Blast from the past: A letter to Amiga World magazine

Wow, this leap year thing must be pretty strong, since this is the third time I'm agreeing with lotsa within a short period of time. The Amiga was great. Way ahead of it's time. The graphics capabilities were stunning, especially when compared to the the CGA/EGA graphics on the PC, and the monochrome screen on the Mac. For a time, Hollywood was using the Amiga on a lot of different CGI projects. NewTek was the leader in that game, since they had the already mentioned Video Toaster, and another product which I believe was called Lightwave. For very little money, you could do a lot. And Psygnosis was also at the top of the their "game" as well. The Shadow of the Beast series really stretched what you could do with 2-3 800 KB disks. Yes, I'm waxing poetic about the platform, but it was quite good. And Paul, WordPerfect did end up coming out for the Amiga as I'm sure you are aware, but it was a subpar port. Final Writer was much better.

I too was enamoured with the Amiga and never thought I'd end up in a job fixing PCs with a Microsoft certification to my name. It used to enrage me the way Commodore marketed their flagship machine. How many times did I look in an electronics store to see an Amiga with the "workbench hand" screen. If they had commissioned a killer demo disk that shipped with every machine it would have been so much more attractive. What a different world it would be if the Amiga had have delivered on its promise....

One of the things that the Amiga started, but the PC finished was the "demo scene". The MOD tracker music format was one of the key starting points for it. Later on, MOD music evolved into ScreamTracker, FastTracker, and InertiaTracker formats, all superior to the original, and for a short time, spawned hardware from a little company called Gravis. That hardware was the Ultrasound sound card. 32 independant voices, mixed in hardware with up-sample interpolation. Truly futuristic hardware design for the time. Gravis updated it with a few variations that removed some key support and features, and I think the final nail in the coffin (also for Gravis's then-booming sound hardware market) was the fact that Windows 95 support just wasn't a priority. Since the key hardware for the "Scene" wasn't supported in the next-gen OS, the scene died fairly quickly. Since all of the demos of the time were coded for DOS, most required their own tweaks to memory management. The entire process was made much more complicated with Windows 95, since it simplified it to the point where it removed accessibility, and many demo groups faded into obscurity. The only Gravis sound card that supported DirectSound was the Gravis Ultrasound PnP (the last one that they made), so customers of the previous generation realized that their sound cards were useless to a new generation of DirectX games for Windows. New sound cards still didn't have the multi-channel hardware mixer support, so sound quality lapsed, and there were only a handful of developers developing trackers for Windows, and so the demo scene died. Fast forward a couple years and the Hornet Archive shuts down, and so that brief time in history came to a close. The end.

"I'd still love to see "Shadow of the Beast" happen on the PC or 360 though. :)" I think that's a case of "rose-tinted-glasses-syndrome". Shadow of the Beast was little more than a (very impressive) tech demo with all that parallax scrolling etc. The game itself was prettty awful and wouldn't translate well to into the modern game scene.