Happy (belated) 40th, for the Commodore Amiga!

RAIDEN1

RAIDEN1

Member
Surprised nobody had posted this, but yesterday marked 40 years to the day when the Amiga was unveiled to the (western) world, a big name in the world of computing, till the rise of the PC's circa 1993..it's no exaggeration to say it was the equivalent to what the Sharp X68000 was for those in Japan, a very capable system, with a host of great games, but unfortunately the brand (Commodore/Amiga) barely lasted a decade, and it ended badly with the least powerful 32-bit system compared to the competition at the time the "CD32"... The Amiga 1200 though for itself, deserved better!

 
What an Incredible computer / os for the time. Going from the C64 to this was a revelation in terms of power and capabilities, coming just 3 years after the launch of the c64.

I had an A500, then a 1200. The AGA chipset although a step up, really was a stopgap really.

The true successor, the AAA chipset would have, maybe, allowed it to compete going forwards. Sadly the lack of funding stymied that, so we'll never know.

It will always be a treasured system for me.
 
Gone, but never forgotten!

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Probably my favourite gaming time. I got the Batman pack with New Zealand Story and F/A 18 interceptor and played the heck out of all 3. Speedball 2 and Kick Off were absolute must after school games and it was the Ultima IV port that really got me into RPGs. How 40 years have flown by.
 
SlyDoughnut said:
Probably my favourite gaming time. I got the Batman pack with New Zealand Story and F/A 18 interceptor and played the heck out of all 3. Speedball 2 and Kick Off were absolute must after school games and it was the Ultima IV port that really got me into RPGs. How 40 years have flown by.
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Batman should have been a lot better especially when you saw the likes of Batman Returns on the SNES...
 
Man I remember when the Amiga started to get shown in all the gamer mags back in the day (even have a few in the attic), on the playground we would all drool over the massive upgrade in graphics over our C64 & Spectrums but lament at the huge price, if I'm remembering correctly it was near £800 which back in the day was out of reach of the majority of us poor bastards on the estate with working class parents, so we could all but dream...

Come Xmas that year, I came downstairs and opened the usual presents content & grateful with what I got (my folks always went above and beyond their means) anyways I was told to go grab some tea in the kitchen and there on the table wrapped in Xmas paper with my name was another gift..

I nearly shouted the place down when I got an Amiga 500, I never asked for it as I knew it was too expensive but my folks knew I was gamer and wouldn't shut up about it lol needless to say everyone was round my house Xmas afternoon to play it, such an upgrade
 
Coming from a C64 I lusted after the Amiga, but the first iteration (Amiga 1000) was prohibitively expensive in Europe. The Atari ST, being much less expensive (at the expensive of graphical power and OS capabilities) was able to grab marketshare when it launched in 86. But everything changed when the Amiga 500 came out: all the power of its bigger brother in a home computer case at an affordable price. What a great machine it was. I got it completely kitted out back then with an 80 MB SCSCI hard drive and 2 megabytes of RAM. The multitasking OS was incredibly powerful and it was a gaming power house.

But then PC came. I got into PCs too in the early nineties so I didn't pick up the Amiga 1200 right away in 92. I actually wanted the more powerful A4000 back then. A friend owned one, but it was far too expensive. So I waited. And then the troubles began with Commodore going bankrupt, Escom taking over, availability getting worse and worse and sales falling all the time. It's a shame I never got a 1200 or a 4000, but the PC world was more interesting back then with new developments all the time (VGA, SVGA, CDROM, hires monitors, etc)
 
Loved the Amiga (and Spectrum) era of gaming. We had an Amiga 500, that came bundled with like 50 games from Captain Planet to Dizzy to Magic Pockets to Street Fighter.

Nowadays it is WASD as standard for movement, but back then we used zx km and space as our main input. Man, so many great memories.
 
What a machine! I remember the A500 fondly. Some of the greatest video game soundtracks are from the Amiga, Turrican II being the GOAT.













