Does AGA capture the spirit of Amiga? - Page 8

nexus · 13 November 2018, 06:56

386 to 486 games were compatible?
that completely depends on a shit ton of factors
no PC is the same
and none have built in video
this is not a fair comparison
be better to compare A1200 to a laptop spec
something that isnt using expansion cards
A1200 is portable
with a 386 not like you are gonna ever be moving that boat anchor
and no 386 laptop was that cheap even excluding the extra cost of LCD you were getting sound and vid as good
A1200 also can hook to any TV
i had a CD32 with SX-1 and i used to bring that back in forth from my dads and moms house every week
easily hook to tv it was great then
now the A4000 thats hard to say
was it worth it compared to other stock PC configs of same price
or was it better buy still just from upgrades that it could use etc etc
over PC route
also does akiko get included in this battle?

vulture · 16 November 2018, 20:25

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hewitson

With all due respect, if you knew what you were doing it was quite easy to configure your config.sys/autoexec.bat for optimum available memory.

Not all games worked with the same settings, too much tinkering.

roondar · 19 November 2018, 10:05

The 386 vs A1200 discussion is interesting, but the prices for 386's in 1992 quoted here are very low. I did some digging for another thread and the pricing we found for low end 386's without monitor or HDD was much higher than the $600 quoted here (closer to $800-900 once you add in a Soundcard and OS).

The 'better and faster graphics' quoted for low end 386 systems (even when equipped with SVGA) is also not very believable IMHO. First, there are a Amiga AGA to PC ports and these rather often required a fairly hefty system. As an example, the PC port of Super Stardust requires a 486@33MHz with HDD and 4MB of RAM vs a 2MB A1200 without HDD. Second, the actual comparison done here is between an OCS game and a SVGA game, which is hardly fair.

Also note that FDD based 2MB 386 PCs in any form won't be running Doom since this requires 4MB and a HDD. And should you go for the 4MB 386@25MHz - that runs Doom at super low (as in 5-8 FPS) frame rates. Seriously, even ADoom on a fast 68030 runs doom better than a 40MHz 386 does.

Edit: I also saw a claim of a 1MB 386. These wouldn't run any of the games compared here, 1MB of RAM was pretty much useless in a 386 PC in 1992 other than for running old software.

Amigajay · 19 November 2018, 11:02

This advert from 1992 from one of the UKs leading PC retailers show how much PC’s were, sure in the US where PCs were taking off faster as the low price computer wars wasn’t as prevalent as in Europe, they were cheaper, but the reason why PC gaming was far behind was the high prices even until the mid 90s.

Taking in to add a £235 colour VGA monitor, the cheapest 386 here is £821, thats £1056 inc VAT, and even then you would need to buy more RAM the following year to play Doom, and even then it would be a tiny screen with 16mhz, so thats more cost to upgrade the CPU.

Even when i bought my first PC in late 1997 when all hope was lost on Amiga i still paid £1000 and still wasnt happy so bought a 3dfx card the following year to play the games i wanted, thats the trouble with PC gaming, you will never be satisfied with the games settings as you rarely get the max, yet the history of PC gaming is blighted and blurred with DOSbox with people playing on max settings and cycles thinking this is how all PC gamers played these games on release, when the truth for 99% of owners was a lower game settings and choppy framerate.

alexh · 19 November 2018, 11:38

Quote:

Originally Posted by Amigajay

i bought my first PC in late 1997 when all hope was lost on Amiga i still paid £1000 and still wasnt happy so bought a 3dfx card the following year to play the games i wanted

Heh, but that is a bonkers price. God knows who you bought from. I bought my first PC in 1998 (only a short time after yourself) retiring the A3000 I saved from a Skip when I was at Argonaut.

I bought all the components from Microdirect in Manchester and assembled it myself :

Intel 440 BX motherboard
Celeron 300a (overclocked to 450)
128MB SDRAM
Nvidia Riva TNT gfx card
SoundBlaster Live sound card
ATX Case
ATX PSU
Pioneer 303s slot loading DVD ROM
Iiyama Vision Master Pro 450 19" CRT monitor
Total price £500-£600

The configuration played everything amazing and didn't need upgrading for years.

nexus · 19 November 2018, 11:54

i hit up expos upgraded a free compaq deskpro to 486sx with S3 VLB 8MB ram and 40MB HDD Double Space lol
monitor was free too
i remember the board was the old school bio that was like 90's EFI haha
how i played terminal velocity

Amigajay · 19 November 2018, 11:59

Quote:

Originally Posted by alexh

Heh, but that is a bonkers price. God knows who you bought from. I bought my first PC in 1998 (only a short time after yourself) retiring the A3000 I saved from a Skip when I was at Argonaut.

