Machine Wars - Fight!

[MalikS]

Originally Posted by touko

I agree, the AGA was crippled mainly to maintain compatibility with OCS,a more powerful amiga was already completed in 89 by miner (before he left commodore) but was never launcher due to costs, mainly for RAM, and if i remember right it was not compatible with the OCS .
The A500 started to have good sales and IMO Commodore did not want to stop that,and restarting a new desert crossing as it was with the A1000, with launching a new machine, even if more powerful it would have been too expensive,so what's the interest if you have a monster which nobody can buy ..

Atari like commodore had the know-how to did a more powerful system, but it was not viable for a mass market, see the X68K .
Why the AGA had better sales than falcon ??,because price,amiga compatibility,and of course softwares, new and existing with the OCS/ECS compatibility .

IMO if i judge the falcon and AGA only by hardware specs, for a stock machine the falcon is better no doubts, but if i takes the overall characteristics(price, softwares,evolutivity) the amiga is a better system .


yes and you buy a x68k,a NeoGeo or a powerful 386 rather,you speak like if money was not a problem,and precisely it was,even a simple 512 ko of RAM expansion for amiga was out of budget for the most of us .

The games defined whether a system could have good sales or not,even nowadays, games are a big factor .

I agree for most of it except for your statement about price.
It is a business rule : you can't get more than what you'll pay for.
Manufacturers like C= and Atari entered a price war, had small margins, and even with good sales they managed to tank.
Acorn did the opposite and survived (and Hermann Hauser, CEO, is a billionaire).
I'd be curious to know what net margin was for the various manufacturers, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was Acorn with its niche education market (and the fact this company spent next to nothing on advertising)

If as you say buying a simple 512 kbytes (ko is for the French ;-) ) RAM expansion is an issue, then you are one of these people who will never buy any game or applications anyway, and will feed piracy ...
Call me posh or / and pedantic but I don't care about these people' feelings or ideas about which machine is the best : they are thieves and destructive.

Btw another way to read your remark about the RAM expansion as 'out of budget' is to understand you admit RAM upgrade for the Amiga was very expensive, thus making the Archimedes, with its standard 1 Mbyte of RAM ( + 512 kbytes ROM at launch time), not that expensive after all.

[Foebane]

AGA was "crippled"? What nonsense. There's nothing wrong with the de facto Amiga chipset. OCS/ECS should be legacy, and AGA the norm. A lot of stuff I've seen on AGA blows MS-DOS away!

AGA was fully 100% compatible with OCS/ECS, and that's the way it should be.

[MalikS]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

I’m not making anything ‘personal’ if you read something out of nothing then its your problem, i’m discussing which of these three computers had the best library of games for that system, so shhhh with the behave yourself Nanny McPhee

I’ve no interest in Acorn’s strategy or goals which seemingly you do, which bring nothing to this conversation about the number of games, i’ve nothing else to add.

Well that's obviously the Amiga.
It's up to you to decide if the best computer is the machine with the best library of games.
It means for you the best computer is a console, and that's not my opinion.
If it's the availability of pirated games that makes you choose, then buy a SNES and a superwild card or UFO, problem solved.

[britelite]

Originally Posted by Foebane

AGA was fully 100% compatible with OCS/ECS, and that's the way it should be.

It most definitely isn't 100% compatible

A lot of stuff I've seen on AGA blows MS-DOS away!

And this is just stupid. A chipset blows an operating system away?

[Hewitson]

Originally Posted by touko

Maybe but compatibily was an important factor for commodore

Absolute bullshit. If compatibility was such an important factor, why was anything other than a 68000/010 machine useless for games?

[Predseda]

Even different units of the same model were often incompatible

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by britelite

It most definitely isn't 100% compatible


And this is just stupid. A chipset blows an operating system away?

OK, my previous post was rather hastily posted without explanation, I just have a hard-on for AGA

I remembered all the compatibility issues with AGA and older OCS/ECS games listed in Amiga magazines, I don't know why I forgot that - must've had a brain fart.

As for the MS-DOS remark, I meant plain VGA, but MS-DOS was one of the first to use it.

Forgive me for my ignorance, BTW

[MalikS]

Originally Posted by Foebane

AGA was "crippled"? What nonsense. There's nothing wrong with the de facto Amiga chipset. OCS/ECS should be legacy, and AGA the norm. A lot of stuff I've seen on AGA blows MS-DOS away!

