Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

The only real 'teething problem' the Amiga had with PCMCIA was that it wasn't a PC. This meant that most PC cards wouldn't work 'out of the box' in the Amiga because the drivers were made for PC laptops. We would have to write our own drivers, which wasn't easy when the card manufacturer didn't publish the required hardware details.

However Amiga hardware designers soon realized that they could make their own PCMCIA devices relatively cheaply because the bus interface was actually quite simple. Performance was good too, twice as fast as Zorro II when in the A1200.

Ali was not responsible for putting PCMCIA on the A600 (and A1200). It was Jeff Porter, designer of the LCD portable and A500, who came up with the idea of putting PCMCIA in the A600. It was also his idea to drop the numeric keys and use smd to make the PCB and case smaller - all with the goal of making it cheaper (which was what Ali wanted). He put PCMCIA in it to replace the Zorro expansion port on the A500, which would be too large for the A600.

A600 has TTL chips for bridging between Agnus's Custom Chip Bus and Gayle/PCMCIA bus. There's are extra TTL chips for PC's byte Swap issues with PCMCIA.

Bridgette's purpose in the A4000 is cost reduce A3000's several TLL chips bridging CPU bus and Custom Chip bus.

Bridgette's purpose
1. Bridge CPU bus to Custom Chip Bus
2. Bridge CPU bus to expansion bus.

R&D resources were wasted on "A1000Jr".

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

As has been previously stated, the Germans wanted a hard drive in the A600 - a good idea IMO. The IDE interface was cheap and allowed the use of a physically smaller internal hard drive that matched the rest of the machine. Compared to the equivalent A500 setup this was a much cheaper solution.

It wasn't a good idea when Commodore was driven into unsustainable P&L loss during 1992.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

In late 1991 the A590 with 20MB XT-IDE drive was selling for £279. In mid 1992 an A600 with 20MB 2.5" drive cost only £95 more than the stock (floppy only) machine. With 2MB RAM the A590 cost £369. A 4MB PCMCIA card for the A600 cost £149. A 4MB RAM expansion box for the A500 cost £179. So having PCMCIA and IDE ports made the A600 cheaper to expand. You could have a 20MB hard drive and 4MB of FastRAM for £35 less than just the 20MB hard drive alone on the A500.

IDE itself is okay, but PCMCIA's extras TTLs wasn't a cost reduction.

A590 has SCSI and XT IDE interfaces with DMac DMA chip and memory controller for Fast RAM.

A600's IDE is just 1986 era PIO Mode 0.

Reference
http://www.kaiiv.de/servicemanuals/A...Schematics.pdf

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Those TTL chips isolate the PCMCIA port from the CPU bus. This was a cheap solution with practically zero development costs, and important to prevent possible ESD damage to sensitive custom chips etc.

http://www.kaiiv.de/servicemanuals/A...Schematics.pdf
Read A600's schematics on "byte swapped" with PCMCIA.

You didn't get the purpose for Bridgette cost reduction against several TTLs.

A600 has less profit margin when compared to A500.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

Dear god, this really is one of the WTHWTThinking design questions. For those who have never had an ST, it really can drive a man to tears...

Indeed, what were they thinking? The Archimedes A3000 did the same thing with its mouse port.

Combine that boneheaded port placement with the squishy keys, stupid angled function keys and vent slots, and the ugly graunchy mouse, and you have a machine that just isn't nice to use. BTW if I see another ST with the mouse cord hanging down over the front of the desk I will spew.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by hammer

You didn't get the purpose for Bridgette cost reduction against several TTLs.

The A600 only has a 16 bit bus so using a custom bridging chip wouldn't reduce costs much. The A1200 uses Budgie to do the PCMCIA data bus, 'saving' two TTL transceiver chips. This makes it a bit less robust than the A600.

One of the projects I am looking at doing is a PCMCIA 'breakout' board for experimenting with various devices. I will be using the A600 for this because I would rather not blow up any of the custom chips in my A1200. If I damage a 74LS245 it's not a problem because they are readily available and dirt cheap (I have dozens of them salvaged off old PC motherboards).

