Warriorisabouttodie, on Wed Mar 26, 2008 12:38 PM, said:
the reason why Mac emulators were hardware based was to accommodate the Mac Roms. I like the ST and the Amiga but if you honestly think the Amiga was not the superior platform for games, then you never used an Amiga. It hardly matters now, and regardless of which one was best, they both had some great games that are still fun to play today.
I am not sure why you had to give an explanation for the hardware based emulators but those are the best types to get by far. I will say it again, those computers were too weak to fully emulate a system via software only.
I played the Amiga before and all I am saying is that the two systems were more similar than not. Whatever great difference in the chip set that some perceived (superior I believe you said) was maybe more on paper than anything else. What you found in the store shelves was another story. The way Amiga users rave about their "chip set" you would think that any game written on the Amiga must be the most impressive for its time.
However, look at a bunch of games from various publishers and you will see this was not simply the case. Shovelware more properly describes it at times. Right off the top, I remember Amiga owners having problems with Sierra Online's Leisure Suit Larry 2 because there was not enough memory or there was some memory issue they had to resolve with only having 256K. Then when you play any Sierra Online game, they all pretty much looked and played the same whether it is on a PC, Atari ST or Commodore Amiga. Towards the end, games like King's Quest V and Space Quest IV just could not even compare to the PC version.
The same could be said about LucasArts' games from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade to Maniac Mansion and The Secret of Monkey's Island. Was there really a big difference between the 3 systems? Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (the graphics adventure) looked way worse than the PC version. The Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (action game) was so bad, I am not even going to start on that one. Why the "chip set" could not help make the Amiga version better baffles us all right?
What about arcade games? We love those games from Sega and Capcom that dominated the arcades. Try playing Out Run, ThunderBlade, Afterburner, Street Fighter, and Street Fighter 2. Honestly, the "chip set" that was supposed to run circles around the Atari ST (as another poster put it) just was not the case. With Street Fighter 2, that game was so awful, if you were buying the Amiga as a gaming computer and you paid over a thousand dollars and then you looked at the Super Nintendo or the Sega Genesis version whose systems were under $129, you may have tossed your Amiga out the window.
There were some games that were better on the Commodore 64 like Platoon. Every Amiga owners' favorite (the crown jewel) Shadow of the Beast came out for the Commodore 64 on cartridge and some C-64 owners swore it was faster (due to it being on cartridge which was obvious) and had better gameplay than the Amiga version. Let us be honest, that game has aged badly. As did most of the 16 bit games. Ever play Back to the Future Part 2? The opening intro was amazing but when you got to play the game, it was a whole different story! If you looked at the large number of bad games, you should be upset at how much you paid for this computer and what you thought you were supposed to be getting.
What is the point of this? By 1989, you could pick up an Atari 520ST in Manhattan for under $280. The money you would save from buying an Amiga could have been put towards more games, a Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, or Atari Lynx. If you picked up 10 games that were developed for both the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga, you would find that most of them were more similar than the shocking differences you were expecting to find due to the Amiga's hyped "chip set." Also, the 16-bit machines' time in the sun was just so short. They both wished they could have had the success of their 8-bit predecessors. Most people skipped these machines in the U.S. and for good reason.
Sarcasm and joking aside. The bottom line? Atari offered "Power without the price" and for the money, the Atari ST was the best value of the two computers. Plus back then, like I said on an earlier post, most people knew and understood that the world ran on PCs, the schools on Apple and games on Atari. Commodore did not want to be known as a gaming computer so it is ironic most here wants to think of it as a gaming computer first before anything else. Few people knew that the Amiga could do some special effects/editing work but so could the Atari ST as well (Genlock was available on the ST as an external add on). At least with the Atari ST you could point to its contribution in the music industry in a big way.
In the end, we are talking about this in an Atari dedicated website and Atari is the biggest name in the classic/retro world period. Long live Atari!
Edited by TheGreatPW, Thu Mar 27, 2008 1:57 AM.
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but look at this way, Atari must have won the argument because we are not debating this on a Amiga or TI99 4/A website right? Honestly, how many Amiga websites do you go to? LOL Just kidding you Amiga owners!
