Actually much earlier. Even during 386 era, which began at 1986 already showed provess in PC's computational performance. Like think about Wing Commander on 386 PC vs Amiga. It ran on PC for higher resolution and insanely much faster. Even soundcards where going leaps per generation forward. Amiga was great system though I had one too. It was good in sound and in. ie sidescrolling pixel games where great. Then game PC's with svga, sound cards let alone that pc's always had some kind of hdd etc. and miggy got obsolete in so short time.
@@jothain The computing power, yes. I remember how long it took the Amiga to calculate a random map for Civilization. But the main advantage of the Amiga was its price. While most PCs in 1990 had VGA graphics already, sound cards were still rare and expensive. That changed around 1992/93. Game sizes were growing (I remember The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes having almost 30 MB), and most Amigas didn't have a hard drive. Switching between 11 diskettes (3,5" DD) in Monkey Island 2 was a pure nightmare. Then, sound cards had become more affordable. Along with the upcoming CD_ROM drives, this opened a new era of games with full speech and even smaller video cutscenes. But in the early years, it was still common to sell the speech packs for the sound card owners separate from the main game.
@@Nikioko Yeah. Miggy was good overall package price feature set vise. Major pitfall I think indeed was that they didn't offer any realistically good mass media indeed. Also its memory was huge issue. Have slight programming error and guru meditation was immediate. Better memory handling, good mass storage would've made workbench decent enough for many tasks. Stuff like MI2 spitting scene was way too much. Took like multiple minutes and something like plus 5 disk swaps. Scene that was over in maybe 15 secs on PC. But it was great when few disks were so-to-say enough for games/programs.
No, not really. What about the Amiga's AGA? That delivered 256-colour DOS-like graphics that kept the Amiga in contention for a couple of years longer at least.
Of course it pulled away. Commodore was bankrupt at that time, duh. If Commodore hadn't gone bankrupt, they would currently blow anything out of the water today.
If only Commodore took advantage of Amiga's technological superiority in the 80s... Unfortunately their management did the opposite. They deliberately used vague and limited marketing, as to not create "internal" competition for the C64, and left software support to third parties.
To be honest they should've killed c64 lineup immeadiately after a500 began to sell well and just state that they have to do it cause of major changes in hardware _and_ also state that future software would be possible to run in future iterations of the Amiga. Also they should've also focus more to the workbench and it's features/usability.
@@jothain I can kinda see why they'd be reluctant to kill the C64, as it was still bringing in considerable profit at the time, but as a result they chose a very shortsighted path.
@@Qba86 Yeah, absolutely. I assume most of the board/investors absolutely wouldn't have agreed in any case. I mean most likely there was much people that didn't believe in rapid improvement of tech let alone if you already happen to be in that big league, it's easy to laydown and keep doing your stuff. That's pretty much what happened to mobile phone market when Apple came with iPhone. Kinda like Nokia had already made touchscreen device prototypes, but they didn't think it would be a big thing. Most manufacturers just made those similar products, maybe improving batterylife or occasionally hitting with those mini phones of the era.
I don't think the C64 was the problem at all, those who could afford an Amiga would have bought one and those that couldn't would buy a much cheaper but still fun computer, the cream of the 8-bit crop. Certainly a strong focus on internal software development for the Amiga would have been nice, both serious and games titles. From what I've read over the years it seems that there was never a majority of Commodore staff working on the Amiga, which boggles my mind because it was clearly their most advanced product.
Amiga (only 68000, 7 mhz and 4 channels!!) put up a hell of a fight against the PC back then (let alone many also ported from pc to amiga), but it is impossible to compete the unleashed intel CPU's, VGA, memory, harddrive and soundblaster/adlib feast of power progressing every day.
still an amazing run for a cpu released in 1979 and driving three quarters of the 90s 16bit gaming era with it being in every single thing out there except the snes.
Some games look better on the amiga, also the sound is better, but on PC on some games you can see a clearer image and better graphics. Although maybe I prefer the Amiga because of the sound and music.
There is more variety today on PC than there ever has. I think that you've been missing out on the whole indie scene. The indie scene devs are about the same size teams as they were back in the Amiga and Atari days. The biggest difference to that of graphics is the quality of the games, there are much more games with good concept and better and more responsive controls. More than half of the games back in the 80~90s was too hard for people because the controls were bad and the level design was poor. Back then people didn't have a concept of what a good control in a game was. Usually the games were made in a very short amount of time and the code was usually so so. This is why people that make games for the old Amiga and Atari's make so much better games today for these systems than people did back in the days. Code and everything is better. Yeah, there are people still making games for these systems today. If these games was released back in those days they would be the best of the bunch. Now we do miss those old simple games once in a while, and these days retro is really in style.(Hench the extreme pricing)
I think the Amiga wins here. PC has slightly better graphics in some games, but vastly inferior sound. The side scrollers performed way better on the Amiga. Hard to believe that PC would blow the Amiga away the following year.
Good to see Anuga still kicking the PC's arse when smooth scrolling is involved. PC much higher framerate in point & clicks where its just re-drawing the whole scene each frame.
I remember Dragon's Lair serie on Amiga .. so many discs just to see a bad choking 5 mins or even less movie with few joystick moves. The same with Space Ace .
By 1992 the Amiga chipset was basically 7 years old so it's not surprising what happened... Most of these 256 colour PC point and click adventure games have been playable on the Amiga for years BTW using Scummvm.
I'd call it about a wash based on the selected games. What's amazing is that the amiga architecture was 1985 vintage, meaning it took the PC around 7 years to catch up. Unfortunately, the end of the line was right around the corner for the amiga and software support would soon dry up. Also, several titles released around this timeframe played much more poorly on the amiga vs pc, star control, wing commander etc.
After Windows 95 era, Amiga offer PowerPC instead x86. I found out there are Amiga OS in modern time can run at x86 system. Backwards compatibility even PowerPC use emulator. It is a big mistake swift to PowerPC instead of x86. Brilliant Amiga product line turn into oblivion
and PC architecture dates back to 1981... it's the approach which has won. Open architecture instead of locked-in hardware. While PC was consistently evolving from pretty crappy system, completely unsuitable for gaming into ultimate multimedia machine, the Amiga development was frozen. Amiga might had brilliant engineers, but IBM allowing 3rd parties to freely design peripherals and update architecture specs was the actual genius.
@@krokeman This comment is completely wrong. The Amiga had an open architecture. Anyone could make upgraded hardware for it, and is fully documented. In fact it was a deciding factor for NASA when they were choosing between PC Mac and Amiga. Between combined reliable and consistent hardware and OS, NASA chose Amiga.
Amiga was priced something like the 1/4 of a VGA/Adlib PC/AT... nevertheless, a stock Amiga could show 4096 colors on screen, offer hardware graphics, PCM sound, and preemptive multitasking on its GUI OS... mind-blowing tech for a 1985 piece of hardware
IBM's 1985 released PGA offered 640x480p 256 colors without cheats and this use case resolution mode was reused in 8514, SVGA and XGA. IBM PGA has 256 colors from 4096 color palette. Amiga 1000 delivered a compete 4096 color palette capable machine at lower price. Amiga's HAM6 mode is like lossy pixel compression.
I was a PC user back in the day, even a simple EGA card/monitor was extremely expensive until 1990... also, I don't remember any game supporting the PGA cart you mention.. I remember only games supporting CGA/EGA/VGA/MCGA@@valenrn8657
with pentium amiga done. i sold my amiga in 1994 at 500usd and bought pentium 100 16mb ram. 1 mb vga card and 6x cd rom driver in 1996 at around 1000 usd. nice work. and great upragde
What was more powerful, an Amiga or an IBM PC compatible computer ? I don’t quite understand the difference. Is it different machine language or something ?
