Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[Arc Angel]

Originally Posted by Promilus

If you swap your motherboard and CPU it's already different platform. It's no longer '92 PC when you invest into Socket7 instead of Socket3, right? Right. And we're talking about disappointments related to A1200 specs. I did previously mention that graphics and sound wise it was fairly possible to match up PCs up to ~95-96. JUST with more powerful CPUs. Because PC games did not rely on VGA cards to accelerate graphics even if they had capabilities (like blitter and other h/w options). And it only did change in late 90s with 3D acceleration. So A1200 paired up with sufficiently fast CPU and with proper support from developers might have been fairly good platform up to the middle of 90s. The problem was... it didn't come great at stock config. It came as cheap solution and most games were written to that specification. It was irrelevant you could've paired it up with 060 and get pentium level of applications with decent (S)VGA graphics.

No, just with a more powerful CPU you'll never ever match the sound output quality of a GUS with its 32 channels, (or SB AWE32 ) this fact alone demonstrates you're delusional.

[Promilus]

No, just with a more powerful CPU you'll never ever match the sound output quality of a GUS with its 32 channels, (or SB AWE32 ) this fact alone demonstrates you're delusional.

Oh? Let's see... CnC - released 1995. You can already play port of Vanilla Conquer on Amiga yes or no? What's the minimum requirement? SB compatible sound card. Tomb raider? Same. Oh well, maybe NFS? Same. Warcraft II? Same... that's the most common sound denominator - Soundblaster. Not AWE... Just soundblaster. Sure there were games which did sound a lot better with newer and better sound cards. But... in 95 PC world wasn't built around Pentium 90 with AWE32 and the Mach64... while such configuration did exist most users had more humble machines. Including sound card which wasn't top priority back then (and ain't nowadays either due to good enough integrated solutions or just usage of digital audio of GPU). And the whole point was "with decent enough CPU A1200 could handle those kind of games". So... if you disagree - give me the proper counter-argument and maybe not one ending with "you're delusional" which I find rather unfair.

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by Promilus

If you swap your motherboard and CPU it's already different platform. It's no longer '92 PC when you invest into Socket7 instead of Socket3, right?

Except plugging an accelerator card in an A1200 is functionality equivalent. So you aren't comparing apples with oranges. And neither a stock A1200 or '92 era PC can play Quake.

The only real difference is that, by 1997, you couldn't really buy anything from Commodore that wasn't a '92 spec Amiga, whereas the baseline spec for PCs had moved on a lot. That's what really did it in for the Amiga, the days when a static hardware platform would suffice for ten years were gone except for games consoles which, at the time, were typically sold at a loss because money could be recouped on game sales.

[Promilus]

Except plugging an accelerator card in an A1200 is functionality equivalent.

No, not really. All 68k line processors were signal-wise pretty compatible. Motorola didn't have to resort to introducing different standards to throw off competition... So, yeah, it was easy to hook up even 060. With new motherboard for PC you change whole infrastructure. Different CPU, different northbridge, different southbridge, different peripherals, different on board cache, different bios, different number of expansion slots, different type of expansion slots. Turbo card for Amiga usually was just CPU + FastRAM + some glue logic. That's it. It is not the same thing. At the basic level whole chipset is still there. So no, that's not the same thing. That might've been true to those going all out - with G-rex or Mediator and with VooDoo3 - that's basically building another platform on top of regular Amiga. But generally - turbo cards were only faster CPUs and more RAM. And that would've been enough to keep Amiga in the loop for quite some time should new games be released for the platform. But they were not. Even things like Settlers II or Warcraft II were not despite the fact they did run well under Mac emulation on Amiga with decent CPU. Yes? 3D games aside Amiga was more than capable to run most mid 90s games if paired with decent CPU.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Promilus

LoL, said by a guy who bought A1200 and PiStorm32 to run quake when every PC from 98 onward does that for a fraction of investment.

1. It has a low entry cost.

My A1200 was sold "for parts" since the seller didn't know about the A1200 since it was found in the roof attic, hence purchase cost is significantly below the market price. I took the risk and found that A1200 was operational with a broken disk drive. I recycled my A500's external disk drive for A1200. You assumed I paid the market price for A1200. That's your mistake.


2. The same A1200 with PiStorm-RPi 4B 4GB can run Windows 10 ARM edition or Linux ARM and the A1200's rear breakout panel has a USB port that is connected to RPI 4B for an external keyboard and mouse.
A1200 provides an external case and electrical power for RPi 4B 4GB.


