Dragon Wars - Released on Steam

The classic RPG Dragon Wars has been released on Steam:

RPGWatch Curation:

This often overlooked gem features nonlinear exploring, puzzle solving, turn-based party combat, a rich story, automapping and many difficult situations to deal with. A true Masterpiece!

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-> GOG-version

More information.

I'd prefer Amiga version of the game with an emulator. Graphics looks much more superior to PC version. PC version has EGA graphics I think.

Gokyabgu said:

I'd prefer Amiga version of the game with an emulator. Graphics looks much more superior to PC version. PC version has EGA graphics I think.

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Wow, what a difference

Too dated for myself.

Own it on GoG, still a great game, well worth playing if you want to lose yourself for a while in an excellent game.

Lucky Day said:

Wow, what a difference

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Indeed.

Is this the "remaster" Burger Becky once teased us? (native code, built-in story paragraphs, etc, etc)
Or just the original DOSBox'ed one?

nah, the one on the right is the original Amiga 500 version. Similar to Bards Tale the amiga versions tended to have the best graphics.

Amiga was superior until they started using VGA graphics on PC.

NewDArt said:

Amiga was superior until they started using VGA graphics on PC.

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Lemmings (Clockwise: Amiga, Atari ST, Sega Genesis, DOS (VGA))

source

It was still better than PC on VGA!

It shows you what crap the Intel/IBM platform was. And this was known since the 70's which is why Wozniak went with the Motorola 6502 and not the Intel 8008.

Lucky Day said:

Lemmings (Clockwise: Amiga, Atari ST, Sega Genesis, DOS (VGA))

source

It was still better than PC on VGA!

It shows you what crap the Intel/IBM platform was. And this was known since the 70's which is why Wozniak went with the Motorola 6502 and not the Intel 8008.

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I'm talking in general terms.

The Amiga was specifically suited for platform games like Lemmings - because it had custom chips designed for certain 2D effects.

Also, Lemmings was done by Psygnosis - a famous Amiga-centric English developer - and the PC version was a quick port.

VGA was superior because it had 256 colors - where Amiga only had 32. Amiga PAL resolution was slightly superior, though.

But the PC destroyed the Amiga when it came to vector graphics, because the Intel CPUs were much better suited for the math involved. This, coupled with Commodore's lazy resting-on-their-laurels approach to Amiga evolution, spelled doom for the Amiga, as games like Wolfenstein, Alone in the Dark, X-Wing and Ultima Underworld became popular.

Beyond that, around the same time that VGA became the norm on PC for gamers - the Sound Blaster card was introduced, which was also superior to the Amiga sound chipset - and since a hard-drive was standard on a PC (where it was a very expensive accessory on Amiga) - it meant that games could have digital sound effects and speech, which was too memory intensive for Amiga hardware, with few exceptions.

So, around ~1993 - Amiga lost the race.

By 1994, Doom had been released - and it being possibly the first truly mainstream computer game whilst the Amiga simply didn't have the hardware necessary for that kind of 3D graphics - meant that any hope for Amiga gaming being competitive was pretty much annihilated.

Which is very sad, because it really was way ahead of its time for the first few years of its lifetime.

bjon045 said:

nah, the one on the right is the original Amiga 500 version. Similar to Bards Tale the amiga versions tended to have the best graphics.

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Not to be nitpicky, but…

BT1 - Tales of the Unknown was actually best on the Atari ST, because it featured different tilesets for the Dungeons, like the 8-bit variants. The Amiga version featured only the glowing-green-bricks tileset.

Also animations and details are better on the ST than on the Amiga.

For those interested in a comparison http://bringerp.free.fr/RE/BardsTale/bard1.php5