Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[Thomas Richter]

Frankly, I doubt additional options for the A1200 would have made much of a difference. At that point, it was already too late. Lots of money was wasted in the rather useless A600, and AGA was simply too late. The damage was done pretty early in the line by not investing into the chipset, so it took too much time to build up all the knowledge to design AGA in first place - AGA should have happened one or two years earlier.

[grond]

The A500 allowed for lots of great games that essentially were hardware-defined. It was the custom chips that made them possible and the CPU had very little to do with it. Realising this simple fact should have made it obvious that a new custom chipset would have to be quite a bit better than just adding 32 bit fetches and two extra bitplanes. For CPU-defined games which quickly would enter the stage in the 90s the chipset was a hindrance and for hardware-defined games the hardware was too weak. The only solution for Commodore to live beyond 1994 would have been to avoid the giant market failures they had and push out a better AGA in 1991. That's when they squandered all opportunities they had. The rest was just a dead company walking.

[Amigajay]

I don’t think a better AGA (or just faster) would have helped Commodore. A500’s were selling by the bucket load in 1991, having an AGA machine out a year earlier would not have helped a jot imo.
The fact A600’s outsold the A1200 showed it was a machine still in demand at a lower price than the A1200’s were, price matters, don’t forget Sega Master Systems were still outselling Sega Mega Drives for the first couple of years the latter was on sale!

Imo the best thing Commodore could have done, drop the A500+ in 1991 (made for the A570 CD drive in reality but another cocked up product), drop the entire AGA range, but keep pushing the A500 as a even cheaper alternative to a games console which the market was turning to.

The A300 was a step in the right direction, but it would have been better with the A1200 case with numpad, launch in spring 1992 for £299 as the A500+ no confusion to what it was (unlike the A600 name), 1mb as standard, bundled with a comp pro style cd32 pad so devs had a standard to dev for instead of outdated 1-2 button sticks and get a great game exclusive, even if it was Zool its still something that was only on Amiga.

1993-1995 was still dominated with 16-bit machines, despite the CD era, Jag, 3DO etc, 16-bit games were still the biggest market, if the Amiga had the hardware at the price it would sell, i mean if they got the machine to £199 in 1993 (which the A600 was to clear stock and it shifted pretty quickly) then who knows it could have kept them alive to get Hombre out without all the wasted cash on AA, AAA, CDTV etc

[TEG]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

Things are as always complicated. Zorro autoconfig space lives in 24 bit RAM because the original 68K had only 24 address bits, so anything that is autoconfiguring and compatible to Zorro-II has to live there. A1200 is limited to 24-bit space because CBM in their infinite wisdom choose an 68EC020 CPU with only 16MB address space. This implies that the PCMCIA address space has necessarily some overlap with autoconfig space.

Due to just another unfortunate event, PCMCIA devices are upon insertion configured as "memory devices" and require a "hand over" to become I/O devices. Thus, whenever you insert a PCMCIA device, it likely populates 4MB autoconfig space, even without the CPU being able to do anything about it.

If the CPU was unfortunate to read data or program instructions from that RAM area, it will read now bytes from the PCMCIA slot and... well, crashes.

Thus, one bad decision drove another and another, all leading to an erratic system. "Insert a PCMCIA card and see the system crash".

I don't understand. If we look at the memory map here, we can see that, in the A1200, there's a First 4MB range dedicated to Fast RAM (200000-5FFFFF). So why PCMCIA would conflict as its range is after (600000-9FFFFF) or the cpu would have something to read in?

[sandruzzo]

Is 020 28mhz + fasteme, enough to push Aga to the limit?

[Paul_s]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

I don’t think a better AGA (or just faster) would have helped Commodore. A500’s were selling by the bucket load in 1991, having an AGA machine out a year earlier would not have helped a jot imo.
The fact A600’s outsold the A1200 showed it was a machine still in demand at a lower price than the A1200’s were, price matters, don’t forget Sega Master Systems were still outselling Sega Mega Drives for the first couple of years the latter was on sale!

Imo the best thing Commodore could have done, drop the A500+ in 1991 (made for the A570 CD drive in reality but another cocked up product), drop the entire AGA range, but keep pushing the A500 as a even cheaper alternative to a games console which the market was turning to.

The A300 was a step in the right direction, but it would have been better with the A1200 case with numpad, launch in spring 1992 for £299 as the A500+ no confusion to what it was (unlike the A600 name), 1mb as standard, bundled with a comp pro style cd32 pad so devs had a standard to dev for instead of outdated 1-2 button sticks and get a great game exclusive, even if it was Zool its still something that was only on Amiga.

