Yes you chaps are very much a part of my week. And though I don't like to think about it these days, were especially appreciated during the lonlier parts of the pandemic. You have created somehting very special here, a kind of "being in the pub with yer mates" kind of feeling. Will be forever grateful! (and congrats on 10K listeners!)
I like to put it on during an hour of drudgery - some kind of tedious work that I'm not looking forward to doing - so the time goes by quicker with part of my mind occupied by something interesting, from people I like.
Great show this week :) Ghostbusters is one of the best 8 bit micro games ... good to see the BBC Micro finally getting a port ( although the C64 is the only way to really play this game!)
Did not change platform but I bought a GameCube for Rogue Squadron. The visuals at the time really blew me away when compared to my old Commodore VIC 20 which was my first computer ever.
Duncan has a free reign to do stuff like this and it makes it worthwhile watching the show every week even though I was there for the recording! (Dave)
LIstening to this, I think most obvious reason why the commercial life of the Amiga came to an end is just hardware, pure and simple. Games began to require more memory, hard disk storage, or a CD drive, plus a higher resolution monitor. It was possible to do all of these things on an Amiga, but the question then was - do you want to spend a lot of money on upgrading your Amiga, or sell it and put the money towards a full PC set up that is more upgradeable that you can also use for home business and productivity?
Yeah, I remember around 1993 was when PC started to increasingly feel like a much more progressive and forward-looking platform even from the outside. There were all sort of things happening there, all sorts of movements, like the rise of CD-ROM media, more advanced CPUs like 486s and Pentiums becoming more powerful every day and promising better more advanced games, all sort of sound cards and peripherals becoming available, SVGA graphics becoming a thing etc.) I can't say there was just one single game that made me jump ship to PC (but certainly games like Doom, Ultima 7, Tie Fighter, Alone in the Dark, Myst did help), but the whole vibe of it. It seemed like all the real life was there, while Amiga's landscape was increasingly depressive and stagnating.
Commodore killed the Amiga nothing else, their total lack of R&D after the initial A500 launch and any foresight as to the way things were inevitably going in the computer and gaming world of the early 90s. Sure there were other big factors that accelerated the inevitable end of the Amiga as a commercial mainstream platform such as the birth of the fps genre and resulting popularity of Doom, the Playstation and 3D cards for the PC, but the major problem the Amiga had was it was stuck on a super expensive CPU line which was woefully underpowered and custom chips that were hopelessly out of date compared to off the shelf parts the PC used. The only scenario that could have ever given the Amiga a chance was to make Amiga OS for x86 architecture and abandon 68k the way Apple did.
The Amiga was of its era -- from when computing power was so limited that the designers had to devise clever dedicated hardware solutions to common bottlenecks. The Amiga was special BECAUSE of its bespoke hardware. But that hardware had a shelf life, and it became an albatross. After a while, the fact that it could connect to a TV and output or blend with NTSC / PAL video meant that it also suffered from limited resolution. Its advanced (for the time) 4-channel hardware sampling didn't matter when you needed to mix 8+ channels in software. The PC wasn't special, it just had two things going for it: 1) It was designed to be augmented. This hurt at first, as the add-on hardware was limited in capability, expensive, and you wouldn't know for sure which of a few common options the user would have. But if you needed to solve a particular problem, and were willing to pay for it, then you could add whatever functionality you wanted. 2) IBM had enough sense to make nearly everything backward-compatible. If you upgraded to EGA, you could still run MGA and CGA software. Same for VGA. Third-party vendors had enough sense to clone this and maintain nearly perfect compatibility, and just bolt on new functionality as needed. This gave developers a common denominator, with the ability to include support for whatever leading edge hardware they wanted. If the Amiga had really embraced hardware augmentation, it would've slowly lost all of its uniqueness and eventually become a PC with a different CPU. The PC isn't what succeeded in the market. It was the ISA bus, and then later, PCI.
It's really nice to hear other people appreciating the 8bit Ghostbusters. It was up there with The Wild Bunch, and A Rockstar Ate My Hamster as the early resource management games that shaped my future 😎👍
What I would like from the N64 topic is a native frontend (like an emulator), it'll detect the roms you have and compile them. Then you can run the game through the front end and tweak the graphics setting and such per game like an emulator.
There is no game that killed Amiga, it was Commodore management. And yeah 32:00 15FPS was good back in the day. Now 60FPS is considered slideshow in competitive gaming :D
I upgrade from the ST to the PC 486 when all the RPG's were coming out for it. I did have an older IBM PC XT clone before getting the Atari ST, but mainly for doing C coding. Before that a Spectrum 48K.
PC was well over £2300 in 1992 lot of money just to play games. PS1 come in UK in 1994 then by around 1996 PC prices had drop to aa low as £700 for basic pc with Windows 95.
3D games like Thief the Dark Project and Half Life ultimately made me buy a PC; however I switched to Playstation before that for Demolition Derby, Tekken and Final Fantasy VII.
Consoles killed the Amiga... CD32 was the last attempt to make the Amiga a relevant games machine which the Amiga always was for computer folks. I played Wolf3d at the time it was released and although it was a great game it couldn´t keep up with the arcades and the subsequent ports that were released on consoles... In 1992 you could only get proper sound with a dedicated soundboard and that was an extra that PC gamers had to buy. The PC only started to really compete with consoles when online gaming became a great way to play with your mates...
Leaving one's own cave to visit The Cave is getting out, rather than staying in, isn't it?! Re N64 Recomp. I have played a lot of the Perfect Dark PC port. Fantastic. It's github also has a link to an exe for the NTSCU version. I wanted to try the NTSCJ and PAL versions as well so I followed the build instructions and personally speaking found it very easy. I'm no programmer though. I have compiled a lot of stuff in the past on Linux and a couple of Windows things.
Bought my first PC in 1994 when I went todo a computing degree ('upgrade' from an Acorn A3000, which could do real 3D ok but didn't have a large enough customer base for a games market, and... Acorn disappeared about the same time as Commodore). "We got it to help you with your homework"... and frag the sh*t out of my mates in Doom LAN deathmatch. So it was a mix of gaming and uni work (C/C++, Unix & Linux 1.0)
the game that broke the Amiga for me was Warcraft 1+2, took ram out of my A4000 put it in my sister's pc, to play it and then playing LAN Duke Nuke Em and Doom 2 was the finale straw
The Amiga *sort of* evolved - it’s the rather barebones models Commodore sold that didn’t evolve *enough*. Right? It’s not like you couldn’t buy graphics cards, sound cards, faster CPUs, CD-ROM drives, RAM aplenty, harddisks… even Voodoo, I hear (via a PCI bridgeboard). It’s that almost all Amiga gamers (that I knew) treated it like a floppy-based console/X-Copy station and chucked it out when it had exhausted its wow factor. I know the 500 was the big seller (heck, without it, 13- or 14-year-old me could only ever have dreamed of having an Amiga), but I wonder sometimes if that was, in the end, to the platform’s detriment. For the PC folks an endles cavalcade of upgrades was just a way of life… I guess they were more affordable, produced in far higher volumes… Later found out my 1200/030 could’ve played a just-about acceptable game of Doom (if it’d been ported to the Amiga at the time), though a faster CPU would’ve been preferable. Well outside my price range, but then so was a gaming-capable PC. Kinda noped out of gaming around that time. Never liked first-person shooters and the no-longer-cartoony military/gun fetish anyway and never wanted Windows with its overbearing bureaucratic nature and funny office monkey boomer clip art…
An RTX 4070 TI Super to just play a pinball game in 4K?? You can tell he isn't too hot on modern tech and games lmao. You could power multiple screens @4K with that. You don't need all that VRAM or processing power lol
Doom always felt like a tech demo to me, it just bored me to tears. In the end I turned on cheats went through it and that was it, pretty boring in my opinion.
It wasn't until Unreal Tournament that I finally caved and bought a PC, i'd happily been on my much upgraded Amiga and PS/N64 up until that point. Even to this day I still don't rate Doom and outside of the UT series COD4 is the only FPS I've put some serious hours into. the genre just doesn't do it for me.
I was going to say that if you saw somebody else waving at the same time you would know it was another TWIRler...but podcasts don't work like that do they...so I won't. - Dunc
MVG’s video was a bit reductionist. I don’t recall anyone getting excited about Wolfenstein 3D back in the day. It felt a bit pedestrian. I had jumped from Amiga to consoles and didn’t get my first PC until 2000. Gaming on a PC always felt like more hassle than gaming on an Amiga or a console. Setups etc and games failing to run properly or at all. Seems a bit smoother these days though. The game that I saw and I was blown away to the point where I had to change my computer was from the humble Spectrum to the Atari ST after seeing Starglider on it and hearing that music and seeing the much smoother and faster wireframe graphics. Wipeout sold me the PS1 instead of going Sega again, so games do sell systems. Systems rarely sell themselves.
