8 ms·

Doom Didn't Kill the Amiga (2024)

62 points by blakespot 1y ago

cmrdporcupine 1y ago
Yeah if your secret sauce is a chip, with very particular timing and memory behaviour... you've just built in obsolescence. There's no abstracted API for doing the fancy graphics (at least not one used by games, etc), and the whole system is built around sharing the memory bus between CPU and VDP (not going to fly once memory & bus speeds became a fraction of the CPU speed and once cache was a serious thing)... it's just stuck in a grotto.. a neighbourhood that looks fantastic when you moved in but now the next city over is getting a brand new subway system while you're still stuck with an old fleet of busses. Nevermind Moore's law and exponential improvements... you're stuck even falling behind in very incremental developments. I also lived through this era, but from the Atari ST side. When I got my 486 it was a feeling of a kind of relenting "sigh" abandoning the 68k and its basic superiority... but economies of scale and the arrival of Linux (I used the very first versions, before the a.out->ELF transition even) made it worthwhile.
- TheAmazingRace 1y ago
  Did you ever use MiNT on your Atari ST when it was relevant? I understand that for some folks, MiNT was kind of the gateway drug that often led users to Linux on PC shortly afterwards.
  - cmrdporcupine 1y ago
    Yes, that was indeed the gateway. Among others. Though my ST only had 1MB of RAM and a floppy, no hard drive. On that I ran a UUCP node to get email and news for a while. And some unix-like shells (Mupfel, I believe was one? Gulam was another great one). I did use MiNT a bit but the whole GNU toolset was a bit big for a floppy system, and the multitasking was only somewhat useful. You could get a unix-like environment without going fully MiNT. The big jump for me was having a 200MB HD in my 486 when I got it. Massive life change.
  - bregma 1y ago
    MiNT and a 16 GB hard drive with all the GNU tools installed. It was just like the Unix at work. Linux came later after also going through AIX, HP/UX, A/UX, AT&T SVr4, SunOS, Solaris, OSF/1, ISC, ...
    - TheAmazingRace 1y ago
      I presume you mean MB and not GB? On native Atari hardware at least, you could only address up to 1 GB partitions on the very last TOS 4.04 based systems like the Falcon.
      - bregma 1y ago
        Yes. nobody had GB drives in those days. The drive I had on my ST was a 16 MB SCSI drive and the CPU ran at 8 MHz. The IBM XTs that were so popular at the time only had 10 MB hard drives and ran at 4.77 MHz.
- spogbiper 1y ago
  its easier to see this in hindsight. the amiga was basically just using the model that every previous home computer had used, expecting game devs to use the hardware directly like they had been doing since the first home PCs. wasting resources on an API or any kind of abstraction was for user level BASICs and similar, not for professional games
  - actionfromafar 1y ago
    Yeah. It was very much the same with DOS games, too.
  - cmrdporcupine 1y ago
    I was not a big Amiga user, but on the Atari ST we had a graphics abstraction API (VDI) from day one. Had the notion of a virtual device and drawing surface. All done through a proper syscall TRAP system, too. I am given to understand that the AmigaOS syscall API was in the form of JMPs. So when the Falcon and TT Etc came along with full 16-bit 256 colour SVGA-like graphics, anything properly written GUI "just worked" Games and the like, yes, had to fall back to a video compat mode.
    - zozbot234 1y ago
      > So when the Falcon and TT Etc came along with full 16-bit 256 colour SVGA-like graphics, anything properly written GUI "just worked" > Games and the like, yes, had to fall back to a video compat mode. The Amiga had retargetable graphics too. No real difference there.
    - actionfromafar 1y ago
      It used JMP, but you looked up the API base addresses from a fixed address, ($4 IIRC) so it worked basically the same. But only like some turned based games, and like some chess games etc used that API. The rest maybe used the APIs to allocate a screen but they were banging hardware after that. Most didn't even use the OS even to read the keyboard, which became an annoyance on the A600 which lacked some of the keys.
- zozbot234 1y ago
  > the whole system is built around sharing the memory bus between CPU and VDP Isn't this what "Unified Memory" does in more modern systems? There's nothing wrong with sharing memory between CPU and hardware graphics.
  - Someone 1y ago
    The combination with “There's no abstracted API for doing the fancy graphics (at least not one used by games, etc)” only works as long as you have a solid unique benefit, and that, Amiga lost fairly rapidly due to Moore’s law.
    - fulafel 1y ago
      It lasted pretty long, especially considering the rate of evolution in those days. It debuted already in 1985, and there were some incremental improvements along the way (first the A3000 and then AGA A4000/A1200 in 1992). After the biggest lead in graphics started to shrink you still had a big user and software user base, multitasking desktop that was far ahead at least until W95, great CLI environment compared to PC stuff, competitive price etc.
      - Someone 1y ago
        > and there were some incremental improvements along the way (first the A3000 and then AGA A4000/A1200 in 1992) About the A3000 Wikipedia says “The machine is reported to have sold 14,380 units in Germany (including Amiga 3000T sales)”, and about the A4000 “The machine is reported to have sold 11,300 units in Germany”. Both were on sale for about 2 years. In comparison, the A2000 sold 124,500 units in Germany, again according to Wikipedia, in the about 4 years of its commercial availability. So, about a 80% decline in sales per month, in what I think/guess was an expanding market for personal computers. ⇒ I don’t think those improvements made much of a difference.
