Commodore Amiga could have easily competed with SNES & MD if they didn't focus on proprietary.

[Lord Innit]

1 hour ago, Leeroy ST said:

Didn't Sega have some deal with Amstrad for a Sega computer?

 

 

Mega PC ?

[Zoyous]

There actually was the TeraDrive, a 286 PC-MegaDrive combo that came out only in Japan in 1991. I would have wanted it if I'd known about it back in the day! However, from what I've read about it, it didn't really have much cross-platform functionality. It was just kind of a lower-spec PC that happened to have a MegaDrive built in to it. https://segaretro.org/TeraDrive

[Leeroy ST]

5 minutes ago, Zoyous said:

There actually was the TeraDrive, a 286 PC-MegaDrive combo that came out only in Japan in 1991. I would have wanted it if I'd known about it back in the day! However, from what I've read about it, it didn't really have much cross-platform functionality. It was just kind of a lower-spec PC that happened to have a MegaDrive built in to it. https://segaretro.org/TeraDrive

From what older documentation I can find it seems you could use Genesis specs for Pc software and it ran dos. Then this is literally the Sega PC people are talking about, didn't do well though. 

[high voltage]

Edited September 25, 2020 by high voltage

[Lord Innit]

4 hours ago, high voltage said:

Commocore CDTV was a SNES and MD killer

If you dropped one  on a SNES or MD it would certainly do the job.

[carlsson]

Yes, both the SEGA Teradrive and the Amstrad Mega PC were rather ho-hum computers, at least for the prices asked. Sure you would have loved a computer with a built in Mega Drive/Genesis if you knew about it, but if you also took into consideration how much it cost and what kind of PC you could get next to your regular Genesis console for the price difference, I'm not so sure you had been that eager to get either model when those were new.

 

I used to own a Mega PC for a short while a couple of years ago and ... wasn't impressed.

[turboxray]

On 9/22/2020 at 8:55 AM, desiv said:

No, that's wrong on a couple of sides.

One, why are you dissing the PC-Engine?    That machine had some great games that compared well to Genesis/SNES quality.

And the Amiga was definitely capable of competing in that area. 

There were some games that prove that no problem...

 

Some games (console style ones), yes. And almost all of them employed an extremely low pixel color just to get dual play fields, masked over with 'rainbow hue' copper list to hide the limitations. But I can see it. And most are slow games running at 25/30fps. As a home computer, yes it was great for console style games (especially considering the competition). But it DID struggle to do what the Genesis and SNES easily did. EU game coders were just really good at hiding those limitations, but make no mistake there's some really serious limitations behind those games. You can't blame everything on "it was an ST port". So yeah, the amount of effort to even get close to the SNES/Genesis required some serious talent, while games that go above and beyond (top tier games) on the SNES/Genesis did not. 

[oky2000]

On 9/25/2020 at 9:24 PM, Lord Innit said:

If you dropped one  on a SNES or MD it would certainly do the job.

The SNES games are coded to within 99% of the chipset potential, 99.99% of Amiga games are coded by assholes and ditto for music and pixel art. The Japanese are just MORE RESPECTFUL but UK developers put out any old shit FACT.

 

There is only one into the screen 'sprite scaling' racing game worth playing on the Amiga 500/1000/2000 and the SNES would struggle with that 60fps Out Run killer. The SNES could NEVER do Shadow of the Beast 1 audio (64kb sound buffer limit for game engines) and the crap CPU in the SNES (65816) usually needs an expensive DSP in the cart, including the launch game Pilot Wings. 

 

The Megadrive on the other hand could barely handle samples better than a Commodore 64 lol and the pathetic music is more like rubbish PC Adlib bullshit DOSwankers loved than anything the Amiga can do without breaking a sweat. Of course the rival to the CDTV (I am talking about 1985/86 Amiga chipset floppy based computers) is the Mega CD and that gets around the problem with CD soundtracks as an option for arcade conversions.

 

Shadow of the Beast 1, Lotus II and Turrican III are classic examples of console quality Amiga games, and two of those require no disk swaps at all. These sort of games are very rare in technical and artistic skill but that is exactly the sort of effort almost all SNES/Megadrive/PC Engine arcade style games had put into them.

