You may be waiting some time for that tweet :D - I think the 386 comparison is sound. When it came to decision time for me on buying an Amiga 1200 or a PC I didn't look so much at colours/resolution but more at the raw power I was seeing from 486 CPU's. Doom with its pseudo 3D and later Need for Speed on a DX2/66 with 3D and textured graphics zipping along, combined with the choice of titles just made it a no brainer for me. We call come crawling back to the Amiga eventually though!

I’m from Denmark, we loved all Commodore here and used it for gaming. The lovely Amiga1200 was here around mid 1993, available to buy in stored. None of us knew about ham8 mode and so on, but only how games looked, at that time, the 486 66MHz computers was out and popular, the SVGA games looked amazing, compared to low resolution Amiga games. Unfortunately the AGA didn’t come to its use, I remember Amiga 1200 users in 94 was SO happy an old game came out for AGA, nobody was talking about more colours no, they were happy about the old game now being compatible with there Amiga 1200. Its so sad, it went as it did, my all time favourite computer is still the Amiga1200.

I like my current PC but I LOVE my A1200. This is the main difference. Every Amiga has a soul!

How have I missed your channel? Subscribed immediately, thank you very much!

I had an Amiga 1200 back in the day. I put the MB in a custom tower, added a 68060 accelerator with 256 Mb memory. I still needed a scan doubler and flicker fixer to use it with a VGA monitor. Eventually added a PCI video card on a Mediator PCI board to boost resolution. About 9 or 10 years ago I put it in a closet and forgot about how much money I had in that 1200. My Asus Laptop would run emulation much faster than any accelerated classic Amiga. So about a year ago I got it out and somehow it died in that closet. Chip ram failure. Unrecoverable. It was super sad. I had to take all my effort to electronic recycling. Or Electronic Heaven and bid farewell. I was so bummed out I had to drink a bunch of IPA's to numb the pain. It was even sadder than when I took my C128D to the same place. An it wasn't even broken. What a fool I've been. There are people who would pay anything to have working systems of either one. OCD I guess.

Gonna get myself one of those Columbus 1492 monitors.

Thank you for such an awesome rundown of the AGA graphics. Today I feel like people's perception of the Amiga is very much based on a comparison between OCS and Super VGA rather than discussing AGA vs VGA. Especially since the benchmarks are generally games. which, In the end, was a gaming library targeting A500 which in extension predominantly consisted of sprite- and tile-based graphics that console hardware was generally better at. However, technically, the AGA hardware a "true" 32-bit capable machine and would theoretically allow for some pretty impressive 32-bit games. Things that became common first with the Playstation. Things like highly detailed pre-rendered backgrounds. Heck the AGA chipset could even do 640x400 pre-rendered backgrounds which was first seen on PS2/Gamecube-era. Sprites were massive as well, 64 x Unlimited height. I could really see a potential future with colorful 2D games like Rayman as well with the CD media allowing RPGs and adventure games like Final Fantasy VII... Theoretically it would be possible with the use sprites or vector 2D characters. Unfortunately both the A1200 and CD32 came out during Commodore's decline and we were never really able to see AGA graphics shine. The other reasons being limited storage, floppy disks, as well as HDD which were expensive and fairly limited in terms of storage. With CD media taking off and the A1200 being able to flex the AGA chipset, I think people would have been impressed if it was utilized to its fullest! :)

In my opinion one word ended the Amiga... Doom - When people saw Doom for the first time on the PC it was game over.

Love this video Doug! And of course I agree 100%

doug you nailed it. AGA rulez VGA 👍🏼

When AGA came out the community was impatient to see something that would re establish the Amiga as the absolute dominator of multimedia computers, which was not possible anymore.. in 1985 Amiga had no competition at all, in the 90s Amiga was one of the many competing solutions available on the market. it was Commodore vs the world an Commodore lost. That’s why many people remember (remember, but didn’t think so at the time) AGA as a disappointment. Also, consider that AGA was being compared (unfairly?) to other machines as the snes which had all those sprites, effects and modes, AGA only had bigger sprites compared to the ECS machines, so yes in the gaming community some people were a bit confused as to why it took Commodore so long (practically 1993) to come out with AGA. Perhaps if they hadn’t wasted so many resources on researching useless stuff like the C65, the C64GS (as they say, flogging a dead horse) better hardware could have been developed for the Amiga. Commodore’s marketing was obsessed with placing something in the 300$ price range but all the machines they pulled out were failures (as I said, C65 but also the A600). Had they spent money on a truly innovative chipset they would have led the market for some more years. The disappointment was Commodore’s management, not the poor honest AGA.

What would be the recent closest paint program to Deluxe Paint 4 on the Amiga? And will it be AGA mode ready?

Fascinating. It would have been great if Amiga won the PC game wars in the 90s. The 386-SX with VGA was DOG slow compared to the Amiga and AGA kicked it's ass. The 386-DX 40 and above with the math co-processors started to compete and win when the VESA was used for SVGA.

Nice video and well explained. I think as a few people have mentioned below that there were certain titles on the PC like DOOM which was a gamechanger and pushed a lot of gamers over to the PC-platform, no doubt about that. I like that you mentioned the important part that the Amiga actually was compatible with TV sets back then, which was something the PCs were missing unless they got extra hardware for it. You have to place yourself back in 1992 and think about what hardware that was available, and what we used computers for back then. It's easy to forget how many things we take for granted these days. There are advantages and disadvantages with the Amiga graphics as summed up here, but we have to remember those things that made the Amiga superior at the time, and that was scrolling, copper and fading effects. Just look at a masterpiece software like Scala Infochannel IC500 which really squeezes everything out of the Amiga. I even still used it for presentations as late as in 2000 on my A1200 with Blizzard1230IV/50Mhz, and the Scala presentations looked awesome on a composite videoprojector compared to what was possible on the Windows platform. The PC even struggeled to push a textline smooth on the screen on a 300Mhz AMD-K6II. We have to admit that the Amiga was not perfect in every way, but the things it was good at, it did very well. My god I miss those days with AmigaOS as my primary operating system.

