What spec would the A1200 had launched with if it was up to YOU

[Karlos]

People with any sense at the time didn't buy a GUS for gaming, they bought it because they wanted to use it musically.

If we are talking fantasy time, 8 channels of Paula, each independently ran through SSM low pass filters (with appropriate registers / HW to support the cutoff and resonance) and free panning.

[8bitbubsy]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I'm all for improvements to Paula so long as they don't cost an arm and a leg. But the idea that it was outdated compared to the very latest (announced in October 1992) top-of-the-line PC sound card is silly.

The budget sound chip inside the affordable Super Nintendo (released late 1990) is superior to Paula in most areas, despite its small 64K RAM space. Still silly?

[oscar_ates]

68020 28MHz, 2 mb fast and 60mb 3.5 inch HD would do great in 1991

[PortuguesePilot]

Originally Posted by 8bitbubsy

The budget sound chip inside the affordable Super Nintendo (released late 1990) is superior to Paula in most areas, despite its small 64K RAM space. Still silly?

Or the Seiko/HS HuV6280, a full PSG based on the EDC 65C02, released with the NEC PC Engine in 1987, was also an affordable alternative with up to 10 bit sound and 6 channels. May not be as good as Paula on the sampling but its also full PCM capable and beats Paula on everything else while being a PSG like the C64's SID, fully capable of FM Synthesis. Surely didn't cost an arm and leg in 1992 and a similar solution could have been added to the A1200 PCB.

[Cris1997XX]

Originally Posted by PortuguesePilot

Or the Seiko/HS HuV6280, a full PSG based on the EDC 65C02, released with the NEC PC Engine in 1987, was also an affordable alternative with up to 10 bit sound and 6 channels. May not be as good as Paula on the sampling but its also full PCM capable and beats Paula on everything else while being a PSG like the C64's SID, fully capable of FM Synthesis. Surely didn't cost an arm and leg in 1992 and a similar solution could have been added to the A1200 PCB.

Wait, let's make things a little more clear...the PC Engine's sound hardware is built into the CPU, so you couldn't use that specific type of PSG chip on a different console unless you straight up went to Hudson Soft/NEC and bought the entire motherboard. Even then, its bass kinda sounds like crap and it has limitations on PCM playback

[CCCP alert]

Originally Posted by StevenJGore

I think 1MB or 2MB fast RAM and a HDD would have put the retail price of the A1200 at about £600, i.e. double what I paid for mine.



My 120MB 2.5" HDD in 1993 cost £250. That was considered a good price at the time, and it included installation (i.e. taking my A1200 to the shop for it to be fitted).

A £2500 T1900 Toshiba laptop in 1993 came with a 120mb 2.5" HDD. Bit unrealistic to expect it inside a £400 computer. Because they ballsed up the CDTV so badly (due to piss poor software that made bugger all use of the CD-ROM to make massive PC HDD sized games for it worth playing) they probably didn't even think of the CD-ROM but that's the only way you are going to be playing PC 20mb HDD only sized complex more advanced games on a £400-500 computer.

Commodore charged what, a £100 extra for a 20mb equipped A1200? Forget hard drives on a £400 computer, not even Dell or Gateway ever managed that in the desktop format.

[Gorf]

As for sound:

The cheapest way (and therefor the most likely thing for Commodore to green light in 91) would be single or dual SID on the ClockPort.
That would give us 6 additional voices.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Cris1997XX

The YMF262 was released in 1990 as Wikipedia says, and it would've been way too recent for Amiga 1200. Plus the developers didn't take full advantage of its FM Synth capabilities, instead they just used it for lazy MIDI conversions, so I'd argue an OPL2 chip would've been just fine

You may be right about that, however it was used in many PC sound cards (including Sound Blaster 16, Adlib gold and Windows Sound System). If Commodore used OPL2 then Amiga fans would complain about it being 'outdated'.

More importantly it came in a small smd package rather than a wide 24 pin DIP, so it would take up much less space on the motherboard.

