The Amiga was great back in the 80s, so far ahead of anything else. In the early 90s trouble arrived, and starting 1992, it was essentially technically dead since PCs had caught up. The newest AGA chipset on the Amiga 1200 and 4000 was a disaster and a nightmare to program (being planar rather than chunky) whilst VGA mode 13h was a dream come true. Nobody really bothered with extracting the most out of AGA resulting in lackluster games that looked terrible compared to what was coming out on the PC w/ VGA (nevermind SVGA later).
The Paula audio chip was essentially unchanged since the first Amiga (4 channels, 8bit samples) and was no match for the Soundblaster 16 (and later the GUS). All of that meant that for the first time, games that were coming out on the PC were way ahead of anything the Amiga had to offer and the momentum had fully shifted. Moreover, they were artistically novel and windows into the future.
Ultima Underworld, Ultima 7, Privateer, Day of the Tentacle, X-Wing, Wolfenstein, Doom, System Shock, Myst were all groundbreaking PC games released in 1992-1994 that never came out on any Amiga. Even games that did come out for both systems 1992 onwards, were usually a lot better on the PC (Dune 2, all Lucasfilm and Sierra adventures, Flashback, Another World, Eye of the Beholders, Syndicate, Theme Park). The Demoscene productions were also a lot better and forging new ground on the PC, AGA demos being limited by the c2p routines that were slow on the 020 and 030 Amigas.
It is still a great machine for hacker types though, nearly infinitely expandable and the OS is a joy to work with. It's just too bad that the models following the A3000 - the last great Amiga -, A1200 and A4000, were absolute disasters that killed the entire platform.
The A1200 and A4000 were essentially too little too late. Dave Haynie reported that there was an A4000 prototype ready in an A3000 chassis almost a year ahead of the A4000. Then there were the production ramp up issues with the A4000 where systems weren't available because chip manufacturing didn't happen due to money problems at Commodore.
There were so many missed oppourtunities. Technically, it would have been possible to ship and AGA machine in 1989 as DRAMs with faster access times were available then (even at an affordable price before the duties were applied), and it might have made a difference, but the march of the PC clones was already growing quite strong. Ah well, at least I had a lot of fun learning on those machines!
The Paula audio chip was essentially unchanged since the first Amiga (4 channels, 8bit samples) and was no match for the Soundblaster 16 (and later the GUS). All of that meant that for the first time, games that were coming out on the PC were way ahead of anything the Amiga had to offer and the momentum had fully shifted. Moreover, they were artistically novel and windows into the future.
Ultima Underworld, Ultima 7, Privateer, Day of the Tentacle, X-Wing, Wolfenstein, Doom, System Shock, Myst were all groundbreaking PC games released in 1992-1994 that never came out on any Amiga. Even games that did come out for both systems 1992 onwards, were usually a lot better on the PC (Dune 2, all Lucasfilm and Sierra adventures, Flashback, Another World, Eye of the Beholders, Syndicate, Theme Park). The Demoscene productions were also a lot better and forging new ground on the PC, AGA demos being limited by the c2p routines that were slow on the 020 and 030 Amigas.
It is still a great machine for hacker types though, nearly infinitely expandable and the OS is a joy to work with. It's just too bad that the models following the A3000 - the last great Amiga -, A1200 and A4000, were absolute disasters that killed the entire platform.