The hardware is evidently capable of running all of this. However, I believe that the algorithmic side wasn't fully fleshed out at that time. I'm not going to sift through old computer graphics papers, but the Amiga 500 came out at a time when real time 3D was still making baby steps, more or less. It just took a few more years until the academic research was put together into engines that could render nicely textured 3D environments on home computers.
By the time that happened, there was no more economic incentive to optimize super hard for a platform that was already dying.
You could put a VGA (or MCGA for that matter) card in a 386 in 1987, the same year the Amiga 500 came out. It would have set you back a lot more than an Amiga 500 though.
[edit]
The PS/2 Model 80 shipped in June of 1987 and AFAICT exceeded the minimum requirements for Wolfenstein 3D.
1: Compaq Deskpro 386 was launched in Q4 1986 and the first PS/2 with a VGA card shipped in Q2 1987. I don't know when the first VGA cards were sold on their own, but nothing was to stop you from swapping the card from a PS/2 to a Deskpro.
Possibly not without modern hardware to develop on!
(We also don't seem to have been given any info about which system the video was recorded from. It's possible it was recorded from an A1200, maybe even likely in order to show the game looking its best. The performance might be worse enough on a genuine OCS Amiga that you wouldn't actually want to play it, impressive though it might be that it does actually run in some form. Similar to Wing Commander or Frontier: Elite II.)
The capture is from an A1200 with fastram, but A500 with 1 MB also provides a playable experience at roughly 10-12fps. Which is still faster on A500 than Alien Breed 3D on a stock A1200, and at more or less 4x the screen size.
Pure witchcraft. Maybe this is how the singularity is alpha testing on innocent targets? Had I seen this back in the day it would have been downright scary. Now, it’s still surreal.
I feel like this type of technical achievement is difficult to appreciate without some understanding of the underlying hardware. For example, those of us who had an Amiga many years ago might stare dumbfounded and gasp in bewilderment as we try to understand how this was made to work on a 7.14 MHz 16 bit machine with half the memory only available to the CPU every other clock cycle. Is it possible to help others appreciate this technical achievement or is this "art form" destined to die out in a few years?