AGA was fully 100% compatible with OCS/ECS, and that's the way it should be.

You can find on eab all the reasons why it was a good step forward but below programmers' expectations.
'Crippled' simply because when 3D becomes so prevalent it only uses bitplanes = doesn't have chunky modes.
(This is where the Falcon's VIDEL screen modes are much more interesting than what AGA delivers although IIRC there is no chunky 256 colour mode which is rather weird).

[britelite]

Originally Posted by Foebane

As for the MS-DOS remark, I meant plain VGA, but MS-DOS was one of the first to use it.

That's pretty much what I guessed. Anyway, considering VGA came out in 1987 (5 years before AGA and even 3 years before ECS), it's not really a fair comparison. But it also highlights how out of date AGA really was when it was introduced.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by MalikS

You can find on eab all the reasons why it was a good step forward but below programmers' expectations.
'Crippled' simply because when 3D becomes so prevalent it only uses bitplanes = doesn't have chunky modes.
(This is where the Falcon's VIDEL screen modes are much more interesting than what AGA delivers although IIRC there is no chunky 256 colour mode which is rather weird).

OK, so AGA wasn't 100% compatible, but I would think that to retain ANY compatibility with OCS/ECS, it would need to keep the exact same system of bitplanes, but more of them and at higher resolutions.

If there is anything I wish Commodore had done, it would be to at least implement something like Akiko (c2p) as standard for the A1200/A4000. Doing it later on for the CD32 was very much like what Atari did with the STE over the ST, ie. too little, too late.

I've programmed chunky displays for VGA, and it really is a dream for fast graphics for already fast processors. No wonder the PC won out.

[Hewitson]

I believe Commodore may have been more successful if "upgrading" to a faster, AGA compatible machine didn't render the majority of people's software useless.

I consider my 1200/060 a worthless piece of shit compared to my 2000/010, simply because everything works on the 2000. What's the point of having a fast machine if nothing works on it?

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by britelite

That's pretty much what I guessed. Anyway, considering VGA came out in 1987 (5 years before AGA and even 3 years before ECS), it's not really a fair comparison. But it also highlights how out of date AGA really was when it was introduced.

It still gave the Amiga a much-needed boost in graphics, even if it wasn't enough to be a serious contender against the PC.

[Hewitson]

On paper it did. But realistically, most AGA games don't look much better than their OCS counterparts.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

On paper it did. But realistically, most AGA games don't look much better than their OCS counterparts.

Isn't that because they augment existing graphics rather than creating totally new graphics from scratch?

[Hewitson]

In many cases, yes. But my point is there's not much point having a "much-needed" boost in graphics if nothing is taking advantage of it.

[Predseda]

I wish AMOS had native AGA support...

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

In many cases, yes. But my point is there's not much point having a "much-needed" boost in graphics if nothing is taking advantage of it.

Not much knowledge of the specs? Limited development time? If I remember, unlike OCS, Commodore didn't widely distribute the AGA specs, but did insist that programmers go through the OS rather than "hitting the metal" directly.

Originally Posted by Predseda

I wish AMOS had native AGA support...

Oh, so do I! The last game I coded for Amiga was in AMOS, and I tried to compensate for the lack of AGA by shoving many more colours into the game than usual for an Amiga game: [ Show youtube player ]

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

Forget Amiga, even the C64 is superior compared to ST/Falcon. Hardware scrolling/sprites, much better sound synthesizer, much better demos.

[Predseda]

Originally Posted by Foebane

Oh, so do I! The last game I coded for Amiga was in AMOS, and I tried to compensate for the lack of AGA by shoving many more colours into the game than usual for an Amiga game: [ Show youtube player ]

So the game doesn't exist anymore? What a shame....

[touko]

Originally Posted by Foebane

AGA was "crippled"? What nonsense. There's nothing wrong with the de facto Amiga chipset. OCS/ECS should be legacy, and AGA the norm. A lot of stuff I've seen on AGA blows MS-DOS away!

Yes we are expecting much more in 92 than a simple refresh of a 8 years old technology .
This don't mean that AGA was a bad system, it was only too little,too late .