Were Amiga owners short-sighted? Could Commodore have helped?

[DisposableHero]

[Commodore's own shortsightedness and mistakes notwithstanding].

In terms of arcade games, the 1Mb A500 level of hardware was competitive with its key rivals (SNES and Mega Drive) right up to Christmas 1994 once you look at it category by category (with the SNES perhaps on top overall and the Mega Drive last, other than beat 'em ups and perhaps sports games). Even before you consider the A1200/CD32, it could have remained quite competitive in those fields another couple of years, even without the under-development AAA or Huron hardware.

However, when you look at the more cerebral genres (strategy, adventures, RPGs, flight sims etc), Amiga hardware was falling behind long before then. 1992 saw a wave of games in those genres that were converted from the PC - Red Baron, Monkey Island 2, Civilization, Might & Magic 3, Links Golf, Heart of China, Wing Commander etc. All really needed a hard drive and/or an accelerator to really be enjoyable. While reviewers at the time accepted the demand for hard drives, the very existence of faster Amigas was ignored by most game reviewers - all the Red Baron reviews rightly considered it to be too slow to be fun, but only Amiga Format and Amiga Joker even mentioned the existence of faster Amigas. And by the end of 1992, US involvement in the Amiga was all-but over. And all those styles saw few genuine classics on the Amiga after that - The Settlers was an Amiga original, Beneath a Steel Sky and UFO, the Ishar games, but not much else.

Worth pointing out at this stage that PCs had entered homes as business / productivity machines much quicker than in the UK, and games like Wing Commander spearheaded the demand for adding expensive graphics and sound cards. Coupled with limited demand for action games on computers in the US (probably because the 8-bit consoles were much more heavily marketed there than in Europe), that was becoming a tough market.

However, by mid 1992 you could get a hard drive with attached FastRam for about £400. GVP did an all-in-one range containing an 030 processor starting at about £750. Alternatively you could get an 020 at 16Mhz for £249. Essentially, considering that the A500 cost £700 on launch in 1987, you could now get an A500+ with considerable upgrades for roughly what the basic 1.2 512K A500 cost in 1987 - or, if you already had an Amiga, upgrade it to its limits for another £750. Admittedly, 1987 was a boom and 1992 a recession, but that didn't stop PCs. Were we all naive for thinking our £400 machine didn't merit these considerable improvements, effectively 3/4 times the power for only double the price? And the figured would be similar for an A1200 in 1994.

Incidentally, when Amiga Power asked their readers for their top 100 games in late 1994, the list was dominated by cerebral games - The Settlers, both Monkey Islands, Civ and Championship Manager all made the top 11, and Cannon Fodder, Syndicate and F1GP at 2,3 and 4 need some thought and planning too. Only one of the top 20 (Rainbow Islands) originated on consoles or in the arcades. Its almost as if the Amiga brand did better at keeping players of those kinds of games, but the Amiga hardware did more to keep action gamers interested.

So, how did we let it happen? Could Commodore have done some sort of deal with GVP or similar to encourage the purchase of accelerators? Or incentivised development of games which demanded more than the base 1Mb 68000 system? Was the A600 lacking a keypad and accelerator capability a big problem when it turned into a replacement for the A500+ rather than a cheaper version? Should the A1200 have been pitched higher from the word go? Were potential console buyers put off the Amiga by the existence of stuff like A320 Airbus, as some claim? (I'm doubtful - did RPG fans shy away from the Amiga due to Zool and Speedball? To me, the Amiga's greatest appeal was the best-of-all-worlds element, all these styles of games plus productivity)

[Pat the Cat]

Originally Posted by DisposableHero

that were converted from the PC

Some people had predicted the PC would win out in 1989. They didn't say when exactly. What they did notice was a trend where customers would go for aYo faster PC, 256 colour graphics card, sound card, JUST to play games.

The PCs had advantages against the A500, A600, A1200. Hard disks and expansion carrds werre cheaper. You could take some upgrades with you, wen you upgraded a PC. You couldn't do that on the equivalent "home" Amiga gear.

I think the breakthrough PC game that I remember was Ultima Underworld. It wasn't FPS, it was gory hack and slash, and no Amiga could really go there.

I tried with a BB, KCS, few other emulator systems. A real PC was as good or better than a BB, and the Amiga equivalnets all cost more, and either ran OK but expensive, slower on that or didn't work at all.

