Amiga Games That Push The Limits - Part 2: 3D

[@rickyrico80]

"Please BACKUP this disk and ONLY play the backup disk". Now that's some awesome 90's DRM I can get into.

[@paulgascoigne5343]

Even when they did introduce copy protection everyone had XCOPY so you'd be fiddling with different read/write methods until you got a game working. My A500 would always leave grooves in disks when a small speck of dust got wedged under the head, as I'm sure it did with many others. There was nothing worse than realising your 3.5 floppy had a very limited play life.

[@Cythil]

Yeah back in the day there where a few companies that recommended you would do that. Of some where not so keen on that and that is why some had copy proaction. As I remember it a lot of those companies allowed you to get a new copy of your software for a small monomial fee rather then you having to make you own backup. I think I saw something about that in some old documentation I have about replacement disks.

[@Mikey-zj8bn]

Lol half the games in the early 90s on PC's wanted u to make copy's and play off them I remember that's how I learned to play PC games

[@Tech-geeky]

At the time, i don't think developers had the same feeling of XCOPY as users how bought them did.. XCOPY may of quickly turned into a "piracy's best friend", i think develops still wanted you to do the right think and not rip DRM. Arguably, you could say the same protections prevented you from "making a backup"

[@blatherskite3009]

@@paulgascoigne5343 Yep. I'm sure that in quite a few cases I spent more time in XCOPY, trying to make a working copy of a game, than I actually spent playing the darn game itself... Looking back, I think I did myself a favour when I bought myself a SNES and had to forget about copying games anymore and just play them instead :)

[@hgu123454321]

6:00 Hunter had this feature that you could get out of a moving vehicle, and it would keep going. One time this conspired to blow my mind in such a way that I remember it 30 years later... I was traveling around on a bicycle, and intended to stop at a building and take a look inside. I parked really close to the door - so close that I was immediately warped inside the moment I stepped off the bike. Took a look around, went back out. The bike's gone! "Wait, what? Somebody has stolen my bike, in a game!?" was my first thought. And as I was staring at the screen, the bike, now with noone riding it, but still very much going, came back into view. Turned out that when I stepped off, I hadn't come to a full stop, so it had continued to move, and since I was making a turn at the time it kept turning, driving itself in a circle... Possibly the first time I saw the power of emergent gameplay.

[@macsmith2013]

I fondly remember No Second Price, and playing it with the superb Gravis Analog Joystick that would emulate mouse input. Thanks for talking me back. :)

[@devMashcom]

Back around 1990 we would haul our Amigas to these big all-weekend beer parties hosted by the SysOp of one of the local BBS and play Stunt Car Racer. We would enlist all party goers on a whiteboard and have all night tournaments head to head. It's was glorious fun. Shout outs to all the peeps from the CryptStar BBS, and those awesome times...

[@NLynchOEcake]

Nice, closest I got to that experience was bringing the original Halo into CompSci class on a USB stick then alt-tabbing between work and the LAN party whenever we thought the teacher wasn't looking, around 2009

[@TheSudsy]

not quite the same but Sunday morning, one NULL modem cable (home made), lounge TV, an Amiga 1200 / 500+ (?) and mates Amiga 600, two more mates - four up playing Lotus Turbo 2. Wife making bacon butties :)

[@Ebilcake]

Frontier was excellent on my old upgraded amiga 1200, lots of fond memories of that game.

[@Kpooji]

Starglider 2 was on one 3.5" disk as well. The same disk contained both the Amiga and the ST versions... of an entire planetary system! How they did that still amazes me.

[@paulgascoigne5343]

Me and my brother sunk so many hours into Microprose Grand Prix. We would choose 70 lap races, multiplayer and it would take all evening to play. Of course, multiplayer back then on one computer meant you'd changed drivers every so often and the AI would take over your car, a countdown would indicate when it would swap. Fortunately we had an accelerated Amiga 500 and then a A1200 040 later on so the graphics were smooth - as with Frontier Elite II.

[@markykid8760]

Hope you're doing well Gazza. Glad to hear you're keeping busy.

[@revlayle]

The first time I played Frontier, it was on an A1200, and it ran pretty decently on that. At least better than an A500.

[@Elbas_Tardo]

3D on Amiga are a bit dissapointing, but for a 1985 hardware is very good.

