Amiga 3000 Review (Byte Magazine 1990)

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Amiga 3000 Review (Byte Magazine 1990)

3 pages before that is a Advert for 680x0 ANSI C compiler Cross Code C for embedded hardware running on MS-DOS for $1995USD makes me think how many copies DICE C sold back in the day, probably would have been less as it had just targetted the Amiga if he had a PC version as well he would have made more $$$.

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I wish Guy Kewney had done the review.

[eXeler0]

Interesting review. This is 1990 and the reviewer correctly noted that the lack of native 8 and 24 bit graphics modes is a concern and that Commodore needed to adress this to stay competitive.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

Interesting review. This is 1990 and the reviewer correctly noted that the lack of native 8 and 24 bit graphics modes is a concern and that Commodore needed to adress this to stay competitive.

Which is silly. The PC had no native graphics modes - only text. The PC's OS had no concept of graphics, or sound, or a pointing device. If you wanted a GUI you had to install a 3rd party software extension (MS Windows, DR Gem etc.), which (hopefully) came with a 'generic' driver that worked with your graphics card if the card manufacturer didn't supply one for that GUI. Similarly for your mouse, which typically plugged into the serial port. Each mouse manufacturer had their own protocols, so you had to run their driver - and this driver also rendered the mouse pointer on the screen so it had to know about the hardware in your video card!

The A3000 had a lot more 'native' stuff in it than the PC did. On the PC everything was an option, one that may or may not be present in your machine. The PC's answer to this problem was bus slots.

The A3000 had 32 bit bus slots. In 1990 the only PCs that had this were very expensive EISA machines and IBM's proprietary Microchannel. Just like on the PC, it was expected that 3rd party manufacturers would make advanced graphics cards for the A3000, and these cards would use drivers inside applications just like the PC did. By the time the A3000 actually began shipping, 8 and 24 bit graphics cards were already available for it - including the Impulse Firecracker which was supported by Imagine, Art Dept. Professional, Turbo Silver 3, Sculpt Animate 3D and Vista Pro - the Keybonus Harlequin which was specifically designed for real-time 24 bit animation - and Commodore's own A2410 which did 8 bit color from a 24 bit palette with standard resolutions of 800x600 and 1024x768. Many other cards became available in 1991 and beyond. There were also a number of high color frame buffers that plugged into the video slot, including Newtek's famous Video Toaster.

The Amiga was getting 8 and 24 bit graphics display devices even before the A3000 was released. The reviewer either didn't know this, or was concerned about a specific type of graphics that few Amiga users were interested in (8 or 24 bit color Workbench).

The A3000 was expensive enough as it was. Had Commodore built 'native' 24 bit graphics into it the price would have been even more out of reach. Many people like me weren't interested in paying for high-end stuff like 24 bit graphics that we didn't need at the time. What I wanted was an Amiga with more processing power, and slots so I could add cards as I needed them. Attractions of the A3000 over an A2000 were the smaller form factor, 32 bit expansion bus, more ChipRAM, built in SCSI controller and flicker fixer that handled all resolutions.

Even if the author of that review was an Amiga fan, the magazine's agenda was betrayed from the start with the word 'mainstream' on the cover. The Amiga was never meant to be 'mainstream'. Its powerful native graphics, sound and animation capabilities were anything but. The Amiga was doing better by not just becoming another PC clone. How many PC graphics cards got an Emmy award for technical excellence, like the Video Toaster did in 1993?

But then this was Byte magazine, which had long since abandoned its original purpose in favor of promoting PCs. Reviews became nothing more than shilling for the advertisers who were the magazine's real customers (its readers were the product).

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Originally Posted by eXeler0

Interesting review. This is 1990 and the reviewer correctly noted that the lack of native 8 and 24 bit graphics modes is a concern and that Commodore needed to adress this to stay competitive.

I think it was on Computer Chronicles when somebody from Commodore on the show fully admitted it was literally a more streamlined, but not really cheaper, replacement for something like an A2500 with C= 030 card etc.

The machine was clearly aimed at the yet to be defined 'desktop video' market. The only 24bit graphics card I can find for 1990 is the Visiona card by X-Pert Computer Services / Viona Development, very impressive actually, but it is only a Zorro-II card.

Commodore had their own A2410 card but this is also listed as being Zorro-II as well.

So we have a Zorro-III machine with the most efficient possible implementation of 030 and ECS chipset BUT a year later not even Commodore have a Zorro-III 24bit graphics card.

