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I never played or knew anything about the Amiga computer until I first got on the internet years ago. However, I know some of its games were ported to the Genesis, so because of that I can respect it, and it does resemble the Genesis in both sound and visuals. Did anyone here ever have one and what did you think of it? It seems to have a devoted fanbase and alot of the games look pretty good, but outside of the Genesis, I have only played a few other games for it through emulation.
Check out cubex55 on youtube for some longplay videos of Amiga games.
Much of my early commercial work was on the Amiga. When I switched from 8 bit to 16 bit computers, the Amiga 500 was the computer I bought. I've still got that A500 in the closet. It was an awesome computer, with hardware and OS a decade (or more) ahead of the competition. It was just sad that Commodore then didn't maintain that lead, but let the competition overtake them. During the late 80's, there wasn't a better gaming computer out.
Awesomeness!
Thats Amiga!
I love mine tooo death.
Amiga can blow the Genny outta the water...
I used it for 2D/3D lightwave and music...
Great Games on it also.
Like Shadow of the Beast/Agony...some of the best music ever!
If ya come across a working amiga on the cheap, dont hesitate on picking it up.
I still use my Amiga 1000 to this day for gaming & animation.
The Amiga has the most awesome PCM chip ever. The music it can create is timeless.
The Amiga is pretty much an equal to the Mega Drive and SNES as a 16-bit machine, whilst the MD's strength was in action games and the SNES' with RPG's and the such, the Amiga's strength was with strategy and adventure (Monkey Island style) games, though like the other aforementioned machines it had a healthy amount of games in each genre. The Amiga was massive as a games machine in Europe (over here Computers were the de-facto way of playing video games until around 92' when the Mega Drive took off) and actually came second only to the Mega Drive in the UK with the SNES selling less than half the hardware and not really being much of a player in that generation (In Germany I think it was SNES 1st, Amiga 2nd but I'm not sure).Quote:
Originally Posted by 5233
The Amiga's action games tend to be much less direct than those on the MD and are usually more non-linear and exploratory with puzzle aspects, it's best games are mainly of European origin (though there were still a few good US companies making games) it's sound was usually a bit better than that of the Mega Drive. Also due to the fact that making computer games and releasing them on floppy disks was much less risky the Amiga was home to a lot of weird games with unique concepts.
Some of it's weakest aspects were it's controller as most games were 1 button only (though not all, you could have a maximum of two buttons) which made it difficult to make a good fighting game on the system. It's lack of Japanese backing meant that there weren't really any notable JRPG's made for it either, and it's shmups tended to be a bit generic and didn't stand up too well to those on MD or even SNES (though a couple could hold their own)
Actually, you could have three buttons on the controller, just the same as the mouse. However, while a few three button mice were made (like the Boing! mouse - I have one of those), no three buttons controllers were made. Instead, CBM went to the CD32 controller, with seven buttons read in a completely different manner (serially). Many later games on the Amiga support the CD32 controller giving the user enough buttons to make a difference. Early games usually stuck with one button, but a few two button games were made (like Leander).Quote:
Originally Posted by jesus.arnold
Whether or not 3 button controllers were possible or available doesn't change the basic fact that unfortunately 99.9% of Amiga games only used 1 or 2 buttons.Quote:
Originally Posted by Chilly Willy
I still have my Amiga 500 (with 512K expansion module) and I dust it off at least once a year. The Amiga was such an amazing machine for its time and it was almost like having CD games, before they even existed. The music and graphics one could create on an Amiga was mindblowing back in 1987.
I still have an Amiga 1200 with a Blizzard 1230 MkIV 68030 50MHz accelerator, 128MB RAM, Subway USB contoller and Indivision Scandoubler as well as all my old camera controll hardware and genlocks, one of the best computers ever made and probably the most widely supported retro platform today in both hardware and software.
www.amigakit.com
I wanted an Amiga for years, eventually being handed an Amiga 500 and a shoebox full of game disks by a friend. The 1902 monitor I was given ended up exploding the first time I tried to use it, likely due to the fact that the monitor had been poorly stored in a weak storage unit outside for several years before being given to me.
I put out an ad in a local computer magazine requesting a free monitor, and someone called the next day after the publication of said ad. I drove over an hour into the middle of nowhere to pick it up, which in retrospect was pretty silly, but fun. The monitor, a 1080, worked fine with the Amiga. But by that time, I wasn't very patient about using the computer anymore so I ended up selling it. The monitor is still here, being used as the primary screen for my testing of new Genesis / Mega Drive games.
