News After nearly 30 years, Settlers II arrives on Amiga — classic RTS sequel finally gets the Commodore version it deserved

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As an Amiga fan, this is dearly beloved that this made it after all these years.
UbiSoft to their devs: "Can we make an Ubi launcher for Amiga and make some money?"
Dev: "...."
 
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The stupidity of these people. With one hand they are actively destroying our ability to play old games, and with the other they feed us "REVAMPED" editions of 20 year old games for hefty premiums. If one cannot see where they wanna go with this, I think you are asking for it.

You will buy a game, and then in a year there was a microsoft update. So you have to buy the game again. New processor? You need a new binary!!!!!! New license !!!!!!! We can buy the same game 800 times if they get to decide. GTA showed the way, and their CEO was never even shameful about how they deliberately are designing the release schedules to get the most people to buy the game more than one , two or even 3 times. Somehow everyone has forgotten how unplayable that game was , for unfathomably long. The online part was broken for many years. The meme's of not being able to reach customer suppoert for months, to then get insta callback if you tell them you have problems with the shark cards. Its a complete joke.

I cannot fathom what the world has become in so few years. It was literally illegal to target kids with advertisements in my youth. Today we cant enforce that, because one of the richest companies in the world would have to pay someone to do some vetting of the ads (poor google) , and we have agreed that wow that is an unbearable weight to lift, and we wouldnt wanna compromise the stock price , amiright? Shit makes zero sense anymore. My sons school have been without toilet for the youngest classes for 5 years. They are busy buying big cars, and 200million dollar chimneys, getting ready for their announcements disguised as press meetings. And the freaking kids cant get a toilet in the capitol of denmark , one of the supposed richest countries per capita in the world. Im seriously speechless.

Big business is literally writing the laws in just a few years, and are already deeply involved for anyone not woken up yet. In my youth it was frowned upon to nudge politicians as a company. Today it is a systematic business - and simultaneously we label ourselves the least corrupt nation in the world. You could not make this shit up. smh 2 the end.

And then, to top all this stupidity and abuse on the interwebs. We have gotten the online safety act which will make sure of absolutely nothing. The kids will still get showered in gambling ads, virtual currencies for obfuscation, NSFW content without choosing it, and an endless spree of grown up base dwellers ready to greed them in roblox. U cant make this stuff up.
 
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The system requirements for this game are so high that there is no factory-made Amiga that could meet them.

The Amiga 4000/040 has a CPU at 25 MHz, not 40.
There was the late model 4000T/060 with a 68060 CPU at 50 MHz though (during the ESCOM years)

And the motherboard supported max 16 MB Fast RAM:

So, in other words, you would need some specific hardware upgrades, which very few people back in teh day had.

But today, perhaps an emulator, a Vampire (CPU in FPGA) or a PiStorm (ARM-chip that emulates the CPU) would work.
 
jonaswox said:
I cannot fathom what the world has become in so few years. It was literally illegal to target kids with advertisements in my youth.
Click to expand...
When where you a youth?! 1687?
All the adds have always been targeted at kids.
All of the Saturday morning cartoons where adds for action figures and othe r products, with other adds interrupting those adds.
Findecanor said:
So, in other words, you would need some specific hardware upgrades, which very few people back in teh day had.
Click to expand...
They had 3rd party accelerators even back in the day.
A 40Mhz 040 was available in 1994. (for more money than the crown jewels)
Yeah it would be very rare which is probably why they didn't release it back then, there was not a big enough market for it.
https://amiga.resource.cx/exp/cyberstorm1
 
Findecanor said:
The system requirements for this game are so high that there is no factory-made Amiga that could meet them.

The Amiga 4000/040 has a CPU at 25 MHz, not 40.
There was the late model 4000T/060 with a 68060 CPU at 50 MHz though (during the ESCOM years)

And the motherboard supported max 16 MB Fast RAM:

So, in other words, you would need some specific hardware upgrades, which very few people back in teh day had.

But today, perhaps an emulator, a Vampire (CPU in FPGA) or a PiStorm (ARM-chip that emulates the CPU) would work.
Click to expand...
No, they are not high (note: I am the author of this Settlers 2 port to AmigaOS).
My port of RetroArch for AmigaOS requires at minimum a PiStorm CM4 equipped Amiga. THAT is high requirements. A 40 MHz 040 are LOW requirements.

25 MHz 040 is not enough to run Settlers 2 (we tried).

For most Amiga Users - even in the 1990s - "factory-made" was irrelevant. Especially as the factory-specs were always so behind.

"no factory-made Amiga" - that is exactly what we hated back then - that they only did Amiga games for "factory-made specifications". Our powerful hardware (of us Amiga users) was NEVER supported. No support for graphics boards, no support for PPC Boards... now I am doing Amiga games. Do you expect me to do the same mistake ? No.

