Doom didn't kill the Amiga. Wolfenstein 3D did [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsADJa-23Sg

by mariuz • 2 years ago

88 113 2 years ago

elmerfud• 2 years ago

The Amiga was dead before a Wolfenstein 3D came out on the PC. A lot of Amiga users failed to recognize it at the time but commodore surely and truly killed that thing off by his horrible mismanagement. When Wolfenstein 3D came around it was really just shifted from keeping it on life support hoping it would awake from its coma to palliative care.

eurekin• 2 years ago

What did the management specifically do? (500 user)

RiverCrochet• 2 years ago

The Deathbed Vigil video provides a lot of interesting perspective. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaTjwo1ywcI

MalphasWats• 2 years ago

in-fighting, power struggles & empire building. Then fell into bankruptcy.

msh2• 2 years ago

They failed to evolve their product while the competition was rapidly improving. The orginal amiga was leaps in front of anything thing else you could get at remotely the same price point, for many features that mattered to games.

But then they only made the smallest incremental improvements to the hardware until they launched the AGA chipset with the A1200 and A4000 which was too little too late. Had the amiga improved at the same rate as consoles or dos PC's they might have had a chance.

The OS (mostly workbench) also did not see any big improvements over its lifetime.

rongenre• 2 years ago

I had an A1000 - even worked in high school at a Commodore/Amiga dealer.

What they really didn't understand is that software sells hardware: The OS was so far ahead, but in terms of basic productivity software? Even the Mac was ahead.

And [IMO] markets can maintain a leader and one strong competitor. But just one. So it became PC/Mac throughout the 90's on the desktop.

timbit4214• 2 years ago

Commodore's bankruptcy was primarily driven by Irving Gould to enrich himself. Mehdi Ali was his henchman. They pulled funding from R&D, preventing the chipset from keeping up with the industry.

idkdotcom• 2 years ago

As a proud commodore Amiga 500 owner starting in 1990 I agree.

When it was released in 1985, the Amiga was at least 5 years ahead of its time when it came to the graphics and sound technology. I don't care about angering Apple bots, but the capabilities of the Mac paled in comparison.

The mismanagement at Commodore that led to the fall of the company is well documented.

For me personally, as a tech professional, the lesson of the episode is clear: superior technology alone is not a guarantee of business success.

The technology companies are high performing in both technology and business. The most clear example of what I mean is NVIDIA that was launched when Commodore was still alive.

wccrawford5• 2 years ago

My parents called this before Wolfenstein even came out, though they did it with the Commodore 64 and 128. I really wanted a 128, and they insisted on an IBM compatible instead.

I was devastated at the time, but they were 100% correct in hindsight.

tfandango• 2 years ago

Wow same here. My Dad could see which way the wind was blowing, I guess. It started my obsession with Sierra games though.

billyjobob3• 2 years ago

Your parents were wrong. Assuming you wanted to play games as well as run productivity software, the C128 was far superior to any PC in 1985. Yes the PC would eventually catch up in the 90s, but the C128 was discontinued by then.

tored• 2 years ago

I had a Commodore 64 that I had bought with my own money, but my friend (rather his dad) had a Commodore 128 with a floppy drive. I was so impressed but also extremely jealous. My brother though bought a PC.

Clubber• 2 years ago

My experience is almost identical. I had a Vic20, C64, C128 and then an A1000 as a kid, then my parents bought a 286 AT 10MHZ with a 20MB HDD and everything changed. They were absolutely right. Had I stuck with Commodore instead of switching in 10th grade, I would have been way behind.

forinti2• 2 years ago

My family had a Beeb with 128KB of RAM. I thought XTs were awful. Sure, they had more RAM, but for our use cases (games and word processing), it wasn't really necessary. I even learnt Pascal on it.

Things definitely changed with 386s and Windows.

glonq• 2 years ago

I moved from an 8-bit Atari to a CGA IBM XT clone. This was both a step forwards and a step backwards. It wasn't until I upgraded to a 386SX PC with VGA and a SoundBlaster that I could totally retire the Atari.

karmakaze• 2 years ago

For PC games Commander Keen running on an EGA display was already enough for PC gaming to be good enough for me.

