Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by babsimov

I reread what had been said to me and I was the one who didn't remember quite well enough.
In fact they explained to me that as you say, the most common DSPs at the time were those with fixed point. On the other hand, they said that the DSP 56001 was one of the best sellers. They didn't understand why Commodore had somehow isolated itself with the choice of the DSP 3210.

Even today most of DSP's used practically are fixed point - float points in real life are used rarely in common DSP applications - DSP's are like work horses - usually they perform same algorithm and frequently overall work quality make fixed implementation more deterministic - sometimes it is better to increase fixed point precision instead going for float - 32 bit float offer only 23(+1) bit precision and this can be too low for some signal processing algorithms - such as high order IIR filters - some physical modern miniDSP's embedded in some CODEC's (ADC/DAC) are fixed point 56bit or more.
Floats are convenient for general developers as they remove necessity to thoroughly understand problem.
But floats are more flexible than fixed point and as such able to cope with more problems.

AT&T DSP3210 is designed like normal CPU, able to address 4GB of RAM, in naked configuration main CPU can use embedded in 3210 8KB RAM as scratchpad so no need external RAM (although this will reduce possible performance).
56000 was used mostly in audio applications due 24 bit word length but probably it was in general not so popular as TI DSP's (despite that TI DSP's fixed point are 16 bit).

[TEG]

Originally Posted by babsimov

If Thomas Rattigan had remained in office, perhaps the management would have been more competent.
Medhi Ali hired in his place clearly showed that he was totally incompetent. So combined with Irving Gould, we probably couldn't make a worse combination.

I believe Rattigan has plotted a coup to take the control of the company and that explained why he was fired and perhaps why Gould took Ali. Would be interesting if someone have more references.

About the DSP it would had the advantage to be in the philosophical Amiga line. I mean bringing something to make dream of some wonder. A piece of tech to master to create some new wonderful graphic or sound effect i.e not being a boring PC.

[babsimov]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

A1200 was a good move.

Not really, the 1200 and the 4000 are a panic reaction after the failure of the 1000jr and the 600.
The AGA models originally planned were much better. The 1000+ included everything the base 1200 lacked and the 3000+ even though it didn't have an 040, had an 030 and DSP as standard. And all of this had to be released much sooner.

[babsimov]

Originally Posted by Gorf

While Rattigan turned C0 back into a profitable zone and initialized the A500 and A2000 development, he also made quite a lot mistakes.
The last round of lay offs was way too harsh on the engineering departments. Development came to an halt.

Nobody is perfect of course. But then I would have much preferred Rattigan to remain in charge rather than the succession of charlots who succeeded him.

When Rattigan arrived, it seemed to me that Commodore was once again on the verge of bankruptcy. So he had to cut down on staff to restore financial balance, if I remember correctly what I read. So of course, it had an impact on Commodore. But despite everything, all this allowed Commodore to survive while the 500 and the 2000 brought in profits.

Spitting the development of the A500 and A2000 into two different teams was questionable - at least the way it was done. The German group did not communicate with the US group and vice versa. Leading to such absurdities as not letting Germany know about the integration of a many discrete parts into Garry, which was only fixed with the B2000.

Also the integrating the bus switch into Agnus but not making the small changes to be able to address the full 1MB as ChipRAM, despite of the package providing enough pins to do so, was a grave lack of oversight ... the SlowRAM stupidity was haunting the A500 for all its life.

It also seems to me that it was a bit of Commodore's policy, to put the teams into competition. As said a little above, everything was not perfect under his leadership, but it was already much better than after him.

Rattigan was a good overall manager, but coming from a softdrink company he had of course no clue about computers or electronics whatsoever.

Jack Tramiel didn't know anything about computers either. And yet he managed Commodore very well when he was in charge.
Irving Gould and Medhi Ali knew nothing about computers and we saw that they also didn't know how to manage Commodore.

[OlafSch]

Originally Posted by babsimov

Not really, the 1200 and the 4000 are a panic reaction after the failure of the 1000jr and the 600.
The AGA models originally planned were much better. The 1000+ included everything the base 1200 lacked and the 3000+ even though it didn't have an 040, had an 030 and DSP as standard. And all of this had to be released much sooner.

As I understand it the A600 was planned to be the successor of A500 but the market had changed. People outside reacted disappointed because the hardware offered almost no advantages. The AGA-Design was ready for a year already and sales people put high pressure to use it. That led to development of A1200 and A4000. Unfortunately Commodore already had produced high numbers of A600 and sold them with high losses.

[babsimov]

Originally Posted by TEG

I believe Rattigan has plotted a coup to take the control of the company and that explained why he was fired and perhaps why Gould took Ali. Would be interesting if someone have more references.

