How the Amiga's death heralded the PC gaming revolution

On a story about how a Commodore Amiga demo helped defeat a patent troll, a Slashdot commenter on the story claims refugees from its culture of bare-metal coders kickstarted the PC gaming revolution after Commodore's demise. Follow-ups challenge the truthiness of this hypothesis. HAM sandwiches for all!

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Anonymous

Agree with the Cinemaware-love. I *heart* Rocket Ranger, and the Three Stooges game. (Best licensed game ever? Maybe not, but close)

These had good ports of Amiga-level tech to EGA, and even their CGA versions were (barely) playable. Given the expense of hardware at the time, this was a good thing.
Anonymous

We need a link to explain what the Amiga was? I feel old now. Still, it was a great set of machines, that could have held its own against the windows hegemony if only Commodore had been less idiotic.

Now get off my stunningly-rendered 4096 colour lawn, kids!
Anonymous

Here’s the original complaint, via Groklaw: http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/IPvRH-1.pdf
Tynam

I second everything MadRat says; Cinemaware games in general brought a new level of story and game design to an industry still learning how.

(Still have the Atari ST version in a box in my loft somewhere. The ST disk drive is long broken, but I’ve never quite made myself dump it.)

And Niloc’s right. The Amiga and ST started to lose to the 286, but they died when the 386/VGA combination made them obsolete, as the Amiga and ST had for the C64/Spectrum/BBC before them. It’s hard to remember now that the PC was once a tiny contender in the home market…
- Doug Sharp
  
  Thanks, Tynam. It was fun breaking new ground with Cinemaware. The Atari port of King of Chi from the Amiga was a challenge ;^)
johnphantom

I wanted an Amiga when I first saw it advertised in Byte.

I played Comanche to death. Very fun game. I wish there were more iterations of the game.

I do question some of the things Anonymous Coward says though:

“…realized that even if you wrote off every PC with less than a 33MHz 486, local-bus video card with VRAM, 4+ megs, and an Ultrasound or SBpro…”

Uh, Comanche ran fine on my regular old SB…

“It was the Amiga programmers who learned that you really COULD forcibly rewrite VGA registers mid-scanline… well, ok… as long as the videocard had VRAM. But by 1993, everyone who mattered had a videocard with VRAM anyway…”

Uh, VRAM is dual ported, and at the time, very expensive. Comanche ran fine on my Tseng ET4000 with 1MB of regular DRAM.

I have owned a total of one video card with VRAM. I never saw a game that would use it. It was Truevision Targa+ 64, that had 2MB of VRAM – and cost $2500 without any software, in 1991.

He says, “because former Amiga programmers were determined to treat PCs like the 32-bit powerhouses that traditional “PC” programmers were afraid to do themselves…”

As a peon PC programmer I wrote a device driver for the Targa+ 64, that took direct advantage of the Targa through bitwise operations directly on the hardware – so where do I land as a programmer?
Anonymous

I had an Amiga 500 with 1 meg of chip ram/3.5 megs total and used the ramdisk a lot until I got a 52 meg scsi hard drive. I always thought it was interesting that the ramdisk concept was never really developed much even though it was available on the PC side too. I would think that having one under Windows 7 or Linux would great speed up web surfing, sparing your hard drive the agony of Adobe Flash thrash, et. al.
If you had an Amiga and really got into the nuts and bolts of the CLI, you would do well with Linux, since all non GUI/Workbench aspects of the Amiga were Unix based.
I couldn’t believe Commodore still would not include a hard drive when the Amiga 1200 came out, or offer a built in IDE interface.
I wonder if going with the 60830 and 68040 would have extended the gaming life of the Amiga. The co-processors were the big turbo boost for the Amiga.
Phat Agnes, Gary, Denise. Sound on the Amiga was great, musicians loved the midi capabilities. If they went improved the co-processors and went with the 68030/40 they could have kept up with the i386. But Commodore was dysfunctional from a business/marketing standpoint.
benher

Cinemaware? As in, It Came From The Desert?! Now those were the days!! I was an Amiga gamer for years – if you ever played Psygnosis games and marveled at the transition of Roger Dean cover art to the very graphics of the game, then you know you were part of something very special!
defunctdoormat

I have an old Amiga 2000 in my garage. I first bought it in 1988 I believe. I’m rather certain I put a 68030 in it. I gamed on it for a long time. When the 386s came out, I compared them, and I stuck with my Amiga because it was far superior as far as graphics and sound.

