I love the Amiga and it certainly excels at certain classes of game but there is simply no sense that it could beat out the contemporary consoles at the games consoles excel at. It's kinda odd to assert otherwise, and even a cursory glance at what was available in the early 90s would bear that out.
Super mario bros 3 is hands down a better designed platformer than just about any you care to name for the Amiga. The flagship platformers for the Genesis and SNES, Sonic and Super Mario World, are simply streets ahead of anything on the Amiga both visually and from a design perspective. Donkey Kong Country is a tour de force. No beat 'em up on the Amiga comes close to the SNES implementations of Mortal Kombat 2 and Street Fighter 2.
Plus, the games in this video are just not strong examples for the Amiga either. Shadow of the Beast, for all its eye candy and nostalgia, has terrible playability. Leander looks good but is borderline monochrome due to the Amiga's palette restrictions. Superfrog's controls feel twitchy, light and insubstantial and the level design lacks focus (see also Robocod). On the flipside there are plenty of genres the Amiga excelled at during the early 90s; The Settlers, Lemmings, F18 Interceptor, Monkey Island 2, Dune 2 are all very strong. Just to name a couple off the top of my head, where you didn't get a very good version of that experience on the consoles of the time.
Edit: actually, to be fair Another World and Flashback are top notch.
100% agree with this take. It's hard to watch someone defend the clunky, awkward animation in Sword of Sodan and Battle Chess as being on par with the extremely high-quality titles available for the Genesis or SNES. There's no comparison.
To be fair, going through the back catalogues of the Genesis, SNES and Amiga there probably are more actually great games on the Amiga than either console. But that is mostly down to there being 4-5 times as many releases. Also a lot of 1990 and pre-1990 Amiga games are pretty rope-y. The arrival of the 16Bit console era ushered in a marked shift in the quality of computer game production across all platforms. So on one hand it probably isn't fair to compare early titles like Sword of Sodan and Shadow of the Beast to console games, but also kinda ridiculous to put them front and centre as the best of the Amiga
Unusual for any home computer, The amiga has a nearly decade long life span meaning that both the 8bit and 16bit consoles are it's contemporaries.
The a500 released in 87 and the Sega megadrive in 88 and the snes in 90. The peak years for amiga game sales start in 1990 and all three machines received ports of one another's games.
a lot of games were good enough, equal as good or sometimes even better AND you got a multi-purpose computer compared to a one trick pony game console. and lets not forget, that as a kid, piracy was just an important factor to choosing a computer over a console as well!
i think comparing sob is valid though, the game got released on the amiga, was popular and got ports to other platforms & consoles, but none matched the amiga version.
> i think comparing sob is valid though, the game got released on the amiga, was popular and got ports to other platforms & consoles, but none matched the amiga version.
It just isn't a good game. It stood out because it was technically impressive and very early but so many much better games came after it on both the amiga and the consoles. It is not a good example of what the amiga was capable of as a games machine.
Right and that's why I don't think it is a good example if you're going to try and make the argument that the amiga beats out the consoles as a games machine. Kinda doesn't matter that it was popular enough to get ported elsewhere. It's not exactly a great example of a game on any platform.
I really loved Flashback on the Amiga plus SimCity, Syndicate, Populous.
Mouse games on the Amiga were better than their console cousins stuck with a Gamepad
Yes! It was the fact that Amiga (and PC) had a mouse that made all the difference in terms of what kind of games that stood out (strategy, point and click adventures). With a few exceptions, platformers, beat em ups and action adventure games were all so much better on consoles with a gamepad. I got a Gravis Gamepad for my Amiga and sure, the controls were better than with a joystick, but I can't remember many games I weren't annoyed with nevertheless.
Platform games and scrolling shmups, beat em ups etc were much better on Megadrive/SNES.
Amiga won with games like SWOS, Frontier, Syndicate, Settlers.
I beleived the Amiga was superior until I tried Mortal Kombat and Adam's Family on the SNES. Animated and moving backgrounds on the SNES made an impression.
It's not very clear why Amiga Adam's family doesn't have backgrounds other than the laziness of the port. The Amiga was very good at layers of horizontally scrolling stuff, there's no shortage of it in a game like Jim Power.
The title is valid in some ways mainly because piracy was easy on the Amiga. It was possible that school friends could easily copy and share cracked games (with their chip tune intros often with game cheats) on floppy disks. Most of us with Amigas had so many more games compared to console owners. It was a unique experience not available to console owners.
