I didn't realise this video was out yet! I've been busy. Great comparison and I like that you were comparing the sliding doors. The A1200 was cracking value for money at the time, and while it's easy to say with hindsight that it was a bit of a dead end, it wasn't clear at the time. Especially for someone who had an A500 why wouldn't you want what the Amiga mags were telling you were the latest greatest. I'm still glad I got my PC though, upgrading it, keeping sort of the same thing all the way up etc...
Cheers Dave. Glad you enjoyed it mate. It's fun to contemplate what could have been firmly in the knowledge that we can't change the past. It's interesting that the machine the A1200 "should" have been, really, is the Atari Falcon.
I migrated from an Amiga 500 to an XT-based PC with CGA graphics and no sound card. I had no idea about PCs at the time and was so disappointed playing what games I could play at the time. To me, it wasn't until I had a 486-based system with SVGA and a sound card (probably a ProAudio Spectrum if I remember right) that I had a system that equaled or surpassed my beloved Amiga 500. I'll admit Chris, you brought back those terrible XT memories. LOL!!!! One thing I did do with that XT was install a 'borrowed' copy of Windows 3.0. Did it actually work on the XT? Yes. Was it useful at all? No. It took like 15 or 20 minutes just to load. It did start me down the path of learning more about PCs and eventually getting into the IT industry (and I fooled people into thinking I knew what I was talking about for almost 30 years).
haha thanks for sharing your memories. I think it shows just how good the Amiga (and other 16 bit micros) actually were. They did everything, at a price most homes could afford.
Pinball Fantasies was even great with the PC Speaker! Really enjoyed this comparison - made me realise that I didn't make a mistake going straight to PC after the 8 bit era. It's also meant my search for an A1200 can take a bit of a back burner until I find a bargain!
The A1200s let downs really are just the ram, and a faster CPU would have been nice. And the first thing we all did to our A500s was add RAM so no change there. Of course this was when ram was very expensive so there is that. What PC did you jump to after the 8 bit era out of interest?
@@005AGIMA actually not, the A1200 was a very obsolete architecture you could not do anything about. The Paula was very outdated and SB16 did a circles around it, the 386DX could beat even 030 accelerated A1200, Amiga is based on planar graphics architecture, a big no go for 3d fist person shooters at playable pace. So, I would tell you that you made the right decision. The Gunship 2000 has much more details in PC version, trees and telephone poles, just to name a few. And shading is also much better. Then you should have tried sims like B-17, totally different game on PC. And in the moment you loaded up Wolf3d you already started to forgetting Amiga, and after the Doom (well, in small window, but still).... what is Amiga? Its funny that Amiga has such a lemmings followers, it was not the best computer of its era, even the Atari ST was better computer (at least for the money, computing power and possibilities), but honestly all other systems surpassed Amiga in 1987 when the first "real" Amiga came out.
Great comparison video mate, was surprised how bad the framerate was on the PC. Space clouds 🤣. Oooh, the frontier intro gave me goosebumps, not heard that in years. Don't care how choppy it is, I still love it.
As a teenager during the 386/486 we would swap & upgrade parts at school. I had a similar situation to you going for midi to Adlib to SB16. Monitors weren't swapped, cards were, but going from an 1084S to SVGA I also had that wow and I never gave that sexy eye to the Amiga again........ But like a first love I still think of the Amiga occasionally.
May I ask how much RAM did you have on your PC, and what was the clock speed of the CPU please? It must have been pretty low spec for it to be struggling like that with GS2000, I would have thought, I'm surprised that the A1200 with no Fast RAM was smoother (my dad thankfully took the advice of the sales assistant when we bought our A1200 in 1994 and added a RAM board with either 2 megs or 4). Mind you, I was looking at early 1990s adverts for computers a while back and the default RAM seemed to be 2mb, which I think was probably a bit deceptive on the part of the retailers because I get the impression that one needed a fair bit more to be running the latest software 'properly' and making good use of the 486. I think the PC beeper actually does a decent job of the intro tunes for PoP and Frontier, they don't sound too bad. The sound card is obviously much better than beeps, especially on GS2000, but I honestly prefer Paula. The PC soundcards obviously had a lot of sophisticated instrumental sounds and I like it in its own way, but they still didn't sound as good as the Amiga to me. Frontier looks better on the PC, more detail and it had texture maps, I think our 4 meg A1200 probably ran it at a relatively similar speed to your 386 but who knows, it was so long ago. I think we were just pleased that it was much faster than on the A500! I remember if I ever cocked up at launch from a planet and got half a dozen police after me in their Cobras, it would slow down to a real crawl :) Lol just heard you remembering 'nebula' is the correct word for 'space cloud' :) Regarding the CPU of the A1200, I think even twice the clock speed would have been good enough while being a fair bit cheaper than an '030 and with 2 megs of Fast RAM then a lot of the games released in 1993-95 would have performed as well as a customer would expect of their new machine.
