[Haggler]

It's been said before many times, was the commodore Amiga way ahead of it's time? a machine that at the time of release and for a few years afterwards was miles ahead of the pc competition with it's multitasking capabilities, superb gfx and sound chip, here are some great clips that will be of interest to any amiga fan.

The Amiga 2000 and Amiga 3000

YouTube - The Amiga 2000 Computer (1987)YouTube - Amiga 3000 (1990)

Amiga & Animation, Amiga & Music

YouTube - Amiga & AnimationYouTube - Amiga & Music

Amiga & Video, Amiga Games & Multitasking

YouTube - Amiga & VideoYouTube - Amiga Games & Multitasking

Amiga & Photography

YouTube - Amiga & Photography

Deluxe Paint III, Disney Animation Studio (1990)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fF1OYaobPAhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSeYivHZpB8

[ukbootlegs]

It was a fantastic machine.

so many classic games have come from it.

also, babylon 5 gfx were created on the amiga.

one thing i remember (call me sad for atching it), paul robinsons secretary on Neighbours, was "tapping" away at her wordprocessor which happened to be an Amiga. How did I know it as an Amiga? Simple, the display showed the insert workbench bootup screen. So God knows what she as tapping away at

[pault2007]

I remember loading some demos on my old A500 with 1MB RAM (512k expansion board) and I was really surprised at the animations it could do.

That might have something to do with me owning a Spectrum before!

Sometime in 1994, I managed to buy a boxed office suite called InterOffice 2.0 and I couldn't believe that you could use a word processor, spreadsheet and database on something with rubbish graphics (for the operating system).

I think it was the A1200 and Workbench 3.0/3.1 that surprised people more because of the gorgeous (at the time) graphics in the GUI and games.

I'd only seen the graphics in Theme Park on the A1200 in an arcade before - was totally blown away by them.

If I remember correctly, my A500 could also speak and I had a really good painting program called Deluxe Paint (version 3?).

To be honest, though, Workbench 1.3 on the A500 wasn't the nicest looking OS - I think our Archimedes Acorn A5000 at school had a much, much, nicer OS (RISC OS 3?)

[Haggler]

Originally Posted by pault2007

I had a really good painting program called Deluxe Paint (version 3?).

Have edited the vids and added this and disneys animation studio, i had deluxe paint 2,3 and 4 as i messed about a lot and i absolutely hammered deluxe paint 4, for painting it was fantastic but animating anything decent on it took ages.

[ukbootlegs]

I remember DP. Did it have a screenlock or sommat?

[pault2007]

I got my A500 second-hand off of a friend of a friend (I had been deciding whether to get an Atari ST, instead but was advised that the Amiga had much better graphics and games).

I appear to have got the Tenstar pack (came with games like Wizball, Buggy Boy, Barbarian).

I remember the joy when I managed to get my Amiga connected up to a Star dot-matrix printer and a page of text printed.

I got my A500's keyboard out the other day and the first thing I thought was, "This thing's massive, so long and heavy - how did I manage to carry it around?".

I hear that Amiga A1200's can support USB, high-capacity hard drives and SD cards now?

http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/...roducts_id=305

[ukbootlegs]

I bought mine brand new for £500 I think. It came with Rainbow Islands which I love.

Along with Nebulus, Speedball I etc :D

[Haggler]

I bought my brothers A500 off him when he upgraded to an A1200 as i stuck with the commodore 64 for a good few years, it was one of the very early A500 models, with the red power on light and running 1.2 instead of the later and more common 1.3

Later on i upgraded to an A1200 too, squeezing in a rather large pc hd as the amiga versions were ridiculously priced, the problem with this was the fact that you could not get the case back together again properly without leaving out half the screws.

The fun i had messing with the thing amounted to hundreds of hours though, i messed with bootblocks, drew my own pictures and made intros, timing effects, pictures etc to music and the loading/decrunch times when running off floppy was a major headache as i compiled my own pd disc collections.

This led to me making various guides and catalogue disks for some of the major public domain houses at the time, though it was all unpaid work it was good fun stuff and something for the little thick person to be proud of at the time. I was always absolutely crap with music though, playing with protracker for ages still ended up fruitless, fortunately there was a dirth of quality stuff available which just asked for credit, in the public domain.