[@fuzzywzhe]

The 500 was 8 Mhz, the 1200 14 Mhz, it was almost twice as fast.

[@yegenek]

"Epic" was also a pretty impressive 3d space combat game that pushed the limits on Amiga.

[@robsonbromberg9042]

Test Drive 2 was pretty cool, the amiga version even simulates the oil pressure and turbo gauges. and 4d sports stunts was alot of fun.

[@阿部雅-e7x]

I am an old Japanese game fan. I found these 3D games to be very cool. they smelled scientific and seemed completely futuristic. In the late 80's, there were few polygon based 3D games on Japanese PCs and game consoles.

[@BluntEversmoke]

Were the .jp consoles and computers of that er not even more 2D oriented than the than the Euro-American ones? Has me idly wonder why the developers for every Japanese home computer and console of that era didn't go Sega and made "pseudo" 3D engines using lots of sprites (sprite scaling)

[@Trick-Framed]

I LOVED Stunt Car Racer! The ultimate arcade type 3D fun the Amiga was starting to be known for by the early 90s. What amazed me was the C=64 port! It was pretty good considering the limitations of the C=64.

[@PsychoticPsoftware]

Robocop 3 was a mind blower back in the day. Lovely 3D driving, flying and of course, FPS action, and all mouse controlled for accuracy with a sinister movie orientated feel which beat the pants off the actual movie!

[@vksasdgaming9472]

If I remember right game came out before the film! Film is atrocious mess, but game is real good. Technically primitive, but it's limitations are known and made use of.

[@NeilRoy]

I remember upgrading the CPU on my A500. I don't recall which one, the 68020 comes to mind as probably the one. Eventually I bought an A1200, but the A500 was always the one I remember with the most love.

[@Tech-geeky]

I think developers went the wrong way with trying to get 3D to rum perfectly on the high-end Amiga's'. Although it can be done, it was a smallhit compared to what the PC could do even with 3D.. Mainly because it had an 'edge'

[@drsnova7313]

Hunter was awesome - I must have played this for days and days back then.

[@mcjdubpower]

Auto brake off, then on at the last minute 😉

[@sirtinley-knot2944]

i played that game so much, but being as i never had the instructions i had no idea what i was supposed to be doing.. and every now and then i'd discover a new key that did something i didn't know about!

[@AlexPaulsen1]

Formula One Grand Prix was a truly fantastic game! I remember spending several hours with it as a child, because it was so realistic for the time.

[@Tech-geeky]

No one bothers to mention Indianapolis 500 when it comes to 3D games. They all look alike to me.

[@alexanderwingeskog758]

Me too! But it really shined on the A1200 and with a 68030 (or better) card.

[@RogueBoyScout]

Oh man, I spent so much time in that game. Running my own team (Black/Yellow livery) Customizing gear ratios for each track... Great times.

[@daishi5571]

@@Tech-geeky Indy 500 game was actually well done on the Amiga which is a surprise.

[@turrican4d599]

@@daishi5571 Yes it was beautiful and smooth

[@FatheredPuma81]

Would have been nice to show the framerate of all the games at the end with the Amiga you used for Frontier. Would have liked to see how they looked/played at smooth framerates.

[@milthyswinbuckle5158]

One of my favourite games of all time was "Alien Breed 3D II: The Killing Grounds." Probably the most impressive game on the Amiga (better in my opinion than Quake and Doom), but you had to have a real beefcake of a machine to run it. I owned a A1200 hundred at the time, and it was this game that convinced me to splash the cash and get a 030 processor for it. Even then, it struggled with the later levels (it really required an 060 but I just didn't have the money). The game is still super impressive and even today some of the intelligence within the game is just starting to be surpassed. Enemy that would track you around levels, call to each other when they spotted you gave you a sense of being hunted, a level designer (which although hard to use, could recreate pretty much whatever levels you wanted once you got the hang of it) and a large selection of varied enemy type. 3D texture mapping (for it's day) at it's best!

[@shaughnprestidge8400]

I loved this one too and ran it on an A1200 with 030 processor with 8MB fastram. Ran well too. I recall having fun hooking up two A1200's and playing it against a friend with lots of fun.