When I finally scummed to buying a 486, I felt horrible. The graphics were STILL worse than my Amiga. Unfortunately, the DAY I bought my 486 (which I also still have stashed away somewhere), the monitor on my Amiga died. I had planned on keeping both around, but that kinda tipped it over for me.
Later, I got an adaptor that let me use the other monitor I picked up.

I still miss my Amiga, and hated that Commodore wouldn’t advertise what I thought was the best gaming machine ever.
Anonymous

Don’t forget Defender of the Crown and Sinbad…loved the heck out of those games at the time.
- Doug Sharp
  
  Anon17 – Defender of the Crown was a graphic stunner and megahit for 1986. Defender sold 250k units while King of Chicago sold 50k units. Kellyn Beeck, who designed Defender of the Crown and Rocket Ranger, hired RJ Mical, one of the Amiga system architects, to do the coding: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defender_of_the_crown
  
  Kellyn always rued the fact that the Amiga version was published before all his design was implemented to get the game out the door for the Christmas market. Kellyn insisted that ports of the game use the full design so non-Amiga versions have deeper gameplay than the original.
  
  Great to see that Cinemaware games still elicit passionate responses two decades after we wrote them!
octopod

tbh, mode 13h and rep movsb killed amiga.

once you had bytes a pixel, ie, a reasonably sized palette with room for effects, there’s not so much need for a fancy bitplane based blitter or scan clocked coprocessor.

once future crew released second reality, it was basically all over.
- octopod
  
  and, or course, dos4gw. darn. that’s oldentimes.
Computer@Sea

Lords of the Rising Sun was the one that really did it for me. At the time my folks were hot and bothered to limit the amount of time I spent with digital media so I played out the game in excrutiatingly short 20 minute intervals daily.

Really a fantastic game.
Doug Sharp

Computer@Sea: Doug Barnett was the amazing fellow who designed, coded, and created the graphics for Lords of the Rising Sun. He told me that a few months before he got Lords out the door he passed out and wound up in a hospital diagnosed with malnourishment. He had run out of advance money from Cinemaware but didn’t want to ask for money to buy food so he was starving himself. Doug has worked on a couple of games before Lords came out that were canceled by their publisher in mid-dev so he didn’t want to risk upsetting Cinemaware right before his first game was published. Lords of the Rising Sun was literally created by a starving artist!
Doug Sharp

As the author of a hit Amiga game in ’87, Cinemaware’s King of Chicago – youtube playthru here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17xQQ-PMPBs – I thank you for that walk down memory lane. The Amiga game market was a wild, sweet ride. It evaporated quickly and everyone moved to the PC.
- Anonymous
  
  Yes, ditto on the thanks for King of Chicago… that & Three Stooges occupied a big chunk of my computer playtime during after-school hours for quite a while there. Incidentally, I found a website by the publisher of both those games, which claims to have such games available for download to those who have Amiga emulators, but their registration page is completely screwed up, so I can’t even join the forum to find out how to see these games! Grrrr…. but good memories all the same.
- MadRat
  
  Doug Sharp: Thank you, for creating King of Chicago. I don’t think I ever beat it but I played that game for more hours than I can remember. I probably still have the original disks somewhere. Cinemaware games were a bold step in a new direction.
  - Doug Sharp
    
    Thanks, Madrat. Glad you enjoyed my little game. I’m still proud of King of Chicago. I gave talks about my Dramaton interactive narrative system at the Game Developers Conference and an AI conference. Here’s a few reviews: http://channelzilch.com/doug/kocblurbs.htm
Niloc

That’s only partly the way I remember it, and I was a long-time Amiga stalwart, remaining so way after they were clearly doomed to the dustbin of computing history. I had an A500 (lightly upgraded to 1 meg total RAM), an stock A1200 and lastly a tricked-out A1200 with a hard drive and a 50mhz 68030 accelerator.

