HN Reader

A more accurate or complete statement:

Doom didn't kill the Amiga. Wolfenstein 3D did. (2024)

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsADJa-23Sg (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40343333)

Nothing else like Video Toaster being available kept Amigas around for a while. 2001 my parent's cable provider still used them for guide/PPV channels.

A lot of words there. But the word ‘console’ is there exactly once.

Games consoles killed the Amiga, just like they did all other home computers that were primarily used for games.

I don’t know anyone that used the Amiga for anything other than games.

PCs survived because they were genuinely used for business, not just games.

> Ever since I saw an Amiga 500 at a friend's house in what was probably late 1988, I wanted one for myself. Back then, computers were uncommon, especially at home. Even though I went to a school in a fairly affluent neighborhood, few kids had home computers or video games.

This may be true in the US and Japan, the rest of the world were mainly using 8-bit (and increasingly 16-bit) computers in this era, so this scans really oddly outside the US.

I grew up on an 80s UK council estate (surrounded by poverty) and practically every kid had a computer, mainly Commodore 64, 16, +4, Sinclair Spectrum, or an Amstrad CPC (maybe a few BBC Micros dotted around, and some other oddities)

Lots of people had the early Atari consoles in the early 80s, but after that I didn't see a console until the Megadrive. Everyone, and I do mean EVERYONE had computers in the mid-late 80s to early 90s where I was growing up.

Long time PC gamer here. I didn’t own an Amiga so I definitely have another POV.

1994?! Every single PC gaming store was flooded with PC CD demos.

Day of the Tentacle. Loom. Monkey Island. Rebel Assault. Myst. 7th Guest.

Every “AAA” release at the time was getting a “talkie” version with added FMV or cd audio.

Plus Doom, and then Doom 2.

I actually think the 93-96 period is basically the most hype I’ve ever seen the PC market, ever.

I’m sure Amiga had a lot of cool stuff still. The demo scene, the various Psygnosis games. But I never got on my radar beyond “this doesn’t need config.sys and it has more colors”.

(2024)

Discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39246825

In 1992, I went from Amiga to a PC solely because of Wolfenstein 3D. I already felt like I was clinging to the Amiga platform. Most of my other friends in the Amiga world had moved on to other platforms. Doom came out about a year later, near Christmas 1993, IIRC.

The author bought their Amiga 500 in early 1992! It was already a "classic" by then.

Amiga was a games console masquerading as a computer.

If it had started life as the cd32 then the company might still be around today.

Yeah if your secret sauce is a chip, with very particular timing and memory behaviour... you've just built in obsolescence. There's no abstracted API for doing the fancy graphics (at least not one used by games, etc), and the whole system is built around sharing the memory bus between CPU and VDP (not going to fly once memory & bus speeds became a fraction of the CPU speed and once cache was a serious thing)... it's just stuck in a grotto.. a neighbourhood that looks fantastic when you moved in but now the next city over is getting a brand new subway system while you're still stuck with an old fleet of busses.

Nevermind Moore's law and exponential improvements... you're stuck even falling behind in very incremental developments.

I also lived through this era, but from the Atari ST side. When I got my 486 it was a feeling of a kind of relenting "sigh" abandoning the 68k and its basic superiority... but economies of scale and the arrival of Linux (I used the very first versions, before the a.out->ELF transition even) made it worthwhile.