Why Space Quest IV on the Amiga is so terrible

The Amiga version of Space Quest IV is by far the most awful version of the game ever officially released. Why is it so bad? Oh, let me count the ways...
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[@hunter141072]

Once I had the opportunity to ask Al why their Amiga games were so awful as me and a friend were able to convert some graphics from the pc version to the amiga using 64 colors and a decent pallette just for fun and the result was a million times better than the one of Sierra. And he told me that the reason was that simply they couldn´t find anyone who was the right person for the job, they really wanted to take advantage of the machine that the Amiga was but they simply didn´t find people to do it so whoever was more or less able to do the job was the one who did it. He even told me that it was a shame that me and my friend didn´t went to Sierra to show our results as we could´ve saved the entire sierra line of products....... yeah..... that did got me depressed. :(

[@spacequesthistorian]

That sounds about right. I'm sure they didn't intend to crap on the Amiga with this; they just didn't see it as a big investment return for all the effort they would have to put into making it run properly... or finding the right people to do it, as you say. It's interesting to see how they still managed to make SQ1VGA come out looking fairly decent! Apparently, even the "wrong guys for the job" people looked at their past efforts and went, "You know what? Maybe we can do just a little bit better."

[@videooblivion]

@@spacequesthistorian Friends and I reverse engineered Amiga SCI in the early 00's. The systems people at Sierra never really understood the machine's architecture intimately enough. And Ken apparently didn't give an Orat's pee-pee.

[@Null_Experis]

@@videooblivion Sierra was more or less all-in on the PC market from very early on, even pushing early Sound Blaster cards in their catalogs for a steep discount at the time. They even sold Roland MT-32 units and midi cards for highly competitive prices. Spending extra time and effort on Amiga was much more difficult to justify once PCs got VGA graphics and every computer owner was spoiled for choice with adlib/sound blaster compatibles.

[@Bugelsson]

This is interesting especially since with Lucasarts it was the opposite situation. Forgot his name but the guy who did German translation for Lucasarts games back then told in one interview how when he saw, maybe it was Monkey Island 1, he wasn't happy for the laggy scrolling the Amiga Version had, and he sent them back a new version of their SCUMM engine, or whatever it was, where scrolling was smooth, but Lucasarts refused to use it and also changed their policy in such way that he didn't get the code for the games anymore.

[@The_Haze]

The Amiga could actually display 64 colors on the screen at one time out of a pallet of 4096 colors using the halfbright mode. 32 colors and 32 more half the brightness of the that pallet. Sierra ports to the Amiga were just god awful and there was not excuse for it. They made ZERO effort to covert the graphics. I looks like they simply used some sort of automated conversion for the images. I remember back in the day how disappointed I was with these ports. I was an Amiga user, and I knew that it could do better. Anyone with an Amiga and a copy of Deluxe Paint knew. Anyways, thanks for this video. I feel like some small justice has been made by you pointing out how much they didn't try.

[@simonebernacchia]

In house sierra tools were notoriously bad: i think they did a superpalette calculation through ALL the game screens

[@daishi5571]

@@simonebernacchia Sometime I swear companies went out of their way to make bad ports in an effort to not have to do any more.

[@simonebernacchia5724]

@@daishi5571 Amigas were mostly successful in europe and at the same time strongly affected by piracy so probably was just a check the box and am done thing - but then people had disbourse at least fifty bucks for a substandard product - and that did somehow morally justify piracy so a whole can of worms there

[@daishi5571]

@@simonebernacchia5724 Piracy on PC (and just about every computer) in Europe was really big (PC was really easy to copy discs on). A lot of it comes down to disposable income. Most people I knew that pirated PC and Amiga games did so due to cost. One game they might have bought in a month but when a dozen "Must have" games (according to the magazines) came out there was no way they could afford them all, so they would go to the market and buy them at a fraction of the cost.

