The Amiga also struggles with frame rates, with most games running at 30hz/25hz. There are quite a few games that have better gameplay on the Commodore 64 port than the Amiga port.
The only arcade games that use the bitmap/blitter architecture were mostly Williams games like Robotron, Joust, and so forth. Everything else was tiles/sprites, except for the Atari vector games.
Despite its obviously far lower MIPS rating the 6502 could just get more "video game" type work done in a clock cycle than a 68000. 68000 interrupt responsiveness was also pretty terrible.
Looking back 68000 had little business in video game type machines. I like the 68000 from a programming POV but it's faster for doing a pile of fast integer calculations than it is at moving memory around and responding to interrupts.
But Atari and Commodore were also imagining their machines to be targeting productivity more than games, so.
The frame rate of games of the era was dictated by the frame rate of the video output. They would have struggled with higher frame rates, but that was entirely moot.
I mean, that's just pedantic. Of course the display frame rate was fixed. The point is what the effective game loop responsiveness was. which was often a fraction of the actual display's capability. If you go back and play some of the classic games of that era, there's often low responsiveness to joystick movements etc.
Graphic fidelity on the 16-bit machines was great. Latency was sometimes bad, depending on how much they were trying to do in the game loop.
It's not pedantic because it means it was categorically not that the machine "struggled with frame rates" but that the frame rates were imposed by external factors.
I can't recall many games with "low responsiveness to joystick movements". On the contrary, latency from movement to action were typically lower than on modern hardware.
It is being pedantic, the others are talking about Amiga games when they say "the Amiga struggles". While the video output was always 50/60Hz, there were plenty of games that failed to update at that rate, taking 2 frames (25/30Hz) or 3 frames (16/20Hz) or some jittery janky mix inbetween.
It could be that what they wanted to do just couldn't be done in 1 frame. Or often it could, the games were just poorly optimised.
There were plenty of games where the code didn't care to pick up the joystick movements in a reasonable time, making the game feel sluggish, even if the joystick movements can be read directly from the CIA port.
Compare games with perfect framerates like Turrican 2, Superfrog or Leander, with games that don't, like Magic Pockets, Xenon 2, Driller. In fact, compare the official version of Stunt Car Racer with the cracked version, where the crackers massively improved the drawing speed and thus the framerate!
> Or often it could, the games were just poorly optimised.
So in other words it wasn't generally an issue with the Amiga, but with sloppy work.
> There were plenty of games where the code didn't care to pick up the joystick movements in a reasonable time, making the game feel sluggish, even if the joystick movements can be read directly from the CIA port.
We clearly had very different experiences. To me that is not something that every concerned me.
> So in other words it wasn't generally an issue with the Amiga, but with sloppy work.
It's both. Programmers' visions for their games either had to be scaled back because the 68000 just wasn't fast enough, or they implemented what they wanted and it tanked the framerate. Sometimes they met in the middle because the programmers thought 25/30Hz was good enough. Sometimes even the finest programmers, with the most optimised code, ended up with a 25Hz game because what they wanted the game to be demanded it.
Of course, some programmers said "this entire game has to run in 1 frame" and made of sure that. Sometimes it's the same programmers, e.g. Sensible Soccer is typically 1 frame, but Cannon Fodder is often not. Uridium 2 is typically 1 frame but Fire & Ice is often not.
The Amiga 1200 opened up new games possibilities, not just because of its added bitplanes allowing 256 colours, but also because having 2MB of Chip RAM instead of 512KB, and a CPU roughly double the speed, made more games viable.
> We clearly had very different experiences
It will depend on the games you played. Something you can try as a challenge: complete the first level of Magic Pockets on an unmodified Amiga 500 (or an emulation of one at its normal speed). Feel how laggy and awkward it is. Even a video doesn't give you that understanding. Then try the first level of Superfrog.
68020 and onwards could also get substantially more work done in a cycle than a 68000. So Amiga 1200 or Atari Falcon not only had substantially higher bus speeds they were just ... better... at the CPU level in terms of how much work could be done.
The only arcade games that use the bitmap/blitter architecture were mostly Williams games like Robotron, Joust, and so forth. Everything else was tiles/sprites, except for the Atari vector games.