3. The Amiga was a mainstream gaming platform during the late 1980s and it's early 1990s i.e. not a retro computer.

Originally Posted by Promilus

Your arguments are idiotic. A1200 with 060 is no better to run quake. It still sux. And BTW Quake for Amiga was released in 98. That's 4 years AFTER commodore did die and 6 after the release of A1200. Again - no f*** PC from 92 can run quake as good upgraded Amiga. So take your silly arguments with PC somewhere else.

Gaming PC's rise during early 1990 and SNES's 1992 arrival in Amiga's core European market has placed market share pressure on Commodore. Amiga wasn't a big player in other markets. Amiga's Western European core market is like NEC's PC-98 Japanese core market.

Apple countered 486SX-25-based PC clones in Q4 1993 while the Amiga was squeezed out from the bottom, mid, and high-price segments.

For Quake, I have an A3000 from early 1992 to mid-1996. I have assessed Phase 5's 1996 upgrade offerings for A3000 against the new Pentium 150-based PC clone build.

I'm aware Amiga's Quake was released in 1998, but I estimated Quake performance between Cyberstorm 68060@ 50Mhz/CyberVision 64/Zorro III Super Buster vs Pentium @ 150 Mhz/S3 Trio 64UV+/PCI 430VX within my student budget. My estimate is correct when Quake was released for the Amiga i.e. CyberStorm 68060@ 50Mhz is barely sufficient for Quake.

My reason for the A1200 purchase is to experience the alternative "What If" path instead of my 386DX-33/ET4000AX to Pentium 150/S3 Trio 64 UV path and I'm not student-poor in the year 2000s compared to my 1990s student years. 386DX-33/ET4000AX-based PC covered my 40 Mhz 68030 A1200 gaming performance requirements without paying for 486SX-25 PC level price for A1200 with 40 Mhz 68030 accelerator.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Promilus

No, not really. All 68k line processors were signal-wise pretty compatible. Motorola didn't have to resort to introducing different standards to throw off competition... So, yeah, it was easy to hook up even 060. With new motherboard for PC you change whole infrastructure. Different CPU, different northbridge, different southbridge, different peripherals, different on board cache, different bios, different number of expansion slots, different type of expansion slots. Turbo card for Amiga usually was just CPU + FastRAM + some glue logic. That's it. It is not the same thing. At the basic level whole chipset is still there. So no, that's not the same thing. That might've been true to those going all out - with G-rex or Mediator and with VooDoo3 - that's basically building another platform on top of regular Amiga. But generally - turbo cards were only faster CPUs and more RAM. And that would've been enough to keep Amiga in the loop for quite some time should new games be released for the platform. But they were not. Even things like Settlers II or Warcraft II were not despite the fact they did run well under Mac emulation on Amiga with decent CPU. Yes? 3D games aside Amiga was more than capable to run most mid 90s games if paired with decent CPU.

Amiga 1200+Mediator (or G-Rex)+ Blizzard A1260 + Voodoo setup's total price wasn't cost-vs-performance effective compared to the competition.
The towered Amiga 1200 case is semi-custom with weak economies of scale.

There are no Amiga clone manufacturers that integrated a 68040 socket with PCI slots and CD32 on a single board for mass production with cost reduction. CD32 is close to A1200 "on a small card".

Unlike AMD/Intel's selling chipsets and reference designs to support PC motherboard clone businesses, Commodore wasn't selling Amiga chipsets to support Amiga clone motherboard business.

There are unrestricted PiStorm hardware clones and a standalone PiStorm Amiga plan could help with unrestricted PiStorm-enabled Amiga clones.

Apollo-Core follows the Apple business model.

[Promilus]

1. It has a low entry cost.

No it does not. At similar price you can get some Celeron J based SBC and emulate whole thing instead of just CPU + fast. So for retro machines leave finances out of it - it will never be anything else than way too expensive than what it offers.

The same A1200 with PiStorm-RPi 4B 4GB can run Windows 10 ARM edition or Linux ARM

No, Rpi can, PiStorm is unused in that particular use case and so is A1200.

