GOAT
At holding back Amiga development by several years, yes it was. Once developers put Amiga first, games got better! Shots fired! Work bench > gems.
The ST does look amazing though.
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The Amiga's gaming legacy is pretty amazing when you think about it
- Thread starter RagnarokIV
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At holding back Amiga development by several years, yes it was. Once developers put Amiga first, games got better! Shots fired! Work bench > gems.
The ST does look amazing though.
PropellerEar
Member
Same for me, loaned all Basic programming books from library to make my first game on the Amiga.
TGO
Hype Train conductor. Works harder than it steams.
Okay...
I remember some very poor attempts of porting it many years later but nothing official that would tie Tomb Raider to the Amiga.
Team Andromeda
Member
I think the ZX Spectrum did far more for UK gaming than the Amiga.
Trilobit
Member
It's a nice little thing when you're poor and don't have the money for the MOTHERFUCKING SHARP X68000, BABY
Hudo at his best friend's wedding congratulating his buddy:
"She's a nice little thing when you're poor and don't have the money for the MOTHERFUCKING SYDNEY SWEENEY, BABY"
shows the couple this photo on his phone
Great OP!
For me, the Amiga holds some of my fondest gaming memories. I remember playing Populous for the first time and feeling completely immersed in this universe.
Dune 2 and Speedball 2 as well were incredible titles (still are).
Many of the devs on the Amiga started mainly on the Speccy though. They reckon that a third of the current game developers originated from the UK as a result of that 8 bit marvel.
Either way, great system. Loved the Amiga.
For me, the Amiga holds some of my fondest gaming memories. I remember playing Populous for the first time and feeling completely immersed in this universe.
Dune 2 and Speedball 2 as well were incredible titles (still are).
Many of the devs on the Amiga started mainly on the Speccy though. They reckon that a third of the current game developers originated from the UK as a result of that 8 bit marvel.
Either way, great system. Loved the Amiga.
Markio128
Gold Member
I have many a good gaming memory from my Amiga days. Sports games like Sensible Soccer, California Games and Bronze, Silver and Gold were a highlight with buddies.
I also had a fondness for creative software like MED (music editor) and SEUCK, both of which were incredibly easy to understand.
I also had a fondness for creative software like MED (music editor) and SEUCK, both of which were incredibly easy to understand.
SportsFan581
Member
Didn't Amiga have better general media capabilities? I thought that was the whole shtick of the Amiga and why it was picked up even in professional circles for photo editing tasks and things like that.
calistan
Member
That looks awful - it's clearly an ST port. They couldn't have made the scrolling any jerkier if they tried.
yurinka
Member
A few classic gems that still play awesomely today:
Speedball 2
Rodland
Sensible World of Soccer
Super Stardust (origins of Sony's Housemarque)
Project X
Lemmings (Rockstar/Psygnosis/SCE Liverpool/Firesprite origins)
Micromachines
Parasol Stars
Blues Brothers
The Secret of Monkey Island
Speedball 2
Rodland
Sensible World of Soccer
Super Stardust (origins of Sony's Housemarque)
Project X
Lemmings (Rockstar/Psygnosis/SCE Liverpool/Firesprite origins)
Micromachines
Parasol Stars
Blues Brothers
The Secret of Monkey Island
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N1tr0sOx1d3
Given another chance
I jest, the Amiga in the day was a powerhouse. I wanted one but my parents couldn’t afford, so ended up with an ST. In many ways best gaming experience I had. They did so much with so little. Dungeon Master was incredible along with Turrican 2. But Bloodwych is my happiest of memories, going through a dungeon crawler in coop with my brother.
nkarafo
Member
Sure, if you had a fully loaded regular Amiga (a 1000 or 2000), with upgraded RAM and a hard disk. Which is the computer professionals used for these tasks.
The Amiga 500 though (which is what 99% of Amiga gamers had) only had the bare essentials to run games. There was no standard hard disc and you had to upgrade the RAM to 1MB if you wanted to play most of the later games.
