Doom didn't kill the Amiga...Wolfenstein 3D did
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- Опубликовано: 6 июн 2024
- Wolfenstein 3D released by id Software in 1992 brought in a change to video games. 2D games were no longer cool and texture mapped 3d rendered games were taking over. However, the ray casting technology presented a challenge if you owned an Amiga computer - it simply wasn't capable of running Wolfenstein 3d and in many ways Wolfenstein 3d can be seen as a major milestone that determined the fate of the Commodore Amiga that went bankrupt in 1994. In this episode we take a closer look at the Amiga and its many FPS clones that attempted to emulate the technology and success of Wolfenstein 3D, but ultimately led to the demise of Commodore.
Credits/Sources:
► • Episode #5 - Part 1 | ...
► • Grind : 'Darkenward Ea...
► • To the beach by Interp...
► aminet.net/package/game/shoot...
► groups.google.com/g/comp.sys....
TimeStamps:
00:00 - 02:18 - The Amiga in 1992
02:19 - 05:03 - Wolfenstein 3D and Mode 13h
05:04 - 07:17 - Why the Amiga struggled to run Wolfenstein
07:18 - 12:38 - Wolfenstein Clones on the Amiga
12:40 - 14:18 - Doom Source Code releases. Amiga gets Doom
14:19 - 16:57 - A happy ending.
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#Amiga #Wolfenstein 
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The Amiga didn't just die, it was *MURDERED*
Ahh, CleanPrinceGaming...
How such an... Unusual person becoming popular.
Murdered only by Commodores management. If you know the history you know i am right. Saying a single game coming out on the PC and killing and Entire Amiga range by Commodore is just nonsense. Look up the history for yourself and take videos like this with a grain of salt as RUclipsrs today will make any video with a clickbait name just to get that money rolling in.
What a reference to a dogshit channel
@@MatthewCobalt I miss Tyler. Hope he's good
Most systems gets murdered at some point, but a console or a gaming computer ”dying” doesn’t matter. It only matters to the people who ran the companies at that time but not to us.
The only thing that matters is how the Amiga lived. Because it was close to the Mega Drive in power but it was so easy to copy games.
The Amiga was my first gaming system in 1991 and the day i got it i already had +100 games, including tons of 80’s arcade ports so i got familiar with gaming history right away, and it still has so many exclusives worth playing.
I'm one of those programmers that had written their own Wolfenstein clones on the PC and tried to make it work on the Amiga. The PC used mode X. This allowed you to write to every 4th pixel. So you needed 4 rendering passes to render a full frame. The advantage beyond "chunky" mode is the you could page in four time as much video memory. This allowed for double buffering where you draw to an off screen buffer and when you're done, you tell the video card to use the new frame and it switches in one go avoiding the tearing effect. You could do triple buffering where you flip during vertical sync. So one frame is on screen, the second is waiting to be displayed during vsync and the third is being rendered into.
Back to drawing every 4th pixel. You either rendered 4 times or you rendered to normal RAM and then did a memory copy four times. The 4x render was actually faster because you could just store offsets for the next pixel/pass and draw vertically for most textures. IOW, you only needed to track horizontal offsets. You could draw a vertical line of pixels from a wall texture with zero slowdown.
So you could eliminate a lot of overhead with mode X, but not all of it. My idea was that the mode X paging wasn't a thing on the Amiga. So maybe I can do pixel conversions in the same amout of time as the mode X overhead on the PC. Both would have overhead, but different kinds and maybe they would even out. I could even use the blitter to help. And it kinda worked. But I ran into a bigger problem. The 68k cpu was too slow even for the main rendering, nevermind any overhead despite 286 used for wolf 3d being less mhz in many cases. It should have been more than fast enough. The problem? Memory speed. Amiga has two types of RAM. Chipset and fast RAM. Chipset RAM is what's used for video RAM and can be accessed by various chips like the blitter chip as well as the CPU. Fast RAM is cpu only. A500 only has chipset RAM. And it is crazy slow when accessed by CPU. And that killed any further attempts. I had timed it compared to a pc and it was staggering the difference. It's been too long, so I don't have the numbers anymore.
You really did need at least a 68020 with fast ram. Anything else was futile.
As for the demos shown on the A500, that's really impressive. I'd be really interested in what kind of techniques they used. One idea I had back then was to use something like anisotropic filtering to completely bypass the per pixel rendering phase. But I lost interest. Wonder if it's something like tha used in the demo. Anyways, those were fun times.
Thanks for your interesting story. It is great to hear some people actually tried to make it work. One of the most important things about PC's was the relative ease to swap and upgrade hardware. You could technically also upgrade your Amiga, but this wasn't as commonly done, as the people that bought them generally bought it as a cheap option that was one and done. A bit like the later gaming consoles, albeit with a lot more customization.
As someone with very little programming experience, reading about the buffering techniques and realizing this was what all those things in the options menu's of most high tech games were about, is certainly an eye opener.
Great.. really that's all saw was that the amiss was ahead but slower. Funny enough there best games where what the pc evolved to many years later.
Thanks for sharing. I had (and still own) and Amega 1000 from way back in 1986. It was a great computer, and a major upgrade to my TRS-80 with only 16kb of ram. Finally I could program with what I thought was no limitations...
Highest-quality utoob comment I've seen in two months.
I was a game dev. I started on the Atari Jaguar that has the 68000 as well.
It's impressive you figured out how to do "ray casting" back then.
At least year before the internet.
For me, I would have had to go on CompuServe and find people like John Carmack, Ken Silverman, etc., for help 😛
Had to work out most things by our selves. If you were lucky you'd have a smart person to bounce ideas of off.
I was an Authorized Amiga service technician from 1990 to 1994 and managed a service department at an old-style brick and mortar computer store at the time. This video is very much spot-on. One thing missing, though, is that components for the Amiga were so much less available compared to the x86 machines that were starting to flood the market. I used to socket and replace Agnus, Gary, Paula and other chips all of the time. However, it just wasn't cost effective compared to the availability of just throwing a new sound card or even motherboard into an x86 machine when needed.
Yes the a500 was good but lacked expansion slots and installing harddrives had some issues (worst case you have to boot on a floppy > hdd).
When I connected to the internet in -94 the newer Amigas were expensive niche computers.
@@anders630 Agreed. The A500 especially suffered from this, as the expansion slot on the side meant that you were adding peripherals, not expansions - because if you slapped something on the side like a Bodega Bay hard drive enclosure, it had to have a pass-through to add anything else. There were a few things that could be done in the actual computer case and the bottom panel, but that was mostly limited to CPU accelerator upgrades and the different memory types like Fast and Chip RAM.
No one ever mentions Denise
@@ScandalUK Ha! Good point. Sorry, Denise!
I thought it was bad company management
I went from Atari 2600 to the Commodore64 with 5.25" disk drive and never looked back till I got my first 486/DX66. A friend had Wolfenstein 3d on their PC before I got mine and I didn't stop playing till I finished it. I had DOOM to enjoy when I got my PC. What a crazy ride. At 65 I game like crazy - don't watch TV or engage with social media and don't see stopping till I die or we get EMP'd to the stone age.
Posting a YT comment is engaging with social media :)
What games are you playing? I've got a discord for mostly older players, if you're interested :)
I remember we were playing in the classroom. Do you remember the serial link to connect 2 PC on Doom ? The main improvement was the first 32 bit CPUs and also the VGA 256 colors mode
@@dunebasher1971Only if he reads the comments, replies to you. Which he probably won’t :)
Amen to this. Games are life. All of my memories are tied to what game I was playing at the time. I can still recall the sensory overload and feeling of being completely overwhelmed when I first played DOOM. DOOM 2 still feels like a big new game to me and I remember the LONG wait for Quake to come out. It was mind blowing going from a 486sx25 to a Pentium 133. I will NEVER stop gaming.
I still recall the first time I saw Wolfenstein, and had this sudden sense of doom for my A500. I got a few more years of Lemmings out of it, but soon moved to a 486 PC and never looked back.
Wolfenstein 3D made me buy a Soundblaster, which is really another thing that led to the Amiga's demise. Finally the PC had good sound with sampling as a cheap upgrade, which previously was the Amiga's strength (even the Commodore 64 had better sound than the PC's beeper).
Chunky mode graphics are NOT called chunky because the pixels look "chunky"! (I mean, all pixels could be called "chunky" at those resolutions!) It's called chunky mode because each pixel is represented by a single "chunk" of memory (e.g. a single byte) that can be addressed and modified in one go. This is compared to Amiga/Atari bitplane graphics where the values that make up a single pixel's appearance are spread over multiple memory locations, and intertwined with values from neighbouring pixels within individual bytes of memory. In a bitplane graphics mode, to plot a single pixel you'd have to read in bytes from multiple planes set the bits you you need and write those modified bytes back out to their respective bitplanes. In a chunky graphics mode, you just write that pixel's single byte and you're done. (When plotting larger blocks of bitplane pixels you can forgo some or all of the reads, but you're still left having to write to multiple bytes for each pixel.) Combine this with faster memory bandwidth and CPU on a PC, and a bunch of clever 256-color shading techniques, and this results in a huge performance increase comparing PC chunky to Amiga planar graphics.
13h mode in vga is still plannar under the hood but it has a simple extra that does the magic: the hardware is using the first 2 bits of the memory address to select the bit plane and the rest for the position, but without having to access any registers. all vga was missing was a simple transparent colour and i would have dominated much before doom. but what can you do....
i believe fast memory access was the thing that our amigas lacked the most for games like doom, in order to have good performance.
I wonder what was the reason behind splitting bits of a single pixel between different memory locations ("planes").
I remember trying to work with EGA memory directly back in the day, it was also "planar" (4 planes in 16 bit modes, which were meat and potatoes of EGA), what a pain it was.
@@Booruvcheek i can think of few reasons: first, most crt controllers, from home computers in the past down to the pc vga, were just a superset of the motorola 6845 controller, which worked with bitplanes. Second, for ega and before, not much video memory, for later, of course compatibility. pc would have died fast without the extensive compatibility that it had through the years.
What do things like the NES or Genesis use?
@@liamconverse8950 Sprites and tile playfields, essentially an extension of character based screen modes as used on early home computers.
Amiga is my favorite computer of all. Learned assembler on it, made a game-engine; uploaded a beta, same day C= went bankrupt. Sad day.
Still have the Amiga4000/40.
Hey, at least you didn't start a Shopping Mall related B2B software startup 6 months before a pandemic like I did :D. Fate is a cruel mistress.
@@SpentAmbitionDrainrise from the ashes. The best entrepreneur will fall.. multiples times. It's a learning experience..
I wish I still had mine. It's still the most expensive computer I've ever owned. But I started travelling overseas and one time when I came back the battery had bled its acid blood all over the motherboard. )-:
Any chance we can see the game engine?
Never knew anyone who owned an Amiga here in the United States on the Midwest. C64’s were very common, but still have never seen an Amiga, grew up in the late 80’s and 90’d as a kid.
The Amiga defined my youth. I didn't switch to PC before mid 1997
Mid 1996 for me. I was doing my best to hold on, but the writing was on the wall.
Amiga Rulez ! :-)
I remember my brother showing me his Amiga 500 in 1987. Coming from the ZX Spectrum, I was blown away by Deluxe Paint and the fact that every pixel could be a different colour. Fast forward to 1989 and I couldn't understand why one of my Uni classmates bought a PC to play games. Fast forward again to 1992 or so - playing Geoff Crammond's F1 GP on PC at my friend's house and comparing it to the Amiga version. I then knew the Amiga was dead. But I still bought an A1200 in 1993 as I couldn't afford a PC.
I don't miss the early PCs but I do miss the Amiga. It way beyond its time..
98 for me, via PlayStation 1 and N64
1987, at 7 years old, playing amiga....absolute magical times..
Wing Commander should've been the serious wake-up call in 1990, but that would've required a company leadership with the faintest of ideas of how to run a business.
Well, if you had an 030, Wing Commander looked, played, and sounded better on the Amiga than the PC. Bu *only* if you had an 030 and up. My A2000 was stock when I first got Frontier and WC, and then I got a GVP combo card. Like night and day.
@@CantankerousDave True, and only took me 30 years to afford that A4000... :)
(That said, I did play it through multiple times on an A1200 with a cheap 68020 accelerator, and it was great!)
Wing Command that game I couldn’t complete due to an asteroid bug. I kept getting killed by invisible Asteroids. Put me off the series for years.
Aside loved Jimmy Whites and Flashback. And Overdrive.
I agree. I lived through this period and I'd say Wolfenstein was more a symptom of than the cause. The real downfall of the Amiga was simply that the PC got VGA graphics and sound cards in the early 90's which made it a much cheaper option for the same or better quality with a massive userbase built in. It was just a matter of time after that.
@@shadowsayer1516Texture mapping and 3D was absolutely a major reason though.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think “chunky” refers to the fact that pixel colour bits are adjacent to each other in memory, instead of the memory being divided up into planes. The Amiga CD32 had special hardware for emulating “chunky” so that you could write graphics like you would for a PC.
yes, this is correct. It has nothing to do with how they look on the screen.
Correct but the CD32 was apparently still pretty poor at it. One of our Amiga friends bought one believing that was going to be true but was very disappointed and quickly bought a PlayStation.
Yep, it's called chunky mode because each pixel on screen is represented by a single "chunk" of memory -- e.g. an individual byte, instead of spread out over multiple memory locations and mixed in with other pixels' data as in a bitplane graphics mode.
Yes. The pixels' bits in the same byte are what made the mode "chunky".
Yes and it was beyond stupid that Commodore never put that chip in the 1200.
One thing many people don't know is that Doom was written on a NeXT - a unix-based computer - and was ported to several other versions of unix, I think largely due to the involvement of a friend of mine at ID, David Taylor (the "ddt" in the secret codes), who ported it to IRIX mainly because I had an SGI Onyx Reality Engine (a 6' tall black and purple monolith) at Origin Games to try it out on (it was amazing on the SGI, at 1280x1024 res). The irony is that a lot of us Austin unix nuts really liked the Amiga, which was the nearest thing to a full unix host many could afford (except for lacking inter-process memory protection), and would have loved to have seen this run well on Amigas.
Chunky vs planar is one thing, but it was also about cpu processing power. High end 386 and then 486 had more cpu processing power than typical home Amiga.
Motorola had a better product originally but the 68K had too many small flaws that the upgrades ended up turning the 68K into a dead end
@@jolibethrodriguez7471 Not really. If it were about flaws there would be no x86. It was combination of factors: vicious circle of shrinking market and lack of investment into shrinking market and Motorola didn't have top fabs anymore.
@@radivojevasiljevic3145 Yeah, that makes sense too, not enough miney for R&D to brute force trought CISC walls
Seeing Wolenstein running buttery smooth on a pc was jaw dropping when looking at the other standard PC games of the time - it was pure voodoo. When John Carmack said that Wolf wasn't a reality on an Amiga, you'd be crazy to question him...all this time later and Grind may well be the result of another Carmack style coder which is exciting. Some of the moves Carmack pulled during his time are legendary 😁 Thanks MVG!
Considering that Grind, a game with graphics quality akin to Doom, was running with acceptable performance on what is essentially an equivalent to a 7Mhz Intel 286, leads me to believe that programmer is even more skilled than Carmack.
grind is nothing short of amazing work and i hope it continues on by more people once they have a final release but i think even if we had the grind of today matched with the wolf3d of old, we could hold our heads up and say we have something similar but wolf3d still kicks us in the face when it comes to framerate. without those chunky modes being paired with planar as an option, even if the C= management werent full morons we still would fall far behind in the 3d world.
