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

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by pandy71

Keeping legacy software compatibility is important

Vitally important. The PC market was built on compatibility. And so was the Amiga. Imagine if Commodore had released the A1200 with an incompatible CPU and/or chipset. It would start off with zero software that could run on it. Who would buy that? The Amiga's most important asset was its existing software base.

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

There was no sufficiently valuable software left that made the Amiga hardware worth preserving, but that mistake was made long before AGA came to be. Games, unlike produtive software, fall out of fashion, and you'd rather buy a new hardware to play the latest game instead of preserving the old hardware to continue playing the old games.

BS.

TOP SELLING GAMES 2024: Unveiling This Year’s Gaming Blockbusters

In 2024, the gaming world has continued to grow, with several titles leading the charge in popularity. Minecraft, GTA 5, and Tetris remain as some of the best-selling video games, showing that classics can still dominate in a modern market.

Below are some of the top contenders for 2024:

Minecraft
Grand Theft Auto V (GTA 5)
Tetris: A timeless puzzle adventure
Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth: Kicking off the year with a bang
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth: Eagerly awaited by fans
Paper Mario: The latest installment of a beloved series

That's right - a text mode game developed in 1985 by Soviet software engineer Alexey Pajitnov and ported to the PC in 1986, is a top contender for most popular game of the year in 2024. No fancy new hardware needed to run this game!

Most of the other games in that list aren't new either. Minecraft was originally released in 2009, GTA in 1997, Final Fantasy in 1987, and Mario in 1985. Many other classic games are being re-jigged to work on modern platforms which can't run the originals, and even more are being played on emulators.

[Promilus]

Any comment how it support your argument? PS2 is best selling stationary game console of all times. Which means no modern console sales figures can reach PS2 level so year after year it's best selling console. And most likely will remain that way because at some point there'll be next Wii or PS or Xbox and older models climbing towards PS2 record will stay below forever... Same goes with Tetris. How stupid argument is that... almost nobody plays tetris anymore and if someone do that's modern reimplementation actually requiring fairly new hardware to be run on.

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

BS.

Please BS yourself, thank you. Would you base your decision to buy or not to buy a new PC really on the compatibility to *old* games? I mean, seriously? As a hobbyist, I would probably decide to keep my old machine for a while, but I would buy a new one if a next cool game comes out I want to play. As an IT person in an office, I would avoid buying new machines for my office if it doesn't run my productivity applications - sure.


But games? Are you serious? I still have a couple of games from ~2000 on the PC, and they do not really play on Win7 even anymore. Did anyone care? No. If I want, I create a virtual machine and run them in there, or in DOSBox or whatever, but that was never a reason to keep my old hardware. Such users are in the minority, and irrelevant market-wise.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

Would you base your decision to buy or not to buy a new PC really on the compatibility to *old* games? I mean, seriously? As a hobbyist, I would probably decide to keep my old machine for a while, but I would buy a new one if a next cool game comes out I want to play.

In the Doom 30th anniversary stream the two Johns talked about why they didn't bother to create versions of their games for weaker systems and the consensus was that especially people that buy new machines will buy games to see what that machine could do. The amount of people that want to buy a game, but don't want to upgrade the hardware was apparently not a problem for id software.

[grond]

Originally Posted by pandy71

I disagree - now playing PS3 - skipped PS4, for a moment seriously considered PS5 but now i don't know - perhaps PS6? New games are better technically but from my perspective this progress is not enough.
So technically now i'm preserving old hardware to play old games - i have too many games - and guess what returning to many of them and still have fun.

Yes, but that is because gaming hardware has also passed a certain point from where on you'll only get even more dots on the screen which at least I can't even see. When I last upgraded my PC, I could play my then favourite game in 4K instead of 1080p. It didn't really change the joy I got from playing the game. I got the new hardware mostly for productivity work.

Most Amiga games didn't get any better at all by moving to more powerful hardware. Throughout the 90s and 2000s PC games were such that a more powerful hardware did give you a better gaming experience even for the games you already had.

Anyway, I totally agree with Thomas at least for the special case of the Amiga in the early 90s: if you wanted to continue playing Amiga games, you kept the hardware you already got. If you wanted to play new games, you bought new hardware, either the Playstation or a PC. Or you did all three at once, the options weren't mutually exclusive. But none of them meant any revenue for Commodore.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by grond

Yes, but that is because gaming hardware has also passed a certain point from where on you'll only get even more dots on the screen which at least I can't even see. When I last upgraded my PC, I could play my then favourite game in 4K instead of 1080p. It didn't really change the joy I got from playing the game. I got the new hardware mostly for productivity work.

Exactly.
Moore's law is coming slowly to an end, and even if new CPUs and GPUs are still so much more powerful each new generation, the perception in so longer that stark.

the differences every 2-3 years in the 80s and 90s were so much bigger and had so much more influence on what you could actually do with new hardware.

Most Amiga games didn't get any better at all by moving to more powerful hardware. Throughout the 90s and 2000s PC games were such that a more powerful hardware did give you a better gaming experience even for the games you already had.

Depends on the genre: action games for the original PC did usually not cope well with faster CPUs and/or could not make use of better gfx - just like on the Amiga.

Only later PC-game developers took the ever growing performance into account .. and some (few) Amiga games did the same - but by then the Amiga was already dead as a platform.

Anyway, I totally agree with Thomas at least for the special case of the Amiga in the early 90s: if you wanted to continue playing Amiga games, you kept the hardware you already got. If you wanted to play new games, you bought new hardware, either the Playstation or a PC. Or you did all three at once, the options weren't mutually exclusive. But none of them meant any revenue for Commodore.

Right. What Bruce misses here, are the actual statistics. Gamers in the 90s DID switch platforms: towards PC and towards a variety of consoles, that had no compatibility to anything at all - while businesses did not switch and relied on backwards compatibility. That is even true for unix workstations: is was not enough that the PC became equally powerful, the switch to PC only happened after a relevant portion of software was ported and compatibility was assured.
At my university we had a huge amount of HP-UX workstations and SUNs during the late 90s and the change to PC-hardware happened only after Linux was mature enough and got supported by commercial software in the early 00s.

The promise of everlasting compatibility was also the reason for the Java hype in businesses in the 90s - write it once and run wherever and forever ...
And while Java is still there, it eventually got superseded by browsers and JS, which now actually make that promise true:
you can still browse the first webpage ever made http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
As well as run entire operating systems in your browser...

Commodore missed the opportunity to make the Amiga THE platform for professional multimedia applications (lack of higher resolutions and processing power)
Thats evident in the CDTV, which tried to be a consumer product only, but was a terrible authoring platform - it was not suited for (professional) creators at all.

[appiah4]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Vitally important. The PC market was built on compatibility. And so was the Amiga. Imagine if Commodore had released the A1200 with an incompatible CPU and/or chipset. It would start off with zero software that could run on it. Who would buy that? The Amiga's most important asset was its existing software base.

I think this is hyperbole. People buy new systems to play new games, not to play old games. If the new system also plays old games, that is a plus. If the system has no new games but can play old games, who gives a sh.t?

At the end of the day, potentially 10x as many people could have bought the A1200 if it had been a good value offering instead of retaining backwards compatibility.

By 1992 playing games from the A500 catalog was really not a big deal for most people, the world had moved on significantly. This is irrefutably evident in the number of people who completely abandoned Amiga for PC and left their A500 library behind. It was simply put an overexaggerated design focus that should have been an afterthought.

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by appiah4

I think this is hyperbole. People buy new systems to play new games, not to play old games. If the new system also plays old games, that is a plus. If the system has no new games but can play old games, who gives a sh.t?

With one remark - if your game library is worth more than new HW and you can't have those games in new hardware then it is PITA...

I like Killzone so at some point keeping PS3 live is the only way to play Killzone...

GTA V - well i admit PS3 not providing all juice but still it is OK - don't feel too much pressure to buy PS5 (perhaps i will wait for PS6 ).

I'm bit ashamed to admit but games was not so attractive to me before PS3 - even PS2 was not impressive (on Amiga if i've played games then it was very limited set of titles - simply games was not so amusing to me - Amiga was for me personal multimedia computer and gaming was not so important).

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by appiah4

I think this is hyperbole. People buy new systems to play new games, not to play old games. If the new system also plays old games, that is a plus. If the system has no new games but can play old games, who gives a sh.t?

I'm talking about existing games (including new games just released or about to be), not 'old' games.

At the end of the day, potentially 10x as many people could have bought the A1200 if it had been a good value offering instead of retaining backwards compatibility.

At the start of the day, nobody would buy an 'Amiga' that didn't run Amiga software - games or apps. To make it viable Commodore would have to organize a massive number of titles to be ready for the A1200's release - which wasn't going to happen. But even then they would be cutting off all the users who wanted to upgrade their existing machines rather than switch to an incompatible platform. At this stage in the game that was probably about half the potential market. It would be a disaster.

By 1992 playing games from the A500 catalog was really not a big deal for most people, the world had moved on significantly. This is irrefutably evident in the number of people who completely abandoned Amiga for PC and left their A500 library behind. It was simply put an overexaggerated design focus that should have been an afterthought.

If a new PC was released that wasn't compatible with existing machines, what do you think would have happened to it? Would gamers flock to this new machine with no games rather than stick with an 'industry standard' PC that ran everything out there?

And don't ignore the large number of users who were not buying a computer (Amiga or PC) just to play games. If that was all they wanted, and they weren't interested in playing existing games, they would probably be more inclined to buy the latest console rather than a computer. The only advantage an Amiga or PC would have for them is games that consoles of the day weren't good enough for - but these would be existing games, not theoretical new games for an unproven platform.

Whenever a new platform is introduced it has the problem of reaching 'critical mass'. This is much harder to achieve when it doesn't have an existing software base ready for customers to run. The obvious way around this is to build in compatibility with an established platform.

When Sony decided to make the PlayStation the first thing they did was set up a software company to produce games for it, because they knew that a new platform without games would be a disaster. When they built the PlayStation 2 they put PlayStation compatibility into it to take advantage of the existing software base. If they hadn't done that, I (and many others) wouldn't have bought one.

The PlayStation had already been out for 6 years when the PlayStation 2 was introduced in 2000. But that wasn't the end of it. At the same time they introduced the PS One, a shrunk down version of the original PlayStation. In that year the PS One became the top selling console overall, even outselling the PlayStation 2.

Sony continued making the PS One for another 6 years, with a total of 28.15 million sold. It was retired in 2006, the same year the PlayStation 3 was introduced - but once again they didn't drop the previous generation. The PlayStation 2 lasted until 2013, a total of 13 years (the PlayStation / PS One lasted 12 years).

Sony weren't stupid. They knew that if they released a new model which was incompatible with existing titles it would be a hard sell until it built up a library of games. The 6 year overlap between generations gives you an idea of how much inertia was in the console games market.

Commodore introduced the Amiga 500 in 1987. It was the first truly mass produced Amiga and soon had a games library rivaling the PC. 5 years later they introduced the 'next generation' replacement with a 68020 CPU and enhanced graphics (AGA). This was risky because the hardware was likely to be incompatible with a large number of existing games (and some 'productivity' stuff). So they tried to maintain as much compatibility as they could by not changing the custom chips too radically and using a 68EC020 rather than an 030. Some Amiga fans didn't think it was radical enough, but I bet those same fans would be howling in protest if not a single game they fed into it worked.

Bottom line: if you were a gamer (or 'serious' user) who wasn't concerned about compatibility then why stick with the Amiga at all? Those who weren't did the obvious thing - bought a PC since it was everywhere and was already getting the best games. They didn't buy a PC for games that might be released for it in the future, they bought it for the games it already had (with the expectation that more of the same would be produced).

It is often said that Doom sold new PCs, particularly 486s. But Doom was developed for the 486 several years after that CPU was introduced. Furthermore Doom actually ran on any 386 with at least 4MB RAM and VGA, it didn't need the very latest hardware. Many people first ran it on a lesser PC, then upgraded to get a better frame rate. But imagine if id had developed Doom for a new platform that wasn't compatible with existing 386 and 486 PCs - eg. a machine with RISC CPU and proprietary (not PC compatible) 3D graphics card. It wouldn't have become nearly as popular, and it wouldn't have sold many of those machines.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by appiah4

By 1992 playing games from the A500 catalog was really not a big deal for most people, the world had moved on significantly. This is irrefutably evident in the number of people who completely abandoned Amiga for PC

That’s nonsense, the Amiga scene was still a ‘big deal’ for alot of people, saying people moved on just because there was more powerful hardware is a mute point, the majority of Amiga owners bought Amiga hardware during the time when there was more powerful hardware and better looking games already!

Plus there can’t be any evidence people abandoned the Amiga for PC, that’s just your opinion rather than fact, the only facts are less people bought Amiga’s from 1992 onwards, that’s not to say those owning them already suddenly abandoned them, the gaming world was a better and more diverse place back then with dozens of systems being supported.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

Plus there can’t be any evidence people abandoned the Amiga for PC, that’s just your opinion rather than fact

Have you been an Amiga user in the 90s???
I have been and it was clear as sunshine, that people were switching to other platforms. Either PC or consoles ... or both.
Amigas got privatly sold off at lowest price, given away for free and eventually even throw in the garbage bin. That happened sadly all over the place. Some kept their Amiga ... in the attic.
At the end of the decade, I felt like the last man standing... none of my friends still had an Amiga.

Proof? Just look at the magazines - they died one after the other. Or the coders, games releases, software companies ...

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by grond

Most Amiga games didn't get any better at all by moving to more powerful hardware. Throughout the 90s and 2000s PC games were such that a more powerful hardware did give you a better gaming experience even for the games you already had.

That was generally only true in later times when games (and apps) were anticipating more powerful machines. And it often didn't make that much difference on them either. Doom recommended a 486, and was pretty smooth on a good one. Sure you could get ridiculous frame rates on a Pentium system, but did it make the game any better? Not really. Most games before that were designed to work well on the recommended existing platform - since it didn't make sense to do otherwise.

A 3D fps or strategy game might still be playable at a low frame rate, but a 2D action game isn't. The Amiga had more performant games of this genre, mostly making use of the custom chips that didn't get faster in a more powerful machine. They didn't need more power because they were already running at the 'correct' speed. But other genres often did benefit from a more powerful Amiga.

Many A500 games were significantly more enjoyable on the A1200 due to smoother operation with fewer slowdowns and/or higher frames, and shorter loading times. You may not have noticed because they were 'good enough' on the A500, or your memory may have faded and you didn't play them side for comparison. Or perhaps you never played some of them at all due to their poor performance on a stock A500.

For example Sierra's graphical adventure games are a lot less tedious on a more powerful Amiga. Most flight simulators are much smoother, strategy games like Dune 2 and The Settlers are more responsive, chess games spend less time 'thinking' etc. And of course when texture-mapped 3D games reached the Amiga they too benefited massively. Dread is 'ok' on an A500, but smooth as butter on a stock A1200!

On the PC however... Defender of the Crown's crappy EGA graphics and PC speaker sound didn't get any better when run on a Pentium system. Many older PC games had no frame rate regulation and ran way too fast on a faster machine. This was not a better gaming experience!

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

When Sony decided to make the PlayStation the first thing they did was set up a software company to produce games for it, because they knew that a new platform without games would be a disaster.

A huge catalog of 12 games ... and only 6 of them showed a little bit of what the hardware could do. Others were e.g. Mahjong, "TwinBee Taisen Puzzle Drama" (like candy crush) or a slot machine simulator.

And most of them were never released outside Japan.
But that was enough.
So apparently you don't need a huge catalog ...

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by Gorf

Have you been an Amiga user in the 90s???
I have been and it was clear as sunshine, that people were switching to other platforms. Either PC or consoles ... or both.
Amigas got privatly sold off at lowest price, given away for free and eventually even throw in the garbage bin. That happened sadly all over the place. Some kept their Amiga ... in the attic.
At the end of the decade, I felt like the last man standing... none of my friends still had an Amiga.

Proof? Just look at the magazines - they died one after the other. Or the coders, games releases, software companies ...

Certainly was, and a late one comparatively speaking, the Amiga had plenty going for it, and to say in 1992 basically it wasn’t worth owning is laughable.

People were selling all sorts as i said the market was crowded, and if you said to a serious gamer in 1992 you had to have a PC you would be laughed off the playground (if not punched first!).

The last paragraphs you are talking ‘by the end of the decade’, obviously it was long gone by then, as mentioned above 1992 was stated in the argument, even most Amiga fans knew by the end of 1994 the end was sooner rather than later, certainly not anytime sooner.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

Certainly was, and a late one comparatively speaking, the Amiga had plenty going for it, and to say in 1992 basically it wasn’t worth owning is laughable.

OK, that's true. Probably even until Doom.
Still owning and using one is one thing ... buying a new one or upgrading an other.
The exodus started (slowly at first) around that year or 93 - and so we come back to the topic of this thread: the 1200 was not what people were hoping for or at least it came too late.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Gorf

Proof? Just look at the magazines - they died one after the other.

In 1992?

Magazine Name, last year of publication

Amiga Format 2000
CU Amiga 1998
Amiga computing 1997
Amiga User International 1997
Amiga Power 1996
Amiga Action 1996
Amiga World 1995

Since Commodore went bust in 1994, it's hardly surprising that the scene died after that. But this is not the time period being discussed in this thread.

BTW I can point to many other computer magazines that didn't make it through the 90's too. In particular Byte (the 'small systems journal') started off in 1975 as a general microcomputing magazine with a strong technical bent that appealed to hobbyists. When IBM released the PC in 1981 the magazine's focus quickly changed to all things PC and its popularity surged. By 1985 anything else (eg. the Amiga 1000) was just a curiosity. You would think that switching to PC-centric content would set them right forever, but no - they folded in 1998 - before the premiere Amiga magazine did!

By the early 1980s, Byte had become an "elite" magazine, seen as a peer of Rolling Stone and Playboy, and others such as David Bunnell of PC Magazine aspired to emulate its reputation and success. It was the only computer publication on the 1981 Folio 400 list of largest magazines. Byte's 1982 average number of pages was 543, and the number of paid advertising pages grew by more than 1,000 while most magazines' amount of advertising did not change. Its circulation of 420,000 was the third highest of all computer magazines. Byte earned $9 million from revenue of $36.6 million in 1983, twice the average profit margin for the magazine industry. It remained successful while many other magazines failed in 1984 during economic weakness in the computer industry. The October 1984 issue had about 300 pages of ads sold at an average of $6,000 per page.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Since Commodore went bust in 1994, it's hardly surprising that the scene died after that. But this is not the time period being discussed in this thread.

I was answering to:

the only facts are less people bought Amiga’s from 1992 onwards, that’s not to say those owning them already suddenly abandoned them,

which I interpreted maybe to widely

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by Gorf

A huge catalog of 12 games ... and only 6 of them showed a little bit of what the hardware could do. Others were e.g. Mahjong, "TwinBee Taisen Puzzle Drama" (like candy crush) or a slot machine simulator.

And most of them were never released outside Japan.
But that was enough.
So apparently you don't need a huge catalog ...

But the PlayStation was a massive leap over the competition, something that was blindingly obvious from day one. It made the decision to switch platform, even if you had to sell your old system and all the games a worthwhile bet.

When PS2 came along Sony were smart enough to see that keeping compatibility in the early models gave people a reason to stay on PlayStation, they could upgrade and keep their old games if they wanted and have access to a much wider library available from day one. And they weren't the only ones who saw benefits in that model, the Gameboy Color plays Gameboy games, the GBA plays Gameboy and Gameboy Color games, the DS plays GBA games, the 3DS played DS games etc.

None of that compatibility was an accident. When your primary market is business applications, like it was for DOS, your primary goal is maintaining compatibility with older business applications. When your primary market is games, like it was for the Amiga, then yes you should be aiming for some compatibility with old games. It doesn't have to be "forever" compatible, it just needs to be enough to smooth over the transition phase and keep current owners brand loyal.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by AestheticDebris

But the PlayStation was a massive leap over the competition, something that was blindingly obvious from day one. It made the decision to switch platform, even if you had to sell your old system and all the games a worthwhile bet.

When PS2 came along Sony were smart enough to see that keeping compatibility in the early models gave people a reason to stay on PlayStation, ....

Sure - compatibility is in general preferable to have. But that was not the point I was trying to make here:

The question was, was compatibility absolutely necessary for a game console and therefor the whole gaming market?
Then the answer must be no, since the PS1 was a huge success without it.
Other consoles of the 90s show the same.
Customers did not expect to be able to play e.g. old MSX games on it.

That stands in contrast to the business application market, where backwards compatibility is much more crucial.

Gamers switch platforms easier than businesses.

Commodores focus on the low end market and selling the Amiga primarily as device for games, was part of its downfall.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Gorf

A huge catalog of 12 games ... and only 6 of them showed a little bit of what the hardware could do. Others were e.g. Mahjong, "TwinBee Taisen Puzzle Drama" (like candy crush) or a slot machine simulator.

But one of them was Ridge Racer.

You sneer at games like Mahjong and TwinBee Taisen, but these are the sort of games that ordinary people actually play. Ridge Racer was impressive, but I got bored with it in few minutes. OTOH I can play Microsoft Solitaire for hours.

And most of them were never released outside Japan.
But that was enough.

Since the PS1 was originally only released in Japan, yes - that was enough.

So apparently you don't need a huge catalog ...

12 is huge compared to 0.

The PlayStation was released in the US in September 1995. By this time a lot more games had come through the pipeline. At least 51 PlayStation games were released in 1995, 22 in the US - including Doom (oh horrors, an old game from 1993!).

But hey, perhaps you are right. If the PlayStation was released with zero games, people might still have bought it anyway in the hope that games would eventually come out for it. With Sony doing nothing to kickstart game production and developers looking at a company who has no experience in the videogame industry selling what effectively is an expensive paperweight, I'm sure they would all jump in to fill the gap. And a year later the games would start to trickle out. One whole year with zero games. But console owners are a patient lot, right?

Amiga fans though... I'm sure they wouldn't put up with that. Reason number #462 to jump ship to the PC!