Wow thanks for the detailed post. This 386DX used has 4MB Ram and was specifically to try and match the Amstrad PC2386DX/65 that I had as my first PC. It's hard to find details, but I believe that CPU was around 20Mhz max on the Amstrad. So we basically matched the performance of Doom to how I know it was. The PC used in the test in this video actually has a Turbo button that doubles the speed, and hence the performance, but this was all about my first PC. No other. The way these games play certainly matches my memories :)
This comparison was very specific as mentioned. Sadly outside of these games I experienced back in the day, the comparison kind of falls apart. There is a part 2 video where I discuss the operating systems and First Person Shooters, however the current intention is to keep that video unlisted, as it will be linked to a magazine article in the future. Stay tuned.
new studio!! :) and mad video skills in place! :) glad to see you finally tried to correct the wrong turn back in the days! Jokes aside! Good episode! And as a bonus I have now seen the gameplay of elite for the first time ever! The early c2p routines was not the best :)
Haha no it's the same room I always use. Just had to use the coffee table this time. Somewhere there's a clip where I'm laying behind the camera screaming "I can't feel my legs!" As I had to kneel down to shoot all of this lol.
The 030 is equivelent to a 386 not the 020...Commodore cost cutting at it's finest and only 14Mhz to boot. The 486 the matches 040 and the pentium the 68060. In the end the memory saving decison of using planar graphics to save RAM instead of chunky graphics proved to be a disadvantage in the graphics department once memory became cheaper and costs came down. However the Amiga was doing things in 1985 to 1990 that PC's could only dream about, but CBM's mistake same as with the c64 was instead of investing in R&D to improve products they did mostly unchanged hardware for 10 year stints and milked it for every penny. The PC is modular and had millions pumped in to R&D, don't like the graphics or sound?? swap them out for better cards. The amiga was mostly stuck with what you had unless you had a big box model (which was too expensive for the mainstream).
In retrospect 1992, when the A1200 was launched, looks like a pivotal year in the computer industry. It saw the debut of the last of the wedge machines targeted at the home user including the A1200 itself, the Atari Falcon and Acorn A3020. By this stage it was clear the home market was being cannibalised by fourth gen consoles at the bottom end and increasingly powerful, increasingly affordable PCs at the top end. The A1200 was reasonably competitive in 92-93 but it wasn't a compelling proposition as shown by falling sales, and Commodore's strategy / product roadmap was just all over the place by this stage.
Great points by yourself and Jon here and all valid. As I've mentioned to others, when I did jump to PC, it wasn't long before I added a SNES to the house, and later a Jaguar. PC gaming at that point just lacked.... Something. The Amiga, in its time, just did both jobs well, as did it's competitors. To this day I find I need a PC, and a consol. And it all comes down to the fact that consoles are not modular, which means the developers know what hardware to target, rather than aim to be compatible with a near infinite number of configurations.
Great video! My path unfortunately never included an Amiga (as much as I drooled over the one my friend had). I grew up in rural Australia so Amigas were DEFINITELY few and far between!!! I went from a Tandy CoCo, to a C64, and then to a 386/DX33 with a 40Mb disk. So of course going from the 64 to a PC was an EPIC jump, especially once I added a CD-ROM and SB Pro to the mix later on. One thing I'm interested to know - how does Elite II perform once the accellerator is back in the Amiga - does it become more playable? Both the PC and Amiga versions seemed just as choppy as each other to me, I'm wondering if the 030 upgrade brings the Amiga up above the PC for this one?
I may do a follow up showing Frontier on the 030 but I actually did the same flight path only last night, using the 030, and it's smooth as silk. However, it should be noted that this 386dx I'm using for the comparison is set to run as close as possible to my original amstrad from back in the day. However, if it press the turbo button, it too can run faster and smoother.
lovely video mate i cant to get this one up and running i found in the bin im pretty sure its a 386 but ye i sold my amiga to fund pc i remember having alone in the dark on it and was blown away by it sold the pc to fund a ps1 lol swopped ps1 for a other pc ha ha ive got back into old pcs after finding 2 old ones in a skip im currently building an xp machine i wasnt to play games like tex murphy midtown madness and the from back in the day frontier is an amazing game much better sound on amiga though 3 finger salute ha ha love it mate
@@005AGIMA one will be up next week i have made a couple of upgrades to the p4 one ive bought a new graphics card and that and generally made the whole system better
I had an A1200 from 92 to 94 and the game that sold me on the Amiga was Microprose Grand Prix. Why did I walk to the PC in 94? Doom… Doom… Doom. That and the ongoing financial collapse of Commodore. It was abundantly clear Doom was not coming to Amiga and that the Amiga was on a shallow dive so I made the switch to a 486SX 25 and booted Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. Never looked back, if I’m honest, especially after the release of Grand Prix 2. I still play all these games today… more than any Amiga game if I’m honest. It was the OS side that I missed the Amiga; Windows 3.11 was no match for Workbench 3 and it wasn’t until Windows 95 arrived that that particular gripe was assuaged. Utility wise the PC was superior on all fronts… a million businesses couldn’t be wrong. Perhaps most important though was that after a year of PC ownership I had enough knowledge of the platform to make me an employable asset to a few companies. It even enabled me to set up my own business in 99 which is still going. Oddly it was around the early noughties that I began buying up old Amigas (and other platforms) from the Freeads. I’ve never strayed far from my old platforms but the PC is the one I’ve used daily since 94. I honestly can’t say I missed the A1200 beyond Workbench and never regretted moving to PC when I did. Still play old PC games rather than Amiga ones and if I’m honest I actually use them for Final Writer, Final Copy II and OctaMED. If I do play a game then the A500 mini is more than adequate to the task. It can even play Doom I believe.
