Murdered only by Commodores management. If you know the history you know i am right. Saying a single game coming out on the PC and killing and Entire Amiga range by Commodore is just nonsense. Look up the history for yourself and take videos like this with a grain of salt as UA-camrs today will make any video with a clickbait name just to get that money rolling in.
Most systems gets murdered at some point, but a console or a gaming computer ”dying” doesn’t matter. It only matters to the people who ran the companies at that time but not to us. The only thing that matters is how the Amiga lived. Because it was close to the Mega Drive in power but it was so easy to copy games. The Amiga was my first gaming system in 1991 and the day i got it i already had +100 games, including tons of 80’s arcade ports so i got familiar with gaming history right away, and it still has so many exclusives worth playing.
I'm one of those programmers that had written their own Wolfenstein clones on the PC and tried to make it work on the Amiga. The PC used mode X. This allowed you to write to every 4th pixel. So you needed 4 rendering passes to render a full frame. The advantage beyond "chunky" mode is the you could page in four time as much video memory. This allowed for double buffering where you draw to an off screen buffer and when you're done, you tell the video card to use the new frame and it switches in one go avoiding the tearing effect. You could do triple buffering where you flip during vertical sync. So one frame is on screen, the second is waiting to be displayed during vsync and the third is being rendered into. Back to drawing every 4th pixel. You either rendered 4 times or you rendered to normal RAM and then did a memory copy four times. The 4x render was actually faster because you could just store offsets for the next pixel/pass and draw vertically for most textures. IOW, you only needed to track horizontal offsets. You could draw a vertical line of pixels from a wall texture with zero slowdown. So you could eliminate a lot of overhead with mode X, but not all of it. My idea was that the mode X paging wasn't a thing on the Amiga. So maybe I can do pixel conversions in the same amout of time as the mode X overhead on the PC. Both would have overhead, but different kinds and maybe they would even out. I could even use the blitter to help. And it kinda worked. But I ran into a bigger problem. The 68k cpu was too slow even for the main rendering, nevermind any overhead despite 286 used for wolf 3d being less mhz in many cases. It should have been more than fast enough. The problem? Memory speed. Amiga has two types of RAM. Chipset and fast RAM. Chipset RAM is what's used for video RAM and can be accessed by various chips like the blitter chip as well as the CPU. Fast RAM is cpu only. A500 only has chipset RAM. And it is crazy slow when accessed by CPU. And that killed any further attempts. I had timed it compared to a pc and it was staggering the difference. It's been too long, so I don't have the numbers anymore. You really did need at least a 68020 with fast ram. Anything else was futile. As for the demos shown on the A500, that's really impressive. I'd be really interested in what kind of techniques they used. One idea I had back then was to use something like anisotropic filtering to completely bypass the per pixel rendering phase. But I lost interest. Wonder if it's something like tha used in the demo. Anyways, those were fun times.
Thanks for your interesting story. It is great to hear some people actually tried to make it work. One of the most important things about PC's was the relative ease to swap and upgrade hardware. You could technically also upgrade your Amiga, but this wasn't as commonly done, as the people that bought them generally bought it as a cheap option that was one and done. A bit like the later gaming consoles, albeit with a lot more customization. As someone with very little programming experience, reading about the buffering techniques and realizing this was what all those things in the options menu's of most high tech games were about, is certainly an eye opener.
Thanks for sharing. I had (and still own) and Amega 1000 from way back in 1986. It was a great computer, and a major upgrade to my TRS-80 with only 16kb of ram. Finally I could program with what I thought was no limitations...
I was a game dev. I started on the Atari Jaguar that has the 68000 as well. It's impressive you figured out how to do "ray casting" back then. At least year before the internet. For me, I would have had to go on CompuServe and find people like John Carmack, Ken Silverman, etc., for help 😛 Had to work out most things by our selves. If you were lucky you'd have a smart person to bounce ideas of off.
I was an Authorized Amiga service technician from 1990 to 1994 and managed a service department at an old-style brick and mortar computer store at the time. This video is very much spot-on. One thing missing, though, is that components for the Amiga were so much less available compared to the x86 machines that were starting to flood the market. I used to socket and replace Agnus, Gary, Paula and other chips all of the time. However, it just wasn't cost effective compared to the availability of just throwing a new sound card or even motherboard into an x86 machine when needed.
Yes the a500 was good but lacked expansion slots and installing harddrives had some issues (worst case you have to boot on a floppy > hdd). When I connected to the internet in -94 the newer Amigas were expensive niche computers.
@@anders630 Agreed. The A500 especially suffered from this, as the expansion slot on the side meant that you were adding peripherals, not expansions - because if you slapped something on the side like a Bodega Bay hard drive enclosure, it had to have a pass-through to add anything else. There were a few things that could be done in the actual computer case and the bottom panel, but that was mostly limited to CPU accelerator upgrades and the different memory types like Fast and Chip RAM.
I owned an Amiga 500 but eventually switched to a PC. It wasn't because of Wolfenstein, though. With the new VGA cards and SoundBlaster, the PC simply started to offer more and better games that I wanted to play. Even so, I'll always have a warm place in my heart for the Amiga. So many great memories.
I bought the kool-aide of the Amiga 4000 and only then realized what junk it was compared to the PC offerings which were significantly more powerful and cheaper. I quickly sold it before the bankruptcy so fortunately got most of the money recouped, quickly bought a 486dx2-66 box with an S3 graphics card that could do 1280x1024 @ 72 Hz and never looked back.
My friend was like you - he changed from Amiga 500 to PC but the main reason he had done that was because he saw future in it (and was apparently right)... The Commodore Amiga was going into self-destructive corner. With expensive part replacement, build into keyboard parts of the PC... I think they would need to spend a lot of money on converting this computer into something more like PC... with good operating system. They wouldn't be that competitive as the Amiga would need to be expensive. They realized they will not be able to do it and therefore kill it. I almost understand this situation.
Amiga is my favorite computer of all. Learned assembler on it, made a game-engine; uploaded a beta, same day C= went bankrupt. Sad day. Still have the Amiga4000/40.
I wish I still had mine. It's still the most expensive computer I've ever owned. But I started travelling overseas and one time when I came back the battery had bled its acid blood all over the motherboard. )-:
Never knew anyone who owned an Amiga here in the United States on the Midwest. C64’s were very common, but still have never seen an Amiga, grew up in the late 80’s and 90’d as a kid.
It depends on how you look at it. Though Wolfenstein did indeed demonstrate how far behind Amiga was lagging at the time, it was Doom that put the final nail in the coffin. I remember it so well, when i finally saw Doom on a 486, and coming from the c64 and Amiga era, and spending time plying games like Pinball Dreams and F29 Retaliator, seeing Doom for the first time was unbelievable, my brain couldn't comprehend it. We all knew that the Amiga was toast after that. I bought a 68060 a few years later, and even though i could play full 3D space games like Doom, games like Quake on the PC just knocked everything else out of the water. And the 68060 alone cost the same as a full Pentium Gaming PC at the time.
Kinda agree on that. There were already many flight sims that showed pc's superior computing power. Then in short time period came games like Wing Commander, X-Com, W3D and Doom that showed that even basic PC is far superior than A500. Even when you thought that maybe A1200 has some sense price wise it was already time for Quake and at least when 3DFX Voodoo came out. Boy that was absolutely the time when miggy just didn't make any kinda sense to have. All in all early 90's was insane progress for PC tech on all technical fronts. Cpu, sound and graphics performance wise. Imo only thing that could've maybe kept miggy alive for bit longer if they'd hop into affordable cd multimedia era, but they missed that too completely.
I bet that was magical times. At 7 years old having an Amiga back then... yea that was for sure cool. While you were doing that I was on my C64 sneaking on the phoneline I ran calling into BBS's on a 300 Baud modem I bought on my C64 while in High School. A College A&M student gave me pointers when he'd come home from school showing me on his Amiga's, then I'd go try and emulate on my C64. He was the only one who knew what I was doing. It was a strange time and yet so magical in my difunctional world. Some of my best memories and I had no idea I was learning valuable knowledge for my future.
I had two Amigas as a kid in my childhood. I had my mom's ex-partner's A600 when he upgraded to A1200 and then the A1200 when he upgraded to a newer powerful PC with Windows 95 on. The funny thing was, was that I also got all of his games when I got them because he collected quite a lot of Amiga games, so I had games like Pinball Fantasies, Pinball Dreams, Trolls, Superfrog, Secret of Monkey Island, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge, Wiz 'n' Liz, Alien Breed, Alien Breed Tower Assault and others.
Funny, in 1992 I was building and customizing my first gaming computer. Cyrix 486. With a diamond video card. I had no problem running Wolfenstein 3d. What memories.
Chunky mode graphics are NOT called chunky because the pixels look "chunky"! (I mean, all pixels could be called "chunky" at those resolutions!) It's called chunky mode because each pixel is represented by a single "chunk" of memory (e.g. a single byte) that can be addressed and modified in one go. This is compared to Amiga/Atari bitplane graphics where the values that make up a single pixel's appearance are spread over multiple memory locations, and intertwined with values from neighbouring pixels within individual bytes of memory. In a bitplane graphics mode, to plot a single pixel you'd have to read in bytes from multiple planes set the bits you you need and write those modified bytes back out to their respective bitplanes. In a chunky graphics mode, you just write that pixel's single byte and you're done. (When plotting larger blocks of bitplane pixels you can forgo some or all of the reads, but you're still left having to write to multiple bytes for each pixel.) Combine this with faster memory bandwidth and CPU on a PC, and a bunch of clever 256-color shading techniques, and this results in a huge performance increase comparing PC chunky to Amiga planar graphics.
13h mode in vga is still plannar under the hood but it has a simple extra that does the magic: the hardware is using the first 2 bits of the memory address to select the bit plane and the rest for the position, but without having to access any registers. all vga was missing was a simple transparent colour and i would have dominated much before doom. but what can you do.... i believe fast memory access was the thing that our amigas lacked the most for games like doom, in order to have good performance.
I wonder what was the reason behind splitting bits of a single pixel between different memory locations ("planes"). I remember trying to work with EGA memory directly back in the day, it was also "planar" (4 planes in 16 bit modes, which were meat and potatoes of EGA), what a pain it was.
@@Booruvcheek i can think of few reasons: first, most crt controllers, from home computers in the past down to the pc vga, were just a superset of the motorola 6845 controller, which worked with bitplanes. Second, for ega and before, not much video memory, for later, of course compatibility. pc would have died fast without the extensive compatibility that it had through the years.
I had an Amiga 500 all the way back in 1990 and, having upgraded to a 1200, abandoned the Amiga all together for a PC in 1993. The Amiga will always live in my heart as the most exciting personal computer and games, ever. There is nothing like playing Defender of the Crown, Wings, Pinball Dreams, Lemmings, Gods, etc etc for the very first time. I remember playing Zoom and that music sample just blowing my mind. Love the Amiga so much and it makes me said that Apple survived and the Amiga didn't.
@@tarnetskygge Well. Steve Jobs would have been the worst person in the world, and for sure he knew zero about the deep technicalities on the stuff he was selling to you... But he was a bussiness wizard and a ruthless visionary. He was the one who brought the UNIX magic to the Mac (again, not as programing it himself, but he brought the required talent and assets to the company to make it possible) and it have been paying them well since then.
@@neatnateable No. Steve Jobs once visited the Amiga team on a "fishing" trip, way back in 1983, even before Amiga was a commodore property, supposedly he made himself at home and was rather obnoxious, and called the - then under development- machine "overengineered. too much hardware". Not much else interaction.
@@christosstamos2785 Interesting. Thanks for the history lesson. It sounds like they both used the PowerPC architecture for awhile though. Is that right?
Yeah, if they would have invested money in changing the architecture it might have turned the tide. The management spent money on luxury goods instead.
They certainly had the rabid gamer fanbase to keep buying their products. But businesses were where the real money was. IBM PCs had convinced every workplace to buy them and not long after that, every education institution.
I went from Atari 2600 to the Commodore64 with 5.25" disk drive and never looked back till I got my first 486/DX66. A friend had Wolfenstein 3d on their PC before I got mine and I didn't stop playing till I finished it. I had DOOM to enjoy when I got my PC. What a crazy ride. At 65 I game like crazy - don't watch TV or engage with social media and don't see stopping till I die or we get EMP'd to the stone age.
I remember we were playing in the classroom. Do you remember the serial link to connect 2 PC on Doom ? The main improvement was the first 32 bit CPUs and also the VGA 256 colors mode
Amen to this. Games are life. All of my memories are tied to what game I was playing at the time. I can still recall the sensory overload and feeling of being completely overwhelmed when I first played DOOM. DOOM 2 still feels like a big new game to me and I remember the LONG wait for Quake to come out. It was mind blowing going from a 486sx25 to a Pentium 133. I will NEVER stop gaming.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think “chunky” refers to the fact that pixel colour bits are adjacent to each other in memory, instead of the memory being divided up into planes. The Amiga CD32 had special hardware for emulating “chunky” so that you could write graphics like you would for a PC.
Correct but the CD32 was apparently still pretty poor at it. One of our Amiga friends bought one believing that was going to be true but was very disappointed and quickly bought a PlayStation.
Yep, it's called chunky mode because each pixel on screen is represented by a single "chunk" of memory -- e.g. an individual byte, instead of spread out over multiple memory locations and mixed in with other pixels' data as in a bitplane graphics mode.
Amiga died because PC flooded the market with cheap clones so everyone started developing games for it. That's what happened to Android vs BlackBerry Symbian Palm OS Windows mobile and even iOS. You need to achieve critical mass for network effect.
Yeah, he fact that you NEEDED a bunch of hardware to be able to do 10% that DOS did with 3D graphics was not helping their case. The Amiga has a really good place in my heart
I was an early adopter with the Amiga, picked my A1000 in Nov, 1985. Grabbed an A2000 as they came out. Designed & fabricated my own custom boards for both systems. Had a toaster & D-TV setups. So to say I was all in with Amiga is a bit of an understatement. But once I saw Wolfenstein & Wing Commander with no Amiga ports in sight, I knew it was game over for Amiga. Early 1993, I packed up all my Amiga equipment & sold it all to a dealer that was willing to buy it for a fair price, I got about $3000 for everything if memory serves. Took that $ and built myself a 386DX\40, 8mb RAM, 512K VGA Card, Sound Blaster & 250MB IDE Hard drive hooked up to a 17 VGA ViewSonic. Seeing Wing Commander running on a PC that I had built for a buddy really drove the point home to me. Amiga was dead, it just didn't know it yet. I got out just in time, while my equipment still had a lot of value.
@@mattperson7293 which was 2 years after it came out on the PC. And it only ran in 32 (16?) colors, not 256, unless there was an AGA version (don't recall). It ran OK on an A500 with an AdSpeed (14.3MHz 68000 accelerator).
@@SeeJayPlayGames The CD32 version was 256 colours. I remember if you had more RAM on your regular Amiga it would play a few more animations, like the joystick and hand would animate with our controls. That was neat.
And here is the irony... you would probably get double of that money of you sold it now... because the retro scene regarding the Amiga is extremely alive and they are willing to pay A LOT for original hardware these days...
@@mattperson7293 yeah true but the A4000's IDE adapter didn't support CD-ROM drives, sadly. I guess it didn't support ATAPI? Anyway, I never had a CD drive on an Amiga. This lack of hardware innovation is really what stymied the whole platform, and CBM did NOT care. The one company that actually NEEDED to care, did not. I hope Irving Gould is burning in hell, and Mehdi Ali joins him soon. edit: P.S. fun fact, Mehdi Ali does NOT have a Wikipedia entry. And I hope it stays that way. IMHO, that's a metric of whether or not you've made a mark on the world.
Commodore killed the Amiga, by not investing enough R&D into it. The A500 was way ahead of its time, and the original hardware was from 1985, but then nothing happened for 7 years, and only then the A1200 was released in 1992 with very modest upgrades. Originally they wanted an AAA chipset with a chunky graphics mode, but then eventually we got the AGA chipset instead.
Imagine they would have done a (chunky) 16bit HighColor mode for the next Amiga after the 500er. Could have been possible. And maybe with some real 3D support like the first Voodoo card. (But Voodoo hat later the same problems like Comodore with the Amiga. And Nvidia, well, they still get it)
we can of course blame bad management but lets be real here. Even with the inventive engineers at Commodore and a decent runway to make an ideal new Amiga. It was doomed. The PC was such a juggernaut it was always going to be the gateway to computing with its hooks in business, prices dropping due to economies of scale. Nothing could have competed with it in the long run. At best we could have had another few years of great new Amiga games using more hardware and hard drive space etc. I say this as someone that adored my Amiga's. One possible future was for the Amiga to fully embrace the PC, become a PC but keep the name and have some kind of extra plugin card that gave it something more. Perhaps more easily hooking up your PC to TV's.
@@ClayMann Consoles have their place, even that the PC has more of everything ( at higher costs.) At at least in the 90ties a well designed system should have performed better than a modular PC. There was a chance with some clever customs chips to get ahead.
I ran my A2000 until the late 90s because I was doing professional video work with a video toaster setup and a PC couldn't touch the Amiga for video work. I had a friend who was an art director at ABC television and one time I went to visit him and saw a room loaded with Amigas! He told me not even the macintosh could touch the Amiga for TV graphics and that ABC was using Amigas for everything. He actually gave me this cool director's chair that Commodore had given the ABC art department because they bought so many Amigas. It was beige canvas and on the front of the backrest it had the bouncing ball and on the back it said, "Only Amiga makes it possible!" I still have it somewhere in my attic. I need to dig it out.
Wing Commander should've been the serious wake-up call in 1990, but that would've required a company leadership with the faintest of ideas of how to run a business.
Well, if you had an 030, Wing Commander looked, played, and sounded better on the Amiga than the PC. Bu *only* if you had an 030 and up. My A2000 was stock when I first got Frontier and WC, and then I got a GVP combo card. Like night and day.
@@CantankerousDave True, and only took me 30 years to afford that A4000... :) (That said, I did play it through multiple times on an A1200 with a cheap 68020 accelerator, and it was great!)
Wing Command that game I couldn’t complete due to an asteroid bug. I kept getting killed by invisible Asteroids. Put me off the series for years. Aside loved Jimmy Whites and Flashback. And Overdrive.
