Does AGA capture the spirit of Amiga?

[-Acid-]

I like AGA Amiga's as this was the era when I first got an Amiga

However looking at it now it's clear that even in 1992 Commodore should have realised they needed to be using other companies hardware and moving to x86. The Amiga should basically have became an OS with C= badging PC's as the machines and solely focusing on OS and driver development. That way the Amiga OS would have had the likes of 3DFX cards as they came out and could have been dual boot systems so users could run Windows as well.

Even now I do not see the point in new versions of Amiga OS for hardware which costs thousands, is years out of date and has like 3 users worldwide. Why isn't it being rewritten for modern and relevant architectures which have a future such as x86 or arm?

[desiv]

Originally Posted by -Acid-

However looking at it now it's clear that even in 1992 Commodore should have realised they needed to be using other companies hardware and moving to x86. The Amiga should basically have became an OS with C= badging PC's as the machines and solely focusing on OS and driver development.

I think if that type of thing would have happened, Commodore would have become just another PC company. They were already thinking that (Colt).
At their heart, Commodore was more a hardware than a software company.
I think that is what made the Amiga different. It wasn't just off the shelf or 3rd party hardware with someone else's OS.
It was custom hardware with their own OS.
That was the spirit of the Amiga, and why an AmigaOS running on standard hardware wouldn't have that same spirit. And not something Commodore (a hardware company at heart) would have done.

[grelbfarlk]

In answer to the question, yes. When I received my A4000 I could sense the very strong fëa of the Amiga in it. I could feel that the fëa of the Amiga was much stronger in it than the A2000 I had before.

[project23]

Originally Posted by roondar

I don't buy into the "better or cheaper Amiga would've saved Commodore" idea. By 1992, it was already too late for the home computer (meaning consumer oriented non-DOS/Windows machines) market - all of these companies were in trouble or had already folded.

I'm not sure I agree with the overall notion of 'Commodore/Amiga was doomed to be left behind by the PC' argument usually given. I'm not pointing the finger at you specifically roondar, its just a convenient quote for me to start, sorry

Take a look at this (if it works):



Commodore clearly had the advantage over Apple in the mid 1980's - as a company, if they had better management could they have potentially been what Apple is today? Sure, Apple was doing better by 1990, but how much of that is down to idiocy outside of the devs hands? The dire management of Commodore international (or global, or however it was named) is well documented in interviews and books etc.

When you consider the use of the big box Amiga's in the terrestrial TV industry at the time, I believe Commodore could have clung on just as Apple did with the DTP advantage they had, and if they had released the right 'thing' at the right 'time' we might be buying Commodore iphones today instead of Apple. One of the reasons Apple resurfaced the way it did was because Jobs brought a lot over from NeXT. The NeXT station looked a lot more Amiga like than PC like. Don't forget it wasn't until the late 90's (early 2000's?) that Apple dropped Motorola.

Point being, I know the Amiga vs PC argument is a little off topic here, but my own opinion is that the real debate should be Commodore vs Apple. Because I really do feel there was at some point at least a chance of Commodore doing much more with the success it had from the C64 and early Amigas.

John

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by -Acid-

However looking at it now it's clear that even in 1992 Commodore should have realised they needed to be using other companies hardware and moving to x86.

As Desiv said, that would't be very nice outcome.
For me, it's the same.... bankruptcy, or C= becoming just another PC clone company.
Actually, bankruptcy sound even better, just like in war, sometimes it's better to die defending, then to become a slave.

I think that they had lots of ways to avoid their fate, and keep the "spirit of the Amiga". Maybe to develop to something like Playstation architecture (and I've heard somewhere that Playstation 1 actually got many idea from Amiga).
I wouldn't know, and my hardware knowledge is smaller then most of you here.

However...
I just saw this on Wiki for PS 1:

One of the key factors in the PlayStation's success was Sony's approach to third party developers. Whereas Sega and Nintendo took an isolationist approach, focusing on first party development while generally leaving third party developers to their own devices, Sony took efforts to streamline game production by providing a range of programming libraries which were constantly updated online, organising third party technical support teams, and in some cases giving direct development support to third party companies.[42] At the close of 1996, there were approximately 400 games in development for the PlayStation, as compared to approximately 200 games in development for the Saturn and 60 for the Nintendo 64

Imagine if C= had that type of organization and marketing. Even with Aga in 1992, they might have been much more financially successful, that could lead to faster development of AAA chipset, or Hombre... or whatever... and released in 1994-5.

