Dude, you're, like, seriously devalueing games here.
A lot of old PC games sell here for $5.99 or something like that. Now, Amiga wasn't a good system. It was The System!! You can take almost any game that was released as both PC (DOS) and Amiga versions, and Amiga totally wins over PC.

So if we're going to use any kind of quality meter here, Amiga versions should cost more, not less, than PC versions of the same games. Just because Amiga practically speaking died, and PC flourished, doesn't mean that old Amiga games are worthless.

(Of course if they are all released as freeware, I'm not really complaining, but just sayin' this...)


Amiga was a whole lot more advanced than you give it credit for. It wasn't your old C64 where you had to press play on tape and then wait 30 minutes. Amiga had hard drives, which were expensive and rare, but still existed. So if it was possible to play without disk changing back in the 90's, it's sure possible now.
No need to "hack".

Basically, for any DOS game released before 1993 that also had an Amiga version, the Amiga version was superior. There are exceptions, but they are few and far between. Hence, for any DOS game from that era worth selling on its own, the Amiga version should be worth at least as much.

The strengths of the Amiga compared to the PC at the time were better graphics and sound. When the PC finally caught up, it left the Amiga behind very fast.

Also, Commodore (the company behind the Amiga) was not known for its keen grasp of marketing. And old joke goes that if Commodore ever acquired Kentucky Fried Chicken, they would rename it Warm Dead Bird.
UAE, which is the most widely used Amiga emulator, supports up to four simultaneous disk drives, same as the Amiga itself did. Hence, for any game using 4 disks or less, no swapping is involved (as long as the game itself supports multiple disk drives, but most of them do).

A piece of software called WHDLoad also exists, which allows you to install a wide selection of games to a virtual Amiga hard drive, even though the games originally only had a floppy version.

But the floppy disks were part of the reason why the Amiga lagged behind in the end. When games began to grow in size, the Amiga was in serious trouble. Amiga floppies were only 720KB, while PC floppies were 1,44MB. Hence, you needed twice the amount of Amiga disks as PC disks to store the same amount of data. This was exemplified by Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge, which on the Amiga came on 11 floppies, as far as I remember. It probably did have an option to install to HDD, but since Amiga HDDs were hellishly expensive (they were not standard components like PC HDDs are), very few people had them, and so had no other option but to swap like mad or buy a PC, if they wanted to play the game.
Well, availability has never been a problem with Amiga games. Legal availability is a whole other story, however.

Let the computers' wars rage on again !!!

they will if spectrum c64 and amstrad games are coming to gog as well

And old Apple computers too ;-)

hahaha :P

Sounds promising...I know Atari could also do 4 disks plus a cassette tape, however i think at most we had 2... And i don't think any of the games supported multiple disks...

If the games are set up properly that way, it would probably be pretty transparent then :)

Hmm... I'll hope the emulator supports COW (Copy-on-write), since likely saves would try to go to one of the original disks, while COW would save to a separate image keeping it pure...

Ouch. And yet i wonder with improved compression algorithms how much extra data could have been packed per disk. Hmmm...

I just came.

Holy cow, this sounds very promising! Can't wait for next week to arrive! :-)

Well, UAE supports save states, which simply saves a memory dump of the RAM. Since a standard Amiga 500 only had 512KB RAM (although many people, myself included, bought a RAM upgrade with an additional 512KB), that's a universal "save-anywhere" system with save games taking up at most 1MB of disk space.

id be fine with that too

but does that include the apple II line or the macintosh games form 80's and early 90's ?

honestly id be fine with either

You just compared the actually available space on Amiga formatted disks to the theoretical volume of PC disks. IIRC Amiga disks were actually formatted to 880kb and PC formatted disks actually had 1,38 MB available.

Also, it's not that simple: I don't know how the Amiga did it exactly, wether better compression techniques were available etc. but there were a few Amiga games that came on fewer disks than their PC counterparts (and we're talking about the same kind of 3,5" disks here) despite having better graphics and digitized sound.

Savestates are easy to do (and bulky). If the game supports saving though (like some large RPG game or adventure) that's where COW would come in.

COW is great as a differencing engine while retaining all the original information, although it doesn't appear to. Think of a painting with a glass put over it. If you change the painting, you draw on top of the glass instead. To everyone that sees it, they see the painting changed while it never was touched.

The question is whether improved compression algorithms would be feasible at all. The Amiga 500 used a Motorola 68000 processor running at about 7MHz. If a higher compression rate meant having to wait half an hour for the game to decompress, chances are you'd rather swap disks. Also, with a standard memory size of only 512KB (less than a floppy) and no hard drive, where would you decompress it to?

And when has the world of computing ever referred to the formatted size? They always use the raw size to make it sound bigger. Although if you are using a system like Linux, you can compress a filesystem using Squashfs and then raw copy to the drive and mount it raw, which is really cool... Or if you have one really big file like a tar.gz file, you can copy directly to the drive without a FS attached giving you the full 1.44....

I'm actually really sad floppies are no longer supported... I loved tinkering with FS's and compression and all that stuff and seeing what i could do with it on laptops. Not to mention tiny 3Mb recovery OS's that were awesome...