        gpderetta 1y ago
        3000 and 4000 were "high end". The 1200 was the 500/600 replacement with AGA and sold relatively well.
- actionfromafar 1y ago
  Commodore operations were very, very poor, too. If they had been smarter with money, I'm sure they could have innovated in many many ways without giving up on backwards compatilibity. Sony put a PS1 inside the PS2. The Sony MSX2 contained an MSX1-on-a-chip. Amiga could easily have had a PCI bus for external video chips. And I'm not even going into the more crazy PS3-like ideas like "so, memory and bus speed are just a fraction of CPU speed? Ok, here are 32 parallel CPUs with their own chunk of the VDP bandwidth and their own local memory".
  - vidarh 1y ago
    The last iteration of the Amiga chipset Commodore worked on when they went bankrupt (Hombre)[1] was intended to be a 2-chip system providing a 64-bit 3D chipset with a PA-RISC CPU on-die in the in one of them that'd break compatibility, and be used for both standalone computers, set-top boxes and for a high-end graphics card. To sort out compatibility, the idea was for an "AGA Amiga on a chip". I'm not convinced Amiga-users would've been all too happy with all of this - or that PA RISC was a good choice, given what we know now -, but it certainly would've been a massive upgrade. (What Commodore was close to completing when they went bankrupt, though, was AAA[2] - which would've seen far more modest but still significant upgrades, like wider buses, support for chunky graphics modes, higher resolutions, far higher video bandwidth; AAA was in testing when Commodore failed) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Amiga_Architecture_chipset https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Amiga_Architecture_ch...
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
ChrisArchitect 1y ago
(2024) Discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39246825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39246825
runjake 1y ago
In 1992, I went from Amiga to a PC solely because of Wolfenstein 3D. I already felt like I was clinging to the Amiga platform. Most of my other friends in the Amiga world had moved on to other platforms. Doom came out about a year later, near Christmas 1993, IIRC. The author bought their Amiga 500 in early 1992! It was already a "classic" by then.
- tomfucksdan 1y ago
  [flagged]
- sandworm101 1y ago
  Ya, the author's timeline doesnt mesh with mine. In my memory the amiga was dead long before 1995. Wing commander was 91/92, which blew away anything on amiga. The great microprose simulations also started in 91/92 when the best Amiga could barely run the original civilization.
  - jl6 1y ago
    Wing Commander was released for the Amiga! It just ran absurdly slowly.
    - blakespot 1y ago
      Yep, one of the first games that really needed a chunky pixel video memory layout (which the Amiga lacked). Amiga's planar arrangement was perfect for platformers, which was the target of the Amiga gfx hardware design.
      - wowtip 1y ago
        It was not like lot's of very talented Amiga devs didn't try their very best to create a Wolfenstein/Doom clone for their platform, but iirc the bitplane setup used by Amiga gfx, which enabled lot's of other cool features did not perform well with the opereations needed for "3D" games. Then with Quake, the 3rd party 3D graphics cards market took off, and even if there were cards for the Amigas too, market economics made them unviable. And even though I usually appreciate Datagubbe's writings, this time I think his take is incorrect. At least in my circles Wolfenstein / Doom and ultimately Quake was the final nails in the Amiga's coffin. Sure, the picture is bigger - PC market drove down prices and very soon the price/performance difference was very unfavorable for Amiga - but at least initially the issue was kids wanted to play Wolfenstein, Doom, or at least something similar, and that was not possible if you stayed on the Amiga.
louthy 1y ago
A lot of words there. But the word ‘console’ is there exactly once. Games consoles killed the Amiga, just like they did all other home computers that were primarily used for games. I don’t know anyone that used the Amiga for anything other than games. PCs survived because they were genuinely used for business, not just games.
- zozbot234 1y ago
  The Amiga platform was originally built on game-console hardware. Incidentally, so was the Raspberry Pi, which is why the first Raspberry Pi models were comparatively very cheap.
  - louthy 1y ago
    The platform is irrelevant. They were more expensive than games consoles. So they lost, just like all other true personal computer manufacturers. They had too many components and couldn’t compete.
    - actionfromafar 1y ago
      I think it was lack of vision and financial mismanagement that killed them more than anything technical. Edit: an interesting take with the games consoles, I never really thought about it from that angle before. But it makes a lot of sense. Console makers get a cut of the revenue stream of the games. Commodore never saw a cent of that and the only commercial niche they briefly owned was low-budget TV production, like cable channels and such.
      - zozbot234 1y ago
