Quote:
Originally Posted by Amigajay
The A600 did outsell the A1200, and being cancelled machine doesn't automatically mean people will buy it, people didn't buy the A1200 because it wasn't a big enough leap.
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I believe there were more reasons than "wasn't a big enough leap". Initially, the 1200 probably would have sold better if it had better compatibility (never underestimate the value of compatibility with computers). Also, AGA games were slow to be released and most were just slight upgrades from ECS titles.
AGA with HAM8 looked close enough to high end PC graphics cards at the time but it was only a minor upgrade in 2D performance. C= stuck with old underpowered processors and did not jump on the HD bandwagon while the PC world performance for fps games grew exponentially and costs of commodity hardware shrunk through competition and economies of scale. Even if AGA had twice the bandwidth, twice the gfx memory speed and chunky gfx it would probably not have kept up. The 68k CPU was also losing the economies of scale battle to the x86. It was relatively easy to shrink the chip dies with enough cash flow in those days (difficult and expensive today but the economies of scale still apply). It is interesting that most of the AGA performance and compatibility limitations can be removed in FPGA (or an ASIC). Likewise, the 68k CPU can be made much higher performance and more compatible than the 68040 or 68060 with today's technology. It makes sense once again to go back to integrated gfx like the Amiga used with the limitation on die shrinks and heat produced from a physically small computer.