[@JMDAmigaMusic]

@@daishi5571 been there -_- 40.000 LIT (italian lire) for Turrican II original was a not small amount for a 20 year old in example

[@tahustvedt]

I own this version boxed. It's a nightmare to play on a real amiga unless you have extra external floppy drives. Before the first game screen loads you have to swap disks 30-40 times. I'm not kidding. Maybe I should record an attempt at starting the game on my Amiga 500 from floppy.

[@spacequesthistorian]

I have the box as well. The manual actually says you HAVE to install it on a hard drive, and I can see why they would say that. I tried running it on an Amiga emulator from floppy images and it was... a real patience-drainer.

[@snorgonofborkkad]

That would be an interesting test. I would watch it.

[@rickyderocher3181]

An external drive is listed as a requirement if you want to run the game from floppies.

[@pdarkXIV]

I finished this on my 7 MHz Amiga 500 with 1MB of ram and an external floppy drive back in the day. Sierra games usually had an element of frustration baked in, but this one took the cake. Every time I slowly sauntered into a new room by mistake and triggered minute-long loading times, it would cause quite a lot of swearing. The depressingly shaded pixelated graphics had you randomly clicking things hoping that a clump of pixels could be interpreted as something meaningful with a bit of imagination. Sadly, you put up with this sort of thing because these games were damn expensive, and once you'd bought them, you'd try your damnedest to finish them. There wasn't *that* much else to choose from at the time on my beloved Amiga. I also bought Police Quest 3 later, and I still believe this game to be pretty much unplayable on the platform.

[@spacequesthistorian]

Oooh. Now I'm kinda interested to see just how bad PQ3 is in comparison to KQ5 and SQ4. 😂

[@TheTurnipKing]

I was fortunately in the small percentage of 1mb Amiga 600 owners with a hard drive, so it was less painful than it might have been.

[@doomsday9973]

@@TheTurnipKing same here, I had a 600 and KQ5 and SQ3 on the Amiga. SQ3 was great. KQ5 on a hard drive actually loaded fine I don’t remember long waits between screens etc, but it could get slow in places for sure

[@VitaEx]

I honestly still haven’t recovered from space quest v never getting voice over

[@CraaaaaabPeople]

This still gets me.

[@winterbeat13]

2:34 It looks like someone sneezed on the screen and called that the color palette for the room. Also, another great video! Keep up the great work.

[@simonebernacchia]

Look like the usual EGA palette to me

[@JMDAmigaMusic]

@@simonebernacchia Correction: has the DNA of an EGA palette but with more shades

[@Leeki85]

Color on Amiga is a bit complicated. In general it has video modes that have 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32 colors, where each color is picked from 4096 color palette.Such modes were easiest to use and lazy port rarely did anything more. However Amiga has also 64 color mode where additional 32 colors are a darker versions of first 32 colors. There's also famous HAM (hold and modify) mode that can display all 4096 colors on screen at once, but only 16 colors can be picked directly and others are created by shifting values of previous ones. This mode was only good for static images though, but it was still amazing in 1985 since it could essentially display photographs and digital art like no other hardware. Amiga had its powerful custom chips. Copper could change graphics registers mid-frame, every line and even mid-line. It was possible to have 4096 colors on screen with the limitation of 32 unique colors per horizontal line. Amiga had also Blitter that could copy areas of memory without using CPU. In other words proper Amiga should look similar or even better than 256-color VGA, while running fast, since displaying few sprites on static screen was very easy for Amiga hardware. However it required using Amiga custom chips. To make this game run at normal speed all they had to do is to rewrite sprite drawing functions to use Blitter instead of using CPU to do memory transfers. Unfortunately Amiga struggled with poor ports. Initially it got lazy Atari ST ports and when Atari ST ended rarely anyone cared about Amiga and PC was the lead platform. Of course there are tons of great games that were first designed for Amiga and then ported to other systems (or are Amiga exclusives) and such games show how powerful Amiga really was.

