Planar graphics allowed for dual playfields, where you could have two independent 4-bitplane screens. This feature was useful for effects like parallax scrolling. Planar modes facilitated bitfield partitioning strategies, such as shading spread palettes algorithmically. Planar graphics were favored by a simpler GPU design. Planar modes included special features like Extra HalfBrite (using a 6th bitplane to halve brightness) and Hold And Modify (HAM) mode (which allowed all 4096 colors to be used in a single screen).
To be honest, the competitors to the PC compatible market were non-existant by 1992. The Amiga was already in a tailspin. The Atari computers were dead. Apple computers just were not consumer price friendly. What really killed everybody was the sheer volume of PC sales and the incredible volume of MS-DOS compatible software. Walk into any computer software store in 1992 and 90% of what was on the shelves was for the PC. Atari and Amiga software didn't sell well because of the piracy problem, so many applications that were killer apps were never ported. The PC had a piracy problem too, but it was made up for by volume, volume, volume.
man.. i miss playing cannonfodder on my a500, north and south, lemmings, lotus esprit turbo challenge, idk and so so many more :) thanks for making me dig for the dics the entire amiga adf library. cheers.
Back in 1992? Dude were you my neighbor? Is your name Chris? Because back in 1992 I was like 6 and the cool college kid down the street from me introduced me to Wolfenstein 3D. ❤😂
The demise of the Amiga began in 1990 when Commodore decided to ignore the fact that PC games were becoming too advanced to run on an Amiga 500. They still ignored it in 1992 since the Amiga 1200 was not supposed to fix this issue.
Unfortunately, Apple did not help Amiga and Atari make Mac compatible clones . So when PC squad took fresh look and standardized on '386 (including SX), VGA and IDE disk they wiped out all competing standards. Win95 was final nail on the coffin.
I fact, was SoundBlaster, once PC started to run fancy games with good graphics and sound, I've started to think to build my first PC. In the other hand, expand Amiga was not so easy and cheap like with a PC.
I bought Amiga in 1989 ,before that i had commodore 64,off course Amiga was WOW,i upgade it with more ram and hard drive .But my best friend already in 1990 had 386 and his father 486 so i played a lot also on his computers .At first i still loved my Amiga ,games were almost the same ,but as i am from Serbia in 1991 we had desintegration off Yugoslavia,war ,total sanctions so new computer was last thing on my parents mind.So i end up with Amiga until late 90s .My friend first neigbour bought in 1995 Pentium 90 mhz and it was for me like another world ,FIFA ,NBA ,Need for Speed ,At that moment my Amiga was ancient technology
No, what killed the Amiga was their management. In the 80s, the Amiga was THE gaming computer, even the PC versions of games had screenshots taken from the Amiga. The issue was that Amiga management didn't want to be a gaming computer, management wanted to be a business computer, and competition with the PC was just never going to fly. PC clones were just too widespread and inexpensive. There was no advantage that the Amiga had. Who cares about gaming performance, on spreadsheets. So, Amiga management stopped supporting technology for gaming, and that is why games like Wing Commander and Wolfenstein 3D did not work well, because the Amiga management wanted them to perform poorly.
One thing I see Saturn getting hate for is something the PlayStation also does. The Saturn uses those grid-like shadows, not because it can't do transparencies (See Burning Rangers and NiGHTS for some examples) but because a CRT blurs them to make them solid, transparent shadows. The same way the PlayStation uses dithering to simulate greater colour depth since it has less than the Saturn. They both used the tech of the time to their advantage, and it doesn't get praised enough. The N64 did it worse since they used their patented VSAA (Vaseline Smear Anti-Aliasing) overlay technology when a CRT would've blurred it anyway, wasting resources and making it look worse too.
We need good competition and MS is shooting its own leg. I used to be a PS fanboy, still am in a way, but during the ps3 days i recognized very well that thanks to xbox doing so well, Sony really had to step up their game and it was a win for the players in the end. You can feel Sony is starting to feel cocky again this gen.
THIS IS STRANGE !!! The whole time you are here talking about shitty A1200 man...... I HAD AMIGA 3000 with TurboCard with MC68040 @ 43MHz + 24Mb Ram and I RUN Quake in 320x240 in fullscreen at 25 FPS STABLE !!!! AND THERE ALSO IS DOOM + DOOM 2 + DOOM PLUTONIA on Amiga lol !!!! AND ALL THOSE GAMES ARE RUNNING AT 50FPS on that Amiga3000 VERY WELL !!! I dont understand why are you THE WHOLE video talking only about A500 and 1200 that are FAR FAR behind the A3000 ?????? And why are you talking about that DOOM never come to amiga lol ???????????????????????????? IT IS NOT TRUE !!!!!!!!!!!
Also ultima underworld and all those big content pc games.. hmm Wing Commander / Strike Commander ? Hmmm Star Wars XWing ? Hmm Commanche.. But yeah, i also switched from the Atari ST to the PC around that time, it was like industry standard + games + raw CPU power (wrt to mhz)
I still have my Nintendo 64 with the Expansion Pak still in it. I remember playing Star Wars Episode I Racer without the Expansion Pak, then later, playing it with it. Definitely a difference.
I guess the trick was that you could play Wolfenstein on most PC's. In the company I worked with we destroyed at least one mouse while playing Wolfenstein.
