Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

So there is - the Amiga 1000 officially had 256k in November 1985.

Your attempt to pick nits is not working.

If I was nitpicking I would say the A1000 was sold with at least 512KB DRAM, in most cases even 768KB DRAM - and I would be technically right.

The original A2000 was based on DIP chips. It was designed in 1986 by Commodore Germany, who did not have the ability to make PLCC chips.

Commodore Germany made no chips at all.

yet another silly nitpick.

You missed the point:
Even as Commodore was clearly able to produce chips with higher pincounts and integrated two chips into the new Agnus, they failed to update the address lines accordingly on the chip itself.
Your argument, they could not produce a chip with a higher pincount, and therefor simply could not add more lines is obviously false, because they did pack Agnus in a 84 PLCC

The A2000's power supply was custom made for it. Having a larger PSU was supposed to be a big deal for the PC-AT

Was it?
You are the only one who brought this subject (PSU) into the discussion.
No one was arguing about the PSU. No one made any comparisons to the PC here.

But if you really must and your argument is, that Commodore manages to raise the power of its PSU in the same amount of years, then you are neglecting, that the PC startet 4 years earlier and by the time the A1000 was released already came with a more powerful PSU, with makes the whole argument collapse again.

But SCSI drives were more expensive ....

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Promilus

Most arguments presented for A1200 here are shared with CD32. In regards of chipset/cpu/ram. Memory card from PS1 is brilliant idea. SNES (and other cart games) had battery backed up SRAM instead with nearly unlimited endurance (but costly). Either allows to move between units and retain save games. Why CD32 opted for serial eeprom soldered inside unit and such small one? It was rather unfortunate.

Especially since the CDTV did come with a memory card interface and the A600 and A1200 hat PCMCIA - Commodore had all the necessary building blocks already laying around ... one could argue this serial eeprom and the necessary changes to support it were even costlier then just keeping the PCMCIA interface from the A1200...

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Gorf

one could argue this serial eeprom and the necessary changes to support it were even costlier then just keeping the PCMCIA interface from the A1200...

One could argue that... and be wrong.

The serial EEPROM in the CD32 is a 24C08 8 pin SOIC chip with 1k Bytes capacity. They were dirt cheap (I can't find a price in 1993, but today they sell for ~US$0.50 each in one-off quantity). Only 2 pins on Akiko were needed to access it, so the total cost of implementation was very low.

Just the PCMCIA socket alone would cost many times more, and then there were the necessary bus buffers. On the A1200 four 74F245 chips were used. Price of these today is ~US$1 each for $4 total, but that's not the worst part.

Current draw of a 74F245 with outputs disabled (PCMCIA slot idle) is 85~110mA, times 4 = up to 440mA or nearly half an amp of extra current draw! 5V x0.4A = 2W of extra heat to get rid off, but more importantly the CD32 power supply's 5V output is only rated for 2.2A. I don't know how much current the CD32 actually draws with all options installed, but the 0.4A needed for those PCMCIA buffer chips would be using 20% of the PSU's capacity.

So a larger (read 'more expensive') power supply might have been needed. Possibly a lot more expensive for Commodore, since they apparently repurposed existing stocks of C65 power supplies for the CD32.

That's not all though, because if the PCMCIA slot is used for saving games then a PCMCIA non-volatile memory card is also required. In 1993 these were not cheap. Today they are very rare. Commodore would probably have needed to get them custom made for the CD32 to get the price down.

The obvious solution for removable storage would be a proprietary slot like the PlayStation had. However this would be significantly more expensive than just putting a small chip on the motherboard, as well as being a potential failure point (they often did fail on the PlayStation).

If Commodore had survived I bet they would have designed an improved version of the CD32. Simply increasing NVRAM size would have been very easy once higher capacity chips became available, since they have the same pinout.

[Amigajay]

Thanks Bruce for that possible reason why Commodore went down that route, its certainly a possibility.

In hindsight yes more memory would have been nice, but at that time CD consoles didn’t have alot of nv-ram/sram, in comparison:

CD32 - 1k
CDTV - 2k
Neo-Geo CD - 2k
Turboduo - 2k
Mega-CD - 8k

None of those would have enough to save really complicated games, but as was mentioned in an interview the CD32 was aimed at the arcade style games market, the nv-ram was just meant to save high scores. The machine just happened to have the ease of porting any Amiga title to it, and this would be a mute point anyway had Commodore survived and released the floppy drive attachment.

But yes everything about the CD32 unlike the CDTV was done on a budget, memory cards of course would have been the best option, but even in 1993 64k cards were more expensive than a floppy drive anyway!

Edit: Oh in the Commodore document that was uploaded to archive, Commodore had plans to upgrade the nv-ram to 32k in an upgraded CD32 in late 1994.

[Gorf]

You are highlighting the wrong part of my sentence:
I wrote the necessary changes might might have been costlier
(in terms or development costs for hard- and software and therefor time to market - not the material)

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

but as was mentioned in an interview the CD32 was aimed at the arcade style games market, the nv-ram was just meant to save high scores.

