in the 80s it wasnt even close, i used to laugh at the PC versions of games, then my friend got Wolfenstein 3D on PC & the writing was on the wall for my Amiga
I would also say 1992. Not just wolf 3d, but ultima underworld and ultima vii. The diskette swapping on amiga had gotten increasingly horrendous towards the end.
As soon as PC got VGA 256 colors, I could see the Amiga wasn't keeping up. Amiga couldn't push its AGA graphics around as fast as the PC could push its VGA graphics around...
@@madpuppet666 The Amiga 1000 came out in 1985, years before VGA was available. It was so ahead of everything else back then it almost seemed magical. Games were light years beyond anything else. Workbench was also amazing at multitasking years before that became a feature in Windows.
Ooops, almost but not quite: the best computer of the '90's was an SGI, followed by a Sun Microsystems, then the Amiga, and then ATARI ST. Sorry but that's the way it is.
@@AnnatarTheMaia Yeah, that's why I said part of the 90's, but It is not fear comparing more expensive computers against the Amiga, and by the way, in those times PC games sucked, no matter how powerful the PC was, to have a decent game on those PC you had to be rich, buying expensive sound cards and RGB monitors. Then earlier 90's (92-93 more precisely) was the end of the Amiga because of more powerful computers arising on the horizon and the opportunity to buy those devices (sound cards etc) much cheaper (supply & demand), that was the final countdown on the Amiga.
@@gabrielirlanda it was the end of Amiga because Commodore went bankrupt; Dave Hynie had a new Super AGA ("AAA") ChipSet prototype done but Commodore was bankrupt. That's why PC took over. We just didn't know it at the time. I wasn't going to go to the PC because it's (still) such garbage, so I skipped it completely and went to the UNIX high end camp. Never regretted it, the best technical decision I ever made. FUCK PC!!!!!
@@AnnatarTheMaia Yes, I was probably some of the last stupids that got the A1200 for nothing in the 90's, then it was all over. But it was not the end of the Commodore because of the "bankrupt", they got bankrupt, because as mentioned, PC started to produce sound cards and display monitors cheaper, 3D games started to born, Commodore tried to 'convince' fans with the CD32 but it was a complete disaster. I used to work with UNIX in my first job to control a IBM digital printer, and yes, it is a great system. Actually I also hate PCs and I only use Apple.
bros, Amiga was killed by SNES cause the 99% of ppl used the Amiga 500 like a console, with floppies. only 1% had Amiga with hard disk and an installed OS. and then in 1995 the PS1 destroyed the PC gaming market. the gaming with real computer restarts in early 2000 with the multiplayer online. I think the games that really brought the game to PC were Ultima Online and Counter Strike first and Medal of Honor and Battlefield soon after. a mass of players. before this, nerds played Doom and Quake ( and "clones" ) no doubt, but the normals played Mario 64, NBA live, Fifa ..
@@Cyberbrickmaster1986 PC was a joke as a gaming platform. PC speaker was the de facto standard game audio solution until 1990-ish. With few games supporting anything else.
That's the thing; it didn't stay that way. If you really want to understand the tale of PC's ultimate dominance, you should put these comparisons in chronological order; from about 1988 to 1993, you'll notice that the Amiga starts out clearly ahead, but as time goes by, the Amiga games essentially don't grown and change, so the PC closes the gap, then equals, and finally surpasses the Amiga completely; culminating in the biggest video game ever Doom in 1993... which had no Amiga release at all; and if you want to know why, compare them to to Doom clones even years later released to the Amiga.
Well, that was not the fault of the Amiga Corp. but of Comodore. Which, if I may say so, completely screwed up. They had an extremely accessible and inexpensive multimedia computer (Before the term multimedia computer even existed.) with which they could have taken the world by storm. But first of all they didn't realize what potential they were just leaving behind and secondly there was extreme mismanagement and incompetence in the Comodore leadership. Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
The Amiga for its release time wrecked a PC which typically had no sound card and CGA. Even the PC Jr/Tandy with its 16 colors and 3 voice sound weren't always supported. When VGA and Soundblasters were the norm, the Amiga fell behind, but with a Single standard spec(baseline A500/A1000) vs an evolving PC spec, of course the PC pulled ahead.
