The AMIGA was crap because....

[Burge]

Games got corrupted too easily. That's my only gripe. Positives on the other hand....

[Pyromania]

Originally posted by MOS-6581
The lack of built-in MIDI ports? The Atari ST lasted as long as it did because it had those frigging MIDI ports! If Commodore weren't such cheapskates, and let the designers have their way, would the ST have sold as well as it did?

CDTV has those damn Midi ports.

[Puzzle]

True. But it was too late.

That was one of the problems in general with the Amiga and Atari - too little, too late (compared to their competitors).

[Amiga1992]

Originally posted by Puzzle
True. But it was too late.

That was one of the problems in general with the Amiga and Atari - too little, too late (compared to their competitors).

Not quite. They didnt learn. They included MIDI ports in teh CDTV, but they SCRAPPED them for the newer models (a600 and A1200)!! WHY!

An A600 with an inbuilt MIDI port would have been a FABULOUS gig machine. Much like the wonderful Apple Classic II.

[Galahad/FLT]

.... fucking commodore knew how to market their machines!

they did their best to distance the CDTv from the Amiga, and couldn't make up their minds what it was supposed to be!

One thing that bugs me is the CDTV is a really REALLY nice looking machine....... spin forward in time to the CD32.... wot the fuck happened there????????

[scifi]

The things I hated on my Amiga 500....

Well, I can't say that I hated but they could be better:

1) Hard and not flexible cord (+short) on the standard mouse! I had always problems with it because the wires always break near the main body (due to lack of space).
2) Bulky modulator
3) Not flexible cables that connected the keyboard with the monitor (audio and video in one). Due to lack of space on my desk I taped the cable in a loop. If you wanted to have both keyboad and monitor on desk the only way to place the monitor was on the right of the desk!!!
4) I hated the message 'guru meditation' (nothing like PC bugs though)
5) I enjoyed the read/write error I always had in Ultimate Manager Soccer where I pulled down the Workbench screen and I played the game underneath!!!
6) It was an odyssee when it was the time to play One On One (fav game!!) and I had to load the game at about 5 times/try in order to see the famous change in deep blue on the logo of Electronic Arts! (Those were the days)
7) When I had to play Mission Elevator I had to lift the keyboard (heavy, wasn't it?) to switch off the extra mem!
8) The continuous swap of floppies when the game came with 4 or 5 disks and you didn't have a hard disk (really expensive!!)

Dedicated to the most loving computer of life!!!!

PS: Amiga 500+ really sucks!!
There was no compatibility with many of the games of Amiga 500. A problem that followed on to the next Amiga generation.

[alkis21]

Originally posted by scifi

7) When I had to play Mission Elevator I had to lift the keyboard (heavy, wasn't it?) to switch off the extra mem!

Same thing with Future Wars. Operation Stealth *could* be played with extra RAM, but if you didn't switch it off you'd have to put up with the lousy game speech.

[ElectroBlaster]

I had a complete CDTV system years ago! i badly wanted to upgrade the thing to the standard of the a2000 but couldnt get sod all for it... apart for a Brickette-joystick adaptor!

And I couldnt get the midi ports working on mine? never knew why??? i sold it a little while after.... now i wish i didnt

In those days, disk swaps during load i recon was my only gripe,
The Miggy was a saviour, the 1st true plug n play desktop machine, but a 2nd disk drive wasn`t something everyone had
back then.
long live the Meeega!!!!.

If only amigas had HD floppies as standard, this would save a lot of disk swapping since 4 disk games would fit on just 2 etc..

[manicx]

...of the CRAP demos. No Amiga demo can go half as close to the ST demos in fun, exploiting the full capabilities of the computer and being innovative...

[Severin]

I've had an amiga since '85 (1000, 2000('90), 4000('94) & One('03 fingers crossed ) and probably used it for an avaerage of 10+ hours a day EVERY day since then

yes, the mice were crap, yes, my 1084 flap broke...

alot of people are gripeing about lack of 16 bit sound, akiko, etc.. but they didn't exist when the original models came out, be fair guys, you would really moan if commodore sold you a A1200+ with them and none of your old games worked...

really my only moan would be the internal bus speed (iirc <2Mhz 1.7ish?) and the slow zorro slots (max 4Mb/s), I was always tempted to get a fast scsi controller (advertised at upto 10Mb/s but why bother with a 4Mb zorro limitation

[Amiga1992]

Originally posted by manicx
...of the CRAP demos. No Amiga demo can go half as close to the ST demos in fun, exploiting the full capabilities of the computer and being innovative...