Also...

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Such a great era. When I see arguments about the current state of games, it reminds me that my childhood was during the best time for gaming!
 
RJMacready73 said:
if I'm remembering correctly it was near £800 which back in the day was out of reach of the majority of us poor bastards on the estate with working class parents, so we could all but dream...
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If you're thinking of the A500, that was 'only' £499 at launch and £399 less than a year later, when the Atari ST started drinking its milkshake.

I loved getting packages of random discs every week from the 'contacts wanted' sections in the magazines. I was even excited to get my first ever computer virus - all it did was display a red text box telling me how great its creator was, but it seemed pretty cool so I made sure to pass it on.
 
I got the A600 with a box containing Pinball Dreams, Zool, Striker and Transwrite.
I think a version of Deluxe Paint came with it as well because I remember using it and the instructions said to add perspective, use the numeric keypad, which the A600 didn't have and I was wondering why give it with the A600 when it doesn't have everything needed.

Some great games.
Was it Going Live or Live & Kicking on BBC had Magic Pockets that people controlled over the phone? I remember seeing that then found out it was actually on the Amiga so got it.

My brother was addicted to SWOS 96/97.

And some great themes like Canon Fodder above and...



And demos on magazines, including bootlegs like Cannon Soccer.
I played a demo for a game called Valhalla and the Lord of Infinity then later heard a remix
 
RAIDEN1 said:
Well the A1200 was the next level up, but it came at the wrong time, or maybe not powerful enough to really make a difference...as well know, come 1994 it was all over..
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I think the writing was on the wall when Compaq launched a 386 machine in 1986. By 1990 the IBM PC market was mature and diverse allowing costumers to go "cheap" ($1500) or expensive ($10000). By 1993 with the advent of multimedia PCs there was nothing Amiga could have done, Apple only survived thanks to the launch of the PowerMacs based on PowerPC CPUs.
 
Futaleufu said:
I think the writing was on the wall when Compaq launched a 386 machine in 1986. By 1990 the IBM PC market was mature and diverse allowing costumers to go "cheap" ($1500) or expensive ($10000). By 1993 with the advent of multimedia PCs there was nothing Amiga could have done, Apple only survived thanks to the launch of the PowerMacs based on PowerPC CPUs.
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Commodore should have come up with new, improved Amiga models much faster. It took them 7 years to come up with a new graphics processor. During that time the PC world saw new innovations every single year. The AGA chip was out of date the moment it was released.
 
Amiga had some great graphics tricks, like being able to display two programs with different resolutions on the same screen. Drag the title bar down and you could have 320x256 mode on one half of the screen, while the other half was 640x512. Weird.

Also, the genlock feature that allowed you to overlay graphics on live video. I remember a music show on UK TV that had captions popping up during videos, with the Amiga mouse pointer clearly visible, opening the text files.

The sound was odd, too. Stereo but with no left/right balance, so two channels came exclusively from the left speaker and the other two from the right. It was a very unusual machine, really. Amazing to think they made that 40 years ago, and perhaps surprising that it became largely a games machine when it could do so much more.
 
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Still annoyed that it never became big in North America despite the C64 doing very well (and the floppy drive too). I mean when the amiga 500 came out, the best PC games had were EGA graphics and Adlib sound (using a cheap fm synth chip found in toy musical keyboards).
 
I never had an Amiga, but I enjoyed the many quality Megadrive ports of its games, Chaos Engine, Populus, Killing Game Show, Speedball 2 and others.
 
AGA was ultimately a disappointment , Amiga Hombre Chipset looked good on paper , i wonder how it would have fared against the gaming hardware of that era , probably superior?
also the A500 was a beast
 
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I could never adjust to the way you interacted with and did 'stuff' on these new 16bit micros after the simplicity of booting directly to a BASIC command line interface on the 8bit micros of my childhood.