Now the Amiga 500 was impressive in that there were no other compromises to the hardware. You still had all the chips the big brother computer had. But those specs were hyped beyond what the machine is capable of when games are concerned and many Amiga fans still advertise them as such. But there is a catch:
Specs say the Amiga can do 4096 colors. It can also do a lot of sprites and has hardware for smooth scrolling. All the good stuff. But they don't tell you the machine can't do all these things at the same time. That means, if your game is going to have 4096 colors, it will be still images. No scrolling, no sprites flying around. If you want the later you will end up with 32 colors most of the time.
It was still amazing for a 1985 system but that was the expensive Amiga 1000 "dream machine" which wasn't really a games centered machine. The Amiga only became a games system when the 500 arrived two years later.
lmimmfn
Member
Not necessarily:
Admittedly thats a new engine, but it was possible back in the day. The issue with the 4096 colour mode(HAM) was that it artifacts from left pixels to right for pixels when are not one of the base 16 colours when scrolling, hence the engine above has a huge vertical sprite down the left hand border. Using the blitter to move objects on a HAM screen can also create the same artifacts but sprites do not cause artifacting.
HAM mode has its limitations but was mainly regarding the artifacts caused by moving the screen/parts of screen.
It also had the half brite 64 colour mode where the 2nd 32 colours are half the brightness of the first.
32 colours also was only a limit per line as with consoles etc. the palette could be changed per vertical line.
calistan
Member
No machines of that time, bar the really basic ones, could display their entire colour palette at once, other than in some special mode. Mega Drive was, what, 64 from 512? SNES was 256 from 32,000-ish.
More relevant to the Amiga was the fact that the Atari ST could only display 16 from 512, and since the ST was often the lead platform that's basically all you ever got in the majority of Amiga games.
nkarafo
Member
True but at least in the magazines at the time, console specs did made the distinction between onscreen and palette colors. So they would mention the Mega Drive can do 60 colors on screen.
The Amiga though, being a computer and all, had so many different color modes that there wasn't a standard amount for colors on screen. So they just used the maximum amount it could do.
calistan
Member
Don't know about any specific magazines, but I had an Amiga and I was pretty clear about what all the different modes were. Low res for games, high res interlaced modes that were unwatchably flickery unless you had a special type of monitor, HAM mode for displaying all the colours in things like Photon Paint, etc.
I remember a magazine ad encouraging UK gamers to hold on for the much-delayed PAL SNES rather than buy a Mega Drive - the slogan was something like "Worth its wait in gold (and 32,000 other colours)". I don't think they ever mentioned that you could only display a fraction of them on screen at once.
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StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
Our fam never had a C64 or Amiga. We had consoles and my bro had an Apple II clone in the 80s. And then for the fam he went PC with a shitty XT. It was so bad he upgraded to a 286 a year later.
But looking at all the Amiga stuff, it destroyed Apple and PC back then. Too bad it never kept going. It's like Amiga came to a stop and PC just ramped up.
The only time I used an Amiga was in high school The art class had one you could mess around with some art program. So I knew it could do that stuff, but gaming wise never saw anything with my own eyes. Nobody I knew had an Amiga too.
But looking at all the Amiga stuff, it destroyed Apple and PC back then. Too bad it never kept going. It's like Amiga came to a stop and PC just ramped up.
The only time I used an Amiga was in high school The art class had one you could mess around with some art program. So I knew it could do that stuff, but gaming wise never saw anything with my own eyes. Nobody I knew had an Amiga too.
nkarafo
Member
That's an ad. Ads were always misinformed bullshit.Don't know about any specific magazines, but I had an Amiga and I was pretty clear about what all the different modes were. Low res for games, high res interlaced modes that were unwatchably flickery unless you had a special type of monitor, HAM mode for displaying all the colours in things like Photon Paint, etc.
I remember a magazine ad encouraging UK gamers to hold on for the much-delayed PAL SNES rather than buy a Mega Drive - the slogan was something like "Worth its wait in gold (and 32,000 other colours)". I don't think they ever mentioned that you could only display a fraction of them on screen at once.
I'm only referring to specs posted by the magazine editors. And those always separated the on screen/palette colors.
