[roondar]

Originally Posted by Retro1234

Workbench 1.3 was pretty terrible did you ever try the notepad thing. 2.x was a big step up but 3.x wasn't much in the world of Windows 3.11.

I'm 100% serious. Workbench 1.3 was way better than Windows 3.11. Case in point: this terrible notepad app on the Amiga could be run side by side with other programs and this would actually work.

This was not generally the case with Windows 3.11, were running more than one program either meant task switching (which tended to crash the machine on a non irregular basis so no one I knew actually did this) or running a program, doing your thing, saving, quiting and then running another program. It sucked.

I used Windows 3.11 for ages at school and business and it caused many more problems than it solved. MS-DOS was better and that's saying something.

To say that Amiga's OS is worse either means you didn't really use it, or that you're looking at Windows now and misremembering just how awful it was in day to day use.

and 3.11 was stable probably used in every Business and school by that time on a regular basis without problems.

Windows 3.11 was not stable for me. I used it for hours/days/months on end (no choice in what your school or company uses) and it seemingly always ended in crashes, lost work and irritation. I wasn't the only one with problems either, I've heard more complaints about the Windows 3 series than any other 'OS' I've ever used.

The only reason it was so popular is that it was a slight step up from MS-DOS (it had a GUI after all) and that was the market leader. MS-DOS, by the way, is also crap. Which just goes to show that popularity says absolutely nothing about quality.

And yes, I used Windows 3.11 on a multitude of different computers. It was horrible on each and every one of them. Workbench 3.0/3.1 was miles better. Oh, it also comes with a much better editor if that's what you want. The A1200, out of the box, came with a powerful and useful OS. I seriously liked that machine - from day one. Got much better with my Blizzard 1230MK IV though, I'll admit that.

The same cannot be said for PC's at that time, which may have had technically better hardware (which you'd expect given the price difference) but the OS was terrible and quite a bit of the 'essential' software was highly overrated.

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Originally Posted by Hewitson

When I got my 1200, I had hundreds of cracked 500 games on disk. Even with using the early-startup and setting it to OCS/ECS and disabling caches, most of them refused to work. I do realise that in some cases the incompatibilities would have been caused by the cracktros themselves, rather than the actual games.

This was not my experience, quite a few of the A500 cracks I had worked fine without any alteration and most of the ones that didn't work ran correctly merely after disabling caches. And when that didn't work, I got close to '100%' results using a simple degrader program.

But it is true that some group of games doesn't work on the A1200. It's just in my experience that number was closer to something like 5% (maybe 10% at a stretch) than what you seem to have gone through.

Whilst 486/Pentium PC's were running 8088 XT software with no issues (admittedly a CPU slowdown TSR was often required).

There were plenty of old PC games that did not run properly on a Pentium even with a slowdown TSR. I ran into a whole bunch of problems trying to do just that. Many old PC games directly hit the CGA or EGA hardware and that didn't work on Super VGA cards. Some really old stuff could only run directly from 5 1/4 inch floppy and tended to not like HD drives. Then there's the problems with MS-DOS: newer versions of DOS used different amounts of memory, which led to all sorts of incompatibilities (though this affected mostly somewhat newer games). Well, for me anyway - apparently you were much more lucky.

My point here is that the results of a single person's experience should be treated carefully.