[HN Gopher] Doom Didn't Kill the Amiga (2024)
___________________________________________________________________
Doom Didn't Kill the Amiga (2024)
Author : blakespot
Score : 54 points
Date : 2025-07-03 14:04 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.datagubbe.se)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.datagubbe.se)
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Yeah if your secret sauce is a chip, with very particular timing
| and memory behaviour... you've just built in obsolescence.
| There's no abstracted API for doing the fancy graphics (at least
| not one used by games, etc), and the whole system is built around
| sharing the memory bus between CPU and VDP (not going to fly once
| memory & bus speeds became a fraction of the CPU speed and once
| cache was a serious thing)... it's just stuck in a grotto.. a
| neighbourhood that looks fantastic when you moved in but now the
| next city over is getting a brand new subway system while you're
| still stuck with an old fleet of busses.
|
| Nevermind Moore's law and exponential improvements... you're
| stuck even falling behind in very incremental developments.
|
| I also lived through this era, but from the Atari ST side. When I
| got my 486 it was a feeling of a kind of relenting "sigh"
| abandoning the 68k and its basic superiority... but economies of
| scale and the arrival of Linux (I used the very first versions,
| before the a.out->ELF transition even) made it worthwhile.
| TheAmazingRace wrote:
| Did you ever use MiNT on your Atari ST when it was relevant? I
| understand that for some folks, MiNT was kind of the gateway
| drug that often led users to Linux on PC shortly afterwards.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Yes, that was indeed the gateway. Among others.
|
| Though my ST only had 1MB of RAM and a floppy, no hard drive.
| On that I ran a UUCP node to get email and news for a while.
| And some unix-like shells (Mupfel, I believe was one? Gulam
| was another great one). I did use MiNT a bit but the whole
| GNU toolset was a bit big for a floppy system, and the
| multitasking was only somewhat useful. You could get a unix-
| like environment without going fully MiNT.
|
| The big jump for me was having a 200MB HD in my 486 when I
| got it. Massive life change.
| bregma wrote:
| MiNT and a 16 GB hard drive with all the GNU tools installed.
| It was just like the Unix at work.
|
| Linux came later after also going through AIX, HP/UX, A/UX,
| AT&T SVr4, SunOS, Solaris, OSF/1, ISC, ...
| TheAmazingRace wrote:
| I presume you mean MB and not GB? On native Atari hardware
| at least, you could only address up to 1 GB partitions on
| the very last TOS 4.04 based systems like the Falcon.
| spogbiper wrote:
| its easier to see this in hindsight. the amiga was basically
| just using the model that every previous home computer had
| used, expecting game devs to use the hardware directly like
| they had been doing since the first home PCs. wasting resources
| on an API or any kind of abstraction was for user level BASICs
| and similar, not for professional games
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I was not a big Amiga user, but on the Atari ST we had a
| graphics abstraction API (VDI) from day one. Had the notion
| of a virtual device and drawing surface. All done through a
| proper syscall TRAP system, too. I am given to understand
| that the AmigaOS syscall API was in the form of JMPs.
|
| So when the Falcon and TT Etc came along with full 16-bit 256
| colour SVGA-like graphics, anything properly written GUI
| "just worked"
|
| Games and the like, yes, had to fall back to a video compat
| mode.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > So when the Falcon and TT Etc came along with full 16-bit
| 256 colour SVGA-like graphics, anything properly written
| GUI "just worked"
|
| > Games and the like, yes, had to fall back to a video
| compat mode.
|
| The Amiga had retargetable graphics too. No real difference
| there.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| It used JMP, but you looked up the API base addresses from
| a fixed address, ($4 IIRC) so it worked basically the same.
| But only like some turned based games, and like some chess
| games etc used that API. The rest maybe used the APIs to
| allocate a screen but they were banging hardware after
| that. Most didn't even use the OS even to read the
| keyboard, which became an annoyance on the A600 which
| lacked some of the keys.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I mean the advantage of the TRAP approach is more
| amenable to supervisor/user mode switch and memory
| protection and the like?
|
| Separate topic from graphics and device independence
| though
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Memory protection was basically impossible or at least
| "Research Level Hard" on the Amiga, because of how the OS
| was designed with linked lists and message passing of
| pointers. This was what made it so fast, but at a cost.
| (They would have needed something like Rust to balance
| that.)
|
| Everything could have been fixed with the March of Moore.
| The OS could have gotten a hypervisor and been running
| each program in its own "VM" thinking it was the only
| program on the machine.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Later iterations of OS extensions on the ST got memory
| protection support, albeit a bit inconistently and with
| likely backwards compat problems. FreeMiNT I think
| supports MMU + protection on 030 machines.
|
| Achilles heel for classic MacOS, too. Sins of our
| fathers.
