alt Hacker News>Sadly, the video capabilities that made it so special eventually became its Achilles heel.
How weird: I was browsing YouTube last night (with the SmartTube app) and somehow stumbled on a video that discussed this exact thing, basically making the case that Wolfenstein 3D killed the Amiga and discussing how the unique video capabilities it had which were great for 2D side-scrollers made it so difficult to make a FPS shooter work well on it, because apparently the Amiga didn't have direct framebuffer access the way PCs did with VGA mode 0x13.
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It didn't exactly kill it. Wolfenstein being feasible on the PC and not the Amiga, was just a symptom of stagnation. The Amiga (as a promising commercial venture!) had doom (pun intended) written all over it even before Wolfenstein. Commodore ignored the Amiga for years and years.
Edit: I just recalled something - the Amiga recquired either a TV or increasingly rare monitors with PAL/NTSC frequencies. You couldn't just walk in to a computer shop and buy an Amiga and a VGA compatible monitor. It was a flickery and low-resolution monitor or a TV. Not exactly endearing to professionals. I mean, I loved the Amiga maybe too much, it was always the underdog, but it was increasingly also the losing underdog.
It certainly has direct framebuffer access. But the bitplane representation where the bits of each pixel's value are spread out across multiple bytes can make certain kinds of updates very time consuming.