This highlights an other stupidity of Commodore.
Amigas strength was a having a much broader portfolio of games - not just arcade style.
Especially when we consider the rather underwhelming hardware capabilities of the CD32 in comparison to other consoles is that particular field (only few hardware sprites, no tiling more …).
So more complicated games are actually the ones that could have set the C32 apart - not recognizing that and arguing other consoles don’t have much space for saving, so 1k should be enough — this is typical for late Commodore and shows why it had to fail.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Promilus

There weren't many developers interested in that particular platform. Should A1200 come a little bit sooner things might be different for CD32 as well.

The A1200 came at about the right time for CDROM, but the market it targeted wasn't very interested due to the expense.

There was some interest among enthusiasts for PD collections on CDROM, which were fairly cheap and gave access to a vast amount of 'free' stuff. I have many of these including complete Aminet sets and 3 Fred Fish discs. In my shop I had an Amiga 2000 running a BBS, with a 5 disc CD changer that we put various CDs into for our customers to access from home.

The issue with CDROM was the cost of the drives, which also required a SCSI interface (cheaper PC CDROM drives had proprietary interfaces and undocumented protocols). That all changed with ATAPI in 1995. However in 1994 you could get a CDROM drive for the A1200 that plugged into the PCMCIA slot for less than £200.

CD32 wasn't the only "gaming console transformable to computer". Each and every one failed at being computer.

The CD32 didn't fail at that. For bare minimum operation as a computer you just needed a mouse and a CD with the OS and your favorite apps/games on it. That was fine provided you didn't need to type anything.

A friend of mine wrote a program to enter text with an on-screen keyboard controlled by the joypad. The better solution was an Amiga keyboard plugged into the mini-DIN socket, with the serial port connected to another computer to transfer files between them. Then the only 'essential' thing missing was a floppy drive.

In 1996 I designed a minimal floppy drive interface, and installed a 3.5" drive into the side of my CD32. This provided pretty much the same functionality as a stock A1200, with the CDROM drive as a bonus. Of course if you had the money you could just buy an SX1 which provided all the required ports. I liked my solution better though because it kept everything nice and compact.

[Promilus]

The CD32 didn't fail at that. For bare minimum operation as a computer you just needed a mouse and a CD with the OS and your favorite apps/games on it.

Ok... so out of 1000 CD32 users back then how many did use it like A1200? More than a half? Less? Much less? Aaaa... Success and failure is measured by popularity of solution. Not a single gaming console did provide adequate computer experience. And CD32 was hard (and expensive) to adjust for that role despite of sharing hardware and OS with computer lineup. Maybe that's exactly why? After all A1200 is still gaming computer. They didn't make CD32 to be transferrable BACK to computer. A1200 essentially offer everything (except ability to mount fmv module and do c2p) to be best of both worlds. It offers more expansions, better expansions and cheaper expansions. And CD as well (if towerized). Trying to revert original Commodore's intent on CD32 sounds absolutely hilarious to me.

[TEG]

About Commodore and the CD32, I remember very well that a least three or four years before it appear I was wondering why CBM did not produced one. Nintendo and Sega were running strong, I was sure CBM had an answer growing in its boxes. An Amiga with more sound voices, fastest cpu, more sprites, a clearly games oriented machine.

I was very impressed when I saw the mode 7 of the Nintendo. It was like a punch into the belly. Commodore was no more the leader and the Amiga platform was clearly outdated.

Then came the CD32, everyone around me saying "too late". However, I have seen a demonstration in a computer show in Paris of the mpeg cartridge on a very big screen and it was impressive. Problem, the cartridge was over heating and unable to run for a long time :-/

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by Promilus

CD32 was hard (and expensive) to adjust for that role despite of sharing hardware and OS with computer lineup. Maybe that's exactly why? After all A1200 is still gaming computer. They didn't make CD32 to be transferrable BACK to computer. A1200 essentially offer everything (except ability to mount fmv module and do c2p) to be best of both worlds. It offers more expansions, better expansions and cheaper expansions. And CD as well (if towerized). Trying to revert original Commodore's intent on CD32 sounds absolutely hilarious to me.

No more expensive than adding a CD drive to the A1200, by late 1994, the A1200 was very hard to get, if you could it was £350+£200 plus £20 for joypad (£570), there was CD32 bundles with SX1, KB, DD, MS for £480 and had better compatibility than the Zappo or whatever CD drive was out at the time (yes compatibility improved over the years but not at that time).

And Commodore WAS going to release its own same setup to do the same thing for the CD32 before it went belly up, hilarious you say!?

[oscar_ates]

I think biggest disappointment came from the 3d texture mapping games for both A1200 and CD32 base machines. Commodore was pinned down by the weak cpus and the low memory bandwidth for this 3d era. They did not have any solution to architecture shortcomings nor any forward sight

[grond]

I think the CD32 was the best Commodore could pull off at that time. It is a miracle they managed to get out another product at all before they collapsed. The CD32 made a lot of sense even though it was rather weak as a console when compared to contemporary consoles. However, all shortcomings of the CD32 are really shortcomings of AGA (no 32 bit blitter, no extra audio channels through 32bit audio DMA, no chunky mode), Commodore had dropped the ball around 1990 when they neglected chipset development.