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

In late 1991 the A590 with 20MB XT-IDE drive was selling for £279. In mid 1992 an A600 with 20MB 2.5" drive cost only £95 more than the stock (floppy only) machine. With 2MB RAM the A590 cost £369. A 4MB PCMCIA card for the A600 cost £149. A 4MB RAM expansion box for the A500 cost £179. So having PCMCIA and IDE ports made the A600 cheaper to expand. You could have a 20MB hard drive and 4MB of FastRAM for £35 less than just the 20MB hard drive alone on the A500.

https://archive.org/details/AmigaFor.../n235/mode/2up
239 of 310, Jan 1992
GVP Series 2 Hard Disk Controller Frame is 169 UKP.


ICD's AdSpeed/IDE is the low cost option for A500.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

The A600 only has a 16 bit bus so using a custom bridging chip wouldn't reduce costs much. The A1200 uses Budgie to do the PCMCIA data bus, 'saving' two TTL transceiver chips.

Commodore's goal is cost reduction.

There are several TTLs that Bridgette has replaced.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

This makes it a bit less robust than the A600.

Not a major issue for my A1200 when I don't experiment with PCMCIA.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

One of the projects I am looking at doing is a PCMCIA 'breakout' board for experimenting with various devices. I will be using the A600 for this because I would rather not blow up any of the custom chips in my A1200. If I damage a 74LS245 it's not a problem because they are readily available and dirt cheap (I have dozens of them salvaged off old PC motherboards).

Again, not a major issue for my A1200 when I don't experiment with PCMCIA.

[sandruzzo]

Commodore's goal? They didn't know it at all!

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Combine that boneheaded port placement with the squishy keys, stupid angled function keys and vent slots, and the ugly graunchy mouse, and you have a machine that just isn't nice to use.

Like I said, I don't mind the slanted keys myself (maybe a bit squishy is true thou) but if I really wanted to vent about the usability it'd be the GEM TOS itself, maybe not even its general simplicity (Jack didn't have time to fool around har har) but the fact it seems to take at least several clicks of the mouse to get any reaction from anything (eg open folder).

I mean, to this day I'm unsure if it's "just me" or is it what's happening to everybody? Because I have only used ST via FPGA, so not with a native mouse, and my real ST has an adapter for USB mouse, so also not native, and so maybe it's the user (ie me) error?

[hammer]

Originally Posted by sandruzzo

Commodore's goal? They didn't know it at all!

What should happen with relatively low risk:
1. A500 with IDE. Modified Gary into Gayle with IDE. Surface Mounted Chips can be applied.

2. A300 replaced C64c.

-------------
Real timeline:
1. A300 evolved into A600 with PCMCIA and IDE. A600 has a higher manufacturing cost and less profit for Commodore when compared to A500.

2. Cancelled A500.

3. A600 was a sales flop.

[sandruzzo]

@hammer

Sorry Mate, but we know that datas, you're always post them: why? I don't get the point,a nd I would like to

[hammer]

Originally Posted by sandruzzo

@hammer

Sorry Mate, but we know that datas, you're always post them: why? I don't get the point,a nd I would like to

Bruce Abbott defends the A600.

[sandruzzo]

@hammer

A ok...Thanks

[TCD]

They both are on a mission. Not sure either will ever be accomplished, but there we are.

[sandruzzo]

@TCD

Gotcha!

[TEG]

Thanks all for the explanations about Jeff Franck and Jeff Porter. However Ali being the top manager, he can't be completely cleared.

It's certain that without drivers PCMCIA was useless. So it lead once again to the question why they did half the job? Why they didn't sold PCMCIA cards with the good driver at the launch of the A600 and A1200 !?? Would have be a very good point to market the machine and have articles written about this. They were not big enough to have the specs or what? And selling extensions is a good way to make bucks. So for me Ali can be blamed to have miss organized all that and not required the drivers from his team.

Thanks @Hammer for David Pleasance's book extract and the Intel video. I don't know how you manage to have all that in mind!

Finally do we know why the A600 was more expensive to manufacture than the A500? From what is said here, there was some TTL added to manage the IDE, the IDE connector and the PCMCIA connector.
I don't understand how it can overtake the gain of the CMD process and the remove of the numeric pad.

[babsimov]

Originally Posted by hammer

I dislike Falcon/ST's function keys.

Tastes and colors

That said, over time, I've come across a lot of people who preferred the ST design in the Amiga community, like me. And despite everything, the design of the case is not everything, since I preferred to take an Amiga for what was inside.

I dislike Falcon's 16-bit gimped 68030 CPU which locked out the built-in CPU's 32-bit expansion capability.