Also one of the last games I bought for the Amiga, Sensible Golf, I was able to copy and give to my friend to play at the time. I think it wasn’t copy protected?
Game compilations were also a thing on Amiga. The [Beau Jolly Collection](https://escapistgamer.co.uk/product/beau-jolly-collection-amiga/) with The Settlers, Chaos Engine and Cannon Fodder was just amazing, one of the best gaming experiences of my life.
Also being able to buy a magazine with game demo disks attached was my favourite Amiga experience. You couldn’t buy a magazine with a console cartridge demo. I spent a lot of time just playing magazine demos (mainly from One Amiga & Amiga Power).
Many of the Amiga ports of games were quite decent. The Retrocore YouTube channel has lots of comparison vids of game ports, here is one of [BC Kid](https://youtu.be/ghWrvGz7j5o?si=kdiSdmUwIciVWaCM) and [Desert Strike](https://youtu.be/TwNufDcqjcM?si=MItqCaEJrhvTXDBZ). The sound was always amazing for the time on Amiga.
Also you can add being able to type assignments, make music and art as well as watch amazing Amiga demoscene demos available from PD mail order as a reason to own an Amiga over a console.
That is some low grade AI imagery.
One thing I remember about the Amiga back in the day was when it did its own, slightly PC thing, it was untouchable for the home. When it tried to ape console games it usually fell flat as the people making those games usually failed to understand how they worked. Stuff like Chaos Engine, Syndicate, Theme Park or Populace? Nintendo and Sega had pale imitations. 2D platformers? The Amiga was usually technically better, but they were a mess like Zool.
> 2D platformers? The Amiga was usually technically better,
Nah. Nothing on the Amiga matches Super Mario World, Yoshi's Island, Mega Man X, Super Metroid or Donkey Kong Country.
You might have got some things that stood up on the AGA machines had Commodore not immediately gone under but that's on a different timeline
Usually. I'm not going to compare them to SNES first party titles. On both a technical level and design level that is comparing the genius kid in school to the one who eats glue.
When I got the Amiga it was a magical machine. It had some very good arcade conversions like Golden Axe. Its music sounded beautiful, it had Cinemaware games that were unlike any other thing I had ever seen. Another World was great, and games like Cannon Fodder and Lemmings are all-time classics.
But let's be honest, Nintendo and Sega had much better quality control and classics like Sonic, Super Mario World, and Donkey Kong's Country. Some Amiga arcade games were not very good like Robocop and OutRun.
When PC got Doom and the newest Lucasarts titles, the Amiga simply couldn't compete anymore.
But still, the Amiga will always be a beloved machine and I will always remember it with a lot of fondness.
Commodore released a computer (hence, the keyboard, serial, parallel ports, etc.), the others released a gaming device. While the Amiga had chips that made game plat exceptionable, it came with an Operating System, the others did not. Even the CD32 came with an OS and computer ports.
This is amiga therapy for me and my brothers- it is notable that we amiga nerds have way more and better contact with other amiga nerds now, 35 years later than back then! Nooooooobody we knew had amigas in 80s Kansas, lol go figure
Flashback, Leander, Shadow of the Beast 1, 2 and 3, It Came From the Desert 1/2, Rocketeer, Wings, Secret of Monkey Island 1/2, Loom, Dragons’s Lair, Space Ace, The Chaos Engine, Syndicate, Populous, FIFA, Awesome, Lemmings, Flight of the Amazon Queen, Beneath a Steel Sky, Scorched Tanks, Star Wars, Megaball, Kyrandria, Battle Isle, Dune, Defender of the Crown, Batman, Cannon Fodder, Agony, Baldur’s Gate, Eye of the Beholder, Stunt Car Racer, Speedball, Pinball Wizard series, Darkseed, Player Manager, Elite, Armageddon, Robocop 3D, Hired Guns, Superfrog, Bamshee, Anything Team17 made, Magic Pockets, every simulation game ever released on Amiga.
Lets be real, consoles ran circles around the Amiga in terms of quality of games. There's nothing like Super Mario World or Chrono Trigger on the Amiga. The only games that excelled on the Amiga were anything that needed a mouse and/or keyboard eg. Lemmings.
It didn't help that a lot of Amiga games were poorly programmed, badly ported or half arsed in general - usually poor frame rates, bad collision detection, STILL relying on 1 button joysticks etc - nothing like what the demoscene offered in terms of showing the true capabilities of Amiga computers.
