Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[sandruzzo]

Originally Posted by Foebane

Apologies, Sandruzzo, I was hasty in describing your English as broken. Sorry.

You're right, cos, in Italy I don't use it a lot. I'm goodto hear it. Speaking and writing a little less...

Maybe, we all went a little bit overboard!

[swinkamor12]

Commodore bankrupt because Amiga 1200 was under powered overpriced crap.
Amiga 1200 was under powered overpriced crap because Amiga 1200 has not:
1. chunky pixels
2. slots for fast ram
3. 68030 or at least custom MMU for 68020.
68k Amiga demoscene end on Amiga 500.
After Amiga 500, 68k Amiga demoscene never show anything worth watching.
Demos for AGA was always crap because AGA has not chunky pixel and c2p took too much procesing power.
I also love Amiga, but what some people here wrote is simple insane, they should accept reality.

[mcgeezer]

Originally Posted by swinkamor12

Commodore bankrupt because Amiga 1200 was under powered overpriced crap.

Wrong.

Originally Posted by swinkamor12

Amiga 1200 was under powered overpriced crap because Amiga 1200 has not:
1. chunky pixels

Wrong again.

Originally Posted by swinkamor12

2. slots for fast ram

Wrong again - congratulations on the hatrick.

Originally Posted by swinkamor12

3. 68030 or at least custom MMU for 68020.

Wrong.

Originally Posted by swinkamor12

68k Amiga demoscene end on Amiga 500.

Wronger.

Originally Posted by swinkamor12

After Amiga 500, 68k Amiga demoscene never show anything worth watching.

Wrongerer.

Originally Posted by swinkamor12

Demos for AGA was always crap because AGA has not chunky pixel and c2p took too much procesing power.

WRONG! https://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?p...=1&order=views

Originally Posted by swinkamor12

I also love Amiga, but what some people here wrote is simple insane, they should accept reality.

Wrong - you don't love the Amiga.

I can be equally as flippant as you, add something constructive to the conversation and you'll get sensible responses ( at least from me ).

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by swinkamor12

Commodore bankrupt because Amiga 1200 was under powered overpriced crap.
Amiga 1200 was under powered overpriced crap because Amiga 1200 has not:
1. chunky pixels
2. slots for fast ram
3. 68030 or at least custom MMU for 68020.
68k Amiga demoscene end on Amiga 500.
After Amiga 500, 68k Amiga demoscene never show anything worth watching.
Demos for AGA was always crap because AGA has not chunky pixel and c2p took too much procesing power.
I also love Amiga, but what some people here wrote is simple insane, they should accept reality.

1. You can create c2p routines in software, you know - with a fast enough CPU, the difference between a custom c2p routine and Akiko is negligible.
2. I'm sure it does.
3. 68030 would've cost too much, and I don't know if you can have an MMU for 68020 (correct me if I'm wrong).
The Amiga Demoscene thrived after the A500, with the A600, A1200 and various accelerators and memory configurations becoming standardised to run the latest prods, very much like upgrading your Amiga to play Doom- oh, they did that, too! In fact, the Amiga Demoscene continues to this very day, on all possible configurations of Amiga, including and especially the stock A500! And there is tons of great visual and sonic stuff out there that blow A500 demos out of the water, I can personally attest to that!

[Galahad/FLT]

I wasn't disappointed with the A1200 when I bought it the day it was released, it had lots of potential, but the A1200 could only ever be considered a "stop gap" machine until Commodore released something proper kick ass, and would have abandoned the 68000 series to start embracing the future.

The A1200 does have its drawbacks unfortunately.

1). Hard drive absolutely should have been standard, they were dirt cheap by this time, might have staved off some of the likes of Lucasfilm and Sierra and others that specialised in adventure software from buggering off.

2). A cheap add-on CD-ROM should have been available on the same release date as the A1200, to encourage users to buy it, and thus we potentially could have had a much larger installed user base of CD-ROM owners which again might have gave those software developers concentrating on the PC something to consider.

