Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[freehand]

Originally Posted by Lord Aga

Dude, you're so much better than the rest of us. We envy you so much

wtf.

I was disappointed in the 1200 so looked for an alternative just my opinion.

Why would reply in such a way.

[lmimmfn]

At the time of the Amiga Format review of the A1200 i was really disappointed by the spec as the Atari Falcon was previewed in some other magazine a month or so beforehand and on paper( and in hindsight ) has much better spec. The Falcon however was mega expensive, i think it was £700 for a 4MB version.
I wanted a Falcon but had to settle on the A1200 and picked it up in Oct/Nov '92, i loved it and always have and still have the same A1200, but it was a compromise machine on price rather than an A500 which was the best computer available at the time regardless of price.

[redblade]

Originally Posted by freehand

When I was referring to scrolling I was talking about smooth scrolling like shoot em ups the pc was terrible at the time amiga has hardware scroll so very good most of the time.

PC Vertical scrolling should be like the Atari-ST scrolling? It should be easier and more smoother to do then horizontal scrolling??

Originally Posted by lmimmfn

At the time of the Amiga Format review of the A1200 i was really disappointed by the spec as the Atari Falcon was previewed in some other magazine a month or so beforehand and on paper( and in hindsight ) has much better spec. The Falcon however was mega expensive, i think it was £700 for a 4MB version.

I think that 700 came with a 40MB HDD. Maybe it would have sold more if the 1MB came with 2MB as standard.

I've only seen one Atari ST in New Zealand, and never saw it in a shop, or an Atari magazine here.

[freehand]

Originally Posted by redblade

PC Vertical scrolling should be like the Atari-ST scrolling? It should be easier and more smoother to do then horizontal scrolling??

.

I was talking about horizontal scrolling.

[Amiga1991]

Was I disappointed with the A1200? Like many people, I was already a very happy and impressed A500+ owner, and for all the fundamental reasons to be happy with the Amiga I was pleased a new one was coming out (can't remember how soon we bought one; we only got the A500+ for Xmas '91 so I expect my Dad waited a year or so before upgrading to the A1200). At the same time, I was aware from my own knowledge and the views of magazine journalists that the A1200 was a bit mediocre in some respects. The detail I most readily recall was that the '020 was considered a modest upgrade over the 68000. I myself had, over the previous couple of years, perused many magazine adverts for all sorts of hardware out of curiosity, and knew that '020 accelerators had long existed for the A2000, an old machine that had never been a high performance beast, and that the two year-old A3000 used a 68030. So the A1200 clearly wasn't a huge leap forward, just a good improvement over the A500. A new Amiga was a better option than anything else- for usability, variety of games and cost, I don't think I would have wanted anything else-nevertheless, it clearly wasn't going to 'wow' me or the world at large.

In retrospect I was disappointed that there wasn't a plethora of games which really showed what the A1200 could do, but I certainly benefitted from some which the A500 couldn't run at all and many it couldn't run well. We later got a hard drive (after badgering from me) and this was a nice boon. We installed several games, including Civ and UFO, and I think F1GP too.

Our A1200 benefitted from 4MB of Fast RAM, something my Dad chose on the recommendation of the sales assistant; my thanks to them both! As I later learned from magazines, the A1200 was hamstrung without a Fast RAM upgrade. I think that things like this were needless false economies by Commodore.