By the time the Amiga 1200 came out, a computer more than capable of going toe to toe with said consoles in terms of technical specs, PCs were vastly superior than the 1200 at that point, so it was sadly obsolete by the time it came out. You can blame Commodore's poor marketing and handling of the development of such computers.
Obviously I have a soft spot for Amigas, but its usually for things like the demoscene or its capabilities as a computer, not really for its games.
Speaking from a game collection the Genesis had a better overall library than the Amiga. That is not to say the Amiga did not have it's share of good games. There were simply more talented studios pushing out content on the consoles.
I loved my A500 to bits but was wildly envious of my SNES and Mega Drive owning friends. Games like Sonic and SMB3 totally blew my mind as a kid. The consoles clearly had another bar for quality than the micros and had really strong third party developers in their fold like Rare.
The difference in game quality between consoles and micros becomes even more apparent, when you look at the 8-bit era. Compare C64 to NES. SMB3 runs on a freaking 6502 (unless the cartridge had some extra chip?). We had nothing even remotely like it on the similarly specced C64, although modern titles like Sam’s Journey demonstrates it was technically possible.
I did not grow up with consoles in my own home and owe my programming career entirely to my C64 and Amiga - but credit where it’s due. Consoles had the better games (minus a handful of mouse based titles).
Ahhh yes the SNES and Megadrive ate the Amiga for breakfast? Hmmm... Streetfighter 2 and Sonic basically?
First party titles.
Amiga managed a rubbish 3rd party SF2 written by someone called Wong in his bedroom. Was still playable.
Recently, another proof of concept (using the blitter) had sf2 better than even the arcade.
Indeed we can even emulate a ps1 at full speed, even on an A1000 with RTG. 1985 machine emulating a machine a decade newer, never mind emulating a SNES.
The difference is first party titles vs third party.
Pinball dreams sucked ass on SNES. Amstrad CPC even gives the SNES a good kicking on the same title. Indeed thanks to the CRTC being used as a blitter, the Amstrad is probably more in line with the ST. The plus range, like 8 bit Amigas.
It's all about who would put the effort in at the time.
Nintendo and Sega had better versions of arcade games because they were first party. Sega paid for the privilege, which they should.
We got US Gold.
Summary: Can the Amiga run rings around both consoles? Yes. And it does. When given to the right people.
…what? Please show me an A1000 emulating a PS1. I love the Amiga (and own three), but the rose-tinted glasses we sometimes let nostalgia give us, especially when it comes to the amiga fan-base is so strange. It was ahead of the curve in many ways, especially during the late 80’s. But at the same time, there were architecture decisions that were made that held it back greatly.
Of course there were third party titles on consoles that were half-assed, just like there were ports to amiga that were also. But to say first party the only reason those consoles succeeded is provably false (and I think indicative of some people in the Amiga community are rooted into a specific niche corner of gaming exposure). You have titles like Street Fighter, Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Mega Man, the Capcom Disney games, Mortal Kombat, NBA Jam, Madden, etc.
Planar graphics were limiting (and only used by Amiga) and a turn off for devs targeting multiple platforms. Commodore’s continued decision to using a single button controller is still mind-boggling. And most of all, people wanted consoles (the cd32 wasn’t a bad idea in theory, just too little too late) - they didn’t want to deal with the complications of a computer and all that came with it.
I know I’m risking downvote hell here, but I think its important to also be realistic about the mistakes that were made with the Amiga. That doesn’t mean I don’t love the thing, or hack away on my A1200 to this day. Hell, I probably spend at least a grand a year on amiga related purchases for my collection. I just think it’s important to not let nostalgia completely blind us.
> Check Caffeine OS under Pistorm.
Hilarious.
You understand the pi4 is capable of emulating the PSX without having to be jammed in an Amiga? The Amiga is quite literally bringing nothing at all to the emulation capabilities of the pi.
> Hmmm... Streetfighter 2 and Sonic basically?
> First party titles.
SF2 was developed and published for the SNES by CAPCOM. They are a 3rd party developer with regards their relationship with Nintendo.
People often say the Mega Drive and Amiga are similiar but they really were not except for the CPU. The Mega Drive had way better hardware for action games (tile mode, 2 layers, lots of sprites) while the Amiga had advantages when it came to more computer-type games (way more RAM, better color palette, bitmapped screen).
Mega drive had newer video chips but those had little on the SNES video modes, mega drive was a little easier for performing hardware scrolling taken to great advantage with Sonic, it had a arcade board lineage but technically it was not a lot more advanced than Amiga ocs.
