I LOVE MY AMIGA !

[Anapan]

I wonder if Pong paddles would work.
My music teacher had an Amiga in the music room, it's what got me into mods and tracked music.
Could anyone suggest a good model of Amiga screen with SCART input to hook my consoles up to? I love the scan-liney picture that can only be gotten with Amiga or arcade monitors.

[Hobie-wan]

I wonder if Pong paddles would work.

I imagine they would if there was a program that supported that input. It uses different pins than sticks do in the plug. The C64 supported paddles as I remember Omega Race could use them.

[norecess]

Amiga CD 32 is basically an Amiga 1200 without keyboard. Designed for gaming only. It uses CDs so it's quite faster to load than original disc-based games.
Amiga 500 is great for gaming too - thus I prefer the CD32 because of the CD-based system.

But from all the Amiga systems I have, my flash-based Amiga 600 is the best gaming platform I ever had - so many great games to play, really fast to load, hours of enjoyment with games.

Amiga makes use for Atari-compatible joysticks, even if Amiga CD 32 gamepad has 4 buttons.
Sega Genesis gamepad works well too.

To me, Jim Power is the best game available on the platform. Shadow Of The Beast.. blah.. I never enjoyed its gameplay, even if I recognize great technical stuff. Turrican Amiga is great too.

You can get Amiga hardware here : http://www.amigakit.com/ with interesting hardware upgrades.

[d123456]

I absolutely hate the Amiga.
The only good thing is the music which is admittedly very very good.
Played almost all games.
Genesis, SNES, pc engine are much much better and cheaper.

[norecess]

It does not compare to consoles. This is computer gaming, you have games you don't find elsewhere.

[Ivo]

It does not compare to consoles. This is computer gaming, you have games you don't find elsewhere.

It does not compare DIRECTLY with consoles, but I think it does compare - the comparison isn't that much lopsided in favor of consoles, IMO.

When looking back, and focusing just on games it is easy for people to forget that back in the peak popularity of the Amiga, PCs tended to be expensive and basically crap for gaming. Genesis / Megadrive and SNES also had very important "1st party" backup - although you won't be able to do word processing or mostly anything else "productive" (Mario Paint vs DeluxePaint?).

Even just in terms of gaming, Herzog Zwei is decent but Dune 2 (with mouse support) is IMO a truer creator of the RTS genre. On the other extreme I agree that platformers and arcade ports often suffered a lot from the "single-button" issue with Amiga joysticks (although there were plenty of keys to assist, which might be handy in complicated games like flight sims etc.).

BTW the cartridge console games back then were more expensive (not cheaper) than floppy games.

With the Amiga you had a jack of all trades (arguably a master of some during a certain period, even).
1. You had productivity stuff which was during a period about as good or even better than PCs and Macs (particularly if you took the lower price into account)

2. You had "computer" style games with mouse control etc - once again as good or even better than PCs and Macs

3. You had "console" style games with joystick control (instead of pad, and with the 1-button problem). Here is where generally the Amiga was trailing behind, mostly due to not having 1st party games but also typically poorer controls (but the graphical power still let it have some of the best home versions of certain arcade ports that didn't need many buttons).

At a certain time I had (for a short while) a Megadrive, in addition to my A500. I would certainly agree that Sonic and Sonic 2 blew out of the water basically everything comparable - this is not necessarily an issue with the hardware (although I do think the Megadrive was better prepared for handling that sort of games). Most likely it was due to the effort put in by Sega into their games (you can bet it had many times the budget of an average Amiga game - I guess most of the Amiga classics were made by rather small teams of devs).

There were still many huge classics which I like more than Sonic that started in the Amiga and then got ported (the Amiga has relatively few top class exclusives for that reason - why would a 3rd party dev not port an Amiga game after it was a success?). I think the Amiga played a big role in the history of gaming as it seems likely that it was precisely because it was an open platform and a cheap computer able to do "productive" that (like other home computers before it) it had an active scene of what would now be called "indie" game makers. There are also a lot of crap games, probably an higher percentage than in consoles and this could simply be due to the same factors of being an open platform etc. (but note there is plenty of crap games in consoles as well).

Ivo.

[Pulsar_t]

I agree with Ivo's post, and would like to add that the Amiga had its own demographic (mostly nerdy, middle-class European technophiles) which wasn't as encompassing as that of consoles of the time. Add to that the fact pirating Amiga game diskettes wasn't as hard as console carts which added to its popularity immensely.

I'm working on an Amiga music collection and would appreciate some recommendations, beside the obvious choices of course (e.g. Turrican, Lotus, Cannon Fodder..)

[Ivo]

I'm working on an Amiga music collection and would appreciate some recommendations, beside the obvious choices of course (e.g. Turrican, Lotus, Cannon Fodder..)

Have a look at Exotica if you haven't already.

http://www.exotica.org.uk/wiki/Main_Page

[Pulsar_t]

Exotica's rips are often missing tracks. Is this due to ripping difficulty?

[Ivo]

Exotica's rips are often missing tracks. Is this due to ripping difficulty?

I'm no expert. From what I observe I think it is a bit messy as differenty pieces are using different... trackers? As far as I understand the music in Amiga (and probably in other hardware as well) is written in specific "formats" and you need the accompanying information on how to read it. Deliplayer has a bunch of that info. What I think is happening is that a given game may be using more than one "format" and some stuff is harder to pull out than other.

If anyone knows more we could take this into another thread as I'm interested in understanding it better.

Ivo.