[@daishi5571]

The blessing/curse of the Amiga was how flexible it was. On other systems you just basically programmed from the CPU, then going to the Amiga where you basically have four custom coprocessors each with DMA lanes it seemed like an alien world. Had a friend who was a programmer mainly on the PC (he had come from Apple, ZX Spectrum background) when he got an A600 dirt cheap (he really didn't want it he only got it because the guy needed money) but he asked if I had some manuals. Next time I saw him, I swear he looked like he hadn't moved in the two weeks I hadn't seen him. He was really enthusiastic about how he could manipulate the chipset. He was an Amiga guy for the next few years.

[@TheTurnipKing]

Another technical issue worth considering is the amount of space some of those graphics would have taken up from floppy. A single floppy is only 880k, maybe a bit more if you kick out of the OS and use a custom disk format. More colours = more space = more time to load. Everything is a tradeoff in game development.

[@snorgonofborkkad]

These “how it’s made” videos are genuinely interesting.

[@simonebernacchia]

Amiga OCS/ECS also had the Half Bright mode where you can have 32 colors plus the same 32 colors at half luminosity hence 64, not to mention the copper skill to change palettes at any time on the screen - see the game Universe by Core Design that used this technique to achieve 256 colors on screen at the same time

[@JustWasted3HoursHere]

Yeah, that game really pushed the envelope on what is possible graphics wise on the Amiga. There's also a similar thing where it's HAM mode* but with the palette changing on every line. It makes great images with 4096 colors but it makes blitting a lot more complicated and demands a lot more from the system. It would probably be impractical for most games. * For those who don't know, Hold and Modify - HAM for short - was a mode that used only 6 bits to potentially represent up to 4096 colors (normally requiring 12 bits) but with some limitations. Basically the last 2 bits in the bitplane determined whether to hold the previous color from the previous pixel or modify the red, green or blue. If done right you could get some amazing graphics for the time.

[@Arashmickey]

Oh great, there goes my evening. The bit about music sent me down the .mod rabbit hole searching for old favorites: edelweis, bert and ernie share appletaart, trash collector, witte chocomel met prik...

[@tharfagreinir]

Love how you go back to what the reviews at the time were like. That's real historian stuff!

[@spacequesthistorian]

Gotta give shoutouts to my friends on the SQH Discord. They were the ones that dug these up.

[@bigstupidgrin]

Music? Yes!

[@ArmpitoftheGiant]

Sadly, I played this on an A500 with 1MB of RAM and 2 floppies. I did finish it and I did enjoy it, oh the follies of youth. The Sierra games were awful on the Amiga. As an example, although Conquests of the Longbow did use 64 colours (and looked decent) on the Amiga it was so slow it was nearly unplayable. The same game, run on the 060 is still very slow. In fact, Amiga ScummVM runs the 256 colour PC version of Conquests of the Longbow faster than the Amiga native version runs on the very same Amiga. Pathetic!

[@lasskinn474]

we played a bit on friends amiga on floppies. we couldn't make it anywhere before getting annoyed.

[@ArtistontheBorder]

8 disc juggling! A nightmare

[@elbee2324]

Those Amiga samples... there is no fade in or out of the sound, like a real instrument would have for each note or slide or chord. It's just full on then full off, with a set volume for the notes. Sounds really... garish and robotic. :-(

[@J0MBi]

"The Amiga" eh? Which one are you refering to - A500? A1200? A4000? CD32? Because all those systems had different graphics and CPU set ups. Space Quest 4 was coded to run only the lowest end set up, one which came out in 1987, a time when the best graphics PCs could make use of was 16 colour EGA .

[@TrentR42]

9:36 I'm a simple man. I still love that, mostly cause the composition rocks. Certainly, the Roland you played first is the best.

[@darkowl9]

The Amiga was the PS3 of its era - some swanky exotic hardware that if you knew how to wrangle it could produce some utterly incredible results, but if you tried to one-size-fits-all-platforms your code, would end up with a woefully inferior experience.

[@jaecynthiakendrick]

I can't say I hate the mod music on SQ4 or SQ3. Yeah, it's not even close to the MT-32, but it certainly beats the PC-speaker or Tandy speaker I had to play the games on the first time around.

[@lasskinn474]

did they choose the palette for the whole game based on an auto conversion of the title screen?