Yeah the SNES had lots of advantages over the Mega Drive, but I would say the Mega Drive had almost the same kind of advantages over OCS.
I don't like talking smack about the Amiga but I feel like most people think OCS could do way more than it could. The Mega Drive had 2 colorful playfields while the Amiga had the 8+7 color playfields if you wanted parallax, and then the blitter objects had to share colors with the playfield. The Mega Drive had lots of huge sprites with lots of colors. The Tile Map was also a very big advantage in arcade games over the Amigas bitmap graphics.
So yeah OCS was excellent for it's time and some programmers managed to make awesome things with it but the Mega Drive with it's 3 years newer arcade-derived graphics had some really huge advantages when it comes to moving lots of colorful objects around at 50fps.
When it comes to sound it's a completely different story though!
I kinda agree, even though even here the FM synthesis of the Mega Drive had some kind of advantages but it could never sound as varied or frankly as great as the Amiga could. Yeah if only the channel split wasn't so extreme, but I feel like that was never an issue back then. I always listened to the Amiga sound from my TV or monitor, never using headphones.
Really, the 4 channels should have fed in to a multiplexer and you should have had full control of the Left-Right pan for each channel.
But that might have made it way too expensive for the early/mid 80s
Was not, it was compairable, often mega drive releases had a slightly higher quality audio. Google that debate.
Console fit everything on cartridge of variable memory size which enabled distribution of higher quality samples than trying to stuff it all into 3.5" floppy discs.
Amiga was best of the wests 16bit home computers, but consoles whole aim was to perform better than a personal computer for less money, the consoles are all newer than the personal computers.
You are comparing apples with oranges.
The consoles were richer than the personal computers of that era. It was a cut throat market.
You do get 6 channel audio on the OPN2 chip in the Megadrive. But only one of those channels allows PCM/sample playback at 8bit. That is simply not "higher quality" than the 8bit samples people typically used on the Amiga. The rest of the channels are FM synthesis channels. Personally, I find these are very limited, mostly sounding like a cheap 80s synth (which is more or less what it is). And listening to megadrive game audio you can hear that it made very little use of sample playback, sticking mostly to FM synthesis for the music and only occasional sample playback for spoken words and the like. I really don't think that sounds better in many, many cases.
In standard operation Paula provides 4 channels of 8Bit PCM-based, synthesis and playback and that simply is more versatile and dynamic. Additionally Paula can achieve 14bit playback (though only 11bit is realisable) and can be made to do both AM and FM synthesis, though I can't imagine those were used much in games (but it does mean that you can build genuinely interesting synths with an amiga). The general trend in computer audio through the 80s was away from AM/FM synthesis and in that respect Paula is pretty ahead of it's time and pre-figures the direction things would go in.
But importantly it's worth doing a side-by-side comparison. Compare the music in Amiga Lemmings versus the Megadrive version. Or for instance the Flashback Intro. The Amiga is clearly superior in both such cases.
Where the megadrive tends to do better is where the original music is based on FM synthesis, like the Rainbow Islands Arcade cabinet. The megadrive does a pretty good job of directly replicating the arcade music and the Amiga's version is beholden to how well you can sample the bits you need (which was pretty mediocre in that case). And this isn't too surprising as both the Rainbow Islands Arcade and megadrive are using Yamaha FM synthesis chips from the same line of yamaha products
SNES was best UK console period, I owned SNES, mega drive, Amiga , Atari ST. You have no idea.
Compaire the Amiga version of street fighter II with the SNES version. No comparison and it's because the SNES hardware was stronger. Same for Ghouls and Ghosts.
SNES had hardware sprite rotation and scaling years before competitors. Amiga never had custom sprite chips.
PC engine had arcade perfect ports of many coin ops. You could barely tell the difference on many titles. Including Space Harrier, and Nemesis/ Gradius.