So, I went back and looked at the Amiga and did a study on the Amiga vs the PC. The problem that I found is that the Amiga had good graphics of AGA, but it was too late and the PC was moving far too fast.. 1) Poor Management of Commodore from 1989 in America verses the entire PC industry (too many strong players vs one company) 2) AGA came super late. Super VGA was a big standard by that time. Even my 1990 Super VGA video card had 1024 x 768 with 256 colors on screen at once (512 megs of ram). By 1993, 16-bit color was already on Super VGA video cards with 1 megabyte of memory. By the time AGA came out, the original VGA was almost 6 years old by that time. 3) The Amiga did not have a CD-ROM drive (Not counting the CD32), and that meant the industry was not going to keep providing games on floppies any longer. 4) The PC industry was moving so fast.... Sound Blaster in 1989 already surpassed the Amiga sound, by 1992 we were doing 16-bit DAC sound in stereo and 32 hardware channels of sound with the Gravis Ultrsound. 5) The PC again was moving too fast, moving from 386sx that came out in 1988, to the Intel 486 that came out in 1989. The PC was so fast that by 1996, we started emulating the Amiga on our PC machines in MSDOS. Yes, fellow was the first Amiga emulator that worked on the PC in 1996. The PC started the 1990's with 25 Mhz, but by 1999 AMD was doing 1 Ghz for the first time and by 1999 the PC had the first GPU architecture with the Geforce 256 and Direct X 7. VGA and the first sound-cards for the PC came out in 1987, and started taking over two years later in 1989, this is when the industry shift started to happen on the PC. Tandy was the first sound chip on the PC which was compatible with the PCjr and came out in 1984. The video modes are better than EGA somewhat, but the sound is what helps. Also, CGA has a composite mode that makes it like 16 colors, so these are the best ways to get graphics and sound back before 1987. Amiga is going to be better than EGA of course and so is the ST, by the way due to the palete being 512 colors instead of just 64 colors on the PC), but the PC could do higher resolutions with more colors than the ST. Amiga was better than both CGA and EGA, but worse than VGA 256 colors. Amiga in sound was beat with both the MT-32 and the original Sound Blaster. We won't even talk about the 3D graphics cards, because that's not fair against Hombre.

Without question, in my opinion the best game I could play on the Amiga 1200 was and will always be Super Star Dust. Just amazing. Loved it.

I used to have an A500 in the early '90s, and it was mostly for gaming. Even back then me and my friends realized, that at least graphically and sonically, the Amiga was superior to the PCs of the day. I guess it was around '95 when I transferred into PC land, just because that was the way of the future. Amiga was on it's way out, and we didn't really have any of the high end Amigas here in Finland. I heard and read about A1200s back then, but never saw one in the flesh. The A2000 to A4000? never saw any of those either. So in that situation, it was obvious that everybody left the Amiga in the past and moved on. Actually, it's only now when I've gotten back to Amigas, I learn (largely through your great videos) how potent machines they were, and could have been.

thank you for good video

This is an exceptionally good overview of what was what _in reality._ People talk a lot, and I mean a LOT about how "Doom killed the Amiga". It was very far from being that simple. The comparison here is perfect. In those days, 1992-1993, what PC/DOS people _actually_ had would pretty much have been some average 386SX system. Then boom! Doom was released. That 2000 dollar 386SX/20 would run it at about 5 fps. Yes, Doom was an absolutely breathtaking game... that however required a higher end machine that _in those times_ was _incredibly_ expensive. Younger people who didn't live through those times or were too young to remember might not properly understand what the market was like. A medium to high end 486 was basically your entire months salary. Computers and stuff weren't just a little bit more expensive back then, they were really, REALLY expensive. (don't forget to adjust for inflation as well). It's not a surprise that a stock or modestly expanded A1200 can't compete against a fast 486 or Pentium PC... but in actual fact, it *can* easily compete against that 386 that's even close to the same price. Equip the A1200 with a relatively cheap accelerator card with some RAM and it will also run Doom. Actually a little faster than that 386.

John was completely right. Having an A1200 and later A4000+PPC and so on didn't give me anything relevant that I could'nt have had with an A500/A2000 with 1MB Ram (Well, OK, it could play mp3s and burn a CD at once, yeahh!). I had some games in OCS and AGA version and didn't even bother checking which version I was playing, because the differences where invisible. We all know what AGA's capabilities where, that's not the point. AGA was way too little way too late. For the time every Amiga should have had an 68030/50 at least and some simple kind of 3d acceleration, plus 8 hardware voices 16bit audio and a hard drive. Because the Amiga spirit was about being in front, not running after.

So, sorry for the noob question, but how does one get 1280x720 without flicker on an A1200 or CD32 with today's monitors? (VGA or HDMI inputs)

Long time Amiga fan here, but there are some pretty significant notes about video modes that need to be made. - AGA was awesome, but really REALLY should have had at least one chunky mode. - VGA was extremely programmable - almost as much as AGA - you only listed the bog standard VGA modes which especially in gaming were not the best, or by '92 or so even the most common. There were lots of applications and games that used all of these modes - Fractint is one just from memory. - Mode 13h, mode X, etc. and especially unchained Planar mode were common and extremely capable. Just a clip from Wikipedia for example: Other graphics modes Nonstandard display modes can be implemented, with horizontal resolutions of: 512 to 800 pixels wide, in 16 colors 256 to 400 pixels wide, in 256 colors And heights of: 200, or 350 to 410 lines (including 400-line) at 70 Hz refresh rate, or 224 to 256, or 448 to 512 lines (including 240 or 480-line) at 60 Hz refresh rate 512 to 600 lines at reduced vertical refresh rates (down to 50 Hz, and including e.g. 528, 544, 552, 560, 576-line), depending on individual monitor compatibility. For example, high resolution modes with square pixels are available at 768×576 or 704×528 in 16 colors, or medium-low resolution at 320×240 with 256 colors. Alternatively, extended resolution is available with "fat" pixels and 256 colors using, e.g. 400×600 (50 Hz) or 360×480 (60 Hz), and "thin" pixels, 16 colors and the 70 Hz refresh rate with e.g. 736×410 mode.

AA+ was designed to support ALL 32-bit 680x0 CPUs. For Chunky pixels support, low end systems would most likely feature a 68020 with full 32-bit memory addressing (i.e. not 68EC020) or even 68EC030 which could handle RTG drivers easily. Commodore did not add chunky pixels to AGA at the time because RTG required at least 68020 (not 68EC020 as in A1200) with 4 MB memory at least, while the standard A1200 had only 2 MB and 68EC020 CPU. 8x memory bandwidth over ECS by using 128-bit long memory bus bursts like AAA. Maximum Chip RAM size would be increased to 8 MB. With 57 MHz pixel clock, AA+ could display progressive 800 x 600 @ 72 Hz in 256 colors, or even interlaced 1024 x 768 screens. Perhaps the most significant advancement was the addition of 16-bit Chunky mode, although the max resolution for 16-bit pixels would be 640 x 480. There is no mention of 8-bit chunky mode in AA+, most likely 256 colors would be only in planar mode, this way Commodore could keep the cost of AA+ down, as 8-bit planar support had to remain, since it was supported in AGA. A 2x blitter performance over AGA/ECS one was promised, however Commodore never mentioned that AA+ had 32-bit blitter like AAA, so AA+ blitter would stay 16-bit to keep the cost down. A 2X performance might be gained by increasing blitter clock cycle from 7 MHz to 14 MHz, but by doing this AA+ will lose compatibility with a large base of hardware banging software which depend on synchronizing with blitter cycles like most demos and games of that era. When asked, Lew Eggebrecht VP of Engineering at Commodore stated that AA+ will support 16-bit sound samples, but it is unclear whether this support would be added by adding a DSP chip, or by improving Paula to something better like AAA, although Lew Eggebrecht stated once that DSP will be integrated in all future Amiga chipsets including the low end ones.

I could never get the Super hi res screen modes on my A1200 to look nice on my commodore 1084S. Were these modes designed for a different monitor?

Always been a svga fan. My first pc in 1994 came with it and I truly loved the lpok of those svga years. I still do and miss svga ganes.

Great video and you nailed the whole price issue: the A1200 (used, hooked to a TV) was the only machine I was able to afford as a poor teen back in 1993. It was just slightly more expensive than a 1990s video game console but did SO MUCH more. As for the games: the likes of SLAM TILT Pinball, SUPER STARDUST AGA pseudo-3D tunnel levels was mind-blowing, ROADKILL, ALADDIN, BREATHLESS etc etc didn't disappointed.

This video has reminded me the ECS and AGA machines can generate VGA signals. I've never done it, so adaptor ordered :-)

Oh and just so we are clear it was a Vic 20 that got me into computers back in 1981 and I started going to a computer club and in 1982 they got a Commodore 64. My parents knew I loved the Atari 2600 & I loved computers, so they bought me an Atari 800 XL for Christmas. I was never against Commodore, it just was that my parents bought me what they bought me and I just went for it and I was running an Atari 8-bit BBS by 1989 and then I bought the PC I was talking about because of my professor in July of 1991. I wanted an Amiga at the time but I went for the computer that my professor told me to get to be future proof. I gave all my Atari stuff away for free to a friend of mine and he took it and sold it off to someone else without telling me (sigh). I sold the Atari 8-bit stuff and bulletin board system because I pulled down the phone line as I had lost my job. From then on I stuck to the PC all of this time and going from MS DOS to 4DOS and then on to Windows 95/98/XP/7 and now Windows 10.

Started using PCs in 1990 whilst re-training (former Welder > Fabricator). Built my own PC in 95 and ever since. My 500s went into storage but my 600, 1200 & CD32 stayed out. They got used less and less over the years --- but still out + used.

Another great episode Doug. Being from Denmark :-) I would like to add, that the price difference in Denmark was extreme due to importtaxes ...in the Amigas favour. I guess this was the case in other countries as well. As a result you would end up buying "cheap" (still very very expensive) copy-hardware from Asia, which ended up being an unstable system (hardware) and on top of that you had to struggle with the unstable Windows operationsystem. So, all-in-all the Amiga graphics was in fact better at the time - and as a complete "gaming-package" the Amiga was so much better (games, joysticks etc.).

I didn't get a PC until a 486 DX2 66 with 8 megs of ram, 40 meg hard drive, SVGA card and soundblaster card in for $800 or so in 1993, I had a Commodore 1950 monitor so I didn't get a new monitor. Played XWING and TIE figther like a mad man. If we consider what was going on with Amiga's 68k upperclass cousing the MAC you really needed a top of the line 68040 or PPC mac to play the newer 3d games that took us to 1995. An 030 didn't cut the mustard at all.

Im surprised that someone would think OCS/ECS is as good or can look as good as AGA. Is it possible that he didnt live through the early Amiga days? (open question coz I dont know the guys background). I had an amiga 500. And the graphics compared to what I was used to (the spectrum 48k+) were simply insane. Batman and Stuntcar Racer were some of the bigger titles I played in the amigas early days. I eventually upgraded the A500 with 0.5MB upgrade but my heart was set on an Amiga 1200. And when I got my A1200 I was once again blown away with its speed and insane graphics. The reason for my a500 upgrade was for DPaint, which was also my reason for wanting an A1200. Nowadays it might be hard to see the step up in image processing, but at the time the difference was obvious.

