rtcvb32: I heard the Amiga was a good system, but never used it myself. I have to wonder what their game strategy is going to be. 10-20 games at a time with a similar theme? A dollar per individual game?
Wishbone: Basically, for any DOS game released before 1993 that also had an Amiga version, the Amiga version was superior. There are exceptions, but they are few and far between. Hence, for any DOS game from that era worth selling on its own, the Amiga version should be worth at least as much.
The strengths of the Amiga compared to the PC at the time were better graphics and sound. When the PC finally caught up, it left the Amiga behind very fast.
Also, Commodore (the company behind the Amiga) was not known for its keen grasp of marketing. And old joke goes that if Commodore ever acquired Kentucky Fried Chicken, they would rename it Warm Dead Bird.
rtcvb32: Now i'm curious about the interface... I recall trying to play some of the more interesting dungeon crawling games on Atari a while back that used 4 floppy disks; It got annoying fast when you got into a fight and had to turn the disk over before the fight would begin so it could load the data... If the games required multiple disks i wonder if they are going to do any hacking so it strings the game into a single disk virtually or something so that type of thing goes away...
Wishbone: UAE, which is the most widely used Amiga emulator, supports up to four simultaneous disk drives, same as the Amiga itself did. Hence, for any game using 4 disks or less, no swapping is involved (as long as the game itself supports multiple disk drives, but most of them do).
A piece of software called WHDLoad also exists, which allows you to install a wide selection of games to a virtual Amiga hard drive, even though the games originally only had a floppy version.
But the floppy disks were part of the reason why the Amiga lagged behind in the end. When games began to grow in size, the Amiga was in serious trouble. Amiga floppies were only 720KB, while PC floppies were 1,44MB. Hence, you needed twice the amount of Amiga disks as PC disks to store the same amount of data. This was exemplified by Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge, which on the Amiga came on 11 floppies, as far as I remember. It probably did have an option to install to HDD, but since Amiga HDDs were hellishly expensive (they were not standard components like PC HDDs are), very few people had them, and so had no other option but to swap like mad or buy a PC, if they wanted to play the game.
rtcvb32: I'm sure there's quite a few games i'm willing to buy, although i probably already have them on a backup disc somewhere with a huge collection of emulation stuff... Now i'm almost getting excited.
Wishbone: Well, availability has never been a problem with Amiga games. Legal availability is a whole other story, however.
IIRC Amiga HDs started at 10Mb and ranged in 10Mb increments up to 100Mb, which you'd need to re-mortgage your home to buy!
