Amiga A500 - Just how good was it?

[Hewitson]

Originally Posted by Cobe

Today when I see it I think the same but back than I havent.

Yeah, I didn't think it was excessively big back then at all. Seems like a monstrosity these days

[Amiga4000]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

Yeah, I didn't think it was excessively big back then at all. Seems like a monstrosity these days

I park my Datsun in it.

[005AGIMA]

The A500 isn't huge at all. Compare it to the big box systems or a modern PC and it's a cute little portable thing that you can carry on your BMX or Skateboard, round to your mates house, for some link up fun.

Try planning a modern gaming PC build that will fit into an A500 case...then you'll see how small it is :P

[Minuous]

It was bigger than the A1000 for no sane reason, whereas it should have been sized more like the A1200. The A600 and A1200 fit a PCMCIA port, RF modulator, RTC, better chipset and hard drive into cases much smaller than the A500.

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by 005AGIMA

The A500 isn't huge at all. Compare it to the big box systems or a modern PC and it's a cute little portable thing that you can carry on your BMX or Skateboard, round to your mates house, for some link up fun.

Ha! I carried my AthlonXP PC miditower on my bike to a mates. Where there is a will, there is a way.

[Hewitson]

Originally Posted by Minuous

The A600 and A1200 fit a PCMCIA port, RF modulator, RTC, better chipset and hard drive into cases much smaller than the A500.

Surface mount technology wasn't very common when the 500 was released.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by Minuous

It was bigger than the A1000 for no sane reason, whereas it should have been sized more like the A1200. The A600 and A1200 fit a PCMCIA port, RF modulator, RTC, better chipset and hard drive into cases much smaller than the A500.

The A1000 and A500 are almost exactly the same size

A1000: Width: 451 mm, height: 108 mm, depth:330 mm
A500: Width: 470 mm, height: 65 mm, depth: 325 mm

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by roondar

The A1000 and A500 are almost exactly the same size

A1000: Width: 451 mm, height: 108 mm, depth:330 mm
A500: Width: 470 mm, height: 65 mm, depth: 325 mm

The A1000 is 40% higher too! Then add the keyboard in front of the A1000 case and its 30% deeper! You guys make up some weird comparisons!

[E-Penguin]

The A500 is perfectly sized to balance one's A1200 on

[ZEUSDAZ]

Well at least it didn't weigh a ton like the ST ;-)
I love my A500 miggy, I wouldn't have it designed in another way :-)

[Pyromania]

I really enjoyed my A500. I shouldn’t have sold it in 1993 but I really wanted to get an A1200.

[AmigaHope]

The A500 was great but it suffered from the sidelining of the original Amiga team.

To really compete as a gaming platform against consoles the Amiga chipset needed a WAY better sprite engine, and 128/256 color modes could have been hacked in AGA-style with almost no new silicon needed. In addition the chipset should have been planned with 32-bit buses from the start, and maybe just released in crippled 16-bit mode on the A1000 initially.

i.e. a slightly-better AGA should have happened in 1987, coupled with a much, much better sprite engine.

The Sharp X68000 showed what was possible in 1987.

[DanScott]

Originally Posted by AmigaHope

The Sharp X68000 showed what was possible in 1987.

The Amiga OCS showed what was possible in 1983!

[Locutus]

Originally Posted by gimbal

Ha! I carried my AthlonXP PC miditower on my bike to a mates. Where there is a will, there is a way.

I hitchhiked to demo parties in germany with my towerized A3000, was handy i could sit on it while by the side of the highway!

[roondar]

Appologies in advance this is a long post - this is not intended to drown you out, I just can't seem to make it shorter without skipping things that I feel play a part for me.

Originally Posted by AmigaHope

The A500 was great but it suffered from the sidelining of the original Amiga team.

To really compete as a gaming platform against consoles the Amiga chipset needed a WAY better sprite engine, and 128/256 color modes could have been hacked in AGA-style with almost no new silicon needed. In addition the chipset should have been planned with 32-bit buses from the start, and maybe just released in crippled 16-bit mode on the A1000 initially.

i.e. a slightly-better AGA should have happened in 1987, coupled with a much, much better sprite engine.

The Sharp X68000 showed what was possible in 1987.

I respect your opinion, but I don't really understand it. I've heard various people say things similar to what you're saying here and I've never gotten it.