You have to wonder what Commodore engineers and marketeers did all day in that building.

Ipso facto, the A3000 should have come bundled with a 24bit card at no extra cost from day one. It was a sidegrade, not an upgrade, 'repacking popular A2000 upgrades into a single machine' IIRC from the interview/demo of the A3000.

If there is no Z3 24bit graphics cards then what's the point of making it for the multimedia/desktop video market?

Bit of a train wreck, sadly unlike the other sidegrade from Commodore this one didn't sell between 2.8 or 4.5 million (depending on whether you believe the designer of the machine's website or wikipedia)

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Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

The A3000 was expensive enough as it was. Had Commodore built 'native' 24 bit graphics into it the price would have been even more out of reach. Many people like me weren't interested in paying for high-end stuff like 24 bit graphics that we didn't need at the time. What I wanted was an Amiga with more processing power, and slots so I could add cards as I needed them. Attractions of the A3000 over an A2000 were the smaller form factor, 32 bit expansion bus, more ChipRAM, built in SCSI controller and flicker fixer that handled all resolutions.

Makes sense, if all you wanted was a faster computer for a BBS and with a cheaper option of upgrading the SCSI HD later. Especially when import taxes are already expensive.
Also seemed a cheaper option at the time if you wanted to install more RAM, but their crystal ball didn't realise that SIMM RAM would have been the future winner for mass produced cheap RAM.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by CCCP alert

I think it was on Computer Chronicles when somebody from Commodore on the show fully admitted it was literally a more streamlined, but not really cheaper, replacement for something like an A2500 with C= 030 card etc.

I don't remember them claiming anything else.

Being a more streamlined A2000 with everything in it is why I bought one. I had an A1000 with 2.5MB RAM and a 20MB hard drive which worked well, but I wanted more grunt for doing development work. I could have bought an A2000 with accelerator card etc. for perhaps a bit cheaper, but I wanted something with a similar form factor to the A1000 (and who wouldn't want the latest Amiga model?).

As 'luck' would have it, my A1000 was stolen along with everything for it (including all my programs and backup disks), shortly after I bought the A3000. The luck part was that I hadn't unpacked the A3000 yet, and the thieves didn't bother to look in the two cardboard boxes in the corner of the room!

In the end the A3000 proved its worth as I upgraded it with a Cyberstorm 50MHz 060 (later overclocked to 66MHz) with 32MB RAM, a Picasso II RTG card and Ethernet card. This provided equivalent performance to a Pentium 75 PC and lasted until the next millennium. I sold it because I needed money and the A1200 was enough for what I was doing after that.

The machine was clearly aimed at the yet to be defined 'desktop video' market.

The 'desktop video' market was only just beginning. Amigas were being used for video titling because they were genlockable, but not for non-linear editing because the technology needed to do it didn't exist back then. However Newtek's Video Toaster (introduced in 1990) added real-time transition effects, frame grabbing and a 24 bit display buffer. It worked with the Amiga's native chipset via the video slot. Other cards were made that performed various functions related to video production too, eg. GVP's Impact Vision 24 (released in 1991) which made use of the A3000's inline Zorro and video slots.

BTW a friend of mine was into commercial video production back then. I developed an interface that allowed him to control a professional Sony video recorder from his A2000. Later on he got a Draco Vision which he used to make TV adverts and other video productions.

The only 24bit graphics card I can find for 1990 is the Visiona card by X-Pert Computer Services / Viona Development, very impressive actually, but it is only a Zorro-II card.

Hardly surprising considering that the A3000 didn't exist until the later half of 1990. I preordered mine in November 1990, but didn't receive it until May 1991 (very slow boat from the US to New Zealand). You might ask why I didn't order one as soon as it was announced. Well back in those days magazines also took 3 months to get here, and there was no Internet to get advance notice of new products! It was like living on a planet 1/4 of a light year away.

Commodore had their own A2410 card but this is also listed as being Zorro-II as well.

The A2410 was a TIGA card intended for use with Unix. It didn't need Zorro III because the onboard 50MHz TMS34010 processor was supposed to do the 'heavy lifting'.

The Progressive Peripherals Rembrant was another card that used Texas Instruments chips, in this case a TMS34020 and TMS34082 for real-time 3D rendering. This card was genlockable and had composite input and output, making it suitable for video work.

So we have a Zorro-III machine with the most efficient possible implementation of 030 and ECS chipset BUT a year later not even Commodore have a Zorro-III 24bit graphics card.

