[AnotherGoodName]

I remember having both and the Amiga seemed 2 generations ahead honestly. Not surprisingly given the shear hardware differences. Amiga really was an everything and the kitchen sink system. High end 32bit CPU, graphics acceleration, amazing audio, literally 256 times the ram of the NES.

Even the SNES didn't come close. Wasn't until the Sega Saturn era that we saw something that could outperform it.

[dansalvato]

Amiga has its strengths, but I find that the SNES outperforms it in video games, because the SNES graphics chips were designed for video games first and foremost.

One major reason is sprites: Amiga can display 8 4-color sprites, or 4 16-color sprites, and the colors are shared with the bitplanes.

SNES can display 128 16-color sprites, and the sprites get 8 palettes all to themselves.

This leads to much more colorful-looking visuals on SNES. Since Amiga is all bitplanes, enabling more colors and higher resolution results in a massive performance hit. Most game entities would need to be blit on top of the background, and then the background "restored" every frame that entity moves. SNES' native support for multiple tile layers and good sprites means that the CPU can do a lot less work to achieve a lot more.

Amiga can do some very cool stuff that SNES can't, especially with the blitter, but SNES is much more practical and powerful for video games.

[vardump]

"One major reason is sprites: Amiga can display 8 4-color sprites, or 4 16-color sprites, and the colors are shared with the bitplanes."

Per scanline. However, you can multiplex them with copper to your hearts content.

"SNES can display 128 16-color sprites, and the sprites get 8 palettes all to themselves."

32 per scanline, but then almost all of those sprites would need to be 8x8. Just 17 of 16 pixels wide sprites.

[Findecanor]

Amiga sprites were also unlimited in height.

BTW. On AGA (Amiga 1200, 4000 and CD32) each sprite could be 32 or 64 pixels wide but I don't think that feature was used much by games.

[nikau]

> because the SNES graphics chips were designed for video games first and foremost.

So was the Amigas chipset - it was originally designed as a games console and pivoted to a home computer when the games console market tanked in the early 80s.

[Dwedit]

Graphically, SNES beats the Amiga hands down.

Assuming you are not rewriting the palette scanline-by-scanline...

Amiga is stuck with 16 colors for the whole bitmap screen unless extra-halfbrite mode is used, then it goes up to 32 colors (extra colors must be half as bright as the base colors). Using the hardware sprites (3 colors + transparent) can add up to 12 more colors.

Meanwhile on the SNES, the most-used video mode has two background layers with 15-color tiles (plus transparent), and one background layer with 3-color tiles (plus transparent). 8 different palettes can be selected, for 128 colors.

Then there are sprites too, lots of sprites can be on the screen at once. 15-colors (plus transparent) for a sprite, and 8 different palettes can be selected.

Then afterwards, color math can be applied, you can make graphics use additive blending (light effects), subtractive blending (darkness effects), or 50% transparent blending.

[stormking]

It's 32 colors in normal and 64 colors in extra-halfbrite.

[vidarh]

32/64 colours, assuming no rewriting, but given the very existence of the copper was motivated by being able to change values like that, plenty of Amiga games exceeded that. Some very substantially.

The copper was also used to multiplex sprites, so again the limitation is per scanline.

And assuming things wouldn't be changed per scanline is assuming a shoddy job - very few games on the Amiga would not make at least some use of the copper to extend the number of sprites or number of colours on screen.

[lttlrck]

I have very vague memories from the time when Lemmimgs was released, something about the sprite/copper that allowed it to display those Lemmings efficiently. Of course the Atari ST had the exactly same game which puzzled me, though presumably it used brute force.

[vidarh]

I think it's more likely it "just" had more colours, and possibly used a different graphics mode for parts of the screen. Lemmings strikes me as a game where the size and number both precludes using sprites for all of them, and where moving the Lemmings themselves shouldn't be computationally costly enough to be a problem.

Though the Amiga does allow changing the positioning of the screen over a larger bitmap, so e.g. panning the levels without much/any copying might have been an option? Doesn't require the copper, though.

[frostburg]

As is was already noted, scanline-level techniques were commonly used in Amiga games.

A few of the more sophisticated efforts could be argued to be technically superior to anything on the SNES; consider Shadow of the Beast 3 or Lionheart.