Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[ferrellsl]

Originally Posted by Gilbert

Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

Most Amiga users and magazines seemed to be very happy with the A1200 when it came out. I wasn't at all, and a look at the first games pretty much ended my association with Amiga gaming. I just saw the same games with more colours and a bit smoother. There was no wow factor. After that I stuck with the Amiga 500 (with half meg memory expansion) and my Super Famicom (Jap SNES).

Here's what Commodore got wrong in my opinion

1. Too much focus on creating higher-res screen modes with more colours (and also making the blitter work in these different screen modes) and not enough on enhancing gaming(8 or maybe 16 sprites when the comparitively old Megadrive and SNES could manage 64 and 128 respectively). It's a bit like the original Amiga - yes it can display 4096 colours on screen, but the majority of the games for the system were 16 colours (Albeit some had added some Copper magic) and most didn't even run at 50/60 fps. That was fine back in 1985 but 7 years(!) later you expect a significant upgrade.

2. There was a mild improvement to dual playfield mode. Great!... when the SNES had 5(?) playfields and could scale and rotate whole screens. Commodore seemed to have no sense they were competing here....

2. Sound chip needed 6 channels to get a decent track playing with sound effects. Again SNES and Megadrive have 6 channels each. Using the same sound chip from 1985 was ridiculous!

3. Like the original Amiga, if you wanted to get a good number of objects on screen with a lot of colours and scrolling, you had to spend ages using hardware tricks or specific techniques. Time = money and developers aren't going to want to spend 2 years making an arcade quality game on the A1200 when simpler systems exist....

I do have a CD32 now, but it's not very impressive from a technical point of view, even the mighty Banshee is bettered on both the SNES and Megadrive. The reason I like it is because it offers something a bit different and it's an Amiga It's fairly obvious it had no hope of competing long term. I just find it hard to see what Commodore was thinking with the AGA architecture??

Yes, I was disappointed. It was too little, too late in terms of both hardware and software. The price I paid for it was higher than a better-performing i486-50Mhz. I ran several benchmarks that confirmed that even with my 68030 accelerator running at 50Mhz that my A1200 was slightly slower than a 486-33Mhz. My PC could also be easily expanded with new graphics cards that supported OpenGL as well. Running Quake 2 under OpenGL was an amazing experience at that time. The high cost and poor performance of my a A1200 were what pushed me into the world of PC's, Linux and Windows. By the time the A1200 was released, PC hardware had surpassed what the Amiga had to offer. I have no doubt that the Amiga would still be alive in some form today had it not been purchased by Commodore. Commodore's only interested was in selling commodity computers in bulk with no interest in keeping the Amiga competitive with other hardware offerings.

[roondar]

The base A1200 was not meant to compete with a 486@50MHz, though. Consequently it was priced way lower than those machines. That said, accelerators were pricey indeed and changing graphics was not a real option. IMHO it's give and take. The A1200 was designed as a budget machine and meant to compete with the cheaper 386's of the time. It did that pretty well all things considered.

On the topic of Quake 2, that was released five years after the A1200 was launched. Frankly I think it's more than a bit odd to expect 1992 hardware to run that game well even when expanded. No PC from 1992 did that, not even the really expensive ones.

Now... Doom, yeah - you'd have a point. No chunky mode was a massive oversight.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by roondar

Then there's the problems with MS-DOS: newer versions of DOS used different amounts of memory, which led to all sorts of incompatibilities (though this affected mostly somewhat newer games).

I remember that. The joys of trying to get enough of the right type of memory in DOS, with each program having its own requirements. Then after (hopefully) winning that battle, you tried to get the sound card and joystick port working correctly without again using up too much memory. And of course most games had to run in DOS because Windows sucked.

The desktop also sucked. Windows could be clicked to front but not to back. With the single mouse button you couldn't multi-select menu items, and there were no submenus. No drives, folders, or file icons - just those horrible 'program groups' that all looked the same, and preset icons for the few apps that had one. To see the actual files you had to use the 'file manager' which was like a poorer version of Diskmaster.

