Even after 20 years I'm still puzzled. Why was Wing Commander so badly and shoddily ported to the Amiga? I think that and the lack of Doom hastened the Amiga's demise as a gaming platform.
Weaknesses were:
1. Sound, dire
2. Music, just please, no, I'd rather listen to a perpetual loop of the Manic Miner theme tune
3. Graphics, washed out and no additional colour depth even if you have a faster processor, or you get the CD32 version.
4. Speed. Well, ok. Nothing we can do there. But even the two d scenes were jerking.
But really it was indicative of the whole "oh yeah and the Amiga too" attitude.
What bugs me most is the music. Frontier was similarly dreadful. Yet we have Super Stardust, even the ancient SOTB-2 or Cannon Fodder providing good sound. The Amiga had good sound hardware, why subject us to this aural cacophony?
Why was Wing Commander so badly and shoddily ported to the Amiga
I haven't a clue what you are talking about! OK, so I never played the PC version, but I loved the Amiga version when I played it - got really sucked in.
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2. Music, just please, no, I'd rather listen to a perpetual loop of the Manic Miner theme tune
You must be very hard to please. I just played the WingCommander MOD now, and it sounds just like I remember - which is really pretty good & atmospheric.
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3. Graphics, washed out and no additional colour depth even if you have a faster processor, or you get the CD32 version.
I recall the graphics being pretty good. And given the time it was released, it would have been aimed squarely at A500s... just like 99% of other Amiga games. Not many games were made for the A1200 (at least for some years) due to the installed user base being so much smaller.
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4. Speed. Well, ok. Nothing we can do there. But even the two d scenes were jerking.
I really think you are setting your expectations too high! This was supposed to load from floppy disk, not CD-ROM.
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But really it was indicative of the whole "oh yeah and the Amiga too" attitude.
I really think you are wrong here: Porting Wing Commander to the Amiga would have been an immense effort, and in some ways it's amazing they got it to work at all on an A500. After that huge success, I don't suppose they had any time or money to think about supporting faster processors (sadly).
Look at a different game: The CD32 port of Syndicate. This would have been an ideal chance to fix problems with the Amiga version (mainly not seeing inside buildings), plus add more colours. But if you read an interview from the developers, they said that (a) they were given very little time or money for the port by Bullfrog, and (b) even the CD32 had extremely limited memory (2MB), so adding loads more colours would have been very difficult if not impossible.
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What bugs me most is the music. Frontier was similarly dreadful.
That's because Frontier's music was MIDI, and that was difficult to render on the Amiga. They probably should have used MODs for the Amiga, but I guess MIDI initially seemed a good (cross-platform) idea, and at some point they ran out of time AND money.
P.S. Sorry, can't check-out your YouTube links at the mo, since I'm using my Amiga.
Wing Commander is OCS floppy based game, one the best I have seen alongside with Frontiet, X-Com and couple more. It miight be one of those games poorly working on plain A500, but it was the time of strenching and feeling the flimits.
All those games work a bit better on A1200 thanks to CPU frequency, but neither are optimized for it (X-Com exists in AGA version).
I assume wpuld work great on Minimig and maybe Natami when it comes out.
My only regret is they have never published Mission disks or any other
PC version needed 386 and Sound Blaster to work smooth, so its another "Yes Amiga can do it" thing.
About Frontier I have seen no reason why First Encouters could not work on 030 AGA ...
Why was Wing Commander so badly and shoddily ported to the Amiga
I haven't a clue what you are talking about!
Don't let that stop you from commenting though! Oh, it didn't
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OK, so I never played the PC version, but I loved the Amiga version when I played it - got really sucked in.
That is due to the gameplay, which is fine, if hampered by the shoddiness on the Amiga version which was, IIRC, released in 1994.
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You must be very hard to please.
? Is that a bad thing? I don't think I'm so VERY hard to please after all I bought an Amiga or four, right?
I compared it with other titles that actually had decent music and sound on the same Amiga.
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I recall the graphics being pretty good. And given the time it was released, it would have been aimed squarely at A500s... just like 99% of other Amiga games. Not many games were made for the A1200 (at least for some years) due to the installed user base being so much smaller.
The colour reduction down to 16 and the 3 channel dire tune were bad enough for performance but there were other models other than the A500 vanilla out at the time. If you are telling me the reason why the port was so unambitious, lame, slow, dire, washed out and naff with absolutely no support for "extras" if you put in an accelerator or used it on an A3000 or A1200 is because they were only appealling to the lowest common denominator then I agree. It was. They just couldn't be bothered to do more. It was at the death knell of the Amiga then wasn't it? When there was no point in teasing the best out of something. "3d" aside, c2p aside, the 2d scenes are slow, equally washed out and reduced.
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I really think you are setting your expectations too high! This was supposed to load from floppy disk, not CD-ROM.
So speed of intended disk access relates directly to ability to scroll colourful graphics while playing a tune? I guess that must mean that xenon, Project X, Alien Breed and a million others must have been designed for a Blu-Ray! Go Team 17!
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I really think you are wrong here: Porting Wing Commander to the Amiga would have been an immense effort, and in some ways it's amazing they got it to work at all on an A500. After that huge success, I don't suppose they had any time or money to think about supporting faster processors (sadly).
What you are saying is that they just tried to squeeze out a few more sales out of the A500s, didn't expect it to bring in enough revenue and had no hope for a decent A1200+ version. I agree. Thats kind of what I was getting at.
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Look at a different game: The CD32 port of Syndicate. This would have been an ideal chance to fix problems with the Amiga version (mainly not seeing inside buildings), plus add more colours. But if you read an interview from the developers, they said that (a) they were given very little time or money for the port by Bullfrog, and (b) even the CD32 had extremely limited memory (2MB), so adding loads more colours would have been very difficult if not impossible.