[@anastronautcartoon]

Ouch! That was painful to watch. As always, amazing review and documentation of real SQ History

[@MonochromeWench]

SQ4 Amiga seems like a perfect candidate for a fan patch/remake to fix it. I have to wonder if the palette swaps were used by sq1 remake because it was a new feature in that version of SCI. Kq5 and SQ4 were the oldest SCI1 games so the feature may not have been added till after they saw the awful results even though vga sci had palette swapping. Interestingly enough the Amiga Palette swapping only allows for 16 colours to be changed. The other 16 colours are fixed for the UI and Ego. an obvious limitation that would be difficult to get around. No doubt sci was slow on Amigas because it was designed as an engine for PCs and almost certainly was designed around the capabilities and quirks of x86 processors. A 68k cpu wouldn't like it. Terrible music I'm guessing was memory limitations for the instrument samples. 4 channels is annoying but someone skilled can make it work and there are many examples of incredible 4 channel mods. Sierra really half assed it, they were a PC games company and it shows.

[@JMDAmigaMusic]

I think SQ4 supports MT-32 if you have midi, but to have a better score on base amiga the sound routines need to be redone from scratch

[@MinisterZdrowia]

Very interesting case. I remember when I was playing Larry 1 on Amiga 600 and swapping disks was a real pain... back then i couldn't afford for second disk station or hard drive.

[@RetroJedi9]

Often you never experienced alternate versions back in the day, I had an accelerated Amiga back then and honestly yes the graphics were noticably bad even back then but apart from that the game play and music was fine. I'm glad to have had it versus nothing at all. When I did finally get a PC and the CDROM version of SQ4 is was a whole new experience.

[@imalebowski]

Great video, but it gets even worse. Space Quest IV was released on PC in 1991. But it was released in 1992 on Amiga. At the time they released Space Quest IV they would've been aware of the new pending Amiga with ... 256 colour graphics support (from a 24-bit palette) and faster processor. Some A1200s were sold with hard disks. They absolutely could've waited and made an almost perfect port with just as much effort, or shipped the lousy version and then reported it for the faster A1200 and the christmas period.

[@katemoody1587]

Why was there no AGA release in the full color palette? By 1992, most amiga users had upgraded to the A1200 or A4000 if they were using their machines for games.

[@daishi5571]

Because they didn't care.

[@deceiver444]

The 1200 never sold enough units to interess Sierra. Even King's Quest who ended up being released in 1994 on the Amiga didn't benefit of an AGA version and was only ported on the old OCS Amigas.

[@TheTomimt]

I do believe Corey Cole (of the Quest for Glory fame) did do some Atari ST conversion (or was a part of a team at least) of Sierra games, including at least SQ3. Maybe he was also in the teams that did Amiga ports?

[@jasonblalock4429]

Jesus crossfitting Christ, that's so bad you have to wonder if it was deliberate. Like Sierra wanted to sabotage the Amiga. It's hard to imagine anyone (even Ken Williams) thinking that was a product fit to release.

[@Echo81Rumple83]

i actually like how the SoundBlaster sounds like; it's very nostalgic to me as is 8-bit chiptunes to those who grew up on Nintendo (i never had Nintendo growing up, but we had PCs, which my dad was into at the time in relation to one of his jobs before he worked for NODC).

[@moregamemusic]

Sierra did not give a F**k about the Amiga back in the day! Thankfully Amiga owners (like myself) got to experience some other wonderful Point and Click games like Simon The Sorcerer. It looks amazing even on an A500.

[@moregamemusic]

Another game that actually uses 256 colors on screen at the same time on Amiga 500 is Core Designs game UNIVERSE from 1994, It's a Space Quest wannabe. The controlbar in the game is horrible and puzzles are very strange.

[@joshm7769]

What where they thinking when they choose that color palette for SQ4! By the way the palette swapping on the msdos version is very apparent during the screen transitions.

[@spacequesthistorian]

Yes. I picked the SQ5 transition though because it's SO apparent, and I didn't have to slow the footage down much.