I've had quite a few amigas since and having bought and sold a few have stuck with a bog standard A500 and A1200 in a spare room.

[ukbootlegs]

I also did a lot of PD work for a company based out of St Albans. At least by doing it, I never had to pay for any PD software

I loved the PD side of it more than the commerical stuff though.

But speaking of commerical stuff, do you remember X-Copy?

[Haggler]

Originally Posted by ukbootlegs

I also did a lot of PD work for a company based out of St Albans. At least by doing it, I never had to pay for any PD software

That was their way, i remember looking through the contents of loads of crappy catalogue disks trying to find 30 or so floppy proggies that i didn't already own for free each time, when you look back at it we must have been idiots. What some folk would do for recognition eh?

Originally Posted by ukbootlegs

But speaking of commerical stuff, do you remember X-Copy?

That went through a fair few versions in it's time, we'd all be liars if we said we never used it

[mattrixdesign2]

Originally Posted by Haggler

That went through a fair few versions in it's time, we'd all be liars if we said we never used it

With a "dual" disc drive setup you were laughing. I used to love the clicking sound it made.

My fondest memories are Delux Paint, Rainbow Islands, Speed Ball, Stunt Car Racer, Elite... warming my feet on the PSU, and adding an extra 512 of memory, its was about the size of a CD case!!!

[SIK]

I have such great memories of my amiga days (intially an A500, then later the 1200). It's probably the most enjoyable gaming period of my life. I remember buying the 512mb RAM upgrade for my A500 just so I could play Dungeon Master.
I hate to think how many hours I killed playing Mega-Lo-Mania, Dungeon Master, Syndicate, Populous, Stunt Car Racer, Denaris, Project-X, Alien Breed, Nebulus, Damocles, Datastorm etc. But I reckon Kick Off 2 ate up most time, I'd spend hours playing that with a mate (after we'd both agreed not to use the 'lob the keeper from the halfway line' trick...)

[ukbootlegs]

Originally Posted by SIK

It's probably the most enjoyable gaming period of my life.

You have a kindred spirit here with that phrase mate.

I loved the Amiga, and had the RAM upgrade, dual floppies etc. And I adored Rainbow Islands, Speedball II, and the myriad of PD games.

Originally Posted by mattrixdesign2

With a "dual" disc drive setup you were laughing. I used to love the clicking sound it made.

The clicking was both scary and funny. I thought it was breaking my disks and drives. It took yonks to copy a disk too

[Haggler]

What about that lovely grinding noise when trying to read a disc with bad sectors. You knew it probably wouldn't work but tried it anyway

[ukbootlegs]

LOL

I think my mate had literally every Amiga game going thanks to X-Copy, where I was stuck into my Rainbow Islands, Speedball and anything by Psygnosis.

And I was a geek about PD stuff, embarrassing now looking back at it.

[ukbootlegs]

And Turrican 2!! I loved that, how did I forget it.

Need an XBLA version of it

[Haggler]

Psygnosis, in the early days (pre lemmngs) had a budget label too, psyclapse or something it was called, i didn't own an amiga then and remember going to boots of all places and buying ballistyx and baal both on that label for my bro at about £5.99 or so, memories are fading....

[SyStemDeMoN]

I'm not sure it was ahead of its time as a computer, but as a games machine it was good.

After all, the Atari ST was released 1st, and was cheaper, a little faster and had an GUI operating system in a ROM, so you could run games using less memory. This is the reason most Amiga owners benefitted from 1mb only games.

The Amiga however had slightly better visual capabilitys, problems that Atari eventually solved, but the only software that took benefit from these 'upgrades' were only ever used in CAD software.

Someone mentioned they got the extra memory to play Dungeon Master. This game was released in the ST 1st and was only then released on the Amiga after its big success, and it ran on a 512k machine

The ST was also slightly better when using vector graphics, making Flight simulators really smooth.

