Yep, one of the first games that really needed a chunky pixel video memory layout (which the Amiga lacked). Amiga's planar arrangement was perfect for platformers, which was the target of the Amiga gfx hardware design.
It was not like lot's of very talented Amiga devs didn't try their very best to create a Wolfenstein/Doom clone for their platform, but iirc the bitplane setup used by Amiga gfx, which enabled lot's of other cool features did not perform well with the opereations needed for "3D" games.
Then with Quake, the 3rd party 3D graphics cards market took off, and even if there were cards for the Amigas too, market economics made them unviable.
And even though I usually appreciate Datagubbe's writings, this time I think his take is incorrect. At least in my circles Wolfenstein / Doom and ultimately Quake was the final nails in the Amiga's coffin.
Sure, the picture is bigger - PC market drove down prices and very soon the price/performance difference was very unfavorable for Amiga - but at least initially the issue was kids wanted to play Wolfenstein, Doom, or at least something similar, and that was not possible if you stayed on the Amiga.
Most of my friends were gaming on consoles at the time. I very much preferred the Amiga (I also had Atari STs during this time) to consoles perhaps mainly due to the ability to use RGB monitors with a proper RGB signal. It was at best composite back then on the consoles of the era - in the states anyway (we didn't have SCART as an option). I know I'm odd here, but that was a major factor -- but also the fact that I used the Amiga for much more than gaming. I BBSed heavily, generated hundreds of images with paint programs, programmed on it, and then there was enjoying scenedemos as a huge part of my use.
Most people in the user group I was in back then (ALFA - Amigoid Life Form Association) were NASA engineers who used them as cheap and capable alternatives to the UNIX workstations they worked with at NASA (which was local, Hampton, VA). Many of these guys were older and didn't game at all.
I heard NASA used their Amiga systems clear up to 2006, which is a rather unusually long lifespan for the application they intended them for. But I suppose commodity PC hardware and the software they needed just wasn't really there at a price point that made sense, plus, I guess as the old adage goes... if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Yes. "Amigas take in all the telemetry data from the spacecraft, scale it by applying coefficients of up to fifth order polynomials and convert the data back to engineering units for display to the engineers working the launch."[1]
I remember those extremely early days, which were filled with slow releases, I must say - but it was a singular experience, playing with that hardware. I left and came back with an Amiga 2000 in 1988 and that was a great time - a peak time to be an Amigoid.
1992 does seem late for a first Amiga - and a 500; I had an A1200 in '92.
I still have two Amigas that I use often (1000, 2000 '020) and a PowerPC "Amiga," that I rarely power on.
My experience mirrors yours, I got my first Amiga 500 in 1986, and besides gaming, it was my home programming rig until 1994. I was studying informatics and while everybody was stuck on monochrome 640Kb MS-DOS equipped PS/2 programming a few hundred lines of Turbo Pascal at most, I had the joy of venturing into a modern OS with multitasking, GUI, a complex file system, writing stuff in AmigaBASIC, compiling my first programs with AC-Basic. Then I started learning C and Intuition, and built several GUI programs. I finally spent a couple years writing like, 300K SLOC of Motorola 68000 assembly, which resulted in a basic, but very fast text editor, and two fractal generators capable of almost matching the performance of FractInt on a PC. My knowledge of C and GUIs finally landed me my very first job as junior developer in august 1994, thanks to my Amiga! Literally a dream come true in Italy. My very first paycheck was spent buying an A4000, but by then I realized the Amiga had lost, and sadly returned it to the seller in exchange for an ugly stupid Pentium PC with Microsoft Windows 3.1, which had far superior graphics, sound, memory, disk and computing power, though it was soulless. The Commodore Amiga OTOH will always have a little place in my heart.
Blake, I have to say you had to have had a VERY cool childhood growing up with your mom helping you get some then cutting edge tech like that in the mid 80s. I have to wonder what a typical 80s kid's exposure to computers was like back then and the discoverability of it all, because computers of any kind in the states were generally very niche in family homes back then, let alone Amiga computers.
Yep, I was lucky. We were a middle-class family and my mom and dad did support my extreme passion in computers. I went through a huge amount of systems.
