Kind of, yeah, except through a much more unstable and ever developing marketplace. In the 90s the Macs and the PCs were slugging it out after everyone else had fallen by the wayside, essentially, I suppose.
The home computer's history lies in specified architecture systems which are not compatible with their contemporaries. When I was 9 yrs old (UK perspective here - 1988) I couldn't share my Commodore 64 games with my friend who had a ZX spectrum. But much like the modern PC, and unlike a console, all the processing was done inside the box and most of the data was held elsewhere (with some exceptions - the C64 had a 'cartridge' port in the back for example). By putting a tape in to a box, the system could read this data in to local memory (typically 32kB or 64kB) and you could play a game.
Then companies developed there products in a straight line, not being interested in offering compatibility for others but just offering their own box. BBC Micros turned in to Archimedes and they populated schools throughout the land (with a decent processing capability but no games catalog to speak of). Commodore 64's turned in to 128's, which turned in to the Amiga 1000 (marketed as a business computer). Then they went for the Amiga 500, which got boxed together at some point with Deluxe Paint and got sold by the shit load for people to play with in their homes. I don't know if Spectrum made a positive step up the technology ladder.
People like me were baffled with the new visual operating system (it took our family a whole day to grasp the concept of the 'double click'), and wondered where we got to program simple BASIC games. Other people got Atari ST's (which were a similar animal, but seemed to be ever so slightly inferior as far as I could tell, possibly as I was what could be termed a 'Fanboy' at the time).
And all the while we had to buy seperate floppy disks with the same game, and we couldn't share with our friends.
Then IBM PC's 'came along', and we scoffed at the EGA graphics and beeps - how could this pretender ever hope to compete with the delicious sound and graphics presented by the Amiga? What fool is investing in this piece of rubbish?
Of course they were far more flexible, and the competition in the hardware market no doubt quickly brought the prices down and drove performance up - as well as the uptake in the workplace.
Commodore collapsed due to poor business practices (I suppose - probably the competition as well) and PCs became the new standard of home computing. Apple stuck around through all the turmoil that finished these companies off, and they now have a nice little niche.
It's interesting thinking back on it! There's as much time going from M.U.L.E. to Frontier: Elite 2 (at the end of the Amiga's life cycle), as there is going from 'Black & White' to 'From Dust'. Goes to show how turbulent the market had to be at the time just to keep up.
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Topic: Emulating Amiga games (Read 5566 times)