Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[Promilus]

Originally Posted by pandy71

No one defend Mehdi Ali but you obviously never worked in large company producing mass selling goods... people trying to cut design by using 3..4 cents cheaper part and you suddenly propose 3$ - in large company those 3$ is multiplied immediately by at least 1 million and convince management to accept 3 million $ loss - good luck with this...

That's funny because OEM works exactly like that. They cut corners, they cut expenses in most trivial matter. And then they spend millions in absolutely most idiotic ways...

Once again - big corpo works and thinks differently and for sure they usually don't care about customer needs - this is like Apple - "We know better what do you need and how to make you happy and if you don't agree with this then sod off".

It kind of is like that, but it doesn't mean in wide picture that's the actual goal. If it was everyone would be buying chinese chips instead of e.g. Infineon and capacitors like Jackcon instead of Panasonic. But somehow there are products based on costly components and usually are considered kind of premium products. You can't really stupidly cut expenses there and absolutely you cannot say to customers "if you don't like it - piss off" ... Siemens and Bosch used to be exactly like that. Used to - as past tense - is intentional.

There is many ways to speedup Agnus/Allice but they need complex design and may ruin legacy compatibility - i can understand lack of will to take risk...
Ranger was also killed (as Jay leaving CBM said clearly it is READY to be produced) - CBM management was poor - we all share this opinion - but they are DEAD and you can't turn time back.

It was obvious you can't ride that car (OCS compatibility) very far. Not with the challenges coming from PC and consoles. Backward compatibility is essential for us now because there wasn't any new Amiga past AGA. So the last product is largely compatible with first product. But generally it was bad decision to focus on compatibility instead of new, powerful features. It only shows they were trying to milk a dying cow and were well aware of that.

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by Promilus

That's funny because OEM works exactly like that. They cut corners, they cut expenses in most trivial matter. And then they spend millions in absolutely most idiotic ways...

I think every large company act like this - worked few years ago in company where it was very difficult to justify spending few euros on RF4CE dongles but way easier to convince them (if you was in right department) to spend like +200k euro on some unused equipment - i was was unable to get second notebook for engineering stuff and at the same time company was happy to stuck many notebooks and desktops on few piles waiting to be transported for starving children in Africa - you know, starving children are dreaming on desktop PC in their villages without electricity...
I always liked to go for some bins discoveries with colleagues as you could find many nice things like once we found 6 rack mountable sets of high end PC's, i don't even mention about rack mountable servers as they was simply stacked on corridors...
But in real life this company also counted each cent on packaging, cables or components (sometimes introducing new HW revision that require separate testing stuff and personnel).
Many very long stories to tell - no time for this...

Originally Posted by Promilus

It kind of is like that, but it doesn't mean in wide picture that's the actual goal. If it was everyone would be buying chinese chips instead of e.g. Infineon and capacitors like Jackcon instead of Panasonic. But somehow there are products based on costly components and usually are considered kind of premium products. You can't really stupidly cut expenses there and absolutely you cannot say to customers "if you don't like it - piss off" ... Siemens and Bosch used to be exactly like that. Used to - as past tense - is intentional.

As i worked closely with large China OEM's then i can say - you can have any quality you wish - from Pasconik to Panasonic - this is simple your business model decision... nice thing is that they are going on the opposite side of street and they are able to propose you solution from for example IC vendor not even yet announced on market...

Originally Posted by Promilus

It was obvious you can't ride that car (OCS compatibility) very far. Not with the challenges coming from PC and consoles. Backward compatibility is essential for us now because there wasn't any new Amiga past AGA. So the last product is largely compatible with first product. But generally it was bad decision to focus on compatibility instead of new, powerful features. It only shows they were trying to milk a dying cow and were well aware of that.

Wrote this many times - AGA shall be single IC's, all (new Paula, Akiko, Alice, Lisa) integrated with some internal buses and decent memory controller able to cope with many things (like FPM or perhaps even EDO) to improve bandwidth and this should be last gen of the dedicated chipset's - new Amiga gen shall be build around PC standards like PCI with legacy compatibility provided at the HW level with such single IC just pumping video as overlay (HW or SW) into RTG board.
But we all know what happened (or what not happened).

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by hammer

Rubbish. You actually defended Mehdi Ali with your personal attack on me.

If fact this is opposite - you are defending Mehdi Ali by attacking personally me... Oh common, what o BS argument from your side - you will not find (i hope) on the whole EAB single person wishing Amiga not well.
Blaming someone on EAB for defending CBM shitty management is untrue however as we all are grown adults then we trying to rationalize some decision acting sometimes as devil advocate.

Originally Posted by hammer

I'm well aware of Toyota's saving a bolt as a cost reduction tactic. My employer has back-office contracts with vehicle companies' chemical suppliers when they have manufacturing operations in Australia!

Every company doing such things - this is how companies earning moneys for management bonuses...

Originally Posted by hammer

Commodore is not competitive in 1993 Gateway 2000's 486SX-33..

When compared to Apple's Quadra 605's 68LC040 for under $1000 USD in Q4 1993, Commodore was gatekeeping 68040 for the elites and asking 486SX-33 level prices for A4000/030 @ 25 Mhz.

