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[doncale]

i dunno if this is true or not, but from what i've read about the Amiga vs Windows, the original 1985 Amiga was roughly 10 years ahead of Microsoft's OS. in 1985 Amiga had an OS that was was not rivaled by Microsoft until Windows 95.

 

[-=DoAvl=-]

Playstation2 is to Struts/Jsp as Xbox is to .net/asp .... i hate struts

 

[Fafalada]

PS2 is the Amiga of this gen, Sony haters be damned.
It has a more active non-profit development community then any console (save perhaps GBA) and the community is actually endorsed by the hw maker (something that is not the case with ANY other hw). PS2 is the only console that legally allows you to write your own applications.
Moreover the hardware is all about Amiga's mindset - lots of powerfull programmable but quirky features that can interact in unpredictable ways.

If anything, XBox is the Atari ST of this generation (a glorified PC that isn't really usefull for much else then playing games ).


Anyway, how about we predict the next gen Amiga I call PSP!

 

[DDayton]

Let's see... the Amiga was the spiritual successor to the Atari 8-bit series (800/Xl/XE)... I don't think Microsoft aligns well with anything in this equation.

 

[Jonnyram]

PS2 is the Amiga of this gen, Sony haters be damned.
It has a more active non-profit development community then any console (save perhaps GBA) and the community is actually endorsed by the hw maker (something that is not the case with ANY other hw). PS2 is the only console that legally allows you to write your own applications.
Moreover the hardware is all about Amiga's mindset - lots of powerfull programmable but quirky features that can interact in unpredictable ways.

If anything, XBox is the Atari ST of this generation (a glorified PC that isn't really usefull for much else then playing games ).

If you're going to make comparisons like that, I would rather say:
PS2 = ST, Xbox = Amiga
i.e. the Amiga is a machine loosely based on the ST, with superior hardware but weaker design.

 

[wazoo]

Part of the Amiga Team went to 3DO.

So the 3DO was the AMiGA successor.

Then tey went to Samsung and finally to MS (am I wrong ?).

But from a spiritual point of view, ps2 is the successor of Amiga.

 

[cybamerc]

I don't get the fascination with the Amiga. It was a PC. For gaming, consoles ruled then as they do now. Disregarding Macs which share the most similarities with the Amiga line of products, and Windows PC which also is very similar, PlayStation clearly took over where Amiga left off.

 

[Vennt]

Part of the Amiga Team went to 3DO.

Almost right,

After leaving Commodore RJ Mical founded NTG with Dave Needle & Dave Morse - they designed a system that eventually became the 3DO, due to a merger between NTG & 3DO.

Before that RJ co-designed the Atari Lynx.

When people talk about the Amiga team, both Jay Miner & RJ Mical spring to my mind.

I don't get the fascination with the Amiga. It was a PC. For gaming, consoles ruled then as they do now.

Not everywhere, while consoles may have blossomed in the states at that time they died a death in the UK while the Amiga & Atari ST ruled the roost, console gaming was relegated to minority status, it wasn't until the release of the Playstation that console gaming took off over here again.

 

[wazoo]

Amiga team, both Jay Miner & RJ Mical spring to my mind.



Not everywhere, while consoles may have blossomed in the states at that time they died a death in the UK while the Amiga & Atari ST ruled the roost, console gaming was relegated to minority status, it wasn't until the release of the Playstation that console gaming took off over here again.

It also the reason behind the poor state of Nintendo in europe. There is no significant NES/SNES fanbase in europe. This is also the reason why Europe is Sony's world. They clearly "invented" console gaming in Europe for the masses.

 

[Fafalada]

i.e. the Amiga is a machine loosely based on the ST, with superior hardware but weaker design.

I dunno, it's more the thing with hw design philosophy that works for me in PS2 - Amiga analogy. The ST - XBox was supposed to be a joke, I though the PC remark made it obvious - plus I doubt many people would be happy with the suggestion that XBox is the weaker designed hw

I don't get the fascination with the Amiga.

You kinda had to own one to understand this And of course nostalgia plays a part in it too.

It was a PC.

