A primer guide to Amiga gaming

[Lum]

Back in the era's tail end (as a kid) I moved from Commodore 64 to the famed DOS+Win3x combo. Marked the finale for me with non-x86 computing. My interest in them has never recovered.

Most of those numerous other systems I got to briefly play around on were little if any appeal. Apple II was OK if I recall. Not much Amiga use. Don't remember if I actually ended up trying Atari ST, Commodore 16, Vic-20, or whatever else that former collector owned. There was an Apple Lisa for some reason they couldn't use.

Sure sometimes I'll find an old computer to try reselling, but I don't have the heart in even that idea to take it seriously. So I tend to lose money on such feeble attempts..

[7Force]

Well take a look at how I created the forum and let me know what types of pc I should list.


I feel amiga deserves it's own forum but so few people remember it , it's a shame.

IMO the C64 should be listed.

[hrahn]

As a longtime owner of an A500 (from 1988 to sometime in the late 90s, later I had a 1200 for a few years) let me add something to that primer.
First, and foremost: Get yourself a RGB cable! The Amiga has a native RGB output on its Video connector, since the connectors are standardized you can even make your own. This, coupled with one of the great RGB monitors from Commodore (1084 series) gives an amazing picture! We enjoyed hours of hours of flicker-free gaming back then.
Second, some games utilize additional hardware. A 512KB ram expansion for the 500 is a MUST (it fits in the trapdoor slot underneath), but you're actually better off using MORE memory. There were expansions up to 8MB as sidecars, my own A500 had 2Meg inside the chassis with a special socket underneath the CPU. Why the extra memory? Well, quite some games utilize it!
Almost all Psygnosis games did to a certain extent (Leander comes to mind, great platformer btw), Uridium 2 even differenciates between the kind of memory you have installed - you should have an A500+ for that since it utilizes 1MB of chip-mem for more music (trapdoor-mem is slow-mem, external ram ist fast-mem, internal mem connected to the board is chip-mem - simplified statement, the reality is more complex ^^ ).
When I first played Silent Service II - I thought the game had crashed on loading. But no, it just loaded everything from the two floppies into memory, so afterwards there were no load times in the game whatsoever!

Sadly, Amiga Hardware got more expensive over the past few years. Good floppy drives are hard to come by since they used a nonstandard 880kb format, you cannot just take any floppy drive and use it in an Amiga.
Luckily for us, Individual Computers has started producing a new Turbo Card for the 1200 range, so that we can ditch the overpriced accelerators on Ebay auctions and use that one instead.
Why use an accelerator card? Well, without one games like "Red Baron", Links or Elite II: Frontier are nearly unplayable. Furthermore, later games which were ported to the machine sometimes required one, some even in tandem with a PPC processor board and a 3D graphics card (Wipeout2097 comes to mind, or Quake. Yes, they were both ported to the Amiga!)

Here is a list of games that will run on any 1MB A500 though, you should try them out:
X-Out, Apidya, Hostages, Bubba'n'Stix, Superfrog, James Pond, The Spy Who Loved Me (just for the title song), Super Cars II (with a friend - soon to be your greatest enemy), Body Blows Galactic, Flashback, Another World (I like the Amiga Versions much more than the PC), Unreal (nothing to do with the PC shooter), Moonstone, Rocket Ranger, Defender Of The Crown, Wings Of Fury, Skidmarks

and I could go on for hours :)

Edit: Oh, oh! Ashes Of Empire! Don't forget that one, follower of Midwinter I and II. And Battle Isle! And Carrier Command! And Tower Of Babel (great 3D-Puzzler!)

And don't forget to look at what the demoscene pulled out of that little 7.14mhz A500 with 1MB as well:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RF-Rf...eature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5HacABiXUE

Or out of an A1200 with its 14mhz 68020:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FD42AupWDmE
(that was 1994 btw, now remember when Doom came out on the PC and what kind of PC it needed to run fluently)

Add an 68060 card to an A1200 (doesn't need a PPC on it) and you can do stuff like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUXOEfG1LN8

[Twimfy]

Great guide. I got an Amiga 600 when my dad dropped my SMS down the stairs. Loved it dearly, Project X was probably my favourite game.

[karsten]

first of all great post, and really wiki-like material...

you can do better and showing more modern amiga os features, AROS, and icAros and much more, but it's a great introduction to the hardware.

Still you deserve a SPANKING for not listing sensible world of soccer :D no soccer game ever matched its variety up to today!