@@yancgc5098 We have far more knowledge and programming tools today than we did back then. People today should have the capability of writing far better code than back in the day. It doesn't mean they're more skilled. It's so much easier to develop for old systems today than when those were current systems.
Carmack did not want to bother with Amiga 500, and even Amiga 1200 that came out later that year (1992) was not much faster. Overall id was going for newer and better games, as hardware was advancing each year they did not bother to optimize much.
By the way have you seen the recent port of Wolf3d for MegaDrive? Works with any Everdrive and plays really nice. Look for gasega68k
It depends on how you look at it. Though Wolfenstein did indeed demonstrate how far behind Amiga was lagging at the time, it was Doom that put the final nail in the coffin. I remember it so well, when i finally saw Doom on a 486, and coming from the c64 and Amiga era, and spending time plying games like Pinball Dreams and F29 Retaliator, seeing Doom for the first time was unbelievable, my brain couldn't comprehend it. We all knew that the Amiga was toast after that. I bought a 68060 a few years later, and even though i could play full 3D space games like Doom, games like Quake on the PC just knocked everything else out of the water. And the 68060 alone cost the same as a full Pentium Gaming PC at the time.
Kinda agree on that. There were already many flight sims that showed pc's superior computing power. Then in short time period came games like Wing Commander, X-Com, W3D and Doom that showed that even basic PC is far superior than A500. Even when you thought that maybe A1200 has some sense price wise it was already time for Quake and at least when 3DFX Voodoo came out. Boy that was absolutely the time when miggy just didn't make any kinda sense to have. All in all early 90's was insane progress for PC tech on all technical fronts. Cpu, sound and graphics performance wise. Imo only thing that could've maybe kept miggy alive for bit longer if they'd hop into affordable cd multimedia era, but they missed that too completely.
@@jothain well Commodore certainly tried to do the "affordable CD multimedia" thing with the CDTV and CD32, but yeah.
He mentions Doom
@@Hdtk2024 Oh wow, you can also read headlines? Impressive... 🤦♂
@@jothain miggy?
I appreciate these smaller historical videos.
Provides context for the technology we have today
amiga was my dream machine and i loved every minute of it. i couldn't believe that most computer stores had PC games and their 16 colors falling off the shelves while Amiga got little to no shelf space. I didn't abandon ship till the announcement of Mechwarrior 2 and that it wouldn't be supported on the Amiga, being a long time Battletech fan that was when i had to give up my baby and buy my first 386 PC. still have all my commodores in storage, from the 64, 128 to the amiga 500. great memories...
Mechwarrior 2... on the Amiga... that was even a question? Seriously? I loved that game, play it to this day, but... I can only imagine what you'd need on an Amiga for it to even be possible. 68040 minimum, I'd say. Which makes the market that could even hope to run the game RIDICULOUSLY limited. Amigas were rare enough, try to find one with an 040. I had one, but... it was very niche. And very "riche." Nope, no software publisher is going to go for that. That's one of the biggest problems with the Amiga market. Developers didn't (couldn't) develop for the high end, they had to develop for the lowest common denominator, because your average Amiga user was some poor sod in Europe who had a bone-stock A500+/600/1200. Too much work for too few sales otherwise. Only one game I can think of (Elite II: Frontier) really begs for a 68030 (and chugs on a 68000). Mostly devs only went with stuff that ran WELL on the low end, and likely wouldn't have even attempted a port of something like Mechwarrior 2. Besides, it would be 30 disks or something (the installed portion on PC is just shy of 30MB) and you'd simply HAVE to tediously install it to a hard drive disk by disk because (almost) no one had a CD-ROM drive, either. And you'd have to rework the CD audio tracks as MOD files. And probably give any FMV cutscenes a miss. TBH it would be quite an interesting backport, and something I'd like to see some brilliant coders attempt, 30 years after it's relevant to do so.
Sorry, not to diss the Amiga (as I've said, I've owned two), but it just didn't have the CPU "umph" for 3D games that the PC did. And certainly, not commonly. Mechwarrior 2 was super demanding to run well on PC; especially at 1024x768. I set DOSBox to 300,000 cycles/msec for that, and it's just about fast enough. That's the equivalent of maybe a 450MHz Pentium II/III. Keep in mind that mid-speed (100-133? MHz) Pentiums were the latest thing back in 1995 when it launched. More realistically, people ran it at 640x480 or even 320x200 (slow Pentiums/486s) in order to get smooth performance.
@@SeeJayPlayGames Wasn't a question, as i said, it was the nail in the coffin for my Amiga days.
I had an Amiga 500 all the way back in 1990 and, having upgraded to a 1200, abandoned the Amiga all together for a PC in 1993. The Amiga will always live in my heart as the most exciting personal computer and games, ever. There is nothing like playing Defender of the Crown, Wings, Pinball Dreams, Lemmings, Gods, etc etc for the very first time. I remember playing Zoom and that music sample just blowing my mind. Love the Amiga so much and it makes me said that Apple survived and the Amiga didn't.
It really is a crime that macs still exist but amigas don't, lol
@@tarnetskygge Well. Steve Jobs would have been the worst person in the world, and for sure he knew zero about the deep technicalities on the stuff he was selling to you... But he was a bussiness wizard and a ruthless visionary. He was the one who brought the UNIX magic to the Mac (again, not as programing it himself, but he brought the required talent and assets to the company to make it possible) and it have been paying them well since then.
Was Apple associated with Amiga in some way?
@@neatnateable No. Steve Jobs once visited the Amiga team on a "fishing" trip, way back in 1983, even before Amiga was a commodore property, supposedly he made himself at home and was rather obnoxious, and called the - then under development- machine "overengineered. too much hardware". Not much else interaction.
@@christosstamos2785 Interesting. Thanks for the history lesson. It sounds like they both used the PowerPC architecture for awhile though. Is that right?
Grind is an insane achievement. To run smoothly on an A1200, and 10-12fps on a 1MB A500, is just mind blowing. The Amiga was obviously on its way out in the early 90's, but if Grind had come out then, it would have been one hell of a swansong.
Grind used line skip tricks that is used in Mega Drive's wolf3d port.
@@valenrn8657yes you could see it as a primitive and fast upscaling method. SNES wolfenstein used mode 7 to upscale the game instead (and BSP rendering because SNES' 65C02 based chip was too slow for games like wolfenstein). Amiga blitter makes upscaling even easier, faster, and better looking than how its done on the genesis. Don't know why Carmack never experimented with it, I guess the Amiga just sold poorly in the early 90s and there was no incentive to make a wolfenstein port for it.
@@aboriginalmang The worse part is that he toyed with an Apple II rather than an Amiga when he was coming up. Guess Amigas just sold poorly in the US and most opted for a PC or Mac.
@@afropovic well, didn't he steal an apple II from his school
I guess the engine needed to change too much for bitplane based systems, so he really never considered to port it. Upscaling is sort of cheating anyway.
You know, in 1996 Quake and Duke Nukem 3D were released on PC and on Amiga they still tried to make good Doom clones in 98. The wake up call for Commodore should have been affordable PC SVGA cards in 1990 and cleap Sound Blaster clones. Unfortunately the AGA chipset graphics released in 92 was no match to many SVGA cards built into PCs that hit the market in the same year. In 92 also the affordable Gravis Ultrasound was released for PC, while AGA chipset was still limited to 4 8-bit sound channels.
When the source code of Doom was released, people found the amazing and unique super fast Square Root function used in the game. This was one of the sticking points on the Amiga, besides the bit planes that require multiple memory writes slowing things down so much. (1 single frame can require 4x the number of memory writes as Mode 0x13 on PC)
I was there at the commodore escom meeting when they literally drove the final mail into amiga's coffin. That was a very sad day because it was very plain to everybody in attendance that the party was over. Feel free to keep telling these stories man - I think the Amiga was the last computer with any kind of soul.
