And here I thought my 120MB A1200 harddrive was gigantic
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I used to think the same about my 40MB Vortex drive for my A500...

Ah well, ya live and learn (although I tend to forget the latter part)
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Try as I might I never did manage to fill my A1200 and A4000 HDs completely. And it wasn't through lack of trying. I installed every game that supports HD installation, every PD, Shareware and any other games I could find, and every application and utility I could get my hands on, but still it wasn't full!

How I wish it was the same today.
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Sorry guys, I got most of my knowledge from game magazines and they always complained about the disk switching.
Especially Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis could drive them up the wall with this so I automatically assumed there weren't any hard disks until years later.

So could you put games like adventures on the Hard Disk?
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Yes, many multi disk games came with Harddrive installers on one of the disks for installing the game. Most Adventure games came with installers. Beneath a Steel Sky, Monkey Island 2 and many of the other games with a lot of disks were so much nicer running from harddrive.

And some games without installers, but with standard Amiga DOS formatted disks could be installed manually if you knew what you were doing.

For all other games their is WHDLoad which allows you to install nearly every game released for the Amiga onto a harddrive using it's own special WHDLoad installers which copies the contents of the original game disks (even non Amiga DOS disks) into a file on the HD and adds it's own game launching icon to run the games.

Also all applications and utilities can be installed to HD too.
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Hello Harrison,

Hmm, where Hard Disks perhaps expensive at the time these games came out, explaining why disk swapping was still a normal activity during games?

It sounds to me that Amigas at the time could compete with PCs regarding storage space.
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Amiga's were far more advanced than PCs. It was only when Windows 95 was launched 3 years after Workbench 3.0 that the PC finally gained nearly the same abilities as the Amiga.

HDs were expensive compared to today, but they were just as expensive for PC users. Think about how much a standard spec PC in the later 80's cost compared to today.
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Still, you have to admit that they pulled of some stuff with the PC that wasn't easily recreated on the Amiga during the 'competitive' years.

I remember for a long time that the Amiga was THE games machine and the PC but a poor substitute but I think it must be around the nineties that that finally changed.

Heh, I just read a couple of last issues of some Amiga magazines, and boy, one had quite some hatred against Bill Gates.
Its not as if the man solely ruined Commodore

Well not really in words, just a halloween mask.
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Yes, towards the end of the Amiga's life in the 90's the PC did eventually catch up and overtake it. The continued development of graphics cards and the falling prices of ram were key factors in that happening and the PC being easy to expand another. But you still had to pay over four times the price of an A1200 to purchase a gaming PC in those days.

The big change came with the advent of 3D. The Amiga was originally designed with 2D Sprites in mind and not 3D polygons and the way it draws the display isn't suited to 3D either. In contrast the PC graphics cards were starting to gain their own graphics memory and draw graphics in a way very suited to 3D. This meant that games heavily reliant on 3D such as Doom, X-Wing or Wing Commander were quite easy to code on the PC and they looked good. The Amiga was different enough to make 3D games much harder (but not impossible) to code.

The blame of the Amiga not keeping up with the PC is completely Commodore's fault. They sat back and enjoyed the success of the A500 for too long. The AGA chipset was developed long before it was actually used in the A4000 and A1200, and by the time the A1200 was launched in 1992 the successor to that chipset, the AAA chipset, was already developed and finished. That shows how slowly Commodore were working on development of new systems for market. By the time the A1200 was released the rest of the market had already started to catch up and it was only a couple more years before it overtook and started to leave the Amiga behind.

It just goes to show that when a company is controlled and run by a business man with profit margins and no actual interest in the technology that it doesn't work. At least Bill Gates was a genius programmer with insight and knowledge of the technology and it's development and progression. He may have had some wild ideas along the way such as 640K being all anyone would need (definitely a programmers pov, not taking graphics into account), or the Internet being just a "fad" and would "never take off", but you can't fault the guy for timing within the marketplace. Something Commodore never learnt later in it's life.
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