I had moved over from the Atari 8-bit line and my professor at my college said not to buy an Atari ST or Amiga and that PC's were the thing to buy and he was right. A couple years later in 1994 Amiga was dead and PC's would move on to Windows 95 and 3D accelerator cards (now we call them GPU's) . I had a 386sx with 2 Megabytes of ram, a Sound Blaster Pro card and an Orchid Super VGA card. Commodore would have been smarter to license out their tech to put into PC's. It really was a missed opportunity as they could have been around today if they fired Irving Gould. I was really an Atari fan, but both Atari and Commodore really let me down overall. I did feel really well with my choice of moving to the PC in 1991 and I loved the new technology. 1) You have to understand that you start the decade with 25 Megahertz and you end the decade with 1000 Megahertz 2) You have to also understand that you start off the decade with MS DOS and end with Windows 98 3) You have to also understand that you start off the decade with BBSes and end the decade with the Internet 4) You have to also understand that you start off the decade with 386 and end the decade with Pentium 3 technology 5) You have to also understand that you start off the decade with SVGA and end with GeForce 256 (The world's first GPU) The 1990's was a ton of changes in the computer industry. I did not know at that time that the Commodore Amiga had the same guys that made the Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Atari 8-bit computers. I wish Jay Miner was still around, him and his team was amazing, but at the end of the day Commodore killed the Amiga because it didn't advertise properly and it had horrible leadership. I still have Amiga Emulation using WinUAE, but I really wish I had experienced that tech earlier, but I was happy that most of the Amiga games came over to the PC at the time and there were other games that were not on the Amiga such as Wing Commander, Wolfenstien 3-D, Doom, etc... We also had Commodore 64 emulation back in 1992. I just recently learned the Amiga had that ability as well, but we added so much more, NES. PlayStation, MAME, SEGA Genesis, SNES, Nintendo 64, etc... I just find it funny that in 1996-1997 we had Fellow and could emulate the Commodore Amiga as well in MS DOS all in software and we didn't even need all the special chips Speed >>>>>> Special Chip-sets Don't get me wrong, I am glad today that the Xbox Series X has machine learning built in and the ability to do real full speed 60 frames per second ray-tracing.

Nice video :) Vesa local bus came in 1992 and was replaced by pci in 1993 says wikipedia, but I have read that pci started first in servers and such before becoming the normal expansion slot for regular consumers. In 1993 I got a 486sx 25mhz with only isa slots, 4mb of ram and no sound card :)

Great video! I have A1200 and A4000. Can simply not live without the AGA chipset. Loved it since I bought A1200 new when it came out. This year will be great for the AGA chipset. We will see Reshoot Proxima 3 and Jump! I do not care for gfx-card on my Amigas. I have scan doubler. That is enough for me ;)

I personally think the biggest mistake about the the ECS and AGA chipsets, was that the Paula never got just a tiny improvement. Commodore could have gone 16Bit and 8 voices

The reason, why I did upgrade in December 1993, were the Lucas Arts adventures! Indiana Jones IV was the last one, that got an Amiga port and I wanted to play Day Of The Tentacle and Sam & Max so badly! When I got the new system, I was disappointed by the sound, though. I upgraded to General Midi and SB16, then to a Gravis Ultrasound. Anyways, besides the two mentioned adventures, I got Indy Car Racing, Grand Prix World Curcuit, Strike Commander, DOOM and Rebel Assault but something was missing.

nice way to start flame war ;-)

I was more than satisfied with my Amiga over the competition up until 1984 when the price of 486 clones dropped to an affordable price and Windows 95 was the first operating system looked comparable to my Amigas. When I did purchase a PC clone in 1986, it replaced my CD32 with a SX-1, that I still use to this day.

You need to remember that Amiga was also competing for people's money with consoles for games. The Amiga could compete a bit with the 16bit consoles but once the Playstation and Saturn came out it was clear that Amiga couldn't compete anymore while PC could with the addition of 3D cards. The Playstation 1 was released only a couple years after the A1200 but people knew it was coming a year before then.

I never gave much thought to the video graphics settings I was a productivity user who happened to run a BBS on an Amiga as well. My friends who scratch their heads as they saw my Amiga Multitask. I would show them some very nice high resolution pictures they could not easily generate with their PC's at the time. It was not until the release of Win95 when they could call me to tell me they could multitask now like my Amiga and I would tell them it was all done in software not in hardware. My move to the PC was due to work related applications first with troubleshooting industrial controls and to run AutoCad and MS Offfice applications. I never got into picture editing until digital cameras became available and scanners and that work was done on a PC and not an Amiga but who knows I might try that out on an Amiga down the road as the Amiga's I use today are expanded have even better graphics capability and it will be a good fun project to do. I will say this with all honesty I never loved the PC to me they are throw away items but my love for Amiga's is forever and its not about games.

its not a matter of cost . no one cared how cheaper nokia was after seeing the iphone . after doom dropped the amiga was obsolete , every knew it and it was dead money . everyone will complain it wasn't just doom , and sure it wasn't , but doom was still that psychological moment , embedded into everyone's brain , the line in the sand that you can never go backwards from again

In theory you are right,in practice not so much.You see the reason that none of us knew about the advanced features of the AGA chipset is because the majority of the Amiga users didn't have the high res monitor.Almost all them had the 1084 which with the standard high resolutions could bleed your eyes until they fell out of their sockets.So all the advanced stuff was totally useless for the majority of the users.Also Wikipedia doesn't say that the standard IBM VGA could do 256 colors in 640x480 with 512k of ram,a pretty good resolution for productivity and other uses.As for SVGA there are a few pretty cheap graphic controllers that had blitter mainly used for GUI acceleration and supported perfectly usable resolutions of 800x600 with 65535 colors up to 1024x768 with 256 colors with a crappy 14inch monitor.And for last I find the price comparison unfair because you failed to mention the superior expandability of the PC.It gave you the capability to gradually expand your computer with a variety of upgrades such as a second HDD, better graphics and sound,CD ROM drives, networking and others without having to spend a fortune.Those characteristics fall into the A4000 category which was super expensive (I think 3700$ for the 68040 model and like 1000 less for the 386dx equivalent 68030)

Good Explain. :)