The Amigas being used in B5 were about 50, and they were all pluged into a toaster engine, so the Amiga was mearly a frontend, as the toaster did all the rendering. And by the end of series 2 they were replaced with a PC based toaster, as the Amigas could not output some of the battle scenes fast enough.

Please go easy on me, I'm not trying to flame, but the Amiga was as good as the ST and the MAC that was around at the time.

[Haggler]

Originally Posted by SyStemDeMoN

but the Amiga was as good as the ST and the MAC that was around at the time.

Come now, as a games machine there was no comparison, the st may have shifted vectors slightly faster but the most popular games of the time were 2d sprite based platformers which nearly always looked better on the amiga, eventually support for the st on the games front waned mainly due to sales and this fact, on the sound front the st had midi capability but the amiga's sound chip for the average user was fantastic enough.

There was no comparison with pc stuff at the time either, i remember seeing beneath a steel sky floppy version on both the pc and the amiga and the amiga 1200 version wiped the floor with it's pc counterpart in the visual stakes, when the A500 came out it was overpriced but after the first 2 reductions it was a bargain and then there was the multitasking, something which took years for the pc to catch up with.

[SyStemDeMoN]

As a games machine it was great. But I wouldn't say it was ahead of its time because some games looked better on it.

As a multi-purpose computer, such as the PC's and Macs of today, the ST was better.

And as far as gaming goes, the ST was also the 1st to have a programming language dedicated to making writing games easy. STos was such a success that they eventually translated to the Amiga, AMos.

[Haggler]

Even the A500 was a multitasking machine and therefore ahead of it's time regardless, You obviously loved the st and it's too late in the day to try and nudge you into the amiga camp, for the rest of us this will make interesting reading :-

The History of the Amiga

[SIK]

Originally Posted by ukbootlegs

And Turrican 2!! I loved that, how did I forget it.

Need an XBLA version of it

Ah, I forgot that one as well! What a bloody great shoot-em-up that was. One of the few games I've completed over and over again just cos it was so much fun.

I vaguely remember when I bought a hard drive for my amiga. It had a capacity of only 20mb and cost a bloody fortune. I bought it so I could install HistoryLine 1914-1918 on it to cut down on all the bloody disc swapping.

[Haggler]

Originally Posted by SIK

I vaguely remember when I bought a hard drive for my amiga. It had a capacity of only 20mb and cost a bloody fortune. I bought it so I could install HistoryLine 1914-1918 on it to cut down on all the bloody disc swapping.

If that was an A1200 the official drives were ridiculously priced due to the fact that they had to fit in the case, we all used to cram a bigger pc one in there with more storage capacity too, the downside was the case would not go back together properly without leaving out some if not all of the screws.

And HistoryLine 1914-1918 was a great game.

[CAS FAN]

The Amiga 500 was a fantastic computer. I upgraded from a Spectrum +3 (as far as my computers went) and it was certainly a huge step up from that! I soon upgraded it to 1mb and enjoyed many days computing on it. I then upgraded to the A1200 and that was a really fantastic computer with some superb AGA games released on it. The Amiga will always have a fond place in my heart as there's so many quality games that I played on it.

That said, when it came to arcade games it couldn't live with the quality of the Megadrive (I bought a Japanese import in 1989) and I remember thinking how naff some of the Arcade conversions were on the Amiga in comparison! The frame rate was often poor on the Amiga and the sprites were generally smaller. Here's a quick comparison of Outrun showing the same start of the 1st level on the Arcade, MD and Amiga.

Arcade

Megadrive

Amiga

Up until the Megadrive i'd been firmly in the home computer camp and hadn't even owned a TV console until then. It was during the Amiga/Megadrive era that it all changed. Consoles started to grow in popularity as they could deliver great gaming results on machines that cost half the amount of a home computer. The Amiga, ST and to a lesser extent the Archimedes were also the end of the multiplatform home computer as from then on the standardised PC took over and apart from the Apple Mac it remained the only real computer platform.

I do miss the days of multiplatform computer gaming though, happy days!

[CAS FAN]

Originally Posted by Haggler

And HistoryLine 1914-1918 was a great game.

It was indeed! I Loved that game and also loved the Battle Isle games as well. Spent ages playing the lot of them.

