An Amiga 4000 was not powerful enough to even play Doom in.... 1999 when HL and Unreal existed.
But, yet, with a 68040, they were able to play MP3s and some low res videos!!!
And today you can even install modern TLS libraries and some modern (JS less) browser.
So you coudn't play Doom but you could comment into HN just fine...
Planar graphics allowed some interesting effects, but Doom’s shortcuts for perspective calculation weren’t compatible.
When VGA came out, it became difficult to see a future for the Amiga - the hardware was just too tied to TV frequencies to match PCs in graphics, just because they didn’t have to be compatible with anything else.
> Yet, a Pentium MMX with 32MB of RAM in 1999 would stomp the Amiga...
On pure computing power, yes of course. But
- at which price compared to A1200 ? (of course in the case of the PC you have to include a reasonable sound card + reasonable graphic card. I could buy my Amiga as a teenager in 1993 for less than 500 € while any entry-level Pentimum MMX PC in 1999 would still be > 1000 €...)
- The OS was fantastic, very responsive despite the limitations of the hardware. Only when I left Amiga to switch to a supposedly much more powerful PC I experienced what meant "lagging" and "bloat"... (original Amigas didn't have an MMU and therefore both OS and apps were written carefully since there was no swap)
>while any entry-level Pentimum MMX PC in 1999 would still be > 1000 €...
It may looked so, but by 1999 you could get a Pentium MMX PC for 600-700 EUR in Spain (100-120,000 pesetas), cheap soundcarp and iGPU included. Cheap, but you could run Quake for sure. And MMX did wonders on multimedia decoding and emulation.
And today you can even install modern TLS libraries and some modern (JS less) browser.
So you coudn't play Doom but you could comment into HN just fine...