Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[sandruzzo]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

They did, the number one request from developers was more ram, it was planned to ship with 1MB like the Falcon and Archimedes, but they upped it to 2mb

Good choice, but a little less disappointed implementation, since cpu can't go access to it at full speed

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by sandruzzo

Good choice, but a little less disappointed implementation, since cpu can't go access to it at full speed

Hey they added it, you didn’t expect them to go further than that

[sandruzzo]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

Hey they added it, you didn’t expect them to go further than that

A little bit of effort by Commodore?

[amigang]

A1200 was my first Amiga, so it hard for me to judge, I think a back at all the games I enjoyed the most and I think Im pretty glad I had an A1200. Wing Commander, Geoff Crammon Grand Prix, Frontier Elite 2 all could run on an A500, but the fps of these games on the A1200 really made them playable. Then there are the later games that pushed the AGA chipset Alien Breed 3d, Super Stardust AGA, Slam title, Theme Park AGA all are real classic that I would of hated not being able to play.

[arcanist]

12 year old me wasn't disappointed, even though I got a A1200 late in 1995. We couldn't afford a decent PC.

OS 3 (upgrading from 1.3), a 170MB hard disk, proper 8bpp color and prettier games. I'd later add a multisync monitor, 030/50 and a modem, tower convert it, almost got 24-bit graphics (sadly couldn't get a free Picasso II to work ).

That little guy took me on a journey through all kinds of creative applications. DICE C and later Storm C got me started on my career. I still program C professionally today.

Now, as a hobbyist, I'm still not disappointed by the A1200. It just needs some fast RAM to relieve bandwidth to the AGA chipset, and that should have been standard. It hasn't been explored much because AGA often gets conflated with accelerators, where the chipset becomes less useful, but I think the best AGA demos have yet to be written.

[backslash]

I never had an A1200 but I started with an A500 in 1987 and loved it and still love it, though I don't have one anymore at hand. :-( The 1200 simply arrived too late for me because around 1992 I already jumped ship and bought a PC (486DX2/33). And boy what a letdown DOS and Windows was and kinda still is to this very day coming from an Amiga. The only thing that comes somewhat close to the Amiga feeling was a Mac when I bought one some 6-7 years ago. It is this feeling that the machine bahaves more like an appliance than an actual computer. Hard to describe...

I lived by the way around the corner of the founding members of Tristar and Red Sector in Düsseldorf. Kinda very active cracker FFC also lived nearby and I visited him also here and there with a friend but we never where real friends or so. I did some demo graphics with Deluxe Paint here and there and created the Loser Demo (http://janeway.exotica.org.uk/release.php?id=29485) with my friends shaming a classmate. :-) At some point while sending some graphics to Vision Factory, I always got the latest stuff from them via mail right to my (parents) inbox. Thanks for this btw. whoever it was! Later on I also bought an US Robotics HST Courier modem and did some blue boxing. I was also close friend to Archangel who ran the Terrordome BBS running it on an rocked down A500 without top cover and using it as an ashtray!!! The very same person who later became better know as DJ Perplexer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXnWlooxUIg). Great times but sadly Commodore missed the opportunity and delivered too little too late. Though I think they couldn't have done much about it. The future was already written on the wall.

The initial Amiga feeling never came back but that is clear since the Amiga was my first computer and was kind of my first love. It also influenced my professional career and the intention to do something with computers as a job later on and so I became a User Experience Designer. I don't think this would have happened if I haven't had an Amiga in the first place. <3

[swinkamor12]

Commodore bankrupt because for price of Amiga 1200 you can buy 386 SX with graphics faster than Amiga 4000.
I just check old ads. In november 1992 for price of a1200 which means 600 USD,
many sellers offer 25 MHz 386SX with 2 MB RAM, better grahics than Amiga 1200 and Amiga 4000
without monitor,hd, sound card for less than 600 USD.
Some here compare 386SX with HD and monitor and more memory to bare a1200 and get 386SX was more expensive, it is stupid.
Especially memory. To add additional RAM to Amiga 1200 additional hardware was needed which cost in summer 1993 at least 300 USD.
For 900 USD everyone can buy in 1993 decent 386 DX.
a1200 was very expensive computer for what it is worth.
Of course after Commodore bankruptcy prices of a1200 drop.

