The big advantage we had on Atari and Amiga was that the 68000 could address more than 640K without a sweat. PC's had this annoying limit up until the 90s and the complexity that it introduced was mind blowing (EMM, EMS, XMS etc.).
In 87 when I was student at University, I managed to write all my sofware on the Mega ST2 and print my papers with Signum! on my 9 pin matrix printer in a quality that my PC colleagues were absolutely jealous of. As said, the advantage was then quickly lost even if I still could use my 1991 acquiered TT up until the mid 90. But by then, the PC was indeed already in another category (CD-ROM, SVGA, Soundcards, Win95 and/or NT or OS/2, beginning of Linux etc.). Our poor niches computer couldn't follow against the sheer mass of the market.
> PC's had this annoying limit up until the 90s and the complexity that it introduced was mind blowing (EMM, EMS, XMS etc.).
Competent enough people on both ends, end-users and programmers alike, simply worked around that. In the end, it still allowed for a platform of industry-leading applications and games, many of them not available on Amigas or Ataris.
You very much do. It's like 3D-workstations and other pro-applications were not a competitive thing for PCs in the Eighties.
> If you were in East Germany at the time, then you wouldn’t have had an accurate view of what was happening in the industry.
You need to connect the dots for a change, friend. I only brought it up to illustrate that you Westerners had a significant headstart; the tech I and most of my peers were fumbling around with beginning in the Nineties was already, parse this slowly please, available to YOU in the Eighties! Geddit?
See, in Central Europe, the Amiga 500 came out only in May '87. In October, the US and UK followed suit. The first reliable Amiga for the pro market, the A2000, made its debut in March 1987. What does that mean? First comparison timepoints: Christmas sales 1987 as well as 1988 (these two numbers are part of what we call "the Eighties"). With the A1000 and the STs, as well as all the 8-bitters, one needs to dial back to Christmas '85 (520) and '86 (1040), not accounting for more affluent early adopters buying systems closer to the release date.
So! What is really possible at these timepoints in the PC world (e. g. 386DX, VGA, Adlib, MT-32, ...), what in the Atari- and Amiga-eco systems? What would be economically sound for what type of customer, in what markets? What software was available?
Nah, I think my point stands. As great as the Atari and Amiga home computers and pro models were, these eco-systems, as such, definitely did not have the massive advantage in "all-inclusive" capabilities that is so often ascribed to them.
> You very much do. It's like 3D-workstations and other pro-applications were not a competitive thing for PCs in the Eighties.
I never said anything about 3D workstations in the 80s.
I said 3D games were the tipping point where the envy flipped from PC->Amiga to Amiga->PC.
And that has nothing to do with personal preference.
> You need to connect the dots for a change, friend. I only brought it up to illustrate that you Westerners had a significant headstart; the tech I and most of my peers were fumbling around with beginning in the Nineties was already, parse this slowly please, available to YOU in the Eighties! Geddit?
I got your point the first time. However you keep conflating personal experience with technology.
Just because you didn’t have access to an Amiga 500 it doesn’t mean PCs were superior technology in the 80s. It just means your experience isn’t inclusive. Literally just that and nothing technical.
this is the crux of your disagreement: Just because you weren’t able to experience the competition in the 80s doesn’t mean it somehow didn’t exist.
> As great as the Atari and Amiga home computers and pro models were, these eco-systems, as such, definitely did not have the massive advantage in "all-inclusive" capabilities that is so often ascribed to them.
You’re making a strawman argument here.
We are simply comparing 80s home computers. In the 80s, PCs were several steps behind the competition. In general and against many common benchmarks and UX metrics.
We aren’t talking about $10,000 top of the line workstations against “pro” STs, we’re talking about a like-for-like in terms of home computers and price points.
PCs were much more upgradable. But then you could upgrade Amigas and STs too if you wanted. However PCs were the better option if you wanted something where you could define your own spec. Albeit this still wasn’t a common a thing until the late 80s. But I do agree that if you wanted the latest bleeding edge hardware then PCs were the way to go. However I’d wager you knew fewer people with $10,000 PCs than you knew with Amigas. ;)
———
Anyway, I think we’ve hit an impasse. You’re unwilling to accept that your experience is flawed and my unwillingness to accept your experience is fact.
So perhaps we should quit here before the conversation degrades.
> I never said anything about 3D workstations in the 80s.
Exactly my point. Your metric (for judging graphics capabilities) in this case was strictly preference (bias) about a set of games with a specific visual aesthetic from 1991/92 ("It wasn’t until the era of ray casting 2.5D 1st person shooter that PCs started looking better than their counterparts").