I also used to love Universal Military Simulator 2 (UMS 2 for short) although that did struggle with the power of the Amiga.

I guess the other games that spring to mind are...

Sensi Soccer
Kick Off 2
Stunt Car Racer
Midwinter 2
Starglider 2
Power Monger
F19 Stealth Fighter
IK+
Airborne Ranger
Indy 500
Stunt Car Racer
Speedball 2
Carrier Command
Laser Squad
Civilisation
Monkey Island 1&2
Syndicate
Sim City
Lemmings
Archer Maclean's Pool
Geoff Crammonds F1 GP

Those are only really scratching the surface as well!

[Haggler]

You're right about the arcade conversions, i think the amiga was definitely a better machine than the megadrive, both sonically and graphically and it was probably because sega themselves ported their arcade games to the megadrive that they were superior.

If i remember correctly elite did ghouls and ghosts on amiga and various other conversions were made by others, golden axe, outrun and street fighter were particularly bad. You only have to look at pinball dreams and compare it to the snes version which in itself as a machine was graphically superior to megadrive (pinball dreams was never released on megadrive) to see the difference.

[CAS FAN]

Originally Posted by Haggler

You're right about the arcade conversions, i think the amiga was definitely a better machine than the megadrive, both sonically and graphically and it was probably because sega themselves ported their arcade games to the megadrive that they were superior.

If i remember correctly elite did ghouls and ghosts on amiga and various other conversions were made by others, golden axe, outrun and street fighter were particularly bad. You only have to look at pinball dreams and compare it to the snes version which in itself as a machine was graphically superior to megadrive (pinball dreams was never released on megadrive) to see the difference.

The Amiga had it's strengths and as a device it was a lot more flexible in it's useage. When it comes to chucking large sprites about in arcade games however the Megadrive was the better machine IMO. That goes for games from other companies as well (i.e. Namco, Capcom, Atari etc.). The visuals were just more solid and more 'arcade like' and that's really due to the MD containing a dedicated VDP chip to display the sprites and background detail.

Not so sure on the sound front either, that is a tricky one. The Amiga was very good at handling samples etc. but in terms of game generated sound I feel that the MD had the edge. The Yamaha FM chip in the MD was very similar to the Yamaha sound chip in their arcade cabs and gave a good arcade sound. This was also backed up by a Texas Instruments sound processor. The Amiga had 4 channels, where as the MD's Yamaha chip could chuck out 6 channels. That said, due to the great sampling capabilities of the Amiga, folk will remember tracks like Xenon 2 Megablast and feel that the sound reproduction was better.

The Megadrive was obviously limited by the memory size of the cartridges and the memory of the console itself, so when it game to larger more expansive games the Amiga had the edge and more flexibility.

[SIK]

Originally Posted by CAS FAN

It was indeed! I Loved that game and also loved the Battle Isle games as well. Spent ages playing the lot of them.

I also used to love Universal Military Simulator 2 (UMS 2 for short) although that did struggle with the power of the Amiga.

I guess the other games that spring to mind are...

Sensi Soccer
Kick Off 2
Stunt Car Racer
Midwinter 2
Starglider 2
Power Monger
F19 Stealth Fighter
IK+
Airborne Ranger
Indy 500
Stunt Car Racer
Speedball 2
Carrier Command
Laser Squad
Civilisation
Monkey Island 1&2
Syndicate
Sim City
Lemmings
Archer Maclean's Pool
Geoff Crammonds F1 GP

Those are only really scratching the surface as well!

Ah, Stunt Car Racer, so good he listed it twice!

Still, I used to love that game. I'd love Crammond to remake it for XBLA or PSN. HD gfx, 60fps and online play but keep the same great physics feel and tracks (stepping stones, ski-jump etc.)

God, I'd give my left gonad for that.....

[Haggler]

Interesting history of the commodore amiga.

YouTube - History Of The Commodore Amiga - Part 1YouTube - History Of The Commodore Amiga - Part 2
YouTube - History Of The Commodore Amiga - Part 3YouTube - History Of The Commodore Amiga - Part 4

[DpM]

Awesome thread, ill read it later