FLATLINE: How The Amiga Languished

[Anonymous No.5206103]

So, Ahoy released a new video after a long and rigorous winter, and its the Rise and FALL of the Amiga computer and its games, and touching on Commodore US Incompetence.
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB_UZsJUbwQ

interesting though, he touches on the early raytracing part.

[Anonymous No.5206145]

>advertising for some eceleb
Go back.

[Anonymous No.5206146]

The history of Commodore and Amiga itself is sad

it was platform with a fuckload of potential, but lost to the ages thanks to sheer corporate stupidity, conspiracies, and the rise of IBM PC's taking its place as the best pc gaming platform in less than a few years.

[Anonymous No.5206150]

>>5206145
>newfag
>calling ahoy eceleb

/v/ and reddit is over there

[Anonymous No.5206156]

>>5206145
I enjoy his videos, didn't know he was celeb though

[Anonymous No.5206157]

The Amiga is the definition of wasted potential

[Anonymous No.5206216]

It failed due to Commodore's dunderpated marketing. They thought it would just sell itself like the C64 had done, but a computer of that price and sophistication needed more than that.

[Anonymous No.5206236]

Ultimately the times were changing and it wasn't possible anymore to cling to this late 70s home computer way of doing things.

[Anonymous No.5206275]

>>5206103
I guess in time Video Toaster became the killer app, but a little too late.

[Anonymous No.5206283]

>>5206103
>5:43
Fairy Tale Adventure was lame as fuck. A huge almost empty world with nothing to do in it.

[Anonymous No.5206292]

Bil Herd explained one of the main reasons for its failure--"It was designed to look good on a TV screen at a time when people were starting to use monitors instead of TVs."

[Anonymous No.5206315]

>>5206292
It looked good on a monitor too, what is he smoking ?

[Anonymous No.5206320]

I think he meant in the sense of using low resolution 200 line video. It's not very easy on the eyes compared with the Mac's super-sharp monochrome.

[Anonymous No.5206336]

>>5206320
>compared to a mac
Top kek, and Im sure the 3 educational games that came out on the mac looked real good.

[Anonymous No.5206352]

>>5206336
Did look very very nice for Aldus Pagemaker, Word, and Excel though. Trying to do that stuff on an Amiga would have been painful.

[Anonymous No.5206472]

>>5206352
Ok but this is a gaming board ergo what does a computer's ability to run Excel have to do with anything? Besides, how was the Amiga less capable of running that stuff than a Mac of that period? Same CPU and memory capacity for the most part.

[Anonymous No.5206475]

>>5206145
>calling ahoy a celebrity
Pull your head out, mate.

[Anonymous No.5206486]

>>5206472
TBF it never did get Excel. There was one shitty WordPerfect port and a really shitty port of MS Office. If you wanted to do work stuff on an Amiga, the available software was mostly very low budget crap.

[Anonymous No.5206493]

>>5206336
The Mac was never really a gaming machine; that isn't its purpose.

[Anonymous No.5206502]

>>5206472
>Ok but this is a gaming board ergo what does a computer's ability to run Excel have to do with anything?
Well, it does go a long way to explaining the Amiga's ultimate failure. Games alone don't pay the bills. You needed some rationale other than James Pond to sell computers and the Amiga just didn't have one.

[Anonymous No.5206510]

>>5206320
Or that puke-inducing blue and orange color scheme.

[Anonymous No.5206524]

The Amiga and Mac did both have a massive advantage over PCs in that they could use 1MB or more of flat memory all accessible on power up with no funny tricks or 64k memory segments. How did PC users put up with that nonsense for so long?

[Anonymous No.5206537]

>>5206524
PCs used an 8086, that was an older CPU than the 68000 and came out in the 70s.

[Anonymous No.5206640]

>>5206486
>If you wanted to do work stuff on an Amiga
Then you had a sidecar or bridgeboard.
>>5206502
>some rationale other than James Pond
Desktop video.

[Anonymous No.5206647]

>>5206103
>mfw instead of watching well researched and interesting videos like the one in the OP, /vr/ instead watches and discusses shitty eceleb videos which spread disinformation and are worse than a straight read of a corresponding wikipedia article.
Finally a good youtube related thread.

[Anonymous No.5206654]

>>5206647
MUH DISINFORMATION is just a poor excuse for when someone reveals that anon's favorite casual game from the past wasn't as good as he remembered.