 

Few people understood the reason we needed the CDTV, including the clueless ass clowns Irving Gould had leading projects. The CDTV is a solution to TWO problems,

 

1. Hard disks were VERY expensive in 1990/91 (especially for Amigas below the A2000 without internal card slots for hard cards) which meant 90% of games players had to play games from floppy disk. This is a massive problem when going against 8mb (64mbit) cart games, if you put in the effort to make a 20mb Cinemaware hard disk install type of game like It Came from the Desert you would have an astonishing bit of 16bit gaming and easily read it off a 150kb/s CDTV drive....on 3 floppy disks as it was released....erm it's nice but it's not the hardware holding back the full potential of the game. As released not quite the experience the hardware could deliver AND constantly interrupts atmosphere with disk swaps. The CDTV + keyboard would be about 100 bucks more than the pig ugly A500 joke of a design option. An Amiga hard disk of 20-30mb alone was about 300 quid!!!!! (800 quid for pig ugly A500 + A530 Zorro 1 HDD)

 

2. Commodore numbnuts engineers had no f$^king clue how to improve the chipset designed by the Los Gatos team in 1984 and had already forced them to resign by expecting them to move half way across the USA to work for Commodore. This meant the 4 channel DAC system which somehow idiots had decided to use via MOD tracker music to waste 1 DAC for 1 instrument for game engines (any idiot knows you use sample loops of multi channel music at 8-12khz in 3-6 seconds loops sequenced together and save 2-3 DACs BUT get Konami 68000 based arcade style 16-32 channel music). With CDTV those idiots can use the CDDA tracks for music and speech (99 tracks, 99 index points per track IRRC) and have up to 4 DACs free for game engine SFX. Let's be honest the speakers in most small TVs and computer monitors of 1980s you wouldn't tell the difference between 12khz 8bit or 48khz 16bit audio

 

There are only about 10 games worth loading up on an Amiga 500, none of those are on the CDTV either.

 

The CDTV failed because the only company that could have saved it, Cinemaware, spent all their money doing some very nasty blocky FMV based PC Engine CD game conversion of It Came from the Desert...idiots. It's is as cringeworthy as the worst 80s movies badly converted to Phillips VideoCD format lol

[oky2000]

On 9/26/2020 at 7:28 AM, turboxray said:

Some games (console style ones), yes. And almost all of them employed an extremely low pixel color just to get dual play fields, masked over with 'rainbow hue' copper list to hide the limitations. But I can see it. And most are slow games running at 25/30fps. As a home computer, yes it was great for console style games (especially considering the competition). But it DID struggle to do what the Genesis and SNES easily did. EU game coders were just really good at hiding those limitations, but make no mistake there's some really serious limitations behind those games. You can't blame everything on "it was an ST port". So yeah, the amount of effort to even get close to the SNES/Genesis required some serious talent, while games that go above and beyond (top tier games) on the SNES/Genesis did not. 

 

There is your reason why the PC Engine CD was a great idea, Vulcan Venture/Gradius II is one of the best late 80s Konami arcade shooters, you need the CD drive for the audio and the PC Engine does what a SNES would need a DSP to do. The Mega-CD would be required for any Megadrive conversion (which is limited to a max of 16 colours per tile layer...239 less than the arcade motherboard) because the Megadrive has PC Adlib type pathetic music abilities. If you like shmups from Konami and you don't own a PC Engine CD based system then you are either poor or an idiot. You also get to play the best versions of R-Type, Salamander and Gradius/Nemesis on this machine. The biggest problem is you need an arcade quality joystick, up to Euromax Zipstik quality or better, and I don't think this exists. Playing Vulcan Venture with shitty little joypads like a 10 year old twat (AKA NES fanboys) is not fun, THAT is the only valid argument against the PCE (and SNES and Megadrive too, ALL the joysticks were f^$king shit and only idiots used them). It's like driving my M3 wearing thick rubber gloves, a bit of a problem. But hey the hardware is more capable the the stock SNES motherboard with slowdown central on all the non DSP equipped shmup carts for it. SNES = 256 colour slow mario clone engine NOT for 60fps intense shmups. Super R-Type with all the slowdown should just have been called Retarded-Type....:) More bloody slowdown than the so-so Amiga R-Type II game engine.