At that time the PC was a work machine. It was never designed or marketed as a home entertainment machine. It wasn't even until 1996 and the advent of MMX instruction sets on the Pentium when it "officially" became the dominating entertainment platform in the world, which of course IT STILL IS. So the Amiga was great in the mid to late 80's, although the SNES and MEGADRIVE gave it a run for it's money. But lets face it, Doom just slapped the shit out of the pride of all the GayMiga fans out there, and they diminished and went into the West, and remained low end.
6-7 years later of Amiga maybe, but i buy after a pentium 100 in 1995 and pay much more, dont got blitter and have problems setting memory and IRQs for sound etc. in each game, in Amiga i insert a disk and work. Today i got problems or i cant play old games for PC in my actual computer like unreal II
hooankee Well that is YOUR fault, not the fault of the all encompasing history of PC's and backward compatibilty. You just have to know how to do it. First you need to understand the basics. There is always a way. Jesus man, you are on the internet! You don't even have to work it out for yourself! Just search google or join a forum and ask some questions! And sure, memory managment was a problem in DOS unless you knew how to tweak the config.sys and autoexec.bat files and load drivers into the upper memory blocks etc. But all of that only took a few hours to learn. For the most part it was just as easy as with the Amiga. And with Windows95, well it was even easier. Not to mention you got DirectX which made Windows gaming almost as fast as DOS gaming, but with the added bonuses of more colours / accelerated 2D and 3D graphics, etc.
TheVanillatech Is my fault? you cant play in quake, it works but the controls dont work good , jump and others. Unreal II not too much old but the screens glitch and is umplayable, and tons of old games dont work with dosbox or emulation but is my fault. Believe me i search, the most time in my life is wasted on internet.
hooankee Yeah of course it's your fault. If you have the reccomended specs for each of those games, and you get very low framerates, then there is something wrong and you have to use your HEAD to work out what it is. If you can't get Windows 98/XP/7 games working then you must be totally dumb. When I was younger I had to carve out extra kilobytesof RAM rom my conventional memory just to load a mouse driver into the upper memory blocks. And Unreal II and Quake cannot be compared. Quake runs on a Pentium 150Mhz just fine, or in DOSBOX with 25,000 cycles. Unreal II required much better hardware. Try running Winquake.Exe directly from windows. Problem solved.
Yes! I used to still play my C64 after getting a 486 with Doom, at times. For platformer games especially. PC was lacking there except Jazz jackrabbit. And on the PC I loved to play Worms, which was also on the Amiga, although I didn't have an Amiga then.
Well, C=64 versions of games were usually the best, even compared to Amiga in the 80s. I would say Tandy 1000 was a good PC but the Hercules/CGA stuff with internal speaker most certainly wasn't.
@@ravengaming4143 no they weren't. I would play the game on the Amiga first, then I'd get it for the Commodore64 and the Commodore64 version was usually trash. Evidence: "Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge", "Star Control". And some games like "Dungeon Master", "Lost Patrol", "Chaos Strikes Back" didn't even exist for the Commodore64. "Eye of the Beholder" port is only being done now, almost 30 years later.
In the Mid to late 80's when many of these games came out, a VGA Video card for the PC, (256 color at 320x400), cost more than the entire Amiga. The early Adlib boards also cost many hundreds of dollars. The Sound Blasters became popular in the early 90's, (at several hundred dollars each), and gave the IBMs... MONO Sound! (No 4 channel stereo sound like on the Amiga). Yes eventually the PCs Devastated everyone! But during the 80's... the Amigas Rules, (and a little bit into the 90's). It just goes to show you how Gross Mismanagement can Devastate a blockbuster company! Sluggo
First: The most used VGA resolution in MSDOS Games was 320x200 up until 1995. Wolfenstein & Doom ran in that resolution back in the days. Second: When Doom came out in 1993 every mid-class PC had a VGA card and was at least a 80386 with 40MHz.
Commodore used console appraoch with making PCs - all-in-one hardware rather than 3rd party market. But ironically, it's the 3rd party that made IBM PC big.