1993-1995 was still dominated with 16-bit machines, despite the CD era, Jag, 3DO etc, 16-bit games were still the biggest market, if the Amiga had the hardware at the price it would sell, i mean if they got the machine to £199 in 1993 (which the A600 was to clear stock and it shifted pretty quickly) then who knows it could have kept them alive to get Hombre out without all the wasted cash on AA, AAA, CDTV etc

I agree, the A500 was very much a capable system and still had a lot of life left in it. Could've had a similar run to that of the C64 (12 years). I feel the A500+ pissed off some Amiga users because of compatibility issues (mainly on older titles, although that was more or less developer problems).

I still like the CDTV (was a well built machine although probably expensive to build back then and with slower uptake why C= canned it eventually).

But here we are again with another episode of Premiership Amiga Manager simulation 2023! lol

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by TEG

I don't understand. If we look at the memory map here, we can see that, in the A1200, there's a First 4MB range dedicated to Fast RAM (200000-5FFFFF). So why PCMCIA would conflict as its range is after (600000-9FFFFF) or the cpu would have something to read in?

It wouldn't - in that first 4MB. The only time there's a problem is if the PCMCIA slot is activated and some program thinks it can use the second 4MB as RAM. I guess it might be possible to have an 8MB RAM board and activate the PCMCIA slot somehow, causing a bus conflict. The OS should prevent that though...

It may seem a bit silly to allocate nearly half the RAM space to PCMCIA when most cards only need a bit of IO space. To understand why it was done that way you have to realize that it was originally designed for the A600, which had no expansion slot and was only 16 bit. Commodore expected that that owners would expand the memory via PCMCIA, so they needed to allocate a good amount of space for it. They left the first 4MB open for a future machine that did have an expansion slot. In 1991 this seemed reasonable, since 4MB was a lot of RAM for a 'low-end' machine.

But PCMCIA RAM cards didn't take off as expected, largely because laptop PCs used proprietary slots (that looked like PCMCIA but weren't) or SIMM sockets, that coupled the DRAM chips directly to the motherboard for lower cost and higher performance.

The few PCMCIA RAM cards did come out were very expensive and not popular. On the A1200 they had the added disadvantage of only being 16 bit, so didn't provide the speedup that a 32 bit trapdoor RAM board did.

I don't know much about how the PCMCIA controller works in the A1200. Is it possible to just activate the I/O and attribute space, leaving the 4MB memory area free for other use? That would be nice if true, however all the RAM boards I have seen don't seem to have that option. Bit of a bummer to have to choose between one or the other.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

Imo the best thing Commodore could have done, drop the A500+ in 1991 (made for the A570 CD drive in reality but another cocked up product), drop the entire AGA range, but keep pushing the A500 as a even cheaper alternative to a games console which the market was turning to.

No, that would have been a disaster. The market was ready for AGA and expecting it. More OCS/ECS was what nearly sunk Commodore when they released the underwhelming A500+ and A600.

The A570 was supposed to turn an A500 into a CDTV. But CDTV wasn't compatible with KS2 which the A500+ had. So yeah, that was a cock up. The A570 should have come out at the same time as the CDTV. This would have boosted CD sales and given the CDTV a base to work from. The CD32 could then be released at the same time as the A1200, with the A600 replacing the A500 later (if they could make it cheap enough).

The timeline would have been:-

1990 - CDTV (as was promised!) along with A570 so A500 users could run the same titles. Commodore achieves 'multimedia standard' before PCs do!

1991 - A1200, A4000 and CD32. Continue selling the A500/A500+ while there was still demand. AGA becomes the next base level.

1992 - A600 as cheap alternative to a games console for A500 games (now on budget labels).

1993 - Commodore PlayStation

1993-1995 was still dominated with 16-bit machines, despite the CD era, Jag, 3DO etc, 16-bit games were still the biggest market, if the Amiga had the hardware at the price it would sell, i mean if they got the machine to £199 in 1993 (which the A600 was to clear stock and it shifted pretty quickly)

This is all true. The A600 sold well when it was cheap enough. Sega was still selling Mega Drives in 1997!

But to keep the press and fans engaged Commodore had to get AGA out as soon as possible. Piracy was killing the Amiga because developers didn't see how they could make enough sales to justify development costs, which meant we had to rely on PC ports. And PCs were becoming the big thing in games anyway, with their VGA graphics and faster CPUs. The Amiga would have to match that if it wasn't to rapidly lose market share. Nobody wanted to spend the effort required to 'downgrade' VGA games for the A500.