 

The only Amiga that could do this game is the CD32 (or A1200/4000 with a CD ROM drive) and handling a CD32 piece of shit is about as tempting as making mudpies with cow shit. Still it could do it, TinyUS (a homebrew Gradius clone that will run on A500/1000/2000/CDTV) clearly shows it's a talent issue not a hardware limiting issue. If you lose the parallax it is not worth doing, and software parallax would be difficult for a 32 colour game vs 8+7 colour shitty dual playfield mode. Amiga AGA sprites are awesome, you could do arcade SF2 graphics in compiled BASIC for one thing on AGA, but the sprites of the older Amigas are as pathetic as those for the NES...and the NES sprites are inferior to the Commodore 64 1981 sprite hardware technology. In fact Amiga sprites are as useful as a chocolate willy to a racist woman running a fever lol and using all 8 hardware sprites makes smooth glitch free scrolling tricky so just forget them and learn how to use the workstation class blitter all Amigas came with.

 

Coding the Amiga to maximise chipset potential is as tricky as the machine code programming project for the Sega Saturn called "Sega Rally". If the only 3 coders worth a shit on the Amiga WERE BUSY you were pretty fucked back then really weren't you? That's why games like this never came out for A1200/CD32...in fact Turrican III which should run on a 1985 Amiga 1000 (beast 1 does) is more impressive than EVERY A1200 exclusive game....and Commodore pinned their hopes on these software publisher scumbags to launch the CD32 console with ZERO in-house 1st party software support as their saviour. Fucking pricks! For a start Amiga 1200 AND CD32 have a CPU that is effectively crippled to 7mhz...WTF use is a 7mhz 68020 vs a 7mhz 68000? Erm not fucking much. The Amiga 1000 had clock double memory bus and shared it between CPU and chipset DMA....the A1200/CD32 does not. See what I mean about clueless asshole Commodore engineers working on the Los Gatos team's original Amiga chipset to upgrade it. Can you imagine Sega launching the Megadrive but having the CPU crippled to 50% speed if you wanted to scroll the screen/move sprites about/play music? A bad joke right? 

 

I have some 16 colour mockups of Vulcan Venture for the ST on this very board, I guess you could do it in 16 colours (most efficient screen memory layout for Amiga 1985-1991 computers) but it really needs 64 colours...I don't even think Adrian Edmondson and co. of Reflections (they wrote Beast 1 game engine) could do it in EHB 64 colour mode and 50/60fps.

 

The fact this game is on the PC Engine CD is not only a clear indication that anybody who says PCE hardware is rubbish is dickhead FACT. You only really need the CD drive to replicate the arcade soundtrack (same reason you need a CD32 to do it justice).

Edited July 6, 2021 by oky2000
WERE BUSY

[zetastrike]

One thing you can say about the Amiga, it gets 40+ year old English guys more fired up and defensive than a German Air raid.

[+GoldenWheels]

Mega Man X? Castlevania IV? FEH! Who's heard of, or wants to play, that nonsense.

 

Which system has the better version of Alfred Chicken, that's what I want to know.

[Leeroy ST]

One thing about the Amiga, AND the Atari St (and the Archimedes), is that unless you waited until 1989 for a $3000 workstation those machines dominated 3D. Mid Winter, Castle Master, Robotcop, No Second Price, Mode-7 looking games with bigger and cleaner graphics and more layers than SNES, Hunter, Mercenary II, Starglider, Terminator, Powerdrome, Interphase, consoles couldn't do games like these. Nor could they do scaling as well. The best you got were Virtua Racing and Star Fox which required expensive hardware and barely performed with that.

 

However, if you were a fan of side-scrollers the consoles had the computers beat. At least the Amiga and ST, after 1990-1991. Although there are some effects like seen in Shadow of the Beast that consoles may have problems with but otherwise the strengths and priorities are different. 

 

By late 1992 PC compatibles were best at both though. Macintosh too......maybe.....

[+Black_Tiger]

On 7/13/2021 at 10:49 AM, Leeroy ST said:

One thing about the Amiga, AND the Atari St (and the Archimedes), is that unless you waited until 1989 for a $3000 workstation those machines dominated 3D. Mid Winter, Castle Master, Robotcop, No Second Price, Mode-7 looking games with bigger and cleaner graphics and more layers than SNES, Hunter, Mercenary II, Starglider, Terminator, Powerdrome, Interphase, consoles couldn't do games like these. Nor could they do scaling as well. The best you got were Virtua Racing and Star Fox which required expensive hardware and barely performed with that.

