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06 January 2010, 16:22

The Amiga 1000 was essentially a retailing proof of concept. When the Amiga 500 came out it was a viable consumer product and for performance and capability wiped out pretty much every other platform up to the level of mainframes.

While I like the external appearance of the A1200, it was a product of the bizarre mix of cost reduction and wastage of many years of viable alternate and probably superior technologies and architectures. Time wasted on projects like the A500+ (which was utterly pointless), alternate versions of the CDTV, and arguably the A600 were compounded by the critical performance enchancing features that were slshed from the motherboard due to the false economy of cost reduction and short sightedness to the long term way the market was going. The fact that the A1200 came with a 020 rather than a faster 030, and that the memory configuration restricted the performance out of the box, is the final straw for me.

But I would guess that the failure to capitalise on all the work they did on the CDTV to integrate an easy way to install an A1200 is for me almost criminal. There could easily have been space to do that on the left side of the case, if they had not saved a few pence on the IDE controller logic. It just seems a complete no brainer to me.

In the end what you had was a machine that looked nice externally, and had a feature set that would appeal to A500 owners keen to upgrade rather than might appeal to the wider market. The AGA graphics mode were nice to have, but in practice, they were not nice to use. They were slow and precluded serious work when compared to VGA and SVGA adapters at the time. I actually think they made a mistake issuing the A4000 with AGA support. It should have just come with a RTG card. Apart from the extra graphics modes, there is not actually that much to distinguish the A1200 from the A500 in the games enviroment.

The A500 was a solid platform, it was the consumer standard, and it was the benchmark by which domestic consumers judged the Amiga range. Of course, Commodore tried to wreck that by coming up with the A500+ which created a huge amount of customer confusion and frustration.

06 January 2010, 16:22	#66
JumpingAnaconda Posts: n/a	The Amiga 1000 was essentially a retailing proof of concept. When the Amiga 500 came out it was a viable consumer product and for performance and capability wiped out pretty much every other platform up to the level of mainframes. While I like the external appearance of the A1200, it was a product of the bizarre mix of cost reduction and wastage of many years of viable alternate and probably superior technologies and architectures. Time wasted on projects like the A500+ (which was utterly pointless), alternate versions of the CDTV, and arguably the A600 were compounded by the critical performance enchancing features that were slshed from the motherboard due to the false economy of cost reduction and short sightedness to the long term way the market was going. The fact that the A1200 came with a 020 rather than a faster 030, and that the memory configuration restricted the performance out of the box, is the final straw for me. But I would guess that the failure to capitalise on all the work they did on the CDTV to integrate an easy way to install an A1200 is for me almost criminal. There could easily have been space to do that on the left side of the case, if they had not saved a few pence on the IDE controller logic. It just seems a complete no brainer to me. In the end what you had was a machine that looked nice externally, and had a feature set that would appeal to A500 owners keen to upgrade rather than might appeal to the wider market. The AGA graphics mode were nice to have, but in practice, they were not nice to use. They were slow and precluded serious work when compared to VGA and SVGA adapters at the time. I actually think they made a mistake issuing the A4000 with AGA support. It should have just come with a RTG card. Apart from the extra graphics modes, there is not actually that much to distinguish the A1200 from the A500 in the games enviroment. The A500 was a solid platform, it was the consumer standard, and it was the benchmark by which domestic consumers judged the Amiga range. Of course, Commodore tried to wreck that by coming up with the A500+ which created a huge amount of customer confusion and frustration.