Amiga and PC are different computers. Both have advantages and disadvantages. As can be seen here, Amiga could scroll faster in 2d games. On the other hand, since PC games mostly were designed for hard drives (you could not run them without one like the Amiga), over the years they started to put more data on PC games. Especially PC adventure games started to have more music and sound effects in them. The fact that PC had 1.44mb disks and Amiga 880kb disks was another reason. When VGA was released, PC games started to have 8 bit color support but Amiga games were mostly still being released for old Amigas without AGA (8 and 18 bit color) support so the transition to new Amigas was slow. After Pentium CPU was released, even the fastest Amiga cpus (68060) started to show their age and they were very expensive.
@@orhunkabakli Your point about Amiga sticking with 880KB FDDs was a good one (Commodore being stupid only put in the 1.6MB in the A4000). Many people don't understand how important it is to a publisher to keep the media expenses down. If you round the storage on both the PC and Amiga the publisher would need to send out twice as many discs for the Amiga and with games getting bigger and bigger that becomes a cost and logistics issue. The point about 8-bit VGA games "starting" to come out is also something most people don't take into account. Even though VGA had been released back in 87 there was a long wait for any games that really used it and most people don't recognize that. They think/remember that VGA was out and everything used it which of course is totally untrue (an anachronism) it took years for all the pieces to fall into place for the PC to use the 256 colour VGA modes. Probably the biggest hurdle was how slow the PC bus was to shift around that amount of info without it going to single digits frames per second, next people having enough memory availability (not just having enough Megabytes but dealing with PC memory architecture) and lastly storage with HDD's being big enough to store all the extra graphical resources but also (as mentioned previously) those floppy disks storing more (seriously who wants to install a 20+ floppy game when it could be halved). Amiga AGA adoption was certainly faster than VGA, but that was because VGA was there first so the assets were easier to convert. Now the Pentium vs 060 is a matter of both time and architecture. Pentium was out about a year earlier and cost a kings ransom (and it probably shouldn't have been released in it's current state) but it did come down in price quite quickly. One of the issues being that it overheated unless it was actively cooled (something many manufacturers skimped on) and could cause actual physical damage (I saw a motherboard with a hole burned through so I guess it caught on actual fire) and the other being that it had a bug in the FPU (I have heard lots of people claim it was overblown, however if you had a render farm (or another computational network) it was a massive issue (I have a friend that had a ray-tracing animation business and it was a disaster). Now the 060 didn't get any addition sales with Apple discontinuing the use of the 680x0 after the 040 (they may have regretted that with the 1st gen PowerPC not performing as well as even an 040 with the legacy software which Apple said it would) in comparing the 060 to the Pentium it's mostly here and there the Pentium had a faster FPU but the 060 was faster in general processing and ALU related stuff. After the Pentium MMX with issues resolved and faster processing speed the 060 being discontinued as a line by Motorola it was all over for the 060. As a side note Motorola processors were always more expensive as a rough comparison vs others (I find it a bit disingenuous to compare across architectures) The MOS 6502 (and originally the pin compatible with the Motorola 6800 MOS 6501) was a direct result with a split with the CPU creators who said it should be cheaper. Only adding extra info for context and those that don't Know.
Oh my... Trolls on DOS has almost the exact same sfx and music like CoolSpot on Dos. I guess there were a few years between when I met thoose games, but never realized this...
no, it took long for windows or dos pc's to get even with amigas and especially super nintendoes. There were a few games that were better like 3d Vector games like elite and later x wing, alone in the dark, Wolfenstein, Doom.. stiff graphix without allot of scrolling that were cpu heavy like Lemmings and Dune 2 (weird game choice here by the way) but the 2d Plattformers and bitmap racing games as you can see here werent yet a match for the sprite machines. it took until the follow up to regular vga and chip based accelerators joined the match, also for sprites and smooth scrolling.
@@KingCrimson82 Agreed. I grew up on MS DOS. Never had an Amiga. But I really wish I had one. The games I've seen on Amiga seem to be better than their MS-DOS counterparts. But I'm thankful for emulation today!
The problem with the Amiga was that it did not improve much at first it was way better than pc but they got new hardware every year and eventually they Caught up while commodore just re-released the same stuff over and over and when there finally was new hardware it was too late and nobody supported it.
@@belstar1128 You are definitely right there. But I feel the games on the Amiga for the time were better in regards to graphics and sound. Later on, that changed for sure. PCs definitely caught up and then surpassed the Amiga. So much of it really depends on what time we're talking about, and also what was affordable for the individual.
@@belstar1128 a pc is tons of off the shelf hardware not 1 specific company and fyi amiga had it too various amounts of 3rd party upgrades and still getting them today And back then amigas were the fastest macs using emulation and for the ultimate setup running pc cards in amigas
I believe the PC and Mac starting off not tied to NTSC or PAL as central to their video ultimately set them on a winning path. Amiga OS was far ahead of the game with multitasking on such modest hardware.
You are correct they didn't start off with NTSC or PAL......or colour! The PC didn't even keep any standard and the Mac used a unaccelerated mono graphics screen which was incredibly slow. Maybe the winning path was being so bad it absolutely required a replacement (repeatedly).
@@dyscotopia I forgot (here comes the Alzheimer's) you could attach CGA to a TV (not through some conversion system like I have seen on VGA) I think the Apple II used a similar trick to get the colours. I was thinking MDA as that was my first PC contact.
VGA's 60 hz is based on NTSC's 60 hz. Recent FreeSync and G-Sync can handle PAL's 50 hz. Baseline HDMI and Display Port has 60 hz. VGA's 31 kHz doubles NTSC's 15 kHz.
The Amiga simply had digital sound. Nothing really that fancy. Actually, PC midi sound was more advanced (after 16bit sound cards) than Amiga and had more channels which was a huge problem for Amiga (most of the time you had to choose between sound effects or music). It's just that the instruments were not high quality. Still, Amiga's sound chip Paula can play 14 bit sound that is almost CD quality but you won't be able to display standard PAL resolution that way. Amiga was way ahead when it was released. It took decades for PC to reach even Amiga 1000 in many aspects.
The PC always had the performance advantage, but it would be YEARS before the PC had better sound than the Amiga. Unless you had like a Soundblaster or GUS card and even then, the majority of games didn't support them. But then, you can't compare a machine running at 66Mhz with one running at 7Mhz.
There was also the Roland MT-32 and later the SC-55/general midi for PC games. Most titles had support for one or the other (or both). The Amiga did sound awesome though.
@@retrononamethe This depends on the game really. Lost Vikings had perfectly smooth scrolling. VGA + 386DX CPU + just released Sound Blaster 16 was an Amiga killer.
People forget how expensive PC was compared to Amiga at that time. Also PC was gaining household footage because employers started PC at home plans at Microsoft its initiatives and the PC became mandatory for many people as a loan in payments to pay the PC. Eventually the PC was simply forced upon us.
@@mrkitty777 Well, the funny thing about those times is that if you were a nerd you could assemble your PC much cheaper than if you would bought a ready-made one. It's the open architecture of PC, which nailed it, cause we know that at the beginning it was a crappy system.
@@krokeman I've seen these pc parts in vitrine and i am sure i could pay the amiga as a 15yr but i couldn't buy the 386, motherboard, soundcard,drive,case, keyboard, monitor at that time i was picking strawberry which would require 2 years picking strawberry 🍓 to pay. Maybe kids of 18yr got better earnings.
Most PC Games had an terrible music back in time, only with an Soundblaster AWE or General Midi Wavetable the music was so good like in this video , with soundblaster only it was a real pain for your ears :)
@@AlistairMaxwell77 Me came 1993 from the Amiga 500 to PC Gaming ;) CD-Rom sound and music was good on PC. but normal Music was for me terrible cause the Amiga do it much better in most cases ;) lg
Beneath a Steel Sky was 15 disks, I kid you not! Also a honorable mention to Monkey Island 2 and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis were both on 11 disks.
@@realtsarbomba And Beneath a Steel Sky was more eye candy on the pc version. In one scene with the huge ventilators in the building, on the pc the ventilators are spinning while on the Amiga they are static. I've played both versions.
As I mentioned a couple of times, this is only a fun experiment to see how the games looked (and sounded) on both systems in late 80s/early 90s. If we go with "dollars for performance" then there is only one winner : The Amiga - no point in making a video that would try to dispute that ;)
@@retrononame That was the only advantage of PC VGA games...you bought Mortal Kombat/SF2 etc for your 386 and it played crap but 2-3 years later when you got a faster PC with a better sound card magically the same game was now better than the console versions :) The same thing doesn't happen with arcade games on Amiga, SF2 is always rubbish on Amiga etc even if you bought a 4000/040 in 1992. It's an important difference between the two formats. Back then you needed a 486/33 or DX2/50 to match Lotus III on an A1200 etc and Pentium 120 for Super Stardust AGA. Of course F1GP on my old 486 of 1992 ran as well as an Amiga 4000/040 and an Amiga could never do something like Screamer Rally etc of course. Depends what kinda games you played really. The direct rival for an Amiga 1200 with a hard drive in 1992 was the 999.99 Amstrad 2286 which cost about twice the price (286 14mhz, VGA, Adlib sound + 20mb hard disk). DOSbox is tricky to set up for older PC performance, a real pain to work out the right CPU cycles so I don't expect people to do that for YT but it is important to remember what it was actually like in 1992/93 if you owned a PC and Amiga at the same time to get an accurate picture of what Commodore were up against with the luke warm AGA update and less than enthusiastic developers not really supporting AGA the same way as A500 games like Soccer Kid/Lotus II/Lionheart/Sword of Sodan which any 386 would have struggled to match.
PC had plenty of games on floppy disks in the early days. The first PCs ran entirely from floppy and didn't come with a hard drive out of the box. You could certainly add one, though. By the 90s, many games were installing to the hard drive it wasn't necessary for every PC game. But for those larger games the hard drive was definitely a better option, and started to become required. Still, I find the Amiga's graphics and sound more impressive. But I can understand compromising that to avoid the dreaded disk swapping and loading times, for sure.
Many Amiga games could be installed on hard drives without the need for software like jst or whdload as well. The problem was that most Amiga users did not care or even know anything about hard drives. To be able to run games without a hard drive was both an advantage and a curse for the Amiga.
Imagine, if Commodore hadn't gone bankrupt! We'd all be using Commodore computers now instead! As shown in this video, Amiga utilized anti-aliasing many years before anti-aliasing even became a thing. Also, the sound is much richer on an Amiga. You see, Commodore built hardware in-house. Almost every PC utilized thorughout the years, 3rd-party hardware, so you were never guaranteed to get two identical PCs even with identical specs.
Commodore has less 3D experience when compared to ex-SGI engineers founded 3DFX. Commodore's approach is semi-custom PA-RISC with 3D extension. NVIDIA's founders have experience with IBM PGA, SUN GX 3D accelerators and AMD microprocessor engineers. AMD's Am29K RISC powered 2D accelerators for Apple's 1990 Macintosh Display Card 8·24 GC (Am29000 at 30 Mhz) for its Macintosh IIfx, and 1987 Pixar Image Computer (four Am29116 at 10 Mhz). 1990 Am29000 at 30 Mhz can do 22 MIPS that is comparable to 68040 @ 25 Mhz. AMD's 386DX reached 40 Mhz in 1991. Commodore's fastest chip design in 1990 was 25 Mhz Ramsey memory controller in the 1990 Amiga 3000. 3DFX Voodoo is fully custom designed ASIC for 3D acceleration. 3DFX was later purchased by NVIDIA. ArtX was founded by ex-SGI engineers that was purchased by ATI which is later purchased by AMD. _In 1991 the line was extended with the Am29030 and Am29035, which included an 8 KB or 4 KB of instruction cache, respectively.[9] By then[10] the Am29050 had also become available, without on-chip cache but featuring a floating-point unit with fully pipelined multiply-accumulate operations, a larger 1 KB Branch Target Cache with a claimed 80% hit rate, and better-pipelined load operations sped up by a 4-entry TLB-like Physical Address Cache. Though it is not a superscalar processor, it permits a floating-point operation and an integer operation to complete at the same cycle. The integer and floating-point sides each have an own write port to the registers.[11] It contained 428,000 transistors[12] on a 1-micron process[13] with a 0.8-micron effective channel length[11] and was available at 20, 25, 33, and 40 MHz. Later the Am29040 was released at 33, 40, and 50 MHz, being like the Am29030 except for featuring a 4 KB data cache, a multiplication unit, and a few other enhancements.[14] The 119 mm² Am29040 contained 1.2 million transistors on a 0.7-micron process_ From 1986 to 1994, Commodore can't match AMD's RISC CPU design. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang left AMD and co-founded NVIDIA in 1993. _AMD used the unreleased 29K microarchitecture as the basis of the K5 series of x86-compatible processors. The ALUs were carried over, as was the re-order buffer with a slight modification. The FPU was taken from the 29050, but extended to 80 bits precision. The K5 translated the x86 instructions into "RISC-OPs" upon decoding, aided by the predecode information held of the cached instructions_
Post 3DFX and ArtX's SGI exodus, the remaining SGI graphics team moves (assimilated) to Nvidia in 1999. 3DFX's graphics business was purchased by NVIDIA in 2000. 3DFX was founded by SGI engineers. The direct successor to SGI's graphics business is NVIDIA. ArtX was purchased by ATI which is later purchased by AMD. ArtX was founded by SGI engineers. NexGen (for K6) was stacked with engineers from ex-DEC Alpha and it was purchased by AMD. Intel assimilated the remaining Compaq's DEC Alpha engineers. AMD's lost a large chunk of ATI engineers to Qualcomm, Intel and Apple. 3DLabs (workstation OpenGL) and (Lockheed) Real3D was purchased by Intel. The efforts when into modern day PCs come from big iron RISC workstation and servers. The PC clone business funds these engineering talents.
Do you mean colour dithering on a CRT with scanlines? PC monitors tended not to have visible scanlines and 256 vga could look quite blocky on these monitors.
I purchased my first PC in Nov 1992 and the rest was history. Before that I had Amiga 500. PC exclusive titles in 92 killed Amiga: Ultima Underworld, Wolf3d, Alone in the Dark, etc.
1992 was the last year that the Amiga could stand toe to toe with the PC. The advent of more advanced sound cards and better implementation of VGA graphics on the PC eroded the Amiga market. Had Commodore released the PowerPC equiped Amiga then things may have been different (see the Amiga Walker), but in 1993 Doom was released on PC and the rest was history. The Amiga was not powerful enough to run FPS games to the same level as PCs and that caused the end of the Amiga for gaming. In an alternative future, Commodore could have maintained the crown, but poor management and disagreements between Commodore USA and Commodore Europe saw the end of the Amiga.
In adventure type games Amiga could match PC VGA using HAM graphics; I think the problem was disk space. In the rest of aspects Amiga still beats PCs in 1992
HAM was very limited, making it almost unusable for games. It worked well for static images, although even then it introduced lossy-compression like artifacts. The better way was to slice screen horizontally line by line and change palette with copper for every line. That way Amiga could display all 4096 on screen, but only 32 unique colors per line. This should mostly replicate the look of 256 color VGA adventure games. However in 1992 Amiga was loosing its user base and game sales were dropping, so publishers weren't interested in spending money for great ports. For example Amiga and Atari ST got same 16-color graphics in (1992) Goblins 2 while PC port used 256 color art. Also talking about PCs in 1992 is complicated. New PCs from that year were much better than Amiga 1200. Low-end hardware started with 386SX 24 MHz and slow(ish) SVGA clone which could easily run Amiga-like graphics, but in 256 colors with MOD music mixed in software by CPU on Sound Blaster. Super Frog or Project X from Team 17 are good examples here. Mid-range 386DX (with cache) PCs were comparable to Amiga 1200 + Turbo cards, while high-end 486 systems were next-gen compared to regular Amiga hardware, only very expensive high-end Amigas could match them, but they weren't meant for home use. On the other hand there were still millions of 8086 and 286 PCs, often with CGA and EGA without any sound device. Amiga was superior in every way for gaming and multimedia content. So you can both pick 1992 games that show how Amiga was still superior and with different games show how obsolete Amiga became.