There's large price gap between A1200 and A4000/030.

If any of those superior to Amiga machines could run NewTek VideoToaster? No? Then you have answer for your question - Big Amiga was mostly selected because non CBM related factors but CBM could charge more for them (they anyway was sold in small numbers compared to A500/A1200 so this justify difference in price - you know - small production volume higher unity cost).

Originally Posted by hammer

What's this topic's purpose?

Just humble reminder that even you can't revive dead Gould and beating his decaying corpse has no sense.

Originally Posted by hammer

https://thandor.net/benchmark/32
From Doom benchmarks

ATI MACH32 is not the fastest PCI 2D card i.e. it's a mid-bottom 2D PCI card.

You are arguing with yourself i never argued that ATI MACH32 is fastest DOS DOOM card - but in Windows environment was definitely one of the fastest. And in 1993 whole PC market has started shifting into Windows GUI.

Originally Posted by hammer

ET6100 2MB PCII(P100) scored 72.59 fps
ATI Mach 32 1MB PCI(P100) scored 61.27fps

Nope - we talking about ET4000w32i/p, ET6100 use MDRAM so it is different story... I told you earlier - i worked many years as PC service technician - i saw every possible combination for those products.
Don't add new products - you like Tseng, fine, good products, at some time probably best but later as this happen frequently in PC market they was passed away by competition.

Originally Posted by hammer

Mainstream 486DX2-66's 33 Mhz front side bus with 33 Mhz VLB exists for a reason.

Yes but DX50 or if you was lucky DX66 beat DX2 by many factors...

Originally Posted by hammer

Pentium P5's mainstream 32-bit PCI has 33 Mhz. 64-bit PCI targeted server and workstations. For graphics, AGP replaced 32-bit PCI.

My point, the PC clone market's advantage is the ability to switch hardware vendors with relative ease. In recent years, NVIDIA's professional software stack is far superior to AMD's Radeon RDNA 1/2/3 professional software stack and it's harder to switch GPU vendors.

PCI was replaced by AGP as PCI bandwidth was in overall quickly too low and need to be shared by video card and others - AGP removed this issue.

My observations is - ATI doing solid HW with decent software, NVidia doing worse HW than ATI (mostly they are doing more cheating) but they provide more complete product also they actively searching for ways to extend market so use GPU not only for graphic - this is what i like too in NVidia.

Originally Posted by hammer

The profitable Commodore UK was willing to fund an upgraded CD32 e.g. contract some 3rd party Amiga accelerator vendor for a CD32 CPU accelerator in economies of scale. CD32 could be manufactured without the existing 14 Mhz 68EC020.

CD32 powered 68EC020 @ 25 Mhz would step on 486SX-33 priced A4000/EC030's performance range and put Commodore Germany's pricey A4000/EC030 existence in question.
Commodore's 386DX-25 performance range would be in the striking range of CD32 powered 68EC020 @ 25 Mhz, again, the Commodore Germany factor.

No Amiga SKU will step on Commodore's DT486DX2 PC' £760. https://dosdays.co.uk/topics/1993.php there's a price and performance gap between A1200 and A4000/EC030 for Commodore's 486DX-25 placement. The mid-priced A1000+ AGA with 68EC020 @ 25 Mhz SKU is canceled. For 1993, Commodore's best machine for Doom in the mid-price range is the Commodore DT486dx-25 PC.

Corporate politics are factors.

Power Computing's CPU-accelerated Amiga 1200 bundles were too late.

You can't beat scale - simply CBM was tiny player when compared to PC market - CBM advantages was OS and some 3rd party products for Amiga - not outdated chipset... and of course large loyal community (but i think this was never important for CBM).

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by hammer

Wholesale price for Q1 1993:

68EC020 25 Mhz = $18
68EC020 16 Mhz = $15

That's a minor price difference for a smoother Wing Commander CD32.

The A1200 was designed for a 16 MHz part, so you just wasted $3.

Or did you intend to run it at a higher clock speed? Not much point when the rest of the machine can only do 14MHz.

And why are you quoting Q1 1993 prices? The A1200's design was fixed a year before then!

BTW the A1200 did produce a smoother Wing Commander - when running the OCS version.

The sad part about Wing Commander on the Amiga was that it could have been released earlier, but the guy who was programming it - Nick Pelling - got very sick and nearly died. Luckily he recovered and was able to complete the project, but this gives you some idea of how tenuous the Amiga games market was by then. Origin was raking it in on the PC version, but Mindscape couldn't afford to put more than one programmer on the job.

A1000+ AGA with 68EC020 @ 25 Mhz was canceled for ECS A1000Jr!

A1000+ AGA was not ready for production. It had to be cancelled because it wouldn't get out in time. And the retail price was pegged at $1000 - not sufficiently cheaper than PC clones (that's what you get when you try to match their specs!).

If your reason for buying a computer was to run Wing Commander then perhaps you should have bought a PC. Then you could play all those other 'hot' PC games that everyone was raving about.

Personally I don't understand all the fuss over Wing Commander. It was pretty cheesy and very limited IMO. There were many Amiga games with better graphics, higher playability and more staying power to spend your money on - like Lemmings, Cannon Fodder, The Settlers etc.

[oscar_ates]

Saving few dollars on commodore side by putting an utter outdated cpu in aga was a bad decision. It put the burden on end customers and relatively few bought the few hundred dollar costing accelerator/fast ram cards. That resulted in no serious games were released for accelerated machines and always stock a1200 was on the radar for the short life span

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Promilus

It was obvious you can't ride that car (OCS compatibility) very far. Not with the challenges coming from PC and consoles. Backward compatibility is essential for us now because there wasn't any new Amiga past AGA. So the last product is largely compatible with first product. But generally it was bad decision to focus on compatibility instead of new, powerful features. It only shows they were trying to milk a dying cow and were well aware of that.

I disagree. The entire PC industry was based on compatibility - no advance could be made without it because customers demanded it. Even IBM couldn't break free of it.

Commodore had big plans to advance the Amiga, but they were always financially constrained and ran out out of money before they could achieve their goals. If it hadn't been for producing the 'backwards compatible' A500 they would have failed a lot earlier. When developing the A1200 they couldn't ignore the existing user base.

The Amiga survived despite not being IBM compatible by finding a niche where the PC couldn't touch it. But as the market matured that niche was bound to get squeezed. Its days were numbered no matter what, just like the C64 and all other home computer platforms. So it was better to focus on inclusivity and preserve the user base as much as practicable, rather than alienate users with an incompatible 'next generation' machine that was bound to fail - which is what did happen after Commodore exited the scene and the 'smart' guys took over.

A lot of Commodore's problems were actually caused by not taking backwards compatibility seriously enough. The A3000 was a disaster, and the A500+ and A600 both got dinged for compatibility issues. AAA never made it out the door because they were too enamored with advanced performance rather than compatibility. The CDTV also failed because they wanted to make something different rather just add on to what they had. Eventually they got some sense and produced the A570, but by the time that was released it was too late!

[TEG]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

The A3000 was a disaster, and the A500+ and A600 both got dinged for compatibility issues.!

For the A500+ I can confirm. A lot of games and demos were not running.

I was happy with the machine due to the new Workbench but I guess there was a lot of disappointment for the ones using it mainly to play.

If I remember well, the 500+ include an access to an early startup to "emulate" a 500 but it was not very efficient and especially tedious.

[emiespo]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Why would I? 640x256 in 8 colors is plenty enough for me, and my TV can't handle VGA scan rates on the composite input.

Why would I lose my time continuing this argument then?

ChipRAM is no more 'overwhelmed' in 256 colors in VGA-only mode than OCS is 16 colors. But of course you want to max everything out and then complain about it being too slow. So just having 256 colors isn't enough, it also has to be 640x480 resolution, right?

In 1985 16 colours Hi-Res were beyond competition. In 1992 Amiga people were expecting to go beyond the best 1992 VGA resolutions.

The advantage of the A1200 was that for that much lower price you got a usable computer system, with access to the Amiga ecosystem. A PC was useless without a hard drive and monitor etc., so you had to buy all that stuff with it. The A1200 could be used on your existing TV, and ran software directly off floppies so you didn't need a hard drive, and games were designed to work on a stock machine so you didn't need a faster CPU and more RAM.

Work on a TV in 640x512 and then you'd spend what you saved to a Specsaver subscription. I get the argument that the A1200 was "relatively" cheap unless you bought a fully-compatible VGA monitor (1960, not cheap at all!), a hard-drive (I remember the price I paid for a 20MB 2.5 IDE hard-drive in 1992... ), an accelerator with some fast-ram... sum all this, you get very close to an entry-level 486.

The A4000 was intended for professionals who didn't care about price. It wasn't overpriced if you wanted to put a Video Toaster into it because the equivalent A2000 system would cost about the same. And it was still cheap compared to the professional video equipment you had it hooked up to.

You confirm my point. The A4000 was ludicrously overpriced, except for a very niche market. For any other home-office use, a PC was a lot cheaper and offered more. How many in this forum had a Video Toaster set up?

And I bought an A4000 at the time, then I matured...

Another thing Commodore shouldn't have offered. If people wanted to create their own weird video modes then fine. And guess what, they did! Even enjoyed doing it.

No. AGA modes were weird - as most of the AGA chipset is clearly a "hurry, the Amiga market will soon be dead, we need to release some upgraded shite!" and not working great on standard VGA monitors. A lot of compatibility issues.

[emiespo]

Originally Posted by hammer

Commodore management caused time wasting, resource misdirection, large-scale corruption, and the loss of proven good engineers.

Agreed. I did not mean all engineers at Commodore, only the director ones that could not talk to marketing guys and vice-versa. All mis-directed by top management.

From [ Show youtube player ]
1. ET4000W32i ISA card handles 800x600 with 16-bit color Windows GDI just fine.

2. ET4000W32i ISA card handles StarCraft's 640x480p 256 colors just fine when the Windows GDI display setting is 640x480p 16-bit hi-color. StarCraft used DirectDraw API.

Gaming PC won for valid technical and cost vs performance reasons.

