Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Errr...yes.

To be more specific, it starts at track 40 and goes inwards to 79. Only once the inner part of the disk is full does it start filling the outer tracks.

That is what I say - it does *not* fill inner tracks first. It fills middle tracks first. Actually, the algorithm is not even like that, it just picks the next free sector that is closest to the previously allocated one, or closest where the head currently sits - that is it. The root sector just happens to be in the middle of the disk, which makes most sense.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

That is what I say - it does *not* fill inner tracks first. It fills middle tracks first. Actually, the algorithm is not even like that, it just picks the next free sector that is closest to the previously allocated one, or closest where the head currently sits - that is it. The root sector just happens to be in the middle of the disk, which makes most sense.

Right, and that 'just happens' to cause the inner tracks (those between the middle and inside of the disk) to be filled before the outer ones.

We should at least be thankful that Commodore used a standard 3.5" drive rather try to adapt their 1541 mechanism to the Amiga, or worse.

The competition was worse.

Atari started with a single-sided 3.5" drive on the ST that stored 360k. They soon switched to a double-sided 720k drive, but ST programs continued to come on single sided disks for years to maintain compatibility with these early drives. Despite having a standard controller chip (WD1772) they didn't use IBM format. For the Mega STE (introduced in 1991) they designed a custom controller that could do 1.44MB, but early machines still only had a 720k drive.

Apple introduced 3.5" drives with the Lisa (originally it had an own-design 5.25" drive they called 'Twiggy', but it was unreliable). This too was only single-sided, and used variable motor speed to improve density on inner tracks - which made the format incompatible with standard 3.5" drives. The same drive was also used in early Macs, and as an external drive for the Mac and Apple IIGS (It could also be used on Apple II, but only with a special controller card because the standard disk controller wasn't fast enough). In 1985 they introduced the double-sided 800k 'UniDisk 3.5', which was slowed down to work with the Apple IIC - making it incompatible with the Mac. In 1986 the Mac Plus came out with an 800k internal drive. Finally in 1988 they introduced the FDHD or 'SuperDrive' which could do 1.44MB IBM format. This still had variable speed to handle older formats.

Then there was IBM. 180k, 360k, 720k, 1.2MB, 1.44M and finally 2.88MB! But 3.5" drives were rare in clones until the 90's, and even then it was common to see machines sold with just a 1.2MB 5.25" drive. Getting the right format onto a disk or even just getting the drive to be properly recognized by the OS could be tricky, and often not possible on a modern PC. A 360k disk written to on a 360k drive and then on a 1.2MB drive would fail to read again on the 360k drive because the old (wider) tracks weren't fully erased.

But hey, that mess had to be better than sticking to one industry standard drive with a good capacity from the start, right? I mean, just look at all that innovation!

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

But hey, that mess had to be better than sticking to one industry standard drive with a good capacity from the start, right?

As you just pointed out yourself:
the double-sided "Sony" 3,5'' drive was no industry standard in 1985.
Nor was Amiga's filesystem or the method of reading/writing whole tracks instead of sectors...

Commodore's bet on the physical 3,5'' format turned out to be right ... sticking to DD after everyone else moved to HD: not so much.

[Cyprian]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Atari started with a single-sided 3.5" drive on the ST that stored 360k. They soon switched to a double-sided 720k drive, but ST programs continued to come on single sided disks for years to maintain compatibility with these early drives. Despite having a standard controller chip (WD1772) they didn't use IBM format.

Atari uses IBM format. The early TOS (1.0) had some issues. I had no any problems with exchanging floppies between my ST TOS 1.04 (and Falcon with TOS 4.04) and PC

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

For the Mega STE (introduced in 1991) they designed a custom controller that could do 1.44MB, but early machines still only had a 720k drive.

Ajax wasn't a custom chip. It was a standard WD1772 but clocked twice faster .

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Promilus

But that's exactly what I'm talking about. They'd have to first agree it IS great gaming machine and should advertise it as such. Along with adverts showing it's NOT ONLY for games. C= marketing did suck.

Actually they did do that - just not in the US.

Being in the US was the problem. The PC was everywhere, and any competing system was hard to promote as an alternative. Perhaps if they had dropped the C64 they could have positioned the Amiga to replace it, but that would mean promoting the gaming side of a machine that was too expensive to just be a gaming machine. The C128 was supposed to fill the 'not only for games role' at a lower price, but it also failed to do that.