> Just because you didn’t have access to an Amiga 500 it doesn’t mean PCs were superior technology in the 80s. [...] this is the crux of your disagreement: Just because you weren’t able to experience the competition in the 80s doesn’t mean it somehow didn’t exist.
As I wrote, I got to experience Atari STs back in the day, albeit in a limited fashion. And this might come as a terrible shock to you, but people are also able to experience technology decades later and extrapolate accordingly. It's what historians (of science and technology for example) do all the time. Good lorde!
> We are simply comparing 80s home computers. In the 80s, PCs were several steps behind the competition.
Yes, until, by my estimation, 1987/88 (at a time a lot of dedicated PC-gaming magazines got off the ground as well). Strictly on technological grounds, i. e. on many technological but also economical metrics, as contextualized by real-world use cases across whole industries and economies in many nations.
The big deal about these home computers was indeed the "bang for the buck" mantra. This is, at least as far as I'm concerned, completely indisputable. But when evaluating whole eco systems against each other, a 386 workstation from 1987 is as much part of that equation as an Amiga 2000 workstation as XT-grade Europlastik from Schneider as an Amiga 500 or an Atari ST. That's not hard to comprehend.
> However I’d wager you knew fewer people with $10,000 PCs than you knew with Amigas. ;)
Well, the first Amiga I ever saw was an A2000 in a yearbook. And "in the flesh"? 2007, at a demoscene thing. PCs, incl. graphics workstations (such as the used one I bought from my mentor who got himself a 486 replacement)? All around me. Even at my grandma's workplace (chemical engineering) which I was often allowed to terrorize as a kidlet, already shortly before the fall of the Iron Curtain. The STs were only an outlier, computers as music instruments; their users (households) also owning/sharing PCs. Video game consoles were much more popular when it came to arcade-style gaming. But that's just in my neck of the woods; I'm well aware that the Amigas were some of the most popular, and capable, machines here in Europe, especially Germany.
> However PCs were the better option if you wanted something where you could define your own spec.
Precisely. The openness of the eco system was and is, generally speaking, both strength and weakness.
> Anyway, I think we’ve hit an impasse. You’re unwilling to accept that your experience is flawed and my unwillingness to accept your experience is fact.
My experience is, as I've internalized a long time ago, certainly limited. But then again, so is yours. :p
> Exactly my point. Your metric (for judging graphics capabilities) in this case was strictly preference (bias) about a set of games with a specific visual aesthetic from 1991/92 ("It wasn’t until the era of ray casting 2.5D 1st person shooter that PCs started looking better than their counterparts").
That’s the literal opposite of my point. I don’t think you’re actually reading my comments properly. Or if you are, you’re just reading the words and assuming I’m wrong so not really listening to the points im making.
> Yes, until, by my estimation, 1987/88 (at a time a lot of dedicated PC-gaming magazines got off the ground as well). Strictly on technological grounds, i. e. on many technological but also economical metrics, as contextualized by real-world use cases across whole industries and economies in many nations.
That’s not an unreasonable estimation. The date isn’t going to be exact and I’d probably nudge it a little later, but I don’t think you’re being unfair with that figure either.
> My experience is, as I've internalized a long time ago, certainly limited. But then again, so is yours. :p
I see you’ve forgotten the part where I mentioned how I ran a side gig as tech support ;)
In your proposition, a whole eco system's ("PCs") graphics started only to "look better" than their counterparts, based on your examples anyway, from 1991/92 onwards. Appeals to specific aesthetics, etc. (e. g. only 2D- or only 3D-capabilities) can quickly lead to fallacies of composition. As they so often do in arguments between mostly opinionated men about their favorite toys. :D
> I see you’ve forgotten the part where I mentioned how I ran a side gig as tech support ;)
You’re replying to peoples comments but you’re not even trying to understand what people have said in those comments.
Take below for example. You keep claiming that I had a preference for 3D games but I made no such statement. And in fact repeatedly try to steer the conversation back to the 80s and before 3D games were the norm on any platform.
What you’re missing is we are talking about hardware technology and you are talking about preference of games. You’re the one who’s arguing about preferences. Not us.
> In your proposition, a whole eco system's ("PCs") graphics started only to "look better" than their counterparts, based on your examples anyway, from 1991/92 onwards. Appeals to specific aesthetics, etc. (e. g. only 2D- or only 3D-capabilities) can quickly lead to fallacies of composition. As they so often do in arguments between mostly opinionated men about their favorite toys. :D
I’m usually the first to invoke the “preference isn’t the same as fact” argument, but in this instance we have impartial proof that PCs lagged behind just by virtue of the technology available at comparable price points.