Edit: Here is a page of a Nintendo brochure in my country (and these kind of brochures were just one small step above ads when it comes to correct information)
4th line is "simultaneously shown colors" and 5th is "available colors"
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Mephisto40
Member
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calistan
Member
That brochure claims the SNES can do 512x448 resolution! On paper, maybe...That's an ad. Ads were always misinformed bullshit.
I'm only referring to specs posted by the magazine editors. And those always separated the on screen/palette colors.
Edit: Here is a page of a Nintendo brochure in my country (and these kind of brochures were just one small step above ads when it comes to correct information)
4th line is "simultaneously shown colors" and 5th is "available colors"
Here's a snippet from the UK's ACE Magazine, which was one of my sources for becoming an informed customer back in the day. The rest of the spread is worth a look, it compares all the major formats of the time. They used to run this guide almost every month.
Hudo
Member
True story.Hudo at his best friend's wedding congratulating his buddy:
"She's a nice little thing when you're poor and don't have the money for the MOTHERFUCKING SYDNEY SWEENEY, BABY"
shows the couple this photo on his phone
CamHostage
Member
It's crazy, Amiga feels to me like a something that happened in a fabled world of fantasy and legend.... what, this thing actually existed, and it was amazing?
It just had no presence in the US (aside from Video Toaster), I would see Amiga games in CGV or something like that but not really think of it as a viable platform for games. (I had played games on the Ataris and Commodores and they often had the feeling of "Here's something mediocre to play with on your homework machine when your parents can't afford a NES," so I assumed that these Amiga games were also very IBM'ish in design. (Then later, some Amiga hits would show up on Genesis, and I think I assumed that these European games were all just waiting to be ported to console, since all PC games for a time released on 5 different platforms and you'd only know some platforms existed because of the generic box back screens.) It was not until much, much later that I realized there were hundreds of these Amiga games, some by the greatest of the industry.
And Amiga still today is mysterious and hard to know to me. Amiga has had very little renaissance in the Virtual Console and retro release era; there's the A500 game box and Retrocade has a few Amiga releases, but otherwise it's rare to find Amiga hits on Steam or on consoles. (Weirdly, some of these studios still exist in some form, so rights could conceivably be less of an issue than most old game contracts, but most are not independent enough or have interest enough in the retro market to dig back into the archives even if they do still have the old paperwork.) Amiga emulators are never talked about, and Amiga classics rarely talked about in retro retrospectives or Best of All Time lists. (Retronauts every once in a while tries to have a Euro episode, but it's one of the areas they struggle for context.) It makes sense that the most viable retro platforms in both conversation and in marketing today are the platforms which still have the manufacturers alive to redistribute the product, but Amiga has so many masterworks and yet they're only hailed as such by those who remember playing them as kids.
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calistan
Member
It's easy to forget how little connection there was between the US and UK/Euro games markets back then. I've been reading Sid Meier's memoir recently and there's only a small passage about the Amiga:
"Without a specific topic in mind, I went to work on a new 3D engine for the Amiga, which would end up being my only project on that machine before it bit the dust. The Amiga wasn't a bad computer by any means but it failed to live up to its promise in sales numbers ... The Amiga had a dedicated cult following, but it never rose to the top, either in homes or in our offices."
I don't think the 3D engine he was talking about ever became a game, they just took some techniques from it to improve Gunship on the Commodore 64.
CamHostage
Member
And some of us knew of these "Euro" PCs, but generally from seeing the assortment of screenshots on the back of home computer games. You'd get this novelty window into other home computer game markets around the world, and you would look at stills to measure up which ones came closest to a decent conversion of Double Dragon or which were still stuck with 4-bit color. And then, you'd go back to playing your NES version (which was itself a barely-recognizable conversion of Double Dragon.)
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CamHostage
Member
Not only was Psygnosis a key game provider for PS1, but it also was a primary tech provider. The Psy-Q development kit was important software critical to producing and testing games on PC for PlayStation productions, and it was eventually acquired by Sony to become the as SDevTC (Sony Developer Toolchain) for all game developers. Technically, this wasn't Psygnosis software (SN Systems made it), but Psygnosis was the distributor of the software and also was a primary user (and I assume sample provider as well,) so when PlayStation started working with them, Psygnosis became the hookup to bring the development tools over to Sony.