I remember how excited I was on my Atari 8-bit awaiting the production of Amiga Lorraine. By the time it came out I think I was less excited, and happy enough with my monochrome Atari ST. The Amiga would certainly have been more fun, but I was glad to have a machine that could run a (Megamax) C compiler. It helped that I got some beta software and dev docs through a connection. The Lorraine was supposed to have it all, graphics+sound+MIDI but the last part went to the ST instead.

It sure was weird when Commodore and Atari made PC-compatibles--the end of an era. In the late 80s I'd already moved past the Atari, Amiga, and even DOS/Windows, being all excited running all versions of OS/2 (until that failed too), but hey we got OS/2 3.0 (aka NT).

KingOfCoders• 2 years ago

I owned an Amiga 4k/040 (after an A500, later with a Retina Z3) at the time and was blown away by Wolfenstein that I played on the 386 (?) of the dad of a friend.

surfingdino• 2 years ago

I'd also add 3DStudio to the list of assassins. It was not even close to LightWave 3D, but it did not require a Video Toaster card and it ran on commodity PC hardware. Amiga never got software package that could outcompete Apple in the graphics, DTP departments either. Add to that the dead-end that was AmigaOS as well.

Grustaf3• 2 years ago

Commodores monumental incompetence killed the Amiga. It would have been comical if it wasn’t so sad.

timbit4214• 2 years ago

It wasn't entirely incompetence. Commodore marketing was incompetent but the bankruptcy was primarily driven by Irving Gould to enrich himself. Mehdi Ali was his henchman. They pulled funding from R&D, preventing the chipset from keeping up with the industry.

Grustaf3• 2 years ago

Well I would include the blatant self-enrichment in incompetence, but perhaps that is too charitable

runjake• 2 years ago

At least from my standpoint, this is completely true. I was hardcore Amiga (AmigaOS and Amiga MINIX) up until 1992 and then Wolfenstein 3D came out and it got me to buy a PC. The OS experience was comparatively terrible, but that game was so good in its day.

I would agree with the other poster that, as far as being a living product, the Amiga was already dead, but as a usable platform, there was still a very helpful, very large community.

tombert5• 2 years ago

People on here have provided good reasons to why the Amiga failed, and I don't really dispute any of them, but it still makes me very sad.

I feel like there was a roughly three year period where Amiga really was better than all the competition. AmigaOS was really impressive, the hardware was cheaper and more capable than Apples, and categorically better than whatever Microsoft was doing. It feels like the management at Commodore didn't really realize the head start that they had; it appears that instead of continuing to grow the OS, they just were happy enough enough keep things business-as-usual and eventually Apple and Microsoft caught up.

That all makes enough sense, but I feel like there exists an alternate universe where Commodore was competently managed, and in 2024 we are all running Commodore machines instead of Apple.

amiga0613472• 2 years ago

I owned an Amiga 500 but had to switch to a PC when I saw the writing on the wall. For many years it was almost painful to think about the lost opportunity the world missed out on. If they had managed the platform better, we would probably see much better computers and operating systems sooner due to the increased competition.

I remember how primitive the PC looked compared to the Amiga. It was not until Windows 95 that I felt that the PC had caught up with Amiga. It would probably be hard to compete with the PC in the office, but I feel it could have competed with Apple to provide an affordable alternative for the home. Having 3 viable platforms would have "forced" software developers to think cross platform, like they often do today.

tombert5• 2 years ago

Yeah, though people have explained to me that there were things in the Amiga that kind of "stayed primitive". While I think it's insanely cool how early they got preemptive multitasking, something that I think hurt them was the fact that by-design it didn't really support any kind of protected memory.