[@belovedconsole]

Was so glad to see you show that final 3D game running on a 4000 with the coprocessor. When I was a kid I always wondered how things were on bigger and faster Amigas.

[@Sharopolis]

Yep I used to wonder the same thing too!

[@elnoel1220]

Combat Air Patrol should be in there. Such a silky smooth frame rate (for a stock A500) and really impressive technically. Another shout goes to Legends of Valour which was like Skyrim before games like Skyrim existed. Texture mapped 3D an’ all!

[@IntyMichael]

Carrier Command was awesome.

[@Preview43]

Remember scrambling all the way to the edge of the map to find the hidden messages?

[@sergeinester6261]

Elite 2 on an Amiga 4000 was amazing. You forgot Carrier Command - not only was it fast it also had the fastest disc loader in history

[@Nov-5062]

There's Elite 2?!

[@sergeinester6261]

@@Nov-5062 frontier.

[@DuckAlertBeats]

Literally 5 frames per second on some of these but I guess the brain kind of filled in the blanks back then. Stunt Race FX on the SNES wasn't much faster really. Still brilliant at the time though. Then Virtua Racing/Fighter in the arcades changed the whole game for real-time 3D. Was well happy with No Second Prize at the time though! Nice work covering that little gem. Nice video, peace!

[@jimmoores7883]

I loved the number of ways you slagged off the frame rate of Frontier.

[@stewsretroreviews]

No second prize is a class bike simulation with some amazing music, its that what I remember the most, the Amiga had some classic tunes on certain games, keep up the good work mate👍🏻

[@myfaveyoutube]

The controls and animation were so smooth on a stock machine it was crazy

[@TechRyze]

Vroom is a decent 3D driving game that runs amazingly. Would be a great game to showcase.

[@ianhiles2678]

Agree with some of the other comments: I expected Birds of Prey and Infestation. Although the planes and missions in BoP got very routine after a while, (which I’m now finding on Elite: Dangerous, so maybe not that much of a slight against BoP) it had things like customizable camera angles and bomb POV. Infestation was more limited in gameplay, but the atmosphere and tension exceeded many horror films. Other than that, it’s a great list and brings back fond memories - particularly Stunt Car Racer and F1 (yes, it was very overwhelming for us casual players). Thanks.

[@Ironlord2015]

I would deffo have given Paul Woakes' classic 3D shooter 'Encounter' a mention. This game started out life on the good ol' C64 in the early 80's, about 1983 at a guess, and it's brilliant on there alone, and is a fave game of mine from childhood. The Amiga version came out in 1991, and it's a superb game, well worth checking out if you don't know it and love a good blasting sesh!!

[@datacipher]

All the atari Miner systems 2600, 8 bit/5200, amiga were all so ahead of their time and so capable of going head to head with systems years into the future, thanks to the powerful and flexible architecture!

[@PJBonoVox]

F1GP is legendary. The title music based on Fleetwood Mac's 'The Chain' was a masterstroke.

[@Sharopolis]

It does sound good.

[@smash461986]

Played Frontier on the A1200 and it was spot on. Only when the police launched a ton of Vipers did it chug a bit.

[@daishi5571]

I had a love/hate relationship with frontier. The game overall was amazing but I hated and I mean hated the combat. I played almost every version of Elite before and frontier is nothing like that. The combat in Elite was methodical and elegant but the combat in Frontier was like jousting with no fun just hit or miss. Then about a year or two ago I found a combat tutorial for frontier and I realized I had been doing it wrong for years (I played it on and off for probably 3-4 years after release) and it is so much better now.

[@Essex121514]

Games by Timestamp: 0:50. - Starglider 2:29. - Starglider 2 4:42. - Hunter 7:23 - Stunt Car Racer 8:51 - Formula One Grand Prix 10:15 - No Second Prize 13:08 - Frontier: Elite II

[@dan_loup]

But can it run Elite 2?

[@Papai_Pai]

I loved frontier back in the day and I was one of the few kids at my school who had a high-end Amiga that was able to play this game perfectly

[@thadonis.]

Could have given a quick mention for Jimmy White's Whirlwind Snooker imo.

[@Tech-geeky]

No golfing games. ? "Nick Faldo's Champion Golf"

[@simonoleary9264]

I used to enjoy F-18 Interceptor, and wasn't Falcon 3 also available on the Amiga? I don't think it really counts in this list, but there was also Wing Commander, which did push the Amiga too. I ended up with an A4000/030 with an 040 accelerator card.. Frontier worked well on that.