You mention pushing accelerators, but AF didn't get that many to talk about. there was the PPS A500 aHD and accelerator that had a very whiny fan, was very expensive, had issues but at least was external. Not much else for the A500 really, that I remember. Vortex maybe? Early Apollo boards, maybe.

I think it's fair to say that less than half of Amiga owners at the time had hard disks even, with the A500, or even A600. It started getting cheaper that way with the A1200, but that itself took a long time for CBM to make, ship to to stores, and sell.PC hard drive ownership was more than double that, maybe up to 90% of total, because it was cheaper to do.

One big difference between then and now was trade restrictions. If a German company wanted to sell in the UK, they had to find a UK distributor. And the other way around. That didn't help any of the small hardware makers really. You relied on your distributors so much, and they took a cut of everything you made, effectively. A good distributor was crucial to any hope of survival. Same choices for Transatlantic, really. The language differences were not so big, but the cultures were VERY different. Power Computing got GVP into the UK and sold loads. They even ended up buying half of GVP, if I remember.

Power Computing had a reputation for bullying. I don't want to talk about that. They certainly complained a lot, and some of that could be taken as threatening. I think the main man, Tony Ianari, was described as "flamboyant". He certainly got on the phone and shouted to stand up for his products, his company. He even went so far as to say he could prove bias on some things. All part of the game, but it was like a dance, with some outfits. Not so much business as pantomime. They certainly did bring some great products to the UK, not just GVP stuff. But they were hard work to deal with, sometimes, over some issues.

[nobody]

I think the A500 had that profile of early 16bit gaming machine. When cheap consoles arrived they tried to market it as a computer and then the PCs were better for that. A500 was obsolete by 1992/1993. Consoles had better games and they were cheaper. You could rent games too so it was a dead end. Commodore was too late with A1200, it should be out on 1990 with a HD as a standard to take the lead again.
The A500 should be out on 1985, so the Amiga was 2 years late all the time in a world that you had a Spectrum 48k at 1984 and then an Atari ST at 1986. Huge technology leaps every year and Commodore stayed still milking from the Amiga for 6-7 years.

[Pat the Cat]

Seem to recall an indepth interview with a couple different games writers over 3D days, about 1992. They both seemed very confident that it wasn't just about processors, but also 3D rendering hardware getting into graphics cards. They were right. The interview was also noteworthy, in that it was the first recorded use of the word "dogwank" in a printed publication in the English language, I think. The programmer was describing their own code, but the publishers were NOT happy, and ey neither were some readers about that. They should have been complaining to CBM and demanding more custom VLSI chips instead. I think that was a big fault of CBM, watching Dave Haynie's videos and interviews. They did take apart NXT's and most other computers, to check for new manufacturing techniques, but they should have been spending a lot more money on new silicon. They didn't. Timex had the early start in 3D graphics solutions, I think. CBM should have been doing that cheaper, rather than the A600. The engineers they had told them to, but the A600 was like a key system to the management. Mass production of that unit was not really in anybody's interests commercially, but some people ended up with Vamped A600s, so it didn't turn out completely bad, in the end.

[Tigerskunk]

Commodore and the Amiga had lost a lot of mindshare in the early 90ies.

They should have introduced the AGA platform with hard disks integrated around 1990, when the Amiga was still hot.

Around the time the Wing Commanders arrived, and hard disks were really needed for these games, the Amiga suddenly looked very old and not competitive anymore.

[nobody]

The Amiga died because the parent company was not in the same spirit as the system. Not dreaming to change the world for sure

[Pat the Cat]

Originally Posted by Steril707

Commodore and the Amiga had lost a lot of mindshare in the early 90ies.

Very good point. It wasn't so much the customers as the developers that walked away early. Various reasons, some were just drawn towards other platorms, but I sensed a trickle of really talented people away from Amiga development.

Originally Posted by Steril707

They should have introduced the AGA platform with hard disks integrated around 1990, when the Amiga was still hot.