In an ideal world (one where Commodore, from the start, had been different- hadn't gotten rid of a lot of the original staff, put decent sized teams on projects for faster development, didn't try to wring fast money out of everything at the expense of long term profitability, didn't waste time and money on revising the C64 range or making the A600...), we would have had AAA machines in the very early 90s rather than AGA in late '92, but even so they could have done better with the A1200. Why was the '020 only running at 14Mhz (about as slow as they could be set), when '020s reportedly came in standard speeds of 16 and 25Mhz? Why not spend that little bit more, give 4MB of Fast RAM to every A1200 and make it a really impressive machine? Looking at a lot of the variety in pricing for the A1200 in those early years, it certainly doesn't seem to have needed to retail for £400 to make ends meet, so they might not even have needed to hike the price much to add that memory. Even 2MB of Fast RAM might have been enough to make a number of games and applications more enjoyable. The most common Amiga (ie 500 and successors), though expandable, were more or less expected to be bought once and serve the user well, but there were a number of games like Sim City 2000 which reputedly crawled on a standard A1200, upsetting a lot of users. That's why I think Commodore should have given the A1200 what it needed for the CPU to do its (meagre) best. Also, another relatively simple improvement- high density floppy drive. This, I think, should have been made standard as early as possible in the Amiga's history. I can't imagine it was technically difficult to make the machines capable of supporting it, and as far as I'm aware they weren't hugely expensive units compared to normal drives (especially given that Amigas were already very cheap in the 80s compared to PCs or Macs), and there is no aspect of computing that couldn't benefit from higher storage floppies.

So even with the disappointment of not having chunky graphics support or better sound etc. than previous Amigas (and AAA would reputedly have added so much more than that, if only it had been developed much faster), and only having an '020, I think an A1200 spec should have (and could easily have) looked like this:

EC68020 @28Mhz
2MB Chip RAM + 4MB Fast RAM
High Density/Double Density floppy drive

I know that wouldn't have made it a PC beater, but I think there is not much justification for NOT having had this sort of spec rather than what we got. Anybody have an opinion on those specs? Am I delusional about the cost of these changes (I know RAM was quite expensive in those days, about £100 I think for 4MB, but what about the CPU clock speed?)?

[nikosidis]

A1200 is the ultimate computer of all time to me. How can you be disappointed!!
The world moved on without Commodore but that is not something A1200 could do anything about.
I do not really like to reply to threads like this. Just be happy about what it was and what it is.
It is a retro system now and a very beautiful one!

[Amiga1991]

Good advice. Don't get me wrong, I remember it fondly and don't regret having it at all. In fact I was gutted when, coming home at the end of my second uni year, it had been sold!

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

It was not "all about PC Doom".
Most of these first 3D games (and even second and third wave" were very ugly to me, back in the day, and now.
Playstation games too.
It wasn't until 2002-2003 that I started to like some of the 3D games.

With the exception of a few late 90s games (which I played when I eventually got a PC in the early 2000s), namely Half Life, Rainbow Six and Delta Force 2, I pretty much agree about the 90s 3D games. The part of me that recognised and respected technological advancement was impressed, but for the most part I think they were rather ugly games and not often enjoyable (Doom has never tempted me, watched a mate playing it). I actually prefer the aesthetic of the early 3D games, like Stunt Car Racer, F1 GP and Frontier (though Frontier got very jerky at times even on our A1200- but we accepted it and in any case, it generally only happened when getting chased by several police ships after accidentally breaking lift-off protocol!).



A few racing games (and in retrospect- as someone who became a big Pro Evo fan in the early 2000s- the excellent ISS games) on the PS1 impressed me, but what I envied PC owners for was more the strategy games etc. that it had been doing well since the start of the decade, things that were no longer coming out on the Amiga (Colonization was probably the last big title). And simply the lack of any quality titles being developed for the Amiga at all in the late 90s.

[Amiga1991]

Originally Posted by scu98rkr

Yeah I think Doom passed me by somehow. I wasnt that bothered about FPS till Half-Life.

What I really wanted to play at the time were better continuations of DuneII/Civilization.

But I had ended up getting an Amiga 600 rather than a 1200 which was almost impossible to upgrade.

I'd have been happy with Command and Conqueror / Red-Alert / Civilization II coming to the Amiga.

I think this could probably have been done on an upgraded 1200.

I agree that on the OS front Workbench still looked much better than Windows until Windows 1995.

Now-adays everyone likes the Amiga 600 as its quite easy to get a classic WHDload up and running on it especially in comparison to the early 500s.

I think at the time everyone knew the 600 was mistake. It certainly was for me. If it hadnt come out im sure I could of convinced my mum to get the 1200.

I think he real issue is the 1200 just needed to come out a year or even 2 earlier.

Until the 1200 really there was no progression since the Amiga 1000/500.