[@RogueBoyScout]

Loved F18 Interceptor...

[@DS-pk4eh]

Yeah, that was the one I played too. That had multiplayer option too. Played with my friend, tons of hours of fun.

[@NULUSIOS]

Carrier Command. F-29. F-16 Falcon. Of course indeed "old school" Amigas couldn't go far with 3D. My A4000/040 was fine though.

[@disgruntledtoons]

This is where the bit-plane design of Amiga graphics showed itself to be very short-sighted. While it enabled the same graphics code to draw 32-color graphics as easily as monochrome graphics, that's about all that can be said for it.

[@turrican4d599]

You forgot to include Indianapolis 500. The joy, when I finally got the whole 500 miles right and became the champion! 😁

[@Larry]

You should have a look at Vroom! as well, an arcadey F1 game, but absolutely lightning fast.

[@Sharopolis]

Yeah that's a good one, If I ever revisit the topic I'll talk about it.

[@Amiculi]

Heyyy, I found the Larry comment without thousands of upvotes and replies!

[@touzimsky]

Elite II ran perfectly fine on an A1200 with a Blizzard accelerator card, though I can see how a stock A500 would struggle to keep up.

[@gwishart]

It ran at a decent speed on the A500 if you turned off background stars and set the model detail to Low.

[@Gobtik]

I played it on an A600 and I guess I just don't remember the struggle, playing it on an old PC laptop now, running XP or even 98 and it's a joy to play

[@Chordonblue]

Actually, it wasn't that bad on a stock A1200 either. There, you had a combination of AGA's extra graphics speed and faster RAM. Certainly less embarrassing than watching it struggle on an A500! :O

[@Tech-geeky]

What kind of developer releases a game far ahead of its time,, No one could realistically play it, unless you have a Blizzard card and/or high end Amiga? To me, it seem someone just wanted to pushed the boundaries a bit too far.

[@amcadam26]

Loved playing it on my A1200. Now I play elite dangerous in VR. Progress huh?

[@mrt7152]

Indeed Carrier command which runned good on a500. And Virus was also a 3d game which was cool to play.

[@ScoopexUs]

I think some games here belong for gameplay and world detail, but I would add F/A-18 Interceptor, Corporation, Virus, Damocles and a few more over some of them! I think it's about gameplay, world detail and story/missions, and performance. Looking at performance only, most of these (except maybe Hunter) could run heavy scenes slightly faster on the ST, since they used the CPU (relying on ports for profitability). It's best to put the performance in relation to screen size - some kept the small one of earlier days and even some later 3D and 2.5Ds games had you shrink the screen to get playable framerates. Some like F1GP said no, and what's good about that is it allowed Amigas with faster CPUs to play it at good speed in full screen.

[@daishi5571]

Telling most ppl to upgrade their Amiga to faster CPU's was next to a waste of time. I think the problem was the Amiga was sold as a complete package (minus screen) and it was damn good so few ppl felt the need for upgrades (it didn't get them invested in to the cycle of upgrading). I never bothered to upgrade my A500 (I did a friends A500 with an 68020) but when the A1200 came out I upgraded that thing immediately, and it was a beast HDD, SCSI, CD, RAM, 020-030-040, Multisynch monitor, When I showed it off it always impressed. But when Commodore went down and ppl started to buy PC I heard many ppl say "My 486 is so much faster than my Amiga" Well what do you know, your A500 from 1987 that you never upgraded is slower than your brand new 1995 PC.

[@matteoboldizzoni9870]

The A1200 managed Frontier well with a couple of megs of fastRAM.. Or low detail..

[@amcadam26]

@@Zuluknob was it softboot that let you switch to NTSC?

[@HerecomestheCalavera]

Something I'm curious about is if the game Bioforge would have been possible on Amiga hardware? Could it have been done as it is or would it need to be compromised to run on an Amiga?

[@1teamski]

Stunt Car Racer was an absolute stonker of a game! I loved it with my Epyx stick. It was the most realistic in the physics department. World Circuit got me started on a long road of racing sims. I was absolutely obsessed with this game and got me into F1 in a big way.....

[@manghariz2211]

The hunter is unbelieaveble Its unbelievable its available to amiga Im pretty sure If amiga cd32 have these game Maybe just maybe it will atleast compete its sale to 3do

[@Sharopolis]

Yep, they just didn't realise what they already had!

[@amcadam26]

If the CD32 had just a meg of fastram it would have done much better.

[@RolloTonéBrownTown]

Wow I am LOVING this video so far. I'm really interested in legacy computers lately with the Amiga being the coolest

[@kelvin1316]

I wonder if part of the reason the Amiga died (aside from Commodore's miss management) was because, as you said at the end, there was no reason to upgrade. Working within the limits is one thing, but that also introduced the issue there was no reason to upgrade either. Had people en-masse upgraded with accelerators etc to make the machine more powerful (much like the PC did), I wonder if it would have lasted a bit longer?

[@stevethepocket]

In the middle of an era where other companies were scrambling to put copy protection into their titles, sometimes resorting to hacks that risked damaging the disk drive, you've got the makers of _Starglider_ straight-up telling people to "Please BACKUP this disk and ONLY USE THE BACKUP!"

[@akaTheWilyFox]

I seem to remember Zeewolf as being good on my old 500+. Also I'm not sure if it's in the spirit of the video, but Robocop 3? That always seemed quite ambitious for the Amiga at the time... Anyways good job as always! 👍

[@CelentAle]

Robocop 3, first game on first person in multi mode, car and walking 💪 first off Doom for PC DOS 🤓 W AMIGA ✌️

[@bloxyman22]

Yeah why is robocop 3 not here?? That was even quite playable on a stock a500 and was way ahead of it's time.

[@peterobinson3678]

OMG, I totally forgot about R3. That was awesome. Apart from the flying bit. :/

[@stefans6557]

Frontier - Elite II did run very well on my Amiga 1200 with 16 MB fast RAM and 68EC030/50 MHz CPU. But most amazing was the 100 billion star systems to explore! And I think it already runs quite well on stock A1200 with just fast RAM added, similar to Ambermoon 3D scenes.

[@danieldougan269]

I had no idea about the relationship with _Star Fox_ -- I loved that game on the SNES!

[@jplo5299]

Damocles by Paul Woakes was one of the best..open world, story line, landing on a comet and watching penultimate doom..great game and great coding..not to mention...The killing cloud..throwing nets and a polygon atmosphere..Then Armageddon which took the the programming physics of Falcon and intoduced new elements...

[@Sharopolis]

The Killing Cloud, that's one I never heard of, looks good too!

[@DS-pk4eh]

I remember playing a fighter jet flight sim on Amiga 1200. It even had multiplayer mode (two Amigas connected through parallel port). Not sure if that was f-18 or something similar, but it surely had 3D graphics.

[@ronnycook3569]

Thunderhawk, Virus, Zeewolf. I'm also really surprised that you didn't look at any of the latter-day textured 3D games, which generally looked terrible but really did push the limits.... I also remember Cybercon III was good. Whenever I see people arguing that games are unplayable at 30FPS I remember those early Amiga 3D games where single-digit FPS was the best you could hope for. ArcticFox. Sleeping Gods Lie. and of course the one you mention, Frontier, which was mostly OK as long as you stayed clear of planetary surfaces.

[@noaht2005]

Anyone who says that 30 fps is unplayable is a snob and isn’t worth your time

[@refractionpcsx2]

Great video! I was surprised Robocop 3 wasn't in there :)

[@Sharopolis]

I nearly put it in there, but I the Atari ST version will feature in an upcoming video, so look out for that.

[@refractionpcsx2]

@@Sharopolis Awesome! Look forward to it!

[@SerBallister]

F29 retaliator, by the same developer iirc was impressive too.

[@KiR_3d]

Subwar 2050, anybody? :)

[@blatherskite3009]

Thanks for naming it! I remembered there being two Amiga games that really stood out to me as being in a different league 3D-wise - one was No Second Prize and the other was ... some Robocop game? :)

[@AnGhaeilge]

Some of these really need later Amiga models to play smoothly. But if your idea is to just showcase what the Amiga 500 alone could do, then I understand. Some of the later Amiga models could play much more impressive 3d titles with better framerates.