Clever programmers were vital to PC games really taking off, that’s for certain – but really it was the 386 (and all the later chips) and 256 color VGA cards. Those provided the horsepower to finally outdo the Amiga. Those two things coupled with Wolf3D and then Doom were the death knell of the Amiga gaming scene. Something finally out did it, and in retrospect it was about damn time – it really took forever for that to happen.

The main thing was the 386 CPU. Speed wise it blew the Amiga out of the water. The Motorola 68000 family of CPUs were lagging badly at that time, even the fastest ones were blown away by the new Intel chips of the day, and of course no one could afford the faster Motorola chips anyway, and so software was written for a 68020 at 14mhz if you were lucky and it was AGA stuff, even after the AGA machines came out most of it was still written for the original Amigas running a 68000 chip at 7mhz. That original CPU was fine in it’s day, but Commodore cheaping out and going with the slow and unpopular 68020 was one of the final nails in the coffin.

I remember downloading early JPeG graphics files on the Amiga, then waiting for them to display, line by line. It could literally take 5 minutes or more to display one picture. I remember thinking “these do look great, and the file sizes are amazing for the quality, but it’s just not practical with this speed”.

Sometime later I checked out some JPGs on a 386 machine. Horribly slow by modern standards, but it was like light speed compared to the Amiga. That’s pretty much when I got it, that CPU wasn’t just “a bit faster”, it was many orders of magnitude more powerful – which is also why we never got a decent Doom clone on the Amiga. It really couldn’t be done (on the stock chips anyway).

For a long time the Amiga simply could do things the PC couldn’t, but ultimately the PC hardware surpassed it and that ultimately allowed the clever software development to move forward.
yer_maw

Jeesus,

CAN SOMEONE EXPLAIN WHAT THE PATENT WAS??????

not everybody has been following this story from he start.
- Stooge
  
  yer_maw, the patent was “User Interface
  With Multiple Workspaces for Sharing Display System Objects”, issued in 1991.
Anonymous

Interesting discussion between an esthete and the technicians around him.

Programming is work, same as anything else. The easier the work, the more polish on the final product, given a similar timeline. Also the longer a platform hangs around, the more tools are developed for it, the better the content. (because of the previous point) I can prove it, too. Look at the best software released at the end of a hardware life-cycle and it’s obvious that it *couldn’t* have been made at the beginning.

In fact, the eighties are a remarkable time in technology. 10 simultaneous releases of a game for wildly disparate platforms, that usually had very different graphics but nearly identical gameplay. It makes our current environment look like daycare.

Here’s how the esthetes (non-programmers by definition, until, say, Macromedia Director) progressed — Amiga, Macintosh. These are Jobs’ most loyal minions — they have iStuff up the yin-yang. They judge things by polish, which is helpful because if the technicians did things their way, the most esthetic products would be wrapped in duct tape.

However, without the technicians, there’d be no useful technology to pretty up. I’ve never understood where the esthete thinks gizmos come from.

Jobs knew where they came from: first Woz, then other pet engineers. That’s why he is where he is. Not that he’d admit it.
Jonathan Badger

The headline seems backwards. The PC gaming revolution heralded the Amiga’s death. As soon as 1) The no-name Taiwanese PC clones arrived making PCs dirt cheap rather than thousands of dollars more than an Amiga (as the real IBM and Compaq machines were) and 2) sound cards and VGA graphics became generally supported and available (both around 1988/1989), Amiga lost its competitive edge. The same thing happened in the 1990s with Silicon Graphics workstations. When I started grad school in the early 1990s, you needed a fancy SGI workstation to rotate a protein model smoothly. By 1999, you could do it on any old PC (of course today, you can even do it on an IPhone…).
Retro Brothers

Great article and great comments!

For me it was around 1994-1995 that signalled the ‘end’ for the Amiga – even though it carried on for a while afterwards.

I actually created a page called How Doom Helped To Doom The Amiga (on HubPages.com) – it was the advent of 1st person shooters that really put the final nail in the coffin of the Amiga.

If only the A1200 had been a big leap forward (a std A1200 was not THAT much better than an A500) the story could have been different. With a faster CPU and better (than AGA) graphics the Amiga could have remained the leader of the pac