Commodore's core revenue demographics are in games.

3DO says Hi... 3DO was 36 channel DMA beast.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Ranger_Chipset
Commodore's original Los Gatos Amiga team shutdown comes to bite back. I rather keep the original Los Gatos Amiga team and fire PC advocates in Commodore!

Couldn't agree more. 3DO was also a creation - up to date with times - of ex-Amiga engineers.

I tried to use my A1200 with TF1260 like my 386DX-33/ET4000-based PC including AGA's Double NTSC 640x400p 256 color Workbench.

AGA's Double NTSC 640x400p 64 color Workbench is okay.

I know, I personally never went above 8 colours (Magic WB FTW!) because it's even faster that way. Then a few years later I got a Cybervision 3D.

Alice's Blitter is still 16-bit with OCS/ECS timings.

AGA is reasonable for a fast +50 fps 320x200/256 with 256 color frame buffer for 2.5D/3D gaming, but it's missing a fast object manipulation processor.

Can't but yet agree. Blitter should've retained compatibility and introduced 32 bit support. Doesn't seem too hard, even in the light of what someone else is trying to defend at all costs...

Copper is a different beast, still it could've at least had 32 bit fetches - a faster copper might have allowed a better chunky-copper mode (imagine Alien Breed 3D in 2x2 with a fast cpu... not too far from Doom, even more colours!).

The price difference between 68EC020 25 Mhz and 16 Mhz is very minor.

I have spoken to Mr Pleasance in person twice, and he confirmed that the main problem at Commodore was the total lack of a business plan.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Promilus

That's funny because OEM works exactly like that. They cut corners, they cut expenses in most trivial matter. And then they spend millions in absolutely most idiotic ways...

In the 1990s, the X86's mainstream motherboard focused on high chip integration towards low chip count motherboards and still delivered 040/486 class platform performance at a lower price.

The A3000/A4000 has a separate memory controller(Ramsey), bus mastering/expansion bus controller (Super Buster), and DMA addressing (Super DMAC) chips while the PC has the Northbridge chip.

Commodore is aware of the PC-style Northbridge integration when they combined memory controller, and expansion bus controller as A1200's Budgie.

CD32 integrates Budgie, Gayle, and the two CIAs as the Akiko chip.

S3 Trio integrates the functions Agnus (Blitter), Denise (Raster), and Vidiot(DAC) in one chip, hence the name Trio.

For core functions, CD32's motherboard is the cheaper A1200.

Commodore didn't apply cost reduction methods for A3000/A4000 i.e. CD32 with expansion slots.

For PCI era, the Intel chipset business boomed and dominated the PC desktop industry. PCChips even named their motherboard "BX Pro" to confuse customers who were looking for "BX" i.e. Intel 440BX.

The "BX" in PCChips BX Pro (SiS 5600 OEM) fooled my Dad and I halted the purchase process. Dirty tactics from PCChips and PC assembly vendors.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I disagree. The entire PC industry was based on compatibility - no advance could be made without it because customers demanded it. Even IBM couldn't break free of it.

PC's backward compatibility is based on runtime modes. The advancement is on i386's protected and X64's long modes. IBM OS/2 Warp and MS Windows 9X/NT were fighting for i386 OS dominance.
Doom runs in 386's protected mode.

For the 64-bit desktop computer era, IBM threw its hat in the ring with PowerPC 970, Intel had Itanium IA-64 (with weak IA-32) and AMD had AMD64 (with strong IA-32). AMD won this stage.

In current times, fat AArch64 directly competes against fat X64. AMD's Zen 5 CPU will directly compete against Qualcomm Oryon CPU (with key engineers from the Apple M1 team). MS is funding advertisements for Qualcomm Oryon-based laptops while AMD supports Valve SteamOS's Linux driver laptop and Samsung's Android (Linux) handset SoC initiatives.

The next Xbox generation doesn't guarantee an AMD X64 CPU since MS listed AArch64 or X64.

Unlike Intel, AMD's Zen 5 is going in full multi-pipeline AVX-512 hardware as mainstream and has a significant jump in integer units (4 to 6 IEU, 3 to 4 AGU). Qualcomm's Oryon team shouldn't be underestimated.

Like Apple's Rosetta 2.0, MS's X86 emulator for ARM doesn't include AVX since Intel threatens court action.
---
PS5 has invested additional hardware for PS4 mode. PS5's 36 CU RDNA 1.9 (with RDNA 2 RT, missing other DirectX12_2 feature levels) GPU scale is based on PS4 Pro's 36 CU Polaris GCN and PS4's 18 CU Liverpool/Hawaii GCN scaling.

Unlike XBox's DirectX12.X(micro-coded front end for the GPU), PlayStation 4 and 5 have less freedom on GPU scaling.

MS's Direct3D ecosystem has resource-tracking features to enable hardware performance scaling from laptops to servers.

"Hit the metal" has a higher silicon price on backward compatibility.

PS5 is facing PiStorm-Emu68 (supports 68000 to 68060 instructions except for MMU) style timing-related backward compatibility issues despite full instruction set support.

Additional work was committed on Emu68's turtle mode features.

Reference
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/PS5/comment...standing_ps5s/
"Turtle mode" is not new.

2. https://www.hwcooling.net/en/amd-con...nce-avx-512en/

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Commodore had big plans to advance the Amiga, but they were always financially constrained and ran out out of money before they could achieve their goals. If it hadn't been for producing the 'backwards compatible' A500 they would have failed a lot earlier. When developing the A1200 they couldn't ignore the existing user base.

Dave Haynie commented on Irving Gould's very high salary package in the millions.

Commodore Netherlands has a large-scale corruption that affected triple digits of millions. David Pleasance commented on this issue.

For UK and Germany CD32 unit sales:
68EC020 25 Mhz, 95,000 CD32 x $18 = $1,710,000
68EC020 16 Mhz, 95,000 CD32 x $15 = $1,425,000

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

The A1200 was designed for a 16 MHz part, so you just wasted $3.

A1200/CD32 internal expansion bus allows for low-cost CPU + Fast RAM boards.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Or did you intend to run it at a higher clock speed? Not much point when the rest of the machine can only do 14MHz.

Again, the A1200/CD32 internal expansion bus allows for low-cost CPU + Fast RAM boards.

For 2.5D/3D performance improvements, Fast RAM is recommended.

For full 256 colors AGA performance, Fast RAM is recommended e.g. Turrican 2 AGA.

Fast RAM enables 68EC020's hardware barrel shifter's full performance.

Nintendo SNES, Sony PS1, 3DO, and Sega Saturn have separate memory pools for CPU and graphics.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

And why are you quoting Q1 1993 prices? The A1200's design was fixed a year before then!

Are you asking me to search for CPU wholesale price for 1992 then? Lead times are in the PDF link provided.

Are you claiming there were no 68EC020 shipments to Commodore in 1993?

The year 1993 was Commodore's important survival year.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

BTW the A1200 did produce a smoother Wing Commander - when running the OCS version.

1. Wrong.

2. Wing Commander with 16 colors wouldn't attract new users to the Amiga platform in 1990-1991's numbers.

3.. Myself and my fellow gamers mocked Amiga's 16-color Wing Commander.
Shit like this is the reason why many others like me bought a full 32-bit gaming PC.

The Amiga fans mocking the PC with EGA graphics are they are returned back with interest.

4. Keep small.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

The sad part about Wing Commander on the Amiga was that it could have been released earlier, but the guy who was programming it - Nick Pelling - got very sick and nearly died. Luckily he recovered and was able to complete the project, but this gives you some idea of how tenuous the Amiga games market was by then. Origin was raking it in on the PC version, but Mindscape couldn't afford to put more than one programmer on the job.

The Amiga AGA platform had an install base size problem.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

A1000+ AGA was not ready for production. It had to be cancelled because it wouldn't get out in time. And the retail price was pegged at $1000 - not sufficiently cheaper than PC clones (that's what you get when you try to match their specs!).

Time wasting is Commodore management's problem.

Go bankrupt then.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

If your reason for buying a computer was to run Wing Commander then perhaps you should have bought a PC. Then you could play all those other 'hot' PC games that everyone was raving about.

Like many others, that's what I did. SNES's Wing Commander is another option.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Personally I don't understand all the fuss over Wing Commander. It was pretty cheesy and very limited IMO. There were many Amiga games with better graphics, higher playability and more staying power to spend your money on - like Lemmings, Cannon Fodder, The Settlers etc.

You're out of touch. Your mentioned 2D games are superior on the PC VGA and the Amiga AGA platform had an install base size problem. If I lived in the UK, Commodore's DT486DX-25 PC clone's asking price would be pretty good.

The main reason for Vampires and PiStorm on the Amiga is to run 1990s PC game ports i.e. PC's MS-DOS user interface and sound card configuration sucked.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by oscar_ates

Saving few dollars on commodore side by putting an utter outdated cpu in aga was a bad decision. It put the burden on end customers and relatively few bought the few hundred dollar costing accelerator/fast ram cards. That resulted in no serious games were released for accelerated machines and always stock a1200 was on the radar for the short life span

It's the chicken and egg problem. AGA's install base is small, and the planning decisions from Amiga-related CPU accelerator vendors are based on each Amiga model's install base size.

CD32, A1200, and A500 have incompatible expansion bus connectors and none of the Amiga CPU accelerator vendors innovated a common Compute Module (RPi style SBC) with low-cost gateway adapters for different Amiga models.

The common RPi-style SBC is not limited by Amiga's small market.

RPi's innovation is the common small board computer form factor with low cost. RPi didn't follow PC's higher-cost ATX standards like Amiga NGs.

Framework is attempting to establish a common laptop PC motherboard form factor standard to deliver desktop PC modularity for PC laptops. Framework Computer's estimated annual revenue is currently $21.6M per year. Framework has raised $27M from Venture Capital.

My RPi 3A and 4B SBCs are manufactured in Sony's UK plant.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by emiespo

In 1985 16 colours Hi-Res were beyond competition.

Wrong. EGA was introduced in October 1984. It had 640x350, which was pretty close to the Amiga's 640x400 but without the flicker. Granted the PC-AT cost a lot more than the Amiga, but people were still comparing the Amiga to it and concluding (correctly) that EGA was better - at least as far as screen resolution was concerned.