| TheAmazingRace wrote:
| Pretty sure MultiTOS (which was derived from MiNT IIRC)
| fully supported preemptive multitasking back in 1992 or
| so when it came out. This, plus the fancier graphics
| support, a proper 68030 instead of the rather cut down
| 68EC020, and addition of a Motorola 56K DSP, meant the
| Atari Falcon was superior to the Amiga A1200, at least on
| paper. I certainly adored mine when I owned it not that
| long ago as a part of my small collection.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Yeah I have two Falcons here. Not that I ever use them,
| but they're amazing machines for the time.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The original Amiga platform had no MMU, hence no support
| for memory protection or virtual memory addressing. Some
| Motorola processors included it (the 68030 and up) but
| these were only used on high-end Amigas that were not the
| most common platform, and are more comparable to
| contemporary workstations. The AmigaOS just used the
| single address space approach, that's not necessarily
| incompatible with protected memory.
|
| The Intel 80386 and its successors were quite exceptional
| in being "killer micros" with a workstation-class feature
| set for the time.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Yeah. It was very much the same with DOS games, too.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > the whole system is built around sharing the memory bus
| between CPU and VDP
|
| Isn't this what "Unified Memory" does in more modern systems?
| There's nothing wrong with sharing memory between CPU and
| hardware graphics.
| Someone wrote:
| The combination with _"There 's no abstracted API for doing
| the fancy graphics (at least not one used by games, etc)"_
| only works as long as you have a solid unique benefit, and
| that, Amiga lost fairly rapidly due to Moore's law.
| fulafel wrote:
| It lasted pretty long, especially considering the rate of
| evolution in those days. It debuted already in 1985, and
| there were some incremental improvements along the way
| (first the A3000 and then AGA A4000/A1200 in 1992). After
| the biggest lead in graphics started to shrink you still
| had a big user and software user base, multitasking desktop
| that was far ahead at least until W95, great CLI
| environment compared to PC stuff, competitive price etc.
| Someone wrote:
| > and there were some incremental improvements along the
| way (first the A3000 and then AGA A4000/A1200 in 1992)
|
| About the A3000 Wikipedia says _"The machine is reported
| to have sold 14,380 units in Germany (including Amiga
| 3000T sales)"_ , and about the A4000 _"The machine is
| reported to have sold 11,300 units in Germany"_. Both
| were on sale for about 2 years.
|
| In comparison, the A2000 sold 124,500 units in Germany,
| again according to Wikipedia, in the about 4 years of its
| commercial availability.
|
| So, about a 80% decline in sales per month, in what I
| think/guess was an expanding market for personal
| computers.
|
| = I don't think those improvements made much of a
| difference.
| gpderetta wrote:
| 3000 and 4000 were "high end". The 1200 was the 500/600
| replacement with AGA and sold relatively well.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| We might be able to circle back to this now by putting some
| portion of memory and video on the die along with the CPU,
| but that was not going to happen for Atari and Commodore back
| in the 90s. Motorola wasn't going to shove 128KB or whatever
| of RAM into a 68k just for them, and even if they did it
| would have been _so expensive_
|
| Memory speeds plateau'd while CPU speeds skyrocketed. Almost
| all the complexities of modern architectures have to do with
| this. There used to be "no need" for something as funky as
| L1/L2/L3 caches really because often your memory was _faster_
| than your CPU (hence why something like the C64 's VIC-II or
| the Atari ST's "Shifter" are even possible).
|
| Hell there were systems back then that didn't even have
| onboard registers in the CPU, but used external memory for it
| (TI's TMS series). The 6502's "zero page" is another example.
|
| You can't do that anymore. The CPU will run many laps around
| your memory.
|
| Still it'd be interesting to see what Jay Miner would have
| come up with in the late 90s or 21st century, if he was still
| around and in the game.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Unified memory is more about taking advantage of zero copy
| access for the GPU. Since everything the GPU wants is already
| _right there_ there 's no need to send it on a trip over a
| bus into separate GPU memory. Memory bandwidth is of course
| still important for both the GPU and CPU so that unified
| memory can be a bottleneck if it's slow or has too few
| channels.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Commodore operations were very, very poor, too.
|
| If they had been smarter with money, I'm sure they could have
| innovated in many many ways without giving up on backwards
| compatilibity. Sony put a PS1 inside the PS2. The Sony MSX2
| contained an MSX1-on-a-chip.
|
| Amiga could easily have had a PCI bus for external video chips.
|
| And I'm not even going into the more crazy PS3-like ideas like
| "so, memory and bus speed are just a fraction of CPU speed? Ok,
| here are 32 parallel CPUs with their own chunk of the VDP
| bandwidth and their own local memory".