I agree. I lived through this period and I'd say Wolfenstein was more a symptom than the cause. The real downfall of the Amiga was simply that the PC got VGA graphics and sound cards in the early 90's which made it a much cheaper option for the same or better quality with a massive userbase built in. It was just a matter of time after that.
Grind is an insane achievement. To run smoothly on an A1200, and 10-12fps on a 1MB A500, is just mind blowing. The Amiga was obviously on its way out in the early 90's, but if Grind had come out then, it would have been one hell of a swansong.
@@valenrn8657yes you could see it as a primitive and fast upscaling method. SNES wolfenstein used mode 7 to upscale the game instead (and BSP rendering because SNES' 65C02 based chip was too slow for games like wolfenstein). Amiga blitter makes upscaling even easier, faster, and better looking than how its done on the genesis. Don't know why Carmack never experimented with it, I guess the Amiga just sold poorly in the early 90s and there was no incentive to make a wolfenstein port for it.
@@aboriginalmang The worse part is that he toyed with an Apple II rather than an Amiga when he was coming up. Guess Amigas just sold poorly in the US and most opted for a PC or Mac.
I guess the engine needed to change too much for bitplane based systems, so he really never considered to port it. Upscaling is sort of cheating anyway.
I started with an Amiga 1000 in 1986. Sold it to a friend and got an Amiga 2000 at the PX while stationed in Berlin, GE. I eventually added a 68030 accelerator card to it and 5MB of RAM (yes, you could add odd MB of memory). I also got a "flicker fixer" for running in high res. I finally added a huge full height Toshiba 1GB hard drive. Ultimately, I bought some C-Net software and ran Utter Chaos BBS on it for a number of years before the WWW became a thing. I didn't get my first PC until the late 90's when I got a Pentium 166 machine.
A LOT of US military guys had Amigas when I was in from the late 80s to the early 90s. My setup was a lot like your 2000: I started with a stock machine, slapped in an A2630 accelerator with some RAM and got a hard drive up and running. I had stock graphics though. When I was stationed in Turkey we played the living hell out of Stunt Car Racer…
Seeing Wolenstein running buttery smooth on a pc was jaw dropping when looking at the other standard PC games of the time - it was pure voodoo. When John Carmack said that Wolf wasn't a reality on an Amiga, you'd be crazy to question him...all this time later and Grind may well be the result of another Carmack style coder which is exciting. Some of the moves Carmack pulled during his time are legendary 😁 Thanks MVG!
Considering that Grind, a game with graphics quality akin to Doom, was running with acceptable performance on what is essentially an equivalent to a 7Mhz Intel 286, leads me to believe that programmer is even more skilled than Carmack.
grind is nothing short of amazing work and i hope it continues on by more people once they have a final release but i think even if we had the grind of today matched with the wolf3d of old, we could hold our heads up and say we have something similar but wolf3d still kicks us in the face when it comes to framerate. without those chunky modes being paired with planar as an option, even if the C= management werent full morons we still would fall far behind in the 3d world.
@@yancgc5098 We have far more knowledge and programming tools today than we did back then. People today should have the capability of writing far better code than back in the day. It doesn't mean they're more skilled. It's so much easier to develop for old systems today than when those were current systems.
Carmack did not want to bother with Amiga 500, and even Amiga 1200 that came out later that year (1992) was not much faster. Overall id was going for newer and better games, as hardware was advancing each year they did not bother to optimize much.
All the people that tried to emulate or copy Doom at the time didn't understood what really made id software games great. Sure the technical aspect was insane, but it is the absolute dedication to every aspect of the game as a whole experience of equal quality. Art, levels, music, gameplay everything should feels great and run great. The whole experience of doom is absolutely timeless. Sure you can mod it or refresh it but at it's core you can still launch the original doom and get hooked for hours 30 years later the gameplay is still solid and fun.
I still recall the first time I saw Wolfenstein, and had this sudden sense of doom for my A500. I got a few more years of Lemmings out of it, but soon moved to a 486 PC and never looked back.
Wolfenstein 3D made me buy a Soundblaster, which is really another thing that led to the Amiga's demise. Finally the PC had good sound with sampling as a cheap upgrade, which previously was the Amiga's strength (even the Commodore 64 had better sound than the PC's beeper).
You missed a lot of fun and great times, if you stopped using Amigas with the A500. Ofcourse the PC gaming had its great times, too, when Unreal, Diablo 2 and Starcraft appeared, all running on the rock solid NT4 operating system without any crashes.
I was there at the commodore escom meeting when they literally drove the final mail into amiga's coffin. That was a very sad day because it was very plain to everybody in attendance that the party was over. Feel free to keep telling these stories man - I think the Amiga was the last computer with any kind of soul.
In hindsight I still cannot really understand why Escom bought the Amiga brand in the first place. Escom was a retailer also selling IBM PCs. In 1995 they sold a PC with a 486 DX/2 CPU for 1700 DM (or 870 €). This machine can run Doom perfectly and also the majority of the PC games released in 1994 and 1995. Anyway Escom spent 13 Mio. DM for the Amiga brand. Escom could have known that is hardly possible to develop a home computer architecture which has the similar performance at a lower price. Not to mention is had to backwards compatible in order to run old Amiga software. Escom went backrupt themselves in early 1996, because of some more bad investments.
@@dabbasw31 You know, at the end of the day? ESCOM didn't seem to give a rat's ass about "Amiga - the computer". They appeared to want the name, the brand - and that was about it. A tragic tale of the wasted potential of a magical machine :(
@@Darkuni In 1995/1996 Escom's Amiga Technologies was developing the Amiga Walker, which was supposed to contain a Motorola 68030/40 MHz CPU, 2 to 4 MB of RAM and a CD-ROM drive. It never came to the public because Escom went bankrupt before. So we will never know how successful the Amiga Walker would have become. Personally I really do not think it would have been successful: On the personal computer market Windows 95 was released and Pentium CPUs had become affordable for private users. And on the game machine market it would have had to compete against the new kid on the block: the Sony PlayStation.
It's weird to think that the feature I remember most from Amiga games is the fluidity and high fraame-rates - especially things like Flashback, Pinball Dreams, Skidmarks. Really speaks to how well the developers played to the strengths the platform had.
The Amiga absolutely _butchered_ the PC when it came to 2D game performance, as did consoles. Unfortunately, those 2D chips were mostly useless when it came to drawing 3D graphics.
I went from an Oric-1 to an Atari 520ST - the Amigas and Spectrums were always beyond my financial reach at the time(or my parents). I was around 19 years old when I got my Atari. I tried to convince myself I was more into programming than gaming back then, whilst all the time watching the games being released for the Amiga with envious eyes. Eventually I built my own 286 PC - from then on, and whenever I could, I would upgrade for England. Been a gamer all my adult life since and still am at 58 years old. 😁
My grandfather, a WWII vet had this game when we were kids. His friend helped him setup a PC and gave him this game in the early 90s. It was the only video game he ever played but it'll always be a classic memory. He probably got me into PC gaming without knowing it.
A few corrections: Alien Breed 3D 2 did not support graphics cards (RTG) The fastest Doom port on an Amiga is DoomAttack Chunky-to-planar routines got extremely fast, and took under 20% of processing power for Doom, and less for more complex titles. This is noticeable, but not detrimental. The worst thing for 3D games on an Amiga was Motorola's abysmal performance on FPU operations.
Doom doesn't use floating-point math. It runs on 386SX and 486SX machines that have no floating-point unit. All arithmetic is either integer or fixed-point. Quake, id Software's next game, does use floating-point math, which nailed Cyrix's coffin. Cyrix, too, had notoriously slow floating-point math.
What Carmack said about Doom was correct. It plays about as well on a 68040 as it does on a fast 386. *Maybe* a little better, but still far worse than an equally-clocked 486.
@@shmehfleh3115 If that's true, then Doom ran faster on a 486 PC than on the NeXT machines it was developed on. That's pretty shocking. Why would they use a development platform slower than the target?
@@argvminusone look up a video called "The Tools that Built Doom"... IIRC it was the ease of development of the tools that steered them that way. Imagine having to develop a level editor on DOS or Windows 3.
@@argvminusone Carmack was a Next fanboy at the time (NextStep vs MSDos). But still saw that he would only get commercial success by shipping PC games.
I loved my Amiga 4000/40 very much. Especially the Amiga OS and Workbench 3.1. I found it groundbreaking that devices could be used in scripts with real names instead of letters like C, D, etc., as on the PC. But most of all, I loved Maxon Word, Maxon Cinema 4D, and PageStream, which allowed for truly professional desktop publishing even back then. I was heartbroken when Maxon discontinued both versions for the Amiga. I also loved the amazing SoundTracker software; I still think Amiga music from that era is iconic. My big hope back then was the porting of AmigaOS to RISC CPUs, and I so wanted that to give the Amiga the boost it needed to survive and thrive. But unfortunately, things went differently. 😢 Now I am even more disappointed that I sold my Amiga in the early 2000s. Thankfully, I made a backup of my hard drives using a serial interface and Diabolo Backup, so with WinUAE, I can occasionally indulge in a bit of nostalgia.
@@dycedargselderbrother5353 yes amazing demo. My first build was a 486 SX-25MHz I replaced the crystal on the mainboard to 40MHz and had a small container with crushed icecubes sitting on the CPU to make it stable and remember running that demo on it for a test. Fun weird things to try out.
Back in the last 1990's I called one one of the Amiga engineers in the US from the UK. He told me the sorry tale behind the Amiga 600 which was supposed to be a cheap C64 replacement until Germany said "We're not selling a computer without a hard drive" and management capitulated. I cannot remember the engineer's name - alas. Really nice guy. He worked on the C128 and I was using a C28D at the time! But the topic of conversation was the demise of Commodore and there was only one name of the guy's lips. Ali. It was Ali all the way. He was useless. I was assured Ali was not deliberately trying to destroy Commodore. He was just utterly clueless. It wasn't Doom, or any other game. It was Ali. That's what I was told, most firmly.
Well imo that was spot on. Around '92 there really shouldn't have been any computers in market without some form of internal mass storage media. I honestly think Commodore might have survived bit longer if they'd implemented internal drives sooner as 3.5" floppy wasn't good solution anymore at that time. Well they had options, but they were insanely priced.
Something I found really interesting when watching some talk on a podcast with Casey Muratori and another guy from Microsoft -- they were discussing software back in the day -- was just how much power John Carmack had over the life and death of certain players in the industry. His work was so profound and amazing that if he chose your platform to put his software on or used your libraries, it was basically golden and in some cases could become the standard and if you didn't... well, you were almost certainly destined for death.
Many of my friends didn't move to PC until Doom was a thing. But I think it's fair to say that Wolfenstein 3D paved the way and is a good marker in time of when the PC started to pull away from the Amiga as a gaming platform. Many thanks for the planar/chunky explanation. Interesting info!
An excellent video, but I do have to point out that although the Amiga couldn't rival Wolfenstein 3D style games in '92, most PCs couldn't either. I first played W3D on a 286 machine at a friends house in '93ish and the FPS was pretty damn choppy. Not that we saw it as such, as we were very used to low FPS on games back then. But really it performed more like that of a (high end) Amiga of the day. It was a far cry from the silky smooth future-pc footage featured in this video. The sound on that old PC also comprised of scratchy "blip blop" PC speaker noises. As for Doom...bleh forget it. No way that old 286 would have coped. You probably needed a chunky 386 for that at least. Sure, it cost thousands to crank up an Amiga to compete with PCs on brute force processor speed, but a fully kitted out 486 IBM PC that could provide the ideal experience on W3D would have cost something like $3000. So although we were aware of the Amiga's shortcomings, I don't recall there being an immediate panic in my Amiga owning circle. It was assumed the next generation of Amiga machines would rise to dominate the 3D game market. Alas a naive assumption, as thanks to Commodore idiocy there was no next generation.
Wolf3D put a big ol' nail into the Amiga's coffin, at least it did for me. But what killed it was Doom. Once I saw Doom, I never looked at the Amiga the same again. It was just software wizardry to me, how something like that was even possible was unfathomable at the time. Add to that how the audio also leaps and bounds ahead with sampled audio for essentially everything and I just couldn't go back. Amiga will always have a special place for me, since it was such a glorious time - but ID Software and John Carmack murdered it.
Doom made me want a PC as a poor kid growing up in Alabama.. My upper-class friend introduced me to Doom, and I didn't wanna leave his house after that.. His parents made me leave..😂😂😂😂 Doom shaped a generation and made me a fan for life..
Wolfenstein didn't impress me, but Doom did. After Doom, the amount of 3D games coming out just passed the Amiga by, so I moved from my CD32 to a PS1 and only looked back at the Amiga through 2D rose-tinted glasses.
@@aikonlatigid I bought the PS1 for Ridge Racer (Revolution), Wipeout and Toshinden. And later again for Resident Evil and Gran Turismo aaand WipeoutXL, this time NTSC
My brother had an Amiga. At the time, I think I had a pc with no sound (for some reason, I was ok with that). I had C64 before that, so I knew that the Amiga was a formidable upgrade. So my brother showed me his new Amiga (with sound) and he loaded in a golf game. I was amazed! You could hear the ball striking through the leaves, if you wacked the ball into the trees. He had a football game with just X’s and O’s, but that was amazing as well. But soon after, computers were progressing in technology faster and faster. He was always getting the latest and greatest, and I could never keep up with him. Yet, I will alway remember that Amiga.
There's an old quote from someone at Commodore back in the day. From my memory… "Commodore isn't a computer company. It's a company that makes widgets."… Okay, I just did some research. The quote comes from an article published in the Philadelphia Inquirer in May of 1994. The person quoted is former Commodore engineer, Brian Jackson. The actual quote: "Commodore was a widgets company. They wanted anything we could hack together real quick from existing technology and sell a zillion of them like we did with the Commodore 64. And with that mentality, you can never really support customers." Basically, yes, Wolfenstein was one of the many deaths by a thousand cuts. The management also didn't understand what business they were in.
"General Motors is not in the business of making cars. It is in the business of making money." (Thomas Murphy, GM CEO from 1974-1980.) Of course that attitude ultimately leads to bankruptcy.
@@jal051 When Jack Tramel bought MOS, he brought on some smart people like Chuck Peddle and later Bil Herd. The engineers could see where the industry was going, but the management wasn’t interested. Irving Gould just wanted use of the private jet.
The original Wolfenstein and Doom ran in Mode X or unchained\planar mode back in those days. This allowed you to have access to the full 256Kb of VGA memory so that you could enable triple buffering and flicker free display of image frames. It was a little trickier to program for due to the fact that you had to enable the required planes to write to specific pixels, but the results were far superior to Mode 13h. I remember writing 3D demos using Mode X and a mix of assembly language and C using the very same Borland C++ compiler you showed in your video!
The use of Mode X also allowed drawing up to four identical pixels in one write. This is why the frame rate of Wolf3D can jump on a slow computer when you walk close to walls, as the duplicated pixel columns of zoomed-in textures are faster to draw.
Yes, the mode was ideal for such games and applications. I had written an emulator in Turbopascal. The nice thing is that the screen memory is linear, so that no address jumps occur. Scrolling was also easy. The only thing that was a bit annoying was the lack of a transparent color. Then you could have made very nice scrolling effects without requiring a lot of computing time.
I do remember seeing WS3D around that time and it looked indeed Jaw Dropping non the less I do find your explanation way too simplistic. It's never just one reason. Not everyone goes nuts over FPS Games. It was a combiation of factors that doomed the Amiga. Among those were: - SNES & Genesis being vastly superior at producing the type of Games that used to be the natural Forte of the Amiga up to that point - VGA Graphics, Soundblaster and Harddrives that became the standard for PC - The general reputation of the Amiga of being a Play Computer - Games like Wolfenstein & Doom, but also the Monkey Island 2 Debacle and Wing Commander 2 who felt technically way more advanced or resulted in constant Disc Change Mayhem on the Amiga unless you were among the few owning an Amiga 2000 - Having the same system at home that you use at Work etc
amiga was my dream machine and i loved every minute of it. i couldn't believe that most computer stores had PC games and their 16 colors falling off the shelves while Amiga got little to no shelf space. I didn't abandon ship till the announcement of Mechwarrior 2 and that it wouldn't be supported on the Amiga, being a long time Battletech fan that was when i had to give up my baby and buy my first 386 PC. still have all my commodores in storage, from the 64, 128 to the amiga 500. great memories...
Mechwarrior 2... on the Amiga... that was even a question? Seriously? I loved that game, play it to this day, but... I can only imagine what you'd need on an Amiga for it to even be possible. 68040 minimum, I'd say. Which makes the market that could even hope to run the game RIDICULOUSLY limited. Amigas were rare enough, try to find one with an 040. I had one, but... it was very niche. And very "riche." Nope, no software publisher is going to go for that. That's one of the biggest problems with the Amiga market. Developers didn't (couldn't) develop for the high end, they had to develop for the lowest common denominator, because your average Amiga user was some poor sod in Europe who had a bone-stock A500+/600/1200. Too much work for too few sales otherwise. Only one game I can think of (Elite II: Frontier) really begs for a 68030 (and chugs on a 68000). Mostly devs only went with stuff that ran WELL on the low end, and likely wouldn't have even attempted a port of something like Mechwarrior 2. Besides, it would be 30 disks or something (the installed portion on PC is just shy of 30MB) and you'd simply HAVE to tediously install it to a hard drive disk by disk because (almost) no one had a CD-ROM drive, either. And you'd have to rework the CD audio tracks as MOD files. And probably give any FMV cutscenes a miss. TBH it would be quite an interesting backport, and something I'd like to see some brilliant coders attempt, 30 years after it's relevant to do so. Sorry, not to diss the Amiga (as I've said, I've owned two), but it just didn't have the CPU "umph" for 3D games that the PC did. And certainly, not commonly. Mechwarrior 2 was super demanding to run well on PC; especially at 1024x768. I set DOSBox to 300,000 cycles/msec for that, and it's just about fast enough. That's the equivalent of maybe a 450MHz Pentium II/III. Keep in mind that mid-speed (100-133? MHz) Pentiums were the latest thing back in 1995 when it launched. More realistically, people ran it at 640x480 or even 320x200 (slow Pentiums/486s) in order to get smooth performance.