And of course I am not doing it like "I target x". I port the game and then look "were can it run". Of course there is optimizations, and sometimes even doing "more minimal versions" (like the 320x256 version I added so that it can run on a 68040 and 50 MHz 68060). But what is your suggestion ? That the game should not have been ported because it does not run on some ultra-lowend setups nobody has anymore ?

Settlers 2 runs fantastic on a 100 MHz 060, a Vampire, a Pistorm, an AmigaOne x1000, in Lowres Mode even on a 40 MHz 040. This is for today's (small as it is) Amiga Market pretty lowend specs.

To compare:

Heretic 2 - AmigaOS 4 machine or PiStorm
Gorky 17 - AmigaOS 4 machine or PiStorm or 400+ MHz WarpOS Setup
RetroArch - AmigaOS 4 machine or PiStorm CM4 or 400+ MHz WarpOS Setup

The requirements of Settlers 2 are MUCH MUCH LOWER.

68020 was the lowend in 1995 or whatever. Today 68040 is lowend on Amiga.
 
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jonaswox said:
The stupidity of these people. With one hand they are actively destroying our ability to play old games, and with the other they feed us "REVAMPED" editions of 20 year old games for hefty premiums. If one cannot see where they wanna go with this, I think you are asking for it.

You will buy a game, and then in a year there was a microsoft update. So you have to buy the game again. New processor? You need a new binary!!!!!! New license !!!!!!! We can buy the same game 800 times if they get to decide. GTA showed the way, and their CEO was never even shameful about how they deliberately are designing the release schedules to get the most people to buy the game more than one , two or even 3 times. Somehow everyone has forgotten how unplayable that game was , for unfathomably long. The online part was broken for many years. The meme's of not being able to reach customer suppoert for months, to then get insta callback if you tell them you have problems with the shark cards. Its a complete joke.
Click to expand...
The AmigaOS version has nothing to do with Microsoft.

And well, of course you do not get the Amiga version for free if you already own the PC version. While Ubisoft gets licence fees, the profit of PC and Amiga version goes to different people.

MagicSN
 
TerryLaze said:
When where you a youth?! 1687?
All the adds have always been targeted at kids.
All of the Saturday morning cartoons where adds for action figures and othe r products, with other adds interrupting those adds.

They had 3rd party accelerators even back in the day.
A 40Mhz 040 was available in 1994. (for more money than the crown jewels)
Yeah it would be very rare which is probably why they didn't release it back then, there was not a big enough market for it.
https://amiga.resource.cx/exp/cyberstorm1
Click to expand...
Had them all. 030 and 040 for A2000 and A3000.. Also $1000.00 German video cards I bought that never worked seamlessly with Workbench.
One of my A500 had a hard drive plugged into the expanding slot. Not great for portability but at least you could still boot from floppy disks if need be.
Also had 020 and 030 bridge boards running DOS or windows 3.x. SX CPU. Clipped a Cyrix 040 SX ontop of the 386. Also a VGA card. Living it! LoL.. Not a speed demon of the day.
 
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TerryLaze said:
Man, I always dreamed of a bridgeboard, such an insane idea to have a full PC on a daughterboard for a gaming computer.
Way way out of my price class...
Click to expand...
The German team seemed to want the bridgeboard. David Haynie head engineer sneered of the thought of plugging a PC board into an Amiga. Who would want DOS or Windows when you are blessed with AmigaDOS. True at the time.
Then came the video toaster. A lot of NTSC history. When Commodore butchered the Amiga,the PC version was an Amiga kludge. Great history.
 
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While this port is highly appreciated and great for Amiga community the hw requirements are higher than expected. Original Settlers for Amiga somehow ran fine with out of the box 7Mhz 1Meg. Of course the second iteration must have been targeted towards AGA machines with 256 colours. What else changed besides sharper graphics and added pre-rendered cut-scenes? Blue Byte should have targeted vanilla 1200 and just drop the svga and optimise the game for available RAM/CPU and actually use other Amiga chips besides CPU. No idea why 2D sprite game wouldn't run on 1200. Perhaps the PC code must have been done lazily as they usually were.

Blue Byte actually planned to release Amiga port with minimum 68030/25Mhz and 8MB RAM and CD-ROM drive requirements which would have sounded at least a bit more sensible, but they canned it obviously, because even that level hardware was not what most Amiga people had and the user base was diminishing. Still, too bad they didn't release it back when.
 