...and bought by jews and islamists to rip apart, for personal profit; Prophets they were not...
My grandfather, a WWII vet had this game when we were kids. His friend helped him setup a PC and gave him this game in the early 90s. It was the only video game he ever played but it'll always be a classic memory. He probably got me into PC gaming without knowing it.
Subbed for the quality and topic in this video.
Brings back memories. Moving 0013h to ax and calling int 10h you felt like the king of the world back then. A whooping 64000 pixels to be filled by your imagination.
I had an A3000 in my bedroom in the 90's. My Dad found a huge cardboard box of an assortment of Amiga loose floppy disks at a car boot sale here in England. He brought it home and let me have at it. There were games both pirated and official, documents, software, and a bunch of Japanese pornographic hentai visual novels. They weren't really visual novels but more just slideshows but needless to say it was certainly eye opening for me at age 12! lol
I only told Dad a couple of years ago lol
liar your dad did not bring dAT box home so dont even try it troll
trying to get a thumbs i can see dat and 12 nim rods gave you a thumb what a joke
bye for now noob
delete ur comment boy
At 12 years old. I could only imagine how my mind would have been blown! Super cool.
Eh, you turned out fine in the end... Right?
Eye opening?, not as wide as your dad's eyes if he happened to look over your shoulder.
Commodore killed the Amiga, by not investing enough R&D into it.
The A500 was way ahead of its time, and the original hardware was from 1985, but then nothing happened for 7 years, and only then the A1200 was released in 1992 with very modest upgrades. Originally they wanted an AAA chipset with a chunky graphics mode, but then eventually we got the AGA chipset instead.
a1000 was 1985, a500 from 1987
Imagine they would have done a (chunky) 16bit HighColor mode for the next Amiga after the 500er. Could have been possible. And maybe with some real 3D support like the first Voodoo card. (But Voodoo hat later the same problems like Comodore with the Amiga. And Nvidia, well, they still get it)
we can of course blame bad management but lets be real here. Even with the inventive engineers at Commodore and a decent runway to make an ideal new Amiga. It was doomed. The PC was such a juggernaut it was always going to be the gateway to computing with its hooks in business, prices dropping due to economies of scale. Nothing could have competed with it in the long run. At best we could have had another few years of great new Amiga games using more hardware and hard drive space etc. I say this as someone that adored my Amiga's.
One possible future was for the Amiga to fully embrace the PC, become a PC but keep the name and have some kind of extra plugin card that gave it something more. Perhaps more easily hooking up your PC to TV's.
@@ClayMann wise words
@@ClayMann Consoles have their place, even that the PC has more of everything ( at higher costs.) At at least in the 90ties a well designed system should have performed better than a modular PC. There was a chance with some clever customs chips to get ahead.
Seeing the A500 bringd back so many memories. It was ahead of its time.
I wrote many Amiga demos from 1991 onwards, many of which can be found on here, but you can't beat a chunky screen for these kind of games. Bitplanes are great for some things, but not for stuff like Doom, Wolfenstein etc. However, you also need a much faster processor to write effectively to a chunky screen, which the PC most definitely had.
The A1200 ran at 14Mhz and most reasonable PCs were 66Mhz or more. Add also that by default the 68020 couldn't do floating point math and that made coding Doom style games almost impossible. For floating point, you really needed a 68882 co-processor.
Later on, games like Gloom used amazingly fast chunky to planer converters, that still required insane power on a machine running at 14Mhz. In fact quite a few scene demos do effects in chunky and then convert the effect back to planer. My own C2P converter used both the blitter and CPU simultaneously to try and be a quick as possible, but you can never beat a screen that's already chunky.
I was an early adopter with the Amiga, picked my A1000 in Nov, 1985. Grabbed an A2000 as they came out. Designed & fabricated my own custom boards for both systems. Had a toaster & D-TV setups. So to say I was all in with Amiga is a bit of an understatement.
But once I saw Wolfenstein & Wing Commander with no Amiga ports in sight, I knew it was game over for Amiga. Early 1993, I packed up all my Amiga equipment & sold it all to a dealer that was willing to buy it for a fair price, I got about $3000 for everything if memory serves. Took that $ and built myself a 386DX\40, 8mb RAM, 512K VGA Card, Sound Blaster & 250MB IDE Hard drive hooked up to a 17 VGA ViewSonic.
Seeing Wing Commander running on a PC that I had built for a buddy really drove the point home to me. Amiga was dead, it just didn't know it yet. I got out just in time, while my equipment still had a lot of value.
Wing Commander came to Amiga in 1992 and played pretty well on an A1200.
@@mattperson7293 which was 2 years after it came out on the PC. And it only ran in 32 (16?) colors, not 256, unless there was an AGA version (don't recall). It ran OK on an A500 with an AdSpeed (14.3MHz 68000 accelerator).
@@SeeJayPlayGames The CD32 version was 256 colours.
I remember if you had more RAM on your regular Amiga it would play a few more animations, like the joystick and hand would animate with our controls. That was neat.
And here is the irony... you would probably get double of that money of you sold it now... because the retro scene regarding the Amiga is extremely alive and they are willing to pay A LOT for original hardware these days...
@@mattperson7293 yeah true but the A4000's IDE adapter didn't support CD-ROM drives, sadly. I guess it didn't support ATAPI? Anyway, I never had a CD drive on an Amiga. This lack of hardware innovation is really what stymied the whole platform, and CBM did NOT care. The one company that actually NEEDED to care, did not. I hope Irving Gould is burning in hell, and Mehdi Ali joins him soon.
edit: P.S. fun fact, Mehdi Ali does NOT have a Wikipedia entry. And I hope it stays that way. IMHO, that's a metric of whether or not you've made a mark on the world.
Something I found really interesting when watching some talk on a podcast with Casey Muratori and another guy from Microsoft -- they were discussing software back in the day -- was just how much power John Carmack had over the life and death of certain players in the industry. His work was so profound and amazing that if he chose your platform to put his software on or used your libraries, it was basically golden and in some cases could become the standard and if you didn't... well, you were almost certainly destined for death.
࿕࿖
My brother always let met play on his A500.
Modern games may not available but all these titles available were so much fun to play.
Over and over again, sometimes only for the music 😅 which was ways better than on any PC.
Miss these times alot.
Thanks for the video ❤️🔥
I was 18 in 1992. What a time to be that age, witnessing all the new tech of the time. Exciting stuff! Thanks for the video down memory lane! :)
As a 90s PC Assembly Demo coder I enjoy watching this immensely 🤠
I love demo scene, any chance we can talk about it?
Ah, a demo brother!
Second Reality was the "Doom" of PC demos.
@@dycedargselderbrother5353 yes amazing demo. My first build was a 486 SX-25MHz I replaced the crystal on the mainboard to 40MHz and had a small container with crushed icecubes sitting on the CPU to make it stable and remember running that demo on it for a test. Fun weird things to try out.
@dycedargselderbrother5353 I remember watching that demo over and over. Sounded awesome on the Gravis Ultrasound Max. Oh the memories.
Ataris and Amigas were both decried as "gaming consoles", when in fact they were so much more. I buddy of mine did music editing on Atari back in 1995 (when PC were already supposed to take over) that simply went beyond what PCs actually were capable of at that time.
Absolutely. I used my for DT Publishing for work purposes and wrote many lengthy assignments on the Amiga. As a creative tool it was so much more than "just games"...though the games were awesome too. I ended up with over 3500 floppies in my collection, and even had them all indexed in a database so i could find things easier. So many memories from back then....though my kids just look at me weird when I reminisce about back in the day lol
Thank you for making this! I have also had similar thoughts over the years and you did a great job of explaining it!
Small correction at 4:25 "chunky" refers to the fact that all bits that make up a pixel are stored right next to each other in memory as a single "chunk" as opposed to multiple bitplanes that are scattered across memory.