Still dreaming...

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

Actually, bankruptcy sound even better, just like in war, sometimes it's better to die defending, then to become a slave.

I really love this analogy. The Amiga was among the last of the independent home computers that did their own thing, before IBM assimilated that market. That makes them unique. Now everything is standardised and safe and dull.

[project23]

Again, around the same time the A3000 came out, the popular Mac was the MacIIci with an 030 at 25mhz, and similar ram capabilities. One of the biggest differences in the Mac's favour is in the graphics arena, but i'm not sure what graphics cards were available for the 3000 when it came out? Point is - it aint that different.

At the time MacOS was not truly multitasking, whereas AmigaOS was.

Apple, in my view, was the true competitor - not the PC - and yes, both Apple and Commodore were failing, but look at how that turned out!

[-Acid-]

I can see what people are saying about the Amiga being it's own hardware and up until a certain point I agree with that and if they could have kept ahead of the game it would still have been the best course of action.

But by the time they were bankrupt PC components were never going to be overtook again as there was newer, better and faster versions of all sorts of components coming out on a almost weekly basis. And then when the 3D cards arrived how could you pick one to stay ahead of the competition for a couple of years at a time with developements progressing as fast as they did in that area?

Maybe the Amiga was always doomed to come to an end in the late 90's as that custom hardware era was being left behind. Commodore couldn't have hoped to have made better parts than the big companies who specialised in a single area be it networking, graphics, sound or whatever. Perhaps best hope of survival would have been a motherboard and OS combo which could use all of the PC's PCI expansion cards and other add ons.

[turrican3]

Originally Posted by project23

Apple, in my view, was the true competitor - not the PC - and yes, both Apple and Commodore were failing, but look at how that turned out!

It turned out like this because microsoft (bill gates) saved apple, if he didn't mac will be dead too.

[project23]

Originally Posted by turrican3

It turned out like this because microsoft (bill gates) saved apple, if he didn't mac will be dead too.

Well that was in '97, after NeXT, and who knows what sort of technology MS got out of the deal with Apple at that point.

If Commodore had been managed to the point where they had NeXT like technology in 96/97, who's to say the deal wouldn't have been with Commodore, or both?

Lets not forget Gates had a thing against Commodore for how they sorta got away with murder (legally sound!) in terms of the license agreement for BASIC being lifelong and single-fee around the time of the C64.

Lets not also forget that one of the reasons the Amiga didn't do so well in the US was that Trammel had all but completely destroyed his sales channels by messing people about over and over again.

The Amiga could have had as big a market as Apple in the US in the early 90's if it wasn't for some of this stuff, and unlike Apple someone at the helm who wasn't a volatile madman who was fired from a company he founded. Instead you could have had a more professionally managed and forward looking Commodore with NeXT sorta-stuff (AAA is sorta NeXT station similar I believe?) earlier by a year or so - you can bet your ass Gates would have had his eyes on that.

But as it happened, Commodore was eating itself up from the inside, and I think the likes of Gates et al knew that. I mean they'd ruined their US market - re-sellers wouldn't deal with the company. There are some great interviews with Dave Pleasence and Chuck Peddle and more on youtube if you're interested in any of this. Bill Hurd too. (am i spellign that name wrong? it's like half two and i'm just in from work, lol) The average American has no idea how big the Amiga was in the EU thanks in part to the likes of Dave Pleasence who knew what he was doing.

I just think its an interesting exercise to sit back and think how the world would look if Commodore won and Apple collapsed after Jobs left (was sacked).

Such a shame, because the lack of direction and silly risk taking is what led to Chuck Peddle being given the green light for what became the PET.

