1992 386DX Beating Amiga?

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

The majority of A500 owners were not expecting to upgrade them except for perhaps some trapdoor RAM and an external floppy drive,

yes - and that was the problem for Amiga as a platform.

so an A2000 was a waste of money for them no matter what the price (assuming it wasn't sold at a loss). Once could argue that Commodore should have produced a mid-range machine without some of the stuff almost nobody wanted (bridgeboard slots, full desktop size case etc.) but high-end users often did want that stuff.

The A2000 was good in some regards and has its place, but should have had a HD controller (DMAC) installed by default and should have been offered with better CPUs sooner ...
The idea of offering a pro machine was the right one - but it lacked crucial pro features and was therefore overpriced.

For the midrange machine:
A cost reduced A1000 with a second floppy drive bay, ROM instead of the piggyback board and a inbuild slot for more RAM would have been a winner.
The "Rejuvenator" or the GBA are showing, that is it not a hard thing to do - should have been easy for a billion dollar company.
For this A1000CR Commodore should have provided a "sidecar" with Buster and ZorroII slots.

The biggest 'ripoff' was the A3000, yet it was still about the same price as an equivalent Compaq 386DX.

that's why I bought one back than

[swinkamor12]

When I look back to Amiga 500 times.
0.5 MB additional RAM and second floppy was enough.
Amiga 500 was so good so nobody need any other extesion for it.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by swinkamor12

When I look back to Amiga 500 times.
0.5 MB additional RAM and second floppy was enough.
Amiga 500 was so good so nobody need any other extesion for it.

right until it wasn't anymore ...

[vbgd]

I sold my Amiga 500 in 1993 or 1994 and bought ab 486 DX 33 instead with 4 MB memory and 340 MB harddisk from seagate to play Origins Strike Commander. I got 250 Euro for my Amiga and paid 3500 for my PC. 2 years later I changed everything for an 486-DX4-100.

[commodorejohn]

The big thing that 386 systems offered that no stock Amiga did (and almost no accelerators, either!) was the option for high-speed cache RAM on the motherboard. Of course, the later 680x0s had L1 cache right on the CPU, but it wasn't until the 040 that there was more than a tiny bit of it; the 386 has no L1 cache, but most decent 386 boards gave you the option for anywhere from 64KB up to even 512KB if you wanted to drop the money on it. That makes a significant difference in performance.

[Turrican_3]

Originally Posted by commodorejohn

The big thing that 386 systems offered that no stock Amiga did

I'd say chunky pixel graphics instead.

Textured 3D games were starting to become a thing in the early '90s (Wing Commander immediately comes to mind, not to mention DOOM) and the Amiga suffered a lot when comparisons were made to the PC world.

By the way it's not like PC developers were eager to develop on the Amiga in the first place and that of course made things worse.

[BrooksterMax]

I see the original post took an unexpected turn I felt the Amiga was still very competitive with the 386 scene at the time and that I was not missing out in any great way. The LucasArts adventures like Monkey Island 2/Fate of Atlantis were making their way to the Amiga still and relatively comparable despite the lack of VGA and hard drive.

For me the PC started to move further away from my A500+ when the 486 came into town in a more mainstream way. Things like UFO Enemy Unknown which ran nicely on it, Doom etc. just seemed to be out of reach. I remember being envious of an uncle that had a 486 running knowing the Amiga was lagging when I first saw it.

[Dunny]

I had an A1000, my friend had a 386.

I was blown away by Ultima: Underworld and was quite, quite jealous of the PC - he had a monitor with crisp pixels, my A1000 ran on a 14" colour portable via RF.

But that Adlib MIDI music was bloody awful as were the spot-effects.

X-Wing and TIE Fighter were pretty bloody cool also. MIDI music sounded bad though.

Platform games were awful. Controls felt wrong, scrolling was atrocious, again sound was utter shit.

I would have liked to get a PC at that point if I could have afforded it (no chance) but only to accompany my A1000, not to replace it.

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by swinkamor12

When I look back to Amiga 500 times.
0.5 MB additional RAM and second floppy was enough.
Amiga 500 was so good so nobody need any other extesion for it.

Eh? One of the big advantages the PC of the era had was a hard drive more or less as standard. So games and software could be installed and you didn't have to deal with endless floppy swapping. That's exactly why the first thing I added to my Amiga when I got it was a hard drive.