I'll try to explain why I don't understand it. First, the TL;DR version

When you consider the actual competition the A500 faced at release was the recently released NES and the Atari ST and remember that there were no 16 bit consoles available when it launched, the A500 suddenly starts to look a lot more powerful and a lot more sensible. Well, to me anyway


---
Now, the long version of the above
See, when the A500 was released the following things were true:

• The A1000 was effectively a flop, being heavily outsold both by Commodore's other machines and by the competition. Price played a big role in it's lacklustre sales.
• The A500 was much cheaper. It's also by far the most successful Amiga ever made.
• The A500 outdid it's competition on launch in sprite/bob abilities quite significantly.
• The A500 launched in the US less than a year after the NES did and nearly two and a half years prior to the launch of the Sega Genesis. The SNES was released only in 1991. In Europe, all of these consoles arrived even later while the A500 was available at roughly the same time as the US.
• The X68000 was released in 1987, at $3000. Which is 5x the cost of the A500. It's high cost was in no small part caused by the many special purpose chips and use of VRAM. It was clearly aimed at a different market.
• The X68000 sold much worse than some people seem to think. The Japanese Wikipedia article puts it at only 130.000 units sold by 1991 (compared to several million MSX units in the same period). It seems to me the high price will have played a role here.

If I look at this, my conclusion is: Commodore didn't make much (if any) money on the A1000. Price seemed to play a big part in this. So, they made a cheaper Amiga. This worked, people bought the A500 in droves. Making a more capable gaming machine would've instead pushed the price way up, which probably would've make sales worse rather than better.

The 16 bit consoles were not available in the key Amiga markets until several years after the A500 was launched. Expecting Commodore to have made the A500 able to compete with them before they were even known about seems, well, odd to me. Look at the stuff that was available in the US/Europe when the A500 released: the NES/Mastersystem/8 bit home computers and Atari ST.

It just seems to me that the idea that Commodore should've made the Amiga capable of competing with the 16 bit consoles or the X68000 is mostly based on looking back at history while kind of forgetting that there is a timeline involved and ignoring the vast difference in price between the X68000 and the A500. I'm pretty sure there'd have been a lot fewer A500 owners if it had cost $3000 back in 1987

Understand, I respect you have your opinion and I also would've loved to see a more powerful Amiga. But maybe you now understand why I think it's was never in the cards for the A500 in particular.

Edit: this isn't actually meant to start a big discussion, I just wanted to give my perspective. Feel free to disagree but I'll try to refrain from making this into a massive discussion about each of these points

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by roondar

Appologies in advance this is a long post - this is not intended to drown you out, I just can't seem to make it shorter without skipping things that I feel play a part for me.

Thanks you Roondar, that's exactly what I wanted to say.

The eternal comparison between the Amiga and others later system always miss two points : timeline AND price.
At the time it was released, Amiga wasn't at all underpowered, even in the sprite departement. And just imagine that games like Mr Nutz, Kid Chaos, Lionheart or Turrican serie just run on a machine released in 1985, with just some extra RAM. Had these games been released in 1986/1987 (yeah, I'm messing with the timeline too), they would have been better than most arcade games at that time.

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

Or ones that didn't, either. The sprite capabilities just aren't good enough.

With sprites and BOBs combined you can have a lot of objects on screen with 50 fps at the same time.

Imho enough to get most arcade machines of the time (1985 to 1988) rather well ported over.

I'd argue that you could do a rather convincing Amiga port of a typical contemporary arcade game like Ghoulsn Ghosts if you skip the parallax.

Understand, I respect you have your opinion and I also would've loved to see a more powerful Amiga. But maybe you now understand why I think it's was never in the cards for the A500 in particular.

Not for the A500, since it was perfect for it's release point of time. The best thing available and kicking everything else on the market into its groins.

But that was 1987. They should have presented AGA in 1990. They had three years time for development.

[Solo Kazuki]

Originally Posted by Steril707

They should have presented AGA in 1990.

And they could! AGA chipset was almost done in 1990, just mr Ali M. decide to release it later. Blame him for it.

Most (if not all) wrong decisions were made by person mentioned above. He's known as Commodore worst manager who cause big company goes to fiasco.

[Tigerskunk]

Imagine they showed us an Amiga capable of displaying 256 colours and 64px wide sprites back in 1990.

[rothers]

It's a very capable machine but it was difficult to code for to get the best from it. On the flip side stuff like the Megadrive was crazy easy to code for. No tricks needed to do anything, just hit a few memory addresses and you have 8 way scrolling with dual playfield + sprites.

What Commodore should have done was code their own engines/routines and licence them out to developers. Then maybe AtariST ports would have not needed to exist.

Instead, you had dozens of developers coding their own engines and routines of various quality and taking ages for the real power of the machine to shine through.