What has that got to do with porting from the PC to the Amiga?
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That's because Frontier's music was MIDI, and that was difficult to render on the Amiga. They probably should have used MODs for the Amiga, but I guess MIDI initially seemed a good (cross-platform) idea, and at some point they ran out of time AND money.
Which is my point again. Business imperatives. It wasnt a good bet. It wasn't a good bet for ID Software either.
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P.S. Sorry, can't check-out your YouTube links at the mo, since I'm using my Amiga.
Always the bridesmaid never the bride with the Amiga. They just can't be bothered to support it ;)
3D and OCS, AGA is not a good mix. If you where in to fly simulators then Mac and PC where the computers to buy at the time in the 80?s and 90?s.
Amiga strongest advantage was it ability to scroll graphic over the screen flicker free, Jump and Run type of games, Amiga was also where good at parallax scrolling, multiple layers of graphics scrolling at different speeds.
The gaming industry was changing a lot in the early 90?s, from simple 2D games to 3D games, AGA targeted 2D games, and Mac and PC did go for graphic cards that where best for 3D.
Amiga 1200 was ready in 1992, 1993 Mac got color and modern graphic cards, Commodore?s investment in the AGA chipset was a total west of cash.
Users that upgraded to Cybervision noticed the huge advantage; it was shame that most games did not support cybervision, CGFX/P96/RTG.
The late 90?s and early 2000 was all about attaching commodity pc components to expansion slots on the Amiga.
Its hoverer where interesting that 3D demos on Amiga showed a lot of promise in 90?s, at least some demo groups where good at this like TBL, Red Sector, Cryptoburners, Oxygene, and many more, but hardware demands for demos are often upgraded Amigas 68030/040/060, standard 68020 is to slow for most of the newer demos.
(NutsAboutAmiga)
Basilisk II for AmigaOS4 AmigaInputAnywhere Excalibur and other tools and apps.
FreeSpace was much better anyway, and I learned FreeSpace2 is being ported by Andrea Palmat? as we speak (Mikey_C wrote about it at AW) so happy space trading/traveling to us all
The gaming industry was changing a lot in the early 90?s, from simple 2D games to 3D games, AGA targeted 2D games, and Mac and PC did go for graphic cards that where best for 3D.
Amiga 1200 was ready in 1992, 1993 Mac got color and modern graphic cards, Commodore?s investment in the AGA chipset was a total west of cash.
I wouldn't go that far - AGA was absolutely necessary, the problem was it didn't go far enough. As you say, gaming was going 3D, and AGA couldn't really handle 3D in software because it used planar graphics modes. Commodore recognised this fact, which is why the CD32 got Akiko. Unfortunately, it was only the CD32 which got Akiko, and AGA needed upgrading to support chunky graphics and some 3D acceleration.
As we know, Commodore got into a little bit of bother so we never saw AAA or Hombre which might have updated the Amiga's graphics enough for it to keep up for a bit longer.
@DaveP FWIW I really enjoyed Wing Commander. Comparing the graphics to any of Team17's stuff is like comparing apples and oranges though - T17 was all hand-drawn 2D art, whereas Wing Commander had 3D textures. The majority of 3D textured games these days still don't look anywhere near as good as T17's 2D Amiga graphic work of over ten years ago, so a software-rendered 3D extravaganza from when 3D games were in their infancy has no chance of competing.
I was quite clear, I thought. I was comparing the audio of the T17 titles with the audio of Wing Commander.
I was commenting on the the 2D performance of Wing Commander.
I'm not so far gone in dotage and alzhiemers that I was comparing 2D with "3D"
Suffice to say, Wing Commander is a bad port simply because it was a hasty port. A quick port. A "downgrade" port rather than an adaptation to hardware that was superior in other ways.
I really enjoyed playing Wing Commander on my 1200 (030@50) but can imagine it struggling on a 500..the thing that upset me back then was Amiga never got any of the many PC expansion crusades?
@TiredOfLife As I recall, it looked a bit too complex to set-up, and I hardly ever want to use YouTube anyway, so I simply haven't been bothered to try. With OWB being much nicer to use these days, I might get around to it...
As I recall, there were two solutions for viewing YouTube. One of them had a requirements list as long as my arm, and apart from the complexity, I didn't want to fill up my OS4 partition with loads of gunk. (If it all installed in the program's directory that would be much more preferable.) I think the *other* solution was called ClipDown, and I plan to look at that at some point.
Clip Down is easy to install, Tubexx a bit more tricky but worth it. Both do the job well. You can store the extra requirements for Tubexx within the program directory.
I'll be happy to help you out next time you are on irc if needs be.
@LiveForIt I 'm a retrogamer myself but I'm not a nostalgic, I only play games that still represent a certain experience in a good way, and I don't think Wing Commander 1 still represents a good way of experiencing that kind of game despite being the first. To make an example I like Dracula X on PC Engine, love Symphony of the Night on PSX but wouldn't touch Castlevania on the NES even if they pay me.
Free Space 2 is to Wing Commander what Simphony of the Night is for Nes Castlevania, yes, the most recent games wouldn't exist without those first efforts but no need to hide that those first efforts are too simplistic for today, so in case someone feels the urgency of playing those types of games there are far better options than the first Wing Commander including Free Space 2 (unless it's just for nostalgia that is).
Wing Commander runs well with faster CPU so it is does not look like gfx was bottleneck there but slow 68000 @ 7MHz. You can not expect singe developer squeeze that great 386+VGA game to Amiga 500 without resorting to compromises.
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