| vidarh wrote:
| The last iteration of the Amiga chipset Commodore worked on
| when they went bankrupt (Hombre)[1] was intended to be a
| 2-chip system providing a 64-bit 3D chipset with a PA-RISC
| CPU on-die in the in one of them that'd break compatibility,
| and be used for both standalone computers, set-top boxes and
| for a high-end graphics card.
|
| To sort out compatibility, the idea was for an "AGA Amiga on
| a chip".
|
| I'm not convinced Amiga-users would've been all too happy
| with all of this - or that PA RISC was a good choice, given
| what we know now -, but it certainly would've been a massive
| upgrade.
|
| (What Commodore was _close to completing_ when they went
| bankrupt, though, was AAA[2] - which would 've seen far more
| modest but still significant upgrades, like wider buses,
| support for chunky graphics modes, higher resolutions, far
| higher video bandwidth; AAA was in testing when Commodore
| failed)
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Amiga_Architecture
| _ch...
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| (2024)
|
| Discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39246825
| runjake wrote:
| In 1992, I went from Amiga to a PC solely because of Wolfenstein
| 3D. I already felt like I was clinging to the Amiga platform.
| Most of my other friends in the Amiga world had moved on to other
| platforms. Doom came out about a year later, near Christmas 1993,
| IIRC.
|
| The author bought their Amiga 500 in early 1992! It was already a
| "classic" by then.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Ya, the author's timeline doesnt mesh with mine. In my memory
| the amiga was dead long before 1995. Wing commander was 91/92,
| which blew away anything on amiga. The great microprose
| simulations also started in 91/92 when the best Amiga could
| barely run the original civilization.
| jl6 wrote:
| Wing Commander was released for the Amiga! It just ran
| absurdly slowly.
| blakespot wrote:
| Yep, one of the first games that really needed a chunky
| pixel video memory layout (which the Amiga lacked). Amiga's
| planar arrangement was perfect for platformers, which was
| the target of the Amiga gfx hardware design.
| wowtip wrote:
| It was not like lot's of very talented Amiga devs didn't
| try their very best to create a Wolfenstein/Doom clone
| for their platform, but iirc the bitplane setup used by
| Amiga gfx, which enabled lot's of other cool features did
| not perform well with the opereations needed for "3D"
| games.
|
| Then with Quake, the 3rd party 3D graphics cards market
| took off, and even if there were cards for the Amigas
| too, market economics made them unviable.
|
| And even though I usually appreciate Datagubbe's
| writings, this time I think his take is incorrect. At
| least in my circles Wolfenstein / Doom and ultimately
| Quake was the final nails in the Amiga's coffin.
|
| Sure, the picture is bigger - PC market drove down prices
| and very soon the price/performance difference was very
| unfavorable for Amiga - but at least initially the issue
| was kids wanted to play Wolfenstein, Doom, or at least
| something similar, and that was not possible if you
| stayed on the Amiga.
| blakespot wrote:
| Indeed, I got my first Amiga in October 1985 - I believe it was
| the first Amiga sold in Virginia (U.S.) and one of the first
| ever sold - period.
|
| https://bytecellar.com/2020/10/27/looking-back-on-35-years-a...
|
| I remember those extremely early days, which were filled with
| slow releases, I must say - but it was a singular experience,
| playing with that hardware. I left and came back with an Amiga
| 2000 in 1988 and that was a great time - a peak time to be an
| Amigoid.
|
| 1992 does seem late for a first Amiga - and a 500; I had an
| A1200 in '92.
|
| I still have two Amigas that I use often (1000, 2000 '020) and
| a PowerPC "Amiga," that I rarely power on.
| TheAmazingRace wrote:
| Blake, I have to say you had to have had a VERY cool
| childhood growing up with your mom helping you get some then
| cutting edge tech like that in the mid 80s. I have to wonder
| what a typical 80s kid's exposure to computers was like back
| then and the discoverability of it all, because computers of
| any kind in the states were generally very niche in family
| homes back then, let alone Amiga computers.
| Sleaker wrote:
| Born in 84 myself, first major introduction to computing
| was in '89 or '90, my grade school had received about 20
| Apple 2e with various edutainment titles.
| blakespot wrote:
| Yep, I was lucky. We were a middle-class family and my mom
| and dad did support my extreme passion in computers. I went
| through a huge amount of systems.
|
| Here's the list: https://bytecellar.com/the-list
|
| I would buy one, love it, read about another and finally
| put the first in the newspaper for sale (
| https://bytecellar.com/2019/05/08/computer-classifieds-
| datin... ) and move to the next, with funds added in by my
| parents to cover the different. I was very lucky in that!
| (The link shared shows actual scans of the newspaper ads I
| ran, selling some of the systems back in the '80s.)