I remember feeling slightly embarassed when friends bought A600s. I think they had been considering an Amiga during the years of everyone and his dog (here in the UK) raving about their A500, and got this nice, smart new one that would not take up much space. But as you say everyone knew it was a mistake. Interestingly, the initial concept was that it would be a very cheap A500 revision, without the NUMPAD but also without a built-in disk drive too, making it (apparently) extremely cheap to make. They were going to call it the A300 and market it to poorer parts of the world such as South America and the Balkans to broaden the Amiga market by providing a machine to people who perhaps hadn't been able to afford a 16-bit computer before. But then someone or other started asking for more stuff, until it became actually more expensive to produce than the A500+!


The A1200 should certainly have come out no later than 1990, as you suggest. At that time it would have been rather impressive, the new A500.

[WDeranged]

From a gaming perspective I was let down. Most A1200 games were just rehashes of older games and quite a few of the more ambitious AGA games ran poorly.

But I was also getting into computer graphics at the time, 3D rendering and video editing. The A1200 was a significant step up in this area.

[RoniWorlds]

Amiga 1200 should start with a 030 processor and a minimum of 8 mb fast. Maybe then programmers could write more complex programs. And so they only got 1 MB more chip memory, and the 020 chip with the AGA chip. And writing on the AGA dice already required more Fast memory. It is possible that if at that time it had a different configuration to start, the gap from A600 to A1200 would be different, and so only cosmetics with practically more colors not used in 100%.

[sandruzzo]

A1200 deserved better copper and blitter and paula of course! They needed to be 14mhz fully 32 bit at least! About gaming even as little as 512k of fast ram would a done a hell of difference, maybe coupled with better chip ram access from cpu!

[RoniWorlds]

Overall, my opinion is that development and programming ended with the CD32, And she hammered the nail in the coffin. After the great intros and CD music, we got the same games as on the A1200. This console should cover the gulf. Seeing what was missing from the A1200.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by RoniWorlds

Amiga 1200 should start with a 030 processor and a minimum of 8 mb fast.

Wouldn't that have been prohibitively expensive in 1992?
I'm mostly talking about the RAM here, not so much the 68030. The A4000 was normally sold with 4MB or less at the time, as were Mac's and PC's (with budget-mid range PC models often only having 1 or 2MB internal RAM).

Note: I do understand why you think this is an improvement and it certainly would've helped (though I'd personally say the number one improvement over the current AGA design would've been much faster Chip RAM), but I also feel it's very early for such high specs for a budget machine.

[acidbottle]

No, for its time it was outstanding value.

Trouble was it took great programming skills to get the best out of it, the list of games that were best on the platform is testimony to that. If it had 1mb fast ram from the offset who knows what could have been achieved.

It was not a 3d gfx computer though, despite many attempts to convince us!

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by RoniWorlds

Amiga 1200 should start with a 030 processor and a minimum of 8 mb fast. Maybe then programmers could write more complex programs.

Doubt it.
Richard Costello mentioned in interview that producers wanted Mortal Kombat 2 for A500, at all costs, because it was owned by majority of Amiga users.
They also made enormous pressure to the same developer team for the Primal Rage game, but it just wasn't possible A500 version, due to A500 hardware limitation.
And that is 2 years after A1200 was on the market.

So, the only way I could see programmers massively switched to A1200, is not making A1200 more powerful, but if Commodore (with smart marketing) sold A1200 in enormous numbers, and if majority of A500 users switched to Aga by 1994.

[hitm4n]

I never for a second regretted upgrading my A500 to an A1200. I used that A1200 for many years and would sneer at my father spending ages trying to get Wing Commander to run smoothly, with sound, while i just popped a disk in and was playing in seconds. The demo scene started requiring 020 processors, and later in the 1200 years, games did start taking advantage of the AGA chipset and extra memory. It wasn't until i saw Quake 1 that i needed a PC. Amiga!!!! Loved it.

