Roger Dean did some great artwork for computer games, etc., in the 1980s. I still have the poster of the cover of the game Barbarian that came with the game. Dean later recycled that painting for the cover of Steve Howe's excellent "Not Necessarily Acoustic" album, and Dean is _still_ producing lovely and amazing artwork for Yes all these years later.
Oh dang, I never played that game but that looks amazing. Especially for .. 1986?! Wow. I never had an Amiga growing up so I missed out on all those classics, and even trying to catch up later I keep discovering more awesome gems like this.
That was a really great game at that moment in time.
I played it quite a bit.
Modern games are very different to that. I don't have
any close attachment to those "who got the better 3D
engine". They seem to lack cleverness; it's all a
unified, singular game experience following a very
simple recipe that has been dumbed down. Clones.
Sometimes there are exceptions to that formula; I
liked little nightmares, even though it was also very
dumbed down, but it was a bit different still to the
usual 3D engine colour-flash-splashy effects.
That's something many did not have. 85% sales were Amiga 500 and not upgradeable. IIUC possible to put Motorola 68060, but AGA required full replacement. And it remained something unseen. Something too late to crave for after bankrupcy. Something like unicorn. Like Roland for DOS gamers. We had SB clones on ESS chips, and they only had AdLib music. We were entering game configuration tools, and there was a choice of Roland. Supaplex had especially visible Roland choice. But nobody knew what is that Roland.
As far as I can tell, non-AGA graphics is also charming enough. For many years I only had EGA and many games were not runnable, they demanded VGA. AGA does not feel like much anticipated upgrade like VGA was. There are hardware clones like MiniMig that lack AGA support and it is passable. IIUC MiSTer FPGA has MiniMig core with same lack of AGA.
Was it so rare? I had A1200 and I think they were quite popular here in Europe. Don’t have any stats, though.
My parents bought it used for me and the seller also threw in Monkey Island 2 on 11 floppies and that started my great love for point and click adventure games :)
Later I’ve even added a hdd and cd-rom drive to it.
There are some per-model stats from Germany issued at the end of 1993 (so a few months before Commodore went tits up)[1], and they have ~1 million A500s, and ~100 thousand A1200s (plus circa 10k A4000s). So there's a fair few out there, but in the greater scheme of things, they're massively outnumbered by the original models (and, seemingly even the A600 outsold the A1200, at least at that point).
The A1200 was only released about a year and a half before the end of Commodore, and I doubt that there was a massive sales boost in the last few months, or the Escom phase of zombie-Amiga, so AGA is a smallish minority of Amiga in general.
> We were entering game configuration tools, and there was a choice of Roland. Supaplex had especially visible Roland choice. But nobody knew what is that Roland.
I distinctly remember this.-
PS. In retrospect I wonder how it came to be that devs actually put in the effort/resources to code for such not-so-widely adopted hardware.-
Were Roland MIDI keyboards used by the developers to capture game audio tracks as played by musicians? Maybe they already had the driver code from that.
That's a cogent theory, also, in that I am sure many game composers used Roland hardware. So you were basically, "playing it back non-lossy" as "intended by the composer", in many ways.-
Seeing the juggler, and lots of other gee-whiz stuff in 1986 inspired me to buy an Amiga 500 as my first computer in 1988. I got a lot of mileage out of that system, with its whopping 1.5MB of RAM, and two floppy drives (after shelling out another ~$150 for the 1MB upgrade and however much for an external floppy).
I also have really fond memories of Cinemaware's Three Stooges game. That's one I'd love to play again. It even had some digitized voices, sound effects and photos of the Stooges. It consisted of several mini-games you had to play in order to make enough money in 30 days to save the orphanage.
One had you wheeling a patient through a hospital, avoiding obstacles, and included a clip of "Calling Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard". Another had Curly trying to eat oyster soup. Another had one of the stooges dashing through town to get a violin for Larry to play. And the best one was the pie fight stage. There might have been one or two more, but it was a really cool game with excellent graphics for the time.
I have especially fond memories associated with this logo (which is a work of art all of its own IMHO): https://amiga.lychesis.net/assets/Logos/Psygnosis_1990_b.png
And this one https://amiga.lychesis.net/assets/Logos/SiliconSynapse.png, besides being a very cool name, will forever be associated in my mind with The Lost Vikings (although I played that one on a PC, not the Amiga).
I remember seeing the Amiga bouncing ball demo and being amazed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ga41edXw3A
The Amiga was the second computer that I ever owned. The first was a C64 that I bought freshman year. (My father bought a TRS-80 before that.)
Roger Dean did some great artwork for computer games, etc., in the 1980s. I still have the poster of the cover of the game Barbarian that came with the game. Dean later recycled that painting for the cover of Steve Howe's excellent "Not Necessarily Acoustic" album, and Dean is _still_ producing lovely and amazing artwork for Yes all these years later.
Agree about the Silicon and Synapse name, they never should have changed it into Blizzard ;)
Defender of the Crown gives me so much flashbacks. The artwork is still great!
https://amiga.lychesis.net/games/DefenderOfTheCrown.html
Oh dang, I never played that game but that looks amazing. Especially for .. 1986?! Wow. I never had an Amiga growing up so I missed out on all those classics, and even trying to catch up later I keep discovering more awesome gems like this.
That was a really great game at that moment in time.
I played it quite a bit.
Modern games are very different to that. I don't have any close attachment to those "who got the better 3D engine". They seem to lack cleverness; it's all a unified, singular game experience following a very simple recipe that has been dumbed down. Clones.
Sometimes there are exceptions to that formula; I liked little nightmares, even though it was also very dumbed down, but it was a bit different still to the usual 3D engine colour-flash-splashy effects.
Calling it AGA gave a snicker to many people I'm sure
That's something many did not have. 85% sales were Amiga 500 and not upgradeable. IIUC possible to put Motorola 68060, but AGA required full replacement. And it remained something unseen. Something too late to crave for after bankrupcy. Something like unicorn. Like Roland for DOS gamers. We had SB clones on ESS chips, and they only had AdLib music. We were entering game configuration tools, and there was a choice of Roland. Supaplex had especially visible Roland choice. But nobody knew what is that Roland.
As far as I can tell, non-AGA graphics is also charming enough. For many years I only had EGA and many games were not runnable, they demanded VGA. AGA does not feel like much anticipated upgrade like VGA was. There are hardware clones like MiniMig that lack AGA support and it is passable. IIUC MiSTer FPGA has MiniMig core with same lack of AGA.
Was it so rare? I had A1200 and I think they were quite popular here in Europe. Don’t have any stats, though. My parents bought it used for me and the seller also threw in Monkey Island 2 on 11 floppies and that started my great love for point and click adventure games :) Later I’ve even added a hdd and cd-rom drive to it.
There are some per-model stats from Germany issued at the end of 1993 (so a few months before Commodore went tits up)[1], and they have ~1 million A500s, and ~100 thousand A1200s (plus circa 10k A4000s). So there's a fair few out there, but in the greater scheme of things, they're massively outnumbered by the original models (and, seemingly even the A600 outsold the A1200, at least at that point).
The A1200 was only released about a year and a half before the end of Commodore, and I doubt that there was a massive sales boost in the last few months, or the Escom phase of zombie-Amiga, so AGA is a smallish minority of Amiga in general.
[1] http://www.bambi-amiga.co.uk/amigahistory/sales.html
idk I had an a1200 in ex-ussr of all places. and upgraded it with 4mb+030 in 90s.
ECS/a600 was considered "meh" in our circles back then.
> We were entering game configuration tools, and there was a choice of Roland. Supaplex had especially visible Roland choice. But nobody knew what is that Roland.
I distinctly remember this.-
PS. In retrospect I wonder how it came to be that devs actually put in the effort/resources to code for such not-so-widely adopted hardware.-
Were Roland MIDI keyboards used by the developers to capture game audio tracks as played by musicians? Maybe they already had the driver code from that.
That's a cogent theory, also, in that I am sure many game composers used Roland hardware. So you were basically, "playing it back non-lossy" as "intended by the composer", in many ways.-
Things were much better back then ;]
I still remember the day I got Shadow of the Beast, as a young teen. Both the visuals and audio were amazing.
I do not think the feeling one got when looking at Amiga visuals, in comparison to the state of the art then, in terms of wonder, can be described.-
Perhaps one's first contact with a GPT3-class model's chat, might be comparable.-
Previously on HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47813566
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10972849
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17783531
and more...
Seeing the juggler, and lots of other gee-whiz stuff in 1986 inspired me to buy an Amiga 500 as my first computer in 1988. I got a lot of mileage out of that system, with its whopping 1.5MB of RAM, and two floppy drives (after shelling out another ~$150 for the 1MB upgrade and however much for an external floppy).
I also have really fond memories of Cinemaware's Three Stooges game. That's one I'd love to play again. It even had some digitized voices, sound effects and photos of the Stooges. It consisted of several mini-games you had to play in order to make enough money in 30 days to save the orphanage.
One had you wheeling a patient through a hospital, avoiding obstacles, and included a clip of "Calling Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard". Another had Curly trying to eat oyster soup. Another had one of the stooges dashing through town to get a violin for Larry to play. And the best one was the pie fight stage. There might have been one or two more, but it was a really cool game with excellent graphics for the time.
If you click the color cycling animations it shows the palette being actively changed and is very interesting to observe!
https://www.editions64k.fr/product/amiga-demoscene-pack
Rabbits!
https://amiga.lychesis.net/assets/SAK/SAK_NightFlight.gif
Almost like a lost art now. Good old Amiga ...