By Michael Webb, Editor-in-Chief, 103165.3700@compuserve.com
Certainly, most people who have been involved with Amigas for any number of years remember that there has been a long-standing focus on games. When new, the Amiga had previously unheard-of multimedia (well before the term was so thoroughly hyped) capabilities. Although the Amiga also had significant power as a business or home computer, Commodore couldn't seem to shake the notion that the Amiga was a games machine. Certainly pulling your A500 out of the closet and hooking it up to a TV wasn't unlike what many people had been doing a number of years earlier with their Atari consoles; but certainly a "box" like the A1000 or a "big box" like the A2000 wasn't so convenient for carting around. It got to the point where some naysayers declared the CD32 to be Commodore's downfall, in effect a blatant admission to the long-standing accusations. Well, the myths perpetuated...and in the meantime, the Amiga thrived on it; as many people discovered, a machine that could play serious games could also run serious multimedia software.
But as it turned out, professionals and amateurs alike would often close their Video, Rendering, Word Processing, Music, or DTP app at the end of the day, and pull out a copy of their favorite game. The gaming experience has always been a part of the Amiga's legacy. Today, the same people who once criticized the Amiga (perhaps more out of jealousy than legitimate disdain) for being a "Games Machine" are out buying Mega-Pentium Windows-Monger PC's...maybe for their work, but in many cases an ulterior motive is to play the latest polygon-cranking 3d free scrolling virtual reality thingie at a tolerable speed.
Now, the current batch of Amigas may balk a little at the notion of running Quake or Descent in 640x480 pixels with full 24-bit color, but they are clearly holding up remarkably well, evidenced by a continuing flood of new games, both commercial and public domain. Charles Jefts, our Games Editor, will be exploring this in greater depth in future issues...but for now, we're looking back -- back to when less was more, when we thought our older Amigas were unquestionably the hottest machines around for playing heavy-duty game software. And they were.
It's remarkable to think how much has changed. How much, for instance, the 68030 outstrips the 68000. And it is remarkable to consider how our perceptions have changed. How, for instance, a 68030 is considered an absolute minimum for a good lot of software. Well, regardless of how far current technology is ahead of 1985's, we should remember that the Amiga was truly top-of-the-line at the time. It was a finely-tuned machine with the very latest in a lot of technology, at least at the consumer level.
Yes, the 68000 had been around since the late 1970's...in mainframes...and had been introduced in the Macintosh a year earlier. The whole concept of coprocessors, however, was relatively new to this field of computing. Notice that the Amiga was equipped with several coprocessors right off the bat, although we sometimes hesitate to think of them as such. The copper is by name and function a coprocessor, although it has shown up most often in the unimpressive (at least today) role of letting you drag one screen down in order to see the one behind it. The blitter, by definition a DMA apparatus, had truly awesome coprocessing power. The 68000 was the top of the line in such a market, and here were two pieces of hardware that could run circles around it for certain tasks, particularly in reference to graphics, video,...and games. There were, of couse, a number of other pieces of hardware that also processed various forms of data concurrently to the CPU, including sound, video output, disk and serial I/O...
The general idea was that no matter how much things have changed, the Amiga was built for ultimate speed and efficiency. It was more finely-tuned than just about any machine on the market, even today...and THAT is what truly gave it its edge for playing high-powered games -- and also part of the reason why it continues to survive despite having gone so long with no development.
People can say that the 680x0 series isn't keeping up with the 80x86 series (which isn't really true yet...the 68060 is no dog), and the the current custom chipset is not keeping up, but critics tread lightly around the Amiga's OS. It was designed from the ground up to be multitasking and user-friendly, not to mention fast and efficient. In addition, it has only gotten faster, more efficient, and more powerful as it has matured. Those two things together cannot be said of any other platform. It was designed to use as little memory as possible, to provide as powerful an environment for software to run as possible, and to make it as easy and convenient as possible for the user to access it. And while Amiga OS 3.1 may not quite run on a 256K Amiga 1000, it comes a lot closer than Windows 95 to doing so.
Isn't it wonderful how advances in computing always end up trickling down to the games market? Well, everything that made AmigaDOS so ideal for running the latest in powerful applications also made it great for running games. The multitasking enabled one process to launch a whole set of others to handle various tasks smoothly...and there's a lot going on in a game. On the other hand, AmigaDOS could be totally disabled for complete access to the computer's awesome hardware (although this ability was unfortunately used WAY too much by early game programmers).
But AmigaDOS provided quite a bit to any programmers, particularly games ones. Libraries of graphics, video, and sound routines simplified and standardized such functions. Today, we may consider what was there to be insufficient, but taken in the light of the standards available at the time (and up through very recent times, in fact) it is quite impressive.
Amiga game developers reached many milestones in the early years in the areas of 3D games (particularly flight sims...yes, there WAS 3D before Doom if anybody remembers), role-playing games, and arcade classics (with some newer arcade hits too). Shoot 'em ups, driving games, chess games...the list goes on. Anybody who was involved with the Amiga community at the time is likely to have run across a number of such games.
Well, I've been around here since 1987, and have collected somewhat of a games arsenal over the years. Many of them won't run on my Amiga in its current state, but I with DKB's MultiStart II board, I can go between Amiga OS 3.1 and AmigaDOS 1.3 at will.
Over the next few months, I will be using this introduction as a springboard, and will "review" some older Amiga gaming classics. It will allow us to relive the "Good Old Days" somewhat, and to re-experience the excitement and enthusiasm of such times.
In times of desperation, you can look upon the past for inspiration. If we are to move forward, we must remember, and value, everything that brought us to where we are now.
And who knows...you may be surprised to recall just how good the games were...