[The Perfect K]

As a longtime owner of an A500 (from 1988 to sometime in the late 90s, later I had a 1200 for a few years) let me add something to that primer.
First, and foremost: Get yourself a RGB cable! The Amiga has a native RGB output on its Video connector, since the connectors are standardized you can even make your own. This, coupled with one of the great RGB monitors from Commodore (1084 series) gives an amazing picture! We enjoyed hours of hours of flicker-free gaming back then.
Second, some games utilize additional hardware. A 512KB ram expansion for the 500 is a MUST (it fits in the trapdoor slot underneath), but you're actually better off using MORE memory. There were expansions up to 8MB as sidecars, my own A500 had 2Meg inside the chassis with a special socket underneath the CPU. Why the extra memory? Well, quite some games utilize it!
Almost all Psygnosis games did to a certain extent (Leander comes to mind, great platformer btw), Uridium 2 even differenciates between the kind of memory you have installed - you should have an A500+ for that since it utilizes 1MB of chip-mem for more music (trapdoor-mem is slow-mem, external ram ist fast-mem, internal mem connected to the board is chip-mem - simplified statement, the reality is more complex ^^ ).
When I first played Silent Service II - I thought the game had crashed on loading. But no, it just loaded everything from the two floppies into memory, so afterwards there were no load times in the game whatsoever!

Sadly, Amiga Hardware got more expensive over the past few years. Good floppy drives are hard to come by since they used a nonstandard 880kb format, you cannot just take any floppy drive and use it in an Amiga.
Luckily for us, Individual Computers has started producing a new Turbo Card for the 1200 range, so that we can ditch the overpriced accelerators on Ebay auctions and use that one instead.
Why use an accelerator card? Well, without one games like "Red Baron", Links or Elite II: Frontier are nearly unplayable. Furthermore, later games which were ported to the machine sometimes required one, some even in tandem with a PPC processor board and a 3D graphics card (Wipeout2097 comes to mind, or Quake. Yes, they were both ported to the Amiga!)

Here is a list of games that will run on any 1MB A500 though, you should try them out:
X-Out, Apidya, Hostages, Bubba'n'Stix, Superfrog, James Pond, The Spy Who Loved Me (just for the title song), Super Cars II (with a friend - soon to be your greatest enemy), Body Blows Galactic, Flashback, Another World (I like the Amiga Versions much more than the PC), Unreal (nothing to do with the PC shooter), Moonstone, Rocket Ranger, Defender Of The Crown, Wings Of Fury, Skidmarks

and I could go on for hours :)

Edit: Oh, oh! Ashes Of Empire! Don't forget that one, follower of Midwinter I and II. And Battle Isle! And Carrier Command! And Tower Of Babel (great 3D-Puzzler!)

And don't forget to look at what the demoscene pulled out of that little 7.14mhz A500 with 1MB as well:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RF-Rf...eature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5HacABiXUE

Or out of an A1200 with its 14mhz 68020:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FD42AupWDmE
(that was 1994 btw, now remember when Doom came out on the PC and what kind of PC it needed to run fluently)

Add an 68060 card to an A1200 (doesn't need a PPC on it) and you can do stuff like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUXOEfG1LN8

Posts like these are why I love the Amiga community - everyone is always so friendly and willing to share. It helps that most are still fanatically enthusiastic about the machine. You're never at a shortage of people to gab about the amiga with if you look hard enough.

Great info too, btw!

[The Perfect K]

Still you deserve a SPANKING for not listing sensible world of soccer :D no soccer game ever matched its variety up to today!

I was wondering when someone would bring up sensible soccer... what can I say? I'm an american, we just don't have that love for soccer. I appreciate that they're extremely well made, they're just not for me. Besides, you can buy sensible soccer on virtually any hardware from that era, and I said I was going to concentrate on stuff that wasn't massively ported.

[7Force]

I always hated Sensible Soccer

[karsten]

I was wondering when someone would bring up sensible soccer... what can I say? I'm an american, we just don't have that love for soccer. I appreciate that they're extremely well made, they're just not for me. Besides, you can buy sensible soccer on virtually any hardware from that era, and I said I was going to concentrate on stuff that wasn't massively ported.

well Sensible World of Soccer is not a standard sensible soccer and not even close... But i guess you never tried it imagine a baseball, hockey or football game in wich you can play, train buy, exchange players from the whole world, from USA to China or San Marino, go on and participate in all kinds of competition until you get the chance to train a national team...

Also the game is out just for amiga, pc and a weird xbox live port.