Official Playstation 1 Software Development Kit (PSYQ) - Retro Reversing (Reverse Engineering)
The home of reverse engineering enthusiasts. Learn about RetroReversing and join the community today!
SN Systems - Wikipedia
Psygnosis Psy-Q & late 16bit Development
I was watching a longplay of Earthworm Jim on Genesis/Mega Drive, and in the end credits they gave a shoutout to the Psy-Q development tools created by Psygnosis. Before they were purchased by Sony, Psygnosis made their own development environments for Genesis/Mega Drive, DNES, 32X and...
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Okay...
I remember some very poor attempts of porting it many years later but nothing official that would tie Tomb Raider to the Amiga.
What I was saying in the original post is that Tomb Raider might not have existed without the Amiga because Core was a majority Amiga based company in the preceding years. I also recently noticed that one of Tomb Raider's programmers Jason Gosling also worked on Bubba N Stix, Wonder Dog, Blastar and Skeleton Krew for the Amiga according to https://www.mobygames.com/person/24115/jason-gosling/credits/ Also artist Heather Gibson worked on Skeleton Krew and Toby Gard playtested Bubba N Stix.
I just came across another possible seismic Amiga influence. TIL that Klax was originally programmed in Amiga Basic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klax_(video_game) Not only was that a massive game with a zillion ports it also may have influenced the layout of Guitar Hero.
nkarafo
Member
My biggest gripe with "Amiga's Legacy" is the 1 button standard. Nintendo had already standardized 2 button controllers with the NES (4 if you count select + start) back in 1983 with the Famicom and later the NES, while Arcades had at least a "Jump" and "Fire" button during this period. But the Amiga stuck with the 1 button "push up to jump" joystick standard. Imagine in 1987 having your brand new, next generation 16bit Amiga 500 and still having the same control options as the Atari 2600. Yeah, you could use the keyboard but not all games would benefit from it, many action/fighting games were made with 1 button in mind even if you used the keyboard.
Well the Amiga always supported 2 button joysticks https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=57540 from the start and even 3 button http://coppershade.org/articles/More!/Topics/Support_3_Buttons_in_Amiga_Games!/ It's just that I guess there wasn't much demand at the time to change from the popular 1 button joysticks. I guess it depends on what you grew up with though, I grew up playing the Amiga so up to jump still feels normal to me but yeah would have been nice if more companies supported 2 buttons. Someone like Psygnosis doing it for SOTB or another big title at the time would have set a good precedent.
Edit: Looks like it's something we can kind of blame the Atari ST for again, it wasn't able to handle 2 buttons so most of the early Amiga games were ST ports and so it became routine to only support 1 button.
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butane bob
Member
It can. It's not common but RPM Racing and one of the Ranma games use that mode.
512x224 was much more common, with many Squaresoft games using it in order to display kanji much more clearly.
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RoboFu
One of the green rats
NES was a better than the c64 in all but ram size, but its carts took care of that.
Core Design became a real juggernaught for sure, they did so much work for Sega Megadrive and the Sega CD, prior to Playstation. Core Design games were usually met with a good level of hype in the early 90's on Amiga. Chuck Rock (1 and 2), Heimdall, Wolf Child, Premiere, Bubba N Stix, Darkmere, Curse of Enchantia, Universe, Jaguar XJ220, Banshee. They had to be one of the best pound for pound developers out there, in that upper echelon with Psygnosis and Gremlin at least on Amiga.
Factor 5's work for Nintendo 64 and Gamecube cannot be understated. That studio deserved better. but another Amiga legend.
Factor 5's work for Nintendo 64 and Gamecube cannot be understated. That studio deserved better. but another Amiga legend.
nkarafo
Member
So true.
ROM carts were always the best medium for games. More expensive, yes, but you got what you paid for.
Holammer
Member
I think some games used it for menus? I recall Namco's Smash Tennis having some crisp text and detail.That brochure claims the SNES can do 512x448 resolution! On paper, maybe...