Yes basically you could write a high-colour pixel in a single write (or maybe two adjacent writes) whereas on the Amiga who had to write to each bitplane. The more colour depth the more bitplanes.
That was my understanding as well, "chunks" of data making the full pixel data, instead of the pixel data being scattered around bitplanes.
while correct, 13h mode is still plannar. it's just that the bitplane is selected automatically by the vga hardware when you r/w in a memory address, without having to access any registers.
@@giornikitop5373 I'm sure they were using Mode X. At least I did back then.
Plus, in this mode, you can write up to 4 pixels at once, if they are the same color and adjusted.
@@RustedCroaker the 4 pixels at once is only done through the latches and no, they don;t need to be the same colour or anything. but in order to use them, you have to 1: access registers by i/o , very slow in anything above 286, and 2: the latches can only be loaded by a vram read operation. it was common practice for mode-x games to use most of the vram (all 256k are available at mode-x/y) for the screen and the last part of it for sprites and stuff, so they could very fast copy vram-to-vram using the latches. Original Doom used the normal mode 13h, only later custom versions used mode-x, once the source was publiished, or was that quake?
A few corrections:
Alien Breed 3D 2 did not support graphics cards (RTG)
The fastest Doom port on an Amiga is DoomAttack
Chunky-to-planar routines got extremely fast, and took under 20% of processing power for Doom, and less for more complex titles. This is noticeable, but not detrimental. The worst thing for 3D games on an Amiga was Motorola's abysmal performance on FPU operations.
Doom doesn't use floating-point math. It runs on 386SX and 486SX machines that have no floating-point unit. All arithmetic is either integer or fixed-point.
Quake, id Software's next game, does use floating-point math, which nailed Cyrix's coffin. Cyrix, too, had notoriously slow floating-point math.
What Carmack said about Doom was correct. It plays about as well on a 68040 as it does on a fast 386. *Maybe* a little better, but still far worse than an equally-clocked 486.
@@shmehfleh3115 If that's true, then Doom ran faster on a 486 PC than on the NeXT machines it was developed on. That's pretty shocking. Why would they use a development platform slower than the target?
@@argvminusone look up a video called "The Tools that Built Doom"... IIRC it was the ease of development of the tools that steered them that way. Imagine having to develop a level editor on DOS or Windows 3.
@@argvminusone Carmack was a Next fanboy at the time (NextStep vs MSDos). But still saw that he would only get commercial success by shipping PC games.
This brings back memories. The A500 was the first computer my father bought in 1990 during the time of reunification. For us kids it was a tool for gaming, and for my father it was the office computer. The electronics of that machine were extremely fragile even by contemporary standards. So we had a few extension cards die. Later I would be more interested in programming, I couldn't afford more doing that in 68k assembler code and Amiga E language. When I went to university, I was in close contact with a lot of the key people in the Amiga scene, despite the grim outlook, there was some optimism still. I had upgraded my A1200 with a 68040 CPU, and 32 MB RAM and a Merlin graphics card, and yes, I played the Amiga version of Quake. I remember when Quake became the de facto benchmark in the developer community, software, and hardware alike. Not only that, but I knew some developers personally, and they knew they banked a lot on that hardware. My friend even owned, for a short time, a PPC card. To be honest, the PPC road would have been an option if there hadn't broken out an ideological war in the community between Haage & Partner and phase5. The former using a much faster header, allowing native loading of PPC RISC code within a 68k environment. The latter used the Linux ELF format which was much slower, required separate and very slow context switches but allowed for use of pre-compiled code already available. Ultimately, it went down in flames because, even with hybrid solutions, there was still a lot of work in progress. Time ran out, and Amiga Corp went bankrupt again. I made the switch to PC later, at that time, Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo were freshly released, so that's where my friend and I stayed. Still, it felt like an immense loss of community. My father continued and still continues his private Amiga projects. Mainly for MIDI purposes, hence why he was just about the sole developer of Bars & Pipes for a long time. He still does odd Amiga development today, he even recently asked me how to translate some 68k into C/C++. I mean in … holy sh*t, this brought back memories and I felt kind of very rusty, still I managed to do it still. Unfortunately, C# on Amiga only exists in Stranger Things…
In my mind, speaking from developer view, games weren't the only thing that brought it down. There was a distinct lack of serious commitment to the platform from the company behind the Amiga, and later on the lack of native support for modern hardware by the OS. The lack of compliance from hardware developers trying to their stuff did the rest. Yes, the demo scene showed that you could still do many things, ultimately they were also limited to an ageing hardware with more and more limiting factors.
Dude MVG! I'm playing through Arzette right now & I just realized the dude you meet taking a hot soak in volcano lava that you talk to, he's voiced by you! 🤘😎 LMFAO that's awesome!
I'm really enjoying this game, the animated cut scenes are great & the music is really good.
Seriously?! Okay, I need to get that game.
This is pretty much what happened to me as a kid, suddenly my Amiga and it's games were nothing when my friends played Wolfenstein3D on their 386 PCs
Wolfenstein didn't impress me, but Doom did. After Doom, the amount of 3D games coming out just passed the Amiga by, so I moved from my CD32 to a PS1 and only looked back at the Amiga through 2D rose-tinted glasses.
@@primalconvoy Needed to play wolf 3d at release not near the end . Voodoo1 cards made pc gaming next gen
@@user-gf7kj5vj3p Wolfenstein made me yawn. Theey were plente of more excitng game s1992 and 1993 on SNES and Amiga!
I purchase sony ps1 soon after realize my high end 486 already obsolete, its cheaper to buy console when pc war still on raging
@@aikonlatigid I bought the PS1 for Ridge Racer (Revolution), Wipeout and Toshinden. And later again for Resident Evil and Gran Turismo aaand WipeoutXL, this time NTSC
There's an old quote from someone at Commodore back in the day. From my memory… "Commodore isn't a computer company. It's a company that makes widgets."… Okay, I just did some research. The quote comes from an article published in the Philadelphia Inquirer in May of 1994. The person quoted is former Commodore engineer, Brian Jackson. The actual quote: "Commodore was a widgets company. They wanted anything we could hack together real quick from existing technology and sell a zillion of them like we did with the Commodore 64. And with that mentality, you can never really support customers."
Basically, yes, Wolfenstein was one of the many deaths by a thousand cuts. The management also didn't understand what business they were in.
"General Motors is not in the business of making cars. It is in the business of making money." (Thomas Murphy, GM CEO from 1974-1980.) Of course that attitude ultimately leads to bankruptcy.
It's weird that they did 2 fantastic computers with that mentality.
@@jal051 When Jack Tramel bought MOS, he brought on some smart people like Chuck Peddle and later Bil Herd. The engineers could see where the industry was going, but the management wasn’t interested. Irving Gould just wanted use of the private jet.
@@jal051 They didn't, though. They bought the Amiga as an essentially finished product.
@@jal051yeah vc20 and C64 were good for their time. (Amiga was bought)
Gosh I must have been like 9 in 1992 and have so many fond memories of the Amiga. My friend had a 500 and got a 1200. We spent many weekends playing click adventure games. Simpler times.
Great video.
Thanks for this, I purchased my very first computer in 1987 and Amiga 2000 but as I was not interested in games I concentrated on using it as a general computer using spreadsheets and database programs such as Microfichefiler then discovered DPaint and ADPro for graphics work which unlocked a whole world of creativity for me as well as Gold Disk products like ProPage & ProDraw all of which were way ahead of the PC at this time. I even invested in a OpalVision card a 24 Bit graphics card that enabled me to handle very advanced 24 Bit graphics unheard of on the PC in the early 90’s I was also heavily into video and was loathing over the Newtech Toaster but could not afford it. I upgraded to an Amiga 4000 etc. The thing is I never understood why the Commodore and the Amiga died but now thanks to your video I have a good explanation, Thank you. PS I still have two Amiga 500’s which work to this very day with one of them hooked up to a 20mb spinning hard drive amazing machines. I also run virtual Cloanto Amiga software in Windows running in Parallels on an Apple M1 Max MBP, great for nostalgia.
It's weird to think that the feature I remember most from Amiga games is the fluidity and high fraame-rates - especially things like Flashback, Pinball Dreams, Skidmarks. Really speaks to how well the developers played to the strengths the platform had.
The Amiga absolutely _butchered_ the PC when it came to 2D game performance, as did consoles. Unfortunately, those 2D chips were mostly useless when it came to drawing 3D graphics.
Oh man the Borland C++ interface brought back some memories! I learned on Turbo Pascal, so that IDE is like coming home hahahaha
Turbo pascal, I learned that I think in 9th grade. I remember nothing of how to code in pascal though... So weird.
@@danrenfroe2016 I also learnt pascal. The closest thing to pascal today would be delphi or lazarus.
Lol I also learned on Turbo Pascal in high school in the late 80s. I haven't coded in pascal in ages and barely remember it though.
Thank you for making a video that's both informative and nostalgic. Play Wolfenstein on my friend's computer sold me on getting a PC. Many happy memories came from that heavy metal box!
I have fond memories of the Amiga. I had a 500 plus, then upgraded to the 1200. It saw me all the way through 6th form and university. I did my essays and dissertations on it. I wrote my arrangements and compositions using KCS and notator software. Games wise, Lemmings, Lotus Turbo Challenge, Carrier Command, North and South, Another world to name just a few. I didn't have a PC until the late 90s.
The original Wolfenstein and Doom ran in Mode X or unchained\planar mode back in those days. This allowed you to have access to the full 256Kb of VGA memory so that you could enable triple buffering and flicker free display of image frames. It was a little trickier to program for due to the fact that you had to enable the required planes to write to specific pixels, but the results were far superior to Mode 13h. I remember writing 3D demos using Mode X and a mix of assembly language and C using the very same Borland C++ compiler you showed in your video!
The use of Mode X also allowed drawing up to four identical pixels in one write. This is why the frame rate of Wolf3D can jump on a slow computer when you walk close to walls, as the duplicated pixel columns of zoomed-in textures are faster to draw.
Back in the last 1990's I called one one of the Amiga engineers in the US from the UK. He told me the sorry tale behind the Amiga 600 which was supposed to be a cheap C64 replacement until Germany said "We're not selling a computer without a hard drive" and management capitulated.
I cannot remember the engineer's name - alas. Really nice guy. He worked on the C128 and I was using a C28D at the time! But the topic of conversation was the demise of Commodore and there was only one name of the guy's lips. Ali.
It was Ali all the way. He was useless. I was assured Ali was not deliberately trying to destroy Commodore. He was just utterly clueless.
It wasn't Doom, or any other game. It was Ali.
That's what I was told, most firmly.
A quick google search finds evidence to this claim. Where is this piece of work now?
Well imo that was spot on. Around '92 there really shouldn't have been any computers in market without some form of internal mass storage media. I honestly think Commodore might have survived bit longer if they'd implemented internal drives sooner as 3.5" floppy wasn't good solution anymore at that time. Well they had options, but they were insanely priced.
@@stoomkracht It's in Commodore the Inside Story - The Untold Tale of a Computer Giant by David John Pleasance
Amiga 600 was sold without hard drive 😁 It had ability to install hard drive, but not those cheap ones from PC market. This killed whole idea.
Bil Herd maybe?
True, I was owner of C64, I remember that I started buying some game magazine in 91-92. There were advertisement with prices of Amiga and PC and for some time i was hesitant, if to want cheaper PC or some better Amiga. I remember when Dune2 came out spring 92, I was already decided hard on wanting 386 PC. Just because the magazine showed, that much more interesting games were released for PC and the prices of PCs went down much quicker. Also more firends had PC, and at that time, nobody was buying games, all were pirated in my area.
14:35 Grind looks REALLY cool! I would have loved this back then!
I still remember learning about mode 13 as a kid, and using inline assembly in turbo pascal to do fast 2d and then 3d graphics. We even had feuds between different groups of kids who tried to one-up each other.
Hah, at that age I was POKEing 23692 with 255
Got a start with a 286 in 1989. Done programming, hacking, and then eventually just art. Essentially following in the footsteps of classic demoscene. I still keep my Creative Assembly archives going back to the very beginning. This channel brings a lot of nostalgia.
Did not done.
This brings back great memories of my first PC in '86, the Compaq "Luggable" (Portable). I finally built my own clone just to play Wolfenstein when it first came out.
I ran my A2000 until the late 90s because I was doing professional video work with a video toaster setup and a PC couldn't touch the Amiga for video work. I had a friend who was an art director at ABC television and one time I went to visit him and saw a room loaded with Amigas! He told me not even the macintosh could touch the Amiga for TV graphics and that ABC was using Amigas for everything. He actually gave me this cool director's chair that Commodore had given the ABC art department because they bought so many Amigas. It was beige canvas and on the front of the backrest it had the bouncing ball and on the back it said, "Only Amiga makes it possible!" I still have it somewhere in my attic. I need to dig it out.
Wolfenstein 3D was my 3D awakening. With a Soundblaster16 back in 1993 it was immaculate.
Right? Those bright graphics, and the digitized sounds. So good.
hearing a soundblaster for the first time instead of beeps and bloings was such an experience.
@@Maartzy1891 Hearing the digitized sound of the changing letting loose was life-changing.
There's something about VGA graphics I still absolutely love, probably the colors.
You can use pretty much any color you want in VGA. Most game use a custom palette.
Legend Of Kyrandia still look beautiful.
Don't see why it would be the colours. It's just 256 from a 6-bit-per-channel RGB space (262144 total). CGA/EGA have more of a claim, as the 4-bit RGBI of CGA and the 200-line modes of EGA _does_ have a distinctive set of 16 colours. Partly due to its special case for brown rather than dark yellow, and partly due to the fact that it wasn't a widely used approach outside of the PC.
It's a bit of a pity that IBM didn't build on RGBI for later hardware, as it could serve as a good way to save memory. For 4N-bit RGBI, you can have colour as accurate as 6N-bit RGB, while using 2/3 of the memory. Of course, you can't represent the whole RGB colour space in it, but that's a worthwhile tradeoff to make when memory is at a premium.
I could not run Wolf3d at first because I had an EGA machine...
Well somehow the PC crashed (cough) and I convinced my dad to get a new one... hehehe
and tadadaaaaa we had VGA.
The C editor screen brings me back to 1991-1993 when I had to do programming on C++. Good times! I had a 386DX-40 back then with a Thundercard.
Very interesting! My first PC gaming experience was 'Tyrian' on the IT Room PC's in the mid/late 90s. At that time I have a Sega Megadrive II, then a year later a Sega Saturn, the following year a PS1. Such huge leaps. I still like a session on Tyrian now and then (OpenTyrian).
“Yep you guessed it, I was a nerd”
That’s why you gathered a army of nerds that could take over the state of North Dakota
Why would someone want to take over North Dakota?
All the people that tried to emulate or copy Doom at the time didn't understood what really made id software games great. Sure the technical aspect was insane, but it is the absolute dedication to every aspect of the game as a whole experience of equal quality. Art, levels, music, gameplay everything should feels great and run great. The whole experience of doom is absolutely timeless. Sure you can mod it or refresh it but at it's core you can still launch the original doom and get hooked for hours 30 years later the gameplay is still solid and fun.
Don't forget the modding capabilities.
I owned an Amiga 500 but eventually switched to a PC. It wasn't because of Wolfenstein, though. With the new VGA cards and SoundBlaster, the PC simply started to offer more and better games that I wanted to play. Even so, I'll always have a warm place in my heart for the Amiga. So many great memories.
Agree 100% in my case. I totally parked the Amiga to play Wolf3D on my brother's business machine 386.
He didn't like to us to use his work oriented PC for gaming, but someone passed us a playable demo and we couldn't believe that it was free to play. The game was just like anything we've had seen before and really addictive.