Like most other home computers the Amiga was primarily designed for playing games on a TV, and its graphics hardware reflected that. 16 colors in hires was a nice addition, but wouldn't make it the preferred machine for CAD or desktop publishing etc.

The problem with the Amiga, which Commodore was keenly aware of, was that the press and pundits would compare it to the PC because that's where market was. And they would say "Oh sure it's probably great for games (chortle), but what about real computing stuff? I mean, just look at that awful flicker - and it's not even IBM compatible!"

This even before 1985. The Amiga had an uphill battle from the start. It would never survive by competing head-to-head with PCs. Unfortunately the A1000 put it there, and the engineers wanted to go even more that way (having dreams of it being a workstation competing against Sun etc.). Luckily someone in Commodore had the sense go the other way with the A500.

It didn't take me long to realize that there was no point point trying to sell someone an Amiga when they really wanted a PC. It wasn't just (or even) the hardware specs. Top of the list was being compatible with everyone else. Next was being able to run PC programs. The Amiga couldn't compete against this no matter good the hardware was.

In 1992 Amiga people were expecting to go beyond the best 1992 VGA resolutions.

Some Amiga people were. The rest just wanted to have some fun with it. But some Amiga fans had unrealistic expectations. Commodore gave them an entire machine that cost the same as the CPU alone in a high-end 486, with the ability to do 256 colors in hires and without flicker too (if you had a suitable monitor). They also got a 24 bit palette and HAM8 which produced true photographic images without the insane memory usage of 24 bit. Compared to what came before it was a huge leap forward.

But that wasn't good enough for some Amiga fans, oh no. Having better graphics than the average PC of the day wasn't good enough for them. They wanted the same or better performance than the latest VL bus 486 systems with 32 bit video cards, but at half the price. And they couldn't see why this was impossible.

Work on a TV in 640x512 and then you'd spend what you saved to a Specsaver subscription.

Not on an LCD TV. My 'old' Samsung LED TV does a perfect job of flickerfixing the A1200. I run IBrowse in 8 colors and it's nice and fast, with enough colors to render the images accurately enough for me. For most other stuff I run the standard resolution of 640x256, with 8 colors on Workbench. Games run in 320x200/256 of course. They look spectacular on the 32" TV, and sound amazing on the 50W stereo with 12" speakers. I have had this setup since the mid 90's (initially on a 29" CRT TV).

I used to run my A1200 in the shop too, with a multisync monitor. It had an 030 accelerator card with SCSI port, connected to an external SCSI hard drive, Iomega ZIP drive, CDROM drive and flatbed scanner. Also connected were two printers and a 28k8 FaxMODEM. This machine was used for sending and receiving faxes, writing letters, making up flyers, and scanning photos to disk for customers, as well as running demos, testing games, and for a bit of relaxation at the end of the day!

In the photo below it is displaying a picture I took at an airshow, scanned and edited with Art Department Professional. The A1200 looks quite unassuming here, but was a very capable machine both for business applications and entertainment.

I get the argument that the A1200 was "relatively" cheap unless you bought a fully-compatible VGA monitor (1960, not cheap at all!), a hard-drive (I remember the price I paid for a 20MB 2.5 IDE hard-drive in 1992... ), an accelerator with some fast-ram... sum all this, you get very close to an entry-level 486.

For sure - the more 'PC' stuff you buy for it, the closer the price gets to a PC. Why would anyone be surprised by this?

OTOH you could often save a bundle by waiting until that PC stuff became available second hand. PC owners were constantly upgrading. We gave them a bit of money for their old junk, then repurposed it for the Amiga. Old laptop drives which were too small for Windows were just right for the A1200. That multisync monitor in the photo above was one I got cheap with an old PC.

You confirm my point. The A4000 was ludicrously overpriced, except for a very niche market. For any other home-office use, a PC was a lot cheaper and offered more. How many in this forum had a Video Toaster set up?

If you needed a PC for home-office use, why on Earth would you buy an A4000 - even if it was the same price? For a start it isn't IBM compatible, so...

And I bought an A4000 at the time, then I matured...

I hope you kept it. A4000s are now worth far more than an old 486 PC.

No. AGA modes were weird - as most of the AGA chipset is clearly a "hurry, the Amiga market will soon be dead, we need to release some upgraded shite!" and not working great on standard VGA monitors. A lot of compatibility issues.

No, they aren't weird at all, they are an obvious extension of ECS. You've got the same old screen modes just with more bitplanes, HAM8 which is the 8 bit version of HAM6, double-PAL/NTSC which are just the old screen modes scan doubled, and a few odd ones like Euro72 demonstrating the flexibility of the chipset. BTW VGA can do other modes than the standard ones too with the right driver, they just aren't commonly used.

The only real problem with this scheme is that standard Amiga modes like PAL 320x256 cannot be converted to VGA 100% without an upscaler. My TV for example will not display scan-doubled PAL because it doesn't accept any frame rate below 60 Hz on the VGA input - this despite it having no trouble displaying composite video in that resolution!

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

A lot of Commodore's problems were actually caused by not taking backwards compatibility seriously enough. The A3000 was a disaster, and the A500+ and A600 both got dinged for compatibility issues.

For my A3000 (Kickstart 2.04 ROM variant)'s backward compatibility issues, I used Degrader and Kickstart 1.3 MMU software. These are not "out of the box" solutions.

A500+ needs a Kickstart 1.3.

Commodore didn't have a strong 1st party game developer team to create WHDLoad-like software solution.

Without the 3rd party WHDLoad efforts, my Amiga's mass storage devices would be less used.

----------
For comparison:

For Xbox 360 backward compatibility on Xbox One, Microsoft allocated its best Windows NT kernel engineers for the job. The so-called business OS company is very serious about gaming.

Before UEFI Class 2 PCs, the PC starts with real-mode backward compatibility mode and up to the new software to change into protected or long mode.

Starting from the 10th Gen Intel Core, Intel no longer provides Legacy Video BIOS for the iGPU (Intel Graphics Technology). Legacy boot with those CPUs requires a Legacy Video BIOS, which can still be provided by a video card.

AMD and NVIDIA still provide legacy VBIOS on the latest and future products i.e. will continue to provide VBIOS as long there's market demand.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

AAA never made it out the door because they were too enamored with advanced performance rather than compatibility.

AAA was a failed moonshot program like Russia's moon program.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

The CDTV also failed because they wanted to make something different rather just add on to what they had. Eventually they got some sense and produced the A570, but by the time that was released it was too late!

CDTV had aging gaming hardware in 1991 and it was expensive for given performance. SNES say Hi.

Sony won the CD gaming with the PS1. Without PS1, Saturn or 3DO would be the other candidates.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by hammer

Dave Haynie commented on Irving Gould's very high salary package in the millions.

Yes, and he was worth it. Without Ali the banks would be calling in their loans and Commodore was toast. Ali was also responsible for getting the engineers off their butts to make products that might actually sell. Of course Dave Haynie didn't like that, but he didn't know anything about finances and didn't understand the precarious situation Commodore was in. If Ali couldn't convince the banks that he could turn it around then that was it for Commodore.

BTW when things turned bad both Gould and Ali took big salary cuts. Gould also sold his corporate jet to raise more money. Neither of them wanted to sink the business.

Commodore Netherlands has a large-scale corruption that affected triple digits of millions. David Pleasance commented on this issue.

Yes, and there was a lot of corruption, waste and inefficiency in other areas too, as is common in large businesses that have been going for a long time. I've worked for a government department and several private businesses, and can tell you a few stories. Even my own business wasn't immune. This kind of stuff is the rule, not the exception.

[Promilus]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I disagree. The entire PC industry was based on compatibility - no advance could be made without it because customers demanded it. Even IBM couldn't break free of it.

So f.. what!? When it suits you - you compare Amiga to PC. When it doesn't you keep saying it is entirely different beast. Everyone here already knows a company using all the same processors as Amiga which did switch architectures several times and basically is at the level of MS itself by now. Yes, apple, and they never did provide hardware compatibility. It's BS to assume you have to provide HARDWARE compatibility. There's no actual HARDWARE compatibility on PC on Amiga chipset level. Basically AAA was something like what PC compatibility looks like - register level. And in mid 90s it was all sham already - there were no actual registers looking back to EGA or CGA. It was all already emulated internally. So as long as there was SOME option to run older software it's all good.
What is most funny - you mention compatibility issues which came with Kickstart - that's OS compatibility issues. There wouldn't be any if they did 1.2/1.3 the right way from the start and every developer used sys libraries. What's most funny - if they DID OS and dev support OS centered from the start there wouldn't be actually that much push to keep hardware compatbility at highest possible level. So as you can see those are problems piling up from bad decisions made early on.

CDTV failed because R&D did nice platform but marketing and sales didn't know what to do with it...

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Wrong. EGA was introduced in October 1984. It had 640x350, which was pretty close to the Amiga's 640x400 but without the flicker. Granted the PC-AT cost a lot more than the Amiga, but people were still comparing the Amiga to it and concluding (correctly) that EGA was better - at least as far as screen resolution was concerned.

NEC's PC-98 has 640 × 400p with 16 colors out of a palette of 4096.

A standard PC-98 has two µPD7220 display controllers (a master and a slave) with 12 KB and 256 KB of video RAMs respectively.

IBM PGC aimed for 640x480p with 256 colors in 1984. IBM had a high and low product segment approach i.e.
High = PGC (1984) led to 8514 (1987).
Low = EGA (1984) led to MCGA (1986) and VGA (1987).

1986's MCGA established 320?×?200 with 256 colors from an 18-bit RGB palette of 262,144 colors at 70 Hz and 256 KB video RAM use case.

1987 VGA is backward compatible with 1986 MCGA.

1990 XGA combines both 8514 and VGA while PC cloners went SVGA direction.

From 1987, it took PC SVGA cloners around two years to master cost-reduced SVGA chipsets e.g. ET4000 being released in 1989.