The Amiga was a bit before my time, sadly, so I'm getting Wikipedia-depth knowledge of this; my dad had one when I was very young but all I ever used it for was playing games. Still, it's easy to look back at these things and feel like things should have been different; particularly I feel like Microsoft got way more slack than it should have. DOS, which felt really primitive by the early 90s, still seemed to be more-or-less standard until Windows 95.

erickhill2• 2 years ago

By the early 90s the design and graphics-focused software for color Macintosh systems was light years better than Amiga. And the high-end video modes on Macs simply worked out of the box. If you needed a Gen-locked system for your local TV station, sure - get an Amiga. Ironically the custom chips that made the Amiga so special and a natural fit for broadcast design is also what killed its ability to use interlaced video modes that didn't make your eyes bleed or require special hardware. Most folks by then didn't want to learn how to make the Amiga "do all the same things". They wanted to go to the store, buy a computer that worked like the ones at school or work and use it. Period.

I have a Quadra 700 (same era as the Amiga 3000, which I also have) that can run circles around the 3000 with far less power or needed upgrades. For example by adding a decent video card the Q700 can output to dual monitors, each running their own resolutions and color depths - while multi-tasking. I can install triple-A CD-based software titles (like Photoshop or Illustrator or Pagemaker or MS Word) and on and on. The tools on Amiga pale in comparison even while the hardware was cool. In the 80s the Amiga was magical. By 1992 the way it seemingly just stood still was tragic.

As previously stated, high-quality print had become a "killer app" and Amiga simply didn't get the same support. And a lot of this had to do with their native video modes.

I can throw video cards and processor cards at the Amiga and make it a much more technically impressive machine. But if I want to run A+ professional software on it I basically need to run a Mac emulator.

As the video points out, the gaming market by '92 was moving on in the US. For 2D the SNES and Genesis took over. For 3D the PC arms race had begun, and there was no looking back.

Gormo3• 2 years ago

It was not until Windows 95 that I felt that the PC had caught up with Amiga.

By the early '90s, new DOS PCs had VGA and Sound Blaster cards as standard equipment, and were usually also including Windows 3.x. That put the typical PC clone on par with Amiga for most home/office use cases, especially including gaming.

It would probably be hard to compete with the PC in the office, but I feel it could have competed with Apple to provide an affordable alternative for the home.

Apple didn't have much of a foothold in the home at this point -- their bread-and-butter market was schools, and they were just beginning to get a foothold in the design and DTP market -- and Apple itself was in deep trouble for similar reasons to Commodore.

The fact that IBM PCs and compatibles had become the de facto standard for business computing is one of the exact reasons why Apple, Atari, and Commodore started losing market share in the early '90s.

If you could buy a single machine that's good for both business and gaming --- one that runs Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, Wolfenstein 3D, and King's Quest V -- perfectly, why would you pay even more for a proprietary platform that only excelled at one set of use cases at the expense of the other?

This was the era of convergence between home and office computing, and the fact that IBM-compatibles dominated the office market, the capabilities of PCs had reached near-parity with the Amiga, and the PC was an open architecture with a large ecosystem of OEMs all competing with each other and driving prices down, spelled doom for any non-x86 computing platform by the mid-'90s.

api• 2 years ago

Commodore could have been Apple if it had been better run.

tombert5• 2 years ago

Yep, no argument here! Commodore computers were, for a time, considerably cheaper and more capable than what Apple was selling.

fidotron3• 2 years ago

I think this Amiga version of history ignores what Apple was good at by the late 80s: DTP. We collectively seem to have forgotten what a huge deal this was, laser printing, postscript etc. It genuinely overhauled the entire publishing industry, not entirely for the better either.

By the mid 90s Microsoft were persuading a lot of people WinNT would displace Apple in publishing, but that never quite worked out how they intended either. (This is one of the reasons Xara was developed on the PC and not the Mac, which with hindsight was a big mistake).

tombert5• 2 years ago

Fair enough; I guess I'm applying a 2024 lens to a 1988 problem. We don't print a lot anymore, but that I will acknowledge that that was really really important back in the 80s and 90s.

pdoege• 2 years ago

The Amiga had good DTP software and hardware at the time. I used them for large format printing. They were initially faster and much cheaper than the Apple solutions.