I recently bought a YMF262 chip, hoping to make a sound card for my A1200. This may go on the clock port or parallel port. I have several other sound chips too, including a YM3812 (OPL2) and YMZ284 (16 pin version of YM2149). I want to try them all!

[PortuguesePilot]

Originally Posted by Cris1997XX

Wait, let's make things a little more clear...the PC Engine's sound hardware is built into the CPU, so you couldn't use that specific type of PSG chip on a different console unless you straight up went to Hudson Soft/NEC and bought the entire motherboard. Even then, its bass kinda sounds like crap and it has limitations on PCM playback

I said a similar solution. I mentioned that specific chip just to show that the technology was there and affordable in 1987. A similar solution could have been developed in-house (if Commodore had maintained their MOS operations, since the HuC6280 is an evolution of the MOS 6502) or even sourced from WDC themselves. Using a CPU as a sound generator (and other operations. The 65C02 or alike could replace Paula altogether) is not unheard of, as you probably know, since several consoles used that resource as some arcade systems did. The Mega Drive itself - released in 1988 - had a Zilog Z80 reserved for special operations (as did the Neo Geo) and, as we all know, the Z80 is a CPU. Heck, even an upgraded SID could have been used on the Amiga line to give it a PSG (this has been discussed several times) since its advent in 1985. The Amiga's "bastard cousin", the X68000, in 1987 boosted not only a Yamaha YM2151 but also an OKI MSM6258, which may sound overkill in 1987 but should have been quite "cheapish" in 1992.

[Cris1997XX]

Originally Posted by PortuguesePilot

I said a similar solution. I mentioned that specific chip just to show that the technology was there and affordable in 1987. A similar solution could have been developed in-house (if Commodore had maintained their MOS operations, since the HuC6280 is an evolution of the MOS 6502) or even sourced from WDC themselves. Using a CPU as a sound generator (and other operations. The 65C02 or alike could replace Paula altogether) is not unheard of, as you probably know, since several consoles used that resource as some arcade systems did. The Mega Drive itself - released in 1988 - had a Zilog Z80 reserved for special operations (as did the Neo Geo) and, as we all know, the Z80 is a CPU. Heck, even an upgraded SID could have been used on the Amiga line to give it a PSG (this has been discussed several times) since its advent in 1985. The Amiga's "bastard cousin", the X68000, in 1987 boosted not only a Yamaha YM2151 but also an OKI MSM6258, which may sound overkill in 1987 but should have been quite "cheapish" in 1992.

The OKI MSM6258 has a single ADPCM channel, and it's not even that high quality (Its CPS1 cousin is more advanced in that regard). Since the Amiga already has a pretty nice synthesizer, I'd say just add true stereo panning, bump it up to 16bit and include a YM2151 in there too

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by CCCP alert

Commodore charged what, a £100 extra for a 20mb equipped A1200? Forget hard drives on a £400 computer, not even Dell or Gateway ever managed that in the desktop format.

The A1200HD/40 came with a 40MB Seagate hard drive. This was the most popular A1200 system that I sold in my shop. I don't remember the price but it was a good deal.

In the August 1993 issue of Amiga Format, WTS Electronics was selling the following:-
A1200 base model £369
A1200 with 20MB £459 (+£90)
A1200 with 40MB £499 (+£130)
A1200 with 120MB £629 (+£260)

Some other vendors offered a 40MB 2.5" drive for £120.

In the same issue AF had a competition with 20 prizes of a 40MB 3.5" internal hard drive for the A1200, supplied by Demon Software. The photo shows a Seagate low profile (24mm high?) drive just fitting. Demon Software was also giving away a free copy of Civilization AGA with any hard drive bought from them!

Though some 3.5" drives were thin enough to fit inside the A1200, I would rather have a 2.5" drive. Much lighter, lower power, more shock-proof and no problems with slow spin-up.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by PortuguesePilot

The Mega Drive itself - released in 1988 - had a Zilog Z80 reserved for special operations (as did the Neo Geo) and, as we all know, the Z80 is a CPU.