        The end of the Motorola MC68000 architecture killed a whole lot of platforms around that same time. Amiga was just one of them among many, but the fact that Atari ST also died, NeXT was ported to x86, the Mac was ported to PowerPC, Sun Microsystems went SPARC etc. etc. all pretty much simultaneously, is not a coincidence.
    - 1y ago
bhlkjlkjcd 1y ago
> Ever since I saw an Amiga 500 at a friend's house in what was probably late 1988, I wanted one for myself. Back then, computers were uncommon, especially at home. Even though I went to a school in a fairly affluent neighborhood, few kids had home computers or video games. This may be true in the US and Japan, the rest of the world were mainly using 8-bit (and increasingly 16-bit) computers in this era, so this scans really oddly outside the US. I grew up on an 80s UK council estate (surrounded by poverty) and practically every kid had a computer, mainly Commodore 64, 16, +4, Sinclair Spectrum, or an Amstrad CPC (maybe a few BBC Micros dotted around, and some other oddities) Lots of people had the early Atari consoles in the early 80s, but after that I didn't see a console until the Megadrive. Everyone, and I do mean EVERYONE had computers in the mid-late 80s to early 90s where I was growing up.
- dragonwriter 1y ago
  > This was may be true in the US In 1989, the closest year I can find stats, home computer penetration was 15% of households in the US, but that wasn't uniformly distributed, so some people will have grown up with the experience of it being VERY common for people around them to have computers (I did), while others will have known no one with one.
- mattl 1y ago
  Yeah, virtually everyone I knew circa 1990 had a home computer. Mostly Spectrum and CPC. A few years later it was a few Amiga 500 too. The only “console” I had seen was the Atari VCS or a dedicated Pong machine. A few people got Game Boys a little later circa 1992. A single friend who had a Master System and one kid with divorced parents who got a SNES as a result. It was in this environment that I would discover programming and the internet.
mzs 1y ago
Nothing else like Video Toaster being available kept Amigas around for a while. 2001 my parent's cable provider still used them for guide/PPV channels.
ChrisArchitect 1y ago
A more accurate or complete statement: Doom didn't kill the Amiga. Wolfenstein 3D did. (2024) Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsADJa-23Sg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsADJa-23Sg (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40343333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40343333)
andrewstuart 1y ago
Amiga was a games console masquerading as a computer. If it had started life as the cd32 then the company might still be around today.
tetrisgm 1y ago
Long time PC gamer here. I didn’t own an Amiga so I definitely have another POV. 1994?! Every single PC gaming store was flooded with PC CD demos. Day of the Tentacle. Loom. Monkey Island. Rebel Assault. Myst. 7th Guest. Every “AAA” release at the time was getting a “talkie” version with added FMV or cd audio. Plus Doom, and then Doom 2. I actually think the 93-96 period is basically the most hype I’ve ever seen the PC market, ever. I’m sure Amiga had a lot of cool stuff still. The demo scene, the various Psygnosis games. But I never got on my radar beyond “this doesn’t need config.sys and it has more colors”.
rbanffy 1y ago
The Amiga is a very interesting case. It started out extremely capable, with a complex architecture with multiple coprocessors tightly coupled to memory and the CPU. As time passed, that complexity made it more difficult to build newer, better Amigas that were compatible with the software already written for it. All its unique features - graphics, 2D acceleration, audio - made it complicated to improve the machine. The PC, on the other hand, was very easy - you could throw out your CGA card and get an EGA or VGA, the same way you could plug in a generic sound card and get MIDI and PCM audio, along with an IDE port for a CD-ROM. If the value proposition held, it could have survived longer, but this business of getting a new computer in order to get better video output gets expensive very quickly. I had EGA on my 10MHz XT-compatible and it was great. Commodore was stuck in the 8-bit home computer model - mostly non-upgradable machines. This was the 1000 (it had a little upgradability), the 500, the 600, and the 1200. The 2000, 3000, and 4000 were seen as their professional counterparts, but they were all saddled by being compatible with games written for their built-in video and audio hardware that was quickly becoming inadequate compared to PCs. Sadly, Atari didn't have as much custom hardware it would need to evolve, but still never quite made the leap from their self-contained machines to more modular ones that'd make it easier to compete with PCs. When they did, they opted for the VME bus instead of something simpler (such as a 16-bit ISA bus). Impressively, near their deaths, both made PCs, but the PCs didn't share anything with their proprietary jewels. Both companies should know much better.
- rasz 1y ago
  It was only difficult because Commodore fired engineers to cut cost. They left absolute minimum staff just to keep the lights on. One example - there was no one at Commodore capable of re-designing Paula stupid PLL to accept 1Mbit clock so Amiga could support HD floppies. They had patents https://patents.google.com/patent/US4780844A/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US4780844A/en they had design documents for original chip, they had chip fab, they had no one with skill nor will to pay for it. All it needed was adding switchable clock dividers to control logic.