256 color at 320x400 - it was a trick and not all cards allowed this mode, native mode was 320x200 and ISA was limiting speed. www.phatcode.net/res/224/files/html/ch31/31-01.html
@@zzador And as once-user of very basic XT-clone must note that 'til 90-91 large percentage of PC games still supported basically maxed out original IBM PC from 1981 (i.e. machine from era when Commodore was selling VICs and even C64 was just a risky R&D). PS While Wolf3D and Doom were glimpse of future to come i wonder why there was no Warcraft, Warlords II or Wizardry VII for advanced Amigas. There were too few of those to bother? First two ran ok on 386DX33 ( and Dune2 was done for Amiga, while warcraft-like RTS were done even for ZX Sp.128 clones), third ran OK on basic 286+1mb+VGA (i.e. in Amiga 500 range).
The Amiga was a games machine that could also do your taxes. The PC was a spreadsheet machine that could be coerced, with considerable DOS configuration skills and many pieces of extra hardware, to play a game.
Yes... I remember it being like this. I had a PC owning friend, who was especially mesmerized by the Amiga's smooth, even "parallax scrolling" screens (like in Shadow of the Beast 3) It's great how the C64 and the Amiga, were both definitely the best sounding computers in their time... Still sound great to me!
Even long after the PC had taken over and had more colours and higher resolutions, it still didn't have the smooth 2D scrolling of the Amiga. Of course post Doom it was all about 3D anyway, but I clearly remember jerky horizontal scrolling in Windows 98 that an old Amiga could do better.
The C64 sounded awesome. I thought the Amiga shared some hardware with the C64, but I learned it actually had a lot more in common with the Atari ST hardware wise.
on ebay they were selling sparcstation cases, I wanted to get one to make a fake with solaris x86, then I wasted time and at Christmas this year they sold them all :(
The Amiga was so advanced for its time, and it cost much less than an IBM PC too. You could get the Amiga and the attachment that let you run MS DOS programs for less than an IBM PC. What an incredible machine.
Marble Madness used CGA on the PC and I have to admit it wasn't that bad (and there were plenty of horrendous CGA games due to bad color combinations) but they should have used EGA. Of course nothing beat the Amiga because it was in full color and closer (graphically) to the arcade version.
@@dennishagans6339 lol that's nonsense. You have to compare games from the same time. A 486 dx2 vs hw designed in the 80s? 😂 That's like comparing SNES with PS3 and saying SNES sucked. In this video Amiga clips are all 32 colour Amiga 500, which came out in 1987 - around the same time as Intel 386.
Let's face it, it wasn't before VGA and better sound cards, and the developers that knew how to use these that PC gaming finally caught up around the late 80s/early 90s. It would still take some time before it finally overtook the Amiga and left it behind. Sure the old graphics and bleeps and bloops bring back memories but I am honestly not sad that that is now far in the past.
The examples given in this video are misleading. "The 8-Bit Guy" has a good overview of how CGA DOS games looked on contemporary hardware: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-niKblgZupOc.html
@jci10, yes, i remember. there were tricks to get more colors on screen. still, all these colors came from the 4096-color range, which just isn't enough to draw smooth looking graphics, at least when compared to vga. btw, were there any realtime games or graphic demos that used the ham-mode? i remember it being horribly artifacted due to the way it worked, even when drawing static images...
It Came from the Desert - Amiga version blows the PC out of the water. Barbarian - Amiga wins again! Gods - Graphics are on par. Amiga had far better sound effects. Music was a matter for taste. Roland CM-32L/LAPC-I had great music, lacked "Into the Wonderful" effects that Amiga and PC Soundblaster had Lost Patrol - Amiga is better! Stunt Car Racer - Only Amiga Makes it Possible! Winter Games - PC version looked and sounded like arse. Amiga was far better Marble Madness - Amiga, need I say more Lotus III - PC MT-32 sounded great, but Amiga had some brilliant music DuckTales - Amiga by miles The Three Stooges - Amiga, nyuk nyuk nyuk, Woo woo woo woo! Wings of Fury - Amiga kills the PC again Rick Dangerous - Amiga is on a killing spree! Defender of the Crown - Long live the King, Amiga. North & South - Amiga blew PC away again.