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

BLASPHEMY!!!
Besides, if I see yet another bob effect in an ST Im gonna puke. The innovation on teh demoscene started on the Amiga. It brought, at least, style into demos. Where once was only coding showoff, now also was style and flair

[Twistin'Ghost]

Originally posted by manicx
...of the CRAP demos. No Amiga demo can go half as close to the ST demos in fun, exploiting the full capabilities of the computer and being innovative...

LOL! This *has* to be a joke. One of the cats on my BBS (back in ancient times) was an ST freak to the core and always felt his smugness reigned over the Amiga users since he knew how to program so many different languages. And he collected EVERYTHING, since he was one of the few (non-university students) at the time who had (hacked) access to the internet. In an effort to impress the #1 Amiga zealot in this area, me, he showed me piles of ST demos by Care Bears and the like. While they weren't terrible, I was more impressed by the C-64 demos another user demo'd for me, as they pushed a generally lesser spec machine (being 8-bit) even more to the limit. In that same respect, the ST was a lesser spec machine than the Amiga, so there was less hardware to bang. That extra ½ MHz processor and stock MIDI really didn't give the ST enough unique goods. And I always found the Amiga coders (and gfx/music artists) to be more creative. That one is a personal call, but I believe it fully.

Every ST demo I ever saw looked like a poor-man's Amiga demo. And in essence, that's just what they were. And history has relegated most ST demos to faceless titles on menu disks.

Long live the Amiga!

Did somebody say ST?!.

[manicx]

Demos that load each sector one after the other and you just sit there doing nothing is not a demo. The ST demos went this computer to the limit and most of the demo groups produced amazing games for the ST. On the amiga side, most demo groups saw the amiga as a joy machine and as a medium to pass messages to people. None of them went further simply because the were lamers....

[Shadowfire]

Issues that plagued Amiga since day one

* No standardized hard disk support until late in machine's life
* No hard disk support in 99.9% of all games, just lots of disk swapping
* Cheap power supply units (for the most part)
* Bizarre/stupid Hold-And-Modify display mode (just WTF were they thinking?)
* Maximum playback sample rate of 22khz
* Costed $150 to get a real mouse (boing optical) - if you didn't you had to clean mouse balls every month
* Overpriced
* Later (a3000, a4000) machines often required upgrades to 3 or 4 different chips (gary, dmac, scsi) in order to use peripherals/cards which SHOULD just have worked by plugging them in
* Software would break every major OS release/chipset release. LOTS of software.
* No definition of what exactly MEMF_PUBLIC is supposed to mean
* A bazillion different memory maps depending on how much and what type of memory was installed, which led to a lot of software incompatibility (yes, developers fault, but end users had to deal with the problems anyways)

Additional issues that plague them in this day and age
* Can't use a normal monitor without an overpriced scan doubler (this also fixes the problem with the nonstandard 23-pin rgb interface)
* Nicad batteries leak
* Overpriced keyboard/mouse converters
* Uses RCA stereo jacks when now every set of computer speakers under the sun uses mini-din input leads
* Memory is hard to find
* Internet browser software is sub-par (not my own assessment but rather those of other people on this board)

I just got a 15" LCD display and I'm thinking about hooking it up to the A3000 just for haha's... anyone interested in knowing what happens?

[MethodGit]

One major fault I always encountered with my Amiga:

The horrible, irritating "read/write" errors that plagued most disks I had. One bizarre thing is that my Workbench 1.3 disk never broke, yet at an eventual point every copy of the disk I've tried to make immediately sputtered a read/write error when I tried to boot it. And this was with new blank floppies too!


Don't understand why everyone missed out on that one.....

[BippyM]

Cuz you had a knackered floppy and the rest of us erm.. didn't

[Twistin'Ghost]

Originally posted by manicx
Demos that load each sector one after the other and you just sit there doing nothing is not a demo.

Do all Amiga demos do this? I'm not sure I even understand your example...

Originally posted by manicx
The ST demos went this computer to the limit and most of the demo groups produced amazing games for the ST. On the amiga side, most demo groups saw the amiga as a joy machine and as a medium to pass messages to people. None of them went further simply because the were lamers....

Amazing games? No examples? The same can be said for Amiga demo coders, so it's hardly something the ST had over on the Amiga, anyways. Your message about most Amiga demos being used simply for passing notes is the stupidest thing you've said yet. Clearly, you've only watched ST demos and are immersed in innuendo about Amiga demos. When one thinks of the demo scene, one thinks of the Amiga. NOT the ST.