It suddenly became all too abstract for me. Part of the reason why I ditched home computers for a good decade, before returning with a Windows 98 PC.
 
I was there on day one. My opinion about Amiga is a mixed bad
Sure it was a boost compared to C64 but some specs didn't catch me
First of all the 8 sprite on screen as a default - exactly like C64. They were bigger and with more colors but come on...
And then the BOBs, big object on paper good for animated objects but very heavy to manage

I remember the big disappointment with celebrated games like the first Psygnosis creations, Barbarian, Obliterator, Blood Money had low/unacceptable framerates and terrible input lag. Making a good game or demo needed a lot more experience and sometimes compromises than C64 needed
 
One of my all time favorite gaming systems!
❤️

Still have my old Amiga 500 from 1987 or something like that, Kickstart 1.2. Still works! All the floppies are still there too, haven't got rid of even a joystick. Even a tiny Philips 8833 CRT screen is still with me.

Then I have an Amiga 1200, bought much later, I modded it with some Individual Computers hw to deal with modern screens, compact flash hdd, turbo card. It's always plugged in and ready for action. Sits on the same pull out keyboard shelf as the main PC, connected to the same screen.
 
Sintoid said:
I remember the big disappointment with celebrated games like the first Psygnosis creations, Barbarian, Obliterator, Blood Money had low/unacceptable framerates and terrible input lag. Making a good game or demo needed a lot more experience and sometimes compromises than C64 needed
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Yeah the early days were problematic. I played on C64 in parallell and some early games had like half the animation frames on the Amiga compared to C64, specifically remember some sports game and the introduction with the torchbearer running up to fire up the olympic cauldron.

Was probably similar to now when more dev resources are needed compared to last gen to make a AAA game because of 4K etc. C64 was the bedroom one man show coder era. Amiga demanded bigger teams.

The industry catched up quick though.
 
RAIDEN1 said:
Batman should have been a lot better especially when you saw the likes of Batman Returns on the SNES...
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The 3D sections were on their own better than most Snes Racing games IMO
No shock since John O'Brien was the man behind them
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The Amiga was an awesome system, but I liked the Atari ST more simply because It was the system I had and far more or my school friends had an ST compared to the 2 friends who had an Amiga
 
Amiga was a weird system. Maybe overcomplicated, outdated, and futuristic at the same time. But a lot of very creative people learned to work with its quirks and get the most they could from it. In the end, like the C64 and most consoles, the design could only be updated so much while still being an Amiga.
 
Fess said:
Yeah the early days were problematic. I played on C64 in parallell and some early games had like half the animation frames on the Amiga compared to C64, specifically remember some sports game and the introduction with the torchbearer running up to fire up the olympic cauldron.

Was probably similar to now when more dev resources are needed compared to last gen to make a AAA game because of 4K etc. C64 was the bedroom one man show coder era. Amiga demanded bigger teams.

The industry catched up quick though.
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I was in the demo scene in that days, mostly C64

We all bought Amiga so quickly that we were stealing it each other in the Stores

Everyone agreed that those were real problems, for example Xenon 2 was a great game but the overall framerate was unacceptable and it was a game born already in the good days of the lifecycle of Amiga. If you look very well to games like Shadow of the Beast you don't see nothing special except a good framerate and a lot of colors on screen but there's few sprites on screen and one or two big BOBs. I never loved it at all

The real Amiga's problem was the choiche of rigid hardware un-upgradable in a world were the hardware boom was ramping quiclky
 
Team Andromeda said:
The 3D sections were on their own better than most Snes Racing games IMO
No shock since John O'Brien was the man behind them
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The Amiga was an awesome system, but I liked the Atari ST more simply because It was the system I had and far more or my school friends had an ST compared to the 2 friends who had an Amiga
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Geoff Crammond made miracles with Amiga
Stunt Car Racer and F1GP 2 are still awesome
Not to mention Powerdrome, the first real futuristic racing game
 
