03 July 2019, 15:59 | #181 |
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I was terribly disappointed that Christmas morning when I seen Amiga 1200. I asked for an Amiga 600 that all my friends had.
When I see these questions I like to ask "Have you ever made a mistake in hindsight?" Looking back its easy to say do this, do that, do the other but if there is one thing I can guarantee you its that the hardware that they put out they genuinely believed it would win the race. They were in it to make money full stop end of story. Yes the Amiga 1200 would of been really cool with a 33mhz 030 2mb fast ram chunky graphics blah blah but then again if it did in all likely hood I wouldn't of got one cause it would of cost twice as much as Santa wasn't rich. It was a budget machine and from the pick it was the best of the bunch. Wiped the floor with the Atari muck and comparing my 1993 A1200 to my early 90s 386 I can categorically tell you the A1200 is my first pick each time. The only thing the 386 has over my A1200 at the time was the HDD so lack of disk swapping but to be honest other than games like Monkey Island 2 with its 13 million disk swaps to merely watch the intro it wasn't an issue. Yeah when we got our Windows 95 Packard Bell the A1200 was passed down to little sister and forgotten for many a year. Of course you'll forget that Commodore were dead and buried by that time and all Escom did with the hardware was change the logo on the badge. People also tend to forget that hardware in those days and especially the 90s moved at a very quick pace. The PS4 is 7 years old and still going strong, they are only now talking of replacing it and I can guarantee you it'll be about for several years even after the PS5 comes. Back in the mid 90s the life span for the current tech was a couple of years max and that what in some ways killed Amiga along with all the other hardware companies. It was going to happen at some point and when it did it weeded out all dead leaving Nintendo, Sega, Sony, the IBM compatible and Apple hanging on for dear life. In terms of only computers, architecture was moving away from the custom chipset to the x86 and off the shelf components. Its a miracle apple managed to hang on as long as they did before following the same route. In fact if I remember correctly the mid to late 90s was shakey time for the fruit. |
03 July 2019, 16:31 | #182 |
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Doom killed Commodore not the A1200 or CD32 but neither were a disappointment.
Pcs were getting cheaper and could play games too, so the Amiga 1200 looked obsolete next to all the PCS running Doom demos in my local PC shop at the time. |
03 July 2019, 17:15 | #183 | |
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Also even so the HD floppy disc drives were available, reading/writing was damn slow due old chipset and could not be used to distribute software and games HD floppy were standard since 1987. In 1992 HD floppy drives were probably already at the same price level as DD drivers or even cheaper... Amiga 4000/040 released in 1992 had HD floppy... Last edited by ExiE; 03 July 2019 at 17:28. |
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03 July 2019, 17:22 | #184 |
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03 July 2019, 17:28 | #185 |
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Yes, but as I pointed out, Amigas couldn't use HD floppy drives directly, instead needing specially customised drives to be able to read HD disks. So, in the Amiga's case, HD floppy drives were still very much more expensive than DD drives, and thus were only fitted to the high end models.
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03 July 2019, 17:43 | #186 | |
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Lets get it upside down. If Commodore improved PAULA chip to be able to read HD floppies at full speed of 300rpm, they would be able to use standard *cheap* HD floppy drives instead of expensive drives modified to run at 150rpm |
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03 July 2019, 17:54 | #187 |
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More important instead of HD floppy a hard drive would be the better choice. And in about 93-95 you could add an CD-ROM for software delivery. At leas I was glad to use a hard drive and don't need to handle with floppies.
I was disappointed with the A1200 because Paula wasn't upgraded to at least 8 channels and 16bit. Also higher and faster screen solutions I missed with AGA. |
03 July 2019, 18:45 | #188 | |
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03 July 2019, 18:58 | #189 |
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People seem to forget the A1200 like the A600 and A500 before were budget computers, simply saying they should have added a harddrive or lots of fastram simply wasn’t feasible to hit their target price of £399 of launch machines.
I also don’t get why people think there is only one market for every games machine? There is multiple markets for machines, the Amiga/ST carved a niche market, as did the Mac, PC and consoles, they weren’t really competing against each other except the odd occasion i.e CD32/Pippin etc The A1200 COULD have saved Commodore for another few years, at the end of the day it was the Amiga ‘sector’ that decided it wasn’t good enough to warrant upgrading in large enough numbers, and that wasn’t because of lack of any expensive hdd or fastram. The A1200 form factor, ram, launch time frame, price were all fine, it was because of the custom chips were not being advanced enough pure and simple, most things Commodore did indeed improve upon but sadly they overlooked the most important ones. When things were looking like being delayed or too expensive with AAA, they should have outsourced to companies like Flare who did the Jaguar chipset, just imagine an A1200 with that power and game support from the Amiga Publishers... |
03 July 2019, 18:59 | #190 | ||
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03 July 2019, 21:34 | #191 |
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By the time I got my A1200 commodore had probably already gone bankrupt. I just thought it was cool to have an Amiga that was better then my A500. I did not expect it to compete with my friends Pentium 90.