By the way, Adlib / Soundblaster music and FX really helped to this masterpiece awesomeness.
In 1992 in Poland... we still had to wait about 2 years before being able to get Commodore C64 :D
Only after Balcerowicz reforms we started to catch up with the rest of the world. While now Poland is quite strong, in the 90s Poles were introduced to: Pegazus (a Famicom clone), C64, Amiga 600, IBM-compatible PC's and Sony Playstation at once. In 1996, when I saw Super Mario Bros for the first time, I hoped one day can create fictional worlds in a technology like that. Yes, I was a child back then. But it doesn't change the fact I had no idea that technology was outdated. Like, by decades.
Nonsense. People had access to those devices years before you described. In other words if a device was available in Germany, you could get it in Poland. The only issue was money.
Growing up in 90s Poland was surely an experience lol.
I remember having Amiga CD32 and going to my next door neighbour to play Fighting Force on his Playstation.
Me and my brother were over the moon when our dad told us that we'll be getting a PSX next day.
Good old days my friend... 😀
At school we sometimes had days where everyone would bring their home computers in and we kinda spend after school having a sort of... copy party. I managed to go to a couple, and it was entirely Amigas and STs at the first one. Second one I went to, someone had bought their PC in, and was showing off Wing Commander and Wolfenstein 3D. Everyone wanted a go. PCs were SO EXPENSIVE at the time though, like over £1000 instead of the £300-400 a decent Amiga or ST package would have been. Some of us, myself included did actually get A1200s, and enjoyed playing Gloom and Alien Breed 3D but we knew... we knew the writing was on the wall. Took me and my bro until '96 to scrape together enough funds to build our own PC. A P133 put together I think with some new parts, some scrounged off upgrading friends. It was Quake that made us do it. We then spent the next few years having regular LAN sessions where we played quake 1, 2 & 3 until the sun came up at weekends. Great times. I loved my Amigas, but I loved those early PC days too.
So they brought in a MASSIVE steel chassis PC case and the monitor and keyboard?
@@papalaz4444244 it wasn't really massive, a regular non-tower style 386 desktop. Guy bought it in a few times as I remember playing it in two of the different computer lab rooms. Which were mostly stocked with BBC micros and Acorn Archimedes. It was only the year I was leaving they replaced the old BBCs with PCs. Which were not really powerful enough to play Doom. We tried it. Could only run it if you shrank the window down to postage stamp size.
@@papalaz4444244I went to many LAN parties and yes we carried those things. That is why sometimes LAN parties lasted the whole weekend. I had a blast, they were so much fun.
1992 was the year that changed everything. PCs were expensive but by early 1993 Commodore themselves were selling a 486sx-25, 4Mb, 52Mb, S-VGA (1Mb) monitor, with Win3.1 and DOS for about £1000 (inc. VAT). To bring an A1200 up to that sort of level, £200 for a HDD, £150 for the RAM, £250 for a SVGA resolution monitor
Nice bit of history. My path was an Apple 2c at home and PC/XT at work. I remember one day at work a co-worker showed me Wolfenstein on his work PC. Besides it being cool, I remember the stomach turning effect the screen movement had on me. It took a while for your brain to comprehend you were not moving and for some reason Wolfenstein was notorious for the motion sickness it induced.
As a side note, Appleworks running on an Apple 2C was an amazing program. A Lotus 123 like program running in only 64KB and able to cut and past between the programs. Another thing, I always wondered why Apple did come up with a battery attachment to make the 2C a portable computer. No screen was needed since any TV would work.
The fact that all the demo scene coders were trying to squeeze Wolfenstein clones in tiny windows was the writing on the wall :(
Good video as usual - but I think Cytadela and Nemac IV deserved being mentioned :)
The title I remember putting the Amiga on notice was Wing Commander (which did eventually receive a port)
Great research and presentation as always! Id always heard that the downfall of Commodore was the management, sad given what seemed like leading hardware.
I especially liked the comparison of other doom-like attempts on the Amiga. Looks like simpler but more general gfx hw in the pc won this time.
What an interesting video analysis! Thank you!
Many of my friends didn't move to PC until Doom was a thing. But I think it's fair to say that Wolfenstein 3D paved the way and is a good marker in time of when the PC started to pull away from the Amiga as a gaming platform. Many thanks for the planar/chunky explanation. Interesting info!
My high school was still rocking 386 33Mhz machines in 1997. Running and learning autocad on those was a nightmare.
Heh. In 96 I had a college class where we got to use Indigo workstations for AutoCAD. That was the smoothest experience I've ever had using that blasted program. The PC version never felt as responsive, even on much more powerful hardware.
We had tandy laptops in 1991 LMAO
@@nateschultz8973 Had the same experience, a few years earlier. In 1989-90 college had a CAD Lab with ~10 Sun 3/60 workstations (68020 or 030, I believe, definitely pre-Sparc). Anyway using the UNIX version of Autocad (Suns ran BSD at the time) was a FAR superior experience than a contemporary PC 386DX at the time.
I grew up with my A1000 and used it all the way through High School, but it was around that time when we got our first IBM PC and I remember playing Wolfenstein. Unfortunately, we never got another Amiga and the 1000 was showing its age by then. My senior year of High School, I took a video production class which had an A4000 Video Toaster with Lightwave 3D. I was the only one in the class who knew about Amiga, and I also found in the cupboards an A1000, A2000, A500, which I set up for other students to use, but no one ever did.
OMG Borland Turbo C. I still have a find spot in my heart for my first IDE.
You mentioning discrete math brought back the trauma of proving 2k is even and 2k+1 is odd.
You're proving a definition?
Hey Robin, I invented everything! Hoo Hoo! Tell em Fred!
Yay! Thanks for mentioning Thalion. The AMIGA was really the last home computer where we had full bare metal control.
I think MS-DOS is also very bare metal. I never programmed for it, but from all what I've seen it probably was. But I really don't like the way dos handles sound, where all software has to implement support for all sound cards manually. That is a nightmare to maintain, and it pushes the user a lot to know exactly what they have to configure the games in a way that they get sound.
But I do miss the midi time, where different computers put different personalities to otherwise the same game. Hearing a known game suddenly somewhere eles whith a very different sound font was an experience that doesn't exist anymore.
My friends that coded for Amiga and PC at that time hit the bare metal on both. It wasn't until a few revisions into Direct3D that people finally started doing PC game and demo type stuff within the OS if I recall correctly.
@@krux02 Yes
@@andrewdunbar828 I remember when Amiga went bust and I had to get a job doing PC game development, dumping most of what I learned on the Amiga. I had to learn DirectX 2, which on top of the Windows APIs, I hated at the time.
@@SerBallister I learned to program under the Windows API but X86 assembly language looked so ugly I never learned it. I didn't learn DirectX either. I seem to recall people disliking it at the time but I can't remember when they started liking it. After Doom I actually lost interest in games anyway (-:
My first was the Amstrad CPC464 with green screen monitor around 1987. I had friends with Amiga's etc but i was buzzing that xmas, everything about it was an upgrade on what i'd seen. There probably wasn't so many games to choose from in comparison to Amiga's and co which were pretty easy to copy but the games i had were mostly solid. The load screen and screeching still gives me nightmares. Online fps gaming here in England was pretty much a no no for a few years purely because of internet speed, you'd be dead long before you finished loading up.
man.. i miss playing cannonfodder on my a500, north and south, lemmings, lotus esprit turbo challenge, idk and so so many more :) thanks for making me dig for the dics the entire amiga adf library. cheers.
Management killed it off, and the fact it was stupidly expensive for hires monitors and not being able to have serious apps like msword etc. I held out for ages then eventually my A1200 ran as a pirate bbs while I got into a 386 for serious work. It was hard to go back after using a hires monitor that didn’t have a shimmering interlace at those resolutions. Glad I enjoyed those years of c64 and Amigas though, they were ahead of the curve for years with their sound, gfx and wimp environment.