[Promilus]

@Bruce

I don't know much about how the PCMCIA controller works in the A1200. Is it possible to just activate the I/O and attribute space, leaving the 4MB memory area free for other use? That would be nice if true, however all the RAM boards I have seen don't seem to have that option. Bit of a bummer to have to choose between one or the other.

If it wasn't a problem there wouldn't be any PCMCIA "unfriendly" ram expansions and yet there were. Or just limited available RAM to 4MB through jumper if PCMCIA was used. So, yeah... to be absolutely foolproof you HAVE to make that space dedicated for PCMCIA. And it should not hurt much. There was hardly any need for 020@14MHz paired with 8MB of RAM in the first place. And if someone really needed that then could use 4MB pcmcia card to get exactly that.

The A600 sold well when it was cheap enough

That was the whole reason of introducing new machine largely overlapping market already taken by A500(+). Pushing few new things and trying to sell it with bigger price tag was plainly stupid. That's not what market expected at all.

Sega was still selling Mega Drives in 1997!

Even 2003 as noted few (dozens) pages ago... in one specific market.

Piracy was killing the Amiga because developers didn't see how they could make enough sales to justify development costs

There was piracy on PC as well. It didn't held them back from creating games for the platform. Console manufacturers did fight off piracy by using EPROM based cartridges which were costly in the first place (so pirated version wouldn't be that much cheaper) and of course not many ppl would be able to copy it. Later on they tried to use CD-ROM as piracy-proof technology and it was initially working. Of course it did change rather rapidly. PS1 was pirated as well but... storage medium was cheap so every original game sold was contributing to positive revenue and due to rapidly growing userbase even big piracy problem did not stop money from flowing. CD in Commodore WAS fairly good way to overcome piracy problem on the platform. But they went into that half-heartedly and of course without cooperation with game developers. So same old same old... games were cut down to fit floppies and pirated en masse.

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I guess it might be possible to have an 8MB RAM board and activate the PCMCIA slot somehow, causing a bus conflict. The OS should prevent that though...

There is nothing the Os can do as this is a hardware thing. What the Os does in 3.1 and 3.2 onwards is to disable the PCMCIA slot completely if there is conflicting RAM in the system.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

It may seem a bit silly to allocate nearly half the RAM space to PCMCIA when most cards only need a bit of IO space.

That is another issue that is only loosely related to the operating system, but to the hardware. PCMCIA cards can operate in two modes, as memory devices and as I/O device. As memory device, they take the entire memory window. Unfortuately, the way how PCMCIA specs work means that the default mode upon insertion is "memory device" and the Os (or some other process) first has to reconfigure the device to make it an I/O device. That implies that if you insert a PCMCIA card, the 4MB are gone, without the Os being able to interfere.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I don't know much about how the PCMCIA controller works in the A1200.

There isn't really much of a "controller" there. It is just routing the CPU address lines to the card if the slot indicates that it is inserted.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Is it possible to just activate the I/O and attribute space, leaving the 4MB memory area free for other use?

That is on the card to decide, and that is on the Os to configure the card. Unfortunately, cards are by default in "memory mode", so the damage is done immediately once they are inserted.


The trouble is really the rather small address space of the 68EC020, so they had to sweeze the 4MB window in somewhere, and the way how PCMCIA works.

[TEG]

@Thomas

OK so you confirm that the configuration imagined by Promilus would work (sockets on the mother board to have Fast up to 4MB). Of course other memory extensions not accompanied by a 32 bits address bus cpu forbidden. Right?

[Thomas Richter]

That's right, but it means that you are limited to 4MB fast with a 68EC020.

[TEG]

Yeah, a choice, but anyway if adding a simple 8MB extension board on the current A1200 generate an incompatibility problem with the PCMCIA reserved space, best to limit to 4MB by design. If you really wanted 8MB you add it 4 more through the PCMCIA.

And it make me think Commodore should have gone to the end of their PCMCIA idea by outsourcing, and making money, by selling PCMCIA devices which were nowhere to be found at the time.

I have another question: how the system manage to have 32 bits memory and 16 bits memory (PCMCIA) at the same time? Agnus taking care?

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by TEG

Yeah, a choice, but anyway if adding a simple 8MB extension board on the current A1200 generate an incompatibility problem with the PCMCIA reserved space, best to limit to 4MB by design. If you really wanted 8MB you add it 4 more through the PCMCIA.

And it make me think Commodore should have gone to the end of their PCMCIA idea by outsourcing, and making money, by selling PCMCIA devices which were nowhere to be found at the time.

I have another question: how the system manage to have 32 bits memory and 16 bits memory (PCMCIA) at the same time? Agnus taking care?

I have a vague memory that only >4mb Fast RAM broke PCMCIA if you stuck with the 14mhz 020 on the motherboard, it wasn't an issue for trapdoor accelerators if I am remembering it correctly.

I am guessing the 16bit and 32bit RAM mix is handled the same way it was handled by the OS with 020 accelerators with 32bit RAM onboard combined with Zorro-1 16bit RAM going as far back as the Amiga 1000 (and Kickstart 1.3 I presume) so it must have been accounted for in the OS way before PCMCIA and A1200 with 32bit Fast RAM in 1992. Again, this is a vague memory and you may have had to add something to the startup script and libraries to the Workbench boot disks or perhaps I am remembering it wrong, but there were 68000 slot CPU accelerators with 020/030 CPU on board which possibly had some 32bit RAM on the board that plugged into the machine for the A500/1000 era. I am sure the advice was not to bother with any accelerator that had no option for adding 32bit RAM, pretty sure some would allow you to move Kickstart into the 32bit RAM too.

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

I don’t think a better AGA (or just faster) would have helped Commodore. A500’s were selling by the bucket load in 1991, having an AGA machine out a year earlier would not have helped a jot imo.
The fact A600’s outsold the A1200 showed it was a machine still in demand at a lower price than the A1200’s were, price matters, don’t forget Sega Master Systems were still outselling Sega Mega Drives for the first couple of years the latter was on sale!

The A300 would have sold well, I presume the A300 was identical in ability to A500 but I am not sure about anything except the much lower price point vs A600/A500plus £400 RRP.

A500 sales figures published in 1991 or for 1991 published in 1992?

[Cyprian]

I wonder how low the Commodore could go with the price of the A300 (e.g. a half of A500 price?)

[desiv]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

I have a vague memory that only >4mb Fast RAM broke PCMCIA if you stuck with the 14mhz 020 on the motherboard, it wasn't an issue for trapdoor accelerators if I am remembering it correctly.
.

Yep...
I know for a while, I had a Microbotics 1200Z 8M Fast RAM card for my A1200, and it had a jumper that I could choose to limit it to 4M if I wanted.
As I didn't have PCMCIA ethernet back then and.... er.. wait... hold on...
(googling)..
I always "thought" it had a jumper for going to 4MB and there was a jumper on the board that says 4MB.
But, I just double checked the manual I found online and it says to use that jumper IF you have 4 or 8 MB installed on the card...
So that jumper might not have done what I (and others based on googling) thought it did... Or maybe the manual was wrong, but....

[Promilus]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

I have a vague memory that only >4mb Fast RAM broke PCMCIA if you stuck with the 14mhz 020 on the motherboard, it wasn't an issue for trapdoor accelerators if I am remembering it correctly.

It was always problem when accelerator mapped part of it's memory over PCMCIA RAM space. TurboJet A1230

Dieser Speicher ist autokonfigurierend,
d.h. die TURBO JET 1230 meldet den 32 Bit Speicher dem System
selbsttätig an. Diese Speicherausbaustufen sind auch der Turbokarte
verfügbar. Bei einem Speicherausbau von mehr als 4 MB ist die
Verwendung von PCMCIA Memory-Karten nicht mehr möglich.

As long as turbo card memory was in "z3 space" it was ok.

[TEG]

Some translation :

This memory is auto-configuring, i.e. the TURBO JET 1230 registers the 32-bit memory to the system automatically. These memory expansion levels are also available to the Turbokarte. With a memory expansion of more than 4 MB the use of PCMCIA memory cards is no longer possible.

So this TURBO JET 1230 have a 68030 but memory conflict is present. Due to conception?

[Promilus]

Yep. If Commodore did use on-board 4MB fast capability and locked other 4MB for PCMCIA on A1200 and A600 there wouldn't be any problem with such turbo cards because - by design - they'd avoid such area of memory and put extra fastram starting from space just outside regular reserved 24bit mem space of Amiga chipset and on-board fast/pcmcia. It might make little sense to A500, 2000, 3000 and 4000 users which had no such problem (and obviously could just use all that space for continuous fast ram block) but since both A600 and A1200 expansions are quite unique it could've been implemented fairly painless way while retaining ability to get 8MB fast RAM on A1200 (but half of that in form of PCMCIA expansion). Obviously Commodore might've get some revenue from selling such PCMCIA expansion for A600/1200 ... So many crazy ideas how to make more money with more refined hardware.