While true, it's a personal computer - it also offered the ease of use of a console. PC was never that simple to play games with it - it's not now, and it especially wasn't then.
That, and the fact that it pushed multimedia content and capabilities years ahead of the DOS-PC curve, was what made it stand out the most.
Once that curve started to flatten out (with later Amiga models that were growing more like PCs and PCs offering multimedia capabilities beyond speaker and CGA graphics), it all kinda went downhill with it.

Also, as mentioned by others, in most European regions consoles of that era just didn't have any kind of relevant presence. Around my area, you would be lucky to know consoles even existed.

 

[disabledHeliocentric]

Xbox is made by people with mullets. Fat mulleted hillbillies, some would say.
This should clue you in right away.

 

[cybamerc]

Freeburn:

> Not everywhere, while consoles may have blossomed in the states at that time they
> died a death in the UK while the Amiga & Atari ST ruled the roost, console gaming was
> relegated to minority status

I wasn't talking market share but rather the quality of the games. Consoles were weren't as popular in Europe at the time but of course ppl had to pay for console games...



Fafalada:

> You kinda had to own one to understand this

What's to understand? It was a PC. Many of my friends had Amigas (and C64s before them) but only pirates would deny the superiority of console gaming.

> PC was never that simple to play games with it - it's not now, and it especially wasn't then.

DOS games were as easy to deal with as anything on C64 or Amiga.

 

[Squeak]

Fafalada:

> You kinda had to own one to understand this

What's to understand? It was a PC. Many of my friends had Amigas (and C64s before them) but only pirates would deny the superiority of console gaming.

To the majority of it's users the Amiga might "just" have been a console with a keyboard and free games, but for the people ready to shell out for a HD and a decent monitor, the Amiga wasn't really rivaled by anything at the time, both in ease of use and technically.
IMO the biggest mistake Commodore ever made, was not to force its customers to buy a HD and a monitor, by bundling them as default, when they bought the computer.

> PC was never that simple to play games with it - it's not now, and it especially wasn't then.

DOS games were as easy to deal with as anything on C64 or Amiga.

Surely you're joking? If not, then you must have forgotten/suppressed the experience of manually editing autoexec.bat and config.sys files, and having to find the right exe. file among a dozen on a neverending list?

 

[Fafalada]

DOS games were as easy to deal with as anything on C64 or Amiga.

On Amiga, playing games was exactly the same as on any console. You inserted the disc, and the game started.

On DOS PC, you had installations, config and autoexecs to edit to even get the game to start, a hundred and one settings at the begining of any game that supported more then Speaker+CGA functionality, the list goes on and on.
PC gaming in DOS days was a complete mess, even comparing it to C64 which had tons of its own complications is being unfair, C64 was still far simpler to deal with.

Many of my friends had Amigas (and C64s before them) but only pirates would deny the superiority of console gaming.

There was no arguments about who had superior gaming what so far, so I don't know why you bring this up?

 

[Panajev2001a]

Let me say something bold. Xenon will be MS's GAMECUBE. Focused less on graphics, less on features, more on games. Will be seen as the least powerful of the three (wether it's true or not in Xenon or GAMECUBE's case). Coming off a dwindling system (X-BOX, you must admit, is alot like N64) which will have alot of projects moved to next generation. Same partners. Same aim at profitable cost effective hardware. Even the controller is going from N64 style (bigger, more face buttons, expansion slots) to GAMECUBE style (smaller, less face buttons, no expansion slot). There's other comparison's I'm sure and I'm wondering if these moves will mirror performance-wise?

Xenon will be freaking powerful GPU wise, no doubt .

 

[cybamerc]

Fafalada:

> On DOS PC, you had installations, config and autoexecs to edit to even get the game to
> start, a hundred and one settings at the begining of any game that supported more then
> Speaker+CGA functionality, the list goes on and on.

I mainly played Sierra's graphical adventures and they were pretty easy to deal with.

> There was no arguments about who had superior gaming what so far, so I don't know
> why you bring this up?

Because noone is talking about Deluxe Paint or music production.

 

[Fafalada]

I mainly played Sierra's graphical adventures and they were pretty easy to deal with.

