17 December 2023, 11:40 | #2941 | |
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17 December 2023, 11:59 | #2942 | |
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LoL, noone can say and you neither ! Only thing I know for sure: not enough sells was the best way to kill the Amiga quickly and it did. Last edited by logo; 17 December 2023 at 13:41. |
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17 December 2023, 12:09 | #2943 |
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The home computer era was on its last legs. The A1200 was one of the last of its kind and nothing could have stopped that. There where only 2 directions left: console and big box.
The commodore big box amigas were hopelessly overpriced and didn't have the sexiness factor in design like the later apple products With CD32 Commo tried but it was too little too late... |
17 December 2023, 13:21 | #2944 |
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Sure I can. 68k was EOL by that time with focus going to AIM (PPC) and you know it. So even if Commodore did survive Amiga as we know it would not. Deal with it already.
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17 December 2023, 13:38 | #2945 |
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17 December 2023, 13:49 | #2946 |
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Amiga isn't a CPU. With more money Commodore would have been able to select another CPU. From Coldfire to PPC or PA-RISC, all kinds of moves were possible. You're not able to come back in the past and to create a fork in the timeline, are you ? Your comment is hypothetical only. Deal with it !
Last edited by logo; 17 December 2023 at 14:01. |
17 December 2023, 14:15 | #2947 | |
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Coldfire - not a directly compatible processor. New OS and existing apps would either lag behind 060 or need recompilation. In the end CPUs were considered lowend as V4 which had at least some compute power was released when desktop computers reached twice or thrice the speed. Including PPC. And of course development stopped with V5 made for single customer. Dead end. PPC - entirely new architecture and it was developed when Commodore went bankrupt. Let's just revise how well it went. First H&P and P5 did create hybrid design. Then they were supposed to create real native PPC OS and hardware. It did took them a lot longer than expected. P5 went bankrupt. Several "amiga" ppc models were introduced afterwards with the newest badass platform is based on pretty old PPC core and costs as much as the newest and most badass x86 gaming PC. Yay! Another dead end! PA-RISC - another one entirely incompatible platform which was supposed to be x86 killer and ended up pretty much dead in 2005. Yet another dead end! It's obviously great amiga community has such zealous fanboys, if only more ppl were using less reason and more emotions choosing their hardware... |
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17 December 2023, 15:23 | #2948 | |
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Say what you will but that's one sexy phone. |
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17 December 2023, 20:29 | #2949 |
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I would buy it in a heartbeat.
My Samsung Galaxy A01 Core doesn't have the stuff that AMIGAphone500 has. 20 years into the 21st century and they can't even give me a frick'n notepad! I bet it wouldn't randomly get stuck on and drain the battery in 5 minutes without warning either. Last edited by Bruce Abbott; 18 December 2023 at 03:46. |
17 December 2023, 23:33 | #2950 |
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19 December 2023, 22:03 | #2951 | |
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They saw Wolfenstein 3d before the A1200 was released but it was too late for design changes. But probably the reason for why CD32 got C2P in Akiko. If you look at design vs parts cost, it would cost very little to throw in a faster CPU, yes it cost a few more buck but very little R&D needed, but then they would also have needed fast ram and that combo maybe pushed it over the treshold… But technically, a 28 MHz 020 + some fastmem would had run Wolfenstein just fine and the maybe ppl would have been less dissapointed ;-) |
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19 December 2023, 23:08 | #2952 | |
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So Commodore wasn't totally clueless. http://obligement.free.fr/articles/itwidsoftware.php |
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19 December 2023, 23:27 | #2953 |
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I suppose that depends on who you are talking about at Commodore. ;-)
(sorry)... Although that is after the A1200's release, so it wouldn't have helped there. Depending on how early they were talking, it's possible that was too late for the CD32 design even, although if those discussions happened early enough, they might have possibly been a partial driver for Akiko... No, as I read it (well, Google Translate there), this was after the CD32 was finalized... So, interesting, but too late to affect either machine's abilities... |
19 December 2023, 23:33 | #2954 |
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How much would a PC capable of running Wolfenstein 3D have cost in late 1992 though? Was it realistic to expect a £400 A1200 to be capable of it? Maybe it could have been 28Mhz and fastRAM for £5-600, but could games designed around such hardware be feasible from floppies? Add a hard drive and you're into the £6-700 range, which is probably more than people were willing to pay, at least until there was software to use it? I wonder if putting a 68000 on alongside the 68020, for compatibility and a potential 40-50% speed boost if programmers used it, would have made more sense? Would there be technical issues with that?