You could run pretty much any resolution on a svga card as well. My dads pc that he bought in 1992 could do 1600x1200 (while the monitor was strugelung). On most vesa standard grapics cars you can actually program them to do any resolution, even unsuported one. And it really wasnt that expensivr, $1400 You could get a cheap 386sx for under $1000 at this time. Sound you can use a $5 patrullen DAC. There is a other factor. It takes abour 2 years to develop a game including making the tools to the game. For the 500 it worked out fine with the 1000 coming about 1 year prior. The games was then made for amiga to be ported to PC from amiga. But in 1989 when 486 came with the XGA grapics. They was expensive yes, but that dont matter for the devs. Hence the first svga games come around in 1991. And xga games in 1993. For the xga games.. If you cant aford to run it, most of them could be down sanpled to svga, and some all the way to vga... same with early vga was possible to downsample to ega. The thing with amiga is that this was possible in theory, but the gap was really to big practical. Bute a 486 true collor game could be downsaple to a 386 256collor game and even to a 286 low resolution game (or 16 color high resolution) This is really where the amiga get punished, it was 7 years between the 1000 and 4000. The thing is not that you could get a better PC in 1992.. you could, ut you also could get it in 1991, 1990, 1989, 1988 and 1987... you have to go all the way back to 1986 before its arguable that the amiga was better than any PC. There was also a new grapics adapter pretty much every year. 1986, MCGA, 1987, VGA, 1988, SVGA, 1989 XGA. 1990, SXGA/UGA, as well as pretty much a new CPU every year, but it kind of worked backwards. The 3000 wasnt a early 4000, but rather a beeffed up 1000. While amiga os was better, that had very little impact on games. And for desktop work, the lower cost of the amiga dont matter in the corperate world.

I'm agree in some points, but 3D games after 90 getting very popular and rendering 3D scene on chunky display systems was nearly 6-7 times faster in 8 bit mode than on planar (no matter if vga card has a slow dram), which was a decent thing, and sadly around 92-93 Amiga start loosing it's "importance" in gaming (too much concurrent and successful platforms: sega,snes,pc...). So actually it's true, AGA much better in many ways than an old VGA (and we compare a late 80's standard to AGA which was released at 92). SVGA which is rapidly become the standard had faster dram or even vram (don't forget vram prices drastically dropped at that time) and SVGA gives you a much better performance overall, even in productivity softwares. Gaming was a decent factor in Amiga sales and 3D was the hype, also if we forget 3D and only focus on 2D games AGA still show poor performance, actually i don't know any real full 256 color 2D games on Amiga (i don't think it's exists), most of the AGA ports usually has much fewer colors. So AGA in 92 was good enough to keep up with older VGA but after late 93 was obsolete. In a game developer perspective after late 93 a 386DX config (not SX!) was not much expensive than the mentioned 1200 setup (hdd+fastram+monitor) and it gives you a huge advantage in gaming, and in late 94 Playstation 1 released = game over.

I went from an (Celecovision, C64 (breadbin and later design), Amiga 500 then) Amiga 2000 that was relatively empty to a Power Mac 7200 603e and at the time I was doing CDROM based development and that Mac got filled with goodies and I have had lots Apple computers since then. I missed the Amiga for years after leaving it behind and still do more than 25 years later but getting a phyisical computer is not anything I could do, I don't have the space for let alone time. I have stayed with Apple for most of the 25 years but over the last few been doing tech support and got a few Windows machines. I'm not a fan boi and just used the best tech that I could find to do the job over the years, and that I was willing to spend.

I got my 1200 as soon as it came out in the uk. Although I loved the machine, I was a bit disappointed. The colours and resolution were nice, but it was a bit slow. Great as you say for video and productivity, but not great for the new wave of 3D games that were coming out. As the Amiga was so innovative when it came out, AGA felt a little bit of stop gap.

AGA truly rocks. Although I did not know this having not having a 1200 or 4000 back in the day. In fact I only found out how good it was thanks to your previous video 😁. Also as you eluded too, when people compare they tend to be comparing SVGA and later because AGA was stuck in its original form and “VGA” evolved. Also before Windows 95 it was always a pain to get a stable system with DOS & Windows 3.1. Whereas workbench “Just works” ... 😉

Aga stunned me with its image quality. Those photos are like nothing i ever saw at the time and still look good.. My main issues with the A1200 came from the limitations of chip mem, re-used paula and weak sprites but im guessing this wasn't changed in order to keep compatibly with ocs/ecs. Still. I owned the CD32 back in the day which is kinda an A1200. Still enjoyed it with all its shovelware :)

And just a question? what heavy were the "Stop the world" request imposed to the CPU when the AGA Hw needs to fetch data to display such high and hi-colorful images? I remember that even on OCS there were not negligiblestop due to DMA requests when "Denise" or blitter are working hard. Sometimes the hw could even drop sprite display because of insufficient bandwidth

What I found disappointing is that most of the games used the 32 colour mode (16 per layer with a max of 2 layers), VGA was standard 256 (320x200), it look like magic back then. I think the AGA was to advanced with regard to the other specs of the A1200; it made higher res and more colours useless for games (but with a exception of the excellent WingCommander port). Or am I missing something?

Nice video, I would check on the prices you give 100 dollar for a sound blaster, I would have loved it back then :)

AGA doesn't mean only graphics but also audio. So we have to compare AGA with Sound Blaster. AGA uses Paula which is the same 8 big audio chip found in OCS and ECS. Audio CD is 16 bit 41KHz and that the minimum quality which can be handle by Sound Blaster. I heard that was Commodore decision to leave AGA with 8 bit audio even they had a 16 bit prototype but more shame to Escom which didn't do nothing but overcharge price. In my country A1200 was more expensive in 1995 than 1993.

I was lucky enough to be able to play both at the same time back in the day. Dad owned an IBM XT and then an AT a bit later, first with CGA, then with EGA and later with SVGA. I purchased an Adlib card myself and later a Sound Blaster 16. My good friend, still to this day, owned an A500 and then later an A2000. Amiga wins. End of story. Haha. To leave his house and go back to mine. It was like Sega and Nintendo but different. Two totally different machines.. But the Amiga was superior. There is no doubt.

