Amiga Games & Multitasking

[trydowave]

I love the Amiga, but to say that any of the conversion surpassed the arcade versions is nonsense. Toki springs to mind, but purley for the soundtrack only.

[pugay69]

make chess move..... wait 30 seconds for crappy animation to finish

[Octavice]

I played battle chess on my Amiga 2000 yesterday.

[cyctechproductions]

Looking at the amiga os almost reminds me of Linux. I wounder how would it be like if linux and amiga were put together?

[Octavice]

@cyctechproductions It would have been bliss! :)

[cyctechproductions]

@Octavice very. If the two are together. then the two would already beaten windows and mac combined

[henrikmk]

It failed, because Commodore managed themselves into the ground. They had a CEO during the Amiga era from the metal industry, who had no experience with fast moving computer tech, and wouldn't put money in development. After the bankruptcy, engineers revealed prototypes and ideas that would've brought it 5 years ahead of anything else in 1990, including a highly modular system, but they weren't allowed to complete them and had to settle for the Amiga 1200 and 4000 with the rushed AGA chipset.

[LanIost]

Dude, I was playing Battle Chess the other day (Apple IIGS). I had it as a kid but was NOT prepared for HOW. F#%KIN SLOW IT IS.

It takes _FOREVER_ to do ANYTHING. I'm using an emulator so I set it to Unlimited .. then it goes SUPER fast. I might as well just do the top view 2d mode though. It doesn't just make the loading fast, it makes the animations go IMMEDIATE.

I can set it to 8mhz and then it loads much faster but it's still SUPER slow.

Sigh.

[joaovictor1994]

Damn, the Amiga was great! I love these things =)

[frigginjoe]

Amiga didn't really fail, it was more a matter of PC's, despite some great advantages the likes of the Atari ST, Macs, Amigas had over it, proliferating.

Windows' success is the product of great ideas demonstrated by others being brought to the platform everyone was buying since, all the brilliance in the world couldn't beat out the PC.

[Paperclown]

@frigginjoe: Wrong. If you are interested in the history check some documentary things on youtube about the CEO Jack Tramiel ... he fucked around near the end of the companies history and didn't pay debts off. That hurt his suppliers and he was buying those companies off for cheap. It was a big scandal and they were forced to file for bankruptsy. Its the same reason Atari fell because the same guy was in charge of them before flopping that company and leaving.

[frigginjoe]

@Paperclown So I'm not sure what you're correcting me on.

[aseglkj]

If the Amiga had won out we'd be living in a Star Trek universe right now!

[seafireliv]

lol. I had this chess game, still great really. 4 megs! how times have changed!

Why don`t someone make a 2010 version of battlechess?.

[Shendue]

@seafireliv: Yeah, battlechess was stunning.

[matt47110815]

@seafireliv Hm? i had Battle Chess on the Amiga on a standard 880k Disk.

[hotrodswe]

@RabidDawg2 What a weird thing to say. What does his way of cheating on IBM go to do with the Amiga? PC was through IBM a huge thing in the industry and at offices before he decided to not write the next OS for IBM but for Microsoft, Windows 3.x. OS/2 didn't receive the same popularity and the rest is history. It's not like it was better than the Amiga. Windows 3.x couldn't multitask, it was a program runing on MS-DOS. It was a lot that it didn't have except for a GUI better than DOS.

[hotrodswe]

@sunmax1 First of all there wasn't many CD32 specific games released. Some games, like Chambers of chaolin where simply the very same game put from disk to CD! Just horrible. Second of all I just guess that it was released to late with to much competition. Commodore went under not that long after they released the CD32. It was a pretty good console at the time though.

[hylkhylk]

Compare the power of the processor and the amount of memory to PC's nowadays and what could do then and now. You need f*cking 4 GB RAM to run Windows properly not mention about the processor you need! And Windows is JUST a f*cking operating system not so much more marvellous than Workbench.

[omgiwaswrong]

How come amiga/atari failed?

One year after this recording Microsoft released Windows 3.0 which took the business world by storm.

They continued to serve as home computers and in niche markets until the mid 90s when Sony launched the Playstation.

[bazfanv2]

I actually thought of star wars before they mentioned it.

[neoprana]

By the way manace (I loved that game) is mage by rockstar games LOL

[neoprana]

Amiga failed because of the company comodore ... they used amiga to earn money and put it to useless PC projects where they lost all money.

They stoped to develop amiga for years and that why it died ... it was most advanced computer back then (well acorn was cool too i guess)

[bazfanv2]

@neoprana Amiga and Atari st failed due to piracy.No other reason.

[neoprana]

@bazfanv2

Amiga failed becasue of commodore didnt invest any money into development of new amigas, and spend it on bullshit like PC computers, read wiki about that.