| aruggirello wrote:
| My experience mirrors yours, I got my first Amiga 500 in
| 1986, and besides gaming, it was my home programming rig
| until 1994. I was studying informatics and while everybody
| was stuck on monochrome 640Kb MS-DOS equipped PS/2
| programming a few hundred lines of Turbo Pascal at most, I
| had the joy of venturing into a modern OS with multitasking,
| GUI, a complex file system, writing stuff in AmigaBASIC,
| compiling my first programs with AC-Basic. Then I started
| learning C and Intuition, and built several GUI programs. I
| finally spent a couple years writing like, 300K SLOC of
| Motorola 68000 assembly, which resulted in a basic, but very
| fast text editor, and two fractal generators capable of
| almost matching the performance of FractInt on a PC. My
| knowledge of C and GUIs finally landed me my very first job
| as junior developer in august 1994, thanks to my Amiga!
| Literally a dream come true in Italy. My very first paycheck
| was spent buying an A4000, but by then I realized the Amiga
| had lost, and sadly returned it to the seller in exchange for
| an ugly stupid Pentium PC with Microsoft Windows 3.1, which
| had far superior graphics, sound, memory, disk and computing
| power, though it was soulless. The Commodore Amiga OTOH will
| always have a little place in my heart.
| runjake wrote:
| Minor correction: The Amiga 500 came out in ~May-October
| 1987, depending on your country.
| aruggirello wrote:
| You're right, it was probably summer 1987.
| louthy wrote:
| A lot of words there. But the word 'console' is there exactly
| once.
|
| Games consoles killed the Amiga, just like they did all other
| home computers that were primarily used for games.
|
| I don't know anyone that used the Amiga for anything other than
| games.
|
| PCs survived because they were genuinely used for business, not
| just games.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The Amiga platform was originally built on game-console
| hardware. Incidentally, so was the Raspberry Pi, which is why
| the first Raspberry Pi models were comparatively very cheap.
| louthy wrote:
| The platform is irrelevant. They were more expensive than
| games consoles. So they lost, just like all other true
| personal computer manufacturers. They had too many components
| and couldn't compete.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| I think it was lack of vision and financial mismanagement
| that killed them more than anything technical.
|
| Edit: an interesting take with the games consoles, I never
| really thought about it from that angle before. But it
| makes a lot of sense. Console makers get a cut of the
| revenue stream of the games. Commodore never saw a cent of
| that and the only commercial niche they briefly owned was
| low-budget TV production, like cable channels and such.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The end of the Motorola MC68000 architecture killed a
| whole lot of platforms around that same time. Amiga was
| just one of them among many, but the fact that Atari ST
| also died, NeXT was ported to x86, the Mac was ported to
| PowerPC, Sun Microsystems went SPARC etc. etc. all pretty
| much simultaneously, is not a coincidence.
| mrits wrote:
| Were they? I bought my Amiga 500 around 1992 for $200 USD
| at Software Etc. I think the Nintendo was around $100 USD
| and the games were often much more expensive. Not to
| mention most games were just the cost of a floppy disk if
| you had Amiga friends.
| louthy wrote:
| $100 < $200
| Retric wrote:
| A console without games isn't useful.
| louthy wrote:
| And a printer without ink doesn't print. Yet we all
| continue to fall for this initial low price bait.
| Retric wrote:
| In 1985 the NES launched in the US at $179.99 and didn't
| include a game. So while I'm sure somebody came home with
| a useless object, in general people where forced to but
| at least one.
|
| In 1996 the first hit became free.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| Video rental was huge. It's the only way I could afford
| to play games.
| Retric wrote:
| In 1985? That didn't take off where I was until PS1 days.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| Oh yea, 1985-1987 is when a lot of the VHS places started
| stocking video games.
|
| It's the only way I was able to play. My best friend
| across the street had the console and I didn't (I had
| Atari 2600). So I would rent and we would play together.
| I eventually got my own in maybe 1987-1988.
|
| PS1 kicked off in 1995 and we had rentals for a long time
| by that point. I never owned a PS1 but same friend did. I
| ended up going from NES, SNES, N64 before switching
| mostly to PC games and eventually went to college where
| video games took a back seat for a number of years
|
| Mostly play Xbox now (short while I had PSP)
| Retric wrote:
| Interesting, of the 3 rental places near me only one
| started carrying video games in 1994 with the others soon
| following.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| This is in Florida too and not a major metropolitan area.
| I just assumed it was everywhere
| rasz wrote:
| Piracy made Amiga cheaper. SNES and two cartridges/Genesis
| with three was more expensive than Amiga 500.
| wlll wrote:
| Were they? I had an Amiga 1200, a friend a 500, both of which
| were around long before games consoles became mainstream.
| samastur wrote:
| I did (but also for games). That wasn't the problem. The
| problem was computers built on closed architecture didn't have
| a future even if company didn't went to shit like Commodore
| did.
| louthy wrote:
| > computers built on closed architecture
|
| Do you honestly think that the general public gave two shits
| about closed architectures?
|
| The vast majority of people, who were using computers, were
| using them to play games. People completely misremember how
| little interest the general public had in computers (for
| serious tasks) at the time.
|
| The only exception to that really was the IBM PC. It didn't
| have an open architecture either. For a long time it was the
| case that if you didn't buy an IBM branded PC, you couldn't
| guarantee that any software would actually work on it.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| > For a long time it was the case that if you didn't buy an
| IBM branded PC, you couldn't guarantee that any software
| would actually work on it.
|
| I don't know if it was a long time. The PC came out in
| 1981, and by 1984 you had the fully compatible Tandy 1000
| and Compaq Deskpro.
|
| Except for the BIOS ROMs, which companies like Compaq
| rewrote themselves, the PC did have an open architecture.
| louthy wrote:
| I didn't buy a pc until much later (I was an Acorn user),
| so you may be right, but the lore around that lasted a
| reasonable amount of time if my memory serves me
| correctly. Well into the late 80s.
|
| I'd still argue nobody cared about architectures, they
| cared about where the type of computer was primarily
| used. PCs were for the office. Acorn was for education.
| Atari, Commodore, Sinclair were for games and therefore
| vulnerable to games consoles.
|
| I seem to remember that PCs had quite a poor rep for
| games, even during the Wolfenstein -> Doom -> Quake era.
| Only really shaking that off when the first graphics
| cards arrived
| badc0ffee wrote:
| PCs were definitely at a disadvantage for anything
| involving a lot of motion, like arcade-style games,
| platformers, shoot em ups, fighting, and racing games.
| But the PC did do well at puzzle games like Lemmings,
| text+graphics games like King's Quest, and sims like
| SimCity. That disadvantage was gone, at least on a
| technical level, by 1992-94.
|
| I think PC graphics had two major leaps forward in this
| era: VGA in 1987, and VLB graphics (on 486 machines) in
| 1992. The former brought an expanded colour palette, and
| the latter brought enough memory bandwidth that you
| didn't need dedicated blitter/sprite chips.
| spankibalt wrote:
| > "PCs were definitely at a disadvantage for anything
| involving a lot of motion, [...]."
|
| Not on a _strictly technical_ level, especially not in
| the world of 3D. 2D arcade games a la _Silpheed_ came out
| for the PC in 1989, running maxed-out on machines that
| were already a possibility, with VGA graphics and Adlib
| or MT-32 sound, from late 1987 onwards, roughly the same
| time the A500 was released in the United States. The
| notion that PCs had "a bad rep for games" after the
| release of titles such as _Wing Commander_ doesn 't
| really hold much water.
|
| It was mostly economical factors and some specific
| usecases that made home computers an excellent, and often
| superior, choice for many of its future users.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Not on a strictly technical level
|
| Yes, there were strictly technical limitations. Memory
| throughput to the video framebuffer did not allow for
| arbitrary full-screen updates at native frame rate, and
| there were no hardware sprites or other display hacks to
| cope with this limitation - the framebuffer was all you
| had. These limitations became gradually less important
| throughout the 1990s, depending on what resolution and
| color depth you were running.
| spankibalt wrote:
| > "Yes, there were strictly technical limitations."
|
| Precision, friend. I never disputed that there were no
| (strictly) technical limitations for PCs. I only argued
| against the notion, emphasis mine, that "PCs were
| definitely at a disadvantage for _anything_ involving a
| lot of motion, like arcade-style games, platformers,
| shoot em ups, fighting, and racing games. [...] That
| disadvantage was gone, at least on a technical level, _by
| 1992-94_. "
|
| Amigas never saw the light against IBM and compatibles in
| a lot of ways, and that already _before_ 1992. Two famous
| titles I already mentioned; one had no Amiga port (
| _Silpheed_ , 1989) AFAIK, the other ( _Wing Commander_ ,
| 1990) came out later as a technically inferior, albeit
| atmospheric, hand-me-down. When people reminisce about
| the graphics capabilities of home computers, especially
| Amigas, they often forget whole, shall we say
| "inconvenient", genres. Et cetera.
| drivers99 wrote:
| > Do you honestly think that the general public gave ...
| about closed architectures?
|
| Not consciously, but they could see more and more capable
| and affordable systems and upgrades available from a lively
| and competitive industry.
| vidarh wrote:
| They gave lots of shits about access to cheaper clones,
| though, and to access to cheaper peripherals.
|
| > It didn't have an open architecture either.
|
| It was open enough that the closed parts could be reverse
| engineered, and so the market was already full of clones by
| the time the Amiga was even released.