I would buy one, love it, read about another and finally put the first in the newspaper for sale ( https://bytecellar.com/2019/05/08/computer-classifieds-datin... ) and move to the next, with funds added in by my parents to cover the different. I was very lucky in that! (The link shared shows actual scans of the newspaper ads I ran, selling some of the systems back in the '80s.)
Thank you for sharing your story and experience Blake. I was born in the late 80s, and my very first introduction to computers was via my dad’s white-box homemade 486 DX/33 PC running MS-DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1 (which from what I understand was pretty hot stuff for 1992 when he built it) and I believe we were the only household on our street that had any kind of PC at that point. My dad even dabbled in BBSes of the day and DOS games, in addition to his usual productivity stuff with WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3.
Sadly, I missed out on the more fun era of computers from the 80s, as PCs became quite the tour-de-force by the time the 90s rolled in. So I made it my mission to procure some classic computers from time to time and use them for awhile before selling them. My current retro system of choice is a modded Atari 520ST with 1 MB of RAM via a Marpet XTRA-RAM expansion.
> I have to wonder what a typical 80s kid's exposure to computers was like back then and the discoverability of it all, because computers of any kind in the states were generally very niche in family homes back then, let alone Amiga computers.
Platform studies as an interdisplinary discipline should, and usually does, pay attention to the subtleties of different markets; many an enthusiast's dabblings in history do not, thereby often enough mimicking the sort of Ereignisgeschichte ("event history") from other fields hobbyists gravitate to, e. g. military history.
I, for my part, value Datagubbe's account as an interesting meditation on personal computing realities, and therefore choices, in the Sweden of the late 80s to early 90s.
Born in 84 myself, first major introduction to computing was in '89 or '90, my grade school had received about 20 Apple 2e with various edutainment titles.
I gave Linux on the desktop a good shake once, back in 1994. I installed Debian from a dev branch that came on 15 floppies. I was running it on an AMD 5x86 160 with 24MB RAM and had a lovely 17-inch (unusual for the time) trinitron display from Nokia. I used it for about 4 months, then went back to Windows 95.
An interesting hitch was that I needed to purchase a commercial X-Window system to get color from my Tseng ET-4000/W32p graphics board. XFree86 would not hit the modes I wanted. It cost $99. Here is the manual:
This is a great look at the creation of the Tinitron aperture grille CRT. My preference for aperture grille over shadow mask technology cannot be overstated. Once I got my first aperture grill display (a Nokia 447Xi with a Trinitron tube) in the early '90s, I never went back.
I still have my 19-inch Sony G420 that I use almost daily.
A good handful of variants were tested as well, as explained in the article. It doesn't seem it could be items on the list. (Fake chips were discussed and identified as well.)
If you read the article carefully, all AY-3-8913s mentioned fall in 1 of 2 categories:
1) Pulled from, or sitting on boards that were built much later (~2010?) than AY-3-8913 original production. There's no clear indication how makers of those boards obtained their ICs. So "bought from random eBay seller, potentially fake or relabeled chip" is entirely possible. Not excluded, anyway. Even if seller was legit, other options like poor storage, ESD damage etc still apply.
2) One vintage board with original IC. This of course pre-owned, IC not tested outside of this board, and... sample size 1.
Same thing: "AY-3-8913 chips we bought may have been duds or fakes".
If you'd find some gear that actually used these AY-3-8913s back in the day, in unmodified state, with a known history (use/storage/previous owners), pull the AY-3-8913s from that, test in isolation, and then also see the same problems, then you'd have a case.
But with the data as presented in article: could be anything, really.
The only thing I take away from all this: if you're building something that uses an AY-3-891x, stay away from the -8913. Because they're rare / hard to find, and "buy from eBay" has a good chance of getting you a bad chip. Dud, fake, re-labeled or otherwise.
Which is good to know but says little to nothing about genuine, original AY-3-8913.
Pretty slick. I've been listening to lots of "new" tracker tunes on the 486 + GUS over the past few months, and it's been lovely. A sample: https://oldbytes.space/@blakespot/111990410300125218 (so to speak...)
I will say that the Atari ST version of Rogue was one of my favorite games for the ST back when I had it in 1986, published by Epyx as mentioned in the article. Nice tile graphics on that one.