What little time I did spend with the Amiga 500 was enjoyable. There's a lot of cool games with great graphics and lovely soundtracks. Since it was so popular especially in Europe, its life was long and it ended up seeing many new, original developments as well as a pile of quality ports. Anyone "into" classic gaming should experience the Amiga at least once.
Zaku was actually developed, in part, using an Amiga 2000HD and Epyx's own authentic Lynx development hardware / software.
One BUTTON!
What about the Keyboard?
:p
Yes, many Amiga games used the keyboard to get around the lack of buttons. The keyboard still doesn't help with fighting games. :DQuote:
Originally Posted by nonner242
Some games actually came with an overlay you put on top of the keyboard that helped identify the keys to use in the game.
Though the keyboard should've helped with fighting games, I guess lack of keyboard options in most games was just due to short sightedness on the part of developers, why the hell a game like Midnight Resistance didn't use the keyboard with four buttons for moving and four for firing I'll never know, instead of getting an arcade perfect control method the port ended up with one far worse than the one in the Mega Drive port :mad:Quote:
Originally Posted by Chilly Willy
EDIT: In fact, what am I talking about? The damn game could've used the mouse and keyboard like Abuse did, move with the arrow keys and aim with the mouse, what an utterly pathetic wasted opportunity, all those Run N' Gun games on Amiga could've been amazing :mad:
See! SEE!? This is why consoles > home computers. Gamepads ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by jesus.arnold
Ohhh and not pressing up for jump :p -jajaja!
Well, I loved my Amiga! Some of the greatest games back then (Lionheart, Turrican 2, MadTV, Monkey Island 1&2, Stunt Car Racer etc.) were on it back then. I still have min, though it currently is dismantled when I started an attempt to create some kind of PC/Amiga hybrid (calles "Project A"; what I managed to create was basically two mainboards in one tower that needed two power supplies and two keyboards connected... which was kind of pointless, so I disnamntled the whole thing again).
As for the controller, well: Both Amiga and the Genesis used the same kind of controller ports... so for some games, I simply used my Genesis controller on the Amiga! Worked like a charm!
Aaah... fun times...
Pushing up for jump is fine....unless you already need to press up to fire upwards at which point it starts to cause some problems as you constantly jump into enemies above you ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by tomaitheous
I have an Amiga 500 but only a few games for it. I picked it up dirt cheap last year and it had lots of extras and mods. But the Amiga 500 was rare as hell here in Canada everyone has DOS based PC's that I remember. So I have never once seen any games for sale for it around here. Eventually I'll grab some off EBAY or something.
The Amiga was awesome, but it's very difficult to get into nowadays. Games can be pretty hard to find, and I don't trust old floppy disks. You also have to watch out for the distinction between OCS and AGA games. And you'll want to track down an old RGB monitor, as the TV output isn't that great, and a lot of games will be PAL (which isn't a problem with a monitor).
I have a CD32. It sounds amazing on paper -- amazing 2d capabilities (and most of its games were 2d), CD-ROM media, lots of ports of excellent games, a full-featured (though not amazing) controller, and it can be given a keyboard, mouse, and floppy drive for AGA Amiga compatibility. Unfortunately, many of the ports are rather poor. You'll find some games that give you the option of either music or sound effects (but not both), which is just ridiculous considering the hardware. And you'll find a lot of games with silly control problems, due to being unchanged from Amiga versions -- Battletoads is particularly egregious, using only one button, which ruins the game. And the CD32 version of Skeleton Krew only uses two buttons, which is very very awkward for that game, whereas the Genesis version supports the 6-button controller.
These CD32 examples are identical to the problems with their Amiga versions, and the Amiga in general at times. But it certainly wasn't all bad, and the Amiga has some great games of its own that were never on a mainstream console.
Wasn't it just the same as the Amiga though?Quote:
Originally Posted by j_factor
I've only played Amiga games through emulation. I am tempted to get a real one, but like you I am concerned about the lifespan of floppies and would prefer to just get the games downloaded instead of investing in games on that format as long as they could be played somehow on a real system. Although that's not to say that I wouldn't mind buying legal re-releases for that system if they happened to appear on Virtual Console or whatnot eventually.