Once the Quadra’s came out it was all over.

roryirvine• 2 years ago

Only briefly. Before about 1988, Unix systems (Interleaf and Frame) were still clear leaders, and then Apple began to stumble from around 1990 - the IIfx was the top of the line for a looong time, and soon looked very dated compared to the 486-based systems selling for a quarter of the price.

But, yeah, for those couple of years the combination of the Mac II, Laserwriter II, and Ready Set Go / Pagemaker / Quark was king. The Amiga never really had a chance to gain a foothold.

timbit4214• 2 years ago

The engineers knew what they had. Marketing failed to market it properly because they didn't understand what they had. Management, as you said, also didn't understand what they had. Thomas Rattigan understood and started the A500 and A2000 projects. Then, head of the board, Irving Gould, fired him.

The root of Commodore' demise goes back to the 1960's when Jack Tramiel let Irving Gould invest to keep Commodore from going bankrupt after Jack made some bad business deals. Without that mistake, Irving Gould wouldn't have caused Jack to leave by preventing Jack's sons from entering management, and wouldn't have pushed out Rattigan or cut R&D which prevented the Amiga chipset from keeping ahead of the industry.

chuckadams3• 2 years ago

Gould made Commodore his own personal piggy bank, but under Tramiel I have a hard time seeing Commodore ever purchasing Amiga in the first place. Tramiel's double-dealing and brazen nepotism didn't do Commodore (or Atari) any favors either.

timcobb• 2 years ago

I often wonder why these days, Doom looms so large over Wolf3D... at the time, Wolfenstein seemed nearly as big as Doom.

timbit4214• 2 years ago

Neither impressed me. Quake did.

sumtechguy• 2 years ago

The hype on usenet for DOOM was quite the thing to behold. It was super hyped because of Wolfenstein was so interesting. It even spawned two different usenet FAQs to track the madness. Wolf was also the first game I found out about motion sickness.

pseudalopex2• 2 years ago

Did it? People called FPS games Doom clones for several years. Not Wolf3D clones.

giantrobot• 2 years ago

I think the biggest reason is just the difference in exposure. Doom had a ton of pre-release because of Wolf3D but then had a buzz of its own. PC sales had also been steadily increasing so just in the time between the two games there were more PCs in consumer hands and pretty much all of them were capable of playing Doom. There were just more instances of Doom running than Wolf3D.

Another aspect is Doom as an engine had longer legs. It got an official sequel not a year after its release as well as official "clones" in the form of Hexen. Hexen's own box advertised its relationship with Doom.

cowmix2• 2 years ago

As someone who followed the development of the Amiga and then bought the Amiga 1000 (plus everything else I could afford with my paper route earnings) the first day it was available -- I do NOT yearn to relive those days. I loved it then and as documented everywhere, it was a head of its time. However, the instability of software and how much Commodore didn't iterate on the technology -- that's what killed the Amiga. I still have PTSD from all the insane amount of crashing and rebooting my setup did.

timbit4214• 2 years ago

My Amigas rarely crashed. When an app crashed, I stopped using it.

cowmix2• 2 years ago

VideoScape 3D and Sculpt 4D where my bread and butter at the time. Although anything would crash.

One day I'll rip and upload a video I made in the late 80s of when I was typing up a chemistry lab report. My Amiga was producing so many guru meditation errors I had my VCR record my typing (in real-time) so I had proof that I did the report. I handed in a draft of the report and a VHS tape.

snvzz3• 2 years ago

A1000 era would be wb1.0/1.1 era.

Before 1.2, AmigaOS was very unstable.

pornel• 2 years ago

Indeed, AmigaOS despite being ahead of its time in the '80s, was doomed to lose by the end of the '90s.

The biggest problem was that Amiga did not have an MMU until very late, and the OS has been designed for unprotected shared memory space. It was crashy, with fragmenting leaky memory, and it could not support fork(). Later AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS struggled to add full process isolation.

In retrospect, Microsoft has been prescient in adding virtual memory to 9x, and incredibly successful in switching to the NT kernel. AmigaOS would have needed the same to survive, instead of just sitting on their multitasking-a-decade-before-Windows laurels.

pseudalopex2• 2 years ago

In retrospect, Microsoft has been prescient in adding virtual memory to 9x

Did you mean protected memory? Didn't OS/2 have both earlier?

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

Related from a few months ago:

How Doom didn't kill the Amiga

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39246825

detritus• 2 years ago

For me it was Comanche ('92) that spelt out the demise of my beloved Amiga. I had a floppy disk demo that I played on my father's crappy, crappy PC at work and it completely destroyed anything you could achieve on the Amiga.

cess11• 2 years ago

I was a kid back then but as far as I understood the waves of computing DOS and Windows 3.0 was dominant in office settings at least a couple of years before Wolfenstein 3D was released, and such machines trickled into people's homes over those years and became part-time gaming stations and created pretty solid expectations in adults about how a computer should work and what to buy for their kids.

poulpy123• 2 years ago

I think that a good part of that killed Amiga and Atari was the fact that IBM PC were the "serious" computers, the one you bought for work, and the Amiga and Atari were less considered. I know that they had some success in their niche like music and publishing for Atari, and graphism and design for amiga, I even saw Atari on a warship. But at the end most of the money at the time was made in a professional setting, and neither Atari or Amiga managed to get a sizable part of it.

I regret it because passing from GEM to DOS really felt a step backward

timbit4214• 2 years ago

There were two reasons the IBM PC clones became dominant. The smaller reason is because IBM created it. The bigger reason is because everything but the BIOS was off-the-shelf parts and easy to copy. Apple had the same problem with Apple II clones where only a couple of companies managed to not lose when sued by Apple. IBM couldn't sue Compaq and others for their clean room BIOS replacements.

If the IBM PC had custom chips, it would not have been easy, or even possible, to clone and would have remained an IBM-only product. If that had been the case, I suspect CP/M and GEM would have won out and Microsoft would be much smaller and still producing language compilers today. The only question is, which version of CP/M would have won out? I think Motorola's 68K series would have won over Intel's x86 series.

NikkiA• 2 years ago

The problem with motorola winning the 80s was that no matter what they did, they were facing the same problem in the 90s, the 88k was going to flop hard. And early PowerPC would still have been 'so so' compared to the Pentium and onwards.

That said, would the Pentium have happened without the PC industry - everything up to the 486 would likely have continued to develop as it did, even without the PC as they were strong embedded chips too.

tverbeure2• 2 years ago

I remember reading magazines when the Amiga 1000 was introduced, and even then the general conclusion was: amazing hardware, but doesn’t run PC software.

tibbydudeza• 2 years ago

Intel 486DX2 along with faster VGA cards using the VLB (VESA Local Bus) simply clobbered the Amiga and it's ECS.

JanSolo• 2 years ago

The home-computer wars of the 1990s have always confused me. There's seems to be a kind of tribal-allegiance that computer-buyers participated in when they became computer-owners. I've never understood why it had to be PC vs Amiga or Nintendo vs Sega or whatever. My best guess is that a lot of the buyers were young kids who did'nt have the maturity yet to see the world in a more flexible way. I was certainly guilty of that back when I was a teen.

weaksauce• 2 years ago

computers were expensive and so was the software you ran on it. it was an investment and switching was starting from zero.

mmcgaha• 2 years ago

I think it was mostly because $1000 items were a bit harder to come by back then so kids would do a lot of reading and day dreaming before getting enough cash to pull the trigger. By the time they could actually afford a computer/monitor/printer/software they had talked themselves into how great the product was.

timbit4214• 2 years ago

It was because there was a lot of difference between the systems then, unlike today where they are all the same technology with a different sticker on the front of the case.

If you cared about games, the system you bought would be completely different than if you cared about business.

