Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by grond

But that is exactly how high-tech companies operate: once you have completed development of a product, you start work on the next generation. Sure, you also have a team that does product maintenance/perfection but you start work on the next gen the moment you fixed the worst bugs with the current generation...

Yes, but they didn't. And that's not the fault of the A1200 or the engineers that designed it. Under the circumstances, it was was decent machine and the only alternative was no machine at all. So why all the 30 year late disenchantment over a machine nobody was under any illusions about when they bought it?

[oscar_ates]

After they fired Jay Miner's original Amiga design team, Commodore had no matching talent in their West Chester group. Also, Amiga tech was heavily depending on custom chips and Commodore's chip design team was heavily under-funded. That is why they could not improve the blitter, copper, sound chips and add chunky modes to A1200. There was only one designer working on Hombre chip and I do not think you can release something sensational with one designer only. I am sure Sony hired/utilized a lot of engineers to design the playstation one.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by grond

But that is exactly how high-tech companies operate: once you have completed development of a product, you start work on the next generation. Sure, you also have a team that does product maintenance/perfection but you start work on the next gen the moment you fixed the worst bugs with the current generation.

Actually: you do that even earlier.
The high-level designers such as e.g. Jay Miner would start the layout of the next generation long before the tape out of the current gen...

Commodore dropped the ball long before work on ECS started. The moment OCS was in the A500/A2000

ECS is really just a minor revision that should have been already part of the A500/A2000 in 87.

After that going 32bit wide and taking advantage of faster DRAM is just the next logical step - one really does not need much fantasy or a crystal ball to come to that conclusion ...

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

Go tell to the wonderful, superior and impressive Falcon buyers (Falcon you probably didn't bought) that the A1200 support wasn't significant.

The good old flame-wars ...

The battle between Atari and Commodore were over at this point in time - not that they made any sense before that.
In 1992 it was PC against all others.

[grond]

Originally Posted by Karlos

Yes, but they didn't. And that's not the fault of the A1200 or the engineers that designed it. Under the circumstances, it was was decent machine and the only alternative was no machine at all. So why all the 30 year late disenchantment over a machine nobody was under any illusions about when they bought it?

It's not like we blame the A1200. We blame Commodore for missing lots of opportunities to earn more of our and everyone's money. I already said that the A1200 was the best Amiga I have ever had and a better computer for my needs than what any other company offered. But it could have been much better without Commodore having to do magic, invest billions they didn't have etc. They could have made a much better machine with the resources they had if they had put them to better use.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Oh wait, of course we will ignore the A4000 because it cost about the same as a name-brand 486 PC. Unacceptable!

Not at all. And as a A3000 customer I was not bothered so much by the price tag, but by the lack of certain features.

SCSI was clearly the favored solution among big-box Amiga customers and many (like me) would have needed to buy an additional SCSI card to support the equipment they already got.

My monitor, which worked fine with Amber, also would not cope with doublePAL screenmode promotion - so I would need an other monitor or hope for some AGA flicker fixer being released soon (occupying already the 2nd slot)

Overall the available high-res screen modes are not what one would expect in this class at least a flicker free 800*600 or a 1024 resolution would have been adequate.

The next was the A4000 case design, that I find absolutely terrible and cheep looking - a huge let down on the appearance front...

And last but not least the botched 040 card memory interface, that wasted a lot of the otherwise good performance of this CPU.

If the Amiga isn't both more powerful and much cheaper than an equivalent PC then I don't want one! Bad Commodore for not breaking the laws of physics!

It does not need to be cheaper, but in comparison to the A1200 with the EXACT SAME custom chips and a 32bit CPU the price gap between these two machines was just not justified - especially if you consider what a faster and better 040 CPU card from GVP with onboard SCSI would cost:
You could buy a A1200 (having all the custom chips and I/O) + this GVP_CPU-board for >$600 less than a A4000
- so Commodore expected its customers to pay >$600 for an ugly metal box alone?
(and you would have an 020 spare in this calculation...)
And its not like GVP was not making money with these cards ....

In the graphics department IBM had their PGA card with 640x480 in 256 colors in 1984. It also had an onboard processor that did line drawing and area filling.

Now you see why so many considered AGA in 1992 a s big let down ...

Clearly this was not designed for games, but high-end CAD work - with a price to match.

While the A4000 did have the price to match but still was not usable for any high resolution applications like CAD.

The Amiga was a budget machine for people who wanted better gaming hardware than what was in typical low-end 8 bit home computers.

I can not agree here. That is not wat the A1000 was and that is clearly not what the operating system indicates the machine is made for.

And it is not how I used my Amiga all these years.

We should also bear in mind that Commodore was not a monolithic organization. 'All hands' may not have helped that much.

That the company was badly organized is really no excuse!
In fact it is, what I was saying all along: they fucked it up...

I'm not arguing that Commodore couldn't have done better - of course they could. So could IBM, and Intel, and Microsoft, and... But this argument that the Amiga 1200 was screwed up by Commodore's incompetence or whatever is silly.