AGA came late 1992. The dawn of Doom was on the horizon. If AGA came out 1988, maybe...

I came here to try to understand why monkey Island on the Amiga has a colour pallette closer to EGA. It could most definitely handle VGA and it sounded really good .

The real question should be what did the PC do that the Amiga was incapable of. Not what did they do on a PC that wasn't done on an Amiga, that's just a list of programs they couldn't be bothered to port over.

No Doug, you had the right picture the first time ;-)

Also talk about animation.An Amiga can animate with all 262.144 colors @1472x576 as opposite to a PC...

I was die hard amiga , last amiga i got was a a1200, soon I realized amiga did not have it going on anymore lol. Got a 486/33 with a cd rom and never looked back.

In the end, how many games really used AGA? That's the big question. How many apps used HAM even? I had a lot of Amiga games on my PC back in the day, such as Speedball and Speedball 2. The one I really like was colorful called "Jim Power", most of the games as of 1990 were being ported to the PC and by 1992/1993 almost all the games were on MS Dos by then. Like I said by 1994 the Amiga was dead because Commodore was dead, sure games were still being released up until the late 1990's but by then everyone had PC's. PC clones creating a "global standard" + Windows 95/98 + Internet Craze + Dedicated gaming GPU's pretty much ended the Amiga.

Can you do a video, werr you compare price/performance in 1992 and the same for todays 2020 eBay prices? Just to see if the gap have closed in or moved further apart? It is like, today VLB cards are really beginning to get expansive. Like 1/3 of the price of an a500, for a decent and good VLB VGA card. Sometimes the highend cards, are worth around a half a1200.

good video, thanks! just subed! but who are you looking at all the time ? lol please look at the camera not the screen

Can't believe I found you so late. Your videos are great! Everyone SUB! Thank you.

I had an Amiga 500 untill like 1995 and then changed to PC 486/DX2. The first pentium machine was on its way out... Amiga was superior to PC in graphics and music. Workbench looked just superb compared to PCs Win3.1 or DOS in the beginning... Saw one Amiga 1200 in a shop and it was too expensive for homecomputer. Heard of Amiga 3000 and 4000 only in computer magazines and were probably meant only for offices due to prices...

Great video Doug! Remember, I'm coming at things from strictly a gaming perspective. I don't doubt AGA's prowess when it comes to things like art and coding for graphics-heavt demos. But for gaming, the proof is in the pudding. No AGA games could compete graphically with the best VGA games of the same era. No newly developed AGA games can compete with the best VGA games of that era. Most "new" AGA games look markedly worse than the best OCS/ECS games from back in the day! Whether it's the fault of the chipset, the fact that it's difficult to develop for, or the fact that game programmers saw the writing on the wall in terms of the Miggy's marketshare and started lazing up their Amiga ports from the PC version, the fact is is that if you paid extra money for an AGA Amiga as a gamer in the early-mid 90's, you were disappointed if you saw AGA "enhanced" versions of ECS/OCS games, and devastated when you saw games like Magic Carpet and The 7th Guest.

Well said Doug. But you forgot to add at the PC price the OS, because Amiga came with it. Or it was included?

AGA is superior for the simple reason it has a true 24 bit color pallet ( 16 million colors ) and VGA does not. Therefore AGA can display anything VGA can but VGA cant display some things the Amiga can.

I agree 1000000000%, did you get your tweet yet???

I never thought i'd defend Boat on this...he's out of his mind. But that said, he's not wrong on everything. He didn't say AGA was worse then VGA...he said it sucked. Now, I don't agree, but there is merit to his lunacy. As you pointed out Doug, AGA was theoretically superior to VGA and even SVGA to a degree, and theoretically it had all the great modes. That's fine...but let's talk actual use here. We play games. Boat's argument was that AGA games were never proven to him to look or play better, or provide more fun, and that was why he thought AGA was a disappointment. On that front, he's not wrong IMHO. AGA may be a boon for using with productivity software as you pointed out..but who cares about that! Games yo! It's the games! In time, AGA might have been used more effectively, but that day didn't come. Almost every marquee game on the Amiga is ECS/OCS. 'Nuff said.

I can only count up to 21, and i have to take off me socks and shorts to count that hi

8With Jay Miner on board there will be no AGA, Amiga could get 2MB VRAM fast chunky pixel before 1988 it would be simmilar in 2D with AGA but much better for 3D.

Please, please, please turn down the volume of the stuff you play in the background so we can actually hear you. Some of the games were so loud that I had difficulty understanding what you were saying.

Did you know that even so old game as secret of monkey island on amiga run only on CPU? Lunch amiga emulator and lunch this game on standard a500 in intro there is no moving clouds, od you lunch it again on a500 configuration but with 020 CPU you get moving clouds and big performance boost. This is do bad that even that old game was ported badly without bliter usage :/

Are your CRT monitors capable of the PAL screen modes? If not, have you seen a PAL screen mode in person before? Most Americans haven’t seen a 50hz CRT display. One characteristic is you get a strobing effect in the peripheral of your vision due to the lower refresh rate and 60hz you don’t see this at all. But the higher resolution makes it well worth it

It is funny, that people always try to compare the gfx card part of a computer (VGA) to a complete architecture (AGA). There are so much more to it, like what controller and memory handling there is under the hood. What BUS type is it running on (VLB, MCA, ISA, PCI, EISA or any other like Asus Media Bus). Basically speaking, it is not only numbers that count. You need to take in what the rest of the PC is build from, when comparing to AGA.

AGA - super, 262000 colors

In my opinion what killed the Amiga was not Doom, but Street Fighter 2. It was massive back then and the SNES version was really good. The Amiga version was utterly poor. Then, Lucasarts games stopped being released on the Amiga, which usually lacked a hard-drive, so games like Day of the Tentacle and Sam and Max never hit the Amiga, where many people were fans of adventure games. Doom was the confirmation that the Amiga was no longer a suitable machine for modern games.