This would have been very difficult. CBM were just moving into SMD boards then. They started with prototype AAA machines, for development within Commodore, and the first attempt at a production run was a big disaster, apparently. Only 3-6 of those machines are thought to have have survived to the present. Dave Haynie is the man to check there. AGA was developed from those first AA3000+, but it didn't really exist as LISA etc until early 1992, I think. You are right, in the sense of, they were slow to get A500 replacement that was real technical improvement. They wanted one with WB2. In hindsight, not a smart set of moves

Originally Posted by Steril707

Around the time the Wing Commanders arrived, and hard disks were really needed for these games, the Amiga suddenly looked very old and not competitive anymore.

Yes, chicken and egg problem. Most customers had no hard disk. CBM relied too much on the idea of CD-ROM to solve the problem. Developers saw that the customers had neither option, so could not have bigger non-floppy based games either way. Other way around on the PC - if you wanted games, you had to have hard disk, for more than half the games maybe. Twin floppy was OK to do non-game stuff on a PC, but it wasn't really a viable game option on a PC after maybe 1989, around that time.

[Amigajay]

I don't understand how people think accelerated more expensive Amiga's would have been better and sold more? I didn't see the A1000/2000/3000/4000 selling more than the budget models?

In hindsight, Wing Commander would be better on a 030 for sure, no one would have paid for it, PC's were too expensive and were gaming was second to what the machine was used for in 99% of cases until 93/94 when Doom kicked off people buying PC's just for gaming.

Originally Posted by nobody

A500 was obsolete by 1992/1993.

Only because Commodore killed it with the A600/A1200 which were dead on arrival. it was far from dead software wise.

Originally Posted by nobody

Commodore was too late with A1200, it should be out on 1990 with a HD as a standard to take the lead again.

The A500 was hitting its biggest sales in 90-92 , awful time to release a new machine.

Originally Posted by nobody

The A500 should be out on 1985, so the Amiga was 2 years late all the time in a world that you had a Spectrum 48k at 1984 and then an Atari ST at 1986. Huge technology leaps every year and Commodore stayed still milking from the Amiga for 6-7 years.

So the budget version of the A1000 should have released the same year as the top range model? yeah ok...
It wasn't 2 years behind at all, the A500 was fine as a budget model until 92, the A600 should have come in cheaper not more expensive, Commodore blew it with the AGA, should have forgot about that and not pulled the trigger in reaction to the AA taking too long, and released Hermes in late 1994 instead, the 16-bit market was still strong, heck even SNES and MD were selling until 1996, the AGA killed the A500 where all Commodores latter sales were coming from and wasn't big enough difference to generate sales itself, the proof being the A600 easily outsold the A1200 both being released the same year, no wonder developers were confused and continued with OCS versions and only adding AGA enhancements, the amount of AGA only games is pitiful.

[Pat the Cat]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

the AGA killed the A500 where all Commodores latter sales were coming from and wasn't big enough difference to generate sales itself.

Agree with most of your post, but there was an issue making enough A1200s to supply demand. Only 10,000 by Christmas 1992, around that figure. They could have sold more like 70,000 in the same time period. CBM had quite a good automatic board making system, very advanced for the time. Seems they forgot this wasn't the whole story, you still needed a human to put the boards into a case etc.

A500 stopped shipping the day beforer the A500+ started shipping. Both stopped the day the day before the A600 shipped. It wasn't so much the A1200 stopping the A500. Didn't quite happen that way.

[nobody]

The moment the consoles came out at 1/3 of the price of A500 and the PCs got the VGA and colorful games it was done. Around 1992. The A1200 didn't even have games for it or they were pd quality.
It should be like this
1985 A500 with good price to establish a user base
1990 A1200 with HD as a standard
1995 some RISC model with 3d emulating the older ones

These need money which Commodore were missing for sure.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by Pat the Cat

A500 stopped shipping the day beforer the A500+ started shipping. Both stopped the day the day before the A600 shipped. It wasn't so much the A1200 stopping the A500. Didn't quite happen that way.

True, but the A500+ didn't slow down the A500 range sales, it took off more, 1992 when it came crashing down with a model like David Pleasance says should have been called the A300 and been cheaper, the A600 if not cheaper wasn't needed, what was the point of the thing!?

Originally Posted by nobody

The moment the consoles came out at 1/3 of the price of A500 and the PCs got the VGA and colorful games it was done. Around 1992. The A1200 didn't even have games for it or they were pd quality.
It should be like this
1985 A500 with good price to establish a user base
1990 A1200 with HD as a standard
1995 some RISC model with 3d emulating the older ones

These need money which Commodore were missing for sure.

Everyone has their wishes, but you have to be realistic, its like saying the A1000 should have come out in 1982 when they first had the idea! The A1200 with a HD in 1990, you do know how much that would have set you back!? The gaming Amiga's were budget price computers.
If Commodore held their nerve and released hermes in late 1994/early 1995 then it would have faired better than the A1200 and competed in peoples minds to still sell, i know some will say oh but the PS1 was out late 1995, yeah but the Amiga was in a different market, there is consoles, computers and budget computer market places, there still is, Commodore rushed a computer to market in a marketplace they had all to themselves now that Atari pulled out, that is the reality.

[Pat the Cat]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

True, but the A500+ didn't slow down the A500 range sales, it took off more, 1992 when it came crashing down with a model like David Pleasance says should have been called the A300 and been cheaper, the A600 if not cheaper wasn't needed, what was the point of the thing!?

Having a machine in the marketplace, I guess. That was the thinking, but it was clearly the WRONG machine.

Originally Posted by nobody

The Amiga died because the parent company was not in the same spirit as the system. Not dreaming to change the world for sure

UM... I would have agreed with you totally at the time. Now I think of it as a whole barrage of really terrible management decisions.

It's wasn't so much CBM that had an issue with spirit, imagination etc. It was the top management, at board and director level. If they had been focussed on the internet to come, the digital networks, as a target, then they would have made very different decisions.

Amigas had a universal design quirk - they were ALL designed to attach to a speaker and microphone, public address system, via the serial port. All Amigas had this, on different unused pins of the serial port.

QUITE why it was there is beyond me. I never saw a system built around that idea, let alone a PA connected to it. Perhaps it was only built to US telephone standards, and was widely implemented over there. If that was CBMs secret strategy to staying on top, for realling doing metadata, hypertext, and what became the www, it clearly wasn't joined up thinking.

[appiah4]

The effort and money involved in investing into Amiga hardware beyond what came inside the box always seemed to be a terrible deal, by 1992 it was basically stupid to try, and Commodore never made the effort to make it a better deal.

Amiga lacked affordable upgrade paths altogether. In 1992, my only logical upgrade path from an A500 was the A1200. Add ons seemed absolutely stupid at the time - in terms of Hard Disks I was locked into the byzantine, obscure pieces of proprietary SCSI Commodore hardware and accelerators for an A500 were obvious dead end upgrades that would not work with a platform upgrade to the A1200.

In comparison, I could see the PC as a 'platform' was something you could invest into and upgrade over time to keep up with gaming demands while staying on the cutting edge. 1994 was when the A500 left the house and a 486 DX33 with VESA SVGA and Sound Blaster Pro rolled in. It wiped the floor with everything a fully upgraded A1200 could do.

It's sad, but IMO Commodore's real failure in hindsight was making the Amiga 500 an AIO mainboard with proprietary chips (which was ironically what made it really accessible in the first place..) instead of something like the 8086 platform - a computer with standardized sockets/slots and OEM hardware compatibility.

A500 was great value for 87-91. 92+, it was underpowered, and a pain in the ass to upgrade. A1200 was a poor value proposition for its timeand got gradually worse and worse over time.

[nobody]

I bet Commodore was severely lacking in cash. I bet they called Dave haynie from a public phone then waiting him to catch an aeroplane to reach Germany to do some r&d.

Amiga helped Commodore, not the opposite. They were just selling some other crazy/dreamer guys machine. Even the multitasking OS would have cost them millions to build from scratch, not mention the sophisticated custom chips

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by appiah4

Amiga lacked affordable upgrade paths altogether. In 1992, my only logical upgrade path from an A500 was the A1200. Add ons seemed absolutely stupid at the time - in terms of Hard Disks I was locked into the byzantine, obscure pieces of proprietary SCSI Commodore hardware and accelerators for an A500 were obvious dead end upgrades that would not work with a platform upgrade to the A1200.

True Commodore didn't help with easy and affordable hard disks, but the gaming models A500/A1200 etc were just that, for gaming, if you wanted easier ways to upgrade then the A3000/A4000 models were for you.
Beyond the basic A500 memory upgrade which Commodore rectified with the A500+ these budget models were just that, the next step from a C64, people didn't buy a C64 and plan to upgrade, same for A500/A1200 owners, the upgrade was a new machine in most people's minds.