And yet Jobs is worshipped (lets not forget that Woz is just, what, left behind to history? He designed the bloody thing!) whilst Peddle (the true father of the home computer) isn't even recognised. Of course Trammel sued Peddle the minute he left, financially ruining him. This is what I mean. They had some of the best minds, at the best time, with the best creativity - and they just threw it around like play dough until a few great things happened (the C64, the Amiga).

Apparently Gould (the sorta, financier, from what I understand?), and Trammel got into a huge fight over Gould using Commodore profits to buy personal items like boats and stuff (sound company this, isn't it?) - anyway i think Trammel said he couldn't be CEO while that was happening, so Gould basically called his bluff. Which is a shame, because Trammel for all his faults got some great things off the ground. But what did he go and do then? First he sued the guy that helped made that fortune in the first place, then he went to Atari (bought the rights to a portion of its name, like the electronics/computer division) to try and build a rival product out of what can only be seen in hindsight as a form of spite (how well did Atari Computers do? If that what it was called. It wasn't the original full Atari title I know that. I'm genuine curious here as I don't know how well it did as a company). But with the ST there was no rival custom chipset or revolutionary design, it was just a cheap knock-off frankly, and how forward thinking is that? What does that say about the plan of the company, and the niche they wanted to fill?

Computing for the masses not the classes, Trammel said. Well the Atari STFM 1040 wasn't that much cheaper than the A500+ without the monitor, from what I can tell?

I mean it all stinks of sh!tty business decisions and opportunities lost.

Okay rant over! its 2:48am and I should get to bed hahaha

John


EDIT: People like alternatives - look at the Apple fanboys/girls of the mid to late 90's we all laughed at. Is that any different to our enduring and passionate Amiga community? It could have happened, I'm just saying... Just... Maybe...

EDIT2: (Yeah I'm still awake, sue me)

From the 3000UX wikipedia page:

At one point, Sun Microsystems approached Commodore-Amiga, Inc. with the offer to produce the A3000UX under license as a low- to mid-range alternative to their high-end Sun workstations.[1] That this offer was declined was one of the many management decisions that led to the popular belief that the Amiga platform would have been a real success story but for Commodore management.

I didn't even know about this. It's just another stupid unnecessary nail in the coffin. Ya know? They could have had so much, haha.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

I just saw this on Wiki for PS 1:I just saw this on Wiki for PS 1:

Imagine if C= had that type of organization and marketing.

IMO Commodore provided plenty of development support. When I got an A1000 in 1987 I was keen to get into advanced programming of its amazing features, and having worked with an Amstrad CPC for several years I appreciated the concept of using OS functions rather than just banging the hardware. So I bought the ROM Kernel manuals and pored over the include files, and was soon making use of the Amiga's amazing multitasking OS and powerful hardware without having to 'bang' anything!

For me the programming support that Commodore provided was a large part of the 'spirit of Amiga'. PCs didn't get proper hardware support in the OS until Windows 95, and then only by kludging it. Remember Windows 3.0 'multimedia extensions'? Having to configure the I/O address and interrupt of your sound card? Trying to get the right combination of conventional and extended/expanded memory? What a joke. And everybody banged the hardware because the BIOS functions were inadequate and Windows was too slow.

How much developer support did PC manufacturers provide? None. Yet by 1993 the PC was already eclipsing the Amiga in almost every department. Because business apps, VGA and a boring game called Doom. All the Amiga development support in the World wasn't going to make up for that PC envy.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Foebane

Now everything is standardised and safe and dull.

Except for those of us who still use Amigas!

This morning I got a phone call from a gentleman with a foreign accent who said he from my ISP, and that my computer had been compromised by hackers. He tried to get me to run a remote desktop app so he could hack into my computer.

Usually I just hang up on these guys, but since I was using the A1200 at the time I decided to string him along. First he got confused by the lack of a 'Windows' key on my keyboard, so I explained that Amigas don't have one. After I told him it wasn't any kind of PC or Mac, he looked up the word 'Amiga' and found out that it was 'an old computer good for playing games'. He then directed me to a website with a file to download. Of course the exe wouldn't run, but that didn't deter him. This went on for about 45 minutes, until it was time to go out shopping so I hung up. He rang back! The poor guy still thought he had a chance.

Another good reason for using an Amiga today, scammers can't get you! This is actually the reason I recently got back into using the A1200, after some very serious people informed me that continuing to use Windows XP was 'criminal' due to its potential vulnerabilities. Being able to play games with a scammer was fun, and that's one who probably won't be bothering me again...

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

How much developer support did PC manufacturers provide? None. Yet by 1993 the PC was already eclipsing the Amiga in almost every department. Because business apps, VGA and a boring game called Doom. All the Amiga development support in the World wasn't going to make up for that PC envy.

Doom? BORING??? It was the main reason (aside from Commodore going bust) that I switched to PC in the first place!

Then again, I didn't like having to fiddle about with MS-DOS just to get games to run, trying to coax enough memory out of the 486 whilst retaining mouse, sound and CD-ROM. Ugh, I felt like some survivor of a nuclear war who was forced to use much more primitive hardware as a result. But Doom was worth it, and to be honest, what more could Commodore do, as a dead entity?

Love your hacker story, BTW.

[PortuguesePilot]

Doom was really a revolution, either we liked it or not. I remember looking at the pictures of it when it came out (most of my PC mates of the time had 386 machines, most without sound cards. A few richer guys had 486SX machines with Ad-Lib or Sound Blaster Pro, so few had the chance of playing it in all of its glory) and I was thinking: "doesn't look so impressive". As an amigan, and with all the talk at the time about "but can the Amiga actually play Doom?" that flooded the magazines at the time, I had a strong dislike towards the game. But then I saw it full-scale and full-blown on a 486DX2-66 with a Sound Blaster 16 and I was really blown away. It was not the first time I felt the PC had bettered the Amiga (Mortal Kombat and Joe & Mac spring to mind, if we exclude those hefty games that were always better suited to the PC, like Wing Commander, Ultima VIII or Civilization), but Doom did signalled to me that the Amiga days were over. It did hurt at the time. Big time. Sorta like one of your beloved pet dies... Never felt that way about any other computer or console. I got a similar-spec PC the very next month.

It's true, though: many aspects of the PC world were still inferior to the Amiga in many ways. Things that the Amiga got right from the get-go were still being debacled on the the PC realm. 640k free mem? LOL! I had to fiddle with QEMM and other programs just to get some games to work. Want to have a mouse drive, a CD-ROM drive and other peripherals (sound card, etc)? There goes your precious conventional memory and some games just won't work. I had to create more than one boot disks to circumvent many issues regarding several games. SVGA was awesome and all, to see high-res (640x480 at the time, LOL) with full 256 colours on screen was awesome, but in early 1995, when I got my PC, the VESA drivers were still kinda new and many games didn't run well on my PC (namely several Maxis games). This was before Windows 95 came out, so I was using MS-DOS 6.21. What a bleeping mess it was compared to the smooth usage of the Amiga. Also: wanna use a joystick with your games? Every guy I know who migrated directly from the Spectrum to the PC (without going through the Amiga) seem to neglect them altogether. They just used the keyboard. But I knew better: arcade and action games just became better with a joystick. But, lo and behold, every PC joystick at the time was a clunky, feeble, beige analogue stick that needs calibration EVERY TIME YOU RUN A NEW GAME!!! Argh. The Amiga, back in 1985, had got a whole lot of rights that the PC world - even in the advent of 486 gaming - was still trying to figure out. The PC only got "sort-of" into the Amiga smoothness on operation when the jump from DOS to Windows became the norm, and that was around 1998/1999 with Windows98, the first Windows to be any good (and it still sucked ass). Plug and play devices only got as smooth and flawless on the PC with the advent of USB and its generalization with Windows XP (this was already in the 21st century).

The PC was never meant to be a gaming machine. It sort-of just became one. The Amiga was born out of a project to make a games console, so it was ALWAYS going to be better than any other computer of its time for gaming (lets exclude the X68000 from this. None of us knew what it was back then). The Amiga wiped the floor with the Ataris, PCs and Macs of its time. Even later computers, like the Archimedes, the new Macs and 486SX PCs struggled with it. It was only with the advent of 486DX processors and powerful SVGA boards, coupled with more RAM, large HDDs and CD-ROM drives that the Amiga was finally beaten. It took more than a decade to defeat the Amiga for good. This in a time when computers used to be obsolete 3 months after you bought them, such was the pace of hardware development, just comes to show how far ahead of the competition the Amiga really was when it came out. It was so radically ahead of anything that even its creators weren't fully aware of what it was truly capable of.