3). I accept that the 68020 economy processor was used, but releasing the A1200 with at least 2 meg of real fast ram would have transformed the machine and set a defacto standard for software companies and meant it couldn't be ignored, we might well have gotten First Encounters had the A1200 shipped with it because fast ram really helped Frontier on the A1200.

4). Blitter had to be faster, even if its set of functions were the same, it had to be faster for the extra data it had to throw around

5). making the copper chip faster to be able to reload on 1 pixel boundaries would have provided a cheap chunky display that could again have negated the PC's lead

6). Extending the custom chip set register range to accommodate 8 channel music would have helped end the one thing that seemed to bug outsiders, and that was music and SFX playing at the same time. Its not that the Amiga couldn't do it anyway, but music always seemed to be an after thought on Amiga and done by 3rd party musicians.

My A1200 cost me £425, and other than the leads and a mouse and power pack, it came with NOTHING.

It should have been cheaper, but the A600 put paid to that. The A600 itself should have been C64 priced I feel to separate the two, but I never felt that the price difference between the two explained why the A1200 was far more expensive.

Sure, 64pixel wide sprites were a good deal better, 16 colour per playfield on dual playfield was better, there were benefits on the A1200 but I never felt that many developers got the best out of the machine, most were content to have an extra scrolling backdrop, and thats where the benefits seemed to end.

Its not as if software companies didn't want to support it, Ocean, Gremlin, Electronic Arts, Psygnosis, Team 17, all pretty much went balls deep with the A1200 right away which I suppose is something, but it was clear that the games the A1200 really needed was ones that could close the gap on the PC and stop the exodus of people moving away to other machines.

I think if it had that 1 pixel chunky mode with the copper and 2 meg of fast ram, that could have made all the difference and made something like Doom happen on Amiga much sooner and not need quite as powerful a machine to do it.

Remember, the only reason ID Software didn't do an Amiga version was because they were convinced the Amiga couldn't do it. Had the A1200 been released with the required hardware right from the off, ID would likely have done a version, and the PC "killer" app, wouldn't have been so killer.

Its still an excellent machine, but we can't look back to the past and only compare it to the A500.

When the A500 was released, we compared that machine to EVERYTHING and we were the ones doing the boasting, when the A1200 was released, we couldn't honestly do that anymore, because there were better machines out there.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

5). making the copper chip faster to be able to reload on 1 pixel boundaries would have provided a cheap chunky display that could again have negated the PC's lead

I think if it had that 1 pixel chunky mode with the copper and 2 meg of fast ram, that could have made all the difference and made something like Doom happen on Amiga much sooner and not need quite as powerful a machine to do it.

I've often thought in the past if a Doom-style game could be done on the Copper as it is, even though it would look extremely blocky? Or if not a game, then a demo which would normally use HAM/8 to put up the thousands of colours on screen at once. Could the Copper, as it is, render chunky pixels of up to 4 regular pixels? Or was it all HAM/8 c2p?

As for those demos that use c2p and HAM/8, I think they simply did the 3D visual processing in memory, per frame, as it would be on a chunky graphics system, and then when the time came, simply used the c2p to send the graphics data to HAM/8 bitplanes like a framebuffer to show the frames? Ingenious, I think, and there would've been ample memory for such processes.

Remember, the only reason ID Software didn't do an Amiga version was because they were convinced the Amiga couldn't do it. Had the A1200 been released with the required hardware right from the off, ID would likely have done a version, and the PC "killer" app, wouldn't have been so killer.

The very reason I switched to PC. (DOS sucked balls)

Its still an excellent machine, but we can't look back to the past and only compare it to the A500.

When the A500 was released, we compared that machine to EVERYTHING and we were the ones doing the boasting, when the A1200 was released, we couldn't honestly do that anymore, because there were better machines out there.

Agreed. PC 386+ with VGA, and the consoles, already had an advantage by then.

[chb]

Originally Posted by Foebane

1. You can create c2p routines in software, you know - with a fast enough CPU, the difference between a custom c2p routine and Akiko is negligible.