3. The Amiga was a mainstream gaming platform during the late 1980s and it's early 1990s i.e. not a retro computer.

Amiga was many things. Gaming platform does NOT exclude being computer. All gaming PC rigs are still computers and are used as such. So was Amiga... hence, retro computing. I honestly don't care if the only thing you did with yours was inserting a floppy and banging the joystick... Your usage case doesn't define what amiga was, is and how it should be treated.

Amiga 1200+Mediator (or G-Rex)+ Blizzard A1260 + Voodoo setup's total price wasn't cost-vs-performance effective compared to the competition.

Sure it was. It was the cheapest platform with that performance capable of running Amiga OS and it's apps. Prove me wrong.

The towered Amiga 1200 case is semi-custom with weak economies of scale.

Amiga itself had weak economy of scale. The only model sold at sufficient quantity to be recognizable was A500. Your point?

Commodore wasn't selling Amiga chipsets to support Amiga clone motherboard business

Apple was doing the same. And in the instance they DID offer license to the cloners it backfired and they never repeated that mistake again. And they do prosper with total net worth overwhelming Intel and AMD together... Again, your point?

[HornBeamSoft]

DOOM on emulated Amiga 1200 14 MHz with FAST RAM and gfx card is really cool.
I play it and can'y stop. It is Amiga retro as it should be.
It is possible to have gfx card in original Amiga 1200 without cpu change?
(I wan't to keep as much as possible from Commodore Amiga)
Were something like that?

[TEG]

Originally Posted by Arc Angel

It's really a pity the 1200 wasn't shipped with a DSP, or a faster CPU, to give it the ooomph necessary for 3D stuff.
68020 14 Mhz, in late 1992 ...

This is an illusion. Without chunky mode or hardware C2P, 3D games would not have been ported/developed.

The Falcon have a DSP and it seems nobody used it for 3D until 2020 [ Show youtube player ]... It require specific development and I think this time was over due to raw power of Intel cpu on PC.

From my point of view, a realistic solution would be to have the A1200 motherboard populated with the maths coprocessor (the place with all the wires is here) and a 32 bits blitter doing the C2P. However I don't know what this last point mean in terms of cycles.

[Cyprian]

Originally Posted by TEG

This is an illusion. Without chunky mode or hardware C2P, 3D games would not have been ported/developed.

chunky pixels would not help without improving chipram bus bandwidth, because it was rather poor in A1200

Originally Posted by TEG

The Falcon have a DSP and it seems nobody used it for 3D [ Show youtube player ]...

wasn't so bad,
there were quite a lot of application which used DSP for different than audio processing like MPEG players or games e.g. Bad Mood https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Bad_Mood , Quake [ Show youtube player ] or applications like Vision: http://jlusetti.free.fr/visione.htm

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by TEG

This is an illusion. Without chunky mode or hardware C2P, 3D games would not have been ported/developed.

And yet they were ported - just not by the original producers, because there was no money in it.

Take Doom for example. Though only ~1% of shareware downloaders bought the full game, by May 1994 iD had sold 65,000 copies. An Amiga port would be lucky to get 5% of that. But by May 1994 Commodore was bankrupt. Nobody in their right mind would waste time porting to a dead platform with perhaps a few thousand owners who had suitable machines.

The Falcon have a DSP and it seems nobody used it for 3D [ Show youtube player ]... It require specific development and I think this time was over due to raw power of Intel cpu on PC.

The Falcon was even worse than the Amiga. Only a few thousand were sold in total and it was discontinued before Doom even arrived! To get anything out of it you had to program the DSP chip, whereas on the A1200 you just needed to add more mips (which many owners were doing anyway).

From my point of view, a realistic solution would be to have the A1200 motherboard populated with the maths coprocessor (the place with all the wires is here) and a 32 bits blitter doing the C2P. However I don't know what this last point mean in terms of cycles.

A 14MHz FPU isn't much use.

Here's a better idea - instead of locking users into a particular CPU etc. which will soon be outdated, just put a 32 bit expansion bus connector in it and enough room to add a card with whatever becomes available. C2P and rendering speed will be sorted with more mips. You could even add a fast 32 bit graphics chip with hardware 3D acceleration, and perhaps a RISC CPU which emulates the 68k for legacy software while providing far more native processing power. Sky's the limit!

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Arc Angel

IMHO that's interesting you use Magic Carpets, as, indeed, when it's been released on the Windoz PC, it was ( again IMHO ) clear that 3D was the next big thing, and the Amiga hardware was left behind, with its 2D only games.