To get the Amiga selling well in the US they needed a massive advertising campaign. They got off to a good start,

[ Show youtube player ]

But what followed was less impressive. Seems they relied on marketing people and advertising agencies who didn't understand what they were selling. The problem was that the Amiga was a brand new system with little to show for itself. Perhaps if there was something to show those ad guys, they might have understood.

Crash And Burn: The Amiga ST Story

By the start of July Commodore was in serious trouble. The SX-64 and new Plus/4 were dead in the water and the C128 wasn’t selling. Commodore shares were almost worthless. Commodore’s banks grumbled about calling in loans.

Irving Gould replaced the Commodore CEO with former PepsiCo exec Thomas Rattigan. Commodore needed a big win to make it through the year. Gould agreed a massive $25 million marketing budget for the rest of 1985 just for the Amiga. Most of this was for the Christmas season but a large amount was put aside for Commodore’s first ever launch event. There was only one problem.

Commodore didn’t have 25 million dollars...

The Amiga was a revolutionary computer so far ahead of its time few people understood it. It was also expensive. K-Mart wouldn’t sell a $1295 computer next to $300 Commodore 128s or even $799 Atari 520STs...

New CEO Thomas Rattigan didn't understand the Amiga. He hired marketing executives from his previous industry. They brought in Nabisco, who produced ads for food products. They also brought in the Ted Bates agency...

Commodore held a single press conference where they announced they were selling all the Amigas they could make. But Commodore had no money, almost no Amigas, was up to it’s eyeballs in debt and the banks would lend no more.

Irving Gould even sold his company jet to keep the lights on... Commodore sold around 40,000 Amigas in 1985. To do this, they spent $40,000,000 on marketing and advertising, or about $800 per $1295 machine sold.

Reading all that, it's a miracle that they managed to achieve what they did. We are very lucky to have the A1200.

And yes, by 87-88 iirc C64 users got official hint about C65. That held back some of them from buying incompatible Amiga 500 if (partially) compatible C65 would offer new screenmodes, blitter, more memory and 16bit CPU. Wow. What a mess.

The C65 was the ultimate C64 - too much so. It would only have appealed to a small number of enthusiasts. Even though I would have loved to get my hands on one, Commodore was right to can it.

Amiga hardware - we love. We cherish it. We know it's weak points. We know what improvements would make it even better. But there's no such improvement which would offset bad marketing or bad timing.

I think modern developments have proved that wrong. Commodore got a bum deal on their US marketing for sure, but despite that they managed to produce machines that could be improved beyond our wildest dreams.

Talking about 'improvements', here's an interesting talk by a modern game developer who had an A3000 back in the day.

[ Show youtube player ]

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Cyprian

Atari uses IBM format. The early TOS (1.0) had some issues. I had no any problems with exchanging floppies between my ST TOS 1.04 (and Falcon with TOS 4.04) and PC

Wikipedia says

IBM PCs can not read Atari disks, because the initial versions of TOS can recognize, read, and write to (but not create) disks in the same specification used by MS-DOS because of differences in the layout of data on track 0.

Is that wrong?

Ajax wasn't a custom chip. It was a standard WD1772 but clocked twice faster.

WD1772 compatible, but still a custom chip.

[Promilus]

@Bruce

I think modern developments have proved that wrong

Examples please. Apple didn't create first portable flash based music player. Nor first pad. Nor first smartphone. But aggressive marketing did result with actual boom for ipod, ipad and iphone. With absolutely no regards whether there were better, faster, cheaper products on the market already. For quite some time now Apple developed complex ecosystem of their products which has to be taken into account (not just hardware features of a single product). Sure, there are plenty of things they go wrong. Filling lawsuits over something as silly as pad itself or rounded edges (it's absolutely silly as it takes Space Odyssey or Star Trek to prove they were no first one to come up with that idea, lol) and (unauthorized) repair service centers for usage of components from broken apple products to repair broken apple products. How stupid is that? But overall Apple has a firm grasp of reality and fits the market perfectly. Not only fits. It does expand. It's absolutely enormous atm. And that's a company which did switch from 8bit 6502 to 32bit Motorola 68k, then 32bit PPC, then 64bit x86 and now 64bit ARM with highly probably RISC-V turn later on.