Just when I thought you would agree ....
It is not silly - that's sadly exactly what happened. As all the things we discussed for pages and pages clearly indicate.

Without Commodore it wouldn't exist at all!

Very debatable - what would Tramiel's Atari have done with that technology?
Or maybe Amiga Inc. would have found an other buyer if Commodore would have had no interest at all?

Trip Hawkins (EA) tried to persuade Steve Jobs to buy Amiga ...

Look at Commodore's history from the beginning and you see them lurching from one disaster to another, taking uninformed risks and pushing stuff out despite dodgy engineering and yet managing to come out on top enough to keep going.

Just barely most of the time and not at all in the end...
This kind of history certainly does not make Commodore management geniuses! Just the opposite.

It was messy, but this is how private enterprise delivers the progress and diversity we otherwise wouldn't get.

Only: After the A1000 Commodore stopped to deliver that progress

Jay Miner wanted a big boring box that copied the IBM PC. Gould hated that.

Not exactly true - Miner wanted it more expandable and said the A2000 was more or less in line with his initial vision (without the ISA slots)
And probably with a nicer case design...

By the way: the first A1000 board had 512k RAM on board ... Commodore cut that down to only 256K ... only to sell the A1000 with 512K again but needing an extra board ...

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by grond

It's not like we blame the A1200. We blame Commodore for missing lots of opportunities to earn more of our and everyone's money. I already said that the A1200 was the best Amiga I have ever had and a better computer for my needs than what any other company offered. But it could have been much better without Commodore having to do magic, invest billions they didn't have etc. They could have made a much better machine with the resources they had if they had put them to better use.

A significant proportion of the thread seems to be just laying into the A1200 for not being able to do X, Y, or Z our of the box for 400 GBP at launch. And equally the thread is specifically asking who was disappointed with the machine.

I feel like I'm in some alternative reality, because I remember opening my A1200 box with glee and loving it straight away, even though it was hobbled in hindsight. And I soon righted things with a proper HD, an accelerator, eventual tower conversion and RTG. I never once bemoaned that I could just get a PC for less than I spent on it. PC just didn't do it for me at the time, even when doom and quake were all the rage. It wasn't until I got into Linux that I even decided the time has come to build one for my own needs.

[Karlos]

It wasn't just the Amigas loss of hardware lead that killed it. Every other single user, non-memory-protected, non-networkable (out of the box) OS powered machine went the same way in the 90s. Needs changed.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Karlos

I feel like I'm in some alternative reality, because I remember opening my A1200 box with glee and loving it straight away, even though it was hobbled in hindsight. And I soon righted things with a proper HD, an accelerator,

So it looks like, the realization that the A1200 was simply underpowered in its initial configuration came pretty fast ...

Commodore (probably) did not earn money with these upgrades. So we see there was clearly something wrong with the business strategy.

eventual tower conversion and RTG.

An other thing Commodore missed out completely: affordable towers.
This form factor was booming in the early 90s, but Commodore reserved it strictly for its higher than high-end products ...

All these tower and desktop conversion kits and Zorro-bus-boards show that there was demand for an Amiga between the low-end machines and the high-end A 3/4000
And that demand existed quite a long time and was also true for the gap between the A500 and A2000 ...

Giving more customers Amigas in desktops and towers would not only profit Commodore in this moment, but would also lead to a more committed user base, that would prefer to stay on that platform and keep all the additional gear working...

But millions of A500s sadly just ended up as quasi-gaming-consoles, booting into workbench out of curiosity just maybe once ... these customers were not committed, did not care, would exchange their current gaming machine easily for the next better thing ... which just was not an Amiga for most of them according to the numbers.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Karlos

It wasn't just the Amigas loss of hardware lead that killed it. Every other single user, non-memory-protected, non-networkable (out of the box) OS powered machine went the same way in the 90s. Needs changed.

Nor was DOS, Windows or Apple's System7 (or 8 or 9). None had memory protection, all were single user and only the Mac was networkable ... but only with other Macs and over serial ...

And while WindowsNT was introduced 1993, mainstream Windows (3, 3.1, 95, 98, ME) were still build upon ancient DOS and quite vulnerable and the famous bluescreen of death was something every user knew ...

So yes: AmigaOS would have needed some changes - and I would argue that Commodore should have done much more on the OS front as well as soon as 86...
But it was a problem the competition had as well.
If Commodore would have survived, I guess a cooperation with BeOS or QNX in 1996 would have been the natural choice.

[lionagony]

Originally Posted by Gorf

[Regarding X68000] You missed to quote my main argument here:
Commodore did not catch up to this level even 5 years later!
(Or at any point in time for that matter ...)
THAT is the point.

It sounds like Jay Miner's vision of the new chipset he developed and tested was similar to the x68000 using VRAM etc. For me, it can't be stated enough that Commodore's biggest mistake was not nurturing the original Amiga team in Los Gatos. If they would have just kept the team at least the same size and had them working on the next generation machines day in and day out then I have no doubt that the Amiga could have kept it's lead until the late 90's at least (who knows what would have happened after Jay Miner's untimely passing).

