08 July 2019, 21:29 | #281 | |
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Just the other day I bought 64GB for my PC and payed something like €330 (thats €0,005/MB). So punching a few numbers into the calculator, the RAM pricenow 10,000 times cheaper (cost per Megabyte) than it was 25 years ago. Thats pretty insane if you think about it. Buying 64GB in 1994 would cost ~€3.3 million :-) |
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08 July 2019, 21:44 | #282 |
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08 July 2019, 21:56 | #283 | |
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Case in point: in 1992, a 386SX25 PC cost around £1000 and would've most likely performed worse than the A1200 at many tasks. Such "cheap PC's" tended to have terrible -read slow- on board VGA and the 386SX itself was actually very slow - about 40% slower than the 386DX. Not to mention that most of these PC's came without sound hardware and a sound card was another £100. On paper, such a 386SX sounds like it would murder the A1200. In reality, they weren't much faster than a 286. To get a good gaming PC, you really needed a 386DX or a 486. Those were a good deal better than the 386SX. However, they were also a lot more expensive. You got what you paid for. You do have point though, many people who bought an A1200 did so because of cost and a lot decided to forgo the HDD. Had Commodore made the case big enough for a 3.5inch model (and it very nearly is), the story might have been different. On the topic of A1200 sales, it's difficult to actually find reliable numbers for the machine (or any Amiga for that matter). I don't dispute it sold less well than the A500/A600, but I do dispute the reason. By late 1992/early 1993, all non-PC/non-console computers were struggling, even those with clearly better specs than the A1200. This strongly suggests to me the low A1200 sales had a lot more to do with overall market sentiment than machine capabilities or price. Serious users had mostly selected the PC, gamers had selected the 16 bit consoles as their weapon of choice. The PC's were expensive but really capable for business (and within a year or so, games as well). The consoles might not have been better at all types of games than the A1200 (though they really excelled at certain types of action games), but they were a lot cheaper to buy. The home computers thus had no more niche and so they failed. Could a better A1200 have helped? Say one with the AAA chipset, some fast memory and a 68030? Personally, I sincerely doubt it. Like I said, other non-PC computers with better specs than the A1200 also failed. The home computer era was ending, people just wanted a PC - no more incompatibilities with the office for writing a note, no more faffing about with converting between different floppy disk formats. Commodore clearly knew this, which is why they put in effort to make the Amiga's more 'compatible' with the PC's by adding such things as Cross DOS. Even now-mighty Apple nearly went under and their machines did have the hardware to compete with the PC one-on-one (though you obviously did pay a price for this). Last edited by roondar; 08 July 2019 at 22:02. |
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08 July 2019, 22:19 | #284 | |
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Still - if "we" survived that, I get the feeling the Playstation and PCs with 3d accelerators would have killed and burried us by the late 90s anyway.. So that is as far as I can see the AMiga surviving as a platform relying on custom hardware and OS. |
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08 July 2019, 22:32 | #285 |
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I concur. I got my first PC about half a year after Commodore went bust, in February 1995, and spent most of my gaming time on Doom and then Quake in 1996, and then upgrading my PC significantly (in fact, getting a new one) so that I could run Quake 2 with a 3D card in 1997. I only recently discovered that, as long as it seemed to last, this entire period of time only spanned about THREE YEARS, so yes, the Amiga's days were numbered, no matter what Commodore did, such was the breakneck pace of graphics technology development.
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08 July 2019, 22:34 | #286 |
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These are the prices paid for a decently specified A1200 at the time. I remember nearly 25 years later the figures.
Amiga 1200 - 1993 or 94 after the price drop: £299 1230IV 50mhz 68030 with mmu with fpu in 1995: £200 8mb simm in 1995: £200 210mb hard drive for amiga in 1995: £160 probably over £200 microvitec 1438 with speakers in 1995: over £200, probably closer to £300 So over 1k there in 1995 for a very decent Amiga set up. I was very pleased indeed with it at the time, and it got me through a long stretch of sixth form and uni. My point is that by the time you had it up to near-windows PC specs (yet I had no network card, no cd-rom, and 256 colour os was unusable) it was not, not cheap computing. Last edited by rare_j; 09 July 2019 at 01:39. |
08 July 2019, 22:35 | #287 | ||
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The release of the Playstation was a massive game changer that made pretty much all games before it (including Doom) look instantly dated and old fashioned. And that was 1995... Doesn't change that I still think the A1200 was an awesome machine for the time/price combo. But it also was too little, too late. So in answer to the thread title: no, I wasn't, it was a pretty significant upgrade for me and on release it did bring the Amiga back to rough parity with the competition after a year or two of clearly falling behind. But I can see why others were. Especially those who, unlike me, got their first Amiga when they were still the hot new thing. Quote:
The essence of my point isn't that an upgraded A1200 was cheap, it was that a baseline A1200 was cheap. And it was. It was also perfectly usable without those upgrades. Sure, it wasn't up to 1995 specs but it also only cost a fraction of an up to date 1995 PC. I don't even think the upgrade cost you list was all that extreme. I know of PC users who spend a great deal more than that to upgrade their ageing PC's back in the day (though admittedly, those with 1992 PC's generally just got a new one). Edit: obviously it's not cheap, so please don't take my post to mean that. I merely meant that I've seen people spend more than that on PC's. Last edited by roondar; 08 July 2019 at 22:46. Reason: Too many edits. Think before you press post. |
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08 July 2019, 22:46 | #288 | |
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And i don’t think the statement ‘people just wanted a PC’ was true at all! In the end most got a PC because it was the standard for most and got the most support unless you had rich pockets to get a Mac, believe me i wouldn't have touched a PC with a bargepole if there were alternatives at the time! Last edited by Amigajay; 08 July 2019 at 23:07. |
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08 July 2019, 23:00 | #289 | |
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The Apples have never been for gamers, and I wouldn't touch ANY Apple with a bargepole. |
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08 July 2019, 23:06 | #290 | |
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Bar Doom and the first Halo i find FPS games pretty dull on the whole tbh, they have reached the level of dullness that console platform games reached in 1995 with Bubsy and the like came out! |
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08 July 2019, 23:15 | #291 | ||
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As I said before: there were other, non PC systems on the market that were more powerful than the AGA systems. These all failed. Not one succeeded. Even the Mac needed a radical rethink to stay competitive and it had a much larger market than the Amiga ever had (as much as this pains me to admit). I just don't feel that specs were really the issue. Now, don't take me wrong here - I'd have loved to see an AAA Amiga. Heck, I'd still like to see one today. But in retrospect, I think Dave Haynie was right when he said that AAA was not going to cut it even if it had been released as early as Commodore possibly could've managed. Quote:
Last edited by roondar; 08 July 2019 at 23:21. |
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09 July 2019, 00:07 | #292 | |
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09 July 2019, 00:08 | #293 | |
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Yes the Archimedes and Falcon were both more powerful but they failed because the software support was terrible, the former survived through the schools programme and not through consumer sales and died off when other machines started being used, and the latter just died off because well Atari were just Atari and didn’t have a clue. The Amiga had a much larger gaming fraternity than either of those, there’s no reason the Amiga couldn’t have survived post Doom and PS1 days had things been different. Plus you mention the Mac, but Macs were mainly only used for DTP, that market was shrinking when PCs started to encroach and became good enough in that sector, it was never because of Doom or gaming in general, people buy didn’t Macs to play games. Fair enough about my PC comment, kinda did say that in around about way! But i will say doesn’t mean it was the best option out there, yes the PC became the standard, but the problem was of upgrading and Microsoft has always been there! Last edited by Amigajay; 09 July 2019 at 08:30. |
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09 July 2019, 00:08 | #294 |
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I bought a 2.5" 260MB IDE drive for my 1200 BITD. Cost £360. They screwed up and sent me a 360MB instead. But I had to save all my pennies - HDDs were certainly not cheap.
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09 July 2019, 00:20 | #295 |
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What?? Isn't that a typo?
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09 July 2019, 01:52 | #296 | |
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The Amiga for all its excellence, was seen by most as a games machine, thats a fact. The Playstation was the first MUST HAVE console that literally decimated everything before it. To claim that the "consoles" had no effect on the state of the Amiga market is simply asinine. Developers and publishers were clamouring to work on the Playstation, and for good reason. It was capable of doing games other consoles (except Saturn) couldn't do and that you would need a proper PC to compete with. The Playstation was a game changer, and people left the Amiga in their droves to buy it. Had the AAA chipset been released, as far as i'm aware, Dave Haynie claimed it was at least as powerful as a Playstation, which meant the Amiga would likely have gotten conversions of Playstation titles and it certainly would have prolonged the life of the brand, but the only way Amiga would still be able to compete would be to either go the PC direction with x86 or, to be constantly on the cusp of releasing new technology every 4-5 years so Amiga could have stayed relevant. But to pretend Playstation had no impact on Amiga A1200 is madness, it affected every machine of the day. |
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09 July 2019, 04:33 | #297 |
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Being equivalent would mean, at the very least, having RTG, an accelerator, and a hard drive, which would push the price of the A1200 far beyond the price of the "equivalent" PC. You can't call a stock A1200 equivalent to a 386DX with SVGA and HDD.
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09 July 2019, 05:53 | #298 | ||||
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I'm skeptical though. The AAA chipset incorporated many previous Amiga chipset features, but no 3D functions. That means a lot of silicon was dedicated to stuff that wasn't necessary in a next generation console, while it was lacking in the most important area. To make up for that they would have needed to put in a much more powerful CPU, and the price would have been uncompetitive. So Commodore did read the market right (competing against the PC is a losing battle and consoles are the way to go) but didn't have the ability make it happen. If they had made it happen though, how many Amiga users would have been satisfied? I know I wouldn't. I bought a PlayStation to play one game (Tomb Raider) which it did reasonably well, but every other game I tried on it was meh. And since it was no good for anything else... Eventually the PlayStation wore out and got trashed, but I still have my A1200! (and use it every day). Quote:
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09 July 2019, 06:31 | #299 | |
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But if by 'equivalent' you mean able to get the same functionality and enjoyment of it, then the Amiga wasn't that far off. It just depends on what you can accept as equivalent. I didn't need an SVGA monitor for my A1200 because it worked on my TV (and would have worked fine on my 1084 monitor too if someone hadn't stolen it). That saved me a lot of money. I didn't need a big hard drive because the OS is in ROM and most games run direct off floppy disk. I also didn't need an expensive graphics card, 'bleeding edge' CPU or huge amounts of RAM because Amiga OS is more efficient and the AGA chipset takes much of the load off the CPU. When Windows 95 first came out I tried it on my 386DX-40 with 4MB RAM. Finally a Windows desktop to rival Workbench! But it was dog slow. In fact nothing less than a 486 with 8MB was any good. In that respect an unexpanded A1200 was equivalent to a much more expensive PC. And shall I mention that the PC wouldn't run any of my Amiga software? After all, if 'equivalence' is the criteria then the PC should at least be able to run the same software, right? So when you talk about being equivalent, what you really mean is was it exactly the same as a PC? If that is the criteria the Amiga will always come up short, but it's an unfair comparison. |
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09 July 2019, 08:30 | #300 |
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