No named disks or assigns (just letters that changed depending on how many drives or partitions you had). No auto detection of removable media, so if you inserted a floppy it would just sit there. The MDOS file system limited you to 8 letter filenames, with a mandatory 3 letter extension to tell it the file type (no datatypes!).

But what about 'under the hood'? There it also sucked. No pre-emptive multitasking, so if one app got stuck the whole thing would freeze. The GDI resource pool was limited to a miserable 64k (result of having a 16 bit kernal), so having too many apps 'running' could cause an out of memory error even though you had heaps left. You could also run out 'conventional' memory below 640k if too many DOS drivers were installed. And the so-called 'memory protection' didn't seem to stop faulty apps from clobbering memory. Graphics rendering was slow and sound was iffy, making it almost useless for games and multimedia. Of course there were no custom screens like on the Amiga, so you were stuck with one resolution for everything.

Anyone who thinks Windows 3 was better than AmigaOS either never had to do anything serious with it, or has a short memory.

Windows 95 was a different story though. When I first tried it knew then that the Amiga was doomed, because Windows had finally caught up. Sure it needed far more resources to work properly, but with the rate of hardware advances in the PC world that wasn't a problem. Finally caught up with the Amiga more than 3 years after we got WB3.0, and after Commodore had already exited the scene.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by roondar

Now... Doom, yeah - you'd have a point. No chunky mode was a massive oversight.

Except that Doom was released (for DOS!) in December 1993, over a year after the A1200 was launched. So once again it's asking a bit much to expect the design to anticipate software that wouldn't appear until more than a year later.

OTOH the CD32 did get chunky-to-planar conversion, so Commodore were keeping up with the play as well as can be expected. If only they had managed to squeeze a faster 020 and a couple Megs of FastRAM into it...

[ferrellsl]

Originally Posted by roondar

The base A1200 was not meant to compete with a 486@50MHz, though. Consequently it was priced way lower than those machines. That said, accelerators were pricey indeed and changing graphics was not a real option. IMHO it's give and take. The A1200 was designed as a budget machine and meant to compete with the cheaper 386's of the time. It did that pretty well all things considered.

On the topic of Quake 2, that was released five years after the A1200 was launched. Frankly I think it's more than a bit odd to expect 1992 hardware to run that game well even when expanded. No PC from 1992 did that, not even the really expensive ones.

Now... Doom, yeah - you'd have a point. No chunky mode was a massive oversight.

My A1200 wasn't a base system and it was purchased in 1994. Had you read my post you would have seen that I had added an 68030-50Mhz accelerator in addition to a hard drive at enormous cost. This was in addition to what I paid for the base system, and even then it couldn't match a stock 486-33Mhz with an OpenGL capable graphics card. I paid less for my PC and it came with a hard drive, 2MB of RAM and an OpenGL graphics card and a 486-66Mhz CPU that ran circles around my 030. In the seven or eight years that Amigas were produced, nothing really changed and by the time Commodore listened to its customers it was too late. Even the A3000/A4000 were seriously handicapped by their hardware and OS by the time they were released and they were designed to compete with PC's. By then, PC's could already run circles around ANY Amiga. It's no wonder Commodore went out of business. You can't pay the bills or make a profit selling inferior goods.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by ferrellsl

My A1200 wasn't a base system and it was purchased in 1994. Had you read my post you would have seen that I had added an 68030-50Mhz accelerator in addition to a hard drive at enormous cost. This was in addition to what I paid for the base system, and even then it couldn't match a stock 486-33Mhz with an OpenGL capable graphics card. I paid less for my PC and it came with a hard drive, 2MB of RAM and an OpenGL graphics card and a 486-66Mhz CPU that ran circles around my 030. In the seven or eight years that Amigas were produced, nothing really changed and by the time Commodore listened to its customers it was too late. Even the A3000/A4000 were seriously handicapped by their hardware and OS by the time they were released and they were designed to compete with PC's. By then, PC's could already run circles around ANY Amiga. It's no wonder Commodore went out of business. You can't pay the bills or make a profit selling inferior goods.