I don't remember reading that in books.
In fact, if I remember correctly, Irving Gould criticized Thomas Rattigan for having embellished the expected financial results a little (which was somewhat true it seems).
And so overnight he banned him from entering Commodore's buildings. Rattigan defended himself and won against Commodore who had to pay him several millions in compensation.

It will turn out that the results announced by Rattigan will come to fruition, but just a year late. Then those who take over will be incapable of doing better, as we have seen.
I even believe that to audit the management of Thomas Rattigan, Irving Gould had mandated Medhi Ali. And he convinced Irving Gould that he would do better than Rattigan. So if anyone did a coup, it seems be Medhi Ali.

About the DSP it would had the advantage to be in the philosophical Amiga line. I mean bringing something to make dream of some wonder. A piece of tech to master to create some new wonderful graphic or sound effect i.e not being a boring PC.

I totally agree.

[babsimov]

Originally Posted by OlafSch

As I understand it the A600 was planned to be the successor of A500 but the market had changed. People outside reacted disappointed because the hardware offered almost no advantages. The AGA-Design was ready for a year already and sales people put high pressure to use it. That led to development of A1200 and A4000. Unfortunately Commodore already had produced high numbers of A600 and sold them with high losses.

No, the 600 was originally to be called the 300. It was an entry-level model which would have been sold in addition to the 500, with the aim of replacing the C64 in the Commodore price range. But, as the 300 ultimately proved more expensive to produce than the 500, it was renamed the 600. So that management wouldn't look stupid with this model, the 500 was withdrawn from the market.


For the rest, that's it, no one wanted the 600 which had to be sold at a loss.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

It doesn't fit unless you give up the internal floppy drive, or can get a very slimline drive that fits over the keyboard ribbon. In both cases the drive's warranty is voided due to being mounted at an angle. A properly engineered solution would require a larger case.

Cheap IDE for A500
https://archive.org/details/amiga-wo.../n101/mode/2up
Page 102 of 146, Amiga World Jan 1992,

ICD's AdIDE has $89 USD asking retail price.

https://ia800605.us.archive.org/Book...ale=2&rotate=0

For AdIDE, ICD suggested mounting a 3.5-inch drive on A500's floppy drive bay and external FDD.

Without PCMCIA inclusion, AA500+ with AGA (Lisa and Alice are new chips), Fat Gary, Ramsey, and four TLL bridge chips (Bridgette replaced these TTL chips in A4000) and IDE chip could have done the job for H2 1991. The internal expansion bus is just a 68020/68030 local bus.

There wouldn't be the "A600" sales flop in 1992.

AGA platform would have an extra year to build its install base. A greater than 1 million AGA install base is possible. AGA needs to reach a critical install base for AGA-optimised games.

Fast RAM and DSP3210 helps with 3D. Fast RAM enables full CPU and AGA performance due to fewer shared memory problems.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by pandy71

Even today most of DSP's used practically are fixed point - float points in real life are used rarely in common DSP applications - DSP's are like work horses - usually they perform same algorithm and frequently overall work quality make fixed implementation more deterministic - sometimes it is better to increase fixed point precision instead going for float - 32 bit float offer only 23(+1) bit precision and this can be too low for some signal processing algorithms - such as high order IIR filters - some physical modern miniDSP's embedded in some CODEC's (ADC/DAC) are fixed point 56bit or more.
Floats are convenient for general developers as they remove necessity to thoroughly understand problem.
But floats are more flexible than fixed point and as such able to cope with more problems.

AT&T DSP3210 is designed like normal CPU, able to address 4GB of RAM, in naked configuration main CPU can use embedded in 3210 8KB RAM as scratchpad so no need external RAM (although this will reduce possible performance).
56000 was used mostly in audio applications due 24 bit word length but probably it was in general not so popular as TI DSP's (despite that TI DSP's fixed point are 16 bit).

FYI, Modern game console DSPs have a floating-point implementation e.g. Cadence Tensilica HiFi EP DSP with Tensilica Xtensa SP floating-point (FP32) support. This is replaced by AMD Polaris Compute Unit (CU, FP32) based DSP.

PS5 has extra GCN CU for DSP processing in addition to GPU's 36 active CU RDNA 2 (there's 40 CUs, 4 extra CUs for yield issues).

The Amiga is mostly about games.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Gorf

But that's only as "parallel" as any task under AmigaOS

Michal Schulz:
Now, I wanted to have a look at old AROS code which was written there by me and Kalamatee when we were testing AROS SMP. I have ported both SmallPT path tracer and Buddhabrot fractal generator to AmigaOS using P96, removed SMP code from there ...
https://www.patreon.com/posts/61450003

SmallPT is just starting 4 ordinary Exec tasks in this video. Nothing more.
This is running under unmodified AmigaOS.
One Core.