Yes, the Falcon is not free from flaws like the 1200.
But, in many ways the hardware inside is what should have been in the new generation of Amiga (chunky display, more sound channels (16 bit sound) and in addition a DSP). From my point of view, the Atari teams did their job better than those from Commodore on this generation (expect for the 030 on a 16 bit bus).

AT&T marketed DSP3210 for 3D and multimedia acceleration.

Yes but Commodore never released it.


However, on another forum I had many discussions with the Falcon community about the DSP and also the comparison with the DSP3210.
DSP connoisseurs explained me that the choice of the DSP3210 for the Amiga was quite curious. It is a scientific DSP at its core (floating calculations). To be equivalent in performance (MIPS) to Motorola's DSP 56001, it had to operate at higher frequencies. They also explained to me that Motorola's DSP was already well known at the time and therefore it was quite easy to find already well documented code for this DSP. The DSP3210 seemed less common and therefore less easy to program at first glance.

Regarding Commodore's choice of DSP 3210. In reality Dave Haynie didn't look far as explained here :
https://www.a1k.org/forum/index.php?.../76673/page-97
It's more of a coincidence that they thought of DSP in the Amiga. In fact, it was an Amiga user passionate about astronomy who had started to create a DSP card (AT&T DSP32) for his Amiga 2000 and who was friends with someone who had experience at Commodore. With the help of Commodore technicians he was able to build his DIY DSP32 card. Following this a meeting between AT&T and Commodore was arranged. After a demo, it was decided that the DSP3210 would be integrated into the future Amiga. But, it does not actually appear that the engineering teams have compared with others DSPs on the market. So maybe another DSP would have been better or more suitable. Motorola had a floating point DSP also, the 96000. Maybe it would have been as good or better? Perhaps software support would have been more widespread ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_96000

Do not be mistaken, I don't say that I wouldn't have been happy to have a DSP3210 in the Amiga. I've already said that I waited until the end for the DSP card promised for the 1200. It's just that if the DSP was considered in the Amiga, to me, it seems to me more of a coincidence than a real study about DSP advantage.
I was very happy to learn about the recreation of the AA3000+ including the DSP and even happier to discover that enthusiasts had succeeded in making the DSP work.

The A3000's case designers didn't factor in the Video Toaster use case i.e. it's style over function.

Yes, the 3000 case for sure has style.

But, from my point of view, it is a serious mistake not to have ensured that this case would be physicaly compatible with the flagship product (the videotoaster) which make miga desktops success in the United States.
The Amiga 3000 was supposed to be the replacement for the existing desktop range, and this product can't fit the Videotoaster !
Proof that it was a serious mistake, Commodore will be forced to continue producing Amiga 2500 just for the Videotaoster. The link about the A2631 card show Dave Haynie must have half-heartedly admitted that in the end the 3000 was perhaps not as good design as he thought.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by babsimov

But, from my point of view, it is a serious mistake not to have ensured that this case would be physicaly compatible with the flagship product (the videotoaster) which make miga desktops success in the United States.
The Amiga 3000 was supposed to be the replacement for the existing desktop range, and this product can't fit the Videotoaster !
Proof that it was a serious mistake, Commodore will be forced to continue producing Amiga 2500 just for the Videotaoster. The link about the A2631 card show Dave Haynie must have half-heartedly admitted that in the end the 3000 was perhaps not as good design as he thought.

Within the given constraints by management ("No new chips!") the A3000 motherboard was a very good design. And while I love the outer design of the case, it has its quirks in the inside and of course they should definitely made provisions to fit a VideoToaster inside - this alone would have doubled the sales of the A3000 for sure (low bar).

The integrated flicker-fixer was of course a hack and should have incorporated the Hadley-Device, which would have given real high resolution options for CAD and ray-tracers ...

A follow-up AA3000 as soon as the chips were ready (a whole year before the A4000) would also have made some impact.

The technology was already there, but management missed the opportunity.

[sandruzzo]

Why are almost all mad for DSP? Numbers aren't actual performance

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by sandruzzo

Why are almost all mad for DSP? Numbers aren't actual performance

Low price compared to a math coprocessor, sound capabilities, could be used as a soft modem, could assist mp3 decoding ...

In the early 90s DSPs had a nice window of opportunity until CPUs got powerful enough to make them obsolete.
For a self proclaimed multimedia machine the inclusion of a DSP would have been a logical step.

[sandruzzo]

@Gorf

Amiga need better HW capabilities first..Maybe Dsp would have been great on A4000, but I would have add a PPC, that would have been useful