@@cattysplat Amigas didn't even typically use graphics cards at all, unless you had a big-box Amiga, and even then it was an OPTION rather than the standard. Bone-stock (or mildly upgraded, maybe RAM and/or mild accelerator) Amiga 500's and 1200's were the most common, so that's what developers targeted. I started out with an A500 with 1MB of RAM and a floppy drive. I soon got some upgrades. For quite a while (well, a year or two, which was a while in tech terms back then), my configuration was an A500 with a 1MB Agnus, 4.5MB of total RAM (with a fully populated BaseBoard) an ICD AdSpeed (14.32MHz 68000) and an 80MB SCSI hard drive. And that was one of the faster machines of the people I knew. Only when people started getting A3000s and A1200s did I start to trail the pack. Then I got an A4000/040. Hell, most games didn't even have hard disk support back in the day. I guess it's more feasible NOW, with WHDLoad, but how long did that take to come out? The "lowest common denominator" is often what holds back a platform as a whole.
For me… I had the Amiga 500 in 1990 and loved it, great times. I’d had a sinclair ZX Spectrum 128 +2A before that, around 87. I upgraded to Amiga 1200 in 94? But … it was actually the Playstation that took me away from the Amiga (for games) as it did 3D well and was mind blowing back then. PCs were still super expensive and I kept the Amiga for my computing needs (basic video, paint and music sequencing) until finally building my first PC in 1998 with a 3DFX voodoo banshee and Pentium II 450 and that was it… game over. Seeing Unreal and using the Unreal engine showed me the way… and of course the games were light years beyond what Amiga or Consoles could do. For me Wolfenstein didn’t come into it. It was mostly other games, Unreal engine and music sequencers with AUDIO (cubase VST at first).
I remember my brother showing me his Amiga 500 in 1987. Coming from the ZX Spectrum, I was blown away by Deluxe Paint and the fact that every pixel could be a different colour. Fast forward to 1989 and I couldn't understand why one of my Uni classmates bought a PC to play games. Fast forward again to 1992 or so - playing Geoff Crammond's F1 GP on PC at my friend's house and comparing it to the Amiga version. I then knew the Amiga was dead. But I still bought an A1200 in 1993 as I couldn't afford a PC.
I still remember learning about mode 13 as a kid, and using inline assembly in turbo pascal to do fast 2d and then 3d graphics. We even had feuds between different groups of kids who tried to one-up each other.
Releasing the source code because he felt bad about killing an entire platform sounds like a very John Carmack thing to do. He's always been good to gamers.
Management killed it off, and the fact it was stupidly expensive for hires monitors and not being able to have serious apps like msword etc. I held out for ages then eventually my A1200 ran as a pirate bbs while I got into a 386 for serious work. It was hard to go back after using a hires monitor that didn’t have a shimmering interlace at those resolutions. Glad I enjoyed those years of c64 and Amigas though, they were ahead of the curve for years with their sound, gfx and wimp environment.
Nah, it was Medhi Ali and Irving Gould who killed the Amiga and ultimately killed Commodore. But it was also Motorola ending the 68000 range and days of custom chips which contributed. By then it was hard to have a competitive edge unless you were way ahead of off the shelf chips. The A600 was the first big mistake. The A1200 should have had a fast 030, fast ram and HDD as standard. The sound chip should have been 16-bit by then, the A3000 nearly came with a 16-bit sound chip + DSP. If that was in the AGA machines they'd have been more competitive.
Correct. I have never heard such garbage as a single PC game being responsible for the death of the Amiga. Unfortunately this is just another video out there with a clickbait title to get them $$$ coming in.
@@BoomBox02then you must have lived on the moon until recently. It's a widespread myth in the retrogaming community that Doom killed the Amiga, of course I never believed it, but this doesn't mean that it's not a common conviction.
@@DioBrando-qr6ye A widespread myth is just that, a Myth, especially if its coming from a group of retro gamers that seem to not know how Commodore was run and truly believe a single game caused the death of the Amiga. They sound as credible as the Fat Earthers arguments for believing the Earth is flat. I prefer facts, and the fact is that Commodore management are solely responsible for the death of the Amiga. Do some research and start with watching the Deathbed Vigil video by Dave Haynie who was an engineer at Commodore. There are also many other videos available online by engineers that worked at Commodore and of all the arguments they make for the demise of the Amiga, Wolfenstein and Doom are not one of them.
I agree. It's clickbait, which is a shame because it's an otherwise interesting and well made video. It's also a shame to see people apparently downvoting OP's comment instead of providing any insightful rebuts. I was surprised to have to scroll this far down to find a comment with this many upvotes. I can only assume it took some effort to dislike it this far down.
Fun Fact doom and the resulting craze of shooters did not only kill the Amiga and ST but also several well beloved genres like the Point and Click adventure games, even the 2d RPGs ran into serious problems after Doom for several years. But the problem with commodore and Atari were bigger. Commodore simply was sleeping on the aging graphics architecture and basically technologically fell wayside while the PC architecture from VGA onwards surpassed it. Atari tried with the tom and jerry chipsets from the jaguar but they were too late to the table. But in the end the shift from the Motorola 680000 arch to PPC while Intel was getting better really was the ultimate death nail for many of the alternative computer manufacturers those who did not do a shift earlier to risc basically fell wayside and went bankrupt or were bought and even Apple who was able to move over to PPC almost did not survive this. Even if Commodore would have survived doom they would not have had the resources to move over to the PPC or Intel with their Arch, and probably after that the rise of 3d accelerators would have killed it just like Atari and 3d0 fell wayside when the PSX came along and 1-2 years later the 3dfx GPU on the PC side!
I had an A3000 in my bedroom in the 90's. My Dad found a huge cardboard box of an assortment of Amiga loose floppy disks at a car boot sale here in England. He brought it home and let me have at it. There were games both pirated and official, documents, software, and a bunch of Japanese pornographic hentai visual novels. They weren't really visual novels but more just slideshows but needless to say it was certainly eye opening for me at age 12! lol I only told Dad a couple of years ago lol
liar your dad did not bring dAT box home so dont even try it troll trying to get a thumbs i can see dat and 12 nim rods gave you a thumb what a joke bye for now noob
One thing many people don't know is that Doom was written on a NeXT - a unix-based computer - and was ported to several other versions of unix, I think largely due to the involvement of a friend of mine at ID, David Taylor (the "ddt" in the secret codes), who ported it to IRIX mainly because I had an SGI Onyx Reality Engine (a 6' tall black and purple monolith) at Origin Games to try it out on (it was amazing on the SGI, at 1280x1024 res). The irony is that a lot of us Austin unix nuts really liked the Amiga, which was the nearest thing to a full unix host many could afford (except for lacking inter-process memory protection), and would have loved to have seen this run well on Amigas.
Both the Amiga and its main nemesis at the time: the Atari St failed because of relying on outdated technology. While both had the same capabilities and did things a lot better than PCs at the time and had great games. It was ID Software who managed to turn the PC around by releasing the first PC side scroller with Commander Keen and killed it with the one-two punch of both Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. ID Software didn’t just kill the Amiga and ST, they murdered them.
At school we sometimes had days where everyone would bring their home computers in and we kinda spend after school having a sort of... copy party. I managed to go to a couple, and it was entirely Amigas and STs at the first one. Second one I went to, someone had bought their PC in, and was showing off Wing Commander and Wolfenstein 3D. Everyone wanted a go. PCs were SO EXPENSIVE at the time though, like over £1000 instead of the £300-400 a decent Amiga or ST package would have been. Some of us, myself included did actually get A1200s, and enjoyed playing Gloom and Alien Breed 3D but we knew... we knew the writing was on the wall. Took me and my bro until '96 to scrape together enough funds to build our own PC. A P133 put together I think with some new parts, some scrounged off upgrading friends. It was Quake that made us do it. We then spent the next few years having regular LAN sessions where we played quake 1, 2 & 3 until the sun came up at weekends. Great times. I loved my Amigas, but I loved those early PC days too.
@@papalaz4444244 it wasn't really massive, a regular non-tower style 386 desktop. Guy bought it in a few times as I remember playing it in two of the different computer lab rooms. Which were mostly stocked with BBC micros and Acorn Archimedes. It was only the year I was leaving they replaced the old BBCs with PCs. Which were not really powerful enough to play Doom. We tried it. Could only run it if you shrank the window down to postage stamp size.
@@papalaz4444244I went to many LAN parties and yes we carried those things. That is why sometimes LAN parties lasted the whole weekend. I had a blast, they were so much fun.
1992 was the year that changed everything. PCs were expensive but by early 1993 Commodore themselves were selling a 486sx-25, 4Mb, 52Mb, S-VGA (1Mb) monitor, with Win3.1 and DOS for about £1000 (inc. VAT). To bring an A1200 up to that sort of level, £200 for a HDD, £150 for the RAM, £250 for a SVGA resolution monitor
I would have to agree with the analysis. I recall myself seeing the end of the line for the amiga when I saw Wolfenstein, first on magazine covers, and then later on a friends PC. It was worlds apart from what we could muster at that time. Then of course later it was Doom and X-Wing which solidified my impression and a little after that I bought my first 486DX2 just in time for X-Com and TIE-Fighter and that was that.
@@dahistrix Not really. I played X-com on my PC and my Amiga fan friend got it for his A500. He said he that in later levels he literally had time to go for sauna and get back to Amiga and still waited like 5mins for one turn to complete. It took like max 10secs per turn on our 486 back then 😀 Amiga's just were way too underpowered to keep up. Not to mention insanely expensive mass storage exanpsions that almost no one got.
I have to agree, once I saw wolf3d running on a PC at an expo in 92 I immediately sold my 1MB expanded Commodore Amiga 500 and got an ESCOM 486DX33 VLB PC. Little did I know at the time both companies would cross paths to their ultimate demise.
Never had an Amiga (played on c64 and by 1990 on my dad's 386) but back in the days my friends had a600 and a500+....Ultima Underworld and Wing Commander where the first games that really impressed them. The average amiga user in my country had a 68000 Amiga with 1 meg ram no hard drive or accelerator ....
Got my Amiga 600 as a hand-me-down thanks to growing up poor. The loading screens for Walker were the only proper 3D graphics I saw (that weren't in movies) until I saved up enough money for a PlayStation. I literally felt Crash Bandicoot blowing my mind.
I'm 36, and don't exactly have any nostalgia for games like Doom and Wolfenstein 3D, and I've never really played those older games much. But Grind [14:23] looks pretty cool. I'd rather play it than most of the garbage that comes out today, and it's great that people are making old games for old systems like that. I love that, plays into the idea that limitations sparked a lot more creativity than the homogeneously powerful systems today. Now there's a few different game engines or systems to play on, but they're all basically the same. Grind showcases that style still carries a lot more weight than just throwing all the graphical horsepower available at a game.
Small correction at 4:25 "chunky" refers to the fact that all bits that make up a pixel are stored right next to each other in memory as a single "chunk" as opposed to multiple bitplanes that are scattered across memory.
Yes basically you could write a high-colour pixel in a single write (or maybe two adjacent writes) whereas on the Amiga who had to write to each bitplane. The more colour depth the more bitplanes.
while correct, 13h mode is still plannar. it's just that the bitplane is selected automatically by the vga hardware when you r/w in a memory address, without having to access any registers.
@@giornikitop5373 I'm sure they were using Mode X. At least I did back then. Plus, in this mode, you can write up to 4 pixels at once, if they are the same color and adjusted.
@@RustedCroaker the 4 pixels at once is only done through the latches and no, they don;t need to be the same colour or anything. but in order to use them, you have to 1: access registers by i/o , very slow in anything above 286, and 2: the latches can only be loaded by a vram read operation. it was common practice for mode-x games to use most of the vram (all 256k are available at mode-x/y) for the screen and the last part of it for sprites and stuff, so they could very fast copy vram-to-vram using the latches. Original Doom used the normal mode 13h, only later custom versions used mode-x, once the source was publiished, or was that quake?
Holy poop! You're so old! In 1992 I was just starting junior high. I was also a nerd. And I too was slowly transitioning away from console games and into computer games around this time. I dont have much nostalgia for the 90's but I loved the huge transition computers made at the time. Games in particular got REALLY good in a short time period.
I think we're about the same age, I had an Atari ST which was my main (well, only) computer from 1985, upgrading from my ZX Spectrum 48K, until 1992, when I got a Mac LC for university. I loved my ST, it was a 520STFM and I remember upgrading the floppy drive from the single-sided drive it came with, to a double-sided drive. The new drive didn't fit properly in the case so I had to cut a hole for the drive button, and I had the drive propped up inside the case via a combination of lego, glue, and sellotape. Hey, it worked! I played a ton of great games on that machine but if I'm being honest - I was always kind of jealous of the Amiga, and always wanted one. I got my wish in the late 90s when I was working, and a local computer store was selling second hand A600s and A1200s. I bought an A1200 and pretty much played Elite II Frontier on it. I moved from the UK to the US in 2000, and for whatever reason the A1200 didn't make the move with me. I honestly don't know what happened to it, and I wish I still had it. Love your videos as always!
It was Wing Commander that killed Amiga for me, and the ever-expanding library of PC games. Got the first Amiga 1000 & played ArcticFox for literally days. Later, a 2000HD. But I got my first PC just to play Wing Commander - I had the choice of a Next Cube or a Zenith lugable with a blue/white *HORRIBLE* LCD screen for the school I was joining around 1990, and picked the Zenith because I could hook it up to an external monitor & play color wing commander. Shoulda chose the cube... Anyway, about a year or two later, oddly enough, I sold that Zenith to Jerry Pournelle's ( RIP ) nephew or something. Small world, although I wish I could have met the man.
The worst part was how Commodore was pumping out a500 with small improvements. Commodore never spent any real money in development the amiga platform. They could have had AGA chipset in 88/89 and AAA in 91/92 acording to david haynie. Commodore had no idea what they had been given, and their coca cola ceo ruined the huge head start they had.
@@ExtremeWreck thats wrong. Amiga was created by a small team, in a company owned by jay miner. Jay had problems getting things running, and took a loan from Jack from Ataria for 50k, the deal was he was supposed to be paid back before x time, or he would own the amiga. THe last day Commodore bought the company from Jay and he paied back Atari...
I still have an A4000 and a 1260 in a tower case. With the 68060, the 1200 ran really fast - for the time. And it was Commodore himself who condemned the Amiga to die. Similar to Apple at the time, they did not want to grant licenses to other manufacturers or transfer parts of the operating system to open source. And ultimately that was what made Bill Gates' Dos computers superior: every manufacturer could build a PC for it and every game developer could come up with new things with every advance. If the Amiga-OS, which was completely superior at the time, had been continuously developed and maintained, we would have been spared these stupid Dos defects (long loading times, hardly any multitasking, updates that take forever, etc.). All life time that we were allowed to waste because Dos/Windows won over AmigaOs and MacOs. It's sad that Commodore was so stupid back then...
Great video as always! However, there's a common misconception that Wolf 3D/Doom runs in Mode 13h - both run in a custom VGA mode nicknamed Mode Y, which is actually still planar! I recommend reading Fabian Sanglard's Game Engine Black Books on Wolf 3D and Doom for a good, in-depth explanation on both engines and their quirks!
In 1992 in Poland... we still had to wait about 2 years before being able to get Commodore C64 :D Only after Balcerowicz reforms we started to catch up with the rest of the world. While now Poland is quite strong, in the 90s Poles were introduced to: Pegazus (a Famicom clone), C64, Amiga 600, IBM-compatible PC's and Sony Playstation at once. In 1996, when I saw Super Mario Bros for the first time, I hoped one day can create fictional worlds in a technology like that. Yes, I was a child back then. But it doesn't change the fact I had no idea that technology was outdated. Like, by decades.
Nonsense. People had access to those devices years before you described. In other words if a device was available in Germany, you could get it in Poland. The only issue was money.
Growing up in 90s Poland was surely an experience lol. I remember having Amiga CD32 and going to my next door neighbour to play Fighting Force on his Playstation. Me and my brother were over the moon when our dad told us that we'll be getting a PSX next day. Good old days my friend... 😀
In the 90s, the performance of PCs almost doubled every year, and under DOS, almost all software was rendered without constraints. A very smart but long-outdated design couldn't really compete with this.
I look at his statement as a segment of time because it was true up to when users had access to broadband. The broadband everything exploded in the sense you could exchange programming books, techniques, and code faster than ever. Even with dial up it was possible, but it was still rendering for the future programmers. So I think the line of John's statement ends around 2001-2003. If someone did it after that it was because there was more people on computers, learning harder, better, and stronger. If someone did do it before that time, it is fair to say his statement was false. I dont actually know which is true, but thats my opinion on where the line should be. Being able to download/even purchase digital coding books changed the games for good. More people needed less effort to be able to get fantastic at programming, and that is surely a good thing.
I still have fond memories of my own Amiga computers. I had a A600 and A1200 playing games like Pinball Fantasies, Pinball Dreams, Superfrog, Zool 2, SoMI and MI2!
I grew up on Amiga, but was too young to recognize it's demise nor the cause of it. In our household it was Windows 95 and MS Word that killed the Amiga, which I used for school work.
Same thing in my house with the added kick in the pants of Encarta. My parents were dumbfounded that the entire Brittanica set they had bought for my sister at incredible expense could be replaced by some plastic disks.
That's true. I remember trying to transfer homework that I had written on my Amiga to my school 386 PC and giving up. From that point, the Amiga wasn't something I could tell my parents was something used for "homework" anymore as it wasn't compatible with anything else.
I never owned an Amiga at the time but still really sad what happened with it, there was such an amazing community around it. That and the Acorn Archimedes were two of my favorite computers of that era, had PC's ever since but do miss that era for all the innovation and people trying new things.
So Interesting you mention the acorn archimedes, on a other gaming channel I watch called retro bird that computer is an in joke about no one knowing what it is
Never had an Amiga, but grew up using a C128 (mostly in C64 mode, as my dad got a few games for it). Learned my first BASIC on there, but graphics was hard to comprehend for me (I wasn't even a teen yet). By the time I was 14, I got my first PC. Way more fun. But I still remember the good old time on my Commodore. My only interaction with an Amiga was with a friend, who had a brother who owned one and we played Turrican 2 on it. Thanks for a nice video with some insights into the world back then.