You have to wonder what Commodore engineers and marketeers did all day in that building.

...and not just Commodore. I wonder what GVP, Macrosystem, Ameristar, Village Tronic etc. were doing during all that time before they introduced Zorro III graphics cards. Were they just sitting around twiddling their thumbs? Or was making a good 32 bit bus graphics card a tiny bit harder than simply snapping your fingers and magicking one up?

Ipso facto, the A3000 should have come bundled with a 24bit card at no extra cost from day one.

Now you're just being silly. Why not throw in a free pony too?

It was a sidegrade, not an upgrade, 'repacking popular A2000 upgrades into a single machine' IIRC from the interview/demo of the A3000.

... apart from the new 32 bit bus, CPU slot and DMA SCSI, the 2MB Agnus, and the flicker fixer that did all video modes and didn't use up the video slot. Yeah, apart from that it was no different from an A2000 stuffed with cards.

And what is wrong with that? IMO the fact that you could upgrade an A2000 to be almost the same as an A3000 was a good thing. It meant that existing users could stay in the game and 3rd party manufacturers had a good market for their products.

If there is no Z3 24bit graphics cards then what's the point of making it for the multimedia/desktop video market?

They weren't making it specifically for the desktop video market. It would fill the same role as the A2000 did there and elsewhere, only potentially better due to the 32 bit bus.

Bit of a train wreck, sadly unlike the other sidegrade from Commodore this one didn't sell between 2.8 or 4.5 million (depending on whether you believe the designer of the machine's website or wikipedia)

Nobody was expecting the A3000 to sell as well as the A500. Where the train went off the rails was when Commodore thought they could break into the Unix workstation market with it. They sold a few to universities and that was it.

To get more sales they needed a cheaper machine. That was supposed to be filled by the A2200 and A2400. I remember getting a price list from Commodore NZ with these models on it. There were no brochures or even a photo them, just a short list of specifications. I had no idea what they were so we didn't order any. Apparently neither did anyone else! Huge marketing cock up - almost like they didn't want to sell them. Seems Commodore's own marketing department was holding out for something better. Perhaps they knew that AGA was just around the corner...

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I think the A3000 was an improvement, it's just Commodore sort of bumbled into it like they did with the C128, hence the comment about it.

As a top of the range machine shipped with a Z3 24bit card, hence my comment about Commodore's 1991 A2410 being Z2 only really shows lack of strategy company-wide. It would have filled the gap between A2000 and A4000. It is pretty much new money for old stock technically, Z3 aside. I would imagine this also has slight efficiency increase over an A2000 with a top end 030 card in the CPU slot too.

The trouble with how Commodore managed Amiga strategy was they had 'one chipset fits all' but the same chipset has to go in a £2000 machine and a £400 machine as is. They probably should have done parallel development or develop a scaleable chipset, like adding an extra blitter and Paula to the top end model.

It's just another pair of machines, if you count CDTV ECS machine, that really didn't improve total colours on screen, sprites or DAC quantity/quality/post processing of sound etc. This had already happened in 1987 with OCS based 'new' Amigas. It's how they ended up in the make or break AGA era vs PC, Archimedes and Mac 256 colour platforms with potential of 'better' audio. A 1990 A3000 and CDTV fusion of abilities in a single machine certainly would have gotten Commodore a fair bit of respect in the conservative computing circles, it was quite unique in being able to boot directly from a CD, something no* PC could do yet. Strategy, making the most of your engineering resource and technical improvements created being maximised company wide.

*possibly the 386 based FM Towns also could do this and it was before A3000 release.

[TheLurker]

Big limitation of the 3000 - it couldn't house the Toaster, unless you wanted to take tin snips to the case and be really careful about grounding on the case.

Which, of course, I did, but the one area in the US where the Amiga had a foothold, and they release a computer that won't run the killer app without a warranty killing mod.

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Luckily the A3000 was a bit of a stop gap and the 4000 soon came along but yes that is odd for such a niche 'most expensive Amiga in the world' type machine. Style over function, the A2000 may have been as ugly as every PC compatible of the era BUT it had all the expandability you could want from an Amiga big box system, more than enough slots to build a 286 PC inside it with sound and video and HDD/FD controller.

That's why I wished Guy had done the review, one of the best technical reviewers and he got both a preview and review machine to review for PCW magazine, his insights would have been fascinating. He truly championed the Amiga 1000, even appearing on ITVs Database TV series to cover the machine in 1985 before it was even PAL capable.