In ataris case i dont care how they died lol

[TERRANCIO]

same CPU as the Mac of that time

[vwrafi]

@Gabbegabbe87 If i would be kidding , than I would write " why the six afraid of seven " .

[cjp240573]

So lame by todays standards but then WOW

[nicolunacba]

I love old click sound xD

[Svendsor]

Amiga :D

[vwrafi]

Does Amiga 2000HD means High Definition ? Does it have HDMI or DVI output ? Or maybe there wasn't any of them than, and the HD signal was output by component cable ?

[desiv1]

@vwrafi - No, this is an OLD computer. The HD stood for Hard Disk. This was the first model Amiga with a Hard Disk included from Commodore. :-)

[crazyleg2006]

My god, Did we used to sit there and watch these dumb animations that took so long just to take one player? Was time that slow for us?

[notanfningain]

guru meditation!!!!

[pokerockmario123]

The music of the first game sounds like Starfox/Starwing for the SNES

[DelfinoDelphis]

When you compare it to the creepy dos of late 80-ties you can imagine how life would be easier if it was Amigas that ruled the world :/

[Mile83]

haha lol

6:25 chess used to be a nice intellectual game guys, what have you done!

[SarahKreuz31]

good ol` times

[gillianx68000]

menace!!!great videogame!!!and menace with trainer!!!awesome!!!

[8bitbubsy]

A 40MB HDD in 1989 costed at least $1.500 ... And no, that is no joke.. Today a 1000GB HDD is $150

[supafreek1234]

@8bitbubsy no its on $89 lol

[TheShockful]

That was awesome! Please take me back!

[BtiGold]

"wow these graphics are great"

[reverendcutterx]

Heh, I was half expecting them to get the beer and nuts out.

Kids.

[Swift4U]

40 MB hard drive..... wow....

[Databamse]

40 MB hard drive at that time is equivalant to 160 GB of todays harddrives.

[BimC]

Epic. thx

[M1s7erH]

The 1200 was about as powerful as the SNES and Sega Genesis in terms of graphics.

Pity not many Amiga games were made for long after its release.

Awesome system.

[guntervda]

The Amiga 500 was far superior above the SNES or Sega mega drive. please check Youtube. Don't forget the A500 came out in 1987.

[M1s7erH]

I have an Amiga 500 & 1200.

There's no way a game like Donkey Kong Country could have been built to run on an A500.

Amiga's are brilliant machines though, I gained most of my knowledge of computers simply by growing up working on and with Amiga's.

[nathanel1313]

Despite I am an Amiga fanboy I looked up game you mentioned on YT... It is unbelivable that they managed to release it for SNES... I guess that there was no A500 game comparable with the one you've mentioned. You were right. :)

On the other hand, A500 was like 1987, SNES was 1991...

[hotrodswe]

@guntervda And the A1000 in 1985 with pretty much the same capabilities. Sound was better for a long time too compared to Genesis/Mega Drive and SNES. In most cases at least.

[hotrodswe]

@M1s7erH It was better than the SNES in some ways and the Genesis had gfx capabilitis closer to the A500 or ECS chipset rather than the A1200. Then we had sound capabilities to compare and at least Genesis/Mega Drive didn't stand a chanse.

[paranoicb]

i have 3 amigas all working fine

ahhhh good old times.

i missed them so much

[vapourmile]

@paranoicb Why?

[Wiilovewii]

I had Amiga 500 and it was the best thing I owned. But this video makes me lol...bunch of serious people discussing gfx on Amiga 2000 lol...my phone draws better gfx nowadays :D

[magicianspirit]

There's an interesting series of articles on the history of the Amiga currently running over at Ars Technica

[therealMarcoman]

Good old computer!

[simozonelayer]

Jeez, I remember using Workbench, Deluxe Paint and Photon Paint (I think it was called that) with it's HAM feature, Hold And Modify (?). Think it had something to do with DP only having 16 colours max then DP 3 was able to have a darker version of the same colour.

Have I remembered any of that right?

I do remember the games being the best I'd ever seen then (late 80's/early 90's) and that's definitely right!

Marvelous post!

[alizta]

Almost.

You could usually use 32 colors. There was also a special mode where you could use 64 colors, but those where actually 32 colors with an additional darker variant of each color.

Hold and Modify mode could actually display 4096 colors, but it was very slow and had some restrictions on the placement of the colors.

All this of course is only true for OCS/ECS amigas. AGA was quite a lot better than that and you could always just get an Graphics card with SVGA Modes.

[scottievand]

Gary Kildall was a legend.

[Robfoxman]

bad marketing and Microsoft world domination ruined it :(

[coldfustion]

How come amiga failed??? i wasnt even around in those days and i can see that they were ahead of their time..