@@mrkitty777 WIth Doom and Wing Commander, ET4000AX ISA equipped 386DX-33 based PC beats Amiga 1200's 68EC020 @ 14 Mhz with 32 bit Fast Ram. ruclips.net/video/KQDEKoRcXZc/видео.html 386DX-33 with Tseng Labs ET4000 playing Doom. Amiga 1200's 68EC020 CPU needs upgrades such as 28 Mhz 68020, 33 Mhz-to-50 Mhz 68030 CPU acceleration cards. My Dad's Amiga 3000 with 25 Mhz 68030 CPU/68882 FPU, 4MB Fast RAM, and 2 MB RAM Chip Ram were useless for Doom. My Dad also has a 386DX-33 with Tseng Labs ET4000-based PC.
@@Leeki85 In 1990s, there are millions of 386-based PCs. Both Compaq and Intel ($4 billion revenue) are many times larger than Commodore at its $1 billion dollar revenue peak.
There might be a fairer comparison if you didn't run the NTSC games in PAL mode. The squished graphics don't do the Amiga versions any favor and result in slower frame rates
I usually try both ways on Amiga (with NTSC on and off) but it seems to make no difference most of the times. Some games flat refuse to work in NTSC mode as well. I don't know if it's the emulator issue or something else, but I do try it. But anyway, this is just a fun comparison of the games on both systems in that era. It's not meant as a serious competition. If we would go "dead serious", the only acceptable results would probably be on the original hardware (not emulated) anyway ;)
Interesting...PC gaming really didn't start coming into its own as the powerhouse it is today unfortunately 1993. Once Doom hit there was no longer just a flow of innovative games there was a deluge and since that point nothing really came close again. Well...minus brand new cutting edge consoles but that generally lasts roughly 6 months.
A bunch of uninteresting games for both platforms. Here it is obvious that game companies weren't spending much time on the Amiga, though -- terrible ports. They should have looked and sounded much better than the PC. But these were definitely premium, top notch games as far as the PC goes at that time.
Now have a look at comanche maximum overkill... It was very much game over already by that point, if wing commander 1 and 2 hadn't already demonstrated this.
@dna9838 None of those games demonstrate why it was all over for the Amiga. Seeing as Wing Commander 1 plays great on the Amiga (grab the CD32 version which will play fine on the A1200 or A4000 so you get the full colour graphics as well) the other two games, which other than not being published on the Amiga did (and required) nothing special. So just like Doom and many other games that were said to not be possible on the Amiga but have now been ported, could have been on the Amiga. For some reason (for most people) the Amiga starts and stops with the A500, but that's like comparing using an IBM 5150.
@@daishi5571 no way even 030 amigas could come close to managing Comanche. They didn’t even bother to release Wing commander 2 or frontier first encounters etc on the Amiga, because it was in steep decline
Thanks for another enjoyable video. 1. Dark Seed, PC wins with crisper graphics and clearer sampled sounds and music. 2. Dragons Lair 3, no real difference I can see between them. 3. Dune, PC for me just pips the Amiga, crisper graphics and better sounding music. 4. lamborghini, strange game this, both have merits though the PC screeching tyres are a poor sound effect 5. Curse of Enchantia, again crisper graphics and sound on the PC version. 6. Waxworks, PC definitely, game plays in a full screen which helps this type of game. 7. Trolls. Definitely Amiga, scrolling and frame rate is better but why no in game music like the PC? 8. Nicky Boom, Amiga winner again, in game soundtrack is superb.
Thanks. I thought that PC started to go ahead of Amiga in Adventure and RPG games, but in 2d side scrollers/platformers, the Amiga still rules in 1992.
not only that the amiga had some titles that the pc could not match cannon fodder, sensible soccer, speedball 2, slamtilt pinball but then came along the likes of doom and duke nukem and that was the end for the amiga
It's worth noting that the PC had MT-32 available at this point (if you could afford it), together with Sound Blaster. Amiga here is AGA, which many people I don't think had. For example Trolls' 256 color palette could not be done on regular Amiga. Many other games are missing - flight sims for example lagged quite heavily on Amiga (think).
@@MrYoSamba I remember my friend had an Amiga, and I(well my father/family) had a PC in 1994, A lot of games were coming out on both, Worms, Cannon Fodder, a lot of other Sensible Software games, Speedball 2 Brutal Deluxe. A lot of older point and click adventure games were getting "Talkie" updated CD versions. Beneath a Steel Sky etc. I remember him saying how the Amiga had better sound than a PC. That's before he and his family got a Windows 95 PC, which he then saved up money to buy both a 3DFX Card, and a SoundBlaster Awe 64 Gold.
@@lmcgregoruk Very few people had money for an MT-32 back then, but you can play games from this era with MT-32 + sound blaster emulation and get superior sound. The Amiga was amazing for its time, but its heyday was 1985-1990. Even in 1991-1992 you got more for less money than you would need with a PC, but nowadays we can enjoy the PC games of the era with "infinite money" in the form of emulation.
@@kikoremacha5722 Just a fun experiment, not meant to be a serious comparison. We all know that PC had more "horsepower" in 1992 and was also a lot more expensive, but Amiga still holds itself in there and is still great gaming computer even in 1992 ;)
@@retrononame Yep, most games ran perfectly fine on a "fast" 286 with VGA graphics in 1992. They didn't really push the limits of the platform at the time. One year later everything changed, when Doom was released. Interesting comparisons btw. :)
@@kikoremacha5722 And why not? For years Amiga owners were comparing hardware built with gaming in mind, to hardware built with office productivity in mind.
By 1992, the PC was starting to pull ahead. You started seeing stuff on the PC that blew anything on the Amiga away.
Actually much earlier. Even during 386 era, which began at 1986 already showed provess in PC's computational performance. Like think about Wing Commander on 386 PC vs Amiga. It ran on PC for higher resolution and insanely much faster. Even soundcards where going leaps per generation forward. Amiga was great system though I had one too. It was good in sound and in. ie sidescrolling pixel games where great. Then game PC's with svga, sound cards let alone that pc's always had some kind of hdd etc. and miggy got obsolete in so short time.
@@jothain The computing power, yes. I remember how long it took the Amiga to calculate a random map for Civilization. But the main advantage of the Amiga was its price. While most PCs in 1990 had VGA graphics already, sound cards were still rare and expensive. That changed around 1992/93. Game sizes were growing (I remember The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes having almost 30 MB), and most Amigas didn't have a hard drive. Switching between 11 diskettes (3,5" DD) in Monkey Island 2 was a pure nightmare. Then, sound cards had become more affordable. Along with the upcoming CD_ROM drives, this opened a new era of games with full speech and even smaller video cutscenes. But in the early years, it was still common to sell the speech packs for the sound card owners separate from the main game.
@@Nikioko Yeah. Miggy was good overall package price feature set vise. Major pitfall I think indeed was that they didn't offer any realistically good mass media indeed. Also its memory was huge issue. Have slight programming error and guru meditation was immediate. Better memory handling, good mass storage would've made workbench decent enough for many tasks. Stuff like MI2 spitting scene was way too much. Took like multiple minutes and something like plus 5 disk swaps. Scene that was over in maybe 15 secs on PC. But it was great when few disks were so-to-say enough for games/programs.
No, not really. What about the Amiga's AGA? That delivered 256-colour DOS-like graphics that kept the Amiga in contention for a couple of years longer at least.
Of course it pulled away. Commodore was bankrupt at that time, duh.
If Commodore hadn't gone bankrupt, they would currently blow anything out of the water today.
If only Commodore took advantage of Amiga's technological superiority in the 80s... Unfortunately their management did the opposite. They deliberately used vague and limited marketing, as to not create "internal" competition for the C64, and left software support to third parties.