[Anonymous No.5206667]

>>5206654
Shitty strawman and bait, try again.

[Anonymous No.5206931]

>>5206654
^This.

[Anonymous No.5206941]

Is this the most Kino ad for a platform?
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GURwztsgJQY

[Anonymous No.5206945]

>>5206941
Meanwhile in America, if you wanted those shitty Simpsons Acclaim games, you could just rent them from Blockbuster for $10 and there was no load time, no copy protection, no accidentally setting the floppy on your stereo speakers and erasing it...

[Anonymous No.5207229]

Why are Amiga threads on /vr/ always so terrible?

[Anonymous No.5207287]

>>5207229
Because it didn't have good games and the threads just become America vs Europe. :^)

[Anonymous No.5207447]

Fairy Tale Adventure

/thread

[Anonymous No.5207540]

I don't think it's fair to compare NES/Genesis/SNES games with home computer ones of the period because console games typically had a much higher budget and some basic content/QC standards imposed on them. A lot of Amiga games feel like some freshman's programming project.

[Anonymous No.5207912]

>>5207229
It's not the amiga in particular, no matter what the trolls try to bait you with. The problem is the lack of interest for the whole of retro computer gaming on this board. Compared to console retro gaming, computer games and hardware are just way too niche for /vr/.
The only reason threads like this don't implode immediately is cause of the shit posting and vitriol. Game discussion is virtually nonexistent compared to console game threads.
It's Just the way things are around here.

[Anonymous No.5208524]

>>5207912
>computer games and hardware are just way too patrician for /vr/
I know, right?

[Anonymous No.5208617]

>>5206945
$10 rental fee? jeez, they were no more than $5 here in the 90s

[Anonymous No.5209415]

>>5207912
>I'm not into retro PC gaming therefore nobody else is

[Anonymous No.5209481]

Double Dragon for the 7800 is a good example of this. It was rushed to market. It's in a cartridge that is half the size of the cartridge used for the NES and SMS versions. It has sprites taken right from another game (Title Match Wrestling). It's made by the same C+ development house that did Touchdown Football and Fight Night on the system. The NES cartridge has an additional mapper on cart. The 7800 one has no hardware. I have no doubt it could have been quite a bit better, had - say Blue Sky Software done it in a 256k cart.

And that's the problem with many of these comparisons. A lot of games were made to time/budget constraints and often the programmers weren't the best in the business. Development tools available in the 80s were also not comparable to ones available today (assemblers/compilers, being able to design graphics on a PC instead of on graph paper and projector overlays, etc). And sometimes we compare games that simply were not the best they could have been and we use it as an example of claiming the hardware was inferior.

Pac Mac and Donkey Kong are often derided on the 2600 yet homebrewers have made amazing versions of those games on those systems that are far better than what was originally released.

[Anonymous No.5209484]

Looking at the specs, the Colecovision and the NES are not too far off, and the Coleco has a few advantages like CPU speed. So how close are they?

There are a lot of games that the MSX has that are quite impressive, and at the same time, they should easily show what the Colecovision is able to do, although I believe the Colecovision can scroll and have more polished graphics.

It may have been possible if not for Adma and CBK that Colecovision could have pushed the NES away from market dominance and would have had computer, MSX, and NES ports which a lot I can see running real well on Coleco especially arcade conversions.

What do you think?

[Anonymous No.5209490]

Double Dragon for the 7800 is a good example of this. It was rushed to market. It's in a cartridge that is half the size of the cartridge used for the NES and SMS versions. It has sprites taken right from another game (Title Match Wrestling). It's made by the same C+ development house that did Touchdown Football and Fight Night on the system. The NES cartridge has an additional mapper on cart. The 7800 one has no hardware. I have no doubt it could have been quite a bit better, had - say Blue Sky Software done it in a 256k cart.

And that's the problem with many of these comparisons. A lot of games were made to time/budget constraints and not all programmers were that good at their job. Development tools available in the 80s were also not comparable to ones available today (assemblers/compilers, being able to design graphics on a PC instead of on graph paper and projector overlays, etc). And sometimes we compare games that simply were not the best they could have been and we use it as an example of claiming the hardware was inferior.

Pac-Man and Donkey Kong are often derided on the 2600 yet homebrewers have made amazing versions of those games on those systems that are far better than what was originally released.

[Anonymous No.5209496]

>>5209484
Are you confusing the MSX and the MSX2? I saw quite a few people make that mistake in Youtube comment sections recently when a computer museum did a review of the MSX.

