directly.īut yeah, like many in this thread have said I agree that a lot of the software left a lot to be desired. Though with some hackery you could make 2 16-color background layers by using sprites (the flight part in Turrican1) There were some tradeoffs you had to make, like for example one 16 or 32 color background (such as Turrican) or 2 parallaxing 8-color backgrounds (Shadow of the Beast 2). Compared to C64, to 8bit consoles, or even 16bit consoles it had its own strengths that took quite extreme skill to use to the maximum. Technically Amiga (500) had a lot of potential, so technically I can't say it's overrated. That video took me right back I have to say and I agree with the sentiment that you had to be there to fully appreciate and understand it. I think we do get a bit complacent, what with how things transpired and such, and we get bogged down with this and that, especially comparing it to machines from the early to mid 90s (which was still fair game, amazingly enough when looked at in the proper context), but the truth is that in '85, the Amiga was a real revolution, especially when you think that the Amstrad was brand new in '84 and the Enterprise was also '85. Within that video there is the bit with the digitised video of the cat walking within the rotating window, I can't remember which show I was at (PCW '86 or '87?), but I remember seeing it at the time and it totally blew me away, a real watershed moment. I just watched this and there is no doubt that the Amiga is the computer that fits this piece of music far more than anything else from the 80s. I am still trying to find a decent a1000 though ebay prices are ridiculous, same as a600.ĭJOS wrote. Commodore was confused is it a gaming or business platform - this is the core failure for Commodore. This opened up the market for gamers for another simple cart based system with great graphics and gameplay as seen on NES or SEGA. The fail was marketing structure, consoles where coming out and used a cartridge system. Is it a very over rated computer? No on the contrary, the capabilities of this system where simply awesome at the time and eclipsed others. There were many awesome demos made on this system, it is far from a fail. Apart from games it was a very capable design and video editing platform on the lower end and even mid range. This is what the down-point and maybe downfall was for the A500 - simply designers didn't want this and neither did customers. Even with a second floppy it was excruciating to deal with. As most games especially - lucasarts or Sierra based adventures came along in x 12 floppy's sometimes swap disk 0, swap disk 1, swap disk 2 swap disk 3 arghhhh. One needed a HDD though back in the days and where very expensive to fully appreciate the system. Wings Cannon Fodder, Speedball I could go on. Great games such as Blood Money Chaos Engine Moonstone. įirst game I played I think was either Rubicon or Walker I had my c64 until about 1990 - then I got an Amiga 500. Amiga 500 was and still is an awesome piece of hardware.
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