Now about that:

but despite that they managed to produce machines that could be improved beyond our wildest dreams

Well they did produce those but they didn't design it that way. A1200 wasn't designed at all to house graphic card. It was thanks to Phase5 and later on Elbox possible to use one with A1200. Neither Warp nor Vampire uses Zorro for their RTG implementation. Obviously as they use internal bus in FPGA to share fast memory (or at least reserve part of physical fast mem for RTG usage), it should be pretty obvious that using similar tech you can upgrade 68k mac as well. It just doesn't have much sense as most of 68k mac users either went PC and are happy about it or went PPC and were happy about it.

Now, about that video you did attach. Didn't watch all of it but the general idea is how bad complexity increase is. And actually that complexity rises through diversity. And through innovations implemented to platforms. One can take a firm grasp over hardware and say "this has to be done exactly this way so it's always simple and efficient and compatible" but ... really, how messed up idea is that? It kills progress and makes platforms die anyway. Yes, today software (along with OS itself) is bloated beyond measure. I honestly can't trust either OS nor applications I use. Not with how they work for me. But how they work for other entities behind my back. And it's general trend. I don't like that. Going into "services" which reports a lot about my activities etc. to "better suit my needs". I do know my own needs, thank you, and my need is to specific program to do specific job and nothing more. But simplicity of AmigaOS will never come back. And soon enough we'll need 64 cores + terabyte of ram just to browse web and write a resume. But one thing is sure - there's absolutely no choice to create one dominant standard for CPUs, GPUs, APIs, browsers, game engines, productivity software, AI and so on. As it would diminish progress trying to fit all wild ideas into one specific thought pattern. We live on this world exactly through diversity. Whole evolution is based on it. And that diversity created complex organisms as we are from millions of evolution of simple and efficient bacteria.

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Is that wrong?

Yes. Atari uses a standard FAT for their floppies, with a standard IBM track layout. What's different is the boot code (obviously, as it is not running on an x86 processor). However, it is extremely easy to avoid that problem.

[Cyprian]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Wikipedia says
Is that wrong?

Thomas Richter explained that

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

WD1772 compatible, but still a custom chip.

this is just doublerated WD1772 (100% compatible with no extra functionality), I would call it a clone, but as you wish you can call it custom chip,

[alexh]

Originally Posted by Cyprian

this is just doublerated WD1772 (100% compatible with no extra functionality), I would call it a clone, but as you wish you can call it custom chip,

It about industry terminology. If you make a chip (or you get someone else to make you a chip) and it isn't sold to anyone else, it is called a custom chip. i.e. custom made for Atari.

[Gorf]

Both is correct:
In the Atari TT it really was just an overclocked WD1772 - not custom made, but just selecting chips, that would tolerate 16MHz

For MegaSTE and Falcon not enough WD1772 were left, so they licensed the chip from Western Digital and produced a custom version manufactured by VLSI

[chb]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

Yes. Atari uses a standard FAT for their floppies, with a standard IBM track layout. What's different is the boot code (obviously, as it is not running on an x86 processor). However, it is extremely easy to avoid that problem.

No, that's not true for early Atari TOS versions, the incompatibility has nothing to do with the boot code. Look here for some very detailed information about Atari disk formats. The important part:

The Atari ST uses the Western Digital WD1772 Floppy Disc Controller (FDC) to access the 3 1/2 inch (or to be more precise 90mm) floppy disks. Western Digital was recommending to use the IBM 3740 Format for Single Density diskette and to use the IBM System 34 Format for Double Density diskette. Actually the default Atari Format used by the TOS is slightly different (nearer to the ISO Double Density Format) as it does not have an IAM byte (and associated GAP), before the first IDAM sector of the track (see diagram below).
However the WD1772 ( and therefore the Atari) is capable to read both format without problem but the reverse is usually not true (i.e. floppies formatted on early Atari machines can't be read on PCs but floppies created on PC can be read on Atari).

But I guess the Wikipedia article is still partially wrong, as the problem seems to be not with track 0, but with the first sector of each track AFAIU.

[Total Eclipse]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Wikipedia says
Is that wrong?

More specifically, early TOS versions (1.0 and 1.2) could read and write to MS-DOS formatted DD floppies, but the built in system formatter didn't format disks as DOS compatible.

There were third party programs that would format a DOS compatible floppy, or I recall you could use a disk editor such as Knife ST to change a couple of bytes in the boot sector to make the disk PC compatible.

Later TOS versions from 1.4 on had an improved formatter that created DOS-compatible disks.

EDIT - More digging suggests that changing the first three bytes of track 0 from 00004E to EB3490 will make the ST disk readable on a PC.