You know, in 1996 Quake and Duke Nukem 3D were released on PC and on Amiga they still tried to make good Doom clones in 98. The wake up call for Commodore should have been affordable PC SVGA cards in 1990 and cleap Sound Blaster clones. Unfortunately the AGA chipset graphics released in 92 was no match to many SVGA cards built into PCs that hit the market in the same year. In 92 also the affordable Gravis Ultrasound was released for PC, while AGA chipset was still limited to 4 8-bit sound channels.
I recall the sound for AAA chipset was to have a full DSP capabilities but it was killed along with the graphics. Even so, it wouldn't have been any better than the PC wavetable cards that started coming out and probably much less useful since the PC software was significantly more richly developed to the exponential userbase compared to the amiga. It was basically a no-win situation for Commodore as Moore's law allowed chipsets to be more powerful and cheaper. Walled off systems like the Amiga had no chance. Even the Mac was near its death and it had leadership a million times better than Commodore.
@@oldtwinsna8347 The Amiga really had its heyday from 1985 up until 1990, really - sure, there were some good games in the following years, but by 1993 or even 1994, it was clear that its days were sadly numbered.
My friend purchased a 386 PC from Cash Converters for around $350 at the time and I thought it would be utter crap, until we played Wolfenstein and I was blown away by how good it was. After the Amiga 2000HD I purchased an LC475 for about 3.5K. My friends $350 PC made me trade in the LC475 and that was the beginning of the PC era and never looked back since 😁
It wasn't that Wolfenstein 3D killed the Amiga, the fact that even the PC was beginning to overtake the Amiga was actually a sad symptom of Commodore's mismanagement. Commodore's board mostly squandered the Amiga's initial advantage, preferring to milk their existing design instead of listening to the Amiga engineers and continuing to develop the custom chips. Naturally, the stagnating chipset was slowly overtaken by everyone, by the time it dawned on Commodore that they really should iterate their hardware at least a couple of times per decade, they had lost most of the engineers who would have enabled them to. Their old hardware was really old, and their new chips were not particularly impressive due to lack of time, resources and talent, plus the languishing 68k architecture ended up holding them back in bus speed and raw processing speed compared to the rapidly developing x86 hardware. What really killed the Amiga wasn't even anything to do with computers, it was Irving Gould the Chairman of the Board. The horrors of what he did after gaining control of the company are too numerous to list here, but if anything killed Commodore, it was borrowing money from that c**t.
Well, there you have DREAD (or even better, GRIND, now in development) for the AMIGA 500 OCS, vastly superior to the original Wolfenstein from a technical view so i think it was Quake the one (even Quake runs fine enough on a 1200 AGA, 060 >= 75 Mhz config)
Out of curiosity, I played some Amiga FPSes a few years back and it was not a good time. I ran into pretty much all the problems you mentioned: tiny viewports, very blocky level design, etc. Fears' weird perspective warping made me want to throw up after a while. Alien Breed 3D is probably the best of the bunch and even that wasn't particularly good; the GZoom remake, Project Osiris, is ironically the best way to play it now and a whole lot better than the original.
I think MS-DOS is also very bare metal. I never programmed for it, but from all what I've seen it probably was. But I really don't like the way dos handles sound, where all software has to implement support for all sound cards manually. That is a nightmare to maintain, and it pushes the user a lot to know exactly what they have to configure the games in a way that they get sound. But I do miss the midi time, where different computers put different personalities to otherwise the same game. Hearing a known game suddenly somewhere eles whith a very different sound font was an experience that doesn't exist anymore.
My friends that coded for Amiga and PC at that time hit the bare metal on both. It wasn't until a few revisions into Direct3D that people finally started doing PC game and demo type stuff within the OS if I recall correctly.
@@andrewdunbar828 I remember when Amiga went bust and I had to get a job doing PC game development, dumping most of what I learned on the Amiga. I had to learn DirectX 2, which on top of the Windows APIs, I hated at the time.
@@SerBallister I learned to program under the Windows API but X86 assembly language looked so ugly I never learned it. I didn't learn DirectX either. I seem to recall people disliking it at the time but I can't remember when they started liking it. After Doom I actually lost interest in games anyway (-:
Let's be honest here: the biggest issue with the Amiga vs PC was simply the fact that it didn't evolve fast enough & its US audience was tiny. The Amiga relied on British developers whereas most US developers grew up around PCs and game studios such as id Software, Origin & Lucas Arts all developed for PC. The PC already had the 486 CPU on the market well before the A1200 appeared and it TROUNCED the A1200 in raw power so devs knew that the balance would shift. The Amiga A1200 was also not THAT cheap - they went for €700 here (without a monitor!) whereas my father bought our first IBM 386 in early 1993 for €1200 which DID include a monitor. The Amiga was very complete, sure, but it didn't come with a hard drive making games load really really slowly until you spent enough money for all kinds of add-ons until you basically paid more than a PC. The biggest weakness of the PC was the fact it was never designed for games but the raw CPU power made up for that & graphics cards quickly focussed on gaming and a better 2D card could see your FPS in Doom almost double (which surprised me how big a difference it made). Also sound was an issue but the Sound Blaster 8 & 16 also put the PC close to the Amiga even though games needed to use MOD music to match it (Star Control 2 anyone?). In the end, I always felt like the PC was the successor of the Amiga & not its enemy. I remember PC games magazines (often featuring staff that came from dead Amiga magazines such as Stuart Campbell) being quite bitter about the Amiga's death & complaining about how complicated & fiddly PCs were and it's true, but even 30+ years later, the PC is still dominant as a games platform ...
Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM were just one of many things that made Amiga obsolete. Even Amiga 1200 had no HDD by default so games were released on floppies 880 KB ones, while PCs from 1992 already used 1.44 MB diskettes. Games on PC had to be installed to HDD, so they could be compressed on floppies. This meant that PC games could use up to 20 MB of data even before they moved to CD-ROM. This lead to a situation where every game since 1992 had more colors, more content, more audio and even cut-scenes on PC compared to Amiga. AGA was overall a failed attempt at bringing next-gen graphics hardware for the Amiga. It was mostly OCS/ECS with ability to work in up to 8-bit planes instead of just 6. However 8-bit mode was slow on AGA and it had a hard time to match increasingly popular (S)VGA PC clones. It not only lacked sprite scaling and 3D features, but couldn't even do tiled parallax backgrounds like SNES and Sega Genesis could. Amiga had very rough hardware parallax backgrounds, but by splitting bitplanes, resulting in 16 + 16 colors on AGA. Furthermore VGA wasn't just a simple framebuffer (like Atari ST had). It had somewhat working hardware scrolling and could draw 4 pixels by just one byte write. Wolfenstein 3D used this to draw floor and ceiling every frame, while other games used this to quickly fill the polygons. In other words fast 286 + VGA or 386 system were able to surpass Amiga even in 2D, when games were using VGA tricks. However when 486 with SVGA using VLB came it was all over. 486DX2 66 MHz + SVGA VLB can not only replicate every possible Amiga trick in software at much higher FPS, but also can deliver graphics that were impossible on Amiga without 68040. Commodore even failed with CD-ROM revolution, despite releasing CD32 console (which was pretty much Amiga 1200 without keyboard and mouse). There were two big CD-ROM releases back then "7th Guest" and "Myst". Both were a huge success and sold thousands of CD-ROM kits for PCs. These games while ported to many CD-ROM based systems were never released on CD32. On the other hand Amiga community and 3rd party companies that were releasing hardware accelerators for Amiga, kept it alive until 2003-2005, when most community moved to Linux eventually. Amiga was always a "better Macintosh". It could not only virtualize Mac OS, but it would run faster compared to Mac with same CPU. This is why Amiga moved to PPC like Macs. Being able to run Mac OS gave Amiga access to commercial software like Internet Browsers or Office tools. In my country Amiga was used by one of TV stations up to early 2000's for displaying on-screen images and logos. Amiga was a popular tool for CGI in analog TV era. By default it had a genlock, which allowed to overlay image from Amiga on other video signal. Amiga also was a powerhouse for graphics, 3D modeling, rendering and audio productivity software in the 90's.
Now thing I really liked on Amiga was its sound capabilities. But then was it '95 I already had got Creative multimedia bundle with sb16 and cd drive for awhile. I wasn't initially impressed with PC's midi music tracks with that card, effects were nice, but then got game Crusader: No Remore and was awestruck with such good mod music capabilities and sound effects. I think that was the game that made me fully ditch Amiga on all tech fronts. SVGA graphics, pumping techno mod soundtrack etc. all cool tech going on simultaneously. CD32 was insanely expensive here and way too little, too late. Imo Amiga should've implemented HDD and CD upgrades to survive and they should've done it cheap. Quite big downfall was that Workbench was quite limited, but it could've been so much more better with internal mass storage. Many have also said poor memory handling was one of the pitfalls too. Guru meditation was thing indeed.
I believe my brother got a A1200 around 1994 and thus we could only witness its slow death, with a slither of hope from the effort of the remaining dedicated magazines and also games such as Gloom and Breathless. But I only acknowledged that the line was flat and would never bip again after Duke Nukem 3D was pictured on the covers of all the other magazines, labelled as the game that killed Doom - the game the Amiga community was still striving to match. But what a lovable machine it was. I remember being so proud Worms on the Amiga was so much better than the PC and Playstation ports :)
Worms was so good, my friend and I would turn off the round timer so you could take as long as you wanted over your turn, and we'd come up with ridiculous strategies, burrowing under the other guy's worms and stuff. Lemmings was also incredible in two-player mode on the Amiga, sadly I don't think many people played that, it was split-screen, you could be super-devious and come up with ways to send the other guy's lemmings flying into oblivion and then you'd suddenly hear yours going 'ahhhh... ahhhh' and realise he'd been doing the same to yours and now you were screwed :D. I remember one day playing a hundred rounds of that, just ALL day!
Very good video. The only thing missing in my opinion are the latest developments. For example, there is an official Amiga Quake 2 release that runs really well with a 100Mhz 68060. This also applies to the JfDuke client with which you can play Duke Nukem 3D very well. With a fast 68060 and a graphics card, this is also possible in higher resolutions such as 800x600 or even 1280x720. If you even have a PiStorm32 accelerator card with Pi CM4 module in the A1200, then you can even play JfDuke in 1920x1080. I still like to use my A4000 from 1993 with 68060 CPU and graphics card for gaming today.
No offense to the people that like to do that but that just sounds like burning money to me. Spending thousands of dollars on upgrades to play games that some random trash pc you find at ewaste can run 10 times faster is just crazy. I understand not wanting to let go of amigas, I have my own vintage computers I love, but I feel like people need to stop trying to make an amiga be a pc and just let it be an amiga.
Unfortunately I have to agree. Seeing Wolfenstein 3D was the beginning of end of love with Amiga for me. I will never forget going to my weekly software swap to pick up some new pirated software (don't judge me, it was the norm back then in my country) and among all the Amigas, Atari STs, ZX Spectrums, C=64s, someone had PC running Wolfenstein 3D and I said to my buddy to give me a copy of the game for Amiga and that's when he told me "Sorry this one is only on PC"... What? That non-gamer computer??? Amiga will forever have most nostalgic gaming moments in my heart, but soon after I moved on from Amiga never to go back.
I wrote many Amiga demos from 1991 onwards, many of which can be found on here, but you can't beat a chunky screen for these kind of games. Bitplanes are great for some things, but not for stuff like Doom, Wolfenstein etc. However, you also need a much faster processor to write effectively to a chunky screen, which the PC most definitely had. The A1200 ran at 14Mhz and most reasonable PCs were 66Mhz or more. Add also that by default the 68020 couldn't do floating point math and that made coding Doom style games almost impossible. For floating point, you really needed a 68882 co-processor. Later on, games like Gloom used amazingly fast chunky to planer converters, that still required insane power on a machine running at 14Mhz. In fact quite a few scene demos do effects in chunky and then convert the effect back to planer. My own C2P converter used both the blitter and CPU simultaneously to try and be a quick as possible, but you can never beat a screen that's already chunky.
My brother always let met play on his A500. Modern games may not available but all these titles available were so much fun to play. Over and over again, sometimes only for the music 😅 which was ways better than on any PC. Miss these times alot. Thanks for the video ❤️🔥
As much as I love the platform I think realistically the Amiga was outdated and outclassed as a games machine long before Wolfenstein appeared. Not only did it have limitations for 3D games, it also had limitations for certain types of 2D game; consoles of the era all had a tile mode which made 2D scrolling of large maps pretty trivial, whereas on the Amiga you have to do a lot of faffing around to emulate it, and the limited number of hardware sprites further compounds the issue - sure, the blitter is fairly capable, but it struggles to compete against the 80 hardware sprites on the Mega Drive (especially on machines with no FastRAM where bus contention can bring the machine to its knees). Sure, there are a lot of technically impressive games out there, but If you compare pretty much any console game to its Amiga counterpart the results can be painful. All that said, it's still the machine I have the most fondness for.
I have been reading old game magazines and somewhere in 1990-1991 PC was already the main gaming computer. Lots of games were made PC first and later to Amiga. PC took markets kinda fast, because in 1987 PC just started to be somewhat mentioned as gaming computer.
Brings back memories. Moving 0013h to ax and calling int 10h you felt like the king of the world back then. A whooping 64000 pixels to be filled by your imagination.
The Amiga didn't just die, it was *MURDERED*
Ahh, CleanPrinceGaming...
How such an... Unusual person becoming popular.
Murdered only by Commodores management. If you know the history you know i am right. Saying a single game coming out on the PC and killing and Entire Amiga range by Commodore is just nonsense. Look up the history for yourself and take videos like this with a grain of salt as UA-camrs today will make any video with a clickbait name just to get that money rolling in.
What a reference to a dogshit channel
@@MatthewCobalt I miss Tyler. Hope he's good
Most systems gets murdered at some point, but a console or a gaming computer ”dying” doesn’t matter. It only matters to the people who ran the companies at that time but not to us.
The only thing that matters is how the Amiga lived. Because it was close to the Mega Drive in power but it was so easy to copy games.
The Amiga was my first gaming system in 1991 and the day i got it i already had +100 games, including tons of 80’s arcade ports so i got familiar with gaming history right away, and it still has so many exclusives worth playing.
I'm one of those programmers that had written their own Wolfenstein clones on the PC and tried to make it work on the Amiga. The PC used mode X. This allowed you to write to every 4th pixel. So you needed 4 rendering passes to render a full frame. The advantage beyond "chunky" mode is the you could page in four time as much video memory. This allowed for double buffering where you draw to an off screen buffer and when you're done, you tell the video card to use the new frame and it switches in one go avoiding the tearing effect. You could do triple buffering where you flip during vertical sync. So one frame is on screen, the second is waiting to be displayed during vsync and the third is being rendered into.
Back to drawing every 4th pixel. You either rendered 4 times or you rendered to normal RAM and then did a memory copy four times. The 4x render was actually faster because you could just store offsets for the next pixel/pass and draw vertically for most textures. IOW, you only needed to track horizontal offsets. You could draw a vertical line of pixels from a wall texture with zero slowdown.
So you could eliminate a lot of overhead with mode X, but not all of it. My idea was that the mode X paging wasn't a thing on the Amiga. So maybe I can do pixel conversions in the same amout of time as the mode X overhead on the PC. Both would have overhead, but different kinds and maybe they would even out. I could even use the blitter to help. And it kinda worked. But I ran into a bigger problem. The 68k cpu was too slow even for the main rendering, nevermind any overhead despite 286 used for wolf 3d being less mhz in many cases. It should have been more than fast enough. The problem? Memory speed. Amiga has two types of RAM. Chipset and fast RAM. Chipset RAM is what's used for video RAM and can be accessed by various chips like the blitter chip as well as the CPU. Fast RAM is cpu only. A500 only has chipset RAM. And it is crazy slow when accessed by CPU. And that killed any further attempts. I had timed it compared to a pc and it was staggering the difference. It's been too long, so I don't have the numbers anymore.
You really did need at least a 68020 with fast ram. Anything else was futile.
As for the demos shown on the A500, that's really impressive. I'd be really interested in what kind of techniques they used. One idea I had back then was to use something like anisotropic filtering to completely bypass the per pixel rendering phase. But I lost interest. Wonder if it's something like tha used in the demo. Anyways, those were fun times.
Thanks for your interesting story. It is great to hear some people actually tried to make it work. One of the most important things about PC's was the relative ease to swap and upgrade hardware. You could technically also upgrade your Amiga, but this wasn't as commonly done, as the people that bought them generally bought it as a cheap option that was one and done. A bit like the later gaming consoles, albeit with a lot more customization.
As someone with very little programming experience, reading about the buffering techniques and realizing this was what all those things in the options menu's of most high tech games were about, is certainly an eye opener.
Great.. really that's all saw was that the amiss was ahead but slower. Funny enough there best games where what the pc evolved to many years later.
Thanks for sharing. I had (and still own) and Amega 1000 from way back in 1986. It was a great computer, and a major upgrade to my TRS-80 with only 16kb of ram. Finally I could program with what I thought was no limitations...
Highest-quality utoob comment I've seen in two months.
I was a game dev. I started on the Atari Jaguar that has the 68000 as well.
It's impressive you figured out how to do "ray casting" back then.
At least year before the internet.
For me, I would have had to go on CompuServe and find people like John Carmack, Ken Silverman, etc., for help 😛
Had to work out most things by our selves. If you were lucky you'd have a smart person to bounce ideas of off.
I was an Authorized Amiga service technician from 1990 to 1994 and managed a service department at an old-style brick and mortar computer store at the time. This video is very much spot-on. One thing missing, though, is that components for the Amiga were so much less available compared to the x86 machines that were starting to flood the market. I used to socket and replace Agnus, Gary, Paula and other chips all of the time. However, it just wasn't cost effective compared to the availability of just throwing a new sound card or even motherboard into an x86 machine when needed.
Yes the a500 was good but lacked expansion slots and installing harddrives had some issues (worst case you have to boot on a floppy > hdd).
When I connected to the internet in -94 the newer Amigas were expensive niche computers.