To be honest they should've killed c64 lineup immeadiately after a500 began to sell well and just state that they have to do it cause of major changes in hardware _and_ also state that future software would be possible to run in future iterations of the Amiga. Also they should've also focus more to the workbench and it's features/usability.
@@jothain I can kinda see why they'd be reluctant to kill the C64, as it was still bringing in considerable profit at the time, but as a result they chose a very shortsighted path.
@@Qba86 Yeah, absolutely. I assume most of the board/investors absolutely wouldn't have agreed in any case. I mean most likely there was much people that didn't believe in rapid improvement of tech let alone if you already happen to be in that big league, it's easy to laydown and keep doing your stuff. That's pretty much what happened to mobile phone market when Apple came with iPhone. Kinda like Nokia had already made touchscreen device prototypes, but they didn't think it would be a big thing. Most manufacturers just made those similar products, maybe improving batterylife or occasionally hitting with those mini phones of the era.
I don't think the C64 was the problem at all, those who could afford an Amiga would have bought one and those that couldn't would buy a much cheaper but still fun computer, the cream of the 8-bit crop. Certainly a strong focus on internal software development for the Amiga would have been nice, both serious and games titles. From what I've read over the years it seems that there was never a majority of Commodore staff working on the Amiga, which boggles my mind because it was clearly their most advanced product.
Amiga (only 68000, 7 mhz and 4 channels!!) put up a hell of a fight against the PC back then (let alone many also ported from pc to amiga), but it is impossible to compete the unleashed intel CPU's, VGA, memory, harddrive and soundblaster/adlib feast of power progressing every day.
still an amazing run for a cpu released in 1979 and driving three quarters of the 90s 16bit gaming era with it being in every single thing out there except the snes.
Some games look better on the amiga, also the sound is better, but on PC on some games you can see a clearer image and better graphics. Although maybe I prefer the Amiga because of the sound and music.
In adventure and 3D games the PC was better. In arcade and action games the Amiga was better.
I always liked the early games on the amiga and atari St there was more variety in games then in the 80s and 90s no variety in PC games today!
There is more variety today on PC than there ever has. I think that you've been missing out on the whole indie scene.
The indie scene devs are about the same size teams as they were back in the Amiga and Atari days.
The biggest difference to that of graphics is the quality of the games, there are much more games with good concept and better and more responsive controls.
More than half of the games back in the 80~90s was too hard for people because the controls were bad and the level design was poor.
Back then people didn't have a concept of what a good control in a game was. Usually the games were made in a very short amount of time and the code was usually so so.
This is why people that make games for the old Amiga and Atari's make so much better games today for these systems than people did back in the days.
Code and everything is better. Yeah, there are people still making games for these systems today.
If these games was released back in those days they would be the best of the bunch.
Now we do miss those old simple games once in a while, and these days retro is really in style.(Hench the extreme pricing)
I think the Amiga wins here. PC has slightly better graphics in some games, but vastly inferior sound. The side scrollers performed way better on the Amiga. Hard to believe that PC would blow the Amiga away the following year.
Good to see Anuga still kicking the PC's arse when smooth scrolling is involved. PC much higher framerate in point & clicks where its just re-drawing the whole scene each frame.
I remember Dragon's Lair serie on Amiga .. so many discs just to see a bad choking 5 mins or even less movie with few joystick moves. The same with Space Ace .
By 1992 the Amiga chipset was basically 7 years old so it's not surprising what happened...
Most of these 256 colour PC point and click adventure games have been playable on the Amiga for years BTW using Scummvm.
AGA came out in 1992 and still could not match a high end PC at that point.
@@camberiu Why would you expect a budget home micro to match a high end PC?
IBM 8514 and VGA were released in 1987 and served as the basis for SVGA clones and IBM XGA. SVGA cloners made the IBM standards cheaper.
@@amanloop Well there was the A2500 or A3000 and if they weren't fast enough, nothing to stop upgrading the CPU.
I'd call it about a wash based on the selected games. What's amazing is that the amiga architecture was 1985 vintage, meaning it took the PC around 7 years to catch up. Unfortunately, the end of the line was right around the corner for the amiga and software support would soon dry up. Also, several titles released around this timeframe played much more poorly on the amiga vs pc, star control, wing commander etc.
After Windows 95 era, Amiga offer PowerPC instead x86. I found out there are Amiga OS in modern time can run at x86 system. Backwards compatibility even PowerPC use emulator. It is a big mistake swift to PowerPC instead of x86. Brilliant Amiga product line turn into oblivion
and PC architecture dates back to 1981... it's the approach which has won. Open architecture instead of locked-in hardware. While PC was consistently evolving from pretty crappy system, completely unsuitable for gaming into ultimate multimedia machine, the Amiga development was frozen. Amiga might had brilliant engineers, but IBM allowing 3rd parties to freely design peripherals and update architecture specs was the actual genius.
@@krokeman This comment is completely wrong. The Amiga had an open architecture. Anyone could make upgraded hardware for it, and is fully documented. In fact it was a deciding factor for NASA when they were choosing between PC Mac and Amiga. Between combined reliable and consistent hardware and OS, NASA chose Amiga.
@@daishi5571 nope. Everybody and their dog could make an IBM-Compatible/IA16/IA32 machine, only Commodore could make an Amiga.
@@daishi5571 So, you claim that it's Commodore which allowed clones and not IBM?
LOL, Nicky Boom saying "yay" when opening the treasure chest.
Amiga was priced something like the 1/4 of a VGA/Adlib PC/AT... nevertheless, a stock Amiga could show 4096 colors on screen, offer hardware graphics, PCM sound, and preemptive multitasking on its GUI OS... mind-blowing tech for a 1985 piece of hardware
IBM's 1985 released PGA offered 640x480p 256 colors without cheats and this use case resolution mode was reused in 8514, SVGA and XGA.
IBM PGA has 256 colors from 4096 color palette. Amiga 1000 delivered a compete 4096 color palette capable machine at lower price.
Amiga's HAM6 mode is like lossy pixel compression.
I was a PC user back in the day, even a simple EGA card/monitor was extremely expensive until 1990... also, I don't remember any game supporting the PGA cart you mention.. I remember only games supporting CGA/EGA/VGA/MCGA@@valenrn8657
@@valenrn8657 PGA was useless and it's obvious by the lack of support.
The amiga lost after 90's. Part of it because processors slow develop to keep up. Most stuff dump on few MB of ram.
with pentium amiga done. i sold my amiga in 1994 at 500usd and bought pentium 100 16mb ram. 1 mb vga card and 6x cd rom driver in 1996 at around 1000 usd. nice work. and great upragde
Great choice u maked
What was more powerful, an Amiga or an IBM PC compatible computer ?
I don’t quite understand the difference. Is it different machine language or something ?
Amiga and PC are different computers. Both have advantages and disadvantages. As can be seen here, Amiga could scroll faster in 2d games. On the other hand, since PC games mostly were designed for hard drives (you could not run them without one like the Amiga), over the years they started to put more data on PC games. Especially PC adventure games started to have more music and sound effects in them. The fact that PC had 1.44mb disks and Amiga 880kb disks was another reason. When VGA was released, PC games started to have 8 bit color support but Amiga games were mostly still being released for old Amigas without AGA (8 and 18 bit color) support so the transition to new Amigas was slow.
After Pentium CPU was released, even the fastest Amiga cpus (68060) started to show their age and they were very expensive.
@@orhunkabakli Your point about Amiga sticking with 880KB FDDs was a good one (Commodore being stupid only put in the 1.6MB in the A4000). Many people don't understand how important it is to a publisher to keep the media expenses down. If you round the storage on both the PC and Amiga the publisher would need to send out twice as many discs for the Amiga and with games getting bigger and bigger that becomes a cost and logistics issue.