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

Agree with that.
Now people are blaming the stock A1200 ...

Who?
Nobody is blaming a machine. And it would be very stupid to do so: blaming an mindless object for something is absolutely pointless - one might equally blame gravity for not being able to float in air...

We are just blaming a very narrow group within the management of Commodore for having done a very bad job.

[grond]

Originally Posted by Karlos

A significant proportion of the thread seems to be just laying into the A1200 for not being able to do X, Y, or Z our of the box for 400 GBP at launch.

Actually the price point of 400 GBP is constantly and exclusively brought up by those that argue what a great computer the A1200 was for that little money. We, who argue it should have been better, explicitly state that we would have spent more money for a better A1200 and that this money would have went to Commodore and not to manufacturers of 3rd party upgrades that we bought shortly after the initial purchase.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by grond

Actually the price point of 400 GBP is constantly and exclusively brought up by those that argue what a great computer the A1200 was for that little money. We, who argue it should have been better, explicitly state that we would have spent more money for a better A1200 and that this money would have went to Commodore and not to manufacturers of 3rd party upgrades that we bought shortly after the initial purchase.

Exactly!

And not only Commodore customers:
People buying a new computer in that period of time did spent probably 600-800 GBP in average. But Commodore had nothing to offer in this range.

[oscar_ates]

Indeed all that money went to other companies which is a strategic business mistake. I had harddisk, Blizzard 030/50 with 8mb ram. Commodore got nothing from these extras. We think A1200 could be much better, not coming with a 1984 cpu and it would last longer as well.

[abu_the_monkey]

looking at it now, commodore probably could have done a better job by offering more options than just the base configuration, some of this (in my case at least) could/was catered for by the resellers.

I think it would have been nice to have had the cpu off board, on a card in the processor slot that could just be an 020@14mhz but provided options to upgrade like unpopulated pads for users to upgrade themselves or take to a commodore reseller to be populated with fast ram, fpu or an up rated cpu.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by abu_the_monkey

looking at it now, commodore probably could have done a better job by offering more options than just the base configuration, some of this (in my case at least) could/was catered for by the resellers.

In fact they did. There was, alongside the basic A1200, an A1200HD, an A4000 with an HD, fast ram and the choice between a 68030 or a 68040 with an MMU/FPU. And they were available in mid 1993.

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by grond

Actually the price point of 400 GBP is constantly and exclusively brought up by those that argue what a great computer the A1200 was for that little money. We, who argue it should have been better, explicitly state that we would have spent more money for a better A1200 and that this money would have went to Commodore and not to manufacturers of 3rd party upgrades that we bought shortly after the initial purchase.

I don't think anyone else is claiming the A1200 couldn't have been better, and certainly not myself. What I am questioning is the degree to which the question of how it could have been better tends towards total flights of fancy that ultimately required commodore to be, well, not commodore.

If the A1200 had been launched with integrated fast memory instead of a clockport that was ultimately next to useless and a hole in the board for an FPU that was never fitted, at the same or very similar price point, I'd go so far as to say that is the best we could've reasonably expected from the commodore we had in this timeline. In some other corner of the multiverse the Amiga is now the ubiquitous brand that Apple is here. Somewhere else it's Atari.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

In fact they did. There was, alongside the basic A1200, an A1200HD, an A4000 with an HD, fast ram and the choice between a 68030 or a 68040 with an MMU/FPU. And they were available in mid 1993.

But none of these are the exact features for price combination that would convince the Amiga fan to buy it. And since every fan had their own idea of what that was (probably changing by the minute) Commodore would have needed to produce dozens of different models.

The answer was to make the A1200 as parts to build you own custom machine from, like PC clone builders did. Commodore would sell the essentials:- motherboard, keyboard, case, power supply, ROMs etc. and the builder would source the other parts separately. CPU and custom chips would be in sockets for easy upgrading. The base model A1200 would then be just the bare motherboard, making it seem ridiculously cheap. By the time you had purchased everything to make your dream machine it would be a lot more expensive, but nobody would talk about that (like they don't talk about how much a Pistorm really costs with everything you need).

Of course this wouldn't suit the market the A1200 was designed for so sales would be poor and few software titles would be produced for it, but who cares so long as Amiga fans get the hardware they want!

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Of course this wouldn't suit the market the A1200 was designed for so sales would be poor and few software titles would be produced for it, but who cares so long as Amiga fans get the hardware they want!

I beg to differ. This is actually *why* the PC worked. You could get your base model really cheap, but over time, would expand it. It is pretty much how I used my A2000. The A2000 always stayed the same, but I plugged in a lot of expansions. Not from CBM, anyhow, because there was not anything competative CBM was able to offer. I believe the only CBM part that was added later on was the flicker fixer, but the rest were third-party expansions.

While most users could not afford 1000$ (or € or whatever) for one machine, they could afford 2000$ over years, piece by piece. In the end, the machine is then more expensive, true, but then, who cares?