Doom didn't kill the Amiga...Wolfenstein 3D did

[Music] back in 1992 I was a poor college student right in my second year of my computer science degree my classes would consist of mathematics and Computing I was learning about languages like C and took classes on computer graphics and discrete mathematics yep you guessed it I was a nerd on campus we had computer labs full of Unix workstations and 286 and 386 PCS running MS DOS and window at home I didn't own a PC I owned an Amiga an A500 to be precise my history growing up with an amga in the household is something that longtime viewers know all about it was the only machine I ever felt that I needed the A500 was pimped out with an accelerator card some extra RAM and 40m hard drive it could multitask was able to emulate a Mac and PC and even read my Mac and PC formatted discs from school by 1992 the igga was still a popular machine and its new line the a1200 introduced the AG chipset faster processor more colors more RAM built-in hard drive but unfortunately it wasn't really the upgrade that many were looking for I still wanted one of course but I couldn't help but feel a little disappointed but in 1992 even if you didn't upgrade to an Omega 1200 everyone would play some amazing games aija was a fantastic IC horizontal shooter map that you could put right next to R type in the arcade Pinball Dreams was a technically brilliant pinball game with realistic physics I have the beholder too a fantastic Dungeon Crawler fighting monsters in the castle of Dark Moon flashback the 2D rotoscope science fiction cinematic platform game from the masters of Storytelling deline software and popul to the bigger and better sequel to Peter Ming's original game these are just a few highlights if you owned an Amiga in 1992 you were certainly eating good and you would still laugh at your friends who own PCS but the good times wouldn't last much longer in May of 1992 the PC Rose from the canvas and knocked out the Amiga with one [Music] punch wolfen star 3D released on May 5th 1992 that's over 32 years ago it sent shock waves through the industry developed by It software suddenly the PC had grown up and was starting to be taken seriously as a true games machine Wolfenstein of course wasn't rendering what we would consider to be true 3D it used a rendering system known as raycasting and billboard its Sprites to cast off the illusion of a 3D world but its performance was impressive even on a high-end 286 PC I remember at the time many in the igga circles were very quick to say that Wolfenstein was cheating and that the igga would still have the edge with its ability to render and fill vectors and do proper 3D but this was really just a coping mechanism at best somehow the IBM PC with its lack of any real custom chips outside of exotic sound cards had leap frogged the Amiga and suddenly 1992 was the beginning of the end which of course we would soon find out when Commodore declared bankruptcy in 1994 after they posted a $375 million loss to investors that [Music] year so what exactly happened how did the PC turn into such an amazing games machine seemingly overnight and how did it Crush any momentum that the Amiga may have had in 1992 well it's all thanks to the PC's VGA screen mode 13h the PC has no blitter no Hardware Sprites but it does have a mode where you can allocate a 320x200 pixel frame buffer and plot pixels from a palet of 256 colors into that frame buffer with only a single memory R per pixel this mode is also referred to what is known as chunky mode the name stems from the fact fact that each pixel that's being drawn on the screen has that classic VGA chunky look about the pixels if we go back to our example of the random pixels being displayed you can see here that we're setting the screen mode to 13h and this W Loop is plotting pixels with a random 8bit color value to any random XY position on the screen of course in this day and age frame buffers like this are standard and any graphics API such as openg DirectX or Vulcan allows the developer to work with frame buffers in this fashion the Amiga on the other hand did not instead it used bit planes simply put when you're rendering to the amiga's graphics Hardware you need a color palette and that palette has to be defined with a certain number of colors so for example if you want a 16 color palette that means you need four bit planes because each bit plane represents a one or a zero if you want 32 colors you need five bit planes this particular mode is known as planer mode now the igga was a 2d Powerhouse it could do a lot of really cool things and it even had the ability to draw connected lines and fill them quite quickly using the blitter but one thing that the Amiga struggled to do was render chunky Graphics if we assume a 16 C pallet with four bit planes and we're asking the hardware to plot a red pixel on the screen the hardware needs to make one read operation in bit plane 1 and then a read operation in