1995 era A1000 wasn't mass produced model which gave time for IBM's MCGA's 1986 and VGA/8514's 1987 releases. Commodore mastered A1000 into A500 cost-reduced mass production around two years.

Japan's PC-98 is like the UK/West Germany's strong Amiga market.

A500's mass production has ramped up from 1987 into 1991.

SNES's late 1980s development and PC clone market focused 256 color use case.

A500 had a "power without the price" entry point advantage from 1987 to 1990. In 1991, Commodore should have launched the A500 with AGA. Mainstream computer press criticized A3000's aging ECS in 1990.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Yes, and he was worth it. Without Ali the banks would be calling in their loans and Commodore was toast. Ali was also responsible for getting the engineers off their butts to make products that might actually sell. Of course Dave Haynie didn't like that, but he didn't know anything about finances and didn't understand the precarious situation Commodore was in. If Ali couldn't convince the banks that he could turn it around then that was it for Commodore.

Reminder, there was a "read my lips, no new chips" management directive during A3000's development.

"68EC020-25Mhz, ECS A1000Jr" was rejected by the Commodore national-level marketing teams. This is on Ali.

"68EC020-25Mhz, ECS A1000Jr" R&D is a waste of time i.e. "lost more 6 months" on Amiga AGA models refinement. This is on Ali.

You missed the Commodore West Germany factor. Ali has to decide on the advice given by Commodore West Germany vs Commodore UK.

Commodore UK wanted a C64c replacement below A500's cost.

A300's scope creep was on Commodore West Germany's fault. A600's resulting higher price led to A500's cancellation.
Commodore West Germany' has declared, that they will not sell another Amiga without a hard disk capability.

A600's sales flop is on Ali and Commodore West Germany! Commodore West Germany had a major role in 1992's revenue trainwreck. This is on Ali.

The correct decision is C64c's A300 replacement and A500++ (Rev 9) with IDE and surface mount chips. Avoid "ECS A1000Jr's more than 6 months time-wasting" and focus on AGA refinements.

There's corporate politics.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

BTW when things turned bad both Gould and Ali took big salary cuts. Gould also sold his corporate jet to raise more money. Neither of them wanted to sink the business.

Yes, and there was a lot of corruption, waste and inefficiency in other areas too, as is common in large businesses that have been going for a long time. I've worked for a government department and several private businesses, and can tell you a few stories. Even my own business wasn't immune. This kind of stuff is the rule, not the exception.

FYI, I still have Aussie government contracts and I'm in my early 40s.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by hammer

Are you claiming there were no 68EC020 shipments to Commodore in 1993?

No, I'm saying the A1200 was designed in early 1992. The designer has to go with the BOM price at the time, not what it might be in a year's time. He will have to justify this price to management. When the decision is made to go ahead with the design, chips will be ordered at the price quoted by the manufacturer. This could be 6 months or more before production begins.

A common situation at Commodore was that someone would design a product and discover that the projected retail price was too high. They would then look at ways to cost reduce it. This might involve reworking the design, removing unnecessary features, or making some things optional extras. And sometimes it went the other way. Bil Herd had to give the C128 CP/M compatibility. The original plan was to use the C64 CP/M cartridge, but he figured out that it was cheaper to put the Z80 on the motherboard because then the power supply could be smaller and cheaper. So the customer effectively got the CP/M hardware for free.

Wing Commander with 16 colors wouldn't attract new users to the Amiga platform in 1990-1991's numbers.

By the time Wing Commander came out for the CD32 there wasn't much market left. But what did it offer? A few more colors and animation. It could have been done with 32 colors and been a lot faster while still looking good, but instead a 'lazy' port was done that didn't improve playability - the most important factor.

BTW if anyone has a CD32 and the original Wing Commander CD, can they please upload a video (preferably filmed directly off the screen) to verify the actual performance? Unfortunately I don't have a CD32 so I can't do it myself (can't justify spending over NZ$1000 just to get this info).

3.. Myself and my fellow gamers mocked Amiga's 16-color Wing Commander.
Shit like this is the reason why many others like me bought a full 32-bit gaming PC.

This kind of attitude makes me want to spew. What did you expect from an A500 version when the PC original needed at least a 12MHz 286 and preferably a 386? I'd say we should thankful that it was done at all. An enhanced optimized A1200 version would have been nice, but it plays the A500 version very well so it seems a bit pointless.

You dismiss all the great games on the Amiga in favor of this piece of shit that PC users went gaga over because? Oh yeah, so you could mock the Amiga's 16-color version, as if somehow a few more colors made up for the game's failings.

The Amiga fans mocking the PC with EGA graphics are they are returned back with interest.

I wasn't one of them. In fact I am playing Sierra's 'The Colonel's Bequest' again on the Amiga, and am still impressed by what they were able to do with those 16 colors. Sure it could have looked even nicer on the Amiga, but so what? The graphic design and game play are what matter, not how accurate the skin tones.

Go bankrupt then.

No. I want my A1200!

The main reason for Vampires and PiStorm on the Amiga is to run 1990s PC game ports

Not for me it wasn't. I bought a Vampire to get similar performance to the A3000 I used to have. Turns I needn't have done that because I am having plenty of fun on my A1200...