Amiga's are quite difficult to emulate I think and the machine doesn't have massive worldwide popularity so I think Virtual Console support will sadly never happen.Quote:
Originally Posted by 5233
I agree with you guys about the floppies too, I decided a while back after being burned a few times to stop paying out a lot of money for Amiga games on Ebay, I'm just going to buy them cheap in the wild from now on (if I can ever find any)
The CD32 was an A1200 without the floppy, keyboard, and some ports, but with two big extras: a CDROM and the AKIKO chip. The AKIKO was a chunky to planar converter chip - it allowed you to make easy conversions of games written for "normal" 256 color graphics. So when Amiga versions of games like Doom came out, you usually had options for using plug-in video cards (on Amigas that allowed such cards), "standard" Amiga planar graphics, and AKIKO converted chunky graphics (CD32 only). It wasn't as good as having a PC video card, but was much better than having to convert the chunky to planar without the AKIKO.Quote:
Originally Posted by tomaitheous
I did a routine for the A1200 that did one pas with the CPU, then the next two passes with the BLITTER that was close to the speed you got from AKIKO, but on higher end Amigas, it was just better to use the CPU for converting chunky to planar. Me and a couple other guys competed to see whose c2p code was more efficient/faster.
Akiko? So it's just a chunky to planar converter? How fast is it?
The conversion is the same either way, so it can do chunky to planar or planar to chunky. It's just a single register in the custom chipset: you write 8 LONG (32-bit) values to the register, then read back 8 LONG values. If you write chunky data, the data you read are planar data (each LONG being one bitplane value). If you write planar data, the data you read are chunky data. There are no wait states, so it takes 16 times the amount of time needed to read/write the custom chipset (which is ~14.3 MHz for AGA if I remember correctly). However, that doesn't mean the conversion of the whole screen is that fast - access to chip memory is the limiting factor here. You spend most of your time waiting on the write to chip memory to finish. That is especially true if you're using a mode that has significant DMA contention, like Double-NTSC/PAL or VGA modes, especially high-res modes. You want to be using NTSC or PAL low-res modes for best speed.Quote:
Originally Posted by tomaitheous
Yes it does...I made a Youtube video for it...Quote:
Originally Posted by Zebbe
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuXVy6qXyuI
It's the same as the AGA Amigas (plus the Akiko chip), and came out only a year after the introduction of that chipset. Pretty damn good stuff for the time, and it was much cheaper than a 3DO, or even an A1200.Quote:
Originally Posted by tomaitheous
Many of the cracked games have been patched to install and play directly from a hard drive. The Amiga 'scene' websites could probably tell you a lot more about that, including supplying you with a list of said games, etc. That's a very solid option, should you choose to seriously get into the Amiga, as it would drastically cut down on the number of floppy disks you'd have to rely on.Quote:
Originally Posted by 5233
http://www.whdload.de/Quote:
Originally Posted by CMA Death Adder
There you go! Run that stuff off the hard drive. :cool:
Thanks! That sounds great. I do not know much about how those old computers worked or were set up, but I'll look into it, as I am eager to try the Amiga!
How exactly do you use that? I've seen Amiga hard drives advertised in magazines, but I've never seen one available on the internet.Quote:
Originally Posted by Chilly Willy
There are a number of ways to add hard drives to the Amiga, depending on the model. For example, the A500 takes a completely different kind of drive than an A1200 (which just uses a plain 2.5" laptop PATA drive). Drives for older Amigas like the A500 tend to be more expensive because they require extra hardware since the A500 wasn't designed to have a hard drive. There were a number of companies that made IDE ports for the A500, allowing you to connect an IDE drive to it. So if you got an A500 and wanted a hard drive, you'd need something like that as well. The A1200 was designed to take a 2.5" PATA drive internally, so all you need for the A1200 is to get an appropriate drive.
Despite perfect emulation being assured, how would getting a real Amiga be any different in regards to the feeling and input as opposed to just using WinUAE or some other program to play the games?
Ahh, so 8 planes then. Does the AGA offer anything else besides extended master palette and bitplanes? Can you section off the BG into two layers of 4bit planes on AGA - extension of OCS features (if that's the correct chipset term)?Quote:
Originally Posted by Chilly Willy
From what I've heard the whole hard drive thing is the best way to go, but if you're talking about the difference between emulation and playing on the computer naturally with floppies I'm going to do a 1st and actually recommend that emulation is better than the real thing, Amiga emulation whilst not perfect is, in my opinion good enough not to give you too much of an inferior experience.Quote:
Originally Posted by 5233
Certain games seem to work better on certain Amiga's, and with emulation you can choose which system you want to use in the options, also using an emulator will mean that you avoid having to worry about different regions and such as a very large part of the Amiga's library was designed to be played at 50hz (European standard) on top of this Floppies are notoriously unreliable, and you may find yourself paying out for games that no longer work/only last a short amount of time. Also, Amiga games seem to be fairly difficult to actually get hold of, even from Ebay.