In the 8-bit era, if you wanted business you got a CP/M system with 80x24 text. If you wanted games, you got an Atari 800 or Commodore 64 with colors, hardware scrolling and sprites.

In the 16-bit era, there was the IBM PC for business, the Mac for people who wanted ease of use, the Amiga for games, 4096 color graphics and stereo sound, and the Atari ST (512 colors, mono sound) if you couldn't afford an Amiga. That said, they could all do games but obviously some were better than others, and they could all do business, but the perception was that game systems weren't good at business so business apps weren't made available.

chuckadams3• 2 years ago

What you said, but add that it was all brand spanking new to most people at the time. Novelty creates excitement, excitement creates cult brands.

jeffnappi• 2 years ago

Many things were platform specific at that time. You didn't have major game titles or business applications widely available across platforms. Folks who used PCs/Apple/etc at work/school were more likely to buy similar for the family at home etc.

In my family I get the impression we chose our home computers based on merit/value. That meant starting with the commodore 128 in the mid 80s and led to my brother buying an Amiga 1000 [with his hard earned teenage burger king min wage $] in 1987.

In the 90s the advent of Windows 3.1 running on cheap PC clones left Commodore in the dust. The value for the money shifted to PC, even if it was inferior at first.

It was really sad that Amiga did not continue to innovate - the hardware was astonishing which can be seen by looking at the demo scene output and games front he time relative to what was possible on other platforms.

erickhill2• 2 years ago

Here we go again. Someone flagging a post they don't like without rhyme or reason. A post that the community is obviously passionate about and enjoying to share their experiences and recollections. How annoying.

mattgrice• 2 years ago

I feel like Amiga was never really alive in the US. I never knew anyone who owned one, or a 520st. Schools were almost exclusively Apple IIe, later some IIgs before Mac SE and LC. And of course PC. IIgs was more comparable to a Commodore 128 but it ran all the Apple II software. Sometimes you'd see a Mac II or SE/30 in an administrator's office running a screensaver.

ZFH2• 2 years ago

It's one of those rare cases where being in the US or Europe gives an uniquely skewed perspective.

It's astonishing to think that the Amiga hardware was done in 1984 and the A1000 came out in 1985 - the same year the NES released in the US! It took Nintendo until 1991 to come up with something roughly comparable power-wise.

From what I understand in the US the Amiga slowly petered out without never truly taking off. In Europe the A1000 never was a thing, but we had four years of the press talking about this mythical monster of a machine and its custom chipset. Then in 1989/90 all of a sudden everyone bought A500s to play Kick Off and Speedball II. That 89/92 period was glorious.

At least in southern Europe Wolfenstein wasn't regarded as a killer app at all, it barely made an impact. Doom and Wing Commander most definitely were, though.

nopakos• 2 years ago

For another data point, as kids in Greece we made fun of our friend who first switched to a PC, (we had Atari STs). Even after he got a Sound Blaster and a VGA card we still had better games like Kick Off and Dungeon Master. But one day he invited us to his house and showed as Wolfenstein. I distinctly remember the feeling. It was over!

timbit4214• 2 years ago

Over half of the Amigas sold worldwide were the 500 model and, in Europe, most people with an Amiga had the 500 or 1200 at home for gaming so you would see it when you visited.

The Amiga was less popular in the US and used more for graphics, sound and video for TV and movies on the 1000, 2000, 3000 and 4000, and with the Video Toaster, but you wouldn't see one as often when you visited people at home.

aixpert• 2 years ago

Another thing that killed the amiga was it's lack of hackability and approachability. On the C64 you could start writing code right away, and instantly go into assembly with an extension

timbit4214• 2 years ago

What extension are you referring to? It wasn't anything that came with the computer.

The Amiga, and none of the other 16-bit systems had an assembler built in either. They had interpreted BASICs just like the 8-bit systems, except on disk instead of in ROM.