[The Perfect K]

well Sensible World of Soccer is not a standard sensible soccer and not even close... But i guess you never tried it imagine a baseball, hockey or football game in wich you can play, train buy, exchange players from the whole world, from USA to China or San Marino, go on and participate in all kinds of competition until you get the chance to train a national team...

Also the game is out just for amiga, pc and a weird xbox live port.

Oh, I had no idea there was a difference between Sensible Soccer and Sensible world of soccer. Good to note.

[nameless hero]

AMIGA!!!

I spent the best days of my childhood on that machine. Let me give you my 2 cents aswell. ^^

The Amiga was very popular here in Germany too, along with the C64. Also, the image as a gaming computer made the Amiga fall imho, although there was a huge amount of great professional software for it. Final Writer comes to mind (WYSIWYG word processing software), NOTHING on PC could compare with it. And ofcourse DPaint.
Workbench, the OS, was extremely advanced for it's time. A Hard Disk is very recommended (There are srsly Amigas not supporting a hard disk? Sure?), i had a huge (2 foot x 2foot) 20MB HDD on my A500. Workbench booted in like 2 seconds... Most multi-disk games can be installed to the hard disk, which is a blessing. Being the disk jockey gets unfunny after the 5th disk change in 3 minutes lol. Also get an external floppy.

1MB chip ram is indeed a must, luckily most A500 should have one installed already. Accelerator cards? Depends if you have the money lol.

The Commodore monitors from that time are indeed amazing, you can throw ANYTHING at it and it will display just fine. I remember having my Workbench at 640x200@15Hz... IIRC.

My game recommendations:
The Settlers (Two mice, one screen cut in the middle, epic fun)
Walker (A Mech shooting Nazis in the 2nd World War, LOOOONG loading time lol)
Warlords (VERY good medieval strategy game)

And since we're at Assembler, has anyone heard the rumours back then, that GTA was developed for the AMIGA in the beginning? Anyone seen a screenshot or a proto lol?

Edit to add: Newcomers, go for a cheap A500 imho btw.

[davenixdorf]

Nobody should go without playing the classic Viz game either ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7K_J9JzsueI

Classic!

[The Perfect K]

Nobody should go without playing the classic Viz game either ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7K_J9JzsueI

Classic!

I had never heard of that game before, but my first impressions are that it reminds me of Kato & Ken (or maybe JJ & Jeff) in terms of style. Not necessarily gameplay, but it seems like it's got that same atmosphere. I'll try it out sometime.

[Borman]

I want an Amiga so bad. Been trying to find one locally, but its tough.

[The Perfect K]

I want an Amiga so bad. Been trying to find one locally, but its tough.

I know a guy over at Sega-16 in Vancouver who has a stock pile of them and is willing to let them go at decent prices if you're interested. It's not quite New York, but you could still save a bit on shipping since it's closer than, say, europe.

[Taucias]

Don't forget Lemmings!

[WolverineDK]

Nope, it's a SRAM card which acts as 2 mb of fast ram.

There is an SD card solution too for the Amiga , just to point out something .

Don't forget Lemmings!

Or Lemmings 2 The Tribes with Walker in one of the training levels, and not just that Lemmings 2 on the Amiga was the best version.

Add an 68060 card to an A1200 (doesn't need a PPC on it) and you can do stuff like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUXOEfG1LN8

Maybe I am just dreaming, but would it not be possible to make a decent port of MGS1 for the Amiga with that card in mind ? Thanks to that demo.

And the cool thing (and why the PPC cards are so sought after by some). Is that you could put a Voodoo card to them ?

[Shou]

Great post, I would've found it useful years ago when I started gathering up my Amiga stash.

I'd recommend writing about the Indivision AGA as it is the best way to display the A1200 on modern displays rather than having to settle for composite video and use PAL/NTSC converters!'

It's really unfortunate that the ST scene is nowhere near as comprehensive as the C64 and Amiga scenes are.

[Superrayman3]

I know a guy over at Sega-16 in Vancouver who has a stock pile of them and is willing to let them go at decent prices if you're interested. It's not quite New York, but you could still save a bit on shipping since it's closer than, say, europe.

Who is this user your refering to on sega-16 because i'm interested in buying an Amiga and what price range does he usually want for one?

[hrahn]

Just remembered another game that shall not be forgotten:
Speedball2 - Brutal Deluxe!

Also "The chaos Machine" is well worth a look. Anything by the Bitmap Brothers really.

And for everyone looking for games & software, this site should be high up on your priority list:
http://www.back2roots.org/

Every game on there has the blessing of the owners/copyright holders/creators to be there, so it is safe to download and enjoy whatever is on there :)