@@anders630 Agreed. The A500 especially suffered from this, as the expansion slot on the side meant that you were adding peripherals, not expansions - because if you slapped something on the side like a Bodega Bay hard drive enclosure, it had to have a pass-through to add anything else. There were a few things that could be done in the actual computer case and the bottom panel, but that was mostly limited to CPU accelerator upgrades and the different memory types like Fast and Chip RAM.
No one ever mentions Denise
@@ScandalUK Ha! Good point. Sorry, Denise!
I thought it was bad company management
I owned an Amiga 500 but eventually switched to a PC. It wasn't because of Wolfenstein, though. With the new VGA cards and SoundBlaster, the PC simply started to offer more and better games that I wanted to play. Even so, I'll always have a warm place in my heart for the Amiga. So many great memories.
I bought the kool-aide of the Amiga 4000 and only then realized what junk it was compared to the PC offerings which were significantly more powerful and cheaper. I quickly sold it before the bankruptcy so fortunately got most of the money recouped, quickly bought a 486dx2-66 box with an S3 graphics card that could do 1280x1024 @ 72 Hz and never looked back.
My friend was like you - he changed from Amiga 500 to PC but the main reason he had done that was because he saw future in it (and was apparently right)... The Commodore Amiga was going into self-destructive corner. With expensive part replacement, build into keyboard parts of the PC... I think they would need to spend a lot of money on converting this computer into something more like PC... with good operating system. They wouldn't be that competitive as the Amiga would need to be expensive. They realized they will not be able to do it and therefore kill it. I almost understand this situation.
For me it was not this game that killed my Amiga it happened earlier in my move to PC to play Indy 500 by papyrus
Amiga is my favorite computer of all. Learned assembler on it, made a game-engine; uploaded a beta, same day C= went bankrupt. Sad day.
Still have the Amiga4000/40.
Hey, at least you didn't start a Shopping Mall related B2B software startup 6 months before a pandemic like I did :D. Fate is a cruel mistress.
@@SpentAmbitionDrainrise from the ashes. The best entrepreneur will fall.. multiples times. It's a learning experience..
I wish I still had mine. It's still the most expensive computer I've ever owned. But I started travelling overseas and one time when I came back the battery had bled its acid blood all over the motherboard. )-:
Any chance we can see the game engine?
Never knew anyone who owned an Amiga here in the United States on the Midwest. C64’s were very common, but still have never seen an Amiga, grew up in the late 80’s and 90’d as a kid.
It depends on how you look at it. Though Wolfenstein did indeed demonstrate how far behind Amiga was lagging at the time, it was Doom that put the final nail in the coffin. I remember it so well, when i finally saw Doom on a 486, and coming from the c64 and Amiga era, and spending time plying games like Pinball Dreams and F29 Retaliator, seeing Doom for the first time was unbelievable, my brain couldn't comprehend it. We all knew that the Amiga was toast after that. I bought a 68060 a few years later, and even though i could play full 3D space games like Doom, games like Quake on the PC just knocked everything else out of the water. And the 68060 alone cost the same as a full Pentium Gaming PC at the time.
Kinda agree on that. There were already many flight sims that showed pc's superior computing power. Then in short time period came games like Wing Commander, X-Com, W3D and Doom that showed that even basic PC is far superior than A500. Even when you thought that maybe A1200 has some sense price wise it was already time for Quake and at least when 3DFX Voodoo came out. Boy that was absolutely the time when miggy just didn't make any kinda sense to have. All in all early 90's was insane progress for PC tech on all technical fronts. Cpu, sound and graphics performance wise. Imo only thing that could've maybe kept miggy alive for bit longer if they'd hop into affordable cd multimedia era, but they missed that too completely.
@@jothain well Commodore certainly tried to do the "affordable CD multimedia" thing with the CDTV and CD32, but yeah.
He mentions Doom
@@Hdtk2024 Oh wow, you can also read headlines? Impressive... 🤦♂
@@jothain miggy?
1987, at 7 years old, playing amiga....absolute magical times..
I bet that was magical times. At 7 years old having an Amiga back then... yea that was for sure cool. While you were doing that I was on my C64 sneaking on the phoneline I ran calling into BBS's on a 300 Baud modem I bought on my C64 while in High School. A College A&M student gave me pointers when he'd come home from school showing me on his Amiga's, then I'd go try and emulate on my C64. He was the only one who knew what I was doing. It was a strange time and yet so magical in my difunctional world. Some of my best memories and I had no idea I was learning valuable knowledge for my future.
I had two Amigas as a kid in my childhood. I had my mom's ex-partner's A600 when he upgraded to A1200 and then the A1200 when he upgraded to a newer powerful PC with Windows 95 on. The funny thing was, was that I also got all of his games when I got them because he collected quite a lot of Amiga games, so I had games like Pinball Fantasies, Pinball Dreams, Trolls, Superfrog, Secret of Monkey Island, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge, Wiz 'n' Liz, Alien Breed, Alien Breed Tower Assault and others.
@hxtr-ii2xv you're corny
Funny, in 1992 I was building and customizing my first gaming computer. Cyrix 486. With a diamond video card. I had no problem running Wolfenstein 3d. What memories.
Gave me my glasses. :)
Chunky mode graphics are NOT called chunky because the pixels look "chunky"! (I mean, all pixels could be called "chunky" at those resolutions!) It's called chunky mode because each pixel is represented by a single "chunk" of memory (e.g. a single byte) that can be addressed and modified in one go. This is compared to Amiga/Atari bitplane graphics where the values that make up a single pixel's appearance are spread over multiple memory locations, and intertwined with values from neighbouring pixels within individual bytes of memory. In a bitplane graphics mode, to plot a single pixel you'd have to read in bytes from multiple planes set the bits you you need and write those modified bytes back out to their respective bitplanes. In a chunky graphics mode, you just write that pixel's single byte and you're done. (When plotting larger blocks of bitplane pixels you can forgo some or all of the reads, but you're still left having to write to multiple bytes for each pixel.) Combine this with faster memory bandwidth and CPU on a PC, and a bunch of clever 256-color shading techniques, and this results in a huge performance increase comparing PC chunky to Amiga planar graphics.
13h mode in vga is still plannar under the hood but it has a simple extra that does the magic: the hardware is using the first 2 bits of the memory address to select the bit plane and the rest for the position, but without having to access any registers. all vga was missing was a simple transparent colour and i would have dominated much before doom. but what can you do....
i believe fast memory access was the thing that our amigas lacked the most for games like doom, in order to have good performance.
I wonder what was the reason behind splitting bits of a single pixel between different memory locations ("planes").
I remember trying to work with EGA memory directly back in the day, it was also "planar" (4 planes in 16 bit modes, which were meat and potatoes of EGA), what a pain it was.
@@Booruvcheek i can think of few reasons: first, most crt controllers, from home computers in the past down to the pc vga, were just a superset of the motorola 6845 controller, which worked with bitplanes. Second, for ega and before, not much video memory, for later, of course compatibility. pc would have died fast without the extensive compatibility that it had through the years.
What do things like the NES or Genesis use?
@@liamconverse8950 Sprites and tile playfields, essentially an extension of character based screen modes as used on early home computers.
I had an Amiga 500 all the way back in 1990 and, having upgraded to a 1200, abandoned the Amiga all together for a PC in 1993. The Amiga will always live in my heart as the most exciting personal computer and games, ever. There is nothing like playing Defender of the Crown, Wings, Pinball Dreams, Lemmings, Gods, etc etc for the very first time. I remember playing Zoom and that music sample just blowing my mind. Love the Amiga so much and it makes me said that Apple survived and the Amiga didn't.
It really is a crime that macs still exist but amigas don't, lol
@@tarnetskygge Well. Steve Jobs would have been the worst person in the world, and for sure he knew zero about the deep technicalities on the stuff he was selling to you... But he was a bussiness wizard and a ruthless visionary. He was the one who brought the UNIX magic to the Mac (again, not as programing it himself, but he brought the required talent and assets to the company to make it possible) and it have been paying them well since then.
Was Apple associated with Amiga in some way?
@@neatnateable No. Steve Jobs once visited the Amiga team on a "fishing" trip, way back in 1983, even before Amiga was a commodore property, supposedly he made himself at home and was rather obnoxious, and called the - then under development- machine "overengineered. too much hardware". Not much else interaction.
@@christosstamos2785 Interesting. Thanks for the history lesson. It sounds like they both used the PowerPC architecture for awhile though. Is that right?
Commodore was “doomed” to fail regardless of any software. Management drove this company into the ground.
Yeah, if they would have invested money in changing the architecture it might have turned the tide. The management spent money on luxury goods instead.
sad but true
They certainly had the rabid gamer fanbase to keep buying their products. But businesses were where the real money was. IBM PCs had convinced every workplace to buy them and not long after that, every education institution.
I don't think you can blame management. It was destined to fail no matter what as PC flooded the market.
Management did the same to Atari
I went from Atari 2600 to the Commodore64 with 5.25" disk drive and never looked back till I got my first 486/DX66. A friend had Wolfenstein 3d on their PC before I got mine and I didn't stop playing till I finished it. I had DOOM to enjoy when I got my PC. What a crazy ride. At 65 I game like crazy - don't watch TV or engage with social media and don't see stopping till I die or we get EMP'd to the stone age.
Posting a YT comment is engaging with social media :)
What games are you playing? I've got a discord for mostly older players, if you're interested :)
I remember we were playing in the classroom. Do you remember the serial link to connect 2 PC on Doom ? The main improvement was the first 32 bit CPUs and also the VGA 256 colors mode
@@dunebasher1971Only if he reads the comments, replies to you. Which he probably won’t :)
Amen to this. Games are life. All of my memories are tied to what game I was playing at the time. I can still recall the sensory overload and feeling of being completely overwhelmed when I first played DOOM. DOOM 2 still feels like a big new game to me and I remember the LONG wait for Quake to come out. It was mind blowing going from a 486sx25 to a Pentium 133. I will NEVER stop gaming.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think “chunky” refers to the fact that pixel colour bits are adjacent to each other in memory, instead of the memory being divided up into planes. The Amiga CD32 had special hardware for emulating “chunky” so that you could write graphics like you would for a PC.
yes, this is correct. It has nothing to do with how they look on the screen.
Correct but the CD32 was apparently still pretty poor at it. One of our Amiga friends bought one believing that was going to be true but was very disappointed and quickly bought a PlayStation.
Yep, it's called chunky mode because each pixel on screen is represented by a single "chunk" of memory -- e.g. an individual byte, instead of spread out over multiple memory locations and mixed in with other pixels' data as in a bitplane graphics mode.
Yes. The pixels' bits in the same byte are what made the mode "chunky".
Yes and it was beyond stupid that Commodore never put that chip in the 1200.
Wolfenstein didn't kill the Amiga, Commedore's failure to evolve the Amiga to adapt to the changing landscape did.
There was no saving the amiga or atari in the 90s.
The x86 took over, nothing could stop that nor compete
Exactly! Someone is getting it.
Amiga died because PC flooded the market with cheap clones so everyone started developing games for it. That's what happened to Android vs BlackBerry Symbian Palm OS Windows mobile and even iOS. You need to achieve critical mass for network effect.
Yeah, he fact that you NEEDED a bunch of hardware to be able to do 10% that DOS did with 3D graphics was not helping their case.
The Amiga has a really good place in my heart
Commodore was badly managed then it was corrupt.
I was an early adopter with the Amiga, picked my A1000 in Nov, 1985. Grabbed an A2000 as they came out. Designed & fabricated my own custom boards for both systems. Had a toaster & D-TV setups. So to say I was all in with Amiga is a bit of an understatement.
But once I saw Wolfenstein & Wing Commander with no Amiga ports in sight, I knew it was game over for Amiga. Early 1993, I packed up all my Amiga equipment & sold it all to a dealer that was willing to buy it for a fair price, I got about $3000 for everything if memory serves. Took that $ and built myself a 386DX\40, 8mb RAM, 512K VGA Card, Sound Blaster & 250MB IDE Hard drive hooked up to a 17 VGA ViewSonic.
Seeing Wing Commander running on a PC that I had built for a buddy really drove the point home to me. Amiga was dead, it just didn't know it yet. I got out just in time, while my equipment still had a lot of value.
Wing Commander came to Amiga in 1992 and played pretty well on an A1200.
@@mattperson7293 which was 2 years after it came out on the PC. And it only ran in 32 (16?) colors, not 256, unless there was an AGA version (don't recall). It ran OK on an A500 with an AdSpeed (14.3MHz 68000 accelerator).
@@SeeJayPlayGames The CD32 version was 256 colours.
I remember if you had more RAM on your regular Amiga it would play a few more animations, like the joystick and hand would animate with our controls. That was neat.
And here is the irony... you would probably get double of that money of you sold it now... because the retro scene regarding the Amiga is extremely alive and they are willing to pay A LOT for original hardware these days...
@@mattperson7293 yeah true but the A4000's IDE adapter didn't support CD-ROM drives, sadly. I guess it didn't support ATAPI? Anyway, I never had a CD drive on an Amiga. This lack of hardware innovation is really what stymied the whole platform, and CBM did NOT care. The one company that actually NEEDED to care, did not. I hope Irving Gould is burning in hell, and Mehdi Ali joins him soon.
edit: P.S. fun fact, Mehdi Ali does NOT have a Wikipedia entry. And I hope it stays that way. IMHO, that's a metric of whether or not you've made a mark on the world.
Commodore killed the Amiga, by not investing enough R&D into it.
The A500 was way ahead of its time, and the original hardware was from 1985, but then nothing happened for 7 years, and only then the A1200 was released in 1992 with very modest upgrades. Originally they wanted an AAA chipset with a chunky graphics mode, but then eventually we got the AGA chipset instead.
a1000 was 1985, a500 from 1987
Imagine they would have done a (chunky) 16bit HighColor mode for the next Amiga after the 500er. Could have been possible. And maybe with some real 3D support like the first Voodoo card. (But Voodoo hat later the same problems like Comodore with the Amiga. And Nvidia, well, they still get it)
we can of course blame bad management but lets be real here. Even with the inventive engineers at Commodore and a decent runway to make an ideal new Amiga. It was doomed. The PC was such a juggernaut it was always going to be the gateway to computing with its hooks in business, prices dropping due to economies of scale. Nothing could have competed with it in the long run. At best we could have had another few years of great new Amiga games using more hardware and hard drive space etc. I say this as someone that adored my Amiga's.
One possible future was for the Amiga to fully embrace the PC, become a PC but keep the name and have some kind of extra plugin card that gave it something more. Perhaps more easily hooking up your PC to TV's.
@@ClayMann wise words
@@ClayMann Consoles have their place, even that the PC has more of everything ( at higher costs.) At at least in the 90ties a well designed system should have performed better than a modular PC. There was a chance with some clever customs chips to get ahead.
I ran my A2000 until the late 90s because I was doing professional video work with a video toaster setup and a PC couldn't touch the Amiga for video work. I had a friend who was an art director at ABC television and one time I went to visit him and saw a room loaded with Amigas! He told me not even the macintosh could touch the Amiga for TV graphics and that ABC was using Amigas for everything. He actually gave me this cool director's chair that Commodore had given the ABC art department because they bought so many Amigas. It was beige canvas and on the front of the backrest it had the bouncing ball and on the back it said, "Only Amiga makes it possible!" I still have it somewhere in my attic. I need to dig it out.
Wing Commander should've been the serious wake-up call in 1990, but that would've required a company leadership with the faintest of ideas of how to run a business.
Well, if you had an 030, Wing Commander looked, played, and sounded better on the Amiga than the PC. Bu *only* if you had an 030 and up. My A2000 was stock when I first got Frontier and WC, and then I got a GVP combo card. Like night and day.
@@CantankerousDave True, and only took me 30 years to afford that A4000... :)
(That said, I did play it through multiple times on an A1200 with a cheap 68020 accelerator, and it was great!)
Wing Command that game I couldn’t complete due to an asteroid bug. I kept getting killed by invisible Asteroids. Put me off the series for years.
Aside loved Jimmy Whites and Flashback. And Overdrive.
I agree. I lived through this period and I'd say Wolfenstein was more a symptom than the cause. The real downfall of the Amiga was simply that the PC got VGA graphics and sound cards in the early 90's which made it a much cheaper option for the same or better quality with a massive userbase built in. It was just a matter of time after that.
@@shadowsayer1516Texture mapping and 3D was absolutely a major reason though.
Grind is an insane achievement. To run smoothly on an A1200, and 10-12fps on a 1MB A500, is just mind blowing. The Amiga was obviously on its way out in the early 90's, but if Grind had come out then, it would have been one hell of a swansong.
Grind used line skip tricks that is used in Mega Drive's wolf3d port.
@@valenrn8657yes you could see it as a primitive and fast upscaling method. SNES wolfenstein used mode 7 to upscale the game instead (and BSP rendering because SNES' 65C02 based chip was too slow for games like wolfenstein). Amiga blitter makes upscaling even easier, faster, and better looking than how its done on the genesis. Don't know why Carmack never experimented with it, I guess the Amiga just sold poorly in the early 90s and there was no incentive to make a wolfenstein port for it.
@@aboriginalmang The worse part is that he toyed with an Apple II rather than an Amiga when he was coming up. Guess Amigas just sold poorly in the US and most opted for a PC or Mac.
@@afropovic well, didn't he steal an apple II from his school
I guess the engine needed to change too much for bitplane based systems, so he really never considered to port it. Upscaling is sort of cheating anyway.
I started with an Amiga 1000 in 1986. Sold it to a friend and got an Amiga 2000 at the PX while stationed in Berlin, GE. I eventually added a 68030 accelerator card to it and 5MB of RAM (yes, you could add odd MB of memory). I also got a "flicker fixer" for running in high res. I finally added a huge full height Toshiba 1GB hard drive. Ultimately, I bought some C-Net software and ran Utter Chaos BBS on it for a number of years before the WWW became a thing. I didn't get my first PC until the late 90's when I got a Pentium 166 machine.
