[AmigaHope]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I think the real problem was the cost of more powerful CPUs (and associated harware) during that period. But this 'problem' turned out to be an asset for Amiga owners, because it meant they didn't have to buy a new machine every 2 years.

2 years is too short a cycle, 4-5 years is much more reasonable. 7 years is way too long.

In comparision, PCs of the day were a nightmare to get games running on - you never knew whether your machine would be compatible or not, even after playing with system settings etc.

That has a lot to do with the crappy all-over-the-place design of IBM upgrades/clones in the early/mid-80's. Once they got hardware compatibility ironed out (base VGA-then-VESA/Soundblaster/XMS) and once developers stopped using CPU loops for timing, stuff stayed more or less compatible. Then it mostly became a matter of "your machine must be this fast to run this" which held out fine until OS-friendly software became the norm.

Ironically, one of the major disappointments of the A1200 was a lack of compatibility with A500 titles. Would this have been less of a problem if Commodore had released an 020 based system earlier? I think not. I bought an A3000 in 1991 and just had to suck it up if a game wouldn't work (had no other Amiga to play games on because some prick stole my A1000). If I was an ardent gamer that would have been a big problem.

If they had released an *affordable* 020 machine earlier it would have helped a lot. The A2500 and A3000 didn't make much of a difference because they were only targeted at the professional market. The A500+ (with a 68020 and maybe a new name) and A3000 should have shipped together in 1989 or 1990. By then the 68020 was a budget CPU.

Compatibility was not really a huge problem on the 020. 80% of stuff worked fine with the caches turned off. (Can confirm as my main machine was an A500 w/68020). This would mostly be a mid-cycle refresh with some games having zero enhancements while others would, with only some requiring the new hardware.

From the start the biggest problem with the Amiga was a lack of installed userbase, and fracturing it into machines with different capabilities would not make it any better. We see the problem with other 'enhanced' home computers in that era - eg. C128, CoCo 3, Apple II GS, Spectrum 128, Amstrad CPC Plus. Few titles were produced that made full use of them because the market was too small.

These are bad comparisons as the only real upgrade there is the IIgs, and it suffered because it was competing with a platform from its own company (the Mac). The IIgs actually had some good releases right when it came out but the writing was on the wall by the time the Mac II came out.

The C128 was a shit upgrade because its best feature (the faster CPU) meant turning off most of the graphical capabilities. Otherwise it turned into a really expensive RAM expansion. The Spectrum 128 was also basically an expensive RAM expansion. In general these setups don't get good support unless there's also an easier/cheaper way to expand the previous model with that RAM.

The Amstrad Plus and CoCo 3 were modest upgrades but their markets were already dead.

A better comparison is the upgrade from MSX to MSX 2, which was hugely successful (albeit not including a CPU upgrade, it did work as a RAM expansion plus huge video upgrade)

Truth is, we were lucky that the Amiga's designers decided to go with the much more expensive 68000 rather than use a 6502 variant, which would probably have been outdated in 2-3 years. That 7 years of 68000 based Amigas gave developers a powerful and stable platform spec to work with, which wasn't found wanting until 386-SX PCs hit the market in the early 90's. So the A1200 was actually released at about the right time.

It was already found wanting as soon as the Megadrive had been released.

The A1200 was released at about the right time for a much better, faster system than the A1200 was.