Here's a snippet from the UK's ACE Magazine, which was one of my sources for becoming an informed customer back in the day. The rest of the spread is worth a look, it compares all the major formats of the time. They used to run this guide almost every month.
Literally 30 years since I played it, so I might be mistaken.
lmimmfn
Member
There is no way in hell the Amoga version was using Amiga Basic(personal experience but Amiga Basic sucked bigtime)
That link implies
Pimpbaa
Member
ROM was too expensive during the early 80’s. Games were often limited by that, especially early famicom games. Games got a lot better when the famicom disk system came out. So back then no, it wasn’t the best medium. But ROM prices dropped in the late 80’s, just when the NES was starting to get really popular. And all was good till the N64 when it definitely wasn’t that best medium for games.
nkarafo
Member
It was always the best medium, technically, ignoring price. See Arcades and the Neo-Geo.
It's super fast, solid state chips where the system has direct access to any single byte of data, without the latency of a mechanical mechanism, laser, spinning disc, etc. And now that this tech isn't limited by the price, we finally have SSDs/NVMe drives as the standard instead of mechanical drives and optical discs. Because the later reached a ceiling where you couldn't make them faster anymore, a disc can only spin so fast before it shatters and the laser can only read from a certain part of the disc at any time. You can't change that.
You say games were limited by the carts but they were also limited by the slowness of the optical disc in different ways. Loading times and slow access did hold game design back for for a long time because nobody likes loading. HDDs helped but again, they reached their limits and there's no turning back.
Also i disagree about the Famicom Disc drive. The average size of the disc was similar to the rom carts. Sure, they were writable which means you had some features like saving your game but that was solved in the carts anyway later on with the battery eeproms. There was no other benefit to those discs and every important game was converted in cart form. So no, the games didn't get "a lot better". But they did get better when the roms got bigger, with the biggest NES roms reaching 700+k while the famicom discs were stuck at 128k.
Yeah it says it was done in AmigaBasic and then converted to C so maybe he just did the general concept in AmigaBasic first.
RickMasters
Member
I had one back in the day. My very first computer. It was supposed to be for homework, but I don’t ever recall doing anything other than play games on it. Xenon 2, speedball 1 and 2. I had a tonne of them Ocean soft and US gold published games. Robocall and total recall, were dope. Forgotten worlds was a good port of the arcade game, but I think remember the megadrive version I got being even better. Switchblade 2 was awesome. Swiv was pinnacle Amiga shhmup. Awesome and shadow of the beast were two of my first psygnosis games.
Man that was an awesom computer. I even used to use my master system and megadrive controllers in it because all the third party Amiga joysticks sucked. I had one ( I think it was called a quick shot pro, or something like that) but it was aweful.
. So I played most of my games with my sega controllers and they actually worked fine
RAIDEN1
Member
The Amiga's legacy is tainted somewhat, because of what transpired, the HUGE missed opportunity with the CD32, and the fact circa 1992/1993, you could only DREAM of getting a decent port of Doom/Streetfighter 2 the biggest titles of that period, when the likes of Sega and Nintendo were showing how's it done....
nkarafo
Member
The CD32 might as well be the worst console ever released. The AGA chip was barely an upgrade (was it even one? I'm not sure) and the 68020 CPU one of the worst CPUs of the era (and the one the Amiga used was even a cut down version of that).
I remember the Aladdin and Lion King ports on the AGA/1200 that were considered good ports and got good reviews in magazines but they were just mere Genesis ports and not even as good. That's on a "next-gen" system that wasn't even suppose to compete with the 16bit consoles but rather with stuff like the 32X/Jaguar/3DO. Those were the standards the Amiga users had to put up with in the mid 90's.
Speaking of the 32X and the Jaguar, even those had some good games that demonstrated how well above they are compared to the Genesis/SNES in terms of capabilities. But there's literally nothing on the CD32. Even it's crappy DOOM clones look and run worse than DOOM on the SNES/FX2 chip. Sure, you can run those games at better frame rates and resolution if you have an upgraded Amiga 1200 (the CD32 was a consolised 1200) with some additional cards that have a 68030 or 68040 on them but on a stock 1200/CD32 these games were nearly unplayable. At best, you could have a game that compares favorably with the Sega CD...