 

However, if you were a fan of side-scrollers the consoles had the computers beat. At least the Amiga and ST, after 1990-1991. Although there are some effects like seen in Shadow of the Beast that consoles may have problems with but otherwise the strengths and priorities are different. 

 

By late 1992 PC compatibles were best at both though. Macintosh too......maybe.....

None of those games were available for Amiga until 1989 or later so your point is moot.

 

The budget Amiga was still $1000 back then, so the "expensive" chipped carts comment is silly.

 

Why waste money on an Amiga when you could get a Neo Geo for less? It had better games and the kind of scaling the Amiga could never do.

 

 

 

 

 

Also, these games used no extra chips and both hold up very well to the Amiga's racing library:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited July 15, 2021 by Black_Tiger

[oky2000]

There are two sides to this issue as far as Amiga, and any home computer + western software developers vs console + Japanese developers.

 

1. Hardware. Like it or lump it getting 100% out of the extremely complex multi co-processor environment in an Amiga was something maybe only 5-10  coders ever managed. Shadow of the Beast 1, Lotus II, Turrican III, Lionheart and the 3D scaling bitmap flying sections of Unreal (not the PC Doom clone!) are some of the rare examples of console quality games on Amiga. You will notice none of them are licensed arcade conversions. Getting 100% out of an Amiga is a lot harder than SNES/MD/PC Engine which have much more flexible parallax hardware and simple to program powerful hardware sprites. None can match the Amiga for audio in reality, even the SNES is using 9bit samples really, not 16bit as they claim, due to weird compression and is limited to 64kb worth of sample data so it ends up sounding like Window 95 .midi General MIDI music files (i.e. cheap toy synths with tiny waveform samples looped enlessly). 

 

2. Developers. There is no reason at all that Amiga Chase HQ couldn't have looked a hell of a lot like the FM Towns port of said game instead of some rubbish that fell out of the asshole of the Continental Circus ST/Amiga game engine coder. THIS is the biggest problem! If the games are all crap conversions I wouldn't wipe my arse with then who cares how good the hardware is? Coding Amiga to 99% efficiency/utilization vs the same for console competition is much more difficult AND the attitude of home computer software publishers stank. Also, most Amiga 'musicians' have zero taste in synthesizers and should be starving buskers on the streets. Absolutely 100% naff samples from very naff and cheap sounding tacky synths were used on 90% of Amiga music. David Whittaker's Beast 1 soundtrack and Jeroen Tel's Agony soundtrack are rare examples where samples are taken from really nice synths and not a bunch of crap hissy instruments from some 50 pence PD disks of Soundtracker instrument disk sets, the same crappy sounds in early Amiga demos. Any idiot who knew how to double click the Deluxe Paint icon on Workbench also managed to get a job as a 'graphic artist' but their spastic efforts made some Amiga games look worse than the best C64 games to be quite frank.

 

 

I chose F17 Challenge because Team 17 were neither the best nor the worst coders/artists so it's a fair comparison. Shaun Southern could easily have replicated the game engine of the FM Towns but nobody was ever as talented as Shaun at 2.5D scaling routines on the Amiga or the ST.

 

Neither the Warner Atari Mickey project or Commodore Amiga would have ever beaten the consoles because console developers putting out rubbish like ST/Amiga OutRun would go bankrupt as they had to pay Sega/Nintendo up front $15/£15 per cartridge and this was easily $1million up front for how much they needed manufactured and would eat the loss if they put crap games on the ROMs inside those carts. People like US Gold hid behind the copyright laws which clearly stated you were NOT entitled to a refund of ANY software no matter how much of a rip-off it was, compare this with how millions of copies of VCS E.T. were sold before Xmas....millions returned for full refund after Xmas, which were now technically used items, and Atari had to accept the returns as a loss. That little bastard who ran US Gold made millions from the fact he could ship 200,000 copies of OutRun to the stores in 2 weeks before any magazine reviews would even hit the news stands. THAT is the problem. £399.99 for an Amiga to play games on mostly was a real shit show, for that money you could get a PC-E, MD and SNES! I'd rather pay more and get PC Engine OutRun....rather than that direct port of a development that was not even remotely worthy of the 8mhz 68000 in the Atari ST.