You are comparing apples with oranges and besides the Amiga hardware was old by the time the SNES Famicom was released
I love the Amiga and it certainly excels at certain classes of game but there is simply no sense that it could beat out the contemporary consoles at the games consoles excel at. It's kinda odd to assert otherwise, and even a cursory glance at what was available in the early 90s would bear that out. Super mario bros 3 is hands down a better designed platformer than just about any you care to name for the Amiga. The flagship platformers for the Genesis and SNES, Sonic and Super Mario World, are simply streets ahead of anything on the Amiga both visually and from a design perspective. Donkey Kong Country is a tour de force. No beat 'em up on the Amiga comes close to the SNES implementations of Mortal Kombat 2 and Street Fighter 2. Plus, the games in this video are just not strong examples for the Amiga either. Shadow of the Beast, for all its eye candy and nostalgia, has terrible playability. Leander looks good but is borderline monochrome due to the Amiga's palette restrictions. Superfrog's controls feel twitchy, light and insubstantial and the level design lacks focus (see also Robocod). On the flipside there are plenty of genres the Amiga excelled at during the early 90s; The Settlers, Lemmings, F18 Interceptor, Monkey Island 2, Dune 2 are all very strong. Just to name a couple off the top of my head, where you didn't get a very good version of that experience on the consoles of the time. Edit: actually, to be fair Another World and Flashback are top notch.
100% agree with this take. It's hard to watch someone defend the clunky, awkward animation in Sword of Sodan and Battle Chess as being on par with the extremely high-quality titles available for the Genesis or SNES. There's no comparison.
To be fair, going through the back catalogues of the Genesis, SNES and Amiga there probably are more actually great games on the Amiga than either console. But that is mostly down to there being 4-5 times as many releases. Also a lot of 1990 and pre-1990 Amiga games are pretty rope-y. The arrival of the 16Bit console era ushered in a marked shift in the quality of computer game production across all platforms. So on one hand it probably isn't fair to compare early titles like Sword of Sodan and Shadow of the Beast to console games, but also kinda ridiculous to put them front and centre as the best of the Amiga
Contemporary how? Amiga released against NES not SNES
Unusual for any home computer, The amiga has a nearly decade long life span meaning that both the 8bit and 16bit consoles are it's contemporaries. The a500 released in 87 and the Sega megadrive in 88 and the snes in 90. The peak years for amiga game sales start in 1990 and all three machines received ports of one another's games.
a lot of games were good enough, equal as good or sometimes even better AND you got a multi-purpose computer compared to a one trick pony game console. and lets not forget, that as a kid, piracy was just an important factor to choosing a computer over a console as well! i think comparing sob is valid though, the game got released on the amiga, was popular and got ports to other platforms & consoles, but none matched the amiga version.
> i think comparing sob is valid though, the game got released on the amiga, was popular and got ports to other platforms & consoles, but none matched the amiga version. It just isn't a good game. It stood out because it was technically impressive and very early but so many much better games came after it on both the amiga and the consoles. It is not a good example of what the amiga was capable of as a games machine.
oh, i agree, it was a technical demo first, a game second.
Right and that's why I don't think it is a good example if you're going to try and make the argument that the amiga beats out the consoles as a games machine. Kinda doesn't matter that it was popular enough to get ported elsewhere. It's not exactly a great example of a game on any platform.
I really loved Flashback on the Amiga plus SimCity, Syndicate, Populous. Mouse games on the Amiga were better than their console cousins stuck with a Gamepad
Yes! It was the fact that Amiga (and PC) had a mouse that made all the difference in terms of what kind of games that stood out (strategy, point and click adventures). With a few exceptions, platformers, beat em ups and action adventure games were all so much better on consoles with a gamepad. I got a Gravis Gamepad for my Amiga and sure, the controls were better than with a joystick, but I can't remember many games I weren't annoyed with nevertheless.
Yes Those games and sim games. I shouldve made the video more about those. oh well!
Platform games and scrolling shmups, beat em ups etc were much better on Megadrive/SNES. Amiga won with games like SWOS, Frontier, Syndicate, Settlers.
I beleived the Amiga was superior until I tried Mortal Kombat and Adam's Family on the SNES. Animated and moving backgrounds on the SNES made an impression.
Also, so many games ran at 25fps on Amiga. Just not good enough for that type of game.
It's not very clear why Amiga Adam's family doesn't have backgrounds other than the laziness of the port. The Amiga was very good at layers of horizontally scrolling stuff, there's no shortage of it in a game like Jim Power.
