Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[Snoopy1234]

Going from an A1000 to my Dad's DX2 mean't leaving the Amiga completely. The A1000 wasn't really up to going online but the office pc was BBS heaven. I played games like Blake then. 90's going to Uni was the first time I saw the "Internet" and learn't how to use Winsock (now browser intergrated but still the parity check when going online) So as one of the first posts in the thread stated "... missed out on the best Amiga years" with the advent of the A1200. Continued with PC's since but with consoles too since becoming a Dad around the millenium. 2016 saw a change and I turned to Amigas' as a hobby and now have 3 A1200's. I consider them versitile with a GUI, Keyboard and Desktop running apps, games from different era's with WHDLoad and gfx sfx proggys, which makes them a great all-rounder. I admit I am easily swayed by popular opinion and agree my A3000 the best built / looking workstation making the wedge A1200 a bit but-ugly in comparison. But the A1200's have been faithful companions while having them over the last 7 years so I'm not complaining nor would I compare them to a console. I admit I wanted the Nintendo gfx sfx "bling" but the versatility of the A1200 made up for that. The thing with Amiga's I have been disappointed with is the suseptibility to environmental interferance. It's like it won't respond well unless you or the house is in a good mood.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by grond

For a games machine the price point of the Amiga 1000 was far too high. Nobody spent serious money on a not serious machine.

Even that would not have been true, with the right marketing and targeting the e.g. Arcade fanatics (as the X68000 shows)

The A1000 got a good start with an arcade-port like "Marble-Madness" but needed a couple more of these - and maybe two or three really good new arcade-like games.

With that you build a transparent arcade-cabinet and install it in hundreds of places -> people would play the games and see it is actually a A1000 doing all that. Something you can actually buy and while it is expensive it is much more affordable and of course more flexible than an actual arcade...

I also would put the A1000 in Video/TV-shops:
together with a genlog and some (primitive) video-titling software.
Camcorders and home video equipment was booming in the 80s...

And I would also target music-/ instrument stores.
The A1000 as a intuitive Midi-sequencer ...

All this, plus as dev-kit for the C64

even at the price they asked for it, it would have worked out pretty good!

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

But the C128 was mostly used in C64 mode, so Commodore probably could have made more money if they had never produced it (since the C64 and A500 both had higher profit margins)

vs.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I'm sure they (Escom) could have sold more if they dropped the price.

So your advice for Commodore would have been, not to sell a machine with low margins, while your advice to Escom would have been to sell with lowest margins possible ... sure


But where did you get the information, that the C128 had a lower margin than the C64? Any prove of that?

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Snoopy1234

Going from an A1000 to my Dad's DX2 mean't leaving the Amiga completely. The A1000 wasn't really up to going online but the office pc was BBS heaven.

Why wouldn't the A1000 not be up to the task? BBS on the Amiga was great.

[Promilus]

Whole thread is a big what-if. Devkits mounted in computers as whole platform are rather expensive anyway. Much more expensive than target machine. But. A1000 was too expensive to be a devkit for A500 (even if they knew it's the best way to get money) and surely it applies to being C64 devkit as well. If they made it below $1000 it just might have a chance. But that's assuming they DID went to gaming business with it from the start. Same with any other field like video editing etc. They'd have to knew exactly what machine has to do and how to sell it. It seems they just dropped it off with a boing ball and some other demos and then observed how it goes because they had absolutely no idea where this tech can lead them. And it obviously led them nowhere with that particular design. In the end Apple took DTP, Atari took MIDI and Amiga took gaming and video editing. The latter with 3rd party tools and hardly any good money for Commodore. Which is kind of suboptimal for such supreme architecture.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Promilus

If they made it below $1000 it just might have a chance. But that's assuming they DID went to gaming business with it from the start. Same with any other field like video editing etc.

I think you look at it too much from an European perspective. The price was not so high in comparison to other computers with the same cpu power. The A1000 was still significantly cheaper than the Macintosh!
(Only Atari ruined the prices of course)

As a video equipment: in 1986 the average price for a camcorder was $1646.
https://www.videomaker.com/videonews...-now-and-then/
And people bought them like crazy.
I am sure many would have payed an additional $1600 for a good video title generator (aka A1000 + genlock)

I would even go so far and entertain the idea, that the price of the A1000 was to low to be seen as a professional equipment.
Selling the A1000 + good monitor + good software package + Midi adapter for $1999 might have been a way.
(and reinvesting all the extra money in software development and R&D)

[Snoopy1234]

Originally Posted by Gorf

Why wouldn't the A1000 not be up to the task? BBS on the Amiga was great.

"Blink". iirc my own cautious personality dictated I'd try this newfound online space at a distance and not at home. In reality the parents weren't interested in such a system.

