[sys_64738]

Games of that era were better to play then and better to play now. Amiga is such an integral part of computing history even though the Mac/PC duopology tries to write it out of history.

When you consider in the early 90s that the Amiga emulated the fastest Mac FASTER than the fastest Mac, you get an idea of the power. Maybe you need to live that time to realize how pathetic today's technology landscape is.

[icedchai]

It felt like things advanced faster back then. The Amiga was a huge leap over other 16-bit platforms when it was released. Time doesn't stand still, and hardware wise the platform barely evolved between 1985 and 1994. AGA was the only major change to the platform, other than faster processors, which every other platform was also getting. Example: An Amiga in 1994 had the same sound chip ("Paula") as one released in 1985.

The slow, incremental improvements weren't enough to keep up with x86 and SVGA. Commodore really dropped the ball. If the 1200/4000 was released in 1990 instead of late '92 it might've been a different story. The 1200's performance was hobbled by lack of fast memory out of the box and a previous generation processor (68020, which as 5+ years old at the time.)

Early versions of the OS were also primitive and unstable. That didn't change until 2.0 which wasn't generally available until late 1990.

[cmrdporcupine]

Absolutely, but even if Commodore had rolled out new updates to the chipset sooner, experience is that people wouldn't really have used it because everything in that era was so tightly coupled to hardware -- with minimal abstraction and API [part of the joy them, tho] -- that people had to write to the lowest common denominator, or whatever was most popular.

Example: Atari's STe line got a nice blitter and more advanced sound hardware than the original ST about 2 years after the original ST launch, but almost no games used it. It just wasn't practical for game authors to target it when so many people had the original generation. (And hence the next generation didn't sell well because no compelling reason and so on). And in fact the marketplace was small enough that even just targeting either Amiga or ST and programming specifically for one and getting the most out of them wasn't done that much. People just wrote what amounted to a generic 68k planar bitmap graphics game that could be ported easily to either the ST or the Amiga, not taking advantage of the better features of either.

PCs were ugly and not nearly as sexy and fun as those machines from that era, but what they brought to the table was standards and upgradable commodity hardware.

[dylan604]

>Maybe you need to live that time to realize how pathetic today's technology landscape is.

Okay, I'm a fan of the Amiga, but this is just too far. Today's computers are "pathetic"? I remember playing with an A500 when I was really young and didn't really know anything other than a few games. I really got into Amiga with the A2000 solely based the Newtek's Video Toaster. Then, computers became all about video for me since. The things we can do now in real-time with video blows an Amiga out of the water. Toaster was all about SD video. We now do more things in real-time with 4K videos.

Your comments act like the rest of the computing world is at a stand still compared to the Amiga of yore.

[MegaDeKay]

> Maybe you need to live that time to realize how pathetic today's technology landscape is.

I think that is going a little far. There are some incredible technologies out there right now. What GPUs can do these days is amazing. For another, the phenomenally fast SSDs in current gen consoles like the PS5 will trickle down to PCs. On the flip side of the coin, you have very capable microcontroller platforms based on chips like the ESP32 for a few dollars, not to mention the latest offerings from the Raspberry Pi foundation. Really low cost boards like these put the technology into the hands of anybody that might be interested in learning something with next to no investment required. Even the Amiga couldn't make that claim back then.

[perl4ever]

>the Amiga emulated the fastest Mac FASTER than the fastest Mac

I remember when people would post this sort of thing on Usenet, for years after most people had given up on the platform.

By the time the A4000 came out (late 1992), there were Macs that also had 68040s and ran at higher clock speeds, so I don't think it was remotely possible to do what you say. How could a 25 MHz CPU emulate a 33MHz CPU faster than native under any circumstances?

[pdoege]

Up until the A3000 and the competing '030 Macintosh machines the Amiga's graphics and sound processors made up for slower CPUs. However, by the time of the '040 the Amiga was behind with the exception of SD NTSC video production.

[icedchai]

I believe that statement is based on getting a 68060 Amiga accelerator (whatever the fastest one at the time was?)