I would have to agree with the analysis. I recall myself seeing the end of the line for the amiga when I saw Wolfenstein, first on magazine covers, and then later on a friends PC. It was worlds apart from what we could muster at that time. Then of course later it was Doom and X-Wing which solidified my impression and a little after that I bought my first 486DX2 just in time for X-Com and TIE-Fighter and that was that.
its a shame that DREAD didnt come out on the amiga back then, it might have changed things a little.
@@dahistrix Commodore's mismanagement was so severe that no game could have saved the platform.
@@dahistrix Not really. I played X-com on my PC and my Amiga fan friend got it for his A500. He said he that in later levels he literally had time to go for sauna and get back to Amiga and still waited like 5mins for one turn to complete. It took like max 10secs per turn on our 486 back then 😀
Amiga's just were way too underpowered to keep up. Not to mention insanely expensive mass storage exanpsions that almost no one got.
Amiga was the first computer i drew a little animation, a dragon sitting on a branch, then flying to the other side of the monitor. It was only the skeleton :) But it was cool that one could draw animations. I was so impressed with the animation of Thunderhawk back in the day.
But the games on Amiga were really cool, too. Sure, there were not so good ones, but still, there are a lot of gems.
And this "Grind" game in this video... excellent, love the style and would love to play a full game of it.
Thanks for all the extra infos.
I was someone who liked playing GBA when PS2 and Xbox was big news so I was never much of a "the latest tech" kinda guy, but history lessons like these really drive home how powerful a factor games whose tech creates visually impressive effects can be on people. Wolfenstein 3D and Doom let you see out of the character eyes, dude! It's like you're really THERE, man! And even if that seems so small now, it was MASSIVE back then. New tech that lead to new ways of play, and almost everyone wanted to be part of the new big thing. If you weren't in it, you were left behind. Man... as someone who's a 2D fighting game fan and saw sprites be derided constantly in the fifth and sixth generation, I feel like what happened to Amiga fans who saw Wolfenstein cut their legs off must be what Tekken / Virtua Fighter was to me times a hundred.
Wolfenstein 3d was my first memorable PC gaming experience. Played it on my mom's IBM 25
The same for me, one of the first games my father got for my brother and I
I think we're about the same age, I had an Atari ST which was my main (well, only) computer from 1985, upgrading from my ZX Spectrum 48K, until 1992, when I got a Mac LC for university. I loved my ST, it was a 520STFM and I remember upgrading the floppy drive from the single-sided drive it came with, to a double-sided drive. The new drive didn't fit properly in the case so I had to cut a hole for the drive button, and I had the drive propped up inside the case via a combination of lego, glue, and sellotape. Hey, it worked! I played a ton of great games on that machine but if I'm being honest - I was always kind of jealous of the Amiga, and always wanted one. I got my wish in the late 90s when I was working, and a local computer store was selling second hand A600s and A1200s. I bought an A1200 and pretty much played Elite II Frontier on it. I moved from the UK to the US in 2000, and for whatever reason the A1200 didn't make the move with me. I honestly don't know what happened to it, and I wish I still had it. Love your videos as always!
Grind looks AWESOME! this is something i would never expect to get out of amiga
any idea about the wizardry behind this insane performance?
Got my Amiga 600 as a hand-me-down thanks to growing up poor. The loading screens for Walker were the only proper 3D graphics I saw (that weren't in movies) until I saved up enough money for a PlayStation. I literally felt Crash Bandicoot blowing my mind.
You had your chance with a proper computer, but then you squandered your savings on a dumb console 😁
@@aleksazunjic9672 To be fair I was 10 years old and my Dad already had a PC. I wanted to be part of the zeitgeist for once.
@@greenhowie I was joking, but there are proves that children playing with consoles grow dumber than children playing with computers.
The worst part was how Commodore was pumping out a500 with small improvements. Commodore never spent any real money in development the amiga platform. They could have had AGA chipset in 88/89 and AAA in 91/92 acording to david haynie. Commodore had no idea what they had been given, and their coca cola ceo ruined the huge head start they had.
Commodore didn't even make the Amiga. It was developed by a small American studio named Amiga & Commodore treated them VERY poorly.
@@ExtremeWreck thats wrong. Amiga was created by a small team, in a company owned by jay miner. Jay had problems getting things running, and took a loan from Jack from Ataria for 50k, the deal was he was supposed to be paid back before x time, or he would own the amiga. THe last day Commodore bought the company from Jay and he paied back Atari...
The noise it made when you ran along walls holding the spacebar(?) down hoping to find hidden treasure hordes... this got me started when I was a young dev with it installed on my work PC :) Still coding, and DEFINITELY still gaming :)
What a fantastic video! Great job! Also, you and me had the same experiences! I had an A1200 w/ Blizzard '030 @ 50MHz w/ FPU and a hard drive thinking, no, KNOWING I was hot shit compared to other computers in the day.
Wolf3D put a big ol' nail into the Amiga's coffin, at least it did for me. But what killed it was Doom. Once I saw Doom, I never looked at the Amiga the same again. It was just software wizardry to me, how something like that was even possible was unfathomable at the time. Add to that how the audio also leaps and bounds ahead with sampled audio for essentially everything and I just couldn't go back. Amiga will always have a special place for me, since it was such a glorious time - but ID Software and John Carmack murdered it.
Doom made me want a PC as a poor kid growing up in Alabama.. My upper-class friend introduced me to Doom, and I didn't wanna leave his house after that.. His parents made me leave..😂😂😂😂 Doom shaped a generation and made me a fan for life..
I never owned an Amiga at the time but still really sad what happened with it, there was such an amazing community around it.
That and the Acorn Archimedes were two of my favorite computers of that era, had PC's ever since but do miss that era for all the innovation and people trying new things.
So Interesting you mention the acorn archimedes, on a other gaming channel I watch called retro bird that computer is an in joke about no one knowing what it is
We had an Amiga 1000 back in the 80’s and had some of the best memories playing games as a kid. Upgraded to a PC in the early 90’s and the rest was history. Still went back to the Amiga games at times but doing dial ups with friends on Warcraft 2 etc… was hard to beat.
I remember these times and these games. So cool to revisit this.
Another great video mate, love the channel.
Very good video. The only thing missing in my opinion are the latest developments. For example, there is an official Amiga Quake 2 release that runs really well with a 100Mhz 68060. This also applies to the JfDuke client with which you can play Duke Nukem 3D very well. With a fast 68060 and a graphics card, this is also possible in higher resolutions such as 800x600 or even 1280x720. If you even have a PiStorm32 accelerator card with Pi CM4 module in the A1200, then you can even play JfDuke in 1920x1080. I still like to use my A4000 from 1993 with 68060 CPU and graphics card for gaming today.
No offense to the people that like to do that but that just sounds like burning money to me. Spending thousands of dollars on upgrades to play games that some random trash pc you find at ewaste can run 10 times faster is just crazy. I understand not wanting to let go of amigas, I have my own vintage computers I love, but I feel like people need to stop trying to make an amiga be a pc and just let it be an amiga.
It was in '93 when we got our first PC. I was the only one of my friends that didn't have a Super Nintendo yet, and I wanted one bad. So I was annoyed that my dad bought this new 486 PC (we had an Apple IIgs at the time, thought it wouldn't be much different lol) and he picked up Wolfenstein 3D with it. I was blown away. Coupled with that gorgeous sounding SB16 sound card, I wasn't much interested in the SNES anymore. A little later when Doom came out, we got that and I was a PC Gamer for life. At that time all my friends were begging their parents for PC's then!
I completely agree! I remember a friend coming to me to play Mortal Kombat. I had an A500, he had a 386DX40. And then Wolf3D was released and I still remember his triumphant look when he first showed me that game. And I realised then that something had changed forever.
And in early ‘93, Xwing came out….and was AWESOME.