Amiga, Commodore and creativity

[Burning Bridges]

Around 2000-3500 euro in todays money per box I think, but for that you got a serious beige business machine that could also play Space Quest

I think the 1040STE was around 1500 DM/750 euro and the Amiga 500 bit cheaper but its all a bit hazy.

In 1990 Amiga 500 with memory upgrade and TV converter was around 1000 DM/ 500Euro I'm pretty sure. Three years after, in 1993 I got a 386DX/25 with 4MB and a 14" screen and payed nearly 3000! Then I bought a new VGA card that didnt improve anything and I soon had to upgrade to an AMD 386/40. A friend obviously got an even smaller penis so he went for a 486/33 and 17" screen and payed in excess of 5000 DM!! So PCs were very, very expensive at the time.

In comparison with the A500 I was somewhat dissappointed by Wing Commander and Red Baron. For the 320x200 didn't look as good as I had thought. The Amiga was better in many ways, especially sound. Admittedly, the Motorola 68000 was of course not able to run fluid 3D graphics with meagre 7.8 Mhz, so in the end the problem was that the Amiga 1200 came much too late.

...for me the turning point was the release of Wing Commander 1

In fact I could't stand Wing Commander. Origins crap is highly overated and hyped, their present day equivalent could be Bethesda :wink:. For me the most important games in the 1993-1995 period were from Dynamix (Red Baron, Aces of the Pacific, Aces of the Deep), Origin (Ultima 7, Ultima Underworld 1+2), SSI (Panzer General), Papyrus (Indycar Racing) and Spectrum Holobyte (Falcon 3.0). This period ended when the 3DFX Voodoo apeared.

 

[Destroid]

I was rather young at the time (born in 83) the oldest games I really remember are games such as:

Earliest:
Teenage mutant ninja turtles (side scrolls/top scroller)
Bionic Commando

Little later:
Populous
688 Attack Sub
Powerdrome

Later still:
Dune 2
Warcraft
Warcraft 2
Wolfenstein3D

Then the games of the mid to late 90s, after I reached my teens (I enjoyed the golden age for FPS, RTS and RPG that was 97-99 when I was 14-16 :D)

 

[Carlos' Bitch1]

Around 2000-3500 euro in todays money per box I think, but for that you got a serious beige business machine that could also play Space Quest

I think the 1040STE was around 1500 DM/750 euro and the Amiga 500 bit cheaper but its all a bit hazy.

In 1990 Amiga 500 with memory upgrade and TV converter was around 1000 DM/ 500Euro I'm pretty sure. Three years after, in 1993 I got a 386DX/25 with 4MB and a 14" screen and payed nearly 3000! Then I bought a new VGA card that didnt improve anything and I soon had to upgrade to an AMD 386/40. A friend obviously got an even smaller penis so he went for a 486/33 and 17" screen and payed in excess of 5000 DM!! So PCs were very, very expensive at the time.

In comparison with the A500 I was somewhat dissappointed by Wing Commander and Red Baron. For the 320x200 didn't look as good as I had thought. The Amiga was better in many ways, especially sound. Admittedly, the Motorola 68000 was of course not able to run fluid 3D graphics with meagre 7.8 Mhz, so in the end the problem was that the Amiga 1200 came much too late.

...for me the turning point was the release of Wing Commander 1

In fact I could't stand Wing Commander. Origins crap is highly overated and hyped, their present day equivalent could be Bethesda :wink:. For me the most important games in the 1993-1995 period were from Dynamix (Red Baron, Aces of the Pacific, Aces of the Deep), Origin (Ultima 7, Ultima Underworld 1+2), SSI (Panzer General), Papyrus (Indycar Racing) and Spectrum Holobyte (Falcon 3.0). This period ended when the 3DFX Voodoo apeared.

I agree with what you have wrote. I went with the IBM because I got most of it for nothing. There was no way I was going to pay the thousands needed for a full setup.

The true irony is that the two (relatively) cheap computers I have, the C64 and Amiga 500 are still humming along fine, yet all of my IBM/PC's have died after a number of years. The only old one that kept going was the 200mmx. The 386 died after a few years, and my win98 machine I had setup until recently bit the dust. It was a P3 800.

 

[RaXz]

I only hope it will be true to both Frontiers - basically FE2 as it would be done with modern tech.

Pretty odd, I am pretty cynical these days, I won't be suprised if it becomes Oblivion in space if it eventually comes out. There is a nifty space MMO in the making with a lot of great promises, a seamless procedural universe with newtonian laws. Sounds pretty much like Elite. I won't be suprised that it will turn out shit, but at least someone is trying to make a real Elite clone.

http://www.infinity-universe.com/Infini ... &Itemid=34

I got my hands on FE2 after Morrowind, and, while I mostly dislike spacesims (being anything but), I am a big hard SF nerd, so my reaction was something along the lines of:

I am no SF nerd, but I really like spacesims. Even X3 with it's shortcomings, even though, Elite is the real deal. That was innovation, now it's just an empty marketing term.