I did read your post, which is why I said two things:

"That said, accelerators were pricey indeed and changing graphics was not a real option. IMHO it's give and take. The A1200 was designed as a budget machine and meant to compete with the cheaper 386's of the time. It did that pretty well all things considered."

And

"On the topic of Quake 2, that was released five years after the A1200 was launched. Frankly I think it's more than a bit odd to expect 1992 hardware to run that game well even when expanded. No PC from 1992 did that, not even the really expensive ones."

Both are direct responses to your post and both happen to be true. Also note I never claimed the A1200 could compete with 486 based systems. Perhaps try reading my posts before claiming I don't read yours

Edit: As for the A4000, it could actually compete with a 486 just fine when outfitted with the 040. It could also use graphics cards and had much cheaper HDD options. It did a lot better compared to the PC in 1992 (which is when it was released) than you're claiming here.

[Retro1234]

Your arguments are such and such software came out later how could old hardware be expected to do the same but thats the point it was never updated never had a price drop.

To be fair the A1200 was the best home computer for a long time but thats where it ended.

So I wasn't disappointed with the A1200 but was with the lack of upgrades and there price.

Price of Hard Drives was stupid.

Lack of six button controller

Lack Of HD disks.

Under developed OS

Lack of support for Ascii,BMP etc.

Basic Notepad all should of been standard.

The Atari ST had better DTP.

etc etc all would not have taken commodore much effort to put right.

[roondar]

Well, Commodore went bust 2 years after releasing the A1200 - which did actually see price drops during that time. IMHO it's somewhat silly to expect a defunct company to upgrade stuff. This is actually part of my main point. It's pretty clear that a lot (not all, but a lot) of the detractors here are looking it this with the benefit of hindsight and not as if it truly were 1992.

When the A1200 was released in 1992 it was a good deal. Not as nice as the 1987 A500, but not bad by any stretch (especially given the cost). It was, regardless of what people say, a pretty hefty upgrade for low end Amiga's and offered several features that were seen as really important at the time.

Nowadays we can all look back and see where it went wrong and why this happened. But back then a £399 machine with specs like that was actually a pretty good deal.

Now, the Amiga Technologies era however - that was indeed stupid. The A1200 was not an acceptable re-release in 1996 and it was way too expensive as well.

Originally Posted by Retro1234

Price of Hard Drives was stupid.

Lack of six button controller

Lack Of HD disks.

Under developed OS

Lack of support for Ascii,BMP etc.

Basic Notepad all should of been standard.

The Atari ST had better DTP.

etc etc all would not have taken commodore much effort to put right.

I take it you never actually used an A1200, right?
Because most of those things are incorrect or at least not really true.

Let's review them:
HDD: After market hard disks for the A1200 were standard PC drives. True, most people used a 2.5inch drive which was slightly more expensive, but a 3.5 inch drive would fit with a rather cheap converter. Doing it that way would cost exactly the same as buying a PC HDD. I actually bought my HDD for the A1200 at a standard PC computer store. Worked great.

Controller: The A1200 had a 100 or so button controller built-in. For action games, the system supported both 3 button joysticks and the 6 button CD32 pad. The hardware was not the problem here.

HD Floppy: If you desired, you could simply get a HD floppy disk drive - they were for sale. Though you are correct it was less than optimal this was not standard.

OS development level: Amiga OS 3.0/3.1 were both way more developed than the competition's efforts at the time. What you say about it is simply nonsense, no matter how often you repeat it.

ASCII/BMP: Amiga OS 3.0 supports ASCII by default - as in it's literally the default encoding. Also, thanks to it's OS being ahead of the curve in 1992, it supports the use of data types. This allows the OS to identify, load and save file types of pretty much any type. As such, it supports ASCII/BMP/TGA/GIF/JPEG/MPEG and about a million others directly through the OS. Not all by default - but then again, the PC didn't support IFF/TGA/AIFF/JPEG/MPEG either without additions.

