15khz 320x200 with proper CRT scanlines (like in arcade games and home consoles and computers on a standard TV) is immensely more pleasing to the eye than the same resolution displayed on a PC monitor.
Probably true for the US. In Europe, it was very country-dependent. Here PS2 sold simply because it was the new PlayStation, to a public that for the vast majority wasn't even aware there was competition.
Got to agree here, in fact what I remember is that the Riva TNT 2 already was the smart pick vs. what 3Dfx had out at the same time, even though Voodoo was the cooler brand and had all that previous goodwill.
It's one of those rare cases where being in the US or Europe gives an uniquely skewed perspective.
It's astonishing to think that the Amiga hardware was done in 1984 and the A1000 came out in 1985 - the same year the NES released in the US! It took Nintendo until 1991 to come up with something roughly comparable power-wise.
From what I understand in the US the Amiga slowly petered out without never truly taking off. In Europe the A1000 never was a thing, but we had four years of the press talking about this mythical monster of a machine and its custom chipset. Then in 1989/90 all of a sudden everyone bought A500s to play Kick Off and Speedball II. That 89/92 period was glorious.
At least in southern Europe Wolfenstein wasn't regarded as a killer app at all, it barely made an impact. Doom and Wing Commander most definitely were, though.
The filfre.net series of articles on the history of Commodore and Amiga is truly great work, and should give you a much clearer picture than pretty much anything else.
I'm sure nobody expected it to live this long, as the grumbling about its various shortcomings must've started in the late eighties at the latest. The curse of good enough strikes again ...
How timely! I was watching a video about the ill fated Vector W8 supercar last night, and wondered about that awesome CRT proto-GPS thing seen in some shots.
I agree it's not optimal. It's not like every game changes on every MAME release, but some indeed get re-dumped from time to time. The usual example is encrypted audio data or color palette ROMs. In an earlier version, lacking the ability to decrypt them they would be emulated with samples or code respectively, then once it's possible to dump them they get integrated into the romset for better accuracy.
Those prices are not what I remember from back then, at least in Europe. Comparable 386 and 486 PCs cost way, way more than an Amiga 500 or later 1200 respectively.
The filfre.net Digital Antiquarian articles on the Commodore/Amiga history are incredibly well researched, and paint a more comprehensive, nuanced version of the usual 'mismanaged to death' narrative. There is a very cogent insight that I first read there, that roughly goes as this:
the Amiga architecture of a 2D oriented console-style custom chipset was badly suited for the gradual transition from coding to the bare metal to having an OS managing the hardware, accessed through APIs.
Keeping up would've meant a complete reinvention of the platform and its ethos, with a much bigger push on OS development, not only the next hot chipset. Commodity, standardized hardware running Windows ultimately got good enough and won.
And as someone else remarked, +1 on Wing Commander, and later the golden era Lucasarts adventures, being the actual beginning of the end.