The title is valid in some ways mainly because piracy was easy on the Amiga. It was possible that school friends could easily copy and share cracked games (with their chip tune intros often with game cheats) on floppy disks. Most of us with Amigas had so many more games compared to console owners. It was a unique experience not available to console owners. Also one of the last games I bought for the Amiga, Sensible Golf, I was able to copy and give to my friend to play at the time. I think it wasn’t copy protected? Game compilations were also a thing on Amiga. The [Beau Jolly Collection](https://escapistgamer.co.uk/product/beau-jolly-collection-amiga/) with The Settlers, Chaos Engine and Cannon Fodder was just amazing, one of the best gaming experiences of my life. Also being able to buy a magazine with game demo disks attached was my favourite Amiga experience. You couldn’t buy a magazine with a console cartridge demo. I spent a lot of time just playing magazine demos (mainly from One Amiga & Amiga Power). Many of the Amiga ports of games were quite decent. The Retrocore YouTube channel has lots of comparison vids of game ports, here is one of [BC Kid](https://youtu.be/ghWrvGz7j5o?si=kdiSdmUwIciVWaCM) and [Desert Strike](https://youtu.be/TwNufDcqjcM?si=MItqCaEJrhvTXDBZ). The sound was always amazing for the time on Amiga. Also you can add being able to type assignments, make music and art as well as watch amazing Amiga demoscene demos available from PD mail order as a reason to own an Amiga over a console.
So much flexibility, hack ability.
I absolutely *lived* for coverdisks. Highlight of my month.
That is some low grade AI imagery. One thing I remember about the Amiga back in the day was when it did its own, slightly PC thing, it was untouchable for the home. When it tried to ape console games it usually fell flat as the people making those games usually failed to understand how they worked. Stuff like Chaos Engine, Syndicate, Theme Park or Populace? Nintendo and Sega had pale imitations. 2D platformers? The Amiga was usually technically better, but they were a mess like Zool.
> 2D platformers? The Amiga was usually technically better, Nah. Nothing on the Amiga matches Super Mario World, Yoshi's Island, Mega Man X, Super Metroid or Donkey Kong Country. You might have got some things that stood up on the AGA machines had Commodore not immediately gone under but that's on a different timeline
Usually. I'm not going to compare them to SNES first party titles. On both a technical level and design level that is comparing the genius kid in school to the one who eats glue.
Zool was such a let down
When I got the Amiga it was a magical machine. It had some very good arcade conversions like Golden Axe. Its music sounded beautiful, it had Cinemaware games that were unlike any other thing I had ever seen. Another World was great, and games like Cannon Fodder and Lemmings are all-time classics. But let's be honest, Nintendo and Sega had much better quality control and classics like Sonic, Super Mario World, and Donkey Kong's Country. Some Amiga arcade games were not very good like Robocop and OutRun. When PC got Doom and the newest Lucasarts titles, the Amiga simply couldn't compete anymore. But still, the Amiga will always be a beloved machine and I will always remember it with a lot of fondness.
Commodore released a computer (hence, the keyboard, serial, parallel ports, etc.), the others released a gaming device. While the Amiga had chips that made game plat exceptionable, it came with an Operating System, the others did not. Even the CD32 came with an OS and computer ports.
Amiga and ST made for a golden era of gaming
Amiga was the PC Master Race before there was a PC Master Race.
Preaching to the choir my brother! Nice vide too btw
thank you. i know my vids have their issues but dang…I like talking about this stuff
This is amiga therapy for me and my brothers- it is notable that we amiga nerds have way more and better contact with other amiga nerds now, 35 years later than back then! Nooooooobody we knew had amigas in 80s Kansas, lol go figure
Tell no one. ;)
Flashback, Leander, Shadow of the Beast 1, 2 and 3, It Came From the Desert 1/2, Rocketeer, Wings, Secret of Monkey Island 1/2, Loom, Dragons’s Lair, Space Ace, The Chaos Engine, Syndicate, Populous, FIFA, Awesome, Lemmings, Flight of the Amazon Queen, Beneath a Steel Sky, Scorched Tanks, Star Wars, Megaball, Kyrandria, Battle Isle, Dune, Defender of the Crown, Batman, Cannon Fodder, Agony, Baldur’s Gate, Eye of the Beholder, Stunt Car Racer, Speedball, Pinball Wizard series, Darkseed, Player Manager, Elite, Armageddon, Robocop 3D, Hired Guns, Superfrog, Bamshee, Anything Team17 made, Magic Pockets, every simulation game ever released on Amiga.
Lets be real, consoles ran circles around the Amiga in terms of quality of games. There's nothing like Super Mario World or Chrono Trigger on the Amiga. The only games that excelled on the Amiga were anything that needed a mouse and/or keyboard eg. Lemmings. It didn't help that a lot of Amiga games were poorly programmed, badly ported or half arsed in general - usually poor frame rates, bad collision detection, STILL relying on 1 button joysticks etc - nothing like what the demoscene offered in terms of showing the true capabilities of Amiga computers. By the time the Amiga 1200 came out, a computer more than capable of going toe to toe with said consoles in terms of technical specs, PCs were vastly superior than the 1200 at that point, so it was sadly obsolete by the time it came out. You can blame Commodore's poor marketing and handling of the development of such computers. Obviously I have a soft spot for Amigas, but its usually for things like the demoscene or its capabilities as a computer, not really for its games.
LOL
Speaking from a game collection the Genesis had a better overall library than the Amiga. That is not to say the Amiga did not have it's share of good games. There were simply more talented studios pushing out content on the consoles.
I loved my A500 to bits but was wildly envious of my SNES and Mega Drive owning friends. Games like Sonic and SMB3 totally blew my mind as a kid. The consoles clearly had another bar for quality than the micros and had really strong third party developers in their fold like Rare. The difference in game quality between consoles and micros becomes even more apparent, when you look at the 8-bit era. Compare C64 to NES. SMB3 runs on a freaking 6502 (unless the cartridge had some extra chip?). We had nothing even remotely like it on the similarly specced C64, although modern titles like Sam’s Journey demonstrates it was technically possible. I did not grow up with consoles in my own home and owe my programming career entirely to my C64 and Amiga - but credit where it’s due. Consoles had the better games (minus a handful of mouse based titles).
Ahhh yes the SNES and Megadrive ate the Amiga for breakfast? Hmmm... Streetfighter 2 and Sonic basically? First party titles. Amiga managed a rubbish 3rd party SF2 written by someone called Wong in his bedroom. Was still playable. Recently, another proof of concept (using the blitter) had sf2 better than even the arcade. Indeed we can even emulate a ps1 at full speed, even on an A1000 with RTG. 1985 machine emulating a machine a decade newer, never mind emulating a SNES. The difference is first party titles vs third party. Pinball dreams sucked ass on SNES. Amstrad CPC even gives the SNES a good kicking on the same title. Indeed thanks to the CRTC being used as a blitter, the Amstrad is probably more in line with the ST. The plus range, like 8 bit Amigas. It's all about who would put the effort in at the time. Nintendo and Sega had better versions of arcade games because they were first party. Sega paid for the privilege, which they should. We got US Gold. Summary: Can the Amiga run rings around both consoles? Yes. And it does. When given to the right people.
…what? Please show me an A1000 emulating a PS1. I love the Amiga (and own three), but the rose-tinted glasses we sometimes let nostalgia give us, especially when it comes to the amiga fan-base is so strange. It was ahead of the curve in many ways, especially during the late 80’s. But at the same time, there were architecture decisions that were made that held it back greatly. Of course there were third party titles on consoles that were half-assed, just like there were ports to amiga that were also. But to say first party the only reason those consoles succeeded is provably false (and I think indicative of some people in the Amiga community are rooted into a specific niche corner of gaming exposure). You have titles like Street Fighter, Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Mega Man, the Capcom Disney games, Mortal Kombat, NBA Jam, Madden, etc. Planar graphics were limiting (and only used by Amiga) and a turn off for devs targeting multiple platforms. Commodore’s continued decision to using a single button controller is still mind-boggling. And most of all, people wanted consoles (the cd32 wasn’t a bad idea in theory, just too little too late) - they didn’t want to deal with the complications of a computer and all that came with it. I know I’m risking downvote hell here, but I think its important to also be realistic about the mistakes that were made with the Amiga. That doesn’t mean I don’t love the thing, or hack away on my A1200 to this day. Hell, I probably spend at least a grand a year on amiga related purchases for my collection. I just think it’s important to not let nostalgia completely blind us.
Check Caffeine OS under Pistorm.
> Check Caffeine OS under Pistorm. Hilarious. You understand the pi4 is capable of emulating the PSX without having to be jammed in an Amiga? The Amiga is quite literally bringing nothing at all to the emulation capabilities of the pi.
That doesn't count, haha!
The day you can put a pistorm in a SNES, Then it won't count 🤣
> Hmmm... Streetfighter 2 and Sonic basically? > First party titles. SF2 was developed and published for the SNES by CAPCOM. They are a 3rd party developer with regards their relationship with Nintendo.
You never owned a SNES? Mega Drive was practically an Amiga, Amiga was great but it certainly was no match for SNES or PC engine turbo graphics.
People often say the Mega Drive and Amiga are similiar but they really were not except for the CPU. The Mega Drive had way better hardware for action games (tile mode, 2 layers, lots of sprites) while the Amiga had advantages when it came to more computer-type games (way more RAM, better color palette, bitmapped screen).
Mega drive had newer video chips but those had little on the SNES video modes, mega drive was a little easier for performing hardware scrolling taken to great advantage with Sonic, it had a arcade board lineage but technically it was not a lot more advanced than Amiga ocs.
Yeah the SNES had lots of advantages over the Mega Drive, but I would say the Mega Drive had almost the same kind of advantages over OCS. I don't like talking smack about the Amiga but I feel like most people think OCS could do way more than it could. The Mega Drive had 2 colorful playfields while the Amiga had the 8+7 color playfields if you wanted parallax, and then the blitter objects had to share colors with the playfield. The Mega Drive had lots of huge sprites with lots of colors. The Tile Map was also a very big advantage in arcade games over the Amigas bitmap graphics. So yeah OCS was excellent for it's time and some programmers managed to make awesome things with it but the Mega Drive with it's 3 years newer arcade-derived graphics had some really huge advantages when it comes to moving lots of colorful objects around at 50fps. When it comes to sound it's a completely different story though!
https://youtu.be/doD7hmlKun8 OCS 😜
Odd channel split aside the Amiga audio hardware is streets ahead of the Megadrive too.
I kinda agree, even though even here the FM synthesis of the Mega Drive had some kind of advantages but it could never sound as varied or frankly as great as the Amiga could. Yeah if only the channel split wasn't so extreme, but I feel like that was never an issue back then. I always listened to the Amiga sound from my TV or monitor, never using headphones.
Really, the 4 channels should have fed in to a multiplexer and you should have had full control of the Left-Right pan for each channel. But that might have made it way too expensive for the early/mid 80s
Was not, it was compairable, often mega drive releases had a slightly higher quality audio. Google that debate. Console fit everything on cartridge of variable memory size which enabled distribution of higher quality samples than trying to stuff it all into 3.5" floppy discs. Amiga was best of the wests 16bit home computers, but consoles whole aim was to perform better than a personal computer for less money, the consoles are all newer than the personal computers. You are comparing apples with oranges. The consoles were richer than the personal computers of that era. It was a cut throat market.
You do get 6 channel audio on the OPN2 chip in the Megadrive. But only one of those channels allows PCM/sample playback at 8bit. That is simply not "higher quality" than the 8bit samples people typically used on the Amiga. The rest of the channels are FM synthesis channels. Personally, I find these are very limited, mostly sounding like a cheap 80s synth (which is more or less what it is). And listening to megadrive game audio you can hear that it made very little use of sample playback, sticking mostly to FM synthesis for the music and only occasional sample playback for spoken words and the like. I really don't think that sounds better in many, many cases. In standard operation Paula provides 4 channels of 8Bit PCM-based, synthesis and playback and that simply is more versatile and dynamic. Additionally Paula can achieve 14bit playback (though only 11bit is realisable) and can be made to do both AM and FM synthesis, though I can't imagine those were used much in games (but it does mean that you can build genuinely interesting synths with an amiga). The general trend in computer audio through the 80s was away from AM/FM synthesis and in that respect Paula is pretty ahead of it's time and pre-figures the direction things would go in. But importantly it's worth doing a side-by-side comparison. Compare the music in Amiga Lemmings versus the Megadrive version. Or for instance the Flashback Intro. The Amiga is clearly superior in both such cases. Where the megadrive tends to do better is where the original music is based on FM synthesis, like the Rainbow Islands Arcade cabinet. The megadrive does a pretty good job of directly replicating the arcade music and the Amiga's version is beholden to how well you can sample the bits you need (which was pretty mediocre in that case). And this isn't too surprising as both the Rainbow Islands Arcade and megadrive are using Yamaha FM synthesis chips from the same line of yamaha products
Devoid of a keyboard and a mountain of pirated software. No thanks.
SNES was best UK console period, I owned SNES, mega drive, Amiga , Atari ST. You have no idea. Compaire the Amiga version of street fighter II with the SNES version. No comparison and it's because the SNES hardware was stronger. Same for Ghouls and Ghosts. SNES had hardware sprite rotation and scaling years before competitors. Amiga never had custom sprite chips. PC engine had arcade perfect ports of many coin ops. You could barely tell the difference on many titles. Including Space Harrier, and Nemesis/ Gradius. You are comparing apples with oranges and besides the Amiga hardware was old by the time the SNES Famicom was released
None of this is relevant. I had a computer that could handle far more complex games, and those games were the cost of a floppy disk. Easy decision.