The point about 8-bit VGA games "starting" to come out is also something most people don't take into account. Even though VGA had been released back in 87 there was a long wait for any games that really used it and most people don't recognize that. They think/remember that VGA was out and everything used it which of course is totally untrue (an anachronism) it took years for all the pieces to fall into place for the PC to use the 256 colour VGA modes. Probably the biggest hurdle was how slow the PC bus was to shift around that amount of info without it going to single digits frames per second, next people having enough memory availability (not just having enough Megabytes but dealing with PC memory architecture) and lastly storage with HDD's being big enough to store all the extra graphical resources but also (as mentioned previously) those floppy disks storing more (seriously who wants to install a 20+ floppy game when it could be halved). Amiga AGA adoption was certainly faster than VGA, but that was because VGA was there first so the assets were easier to convert.
Now the Pentium vs 060 is a matter of both time and architecture. Pentium was out about a year earlier and cost a kings ransom (and it probably shouldn't have been released in it's current state) but it did come down in price quite quickly. One of the issues being that it overheated unless it was actively cooled (something many manufacturers skimped on) and could cause actual physical damage (I saw a motherboard with a hole burned through so I guess it caught on actual fire) and the other being that it had a bug in the FPU (I have heard lots of people claim it was overblown, however if you had a render farm (or another computational network) it was a massive issue (I have a friend that had a ray-tracing animation business and it was a disaster). Now the 060 didn't get any addition sales with Apple discontinuing the use of the 680x0 after the 040 (they may have regretted that with the 1st gen PowerPC not performing as well as even an 040 with the legacy software which Apple said it would) in comparing the 060 to the Pentium it's mostly here and there the Pentium had a faster FPU but the 060 was faster in general processing and ALU related stuff. After the Pentium MMX with issues resolved and faster processing speed the 060 being discontinued as a line by Motorola it was all over for the 060.
As a side note Motorola processors were always more expensive as a rough comparison vs others (I find it a bit disingenuous to compare across architectures) The MOS 6502 (and originally the pin compatible with the Motorola 6800 MOS 6501) was a direct result with a split with the CPU creators who said it should be cheaper.
Only adding extra info for context and those that don't Know.
Oh my... Trolls on DOS has almost the exact same sfx and music like CoolSpot on Dos. I guess there were a few years between when I met thoose games, but never realized this...
Ah yes, the time PC was about to unambiguously surpass the aging Amiga with it's locked-in hardware.
no, it took long for windows or dos pc's to get even with amigas and especially super nintendoes. There were a few games that were better like 3d Vector games like elite and later x wing, alone in the dark, Wolfenstein, Doom.. stiff graphix without allot of scrolling that were cpu heavy like Lemmings and Dune 2 (weird game choice here by the way) but the 2d Plattformers and bitmap racing games as you can see here werent yet a match for the sprite machines. it took until the follow up to regular vga and chip based accelerators joined the match, also for sprites and smooth scrolling.
@@KingCrimson82 Agreed. I grew up on MS DOS. Never had an Amiga. But I really wish I had one. The games I've seen on Amiga seem to be better than their MS-DOS counterparts. But I'm thankful for emulation today!
The problem with the Amiga was that it did not improve much at first it was way better than pc but they got new hardware every year and eventually they Caught up while commodore just re-released the same stuff over and over and when there finally was new hardware it was too late and nobody supported it.
@@belstar1128 You are definitely right there. But I feel the games on the Amiga for the time were better in regards to graphics and sound. Later on, that changed for sure. PCs definitely caught up and then surpassed the Amiga. So much of it really depends on what time we're talking about, and also what was affordable for the individual.
@@belstar1128 a pc is tons of off the shelf hardware not 1 specific company and fyi amiga had it too various amounts of 3rd party upgrades and still getting them today
And back then amigas were the fastest macs using emulation and for the ultimate setup running pc cards in amigas
I believe the PC and Mac starting off not tied to NTSC or PAL as central to their video ultimately set them on a winning path. Amiga OS was far ahead of the game with multitasking on such modest hardware.
You are correct they didn't start off with NTSC or PAL......or colour! The PC didn't even keep any standard and the Mac used a unaccelerated mono graphics screen which was incredibly slow. Maybe the winning path was being so bad it absolutely required a replacement (repeatedly).
@@daishi5571 same with sound. It was so basic it requires a different solution!
@@daishi5571 early CGA cards were NTSC. They could output to a tv or composite monitor and fake 16 colors from the artifacting
@@dyscotopia I forgot (here comes the Alzheimer's) you could attach CGA to a TV (not through some conversion system like I have seen on VGA) I think the Apple II used a similar trick to get the colours. I was thinking MDA as that was my first PC contact.
VGA's 60 hz is based on NTSC's 60 hz. Recent FreeSync and G-Sync can handle PAL's 50 hz. Baseline HDMI and Display Port has 60 hz.
VGA's 31 kHz doubles NTSC's 15 kHz.
Sound quality on amiga was amazing.. Just listen to that dune soundtrack on PC it's a crime.
The Amiga simply had digital sound. Nothing really that fancy. Actually, PC midi sound was more advanced (after 16bit sound cards) than Amiga and had more channels which was a huge problem for Amiga (most of the time you had to choose between sound effects or music). It's just that the instruments were not high quality.
Still, Amiga's sound chip Paula can play 14 bit sound that is almost CD quality but you won't be able to display standard PAL resolution that way. Amiga was way ahead when it was released. It took decades for PC to reach even Amiga 1000 in many aspects.
The PC always had the performance advantage, but it would be YEARS before the PC had better sound than the Amiga. Unless you had like a Soundblaster or GUS card and even then, the majority of games didn't support them. But then, you can't compare a machine running at 66Mhz with one running at 7Mhz.
There was also the Roland MT-32 and later the SC-55/general midi for PC games. Most titles had support for one or the other (or both). The Amiga did sound awesome though.
it took the CD-ROM era to finally end the pain for PC users' ears lol
The Amiga still had a performance advantage in side scrollers at this point. PC needed a way faster CPU than the Amiga to achieve smooth scrolling.
In the video, How to know if the game is dos or amiga version?
Bottom left corner of the "television".
There is a game title and the version written there.
I remember it was an infinite war between PC and Amiga users in the early 90s...Then in 1995 all finished.
Commodore went bankrupt in 1994.
It was over in 92
@@NoWonderDragon well. I think after Mortal Kombat Dos conversion...
You gradually see it quality wise shifting to pc. Still. 2d scrolling is way better on Amiga.
Yeap, 2d games were still better (more smooth) on Amiga. Even in 1992.
@@retrononamethe This depends on the game really. Lost Vikings had perfectly smooth scrolling. VGA + 386DX CPU + just released Sound Blaster 16 was an Amiga killer.
People forget how expensive PC was compared to Amiga at that time. Also PC was gaining household footage because employers started PC at home plans at Microsoft its initiatives and the PC became mandatory for many people as a loan in payments to pay the PC. Eventually the PC was simply forced upon us.
@@mrkitty777 Well, the funny thing about those times is that if you were a nerd you could assemble your PC much cheaper than if you would bought a ready-made one. It's the open architecture of PC, which nailed it, cause we know that at the beginning it was a crappy system.
@@krokeman I've seen these pc parts in vitrine and i am sure i could pay the amiga as a 15yr but i couldn't buy the 386, motherboard, soundcard,drive,case, keyboard, monitor at that time i was picking strawberry which would require 2 years picking strawberry 🍓 to pay. Maybe kids of 18yr got better earnings.
Most PC Games had an terrible music back in time, only with an Soundblaster AWE or General Midi Wavetable the music was so good like in this video , with soundblaster only it was a real pain for your ears :)
lots of people love the FM sound chips sound. the dos box emulation isnt the best
@@AlistairMaxwell77
Me came 1993 from the Amiga 500 to PC Gaming ;)
CD-Rom sound and music was good on PC.
but normal Music was for me terrible cause the Amiga do it much better in most cases ;)
lg
Dragons lair looks the same on both machines. Shame so few amiga users had a hard drive so that was about ten disks:)
Beneath a Steel Sky was 15 disks, I kid you not! Also a honorable mention to Monkey Island 2 and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis were both on 11 disks.