I'm pretty sure the MSX1 used the same exact chipset as the Colecovision. They use the same weird colors. There are quite a few limitations including single colored sprites and a lack of scrolling. The Colecovision uses a faster CPU, but that is really the only advantage it has over the NES.

I think if Coleco had held on, they would have eaten into Atari (or more likely locked Atari out) rather than chipping away at Nintendo. Not only was the NES better in almost every way, but Nintendo would have locked the games up anyway as they did with Atari 7800 and SMS.

Even if certain limitations could have been overcome (like adding RAM on cartridges), overcoming the video chip would not have happened. They might have sped things up, but they really could not have overcome these limitations. The C64 had the same problem. Even the 512k ROM cartridges just could not compete because of the limitations of the VIC-II chip.

[popeye No.5209502]

>>5206103
It ain't winter yet, boy.

[Anonymous No.5209520]

>>5209496
Eh? I think the C64 compares pretty favourably to the NES. They're both nearly contemporaries (the NES being newer by a year).

[Anonymous No.5209539]

>>5209484
A lot of consoles just got swept away by the crash of 83, their parent companies never to return.

NES is clearly superior to Colecovision but if Coleco put out a successor console it could have clashed head to head with the NES.

In fact, the Sega Master System is basically an upgraded Colecosivion, internal hardware-wise.

[Anonymous No.5209554]

>>5209520
The Famicom doesn't have the resolution/color limitations of the C64 and it has a bigger palette, so graphics overall look crisper and more colorful. On the other hand, it has a very annoying limitation in that every block of four tiles must use the same color palette. Its CPU is also faster and scrolling is very very cheap and requires almost no CPU cycles.

The C64's sprites are larger however, it offers more freedom of color placement despite the smaller palette, and the SID is easily better than the Famicom's PSG. Also the C64 has more memory to play with, and lets you do raster tricks, access the video registers and RAM at any time. You can also do split screen scrolling without add-on hardware or l33t hax0r tricks.

The Famicom has 40k of ROM space, 2k of WRAM, and 2k of VRAM. The C64 lets you use all but 8 bytes of 64k of RAM.

When you get down to it, the Famicom's hardware is optimized specifically for scrolling arcade games, so while it's overall better at that, the C64's capabilities are more balanced and the greater memory lets you do more types of and more complex kinds of games.

[Anonymous No.5209562]

>>5209539
The Colecovision only did 32k of ROM space and there were no provisions for add-on cartridge hardware. It also didn't have a real hardware scroll capability.

[Anonymous No.5209573]

The Colecovision was mostly built out of off-the-shelf components. Nintendo pretty much used their own custom chips in the Famicom and it did incorporate some really clever, forward-thinking features like putting the video bus on the cartridge slot (thus making add-on cartridge hardware possible) and using ROMs to store graphics data instead of more expensive RAM.

[Anonymous No.5209624]

>>5209554
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bIpXvt0wxo

I've never seen a NES game do falling snow like in level 4 of Creatures 2. The gigantic boss would have also been tough to do with the tiny NES sprites.

[Anonymous No.5209695]

What made the NES great was less the hardware than the brilliant programmers and game designers at Nintendo, Konami, and Capcom.

[Anonymous No.5209736]

>>5206945
>no copy protection
>Cartridge games no copy protection

Fucking moron

[Anonymous No.5209745]

>>5209736
I don't ever remember a Nintendo game that made you look up some stupid numbers in the manual that you needed 3D glasses to see.

[Anonymous No.5209825]

>>5209562
Colecovision is Z80-based, NES is 6502-based. Z80 code is more compact, but it also executes slower than 6502 code.

[Anonymous No.5209838]

>>5209825
Yes well Nintendo as I said made their own custom chips and also went with the 6502 because it was smaller/cheaper than the Z80 (technically a modded 6502 clone that also had the sound hardware onboard).

[Anonymous No.5209856]

>>5209838
The NES's CPU had the decimal mode of the 6502 disabled. This was done by cutting a single trace so they didn't have to pay Commodore Semiconductor Group royalties.

[Anonymous No.5209880]

>>5209539
The Colecovision didn't last too long, just about three years (August 1982 to June 1985). Leftover units were sold into the fall of 85. Also about 80% of its sales were in the first year and then quickly tapered off. One reason for it was Coleco's decision to take resources from it and redirect them to a massive increase in Cabbage Patch Kids production.

[Anonymous No.5209885]

In fact Coleco had made earlier attempts at video games in the late 70s that blew up on them with the Pong machine collapse. By the time the Colecovision project had started in 81, video game sales were booming and RAM was getting cheaper as well.

[Anonymous No.5209890]

>>5209539
And somehow the Atari 2600 and Intellivision lasted into the early 90s.

[Anonymous No.5210005]

>>5206103
Cool story bro. I'll totally not not give you the view

[Anonymous No.5210029]

>>5209624
The guy who made the game was an awesome coder, he hacked that shit.

[Anonymous No.5210032]

>>5209624
The Japanese version of Contra does it, but it needed a Konami VRC4 mapper and it still looks more like hailstones than snow.

[Anonymous No.5210038]

>>5209624
The Japanese version of Contra does it, but it needed a Konami VRC2 mapper and it still looks more like hailstones than snow.

[Anonymous No.5210052]

>>5210038
As someone else said, the Famicom didn't make as many l33t hax0r tricks possible for the programmer because you can't alter the video RAM or registers except during the 70 cycle vertical retrace. So no raster effects, palette changes in mid-line, or any of the other cool stunts you can do on a C64 or other home computers.

[Anonymous No.5210138]

Console gaming didn't go much of anywhere in the UK until Sega set up shop here in 89. The home computer market was everything and anything. Nobody wanted to pay £40 for Nintendo cartridges that didn't look or sound any better than an Amstrad CPC game. And PCs? Forget about it. Hugely overpriced CGA/EGA bleeper rubbish. British users willing to put up with a machine as cheap and limiting as a ZX Spectrum still weren't going to buy a £2000 PC with pink and aqua graphics.

[Anonymous No.5210148]

>>5210138
Yeah but in the end all you had were horrible ports of arcade games made by Ocean and US Gold who'd buy up licenses and hire some teenagers to do the port in six weeks on a $30 budget. None of those things could touch the best NES games made by top-tier developers with very strict Q/C standards and high levels of craftsmanship.

[Anonymous No.5210154]

>>5210138
Or don't forget Crapple and their overpriced monochrome shitboxes. Steve Jobs was the master of hype and creating a brainwashed legion of zombie followers who eat the shit Apple pulls from their behinds.

[Anonymous No.5210157]

>>5210154
Not fair. Jobs contributed a huge amount to their success. On the early Apple products, he oversaw everything from the case designs to the look of the manuals to even the PCB layouts. He pushed Apple products at trade shows, negotiated with suppliers, drove his programming and engineering teams with a bullwhip, and studied Sony and other Japanese companies for ideas. As a result, he made Apple's production lines more efficient with better Q/C standards and ultimately more profitable than most of the competition.

[Anonymous No.5210196]

>>5209624
European coders were generally better at technically impressive demo effects (mostly because PAL's slower speed gave them more cycles to work with) but I think US devs like LucasArts and Microprose were better at putting together quality games on the C64. If for example you read about the development of Maniac Mansion and just what they had to do to get the game to work, and it took something like an entire year to finish. I highly doubt any European developer put that kind of time and effort into a game designed around an 8-bit system.

[Anonymous No.5210202]

>>5210138
I guess the TRS-80 CoCo was the closest US equivalent to the ZX Spectrum (certainly the longest lived one) but it never did all that well especially because Radio Shack's distribution model limited its software availability.

[Anonymous No.5210204]

>>5210202
They sold a CoCo clone in the UK, the Dragon 32 which used the same chipset but deleted the bitmap mode since it wouldn't be able to get any colour on PAL TVs. Didn't do all that well though.

[Anonymous No.5210207]

And MSX? Forget about it. Never went anywhere and never got anything but shit Spectrum ports.

[Anonymous No.5210756]

All things considered, what would have happened if Jack decided to bite the bullet and stay?

[Anonymous No.5211640]

>>5210207
It was popular in Spain along with Spectrums and Spectrum clones.

[Anonymous No.5211654]

>>5211640
All true but the Spanish computer market was smaller and less sophisticated than the UK one.

[Anonymous No.5211673]

>>5210196
Nah you just ended up with Bionic Granny instead.

[Anonymous No.5211685]

>>5210756
The board of directors expelled him, he didn't leave of his own volition.

[Anonymous No.5211693]

>>5210138
Ocean were doing PC games in the late 80s.

