Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by Turrican_3

PS: JL Gassee briefly talks about the Amiga in his recent book, I'll try to take and quote the relevant stuff later

Interesting. IIRC, BeOs was party inspired by AmigaOs.

[freehand]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

It's quite amazing how you have managed to completely avoid responding to being called out for insulting console owners as "having no brain" (which coincidentially also insults a large chunk of Amiga userbase, since we liked the same games), and your only offering is just more old tripe about how Amiga users are an ungrateful and ignorant lot for not recognizing A1200 brilliance.

Stay classy, eh.

He is very lucky I am not a moderator.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by TEG

The management was already chaotic. Why a "PET machine" based on the C64 hardware was not quickly release to have something to offer to the educational market and so to the foundations for the futur of the brand perception?

The C128 was the 'serious' machine aimed at businesses/education, but indeed released in 1985 parallel to the Amiga. A lot of people coming from the C64 would upgrade to the C128 and not really consider the Amiga (and marketing did a 'great' job at promoting the C128 over the Amiga).

[Promilus]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

So tell me, which contemporary home computer models from other manufacturers were not 'disappointments and flops'. (...)

Commodore problems didn't start at 1992/93 but had a finalization back then. They did bet on wrong horse. Amiga would've been fairly successful gaming console or exactly what A500 was. Kind of gaming computer with option to be expanded to full computer. And obviously phased out at some point (instead of blindly being developed toward the ultimate dead end) but with entirely new approach being developed which DID NOT CAME (and yet they did work on it but pretty much too late and again betting on wrong horse - PA RISC - even going as far as trying to circumvent license agreements with HP to obtain rights for architecture). Either way 68k Amiga was always heading towards oblivion... and it is the only one Amiga you really care about. It's obvious Amiga could not survive. Not on 68k processors. Not with integrated chipset alone. And not with backward compatibility maintained at all cost. When it comes to games PC architecture did not come ahead of Amiga capabilities by chance. And even due to pressure from 3rd parties (with some products being developed to work on Amiga as well like Picasso or Cybervision) it only went ahead of Amiga due to actual platform development with new CPUs from different manufacturers being widely and cheaply available. Same goes with things like SIMM (which ain't original IBM design!), VLB, EISA, PCI and later on USB, PCIE, SATA. In other words - if you can't keep up with your own engineers... maybe just use 3rd parties instead? So... let go, loosen your grip. Let it fly, let it evolve.

[TEG]

Originally Posted by TCD

The C128 was the 'serious' machine aimed at businesses/education, but indeed released in 1985 parallel to the Amiga. A lot of people coming from the C64 would upgrade to the C128 and not really consider the Amiga (and marketing did a 'great' job at promoting the C128 over the Amiga).

Yeah, the C128 was initiated by the engineering staff! Bill Herd proposed the machine to the management, because he saw an hole in the planning. Bill Herd, the C128 creator, explain this in an interview.
So it was done late and with the approach of a general computer eventually able to do professional job due to CP/M and 80 columns mode but not directly targeting the market left by the PET. A market which wanted robust cases in the style of the PET and Apple II one.

In Wikipedia we can read that Commodore decided to withdraw the still selling PET :

In 1982, Commodore retired the PET line with the intention of replacing it with the B-series machines; however, they were a marketplace flop and also very expensive to manufacture. Because Commodore still had a strong business software market in Europe, the 80xx series PET was revived during 1984 in a new molded plastic case with a swivel monitor.

Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_PET#

And so in 1983 and 1984 the educational/pro battlefield was free for Apple and the PC. It was the first shoot in the foot. And so the Amiga 1000 suffered from this because Commodore was now know as a toys company due to the C64 now only successful product and a one not supporting his professionals customers, which is paramount on this market.

It look like there was two divisions at Commodore, the professional one and the general public one. But since it seems they did not manage to capitalize on what they have built on the educational/professional field since this 1982 decision. And this was Tramiel at the controllers at the time, he left January 1984.

Perhaps Gould was angry at him since some time because he witnessed this market loss. Tramiel being obsess to use the C64 to sink the Texas Instrument computer (the TI99/4a) at the expanse of not giving up the PET market and making a bad reputation of Commodore on the resellers side. Which impacted the Amiga start too.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by TEG

Yeah but what was forced to be included in the plans? And more importantly for a team, did the man have unanimous support? Was he a visionary? At least a leader? Or did he have its own agenda?

Unanimous support? What he had was a bunch of engineers used to doing whatever they felt like whether it fitted the market or not.

They were working on the A1000 plus, which was going to have the AA chipset and retail for $800, twice the price of the A1200. Sure it had a couple of slots and you could add a 3.5" hard drive, but it doubled the cost of owning a AA machine. So this was no replacement for the A500. By the time a hard drive was added the retail price would be US$1000.

But then it became clear that the AA chipset would not be ready in time, so they were 'forced' to put in the ECS chipset instead because they couldn't meet Mehdi Ali's tight schedule. Fortunately it didn't happen, because none of the dealers (including me) wanted to order machines that they knew nothing about.

In his book "Commodore The Final Years", Brian Bagnall says:-

A1200 Origins

Mehdi Ali had received criticism from Commodore engineers over the years, but that's not to say that everything he did was wrong... Ali Knew how vital the low-end Amigas were to the survival of Commodore. By 1992, the major video game developers were programming primarily VGA games and not bothering to develop ports... By using the AGA chipset in a low-end Amiga it would be much easier to port those VGA games.