@@realtsarbomba And Beneath a Steel Sky was more eye candy on the pc version. In one scene with the huge ventilators in the building, on the pc the ventilators are spinning while on the Amiga they are static. I've played both versions.
So the arcade games are better on the Amiga and the Adventure/ Strategy are better on the PC.
I thought so yes.
and 3d, roughly yes. I liked the time i had my Atari installed until 99
These are not emulating a 16mhz 80286 with ISA VGA card I guess, which was the TOP END 999.99 SYSTEM for home users via High Street stores in 1992 ;)
As I mentioned a couple of times, this is only a fun experiment to see how the games looked (and sounded) on both systems in late 80s/early 90s.
If we go with "dollars for performance" then there is only one winner : The Amiga - no point in making a video that would try to dispute that ;)
@@retrononame That was the only advantage of PC VGA games...you bought Mortal Kombat/SF2 etc for your 386 and it played crap but 2-3 years later when you got a faster PC with a better sound card magically the same game was now better than the console versions :) The same thing doesn't happen with arcade games on Amiga, SF2 is always rubbish on Amiga etc even if you bought a 4000/040 in 1992. It's an important difference between the two formats. Back then you needed a 486/33 or DX2/50 to match Lotus III on an A1200 etc and Pentium 120 for Super Stardust AGA. Of course F1GP on my old 486 of 1992 ran as well as an Amiga 4000/040 and an Amiga could never do something like Screamer Rally etc of course. Depends what kinda games you played really. The direct rival for an Amiga 1200 with a hard drive in 1992 was the 999.99 Amstrad 2286 which cost about twice the price (286 14mhz, VGA, Adlib sound + 20mb hard disk). DOSbox is tricky to set up for older PC performance, a real pain to work out the right CPU cycles so I don't expect people to do that for YT but it is important to remember what it was actually like in 1992/93 if you owned a PC and Amiga at the same time to get an accurate picture of what Commodore were up against with the luke warm AGA update and less than enthusiastic developers not really supporting AGA the same way as A500 games like Soccer Kid/Lotus II/Lionheart/Sword of Sodan which any 386 would have struggled to match.
In 1992 a top end system would have a 486 cpu. Entries a 386. The 286 was outdated in 1992.
Amiga games was floppy based. PC games was hard disk. Disk swapping Dragon’s Lair on Amiga was terrible even with duel external drives.
PC had plenty of games on floppy disks in the early days. The first PCs ran entirely from floppy and didn't come with a hard drive out of the box. You could certainly add one, though. By the 90s, many games were installing to the hard drive it wasn't necessary for every PC game.
But for those larger games the hard drive was definitely a better option, and started to become required.
Still, I find the Amiga's graphics and sound more impressive. But I can understand compromising that to avoid the dreaded disk swapping and loading times, for sure.
@@MichaelWilliams-lr4mb my first ever game played on PC was Buck Rogers, 1986! Back then I had a C64 and azing it played from a hard disk!!
Many Amiga games could be installed on hard drives without the need for software like jst or whdload as well. The problem was that most Amiga users did not care or even know anything about hard drives. To be able to run games without a hard drive was both an advantage and a curse for the Amiga.
Imagine, if Commodore hadn't gone bankrupt! We'd all be using Commodore computers now instead!
As shown in this video, Amiga utilized anti-aliasing many years before anti-aliasing even became a thing. Also, the sound is much richer on an Amiga. You see, Commodore built hardware in-house. Almost every PC utilized thorughout the years, 3rd-party hardware, so you were never guaranteed to get two identical PCs even with identical specs.
Commodore has less 3D experience when compared to ex-SGI engineers founded 3DFX. Commodore's approach is semi-custom PA-RISC with 3D extension.
NVIDIA's founders have experience with IBM PGA, SUN GX 3D accelerators and AMD microprocessor engineers.
AMD's Am29K RISC powered 2D accelerators for Apple's 1990 Macintosh Display Card 8·24 GC (Am29000 at 30 Mhz) for its Macintosh IIfx, and 1987 Pixar Image Computer (four Am29116 at 10 Mhz). 1990 Am29000 at 30 Mhz can do 22 MIPS that is comparable to 68040 @ 25 Mhz.
AMD's 386DX reached 40 Mhz in 1991. Commodore's fastest chip design in 1990 was 25 Mhz Ramsey memory controller in the 1990 Amiga 3000.
3DFX Voodoo is fully custom designed ASIC for 3D acceleration. 3DFX was later purchased by NVIDIA.
ArtX was founded by ex-SGI engineers that was purchased by ATI which is later purchased by AMD.
_In 1991 the line was extended with the Am29030 and Am29035, which included an 8 KB or 4 KB of instruction cache, respectively.[9] By then[10] the Am29050 had also become available, without on-chip cache but featuring a floating-point unit with fully pipelined multiply-accumulate operations, a larger 1 KB Branch Target Cache with a claimed 80% hit rate, and better-pipelined load operations sped up by a 4-entry TLB-like Physical Address Cache. Though it is not a superscalar processor, it permits a floating-point operation and an integer operation to complete at the same cycle. The integer and floating-point sides each have an own write port to the registers.[11] It contained 428,000 transistors[12] on a 1-micron process[13] with a 0.8-micron effective channel length[11] and was available at 20, 25, 33, and 40 MHz. Later the Am29040 was released at 33, 40, and 50 MHz, being like the Am29030 except for featuring a 4 KB data cache, a multiplication unit, and a few other enhancements.[14] The 119 mm² Am29040 contained 1.2 million transistors on a 0.7-micron process_
From 1986 to 1994, Commodore can't match AMD's RISC CPU design. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang left AMD and co-founded NVIDIA in 1993.
_AMD used the unreleased 29K microarchitecture as the basis of the K5 series of x86-compatible processors. The ALUs were carried over, as was the re-order buffer with a slight modification. The FPU was taken from the 29050, but extended to 80 bits precision. The K5 translated the x86 instructions into "RISC-OPs" upon decoding, aided by the predecode information held of the cached instructions_
Post 3DFX and ArtX's SGI exodus, the remaining SGI graphics team moves (assimilated) to Nvidia in 1999.
3DFX's graphics business was purchased by NVIDIA in 2000. 3DFX was founded by SGI engineers. The direct successor to SGI's graphics business is NVIDIA.
ArtX was purchased by ATI which is later purchased by AMD. ArtX was founded by SGI engineers. NexGen (for K6) was stacked with engineers from ex-DEC Alpha and it was purchased by AMD.
Intel assimilated the remaining Compaq's DEC Alpha engineers. AMD's lost a large chunk of ATI engineers to Qualcomm, Intel and Apple.
3DLabs (workstation OpenGL) and (Lockheed) Real3D was purchased by Intel.
The efforts when into modern day PCs come from big iron RISC workstation and servers. The PC clone business funds these engineering talents.
Do you mean colour dithering on a CRT with scanlines? PC monitors tended not to have visible scanlines and 256 vga could look quite blocky on these monitors.
Damm the last game monsters looked scaring
I purchased my first PC in Nov 1992 and the rest was history. Before that I had Amiga 500. PC exclusive titles in 92 killed Amiga: Ultima Underworld, Wolf3d, Alone in the Dark, etc.
1992 was the last year that the Amiga could stand toe to toe with the PC. The advent of more advanced sound cards and better implementation of VGA graphics on the PC eroded the Amiga market. Had Commodore released the PowerPC equiped Amiga then things may have been different (see the Amiga Walker), but in 1993 Doom was released on PC and the rest was history. The Amiga was not powerful enough to run FPS games to the same level as PCs and that caused the end of the Amiga for gaming.
In an alternative future, Commodore could have maintained the crown, but poor management and disagreements between Commodore USA and Commodore Europe saw the end of the Amiga.
Agreed. I still think that if Commodore would manage things better, the Amiga could be an additional player alongside Windows PCs and Macs.
I don't know how anyone with ears could tolerate those PC sounds lol, Amiga still sounded so much better even as the hardware was becoming obsolete.
