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by flohofwoe
8 days ago
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A VGA card was not in every aspect better than the Amiga custom chipset, otherwise Doom would have happened much earlier. The 256 color mode only really made sense when coupled with a powerful enough CPU which had enough oompfh to update each pixel each frame (for instance Doom's recommended spec was a 486). For some 2D graphical effects, the Amiga could do much more with much less hardware power and for a much lower price. But where the Amiga really was ahead was in software, it took the PC until Win95 (arguably, until NT4) to implement 'proper' multithreading and to finally get a desktop UI that wasn't a complete joke, and the Mac only got preemptive multitasking with OSX in 2001. Amiga was basically the poor man's UNIX-like workstation when you couldn't afford to shell out somewhere between 10k and 100k for a NeXT, Sun or SGI workstation. |
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Or 6K (1.5K used in 92/93) for a well-specced 386 that can actually run UNIX, multiple DOS versions (including preemptive multitaskers), OS/2, Windows (3.x/NT). And that's just the surface of the mainstream.
> But where the Amiga really was ahead was in software, [...].
You confuse "software" for your specific preferences in GUIs. And software? The PC software catalog in DOS alone towers over Amigas, with a couple of notable outliers (the odd exclusive here and there, especially in cost-effective video production).
> The 256 color mode only really made sense when coupled with a powerful enough CPU which had enough oompfh to update each pixel each frame (for instance Doom's recommended spec was a 486).
Yeah, like 2D platformer Stormlord (VGA version released in 1989) or Red Baron (1990). Played the latter first in VGA on a 286. Ran smooth. Amiga 500? Stutterfest. The game that allegedly sold more 386 machines than any other? Wing Commander. 1990. The late OCS port was technically inferior. Yeah, yeah, I know. 2.5D only counts when one invokes Doom.