Notepad/Basic: Amiga OS 3.0 comes with not one, not two, but three text editors built-in. One of which is roughly equal to Notepad, one is miles better. It also does have a programming language available as default (AREXX). Windows 3.11 does not - it doesn't even have Basic.

[Retro1234]

The end of line Ascii was not standard
HD floppy were not standard
BMP editing wasn't standard
Six button controller wasn't standard
And what compared to notepad or Wordpad as standard nothing the built-in editors were crappy.

And Visual Basic compared to Arexx this is just silly.

[005AGIMA]

I'm disappointed that I didn't know more about, and understand the A1200, and went to a used 386 instead.

[Hewitson]

Originally Posted by Retro1234

BMP editing wasn't standard

Really? I wonder why? Maybe because it's a PC format invented by Microsoft?

Originally Posted by Retro1234

And what compared to notepad or Wordpad as standard nothing the built-in editors were crappy.

And Visual Basic compared to Arexx this is just silly.

Wow. It really must take a lot of effort to be this stupid.

"Ed", is still to this day, one of the best text editors I have ever used.

Arexx is a part of the OS. Which versions of Windows come with Visual Basic? Oh that's right, none.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Windows 95 was a different story though. When I first tried it knew then that the Amiga was doomed, because Windows had finally caught up.

Windows 95 crashed more often than any other operating system I've ever used. It hadn't caught up to the Amiga at all, far from it.

Originally Posted by roondar

This was not my experience, quite a few of the A500 cracks I had worked fine without any alteration and most of the ones that didn't work ran correctly merely after disabling caches. And when that didn't work, I got close to '100%' results using a simple degrader program.

But it is true that some group of games doesn't work on the A1200. It's just in my experience that number was closer to something like 5% (maybe 10% at a stretch) than what you seem to have gone through.

I'd say that maybe about 25% of my games worked. And I feel like I'm being generous here.

Originally Posted by roondar

There were plenty of old PC games that did not run properly on a Pentium even with a slowdown TSR. I ran into a whole bunch of problems trying to do just that. Many old PC games directly hit the CGA or EGA hardware and that didn't work on Super VGA cards. Some really old stuff could only run directly from 5 1/4 inch floppy and tended to not like HD drives. Then there's the problems with MS-DOS: newer versions of DOS used different amounts of memory, which led to all sorts of incompatibilities (though this affected mostly somewhat newer games). Well, for me anyway - apparently you were much more lucky.

Extremely old games, like those which were hardcoded to run from diskette, were troublesome. I don't recall any problems with getting CGA/EGA games running on newer display hardware, but I don't doubt that it's possible.

I'm not sure what you're referring to regarding the memory.

[Minuous]

>Price of Hard Drives was stupid.

Around here, at least, the A1200HD was not much more expensive than the floppy-only model.

>The end of line Ascii was not standard

And what, according to you, should be the "standard" here? Some platforms use LF, some use CR, some use CR+LF. (CR+LF (as used on the IBM-PC) being the worst standard IMO as it causes needless bloat.)

>BMP editing wasn't standard

Even now Windows still doesn't have IFF ILBM editing, so not sure why you would expect AmigaOS to have BMP editing. But it's easy enough with datatypes and a paint program.

[sandruzzo]

A1200? A crap machine? Yes. Too few too late. But if commodore would have done some fixes on it, it could have been a "good" Amiga.

- 8 audio channel at 14mhz 16 bit dac with 8 bit volume level.
- 14 mhz 32 bit blitter
- 14 mhz 32 bit copper (2 stage chip, like blitter, and it able to access to all dma's slots)
- 128 kb of fast ram
- a separated bus for chips' register
- trap door ram accessible to cpu + blitter + copper

not so much works to do...

