English Amiga Board - View Single Post - A600

DisposableHero · 13 August 2015, 01:55

Hate, with a passion. A budget version of the A500+was a bad idea all along, the Amiga should have been punching up, not down. And why still only a one-button controller, how was that going to take on the consoles? But when they failed to actually make it cheaper than the A500+ it should have been binned, not released as a replacement.

The internal hard drive fitting was nice, and the Surface Mounted Technology gave a decent improvement in reliability, so ideally those features would have been in the Plus (or an A500+B), but only if a way of making accelerators for it had been worked out at the time. A cheap hard drive was only worth so much when you were stuck with the 68000.

The PCMCIA slot was fine, as far as it went. Not significantly better or worse than the A500's edge connector, but it left companies having to design new versions of their hardware for it - when many had just done that for the A500+, and Commodore knew full well that they'd have to do it for the A1200 in a few months. The issues with games and serious software (including the serious program bundled with the machine, whcih sums yup what an afterthought trying to market it as a computer was) were totally unpredictable for companies (so how Akira can blame them is beyond me) and were one more hassle for the games industry - again, Commdore knew full well that this was merely one hassle out of three in a year.

My suspicion is that having only the A600 out there panicked Commodore into rushing the A1200, knowing that there as no useful base-end Amiga for serious applications or flight sims (in particular) instead of waiting until the AAA hardware was ready and the A1200 could have been launched in late 1993 with higher specs and loads of software ready to launch. I'm not sure it's an exaggeration to say the A600 (and related Commodore idiocy) ultimately killed the Amiga, in fact.

13 August 2015, 01:55	#7
DisposableHero Registered User Join Date: Nov 2004 Location: England Posts: 188	Hate, with a passion. A budget version of the A500+was a bad idea all along, the Amiga should have been punching up, not down. And why still only a one-button controller, how was that going to take on the consoles? But when they failed to actually make it cheaper than the A500+ it should have been binned, not released as a replacement. The internal hard drive fitting was nice, and the Surface Mounted Technology gave a decent improvement in reliability, so ideally those features would have been in the Plus (or an A500+B), but only if a way of making accelerators for it had been worked out at the time. A cheap hard drive was only worth so much when you were stuck with the 68000. The PCMCIA slot was fine, as far as it went. Not significantly better or worse than the A500's edge connector, but it left companies having to design new versions of their hardware for it - when many had just done that for the A500+, and Commodore knew full well that they'd have to do it for the A1200 in a few months. The issues with games and serious software (including the serious program bundled with the machine, whcih sums yup what an afterthought trying to market it as a computer was) were totally unpredictable for companies (so how Akira can blame them is beyond me) and were one more hassle for the games industry - again, Commdore knew full well that this was merely one hassle out of three in a year. My suspicion is that having only the A600 out there panicked Commodore into rushing the A1200, knowing that there as no useful base-end Amiga for serious applications or flight sims (in particular) instead of waiting until the AAA hardware was ready and the A1200 could have been launched in late 1993 with higher specs and loads of software ready to launch. I'm not sure it's an exaggeration to say the A600 (and related Commodore idiocy) ultimately killed the Amiga, in fact.