[@Waccoon]

Good 3D was bloody difficult to pull off on the Amiga, thanks to its planar graphics system. Polygons rendering done by the CPU was insanely slow, but when the blitter was used, this locked framerates to the speed of the blitter, rendering CPU upgrades mostly useless. It's a real shame the AGA chipset didn't fix this.

[@daishi5571]

It wasn't the Planar system that was the issue for most 3D games, it was most games were aimed for the ST and a CPU @ 7MHz (ST had an 8MHz CPU) If you add a 68030 almost every 3D game is sped up immensely (a few exception exist where it was locked to a certain frame rate but even then it still was sped up and more stable to some degree) The whole Planar vs Chunky debate comes about when moving a screen full of textured graphics. Doom is the one that get most of the focus but take a look at Doom on a 68030 @50 and it's comparable to a high end 386 system (systems which at a CPU level are reasonably comparable) Move up to a 68040 and again compare it to a 486!!! It's hard to do a direct head to head with 68K vs x86 CPU's but as a generalization the 68K family were always more efficient, but when doing the chunky to planar conversion it took extra CPU cycles so you did need a bit more powerful CPU for that.

[@rainbowthrustars]

I really enjoyed Wings when it came out, though it required you to have 1 MB of Ram (the madness) but the way it mixed 3d and 2d was amazing for its time and I liked the little things in between levels where you read the protagonists diary and so on.

[@newkfromrotterdam]

Thunderhawk was running pretty smooth on stock Amigas, also mouse controlled and a good balance between simulation and action game (imho). Another game by Argonaut was Birds Of Prey... a bit more serious simulator Carrier Command is a real classic and the Armourgeddon games are also awesome in their similar style

[@stufaryde8819]

Starglider 2 did have intro music. It was awesome. It just took a while to load. A shame No Man's Sky didn't borrow more from SG2.

[@BubbaunJohn]

I got my C-64 in 1982 because I realized that I needed some help in my college courses. My whole family spent 2 weeks typing in Speedscript from Compute's Gazette. I stayed with the 64, for productivity and gaming until 1994 when I got my first PC. I always felt that the Amiga was only about the eye-candy rather than the gameplay and this series has convinced me that I was right.

[@Jacky_man542]

Starglider 2 was the game I purchased when I bought my Amiga 500.Still rate the game highly due to the open world nature and filled in 3D graphics.

[@GregDaniel78]

Thinking back, the Amiga struggled with vector-based games really. The ones which stick in my mind tend to be the ones which somewhat overcame the frame-rate battle. Resolution 101, Virus, Robocop 3, Vroom, Trex Warrior, Liberation: Captive 2 and Mercenary 2&3 for example.

[@djsquibby]

Spent many memorable hours playing the Amiga 500 and 1200 back in the day. Microprose F1GP was totally awesome once everything was setup correctly ;)

[@petrirantavalli859]

also you could add up graphics from the .ini file as the graphics assets were still there in the game files but then the game pushed even my 68060 beefed up 16mb A1200 to the limits.

[@MortenSlottHansen]

Try loading up "killing cloud" and disable fog causing a lang draw distance. We are talking seconds or frames ;) Alt. Armourgedon from Psygnosis was a blast to play - 3D world like Carrier Command and with null modem support. Had a blast playing that with my brother back in the day.

[@Pickchore]

1:42 - I have Star Wars arcade on a compilation disk somewhere. I used to love playing that and there was the actual arcade machine in my home town, late 90s.

[@DjClarky78]

Thanks for the upload - I remember having 1990's "Battle Command" by Tsepesi. Loved it. Worth a look. "

[@tmtigd]

If you make a video about the Frontier game, I’ll totally watch it. It blows my mind what they were doing when I was a toddler and I grew up thinking the SNES was the epitome of gaming at the time.

[@wolfcrow4822]

The original Elite was a single programmer job and he managed to fit it on one 3 inch floppy disc. They were real experts at tight programming back then because they had to be.

[@fandangobrandango7864]

​@@wolfcrow4822 original Elite was by two people, and those were David Braben and Ian Bell

[@aaronmicalowe]

My favourites are Stunt Car Racer and Elite Frontier, but then I managed to grab hold of an accelerator that pushed my A1200 to 50MHertz or even 60MHertz for some more stable games. That made these games as smooth as ice. Another game was STUN Runner though I found it crashed when accelerated. And who can forget FA-18 Flight Simulator, single handedly programmed by a retired fighter pilot over just 3 years (according to the sheet that came with the original game box).