[oscar_ates]

Why the hell on earth Commodore could not make machine that can read high density floppy disks at full speed while owning Amiga tech for 9 years? A1200 had DD support, commodore A4000 had half-speed hd floppy drive, Escom A4000s went back to dd drives

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by oscar_ates

Why the hell on earth Commodore could not make machine that can read high density floppy disks at full speed while owning Amiga tech for 9 years? A1200 had DD support, commodore A4000 had half-speed hd floppy drive, Escom A4000s went back to dd drives

http://aminet.net/package/docs/hard/drv-1.44

someone figured out the solution for this problem in 1991...

also see:
https://aminet.net/package/disk/misc/HiDensity

[Promilus]

AFAIK that's paula restriction.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Promilus

AFAIK that's paula restriction.

you can circumvent that problem (Paula's limited DMA slots) with using GCR-encoding instead of MFM, like the solutions mentioned above do.

[Thorham]

It's all very simple. Commodore should've just done what the most successful companies did. That way it would've won, and we'd all have Amiga computers right now that would probably be similar to what we have already

[oscar_ates]

Another shortcoming of the A500 and A1200 was the missing real-time clock. They saved probably 2$ by not having it

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by Gorf

you can circumvent that problem (Paula's limited DMA slots) with using GCR-encoding instead of MFM, like the solutions mentioned above do.

Except that this doesn't give you 1.44MB of storage capacity. GCR only reads at half the rate, and decoding is more complicated as well.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

Except that this doesn't give you 1.44MB of storage capacity.

No, it gives you not 1.44MB but 1.52MB

Moutlist:

df2:       Device = gcrdisk.device
           Unit   = 2
           Mount = 1
           Flags  = 0
           Surfaces  = 2
           BlocksPerTrack = 19
           Reserved = 2
           Interleave = 0
           LowCyl = 0  ;  HighCyl = 79
           Buffers = 20
           BufMemType = 3

GCR only reads at half the rate

Why would it? Paula is blissfully unaware in what format the data is encoded.
as long as the phase-changes happen fast enough the chip will lock onto that signal.

[duga]

Originally Posted by oscar_ates

Another shortcoming of the A500 and A1200 was the missing real-time clock. They saved probably 2$ by not having it

And many ruined motherboards with RTC and barrel batteries mounted on them.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by duga

And many ruined motherboards with RTC and barrel batteries mounted on them.

like 10 years later ... yes. This is relevant from a retro or collectors perspective, but at the time it was really just a disadvantage and made the system look cheap and unprofessional.

[TEG]

Originally Posted by Promilus

On the other hand C64 for good compatibility has to offer a way to let 6502 and VIC access memory every 500ns or so. It most likely would be impossible with chipset interference so there's only one choice - dedicated memory. But while it would work perfectly for 8bit software it'd also make tricky to copy-back screen data to chipram and intercept access to cia and sid registers. I find it as actually more challenging project than sidecar

Good point.

How do you know about the 500ns access speed requirement? I take a look at Wikipedia and C64-wiki VIC-II page but there's no info.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Promilus

Now... Gorf - as for hardware implementation. ....
On the other hand C64 for good compatibility has to offer a way to let 6502 and VIC access memory every 500ns or so. It most likely would be impossible with chipset interference so there's only one choice - dedicated memory.

Ah I did miss this part the first time reading it ..

You seem to misunderstand, what I proposed as a solution:
The 6510 and the ViC-II would of course have their own dedicated 64KB of RAM - but the modified VIC-II would write its output to a region of chipram!
Since the low-res pixel-clock should be very similar this cold actually work.

After some more thought, I would change "region" to a single line (or two lines for double buffering) - a 1-2 KB of fast SRAM or a line buffer like within Amber would be enough for that:

VIC-II is filling this line up with 4 bits per pixel "vertically" while Agnus/Denise would read 16 bits "horizontally" for each of the 4 bitplanes that are formed this way.
(yes: this is c2p in hardware)

The Amiga bitplane pointers would be reset to the same address after every line, reading the "same" line over and over again, but it would have a different content each time of course ...

This way you could treat is as any other Screen. You could even mix it with a fifth bitplane somewhere else in chipram or display Amiga-sprites on it.
(the C64 sprites are of course automatically part of the VIC-II output)


I guess I need to draw a picture to make this clear?

PS:
This is something what could actually be done today with a A314 running Vice

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Gorf

like 10 years later ... yes. This is relevant from a retro or collectors perspective, but at the time it was really just a disadvantage and made the system look cheap and unprofessional.

XT PCs didn't have a realtime clock as standard, and they needed it far more than a home computer that would mostly be used for playing games.

As for being 'cheap and unprofessional' - yep, that was intended. If you wanted expensive and professional you bought an A2000.

This is just another example of the 'have your cake and eat it too' attitude of some Amiga fans. You wanted the Amiga to be both markedly cheaper and more powerful than anything else. But to get that you must cut out unnecessary bloat.

Originally Posted by duga

And many ruined motherboards with RTC and barrel batteries mounted on them.

The number of PC motherboards that were killed by battery leakage was staggering. It used to make me cry - and still does today. Just last week I cannibalized a 486 motherboard that was detroyed by it. It often didn't take that long to happen either. Back in the day I used to put PC motherboards in a sink full of hot water and scrub them with a toothbrush in order to get rid of the corrosion. It worked - sometimes...