Posted March 09, 2023
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The 16Bit consoles of the days were by far superior to everything that the PC could offer and the design of the Amiga allowed graphical enhancements that were not thinkeable of at the time. It also stood up against all other 16Bit machines. Since you could change the palette of the graphic bitplanes on the fly, it was possible to get 4096 colors on one screen. But even the 16 color and 32 color games looked better than on other systems with the same color depth. At some point it got a 32+32 color mode for games, which was hardly ever used however. It had preemptive multi tasking, preventing that one task could stop the whole system.
Sure, at some point Nintendo and especially Sega catched up graphically and partially also surpassed it (not when it came to music. While all others used synthesizers, the Amiga could play four wave samples at the same time, with software support more. Turrican 2 used 7 channels), but this machine was something else, mostly thanks to it's coprocessors. The PC was far behind. At some point VGA closed the graphic gap and with the introduction of the Soundblaster it was also better when it came to music. For a long time also semi professional musicians used the Amiga as cheap alternative to the big sampler systems and the A1200 emulation of a Macintosh with the same CPU was actually faster and cheaper than the Mac itself. It found also it's way as a controller for example for disco lights.
Someone even created a raytraced render video with his Amiga - in 1985! Google "juggler amiga". Sure, it's very simple.But this was done with a 7MHz 16 Bit processor.
Why it died? Complete and utterly failure in marketing. While the Amiga was designed to support all sorts of extensions which actually existed (graphic cards, better processor, hard drives, ...), Commodore for some reason hesitated long to promote these, they were more interested in selling new models. But the A500 was so successful, that hardly anyone saw the need to upgrade and software studios would focus on the most common model of course.
And since hard discs were never promoted, bigger games on multiple floppies could be a bit of a pain in the ass, even if one had four floppy drives installed - which had to be supported by the game of course. Many games only looked for data on df0:
Keeping the games alive in emulators is a legal problem, because part of the operating system is stored in a ROM chip or on a disk (early models) and is still under copyright, has to be licenced (formerly from Commodore, now from Cloanto)