Yep a very fair comment. It's a shame as the A1200 is very capable of running FPSs, and this was proved in 1995 by several titles. Sadly, too little too late. I did cover the OS's and FPS's in recording this video, but it was waaaaay too long. So a magazine article on the topic has been submitted ;) ;) :D
@@005AGIMA Should have made it a two part video. 🙂 The other huge coffin nail a year later in 95 was the arrival of video game chic in the form of PlayStation. We’d all seen the videos and read the articles in 94 and knew it was coming. Actually my then job of installing Windows 95 on resident office PCs in 1995 enabled me to buy one on launch day. Halcyon days of tech excess they were… whatever was new I bought. I think you’d have had to have been extremely invested to have stuck with the Amiga in 95 when the world had so visibly moved on. I think the A1200 was a good computer of the time but not the great one so many think it today. It’s creators never seemed to quite know what it was for and the community back then seemed more keen to trash talk it than adopt it. So many pieces of software were not compatible magazines ran lists of what didn’t work and AGA promises quickly evaporated. Let’s face it, many of us who’d bought it began to think we’d made a mistake quite early in our ownership. I honestly think you made the right choice at the right time. Living those A1200 days as I did never really made me love the Amiga as deeply as you A500 owners do. In fact A1200 ownership back then might have lessened your love. The A1200 was… adequate. If I’m honest for University the PC would have made more sense and if my accident compensation had been a thousand more I might have gone straight to PC and never owned an Amiga. Grand Prix was on PC too after all.
We had slightly different paths in gaming. I went from 82 to 91 on the Speccy range, on tho the Mega Drive then on to a 486 in 93. I used 386s in college in 90/91, and yeah, we did use lab time for games 😂
Yeah oddly once I jumped to the 386dx, I also got a SNES as, well, I needed an actual games machine. That was later swapped for the Atari Jaguar, while still owning the 386. And then I added a 486sx IBM PS2 to the collection. Yep all three at once, with an amstrad notepad nc100 on the side. And oddly, since then, I've found a need to own both PC and console, to this day.
@@005AGIMA Nice. Also ofc there was little point back then for the vast majority of people to get the DX version. Might as well save some money and focus on the clock unless you wanted to do co-proc specific work.
Yeah it's a must have hey. I only went for a Game Card first as I couldn't afford an SB at the time. Needed a Joystick for GS2000 though, unless you have everything set to "easy".
I "upgraded" from my A500 to a used 386sx, which was less of an upgrade and more of a compatibility effort for Uni work. The thing I did like about that 386 was that a year later it cost me $40 to swap in a used 486dx board.
this is a great comparison.. however, I do wonder if like me, most people moved over to the PC (for me it was from an Amiga1200 to a 486 dx2/66 in 1994) in order to take advantage of better productivity software.. MSWord, MSexcel, Lotus 123 Office suite etc.. It wasn't about gaming for me, it was more about applications..
@@005AGIMA totally, i sold my A1200, with a 20meg hard drive, extra disk drive, loads of games, extra memory, etc etc.. i can't remember how much i got for it.. but ended up getting a 2/66 486 second hand for £825..(i remember handing over the money, begrudgingly)
As much as Commodore should have gotten AGA out earlier or with more/better features, the A1200 should have shipped with 2MB Fast RAM for the CPU to let it breath! Adding fast ram to an A1200 gives it such a boost. (I personally still believe AGA should have been designed with 4MB Chips Ram in mind even if it shipped with 2 as base config, it should have been expandable by user)
Not sure if the exact clock speed but we tried to match it to the computer I had back in the day. This one has a turbo button which doubles the clock speed but I didn't use it for the comparison for the very reason that this is about my personal journey, and if I would have been happy with an a1200 rather than the PC I ended up with.
Sound effects & music are consistently better on the Amiga, slight performance gain on pc? its close though, if this was the competition from the PC, the Amiga does itself proud. this demonstrates A1200 was competitive especially with the price/performance advantage the Amiga had. If only Commodore weren't incompetent things could have been different.
I 100% agree Lee. Commodore mismanagement, cheap parts, lack of certain developer support... It was all stacked against the Amiga from here on in. I wish I'd picked up and A1200 when escom were giving them away now though. 🤣
Honestly, I think you would've been content with the 1200. For about a year. And then Doom became a thing, PC gaming really took off, and you would've gotten a PC anyway.
The funny thing is, those who did get an a1200 or 4000 back in the day, seem to be the stayers in the amiga community. As in, they kept with the amiga until mid to late 90s. Doom is another topic. The A1200 could have done Doom, as is proved by the existence of...... No.... I'll save that argument for a magazine article 😉
@@005AGIMA You probably missed that discussion in the Discord, but in the Netherlands, Escom had a campaign that basically let you straight swap an 4000 for a DX2-66 PC with monitor. Bringing in a 1200 would've gotten you about halfway there. Would you have been interested in such an offer?