I miss my Amiga 3000 and 4000T so damn much! and every time I look on ebay they cost a fortune

Cool. Now talk to us about how Betamax was better than VHS. :-)

Great video! Maybe you forgot that on the PC you still have to buy the Operating System? Not sure how much that adds, maybe another 100 bucks?

When I started university, I bought my first pc, a gateway 2000 386 sx the same config you mentioned, I would have preferred to buy an amiga but I had to buy that pc because the networking hardware and driver and support, the softwares, files, home works, development warez, howtos etc everything was PC. so none of these technical specs mattered. In fact I was surprised how much pc sucked compared to an a500. I wish everyone had an A3000 instead of PC back then. How many a3000s were produced do you know?

Wouldn't it be 262,144 colors ? Not 256 thousand.

Enjoyed the video but there is lot of information you missed and your conclusions/memories are not very accurate. First let me say that I was both a PC and Amiga user during the late 80s and 90s. I was also a hobbyist developer for both PC and Amiga, writing small games and graphical demos for fun. I was based in Europe then, had an Amiga 500 (later I also had an Amiga 1200 for professional use), a 386 DX, then a 486 DX then a Pentium and so on. So let's begin with ease of development, comparing AGA to VGA. Not many people know this, but the VGA hardware is planar except it doesn't do bitplanes like the Amiga, but bank switching. That said, the VGA 320x200 256 color mode, also called mode 13h, was the absolute game changer. It was a piece of cake to write code for. The frame buffer was a linear byte array directly mapped to main memory. You wanted to change a pixel, all you had to do was change a single byte in memory. Palette operations were a piece of cake to do as well. Compared to this ease of use, the Amiga bitplanes and programmable copper were a nightmare to use in similar fashion. So when it comes to ease of use in putting 256 colors on the screen, VGA wins by a landslide. I could teach a 9 year old kid to do it in 5 minutes using Turbo Pascal or C or Assembly even. The equivalent AGA code would drive the same kid insane. It's not surprising not many people bothered learning how to make AGA sing. Now let's move to the games, which is where your argument that the Amiga was better or keeping up until 1995 completely falls apart. I declare that: Some PC VGA games were clearly superior starting from 1991 and starting from 1992 most PC VGA games were simply in a different league. Total PC VGA domination from 1992, which is what killed the Amiga as far as games were concerned. Proof: In 1991 you had Monkey Island 2 on the PC. It played perfectly well on a 386 DX with a VGA and Soundblaster and had superior 256 color VGA graphics. The Amiga port (as all LucasArts Amiga ports) was totally inferior with far fewer colors and never made it to AGA. 1992 enters which is where the PC dominates: Ultima Underworld: Stygian Abyss (first-ever realtime 3D game). This is the game that made me drool, sell my Amiga 500 within a few weeks and buy a PC. Ultima 7. Fate of Atlantis (The Amiga port was so bad it almost made the game unplayable). Wolfenstein 3D. Star Control 2. Alone in the Dark. 1993 enters. SB16 is released and sells like crazy. 16bit samples, CD quality sounds. In a class of its own, totally dominating Paula. Then we get Doom. Gabriel Knight. X-Wing. 7th Guest. Day of the Tentacle. Master of Orion. Sam & Max. Myst. Privateer. None of these games were ported to the Amiga. All of these games could make any Amiga user go mad with jealousy because they were windows into the future and creative nuclear bombs. I remember comparing Privateer to Frontier: Elite 2 that some of my friends were playing at the time. I felt sorry for them. The nails are hammered on the Amiga coffin. I remember a friend from school in 1994 that had an Amiga 4000 -his father really-, which was a big deal back then because it was expensive as fuck. He was so proud of that machine. But then one day, I invite him over and I show him System Shock and One Must Fall 2097 (robot fighting game) on my PC. His jaw must have hit the floor. His face was going through different emotions, you could both see sadness but also wonderment. It wasn't long after that he got a 486 himself. I remember playing Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter 2 and Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo on my PC and on various Amigas and laughing at how totally unplayable the Amiga ports were. By 1997, we both had Pentiums with S3 Virge, CD-ROM and 3DFX Voodoo graphics. The Amiga was a rapidly fading memory at that point in time, things were moving so fast it felt as if breakthroughs happened every week. So we can clearly see that even as far back as 1992, the Amiga simply has no equivalent quality games. All my friends at school that still had Amigas, were jealous of my 386 DX with Soundblaster Pro and VGA. What were they playing? Zool. Alien Breed. Flashback (the PC version was superior). Dune 2 (the PC version was superior). See a pattern? Take any game released for both PC and Amiga starting 1992 onwards, and 9/10 the PC version will be utterly superior. And then of course, a lot of the best games, the total game changers were only released for PC. Hardware-wise, the 386DX with SB and VGA is a good match for an A1200 but when it comes to the games, it's just on a different league. Miles better. So if I had to pick a period for Amiga's doom (no pun intended) when it comes to gaming vs PC, I would definitely choose 1991-1992. It was a monumental moment in time that simply broke the Amiga. When the 486 came, the PC was also technically far superior. It could do audio mixing of 16bit samples in software, while the Amiga was still stuck with 4-channel 8bit low quality samples. The SB16 was simply a much better sound card than Paula, not to mention the AWE32 and the GUS. The PC trackers (fast tracker 2, impulse tracker, scream tracker) were better than any tracker on the Amiga had ever been. The PC demos were dominating. All PCs had CD-ROM drives. Games were taking advantage of high resolutions and 16bit graphics. 3DFX happened and blew everyone away. Commodore had a really good chance, maybe even the best, but totally blew it by the end of the 80s. No real vision for the future, terrible execution and marketing and so on. They had at least a 5 year technological lead and flushed it down the toilet. Totally one for the books.