[Zak]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

Eh? One of the big advantages the PC of the era had was a hard drive more or less as standard. So games and software could be installed and you didn't have to deal with endless floppy swapping. That's exactly why the first thing I added to my Amiga when I got it was a hard drive.

Harddisk for Amiga 500 is useless because all the programs are NODOS.

[Turrican_3]

Originally Posted by Zak

Harddisk for Amiga 500 is useless because all the programs are NODOS.

This is factually false.

[Zak]

Originally Posted by Turrican_3

This is factually false.

*MOST* of the programs are NODOS, nitpicker. From my old disk boxes I could install like 10%. Even DOS programs are hard to install because they use unique libraries or have other restrictions that prevent them from installing to a harddisk.

[Turrican_3]

That's more accurate.

Still doesn't make an hard drive for the A500 "useless" as you claimed before.

[Anubis]

Originally Posted by Turrican_3

This is factually false.

Second this...

Played all of those from HD on A500+ back in the day before whdload and jtd:

* Civilization
* Colonization
* UFO: Enemy Unknown (x-com)
* Syndicate
* The Settler
* Sim City
* Burntime
* Monkey Island 2
* Indiana Jones and Fate of Atlantis
* Beyond the steel sky
* Chassmaster 2000
* Simon the Sorcerrer

There were few other games, but those were major games I've used 20MB HD for. I remember thinking of upgrading HD just to be able to have them all loaded at the same time, but reasoned that it is better to upgrade to A1200 - it was cheaper to get IDE HD instead of SCSI. (had no idea that you could use XT IDE mode in it)

Quite few games had installer, but mostly it would be removed when game were hacked.

http://hol.abime.net/hol_search.php?N_hd=yes

[Zak]

I stand my ground. Why would I get a harddisk for my A500 because I can run 10 programs on it. And the rest not. And in fact many times you would need an A500+ because you need more chip memory when you start programs from harddisk.
I did try all this. Like I said 10%. Too little and hence USELESS.

[donnie]

thats if you want to run whdload?

Native game installers dont need 2 megs of chipram right?

[Anubis]

Originally Posted by Zak

I stand my ground. Why would I get a harddisk for my A500 because I can run 10 programs on it. And the rest not. And in fact many times you would need an A500+ because you need more chip memory when you start programs from harddisk.
I did try all this. Like I said 10%. Too little and hence USELESS.

I had 512KB memory and 20MB HD and it made huge difference for those games. (added few more titles as I remember what I played back in day)

My cousin who also had A500 at the time, and actually had it before me, had no idea how to use Workbench just because he never had a reason to use it.

It was far more than 10 games, plus a lot of other stuff I found on cover disks at the time. From application programs, probably most used was DPaint, x-copy and OctaMed.

Originally Posted by donnie

thats if you want to run whdload?

Native game installers dont need 2 megs of chipram right?

From what I remember, this might be off a bit, most games would work, but some would work better if you had more memory. For example, Colonization would load more music/sound files if you had 1.5MB instead of 1MB. Sam was with Settler iirc.

[Zak]

Originally Posted by donnie

thats if you want to run whdload?

Native game installers dont need 2 megs och chipram right?

No you would often have problems with programs that use just a few kilobytes more chip memory when starting from harddisk, just enough kilobytes more that they won't run on a basic A500 anymore, even when started from CLI and not Workbench.

[Turrican_3]

Originally Posted by Zak

I stand my ground.

Well, of course everyone is entitled to have his own opinion.

And I personally did the same back then: didn't bother to purchase an HDD for my A500 (mostly because I felt it was too expensive)

But it was the very first expansion I got for the A1200; issues were more or less the same (it's not like software houses were pushing for DOS-friendly games all of a sudden) yet I believe it would be hard to label an HDD as useless anyway.

Again, just my opinion... likely also slightly biased because I didn't use the Amiga just to play games.

[Anubis]

Originally Posted by Zak

No you would have often problems with programs that use just a few kilobytes more chip memory when starting from harddisk, just enough kilobytes more that they won't run on a basic A500 anymore., even when started from CLI and not Workbench.

This is also false. Most of the games that offered HD install were originally made with 1MB in mind. Some, as I've already said, offered more with more memory.

It was worth getting one, if you could afford one at the time.

I remember some game, but can't remember what game it was, that strongly recommended HD install in manuals. Was it x-Com or Boddy Blows? IIRC it was because of frequent disk changes.