PablitaPicasita That is definitely true, since the basic Amiga 500 didn't have a very fast CPU at all, and relied on custom graphics chips, none of which helped with polygonal 3D graphics. The framerate is smooth on faster Amigas, though (goes for a lot of 3D games).
+wocko1 Amigas, for the most part, had a dedicated set of hardware. IBM PC games at the time ,were being developed for machines where sound cards were considered a luxury, as were things like VGA cards.
Great to see all those past games and memories they bring back ! Thank you Laffer35. For the 'Amiga - memory lane. Of course the Pc wasn't even trying or saw no market in silly games, especially when you consider the cost of them then. They were pure business focused in comparison with just odd curio here and there. So Amigas had their Golden Era. We sneered at the Atari ST faithful. having same arguments over sound verses colours / art capability. Never actually owned or used a ST, but they seemed to push the music aspect if I recall correctly. Yes, master Amiga Race, with the consoles as feeders or bright Japanese Arcady titles. You could still get those mid sized, portable electronic games, each dedicated to one game such as - Astro Blaster, Tron, Pac Man. Then.... the Playstation loomed across the Oceans. Overnight it blew Amiga away with its fancy new tricks. They tried but it just wasn't able to make the new 3D effects. Like some Proud Heavyweight Boxer who has only been defeated by time.
At MrRetroville: You're right, when AMIGA first came, it was way better than PCs. But you know why? Because in that time, PC didn't have a decent sound card and not a decent graphic card. Only when Creative Labs did start to make Sound Blaster Cards and VGA came, PC was far superior than Amiga in all senses - again, check out differences in games such as the Secret of Monkey Island 1 and 2, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Elvira 1 and 2, and LOTS of others more.
Problem was that in the early 90s, most DOS games back then were ports of other versions, relying mostly on speaker sound. So not a lot was spent in recomposing music, till the arrival of wavetable cards a little later. Native MS-DOS games had better music though. But Elvira 1 and 2 has far superior music in the Amiga version. MS-DOS versions sound very poor, even with SoundBlaster cards. Eg in Elvira 1, the ambient sound theme in the garden area remains unsurpassed in the amiga version.
petr79 That's true, what you say about sounds. However, like I said, the PC soon surpassed Amiga in terms of graphics and, later on, in terms of sounds/musics. Anyway, the Commodore Amiga was a great computer, like the ZX Spectrum was in its time. All greatly important for what computers are nowadays!
Very nicely done. I miss my Amiga so much. :( Used to play Stunt Car Racer on my Amiga quite a bit. It had a split screen multiplayer mode as well that was fun.
Never had interest in PC in my childhood. AMIGA 500 was the one I was always longing for. Was so happy when having it. Till today the memories with that computer is so precious. Loving my parents for giving me all of this
I've had my Amiga 500 since 1989. My PC friends were trying to downplay the superiority of the Amiga to the PC. One of them said that all the Amiga was, was graphics and sound. I still laugh about that. My PC friends finally won me over, when titles like Doom and Wing Commander came out out the PC. The PC had come a long ways in those 4 years and really came into its own with the advent of the CD.
It didn't help commodore steering the Amiga into rocks and the still strong console market proves they lost the games lead trying to be a pc.They should of smashed sega and sony instead they handed it all to them on a plate. The pc effectively killed off the computer games market by retro-forming the notion of a $500 plus price tag.
Defender of the Crown, although only displaying 32 colors on the screen was the closest thing you'd get to VGA graphics in 1986 before such a thing existed on the PC. When it was ported on PC you simply had 16 color EGA. Same amount of colors on display as a C-64.
@@JohnnyProctor9 I owned an NES in the day and owned Defender of the Crown. The graphics were amazing for the NES. Not as good as the Amiga, but still amazing by 8-bit standards. I found the NES interface more user-friendly than the ones used on home computers that's why I feel the NES version is the best for playability. Oh yeah, you were also referring to graphics capability. On the NES you could only display 13 colors for sprites and 13 colors for background tiles from a palette of 56 colors, so I believe an NES couldn't display more than 26 colors at once with a resolution of 256x224 for the NTSC (North American version) while Amiga had 320x200 same as VGA but with only 32 colors instead of 256.
The only "video card" you needed to play DooM was a bog standard VGA card. Those were standard equipment by the time Doom came out! Failing that you could get a used one.
If you had a CGA/EGA card you also had an EGA display, so you had to buy a new display too! Realistically most PCs under 5000 could only play doom in the window the size of a postage stamp.
Sherbert's World: Not really, doom didn't do that much different in neither graphic, sound or gameplay, it wasn't anything the Amiga couldn't do, I even dare say that the sound might have been better if doom was played on amiga.
The Amiga also cost 1/3 of what a PC cost back then too. Not that the Amiga was cheap though, it was £400 in the UK on 1992 when I got mine, which is £750 in todays money when adjusted for inflation. But the cheapest, bare bones entry level PC in 1992 cost at least £1000, and you'd have to lay out over £1200 for one that was capable of games. The PC came with a monitor and the Amiga was connected to a TV, but that PC would cost £2,250 in todays money. I still remember when my uncle bought a top of the range PC in 1993 that cost enough to buy a family car. Friends and neighbours came round to just stare at it, like it had beamed in from future. They were all so impressed and he was so proud, but unfortunately his day was ruined by the tactless 13 year old me saying "It only does SIXTEEN colours? Seriously? My Amiga does over four thousand. Whats that buzzing and beeping noise, wheres the music? What, it cant do music?!?! NO way! How much did this cost? Waaaahhhahahahahahaha!" It was years and years before using a PC didnt feel a massive step down from using an Amiga
Aahh for so many years the Amiga was superior to EVERYTHING. It's a shame that Commodore sat back on their laurels. The A1200 should have been the machine to put the Amiga back on top, but it wasn't and it was merely a good piece of hardware that blended in with the rest of the market. If the A1200 had been superior to a bog standard PC then once again, Commodore would have commanded the lead and deservedly so. It's such a shame that they put so little into the A1200 and also delivered the uninspiring CD32. We could have been using Amiga's today. Imagine how great they would be!
Yeah, I agree. If i remember correctly, Commodore was pretty much finished as a company by the time the A1200 was ready to get shipped. Mediocre crap that frequently needs replacement (or successfully gives the illusion of that) beats quality hardware in a capitalist economy. Every. Single. Time.
I don't know. I am not sure I'd want to use a computer that was owned, and sold by a singular company. The PC atleast is not owned by anyone, and is completely open. Now I am not old enough to even remember the Amiga, I don't even remember seeing it anywhere when I was a kid, being from the USA, it was not very big here. I don't know how open the Amiga was. I think when Doom came around, that was pretty much the final nail in the Amiga's coffin. It's kind of a moot point now, seeing as PC's are so ridiculously powerful today, that hardly anyone has the talent to harness the full power of the more powerful hardware, which is pretty sad considering not too long ago, hardware was never powerful enough.
Joey JoeJoe Jr Shabadoo You are right, Doom was one of the nails in the Amiga's coffin (I wrote a Hub-Page about it). It's just that, pound for pound the Amiga outstripped EVERYHING for years. In terms of all round use; music, games, graphics, programming, networking etc nothing could touch the Amiga. A PC to do the same work would cost you three times as much. It really was ahead of the competition for years. Commodore eventually managed to mess it up so when the A1200 was released it was no longer ahead of the competition. They allowed everyone else to catch up and the rest, as they say, is history.
Retro Brothers True, when I first saw the Amiga 1000, and realized it was from 1985, I was like "WHAT?! you gotta be kidding me! that thing has better graphics and sound than the SNES, and it came out 5-6 years before that! unreal!" becuase up to that point, I thought computers in the 80's were what the IBM PC was, and nothing more. it was indeed way ahead of it's time. But like I said earlier, I feel safer not owning a computer that is made, and sold by one company, becuase well, commodore gave up it's technological lead by being stupid, and went bankrupt, and when that happens, you have no more support, and your hardware, and OS become door stops.
