The most detailed information about the Amiga A300?

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

Laptops were really used in 3 ways from my experience in the mid nineties.

1. You need to be based at multiple sites so you take your laptop with you.
2. You need to be based away from home, like a hotel, so you take your laptop with you.
3. You need to be able to do work on the train or on the road whilst travelling between clients in a single day.

Yes, because you wouldn't put up with one on the desktop when they cost so much and the screens were so crappy.

But the A600 was different. Everybody had a TV, so you could take it to a mate's place and have fun - just like you did with a gaming console - and hook it up to an RGB monitor at home for more 'serious' work. Or do the same thing at home. You wouldn't want do that with a desktop PC because you would have to drag the monitor and keyboard around with it.

Anyway my point wasn't so much about where you could use it, as that (like laptops) the size reduction was worth losing the numeric keypad. I use a Quickfire Rapid keyboard on my desktop PC so I have more room on the desk for other stuff.

Back in the 90's I thought it would be a good idea to have a portable Amiga so I could do programming anywhere, but this was actually a silly idea. I doubt that I would get much work done on a train or at the beach etc. - too many distractions!

Commodore, unlike Atari, never bothered to make an Amiga laptop. Couldn't tell you if this is lack of interest at the corporate level or lack of talent in the engineering department.

Technically it was a challenge because laptops are expected to run on batteries but the Amiga's chipset was NMOS which drew a lot of power. The solutions were either to remake the chips in CMOS, or have a large heavy battery - which in those days had to be a (relatively) low capacity Nicad because suitable MiMH and Lithium-ion cells weren't available. The available LCD screens weren't good either until around 1992 when TFT was developed. They suffered from poor contrast, ghosting, and slow response, not good for graphics or games and not a pleasant experience.

The other issue was the limited market. 99% of Amigas were mostly used for entertainment, and a laptop model would be several times the price of an A600.

Several prototype Amiga laptops were produced by 3rd parties using an A600 or A1200 motherboard and an LCD screen in a custom case. One called 'PAWS' was made as a kit to put your A1200 into. I doubt they sold many.

it would be no less of a commercial success as the Atari Stacy laptop.

Wikipedia says "With built-in MIDI, the STacy enjoyed success for running music-sequencer software and as a controller of musical instruments among both amateurs and well-known musicians.". Without that market I bet sales would have been abysmal. Apparently it only sold ~35,000 between 1989 and 1991. The Amiga 600 sold 193,000 in Germany alone in a similar timeframe.

Another interesting fact about the STacy is that it was originally designed to run from 12 C size cells, but the runtime was apparently so short that Atari glued the battery hatch shut and sold it as mains powered only. So much for using it on the train!

Nobody knew PCMCIA would be useless for Amiga all the way back in 1990/91.

And it wasn't useless. The only issue was the thing people mostly wanted to use it for - extra RAM - was very expensive. But that would have been different if there was enough demand. A PCMCIA FastRAM card for the A600 would be quite easy to make and much cheaper than the PC static RAM cards that were available. Other devices like CDROM drives and networks cards did appear later, so it was no less 'useless' than the A500's expansion port.

At the right price the A600 would still have a place in the market in 1992 next to the A1200, the problem is Commodore neither could nor would sell an A600 for £199.99 in 1992 but from a technological point of view that is the price point 7 year old technology needs to be at. £100 less for no AGA, slower CPU, half the RAM and smaller keyboard of a home computer is what crippled the A600 as soon as the A1200 went on sale.

Yes, being older technology did 'cripple' it in that way. However it was £100 cheaper so if pirated A500 titles were all you wanted to run it was still a good buy.

£250 was a lot of money in 1991, seems trivial today but back then it was a simple case of Megadrive/SNES purchase or nothing because you couldn't afford anything more,

In 1992 the average weekly wage of males aged 25-29 was £300 per week. In September 2022 it was £500 per week. The cheapest gaming PC I could find on Currys was £599 ("save £130"). So gaming computers have gotten a lot better over the last 30 years, but they still cost about the same relative to gamers' incomes.

[Megalomaniac]

It's a bit off-topic, but - the Amiga having extra and much more complex and probably power-hungry custom chips compared to the ST probably made it more expensive to make a workable laptop. Considering that the later ST Book only sold around 1200 despite being quite well-regarded for the time, it probably wouldn't've been worthwhile.

It took far too long for enough PCMCIA devices to become available for the Amiga to make it worthwhile. A CD drive for both A1200 and A600 needed to be available by mid-1993 at the very latest, considering that the A570 only worked with the A500+ and 1Meg ChipRAM A500s. You couldn't even use it to transfer files between a PCMCIA-equipped PC and an Amiga. I'm not sure that the original edge connector was ever really overhauled for usefulness by PCMCIA during the Amiga's lifespan.

[grond]

My first CD-writer for PC was an external drive that connected to the PC's PAR-port (my first PCs were all laptop computers). I guess CD-drives could also have connected to the Amiga's parallel port, no need for PCMCIA (let alone trapdoor connectors like planned by Commodore). While my A600 cost 299 DM in 1993, PCMCIA ethernet cards were still >400 DM in 1997. PCMCIA RAM was similarly expensive. That's how useful a PCMCIA slot was in the mid-90s. Commodore was placing a bet on compatibility with PC hardware. They had a point but lost the bet. Today we are glad they did it, it just didn't help them back in the day.