To be fair, that's more because Akiko is a really crappy solution for a chunky mode (read chunky data with the CPU, write chunky data to the Akiko registers with the CPU, read planar back with the CPU and copy to chip mem with the CPU, then read planar data with the display hardware - huge overhead compared to directly displaying chunky data). But to be fair again, the CD32 designers planned that feature during a lunch break and the chip designer (Hedley Davis) put it in the same evening from their sketch on a napkin...
https://www.bigbookofamigahardware.c...t.aspx?id=1604

[roondar]

On the topics of A1200 specs, pricing & doom:

1. A harddisk as standard would indeed have probably done a world of good and shouldn't have raised prices by much
   
2. 2MB of extra memory, though that was never going to happen.
   
   Back in 1992, a 4MB machine was considered 'high end' and such an amount of memory cost quite a lot of money - easily around 200 pounds for the RAM alone. I keep repeating this, but the A1200 was a budget machine. It already had 2MB, which was more or less the standard amount for 1992 mid-range machines. Consider the A500, which only had 512KB on board in an era where PC's already tended to have more on board.
   
   A 1MB chip/1MB fast split however, that would've made the machine much faster.
   
3. The A1200 was actually very reasonably priced. It cost around 400 pounds on release, which was quite a bit cheaper than a 386 setup that actually did the same thing.
   
   Sure, there were cheap 386's - but those were SX models and had very slow graphics cards. On paper they were great, in practice they sucked for gaming - you needed a 386DX to properly play games and those were still not that cheap.
   
4. Doom required a 486DX33/486SX50 with 4MB to play well (it does run on a 386, but is pretty terrible). Those machines were several times more expensive than an A1200 back in 1992 and still were far more expensive than an A1200 in 1993. For a similar price in 1992, you could actually buy an Amiga that would probably have run it fairly well: the A4000/040.
   
   Sure, DOOM on an A1200 would've been nice. But it wasn't that realistic as that game pretty much requires a 68040 or 486 to run well. And yes, that would've been true even if Commodore had added a fast chunky mode.
   
   What I'm getting at here is the same thing as before: the A1200 was not a high end computer, but DOOM did require a high end computer. Thus, for the Amiga community to get DOOM, we'd have needed to buy high end Amiga's in large numbers. But no one did that - we all wanted the cheap one and some of us are still complaining to this day that Commodore didn't magic up an Amiga which was really cheap, yet could do DOOM.
   
   Here's the simple truth: the problem with DOOM would not have been fixed with better GFX hardware.
   
   DOOM needs CPU grunt and lots of memory to run well (that is, for 1992/93). It doesn't actually care about the graphics card all that much - it'll happily run on a middle of the road VGA card. Frankly, most of us Amiga users were too cheap to invest in such things. PC owners en masse bought brand new 486 machines to run that game. Those 486's were not cheap. Perhaps not 'A4000 expensive' by 1993/94, but certainly vastly more expensive than the A1200 ever was.
   
   No wonder ID software didn't want to do DOOM for the Amiga!

On a side note: The A500 was not as high end upon release as we remember. Sure, the graphics and sound were quite nice, but in 1987 (when it was released) you could already get 8088/8086 and 286 PC's with VGA (256 colours) on board as well as the Acorn Archimedes (256 colours/8 channel sound) and in Japan the PC-Engine (512 on screen colours and arguably better support hardware for sprites/objects) and the X68000 (1024 colours).

For PC users that wanted more colours on screen and didn't care as much about games, there were also 'high colour' graphics cards with up to 24 bit colour. In 1987 that is. They weren't even that expensive, all things considered.

The real problem on the PC side had much more to do with software support than available hardware. A fast 286 with VGA is actually a better machine than the A500 in some ways - the processor is faster, it can display more on screen colours without limitations and, later, there actually were some nice games for it that look and sound better than their A500 equivalents. If programmed well it can even scroll quite decently.

The Amiga's hardware edge was already diminishing by 1987, because it had languished in the market for (essentially) two whole years. The A1000 never was that popular.

Don't take this to mean I didn't like the A500 though - far from it. It (like the A1200) was awesome. Both gave you a lot of computing power at an affordable price. And that's the key here: the A1200 and the A500 were machines for the mass market. Aimed at people who didn't want or couldn't spend several thousand euros/dollars/pounds on a computer. Neither actually had 'mega specs' on release.

I still love the Amiga chipset though, it's such a nice thing to work with.

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by roondar

On the topics of A1200 specs, pricing & doom:

1. A harddisk as standard would indeed have probably done a world of good and shouldn't have raised prices by much
   
2. 2MB of extra memory, though that was never going to happen.
   
   Back in 1992, a 4MB machine was considered 'high end' and such an amount of memory cost quite a lot of money - easily around 200 pounds for the RAM alone. I keep repeating this, but the A1200 was a budget machine. It already had 2MB, which was more or less the standard amount for 1992 mid-range machines. Consider the A500, which only had 512KB on board in an era where PC's already tended to have more on board.
   
   A 1MB chip/1MB fast split however, that would've made the machine much faster.
   
3. The A1200 was actually very reasonably priced. It cost around 400 pounds on release, which was quite a bit cheaper than a 386 setup that actually did the same thing.
   
   Sure, there were cheap 386's - but those were SX models and had very slow graphics cards. On paper they were great, in practice they sucked for gaming - you needed a 386DX to properly play games and those were still not that cheap.
   
4. Doom required a 486DX33/486SX50 with 4MB to play well (it does run on a 386, but is pretty terrible). Those machines were several times more expensive than an A1200 back in 1992 and still were far more expensive than an A1200 in 1993. For a similar price in 1992, you could actually buy an Amiga that would probably have run it fairly well: the A4000/040.
   
   Sure, DOOM on an A1200 would've been nice. But it wasn't that realistic as that game pretty much requires a 68040 or 486 to run well. And yes, that would've been true even if Commodore had added a fast chunky mode.
   
   What I'm getting at here is the same thing as before: the A1200 was not a high end computer, but DOOM did require a high end computer. Thus, for the Amiga community to get DOOM, we'd have needed to buy high end Amiga's in large numbers. But no one did that - we all wanted the cheap one and some of us are still complaining to this day that Commodore didn't magic up an Amiga which was really cheap, yet could do DOOM.
   
   Here's the simple truth: the problem with DOOM would not have been fixed with better GFX hardware.
   
   DOOM needs CPU grunt and lots of memory to run well (that is, for 1992/93). It doesn't actually care about the graphics card all that much - it'll happily run on a middle of the road VGA card. Frankly, most of us Amiga users were too cheap to invest in such things. PC owners en masse bought brand new 486 machines to run that game. Those 486's were not cheap. Perhaps not 'A4000 expensive' by 1993/94, but certainly vastly more expensive than the A1200 ever was.
   
   No wonder ID software didn't want to do DOOM for the Amiga!

On a side note: The A500 was not as high end upon release as we remember. Sure, the graphics and sound were quite nice, but in 1987 (when it was released) you could already get 8088/8086 and 286 PC's with VGA (256 colours) on board as well as the Acorn Archimedes (256 colours/8 channel sound) and in Japan the PC-Engine (512 on screen colours and arguably better support hardware for sprites/objects) and the X68000 (1024 colours).

For PC users that wanted more colours on screen and didn't care as much about games, there were also 'high colour' graphics cards with up to 24 bit colour. In 1987 that is. They weren't even that expensive, all things considered.

The real problem on the PC side had much more to do with software support than available hardware. A fast 286 with VGA is actually a better machine than the A500 in some ways - the processor is faster, it can display more on screen colours without limitations and, later, there actually were some nice games for it that look and sound better than their A500 equivalents. If programmed well it can even scroll quite decently.

The Amiga's hardware edge was already diminishing by 1987, because it had languished in the market for (essentially) two whole years. The A1000 never was that popular.

Don't take this to mean I didn't like the A500 though - far from it. It (like the A1200) was awesome. Both gave you a lot of computing power at an affordable price. And that's the key here: the A1200 and the A500 were machines for the mass market. Aimed at people who didn't want or couldn't spend several thousand euros/dollars/pounds on a computer. Neither actually had 'mega specs' on release.

I still love the Amiga chipset though, it's such a nice thing to work with.

Sorry, just not true about Doom needing a shit load of memory.

The Atari Jaguar got Doom and that ran in 2MB, i've also seen the ASM source code to Alien Vs Predator for the Jaguar, that also ran in 2MB

Yes the Jaguar was certainly more powerful than the Amiga A1200 in areas, but even the Jaguar showed that a bespoke version could be rewritten to take advantage of the available hardware and not be entirely reliant on the PC version code as the only basis for producing more versions.

Alien Breed 3D showed that a passable version ran OK for A1200, with 2meg of fast ram (or 1meg like you said) would have made a massive difference and with a 1 pixel copper mode, well, that would have been the visuals taken care of. Whether that would have been enough to compete with Doom I don't know, but considering the Amiga was never designed to produce that type of game, it did OK with the hardware it had, but with some additional tweaks, could have looked measurably better.

I happen to think that some of the Amiga programmers of the day were better than their PC counterparts, they had to think outside the box and get the Amiga to do stuff it wasn't meant to do, PC programmers? Just tell the end user their machine isn't fast enough and they need to upgrade.

Doom is a great game, other versions that were rewritten for their prospective machines have shown that the PC version relies more on the power of the machine its running on rather than the skills in the programming department.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

Sorry, just not true about Doom needing a shit load of memory.

The Atari Jaguar got Doom and that ran in 2MB, i've also seen the ASM source code to Alien Vs Predator for the Jaguar, that also ran in 2MB

Yes the Jaguar was certainly more powerful than the Amiga A1200 in areas, but even the Jaguar showed that a bespoke version could be rewritten to take advantage of the available hardware and not be entirely reliant on the PC version code as the only basis for producing more versions.

Alien Breed 3D showed that a passable version ran OK for A1200, with 2meg of fast ram (or 1meg like you said) would have made a massive difference and with a 1 pixel copper mode, well, that would have been the visuals taken care of. Whether that would have been enough to compete with Doom I don't know, but considering the Amiga was never designed to produce that type of game, it did OK with the hardware it had, but with some additional tweaks, could have looked measurably better.

I happen to think that some of the Amiga programmers of the day were better than their PC counterparts, they had to think outside the box and get the Amiga to do stuff it wasn't meant to do, PC programmers? Just tell the end user their machine isn't fast enough and they need to upgrade.

Doom is a great game, other versions that were rewritten for their prospective machines have shown that the PC version relies more on the power of the machine its running on rather than the skills in the programming department.

It is true that the Jaguar got a version of DOOM in 2MB, but it was cut down in places. It had no music, the levels were somewhat simplified, certain textures were missing and some enemies were omitted. Interestingly, it didn't have music because the DSP normally used for sound was busy doing collision detection and other things offloaded from the CPU.

But anyway: granted, a bespoke version might have been done in less memory and perform better than I thought.

That said, I don't really agree on Alien Breed 3D. Compared to DOOM it's a less complex game (IMHO anyway) and it does run in a fairly small window. I'd say running Alien Breed 3D full screen and 1x1 would've probably required a hefty upgrade in processing power (again, setting aside the chunky-to-planar thing). After all, it's one thing to be able to plot the pixels, but another to also calculate their values.

There were some 'Doom clones' on the Amiga that ran in '1x1 mode' and they all required quite a bit of processing power to get to a reasonable frame rate. None of them actually ran at 25FPS (DOOM actually ran at 35FPS, but 25 would probably be plenty) unless you had a 'monster' Amiga.

But like I just said above, it's certainly possible a version of DOOM that was better suited for the Amiga could be made.

I'm just not so sure that the requirement for C2P was really the problem. Meaning I still don't really think that a 1 pixel copper or chunky mode would've really fixed the issue.

Take a look at DOOM on the Falcon to see what I mean, it doesn't run at all well using just the on board 68030 even though it has a chunky pixel mode. Only the version using the DSP quite heavily runs reasonably well and is still not exactly smooth. This version also requires no less than 14MB of RAM. But perhaps the Atari code can be bettered. I'm certainly no expert on coding ray casters so anything is possible.

However... An A1200 with a 1x1 Copper/chunky mode would've certainly have been better.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

Sorry, just not true about Doom needing a shit load of memory.

The Atari Jaguar got Doom and that ran in 2MB, i've also seen the ASM source code to Alien Vs Predator for the Jaguar, that also ran in 2MB

The way I see it, PC memory is in increments of powers of 2 (4mb, 8mb, 16mb... 64mb, 128mb... 4gb, 8gb) and so forth, and I think there is a bit of breathing room inbetween. The point is, I think that Doom 1993 ran very well in LESS than 4mb, but the limits were easily reached before long.

In Doom 1993, the monsters take up memory, enough to fit in within 4mb, and I'm sure the level designers kept it that way, as some newer maps can have thousands of monsters and they have been known to break limits. The point is, in that game, the monsters did not spawn other monsters, like the Pain Elemental with Lost Souls and the Icon of Sin cubes with any major monster except bosses. HOWEVER, Doom 2 did, and those two spawners alone caused memory to run out when I played the Icon of Sin level. I was happily fighting the monsters as more and more arrived on the map thanks to the cubes, and the next thing I know, the game crashes out with OUT OF MEMORY, basically. So 4mb was fine for Doom, but Doom 2 (and I later found out, Hexen) required more memory.

Today, I have Doom 2016, and I have managed to get it working reasonably well on a PC without a graphics card, but with UHD 630 integrated graphics, on an 8Gb machine. The specs for this game are 8Gb, with a 2Gb graphics card, but since the CPU and integrated GPU share the memory, then I'm going to see if I can complete the game on such limited memory, that is, 8Gb as opposed to 10Gb. It will be interesting to see.

What I'm saying is, maybe memory requirements have always been conservative, and there's room for extra?

[roondar]

That's interesting. Jaguar DOOM also cuts out several monster types. Maybe for the same reason?

Anyway, back to discussing the A1200

[chb]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

The Atari Jaguar got Doom and that ran in 2MB, i've also seen the ASM source code to Alien Vs Predator for the Jaguar, that also ran in 2MB

But the Jaguar is a cartridge based system, so it would not need to load graphical assets and code into RAM? I think it's not fair to compare a disk-based and a cartridge-based system with the same amount of RAM.

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

Yes the Jaguar was certainly more powerful than the Amiga A1200 in areas, but even the Jaguar showed that a bespoke version could be rewritten to take advantage of the available hardware and not be entirely reliant on the PC version code as the only basis for producing more versions.

That's certainly true. AFAIR the Jaguar version was very different from the PC version, and quite tough to programm according to John Carmack* (who nevertheless seemed to like the Jaguar), mainly because the custom RISC could only execute code from its internal 4kB scratchpad RAM, so the game code had to be split into a number of chunks. In hindsight, it appears strange that they put so much effort into that conversion, but probably they saw a bigger market than the one that materialized. Probably that's the most likely explanation why there was no official doom port for the (higher-end) Amiga: They did not see a market justifying the effort, which may be the reason for a lot of non-existing AGA conversions that would be totally possibly technically (e.g. the Lucasfilm adventures).
* https://steemit.com/gaming/@alexbeym...e-atari-jaguar

EDIT:

Originally Posted by roondar

Anyway, back to discussing the A1200

Sorry, you're right of course!

[sneckburger]

I Think people are forgetting that Doom was playable at sub 15FPS and the fact an old 386 could run it and the Amiga couldn't was the nail in its coffin. The standard of 3d games back then wasn't like today where people moan if its below 60FPS! I spent hours on Frontier Elite2 on my A600 and the slide show graphics back then never bothered me. I played AB2TKG on my A1200 on full screen with an Apollo 040. the frame rate was around 15 then if I reduced the screen about an inch top and bottom, but enjoyed the game.

[swinkamor12]

Some amiga fanatics never admit that Commodore bankrupt because for price of amiga 1200 one can buy better pc.
Amiga community never be health as long as they do not accept reality.
a500 was better than pc, but amiga 1200? It was crap. underpowered overpriced crap.

[mcgeezer]

Originally Posted by swinkamor12

Some amiga fanatics never admit that Commodore bankrupt because for price of amiga 1200 one can buy better pc.
Amiga community never be health as long as they do not accept reality.
a500 was better than pc, but amiga 1200? It was crap. underpowered overpriced crap.

This guy needs to be fucking sectioned.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by sneckburger

I Think people are forgetting that Doom was playable at sub 15FPS and the fact an old 386 could run it and the Amiga couldn't was the nail in its coffin. The standard of 3d games back then wasn't like today where people moan if its below 60FPS! I spent hours on Frontier Elite2 on my A600 and the slide show graphics back then never bothered me. I played AB2TKG on my A1200 on full screen with an Apollo 040. the frame rate was around 15 then if I reduced the screen about an inch top and bottom, but enjoyed the game.

DOOM on a 386 is not 'sub 15FPS'. Well, it is. But it's also sub 10FPS. And in busy sections may even touch 5-6FPS. It's not playable on standard settings. I tried it at a friend's house on his 386SX25 and was not impressed. Granted, you can reduce the screen size to a postage stamp and then it becomes a good deal better but what exactly does that prove? At that screen size the A1200 would probably have done fine as well.

There's a guy who actually went to the trouble of benchmarking DOOM on a 386DX/40 (which is the fastest clock speed/model you could get for the 386 and those were not cheap in 1992). His results mirror what I'm saying above: unless you dial the detail and screen size down by a fair amount, it's just not any good. He also makes the point that DOOM is an action game and really kind of needs the higher frame rates to be fun. See here: [ Show youtube player ]

Originally Posted by swinkamor12

Some amiga fanatics never admit that Commodore bankrupt because for price of amiga 1200 one can buy better pc.

The A1200 at launch cost around 1/3 of a comparable PC were I lived. I checked UK prices at the time as well and guess what, an equivalent PC over there was also way more expensive than the A1200 (about 2x the price). So, no. You definitely couldn't.

Amiga community never be health as long as they do not accept reality.
a500 was better than pc, but amiga 1200? It was crap. underpowered overpriced crap.

Repeating a falsehood won't make it true - the A1200 was way cheaper on launch than an equivalent PC. It was also 100 pounds cheaper in the UK than the A500 at launch. And that's not counting 5 years of inflation separating them. So you're wrong on both counts.

[rare_j]

People are saying hard disks weren't expensive, but a reasonably sized amiga hdd really was.
20mb desktop 3.5 inch drives may have been coming down in price at the time, but laptop 2.5 inch drives of any size did not.
And ram was expensive as well. Even 2mb simms were very pricey.

[Foebane]

I remember upgrading my PC in 1995 by 4mb, and the simm alone cost me £100!!!!! AND it was fried by my having it in my pocket!

And a few years before that, I remember the 0.5mb A500 trapdoor upgrade costing me £50, too!

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by rare_j

People are saying hard disks weren't expensive, but a reasonably sized amiga hdd really was.
20mb desktop 3.5 inch drives may have been coming down in price at the time, but laptop 2.5 inch drives of any size did not.
And ram was expensive as well. Even 2mb simms were very pricey.

Peoples memories aren’t what they used to be! Even the 20MB A600HD pack that came out in 1992 was £499 a £100 more than the base pack at launch, a £499 A1200 would have sold even less than a £399 one! Budget computer buyers didn’t want to pay for a HDD if they didn’t need them, and unlike PC owners, they didn’t!

Edit: for comparison and to show prices the Atari Falcon launched at £599 for 1MB model, for the 4MB and 65MB HDD it went up £400 to £999, and people in this thread expected a budget computer to have more ram and a hdd!