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by sandruzzo

if commodore would have done some fixes on it, it could have been a "good" Amiga.

- 8 audio channel at 14mhz 16 bit dac with 8 bit volume level.
- 14 mhz 32 bit blitter
- 14 mhz 32 bit copper (2 stage chip, like blitter, and it able to access to all dma's slots)
- 128 kb of fast ram
- a separated bus for chips' register
- trap door ram accessible to cpu + blitter + copper

128kb FastRAM?

It already was a good Amiga. By not making the blitter 32 bit they ensured compatibility with earlier models, and the sound didn't need upgrading. But they did put a full 32 bit bus in the trapdoor slot, which meant they didn't have to provide FastRAM or a more powerful CPU because third parties could do it. So now, 27 years later, we still haven't run out of upgrade possibilities. Compare that to your average 386-SX PC (non-upgradable CPU, 8MHz 16 bit ISA slots etc.).

I recently bought a 386-SX motherboard off eBay, and have been gradually collecting bits for it. Luckily it has VGA on the motherboard (because ISA bus VGA cards suck), but max 'fast' RAM is only 4MB, and I can only install 2MB because two of the simm slots are broken. The 25MHz CPU is soldered onto the board and there is no socket for another. I can't find a manual for this board so changing the configuration jumpers will be hit-and-miss. Next job is to find an old IDE hard drive that will work with it (oh God it's coming back to me now - CHS? LBA? 3.3V bus compatibility? how many Megabytes max?).

With those specs it won't be running Win95, so I will install DOS and Win3.1 - then I will compare it to my A1200 and see which is the better machine!

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

Windows 95 crashed more often than any other operating system I've ever used. It hadn't caught up to the Amiga at all, far from it.

I meant the OS and GUI design had caught up. Windows 95 didn't get stable until version B, but the biggest problem was people running it on under-powered machines. Not really their fault - Microsoft did say it would run on a 386DX with 4MB RAM - and it did, barely. It really needed at least 8MB to run without constant disk thrashing (and potential for crashes), but back then that amount of RAM was expensive.

What is interesting though is the different attitude of PC owners. Instead of moaning about how their machines weren't powerful enough, they just upgraded - continuously. And the more they did, the more powerful the hardware got. Even today people are spending thousands on custom-built 'gaming' machines - just to play the latest boring FPS.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Retro1234

The end of line Ascii was not standard

Yeah, it was only used in Multics, Unix, Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, AIX, Xenix, BeOS, RISC OS...

But you missed the biggy - Backslash! That's the standard separator for file paths, right? Why did Amiga choose / instead - nobody uses that!

HD floppy were not standard

Yeah, why didn't the Amiga come with a 5.25" 1.2MB floppy drive?

BMP editing wasn't standard

Not a concern for those of us not running Windows. Anyway BMP format is a mess, and not a good match for Amiga applications.

Six button controller wasn't standard

At that time the standard IBM joystick was analog, and a pain to set up and calibrate. Multi-button support was reliant on having the right custom driver for your stick. Just getting the stick to work at all was often tricky, as you had to set the sound card I/O addresses and interrupts.

And Visual Basic compared to Arexx this is just silly.

You are right. Comparing Visual BASIC to any proper language is just silly.

Rexx

Over the years IBM included Rexx in almost all of its operating systems (VM/CMS, MVS TSO/E, AS/400, VSE/ESA, AIX, PC DOS, and OS/2), and has made versions available for Novell NetWare, Windows, Java, and Linux.

The first non-IBM version was written for PC DOS by Charles Daney in 1984/5 and marketed by the Mansfield Software Group (founded by Kevin J. Kearney in 1986). The first compiler version appeared in 1987, written for CMS by Lundin and Woodruff. Other versions have also been developed for Atari, AmigaOS, Unix (many variants), Solaris, DEC, Windows, Windows CE, Pocket PC, DOS, Palm OS, QNX, OS/2, Linux, BeOS, EPOC32/Symbian, AtheOS, OpenVMS, Apple Macintosh, and Mac OS X.