The biggest problem with Amiga emulation is that if you don't have knowledge of the machines then there seems to be a fairly steep learning curve.
Yes, dual-playfield can take advantage of the extra planes so that two 16-color planes are possible. HAM was also extended to HAM8 so that you can modify 6 bits per component instead of 4. All modes are also now possible in all resolutions. EHB is still available, but kinda useless when you have true 64 color mode now; it's just for backwards compatibility.Quote:
Originally Posted by tomaitheous
Another extension in AGA - when quadruple fetch is active, sprites can change from a word wide to 4 words wide (64 pixels wide instead of 16); you set one of the unused bits in the sprite control word to select 16 or 64 wide.
I used to have a 30MB HD equipped Amiga 600 back then, with the 1MB Chip Ram upgrade. The problem with it was that some very old games don't run on it (without use of a early kickstart disk) and it didn't have AGA (although it was released as some sort of cheap A1200, because of the similarities like the 2.5" IDE HD, PCMCIA connector, and RF lead)
But I did get have some great experience with it!
Indeed disk loading and swapping sucked, especially since a lot of games weren't harddisk installable on purpose (copy protection schemes). Which isn't a big issue when the game came on 1 disk, but there were games released on 4 or 5 disks (like MK2) which were not installable :/ Also I get the impression not a lot of people actually had a harddisk.
Another problem was that when games that weren't developed for AGA they were just developed for 'regular' 1MB A500's (with 512KB Chip Ram), and didn't take advantage if you had more (chip) mem installed (chip memory is memory directly accessible by the custom chips, making it essentially both graphics and sound memory, so having more of it could sustain more and/or better sound effects/music/sprites/etc.).
Also for some reason a lot of disks weren't reliable so you could be playing and enjoying some game, and the next day it doesn't work since the disk became bad for some reason.
Fortunately there is since a couple of years something called 'Whdload' making it possible to install non-installable games on HD. Also compatibility issues are fixed in the process (so you can now play that old 1987 game on a A1200 or A4000), copy protections (like manual look-ups) removed and even some bugs/inefficiencies fixed (like the Lion King which originally suffers from heavy slowdowns).
Plus games (hd-installed and disk images) are easily downloadable. So best is to have a CD-equipped Amiga or an A600 or A1200 with a CompactFlash adapter to transfer between them and your PC. Disk images can then be transferred onto real disks (although finding DS-DD disks is becoming somewhat more difficult).
Also I believe you can use a 6-button Megadrive/Genesis (or the Competition Pro ones) gamecontroller instead of a 'real' CD32-gamepad, since the D-pad on that one is not so great.
EDIT: I personally believe the A1200 is the model to go for. Although the A500 is MUCH more common, it's (what Chilly Willy said) harder to get a Harddisk for, since you have to go hunting for additional peripherals which aren't as easy to obtain. The A1200 just uses a 2.5" laptop HD (best is to find one with 4GB or less: OS3.0/3.1 limitations). Also OS2.0 or later are a lot better than 1.3 or earlier that came with the A500). Also WHDload (and such) fix compatibility issues when trying to run older games on newer hardware. AND you have AGA support so you can play the best version of Wing Commander next to the Kilrathi Saga PC version there is :p)
And on an A1200 you have a PCMCIA port, which is easy to obtain a CompactFlash adaptor (or alike) for, and not even that expensive!
Are you Sure about Wing Commander? From what I've seen of the A1200/CD32 versions is that the framerate is just horrible (without CPU accelerators that is) and the sound is more or less the same as the SNES port.
And a note on Kilrathi Saga... I'm not sure it's a good idea either, WC1/2 seem to only want to run in 320x200 mode which most newer (LCD) monitors won't support, though the games run fine, even on Vista 32. DOSBox will automatically scale (in software or using your video card depending on your configuration) so that's no issue, but you're stuck with Adlib (inless you set up Roland emulation -real emulation not a crappy soundfront which sucks, and don't try to tell me Paula is better than properly arranged MT-32).