|
| Meanwhile, the Amiga was tied to custom chips only
| manufactured by Commodore, and didn't get anything
| resembling a clone until Commodore was already bankrupt
| (DraCo, which ditched a lot of backwards compatibility)
|
| > For a long time it was the case that if you didn't buy an
| IBM branded PC, you couldn't guarantee that any software
| would actually work on it
|
| By the time the Amiga died, this hadn't been an issue for
| many years.
| spankibalt wrote:
| > Do you honestly think that the general public gave two
| shits about closed architectures?
|
| First, this specific argument is about the _computer-buying
| public_ , not the _general public_. Furthermore, yes, many
| people also bought into the IBM-PC & Compatibles eco-
| system because it was much more open. Many young(er) urban
| professionals of the time took their work home, to be
| continued on computers. I think financial mobility, supply,
| as well as culture (incl. generational divides) are more
| much important factors.
|
| > The vast majority of people, who were using computers,
| were using them to play games.
|
| Do you have data to back that up? Because where I'm from
| (East Germany), strictly based on my observations, this
| didn't track; many PCs were used as intended: general-
| purpose computing. That means work _and_ play.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| > The problem was computers built on closed architecture
| didn't have a future
|
| Like Apple/Mac?
| gapan wrote:
| > Like Apple/Mac?
|
| One could argue that apple is the only exception to the
| rule. And let's not forget that apple almost went bankrupt
| in 1997, only to be rescued by Microsoft.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > I don't know anyone that used the Amiga for anything other
| than games.
|
| I mean TV studios and media houses, but admittedly, that's not
| exactly a huge market.
| blackhaz wrote:
| In my part of the woods all those consoles were frowned upon,
| back in the days when we had 386s, 486s and Pentiums. Yes, PS1
| could display some interesting games, but you couldn't do
| anything creative on it.
|
| As to what killed Amiga - I think it's in the article - the
| lagging behind the x86 performance, especially when 386DX-40
| came about, and please allow me to propose one additional, if
| not the primary, factor - that our fathers suddenly began to
| require Word and Excel to do their work at home.
| drivers99 wrote:
| > I don't know anyone that used the Amiga for anything other
| than games.
|
| My Amiga friends used it for playing games and for creative
| things: writing music, pixel/digital art, some coding, making
| games (at least, in shoot-em-up-construction-kit), as well as
| dialing up BBSes and the text-based Internet (like me on my
| PC).
| tjr wrote:
| I used my Amiga 3000 for a lot of video production and
| graphics work, along with some word processing / desktop
| publishing, and a bit of programming. And games! In my
| observation of other Amiga users at the time, this was
| typical.
|
| Besides random individual users doing these sorts of things,
| Amigas were used in local broadcast television studios as
| video switchers and graphics layover systems, and even in
| more major media production outlets for video editing and 3D
| animation. They were seen as a more economical solution to
| more expensive hardware built specifically for television or
| graphics, but could pull of the work on a comparable level.
| vidarh wrote:
| Most of my circle used the Amiga primarily for other things
| than games.
|
| None of us replaced them with consoles.
|
| While the use in business was of course important, that the PC
| survives is just as much down to the open platform and the
| clone market that prevented its future from being tied to a
| single company - in this case a wildly dysfunctional one.
| louthy wrote:
| > Most of my circle used the Amiga primarily for other things
| than games.
|
| Are you claiming your circle is representative of the
| computer buying masses of the time? (whether the computers
| were consoles or not)
| vidarh wrote:
| No, I'm pointing out that your anecdote doesn't mean much.
| Lots of people used it for other things. In fact, the US
| Amiga gaming market, for example, was extremely lackluster
| because unlike in Europe, in the US the sale was geared
| much more toward professional use, which was also reflected
| in e.g. US Amiga magazines like Amiga World, as well as in
| models like the Amiga 2500 which was aimed at the
| professional market and mostly sold in the US and Canada.
|
| The profile varied extensively by country - Germany as well
| had a market where Commodore was big in the business
| market, and while that was mostly PC's, it was also the
| reason for much of the success of the Amiga 2000, which
| also largely aimed at non-gaming users.
|
| Commodore UK meanwhile, did fit your "profile" for the
| Amiga and was very much focused on games.
|
| But Commodore UK _was the subsidiary that remained most
| successful_ despite competition from consoles.
|
| In fact Commodore UK survived the bankruptcy of Commodore
| International and did well enough that management tried to
| put together a buyout offer (but had to throw in the towel
| after Dell and Escom entered the process).
|
| In other words, while you're right that competition from
| consoles and PC's of course mattered a lot, it was a lot
| more nuanced than that.
