[pjmlp]

And by 2000, sound cards and 3D accelerators on the PC removed all the advantage, with BeOS looking like a possible replacement for the Amiga generation, oh well.

I guess those ideas now live on macOS and Windows platforms, to some extent.

[perl4ever]

It was when the A3000 came out that Macs started looking more attractive to me. Originally, it was like "4096 colors, cool!" but once high resolution screens became more common, flickering interlace mode and 16 colors was underwhelming.

16 bit color made HAM irrelevant and was more exciting than pre-emptive multitasking and graphic acceleration.

BeOS was almost acquired by Apple to replace the Mac OS, but it wasn't, and it makes you wonder how history would have been different.

[pjmlp]

Indeed, it would have been mostly C++ based, and not offer the scenario of buying Apple systems as pretty UNIX, as big alternative universe.

Ironically there was a group of engineers at Commodore that was big into trying to merge Amiga OS and UNIX.

"VCFMW 11 - Bil Herd: Tales From Inside Commodore"

https://youtu.be/-Zpv6u5vCJ4

[spamizbad]

I feel like we hit this point way before 2000. By 1994 you could buy a Pentium machine with CD-quality audio and SVGA graphics on a fast PCI bus. You could browse the web! Just 2 years later in 1996 you have 3D acceleration and sophisticated graphics APIs mainstreamed on PCs: not to mention the arrival of the Pentium Pro and MMX extensions.

[tom_]

My recollection is that the Amiga was 99% dead by 1995, at least in the UK, and by 2000 it was 100% gone.

The PC killed it off. Even before 3D accelerators came along, there'd been years of year-on-year performance improvements, each time at the same or lower prices thanks to competition between suppliers of commodity parts. You also had byte-per-pixel display memory, and much better ALU throughput than the Amiga, so the games would look more interesting even when they weren't the nice high production value stuff you'd now be able to get from US developers.

[vidarh]

Doom was basically the end for Amiga gaming. There were still some noteworthy Amiga games after that, but it was the point where chunky graphics modes definitively were shown to be necessary to keep up.