Yeah, just to clear that up, when I said PC's I meant IBM PCs, not "home computers" in general.
Games were still being coded in CGA (4 colours!) graphics in 1987, 3 years after the EGA (16 colours!!) standard was introduced. The PC Speaker is infamous for the horrible noises it made, even in the 1990s.
I agree with your idea about the PC being a shite platform until maybe 1987, but I disagree with all the specific examples you gave. I can't think of many CGA games in 87, and while it's true it took more than it should have for EGA to really kick off pretty much all the games of note (except maybe Wizardry) were on EGA by then.
The MS-DOS version of Wizball is a perfect example for my case. On home computers (not just PCs) it was a pretty big title at the time, so a conversion from the original C-64 version that toned down the graphics (not to mention the sound) is a very glaring mistake. On that note, I just remembered another title, Zombi. That was in 1990, and it was CGA. (It was also published by Ubisoft, so go figure.)
Sceptic said:
COMPLETELY disagree about sound though; the MT-32 came out in 1988 and offered better sound than any other platform could dream of, and by 1990 Adlib's OPL was pretty much standard. Then when Wing Commander II came out everyone rushed to buy a Sound Blaster, and those who could afford to hooked it up to the also just-released Sound Canvas. Sure, not everyone could afford a Roland, but the Adlib and SB were pretty cheap.
The problem with all of these sound cards that emerged in the late 80s is that they weren't "pretty much" the standard, they simply
weren't the standard. They were an optional add-on that took quite a considerable know-how just to get installed and working properly, and more often than not required a visit to a computer workshop. EVERYONE that reads this that played games on PCs in the early 90s remember the pain of getting the IRQ and DMA setting correct for EVERY SINGLE GAME. Meanwhile Commodore computers and the Atari ST came with pretty decent sound chips as part of the starting package. True, they had upgrade problems of their own, but I doubt they were as troublesome as the sound cards were for the PC.
And speaking from my own personal experience, sound cards were NOT cheap. None of them were. Not until 1994 at the earliest. Not saying that you're wrong, it just doesn't add up to what I had to go through.
Agreed on the Golden Age, disagreed on Ancient Times. It's not that people started to move to the PC in 1990, it's that all the competing platforms had been completely abandoned by then. Look at how multi-platform the early games in all the big series were: Amiga, Apple II, C64, ST, and a year or two later, the shitty PC port. Now look at 87-88: suddenly the PC port is coming out the same year as the others. 1990: the non-PC versions don't even exist in some cases (Ultima 6). I think it's really the VGA/Adlib combination that killed the other platforms, when most developers decided that was the way to go, but the PC was already holding up relatively well since 1988 (take Ultima 5; it looks identical on PC, Amiga and ST).
You're making one mistake in the above statement, you're basing all the times above on the first examples, the pioneers and the trendsetters, if you'd like. Not on the norm. Ultima 6 is a perfect example of this. It was a groundbreaking title in many ways, one of which was that it required considerable resources above and beyond what was normal for a game to require at the time, Ultima or otherwise. The PC could certainly pull it off, it was easiest to start there. Origin were trendsetters in this regard, not following the norm. The same problem repeated itself 2 years later with Ultima 7, only on a much larger scale. Very few PC users could play Ultima 7 right off the bat on release day.
Competing platforms had NOT been completely abandoned by 1990. The 8-bits were as good as dead, true
cry
and the "no-name" 16-bit computer brands barely left a mark, but the Atari ST and the Amiga were still doing pretty good, and the Macintosh held out surprisingly well. But the support for them was waning in 1990. The PC was catching up really fast compared to where it was in 1987, but it didn't really catch up until 1991, and took the lead in 1992. By then the competing platforms were pretty much dead in the water.
The PC as a gaming platform did something that no other gaming platform has ever done: It evolved through the years. It caught up with the de facto standards of its time, then took the lead and replaced them. This is evident in your examples of when PC ports were released. But the PC ports were rarely comparable to the other versions. If it wasn't the graphics then it was the sound. Or the controls. Or the speed of the game. And to name one extreme example, the game Captive (1990) didn't get a PC release until 2 years later... and it was shit. Totally b0rked up the XP rewards. Graphics and gameplay are identical, music and sound are close, but it's still a failure.
PC conversions of games that were comparable to other versions weren't the norm until late 1989 at the earliest. It doesn't matter if the conversions were released at the same time, the
quality had to add up as well. That is one of the reasons of my opinion of where the Golden Age starts.
) according to your opinion, I do raise serious objection about the start of it.
, just 