I remember seeing a screenshot of Magic Carpet in an Amiga magazine and thinking meh, what's this game got that makes it worth having? Then yesterday I watched YouTube video of it in action. Double meh.

There are a ton of excellent 2D games on the Amiga that I have barely played if at all. That was largely because I was so busy selling and repairing PCs that I didn't have time to play many games. And like most users I wasn't rich enough to own many games either.

But even if I was rich and had all the time in the world I still wouldn't waste it on a game like Magic Carpet.

It's really a pity the 1200 wasn't shipped with a DSP, or a faster CPU, to give it the ooomph necessary for 3D stuff.
68020 14 Mhz, in late 1992 ...

Yes, it should have had more power than a 486 and still be less than half the price. No problem for Commodore if they weren't so incompetent, right? Now where's that magic wand...

[HornBeamSoft]

I try doomattack on emulated amiga 1200 14 MHz with fast RAM and graffiti.
It looks very good like on 386 30 years ago.
It it that I need. I will try to buy real hardware.

[Arc Angel]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I remember seeing a screenshot of Magic Carpet in an Amiga magazine and thinking meh, what's this game got that makes it worth having? Then yesterday I watched YouTube video of it in action. Double meh.

There are a ton of excellent 2D games on the Amiga that I have barely played if at all. That was largely because I was so busy selling and repairing PCs that I didn't have time to play many games. And like most users I wasn't rich enough to own many games either.

But even if I was rich and had all the time in the world I still wouldn't waste it on a game like Magic Carpet.

Yes, it should have had more power than a 486 and still be less than half the price. No problem for Commodore if they weren't so incompetent, right? Now where's that magic wand...

It's nice to not be part of the herd ... some times.
But every single time, it's painful
Doom was a fantastic game, your denying it as you did over and over previously is foolish.
Magic carpet was a great game, and one of these games with great audio if you had a Gravis Ultrasound.
Whether you like it or not, want to admit it or not, even if 2D was still great, 3D was the future, and a standard Amiga couldn't offer what a standard windoz PC could offer.

To prove you're here only to please your ego and to oppose common good sense thinking, here is a video of Magic carpet, and an excerpt from the description will remind you the facts :
'Its graphics and gameplay were considered innovative and technically impressive at the time of its release'.
I invite eab readers to read the YT comments too.
[ Show youtube player ]

[oscar_ates]

It is obvious that Mr. Abbott praises commodore unconditionally like a religious fanatic. While he did not like the 3d games but rest of the world population liked it. I read that all eab thread about magic carpet. Bullfrog's conclusion was "not possible" which is obvious given that the A1200 and CD32 has not enough HP to run that level of games.

[Lord Aga]

Originally Posted by oscar_ates

While he did not like the 3d games but rest of the world population liked it.

Eh, "the rest of the world population" is kinda overblowing it.

I'm team Drunk3lf & Bruce. I didn't care at all for Wolfenstein, Doom, and Descent. Still don't.

I was, however, sad that I couldn't play C&C on my Amiga And some adventure games. And Warcraft. And MK3.

So pretty much the games that were possible on the Amiga with a stronger CPU and more RAM.

My A1200 was capable of it, so I wasn't disappointed in the Amiga, just the market, or circumstances I guess...

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by oscar_ates

While he did not like the 3d games but rest of the world population liked it.

He said he likes Tomb Raider, so that's not true.

Originally Posted by Lord Aga

I was, however, sad that I couldn't play C&C on my Amiga And some adventure games. And Warcraft. And MK3.

Warcraft 2 was indeed sorely missed And Diablo

[Promilus]

@Thorham - doesn't matter. I don't really miss Doom... But I did miss Settlers II, proper Dune and Dune II (with voices and soundtrack from CD), Warcraft II, System Shock or Dark Forces. And many, many games Amiga was capable of running but either get that chance really late or never...

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Promilus

I don't really miss Doom... But I did miss Settlers II, proper Dune and Dune II (with voices and soundtrack from CD), Warcraft II, System Shock or Dark Forces. And many, many games Amiga was capable of running but either get that chance really late or never...

Exactly. If there was one thing to be disappointed about it was the Amiga's market position and it's decline.

[oscar_ates]

Originally Posted by Thorham

Exactly. If there was one thing to be disappointed about it was the Amiga's market position and it's decline.

Why did it lose its market share and what was the reason of its demise?