|
| E.g. in the US, Commodore had burned its relationships to
| the ground, and so failed to get the low-end Amiga's out
| there as gaming machines _too_ , and were nowhere near as
| successful as some of the subsidiaries like Commodore UK,
| and Commodore B.V (Netherlands; also briefly survived
| bankruptcy).
|
| Where Commodore did best, it did okay in both the game
| market _and_ in various professional niches, but that meant
| actually working the game market hard. E.g. Commodore UK
| did a "famous" bundle with the game for the 1989 Batman
| movie which drove relatively-speaking huge sales.
|
| Had the rest of the subsidiaries done close to as well as
| Commodore UK, the company as a whole would've at least
| weathered the cash crunch that killed it in '94. Whether
| that'd have let them rebuild (e.g. by completing their next
| chipsets) or if it'd have just made them linger on in a
| zombie state another year, is an open question.
| evaneykelen wrote:
| > I don't know anyone that used the Amiga for anything other
| than games.
|
| The Amiga was used worldwide by TV stations for CGI and titling
| effects, for digital signage eg arrivals/departures at
| airports, and video walls, besides being a tool for countless
| digital artists. I know because I wrote digital signage
| software for the Amiga and sold it to customers in 21
| countries.
| louthy wrote:
| Just to be clear, because there have been a number of similar
| responses, I am not claiming the Amiga couldn't do anything
| else, nor that it wasn't used for anything other than games.
|
| But, the vast majority of people who bought Amigas did so
| because it was a great machine for games and had lots of high
| quality titles.
|
| When the majority of your market disappears and moves to
| cheaper options; and all you have left is video walls in
| departure lounges, you're fucked.
| vidarh wrote:
| But as I pointed out elsewhere: The subsidiary that
| survived the longest did so on the continued strength of
| sales driven by games - that market continued to do well
| for the Amiga until the end in the markets where the
| subsidiaries actually focused on gaming bundles.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| The Video Toaster was the first successful competitor to the
| horribly expensive Avid system ($100k+) for non-linear video
| editing, titling, SMTPE code syncing, etc. and ran on an
| Amiga 2000 as a double card. I think it was $3k.
|
| It was used to make the first 3 seasons of Babylon 5 and all
| of the sub graphics for Sealquest DSV.
|
| As an aside, Dana Carveys brother was one of the lead
| designers.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster
| District5524 wrote:
| I'm sure that was an important reason for the US and UK
| markets. I don't know much about the Swedish market, but in the
| Eastern European markets, game consoles were not popular at all
| until the very late 1990s. Gamers in the early 1990s used
| Commodore (and less affluents ZX Spectrums and clones), and
| later, as the article says, more and more PCs. In these parts,
| people were very short of money, which caused piracy to grow
| HUGE. Computers were also preferred due to being multipurpose.
| And console games were difficult to copy, so if you wanted to
| be a serious gamer, you had to have a PC. Even if you had the
| money to buy games, you couldn't really do that, because nobody
| really was selling actual games in these markets. With
| different currencies and limitations on hard currency exchange,
| you didn't spend those limited funds on games, even if you
| travelled abroad. Probably also as a consequence, playing on
| consoles was considered to be lame. It was for kids only. Hah,
| for those born in the 1990s only! So that was a bit different
| over here.
| blakespot wrote:
| Most of my friends were gaming on consoles at the time. I very
| much preferred the Amiga (I also had Atari STs during this
| time) to consoles perhaps mainly due to the ability to use RGB
| monitors with a proper RGB signal. It was at best composite
| back then on the consoles of the era - in the states anyway (we
| didn't have SCART as an option). I know I'm odd here, but that
| was a major factor -- but also the fact that I used the Amiga
| for much more than gaming. I BBSed heavily, generated hundreds
| of images with paint programs, programmed on it, and then there
| was enjoying scenedemos as a huge part of my use.
|
| Most people in the user group I was in back then (ALFA -
| Amigoid Life Form Association) were NASA engineers who used
| them as cheap and capable alternatives to the UNIX workstations
| they worked with at NASA (which was local, Hampton, VA). Many
| of these guys were older and didn't game at all.
| TheAmazingRace wrote:
| I heard NASA used their Amiga systems clear up to 2006, which
| is a rather unusually long lifespan for the application they
| intended them for. But I suppose commodity PC hardware and
| the software they needed just wasn't really there at a price
| point that made sense, plus, I guess as the old adage goes...
| if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
| sillywalk wrote:
| > I heard NASA used their Amiga systems
|
| Yes. "Amigas take in all the telemetry data from the
| spacecraft, scale it by applying coefficients of up to
| fifth order polynomials and convert the data back to
| engineering units for display to the engineers working the
| launch."[1]
|
| [0] https://hackaday.com/2021/08/16/retrotechtacular-amiga-
| pips-...
|
| [1] http://obligement.free.fr/articles_traduction/amiganasa
| _en.p...