62 points by blakespot 1y ago

Yeah if your secret sauce is a chip, with very particular timing and memory behaviour... you've just built in obsolescence. There's no abstracted API for doing the fancy graphics (at least not one used by games, etc), and the whole system is built around sharing the memory bus between CPU and VDP (not going to fly once memory & bus speeds became a fraction of the CPU speed and once cache was a serious thing)... it's just stuck in a grotto.. a neighbourhood that looks fantastic when you moved in but now the next city over is getting a brand new subway system while you're still stuck with an old fleet of busses. Nevermind Moore's law and exponential improvements... you're stuck even falling behind in very incremental developments. I also lived through this era, but from the Atari ST side. When I got my 486 it was a feeling of a kind of relenting "sigh" abandoning the 68k and its basic superiority... but economies of scale and the arrival of Linux (I used the very first versions, before the a.out->ELF transition even) made it worthwhile.

TheAmazingRace 1y ago
Did you ever use MiNT on your Atari ST when it was relevant? I understand that for some folks, MiNT was kind of the gateway drug that often led users to Linux on PC shortly afterwards.
- cmrdporcupine 1y ago
  Yes, that was indeed the gateway. Among others. Though my ST only had 1MB of RAM and a floppy, no hard drive. On that I ran a UUCP node to get email and news for a while. And some unix-like shells (Mupfel, I believe was one? Gulam was another great one). I did use MiNT a bit but the whole GNU toolset was a bit big for a floppy system, and the multitasking was only somewhat useful. You could get a unix-like environment without going fully MiNT. The big jump for me was having a 200MB HD in my 486 when I got it. Massive life change.
- bregma 1y ago
  MiNT and a 16 GB hard drive with all the GNU tools installed. It was just like the Unix at work. Linux came later after also going through AIX, HP/UX, A/UX, AT&T SVr4, SunOS, Solaris, OSF/1, ISC, ...
  - TheAmazingRace 1y ago
    I presume you mean MB and not GB? On native Atari hardware at least, you could only address up to 1 GB partitions on the very last TOS 4.04 based systems like the Falcon.
    - bregma 1y ago
      Yes. nobody had GB drives in those days. The drive I had on my ST was a 16 MB SCSI drive and the CPU ran at 8 MHz. The IBM XTs that were so popular at the time only had 10 MB hard drives and ran at 4.77 MHz.
spogbiper 1y ago
its easier to see this in hindsight. the amiga was basically just using the model that every previous home computer had used, expecting game devs to use the hardware directly like they had been doing since the first home PCs. wasting resources on an API or any kind of abstraction was for user level BASICs and similar, not for professional games
- actionfromafar 1y ago
  Yeah. It was very much the same with DOS games, too.
- cmrdporcupine 1y ago
  I was not a big Amiga user, but on the Atari ST we had a graphics abstraction API (VDI) from day one. Had the notion of a virtual device and drawing surface. All done through a proper syscall TRAP system, too. I am given to understand that the AmigaOS syscall API was in the form of JMPs. So when the Falcon and TT Etc came along with full 16-bit 256 colour SVGA-like graphics, anything properly written GUI "just worked" Games and the like, yes, had to fall back to a video compat mode.
  - zozbot234 1y ago
    > So when the Falcon and TT Etc came along with full 16-bit 256 colour SVGA-like graphics, anything properly written GUI "just worked" > Games and the like, yes, had to fall back to a video compat mode. The Amiga had retargetable graphics too. No real difference there.
  - actionfromafar 1y ago
