In its time (approx. 1988–1992), the Amiga was undoubtedly
the best gaming platform among the home computers. Many classics
originated on the Amiga. There were roughly
five periods of Amiga games:
1985–1987: As long as the Amiga 1000 was the only model
available, there was
very little original development, though many, especially US, games
were ported. The only relevant original titles of this period are
Defender of the Crown and
Ports of Call.
1988–1991: After the introduction of the Amiga 500 in 1987,
the popularity of the
platform rose significantly, especially in Europe. In this phase, it
had become the main platform for game development in the
UK. US developers preferred the PC,
French and German
developers the Atari ST, but they all usually
ported their games. In this phase, there are very few games that
were not available for the Amiga.
1992–1994: Ironically just as a new series of Amigas with faster
processors and the new AGA chipset became
available, US developers more or less gave up on the platform. But
at the same time it became popular in Europe as never before.
1995/96: After Commodore crashed and the Amiga was bought by
ESCOM, it ceased to be a mainstream game platform. With few exceptions,
games developed for the Amiga afterwards were never ported to another
platform. The developers were now increasingly from Italy and former
Yugoslavia.
Since 1997: Again ironically, just as graphics cards became
available, independent development diminished even more. Most of
the new games in this phase were ports from the PC. Since 2000
even this is mostly restricted to open source ports.
Many Amiga games have
been ported to or co-released on the PC, some to the
Mac.
Since most Amiga games were designed to run on any
Amiga, system requirements of these ports are usually low.
DOS ports from the 80s tend to be bad. To EGA converted
Amiga graphics look far worse than original EGA graphics, sound and music were left out or are played
through the PC speaker, there is no mouse support, which
sometimes proves fatal for playability.
DOS ports from the 90s are good. VGA was capable of displaying
the graphics without degradation, the lack of a seperate sprite
coprocessor seems to have been no problem either. Of course,
the MIDI and Soundblaster were no match to the Amiga's MOD
music.
Usually, the only problem of Mac ports is that graphics were
always a bit distorted, since Macs can't display oblong pixels.
With very few exceptions, games from 1995 on have not been ported
to any other platforms any more.
Emulation
At one point, the Commodore Amiga had gained
the reputation of being unemulatable. Its plethora of
graphics and sound modes along with its tightly interwoven
OS has made it the holy grail of emulators. However, dedicated
programming efforts have made even Amiga emulation possible.—emulation.net
This emulator actually
works and is free. It is distributed under the GNU public licence. Originally for
Linux, it has been ported to various other operating systems:
The
officially licensed all-in-one Amiga emulation and connectivity
environment for PCs, and includes Amiga ROM (Kickstart) and
OS files. The package features special support for Windows systems,
but also contains numerous cross-platform components. As you might
guess, this one is not free ($59.95 on CD, $29.95 download).
General Amiga Links
The Amiga community is quite large and active.
There are many more sites than the few I have listed here.
Just enter "Amiga" into the search engine of your choice.
![[PSX Mod Chips]](http://www.svatopluk.com/banners/mod-chip.png)
![[Against TCPA!]](images/tcpa.gif)
|
![[Valid HTML 4.01!]](images/valid401.gif)