A LOT of US military guys had Amigas when I was in from the late 80s to the early 90s. My setup was a lot like your 2000: I started with a stock machine, slapped in an A2630 accelerator with some RAM and got a hard drive up and running. I had stock graphics though. When I was stationed in Turkey we played the living hell out of Stunt Car Racer…
Ah yes, the days of the bit nibbler software
Seeing Wolenstein running buttery smooth on a pc was jaw dropping when looking at the other standard PC games of the time - it was pure voodoo. When John Carmack said that Wolf wasn't a reality on an Amiga, you'd be crazy to question him...all this time later and Grind may well be the result of another Carmack style coder which is exciting. Some of the moves Carmack pulled during his time are legendary 😁 Thanks MVG!
Considering that Grind, a game with graphics quality akin to Doom, was running with acceptable performance on what is essentially an equivalent to a 7Mhz Intel 286, leads me to believe that programmer is even more skilled than Carmack.
grind is nothing short of amazing work and i hope it continues on by more people once they have a final release but i think even if we had the grind of today matched with the wolf3d of old, we could hold our heads up and say we have something similar but wolf3d still kicks us in the face when it comes to framerate. without those chunky modes being paired with planar as an option, even if the C= management werent full morons we still would fall far behind in the 3d world.
@@yancgc5098 We have far more knowledge and programming tools today than we did back then. People today should have the capability of writing far better code than back in the day. It doesn't mean they're more skilled. It's so much easier to develop for old systems today than when those were current systems.
Carmack did not want to bother with Amiga 500, and even Amiga 1200 that came out later that year (1992) was not much faster. Overall id was going for newer and better games, as hardware was advancing each year they did not bother to optimize much.
By the way have you seen the recent port of Wolf3d for MegaDrive? Works with any Everdrive and plays really nice. Look for gasega68k
All the people that tried to emulate or copy Doom at the time didn't understood what really made id software games great. Sure the technical aspect was insane, but it is the absolute dedication to every aspect of the game as a whole experience of equal quality. Art, levels, music, gameplay everything should feels great and run great. The whole experience of doom is absolutely timeless. Sure you can mod it or refresh it but at it's core you can still launch the original doom and get hooked for hours 30 years later the gameplay is still solid and fun.
Don't forget the modding capabilities.
I still recall the first time I saw Wolfenstein, and had this sudden sense of doom for my A500. I got a few more years of Lemmings out of it, but soon moved to a 486 PC and never looked back.
Wolfenstein 3D made me buy a Soundblaster, which is really another thing that led to the Amiga's demise. Finally the PC had good sound with sampling as a cheap upgrade, which previously was the Amiga's strength (even the Commodore 64 had better sound than the PC's beeper).
Lemmings were great
You missed a lot of fun and great times, if you stopped using Amigas with the A500. Ofcourse the PC gaming had its great times, too, when Unreal, Diablo 2 and Starcraft appeared, all running on the rock solid NT4 operating system without any crashes.
You had a sense of "doom"
I was there at the commodore escom meeting when they literally drove the final mail into amiga's coffin. That was a very sad day because it was very plain to everybody in attendance that the party was over. Feel free to keep telling these stories man - I think the Amiga was the last computer with any kind of soul.
...and bought by jews and islamists to rip apart, for personal profit; Prophets they were not...
In hindsight I still cannot really understand why Escom bought the Amiga brand in the first place. Escom was a retailer also selling IBM PCs. In 1995 they sold a PC with a 486 DX/2 CPU for 1700 DM (or 870 €). This machine can run Doom perfectly and also the majority of the PC games released in 1994 and 1995.
Anyway Escom spent 13 Mio. DM for the Amiga brand. Escom could have known that is hardly possible to develop a home computer architecture which has the similar performance at a lower price. Not to mention is had to backwards compatible in order to run old Amiga software.
Escom went backrupt themselves in early 1996, because of some more bad investments.
@@dabbasw31 You know, at the end of the day? ESCOM didn't seem to give a rat's ass about "Amiga - the computer". They appeared to want the name, the brand - and that was about it. A tragic tale of the wasted potential of a magical machine :(
@@Darkuni In 1995/1996 Escom's Amiga Technologies was developing the Amiga Walker, which was supposed to contain a Motorola 68030/40 MHz CPU, 2 to 4 MB of RAM and a CD-ROM drive. It never came to the public because Escom went bankrupt before. So we will never know how successful the Amiga Walker would have become.
Personally I really do not think it would have been successful: On the personal computer market Windows 95 was released and Pentium CPUs had become affordable for private users. And on the game machine market it would have had to compete against the new kid on the block: the Sony PlayStation.
It's weird to think that the feature I remember most from Amiga games is the fluidity and high fraame-rates - especially things like Flashback, Pinball Dreams, Skidmarks. Really speaks to how well the developers played to the strengths the platform had.
The Amiga absolutely _butchered_ the PC when it came to 2D game performance, as did consoles. Unfortunately, those 2D chips were mostly useless when it came to drawing 3D graphics.
I went from an Oric-1 to an Atari 520ST - the Amigas and Spectrums were always beyond my financial reach at the time(or my parents). I was around 19 years old when I got my Atari. I tried to convince myself I was more into programming than gaming back then, whilst all the time watching the games being released for the Amiga with envious eyes. Eventually I built my own 286 PC - from then on, and whenever I could, I would upgrade for England. Been a gamer all my adult life since and still am at 58 years old. 😁
My grandfather, a WWII vet had this game when we were kids. His friend helped him setup a PC and gave him this game in the early 90s. It was the only video game he ever played but it'll always be a classic memory. He probably got me into PC gaming without knowing it.
I'm surprised he played this game willingly, considering its subject matter and his experiences.
A few corrections:
Alien Breed 3D 2 did not support graphics cards (RTG)
The fastest Doom port on an Amiga is DoomAttack
Chunky-to-planar routines got extremely fast, and took under 20% of processing power for Doom, and less for more complex titles. This is noticeable, but not detrimental. The worst thing for 3D games on an Amiga was Motorola's abysmal performance on FPU operations.
Doom doesn't use floating-point math. It runs on 386SX and 486SX machines that have no floating-point unit. All arithmetic is either integer or fixed-point.
Quake, id Software's next game, does use floating-point math, which nailed Cyrix's coffin. Cyrix, too, had notoriously slow floating-point math.
What Carmack said about Doom was correct. It plays about as well on a 68040 as it does on a fast 386. *Maybe* a little better, but still far worse than an equally-clocked 486.
@@shmehfleh3115 If that's true, then Doom ran faster on a 486 PC than on the NeXT machines it was developed on. That's pretty shocking. Why would they use a development platform slower than the target?
@@argvminusone look up a video called "The Tools that Built Doom"... IIRC it was the ease of development of the tools that steered them that way. Imagine having to develop a level editor on DOS or Windows 3.
@@argvminusone Carmack was a Next fanboy at the time (NextStep vs MSDos). But still saw that he would only get commercial success by shipping PC games.
I loved my Amiga 4000/40 very much. Especially the Amiga OS and Workbench 3.1. I found it groundbreaking that devices could be used in scripts with real names instead of letters like C, D, etc., as on the PC. But most of all, I loved Maxon Word, Maxon Cinema 4D, and PageStream, which allowed for truly professional desktop publishing even back then. I was heartbroken when Maxon discontinued both versions for the Amiga. I also loved the amazing SoundTracker software; I still think Amiga music from that era is iconic. My big hope back then was the porting of AmigaOS to RISC CPUs, and I so wanted that to give the Amiga the boost it needed to survive and thrive. But unfortunately, things went differently. 😢
Now I am even more disappointed that I sold my Amiga in the early 2000s. Thankfully, I made a backup of my hard drives using a serial interface and Diabolo Backup, so with WinUAE, I can occasionally indulge in a bit of nostalgia.
As a 90s PC Assembly Demo coder I enjoy watching this immensely 🤠
I love demo scene, any chance we can talk about it?
Ah, a demo brother!
Second Reality was the "Doom" of PC demos.
@@dycedargselderbrother5353 yes amazing demo. My first build was a 486 SX-25MHz I replaced the crystal on the mainboard to 40MHz and had a small container with crushed icecubes sitting on the CPU to make it stable and remember running that demo on it for a test. Fun weird things to try out.
@dycedargselderbrother5353 I remember watching that demo over and over. Sounded awesome on the Gravis Ultrasound Max. Oh the memories.
Back in the last 1990's I called one one of the Amiga engineers in the US from the UK. He told me the sorry tale behind the Amiga 600 which was supposed to be a cheap C64 replacement until Germany said "We're not selling a computer without a hard drive" and management capitulated.
I cannot remember the engineer's name - alas. Really nice guy. He worked on the C128 and I was using a C28D at the time! But the topic of conversation was the demise of Commodore and there was only one name of the guy's lips. Ali.
It was Ali all the way. He was useless. I was assured Ali was not deliberately trying to destroy Commodore. He was just utterly clueless.
It wasn't Doom, or any other game. It was Ali.
That's what I was told, most firmly.
A quick google search finds evidence to this claim. Where is this piece of work now?
Well imo that was spot on. Around '92 there really shouldn't have been any computers in market without some form of internal mass storage media. I honestly think Commodore might have survived bit longer if they'd implemented internal drives sooner as 3.5" floppy wasn't good solution anymore at that time. Well they had options, but they were insanely priced.
@@stoomkracht It's in Commodore the Inside Story - The Untold Tale of a Computer Giant by David John Pleasance
Amiga 600 was sold without hard drive 😁 It had ability to install hard drive, but not those cheap ones from PC market. This killed whole idea.
Bil Herd maybe?
Lots of Amiga enthusiasts that pirated all their games still to this day think their actions didn't contribute in any way to the machine's demise
Yeah, when most of the user base are actively making the platform unprofitable to developers, it's gonna die.
Bull corn. We still ripped pc games and chipped the PS. Did they demise? No, it's marketing what destroys one console and sells another
Something I found really interesting when watching some talk on a podcast with Casey Muratori and another guy from Microsoft -- they were discussing software back in the day -- was just how much power John Carmack had over the life and death of certain players in the industry. His work was so profound and amazing that if he chose your platform to put his software on or used your libraries, it was basically golden and in some cases could become the standard and if you didn't... well, you were almost certainly destined for death.
࿕࿖
Many of my friends didn't move to PC until Doom was a thing. But I think it's fair to say that Wolfenstein 3D paved the way and is a good marker in time of when the PC started to pull away from the Amiga as a gaming platform. Many thanks for the planar/chunky explanation. Interesting info!
An excellent video, but I do have to point out that although the Amiga couldn't rival Wolfenstein 3D style games in '92, most PCs couldn't either.
I first played W3D on a 286 machine at a friends house in '93ish and the FPS was pretty damn choppy. Not that we saw it as such, as we were very used to low FPS on games back then. But really it performed more like that of a (high end) Amiga of the day. It was a far cry from the silky smooth future-pc footage featured in this video. The sound on that old PC also comprised of scratchy "blip blop" PC speaker noises. As for Doom...bleh forget it. No way that old 286 would have coped. You probably needed a chunky 386 for that at least.
Sure, it cost thousands to crank up an Amiga to compete with PCs on brute force processor speed, but a fully kitted out 486 IBM PC that could provide the ideal experience on W3D would have cost something like $3000. So although we were aware of the Amiga's shortcomings, I don't recall there being an immediate panic in my Amiga owning circle. It was assumed the next generation of Amiga machines would rise to dominate the 3D game market.
Alas a naive assumption, as thanks to Commodore idiocy there was no next generation.
Wolf3D put a big ol' nail into the Amiga's coffin, at least it did for me. But what killed it was Doom. Once I saw Doom, I never looked at the Amiga the same again. It was just software wizardry to me, how something like that was even possible was unfathomable at the time. Add to that how the audio also leaps and bounds ahead with sampled audio for essentially everything and I just couldn't go back. Amiga will always have a special place for me, since it was such a glorious time - but ID Software and John Carmack murdered it.
Doom made me want a PC as a poor kid growing up in Alabama.. My upper-class friend introduced me to Doom, and I didn't wanna leave his house after that.. His parents made me leave..😂😂😂😂 Doom shaped a generation and made me a fan for life..
This is pretty much what happened to me as a kid, suddenly my Amiga and it's games were nothing when my friends played Wolfenstein3D on their 386 PCs
Wolfenstein didn't impress me, but Doom did. After Doom, the amount of 3D games coming out just passed the Amiga by, so I moved from my CD32 to a PS1 and only looked back at the Amiga through 2D rose-tinted glasses.
@@primalconvoy Needed to play wolf 3d at release not near the end . Voodoo1 cards made pc gaming next gen
@@johnsmith-i5j7i Wolfenstein made me yawn. Theey were plente of more excitng game s1992 and 1993 on SNES and Amiga!
I purchase sony ps1 soon after realize my high end 486 already obsolete, its cheaper to buy console when pc war still on raging
@@aikonlatigid I bought the PS1 for Ridge Racer (Revolution), Wipeout and Toshinden. And later again for Resident Evil and Gran Turismo aaand WipeoutXL, this time NTSC
My brother had an Amiga. At the time, I think I had a pc with no sound (for some reason, I was ok with that). I had C64 before that, so I knew that the Amiga was a formidable upgrade. So my brother showed me his new Amiga (with sound) and he loaded in a golf game. I was amazed! You could hear the ball striking through the leaves, if you wacked the ball into the trees. He had a football game with just X’s and O’s, but that was amazing as well. But soon after, computers were progressing in technology faster and faster. He was always getting the latest and greatest, and I could never keep up with him. Yet, I will alway remember that Amiga.
There's an old quote from someone at Commodore back in the day. From my memory… "Commodore isn't a computer company. It's a company that makes widgets."… Okay, I just did some research. The quote comes from an article published in the Philadelphia Inquirer in May of 1994. The person quoted is former Commodore engineer, Brian Jackson. The actual quote: "Commodore was a widgets company. They wanted anything we could hack together real quick from existing technology and sell a zillion of them like we did with the Commodore 64. And with that mentality, you can never really support customers."
Basically, yes, Wolfenstein was one of the many deaths by a thousand cuts. The management also didn't understand what business they were in.
"General Motors is not in the business of making cars. It is in the business of making money." (Thomas Murphy, GM CEO from 1974-1980.) Of course that attitude ultimately leads to bankruptcy.
It's weird that they did 2 fantastic computers with that mentality.
@@jal051 When Jack Tramel bought MOS, he brought on some smart people like Chuck Peddle and later Bil Herd. The engineers could see where the industry was going, but the management wasn’t interested. Irving Gould just wanted use of the private jet.
@@jal051 They didn't, though. They bought the Amiga as an essentially finished product.
@@jal051yeah vc20 and C64 were good for their time. (Amiga was bought)
The original Wolfenstein and Doom ran in Mode X or unchained\planar mode back in those days. This allowed you to have access to the full 256Kb of VGA memory so that you could enable triple buffering and flicker free display of image frames. It was a little trickier to program for due to the fact that you had to enable the required planes to write to specific pixels, but the results were far superior to Mode 13h. I remember writing 3D demos using Mode X and a mix of assembly language and C using the very same Borland C++ compiler you showed in your video!
The use of Mode X also allowed drawing up to four identical pixels in one write. This is why the frame rate of Wolf3D can jump on a slow computer when you walk close to walls, as the duplicated pixel columns of zoomed-in textures are faster to draw.
Yes, the mode was ideal for such games and applications. I had written an emulator in Turbopascal. The nice thing is that the screen memory is linear, so that no address jumps occur. Scrolling was also easy. The only thing that was a bit annoying was the lack of a transparent color. Then you could have made very nice scrolling effects without requiring a lot of computing time.
I do remember seeing WS3D around that time and it looked indeed Jaw Dropping non the less I do find your explanation way too simplistic. It's never just one reason. Not everyone goes nuts over FPS Games. It was a combiation of factors that doomed the Amiga. Among those were:
- SNES & Genesis being vastly superior at producing the type of Games that used to be the natural Forte of the Amiga up to that point
- VGA Graphics, Soundblaster and Harddrives that became the standard for PC
- The general reputation of the Amiga of being a Play Computer
- Games like Wolfenstein & Doom, but also the Monkey Island 2 Debacle and Wing Commander 2 who felt technically way more advanced or resulted in constant Disc Change Mayhem on the Amiga unless you were among the few owning an Amiga 2000
- Having the same system at home that you use at Work
etc
Oh man the Borland C++ interface brought back some memories! I learned on Turbo Pascal, so that IDE is like coming home hahahaha
Turbo pascal, I learned that I think in 9th grade. I remember nothing of how to code in pascal though... So weird.
@@danrenfroe2016 I also learnt pascal. The closest thing to pascal today would be delphi or lazarus.
Lol I also learned on Turbo Pascal in high school in the late 80s. I haven't coded in pascal in ages and barely remember it though.
amiga was my dream machine and i loved every minute of it. i couldn't believe that most computer stores had PC games and their 16 colors falling off the shelves while Amiga got little to no shelf space. I didn't abandon ship till the announcement of Mechwarrior 2 and that it wouldn't be supported on the Amiga, being a long time Battletech fan that was when i had to give up my baby and buy my first 386 PC. still have all my commodores in storage, from the 64, 128 to the amiga 500. great memories...
Mechwarrior 2... on the Amiga... that was even a question? Seriously? I loved that game, play it to this day, but... I can only imagine what you'd need on an Amiga for it to even be possible. 68040 minimum, I'd say. Which makes the market that could even hope to run the game RIDICULOUSLY limited. Amigas were rare enough, try to find one with an 040. I had one, but... it was very niche. And very "riche." Nope, no software publisher is going to go for that. That's one of the biggest problems with the Amiga market. Developers didn't (couldn't) develop for the high end, they had to develop for the lowest common denominator, because your average Amiga user was some poor sod in Europe who had a bone-stock A500+/600/1200. Too much work for too few sales otherwise. Only one game I can think of (Elite II: Frontier) really begs for a 68030 (and chugs on a 68000). Mostly devs only went with stuff that ran WELL on the low end, and likely wouldn't have even attempted a port of something like Mechwarrior 2. Besides, it would be 30 disks or something (the installed portion on PC is just shy of 30MB) and you'd simply HAVE to tediously install it to a hard drive disk by disk because (almost) no one had a CD-ROM drive, either. And you'd have to rework the CD audio tracks as MOD files. And probably give any FMV cutscenes a miss. TBH it would be quite an interesting backport, and something I'd like to see some brilliant coders attempt, 30 years after it's relevant to do so.