With all this lead, with all this edge, Commodore (or Amiga, or whatever) really just slept under the shadow of their own success, because if they kept this edge consistently, no other computer would have stood a chance. PCs flooded the work market, that's one of the main reasons for their success (even despite them being more expensive, complicated). The marketing work of Commodore really was dismal. Many opportunites were lost. The american market was never truly conquered (was Trammel the only culprit?) and then later business ventures were disastrous (I'm looking at you, Mehdi Ali). Too bad. Commodore (and the Amiga) could have had a glorious history. They still did, though, albeit for a short time (more or less a decade).

On-topic again: AGA was Amiga. It has all the hallmarks of the Amiga. It has the "true spirit of Amiga", whatever that is. Pity we never got to see AAA or Ranger or anything else. I read elsewhere that AAA was going to be able to compete with the Playstation graphic abilities. If that was the case, the Amiga could have gone on for a decade more. If Commodore were able to develop wrapper or DLL based 3D graphic cards (à la 3Dfx), you could add five more years to that as well. Such a shame that those never came to be... Of course, we're now talking with the illuminated knowledge of hindsight, and even with all we read and learn, we still don't know what it was like to be there, in Commodore, at the time. Still, I have a sense that if a few better decisions were made at the right time, Commodore could have survived the computer wars and still be here doing its thing. A pity...

[coder76]

I think AGA is still underrated in terms of performance vs. OCS. While AGA was not designed to run games like Doom and Quake, it turned out that these will run decently on an AGA machine with enough CPU power (comparable to x86's). Try running Doom on an A500 even with a heavily upgraded CPU, and it will still be very slow and color-limited.

Here's Doom on a 68030/25 MHz A500:
[ Show youtube player ]

And here on an A1200 with 68030/50 MHz:
[ Show youtube player ]

While the A1200 has here a 2x faster CPU, the OCS chipset has such a slow access to chip ram, that it will cripple faster CPUs, while the AGA has faster access to chipram, and the 256 color lowres screenmode doesn't also cripple performance.

[_ThEcRoW]

Out of curiosity, does anyone know if there is anya way to get the music playing on amiga doom?. I tried different versions on my 030/50 but no luck getting the soundtrack played.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by _ThEcRoW

Out of curiosity, does anyone know if there is anya way to get the music playing on amiga doom?. I tried different versions on my 030/50 but no luck getting the soundtrack played.

Probably because the music on Doom (1993) is MIDI, and the Amiga has enough to deal with with the sound FX, let alone playing multi-channel music as well.

[nexus]

486DX and SVGA cards etc were not beating amiga
you have to remember that was all made by many many companies
we had the same on our side with PPC etc etc so amiga wasnt beat till after they were already gone to me
well as in CBM owning amiga anways
we already know we could run doom just fine it wasnt the hardware it was software
very hard to beat a platform that became open as hell that anyone could make and
produce like what was going on at that time

even in japan they were giving up and rolling with PC systems
most people didnt really jump on PC around me till late 90's when they could afford one my father used his c64 till 1995 when he got a P166 PC

then we have the console 3D explosion which also didnt help amiga
if only they did the CD32 correctly they might have had a chance in that market
but amiga was doomed from the inside anyways
business men only care about profits etc

[Foebane]

The sad thing is, Jay Miner. the visionary and the Father of the Amiga, lived just long enough to see Commodore go bust and then himself succumbed a short while later. It seems tragic, especially seeing as how he helped saved lives as well as advance computer technology.

[project23]

Originally Posted by Foebane

The sad thing is, Jay Miner. the visionary and the Father of the Amiga, lived just long enough to see Commodore go bust and then himself succumbed a short while later. It seems tragic, especially seeing as how he helped saved lives as well as advance computer technology.

I think he'd have loved to see the community thrive the way it does today.

Maybe him and his dog are looking down on our in-fighting

John