Nice stories btw, I only remember the fun that I had with it. Everything was a accomplishment, that reminds me of one of my first discoveries, the autopilot. Before that discovery I flew manually to Earth, man that was frustrating. If you turned time acceleration on a bit to much, the planet flew away. But I managed to land on it manually after a couple of hours. It's not diffuclt to imagine the relieve I felt when I discovered the amazing autopilot.

On more thing - coming too close to a big planet? Some guys from Poland were making a contest about who could slingshot closest to Sirius B - a white dwarf - and make it out of there alive. The winner briefly entered the star's atmosphere - I suspect they had to cut him out of his craft, he might also show interest in skinhead fashion and teeth prosthetics after his flight - skimming a white dwarf is unkind to your DNA. Of course the whole point in this contest was that you can't just use your engines to not fall on a white dwarf - you have to make a slingshot manoeuvre with enough velocity to carry you back away from the star, while fine tuning your orbit to pass as close to the surface as possible.

Cool, when I was bored I tried that with Jupiter, usually I faild utterly and sometimes there was a slingshot that wasn't that spectacular. Gotta try that again someday.

I bought (!) the game on release day for Amiga. It got good reviews in the gaming press (not 90+ but 85-87'ish), so I wouldn't say that people were too dissapointed on it. Oh, and it ran perfectly fine on Amiga too ;-)

One of the few games that were actually worth the money, I'd say. It came with two manuals, a novel, a map of the galaxy and a T-shirt.

Just what I was thinking, it became a bit laggy when I tried everything on maximum on my A600. And getting a lot of score's above the 85 are pretty rave reviews, at least in the standards back then. Something isn't right when Halo gets a lot of 90+ reviews.

 

[DraQ]

I only hope it will be true to both Frontiers - basically FE2 as it would be done with modern tech.

Pretty odd, I am pretty cynical these days, I won't be suprised if it becomes Oblivion in space if it eventually comes out. There is a nifty space MMO in the making with a lot of great promises, a seamless procedural universe with newtonian laws. Sounds pretty much like Elite. I won't be suprised that it will turn out shit, but at least someone is trying to make a real Elite clone.

Hopefully DB will be reluctant to piss all over his dreams from his days of youth.

Nice stories btw, I only remember the fun that I had with it. Everything was a accomplishment, that reminds me of one of my first discoveries, the autopilot. Before that discovery I flew manually to Earth, man that was frustrating. If you turned time acceleration on a bit to much, the planet flew away. But I managed to land on it manually after a couple of hours. It's not diffuclt to imagine the relieve I felt when I discovered the amazing autopilot.

Autopilot was a good thing, as well as a perfect example of bridging the gap between hardcore and casual in one single step.

Cool, when I was bored I tried that with Jupiter, usually I faild utterly and sometimes there was a slingshot that wasn't that spectacular. Gotta try that again someday.

Approach the planet using autopilot, then aim for it's limb while setting the speed to something manageable. After entering the atmosphere descend slowly 'till you see the clouds. I'd recommend Saturn over Jupiter, actually, as it has nice big rings. Or Aster in Ross 154 - not only does it have rings, not only it is much less massive, but it also has it's icy moon, Merlin, on relatively low orbit.

You can put your ship in orbit around a planet too - orbital map in FE2 helps here, as it can predict your and everyone else's trajectory (assuming no burns) using fast forward mode. Once you are in the right place ad have right velocity, you can turn engines off and keep revolving around the planet - orbital movement is nothing more than an act of falling onto a body in such way as to miss it.

 

[RaXz]

Aster, I remember how awesome it was to see that planet rise on the horizon when starting a game in Ros 154.

Seems that I still have a lot to do in Elite, I never came as far that I got a Elite rank, maybe close. Oh, the poor enemy bases that I nuked with military missions. Sweet memories.

 

[WDeranged]

I saw this thread and thought it looked like a good place for one of my first posts, my earliest memory of a computer is my older brother's C64 around 1986, I used to play Beach Head and Little Computer People, he had the floppy drive and a load of compilation disks so I didn't actually get to experience tape loading until I got my own computer a year or two later, a half knackered Spectrum+2 that could only load Ghostbusters

Around the same time my brother got an Amiga 500 which was completely mind blowing, even if there weren't many games out at that point, I remember..

Wizball - http://www.lemonamiga.com/games/details.php?id=1139

Defender of the Crown - http://www.lemonamiga.com/games/details.php?id=313

Leisure Suit Larry - http://www.lemonamiga.com/games/details.php?id=703

There was also this simple top down game with tanks, you could blow up eachother's bases and drive over the men that ran out but I can't just remember what it was called though it had THE best sampled explosion sound :twisted:

A few years later I got my own Amiga 500, walking home from school I somehow knew my dad had bought me one, it was bizarre when I first got to stretch out that lame workbench clock on my own computer, much later I got an A1200 and then around 1995 I migrated to PC's.

