Amiga

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Amiga 500

Around the time of NES and the arcade, the Amiga 500 entered my life. The arcade stood for awesome graphics and quality but was limited to it's typical arcade genre of games. The Amiga had amazing innovation of gameplay in combination with awesome powerful hardware considering it's time. NES could not compete with any of this, yet the Amiga never became that very big in the US as it was in Scandinavia.

	Amiga	NES
Computation power	Very good1	Bad2
Resolution	320x2563	256x240
Colors	32 on screen, Palette of 4096	53 fixed colors, 25 each scanline4.
Graphics power	Very good, arbitrary	Bad5
Memory	512Kb, 512Kb expansion6.	2Kb
Sound	Very good7	Bad8
Unit price	699 USD	129.95 USD
Game Prices	Cheap	Expensive

After the total letdown of the Atari 600XL, I wanted to buy a machine that was really good and nothing second hand. So instead of buying a C64, I waited and bought an Amiga, even though I knew absolutely nothing about it. The only thing I've heard was that some kid had bought a computer which was much better than a C64 and that made me go to a shop and buy the only thing I thought it might be.

When I came home and for the first time inserted a disk in the floppy drive, I became really scared as the drive roared like a lion and gnarled like an angry pig. I thought I'd made a huge mistake like put the disk upside down but it was supposed to sound like that.

I was 12 years old and knew very little English. This was my road towards learning even if I wanted to or not. I remember having bought "Bards Tale" and it said "Insert Save Game Disk". As I had only gotten 1 disk with the game, I put that one into the drive. Then it said: "Disk is not formated. Do you want to format? Yes/No. As the game did not start up when I pushed no, I felt that the only option left was to push yes. After that experience I got a bit better understanding about what a formated disk was.

What a supercomputer the Amiga really was. The graphics was awesome, the sound was awesome and best of all, the games were totally awesome! It felt like no end to the game developers imagination. So very many new kind of games appeared that was nothing like the games I played before. I meant to write a small list, but that was not really possible with all the great games on the Amiga.

Favorite Games
Name	Developer	Year
Defender of the Crown	Cinemaware	1986
The King of Chicago	Cinemaware	1987
Ports of Call	Aegis	1987
The Faery Tale Adventure	MicroIllusions	1987
Silent Service	MicroProse	1987
Fire Power	Silent Software, Inc.	1987
Shadowgate	Mindscape	1987
Kings Quest – Quest for the Crown	Sierra	1987
Kings Quest 2 – Romancing the Throne	Sierra	1988
Kings Quest 3 – To Heir Is Human	Sierra	1989
Kings Quest 4 – The Perils Of Rosella	Sierra	1990
Space Quest – The Sarien Encounter	Sierra	1987
Space Quest 2 – Vohaul's Revenge	Sierra	1988
Space Quest 3 – The Pirates of Pestulon	Sierra	1989
Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards	Sierra	1987
Police Quest – In Pursuit Of The Death Angel	Sierra	1987
Gold Rush!	Sierra	1988
Heros Quest aka Quest for Glory	Sierra	1989
Hybris	Cope-Com	1989
Quest for Glory II	Sierra	1990
Test Drive 1	Distinctive Software	1987
Test Drive 2 – The Duel	Distinctive Software	1989
ECO	Denton Designs	1988
Gone Fish'n	Unknown9	1988
F-18 Interceptor	Electronic Arts	1988
International Karate +10	Software Studios (Activision)	1988
Captain Blood11	Exxos	1988
Barbarian	Kixx	1988
Battle Chess	Interplay	1988
Sim City	Maxis	1988
Prince of Persia	Broderbund	1989
Budokan – The Martial Spirit	Electronic Arts	1989
Elite	Mr. Micro	1989
Stunt Car Racer	Micro Style	1989
Oil Imperium	reLINE	1989
North & South	Infogrames	1989
Shadow of the Beast	Reflections Interactive	1989
Kick Off	Anco	1989
Turrican12	Factor 5	1989
Turrican II13	Factor 5	1991
Populous	Bullfrog	1989
Populous 2	Bullfrog	1991
Nuclear War	New World Computing	1990
Panza Kick Boxing14	Futura	1990
Best Of The Best: Championship Karate	Futura	1993
Silk Worm	Tecmo	1990
James Pond	Vectordean	1990
Wings	Cinemaware	1990
LotusEsprite Turbo Challenge	Magnetic Fields	1990
Loom	Lucasarts	1990
Eye of the Beholder	Westwood Studios	1990
Super Cars	Magnetic Fields	1990
Super Cars 2	Magnetic Fields	1991
Street Rod	P2K	1990
Street Rod 2	P.Z.Karen Co. Development Group & Logical Design Works	1991
4D Sports Boxing	Distinctive Software	1991
Black Crypt	Raven Software	1991
Lemmings	Psygnosis	1991
Monkey Island	Lucas Arts	1991
Moonstone - A Hard Days Knight	Mindscape	1991
Another World	Delphine Software	1991
Metal Masters	Incal	1991
Utopia	Celestial Software	1991
Mega Lo Mania	Sensible Software	1991
Deuteros – The Next Millennium	Activision	1991
Elvira: Mistress of the Dark15	Horrorsoft	1991
Indiana Jones and the fate of Atlantis	Lucasarts	1992
Lure of the Temptress	Revolution Software	1992
Dune	Cryo	1992
Dune 2	Westwood	1993
Goblins	Coktel	1992
Goblins 2 – The Prince Buffoon	Coktel	1993
Goblins 3	Coktel	1994
Pinball Dreams	Digital Illusions	1992
Pinball Fantasies	Digital Illusions	1993
Pinball Illusions	Digital Illusions	1995
Cannon Fodder	Sensible	1993
Simon The Sorcerer	Adventure Soft	1993
Flashback	Delphine Software	1993
Worms	Team 17	1995

Footnotes

1. The Amiga has a custom chipset consisting of several coprocessors, which handle audio, video and direct memory access independently of CPU. This architecture freed up the Amiga's processor (a 7.09Mhz Motorola 68000) for other tasks.

2. It's CPU was an 8bit 1.66MHz Ricoh 2A07. The NTSC version had a clock speed of 1.79 MHz.

3. PAL mode: 320×256, 640×256, 640×512 (interlace), 704×576 in overscan. 320x256 was the common resolution for games.

4. Background: 4 Palettes x 3 Colors + 1 Back Color. Sprites: 4 Palettes x 3 Colors.

5. 64 sprites, 8 sprites per scanline. 8x16 pixels per sprite. 8x8 tiled background.

6. Many games used the 512Kb memory expansion

7. 4 hardware-mixed channels of 8-bit sound at up to 28 kHz.

8. 5 channels (2 pulse wave, 1 triangle wave, 1 white noise, 1 DPCM/PCM)

9. Based on 1987 Roger Damon/Interstel Atari ST release. Amiga coding by Doug Gerecht & Tim Linstrom.

10. Released on the C64 1986, the game got a beautiful remake for it's conversion to the Amiga.

11. Originally released on the Atari ST which had the better version with a full set of alien language sounds. Noted here due to the lack of an Atari ST section and the games very original style and gameplay.

12. Originally programmed for and on a C64.

13. Originally programmed for and on a C64 even though the Amiga version was finished earlier.

14. Prequel to "Best Of The Best: Championship Karate" alias "Panza Kick Boxing 2"

15. Released for the PC 1990.

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