In adventure type games Amiga could match PC VGA using HAM graphics; I think the problem was disk space. In the rest of aspects Amiga still beats PCs in 1992
Most games in few.MB
HAM was very limited, making it almost unusable for games. It worked well for static images, although even then it introduced lossy-compression like artifacts. The better way was to slice screen horizontally line by line and change palette with copper for every line. That way Amiga could display all 4096 on screen, but only 32 unique colors per line.
This should mostly replicate the look of 256 color VGA adventure games.
However in 1992 Amiga was loosing its user base and game sales were dropping, so publishers weren't interested in spending money for great ports. For example Amiga and Atari ST got same 16-color graphics in (1992) Goblins 2 while PC port used 256 color art.
Also talking about PCs in 1992 is complicated. New PCs from that year were much better than Amiga 1200. Low-end hardware started with 386SX 24 MHz and slow(ish) SVGA clone which could easily run Amiga-like graphics, but in 256 colors with MOD music mixed in software by CPU on Sound Blaster. Super Frog or Project X from Team 17 are good examples here.
Mid-range 386DX (with cache) PCs were comparable to Amiga 1200 + Turbo cards, while high-end 486 systems were next-gen compared to regular Amiga hardware, only very expensive high-end Amigas could match them, but they weren't meant for home use.
On the other hand there were still millions of 8086 and 286 PCs, often with CGA and EGA without any sound device. Amiga was superior in every way for gaming and multimedia content.
So you can both pick 1992 games that show how Amiga was still superior and with different games show how obsolete Amiga became.
@@Leeki85 386 was unpayable in 1992
@@mrkitty777 WIth Doom and Wing Commander, ET4000AX ISA equipped 386DX-33 based PC beats Amiga 1200's 68EC020 @ 14 Mhz with 32 bit Fast Ram.
ruclips.net/video/KQDEKoRcXZc/видео.html
386DX-33 with Tseng Labs ET4000 playing Doom. Amiga 1200's 68EC020 CPU needs upgrades such as 28 Mhz 68020, 33 Mhz-to-50 Mhz 68030 CPU acceleration cards.
My Dad's Amiga 3000 with 25 Mhz 68030 CPU/68882 FPU, 4MB Fast RAM, and 2 MB RAM Chip Ram were useless for Doom. My Dad also has a 386DX-33 with Tseng Labs ET4000-based PC.
@@Leeki85 In 1990s, there are millions of 386-based PCs. Both Compaq and Intel ($4 billion revenue) are many times larger than Commodore at its $1 billion dollar revenue peak.
It was at this point the Amiga knew......it f*cked up
There might be a fairer comparison if you didn't run the NTSC games in PAL mode. The squished graphics don't do the Amiga versions any favor and result in slower frame rates
I usually try both ways on Amiga (with NTSC on and off) but it seems to make no difference most of the times. Some games flat refuse to work in NTSC mode as well. I don't know if it's the emulator issue or something else, but I do try it.
But anyway, this is just a fun comparison of the games on both systems in that era. It's not meant as a serious competition. If we would go "dead serious", the only acceptable results would probably be on the original hardware (not emulated) anyway ;)
Writing on the wall for the Amiga by this time.
4:43 I remember that in this game on my pc there was no such fps drawdown :[
Formula One Grand Prix? Released for AMiga in '91, DOS in '92...
Cost vs quality, amiga won and I doubt most pcs in 1987 had a good sound card/ gfx
Interesting...PC gaming really didn't start coming into its own as the powerhouse it is today unfortunately 1993. Once Doom hit there was no longer just a flow of innovative games there was a deluge and since that point nothing really came close again. Well...minus brand new cutting edge consoles but that generally lasts roughly 6 months.
A bunch of uninteresting games for both platforms. Here it is obvious that game companies weren't spending much time on the Amiga, though -- terrible ports. They should have looked and sounded much better than the PC. But these were definitely premium, top notch games as far as the PC goes at that time.
Now have a look at comanche maximum overkill... It was very much game over already by that point, if wing commander 1 and 2 hadn't already demonstrated this.
@dna9838 None of those games demonstrate why it was all over for the Amiga. Seeing as Wing Commander 1 plays great on the Amiga (grab the CD32 version which will play fine on the A1200 or A4000 so you get the full colour graphics as well) the other two games, which other than not being published on the Amiga did (and required) nothing special. So just like Doom and many other games that were said to not be possible on the Amiga but have now been ported, could have been on the Amiga.
For some reason (for most people) the Amiga starts and stops with the A500, but that's like comparing using an IBM 5150.
@@daishi5571 no way even 030 amigas could come close to managing Comanche. They didn’t even bother to release Wing commander 2 or frontier first encounters etc on the Amiga, because it was in steep decline
too bad that the Amiga was able to assert itself on the market
Stupid Amiga company making stupid choices make the whole product line into darkness.
@@takerulee9342 yes, Commodore had a very Bad Management in America
At this point PC had already better specs than Amiga. It was only a matter of time...
Thanks for another enjoyable video.
1. Dark Seed, PC wins with crisper graphics and clearer sampled sounds and music.
2. Dragons Lair 3, no real difference I can see between them.
3. Dune, PC for me just pips the Amiga, crisper graphics and better sounding music.
4. lamborghini, strange game this, both have merits though the PC screeching tyres are a poor sound effect
5. Curse of Enchantia, again crisper graphics and sound on the PC version.
6. Waxworks, PC definitely, game plays in a full screen which helps this type of game.
7. Trolls. Definitely Amiga, scrolling and frame rate is better but why no in game music like the PC?
8. Nicky Boom, Amiga winner again, in game soundtrack is superb.
Thanks.
I thought that PC started to go ahead of Amiga in Adventure and RPG games, but in 2d side scrollers/platformers, the Amiga still rules in 1992.
not only that the amiga had some titles that the pc could not match cannon fodder, sensible soccer, speedball 2, slamtilt pinball but then came along the likes of doom and duke nukem and that was the end for the amiga
It's worth noting that the PC had MT-32 available at this point (if you could afford it), together with Sound Blaster. Amiga here is AGA, which many people I don't think had. For example Trolls' 256 color palette could not be done on regular Amiga. Many other games are missing - flight sims for example lagged quite heavily on Amiga (think).
@@MrYoSamba I remember my friend had an Amiga, and I(well my father/family) had a PC in 1994, A lot of games were coming out on both, Worms, Cannon Fodder, a lot of other Sensible Software games, Speedball 2 Brutal Deluxe. A lot of older point and click adventure games were getting "Talkie" updated CD versions. Beneath a Steel Sky etc. I remember him saying how the Amiga had better sound than a PC. That's before he and his family got a Windows 95 PC, which he then saved up money to buy both a 3DFX Card, and a SoundBlaster Awe 64 Gold.
@@lmcgregoruk Very few people had money for an MT-32 back then, but you can play games from this era with MT-32 + sound blaster emulation and get superior sound. The Amiga was amazing for its time, but its heyday was 1985-1990. Even in 1991-1992 you got more for less money than you would need with a PC, but nowadays we can enjoy the PC games of the era with "infinite money" in the form of emulation.
PC setup?
DOSBox emulator set to emulate 486 processor and VGA/Soundblaster (where possible)
@@retrononame You compare amiga 500 and 486!?! Jejeje.
@@kikoremacha5722 Just a fun experiment, not meant to be a serious comparison. We all know that PC had more "horsepower" in 1992 and was also a lot more expensive, but Amiga still holds itself in there and is still great gaming computer even in 1992 ;)
@@retrononame Yep, most games ran perfectly fine on a "fast" 286 with VGA graphics in 1992. They didn't really push the limits of the platform at the time. One year later everything changed, when Doom was released. Interesting comparisons btw. :)
@@kikoremacha5722 And why not? For years Amiga owners were comparing hardware built with gaming in mind, to hardware built with office productivity in mind.
Sony purchased the Amiga technology and made the playstation, by 1992 the Amiga was outdated and still had better audio v PC.
Amiga was also a PC 🤪
Someone makes this dumb comment on EVERY video in this series. We get it.