[@paulgascoigne5343]

The PSU for the A1200 wasn't up to the job if I remember correctly. Mine would crash with an accelerator card with lots of games. My school was throwing out a load of ancient PCs with AT power supplies so got one of those for free, used a multimeter and soldered on the amiga power cord to the corresponding outputs. After which, with an 040 and 8mb ram and 40mb HDD it never crashed again. Swap back to the amiga PSU and every hour or so it would guru meditation.

[@aaronmicalowe]

@@paulgascoigne5343 I have played Elite Frontier on a non-accelerated A1200. It was about 4 times faster than in this video, but still good enough to play. Expectations on FPS were much lower back then so 15 FPS were perfectly acceptable and only the intro had that much slowdown. As for accelerators, some were better than others. And the PSU - I swapped that for the modern A600 replacement quickly because it took up about a quarter of the space of an original A500 power supply.

[@paulgascoigne5343]

@@aaronmicalowe some people today would walk away from a computer that doesn't run 60fps lol. There was a lot of dedication from users to enjoy a game and it's often ground-breaking achievements despite the flaws.

[@005AGIMA]

...and all I can say is....I'm glad I experienced Elite II on PC. Played GREAT on a 386DX. Epic game. Wish I'd kept it, complete with box, manuals, short stories, and star map poster based on our own galaxy.

[@mattjackson9859]

I'd have Cybercon III here - perhaps the first game to use portal rendering, so you could see through open doors into the next room, rather than just being black rectangles.

[@j0eCommodore]

I can only speak for Elite Frontier, when you put an accelerator on the Amiga (in my case it was a Turbo 28) the frame rate is spectacular. I'm sure others were coded to play nice with acceleration.

[@starcrashr]

I love how the last game was included due to popular demand, but the segment ended up being a takedown of it.

[@Valitzu777]

You had me at "Amiga"

[@ZiltoidDerOmniscient]

I had a fully upgraded 1200 with Frontier installed on the internal HDD. It ran fine and was brilliant, I played it for hours on end!

[@Sharopolis]

I've played it a bit more since I've finished the vid, it's an amazing game on the right hardware!

[@ZiltoidDerOmniscient]

@@Sharopolis Truly. The original Elite on the Amiga was quite a lot of fun too. It was the fact that you could do planetary landings in Frontier that blew my mind when I first bought it.

[@keithbeard7133]

Quite a fair assessment in regard to Frontier on the Amiga, and a good call for limiting to stock 500 ish ;) While you can reduce the draw complexity of Frontier ( Elite II ) it does struggle on the A500/A500+ ( Stock 68k systems ) I should mention for European / SCART Amiga Users we could ( and I often did ) put the video mode in to NTSC ( 60 Hz ) mode as opposed to the PAL ( 50 Hz ). Doing this offered a quick 20% performance boost to software at the cost of about 50 scan-lines at the bottom of the screen. Please note that the colour carrier ( NTSC / PAL ) is agnostic on SCART RGB so it was just 60Hz Pal Signal. There are few boot programs that allowed you to do this from disk, or you could force this option from the Boot Menu. This difference in some games actually makes them playable on stock OCS/ECS Amiga A500 If I could be so bold as to offer some ideas if you want to see more 3D software on the stock Amiga 68k Machines Running the Amiga in NTSC Mode ( re: 60Hz PAL ) via SCART RGB really does improve the experience Elite Elite Adv ( the latter is modded / upgraded ) Robocop 3 Desert Wolf Epic Blue Max Aces of the Great War Armour-Geddon 2 4D Sports Driving Citadel Ashes of Empire Hybrid 3D (bitmaps sprites 3d environment) Air Strike USA / ATF II ( Advanced Tactical Fighter )

[@jasonblalock4429]

Yeah, I played a lot of Elite 2 on my PC at the time. If you had beefy hardware, it really was amazing. It could handle completely seamless ground-to-space-to-ground transitions twenty+ years before No Man's Sky... and in a accurate Newtonian universe, to boot. The planets were genuinely in orbit around their stars! It's absolutely mindblowing what they pulled off on the relatively weak hardware at the time. I mean, a top-end machine would have been around 25mhz or 33mhz, and maybe a few megs of RAM if you were lucky.

[@blazer666del]

Elite made me upgrade my Amiga...cost me 800 quid back in the day...bought a 68030 50mhz accelerator board...

[@Rip-Van-Tinkle]

If you want a game from the time that really requires a super Amiga, then surely that's Alien Breed 3D 2? If you had the power to run it, the graphics were extremely impressive for the time. Oh, and Elite 2 is one of the top ten best games ever for me, and I played it on my A500+ 😁

[@fourthhorseman4531]

What was that Psygnosis game where you had a base and could spawn different types of vehicles, both ground and air, and then pilot them to repel and enemy invasion? Anybody remember that one? EDIT: Google to the rescue, it was titled Armour-Geddon.

[@0xABADCAFE]

What about the AGA era? There were many Doom clones and later, ports of Doom itself. Team17s Alien Breed 3D 2 pushed the machine hard with it's realtime lighting effects. The Amiga was also one of the first platforms to get an official port of Quake, which, like AB3D2, really needed a 68060.

[@more7642]

You sound so british, that I almost expected you'll offer me a cup of tea)

[@gedbyrne8482]

No Carrier Command or Midwinter?

[@d2factotum]

Mindwinter 2, as well, that game was absolutely incredible.

[@mooseyman74]

Midwinter was great 👍🏻

[@MatthewChaplain]

@@d2factotum I loved Midwinter, but its sequel was just a disk-swap nightmare :(

[@jfwfreo]

Its amazing to think just how far ahead of its time the Amiga was. No other system available at the time could come close to matching the Amiga in graphical capabilities. It was far head of what the SNES and Mega Drive were capable of (at least without any enhancement chips). The Amiga was light-years ahead of the best machines from IBM and Apple and well ahead of the Atari ST (its closest rival). Before the Amiga, the only way to get that kind of graphics power was to buy a high-end graphics workstation from someone like Silicon Graphics costing tens of thousands of dollars.

[@Domarius64]

That run at 11:43 was mad. There's no way I would've avoided that crash at the end, I was surprised you made it that far.

[@Sharopolis]

It's a fun game, you can do some crazy runs when you start to get the hang of the controls!

[@Domarius64]

Sharopolis I’m going to check it out! I also have a love for that low poly style...

[@secularnevrosis]

What we all can learn from games like Elite is that "impossible spec" games become possible when they are programmed the right way. One disc!!!

[@valley_robot]

Or tape, it ran on 8 bit machines as well

[@1973Washu]

Frontier Elite was a joy to play on a 486 DX-4 100 , it is the game that pushed me into using PCs as a gaming machine.

[@doomyboi]

I'm not going to lie Starglider 2 is blowing me away right now with the scope of its game world and the ability to go seamlessly through different layers. It's like the great great grandaddy to No Man's Sky.

[@startedtech]

Yes! I've been waiting for this, I love early 3D so much.

[@Sharopolis]

Thanks!

[@faxis2k]

Whoah! I never realized the Starglider II - Star Fox connection! That's brilliant! I never noticed how similar they were.

[@DuckAlertBeats]

Hunter was interesting to see too, never had that game. Quite ahead of its time probably. Strangely stylish looking I think.

[@Turrican]

Stunt car racer still terrifies me.

[@brixomatic]

Frontier played well on my Amiga 2000 with a Hurricane/030 accelerator and 4MB RAM.

[@evilshrimp666]

I used to play Stunt Car Racer together with my friend. You could use the spare parts of a broken joystick and som cable to link two Amigas and play it as a two player game. It was awesome.

[@intrepidsilence]

You should also check out Powerdrome released by Electronic Arts. It was a precursor to Wipeout and was very hard but the production values were quite high and it ran very well on an A500.

[@TonimanGalvez]

I had a 68060 acelerator in the 90s and all of this games runs pretty smooth.

[@LordWamphyri]

Might be a bit late here, only just found this channel. Favourite 3D game for me on the Amiga was Cybercon 3

[@daishi5571]

That was a great game, but I never finished it.

[@schubutz]

14:08 as an Arrma 3 gamer i had a pretty solid laugh at this moment