Joey JoeJoe Jr Shabadoo Yes, it was a really great piece of kit. It really was. Have a look at preceding 8-bit machines such as the Commodore 64, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro, Oric 1, Atari 800XL.... you'll be amazed at what developers squeezed out of such humble hardware. The thing is, at that time IBM PC's were serious money and for 'businesses only' - so all home computers were made by a company: Sinclair, Commodore, Oric, Atari.... it mattered not. You got the machine you wanted. I had a ZX Spectrum then moved on to the Amiga as the 16-bit reign began. Kudos to the Atari ST too - but the Amiga was supreme. Back then the thought of 'no Commodore' was unthinkable.
A minor issue is that you're showing mostly games from a time when the Amiga had the better hardware for gaming, Deathsword especially. Both systems have been around for a very long time, and there are plenty of PC games that could blow the Amiga out of the water once VGA cards and things like the Adlib and Soundblaster happened like Stunts, Daggerfall, Quake, Bioforge, Corncob 3d, Doom, Comanche: Maximum Overkill, Magic Carpet, the list goes on. Both systems had their heyday.
Whoa - Marble Madness! Now that brings back some memories. I used to love my Amiga! Walked all over the PC back in the day and here's the proof. Nice one
+Gernot Schrader Had an A2000 and i bought a A1200 when it came out although the Amiga was dying this time. But Wing Comnander and Doom killed the Amiga finally. Then i bought an 486 DX2 66 and it was a good gaming machine with VGA and Soundblaster. I was glad i didnt have to play with cga/ega and PC speaker.
Old games were really crap in PC. Amiga computers are really good at graphics processing and audio quality. But when games like Doom come the things changed...
@@juniorsilvabroadcast bad games on the PC changed in the early 90's. And the PC changed it all forever, until today. There's nothing better than a PC when it comes to play games!
It is important to say that the DOS version of the games you're presenting are most of them EGA (16 colors) and CGA (4 colors), not the VGA versions. Try to compare Gobliiins, The Secret of Monkey Island 1 and 2, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Elvira 1 and 2, Waxworks, Beneath a Steel Sky, etc, and you'll see the differences between AMIGA and a REAL PC version :) This comparison should have been done differently, comparing games with similar feature: sound cards and graphic cards.
That was kind of the point though, PCs eventually passed machines like the Amiga, but for their time both the Atari ST and Amiga kicked the shit out of their competition. It just couldn't be kept up, and as we all know Apple was the only one of these more locked down computers to survive.. for whatever reason...
Dylan Collins In those old days, PC developers were also a bit lazy to make games for the PC. It kinda reminds me what happened with ZX Spectrum and C64 machines. :)
That's also very true, the specialized hardware of systems like the Amiga made it easy to optimize the game like you would on a console, while the PC got what often appeared to be a hack job version of the game. At least this didn't last though. By the 90s the PC was arguably the dominate game machine.
Can remember buying PC version of Boulder Dash and playing under emulation on Amiga. Back in the day. Kind of even found the Spectrum version had more bling. :) I think they even fitted it into 30-40k. :)
Was the Lotus 3 on PC smoother than Amiga? I never knew that. I heard Lotus 3 was a good game on Amiga, but I always played the PC version and loved it. The midi music is still quite good.
It's like Jurassic Park but for the Amiga! www.forbes.com/sites/marcochiappetta/2018/10/29/the-first-next-generation-68k-based-amiga-in-decades-booted-up-yesterday/?fbclid=IwAR3_BK026IW4UafG39KGJ92M0UCewN2UnwNmBD1Zb8FnpnfLsmPkBy5uu1o#43a313396d74
The Amiga was the superior being, Workbench was basically better than windows 3.1 and it was older, the games had better graphics for their time and the Super-AGA graphics were awesome for their time. PC was under and below anything. The reason why PC got more attention than AMIGA is the same reason we are not using Tesla technology for energy consumption.
