(this is a follow-up thread to "Alternate Timeline", which went in the direction of what Commodore should have done.), but at the introduction of the machine back in 1985.
There are many Amiga design flaws that annoy me even till today, and which could have made designed better, eventually making the Amiga machines better from day one and more desirable.
Don't get me wrong, I love the Amiga for what it is, but I still believe things could have made better, even back in 1985.
Okay let me start:
1. Digital joystick - the same one as in Atari 2600 with SINGLE button! Like what the hell they were thinking? Designing the most sophisticated gaming machine, with the crappiest joystick possible as standard!? Even the Apple II had better Joystick as standard 16-pin DIP socket for Analog Joystick with TWO buttons. I really can't explain how almost every Amiga game sucks from this limitation. The game programmers had to invent the up for jump, but what about the jumping on ladder or more than one weapon, or special moves. Later games used SPACE as fire second button and still up for jump like in Turrican, but then in Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter II you had to use sophisticated move combinations for some basic hits. Analog joystick with at least 3 buttons could have been much much better. Not to mention that the DIP socket for analog joysticks can be used for other tasks as well - for example audio sampling with very cheap DACs and simple schemes. Okay, probably the machine was intended more for the art oriented persons, that's why they neglected the gamers crowd by giving them one of the crappiest inputs devices ever. Which leads to number 2.
2. No MIDI port! The machine with the best sound capabilities, not suitable for musicians because they were not able to plug in their MIDI talking instruments directly and had to use 3rd party hardware, which may come with incompatibilities and troubles. That why the Atari ST was more desired by audiophiles - even if it had crappier sound, the musicians loved the simple plug-in and play feature of the Atari. Okay, probably the machine was for the graphic art oriented persons, not audio art, that's why they neglected the musicians, which leads to number 3.
3. HAM mode was a hack, mostly useless for other than static pictures! Okay, you wanted graphics people to design the most awesome graphics and cartoons on the Amiga. Then why the HAM mode was neglected and left just like it was back from the days when Jay Miner experimented with it and was going to remove it, because he saw it was not very useful. Remember they left the HAM mode, because there was going to be a hole in the chip, not because they saw it as usable. From the Wiki page for HAM mode -
Quote:
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However, HAM has significant technical limitations which prevent it from being used as a general purpose display mode.
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Okay, probably the machine was for the business oriented people working with spreadsheets and numbers, that's why they neglected the graphicians, which leads to number 4.
4. Non standard floppy disk format, very error prone! Yes, the Amiga written disks were giving much more errors that PC or Atari written disks. Simply because the Amiga wrote more bytes per sector, tracks and disks. I love the idea of getting more data on single disk, even the double sided feature was nice, but most of the manufactured floppies were tested as 720 KB PC disks. On the Amiga, writing more data meant more probability of errors, since you were using the disk with a format not supported by the manufacturer. Back in 1990-ies when I was buying packs of disks usually sometimes I had whole boxes of 100s disks simply not working on the Amiga and giving errors. When I returned them to the shop they were saying that PC owners never return these batches, only Amigans do. Because these floppies worked fine on PCs, but not on Amigas. Okay, probably the machine was for the business oriented people, who won't rely on floppy disks for their important data (remember spreadsheets required lots of read-writes because of the what-if scenarios and daily updates), that's why they neglected the floppy disks users, which leads to number 5.
5. No hard disk controller on board. Back in 1985 there were already 10 MB hard disks for under $1000. Having the option to buy off the shelf hard drive and install it in your Amiga would have made the machine much more desirable for the business users. Because of the hard expansion options (especially for hard drive) the Amiga was often looked by the business oriented people as a toy for gaming, not for serious productivity work.
These are the main flaws that I see and annoy me. Of course there are other design flaws.
Please post your input that you think could have made the Amiga better even back in 1985, which annoys you even till today. Thank you.