Some developers fall into the trap of equating multithreading to parallelism. That is not accurate.

You can have multithreading on a single-core machine, but you can only have parallelism on a multi-core machine.

"Parallel threads" wasn't true and it threw me off.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by babsimov

Thanks for these informations.

I reread what had been said to me and I was the one who didn't remember quite well enough.
In fact they explained to me that as you say, the most common DSPs at the time were those with fixed point. On the other hand, they said that the DSP 56001 was one of the best sellers. They didn't understand why Commodore had somehow isolated itself with the choice of the DSP 3210.

The selection for DSP3210 is for "render" i.e. AT&T's "3D and multimedia" use case. DSP3210's softmodem bonus was a business excuse. It's about games, not homework.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Tigerskunk

Commodore never understood what people loved about the Amiga1000 that was the reason they bought the technology in the cheaper form of an A500.

But then, some people here do not either .

For the 1989 timeline, my family paid an extra premium for A500 (Rev6, ECS Agnus) over the "lower cost Atari STe", but the PC wasn't games cost-effective.

The Amiga during its golden era had an extra hardware premium that wasn't the "lower cost Atari ST". The Amiga punched above its price class in relation to the PC.

Since A1200 has a healthy profit margin, A1200 with DSP3210 (or similar) and 32-bit Fast RAM would have punched above its price class in relation to the fast 386DX-33/386DX-40/486SX-25/486SX-33/486DX-33 PCs. UK game developers who were pushing cheap SuperFX/DSP for mass-produced game platforms would be satisfied with DSP3210.

It's about finding the sweet spot relative to the PC competition.

DSP32120 supported datatypes common with similar era 32-bit CPUs and FPU's FP32.

The A1200 was "PC JR'ed" to maximize the "healthy profit margin".

With a similar A1200 functionality, CD32 had 299 UKP target instead of A1200's $399 UKP target. A1200 is okay for 2D, but the 3D problem needs to be addressed.

[grelbfarlk]

Hey there's a thread on www.amigaworld.net with this very topic and it's very lively right now, we should all go over there to talk about this, instead of here, for everything else.

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by TEG

I mean bringing something to make dream of some wonder. A piece of tech to master to create some new wonderful graphic or sound effect i.e not being a boring PC.

SotB, Lionheart, Mr.Nutz: Amiga Magic!
WC, Wolfenstein 3D, Commanche: Boring PC (zzz)


The logic of this thread will never cease to amaze me

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by hammer

The Amiga is mostly about games.

The Amiga is NOT a games system

[Locutus]

Originally Posted by grelbfarlk

Hey there's a thread on www.amigaworld.net with this very topic and it's very lively right now, we should all go over there to talk about this, instead of here, for everything else.

I think we need to invite DoomMaster into this discussion for his unique perspective to freshen this discussion up.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by grelbfarlk

Hey there's a thread on www.amigaworld.net with this very topic and it's very lively right now, we should all go over there to talk about this, instead of here, for everything else.

Yeah, that sounds like an absolutely stellar idea

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Thorham

The Amiga is NOT a games system

1. When Amiga's game scene collapsed, it took out Amiga's non-games market with it.

Amithlon's "we don't care about games" mindset is a failure.

Unlike Apple's larger DTP market, Amiga's Video Toaster niche is NOT large enough to sustain Commodore.

Classic Amiga, AmigaPPC, and Amithlon weren't in the later social media video NLE revolution!

2. "Only the Amiga" rendered the full 32-bit 68020/68030 equipped Amigas as dead ends for 256-color gaming. Amiga's core graphics not being modular behaves like a game console system.

You can't handle the truth.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

SotB, Lionheart, Mr.Nutz: Amiga Magic!
WC, Wolfenstein 3D, Commanche: Boring PC (zzz)

The logic of this thread will never cease to amaze me

PC DOS had excellent Mortal Kombat 1 and 2 ports.

With a similar color selection style, PC DOS has Jazz Jackrabbit to counter Mr. Nutz: Hoppin' Mad(1994).

PC has Zool 2 ports from the Amiga. [ Show youtube player ]

PC's 2D games running on 286-16 Mhz and fast VGA.
[ Show youtube player ]
15:54 Body Blows
31:46 Gods
44:47 Pinball Fantasies
58:52 Prehistorik 2 wasn't available on the Amiga until open source port to the Amiga.

[ Show youtube player ]
PC DOS Illusion Blaze (1994).

[ Show youtube player ]
PC DOS's Jim Power: The Lost Dimension (1993)

1990s full 32-bit PC with fast VGA is not an "Atari ST" competitor.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by hammer

You can't handle the truth.

While that smiley was a joke, you're still wrong.