ChainOfFools3• 2 years ago

MS-DOS had debug.com built in from 1.0 onwards.

a:\DEBUG < FOO.ASM

-a

(press enter until you reach the end of your source code at whatever address)

(enter a blank opcode to mark end of assembly range)

-g =100

voila, your (naturally, bug-free, right?) code assembles and runs.

It's living about as close to the land as you can get when it comes to an assembler, but it did the job.

from ms-dos 2.0 onwards debug was apparently re-entrant and could read its own binary from disk, "un"assemble it, assemble it again, and run another instance of itself from inside itself. When I first discovered this at 12 or so It felt I stumbled across a tiny doorway to some alternate dimension.

snakeyjake• 2 years ago

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills because the Amiga was an architectural nightmare but everyone pretends to love it.

There were multiple types of RAM, and not like the PC's conventional/extended/enhanced or whatever there were multiple PHYSICAL types of RAM and upgrading one over the other might make it so upgrade cards don't work, or are slower, or have incompatibility issues.

When I upgraded the video card in my A2000 to a picasso-something I had to have three different drivers and switch between them because AmigaOS didn't have the concept of "a driver" like Mac and PC. One operating mode for old amiga programs hard-coded to OCS, one mode for compatibility with later amiga standards, and one mode for card-specific high-res/high-color modes for pro apps.

How can you tell which mode you have to use? Just do things until it crashes and then guess that the video mode was the culprit and switch modes until one works, of course!

I installed too much of one kind of ram so the address space of the ram expansion board overran into the space for other zorro-ii slots which switched my graphics card into a slower mode unless I disabled some ram. Was this documented, either by the board manufacturer or Commodore? No. Did I find out on a random BBS while complaining about how my fancy new graphics card was so slow? Yes.

The 68000 in my A2000 was slow the day it was introduced so a couple of months later I forked out for an accelerator card and because everything was so tightly integrated with the original CPU and the amiga solution to everything seemed to be "just hang it off the CPU bus and hard code it to the timing of the original CPU" things would be blazing fast until they hit some kind of rarely-used Paula/Denise/Agnus function that HAD to occur at 7 MHz and crashed at which time I had to turn the A2000 off, flip a toggle switch I drilled into the back of the case, reboot and re-do what I was doing at the original speed.

But yeah, the last time I turned on my A2000, which I still have, (except to play Lemmings or pull some files off its hard drive) was around the time that Wolfenstein 3D came out.

edit: also, until its dying day Commodore refused to even acknowledge that computer networking existed. It was easier to share files and resources between an Apple II and a PC over a network than it was to share files and resources between two Amigas.

timbit4214• 2 years ago

You are not taking crazy pills. You just had a bad experience because you bought a low quality accelerator and video card for your Amiga.

The different types of RAM were part of the reason the Amiga was so powerful and was a feature, not a flaw. The fast RAM was only used by the CPU so it could run faster without the custom chips slowing the CPU. Because the CPU mostly used the fast RAM, the custom chips weren't slowed down by the CPU. This effectively made the data bus nearly twice as fast.

By the time custom graphic cards were coming for the Amiga, people were just trying to keep up with the IBM PC. Those video cards weren't designed to match the architecture of the system. That's not the Amiga's fault, but a fault of those aftermarket video cards. That is also why you had problems with RAM overlapping. I never used those cards and had no problems.

If you bought an IBM PC at 4.77 MHz and put a 286 accelerator in it, it would be hobbled too. If you wanted more speed, you should have gotten the Amiga 3000 in 1990 with a fully 32-bit 68030 @ 25 MHz with 32-bit RAM, like I did, and I never had to deal with crashes and it was faster than your accelerator.

I don't know how you can say Commodore refused to acknowledge that computer networking existed when they had released the A2065 Ethernet card for the A2000. Few people had LANs at home back then so it was mostly used in businesses.

It sounds to me like you made a number of bad purchase decisions and ended up with a mess of your own making. Sure there were good quality accelerators and video cards but apparently you didn't buy those ones or didn't want to wait for the Amiga 3000.

Doom didn't kill the Amiga. Wolfenstein 3D did [video]

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