Why play Amiga games?¶

Apart from Amiga-exclusive titles, most of the games in RML Amiga have also been released for MS-DOS. So what’s the point then, you might ask; why prefer Amiga originals or ports over the DOS versions?

A short history¶

The first Amiga was released in 1985 and it had unsurpassed graphics and sound capabilities for a very long time. As the Computer History Museum put it, it was “a radical multimedia machine from a group of thinkers, tinkerers, and visionaries which delivered affordable graphics, animation, music, and multitasking interaction the personal computer world hadn’t even dreamt of.” That’s a pretty accurate summary; the Amiga was at least a good 10 years ahead of its time.

IBM PCs from that era cost a small fortune, could only display 16 garish colours at best, and had rather primitive sound capabilities. The Amiga could display 64 colours out of its 4096-colour palette (or even hundreds of colours with clever programming tricks, or all 4096 colours at once in a special video mode), and had 4-channel digital sound—all that at a fraction of what an IBM PC costed¹. Although early models only had a 7.14 MHz CPU, all Amigas were also equipped with custom graphics and sound chips (co-processors) that worked in parallel with the CPU, freeing it up to do other tasks. This is similar to how modern GPUs operate.

In contrast, IBM PCs running MS-DOS had to do everything on the CPU by brute force. VGA graphics adapters and Sound Blaster cards were rather “dumb” compared to the sophisticated custom chips of the Amiga capable of semi-autonomous operation, so they needed a lot of CPU horsepower to drive. You needed a pretty fast decked-out Pentium to even just approximate what the original Amiga 1000 from 1985 was capable of. Although the Gravis UltraSound and Sound Blaster AWE32 cards eventually far surpassed the audio capabilities of the Amiga, they came late to the party and thus were sadly not widely utilised in DOS games.

Amiga vs DOS versions¶

In practical terms, any game released before 1990 has the potential to be vastly better on the Amiga. We’re talking about “potentials” here because there were many lazy Amiga ports of technically inferior DOS and Atari ST games, done by developers who did not understand the platform and thus did not utilise it to the fullest (Sierra is the most well-known example). But even these low-effort ports usually have superior sound on the Amiga.

In the early 1990s, when 386DX/40 or better machines equipped with VGA and Sound Blaster became the minimum standard in gaming circles, DOS games started catching up with the Amiga. Due to the relative unpopularity of the Amiga in the USA, North American game developers started dropping Amiga support from 1990 onwards. Many post-1990 North American Amiga releases are nothing to write home about; most of them are low-effort ports of the DOS originals.

The situation in Europe, however, was the exact opposite. The Amiga was vastly more successful there than IBM PCs right until the mid-90s when Windows 95 eventually took over (the German and the UK markets accounted for about 60% of total worldwide Amiga sales). Most European developers either adopted an “Amiga-first” approach, or at the very least properly utilised the strengths of the platform in their multi-platform releases. The biggest differentiating factor is usually the sound: even games made in the late 1993-1995 period have really good music and sound effects on the Amiga via digital samples of real instruments, while the DOS port often only has synthetic-sounding AdLib/OPL music, no sound effects, or some generic MIDI conversion of the original Amiga music.

General recommendations¶

In short, for pre-1990 games, it’s not even a contest—the Amiga almost always wins on all fronts. From 1990 onwards, it varies per game, but in general, European-made games are often best on the Amiga. Then regardless of the year of release, the Amiga versions are often the best-sounding, or at least they offer something unique in the sound department compared to the OPL or MIDI audio of their DOS counterparts. On the other hand, you often get better FPS in DOS versions of 3D games because these just need the raw CPU power for software 3D rendering that stock Amigas did not have.

Why play Amiga games?¶

A short history¶

Amiga vs DOS versions¶

General recommendations¶

Further reading¶