No . The whole point of this comparison was to see how a new A1200 would have stacked up against a used 386DX similar to the one I purchased in the 90s. Would I have been happy with the 1200 instead?
@@daishi5571 I think the most probable upgrade I'd have done would be a RAM expansion. Accelerators weren't as cheap as a Sound Card I don't think? I could be wrong.
@@orhunkabakli Actually you may have a point. The SoundCard wasn't cheap, but I'd argue it would have been at least half the cost of an 030 Accelerator at the time. HOWEVER.....A1200's became bargain bin machines. They literally couldn't give them away toward the end (wish I'd have known at the time), and so I could have easily picked up a very cheap one. Not at the time I jumped, no. But a year later perhaps? 2 years later...easily.
Listening on headphones...NEBULA! Now deaf thanks 😂. Personally I think you should of waiting for a 486DX and kept your A500 a bit longer, thats what I did. Good comparison though apart drom the crap sound from the pc including the soundcard that sounds like a 10 year old is doing the trumpeting with his lips into his hand, they seem very simlar in comparison. I remember Frontier being unplayable on my CD32 due to choppyness, I have a TerribleFire card in it now, look forward to trying Frontier again.
haha yes I should have waited and saved for longer and got a 486DX, but by the time I could afford one, the Pentiums were on the horizon. Arrrggghhhh it never ends lol.
I know what you're saying,, and you probably know the reason, but just in case..... It was only Amiga games in pal regions that suffer this. The reason is, Pal is a higher vertical resolution than NTSC... Yes higher. That's good, but sadly what happened is, rather than Devs making use of this higher res, they'd develop games to fit the NTSC regions, rather than making two versions (makes financial sense). So while the games FILL the screen on an NTSC machine, they do not on a PAL machine. It gets more complicated though, as given so many software houses were UK based, the graphics look stretched when viewed full screen in NTSC.
I'm no expert but I think it's that it can handle higher clock speeds? The period correct cards are in the 20 to 30 MHz range I think. The one I have now is 42mhz. That makes a massive difference in games like Frontier and Gloom deluxe for example.
No I didn't say that or mean to say that. The A1200 was cheaper than a NEW PC by a long way. My first PC, as stated, was a "USED" 386, at a comparable price.
The a1200 needed to be released years before if Commodore wanted to remain competitive and with at least 4mbytes of ram By 92 the very minimum would be a 030 processor, enhanced graphics and sound, cd rom support ,VGA output... By 95 amiga should use Intel processors instead.
Hang on, further to my other reply, I showed 2 2d games and 2 3d games in this video lol. But I also explained why these games were chosen in the video. 😉
@@005AGIMA indeed at the time of a500 PC was way behind Amiga had blitter which if good utilized could give it an extra humpf, but as temp went by people keep upgrading PCs for their work and Amigas were still being used vanilla as they were first bought, they could no longer stand a chance
@@005AGIMA the marketing/management of commodore was so bad that had we had an option of +1mb of fast ram in A1200 it would make it twice as fast. Had it been that the case it would have had a better chance with this 386dx :)
Part 2 can be found here: ua-cam.com/video/jp7m_kVEYuw/v-deo.html
I didn't realise this video was out yet! I've been busy.
Great comparison and I like that you were comparing the sliding doors. The A1200 was cracking value for money at the time, and while it's easy to say with hindsight that it was a bit of a dead end, it wasn't clear at the time. Especially for someone who had an A500 why wouldn't you want what the Amiga mags were telling you were the latest greatest. I'm still glad I got my PC though, upgrading it, keeping sort of the same thing all the way up etc...
Cheers Dave. Glad you enjoyed it mate. It's fun to contemplate what could have been firmly in the knowledge that we can't change the past. It's interesting that the machine the A1200 "should" have been, really, is the Atari Falcon.
I migrated from an Amiga 500 to an XT-based PC with CGA graphics and no sound card. I had no idea about PCs at the time and was so disappointed playing what games I could play at the time. To me, it wasn't until I had a 486-based system with SVGA and a sound card (probably a ProAudio Spectrum if I remember right) that I had a system that equaled or surpassed my beloved Amiga 500.
I'll admit Chris, you brought back those terrible XT memories. LOL!!!!
One thing I did do with that XT was install a 'borrowed' copy of Windows 3.0. Did it actually work on the XT? Yes. Was it useful at all? No. It took like 15 or 20 minutes just to load. It did start me down the path of learning more about PCs and eventually getting into the IT industry (and I fooled people into thinking I knew what I was talking about for almost 30 years).
haha thanks for sharing your memories. I think it shows just how good the Amiga (and other 16 bit micros) actually were. They did everything, at a price most homes could afford.
Pinball Fantasies was even great with the PC Speaker! Really enjoyed this comparison - made me realise that I didn't make a mistake going straight to PC after the 8 bit era. It's also meant my search for an A1200 can take a bit of a back burner until I find a bargain!