[@joshm7769]

But in SQ4, among other games the transitions were especially ugly. They loaded the new palette first, distorting the picture, and then the new picture would load in. Tons of fun!

[@someguy1735]

Hey I have know there is a couple og games on the amiga that support the Mt 32 for some reason two of them are sq4 and lsl5 those are the only two I I know support it

[@LadyNicola]

I'll dig out my sampler and try to do a better version. 😊 OctaMED does 8 channels, maybe it wasn't released yet.

[@spacequesthistorian]

Sounds like it could be interesting! Please do share if you get something together. 😊

[@G00berella]

Man the pain train marathon was fun, mostly to see you fall apart each passing hour.

[@JoeStuffzAlt]

According to sources, the Amiga might have 32 colors from a 4096 palette. Why does the EGA version look better (also feel free to correct me on the colors on the Amica. EGA is 16-colors from a 64-color palette) That one sound version sounds like the PCJr / Tandy audio...

[@J0MBi]

"the Amiga" my guy... there was over a dozen Amiga systems with multple CPU and GFX chipset combinations

[@NozomuYume]

The sad thing is the games often work better in Amiga ScummVM than the native versions. The only Sierra adventure games post-AGI that are worth a damn in their native Amiga form are Kings Quest VI (which, as you noted, uses Revolution's Virtual Cinema engine), and Conquest of the Longbow, which actually bothered to use the Amiga's 64-color EHB mode. If you want to see an Amiga game that uses the 64-color mode well, check out Raven Software's Black Crypt. (Raven Software got bought by EA and is now sadly relegated to the CoD mines) And of course no Sierra game bothered to support 256-color graphics devices on 1985 chipset Amigas. One of them, the Black Belt HAM-E, was only $300. That's a chicken-and egg problem though as no games supported it so few people bought it. You could also increase the number of colors for backgrounds using the Copper, changing the palette every scanline. This has zero CPU overhead, and many, MANY games used this feature. This would have required either computing palettes for each environment, but this is doable and many Amiga games used this feature. It would have required reserving some colors for foreground entities, but this is something they ALREADY DID in their SCI engine, which split up 16 colors for backgrounds and 16 colors for moving objects. And in EHB mode this could have easily become 32 colors for backgrounds and 32 colors for moving objects. With some trickery you could also make games that used 4096-color HAM backgrounds, though this was a bit of deep magick that involved using limited movable object palettes, and hardware to cover up the fringing, and would be difficult to implement in SCI.

[@JMDAmigaMusic]

Well, EHB creates the other 32 colors from the base 32, but sprites still use the second 16 color block so you might have had EHB backgrounds and 16 color sprite for max 64 pixel on screen - you could however use BOBs for an adventure game, it does not need the responsivity of an action game and should be fine

[@NozomuYume]

@@JMDAmigaMusic I was assuming using blitter (or CPU) for pretty much everything, and sprites only for stuff like UI elements. Objects that are tied to a particular screen (like a character that only appears on one screen, or a moving tree, etc.) would be part of the "background" palette. Since sprites could only use the "bright" versions of the colors, it would really only be useful for UI stuff, though maybe you could throw in sprites for other effects in a few specific places.

[@keeknomics6506]

I remember Space Quest 3 on the Amiga looking and sounding rather good? WTH happened to the conversion team?? Had no idea KQ4 and SQ4 came out on the Amiga. Was always jealous of PC owners for those, but I’m also glad I did NOT know!

[@spacequesthistorian]

I can't be sure, but my guess is the Amiga versions were just a sort of afterthought and not a lot of resources were allocated to making versions for systems that weren't the PC.

[@Kirkklan]

And then you have me over here wondering if someone could either mod the game to be better or just... reverse engineer KQ6's engine to do remakes of some the games that did come over to the Amiga. Though, at this point in time, it's a very huge question of why would you want to do it.

[@goodgoodstuff]

Mods can sound fantastic...

[@spacequesthistorian]

They can indeed. I was a MOD tracker myself in my young days. (Not that mine sounded that great, but I listened to a lot of MODs.)