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAPD9HA8Unw&t=1s
| nsxwolf wrote:
| I had consoles and a PC and so did all of my friends. They
| offered very different experiences in the 90s.
|
| Amiga could offer the PC experiences too, and did, until it ran
| into hardware limitations. Then it was suddenly competing with
| the Genesis and Super Nintendo, but with inferior European side
| scrolling games, with their single button controls, "sound or
| music not both", etc.
| leoc wrote:
| > Games consoles killed the Amiga, just like they did all other
| home computers that were primarily used for games.
|
| Wait, which games, and which consoles? Arcadey sprite-based
| action games were popular on the Amiga, and there the consoles
| caught up to it by about 1990 (the Sega Master System) or 1992
| (the SNES) in the European market. But 16-bit consoles would
| have been a depressingly bad substitute for the Amiga when it
| came to games like point-and-click adventures, _Lemmings_ ,
| _Populous_ , the Freescape games, or _XCOM_ , when those even
| received a 16-bit console port at all. The Amiga was in actual
| use mostly a games system, yes, but to a large extent the
| successful, beloved games were the kind of thing we now think
| of as _PC_ games. That 's also probably a big part of why
| finally losing pace with the PC over _DOOM_ was such a bitter
| blow. The 32-bit consoles only started to take off in Europe
| with the release of the PlayStation there, well into 1995 when
| it seems the Amiga 's goose was mostly already cooked, and even
| those systems weren't a great place to have a PC-like gaming
| experience. Then there's the awkward issue of downloading a
| car: famously, many Amiga users were piracy-happy, and would
| not have welcomed the game prices and relatively successful
| copy protection of '90s consoles.
|
| (Data mostly from Wikipedia. I'm not an expert on the Amiga's
| commercial history, and it's a complicated topic.)
| bhlkjlkjcd wrote:
| > Ever since I saw an Amiga 500 at a friend's house in what was
| probably late 1988, I wanted one for myself. Back then, computers
| were uncommon, especially at home. Even though I went to a school
| in a fairly affluent neighborhood, few kids had home computers or
| video games.
|
| This may be true in the US and Japan, the rest of the world were
| mainly using 8-bit (and increasingly 16-bit) computers in this
| era, so this scans really oddly outside the US.
|
| I grew up on an 80s UK council estate (surrounded by poverty) and
| practically every kid had a computer, mainly Commodore 64, 16,
| +4, Sinclair Spectrum, or an Amstrad CPC (maybe a few BBC Micros
| dotted around, and some other oddities)
|
| Lots of people had the early Atari consoles in the early 80s, but
| after that I didn't see a console until the Megadrive. Everyone,
| and I do mean EVERYONE had computers in the mid-late 80s to early
| 90s where I was growing up.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > This was may be true in the US
|
| In 1989, the closest year I can find stats, home computer
| penetration was 15% of households in the US, but that wasn't
| uniformly distributed, so some people will have grown up with
| the experience of it being VERY common for people around them
| to have computers (I did), while others will have known no one
| with one.
| mattl wrote:
| Yeah, virtually everyone I knew circa 1990 had a home computer.
| Mostly Spectrum and CPC. A few years later it was a few Amiga
| 500 too. The only "console" I had seen was the Atari VCS or a
| dedicated Pong machine. A few people got Game Boys a little
| later circa 1992. A single friend who had a Master System and
| one kid with divorced parents who got a SNES as a result.
|
| It was in this environment that I would discover programming
| and the internet.
| mzs wrote:
| Nothing else like Video Toaster being available kept Amigas
| around for a while. 2001 my parent's cable provider still used
| them for guide/PPV channels.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| A more accurate or complete statement:
|
| Doom didn't kill the Amiga. _Wolfenstein 3D_ did. (2024)
|
| Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsADJa-23Sg
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40343333)
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Amiga was a games console masquerading as a computer.
|
| If it had started life as the cd32 then the company might still
| be around today.
| leshokunin wrote:
| Long time PC gamer here. I didn't own an Amiga so I definitely
| have another POV.
|
| 1994?! Every single PC gaming store was flooded with PC CD demos.
|
| Day of the Tentacle. Loom. Monkey Island. Rebel Assault. Myst.
| 7th Guest.
|
| Every "AAA" release at the time was getting a "talkie" version
| with added FMV or cd audio.
|
| Plus Doom, and then Doom 2.
|
| I actually think the 93-96 period is basically the most hype I've
| ever seen the PC market, ever.
|
| I'm sure Amiga had a lot of cool stuff still. The demo scene, the
| various Psygnosis games. But I never got on my radar beyond "this
| doesn't need config.sys and it has more colors".
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