I'll bite although I probably shouldn't. Ideally the original Amiga team could have stayed on and they may have blown all competition away with a next gen Amiga around 1990 but even on the timeline we got AGA was a worthy upgrade that in terms of games could outperform the SNES in many cases. Remember AGA came out in 1992 the same year the SNES came out in the UK/Europe. Games such as Super Stardust, Banshee, Slam Tilt looked and played incredibly, not to mention modern AGA games like Reshoot R and Reshoot Proxima III. Point and click games like Simon the Sorceror and Beneath a Steel Sky were greatly enhanced with CD narration. CD32 launch title Microcosm wasn't the best game but it did look next gen with all the cut scenes and rendering.
The CD32 was competing with the Sega CD and outselling it in the UK. The CD32 came out in Sept 93 at a price of $399 US (never made it to US though because of patent troll) and the 3D0 came out a month later in NA at a price of $699 US and didn't make it to Europe until a whole year after the CD32 in Sept 94. The Playstation wasn't out in NA or Europe for 2 more years, Sept 95 so the CD32 had a 2 year window where it could have gained a solid footing if not for Commodore's bankruptcy a mere 7 months or so after it's launch. A lot of games that were scheduled for the CD32 were cancelled after the bankruptcy. Wikipedia lists 147 CD32 games whereas the 32X got 40 and the Jaguar 63. The CD32 was a 2D powerhouse, many people forget that Doom didn't come out until Dec 1993, that's 3 months after the CD32 was on the shelves.
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sloppyjoe_gamer
Gold Member
I tried lol.....i live in the states and had the C64 for a while and then dad got me an Amiga 500 which i adored! Once it finally came out many years later, got the Amiga CD32 also.
SidViscous
Member
EA (electronic arts) made Deluxe Paint for the Amiga, which was its killer productivity app, now you know why they are called Electronic Arts.
The founders of Starbreeze Studios cut their teeth by making a (music) tracker on the Amiga, I remember chatting to them it at the time and they spoke about their next hobby project which was a 3D engine for the system. Studio later went on to release that Riddick game.
I vaguely recall the CD Projeck Red founders were pretty active in the amiga demo scene, but can't google anything to back this up.
The founders of Starbreeze Studios cut their teeth by making a (music) tracker on the Amiga, I remember chatting to them it at the time and they spoke about their next hobby project which was a 3D engine for the system. Studio later went on to release that Riddick game.
I vaguely recall the CD Projeck Red founders were pretty active in the amiga demo scene, but can't google anything to back this up.
nkarafo
Member
I doubt the CD32 was a powerhouse for 2D graphics. All the games you mentioned look like something the SNES could handle. Or at least they look closer to a late SNES/Genesis game than, say, Kolibri or Tempo on the 32X, let alone something like Rayman on the Jaguar. Now that console was a 2D powerhouse if you are looking for one (and at a lower price). I don't doubt it could even beat the Neo-Geo if it used a ROM cart larger than 4MB. Atari really screwed up that one.
Well, the Jaguar was also released before DOOM and it could handle it pretty well. Though i'm not sure what you are arguing here. Isn't a band new console supposed to handle new games that get released shortly after? Is it supposed to only handle old, exiting games from older systems? I don't think any new system has ever been released with that logic in mind. You buy a new console to play new games, that's how it always has been.
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RAIDEN1
Member
Not even on a Sega CD level could the CD32 compete, I can't see how it could adequately handle a port of Sonic CD, much less Thunderhawk 1 by Core Design...
nkarafo
Member
I suppose you are right the Sega CD seems better for things like scaling. I don't remember something on the CD32 on that note. But seeing how the system was flooded with FMV games, well, the CD32 could do much better FMV. Iionagony mentioned Microcosm on the CD32 and that looked much better than the Sega CD version.
Now, how much should anyone care about FMV playback is another story.