Sorry, not to diss the Amiga (as I've said, I've owned two), but it just didn't have the CPU "umph" for 3D games that the PC did. And certainly, not commonly. Mechwarrior 2 was super demanding to run well on PC; especially at 1024x768. I set DOSBox to 300,000 cycles/msec for that, and it's just about fast enough. That's the equivalent of maybe a 450MHz Pentium II/III. Keep in mind that mid-speed (100-133? MHz) Pentiums were the latest thing back in 1995 when it launched. More realistically, people ran it at 640x480 or even 320x200 (slow Pentiums/486s) in order to get smooth performance.
@@SeeJayPlayGames Wasn't a question, as i said, it was the nail in the coffin for my Amiga days.
@@SeeJayPlayGames Not to mention the 3Dfx card version of Mechwarrior 2, showing that PC graphics cards were on another level.
@@cattysplat Amigas didn't even typically use graphics cards at all, unless you had a big-box Amiga, and even then it was an OPTION rather than the standard.
Bone-stock (or mildly upgraded, maybe RAM and/or mild accelerator) Amiga 500's and 1200's were the most common, so that's what developers targeted. I started out with an A500 with 1MB of RAM and a floppy drive. I soon got some upgrades. For quite a while (well, a year or two, which was a while in tech terms back then), my configuration was an A500 with a 1MB Agnus, 4.5MB of total RAM (with a fully populated BaseBoard) an ICD AdSpeed (14.32MHz 68000) and an 80MB SCSI hard drive. And that was one of the faster machines of the people I knew. Only when people started getting A3000s and A1200s did I start to trail the pack. Then I got an A4000/040.
Hell, most games didn't even have hard disk support back in the day. I guess it's more feasible NOW, with WHDLoad, but how long did that take to come out? The "lowest common denominator" is often what holds back a platform as a whole.
For me… I had the Amiga 500 in 1990 and loved it, great times. I’d had a sinclair ZX Spectrum 128 +2A before that, around 87. I upgraded to Amiga 1200 in 94? But … it was actually the Playstation that took me away from the Amiga (for games) as it did 3D well and was mind blowing back then. PCs were still super expensive and I kept the Amiga for my computing needs (basic video, paint and music sequencing) until finally building my first PC in 1998 with a 3DFX voodoo banshee and Pentium II 450 and that was it… game over. Seeing Unreal and using the Unreal engine showed me the way… and of course the games were light years beyond what Amiga or Consoles could do. For me Wolfenstein didn’t come into it. It was mostly other games, Unreal engine and music sequencers with AUDIO (cubase VST at first).
The Amiga defined my youth. I didn't switch to PC before mid 1997
Mid 1996 for me. I was doing my best to hold on, but the writing was on the wall.
Amiga Rulez ! :-)
I remember my brother showing me his Amiga 500 in 1987. Coming from the ZX Spectrum, I was blown away by Deluxe Paint and the fact that every pixel could be a different colour. Fast forward to 1989 and I couldn't understand why one of my Uni classmates bought a PC to play games. Fast forward again to 1992 or so - playing Geoff Crammond's F1 GP on PC at my friend's house and comparing it to the Amiga version. I then knew the Amiga was dead. But I still bought an A1200 in 1993 as I couldn't afford a PC.
I don't miss the early PCs but I do miss the Amiga. It way beyond its time..
98 for me, via PlayStation 1 and N64
I still remember learning about mode 13 as a kid, and using inline assembly in turbo pascal to do fast 2d and then 3d graphics. We even had feuds between different groups of kids who tried to one-up each other.
Hah, at that age I was POKEing 23692 with 255
Releasing the source code because he felt bad about killing an entire platform sounds like a very John Carmack thing to do. He's always been good to gamers.
Management killed it off, and the fact it was stupidly expensive for hires monitors and not being able to have serious apps like msword etc. I held out for ages then eventually my A1200 ran as a pirate bbs while I got into a 386 for serious work. It was hard to go back after using a hires monitor that didn’t have a shimmering interlace at those resolutions. Glad I enjoyed those years of c64 and Amigas though, they were ahead of the curve for years with their sound, gfx and wimp environment.
Nah, it was Medhi Ali and Irving Gould who killed the Amiga and ultimately killed Commodore. But it was also Motorola ending the 68000 range and days of custom chips which contributed. By then it was hard to have a competitive edge unless you were way ahead of off the shelf chips. The A600 was the first big mistake. The A1200 should have had a fast 030, fast ram and HDD as standard. The sound chip should have been 16-bit by then, the A3000 nearly came with a 16-bit sound chip + DSP. If that was in the AGA machines they'd have been more competitive.
Correct. I have never heard such garbage as a single PC game being responsible for the death of the Amiga. Unfortunately this is just another video out there with a clickbait title to get them $$$ coming in.
@@BoomBox02then you must have lived on the moon until recently. It's a widespread myth in the retrogaming community that Doom killed the Amiga, of course I never believed it, but this doesn't mean that it's not a common conviction.
@@DioBrando-qr6ye A widespread myth is just that, a Myth, especially if its coming from a group of retro gamers that seem to not know how Commodore was run and truly believe a single game caused the death of the Amiga. They sound as credible as the Fat Earthers arguments for believing the Earth is flat. I prefer facts, and the fact is that Commodore management are solely responsible for the death of the Amiga. Do some research and start with watching the Deathbed Vigil video by Dave Haynie who was an engineer at Commodore. There are also many other videos available online by engineers that worked at Commodore and of all the arguments they make for the demise of the Amiga, Wolfenstein and Doom are not one of them.
I agree. It's clickbait, which is a shame because it's an otherwise interesting and well made video. It's also a shame to see people apparently downvoting OP's comment instead of providing any insightful rebuts. I was surprised to have to scroll this far down to find a comment with this many upvotes. I can only assume it took some effort to dislike it this far down.
Fun Fact doom and the resulting craze of shooters did not only kill the Amiga and ST but also several well beloved genres like the Point and Click adventure games, even the 2d RPGs ran into serious problems after Doom for several years.
But the problem with commodore and Atari were bigger. Commodore simply was sleeping on the aging graphics architecture and basically technologically fell wayside while the PC architecture from VGA onwards surpassed it.
Atari tried with the tom and jerry chipsets from the jaguar but they were too late to the table. But in the end the shift from the Motorola 680000 arch to PPC while Intel was getting better really was the ultimate death nail for many of the alternative computer manufacturers those who did not do a shift earlier to risc basically fell wayside and went bankrupt or were bought and even Apple who was able to move over to PPC almost did not survive this.
Even if Commodore would have survived doom they would not have had the resources to move over to the PPC or Intel with their Arch, and probably after that the rise of 3d accelerators would have killed it just like Atari and 3d0 fell wayside when the PSX came along and 1-2 years later the 3dfx GPU on the PC side!
I had an A3000 in my bedroom in the 90's. My Dad found a huge cardboard box of an assortment of Amiga loose floppy disks at a car boot sale here in England. He brought it home and let me have at it. There were games both pirated and official, documents, software, and a bunch of Japanese pornographic hentai visual novels. They weren't really visual novels but more just slideshows but needless to say it was certainly eye opening for me at age 12! lol
I only told Dad a couple of years ago lol
liar your dad did not bring dAT box home so dont even try it troll
trying to get a thumbs i can see dat and 12 nim rods gave you a thumb what a joke
bye for now noob
delete ur comment boy
At 12 years old. I could only imagine how my mind would have been blown! Super cool.
Eh, you turned out fine in the end... Right?
Eye opening?, not as wide as your dad's eyes if he happened to look over your shoulder.
One thing many people don't know is that Doom was written on a NeXT - a unix-based computer - and was ported to several other versions of unix, I think largely due to the involvement of a friend of mine at ID, David Taylor (the "ddt" in the secret codes), who ported it to IRIX mainly because I had an SGI Onyx Reality Engine (a 6' tall black and purple monolith) at Origin Games to try it out on (it was amazing on the SGI, at 1280x1024 res). The irony is that a lot of us Austin unix nuts really liked the Amiga, which was the nearest thing to a full unix host many could afford (except for lacking inter-process memory protection), and would have loved to have seen this run well on Amigas.
I had both a Next cube and a slab on my desk, the only thing interesting after the Amiga. At least until Mac started running Next code.
Both the Amiga and its main nemesis at the time: the Atari St failed because of relying on outdated technology. While both had the same capabilities and did things a lot better than PCs at the time and had great games. It was ID Software who managed to turn the PC around by releasing the first PC side scroller with Commander Keen and killed it with the one-two punch of both Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. ID Software didn’t just kill the Amiga and ST, they murdered them.
At school we sometimes had days where everyone would bring their home computers in and we kinda spend after school having a sort of... copy party. I managed to go to a couple, and it was entirely Amigas and STs at the first one. Second one I went to, someone had bought their PC in, and was showing off Wing Commander and Wolfenstein 3D. Everyone wanted a go. PCs were SO EXPENSIVE at the time though, like over £1000 instead of the £300-400 a decent Amiga or ST package would have been. Some of us, myself included did actually get A1200s, and enjoyed playing Gloom and Alien Breed 3D but we knew... we knew the writing was on the wall. Took me and my bro until '96 to scrape together enough funds to build our own PC. A P133 put together I think with some new parts, some scrounged off upgrading friends. It was Quake that made us do it. We then spent the next few years having regular LAN sessions where we played quake 1, 2 & 3 until the sun came up at weekends. Great times. I loved my Amigas, but I loved those early PC days too.
So they brought in a MASSIVE steel chassis PC case and the monitor and keyboard?
@@papalaz4444244 it wasn't really massive, a regular non-tower style 386 desktop. Guy bought it in a few times as I remember playing it in two of the different computer lab rooms. Which were mostly stocked with BBC micros and Acorn Archimedes. It was only the year I was leaving they replaced the old BBCs with PCs. Which were not really powerful enough to play Doom. We tried it. Could only run it if you shrank the window down to postage stamp size.
@@papalaz4444244I went to many LAN parties and yes we carried those things. That is why sometimes LAN parties lasted the whole weekend. I had a blast, they were so much fun.
1992 was the year that changed everything. PCs were expensive but by early 1993 Commodore themselves were selling a 486sx-25, 4Mb, 52Mb, S-VGA (1Mb) monitor, with Win3.1 and DOS for about £1000 (inc. VAT). To bring an A1200 up to that sort of level, £200 for a HDD, £150 for the RAM, £250 for a SVGA resolution monitor
I would have to agree with the analysis. I recall myself seeing the end of the line for the amiga when I saw Wolfenstein, first on magazine covers, and then later on a friends PC. It was worlds apart from what we could muster at that time. Then of course later it was Doom and X-Wing which solidified my impression and a little after that I bought my first 486DX2 just in time for X-Com and TIE-Fighter and that was that.
its a shame that DREAD didnt come out on the amiga back then, it might have changed things a little.
@@dahistrix Commodore's mismanagement was so severe that no game could have saved the platform.
@@dahistrix Not really. I played X-com on my PC and my Amiga fan friend got it for his A500. He said he that in later levels he literally had time to go for sauna and get back to Amiga and still waited like 5mins for one turn to complete. It took like max 10secs per turn on our 486 back then 😀
Amiga's just were way too underpowered to keep up. Not to mention insanely expensive mass storage exanpsions that almost no one got.
I have to agree, once I saw wolf3d running on a PC at an expo in 92 I immediately sold my 1MB expanded Commodore Amiga 500 and got an ESCOM 486DX33 VLB PC. Little did I know at the time both companies would cross paths to their ultimate demise.
Never had an Amiga (played on c64 and by 1990 on my dad's 386) but back in the days my friends had a600 and a500+....Ultima Underworld and Wing Commander where the first games that really impressed them.
The average amiga user in my country had a 68000 Amiga with 1 meg ram no hard drive or accelerator ....
Got my Amiga 600 as a hand-me-down thanks to growing up poor. The loading screens for Walker were the only proper 3D graphics I saw (that weren't in movies) until I saved up enough money for a PlayStation. I literally felt Crash Bandicoot blowing my mind.
You had your chance with a proper computer, but then you squandered your savings on a dumb console 😁
@@aleksazunjic9672 To be fair I was 10 years old and my Dad already had a PC. I wanted to be part of the zeitgeist for once.
@@greenhowie I was joking, but there are proves that children playing with consoles grow dumber than children playing with computers.
I'm 36, and don't exactly have any nostalgia for games like Doom and Wolfenstein 3D, and I've never really played those older games much. But Grind [14:23] looks pretty cool. I'd rather play it than most of the garbage that comes out today, and it's great that people are making old games for old systems like that. I love that, plays into the idea that limitations sparked a lot more creativity than the homogeneously powerful systems today. Now there's a few different game engines or systems to play on, but they're all basically the same. Grind showcases that style still carries a lot more weight than just throwing all the graphical horsepower available at a game.
Small correction at 4:25 "chunky" refers to the fact that all bits that make up a pixel are stored right next to each other in memory as a single "chunk" as opposed to multiple bitplanes that are scattered across memory.
Yes basically you could write a high-colour pixel in a single write (or maybe two adjacent writes) whereas on the Amiga who had to write to each bitplane. The more colour depth the more bitplanes.
That was my understanding as well, "chunks" of data making the full pixel data, instead of the pixel data being scattered around bitplanes.
while correct, 13h mode is still plannar. it's just that the bitplane is selected automatically by the vga hardware when you r/w in a memory address, without having to access any registers.
@@giornikitop5373 I'm sure they were using Mode X. At least I did back then.
Plus, in this mode, you can write up to 4 pixels at once, if they are the same color and adjusted.
@@RustedCroaker the 4 pixels at once is only done through the latches and no, they don;t need to be the same colour or anything. but in order to use them, you have to 1: access registers by i/o , very slow in anything above 286, and 2: the latches can only be loaded by a vram read operation. it was common practice for mode-x games to use most of the vram (all 256k are available at mode-x/y) for the screen and the last part of it for sprites and stuff, so they could very fast copy vram-to-vram using the latches. Original Doom used the normal mode 13h, only later custom versions used mode-x, once the source was publiished, or was that quake?
Holy poop! You're so old! In 1992 I was just starting junior high. I was also a nerd. And I too was slowly transitioning away from console games and into computer games around this time. I dont have much nostalgia for the 90's but I loved the huge transition computers made at the time. Games in particular got REALLY good in a short time period.
Wolfenstein 3d was my first memorable PC gaming experience. Played it on my mom's IBM 25
The same for me, one of the first games my father got for my brother and I
I think we're about the same age, I had an Atari ST which was my main (well, only) computer from 1985, upgrading from my ZX Spectrum 48K, until 1992, when I got a Mac LC for university. I loved my ST, it was a 520STFM and I remember upgrading the floppy drive from the single-sided drive it came with, to a double-sided drive. The new drive didn't fit properly in the case so I had to cut a hole for the drive button, and I had the drive propped up inside the case via a combination of lego, glue, and sellotape. Hey, it worked! I played a ton of great games on that machine but if I'm being honest - I was always kind of jealous of the Amiga, and always wanted one. I got my wish in the late 90s when I was working, and a local computer store was selling second hand A600s and A1200s. I bought an A1200 and pretty much played Elite II Frontier on it. I moved from the UK to the US in 2000, and for whatever reason the A1200 didn't make the move with me. I honestly don't know what happened to it, and I wish I still had it. Love your videos as always!
It was Wing Commander that killed Amiga for me, and the ever-expanding library of PC games. Got the first Amiga 1000 & played ArcticFox for literally days. Later, a 2000HD. But I got my first PC just to play Wing Commander - I had the choice of a Next Cube or a Zenith lugable with a blue/white *HORRIBLE* LCD screen for the school I was joining around 1990, and picked the Zenith because I could hook it up to an external monitor & play color wing commander. Shoulda chose the cube... Anyway, about a year or two later, oddly enough, I sold that Zenith to Jerry Pournelle's ( RIP ) nephew or something. Small world, although I wish I could have met the man.
Wing Commander did get ported to the Amiga, but it was quite a downgrade.
The worst part was how Commodore was pumping out a500 with small improvements. Commodore never spent any real money in development the amiga platform. They could have had AGA chipset in 88/89 and AAA in 91/92 acording to david haynie. Commodore had no idea what they had been given, and their coca cola ceo ruined the huge head start they had.
Commodore didn't even make the Amiga. It was developed by a small American studio named Amiga & Commodore treated them VERY poorly.
@@ExtremeWreck thats wrong. Amiga was created by a small team, in a company owned by jay miner. Jay had problems getting things running, and took a loan from Jack from Ataria for 50k, the deal was he was supposed to be paid back before x time, or he would own the amiga. THe last day Commodore bought the company from Jay and he paied back Atari...
Wolfenstein 3D was my 3D awakening. With a Soundblaster16 back in 1993 it was immaculate.
Right? Those bright graphics, and the digitized sounds. So good.
hearing a soundblaster for the first time instead of beeps and bloings was such an experience.
@@Maartzy1891 Hearing the digitized sound of the changing letting loose was life-changing.
I still have an A4000 and a 1260 in a tower case. With the 68060, the 1200 ran really fast - for the time. And it was Commodore himself who condemned the Amiga to die. Similar to Apple at the time, they did not want to grant licenses to other manufacturers or transfer parts of the operating system to open source.
And ultimately that was what made Bill Gates' Dos computers superior: every manufacturer could build a PC for it and every game developer could come up with new things with every advance. If the Amiga-OS, which was completely superior at the time, had been continuously developed and maintained, we would have been spared these stupid Dos defects (long loading times, hardly any multitasking, updates that take forever, etc.). All life time that we were allowed to waste because Dos/Windows won over AmigaOs and MacOs. It's sad that Commodore was so stupid back then...
Great video as always! However, there's a common misconception that Wolf 3D/Doom runs in Mode 13h - both run in a custom VGA mode nicknamed Mode Y, which is actually still planar! I recommend reading Fabian Sanglard's Game Engine Black Books on Wolf 3D and Doom for a good, in-depth explanation on both engines and their quirks!
