From: caw@miroc.Chi.IL.US (Christopher A. Wichura)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.games
Subject: Re: Ultima 6 port (and Might and Magic III)
Date: 8 Apr 92 21:34:27 GMT
X-NewsSoftware: Amiga GRn V1.28 2/25/92 (Beta) by Mike Schwartz

In article <1992Apr07.172700.25581@crash.cts.com> uzun@crash.cts.com (Roger Uzun) writes:
>In <ku1ga6INNdlk@appserv.Eng.Sun.COM> stuartm@rocksalt.Eng.Sun.COM (Stuart M.) writes:
>
>
>>entity@cccan.uucp (Cybernetworx) writes:
>
>>BTW, a working copy of MM3 is on seven 880k disks.
>
>>The game must have been ported to an A3000/25 with a fast hard drive.  On
>>that platform, I imagine, it would be fun.

The game is not really CPU intensive and I hear that it actually runs quite
reasonably on a 1M machine with two floppies (i.e., they have the disks layed
out intelligently to minimise disk swaps).  Of course, I'm playing it on an
A3000, so...

Still, this is one killer game, and they did a __VERY__ nice port of it.  The
ending sequence is actually pretty good, unlike a lot of adventure games
where your gut feeling is "I wasted all this time to see THAT!?!?!"

>Now we port them over to the amiga, and the base machine here
>is a 2 Floppy, 1M A500 running at 7Mhz at best.
>This means for certain types of games, it is a no win sort
>of port.  I applaud New World computing for making a decent port,
>but in fact, for this type of game, the base Amiga market is
>so under-powered I feel that they will get a lot of flack from A500
>owners.  I know of no answers, but I would rather see an A3000
>as the target machine that get some lame port of a wonderful
>MS-DOS product.  The A500 is great for Shadow of the Beast type games,
>but I woud dread playing falcon 3.0 on one!

I agree whole heartedly.  The Amiga will continue to be left in the dust in
the games market if the developers can't aim for a higher class machine.
Unfortunately, the A500+ and the A600 don't help this, much (how much more
would it have cost to include a 16Mhz 68000 in the A600? -- This is an honest
question).  People like New World Computing, Maxis, and Dynamix (and more
recent Sierra stuff as they are getting stuff from the Dynamix Amiga guys I
guess) are going out on a limb to port stuff that really needs a more
powerful machine to the Amiga and actually trying to do a real port of it
instead of stipping it to pieces to work on a 1M 1 floppy A500.  I can only
hope that more software houses do the same.  Unfortunately, the number of
A500 owners out there who whine and cry and label anything that needs more
power than their machine has as complete and utter trash is staggering and it
will be a long time before their influence can really be overcome (if ever,
again, the A500+ and A600 aren't gonna help this any).  The way I look at it,
though, is that probably a good 2/3rd to 3/4ths of these people don't buy the
games anyway, so why bother putting up with them.  If you make a better
quality game and sell it to people who actually buy it then you will make
money.  If you make a shitty game for the people who won't buy it, the people
that would won't buy it either because it's crap.

This has gotten to be one of my "buttons" as of late... :-)

-=> CAW

--

Christopher A. Wichura                Multitasking.  Just DO it.
caw@miroc.chi.il.us  (my amiga)                          ...the Amiga way...
u12401@uicvm.uic.edu (school account)