And how outdated would a budget 1992 PC have been by Christmas 1994? By that time the A1200 was cut off by Commodore's demise and the lack of new users that year, but it was just starting to hit its stride, with stuff like Super Stardust, Banshee and Pinball Illusions, and getting things like UFO and Bloodnet first (and more colourful and faster). Obviously the Playstation and Saturn did things a stock A1200 realistically couldn't, so it wouldn't've truly lasted, but we know there would have been more fun to be had before we had to upgrade or move on. I never had an A1200 in its heyday, but I was a bit jealous of people who did. |
19 December 2023, 23:42 | #2955 |
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IMO, the only thing the A1200 was lacking is a 40Mb HD as standard. This is what was asked by american developpers to continue supporting the Amiga.
The users would have added more ram quickly after that, to avoid launching games by a command line on boot and to benefits some extra speed. A500 example showed that the ONLY thing the vast majority of Amiga users were keen (and able ) to do is adding extra ram by the trapdoor. . |
19 December 2023, 23:44 | #2956 |
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I just wish Commodore would have put a SIMM socket or two on the board for Fast RAM addition.
I wouldn't think that would have increased the cost too much and would have made at least adding some Fast RAM an affordable option for more... Even those 8M Fast RAM cards were outside my price range back then after getting the 1200. |
20 December 2023, 04:15 | #2957 | ||
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So the problem with Wolf 3D wasn't the hardware, just a lack of will to do a proper port. id ignored the A1200 because there weren't enough users to justify the effort. They couldn't even be bothered producing an SNES port after being given a US$100,000 advance to do it! Wolfenstein 3D Quote:
[ Show youtube player ] Further proof that a stock A1200 could do it is this Wolf 3D level using the Dread engine, proving that it could have been done on the A500 too! [ Show youtube player ] What all this proves is that in 1992 the A1200 was quite capable of hosting awesome games. The real problem wasn't the hardware, it was lack of talent and willingness to rise to the challenge. This might have been different if more A1200 were sold, which means the most important thing was to get it out ASAP. The only real failure of the A1200 was not releasing it sooner. A year earlier texture mapped 3D was just a curiosity and affordable PCs weren't as powerful, so the A1200 wouldn't have been disappointing and would have had a good user base by the time Wolfenstein 3D arrived. Last edited by Bruce Abbott; 20 December 2023 at 05:27. |
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20 December 2023, 05:25 | #2958 | |||||
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For context, Wolfenstein 3D was ported to the SNES, Acorn Archimedes, Apple Macintosh, and Atari Jaguar in 1994, the 3DO in 1995 and the Apple IIGS in 1998. So by the time other platforms got it the cost of upgrading your A1200 to play it better wasn't onerous. Quote:
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But this was not the home computer way. We expected to buy a machine and use it for many years with minimal upgrades. The Amiga was for those of us who didn't want to be constantly buying new computers just to keep up. Home computer developers enjoyed trying to get more out of existing hardware rather than taking the lazy way out, a trend that has also continued until today. Some of us are just getting into it 30 years later! |
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20 December 2023, 08:02 | #2959 | |
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And these technical reasons are also why they didn't made an Amiga port : they were thinking the Amiga just could'nt do it. Last edited by sokolovic; 20 December 2023 at 08:07. |
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20 December 2023, 18:06 | #2960 |
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Every successful project comes from careful consideration... how much time and money to invest into a project. How big will be the reward... SNES was not a platform of choice for id due to insufficient performance, despite the fairly large userbase. FX did solve some problems but in the end SNES DOOM is made by 3rd party and uses different engine whatsoever. AFAIK all Jaguar, 32X and Saturn ports were recently heavily improved when ppl actually learned how to write on those platform efficiently. Amiga required special coding AND reward for that wasn't so big due to miniscule number of AGA users back then. So there was absolutely no point in doing Amiga port by id. But even if they did it would not translate to more money for Commodore... most likely it would only mean more money for Phase5 or other turbo makers. And even less of the usual "economical" argument Bruce throws left and right. And it the end it would have changed nothing.
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