[@jasonblalock4429]

@@spacequesthistorian Well, I have to ask: are your works on the MOD Archive? :-)

[@spacequesthistorian]

@@jasonblalock4429 No, unfortunately I lost all of them in a hard drive crash a long time ago. Some of them survived but only in mp3 format.

[@jasonblalock4429]

@@spacequesthistorian Ugh, totally sympathize. I've also lost most of the stuff I made in the 90s too. Aside from a Wolf3D mod I'd be embarrassed to ever show anyone today, haha.

[@spacequesthistorian]

@@jasonblalock4429 Heh... Why is it always the embarrassing stuff that lives on? 😂 But some of the music in this video is actually from my old MOD files.

[@AngryCalvin]

It’s too bad. I really like and respect the Amiga. I had Space Quest IV on my PC which was one of the most memorable PC games of all time even if you didn’t care at all for adventure games. I got the Amiga Forever package and decided to try out all the games I owned growing up. This was disappointing. The color pallet was not good at all.

[@simonebernacchia]

Mod is not THE amiga standard for music, more like a 'de facto' standard so is not officially supposed to be supported. On the game, i bet is using a 'poor man' midi driver to play selected channels of the original songs in the four audio channels; due to sierra 'assembly chain' game production approach - simply porting the game engine by recompiling - the midi support and MT-32 support was on some of its amiga games, but am not sure space quest IV is one of those. You could try

[@spacequesthistorian]

I was not aware of that. I thought MOD music/sound was how the Amiga always handled audio. Thanks for clearing that up!

[@JMDAmigaMusic]

@@spacequesthistorian First music score file format was IFF.smus used by Deluxe Music and sonix, was supposed to be an interchange format but di donly contain score with no effects; instruments were shipped in to files, .instr and .ss with the first containing either waveforms or parameters and the second being an IFF.8svx file with samples (sometimes in more octaves). Later on mod files appeared as offspring of the Soundtracker/protracker format; since is a score+sample encapsulated file and easier to handle was used a lot by demo groups ald later on by game developers. But those were not the only formats, each musician if also coder did ship its own audio format, mostly proprietary, plus other trackers like Octamed (.med) and soundFX (sfx)

[@mattalki]

I originally played the 16 color version of SQ4 on my Tandy 1000TL, and it looked better than the Amiga version by a lot. It mostly just looked like an SCI game at the time. I'm surprised they didn't just go that route, as it would have been less distracting.

[@TheTurnipKing]

12:31 The AGI games on Amiga are generally accurate to the PCjr versions. But that in itself is a crime.

[@LordSenile]

It's interesting, since all the Sierra games BEFORE they went to 256 colors were actually BETTER on the Amiga and the Atari ST than their PC counterparts, since they had a larger palette to choose from than the EGA palette. And the ST at least supported Roland MT-32, not sure about the Amiga. But they still show how little Sierra cared about those 16-bit systems, since they could actually have been A LOT better instead of just slightly better, since both the AGI and SCI games essentially just added mouse support in all the games and gave a little better color range (and the music in the AGI versions were certainly better than the PC speaker bleeps on the PC) instead of actually recreating the graphics. Just take a look at some of the other games for those platforms, like Cadaver for instance, and compare those to to any SCI or AGI game (pre-256c) to see how limited the Sierra games were in their graphics.

[@NozomuYume]

Sierra games on the Amiga actually did support the Roland MT-32 and were almost the only games on the Amiga that did. Unfortunately their native Amiga music engine was garbage, which it didn't have to be as LucasArts games like Monkey Island had amazing music and I actually prefer the Amiga Monkey Island soundtrack over all others.

[@HoldandModify]

Mead is something that makes you like your family again. MIDI is a format for music note translation. MID-E. ;) Great video all kidding aside. I never knew the “why” those were so terrible looking.

[@RiiViiMedia2424]

I'd say the visuals and music are o-kaaaaaaay all things considered. However, if you're moving so slow that you can't get anywhere (at least on less-capable Amiga systems), then I wouldn't say that's a good omen.