1995. In 1995 new games were released mostly for PC and PS1 and a1200 was more expensive pegasos - toy for litte kids.

Most annoying thing in a1200 was graphics.
Amiga gpu - blitter was designed in 1983 when pc has worse graphics than c64,
when pc graphics cards has only 16 KB RAM and use 8 bit chips like 6845 also used in Amstrad CPC.
And by teen years between buying Amiga (1984) and bankruptcy (1994)
Commodore change only one thing in blitter - expand some registers in 1988 so blitter can adress 2MB RAM (0.5 MB in 1983).
Time passed by but Commodore still sell hardware almost no changed since 1983.
On pc was Comanche, Wolf 3D, Ultima Underworld but a1200 still has gpu from 1983 as fast as it was in 1983,
when pc has graphics on 8 bit level and on some pc software was loaded from cassete recorder like on 8 bit.
It should not surprise anyone that they finally went bankrupt.

[malko]

^ have you tried to emulate such 386" beast" (same config as the one on the advert you mention) and compare it with a A1200 ?
I am sure you can find in abandonware sites some games to suit it. Then you can come back with some factual things instead of saying that everybody is wrong.

[Hewitson]

Originally Posted by mcgeezer

Yup, loading network drivers into the 640kb base - a true pain.

Never heard of DEVICEHIGH & LOADHIGH?

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by swinkamor12

Commodore bankrupt because for price of Amiga 1200 you can buy 386 SX with graphics faster than Amiga 4000.
I just check old ads. In november 1992 for price of a1200 which means 600 USD,
many sellers offer 25 MHz 386SX with 2 MB RAM, better grahics than Amiga 1200 and Amiga 4000

you don't seen to understand the difference of DX and SX.
the 386SX has only a 16bit data bus and only 24bit address bus.

It is essentially a drop-in replacement for the 286, so manufacturers could use their old 16bit mainboards with a 386.

Memory access is slow on a SX!!

and the VGA cards back then had usually no acceleration at all.
they are just frame buffers, with no gpu.

and your PC still got no sound..

Especially memory. To add additional RAM to Amiga 1200 additional hardware was needed which cost in summer 1993 at least 300 USD.
For 900 USD everyone can buy in 1993 decent 386 DX.

yes, but on a 900$ 386DX you need still money to add RAM!

so you are now comparing an upgraded 1200 with FastRAM to an PC with less RAM...

It should not surprise anyone that they finally went bankrupt.

everyone is agreeing that they needed to do much more R&D and at least AAA by 93 and yes with that kind of management it is astonishing they lasted as log as they did - but your comparisons are still wrong.

[lesta_smsc]

Amiga was cheaper than PC for the same selection of games and let's not forget most games were made for A500 so essentially stock machines ran them fine although more and more then required 1MB RAM... hence with A600 this was eliminated unless you needed to use Relokick.

[rue]

During the years I used it - no I wasn't disappointed with the A1200. While it was nowhere near as impressive as the A500 in its time - when my notion of what a computer was capable of was defined by the likes of the C64 and Spectrum it was still a great computer for its time and price and for me saw far more use as a computer compared to the A500.

I can't say the machine isn't flawed though - much of it is the legacy of management decisions in engineering at the time and it's frustrating to think that it could have been much better if certain choices weren't made. The PCMCIA and 2.5" HDD feel like hold-overs from the A600 design to get it out the door quickly and should really have been a combination of an A500-like edge connector and 3.5". The lack of FastRAM and HD floppy drive might have been because of cost considerations but they didn't even have a cheap (say sub-£100) A1201/2 like the A501 or A601 at or soon after launch was a mistake.

More troublesome was the chipset: They had AA working in early '91 and knew what they wanted to do with it (Eggebrecht/Haynie: 'AA+ is what we wanted AA to be but didn't have the time'/'We were only allowed to do one chip') - either they should have launched those machines late '91/early '92 or spent the extra time and money to develop AA into the proposed AA+. Instead they halted AA work and tried to push more and more ECS machines out dooming the A1200 to be introduced into a now confused low-end market and so late that they missed Xmas in quantity.

In short as summed up plenty of times in this thread: It was too little and too late. But ontop of that some amazingly bad management.


So given this why wasn't I disappointed with the A1200?

It had a nice small footprint yet was very upgradable. My A1200 saw the following: A ~100MB 2.5"HDD, Blizzard 1230-IV with some (4MB? then 8MB) FastRAM, A CD-ROM drive before finally a 040 card (I was disappointed with this) and a ~1GB slim 3.5" HDD. Apart from the 040 every upgrade felt like a significant step forward and made the machine nicer to use. What started as a good machine became great.