Retroman81 said:
While this port is highly appreciated and great for Amiga community the hw requirements are higher than expected. Original Settlers for Amiga somehow ran fine with out of the box 7Mhz 1Meg. Of course the second iteration must have been targeted towards AGA machines with 256 colours. What else changed besides sharper graphics and added pre-rendered cut-scenes? Blue Byte should have targeted vanilla 1200 and just drop the svga and optimise the game for available RAM/CPU and actually use other Amiga chips besides CPU. No idea why 2D sprite game wouldn't run on 1200. Perhaps the PC code must have been done lazily as they usually were.

Blue Byte actually planned to release Amiga port with minimum 68030/25Mhz and 8MB RAM and CD-ROM drive requirements which would have sounded at least a bit more sensible, but they canned it obviously, because even that level hardware was not what most Amiga people had and the user base was diminishing. Still, too bad they didn't release it back when.
Click to expand...
But the Amiga 1200 had an internal expansion slot for RAM/CPU and external PCMCIA slot for CDROM.. MSDOS users were expected to upgrade their PC/486. This argument makes absolutely no sense to me. The biggest problem for A1200 was lack space for graphic card upgrade.
 
JeffreyP55 said:
The German team seemed to want the bridgeboard. David Haynie head engineer sneered of the thought of plugging a PC board into an Amiga. Who would want DOS or Windows when you are blessed with AmigaDOS. True at the time.
Then came the video toaster. A lot of NTSC history. When Commodore butchered the Amiga,the PC version was an Amiga kludge. Great history.
Click to expand...
Video toaster was not a graphic card upgrade for normal users; it was video editing solution.

Blizzard BVision, CyberGraphic cards bases on S2 Virge chipset, was most popular on Amiga.

Now days, hybrid solution has become popular, CPU emulation with real hardware for AGA/OCS, or FPGA based solutions, unless your more interested in AmigaOS, in that case newer PowerPC based computers is what people use.
 
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Not exactly as it was.

Already in 1992 there was fast CPU card with 040/40 (060 starting 1994) and loads of fast RAM for the A3000/4000 and also RTG card.
Even the A1200 released in 1992 already had access to 040/060 CPU in 1995.

The latest ever released Amiga was, as far as I know, the A4000T from Escom with a 060 CPU card.

Findecanor said:
The system requirements for this game are so high that there is no factory-made Amiga that could meet them.

The Amiga 4000/040 has a CPU at 25 MHz, not 40.
There was the late model 4000T/060 with a 68060 CPU at 50 MHz though (during the ESCOM years)

And the motherboard supported max 16 MB Fast RAM:

So, in other words, you would need some specific hardware upgrades, which very few people back in teh day had.

But today, perhaps an emulator, a Vampire (CPU in FPGA) or a PiStorm (ARM-chip that emulates the CPU) would work.
Click to expand...
 
NicolasDet said:
Not exactly as it was.

Already in 1992 there was fast CPU card with 040/40 (060 starting 1994) and loads of fast RAM for the A3000/4000 and also RTG card.
Even the A1200 released in 1992 already had access to 040/060 CPU in 1995.

The latest ever released Amiga was, as far as I know, the A4000T from Escom with a 060 CPU card.
Click to expand...
Yes, for the cheap cheap price of 3 times the cost of an A2000 (or A1500 for the uk) you could get an 040 that would not be usable on any game.
2bilnfF.jpeg
 
LiveForIt said:
Video toaster was a graphic card upgrade; it was video editing solution.
Blizzard BVision, CyberGraphic cards bases on S2 Virge chipset, was most popular on Amiga.

Now days, hybrid solution has become popular, CPU emulation with real hardware for AGA/OCS, or FPGA based solutions, unless your more interested in AmigaOS, in that case newer PowerPC based computers is what people use.
Click to expand...
I lived all that stuff. I used to go to Amiga world in SF. One year I recieved a real rundowns with the toaster. The adorable Newtek girl (forgot her name) was there looking good. Video slot. Accelerator boards.. 2000, slot. I install an 040 piggyback accelerator board in my A3000. I have had most early amigas except for an A1000. I worked for Stanford U for 34 years. We used Amigas for the superior graphics making FTP (fast time plots) I worked for the Stanford linear accelerator center for 34 years. High energy physics. Grandvalley products? forgot the the name. The made some great Amiga products. I first bought an Amiga 500 when my daughters were wee ones. Now they are in their 40's. Showed them how to play games. Soon both of them were kicking my butt. :)
 
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In 1996, the price/power gap between an Amiga and a PC was not that high.

And the OS was still way better.

You get an A1200 with 040/40 for 1200$. 060 for 1000$ more. RAM/HD were identical .

But the PC market was for sure future proof!

TerryLaze said:
Yes, for the cheap cheap price of 3 times the cost of an A2000 (or A1500 for the uk) you could get an 040 that would not be usable on any game.
2bilnfF.jpeg
Click to expand...
 
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