+Astro Monkey Well, amiga was better than PC when it first came out, but years after years, PC's expansion cards became better and better (cpu was already better, the 386 came out in 1985/1986 and had a minimum speed of 16mhz, was a 32bits architecture, etc). PC wasn't made for gaming in the first place, so it had a very nice CPU for it's time, but it had no capabilities for graphism or sound. But it evolved constaintly and by 1987, it was ready for gaming (VGA and adlib cards were released that year). The fact that they were almost never used before let's say 1990, is that PC were still very expensive, so developpers didn't wanted to waste their time on something that almost nobody could use. If you compare a later PC game that still can run on a 386 with it's amiga port, you'll see that the PC was in some ways superior/equal, but almost never used like so (adlib still lacked wave sound) Also, AMIGA had a hardware accelerator since the begining, while PC got it only at the mid 90's (when nvidia, ati, S3, 3Dfx released their "3D" chipsets). There is almost no VGA hardware accelerator (except for some later revisions that brough "blitter", and some other stuff)
this set off a cascade of creative output and application of computers in media and in consumers homes that simply had never been seen before. lovely examples of hooking up special hardware, built to work symbiotically with the Amiga that turned whole industries up-side down - like the NewTek Video Toaster (fascinating story - wikipedia / featured in an episode of Computer Chronicles)
Try running the games on a 7mhz cpu 1mb ram PC that costed the same as an Amiga at the time these games were released for a more accurate comparison... irony btw
Well, even if you don't like parallax scrolling, you have to admit that silky smooth 13 layer parallax scrolling on a 1987 home computer is pretty impressive ;)
@Lemmy556 - cool! What are the hardware specs? It'd be cool for the market to have a real Amiga in it again... no more Windows or Linux clones (which includes Mac OS X)
@scarybozo If that is the case, it's due to bad research on my side, definitely not intentional. Could you (or anyone else) link me to EGA screenshots of the games in question? There are two games called Barbarian, and they're very different - the one in this video also known as "Death Sword"... just so no one links to the wrong game. One thing I did mess up with though is - the ugly pink CGA palette is incorrect, it's what you get on modern cards.
I like this video: is useful to emphasize the differences between them, and the monstruous delay of PC to be competitive than Amiga! I want to remember to all who don't know: with Amiga, don't need graphics schede, sound schede, joystick-port, it's all 'ready to use'! Long live to Amiga fan!!
hey, now that i think of it... I'd like to play some of those games again. but concerning amiga, the emulator thing isn't doing it for me (it runs badly). I'm not entirely aware of the specs. What would you say, games like cannon fodder, look better on Amiga or SNES console, or equal?
VGA and Sound cards did for the Amiga. For a bit in 92ish it was the superior platform. Texture mapping did it in. We do have the Amiga crowd to thank for MOD files which will live forever. Also the demo scene. RIP Amiga. Respect. Luv and Peace.
I never once saw an Amiga in stores anywhere when I was a kid but always wanted one after seeing pics here and there in various game magazines. Used to see a lot of computer games in the bargain bin and as a console gamer was quite jealous. That's my one main regret was not trying to obtain one, it seemed to go mostly ignored by everyone I knew....we all either had Snes or Genesis/NES and that was it as if that's all there was. Clearly I missed out on some fantastic gaming experiences so I dabble with Amiga games in emulators nowadays but not the same as it would have been back in the day.
I really love your videos! I grew up with amigas around me and spent a significant amount of time with them. But, as mentioned in the comments before, with vga and more mhz coming, games like comanche and doom becme possible, and as a technically fascinated gamer i sensed that i had to switch to pc sooner or later. Actually, even comparing monkey2 screens amiga vs. vga already showed me the way. loved those smooth color transitions on vga, impossible on ecs amiga with 32 colors.
yes, agreed with that. in the end, it was the eyes of the artists back then that decided if the screen looked good or had to be manually retouched. besides KQ4, there is evidence of this looking at indy 4 amiga vs. VGA. On some screens, darker details fully drawn on vga in, say, 5-10 shades are only kept as 2-colored outlines of the same objects on amiga. this is a very interesting discussion, as i spent a lot of time back then trying to figure out how to use the amiga palette best on d-paint.
Any chance i can get a copy of that CD? heh ... or if thats a issue you know where i can buy all of the original boards i've had a real hard time finding the epic pinball stuff i think silverball was the main package... thanks in advance.
I've just noticed Lotus 3 music is almost the same as the music in Zool, but then they were both Gremlin games. Super vid. I think A-Train, Arcade Pool, and Pinball Dreams/Fanasies need to be compared also. Even when PC games had 256 colours (which A1200 can do anyway), the PC could not do scrolling, even up and down some unformatted text on a 2000 system was rough. Today when graphics move sideways on a fairly mordern PC it still spasses out now.
I showed early games on purpose as I think that is more fair. The Amiga 500 was released in 1987, so I'm obviously going to show games as close to that as possible.
Strange, I read a book on the history of computers a few weeks ago and there was no mention of the Amiga. It was as if it never existed. It was a major threat to other manufacturers, as the operating system was so efficient. The Amiga was the world's first affordable multimedia, multitasking personal computer, the AmigaOS could operate fully and multitask in as little as 250K of memory, try that on a PC.....
I had a PC and played in DOS. Some of my mates had AMIGA (NEMIGA). Most of the time I played different games on the two different machines. However. Somewhere around 1990 I tried North and South on AMIGA. It was way better than PC version. I always knew PC would pass AMIGA and make it useless in a few years. The comparision of Barbarian on PC and AMIGA showed a ridculous big difference. I hated the CGA graphics from the beginning, but soon EGA and VGA came. And we dreamt of SVGA. The sound was no highlight either, but I played many games without sound (like CM1). When it came to Ports of Call I preferred it on PC. Better than AMIGA.
While the PC obviously passed the Amiga eventually, it doesn't change though that for years it was an amazing machine that pretty much blew everything else out of the water. It was a marvelously advanced machine for its time, it's just a shame they couldn't keep it up with later releases. By the time they were releasing the Amiga 4000 it was nothing but a shell of what was once a great name.
It is a good thing we can enjoy these classics in either their DOS version (DOSBox) or their Amiga version (WinUAE) at our current PCs. I would play the Amiga version on those without beautiful VGA graphics
do you remember a scrolling starship fighter game with M and B bomb looking things with a claw coming out 2 grab it? i've been looking for it but can't seem 2 find it i miss that game if you know i'd be super happy!!!
There was a Tandy 1000 version of the Three Stooges game. The audio still wasn't as good as the Amiga version, but it had 3+1 channel sound and some sampled audio.
EGA graphics were clearly inferior to the Amiga, and the Amiga tracker music was better for quite some time. Around 90-91 the DOS platform begun to receive decent ports of Amiga games and throughout 92-94 the DOS platform eventually surpassed the Amiga.
Nice vid, a lot of my child hood is made in front of the amiga so im a huge fan of amiga stuff. So just keep up the good work and you can see that amiga was ahed in tec at the time
@HardWarUK WTF are you talking about? CGA?and 4 colour games? Amiga was 256 and 4096 colour modes from day one.... think you got Amiga and PC-DOS mixed up there.
Commodore got Jay Miner onboard. He was an ex Atari engineer. His Amiga saved Commodore (for a few years). Commodore was a chaos company, had little luck with most of their products except two lucky strikes. The C64 and Amiga
Raar! How dare you do this video?! Just kidding. I really liked the comparison video, since I've never used an Amiga. The difference in visual and audio quality is stunning.
Didn't Shadow of the Beast use tricks to get over 50 colors on screen at once? I seem to remember a video on youtube showing it using 52 colors or something like that.
DooM on the PC was the game that finished the Amiga off as it showed real power of a PC. But 1985 till 1993 the Amiga ruled everything including PC and its hardware.
Very interesting comparisons. There was a time when programmers put very little effort in the OPL3 music, or even General Midi or MT32 ones, and what is worse, there was a time when programmers ignored the 256 colours capability of the VGA PCs.
You were actually kind to the PC. Considering earlier on in the Amiga's life, you were as likely to see CGA as a hercules adapter being used in a PC, and certainly not a sound board. It was beeps. LOL. Amiga was an amazing computer.
Why run all the CGA games in 4 color RGB mode, when running them in composite mode would yield 16 colors (with several different pallets)? The whole point of the composite mode was to make games more colorfull, and people playong early CGA PC games would most likely use composite mode instead of RBG mode for that very reason. Therefore, many of the comparisons here aren`t really fair.