In 1992 in Poland... we still had to wait about 2 years before being able to get Commodore C64 :D
Only after Balcerowicz reforms we started to catch up with the rest of the world. While now Poland is quite strong, in the 90s Poles were introduced to: Pegazus (a Famicom clone), C64, Amiga 600, IBM-compatible PC's and Sony Playstation at once. In 1996, when I saw Super Mario Bros for the first time, I hoped one day can create fictional worlds in a technology like that. Yes, I was a child back then. But it doesn't change the fact I had no idea that technology was outdated. Like, by decades.
Nonsense. People had access to those devices years before you described. In other words if a device was available in Germany, you could get it in Poland. The only issue was money.
Growing up in 90s Poland was surely an experience lol.
I remember having Amiga CD32 and going to my next door neighbour to play Fighting Force on his Playstation.
Me and my brother were over the moon when our dad told us that we'll be getting a PSX next day.
Good old days my friend... 😀
In the 90s, the performance of PCs almost doubled every year, and under DOS, almost all software was rendered without constraints. A very smart but long-outdated design couldn't really compete with this.
The title I remember putting the Amiga on notice was Wing Commander (which did eventually receive a port)
I look at his statement as a segment of time because it was true up to when users had access to broadband. The broadband everything exploded in the sense you could exchange programming books, techniques, and code faster than ever. Even with dial up it was possible, but it was still rendering for the future programmers.
So I think the line of John's statement ends around 2001-2003. If someone did it after that it was because there was more people on computers, learning harder, better, and stronger. If someone did do it before that time, it is fair to say his statement was false.
I dont actually know which is true, but thats my opinion on where the line should be. Being able to download/even purchase digital coding books changed the games for good. More people needed less effort to be able to get fantastic at programming, and that is surely a good thing.
I still have fond memories of my own Amiga computers. I had a A600 and A1200 playing games like Pinball Fantasies, Pinball Dreams, Superfrog, Zool 2, SoMI and MI2!
I grew up on Amiga, but was too young to recognize it's demise nor the cause of it. In our household it was Windows 95 and MS Word that killed the Amiga, which I used for school work.
Same thing in my house with the added kick in the pants of Encarta. My parents were dumbfounded that the entire Brittanica set they had bought for my sister at incredible expense could be replaced by some plastic disks.
Same here, we had an amiga for a long time and then it got replaced by a windows 95 pc.
That's true. I remember trying to transfer homework that I had written on my Amiga to my school 386 PC and giving up. From that point, the Amiga wasn't something I could tell my parents was something used for "homework" anymore as it wasn't compatible with anything else.
@@mackado Counterpoint: you try using that version of Encarta, lately?
@@nateschultz8973 Counter-counterpoint: you try storing 400lbs of books for 30 years? Try even giving them away for free?
I never owned an Amiga at the time but still really sad what happened with it, there was such an amazing community around it.
That and the Acorn Archimedes were two of my favorite computers of that era, had PC's ever since but do miss that era for all the innovation and people trying new things.
So Interesting you mention the acorn archimedes, on a other gaming channel I watch called retro bird that computer is an in joke about no one knowing what it is
Never had an Amiga, but grew up using a C128 (mostly in C64 mode, as my dad got a few games for it).
Learned my first BASIC on there, but graphics was hard to comprehend for me (I wasn't even a teen yet).
By the time I was 14, I got my first PC. Way more fun. But I still remember the good old time on my Commodore.
My only interaction with an Amiga was with a friend, who had a brother who owned one and we played Turrican 2 on it.
Thanks for a nice video with some insights into the world back then.
You know, in 1996 Quake and Duke Nukem 3D were released on PC and on Amiga they still tried to make good Doom clones in 98. The wake up call for Commodore should have been affordable PC SVGA cards in 1990 and cleap Sound Blaster clones. Unfortunately the AGA chipset graphics released in 92 was no match to many SVGA cards built into PCs that hit the market in the same year. In 92 also the affordable Gravis Ultrasound was released for PC, while AGA chipset was still limited to 4 8-bit sound channels.
I recall the sound for AAA chipset was to have a full DSP capabilities but it was killed along with the graphics. Even so, it wouldn't have been any better than the PC wavetable cards that started coming out and probably much less useful since the PC software was significantly more richly developed to the exponential userbase compared to the amiga. It was basically a no-win situation for Commodore as Moore's law allowed chipsets to be more powerful and cheaper. Walled off systems like the Amiga had no chance. Even the Mac was near its death and it had leadership a million times better than Commodore.
@@oldtwinsna8347 The Amiga really had its heyday from 1985 up until 1990, really - sure, there were some good games in the following years, but by 1993 or even 1994, it was clear that its days were sadly numbered.
I appreciate these smaller historical videos.
Provides context for the technology we have today
I love it too, and brings me back, and how far we have come. It's truly amazing.
My friend purchased a 386 PC from Cash Converters for around $350 at the time and I thought it would be utter crap, until we played Wolfenstein and I was blown away by how good it was. After the Amiga 2000HD I purchased an LC475 for about 3.5K. My friends $350 PC made me trade in the LC475 and that was the beginning of the PC era and never looked back since 😁
Thank you for making this! I have also had similar thoughts over the years and you did a great job of explaining it!
Seeing the A500 bringd back so many memories. It was ahead of its time.
It wasn't that Wolfenstein 3D killed the Amiga, the fact that even the PC was beginning to overtake the Amiga was actually a sad symptom of Commodore's mismanagement.
Commodore's board mostly squandered the Amiga's initial advantage, preferring to milk their existing design instead of listening to the Amiga engineers and continuing to develop the custom chips. Naturally, the stagnating chipset was slowly overtaken by everyone, by the time it dawned on Commodore that they really should iterate their hardware at least a couple of times per decade, they had lost most of the engineers who would have enabled them to.
Their old hardware was really old, and their new chips were not particularly impressive due to lack of time, resources and talent, plus the languishing 68k architecture ended up holding them back in bus speed and raw processing speed compared to the rapidly developing x86 hardware.
What really killed the Amiga wasn't even anything to do with computers, it was Irving Gould the Chairman of the Board. The horrors of what he did after gaining control of the company are too numerous to list here, but if anything killed Commodore, it was borrowing money from that c**t.
Well, there you have DREAD (or even better, GRIND, now in development) for the AMIGA 500 OCS, vastly superior to the original Wolfenstein from a technical view so i think it was Quake the one (even Quake runs fine enough on a 1200 AGA, 060 >= 75 Mhz config)
Dread is excellent!
Look at the time frame though. They've been teasing us with it for years. Longer than the dev cycles of Wolfenstein 3-D and Doom combined.
Out of curiosity, I played some Amiga FPSes a few years back and it was not a good time. I ran into pretty much all the problems you mentioned: tiny viewports, very blocky level design, etc. Fears' weird perspective warping made me want to throw up after a while. Alien Breed 3D is probably the best of the bunch and even that wasn't particularly good; the GZoom remake, Project Osiris, is ironically the best way to play it now and a whole lot better than the original.
Project Osiris dev here, thanks for the shoutout!
@@ArcturusDeluxe Awesome. You guys made that game playable! Love your work.
Even the Sega Master System could do a better FPS.
I was 18 in 1992. What a time to be that age, witnessing all the new tech of the time. Exciting stuff! Thanks for the video down memory lane! :)
Yay! Thanks for mentioning Thalion. The AMIGA was really the last home computer where we had full bare metal control.
I think MS-DOS is also very bare metal. I never programmed for it, but from all what I've seen it probably was. But I really don't like the way dos handles sound, where all software has to implement support for all sound cards manually. That is a nightmare to maintain, and it pushes the user a lot to know exactly what they have to configure the games in a way that they get sound.
But I do miss the midi time, where different computers put different personalities to otherwise the same game. Hearing a known game suddenly somewhere eles whith a very different sound font was an experience that doesn't exist anymore.
My friends that coded for Amiga and PC at that time hit the bare metal on both. It wasn't until a few revisions into Direct3D that people finally started doing PC game and demo type stuff within the OS if I recall correctly.
@@krux02 Yes
@@andrewdunbar828 I remember when Amiga went bust and I had to get a job doing PC game development, dumping most of what I learned on the Amiga. I had to learn DirectX 2, which on top of the Windows APIs, I hated at the time.
@@SerBallister I learned to program under the Windows API but X86 assembly language looked so ugly I never learned it. I didn't learn DirectX either. I seem to recall people disliking it at the time but I can't remember when they started liking it. After Doom I actually lost interest in games anyway (-:
Let's be honest here: the biggest issue with the Amiga vs PC was simply the fact that it didn't evolve fast enough & its US audience was tiny. The Amiga relied on British developers whereas most US developers grew up around PCs and game studios such as id Software, Origin & Lucas Arts all developed for PC. The PC already had the 486 CPU on the market well before the A1200 appeared and it TROUNCED the A1200 in raw power so devs knew that the balance would shift.
The Amiga A1200 was also not THAT cheap - they went for €700 here (without a monitor!) whereas my father bought our first IBM 386 in early 1993 for €1200 which DID include a monitor. The Amiga was very complete, sure, but it didn't come with a hard drive making games load really really slowly until you spent enough money for all kinds of add-ons until you basically paid more than a PC.
The biggest weakness of the PC was the fact it was never designed for games but the raw CPU power made up for that & graphics cards quickly focussed on gaming and a better 2D card could see your FPS in Doom almost double (which surprised me how big a difference it made). Also sound was an issue but the Sound Blaster 8 & 16 also put the PC close to the Amiga even though games needed to use MOD music to match it (Star Control 2 anyone?).
In the end, I always felt like the PC was the successor of the Amiga & not its enemy. I remember PC games magazines (often featuring staff that came from dead Amiga magazines such as Stuart Campbell) being quite bitter about the Amiga's death & complaining about how complicated & fiddly PCs were and it's true, but even 30+ years later, the PC is still dominant as a games platform ...
This is the first time I've heard someone properly spell out a technical failing of the Amiga. Great vid!
Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM were just one of many things that made Amiga obsolete. Even Amiga 1200 had no HDD by default so games were released on floppies 880 KB ones, while PCs from 1992 already used 1.44 MB diskettes.
Games on PC had to be installed to HDD, so they could be compressed on floppies. This meant that PC games could use up to 20 MB of data even before they moved to CD-ROM.
This lead to a situation where every game since 1992 had more colors, more content, more audio and even cut-scenes on PC compared to Amiga.
AGA was overall a failed attempt at bringing next-gen graphics hardware for the Amiga. It was mostly OCS/ECS with ability to work in up to 8-bit planes instead of just 6. However 8-bit mode was slow on AGA and it had a hard time to match increasingly popular (S)VGA PC clones.
It not only lacked sprite scaling and 3D features, but couldn't even do tiled parallax backgrounds like SNES and Sega Genesis could. Amiga had very rough hardware parallax backgrounds, but by splitting bitplanes, resulting in 16 + 16 colors on AGA.
Furthermore VGA wasn't just a simple framebuffer (like Atari ST had). It had somewhat working hardware scrolling and could draw 4 pixels by just one byte write. Wolfenstein 3D used this to draw floor and ceiling every frame, while other games used this to quickly fill the polygons.
In other words fast 286 + VGA or 386 system were able to surpass Amiga even in 2D, when games were using VGA tricks.
However when 486 with SVGA using VLB came it was all over. 486DX2 66 MHz + SVGA VLB can not only replicate every possible Amiga trick in software at much higher FPS, but also can deliver graphics that were impossible on Amiga without 68040.
Commodore even failed with CD-ROM revolution, despite releasing CD32 console (which was pretty much Amiga 1200 without keyboard and mouse). There were two big CD-ROM releases back then "7th Guest" and "Myst". Both were a huge success and sold thousands of CD-ROM kits for PCs. These games while ported to many CD-ROM based systems were never released on CD32.
On the other hand Amiga community and 3rd party companies that were releasing hardware accelerators for Amiga, kept it alive until 2003-2005, when most community moved to Linux eventually.
Amiga was always a "better Macintosh". It could not only virtualize Mac OS, but it would run faster compared to Mac with same CPU. This is why Amiga moved to PPC like Macs. Being able to run Mac OS gave Amiga access to commercial software like Internet Browsers or Office tools.
In my country Amiga was used by one of TV stations up to early 2000's for displaying on-screen images and logos. Amiga was a popular tool for CGI in analog TV era. By default it had a genlock, which allowed to overlay image from Amiga on other video signal. Amiga also was a powerhouse for graphics, 3D modeling, rendering and audio productivity software in the 90's.
Now thing I really liked on Amiga was its sound capabilities. But then was it '95 I already had got Creative multimedia bundle with sb16 and cd drive for awhile. I wasn't initially impressed with PC's midi music tracks with that card, effects were nice, but then got game Crusader: No Remore and was awestruck with such good mod music capabilities and sound effects. I think that was the game that made me fully ditch Amiga on all tech fronts. SVGA graphics, pumping techno mod soundtrack etc. all cool tech going on simultaneously. CD32 was insanely expensive here and way too little, too late. Imo Amiga should've implemented HDD and CD upgrades to survive and they should've done it cheap. Quite big downfall was that Workbench was quite limited, but it could've been so much more better with internal mass storage. Many have also said poor memory handling was one of the pitfalls too. Guru meditation was thing indeed.
You mentioning discrete math brought back the trauma of proving 2k is even and 2k+1 is odd.
You're proving a definition?
Hey Robin, I invented everything! Hoo Hoo! Tell em Fred!
I had an Amiga 1000. I also had a C64. I liked playing Civilization, Empire, Warlords II and Fairytale.
I believe my brother got a A1200 around 1994 and thus we could only witness its slow death, with a slither of hope from the effort of the remaining dedicated magazines and also games such as Gloom and Breathless. But I only acknowledged that the line was flat and would never bip again after Duke Nukem 3D was pictured on the covers of all the other magazines, labelled as the game that killed Doom - the game the Amiga community was still striving to match.
But what a lovable machine it was. I remember being so proud Worms on the Amiga was so much better than the PC and Playstation ports :)
Worms was so good, my friend and I would turn off the round timer so you could take as long as you wanted over your turn, and we'd come up with ridiculous strategies, burrowing under the other guy's worms and stuff. Lemmings was also incredible in two-player mode on the Amiga, sadly I don't think many people played that, it was split-screen, you could be super-devious and come up with ways to send the other guy's lemmings flying into oblivion and then you'd suddenly hear yours going 'ahhhh... ahhhh' and realise he'd been doing the same to yours and now you were screwed :D. I remember one day playing a hundred rounds of that, just ALL day!
Very good video. The only thing missing in my opinion are the latest developments. For example, there is an official Amiga Quake 2 release that runs really well with a 100Mhz 68060. This also applies to the JfDuke client with which you can play Duke Nukem 3D very well. With a fast 68060 and a graphics card, this is also possible in higher resolutions such as 800x600 or even 1280x720. If you even have a PiStorm32 accelerator card with Pi CM4 module in the A1200, then you can even play JfDuke in 1920x1080. I still like to use my A4000 from 1993 with 68060 CPU and graphics card for gaming today.
No offense to the people that like to do that but that just sounds like burning money to me. Spending thousands of dollars on upgrades to play games that some random trash pc you find at ewaste can run 10 times faster is just crazy. I understand not wanting to let go of amigas, I have my own vintage computers I love, but I feel like people need to stop trying to make an amiga be a pc and just let it be an amiga.
You know your old when your first HDD smaller than yours Cache
Unfortunately I have to agree. Seeing Wolfenstein 3D was the beginning of end of love with Amiga for me. I will never forget going to my weekly software swap to pick up some new pirated software (don't judge me, it was the norm back then in my country) and among all the Amigas, Atari STs, ZX Spectrums, C=64s, someone had PC running Wolfenstein 3D and I said to my buddy to give me a copy of the game for Amiga and that's when he told me "Sorry this one is only on PC"... What? That non-gamer computer???
Amiga will forever have most nostalgic gaming moments in my heart, but soon after I moved on from Amiga never to go back.
exactly, I was beside myself that it was on PC.
I wrote many Amiga demos from 1991 onwards, many of which can be found on here, but you can't beat a chunky screen for these kind of games. Bitplanes are great for some things, but not for stuff like Doom, Wolfenstein etc. However, you also need a much faster processor to write effectively to a chunky screen, which the PC most definitely had.
The A1200 ran at 14Mhz and most reasonable PCs were 66Mhz or more. Add also that by default the 68020 couldn't do floating point math and that made coding Doom style games almost impossible. For floating point, you really needed a 68882 co-processor.
Later on, games like Gloom used amazingly fast chunky to planer converters, that still required insane power on a machine running at 14Mhz. In fact quite a few scene demos do effects in chunky and then convert the effect back to planer. My own C2P converter used both the blitter and CPU simultaneously to try and be a quick as possible, but you can never beat a screen that's already chunky.
66Mhz PC also cost 3x what an A1200 did
My brother always let met play on his A500.
Modern games may not available but all these titles available were so much fun to play.
Over and over again, sometimes only for the music 😅 which was ways better than on any PC.
Miss these times alot.
Thanks for the video ❤️🔥
Good video as usual - but I think Cytadela and Nemac IV deserved being mentioned :)
As much as I love the platform I think realistically the Amiga was outdated and outclassed as a games machine long before Wolfenstein appeared. Not only did it have limitations for 3D games, it also had limitations for certain types of 2D game; consoles of the era all had a tile mode which made 2D scrolling of large maps pretty trivial, whereas on the Amiga you have to do a lot of faffing around to emulate it, and the limited number of hardware sprites further compounds the issue - sure, the blitter is fairly capable, but it struggles to compete against the 80 hardware sprites on the Mega Drive (especially on machines with no FastRAM where bus contention can bring the machine to its knees). Sure, there are a lot of technically impressive games out there, but If you compare pretty much any console game to its Amiga counterpart the results can be painful.
All that said, it's still the machine I have the most fondness for.
Worst feature of Amiga for 2D games was the popularity of single button joysticks.
I have been reading old game magazines and somewhere in 1990-1991 PC was already the main gaming computer. Lots of games were made PC first and later to Amiga. PC took markets kinda fast, because in 1987 PC just started to be somewhat mentioned as gaming computer.
Brings back memories. Moving 0013h to ax and calling int 10h you felt like the king of the world back then. A whooping 64000 pixels to be filled by your imagination.