Sintoid said:
Geoff Crammond made miracles with Amiga
Stunt Car Racer and F1GP 2 are still awesome
Not to mention Powerdrome, the first real futuristic racing game
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Geoff was the main, but most polygon games ran that little bit better on the ST (for which it gets no credit) and do have to say when it came to F1 games, nothing beats F1GP 2 from Geoff.
I so wish Geoff would make a sequel to Stunt Racer, I even remember in school our computer teacher allowing a link-up game to be played in school with the mates who had the Amiga (Our computer teacher was also a fan) for Stunt racer

John O'Brien made my fav 16-bit racer mind with Batman Returns on the Mega/SEGA CD, He was GOD on the Mega CD in my eyes
 
Team Andromeda said:
Geoff was the main, but most polygon games ran that little bit better on the ST (for which it gets no credit) and do have to say when it came to F1 games, nothing beats F1GP 2 from Geoff.
I so wish Geoff would make a sequel to Stunt Racer, I even remember in school our computer teacher allowing a link-up game to be played in school with the mates who had the Amiga (Our computer teacher was also a fan) for Stunt racer

John O'Brien made my fav 16-bit racer mind with Batman Returns on the Mega/SEGA CD, He was GOD on the Mega CD in my eyes
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True, Atari ST is my weak point, no one of my friends had one except of a musican that used it for its' MIDI interface (wich he said was awesome)
 
Sintoid said:
True, Atari ST is my weak point, no one of my friends had one except of a musican that used it for its' MIDI interface (wich he said was awesome)
Click to expand...

I'm in the Welsh Valleys and the Amiga 500 was simply out of most people's price range. In my school, it was mainly the Master System and ST for gamers (before Sonic and the MD took over)
I really loved my ST before falling in love with the Master system.

At school, the ST was very popular (no bullcrap) and also my Computer teacher was an Amiga fanboy and hated consoles with a passion; In his eyes consoles were for kids, not teenagers or adults
 
I had an Amiga 500 plus. Godly system.

My first game was Lotus 2. That intro music is one of the finest tunes of all time.
The algorith one day led me to this channel. Just listen to this masterpiece.



Tons of point and clicks too. Simon the Sorcerer, Beneath a Steel Sky, Monkey Island 1+2, Flight of The Amazon queen, Innocent Until Caught...

My most played game was probably Arabian Nights. Fantastic platform adventure with awesome soundtrack.



Another game I loved:

UGH!



And tons of others: Pinball Fantasies, BC Kid, Rodland, Arcade Pool, Sensible World of Soccer, Shadow of the Beast, Zool, Pince of Persia.

Great stuff
 
Don't know if anyone else did this. But I had paper round and Saturday job and persuaded my mum to buy me the Amiga from Kayes Catalogue (think that's what it was called, there were a few of them at the time). You could buy things and pay weekly for a year.

Reminiscing, I also have fond nerdy memories of Might and Magic III and Champions of Krynn.
 
Team Andromeda said:
I'm in the Welsh Valleys and the Amiga 500 was simply out of most people's price range. In my school, it was mainly the Master System and ST for gamers (before Sonic and the MD took over)
I really loved my ST before falling in love with the Master system.

At school, the ST was very popular (no bullcrap) and also my Computer teacher was an Amiga fanboy and hated consoles with a passion; In his eyes consoles were for kids, not teenagers or adults
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Yes, I remember that dicotomy - Computer are serious and console are for games or something like that
That's one of the reasons in my opinion that Sega rocked that market: they had great arcade games and there were arcades in all the world

Everybody wanted real Sega ported Arcade Games instead of bad US Gold conversions XD

Anyway fanboysm was not a thing at that time, I remember bringing my SNes at home of a friend of mine wich had Megadrive; we played both consoles all the weekend and I went at home.
A couple of week later I bought a Megadrive inspired by that weekend and I went to my frien's house to show it to him.
He was playing with his brand new Snes
 
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