The A1200s let downs really are just the ram, and a faster CPU would have been nice. And the first thing we all did to our A500s was add RAM so no change there. Of course this was when ram was very expensive so there is that. What PC did you jump to after the 8 bit era out of interest?
I can tempt you...;)
@@005AGIMA actually not, the A1200 was a very obsolete architecture you could not do anything about. The Paula was very outdated and SB16 did a circles around it, the 386DX could beat even 030 accelerated A1200, Amiga is based on planar graphics architecture, a big no go for 3d fist person shooters at playable pace.
So, I would tell you that you made the right decision. The Gunship 2000 has much more details in PC version, trees and telephone poles, just to name a few. And shading is also much better. Then you should have tried sims like B-17, totally different game on PC.
And in the moment you loaded up Wolf3d you already started to forgetting Amiga, and after the Doom (well, in small window, but still).... what is Amiga?
Its funny that Amiga has such a lemmings followers, it was not the best computer of its era, even the Atari ST was better computer (at least for the money, computing power and possibilities), but honestly all other systems surpassed Amiga in 1987 when the first "real" Amiga came out.
Great comparison video mate, was surprised how bad the framerate was on the PC.
Space clouds 🤣.
Oooh, the frontier intro gave me goosebumps, not heard that in years.
Don't care how choppy it is, I still love it.
Space cloud! Sounds like a title for a really crap game or horror movie.
As a teenager during the 386/486 we would swap & upgrade parts at school. I had a similar situation to you going for midi to Adlib to SB16. Monitors weren't swapped, cards were, but going from an 1084S to SVGA I also had that wow and I never gave that sexy eye to the Amiga again........
But like a first love I still think of the Amiga occasionally.
Yeah don't get me wrong, the eventual jump to PC was good, but not so much the used 386 lol. Then again....X-Wing :)
May I ask how much RAM did you have on your PC, and what was the clock speed of the CPU please? It must have been pretty low spec for it to be struggling like that with GS2000, I would have thought, I'm surprised that the A1200 with no Fast RAM was smoother (my dad thankfully took the advice of the sales assistant when we bought our A1200 in 1994 and added a RAM board with either 2 megs or 4). Mind you, I was looking at early 1990s adverts for computers a while back and the default RAM seemed to be 2mb, which I think was probably a bit deceptive on the part of the retailers because I get the impression that one needed a fair bit more to be running the latest software 'properly' and making good use of the 486. I think the PC beeper actually does a decent job of the intro tunes for PoP and Frontier, they don't sound too bad. The sound card is obviously much better than beeps, especially on GS2000, but I honestly prefer Paula. The PC soundcards obviously had a lot of sophisticated instrumental sounds and I like it in its own way, but they still didn't sound as good as the Amiga to me. Frontier looks better on the PC, more detail and it had texture maps, I think our 4 meg A1200 probably ran it at a relatively similar speed to your 386 but who knows, it was so long ago. I think we were just pleased that it was much faster than on the A500! I remember if I ever cocked up at launch from a planet and got half a dozen police after me in their Cobras, it would slow down to a real crawl :) Lol just heard you remembering 'nebula' is the correct word for 'space cloud' :) Regarding the CPU of the A1200, I think even twice the clock speed would have been good enough while being a fair bit cheaper than an '030 and with 2 megs of Fast RAM then a lot of the games released in 1993-95 would have performed as well as a customer would expect of their new machine.
Wow thanks for the detailed post. This 386DX used has 4MB Ram and was specifically to try and match the Amstrad PC2386DX/65 that I had as my first PC. It's hard to find details, but I believe that CPU was around 20Mhz max on the Amstrad. So we basically matched the performance of Doom to how I know it was. The PC used in the test in this video actually has a Turbo button that doubles the speed, and hence the performance, but this was all about my first PC. No other. The way these games play certainly matches my memories :)
I'm suprised with GS2K and Frontier - how it was choppy on 386DX. Very nice comparison. I'd love to see more games. Part 2 maybe?
This comparison was very specific as mentioned. Sadly outside of these games I experienced back in the day, the comparison kind of falls apart. There is a part 2 video where I discuss the operating systems and First Person Shooters, however the current intention is to keep that video unlisted, as it will be linked to a magazine article in the future. Stay tuned.
new studio!! :) and mad video skills in place! :) glad to see you finally tried to correct the wrong turn back in the days! Jokes aside! Good episode! And as a bonus I have now seen the gameplay of elite for the first time ever! The early c2p routines was not the best :)
Haha no it's the same room I always use. Just had to use the coffee table this time. Somewhere there's a clip where I'm laying behind the camera screaming "I can't feel my legs!" As I had to kneel down to shoot all of this lol.
The 030 is equivelent to a 386 not the 020...Commodore cost cutting at it's finest and only 14Mhz to boot. The 486 the matches 040 and the pentium the 68060. In the end the memory saving decison of using planar graphics to save RAM instead of chunky graphics proved to be a disadvantage in the graphics department once memory became cheaper and costs came down. However the Amiga was doing things in 1985 to 1990 that PC's could only dream about, but CBM's mistake same as with the c64 was instead of investing in R&D to improve products they did mostly unchanged hardware for 10 year stints and milked it for every penny. The PC is modular and had millions pumped in to R&D, don't like the graphics or sound?? swap them out for better cards. The amiga was mostly stuck with what you had unless you had a big box model (which was too expensive for the mainstream).
In retrospect 1992, when the A1200 was launched, looks like a pivotal year in the computer industry. It saw the debut of the last of the wedge machines targeted at the home user including the A1200 itself, the Atari Falcon and Acorn A3020. By this stage it was clear the home market was being cannibalised by fourth gen consoles at the bottom end and increasingly powerful, increasingly affordable PCs at the top end. The A1200 was reasonably competitive in 92-93 but it wasn't a compelling proposition as shown by falling sales, and Commodore's strategy / product roadmap was just all over the place by this stage.
Great points by yourself and Jon here and all valid. As I've mentioned to others, when I did jump to PC, it wasn't long before I added a SNES to the house, and later a Jaguar. PC gaming at that point just lacked.... Something. The Amiga, in its time, just did both jobs well, as did it's competitors. To this day I find I need a PC, and a consol. And it all comes down to the fact that consoles are not modular, which means the developers know what hardware to target, rather than aim to be compatible with a near infinite number of configurations.
@@005AGIMA whoa whoa whoa! IBM compat gaming lacked something? Am I hearing this right? Around 1993/1994?
Great video!
My path unfortunately never included an Amiga (as much as I drooled over the one my friend had). I grew up in rural Australia so Amigas were DEFINITELY few and far between!!!
I went from a Tandy CoCo, to a C64, and then to a 386/DX33 with a 40Mb disk. So of course going from the 64 to a PC was an EPIC jump, especially once I added a CD-ROM and SB Pro to the mix later on.
One thing I'm interested to know - how does Elite II perform once the accellerator is back in the Amiga - does it become more playable? Both the PC and Amiga versions seemed just as choppy as each other to me, I'm wondering if the 030 upgrade brings the Amiga up above the PC for this one?
I may do a follow up showing Frontier on the 030 but I actually did the same flight path only last night, using the 030, and it's smooth as silk. However, it should be noted that this 386dx I'm using for the comparison is set to run as close as possible to my original amstrad from back in the day. However, if it press the turbo button, it too can run faster and smoother.
@@005AGIMA wasnt the Amstrad 386SX?
lovely video mate i cant to get this one up and running i found in the bin im pretty sure its a 386
but ye i sold my amiga to fund pc i remember having alone in the dark on it and was blown away by it
sold the pc to fund a ps1 lol
swopped ps1 for a other pc ha ha
ive got back into old pcs after finding 2 old ones in a skip im currently building an xp machine i wasnt to play games like tex murphy midtown madness and the from back in the day
frontier is an amazing game much better sound on amiga though
3 finger salute ha ha love it mate
Mate really keen to see you get those PC's up and running. Good luck dude.
@@005AGIMA one will be up next week i have made a couple of upgrades to the p4 one
ive bought a new graphics card and that and generally made the whole system better
Sounds like you really wanted an Atari Falcon :) Shame the games industry (and most other people) ignored it...
Well that is actually a very fair comment. But then I'd again have to restart my games library from scratch.
I had a 386DX-33 and ET4000AX equipped PC in 1992. A fast VGA framebuffer is important.
We need to get you some Amiga tinted glasses so look you can look back at everything this way ;)
Haha I'd wear them for sure 😁
I had an A1200 from 92 to 94 and the game that sold me on the Amiga was Microprose Grand Prix.
Why did I walk to the PC in 94? Doom… Doom… Doom.
That and the ongoing financial collapse of Commodore. It was abundantly clear Doom was not coming to Amiga and that the Amiga was on a shallow dive so I made the switch to a 486SX 25 and booted Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. Never looked back, if I’m honest, especially after the release of Grand Prix 2. I still play all these games today… more than any Amiga game if I’m honest.
It was the OS side that I missed the Amiga; Windows 3.11 was no match for Workbench 3 and it wasn’t until Windows 95 arrived that that particular gripe was assuaged. Utility wise the PC was superior on all fronts… a million businesses couldn’t be wrong.
Perhaps most important though was that after a year of PC ownership I had enough knowledge of the platform to make me an employable asset to a few companies. It even enabled me to set up my own business in 99 which is still going.
Oddly it was around the early noughties that I began buying up old Amigas (and other platforms) from the Freeads.
I’ve never strayed far from my old platforms but the PC is the one I’ve used daily since 94.
I honestly can’t say I missed the A1200 beyond Workbench and never regretted moving to PC when I did. Still play old PC games rather than Amiga ones and if I’m honest I actually use them for Final Writer, Final Copy II and OctaMED. If I do play a game then the A500 mini is more than adequate to the task. It can even play Doom I believe.
Yep a very fair comment. It's a shame as the A1200 is very capable of running FPSs, and this was proved in 1995 by several titles. Sadly, too little too late. I did cover the OS's and FPS's in recording this video, but it was waaaaay too long. So a magazine article on the topic has been submitted ;) ;) :D
@@005AGIMA Should have made it a two part video. 🙂
The other huge coffin nail a year later in 95 was the arrival of video game chic in the form of PlayStation. We’d all seen the videos and read the articles in 94 and knew it was coming. Actually my then job of installing Windows 95 on resident office PCs in 1995 enabled me to buy one on launch day. Halcyon days of tech excess they were… whatever was new I bought.
I think you’d have had to have been extremely invested to have stuck with the Amiga in 95 when the world had so visibly moved on.
I think the A1200 was a good computer of the time but not the great one so many think it today. It’s creators never seemed to quite know what it was for and the community back then seemed more keen to trash talk it than adopt it. So many pieces of software were not compatible magazines ran lists of what didn’t work and AGA promises quickly evaporated. Let’s face it, many of us who’d bought it began to think we’d made a mistake quite early in our ownership.
I honestly think you made the right choice at the right time. Living those A1200 days as I did never really made me love the Amiga as deeply as you A500 owners do. In fact A1200 ownership back then might have lessened your love.
The A1200 was… adequate. If I’m honest for University the PC would have made more sense and if my accident compensation had been a thousand more I might have gone straight to PC and never owned an Amiga. Grand Prix was on PC too after all.
We had slightly different paths in gaming. I went from 82 to 91 on the Speccy range, on tho the Mega Drive then on to a 486 in 93. I used 386s in college in 90/91, and yeah, we did use lab time for games 😂
Roughly and on average the 486 was around twice as fast as the 386 at the same clock speed. Great times indeed back then.
@@david-spliso1928 it's the era of PC gaming that I never left 😂
Yeah oddly once I jumped to the 386dx, I also got a SNES as, well, I needed an actual games machine. That was later swapped for the Atari Jaguar, while still owning the 386. And then I added a 486sx IBM PS2 to the collection. Yep all three at once, with an amstrad notepad nc100 on the side. And oddly, since then, I've found a need to own both PC and console, to this day.
@@005AGIMA Nice. Also ofc there was little point back then for the vast majority of people to get the DX version. Might as well save some money and focus on the clock unless you wanted to do co-proc specific work.
@@005AGIMA Am still smarting from foolishly selling my Jag in 2007. Aw well 🥲
A Sound Blaster was pretty much the first thing I got for my 286.
Yeah it's a must have hey. I only went for a Game Card first as I couldn't afford an SB at the time. Needed a Joystick for GS2000 though, unless you have everything set to "easy".
I "upgraded" from my A500 to a used 386sx, which was less of an upgrade and more of a compatibility effort for Uni work.
The thing I did like about that 386 was that a year later it cost me $40 to swap in a used 486dx board.
Yeah compatibility was the big driver. That and most of the next gen flight Sims were PC only. Oddly, I didn't buy many.
this is a great comparison.. however, I do wonder if like me, most people moved over to the PC (for me it was from an Amiga1200 to a 486 dx2/66 in 1994) in order to take advantage of better productivity software.. MSWord, MSexcel, Lotus 123 Office suite etc.. It wasn't about gaming for me, it was more about applications..
Yep 100% mate. The reasons for the move were really about moving with the times, but sadly within a budget.
@@005AGIMA totally, i sold my A1200, with a 20meg hard drive, extra disk drive, loads of games, extra memory, etc etc.. i can't remember how much i got for it.. but ended up getting a 2/66 486 second hand for £825..(i remember handing over the money, begrudgingly)
As much as Commodore should have gotten AGA out earlier or with more/better features, the A1200 should have shipped with 2MB Fast RAM for the CPU to let it breath! Adding fast ram to an A1200 gives it such a boost. (I personally still believe AGA should have been designed with 4MB Chips Ram in mind even if it shipped with 2 as base config, it should have been expandable by user)
What clock speed has this 386? One thing i want to point out is that adding Fast ram to A1200 makes it 2.3 times faster.
Not sure if the exact clock speed but we tried to match it to the computer I had back in the day. This one has a turbo button which doubles the clock speed but I didn't use it for the comparison for the very reason that this is about my personal journey, and if I would have been happy with an a1200 rather than the PC I ended up with.
Regarding Gunship 2000 not being playable on hd, perhaps if you run amiga without startup sequence onto dos might do the trick
Sound effects & music are consistently better on the Amiga, slight performance gain on pc? its close though, if this was the competition from the PC, the Amiga does itself proud. this demonstrates A1200 was competitive especially with the price/performance advantage the Amiga had. If only Commodore weren't incompetent things could have been different.
I 100% agree Lee. Commodore mismanagement, cheap parts, lack of certain developer support... It was all stacked against the Amiga from here on in. I wish I'd picked up and A1200 when escom were giving them away now though. 🤣
Amiga Rulez! 🙂
Honestly, I think you would've been content with the 1200. For about a year. And then Doom became a thing, PC gaming really took off, and you would've gotten a PC anyway.