While there were plenty of incompatibilities at the start with the arrival of Relokick it played almost all of my A500 game collection - and while AGA titles were mostly poor ports from OCS not leveraging enough of the advantages offered the games library I had at the end of the A1200s life was expansive filled to the brim with great titles.

The OS was simply astounding. While I'd tinkered a bit with WB 1.2/1.3 what we got with the A1200 was where I spent a lot of my time. Really I think it spoiled me. After moving over to a PC sometime in late '97 my experience really underscored just how nice the Amigas OS was - it felt like such a huge backwards step. The PC might have poopoo'd on the Amiga from a great height for games during this golden age but for all its power dear God were Windows and DOS absolute dogs to use.


In retrospect given the money and choice back then I probably would have been happier with a PC for games, it's just the way the industry was going, but there was no way I could afford it. Later on I'd probably have been happier with a modestly upgraded A1200 (maybe even just FastRAM+HDD or 020@28Mhz - my default UAE setup nowadays) complimenting it with a Playstation since it was the first that could do 3D that looked like it moved the goalposts forward from the likes of Starglider 2, Carrier Command, Stunt Car Racer and the like. Still I can't say I regret it.

So yeah, in the end I thought it was great. The A1200 was the last computer I'd any real affection until Apple released the PPC Mac Mini for £399 - another little cheap computer that could. The A1200 followed by the A500 remain at the top of my pile though, by far.

[swinkamor12]

Originally Posted by Gorf

you don't seen to understand the difference of DX and SX.
the 386SX has only a 16bit data bus and only 24bit address bus.

It is simple. 386SX has faster graphics than a4000 and 386 DX even faster.

It is essentially a drop-in replacement for the 286, so manufacturers could use their old 16bit mainboards with a 386.

Memory access is slow on a SX!!

and the VGA cards back then had usually no acceleration at all.
they are just frame buffers, with no gpu.

Yes I know this. 25 MHz 386 SX was almost two times slower than a1200 68020 14 MHz.
But in 256 colors 25 MHz 386 SX is still able to draw lines faster than amiga blitter.
hint: chunky pixels.

yes, but on a 900$ 386DX you need still money to add RAM!

so you are now comparing an upgraded 1200 with FastRAM to an PC with less RAM...

To add fast ram to a1200 You have to use addidtional hardware very expensive in 1993.
That costs in 1993 the same money as upgrade pc form 386 SX to 386 DX.
I compare a1200 with 386 DX with addidtional memory because at that time it cost the same.

everyone is agreeing that they needed to do much more R&D and at least AAA by 93 and yes with that kind of management it is astonishing they lasted as log as they did - but your comparisons are still wrong.

I'm always right in my comparisons.

[vulture]

"I'm always right in my comparisons"

troll

[Gardhul]

First and only Amiga was A1200 for me, in 1990, so can't be disappointed at all. Maybe the AGA chipset came a bit too late in comparison to VGA...

[grond]

Originally Posted by Gardhul

First and only Amiga was A1200 for me, in 1990

The A1200 came out in 1992

[Gardhul]

Originally Posted by grond

The A1200 came out in 1992

mmm I had some calcs and I was sure about the year, but obviously I remember wrong... it was a couple years later then...

[sneckburger]

Don't forget Amiga didn't die because of competition from the PC market. It was simply poor mismanagement of Commodore.
We were all waiting for an successor to the A1200 but it never came, even the magazines and games companies were all holding on as long as they could.
With more of a following than any other platform at the time I find it amazing on how badly Commodore screwed everything up!

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by sneckburger

We were all waiting for an successor to the A1200 but it never came, even the magazines and games companies were all holding on as long as they could.

I was waiting for a successor to the A500, and when the A1200 arrived, everybody I knew who had an Amiga before had already left for the PC, where as I bought myself a SNES, since I didn't have the money for a full PC setup.

I didn't even know there was a A1200, until I got interested in the Amiga again around 2006.

[sneckburger]

A1200 was an evolutionary step forward. I suppose it wasn't groundbreaking like the A500, but it was a move forward. Commodore needed something new and they must have known it wouldn't have lasted by resting its laurels.

I was in it mainly for the games but I did have little interest in other things like paint and Amos.
I came later to the scene than you I suppose as I wanted any Amiga like my mates A500+ and the A600 was the only new option my family could afford at that time.
I'd have had an A1200 if they were in my budget for a Christmas present but I was very happy with my A600 for a few years at least until I saw that the A1200 could do more. Then I sold it for a A1200.