No, they didn't matter. If improved graphics were available for these games back then - then they would've ditched your sacred PSX and N64s in a heartbeat. And no, graphical innovation didn't happen due to the success of these consoles and their games. The time gap for graphical innovation at the time wasn't that wide and the improvements were coming in fast, with or without your nostalgia comfort games. Considering that most of these consoles were just made for entertainment, they had never attributed to the jump in technology - so it was the engineers and architects that mattered, not your games and consoles. You people can carry on slurping up the leftovers of past generations. I'll just be waiting for this 'old is gold' mentality to die off.
No game killed the Amiga, the executive management did. I used to run the Amiga Games Usenet group and was very immersed into the gaming world of both platforms at the time. To say that Wolfenstein killed the Amiga is just pure ignorance as to what was happening to the Commodore company at the time.
For me, it was Wing Commander which killed the Amiga (500) about 2 years prior to W3D. I just had to play that game. I remember being disappointed at first because of VGA (the edgy pixels were just way more visible than on the old screen I had on Amiga at 320x256) and the sound quality (despite Soundblaster 2.0). That disappointment didn't last long. 🕹😂
I played all of these games on my amiga with a 68060 Blizzard , for MAC. Using Shapeshifter I ran MAC OS 7.5, I ran Doom and Star Wars Dark Forces with no issues.
I was *BIG* into the Amiga scene from about 1984 to 1992, and the great thing about the Amiga when it was released in 1984, the custom chips, were also it's downfall. They really *couldn't* solve the flicker in interlaced mode because the system bus was running in multiples of the NTSC signal. It would have basically made every bit of software useless (and the flicker fixer wasn't really a solution, it was a bandaid). And since it was built around a 68000 chip instead of the the 68020 and MMU so an errant process could crash the machine. [ _as an aside, it didn't help that the M68000 line died with the 68040. Sure they've come up with one or two iterations since then, but the x86 coming out with new chips years withhuge gains in performance and Motorola had no answer to that_ ] Commodore wasn't the kind of company to actually have a roadmap for improving any platform other than what Dave Haynie thought up and even then, they were running out of money. In hindsight, there never really was a way for the Amiga to grow very much, but it was a great ride while it lasted.
I remember how sad I was that I couldnt run some of the cool games by Psygnosis on my aunts PC at home. Not understanding OS and hardware differences at the time. Her 386 was woefully anemic when it came to games. just a few years later, I was quite glad that I had a PC :) The tables completely turned.
It was the 3DFX voodoo card that killed the Amiga ....... I started with the Commodore Vic 20, then the Amiags 64, and the Amiga 1200, Then I saw the graphics on a PC with the Voodoo Card......
This is what happens - game companies have come and gone since the 80s. A new generation is coming up, and many indies are breaking into the AAA space. I remember in the early 2000s there was a similar state of play, and then previously smaller companies like Ubi-Soft or uninvolved companies like Microsoft gained the trust of gamers and the wheel continues to turn.
I wrote many Amiga demos from 1991 onwards, many of which can be found on here, but you can't beat a chunky screen for these kind of games. Bitplanes are great for some things, but not for stuff like Doom, Wolfenstein etc. However, you also need a much faster processor to write effectively to a chunky screen, which the PC most definitely had. The A1200 ran at 14Mhz and most reasonable PCs were 66Mhz or more. Add also that by default the 68020 couldn't do floating point math and that made coding Doom style games almost impossible. For floating point, you really needed a 68882 co-processor. Later on, games like Gloom used amazingly fast chunky to planer converters, that still required insane power on a machine running at 14Mhz. In fact quite a few scene demos do effects in chunky and then convert the effect back to planer. My own C2P converter used both the blitter and CPU simultaneously to try and be a quick as possible, but you can never beat a screen that's already chunky.
What killed the Amiga was Commodore's inability to compete head to head in the personal computer business and educational markets against Microsoft and Apple, both of which were already well entrenched and largely immovable by that time.
I really miss the Amiga system, and Commodore as a whole. Before there was digital nonlinear editing, I used the NewTek Video Toaster on the Amiga platform, and it was very reliable as I recall. I always wonder what Commodore could have developed the Amiga platform into today, had they survived...
I loved my Amiga 500. I remember riding my bike home from school during lunch break just to get a few games of Sensible Soccer in and then ride back to school once lunch break was over. I remember seeing Wolfenstein running at my friends place and was just in awe over it. Either way, good times.
Wrong, It wasn't Doom nor Wolfenstein. It was Lotus 1-2-3 and Super Mario Bros. By the time Wolfenstein arrived, the Amiga was already dead where it mattered (the US market), squashed on the games side by the NES and on the business side by the PC.
Limitation breeds innovation. As a Final Fantasy stan I've read too much and multiple developers on the teams said the limitations were beneficial as it forced them to really think outside the box. The end result was epic experiences. One of the reasons modern gaming has become so stagnant is limitations have significantly disappeared.
holy crap this is a trip down memory lane, still got the 486dx2 in storage as i refused to let my dad throw it away. endless hours playing NES and SNES emulators, Doom, wolfenstein 3d with the editor(me and my younger brother used to make challenege levels for eachothers and some of them were truly diabolical), aladdin, prince of persia, lion king, ports of call, commander keen, larry 1 and 2 and a crapton of quest games(space quest, police quest etc). all those games is how i learned the english language with a dictionary at hand next to the PC