The funny thing is, those who did get an a1200 or 4000 back in the day, seem to be the stayers in the amiga community. As in, they kept with the amiga until mid to late 90s. Doom is another topic. The A1200 could have done Doom, as is proved by the existence of...... No.... I'll save that argument for a magazine article 😉
@@005AGIMA You probably missed that discussion in the Discord, but in the Netherlands, Escom had a campaign that basically let you straight swap an 4000 for a DX2-66 PC with monitor. Bringing in a 1200 would've gotten you about halfway there. Would you have been interested in such an offer?
Stick in the 030 make it a fair fight on CPU power.
No . The whole point of this comparison was to see how a new A1200 would have stacked up against a used 386DX similar to the one I purchased in the 90s. Would I have been happy with the 1200 instead?
@@005AGIMA Well that's what I thought, but then you said you upgraded your sound card. So I thought it was era appropriate upgrades also, sorry.
@@daishi5571 I think the most probable upgrade I'd have done would be a RAM expansion. Accelerators weren't as cheap as a Sound Card I don't think? I could be wrong.
@@005AGIMA Getting a second-hand A1200 with 030 would have been cheaper than getting a second-hand 386 with a sound card. Or not?
@@orhunkabakli Actually you may have a point. The SoundCard wasn't cheap, but I'd argue it would have been at least half the cost of an 030 Accelerator at the time. HOWEVER.....A1200's became bargain bin machines. They literally couldn't give them away toward the end (wish I'd have known at the time), and so I could have easily picked up a very cheap one. Not at the time I jumped, no. But a year later perhaps? 2 years later...easily.
extra ram was a must for a 1200 and a hard drive
Agreed
Listening on headphones...NEBULA! Now deaf thanks 😂. Personally I think you should of waiting for a 486DX and kept your A500 a bit longer, thats what I did. Good comparison though apart drom the crap sound from the pc including the soundcard that sounds like a 10 year old is doing the trumpeting with his lips into his hand, they seem very simlar in comparison. I remember Frontier being unplayable on my CD32 due to choppyness, I have a TerribleFire card in it now, look forward to trying Frontier again.
haha yes I should have waited and saved for longer and got a 486DX, but by the time I could afford one, the Pentiums were on the horizon. Arrrggghhhh it never ends lol.
@@005AGIMA I got my CD32 with TerribleFire expansion up and running and can report, Frontier still runs like kack! 😆
annoying how many amiga games didnt use the full screen
I know what you're saying,, and you probably know the reason, but just in case..... It was only Amiga games in pal regions that suffer this. The reason is, Pal is a higher vertical resolution than NTSC... Yes higher. That's good, but sadly what happened is, rather than Devs making use of this higher res, they'd develop games to fit the NTSC regions, rather than making two versions (makes financial sense). So while the games FILL the screen on an NTSC machine, they do not on a PAL machine. It gets more complicated though, as given so many software houses were UK based, the graphics look stretched when viewed full screen in NTSC.
Looking at the specs the 030 is barely different to the 020. Not hugely in stock capability anyway.
I'm no expert but I think it's that it can handle higher clock speeds? The period correct cards are in the 20 to 30 MHz range I think. The one I have now is 42mhz. That makes a massive difference in games like Frontier and Gloom deluxe for example.
@@005AGIMA Well if that's so it makes sense and is well worth it then 👍
I don't understand, you make it aound a simple Amiga 1200 costed more then a 386... Not in my country, not by a longshot
No I didn't say that or mean to say that. The A1200 was cheaper than a NEW PC by a long way. My first PC, as stated, was a "USED" 386, at a comparable price.
The a1200 needed to be released years before if Commodore wanted to remain competitive and with at least 4mbytes of ram
By 92 the very minimum would be a 030 processor, enhanced graphics and sound, cd rom support ,VGA output...
By 95 amiga should use Intel processors instead.
Yes but its mystery is only exceeded by its power.
@005AGIMA and it's power is only exceeded by its mystery.
@@impactsuit9871 "Special treats" from Commodore.
Sorry, but a stock Amiga 1200 was never the “pinnacle” of anything. You need to at least put in some Fast RAM to make the system preform well.
The thing is, you pick the lot of 3d games which never were the Amiga strength
I lived and breathed flight Sims on the Amiga. They absolutely were it's strength. And that was on the a500.
Hang on, further to my other reply, I showed 2 2d games and 2 3d games in this video lol. But I also explained why these games were chosen in the video. 😉
@@005AGIMA indeed at the time of a500 PC was way behind Amiga had blitter which if good utilized could give it an extra humpf, but as temp went by people keep upgrading PCs for their work and Amigas were still being used vanilla as they were first bought, they could no longer stand a chance
@@005AGIMA the marketing/management of commodore was so bad that had we had an option of +1mb of fast ram in A1200 it would make it twice as fast. Had it been that the case it would have had a better chance with this 386dx :)
Nebula!
🤣🤣🤣
zx spectrum sound quality lol
🤣🤣🤣
@@005AGIMA how fast was the 386 clocked it didn't look any faster than the Amiga did it. Lol
You should test with Geoff grammonds F1 gp superb game of the day ran at a very playable and smooth for the time 12fps Amiga 1200 with fast ram