[Anonymous No.5211701]

>>5211693
Yes but they were the largest UK dev and had way more resources than most. One thing that strikes me about a lot of those Ocean PC ports was how they pretty much never support CGA graphics while nearly all US PC game devs supported it until the early 90s. Did Brits really have that much of an extreme hate for CGA graphics?

[Anonymous No.5211713]

Post-video game crash, American devs mostly quit doing arcade games and instead concentrated on dungeon crawlers and adventure games. Arcade ports on computers were outsourced to Europe. The few exceptions were ports on the PC and Apple II because Europeans didn't develop for those systems (Ocean did PC stuff like Batman). So the PC ports of stuff like Bubble Bobble and Arkanoid were developed stateside while the C64 ports were done in the UK.

[Anonymous No.5211789]

>>5211713
As you started getting into the 90s, the era of bedroom coders was disappearing and most of those small/shovelware devs folded or were bought up by the giants like Ocean and Ubisoft.

[Anonymous No.5211827]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOHbTgNipV0

>0:30
I don't get it. Why doesn't he just plug the thing into a TV if he wants color?

[Anonymous No.5211898]

>>5211713
Ocean had both disk and tape releases of their C64 titles and the former usually had additional levels, music, or other content not in the tape version. The US/NTSC versions were based on the disk ones.

[Anonymous No.5211951]

>>5209554
NES graphics are stored in the CHR ROM. Character sets are 256 characters of which half are background graphics and half sprites. You can freely select which half is the character side and which half is the sprite side. Since each tile/sprite takes 8 bytes to store, a single character set is 2k in size and the CHR ROM can be 8k before you have to bank switch. So four sets of background tiles and four sets of sprites. The background tiles and sprites also have separate palettes with 24 background colors and 25 sprite colors out of 52 total colors.

Some games such as Zelda and Castlevania 1 store the character data in the main program ROM instead and have a RAM chip rather than CHR ROM. The data is then just copied into the RAM. This was mostly done to produce animated tiles.

[Anonymous No.5212042]

You'd struggle to even find Amiga software and peripherals in the US in the late 80s-early 90s.

[Anonymous No.5212047]

>>5212042
That's the fault of Americans for refusing to support the thing. Amiga gear was all over the place and readily available here.

[Anonymous No.5212054]

No Lotus 123 or dBase makes Amiga a dull boy.

[Anonymous No.5212062]

Just my thoughts on this.

I think the Nes was the Amiga's downfall in the US. Also the Amiga had no Mario/Zelda type mascot and the arcade ports were mainly rubbish with a few exceptions.

In the UK the Nes was a bit like the Wii U up until Mario 3, TMNT, and the games were expensive, so most kids either upgraded to an Amiga or ST from Spectrum&C64, or wanted a Amiga/ST.

[Anonymous No.5212073]

By the late 80s you pretty much had PCs for work stuff and Macs for desktop publishing and a C64 if you wanted to do computer games. NES games if you wanted arcade-style stuff.

[Anonymous No.5212074]

>>5209745
The fact the games were on cartridge WAS the copy protection you mong

[Anonymous No.5212089]

From my dim memory of Ontario in the 80s, the business market was dominated by PCs, and the home market was dominated by Commodore 64. And when people were ready to upgrade their C64s they switched to PC clones which were much cheaper.

Atari ST, Amiga, and Mac were more niche market machines, used for specialty applications.

[Anonymous No.5212094]

PCs were expensive and Europeans didn't really have console gaming pre-90s so they used computer games as a fill-in for it.

[Anonymous No.5212106]

As an aside, how compatible are European Atari ST/Amiga games with US model machines? Would they not work because of the 50hz/60Hz difference?

[Anonymous No.5212115]

>>5212042
Atari ST stuff was worse especially because Atari in 1988 decided to shift the bulk of production of Europe. The European market was bigger than the US one and they were a relatively small company so it made more sense to concentrate their resources there.

[Anonymous No.5212130]

>>5212106
IDK about the Amiga, but from my experience, US model Atari STs will play games a little faster, but still playable. Certain PAL region games will cause the picture to roll but this can usually be solved by adjusting the vertical hold knob on the monitor.

Myself I'm used to playing games on US model STs at NTSC speeds so that I find PAL mode on emulation too sluggish for my taste.

[Anonymous No.5212146]

>>5210207
>And MSX? Forget about it. Never went anywhere

[Anonymous No.5212156]

The US is a huge place compared to any European country. Atari ST stuff from 86-89 was uncommon but still not at TRS-80 level where you had to order it all from catalogs. I've seen original copies of ST games at flea markets before. There wasn't a lot of ST stuff in comparison to the mountain of C64, PC, and Apple software, but you could still find it wherever software was sold.

By the early 90s though, ST stuff became really rare and any new software you could get was imported from Europe, US-based ST development had completely ceased by that point.

[Anonymous No.5212160]

>>5212146
Not in my country anyway.

[Anonymous No.5212169]

Much of the Amiga library is comprised of terrible ST ports that can't even scroll properly and have no improvements beyond sound. The ST was the lowest common denominator, therefor most Euro devs preferred to make that version first and then copy/paste it to the Amiga. Are you going to argue against this?

[Anonymous No.5212178]

The reason that US Atari dealers were short-shipped Atari ST product was because they didn't pay their bills. Flying in the face of that is the well-documented (through magazines, testimony, personal experience) fact that Atari was a small company, there was a DRAM shortage, and the Euro market was more profitable and Atari threw the U.S. dealers to the wolves. Atari dealers, the ST computer line, and Atari Corp. themselves would eventually pay a price. Low post count, newbie, or whatever, it's ridiculous to claim one could "know" why (and specifically because those small businesses decided to shoot themselves in the foot by not paying their bills) other Atari dealers (with whom one had no contact nor information of whatsoever) weren't being shipped product. This is just common sense, if that's still fashionable. Newbie idiot perhaps not, but preposterous position, save for some supernatural clairvoyance, of which I'd like to see further evidence of.

[Anonymous No.5212184]

>>5212178
The DRAM shortage in the late 80s was political. At that time, the only North American DRAM manufacturers were Texas Instruments and Micron, and the latter had atrocious Q/C. They lobbied the Reagan Administration into putting tariffs on Japanese DRAM. It caused supplies to shrink and prices to shoot up and a lot of manufacturers including Tramiel's Atari went out of their way to evade them.

[Anonymous No.5212194]

Commodore made one huge blunder after another. The A500 was the only viable machine they made after the C64. Although they were making unholy amounts of money at one point, most of this was spent buying the executives beach homes in Hawaii rather than on new products.

[Anonymous No.5212205]

>>5212094
Yeah there wasn't any indigenously produced game console in Europe for whatever reason.

[Anonymous No.5212252]

>>5212194
The 128 could have easily been a worthy successor to the 64, but they added backwards compatibility with the 64 and it bit them in the ass

[Anonymous No.5212279]

>>5212252
The C128 was mostly designed as a temporary fill-in so Commodore would have something new to show off at the 1985 Consumer Electronics Expo.

[Anonymous No.5212297]

Also I'm pretty sure NTSC C128s are more common than PAL units. It was expensive for European standards and also pretty much required a 1571 drive to be useful at all.

[Anonymous No.5212298]

I've always wanted a good source on Medhi Ali shipping Amigas around the world to engage in a currency trading scam. That sounds like a hilarious story.
There's an interview with David Pleasance with a bunch of hilarious stories though. At one point, Australia had a shortage of Amiga monitors, so they shipped a bunch down from Britain because they're both PAL countries, only to find when they arrived they were completely useless because they needed to reverse the polarity. I think they might've had to ship them all back to Britain to do that.

There's another story to the extent of: A guy came in and asked to buy some C64s(?) in the run up to Christmas, which Pleasance couldn't have provided at any price. The guy got really exasperated and said something like "look, I've got a million pounds here and you're telling me you've got nothing to sell me?" and David was like "Ah, well have you heard about the Commodore Plus 4?" and dumped his entire backlog of unsold +4s, and eventually the entire backlog for all of Europe. Naturally no mention was made of the fact it was a completely different model line that was incompatible.

[Anonymous No.5212305]

>>5212298
Oh and how they intentionally shipped a lot of C64s that failed the factory Q/C test to meet shipment quotas.

[Anonymous No.5212326]

>>5212298
>>5210157
You see now why Atari and Commodore are no longer with us and Apple is. Running a company Eastern European Mafia boss style never works in the long run.

[Anonymous No.5212336]

>>5212326
Commodore UK was actually pretty well run, it's just everything else that was a shitshow.

[Anonymous No.5212339]

>>5212336
BTW, that was a brilliant move they did by offering Amiga 500s with the Ocean Batman game as a promotional deal for the movie, it caused Amiga sales in the UK to skyrocket.

[Anonymous No.5212445]

>>5212279
Well, for a fill-in, it sure was ambitious, though the same stupid decisions that crippled the 16 line would follow with the 128.
It's kinda sad, to be honest. I think we could have gotten some really impressive software running on native 128 mode, but alas, the 128 was seen more or less as another fancy remodeling of the 64, at least from a software development point of view

[Anonymous No.5212495]

>>5212326
How are Apple not run like that? They charged over 1000 USD for the Apple II, a machine which had ZX Spectrum levels of audiovisuals, and over 2000 for the monochrome bleeper sound Mac while an Amiga for half that price had amazing audiovisuals.

[Anonymous No.5212592]

>>5209624
>The gigantic boss would have also been tough to do with the tiny NES sprites.
you can kinda achieve something similar if you use tiles but then those bosses usually have no background

look at life force for example, backgrounds tend to fade out for the bigger bosses.

[Anonymous No.5212603]

>>5212592
You can also set the NES to use 8x16 sprites (SMB3 does it) but then you halve the number available from 128 to 64.

[Anonymous No.5212606]

>>5212495
>muh games!!!!!
Apple did not sell game consoles with keyboards like the Amiga. They sold to business users and schools. Monochrome was a plus for them at the time because color monitors were shit.

[Anonymous No.5212663]

>>5212592
The Yellow Devil in MM1. Note that the background is mostly empty.

[Anonymous No.5212695]

>>5212042
>You'd
I think you mean (You). I had no problem. You did because you were still in your dads ballsack.

[Anonymous No.5212697]

>>5212695
>American sex education

[Anonymous No.5212715]

Don't make me repost these.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcyPvbqHjrM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8O3inzWEKyI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apBUOVU2oZg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RXO_VyJoCY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KJeCensol8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wqytPjs6ZY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arLSgEmK6cw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2f8Oc1ANHAA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaejwInoRPw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5h1smUA4lQ

[Anonymous No.5212727]

>>5212715
We've been over this and over this. Nobody bought a PC for stuff like Paperboy and Ikari Warriors. I didn't know anyone back when who had a PC and those games. PCs were for stuff like Space Quest and F-117 Stealth Bomber.

[Anonymous No.5212734]

>>5212727
No, PCs were for stuff like Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect.

[Anonymous No.5212738]

>>5212727
Surely you could play those on the Amiga too?

[Anonymous No.5212746]

>>5212738
Sierra games on the Amiga were phoned-in crud, you don't want to play those.

[Anonymous No.5212792]

>>5212495
You paid for the expandability and Apple's tech support.

[Anonymous No.5212919]

>>5209484
The Colecovision was based around the TMS 9918 which has 16 fixed colors, no true hardware scrolling, and four monochrome sprites per line (32 total sprites). So no, it's definitely not as capable as the Famicom.

[Anonymous No.5213251]

How did the Amiga do in Australia/New Zealand?

[Anonymous No.5213354]

>>5212697
Where does youropoor sperm come from?

[Anonymous No.5213620]

>>5210138
I can see why the UK stuck with their domestic computers. Compare this with the NES. Theirs no comparison!

https://youtu.be/BRvwYtEFnNs

Plus, as everyone seems to point out, it was free! Nobody paid for games in Europe! Saved 40£! That’s a lot of pints and snooker!

[Anonymous No.5213629]

>>5212495
The Apple II was a useful home computer.

[Anonymous No.5214095]

>>5206352
>>5206486
I did all that on my A1200 way into the 2000's and I didn't even used an accelerator card in my Amiga.

I used Wordworth for word processing (I could even use the typical TTF fonts from PC with it) and TurboCalc for Spread sheet stuff.

https://www.vesalia.de/e_turbocalc5.htm
https://www.vesalia.de/e_wordworth7.htm

That notion about the Amiga not having productivity software is just a meme btw.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_productivity_software#Word_processing_and_page_layout

Especially in the last decade that I used my amiga (until 2008) I hardly used it for games and almost exclusively for productivity software, internet stuff etc.

[Anonymous No.5214437]

>>5214095
It did but Amiga productivity software was usually low budget and amateurish compared to the giants like Excel and dBase. The 200 line video and 8x8 text was also not very nice to look at.

[Anonymous No.5214460]

>>5213620
The Amstrad Contra is actually pretty good all things considered, although they had to leave out scrolling because the CPU just couldn't lug around a 16k video page like that.