[alizta]

Because, usually it isn't the best tech that spreads. There are numerous factors on what people choose.

You should have seen the Microsoft stuff from that time, makes you think that actually the *worst* tech spread.

[pacpacfujishima]

@coldfustion Badly marketed, many people saw it as a "videogame" console rather than a computer, lack of some key "serious" softwares like the day's premiere spreadsheets and word processors, and later as a "games machine" it faced fierce competition from Sega and Nintendo's respective 16-bit systems.

[hotrodswe]

@pacpacfujishima The only thing that I would dissagree on is the lack of spreadsheets and word processors. At the time it had good options like Wordworth and Final Writer. Also Page Stream was available and still are wich is a great DTP application. I do agree on the other points though.

[carm3d]

@coldfustion Commodore all but stopped spending money on R&D. Not to mention marketing. Then they made their executives the highest paid computer company executives in the world.. With their own private planes, etc.. Basically they bled the Amiga to death.

[MisterEvasion]

@coldfustion - 2yr old comment - oh well. It has to do with the proprietary system. Microsoft came up with the idea of licensing in the days when they were the good guys! IBM bosses made ridiculous demands to developers by measuring productivity by the lines of code written. Microsoft workers under contract to IBM hated this and the rift began. Apple is the most successful of proprietary systems of course - but even they are more an operating system nowadays since they are Intel driven.

[lurkerrekrul]

@coldfustion - Because Commodore sat on their asses, not making any real improvements to the Amiga hardware, while the IBM world was steadily improving. The graphics stayed the same for years, half the Amigas in use didn't have hard drives and the only real upgrades were more memory and a faster processor. The Amiga graphics made it hard to do 3D games like Doom without a top of the line system. Microsoft got computer companies to put Windows on new systems and it was over for the Amiga.

[tiberianfiend]

@coldfustion Commodore was thought to be a game computer manufacturer and not for serious business users, and the fact that the Commodore guys had nothing to show on Amiga but games and a word processor reinforces that image.

[fridrikur]

@coldfustion Because it was not compatible with other systems. Furthermore they seldom had diskette drives. But you could buy external diskette drives. They needed to be formatted into amiga format though. I remember people talking in awe about the amiga. Using a pc I often booted the system to install drivers and such my amiga friends told me that they never needed to do this on an amiga, and that they could use graphical programs which I could not on my dos pc. Not much need for a mouse.

[matt47110815]

@fridrikur By "Diskette Drives" you mean HardDrives? Because ALL Amigas came with a Diskette Drive. ;-)

Anyhow, Models like the A500+, A600, A1200 and the bigger Brothers anyway, e.g. A2000,3000,4000) had optional internal HardDrives, not just extenal solutions. Usually SCSI, A1200,3000,4000 had (also) an IDE port.

[vojinvidanovic79]

@coldfustion

Main company Commodore died in 1994. After that there was a lot of crappy owners and copyright fights, vaporware products, but Amiga continued to live as AmigaOS 4 and is in development even today.

Check Wiki for beginning

[Shendue]

@coldfustion: Sometimes being ahead of its time damages products instead of granting them success. The Sega Dreamcast videogame console comes to mind. It had integrated online functions and many other revolutionary features, yet it failed.

[morgs2020]

@coldfustion I'm not sure what they could have really done to be around today. I think the customisable x86 IBM compatible model works well. I'd like to see the growth of multi platform web browser based applications decrease the demand for proprietary operating systems. And see Open standards such as OpenCL flourish.

In the distant future I'd like to see the implementation of a resource based economy. This co-operative approach would allow for the most advance platforms.

thezeitgeistmovement

[LanIost]

@coldfustion: who said the amiga failed? It was super popular in europe. I know it was popular here too, just not how much (here: US)

[nicholasthetaylor]

@coldfustion I reckon that Commodore got greedy. The Amiga was doing so well as a PC, and if they had concentrated more on Multimedia, instead of chasing after Nintendo and Sega's crowns, they would have done better. One thing that I didn't understand was why the Amiga lacked a cartridge port, which the C64 had. I know they were built by different groups, but hey. That cartridge slot was one of my favourite parts of the C64. You wouldn't build a girl without a fanny, so why the Amiga?

[Suprasylph]

@coldfustion It failed because the last CEO that took over Commodore used the company as a tax shelter and allowed it to fail. Commodore also lacked serious marketing in North America which is where a lot of its money was supposed to be coming from. Eventually Commodore-America fell and Commodore-Europe followed soon after.

[spikeman14]

@coldfustion They didn't fail. Commodore went bust. The amiga was used massively in TV stations during the early 90's and was a good home computer

[Octavice]

@coldfustion It didnt fail!