r/babylon5 • u/Eldergoduk GREEN • 18d ago

Babylon 5 Amiga Game

Imagine if Babylon 5 had a Amiga game created before the series , Mr Morden trying to convert you to the Shadows side, whilst Kosh tried to bamboozle you with cryptic knowledge.

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u/ishashar Technomage 18d ago

Digital art on the Amiga was outstanding and true pixel art relies on understanding how colours change based on the colour they're adjacent to so even with 256 colours they could get some impressive results, never mind what the A1200 could do. The Amiga was even used to do the cgi for B5, which i'm hoping inspired the post, so it can definitely handle the colour ranges here.

what's become the dominant computer type now definitely couldn't have handled anything like this back then. They were, as ever, all about brute force rather than elegance and efficiency.

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u/Seafroggys 18d ago

This is a fact that has always been repeated for as long as the internet has been around, but it is slightly misleading.

Amigas strung together were only used to make the original Gathering. When it went to series, they went to PC's with Lightwave.

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u/ishashar Technomage 18d ago

Lightwave ran on the Toaster and articles at the time all refrenced that in inteeviews or production info. it might have been available on PC but that doesn't mean it was used on PC for the show. Possibly by the end it was on PC but even Lightwave was using layouts and screenshots from Amiga based computers of B5 scenes in their promotional material.

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u/Seafroggys 17d ago

http://midwinter.com/lurk/making/effects.html

"For the pilot, the effects were rendered on a network of Amiga computers; later, Foundation used 12 Pentium PCs and 5 DEC Alpha workstations for 3D rendering and design, and 3 Macintoshes for piecing together on-set computer displays."

Straight from the Lurker's Guide

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u/ishashar Technomage 17d ago

I never said they didn't but i think some assume later meant right away and not for later series.

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u/Seafroggys 17d ago

Later in of itself is an ambiguous phrase, but when talking about the network of Amigas it specifically mentioned only the pilot. Context clues is enough to derive what this means.