When PCs were stuck with CGA, not support for scrolling, etc, they were unambiguously worse than games consoles of that era. While Atari ST and Amiga were producing graphics that exceeded what the Master System and NES could do.
The whole reason Commander Keen existed was because Carmak (I forget how his name is spelt) found a hack to produce Super Mario quality graphics on commodity IBM-compatible hardware. Something previously considered impossible to do.
The point I’m making about 2.5D games isn’t pretence either. It’s showing where PCs grew beyond the capabilities of their contemporaries. You couldn’t do ray tracing on 16 bit consoles. Frankly, it even performed like shit on most 32bit consoles too. Yet it worked really well on PCs.
What you’re talking about is games that you liked to play. What I’m talking about is the actual technical capabilities of the hardware.
And the fact that literally every single person you’ve chatted to about this has disagreed with your analysis and echoed my statements must surely demonstrate that you’re attempting to rewrite history around your own preferences for PCs.
It’s fine to like prefer PCs. Nobody would criticise you for having that preference. The comments being made here wasn’t that you can’t have a good time with PCs. It was that the technology behind the PCs was shit compared to the other 80s alternatives. And that’s something that you can easily, and everyone already has, clearly demonstrated in our posts.
I think the real crux of the problem here is that you’re too young and/or grew up in the wrong part of Europe to have really seen the difference and instead of listening to others, you’re still firmly clinging onto the belief that your opinions are infallible. Unfortunately, in this specific instance, the body of evidence is overwhelmingly stacked against you.
> You keep claiming that I had a preference for 3D games but I made no such statement.
How absurd, I made no such claim. I simply referred to something you brought up: the visual aesthetics of 2.5D raytraced games from ca. '91/'92, which was your yardstick to judge the (graphics) capabilities of competing eco systems, i. e. to determine when PC games began to "look better than their counterparts" from the homecomputer world. Which, to me, is just a generalization; a fallacy.
You either didn't read my posts properly, or are deliberately putting words in my mouth. So unless you offer up some serious numbers, detailed use cases, cultural insights, war stories, et cetera... this conversation has run its course for me. For the record, the rest of my reply is here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44273046].
> I’m usually the first to invoke the “preference isn’t the same as fact” argument, but in this instance we have impartial proof that PCs lagged behind just by virtue of the technology available at comparable price points.
The "bang for the buck"-deal relevant home computers had going for 'em was something I already acknowledged... more than once... a while ago.
> When PCs were stuck with CGA, not support for scrolling, etc, they were unambiguously worse than games consoles of that era. While Atari ST and Amiga were producing graphics that exceeded what the Master System and NES could do.
Once again, the Amiga 500 home computer came to the market only in 1987, a machine already outperformed by top-of-the-line PCs from the same year, strictly in technological terms of course. For an economical comparison one would need specific use cases and numbers, i. e. prices, accessability, and so on. The rest falls into the area of coders and users adapting to these very platforms and eco systems, and their associated culture and politics, et cetera.
> The whole reason Commander Keen existed was because [...] Something previously considered impossible to do.
Yeah, negotiating, and overcoming, specific limitations every platform had in one form or another. Also already addressed when I replied to the other chap trying to make a huge deal out of PC memory segmentation...
> What you’re talking about is games that you liked to play. What I’m talking about is the actual technical capabilities of the hardware.
Yeah, when I mention the superior technical capabilities of PCs from, say, '87/'88 onwards several times (VGA, MT-32, expandability, etc.), it's "just games I like to play"; when you talk about some 2.5D titles just "looking better than some nebulous counterparts" it's of course hardware capability. :D
As I've said, somebody needs to write a piece of satire. A sort of two-hander the likes of The Sunset Limited or My Dinner with Andre. Just for us nerdlingers.
> And the fact that literally every single person you’ve chatted to [...].
For every Atari etc. fan with an application edge-case or preference (e. g. Signum!), I can easily forward one myself.
> I think the real crux of the problem here is that you’re too young and/or grew up in the wrong part of Europe to have really seen the difference and instead of listening to others, you’re still firmly clinging onto the belief that your opinions are infallible.
As mentioned several times already as well, I saw the sign, bro, I have seen the difference. I got hands-on experience with C64s, C128s and PCs (including XT- and AT-class machines) from '89 onwards, the Atari ST from '90 onwards, and the Amiga eco-system by only reading all the relevant glossies, including back-issues, in a very dedicated fashion from '90/'91 onwards. In the latter case, hands-on experience came only much later (mostly in the form of A600s and A1200s, the faves of the retro/vintage gaming circuit), from 2007 onwards.
And that's just computers. Consoles are another matter.
