Untamoi said: @MikeB: While C64 was a huge success, Amiga was a huge disappointment in sales. C64 sold 30 million while Amiga (all models included) only sold 6 million worldwide. Amiga only sold decently in Europe and even there it never sold even half as much as C64.

 

That's correct in terms of total sales, for example despite heavy use of hollywood and TV operators, etc in the United States, just in Italy alone more Amigas were sold than for the US as a whole.

For professional use the Amiga was priced as the Ferrari amongst available computers of the time (much unlike the C64) and Commodore generated good profits from this without changing the basic design much over the years.

The most important markets for the Amiga were the United Kingdom and Germany with regard to gaming, about 1.7 million sales in Germany and 1.8 million for the UK. Hence most of the thousands of Amiga games were made in Europe.

totalwar23 said: Yes, we have. You're apparently desperate to prove that the PS3 is superior in every way that you're willing to dig up old debates about long forgotten computers while forgetting that the PS3 is just a gaming console which will be replace by a succesor in 5 years time. Not to mention both HD consoles are getting their asses seriously whooped by an extremely weaker console.

The Amiga and Atari ST are not "long forgotten" and the longest serving and most popular Amiga (the A500) only lasted 4 years before being discontinued, notably shorter than the average life expectancy for a games console.

Not to mention the fact that both the Amiga and Atari ST were consistently outsold by the vastly inferior, but much cheaper C64.

Perhaps the analogy holds up after all?

 

A very funny review of Speedball 2 on the Amiga:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=wAK0OfB2P1o

Reviewer comments that the ports of this game to other platforms suck in comparison (ex-Genesis owner, someone fairly new to Amiga).

It was a wonderful little game made by the Bitmap brothers. My favorite Amiga game by them was the Chaos Engine though:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Pm-X8zmxpns

The game got a near faithful port for the Snes (although I prefer an Arcade joystick for this game) and a bit less faithful port to the MegaDrive.

RolStoppable said: MikeB said: Why? (...) Because it should remind you of what is happening today, but apparently you didn't understand what he was getting at. Some PS3 and 360 fans are debating the specs of their systems over and over again while it's an absolutely meaningless fight, because another system (Wii) is winning the market.

On the contrary, I think it was you who didn't understand what Mike B was getting at.

He was using the analogy of the Amiga vs. Atari ST to suggest that the technical superiority of the PS3 over the 360 will become increasingly apparent, just as it did with the Amiga over the ST.

It has absolutely nothing to do with the Wii, or with sales in general. It is not about which of the current consoles is the most popular, but which is the best. There are many factors in determining which console is superior. Technical specifications are one measure, popularity is not. Unless you own shares in one of the big 3, it is "winning" the market that is "an absolutely meaningless fight." Debating a consoles technical capabilities is anything but.

Not every thread is an excuse for you to try and justify your infantilism love of Nintendo.

 

@ Played_Out

Spot on!

Also for example, I did own a Commodore 64 next to a professional Amiga. But I have more fond memories of the Amiga, because it allowed me to do things not possible on other systems of the time. I could perform movie editing better and easier than I could on a PC more than a decade later, I could copy & paste my writings and charts between a paint program, spreadsheet and word processor with ease, running these applications all at once, switching back and forth without effort. I was able to play the bulk of the best games released around the time with usually well superior graphics and audio quality.

The thread wasn't really focused on sales, anyone I know who was a c64 (more sales) or Atari ST owner would happily trade his or her system for my Amiga.

@ Played_Out

To quote myself from years before the PS3 launched with regard to the Cell and PS3:

"I understand that games developers may not be too fond of the idea of having to learn new ways to write their software."

"Today single CPU solutions are dominant, thus multithreading isn't really that much of a benefit. Software developers who mainly write for single processor solutions don't like doing extra (time=money) work to get the most out of multithreading for other platforms."

"It will probably take some time before developers manage to get the most out of this platform, as has for example also been the case with the classic Amiga chipsets. The early Amiga games don't compare well to the complex graphics used by for instance game like Elfmania or Lion Heart."

The Amiga was very different from other platforms of its time (like the PS3's core architecture), most close was the Atari ST and due to a headstart and significant pricing advantage, this resulted into early multi-platform Amiga games having been designed around the ST's strongpoints while not really tapping enough the Amiga's superior custom chips and this resulted in some ST advantages for some games early on, roughly such games were about on par though.

Like the PS3, the Amiga significantly increased its install base relative to the Atari ST over time. Game developers started to more focus on the Amiga hardware, learned better ways to harvest its potential and even multi-platform games eventually became significantly better on the Amiga compared to the ST.

On the PS3 we have already seen exclusive games which are already using some of its distinguishing capabilities vs the 360. I think things will only get better from here on. I predict 1 year from now there won't be a 360 vs PS3 technical debate.

MikeB said: All the major TV networks used Amigas, video editing, titling, overlays, channel guides, etc, etc. Ironically even Atari used Amigas in the development of their Atari Lynx handheld.

Technically the Lynx was designed by Epyx, the project ws later bought by Atari

EDIT: Late to the party

 

Soleron said: The Amiga was more like a 'computer' than a 'console'. It was competing with the IBM PC compatible... and lost. No computer since the PC has quite as successful - we still use MS-DOS/Windows derived systems, x86 CPUs and for some reason PS/2 ports.

Fix.

You forget the magic word. However the best selling "single version" home omputer ever is the C64.

 

MikeB said: @ jalsonmi Mid-80's on was where the DOS based computer completely took over the market. I just stated Commodore and Atari were big names around that period 1985-1986. Note Commodore also introduced Commodore PCs since 1984, entering the PC clone market themselves (though far behind IBM, they were one of the leading PC brands). Commodore PC-1 ,PC 10, PC-10 II, PC 20, PC-30 and PC 70 (in the end it's funny to note how they themselves contributed towards digging their own grave). With regard to home usage, the c64 and then the Amiga were dominant home computer gaming platforms. Testament of this is the sheer amount of games released for these platform from 1982 to 1993 compared to PC releases. But computer gaming was especially popular in Europe, for the US the bulk turned towards the NES. PCs only became popular as a gaming platform 1993 onwards. Like I said earlier, I agree with you the release of Doom had a major impact on the PC gaming market in December 1993. Many people upgrading resulted in PCs becoming far more viable for gaming.

 

Agreed--I think I just misinterpreted what you were trying to say. PC gaming was a relatively late creation, and took off with Doom and the popularization of a few genres that specifically geared towards PCs, such as RTSes and Sim games (like Sim City 2000). I thought you were saying that gaming is what popularized the adoption of PCs over non-DOS based machines, which I disagreed with (though I no longer think you were saying that)

I still say, though, that it wasn't a specific game that really caused PCs to take over the computer gaming marker, but simply the fact that they became so damn ubiquitous that of course game developers had to follow suit and make games primarily for PC over other computer types. Hell, I remember when Mac had more of a gaming library. I mean, it's on the upswing again but for a while it was pretty barren. But I digress.

And I'm certainly Aware of Atari's brandname power. However, the Atari computers were all massive failures, and thus don't really belong/deserve to be thought of aside the C64, much less the Amiga.

Teoulas said: This thread also reminded me of the C64, Spectrum and CPC system wars back in the 8-bit home computer era. That was fun.

This thread remind me of the 3D0 vs Jaguar war.