 

[Burning Bridges]

WDeranged, 2 posts in 6 months, I wish all people were so restrained :wink:
I remember Beach Head and Defender of the Crown. Actually DotC is one of my all time favorites. Iin many ways it was the spiritual father of the whole Total War franchise, though hardly anyone remembers that right now.

 

[WDeranged]

WDeranged, 2 posts in 6 months, I wish all people were so restrained :wink:
I remember Beach Head and Defender of the Crown. Actually DotC is one of my all time favorites. Iin many ways it was the spiritual father of the whole Total War franchise, though hardly anyone remembers that right now.

Dragon Age is coming out soon and I've got my hopes pinned on it, if they fuck it up my post count will no doubt explode, also I can see where you're coming from with total war, I had way more fun playing Rome from the strategy map

 

[Burning Bridges]

Dragon Age is coming out soon and I've got my hopes pinned on it

Nothing like seeing peoples hopes dashed ..

 

[RaXz]

Beach head! Played that game sick on the MSX, didn't play DotC much though. Lords of the Realm was a precursor to Total War too, played that one a lot.

Wizball reminds me a bit of Wizkid, that was a rather odd game. I guess it's the sequel of Wizball.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4m_6waxKRo

 

[WDeranged]

I just remembered that I could never actually play Leisure Suit Larry, it was one of the forbidden disks that I was too young to play, I was so young I actually thought the "age protection" was like a test with questions only adults could answer...

http://www.lemonamiga.com/?mainurl=http ... 3Fid%3D987

 

[Haba]

There was also this simple top down game with tanks, you could blow up eachother's bases and drive over the men that ran out but I can't just remember what it was called though it had THE best sampled explosion sound :twisted:

Firepower

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edtwiQg6tLk

Damn did I waste time playing that one. Didn't it even have a co-op mode?

 

[WDeranged]

That's the one, I can't remember if it had co op but the vs mode with two players was so much fun, it's a shame that video hasn't got the actual sound effects.

*SPLOSION!*

 

[WDeranged]

Ha, turns out the age check was an actual age test, I linked to the 90's re-release before.

http://www.lemonamiga.com/games/docs.php?id=985

 

[Destroid]

I remember playing Firepower with my cousin who lived in another state... was a lot of fun, don't know what system though (amiga or pc).

There have been quite a few remakes of firepower over the years, although I can't recall the names of any of them.

 

[WDeranged]

I remember playing Firepower with my cousin who lived in another state... was a lot of fun, don't know what system though

There was a DOS version, I can't remember the Amiga version having modem support but my memory is hazy, that must have been pretty damn cool though, long distance gaming retro style.

 

[Destroid]

I meant when we visited, first game I played modem was Starcraft, and man I played the shit out of it.

 

[WDeranged]

Ahh, gotcha, Quake was my first when ID released that networking patch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuakeWorld

Good memories

 

[RaXz]

Remakes of firepower over the years, although I can't recall the names of any of them.

Maybe Return Fire? Looks pretty similar.

Another list of nostalgia.

Stunt Car Racer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kn32IgQGrOQ

I won't be suprised if nobody knows the following games. Fun multiplayer games, a mix between Gravitar and Asteroids.

Gravity Force 2

Turbo Raketti

Rocketz

 

[WDeranged]

Stunt Car Racer was the first game to give me an adrenaline kick, those high jumps were fucking awesome.

 

[RaXz]

Stunt Car Racer was the first game to give me an adrenaline kick, those high jumps were fucking awesome.

Yeah :D, like the Ski Ramp track.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A86J9Jf-xgo#t=2m00

The later levels got pretty annoying, with all the moving parts. I hope the remake is gonna pull through.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMr-FZuFJkU

By the way, the game Vroom had a great sense of speed.

Vroom
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lhgfd2D30s8

And this one too, with the fast bikes with nitro. Sometimes you had to walk a long distance to your bike when you flew off in a crash.

Road Rash
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUPxxZu9E4Q

 

[WDeranged]

Hmm, I never had Vroom, most racing games back then were god awful slow, I'll have to pop it into UAE and have a look.

 

[Burning Bridges]

Sure I remember Stunt Car Racer. I always liked racing games!

C-64:

Test Drive
hard to believe these graphics once gave me a boner, but they did

Grand Prix Circuit

Amiga:

Indianapolis 500
I still wonder how many thousand rounds I made on that track, especially as I continued playing it on the PC afterwards.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Seeing that Indianapolis 500 screenshot reminded me of the 5 minutes I spent playing that game. I found it to be utterly dull.

It also reminded me of another game I used to love - LHX Attack Chopper. It was a helicopter combat simulator where you could fly the LHX (known today as the RAH-66 Comanche) an AH-64A Apache, a V-22 OSPREY (with VTOL abilities) and a UH-60 Black Hawk. Of the four, I found the Apache to be the most fun of fly.

Oddly, the only real memories I have of playing that game were wasting armed footsoldiers and camels with Hellfire missiles. :twisted: