"Except raw CPU power" is not much of an "except". If you have raw CPU power, that fixes everything. You don't need a blitter, and you don't need sprites, and you don't need playfields, and you can do your sound mixing on the CPU. Then 256 colours makes up for some of the things you'd use the copper for; the rest, the CPU power will sort out. A byte-per-pixel framebuffer memory layout makes easy what would be a thorough pain on the Amiga - though with a faster CPU, not like it would be a massive problem anyway.
"Except raw CPU power" is why the Amiga had all the custom junk in the first place - it didn't have the raw CPU power to do without!
(As for the mouse cursor, what need is there for a zero-cost one? Just draw the cursor at the end of the frame, when you're done. No problem. I don't remember any mouse cursor problems in games; presumably they all did what I suggest, because it's the obvious, easy, reliable thing to do.)
Some PC games I remember playing in 1995, or before: Doom II, Hi-Octane, Magic Carpet, Syndicate (the Amiga version of this on a stock Amiga was a sad joke), Command and Conquer, Wing Commander (the Amiga version of this was pretty poor, even on an Amiga 1200), Comanche: Maximum Overkill, Microprose Formula 1 Grand Prix, Stunt Island, various of the X-Wing series, and Indianapolis 500.
Looking at the games you cite, I think the PC ones are much better! Better graphics, due to having more colours or resolution. More interesting play, due to having more CPU time to do interesting stuff. Yes, even better sound, because you've got as many channels as there's CPU time for, and more accurate stereo positioning because of it.
OK, so I like the art direction of Shadow of the Beast. That's about it.
> Then 256 colours makes up for some of the things you'd use the copper for; the rest, the CPU power will sort out. A byte-per-pixel framebuffer memory layout makes easy what would be a thorough pain on the Amiga
That's simply not true.
Take e.g. Doom II from your list; In order to have double buffering (required for smooth screen update), it had to use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_X which is .. a planar mode even if it is 1-byte per pixel (in a slightly nicer way than the Amiga's planar mode; but switching planes cost an arm and a leg in I/O communication, so to actually work efficiently with it, it was as bad as the Amiga's planar mode).
> If you have raw CPU power, that fixes everything. You don't need a blitter, and you don't need sprites, and you don't need playfields, and you can do your sound mixing on the CPU.
I remember one (1) reasonable multi-level parallax scrolling game for the PC with reasonable performance, but not its name. (I remember it well, because I spent a few afternoons with a debugger trying to figure out how the f*ck they managed). CPU was NOT enough to not need all of these.
Almost all the games you mentioned have a 3D point of view (those that I'm familiar with, anyway) - for which the Amiga's '85 2D acceleration wasn't helpful, of course. But the 2D games of the PC, especially scrollers, were inferior.
Non of them, as far as I can tell, had 3d sound or multi channel stereo mixing in 1995 -- PC mod players back then were struggling to go below 30% CPU (I know, I wrote one of the fastest ones), and no game could afford them.
I released a sideways scroller for the PC in '94, that achieved constant 60fps (with not a lot of CPU to spare) on the 486DX of the time, and a respectable 30fps on the 386 that were still super common. To get that, I needed to use ModeX, used Adlib for music so I can use DMA sample playing for the effects (also, pure adlib was _still_ common enough to warrant support if you didn't have a soundblaster). It needed an awful lot of tricks to get reasonable performance; The graphics engine was all assembly, and some of the game logic too. And I needed continuously recalibrating the int8 timer to get interrupts at the vertical retrace so that everything worked properly without wasting CPU.
I never got to do an Amiga version, but it would have been 100 times simpler. And would have worked equally well on an 1985 Amiga 1000.
"Except raw CPU power" is why the Amiga had all the custom junk in the first place - it didn't have the raw CPU power to do without!
(As for the mouse cursor, what need is there for a zero-cost one? Just draw the cursor at the end of the frame, when you're done. No problem. I don't remember any mouse cursor problems in games; presumably they all did what I suggest, because it's the obvious, easy, reliable thing to do.)
Some PC games I remember playing in 1995, or before: Doom II, Hi-Octane, Magic Carpet, Syndicate (the Amiga version of this on a stock Amiga was a sad joke), Command and Conquer, Wing Commander (the Amiga version of this was pretty poor, even on an Amiga 1200), Comanche: Maximum Overkill, Microprose Formula 1 Grand Prix, Stunt Island, various of the X-Wing series, and Indianapolis 500.
Looking at the games you cite, I think the PC ones are much better! Better graphics, due to having more colours or resolution. More interesting play, due to having more CPU time to do interesting stuff. Yes, even better sound, because you've got as many channels as there's CPU time for, and more accurate stereo positioning because of it.
OK, so I like the art direction of Shadow of the Beast. That's about it.