[@Thrakus]

I want to see space quest via Minecraft, However, KQ4 would work better as it is a single area open world, But wrap zones could fix that.

[@hgilial3752]

probably because it was hard to find people who had knowledge about porting games to the amiga properly & there where maybe no good software tools availiable to get the job done quickly and atleast make the game playable. So many criminally awful ports to the amiga, some barely playable. Amiga might needed abit more special care to port to but timerestrictions etc.. The good ports to amiga i think the devs had the source code and just build the game from scratch to match the amiga, but again timerestrictions and to complicated a task maybe to do a proper port. MAybe if scorpion engine was availiable back then :D

[@MagusMarquillin]

_Errrrrm,_ I do prefer 256 colours to that Amiga diarrhea, but forcing it into CGA looks like it could be a lot of fun - cyan and magenta is a very unique look, something so very 1980s about it. I likewise think I could have fun with the Amiga's musical aesthetic - not saying it's not lazy or does justice to the game, but it's like a warped drug trip version that might be worth a play...if only I could get it without the other Amiga issues!

[@daishi5571]

The Amiga had so many games just dumped on it instead of giving it a proper treatment. I remember when SimCity 2000 was released to the Amiga. I had a A1200 with a 68030 @50 and it was still very slow, but where I worked they had Macs (lC III and 475) and it ran better on them. So I took My Amiga in and did a comparison, my Amiga with its 68030 @50MHz ran SC2K slower than the LC II with its 68030 @25MHz so disappointing. So I ran a Macintosh emulator on my Amiga and tried the Mac version on the Amiga and what a difference, it was now easily faster than the LC III and I would say it was maybe a bit faster than on the LC 475 with a 68040 which should have been way faster. It was just a really bad Amiga port, not the system.

[@spacequesthistorian]

I guess they had a similar problem that Sierra did: The Amiga, with all its power and promise, clearly requires someone who has a deep understanding of how the architecture works. You can't just dump a bunch of game code on it, write a quick and dirty interpreter, and call it a day.

[@Envisaged0ne]

I dunno. It was pretty bad, but I think that CGA mod of the game was worse. But then again, it wasn't official. As an official release, yes the Amiga version is by far the worse version. Great video as always!

[@ApologyforPepology]

1992 had another god awful Amiga conversion. I never finished Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (or Space Quest IV) for that very reason. Sure the Amiga 500 had it's limitation and the 1200 was just around the corner, but as you said, neither of the future models could have saved a careless conversion to begin with. However, the MT-Roland comparison is a little unfair though, at least back then I didn't knew a single gamer who had that expensive one with their PCs.

[@danyoutube7491]

My brother and I really enjoyed Indiana Jones a lot, I don't see what was wrong with it. Sure it wasn't as colourful as the PC version, but not only could I not see that at the time but even seeing the comparisons now I still think the Amiga version looks good. Again, not as colourful as the PC version, but it still looks good.

[@ApologyforPepology]

@@danyoutube7491 I remember Indy 4 on the Amiga 500 was a very slow and choppy experience, loading times even within the same room, disk shuffling with 11 disks. I also remember it had very slow, like really slow scrolling in certain areas. I was very disappointed with the conversion that I stopped playing after a while. Indy 4 soured my experience so much that I skipped it on my Lucasfilm/Arts adventure replays (even though I haven't done them since the early 2000s).

[@danyoutube7491]

@@ApologyforPepology Ah, right. I think when we played it we already had the A1200, and perhaps we even had the hard drive by the time my brother bought the game, or not very long after. In any case, I don't remember it as being a trying experience, but then regarding disk swapping I think I was a bit inured to being bothered by it at the time because we were so used to it.

[@snabbott]

I wonder... was this laziness/incompetence, or were they doing the best they could given time and budget constraints for the port?