[ImmortalA1000]

Here's a question, if you were disappointed with the AGA games can you blame Commodore engineers or should you be blaming the coders who wrote those games who's AGA output was less impressive than the coders of Lotus II, Lionheart, Soccer Kid, Beast 1 which all run fine on a 512k+512k 1986 Amiga 1000 in PAL mode? Top Gear is garbage, as is the framerate of F17 challenge on A1200 vs Lotus II on A1000.

It's time to split off wish lists for what Commodore should have put in there and where the blame should really go for lacklustre AGA entertainment software i.e. the publisher's low quality standards and their chosen bargain bucket 3rd party dev teams.

They could have made AGA byte per pixel not planar from the start but then it would not be OCS/ECS compatible. There was some weird add-on that did give you Chunky 256 colour mode you plugged into the video port that cost very little, can't remember what year it was or when it came out but CU Amiga and AF both reviewed it. There was even a Doom style game it had bundled with it. I think that was 1994 onward though so not really much help in reality.

You're not going to notice the difference between the 8bit samples used in Agony vs PC 16bit on a tiny little desktop/monitor speaker either. Of course it's not the Amiga's fault when a musician with no taste in instruments samples them from a naff synth at 10khz or something so it sounds like a tape being played on a £10 tape deck, that's not the fault of the hardware as Beast1 and Agony soundtrack prove without a doubt. My Amiga is always connected to my hi-fi, some games have no output for half of the range of the spectrum analyser, that's not the fault of the Amiga designers.

[grond]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

They could have made AGA byte per pixel not planar from the start but then it would not be OCS/ECS compatible.

Obviously there should have been both planar and chunky 8 bit modes. The chunky mode would only have needed some bit reordering after loading the pixel data from chipmem. It would have cost a few dozens of transistors inside the chip.

[Promilus]

@ImmortalA1000 - I did encounter games for OCS machines in early 90s that still looked like something C64 would be ashamed of. Developers plays a big part of overall experience, yes. But why do you assume developers should really put their minds to architecture which came in late 92 (actually was overall available in 93) and had limited userbase and there was no real roadmap of how it will be improved over time. I'd say ppl should be happy some OCS games were recolored for their AGA machines at all. If developers got machines much faster and with proper motivation from commodore they'd most likely show off something really nice during A1200's debut. It's kind of like Jaguar or 3DO. There were hardly any devkits and final specs. Nobody did try to get some game developers to work on those machines early on and support development with their own engineers. And that's kind of approach Sony used back then. And guess what - it worked.

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by grond

Obviously there should have been both planar and chunky 8 bit modes. The chunky mode would only have needed some bit reordering after loading the pixel data from chipmem. It would have cost a few dozens of transistors inside the chip.

The thing is you needed a Pentium 133 to play Super Stardust on PC vs stock 2mb Amiga 1200 as sold. Even Lotus III which runs with zero framedrops on A1200 needed a 486DX33 or DX250 to match it on the PC.

For stuff like F1GP at 25mhz 486 speeds you would need a 25mhz 040 and let's be honest the PS1 wiped the floor with everything as soon as it hit the shelves, there was no answer from Apple, PC, Atari, Acorn or Amiga camp to rival the texture mapped 3D of PS1 for £300. Eventually the budget home computer party would be over one way or another.

[TEG]

@ImmortalA1000/@Promilus

This lead to an interesting point that Commodore did not take care to improve: the ease of programming the machine.

I remember myself a video explaining how easy it was to scroll the screen on the Nintendo or the Sega console comparatively to the Amiga.

From my own experience, I would say AGA was a nightmare to programme in assembly because of all the new bits to set here and here and the new registers. I made some attempts, saw the mess and it stopped me.

They should have provide a more high level API especially in front of the raw force and so more simplest method used on PC. 5 years (from the A500).

[grond]

Commodore didn't even publish information on the AGA-specific stuff to stop coders from hitting the hardware directly. How could you then expect companies to come up with impressive new stuff quickly?

[Promilus]

High level tools most likely would be useless to chipset magicians. Most truly impressive titles are done the same way as most impressive C64 games - with each and every cycle taken into account, each dma slot carefully used. I'd say something kind of like AMOS but more optimized and with AGA support might just do the trick. Of course it most likely would not let to made most impressive games possible but such easy to use dev tools allow many games to be created and more enthusiast would be able to try developing on their own without having to remember all registers, slots, 68k instructions and so on. And with embedded routines to handle pictures and sound samples.