bit Plane 2 and then a read operation in bit Plane 3 and a read operation in bit plane 4 just to calculate the color value of a single Pixel and then this operation needs to be repeated for the amount of times that you're drawing on the screen at the time it was generally agreed upon that the amga 500 couldn't run Wolfenstein it didn't have enough colors it didn't have a native chunky mode and most importantly it didn't have the processing power at only 7.14 MHz even with its custom chips it's seemed impossible and for years it was there were a few efforts to prove the naysay is wrong some commercial games released with an attempt at a similar raycasting engine some with some interesting results and experienced coders would come up with fast chunky two planer routines and the demo scene would show off some interesting results but this would not be ideal for the Omega 500 and it's 16bit processor so game Publishers demo coders and hobbyists would look to the omiga 1200 with its faster 32bit 68020 and wider 32-bit bus and improved a chipset many believe that the Omega 1200 would be capable of running Wolfenstein 3D but unfortunately it never came at least officially at the end of 1993 It software released Doom the Amiga still didn't have Wolfenstein but it did have expandability accelerated cards were becoming cheaper and quite popular The Sweet Spot being the 6830 cards clocked out 33 and 50 MHz if you had the cash you could even pick up a 68040 or even a 68060 card which cost thousands of dollars but this wasn't all dedicated graphics cards started to appear known as RTG or retargetable Graphics these cards would take the heavy lifting of rendering Graphics off the Amiga and onto the card itself and the best part was most of them would come built in with chunky modes surely by now Wolfenstein 3D and doom retainable but in 1994 John karmac famously said that the igga wasn't powerful enough to run doom and singled out the need for an expensive 68040 class processor and criticized the igga for its lack of chunky mode this response sent the igga community into a frenzy many believed he was wrong and that Doom was indeed possible others felt that while Doom was unattainable surely Wolfenstein 3D could be considered playable right but in 1994 John karmac wasn't wrong unless you had a high-end Amiga that cost a few thousand the hardware was never meant to run 3D texture mapped FPS style games even if its software invested in delivering either Doom or Wolfenstein to the igga it would only ever tap into a very small percentage of users who had amiga's capable of running the game at the time but by now the Amiga 1200 was the standard and the gauntlet had been thrown down developers and Publishers knew that Doom would never come to the Amiga and certainly not Wolfenstein 3D at least by John karmac and IT software's hand over the next few years the Amiga would see a flurry of Doom clones now this is a bit misleading to say this but it's the best way to describe the games that we would see most of them used raycasting methods Gloom is a technically impressive raycasting game that ran at somewhat decent speeds on a stocka 12 00 with extra Ram it was scalable and it ran well on pretty much any system that you had even taking advantage of retargetable Graphics Gloom 3 would see many improvements to the Gloom engine and the Gloom series would end up being somewhat popular on the Amiga but it was scalable and took advantage of accelerated cards and retargetable graphics cards and it ran pretty well no matter what setup you had even if it meant reducing the viewport to the size of a postage damp Team 17 would release alien breed 3D in 1995 and for me this game has the best feeling of a Wolfenstein or a doom clone above and beyond anything else that I've played on the Amiga it also had good speed but again the window size is just a bit larger than a postage stamp and those chunky Graphics are quite chunky Team 17 would follow this up with alien breed 3d2 a few years later but this was a much more ambitious effort with some pretty cool lighting but it was quite slow on anything less than a 68040 igga with an RTG card breathless is probably one of the more technical impressive Doom clones on the Amiga released in 1995 it runs well even on a stock omga 1200 with fast RAM and it scales nicely on a fast 03 or higher the problem is and what we will find out with many of these Doom clones on the Amiga is that the game play isn't much fun repetitive enemies and the environments lack any atmosphere the player movement is also far too slow for me this is more of a nice Tech demo and it was something that actually came bundled with accelerator cards back in the day genetic species is probably one of the best looking Wolfenstein 3D raycasting clones I've seen in a while it's a well-made 3D shooter with lots of atmosphere the lighting is especially nice for a 1998 egga FPS game it also scales well even on a stock amga with 4 Megs