    It used JMP, but you looked up the API base addresses from a fixed address, ($4 IIRC) so it worked basically the same. But only like some turned based games, and like some chess games etc used that API. The rest maybe used the APIs to allocate a screen but they were banging hardware after that. Most didn't even use the OS even to read the keyboard, which became an annoyance on the A600 which lacked some of the keys.
zozbot234 1y ago
> the whole system is built around sharing the memory bus between CPU and VDP Isn't this what "Unified Memory" does in more modern systems? There's nothing wrong with sharing memory between CPU and hardware graphics.
- Someone 1y ago
  The combination with “There's no abstracted API for doing the fancy graphics (at least not one used by games, etc)” only works as long as you have a solid unique benefit, and that, Amiga lost fairly rapidly due to Moore’s law.
  - fulafel 1y ago
    It lasted pretty long, especially considering the rate of evolution in those days. It debuted already in 1985, and there were some incremental improvements along the way (first the A3000 and then AGA A4000/A1200 in 1992). After the biggest lead in graphics started to shrink you still had a big user and software user base, multitasking desktop that was far ahead at least until W95, great CLI environment compared to PC stuff, competitive price etc.
    - Someone 1y ago
      > and there were some incremental improvements along the way (first the A3000 and then AGA A4000/A1200 in 1992) About the A3000 Wikipedia says “The machine is reported to have sold 14,380 units in Germany (including Amiga 3000T sales)”, and about the A4000 “The machine is reported to have sold 11,300 units in Germany”. Both were on sale for about 2 years. In comparison, the A2000 sold 124,500 units in Germany, again according to Wikipedia, in the about 4 years of its commercial availability. So, about a 80% decline in sales per month, in what I think/guess was an expanding market for personal computers. ⇒ I don’t think those improvements made much of a difference.
      - gpderetta 1y ago
        3000 and 4000 were "high end". The 1200 was the 500/600 replacement with AGA and sold relatively well.
actionfromafar 1y ago
Commodore operations were very, very poor, too. If they had been smarter with money, I'm sure they could have innovated in many many ways without giving up on backwards compatilibity. Sony put a PS1 inside the PS2. The Sony MSX2 contained an MSX1-on-a-chip. Amiga could easily have had a PCI bus for external video chips. And I'm not even going into the more crazy PS3-like ideas like "so, memory and bus speed are just a fraction of CPU speed? Ok, here are 32 parallel CPUs with their own chunk of the VDP bandwidth and their own local memory".
- vidarh 1y ago
  The last iteration of the Amiga chipset Commodore worked on when they went bankrupt (Hombre)[1] was intended to be a 2-chip system providing a 64-bit 3D chipset with a PA-RISC CPU on-die in the in one of them that'd break compatibility, and be used for both standalone computers, set-top boxes and for a high-end graphics card. To sort out compatibility, the idea was for an "AGA Amiga on a chip". I'm not convinced Amiga-users would've been all too happy with all of this - or that PA RISC was a good choice, given what we know now -, but it certainly would've been a massive upgrade. (What Commodore was close to completing when they went bankrupt, though, was AAA[2] - which would've seen far more modest but still significant upgrades, like wider buses, support for chunky graphics modes, higher resolutions, far higher video bandwidth; AAA was in testing when Commodore failed) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Amiga_Architecture_chipset https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Amiga_Architecture_ch...