The Amiga version of Rexx, called ARexx, was included with AmigaOS 2 onwards and was popular for scripting as well as application control. Many Amiga applications have an "ARexx port" built into them which allows control of the application from Rexx. One single Rexx script could even switch between different Rexx ports in order to control several running applications.

[Retro1234]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

"Ed", is still to this day, one of the best text editors I have ever used.

.

Best statement ever.

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by roondar

On the topic of Quake 2, that was released five years after the A1200 was launched. Frankly I think it's more than a bit odd to expect 1992 hardware to run that game well even when expanded. No PC from 1992 did that, not even the really expensive ones.

I do wonder as well about how much it cost to upgrade a 2MB 486 machine in order for it to be capable of running Quake 2...

Originally Posted by Retro1234

The end of line Ascii was not standard

As pointed out, there are many "standards" for this. What the Amiga did include, however, was a mechanism for converting line endings on the fly as you transfer text files to and from PC disks. That's more than PCs offered, where even to this day Notepad struggles to display and edit text files from other platforms like Linux.

HD floppy were not standard

True, and that was a minor inconvenience alright, but the Amiga's solution for HD floppies was an expensive one, which is why it was only fitted to top-end models.

BMP editing wasn't standard

Neither was TIFF. Or TGA. Or PDF. Or DOC. It's not up to the OS to edit documents in that way. The Amiga was, and still is, blessed with many excellent pixel graphics packages, most of which can read and write BMPs just fine. and, as pointed out, direct support for any graphics format can be added easily via datatypes.

Six button controller wasn't standard

True, it was supported but not standard, and the CD32 controller hadn't been released when the A1200 was released. The Amiga unfortunately started off as some sort of more powerful 8-bit-era machine when it game to many game developers, which made essentially 8-bit games with uprated graphics, and so used single-button joysticks. The Amiga has had documented support for 2-button pads since day 1 though, and that really should've been used from the start.

And what compared to notepad or Wordpad as standard nothing the built-in editors were crappy.

Ed is fine to use - what does Notepad have that Ed doesn't, other than an icon? If you wanted a more powerful editor, there was also a version of EMACS included that ran rings around the standard Windows editors.

And Visual Basic compared to Arexx this is just silly.

Indeed, ARexx was far better integrated into the OS and so many applications than VB ever was. And it was included with the OS.

[sandruzzo]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

128kb FastRAM?

It already was a good Amiga. By not making the blitter 32 bit they ensured compatibility with earlier models, and the sound didn't need upgrading. But they did put a full 32 bit bus in the trapdoor slot, which meant they didn't have to provide FastRAM or a more powerful CPU because third parties could do it. So now, 27 years later, we still haven't run out of upgrade possibilities. Compare that to your average 386-SX PC (non-upgradable CPU, 8MHz 16 bit ISA slots etc.).

I recently bought a 386-SX motherboard off eBay, and have been gradually collecting bits for it. Luckily it has VGA on the motherboard (because ISA bus VGA cards suck), but max 'fast' RAM is only 4MB, and I can only install 2MB because two of the simm slots are broken. The 25MHz CPU is soldered onto the board and there is no socket for another. I can't find a manual for this board so changing the configuration jumpers will be hit-and-miss. Next job is to find an old IDE hard drive that will work with it (oh God it's coming back to me now - CHS? LBA? 3.3V bus compatibility? how many Megabytes max?).

With those specs it won't be running Win95, so I will install DOS and Win3.1 - then I will compare it to my A1200 and see which is the better machine!

If were up to me, in the 1992 at least 28mhz 030 and 256-512k would have been a base Amiga. Come on 1992!

[Hewitson]

When current, the A1200 was already a very expensive computer for what it was. Yes an 030 and fast memory would have made it a better machine, but what was really required was a major overhaul of the graphics and sound capabilities. It needed to compete with the consoles and PC's of the time, and it simply couldn't.