A1200 with Z80 CPU added. Now there's a thought...

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

A1200 with Z80 CPU added. Now there's a thought...

Or probably more realistic a 65CE02 in this case ...

But what would be the use case?

[Samurai_Crow]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Having both would be tricky anyway, since there was very little room left on the motherboard. You might get a trapdoor area too small to take much more than just the CPU.



Of course this wouldn't be such a problem in a larger case, as we saw with the A4000. But then you get the down side - this onboard RAM would be slower than a fast CPU, so you end up having to put RAM on the accelerator card anyway for best performance.

I was referring to the existing belly slot, not a SIMM card on the morherboard.

[grelbfarlk]

It should have had dual 5 1/4" bays on opposite sides where the floppy drive was.

Then an 030 with a copro slot.

Then they'd make Lisa and Alice with a bunch of empty unconnected gates and infused (or suffused) the gates with an entropy reversing matrix of chroniton particles. So as you used the machine things that were slow would eventually start getting faster.

Then they'd put in twin neutrino radios so you could exchange files or network with other A1200s if you knew the exact compass heading and inclination/declination to aim the emitter at.

Then they'd put in a methane gassifier/compositor into the power supply, so as long as you fed it leftovers it could decompose the food waste and burn it to provide a stable power supply, which also fixes the problem that we couldn't have laptop amigas, because the battrees of the time were so weak.

[Promilus]

@Gorf
Why 8bit in 32b machine in the first place?

[Samurai_Crow]

Originally Posted by Gorf

Such a mode would be nice indeed - but it would saturate the bus pretty much, wouldn't it? So not much memory access left for the CPU. So it is not really a suitably candidate for early 3D games. A real 8bit chunky mode in addition to that would still be a good thing.

(which could be archived pretty easy be moving the Akiko logic into Alice along with some buffers)

Without the Budgie upgrade, the existing 16-bit fetches of the blitter and copper wastes 75% of every page fetch and 75% of every page-mode write by the blitter. Using lookahead buffers on every 64-bit page fetch would just use the same bandwidth smarter.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Samurai_Crow

Without the Budgie upgrade, the existing 16-bit fetches of the blitter and copper wastes 75% of every page fetch and 75% of every page-mode write by the blitter. Using lookahead buffers on every 64-bit page fetch would just use the same bandwidth smarter.

I know, but how much of that newly gained bandwidth would a 320x240 copper-chunky mode at 12bit (as you suggested) eat up? How much would be left for the CPU?

Also:
using 64 bit fetches and buffers for the Blitter is fine … for aligned data. But for small areas (e.g. a vsprite or text) this would not help at all, since the next 16 pixels are in a different row or on a different bitplane.

For smaller blits it would be more useful to be able to perform two independent memory accesses within the usual 280ns time slot. Don’t know if this is possible with the 70ns RAM Commodore used or if this would require more expensive 60ns chips
(the ns numbers fir RAM are access times and not roundtrip times, wich are usually at least two times longer)

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Promilus

@Gorf
Why 8bit in 32b machine in the first place?

Depends on what it should do. There is a 6502 in your Amiga keyboard as controller.
The CSG 4510 (a 65CE02 plus CIA) was driving the LCD in the CDTV-CR

Such a 8bit chip could be possibly used to deflate the MFM signal from the floppy drive before it reaches Paula - that way an unaltered Paula could handle normal HD-drives.

Or it could be used to drive a SID chip for additional sound channels.

I don’t know it all of this is really useful/needed or the most elegant way to do it, hence my question for the actual use case of such an 8bit CPU in the A1200 to the people that suggested it here in this thread.

[Howardphilips]

When I read what-if threads like that, I can't help realising how difficult Commodore's choices were back then, as everybody seems to be persuaded that they have the right vision (hindsight included) but nobody seems to be of the same opinion.