Originally Posted by appiah4

In comparison, I could see the PC as a 'platform' was something you could invest into and upgrade over time to keep up with gaming demands while staying on the cutting edge. 1994 was when the A500 left the house and a 486 DX33 with VESA SVGA and Sound Blaster Pro rolled in. It wiped the floor with everything a fully upgraded A1200 could do.

*shudder* PC's may have been more powerful (of course they cost more!) but the ease of use and incompatibility still leaves a sour taste in my mouth!

Originally Posted by appiah4

A500 was great value for 87-91. 92+, it was underpowered, and a pain in the ass to upgrade. A1200 was a poor value proposition for its timeand got gradually worse and worse over time.

Not under-powered at all for most of its normal shelf-life, by the time 92-93 when the SNES came along in Europe it was starting to struggle in terms of shifting sprites, but it still had original games, plenty of these were ported to the SNES, the A600 should have been released at £199-£249 as a real budget started computer to sit alongside the SNES which was released a month later in Europe.
Power only came into a product if its new and priced high, the product was still a great product that i would have no hesitation in paying £250 for in 1992 had i not an A500, trouble was Commodore launched it at £349, cheaper to produce yet the same price the A500 was selling for the last 2 years!

[Pat the Cat]

Not sure about the phone call. Maybe the put a note in an empty milk bottle, or just used a pigeon. Smoke signals or something.

Anyway... I always thought AAA was some grand crazy dream. Turns out, it was used to invent AGA, a much inferior system.

I guess CBM well always trying to hold back an edge for thmselves, but if they'd just worked around selling it to customers, that might have made a big difference. Might not.

But if their best products were never for sale to the general public, how could they expect to make a living? The must have thought they could borrow money forever or something. Very unrealistic outlook they had - they had to sell 20 A600s to make the same money as selling 1 A4000..

[idrougge]

The A500 sold well but the ever-lowering prices of the A500 also meant that it sank down into a cash-strapped audience that had previously been hanging on to their ZX Spectrums. Spectrum owners aren't exactly well-known for their willingness to buy hardware any more expensive than a joystick.

Which brings us to the subject of expansion. The base Amiga was cheap and accessible, but any kind of real expansion was noticeably more expensive than PC hardware. Back in 1992, an Amiga 500 would cost considerably less than even the cheapest PC, but even the cheapest PC had a hard drive and a monitor. Adding a hard drive and a monitor to an A500 made the price jump straight into PC territory, not to mention the proposition of an accelerator card which might or might not work with games.

As for games, it would have been plain stupid for publishers to aim for anything but the lowest common denominator. Even asking for 1 MB of cheap trapdoor memory didn't become accepted in the games business until 1992. The Amiga market was never very lucrative for anyone involved, so aiming at a small subsegment of that market (accelerated or even HD equipped Amigas) was a financial own goal.

Even the A1200 with its internal IDE controller was stuck to expensive 2.5" hard drives, making the A1200 look like a bad financial proposition if you wanted even moderate storage capacity, and even as memory prices came down, those cost reductions were absorbed by the cost of the trapdoor expansion where you could mount those SIMMs.

[rare_j]

Lets pretend the a600 never happened, the a1200 had fast ram and a hard drive and who knows maybe a faster blitter.
Even if the amiga had somehow held its own against the megadrive, snes and vga 486pc, it would never have survived the next big thing, 3dfx and Playstation, then ati and nvidia. Commodore definately had no answer to that. Where were they going to pull stunning 3d hardware from and fit it into the chipset?
Commodore maybe didn't do their best with the a1200, but once 3d was on the scene it was all over anyway.

[Anakirob]

That's assuming that a competently managed company would not have had the foresight to begin developing this tech in '94 to have released around '96. And it seems that perhaps Commodore were thinking about this feature when including the Akiko chip in the CD32.

[alpine9000]

The thing I wonder about if C= did survive is what they would have done with the OS.

As much as we all loved Amiga OS, without memory protection it would never have been able to compete with Windows NT/Linux/OSX.

Apple failed in their attempt at producing a next gen operating system, Microsoft spent mega bucks developing NT.

Short of putting a skin on Linux/bsd I can't see that a next gen operating system would have arrived in time?