[BigD]

The A600 didn't help, period! The only use I saw was for a slightly cheaper gameshow prize on Noel's House Party or Family Fortunes in 1992/93! The A600 should have been an Amiga laptop project IMHO!

[oscar_ates]

From what I read, Commodore was in confusion of creating a bit less A500 or a bit more A500 and at the end they did both and fail miserably

[ImmortalA1000]

The A500 certainly benefited from a new base model with internal IDE added, that was the A500/1000 biggest drawback vs A2000. Amiga + HDD = joy of joys for home user

As for technical difficulties, no less difficult getting an Acorn Archimedes or Atari ST into a battery powered laptop model, Commodore are the only ones who didn't really go for this market (probably due to poor potential sales as rival laptops proved).

I am not 100% sure but I think it was the 486 era where Toshiba and IBM first had proper TFT active LCD screens and they were fine to use, expensive option over the cheaper DSTN but they didn't suffer the ghosting effect of slow response of DSTN.

The A600 is less portable than the Commodore SX-64 and even that isn't an alternative to an actual laptop computer even though it has a screen.

The real issue is the kind of people using their computer in the car/on the train/in the hotel for work are unlikely to be using an Amiga. If it is required as part of the cost cutting to get a very cheap Amiga out their to a new generation/sector of the consumer market that wouldn't go for a £400 A500plus then fine but I don't think it was intentional as a roadmap to a 'more portable' Amiga.

I think it was Guy Kewney (RIP) of PCW magazine who said that a portable Amiga should be on the cards now the A500 and A2000 projects are finished. There was a notion that every remotely serious/powerful machine have a laptop option in the works back then.

I think Commodore made some 486 PC laptops didn't they?

[redblade]

ECS supported 640x480 resolution 4 colours out of 64
320x240 16 colours out of 4096 <-- I think,
So maybe if they just released the laptop and focused on the 640x480 resolution in 4 colours for productivity

[ImmortalA1000]

Back then you could get LCD panels that did 1280x1024 which is a perfect 200% mapping of 640x512 and you can build in the scandoubling in the LCD driver circuit so no problem doing 640x512x16/4096 and any other lower resolution and supply standard RGB and S-video for broadcast equipment.

Seeing as most people would be using an Amiga laptop vs Acorn/Atari/Mac/DOS laptop for the graphical multimedia abilities of the Amiga it would be a shame to not be able to display broadcast standard displays on any LCD screen for the desktop video professionals who might want to purchase one IMO.

[Megalomaniac]

Could Commodore have made a 640x512x16 Amiga laptop for a price that would be competitive with more mass-produced PC laptops of the day? Even 16 colours would still leave people having to do a lot of touching-up of their work once they get back to base. It strikes me that PCs, Macs and STs were much easier to turn into workable laptops, what gave the Amiga its advantages at home was power-hungry, technically complicated and expensive relative to the underlying hardware of those systems.

[grond]

I believe flat panel development in its early stages was mostly driven by laptop computer and industrial applications. It would still take some years until flat panels were good enough for stationary uses such as TV. Thus, an Amiga laptop using a TV mode wasn't viable while Commodore was alive. People would have wanted an Amiga to be able to do what an Amiga was particularly good at, i.e. display colourful stuff. The available flat panels were useful only for stuff you'd also do on monochrome displays or using only very basic colours. That's precisely the stuff few people considered using an Amiga for. That pretty much left no target audience for such an Amiga laptop.

[BigD]

There was most likely more of a market for a laptop than an increasingly expensive A300 project!

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

Could Commodore have made a 640x512x16 Amiga laptop for a price that would be competitive with more mass-produced PC laptops of the day? Even 16 colours would still leave people having to do a lot of touching-up of their work once they get back to base. It strikes me that PCs, Macs and STs were much easier to turn into workable laptops, what gave the Amiga its advantages at home was power-hungry, technically complicated and expensive relative to the underlying hardware of those systems.

The ST book, Acorn Archimedes and most 486 VGA PC laptops were hugely expensive in the 90s. Laptops didn't really become affordable until around 2007/2008 period when disposable junk from ASUS/ACER hit the market. I know this because I used to sell ex-corporate laptops on ebay from 2002-2009 and then gave up as people couldn't care less for ATI equipped properly constructed used DELL/Thinkpad vs rubbish in PC World for the same price.

I am pretty sure Commodore made a P75 laptop.

The problem is who would buy an expensive Amiga laptop, it doesn't make financial sense.

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

The problem is who would buy an expensive Amiga laptop, it doesn't make financial sense.

Yes, an Amiga laptop in early 90 would have flopped worse than the CDTV even. The right tech that would make it justice wasnt available at affordable prices ( good quality color LCD !)

[Amigajay]

Upload of original A300 user manual.

https://archive.org/details/introducing-the-amiga-300/

Amazingly they were planning to still have 512k ram for this machine in 1991!

I wonder at what point during 1991 someone said “hey those 1MB games which more and more publishers are releasing aren’t gonna run on our new model which we are going to launch next year guys!” “Hey don’t worry we have another model planned for Xmas the A500+ with 1MB!” “What about the A300? Ah shut up! and get back to work, whats with all these questions!”