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

ChrisArchitect 1y ago

(2024) Discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39246825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39246825

runjake 1y ago

In 1992, I went from Amiga to a PC solely because of Wolfenstein 3D. I already felt like I was clinging to the Amiga platform. Most of my other friends in the Amiga world had moved on to other platforms. Doom came out about a year later, near Christmas 1993, IIRC. The author bought their Amiga 500 in early 1992! It was already a "classic" by then.

tomfucksdan 1y ago
[flagged]
sandworm101 1y ago
Ya, the author's timeline doesnt mesh with mine. In my memory the amiga was dead long before 1995. Wing commander was 91/92, which blew away anything on amiga. The great microprose simulations also started in 91/92 when the best Amiga could barely run the original civilization.
- jl6 1y ago
  Wing Commander was released for the Amiga! It just ran absurdly slowly.
  - blakespot 1y ago
    Yep, one of the first games that really needed a chunky pixel video memory layout (which the Amiga lacked). Amiga's planar arrangement was perfect for platformers, which was the target of the Amiga gfx hardware design.
    - wowtip 1y ago
      It was not like lot's of very talented Amiga devs didn't try their very best to create a Wolfenstein/Doom clone for their platform, but iirc the bitplane setup used by Amiga gfx, which enabled lot's of other cool features did not perform well with the opereations needed for "3D" games. Then with Quake, the 3rd party 3D graphics cards market took off, and even if there were cards for the Amigas too, market economics made them unviable. And even though I usually appreciate Datagubbe's writings, this time I think his take is incorrect. At least in my circles Wolfenstein / Doom and ultimately Quake was the final nails in the Amiga's coffin. Sure, the picture is bigger - PC market drove down prices and very soon the price/performance difference was very unfavorable for Amiga - but at least initially the issue was kids wanted to play Wolfenstein, Doom, or at least something similar, and that was not possible if you stayed on the Amiga.

louthy 1y ago

A lot of words there. But the word ‘console’ is there exactly once. Games consoles killed the Amiga, just like they did all other home computers that were primarily used for games. I don’t know anyone that used the Amiga for anything other than games. PCs survived because they were genuinely used for business, not just games.

zozbot234 1y ago
The Amiga platform was originally built on game-console hardware. Incidentally, so was the Raspberry Pi, which is why the first Raspberry Pi models were comparatively very cheap.
- louthy 1y ago
  The platform is irrelevant. They were more expensive than games consoles. So they lost, just like all other true personal computer manufacturers. They had too many components and couldn’t compete.
  - actionfromafar 1y ago
    I think it was lack of vision and financial mismanagement that killed them more than anything technical. Edit: an interesting take with the games consoles, I never really thought about it from that angle before. But it makes a lot of sense. Console makers get a cut of the revenue stream of the games. Commodore never saw a cent of that and the only commercial niche they briefly owned was low-budget TV production, like cable channels and such.
    - zozbot234 1y ago
      The end of the Motorola MC68000 architecture killed a whole lot of platforms around that same time. Amiga was just one of them among many, but the fact that Atari ST also died, NeXT was ported to x86, the Mac was ported to PowerPC, Sun Microsystems went SPARC etc. etc. all pretty much simultaneously, is not a coincidence.
  - 1y ago

bhlkjlkjcd 1y ago

> Ever since I saw an Amiga 500 at a friend's house in what was probably late 1988, I wanted one for myself. Back then, computers were uncommon, especially at home. Even though I went to a school in a fairly affluent neighborhood, few kids had home computers or video games. This may be true in the US and Japan, the rest of the world were mainly using 8-bit (and increasingly 16-bit) computers in this era, so this scans really oddly outside the US. I grew up on an 80s UK council estate (surrounded by poverty) and practically every kid had a computer, mainly Commodore 64, 16, +4, Sinclair Spectrum, or an Amstrad CPC (maybe a few BBC Micros dotted around, and some other oddities) Lots of people had the early Atari consoles in the early 80s, but after that I didn't see a console until the Megadrive. Everyone, and I do mean EVERYONE had computers in the mid-late 80s to early 90s where I was growing up.