I bought all the components from Microdirect in Manchester and assembled it myself :

Intel 440 BX motherboard
Celeron 300a (overclocked to 450)
128MB SDRAM
Nvidia Riva TNT gfx card
SoundBlaster Live sound card
ATX Case
ATX PSU
Pioneer 303s slot loading DVD ROM
Iiyama Vision Master Pro 450 19" CRT monitor
Total price £500-£600

The configuration played everything amazing and didn't need upgrading for years.

Of course you can get things cheaper when you buy and build yourself, but thats skewing the price comparisons of shop bought ready machines.

My price was because it came with a CDRW drive which were £300 at the time, plus Games and Windows software which you havent included the price for.

Plus i doubt you could play the latest games for ‘years’ unless you were playing on lower settings, i bought a Dreamcast in 1999 after drooling over the graphics, 3dfx was good but coupled with my cpu wasnt optimised enough and even at lower resolutions couldnt maintain steady framerates without compromising detail.

roondar · 19 November 2018, 12:20

Doom won't run decently on any 386 though, so you'd be looking at an upgraded motherboard and RAM as well. See [ Show youtube player ] for some benchmarks on a 40 MHZ 386 (results around the 3:32 mark). Note that screen size 5 is pretty small and combined with low quality still only gives you 15FPS for the Doom built-in benchmark. The guy doing the video even notes that the Doom built-in benchmark doesn't include really busy scenes and thus the in-game FPS is probably lower.

Quote:

Originally Posted by alexh

Heh, but that is a bonkers price. God knows who you bought from. I bought my first PC in 1998 (only a short time after yourself) retiring the A3000 I saved from a Skip when I was at Argonaut.

I bought all the components from Microdirect in Manchester and assembled it myself :

Intel 440 BX motherboard
Celeron 300a (overclocked to 450)
128MB SDRAM
Nvidia Riva TNT gfx card
SoundBlaster Live sound card
ATX Case
ATX PSU
Pioneer 303s slot loading DVD ROM
Iiyama Vision Master Pro 450 19" CRT monitor
Total price £500-£600

The configuration played everything amazing and didn't need upgrading for years.

Are you sure about that price?

I have a feeling you may have forgotten to add in the monitor to the total, given I remember the Iiyama Vision Master Pro series to be rather expensive (but great) monitors. Can't say for sure what the price would be without it, but I do seem to recall that DVD drives where actually fairly expensive until around 2000 and IIRC so was the Soundblaster Live - this was only just released in 1998.

To be a bit more certain, I looked up and found a review of that monitor on Anandtech (https://www.anandtech.com/show/407) which puts it's price at $650 (US price, so no sales tax/VAT included) in 1999.

Note that I'm not saying the PC without monitor wasn't this cheap (as I really don't know), but it feels like you may have misremembered. Or, alternatively, I'm wrong - that's also possible

Leffmann · 19 November 2018, 12:52

Quote:

Originally Posted by alexh

Heh, but that is a bonkers price. God knows who you bought from. I bought my first PC in 1998 (only a short time after yourself) retiring the A3000 I saved from a Skip when I was at Argonaut.

I bought all the components from Microdirect in Manchester and assembled it myself :

Intel 440 BX motherboard
Celeron 300a (overclocked to 450)
128MB SDRAM
Nvidia Riva TNT gfx card
SoundBlaster Live sound card
ATX Case
ATX PSU
Pioneer 303s slot loading DVD ROM
Iiyama Vision Master Pro 450 19" CRT monitor
Total price £500-£600

The configuration played everything amazing and didn't need upgrading for years.

I bought my first PC in December 1998, and I paid twice as much for less than that. Are you sure about the ~£600 price?

d4rk3lf · 19 November 2018, 12:55

Quote:

Originally Posted by roondar

Edit: I also saw a claim of a 1MB 386. These wouldn't run any of the games compared here, 1MB of RAM was pretty much useless in a 386 PC in 1992 other than for running old software.

Everything bellow 4MB Ram for 386, makes 386 not being able to run 70-80% games, released in the early 90's.
As I stated before, my very good friend had 386DX/40Mhz and only 2MB Ram, and he was desperate for the fact he didn't had additional 2MB, so he can run many games.

sneeker · 19 November 2018, 17:23

My celeron 300a with a gigabyte motherboard cost me less then £150 in 1998, I bought it with a weeks wages and still had enough money to get to work and back for the rest of the week, and I had just left university then.

That celeron was stilll going strong even with xp, as I gave it to a friend and it still ran a lot of things well, but it has 640mb of ram and a geforce 4 mx in it by then.

sandruzzo · 20 November 2018, 10:27

Even with a little better copper and blitter(fully 32bit) and better paula(8 voices 16bit) and alittle fast ram(128k) would had suffice! Not so much works to do...

Marle · 20 November 2018, 10:46

As noted earlier on I think in this thread, I think it was here I posted it...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_AA%2B_Chipset

Commodore towards is last days in engineering once the PC compatible debacle came to an end was at least aware of AGA's shortcomings.

