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If you long to play again on Amiga and dont have one anymore, get yourself a copy of WinUAE (Ubiquitous Amiga Emulator). It can emulate any Amiga model and does so very well, even so far as to mimick the disk drive noises. Everything is customisable... RAM, ROM version, hard drives, chipsets, you name it. "Disks" are selected & loaded as .ADF files, which are basically the Amiga version of ISO's and there's options for up to (I think) 4 virtual peripheral drives (which just like the real thing, aren't always recognised by every bit of software!)
Everything you need, including links to some pretty massive software libraries is here...
http://www.winuae.net/
ROMS can be tricky to get hold of, as there's still confusion over who owns the rights to them but if you come unstuck drop me a line & I may be able to help.
I am sure there would be a market for an Amiga emulator and Amiga games on Steam or GOG. I'm reluctant to go "off piste" for fear of getting nasties in my system. Something clogged up my old laptop and it took a lot of faffing about to sort it out. I'm more careful now - although I've always been ideologically opposed to piracy.
I've got a disc of old Atari games (an official release). Battlezone, Centipede, Millipede and Asteroids were fantastic but let's face it other than "Adventure" and "Tanks" most of the original home Atari games were pants. Due respect for those working close to the dawn of time though.
There are some decent countdowns on YouTube of Amiga games.
My favourite rarely features - "Mega-Lo-Mania". Other memories - Cannon Fodder (I only once successfully got the jeep off the cliff in Level 6 Mission 2, usually after most of my squad had been shot up with Bazookas in Level 6 Mission 1), Sensible Soccer, a really good reworking of Defender for which I can't remember the name, Alien Breed (remember Team 17 ? - Great studio), Pirates (great, but the PC revamp is better).
I was going to name Xenon 1, Zorgon's Revenge, and Pasta Blasta - but they were on the Oric, a defeated competitor of the Spectrum and pre-dating even the Amiga.
Old enough to know better indeed.
S.x.
I understand your hesitancy in "going off piste" as it were & not trusting a link. Certainly though it's perfectly stable & genuine software and there's no piracy involved whatsoever, else I wouldn't dare post it on Steam for fear of a ban. Indeed many of the ADF databases now charge for downloading certain games, etc that are still considered proprietary. Most games have fallen into abandonware now though, so no costs or worries involved with them at all. As I say, the ROMs are harder come by but I believe some new ones have been written under general licence. Also there's a couple of rare ones that did fall to abandon if you can find them. Either way, even if you don't want to use the link, I highly recommend doing a web search for it... watch some demo videos or whatnot.
As for Atari, never had one myself. My first was a C64, bought mainly because we couldn't afford the A500, which was brand spanking at the time. Agreed though, Atari games weren't exactly anything to write home about. Battlezone I seem to remember being quite revolutionary, though all I was interested in at the time was Dizzy... because he was... an egg with boxing gloves! Ahh the memories!
When the Amiga days started it was Civilization for me... Xenon 2 & Speedball because the music was incredible... Elite II: Frontier, the 3D Construction Kit, Settlers... Barbarian (decapitations! Woohoo!)... and Dizzy of course, finally in 16bit colour!
Alien Breed always scared me... I think it was the countdown timer that did it!
Zool, F19 & F117a. Pirates definitely. Flahsback (yeaaah!) and yes, Cannon Fodder, even though I could never play past loosing Jops, Jools or Stoo (also the music was a bit of a haunting story in itself.)
And who could forget Vulcan Software with their Valhalla series (me and a friend actually helped design the 3rd one when we were about 12. Paul even sent me a copy of the map editor they used on the first 2! How cool is that!)
Beyond that I was stuck into BASIC, learning how to "write" pictures like a spirograph & programming my primordial version of a chat bot, which liked to throw around rude words & insults!
I too remember the Oric, though never got my hands on one. All those bright orange keys looked like great fun though!
Sorry for the wall of text. Shocking what memories I'm uncovering here! Good times!
Suppose we ought to keep this conversation between us in case Steam realises what dinosaurs we are & puts us in an exhibit!
I recently found a disc of ascii art from various BBs I have saved, and popping them up on my rig I was amazed at how craptastic they seem today. And yeah it brought back some memories just like this game does.
Still, I stand by what's been said that the Amiga version was much nicer looking. Normally I'd tend to agree that it could've been due to those 10" or 12" CRT screens we all had at the time but that wouldn't explain why it still looks better now on a 20" LCD.
If you haven't already tried it, get yourself a copy of WinUAE and compare the two versions for yourself. The Amiga version really does look better. It's not something that was done for the Steam release either. I had the Amiga version the second it was published & loved it so much I bought it again for PC some 10 years later when I got my first desktop. Being as the PC was much more powerful, I expected the game would look better on that platform but it didn't. Instead it looked worse! PC consistently did the same to countless titles (some mentioned in previous posts). In most cases the "clean up for PC" had the added effect of completely destroying the original ambience. These games just weren't the same once PC got hold of them.
To this day if I want to play a game I loved on the Amiga & truly enjoy it, I have to play the Amiga version. Anything else just looks & feels like a cheap rip-off substitute. That's not the product of a fuzzy memory or the rose-tinted spectacles of hindsight, it's the conclusion of 25+ years of observation!
Certainly there are similar comments about Mega Lo Mania. Man, I'd love to play that game again.
S.x.
But I just found the original CD again, loaded it, and was able to get to the main screen before crashing (the needed patch is on a floppy along with my xcom patch and I haven't had a floppy drive in ages). It looks pretty much identical full screen on my 27" 1080p as this steam version. It really is just the low resolution along with the expanded pixels of a larger monitor. Which makes me think this would be a great tablet port if it had some kind of stylus support.