There is no question. AGA for the Win. Why? Because Amiga :P

Ok ok its all right, but then you visiting your friend with pc, and see games like Alone in The Dark, X-wing or Doom, and case is closed.

Fantastic video analysis but you need your eyes checked. I can count up to 4,432,776 colours.

I don't know why you keep saying 256,000 colours, when really it was 262,144 colours in HAM8 mode.

If Amiga 1200 had either coprocessor or 4-6 MB ram on launch, whole world would be amiga today

it's like with all standards they get superseded sometimes for the better sometimes for the worst.. reality commodore was a failed company by the time they released the Amiga 500/1200/3000 the writin on the wall was there when Jack left, looking at the people that were making the hardware before the kernel was added I would have poor dev cycle caused the death of commodore and by extension amiga was already belly up prior to the hardwares launch.. don't know about you here in Australia 1992 was more 286/386, 486/486dx was more 1994-96 after that we were 586, 586 and p1-p3 class cpu's think aga failed because by that stage every making games were making them for the vga/svga. i was still using a tandy trs-80 in 93. by 96 i was on win 95a and never looked back though atleast i can still play outdated 1990-2017 class gamea on a modern pc.. can't really state that with the entirety of the Commodore hardware line..

AGA wasn't designed for chunky pixel games like Doom

2mins in and I'm guessing AGA is better, because Amiga did everything better than IBM International Business Machines (Yah includes the knockoffs, IBM compatible) with a media card inserted lol We still use business PC's today with media cards. Why everything has to run faster to have a chance to compare. Amiga beating modern day Macs at chess = lol 40 years behind we are. PC has snake eyes.

AGA will always be superior to anything past, present or future.

Ok, i got an amiga since 1991 and i also have pc's since 1996. and i'm a programmer. and i can say, bitplane mode sucks. the most modes you are talking about are useless for games and productivity. i was very proud about the amiga back then. but the first kick in the ass was wolfenstein and the second was doom. and at that point i knew, amiga couldn't handle that. sorry, but amiga's sweet spot was the cpu, chipram and the bitplanes.

Im afraid you omitted few very important facts in your comparison. First of all the A1200 AGA has planar graphics only, the games using planar graphics were on the way out in 1993, the cheap PC had chunky graphics which is AGA unable to do without conversion to planar. All modern games in 1993 used chunky graphics, since it was much faster, Im talking about FPS like Doom and about all 3D vector and 3D textured vector games. The cheap 386 needed half the power to achieve same then A1200 AGA did. Also the SB you added was vastly superior to outdated Paula on Amiga. The graphics mode is another theme, claiming resolutions and colours is just one part of the whole picture. The thing is that the 386 with SVGA monitor could 800x600x256c progressive scan at 70+ Hz, A1200 could not reach 50Hz at this resolution, and I can guaranty you that you really do not want to look at such a screen doing work all day long. The 70Hz on progressive scan PC is very much a ergonomic standard, AGA is pain to watch for long time. Another factor you somehow omit is that the PC had 1.44 floppy at full speed, while the A1200 had just 880kB, for some reason. The 386SX had most likely some L2 Cache on board which is Amiga lacking at all. Also if I right remember the fast RAM expansion was not 140USD in 1993, well it was, but only the board without the RAM stick. So you have to add at least another 100 to the price. Also you somehow omit the fact that majority of SVGA cards in 1993 had upgradable VRAM, so you could easy upgrade to either 2 or often even to 4MB VRAM, suddenly having 800x600x24bit progressive scan at 70Hz, what about AGA...? In 1994 the situation was even worse...

PC_World June 1993 Gateway Party List, Page 72 of 314 4SX-33 with 486-SX 33Mhz, 4MB RAM, 170 MB HDD, Windows Video accelerator 1MB video DRAM, 14-inch monitor for $1494, 4DX-33 with 486-DX 33Mhz, 8MB RAM, 212 MB HDD, Windows Video accelerator 1MB video DRAM, 14-inch monitor for $1895, Page 128 of 314 Polywell Poly 486-33V with 486SX-33, 4MB of RAM, SVGA 1MB VL-Bus, price: $1250 Amigaworld, October 1993, Page 66 of 104 Amiga 4000/040 @ 25Mhz for $2299 Amiga 4000/030 @ 25Mhz for $1599 Page 82 of 104 M1230X's 68030 @ 50Mhz has $349 1942 Monitor has $389 A1200 with 85MB HDD has $624 A1200 with 130MB HDD has $724 The Commodore solution is beaten by the Gateway solution. Target sales period: XMas of 1993 Q4. 1993 XMas sales period was Commodore's last chance. 68030 @ 50 Mhz is needed for Doom which can rival 386DX-40 with an ET4000AX PC clone. Doom-type games don't require FPUs. 68030 @ 40 Mhz + AGA ~= 386DX-33 + ET4000AX. The Amiga incurs a minor C2P overhead.

PCs won because of open architecture and affordable prices. Technical superiority was not a point.

Please remove the high pitch sound

I'm gonna stop you right here, you tried to compare AGA to VGA. If you don't know why that was dumb of you.. I don't know how to explain that multiple follow ups tandards were already released several years before the first AGA chipset was ever shipped. Fully supported and in use. The fact you also thought it was 1024x768 in 16.. I mean.. no? It was 1024x768x256 capable and 1024x768x16 availble depending on what you needed to do. Essentially VGA had already been supplanted by then and it's limitations were based on video memory and were rather arbitrary up to a certain point. Literally IBM's take 5years before AGA existed was for 1280×1024 with 24-bit color. Far in excess of anything the AGA chipset ever had to offer. ATI made the cards even, like this wasn't a secret a VGA wonder could do the IBM version of Super VGA. If you didn't know Super VGA has multiple meanings, and it doesn't just mean 800x600, it was an IBM standard as well. So you want to compare 1280x1024 and 1.6 million colors now to what /you/ were trying to say? Yah, Id idn't think so, but it was also available YEARS earlier.