of RAM and could run fairly well with an accelerated card the gam playay itself isn't very special it's very similar to what you would expect shoot enemies find key cards and locate the exit to the next level fears is a 1995 Doom clone that is technically quite good it uses a more advanced 3D Engine with levels stairs slopes and water it ran well on an accelerated Amiga but the Developers really pulled in the camera perspective in an interesting way and it almost feels like a Sega super Scala arcade game over a conventional FPS but it wasn't just commercial games that were trying to replicate Wolfenstein 3D the imiga community was as well this is text demo 5 written by John Hendrick it's a simple demo showing off texture map walls and Floors running on a 68030 class amga it allows for multiple walls and floor textures and also allows floors to be any height now of course these were all very Valiant efforts but at the end of the day it was still not Wolfenstein 3D and it certainly wasn't Doom in 1997 the Doom source code was released on December the 23rd and this meant that the igga finally got its Doom ad Doom is the best version of Doom that is available on the Amiga and it runs pretty well but if we're talking about performance it's benchmarked to run at about 5 frames per second with a full window size on high detail on a 68030 class machine running at 28 MHz and around 10 FPS at 50 MHz and to round out the story Wolfenstein 3D finally would see an igga release and this is the most upto-date version known as Amy Wolf 3D now this was released in 2022 and it's a very well optimized only requiring a stock omga 1200 that required at least 1 mbte of additional memory so for me it's obvious of course commodore's failure to innovate would result in their demise the omiga 1200 the cd32 and the AG chipset was not the upgrade people were wanting they wanted more but ultimately Doom didn't kill the Amiga Wolfenstein did all the way back in 1992 computer Graphics were evolving and none of commodore's machines were really able to match it the 7-year-old Amiga architecture was useless for that type of FPS game and game developers knew it even though they tried to come up with their own solutions by the time Doom had released in 1993 the igga was already dead but there is somewhat of a happy ending here as it turns out you can run a fast FPS game on a stock and omiga without a CPU upgrade and John karmac may have been wrong all these years this is grind currently a work in progress title that demonstrates a very polished FPS running at between 25 to 30 FPS on a stock Amiga with fast memory the game promises to run at identical performance on a barebones Omega 500 as well with some added memory this is technical Wizardry at play here and I guess that if grind released all the way back in 1992 as a commercial product it would have have sold extremely well grind is one of those games that genuinely has me excited to play it does look quite fantastic while Wolfenstein and doom never did see commercial releases on the Amiga Quake of all games did it was ported to the Amiga by Click Boom software and it's a very faithful version of the PC original with all the features here however the game does require a very fast processor a 68060 class is recommended for frame rates over 15 FPS at full screen it would also take advantage of the amiga's power PC chipset and accelerator cards if you were Rich enough to afford a high-end power PC accelerator board or motherboard now if you do believe that Wolfenstein killed the Amiga or not really is up to your interpretation obviously there are other factors at play that we haven't really talked about including software piracy the mismanagement of comor and the disappointing AG chipset upgrade that simply wasn't good enough but for many gamers that did own and Amiga once they saw Wolfenstein 3D running on the PC it was all over the landscape of the computer video games had changed no longer was 2D popular it was all about 3D texture map firstperson Shooters and with that we are going to leave it here for today's episode I love going back and revisiting old Amiga history cuz it is very much a Nostalgia trip for me in many different ways now if you agree that Wolfenstein killed the Amiga or not let me know your thoughts about it in the comments below but we are going to leave it here thank you so much for watching if you liked it please don't forget to leave me a thumbs up and we'll catch you guys in the next episode bye for now [Music]

Channel: Modern Vintage Gamer

Views: 680,054

Keywords: amiga 500, amiga, best amiga games, wolf3d, wolfenstein 3d, wolf, doom, id software, fps, amiga fps, killed, mvg, modern vintage gamer, chunky, vga, ibm pc, 286, 386, 68030, 68040, cpu, texture mapping, raycasting, commodore, kickstart, wolfenstein, accelerator card, a1200, amiga 1200, aga, planar, bitplanes, c2p

Id: wsADJa-23Sg

Length: 16min 57sec (1017 seconds)

Published: Mon May 13 2024