They were still easier to deal with on Amiga.

Because noone is talking about Deluxe Paint or music production.

You asked what made Amiga appealing - both of these played a part in that too. It was the first multimedia PC after all.
Having game experience close to that of consoles was just one of its aspects.

 

[dark10x]

They were still easier to deal with on Amiga.

That's true, but you only had to deal with it once. The only two PCs that I played a lot of DOS games on were an 8086 and a 486. In both cases, I simply set up a nice boot menu that covered all of the options I would ever need. Like I said, it was more difficult...but after setting that up, I never really needed to do a whole lot of work again.

Of course, limited ram did make for some fun challenges. Before upgrading my 486, I only had 4mb of ram. I managed to squeeze The Dig into that low amount of ram with some creative tinkering after discovering that it could run in very little ram. Of course, they were right in suggesting 8mb as the requirement, as it was certainly not easy to get running. That's one of the few exceptions where it took a lot of fiddling to get results, though...

 

[Lord Error]

I don't get the fascination with the Amiga. It was a PC. For gaming, consoles ruled then as they do now.

Well, if you don't get, you don't get it. I think that in addition to owning one, you really had to:
a) Be interested in more than just games.
b) Live in Europe, and be interested in all the demo scene stuff going on

to understand Amiga's appeal completely.

Console games never interested me much back then. They seemed just as limited in their variety as PC games are nowadays (except it was completely different genres in question) On the other hand, thanks to Amiga, I learned so much about computer graphics and technology, that it has defined the shape of my future profession. If it wasn't for it's excelent operating system, graphics and sound capabilities and affordability, if it wasn't for the demo scene to show me just how awesome the blend of design and programming can be, it's safe to say it might not have happenned for me the way it did.

If you ask people who now work at Digital Illusions, Guerilla or Factor 5, I suspect they might tell you the same, or simillar story.

 

[Izzy]

DOS games were as easy to deal with as anything on C64 or Amiga.

Like bollocks they were. You had to literally reconfigure autoexec.bat, config.sys for each and every game. Not to mention that even with perfect, manual optimisation, thanks to the 640 KB limit, you sometimes had to disable the mouse driver just to start a game that actually requires mouse compatible device for the input.

 

[MightyHedgehog]

XBOX and Amiga have nothing in common, except for a slight nod to the fact that both relied on western development...but then again, so did every just about every 8/16-bit computer back then.

Other than that, there's nothing remotely close about the two. Amiga was a computer, XBOX is not...despite its hardware makeup.

As to the whole DOS vs. Amiga thing:

please don't let this age-old argument spill into the ST vs. Amiga debate...

 

[nubbe]

The first think I had to learn when I got my first PC was memory management
Good times, I kind of miss it

 

[Funky Papa]

It has a more active non-profit development community then any console (save perhaps GBA)

My HD sings a very different song

Like bollocks they were. You had to literally reconfigure autoexec.bat, config.sys for each and every game. Not to mention that even with perfect, manual optimisation, thanks to the 640 KB limit, you sometimes had to disable the mouse driver just to start a game that actually requires mouse compatible device for the input.

But wasn't that beautiful? Kids nowadays can use a PC almost as easily as a console, just double click the install thingie, select the folder and you are done :-/

 

[Fafalada]

please don't let this age-old argument spill into the ST vs. Amiga debate...

In my country, the worst flame-wars of the time were ST vs x86 PC debates actually. Amiga was considered "kiddy", "just a games machine" etc. while ST and PC were well... serious computers that warranted the endless fights about which is better.

I am sure Marc can back me up on that, I bet he read some of the same magazines that I did back then

If you ask people who now work at Digital Illusions, Guerilla or Factor 5, I suspect they might tell you the same, or simillar story.

Them and probably many others. I wrote my first 3d apps on it, learned C, ASM and some other languages etc. all on Amiga.
Curious, sincce you mention influences on your career also, what do you do for living now?

But wasn't that beautiful?

No, not really Which is partly why I used my PC strictly for programming in that time. The other reason was because it had a HDD and my Amiga didn't.