dragonwriter 1y ago
> This was may be true in the US In 1989, the closest year I can find stats, home computer penetration was 15% of households in the US, but that wasn't uniformly distributed, so some people will have grown up with the experience of it being VERY common for people around them to have computers (I did), while others will have known no one with one.
mattl 1y ago
Yeah, virtually everyone I knew circa 1990 had a home computer. Mostly Spectrum and CPC. A few years later it was a few Amiga 500 too. The only “console” I had seen was the Atari VCS or a dedicated Pong machine. A few people got Game Boys a little later circa 1992. A single friend who had a Master System and one kid with divorced parents who got a SNES as a result. It was in this environment that I would discover programming and the internet.

mzs 1y ago

Nothing else like Video Toaster being available kept Amigas around for a while. 2001 my parent's cable provider still used them for guide/PPV channels.

ChrisArchitect 1y ago

A more accurate or complete statement: Doom didn't kill the Amiga. Wolfenstein 3D did. (2024) Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsADJa-23Sg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsADJa-23Sg (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40343333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40343333)

andrewstuart 1y ago

Amiga was a games console masquerading as a computer. If it had started life as the cd32 then the company might still be around today.

tetrisgm 1y ago

Long time PC gamer here. I didn’t own an Amiga so I definitely have another POV. 1994?! Every single PC gaming store was flooded with PC CD demos. Day of the Tentacle. Loom. Monkey Island. Rebel Assault. Myst. 7th Guest. Every “AAA” release at the time was getting a “talkie” version with added FMV or cd audio. Plus Doom, and then Doom 2. I actually think the 93-96 period is basically the most hype I’ve ever seen the PC market, ever. I’m sure Amiga had a lot of cool stuff still. The demo scene, the various Psygnosis games. But I never got on my radar beyond “this doesn’t need config.sys and it has more colors”.

rbanffy 1y ago

The Amiga is a very interesting case. It started out extremely capable, with a complex architecture with multiple coprocessors tightly coupled to memory and the CPU. As time passed, that complexity made it more difficult to build newer, better Amigas that were compatible with the software already written for it. All its unique features - graphics, 2D acceleration, audio - made it complicated to improve the machine. The PC, on the other hand, was very easy - you could throw out your CGA card and get an EGA or VGA, the same way you could plug in a generic sound card and get MIDI and PCM audio, along with an IDE port for a CD-ROM. If the value proposition held, it could have survived longer, but this business of getting a new computer in order to get better video output gets expensive very quickly. I had EGA on my 10MHz XT-compatible and it was great. Commodore was stuck in the 8-bit home computer model - mostly non-upgradable machines. This was the 1000 (it had a little upgradability), the 500, the 600, and the 1200. The 2000, 3000, and 4000 were seen as their professional counterparts, but they were all saddled by being compatible with games written for their built-in video and audio hardware that was quickly becoming inadequate compared to PCs. Sadly, Atari didn't have as much custom hardware it would need to evolve, but still never quite made the leap from their self-contained machines to more modular ones that'd make it easier to compete with PCs. When they did, they opted for the VME bus instead of something simpler (such as a 16-bit ISA bus). Impressively, near their deaths, both made PCs, but the PCs didn't share anything with their proprietary jewels. Both companies should know much better.

rasz 1y ago
It was only difficult because Commodore fired engineers to cut cost. They left absolute minimum staff just to keep the lights on. One example - there was no one at Commodore capable of re-designing Paula stupid PLL to accept 1Mbit clock so Amiga could support HD floppies. They had patents https://patents.google.com/patent/US4780844A/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US4780844A/en they had design documents for original chip, they had chip fab, they had no one with skill nor will to pay for it. All it needed was adding switchable clock dividers to control logic.