[grond]

As I probably mentioned before, Commodore should have put the 020 on a CPU card. It would have cost them a few $ more and it would have enabled them to offer various configurations ranging from the 020 and no fastmem to fast 030s, FPUs and fastmem without having to change the motherboard. In this way most A1200 users wouldn't have a useless 020 sitting on the motherboard they paid for. Commodore would have saved some PCB area which they could have used for putting a 3.5" IDE-socket and IDE power connector for using 3.5" harddisks instead of the ridiculously expensive 2.5" harddisks. All this starting 1991 and including AGA with an 8bit chunky mode and a 32bit blitter and the machine would have been good for another few years.

[roondar]

Putting the CPU on a card would've been a good idea, yeah.

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by nikosidis

A1200 is the ultimate computer of all time to me. How can you be disappointed!!

It was that thing of beauty that I desperately wanted but was forever out of my reach. Mostly the A1200 represented one thing for me; games I couldn't play. A very sour note.

The most sour of moments was when I got my monthly magazine, always that fun moment of the month to read it and play with the coverdisk. At that point I only got one of the two coverdisks that came with the magazine because I was an overseas reader. And the coverdisk had... Super Stardust. I couldn't play it. It still burns.

[PortuguesePilot]

Originally Posted by roondar

Wouldn't that have been prohibitively expensive in 1992?
I'm mostly talking about the RAM here, not so much the 68030. The A4000 was normally sold with 4MB or less at the time, as were Mac's and PC's (with budget-mid range PC models often only having 1 or 2MB internal RAM).

Note: I do understand why you think this is an improvement and it certainly would've helped (though I'd personally say the number one improvement over the current AGA design would've been much faster Chip RAM), but I also feel it's very early for such high specs for a budget machine.

Completely agree. A figure like 8MB at the time was prohibitively expensive and would make the A1200 unaffordable and sink for lack of sales. I really hate to say it but 2MB was the right choice at the time, economically speaking. It should have been Fast RAM, though. Chip RAM was a legacy thing that should have been dropped. Maybe it would break compatibility a bit? Alas, if that meant for the A1200 to be a little better, then it was a fair price to pay. AGA and KS 3.0 also broke some compatibility and it was still a trade-off for the better.

The A1200's expandability should have been better and fully supported by Commodore themselves. They should have a base A1200 for sell and then a whole panoply of factory upgrades (2MB and 4MB fast RAM upgrades, HDDs, high-density floppy disk drives, CD-ROM drives, chipset upgrades for AAA or similar, etc). The expandability of the A1200 was good, don't take me the wrong way, but there simply was no support from Commodore there, with a few alternatives by third parties. It would have been a smart move to sell a base computer and then upgrade parts for those who wanted them. It would have "emulated" the way the PC-upgrade market worked at the time and that got some people hooked on upgrading hardware (a trend that lives on until today, the age of full-blown factory-brand gaming PCs). It would also help the A1200 to stay around for a tad bit longer, I think, because Commodore would have a whole flux of income from the parts (considering they were fairly priced but still got some revenue in). I know that Commodore was already up to their ears under financial strain and "make a panoply of hardware upgrades since day one" probably wouldn't have been feasible, but it would have been a way to maintain the A1200 afloat for a bit more time.

The biggest fault on the A1200 was the processor, not the RAM figure. In 1993, the 68020 clocked at 14MHz was simply too feeble to be taken seriously. The 6030 at 20MHz should have been the bare bone minimum to equip the base A1200 and there should be presented options - from the get go - for people to easily upgrade the CPU with the board being prepared from the ground up to accommodate these potential changes. And as I've said elsewhere in this thread, AGA should also have been more than it ended up being with at least a functional chunky mode available.

Hindsight always makes us all seem very knowledgeable and all, but some moves by Commodore with the A1200 (making a near-closed design system, a bet on an already weak CPU and legacy RAM and chipset) spelled doom right from the get-go. Yes, I know it has been argued that Commodore did as much as it could given their precarious financial situation at the time and that the A1200 was sort of a small miracle given their near-death stand, but if they had been better managed, had had some key people under their belt, if they had done their job right and if they had played the right cards at the right time, maybe the A1200 would have been an even better machine and sort-of been for the late 90's what the A500 was for the early 90's.