[@spacequesthistorian]

I very much doubt they had much of a budget - or any particular noteworthy insight into how the Amiga worked. I think they saw something come up on screen that looked vaguely like the game they were supposed to be porting, called it a success, and moved on. Also, it's worth noting that the lackluster (if we're being polite) end result could have something to do with how the SCI engine was optimized to run on the PC platform - and games like SQ4 were proper beasts of their time - which meant that you couldn't just shove the interpreter on to a platform like the Amiga without having to do some serious tinkering and optimizing. That must have seemed like too much effort for too little return-on-investment to them. After all, their core audience wasn't on the Amiga (I assume was their reasoning).

[@williamwright9079]

Love the Amiga. The fade out suxxx.

[@Kawa-oneechan]

... they actually managed to mess up the timing on the SQ3 theme.

[@spacequesthistorian]

Fun fact: This is because the Sierra Amiga games were built for the NTSC Amiga... even though the vast majority of Amiga users were in Europe. Way to suss out your market there.

[@Kawa-oneechan]

@@spacequesthistorian I don't mean the entire thing is playing at the wrong tempo, I mean the timing in one particular phrase is off.

[@earthsteward70]

Jesus fucking christ, I feel like i could do a MILLION TIMES better if i knew how to actually compile an amiga game, Im surprised there isnt a fan hack to un-fuck this verison.

[@JMDAmigaMusic]

European amigans were more in action games and Hard Disk was still a priced commodity, i could not even have one because my 500 was 1.2 so no routines for the Hard disk boot, but later on i got a 1200 with half gig HD

[@Calculon1712]

Sierra never gave a shit about the Amiga and it showed thats why I was more a LucasArts fan, as someone who grew up with the Amiga they could have done so much better. I only played Larry 1 VGA and Larry 5 on Amiga and they were not great Id love to know from ex Sierra developers was the Amiga not popular with them and why were they this bad. I wonder if they had some issue with Commodore

[@spacequesthistorian]

From what I remember reading at the time, later LucasArts games like Fate of Atlantis didn't work too well on the Amiga, either. But I'll bet they LOOKED a lot better than this!

[@Calculon1712]

@@spacequesthistorian Id love to know from ex Sierra developers was the Amiga not popular with them and why were they this bad. I wonder if they had some issue with Commodore. Fate of Atlantis looked alright and so did both Monkey Island games on the Amiga

[@spacequesthistorian]

I think they didn't give two shits, as you say, and just shat them out the door as quickly as they could.

[@Calculon1712]

@@spacequesthistorian be interesting though to know how they really felt about it. I think it was on Lemon Amiga website ages ago someone said they found a press release for SQ 4 coming to Amiga and stated it only took them 3 weeks to do it, id love to see that press release.

[@spacequesthistorian]

@@Calculon1712 That would certainly explain a lot. I talked to Ken Allen yesterday and he said he'd never heard what they did to his music on the Amiga. I told him not to look it up. 😳

[@nch2363]

Do Police Quest!

[@spacequesthistorian]

You mean Police Quest on the Amiga?

[@nch2363]

I believe it was also on the Apple II

[@spacequesthistorian]

@@nch2363 Oh, if you mean a series retrospective, I'm already on my way! Check out my second channel, youtube.com/@sqhplays, for Let's Plays, and look for an edited retrospective coming on this channel very soon!

[@nch2363]

@@spacequesthistorian Sweet!

[@beavinator]

Is pronouncing it "meedy" a European thing or something? I've only ever heard "middy".

[@Guardian1224]

It truly is a disgrace for the Amiga :-(

[@doggonemess1]

I just assumed it was because the Amiga was terrible. XD Interestingly, the early Sierra games were better on crummy systems like the Tandy. Oh man, that was an unholy machine.

[@J0MBi]

"the" ?

[@randomrants148]

I would love get my hand on these primtive computer. I would adore to get a working on but I heard these computer made from harmful metals. Still I would like one.

[@beavinator]

Is pronouncing it "meedy" a European thing or something? I've only ever heard "middy".

[@spacequesthistorian]

Curiously, if I was speaking Danish, I would pronounce it "middy." I don't know where "meedy" comes from; it just sounds more natural to me in English. YMMV.