13 November 2018, 06:56	#141
nexus Registered User Join Date: Aug 2017 Location: USA Posts: 728	386 to 486 games were compatible? that completely depends on a shit ton of factors no PC is the same and none have built in video this is not a fair comparison be better to compare A1200 to a laptop spec something that isnt using expansion cards A1200 is portable with a 386 not like you are gonna ever be moving that boat anchor and no 386 laptop was that cheap even excluding the extra cost of LCD you were getting sound and vid as good A1200 also can hook to any TV i had a CD32 with SX-1 and i used to bring that back in forth from my dads and moms house every week easily hook to tv it was great then now the A4000 thats hard to say was it worth it compared to other stock PC configs of same price or was it better buy still just from upgrades that it could use etc etc over PC route also does akiko get included in this battle? Last edited by nexus; 13 November 2018 at 07:21.

19 November 2018, 10:05	#143
roondar Registered User Join Date: Jul 2015 Location: The Netherlands Posts: 3,408	The 386 vs A1200 discussion is interesting, but the prices for 386's in 1992 quoted here are very low. I did some digging for another thread and the pricing we found for low end 386's without monitor or HDD was much higher than the $600 quoted here (closer to $800-900 once you add in a Soundcard and OS). The 'better and faster graphics' quoted for low end 386 systems (even when equipped with SVGA) is also not very believable IMHO. First, there are a Amiga AGA to PC ports and these rather often required a fairly hefty system. As an example, the PC port of Super Stardust requires a 486@33MHz with HDD and 4MB of RAM vs a 2MB A1200 without HDD. Second, the actual comparison done here is between an OCS game and a SVGA game, which is hardly fair. Also note that FDD based 2MB 386 PCs in any form won't be running Doom since this requires 4MB and a HDD. And should you go for the 4MB 386@25MHz - that runs Doom at super low (as in 5-8 FPS) frame rates. Seriously, even ADoom on a fast 68030 runs doom better than a 40MHz 386 does. Edit: I also saw a claim of a 1MB 386. These wouldn't run any of the games compared here, 1MB of RAM was pretty much useless in a 386 PC in 1992 other than for running old software. Last edited by roondar; 19 November 2018 at 13:25.

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19 November 2018, 11:02	#144
Amigajay Registered User Join Date: Jan 2010 Location: > Posts: 2,881	This advert from 1992 from one of the UKs leading PC retailers show how much PC’s were, sure in the US where PCs were taking off faster as the low price computer wars wasn’t as prevalent as in Europe, they were cheaper, but the reason why PC gaming was far behind was the high prices even until the mid 90s. Taking in to add a £235 colour VGA monitor, the cheapest 386 here is £821, thats £1056 inc VAT, and even then you would need to buy more RAM the following year to play Doom, and even then it would be a tiny screen with 16mhz, so thats more cost to upgrade the CPU. Even when i bought my first PC in late 1997 when all hope was lost on Amiga i still paid £1000 and still wasnt happy so bought a 3dfx card the following year to play the games i wanted, thats the trouble with PC gaming, you will never be satisfied with the games settings as you rarely get the max, yet the history of PC gaming is blighted and blurred with DOSbox with people playing on max settings and cycles thinking this is how all PC gamers played these games on release, when the truth for 99% of owners was a lower game settings and choppy framerate.

19 November 2018, 11:54	#146
nexus Registered User Join Date: Aug 2017 Location: USA Posts: 728	i hit up expos upgraded a free compaq deskpro to 486sx with S3 VLB 8MB ram and 40MB HDD Double Space lol monitor was free too i remember the board was the old school bio that was like 90's EFI haha how i played terminal velocity

19 November 2018, 17:23	#151
sneeker Registered User Join Date: Mar 2008 Location: Manchester! Posts: 308	My celeron 300a with a gigabyte motherboard cost me less then £150 in 1998, I bought it with a weeks wages and still had enough money to get to work and back for the rest of the week, and I had just left university then. That celeron was stilll going strong even with xp, as I gave it to a friend and it still ran a lot of things well, but it has 640mb of ram and a geforce 4 mx in it by then.

20 November 2018, 10:27	#152
sandruzzo Registered User Join Date: Feb 2011 Location: Italy/Rome Posts: 2,281	Even with a little better copper and blitter(fully 32bit) and better paula(8 voices 16bit) and alittle fast ram(128k) would had suffice! Not so much works to do...

20 November 2018, 10:46	#153
Marle Pixel Vixen Join Date: Feb 2018 Location: Mie, Japan Posts: 219	As noted earlier on I think in this thread, I think it was here I posted it... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_AA%2B_Chipset Commodore towards is last days in engineering once the PC compatible debacle came to an end was at least aware of AGA's shortcomings.

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