[desiv]

Originally Posted by grond

It is a miracle they managed to get out another product at all before they collapsed.

Yeah, although with the XOR lawsuit, they didn't really get it out the way they wanted to.
Not to the larger possible US market.
That would have been a full year before the Playstation, and with the price of the 3DO, that wasn't competition.
Yes, the CD32 would have failed once the Playstation dropped, but they might have had 6 months to a year of decent sales if they played their marketing cards right...
(OK, who am I kidding. Commodore wouldn't have played their marketing cards right...) ;-)

[sokolovic]

That thread is becoming the Western Wall of Amiga zealots. It should be renamed as such.

[desiv]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

That thread is becoming the Western Wall of Amiga zealots. It should be renamed as such.

What? Amiga zealots? On an Amiga forum???? How could that be????

[TCD]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

That thread is becoming the Western Wall of Amiga zealots. It should be renamed as such.

You must be new here

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by desiv

Yeah, although with the XOR lawsuit, they didn't really get it out the way they wanted to.

That lawsuit is an other mystery:
why was this patent troll not willing to make a deal?
I mean, Commodore was really on the brink and what good is a company that goes bankrupt for a patent troll?
Why didn't they make a deal like
"ok, this year we give you a license for just one million ... next year we make a new deal"

(not to mention that this was a hoax anyway and that there was clearly prior art ...)

[oscar_ates]

Commodore could not pay the 10 million to the patent trol. This is also pathetic for so called a big company

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by oscar_ates

Commodore could not pay the 10 million to the patent trol. This is also pathetic for so called a big company

It was of course the proverbial last drop - it probably would have been two or three more month before commodore would folded anyways.

[TEG]

Originally Posted by Gorf

That lawsuit is an other mystery:
why was this patent troll not willing to make a deal?
I mean, Commodore was really on the brink and what good is a company that goes bankrupt for a patent troll?
Why didn't they make a deal like
"ok, this year we give you a license for just one million ... next year we make a new deal"

(not to mention that this was a hoax anyway and that there was clearly prior art ...)

I agree, it's a bit strange. At work, I was friend with the person who was in charge of patents. He had access to the world database patents. I wanted to search with him if we would be able to find the XOR Commodore case. Unfortunately he left for another job before we found some time to do the research. Now the new person in charge work mostly at home so it's over.

From reddit:

The 10 million dollar lawsuit is mentioned in the book "On the edge" (p.544-546), along with the US import restrictions that followed when Commodore didn't pay. The book mentions that CADTracks lawyers convinced the jury on false grounds by showing different screenshots of mouse pointers.

From Wikipedia:

The CD32 was released in Canada and Australia and was planned for release in the United States. Commodore stated that the console would launch in the United States in either late February or early March 1994, at the price of $399 with two pack-in games, Pinball Fantasies and Sleepwalker, as well as six separately sold launch games. However, a deadline was reached for Commodore to pay 10 million USD in patent royalty to Cad Track (U.S. Patent 4,197,590) for their use of their XOR patent. A federal judge ordered an injunction against Commodore preventing them from importing anything into the United States.

Seems it was applied for in 1978 and it would have been valid from then till 1998.

Another interesting quote:

U.S. Patent 4,197,590: The inventor founded a company to develop and market what appears to be the first personal computer to write directly from memory to the display. This invention has been widely licensed to the personal computer industry by Cadtrak. The "XOR" is only part of the invention. Cadtrak filed and has won at least one lawsuit against a larger company. The idea behind the "XOR" claims of this patent is simple. A program XORs a cursor icon onto a display device; later a second XOR to the same place erases the cursor restoring the original display. To move the cursor one XORs the cursor to its old location, then XORs it onto the new location. There are many ways to get around this patent. One can use an underline as a cursor or "logically or" the cursor onto the display, erasing later by rewriting the display with its original information. This approach is fast, lets you change cursor icons easily, accesses the minimum possible data, and requires no space be reserved on the screen for the cursor.

The League says this patent can be infringed in "a few lines of a program." It can be, but not on a computer that was commercially available at the time the invention was made. The invention is largely the invention of the frame buffer. As such, it requires hardware which has since become common, making it possible to infringe the XOR claims with a few lines of code. Many, if not most, computer manufacturers including Apple and IBM have taken out licenses which covers programs running on their computers.

This patent illustrates that it is usually easy to design around a patent one accidentally infringes. If this patent, a hardware patent, is a "bad" patent as some claim, it only demonstrates that the electronics industry tolerates "bad" patents because it finds patents beneficial on balance. Software should be able to tolerate "bad" patents similarly. To discard the patent system because some bad patents exist would be the same as suppressing free speech to stamp out lies.

If this assertion about Apple and IBM is true, it's possible that Commodore did not paid attention and Cadtrak jumped onto the wounded pray.