Looking back at it now though I think the A1200 was a huge disappointment. Most of the Amiga models are disappointments really (the A1000, A500 and A3000 being the exceptions). The 1200 really should have had a faster CPU. An 030 would have done the trick (none of that silly EC020 nonsense) and 2mb ram was quickly too little. They should have made it possible to add more ram right on the motherboard. With an 030 and 2mb (upgradabe to 8/16mb on MB) the A1200 would have been a winner, and those specs would have overshadowed AGA's shortcomings (and the dated soundchipset). It would have been a more expensive machine, and possibly slightly larger, but I don't see any problems there. |
03 July 2019, 23:12 | #192 | ||
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What the A1200 really needed was a hard drive, so users wouldn't have to keep swapping disks all the time. Another thing that rarely gets mentioned is the PCMCIA slot. When the A600 was being designed the PCMCIA standard hadn't even been released yet (and USB was years away), so that was some pretty forward thinking from Commodore. That slot is very useful! It has been used for high speed modems, audio and video digitizers, CDROM drives, and of course CF cards and network cards. But does Commodore get credit for having the guts to go with new hardware standards? No, just brickbats for not turning the Amiga into a PC clone. COMMODORE INTRODUCES NEW AMIGA By PETER H. LEWISJULY 30, 1985 Quote:
Fast-forward to 1992 when the A1200 was released, and every PC still had to have a 5.25" drive for compatibility. Low-end machines often only came with a 5.25" drive. |
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03 July 2019, 23:34 | #193 | ||||||
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Of my old A500 games, about 60% worked without me doing anything - meaning they just worked. About half of the remaining games worked when I used the early start-up menu option to disable the caches. Of the rest, maybe 20 or 30 did not work at all. However, what remained did work when using a degrader. It is true that I only had about 600 or so games (of which 50 or so originals)*, so maybe your collection just happened to have all the incompatible stuff. *) Yeah.. these days I'd not use that many cracked games. Growing up does change you it seems. Quote:
The rest had to do with hardware incompatibilities - VGA/Adlib/Soundblaster/etc were only 'standard' in a loose sense. In my experience many games were incredibly picky regarding sound of video card. And the more recent the graphics/sound card was, the larger the chance of things failing. Quote:
And that's not getting into the 'minor inconvenience' of needing separate configs per game to begin with. My A1200 with degrader was sometimes not so much fun, but it was a metric ton easier to get (old) games to work on that than on the total mess that was MS-DOS in the mid 90s. Quote:
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So no, it was not 'stupid'. It was a compromise. Quote:
(This is aside from the people who didn't mind installing one themselves, or having their shop do it for them at the expense of warranty). |
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03 July 2019, 23:56 | #194 | |
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Third party manufacturers already had lots of experience producing accelerators and RAM boards for the A2000 etc, so it wouldn't take them long to produce A1200 cards. And look what we got! Everything up to 75MHz 060 and PPC, and now even beyond. Shortly you will able to put in a card with HDMI RTG graphics, SD card slot, 128MB of super fast RAM, and a 68k CPU with double the power of an 060 without the heat! But only because Commodore had the forethought to make an affordable machine with open-ended expandability. |
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04 July 2019, 00:03 | #195 |
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Why do you feel the need to defend everything that people find disappointing, this is "Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?"
and it would only cost more for such and such because commodore were greedy they could have lowered there profit margins that were probably very high and lack of investment. Also you just cant except PC was the leading force and there was a need for compatibility with it. Also its all irrelevant now we all have XBOX's Last edited by Retro1234; 04 July 2019 at 00:14. |
04 July 2019, 00:12 | #196 | |
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Anyway my point is, they did give us a hard drive, and that was more important than having an HD floppy drive. Not that it would been that hard, but considering Commodore's financial frailty it's a miracle we got as much as we did. Just think how many things they could have done to the A1200 that would have totally screwed it up... |
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04 July 2019, 00:54 | #197 | |||
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However I won't sit back while lies and misconceptions about the Amiga continue to be promulgated. Quote:
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04 July 2019, 00:57 | #198 | |
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If all AGA machines had HD floppy drivers, there would be no reason whatsoever to distribute software for AGA machines on DD floppies. It would mean also less crippled game ports probably... We call it progress. Nice image but if you check cover of the very same magazine from September 1988 you will find there several machines with both drives already and even IBM 386 with only 3.5" drive. After 1990 5.25" drives was there just for compatibility as you said and rarely used... |
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04 July 2019, 01:59 | #199 |
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04 July 2019, 02:20 | #200 |
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"However I won't sit back while lies and misconceptions about the Amiga continue to be promulgated."
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