MODs became popular on other systems because the audio files were so diverse and of such a high quality. That isn't a testament to the Amiga's design; it was a testament to the talent of the composers. I'm anticipating your next statement to be "trackers wouldn't exist without the Amiga". Possibly, but that's irrelevant. I wrote a PC modplayer to play mods, not to emulate a Paula ;-)
I don't think you understood the point I tried to make, so let me try again:
The Amiga was the first machine to have a simple form of 'wavetable synthesis'. That is the revolutionary part. Before that you had sound chips like SID, POKEY, SN76489 and whatnot. Amiga's sound capabilities opened up completely new possibilities.
I certainly won't claim that trackers wouldn't exist without the Amiga. Just look up my earlier post in this very thread, where I point out Soundmonitor on the C64 as an early example of a tracker. The idea of trackers as music editors (even including sample playback, because the C64 could do that on a single channel) existed before it became popular on the Amiga. It's just that things really took off once the Amiga arrived, because its audio hardware was unlike anything that went before it, and going full sample-based completely changed the way computer music sounded. The tracker interface worked very well for 'optimizing' music for a given audio chip (low number of channels, frame-based music routines etc), and it suited the Amiga very well.
And you wrote a PC modplayer to play Amiga mods, so you were emulating a Paula even though you may not have fully realized it
Because you cannot deny that the MOD format is tied VERY closely to the Amiga hardware, down to using the Amiga's timer division for note pitch, and the Amiga's 65-level volume. You had to convert that to something a PC could play, so you were emulating.
It was only the second generation of trackers on PC (Scream Tracker 3, FastTracker 2) that actually moved away from the Amiga, and evolved into something more native to the PC hardware at the time.
There were ways to compose with wavetable instruments on personal computers before trackers on the amiga.
That's not really the point. The point is that the Amiga was the first home computer where the stock hardware was aimed at wavetable, so you didn't have to burn all your CPU on software mixing at low quality.
MODs didn't really come into their own on the PC until we had fast 386/486 systems, where you actually had enough CPU power to get good quality mixing AND have enough CPU left to do an actual game or demo in the foreground. An Amiga could already do that in 1985 (it's just that it took a few years for the actual tracker software to mature on the platform, but I was talking about the hardware capabilities that made it possible).
DeskMate or DMCS aren't anything like ProTracker. Neither in sound, in user-interface, nor CPU-load. This is a pars-pro-toto fallacy.
I mean, I'm not sure if I have to point this out to anyone... but on an Amiga, playing back a MOD takes virtually no CPU at all. You just need to update a few registers every frame, a fast replay routine can play back even the most complex songs on Amiga in about 10 scanlines time. Which is similar to the cost of SID music on a C64 for example.
On other platforms it's very different, because they have to perform CPU-intensive software mixing. You shouldn't compare the two. MOD was not designed for PCs or software mixing. It was designed for Amiga, for playing high-quality music in the background of a CPU-intensive game or demo.
Which it did very well: