Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Cyprian

crippled by what? better video, audio, bus performance, cpu performace or dsp performance?

Falcon's 16-bit front-side bus 68030 was mocked.

A1200 has baked in 32-bit Fast RAM controller without DRAMs.

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

The 'world' moved on from the Amiga in 1994, if not before. But Amiga fans didn't care because they lived in their own world - the world of Amiga. In that world Doom was a new thing at the end of 1997

This, I believe, is what logic bros call "motte & bailey". The above statement is perfectly fine and therefore easy to defend (bailey). Nobody can say there is anything wrong with the fact that there were some hardcore Amiga fans who enjoyed Doom in 1997 on their beefed up 1200s.

The problem is that most of the time Mr Abbott operates in the motte - where the order of the day is saying how terrible PCs were and that perennially ungrateful Amigans had no real reason to defect to them. Now, that's an entirely different kettle of fish, and so it's much easier to retreat to the bailey when called out on the motte.

Originally Posted by sokolovic

That sum it all.
Publishers had no problem to develop for the GameBoy Color released in 1998.

GBC sold like hot cakes and eventually its user base reached ~120 million. Meanwhile Amiga...especially A1200...

Piracy could have been some sort of a factor, though it's really hard to establish how big, and I suppose it was not at all decisive. "Underpowered" shouldn't be dismissed out of hand since for the computer-style games it mattered much more than some simple arcade fare which would still be fun even if severely downgraded, like on GBC. Especially the lack of (cheap) HDD solution was a no-no at this time.

But most of all it was the installed user base numbers that spelt the death toll. Now, you can try to spin it positively, saying that "A1200 sold well", but this really is a kind of Big-In-Japan style defence, since these numbers were still minuscule compared to PC and console (even when factoring in the alleged shortage). It goes back to the "but piracy" argument since PC had exactly the same problem, but even if pirated a game could still sell enough - because enough people had the machines.

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Allright, we're nearly there! 200 pages! Just one more little push...

[Promilus]

It's funny to bring up GBC or GB itself... it's entirely different kind of beast! GBC was kind of NES/SNES portable... two really great platforms with reworked for the hardware but still - many games from the older consoles. They obviously weren't as good as SNES graphics but on relatively small screen it didn't show. It's the same with newer nintendo consoles which aren't going to compete with top dogs Sony and MS. They have found a niche and are exploiting it. Commodore found a niche and didn't know how to exploit it. That's that... there's no single solution, especially from R&D department which could change that. So it would not really matter if there was 50MHz 030 in A1200 and 8MB fast RAM on stock machines or 80MB hdd... it would still not bump up userbase enough nor convince developers to release their titles on the machine. Sure it might've been enough to play Doom but... so what? Apple does similar to what Commodore did - they do OS, they do h/w ... they do software and invest A LOT into development of 3rd party s/w for their platform. How much did invest commodore into that? Aaahh... Sony did create powerful console but without actual relationship with game developers it would've meet the fate of Jaguar or Saturn... And from all of competitors actually Sega was kind of supporting developers (kind of... it was like toxic love actually). Then again - where's commodore? What exactly they did do except releasing machines and OS to the market?

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Promilus

Commodore found a niche and didn't know how to exploit it

Indeed, the Amiga was utterly wasted on Commodore

[BigD]

Originally Posted by Thorham

Indeed, the Amiga was utterly wasted on Commodore

Medhi Ali (I believe) screwed up the Japanese launch entirely despite the basics being in place. The Bullfrog, Psygnosis, Team17 and C= UK meeting with Medhi about A1200 030 SKU bundles was mishandled too! They just sold widgets!

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by Cyprian

crippled by what? better video, audio, bus performance, cpu performace or dsp performance?

The 16-bit CPU bus included to increase compatibility with the ST, coupled with it's notorious lack of compatibility with the ST.

They should've just "clean breaked" it and made Falcon a new fully 32-bit architecture. And Commodore should probably have done the same with the Amiga. Trying to compete with the PC on long-term compatibility was a mistake and introduced too many deficiencies for not much gain.

The 8-bit to 16-bit transition worked better by not caring about software compatibility. It's plausible the same could've been true of the next transition.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by hammer

The original intent for AGA's object manipulator was $20 DSP3210 with Fast RAM.

To put this price into perspective, all the MOS chips in the A1200 (Alice/Lisa/Paula/2xCIA/keyboard MCU) combined cost $19.85. Budgie cost $10, 68EC020 was $7.61, and the 4 DRAM chips cost $50.32.

At $20 the DSP chip would raise the retail price by ~$50 just for the chip itself, not counting support chips. The high speed static RAM chips wouldn't be cheap. This would certainly exceed the 'magic' £399 retail price that was a big part of the A1200's popularity.

The 'original intent' of putting a DSP chip in the Amiga was for video and audio processing, and perhaps for a 'software' modem. AGA's 'object manipulator' was the Blitter. AFAIK the DSP chip was not intended to take over this role.

A1200's Budgie has Fast RAM controller support baked in which is missing on A500's Zorro I edge connector.

This statement - while technically true - is a bit deceptive. The A1200's expansion was similar to Zorro I except for being 32 bit. It was the same idea as VL bus on PCs, a direct 32 bit CPU interface without any fancy protocols. This scheme was envisioned for the A1000+ too, but Commodore's European subsidiaries wanted at least two Zorro-II/III slots.

Lew Eggebrecht intended to restore the original AGA+DSP3210 bundle and Lew made sure the $20 argument is focused on.

I'm not sure about that. I do know that Lew Eggebrecht didn't think the Amiga's architecture suited 'high-end' machines. He thought an entirely new architecture using more 'standard' parts (including a RISC CPU) should be produced for that market. At the lower end he thought they should concentrate on improving the A500, which was Commodore's main money spinner.

The engineers didn't like this at all. They wanted high-end machines with super-powerful graphics that would beat PCs for years to come, and stuff like DSP chips for real-time movie playback etc. The fact that they couldn't achieve this in a reasonable time frame didn't seem to faze them.

Bill "IBM PCJr" Sydnes made A1200 to be another JR.

This isn't quite right. Mehdi Ali put pressure on Syndes to get the A1000+ out - AA or not - because Gould had publicly promised a new machine and was expecting it. Sydnes didn't have a lot of choice. Personally I would have been cracking the whip a lot earlier to get the AA chipset finished, even if some features were missing. It all came down to engineers focusing on what they wanted, not what was needed.

The 'A1000jr' didn't get released because Lew Eggebrecht sensibly polled Commodore's subsidiaries to gauge demand - which turned out to be zero. Everybody wanted something with enhanced graphics, not another ECS machine. That's when Commodore finally realized that they needed to get AGA systems out ASAP. When the pressure was put on the engineers did a good of the A1200. Just pity they hadn't done it earlier!

Reading Brian Bagnall's books 'Commodore the Amiga Years' and 'Commodore the Final Years' one common theme stands out - product releases were constantly slipping due to engineers not focusing enough on getting the job done. This was more apparent after Jack left, though not always. The A1000 was produced quite quickly, as were the A500 and A2000 once the rivalry was sorted out. However after 1987 they started way too many projects with dubious prospects and little urgency to get them finished.

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by Promilus

@pandy - ZIII never reached quarter of that so ... talking about theoretical ISA throughput then showing how it was actually shitty solution due to the fact real bandwidth was quarter of that... 3rd at best. Then comes Zorro III which not only destroys EISA (being actually THE SAME KIND OF DESIGN) but reaches VLB/PCI with... theoretical bandwidth. Shame actual bandwidth is much, much, much smaller and most likely even slowest PCI in PC world (so shady 486 chipsets) can outperform it. ISA (and by extension EISA) were x86 processor buses adapted to work as expansion slots. Zorro II (and by extension Zorro III) were 68k processor busses adapted to work as expansion slots. EISA was 32bit extension of ISA which was kind of backward compatible? Zorro III was 32b extension of Zorro II which was kind of backward compatible. So... yeah. Also how many native ZII/ZIII chips were produced... ever? Most of ZII/ZIII add-ons uses ISA/PCI chips with glue logic. Also... how long typical zorro card was? :P

True - but Amiga Zorro III implementation was mostly limited by MOS/CSG manufacturing capabilities not by architectural limitations. I agree that PCI was way better in terms of standardization than Zorro III and as such being more future proof. Length of PIC was outcome of fact that CBM accepted superiority of IBM PC market penetration - ISA was prioritized over Zorro.

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

Input status 1 is a regular VGA register, and it includes the information you seek. This is a standard feature. What was unfortunately less standard is to wire the interrupt output of the VGA chip to an interrupt of the ISA slot.

Yes, you have information that V sync blank is active but to fully use it you need to determine when it starts as such you need wait and pool status for whole line (or perform some measurement - calibrate and reprogram timer and use later system interrupts hoping that it doesn't de-synchronize too much between V sync start). Obviously using this feature is PITA.

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by Cyprian

But you know, those "dots" are not points/pixels on the screen but something more complex

Regarding dot/pixels DSP has the same as 68k dedicated instructions for that - BSET/BCLR (single cycle or two cycles each, don't remember now).

56k was used as 3D graphic accelerator and dot product is one of key operation in vector graphics.

Originally Posted by Cyprian

It wasn't "design limitations" but outdated design in both cases Falcon and A1200. I think both computers were late and should be released two years earlier

I didn't called Falcon design outdated - it was way newer in approach than A1200 but cost reduction approach made Falcon way worse machine than it could be - having 32 bit CPU/RAM interface and FAST 56k connection (DMA drive?) with bigger DSP RAM will be beneficial for overall Falcon performance.

Originally Posted by Cyprian

You can't use HAM in Workbench or inside your own GUI window.
Regarding games - I'm not really interested in this area, but I know only one game preview (shown here this year - really nice screen) with HAM but sprites there are static.

This is not HW limitation but pure software choice - you can imagine Workbench with HAM (on AGA machines where 640 and 1280 pixels modes are capable to be active with HAM) - under some limitations you could use also ICS/OCS/ECS if 320 pixels limitation accepted.
So when we talk about HW capabilities then we comparing all HW capabilities. - this is pure software design choice/limitation. I can imagine perhaps even not so slow Workbench in HAM mode as Workbench may use only CLUT part of screen (so changing only limited number of planes) and with some tricks this will work in HAM quite OK. Problem is more CPU cycles required but today with PIStorm this is probably possible - also simulating 24 bit converted on the fly to 12/24 bit HAM.
Simply no one tried this before...

Originally Posted by Cyprian

good point, I'm wondering the same thing.

Atari had a new fast architecture - Jaguar. It had 108Mb/s bus bandwidth (compared to Falcon's 32MB/s Falcon or A1200's 28MB/s), and Falcon Painter (with 68040) had integrated Jaguar chipsets.
Amiga had Ranger chips if I'm not wrong.
Both companies had an interesting technology, but both were very slow to implement it.

No clue why but it was not implemented - now we all see that it could be right choice - fast serial buses dominated modern designs.

[TEG]

Originally Posted by pandy71

TBH - i always have difficulty to understand why either CBM or Atari didn't introduced something like LPC version of inter/between IC communication to reduce IC pin count (reduce cost), simplify PCB layout (reduce cost) and improve bandwidth - but now is easy to say what and where was wrong and/or too late.

From the Wikipedia page you provided, the LPC bus was introduced by Intel in 1998. Commodore closed doors in 1994.

Perhaps you mean it was something already available in the industry outside Intel before that date ? An perhaps if it was not, it was due to the limitation of the technologies as a rise in frequency is needed to do the multiplexing.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Promilus

Sony did create powerful console but without actual relationship with game developers it would've meet the fate of Jaguar or Saturn... And from all of competitors actually Sega was kind of supporting developers (kind of... it was like toxic love actually). Then again - where's commodore? What exactly they did do except releasing machines and OS to the market?

When producing a new console architecture it was absolutely essential to directly support commercial developers because without them you had no software. You would need to supply them with a special hardware and software package that could cost over $20,000. You might even need to develop titles in-house because it was a serious commitment that few developers would be interested in when your product is unproven in the marketplace.

This was not true of home computers, which typically came with BASIC and an instruction manual that described the hardware well enough to get started. Anyone could develop software for them without direct contact with the manufacturer.

Commodore certainly did that and more for the Amiga. Right from the beginning they provided a hardware reference manual, OS programming manuals, and an assembler and compiler that anyone could buy. They had a registered developers program for both personal ($25 per year) and commercial developers. This gave access to developer notes and online forums, personal help from the CATS team, and advance information on new products. Commercial developers could get advance hardware too.

If you were a registered developer you would know all this, and then you wouldn't be asking 'What exactly they did do except releasing machines and OS to the market?'.

CATS

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[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by pandy71

Yes, you have information that V sync blank is active but to fully use it you need to determine when it starts as such you need wait and pool status for whole line (or perform some measurement - calibrate and reprogram timer and use later system interrupts hoping that it doesn't de-synchronize too much between V sync start). Obviously using this feature is PITA.

Basically unusable for anything except a demo running in DOS.

The way to do copper bars on VGA is to draw lines of different colors and change the palette entries to color cycle them. You have 256 colors so you can do 256 unique lines. If you want anything else on the screen you will have to give up some of those lines. This still requires CPU time to do the color cycling, but only needs to be done 'sometime' during blank or while racing the beam. Still a pain compared to a copper list, but possibly less CPU intensive than rendering each line in real time.

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by TEG

From the Wikipedia page you provided, the LPC bus was introduced by Intel in 1998. Commodore closed doors in 1994.

Perhaps you mean it was something already available in the industry outside Intel before that date ? An perhaps if it was not, it was due to the limitation of the technologies as a rise in frequency is needed to do the multiplexing.

Yes but Commodore could "discover" this earlier as they created ALL HW environment by themselves - Amiga was founded around custom chipset idea so it is quite natural choice to reduce pin count in IC's (as pins cost money) or integrate whole, multiple chips design into single chip where interconnects are way cheaper. Zorro III reused same Zorro II lines to keep mechanical compatibility - but using custom silicone similar to LPC design could be introduced earlier - both, for cost reduction and for improved performance.
Going from 3.5MHz to 28MHz perhaps could be impossible but to 14MHz perfectly possible. At the beginning of 90's at least one company offered something similar to what we call today SERDES - Am7968/Am7969.
Paula communication with Agnus (DMAL) is example that Commodore was aware of this possibility - why it was not used more frequently? No clue.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by TCD

Isn't your whole 'shtick' that the Amiga was so much cheaper than a PC?

No, that isn't my whole 'shtick'. The Amiga had advantages over a PC even at the same price. But it had the big advantage of being much cheaper to own the base model while still being able to upgrade as much as you liked and/or could afford.

OTOH an Amiga decked out with equivalent hardware to a PC had a big downside - it wasn't IBM compatible (which is why I eventually sold my A3000). But if you could only afford the base model Amiga this wasn't an issue, because you couldn't have a PC anyway. So the Amiga suited people with limited budgets, just like earlier home computers did.

I'm sure every Amiga user that was still using the platform in late 1997 was very happy to get a Doom port. That isn't exactly the same thing as getting it to work on a pregnancy test

True.

Doom on the Amiga is virtually identical to the PC version, so you get an 'authentic' experience. Even better, you can have endless fun doing various things to improve (or not) the frame rate. "Forget shooting things, I just want to get the highest possible fps!". PiStorm here we come...

Edit: PS Doom got a cool new soundtrack, colored lighting and sound effects though. Really not too shabby especially if you consider the price

Yes, I saw that. Wasn't impressed. The colored lighting looked tacky and killed the atmosphere, and the sound just sounded 'off'. It's not the true Doom if it doesn't have the same sound!

Edit 2: I should mention that I owned Doom on the Jaguar

I commiserate.

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Basically unusable for anything except a demo running in DOS.

The way to do copper bars on VGA is to draw lines of different colors and change the palette entries to color cycle them. You have 256 colors so you can do 256 unique lines. If you want anything else on the screen you will have to give up some of those lines. This still requires CPU time to do the color cycling, but only needs to be done 'sometime' during blank or while racing the beam. Still a pain compared to a copper list, but possibly less CPU intensive than rendering each line in real time.

In fact i've tried in past (not advanced try to be honest as i use DOS DEBUG embedded assembler) just to quickly change RAMDAC zero color and it worked... somehow... Never had opportunity to try do something serious on this... Code was very simplistic - just sequence of 4 writes to particular I/O address - not much.
However using system timer with higher frequency was quite popular (like case for PC speaker when some interrupt rate was set even to 7..8kHz) line raster should be possible.

[TEG]

Originally Posted by pandy71

Yes but Commodore could "discover" this earlier as they created ALL HW environment by themselves - Amiga was founded around custom chipset idea so it is quite natural choice to reduce pin count in IC's (as pins cost money) or integrate whole, multiple chips design into single chip where interconnects are way cheaper. Zorro III reused same Zorro II lines to keep mechanical compatibility - but using custom silicone similar to LPC design could be introduced earlier - both, for cost reduction and for improved performance.
Going from 3.5MHz to 28MHz perhaps could be impossible but to 14MHz perfectly possible. At the beginning of 90's at least one company offered something similar to what we call today SERDES - Am7968/Am7969.
Paula communication with Agnus (DMAL) is example that Commodore was aware of this possibility - why it was not used more frequently? No clue.

Now I better understand why you have in mind but several points:


- According to the Data Sheet, Am7968/Am7969 is from 1994. Description of the chip:

The Am7968 TAXIchip Transmitter and Am7969 TAXIchip Receiver Chipset is a general-purpose inter- face for very high-speed (4–17.5 Mbyte/s, 40–175 Mbaud serially) point-to-point communications over co- axial or fiber-optic media. The TAXIchip set emulates a pseudo-parallel register. They load data into one side and output it on the other, except in this case, the “other” side is separated by a long serial link.

- I don't understand why Paula DMA make you think of multiplexing
[Edit] I realized you mean using the data lines for different things.

That said, it is true that the technology of multiplexing is know since long...

The history of multiplexing goes back to the 1800s, when Samuel Morse developed his telegraph system which enabled long-distance communications. Later in 1874, Thomas Edison invented diplexing to transmit two individual messages over one line at the same time. Later in 1894 and the 1930s, time-division multiplexing (TDM) and frequency division multiplexing (FDM) came into existence. Source

I think the short answer to your question is the lack of R&D funding. In the same line, I always wondered why, having MOS Technology, they did not used it to make (a lot of) money by producing and selling components wanted by the market. I know they did that a little bit by producing logic gates when there was a shortage but it was under pressure.

[oscar_ates]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

When producing a new console architecture it was absolutely essential to directly support commercial developers because without them you had no software. You would need to supply them with a special hardware and software package that could cost over $20,000. You might even need to develop titles in-house because it was a serious commitment that few developers would be interested in when your product is unproven in the marketplace.

This was not true of home computers, which typically came with BASIC and an instruction manual that described the hardware well enough to get started. Anyone could develop software for them without direct contact with the manufacturer.

If you were a registered developer you would know all this, and then you wouldn't be asking 'What exactly they did do except releasing machines and OS to the market?'.

CATS

AmigaMail

Amiga Developer Conference Denver 1991

Amiga Developer Conference 1993

Amiga Development System

They released some interesting start bundles on A1200 and CD32, although games selection was a bit off with especially the "Dangerous Streets" and "Kang Fu".

[Promilus]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

When producing a new console architecture it was absolutely essential to directly support commercial developers because without them you had no software. You would need to supply them with a special hardware and software package that could cost over $20,000. You might even need to develop titles in-house because it was a serious commitment that few developers would be interested in when your product is unproven in the marketplace.

This was not true of home computers, which typically came with BASIC and an instruction manual that described the hardware well enough to get started. Anyone could develop software for them without direct contact with the manufacturer.

Commodore certainly did that and more for the Amiga. Right from the beginning they provided a hardware reference manual, OS programming manuals, and an assembler and compiler that anyone could buy. They had a registered developers program for both personal ($25 per year) and commercial developers. This gave access to developer notes and online forums, personal help from the CATS team, and advance information on new products. Commercial developers could get advance hardware too.

If you were a registered developer you would know all this, and then you wouldn't be asking 'What exactly they did do except releasing machines and OS to the market?'.

CATS

AmigaMail

Amiga Developer Conference Denver 1991

Amiga Developer Conference 1993

Amiga Development System

you are (again!) missing the point and pointing the obvious. Giving some kind of documentation is just BARE MINIMUM that EVERY h/w manufacturer has to provide. You're not listening to reason... Again - look what Sony did to developers and them compare to what Commodore did to provide software on their platform. There's big difference. Commodore was too small? Without proper funding? So it was absolutely pointless trying to do things like CD32... Bundles of already existing Amiga games are NOT system seller. Same with A1200... it didn't have killer apps and games at launch and hardly any killer app came out later...

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Promilus

Same with A1200... it didn't have killer apps and games at launch and hardly any killer app came out later...

Yep. Commodore knew that the CD32 needed 'system sellers' (Pleasance said so multiple times), but for the A1200 that didn't seem to be any priority.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by TCD

Yep. Commodore knew that the CD32 needed 'system sellers' (Pleasance said so multiple times), but for the A1200 that didn't seem to be any priority.

The problem being that for David, Wing Commander 1 and Defender of the Crown 2 were potential system sellers in 1994. And also Dangerous Streets.