Red Baron had abysmal performance - but it was a PC-first development with a lot of details (and simple shading IIRC). Knights of the Sky was better in this regard. Midwinter 2 was playable, but yeah, it could turn into a slide show with a lot of stuff going on.

The DID games were a miracle compared to the rest, but another game with outstanding performance was Birds of Prey by Argonaut.

I presume that's running on an emulator (WinUAE), but that's about the speed it ran on real Amiga 500 as far as I remember. It was not really smooth, but playable. If those videos are of any indication, the original Zarch on Acorn Archimedes ran considerably smoother.

As far as I recall, speedwise A500, A1000 and A2000 were identical. They shared the same CPU and graphics chipsets, so Virus would run identically on those three Amiga models, I presume. A1000 was the very first Amiga (very expensive too if I recall right), A500 was a "cost reduction" version of it (more affordable to homes) but still with similar performance, and A2000 was the same as A500, but with more expansion options (expansion card slots etc.).

There were at least two different models of A500 though, the early ones had 512kB chip memory (you could buy an internal 512kB memory expansion, but I recall it was not "chip memory", but probably "fast memory"), while newer A500s had 1MB. But that didn't affect speed either.

A1200, A3000, A4000 etc. then had more performance with newer and faster graphics chipsets (AGA), CPUs etc. But I was out of Amiga scene at that point already, becoming a PC gamer.

Well, I guess I could have just as well linked here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_models_and_variants

So which is it? :) If you have played the game, then you have seen it because it is in the very first encounter.

Although you could upgrade the regular A500 model with 512kb to 1MB. It's what we did (well, my dad, because I was little more than a toddler when he did it).

Oh yeah, it's that A1200 that aways confuses me. I think a friend of us had that one and my brother and I were extremely jealous when we saw the stick in Wing Commander actually move. :D

I don't wanna say. I feel like a perv for having shown any interest in the game. Nah, okay, it's Cobra Mission. ^^ And yeah, I must have seen that character back then since I recall the combat but I totally didn't remember this particular pic. Also I got stuck pretty early and didn't play the game that much.

I was going to say the old Lotus (Turbo Challenge) games...but maybe not. Their backgrounds move kinda up-down-up to make the moving to up- and downhill more apparent. so thats actually totally different case.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLlWlsb9GpQ

However M.A.C.E. has the parallax thingy for sure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ic-gQQ8C1xI

Older games: I loved it in Worms.
Newer games: Terraria does it just right, IMO.

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night has the sweetest effects throughout: e.g. , [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4S8VNEydxA&t=6m48s]here and here.

Oh god, the scary memories. All those forest creatures of hell, AAAAAHH!!!

The Trine games look to be full perspective 3D engine to me but I'd have to double check to be sure.

Yeah amigas were confusing!
I had A1200 with 2M Chip... Then some games would load faster if you had fast memory... So I bought 8M fast. But then there was stuff that MC68020 could not handle at all... wasn't it 14Mhz Cpu? :) So you would need to buy a '030/040/060... And then there was all those ECS and OCS games, some or many of which didn't run at all, unless you went looking for a fix... And the fixes were not easy to come by, unless you knew Somebody :) Of course Aminet helped... But man was it expensive to use that sloooow internet those days on an Amiga :)

on topic: Man I was sure I had something, but now I just think Beast 3 :)
How about Super Mario land 1 and 2? You get those wings and off you go!
Amiga had Battle Squadron! And Alien Breed series.... They made PC-remakes but with semi-poor ratings.

Yeah, I did that too. The expansion was not "chip memory" though, I don't recall if it was called "fast memory" or "slow memory" instead. Amiga seemed to have lots of different memory types (chip, fast, slow, god knows what else). :)

I think the newer A500 model came with 1MB of chip memory (not 512kB chip + 512kB fast/slow), and also the Kickstart ROM was 1.3 (1.2 in the earlier A500 model that I had). But in the end I don't think any of that really mattered, all pre-AGA Amiga games seemed to be designed with the original A500 in mind, ie. 512kB chip memory, and if you had the 512kB memory expansion on top of it (or an A500 with 1MB chip RAM), the game might take advantage of it too in some way, like with reduced loading times.

I think Amiga games stayed that way until A1200 (and CD32) came around, after which there started to be graphically improved AGA-versions as well. But Amiga was already a declining star at that point, I think.

Bingo.

Well, I had to educate myself what the different Amiga RAM types were, and yeah, the original A500 "trapdoor" memory expansion (extra 512kB RAM) was considered as "pseudo-fast RAM" aka "slow RAM". The other types of memory expansions were generally referred to as "fast RAM", and the built-in memory which the graphics chipset could access was "chip RAM".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Chip_RAM

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Chip_RAM#Fast_RAM

Yeah, Parallax was developed by Sensible Software
http://www.mobygames.com/game/c64/parallax
The same guys behind Wizball, SEUCK, Sensible Soccer, Cannon Fodder and a bunch of other great games - LOVE those guys!
Shame no-one had the balls to bank roll Sex n' Drug n' Rock n' Roll - the project that bankrupted them!

Sorry F4LL0UT, but the only examples of parallax scrolling I can remember are from the old days of C64 and Amiga... forgive me if I post them here...
On the C64, and that little obscure game, [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcqJHuACxoU]Rimrunner.
On the Amiga I recall , [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yErm-YRYzjM]Leander and Flimbo's Quest. Also Silkworm had a bit of parallax.
Yet, the most impressive example of that I remember comes from the underwater sequences of Nebulus on the C64.
There were many, many games with parallax scrolling; I surely played many of them, but I can't remember them at the moment.

Me too :)

I had the game (albeit with a different, fake title) on my expanded A500 and I can attest the performance was like that in the video, if i remember correctly. Really hard controls, indeed.

Great game, I played it!

They're legendary!

It fits

But Forbidden Forrest 2 gives a better idea and use of Parallax being written years later by the same coder.

It was one of my fave games at the time and I didn't care how blocky expanded sprites were it was a technical marvel and good use of the unique features the C64 had.
The Archimedes still has a legacy today being a RISC based chip (Reduced Instruction Set) it was this that made the Archimedes fast as the Amiga used custom chips to give it the speed edge over its nearest rival which was the Atari ST.

I had the A1000 which was 256mb but had the 256Mb upgrade making it 512mb which to be honest you really had to have for Multitasking.

I could go on and on about the Amiga and C64 being a huge huge chunk of my life. But although I was never a fan of the Archimedes, its legacy is the RISC Chip, which you will find in many mobile phones now (ARM)

That's an error that I'm also prone to make. It's incredible how much everything has scaled up. Telephones have gigabytes of memory. Terrabyte disks are the norm (the first HD I saw had 10MB).