Kilrathi Saga has all those nice wav files for music and sfx... I'm not sure, but the CD re-releases for WC,WC2, or both (collection pack, on one disc iirc) might be the same, not sure though, it might depend on the release. Any from before 1995 would probably just be CD re-releases with all the expansions included, but I think some were re-released along with th elaunch of WCIV which went to Win95 and DOS.
You're right about the speed, my advice is to use a 68030 minimum with it. But compared to the SNES, sound and graphics are definately better. But I don't know what they did to the SNES version though, because graphicswise it looks horrible, even the transaction screens, they look like they have 16 colors like the OCS Amiga version, but with a cartoony look in lower resolution.Quote:
Originally Posted by kool kitty89
Kilrathi saga has indeed those great sound and music enhancements for WC1 through 3, aside that it runs on Win95, that's why I named that compilation as the best (although pretty rare).Quote:
And a note on Kilrathi Saga... I'm not sure it's a good idea either, WC1/2 seem to only want to run in 320x200 mode which most newer (LCD) monitors won't support, though the games run fine, even on Vista 32. DOSBox will automatically scale (in software or using your video card depending on your configuration) so that's no issue, but you're stuck with Adlib (inless you set up Roland emulation -real emulation not a crappy soundfront which sucks, and don't try to tell me Paula is better than properly arranged MT-32).
Kilrathi Saga has all those nice wav files for music and sfx... I'm not sure, but the CD re-releases for WC,WC2, or both (collection pack, on one disc iirc) might be the same, not sure though, it might depend on the release. Any from before 1995 would probably just be CD re-releases with all the expansions included, but I think some were re-released along with th elaunch of WCIV which went to Win95 and DOS.
The individual (DOS) re-releases of them still have the midi music and (in case of WC1 and 2) not so great sound effects. And back then not much people had an MT32, so Paula was definately better than Adlib.
Also newer videocards don't seem to support resolutions below 640x480 anymore :/
EDIT: If I remember correctly, WCIV was initially a DOS-only release. Kilrathi Saga even had a Win95 patch for WCIV included. The budget re-release of WCIV did have the Win95 version included.
I think the SNES version is stuck with lower res (256x224), but I'm not sure about color, the lower res itsself is an issue, with less detailed transitions and such. I think the game is also done either with psudo scaling (like sprites in Mario Kart and such), or choppy software scaling like in Wolf3D (which is rather impressive considdering the SNES CPU), with the exception of portions done with mode 7. (the launch tube for one, and I think some ships as well, maybe the tigers claw)
One problem with the Dos version of the original WC is it's dependent on processor speed, thus it's impossible to get a really smoothe game, setting cycles higher than a certain point (~3500 in dosbox -that's instructions per millisecond) the game runs too fast. (not an issue with kilrathi saga)
Maybe you're right about the video card thing, I last tried it on my Vista32 laptop with a GeForce 7150 and there was something displayed but it was a mess of pixels crammed into the upper part of the screen. Dosbox works fine when set to native game resultion mode with hardware scaling enabled. (you need to use the aspect correction feature though or 320x200 will display as square pixels not in 4:3)
When I tried that on my old computer nothing displayed with my LCD monitor (CRT was fine), I had to set resolution to 640x480 or higher for it to work) And on that same LCD monitor the exact same thing happened with Kilrathi Saga, just an off dull grayish odd looking screen as it couldn't sync. (completely different from the laptop's problem)
I'm still not sure it's not the monitor though, I'll have to try the VGA out port with a CRT moitor to be sure.
It worked fine that way on my older XP machine (Radeon 9600 SE I think, one of the cut-down 9600 models I'm sure), again not with the LCD monitor.
BTW do you know if any of the DOS re-releases of WC 1/2 supported other midi formats/sound cards? (general midi or Ultrasound for example) I know WC III at least supported General midi. (I've yet to try out my copy of WC IV -definitely the DOS release- but it uses digital audio tracks rather than midi?)
As to Rolland, true, it was expensive and not especially common, but what I meant was for retro stuff now. I really need to set up a MT-32 emulator to work with DOSBox, if for nothing else than Wing Commander, well and Silpheed. (I haven't got much else, from what I've herad of MT-32 clips in X-Wing it's not particularly impressive compared to FM or General midi, though I've only heard the title music -and it wasn't with a sound front)