In February 1992, Ali told Sydnes he wanted a "full court press" to produce an A500 class machine using the upcoming AGA chipset by September 1992. He wanted it completed even before the AA chipset had finished beta testing.

On February 26, Bill Sydnes asked his subordinate Jeff Frank how he could could meet the aggressive schedule... Frank proposed building the system starting with the A600 design... "That project was not as cost-sensitive," says Jeff Porter "I thought it was pretty good."...

the AA600 (as Sydnes called it then)... would include a 32-bit CPU/RAM expansion slot, a feature that made Gerard Bucas of GVP happy. "expandability was back," he says "The CPU speed was twice what it was on the A500. It was a great computer"...

The situation now was very similar to the 1986 time period when Commodore was under severe financial pressure to develop a hit product... The AA600... would be be, from a design and marketing perspective, some of the best work the company ever produced.

We have Mehdi Ali to thank for aggressively pushing them to produce the A1200. Without him what would we have gotten - more A500s? Another overpriced pizza box?

[TEG]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

In February 1992, Ali told Sydnes he wanted a "full court press" to produce an A500 class machine using the upcoming AGA chipset by September 1992. He wanted it completed even before the AA chipset had finished beta testing.

The problem is the 1992 date!

So it was in 1986 that Ali began his time with Commodore. Over the next three years he proved his worth to Gould and in August 1988, Ali became a member of the Board. In 1989 Gould had fired his second last CEO. Ali, now just 43 years old, was promoted as the man to steer the Commodore ship with serious cost cutting as his remedy for its financial ailments.

https://www.commodore.ca/commodore-h...-of-commodore/

Why we had to wait 1992 for the A1200??? What he did since 1989???

When a company’s engineers don’t just hold their executive team in contempt, but feel actual, bona-fide loathing for their chieftains, something’s wrong. By the time Commodore went bankrupt, Commodore’s engineers really didn’t like the last executive team, led by CEO Mehdi Ali. It could be said some of them hated him. In Dave Haynie’s Deathbed Vigil video, they burn an effigy of him.

Mehdi Ali was the last CEO to be appointed by Commodore’s board of directors. Some of the blunders he and his highly paid (Ali was said in the video to have been paid something like $2 million a year)…
From Commodore to Amiga Inc – Executive Slaughterhouse

https://www.commodore.ca/commodore-h...-of-commodore/

Seems there was a serious management problem here, clearly unable to manage people.

But the situation was already seriously gloomy at those time. Problems starting back in 1982, as we saw above, when the brand failed its positioning. But perhaps, with the A500 success, a good management would have been able to do it until today. Especially with the incoming console market. The brand was strong on the game segment but what was needed in 1992 CBM's lab was something at the level of the PlayStation (released in 1994) or the Nintendo 64 (released in 1996). Impossible with the atmosphere of the company described above. However they had a good point with mastering the CD technology (CDTV released in 1991). So I think, with motivated engineers, and the correct budget, a product able to make the company survive was possible in 1991. A console with raw power, new chips and the CD.

And by the way, the PS1 was an engineer affair, alike the Amiga time under Jeff Miner:

Eventually, the partnership between Sony and Nintendo faltered due to licensing disagreements, but Kutaragi and Sony continued to develop their own console. Kutaragi later recalled staying up all night working on the console design for several nights in a row "because our work was so interesting." Despite being considered a risky gamble by other Sony executives, Kutaragi once again had the support of Ohga and several years later the company released the original PlayStation.

Negotiations (with Nintendo) officially ended in May 1992 and in order to decide the fate of the PlayStation project, a meeting was held in June 1992, consisting of Sony President Ohga, PlayStation Head Kutaragi and several senior members of Sony's board. At the meeting, Kutaragi unveiled a proprietary CD-ROM-based system he had been working on which involved playing video games with 3D graphics to the board. Eventually, Sony President Ohga decided to retain the project after being reminded by Kutaragi of the humiliation he suffered from Nintendo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Kutaragi

[AestheticDebris]

A1200 Origins

Mehdi Ali had received criticism from Commodore engineers over the years, but that's not to say that everything he did was wrong... Ali Knew how vital the low-end Amigas were to the survival of Commodore. By 1992, the major video game developers were programming primarily VGA games and not bothering to develop ports... By using the AGA chipset in a low-end Amiga it would be much easier to port those VGA games.

The problem is that this bit just wasn't true with AGA. I mean, theoretically both were capable of similar resolutions and 256 colour depth, but PC VGA games were managing to pull it off and AGA Amigas just weren't.

And that's comparing against PCs, which were still expensive and a bit crap for gaming. It's naive to assume that the key low end market was really about anything other than games and the consoles were absolutely eating into that market, being capable of pulling off better results for less effort. Maybe if Commodore had.seen that and pivoted the development of AGA to focus on a console first, binning off all the "computer" bits they didn't need, they'd have had the kind of graphics chipset they could have later integrated into a "proper" Amiga.

It's easy to see that a central focus was definitely lacking at Commodore though, given the number of wildly different and entirely incompatible machines they kept releasing. Even if you wanted to be faithful to Commodore, what you should buy was entirely non-obvious.

[TEG]

Originally Posted by AestheticDebris

The problem is that this bit just wasn't true with AGA. I mean, theoretically both were capable of similar resolutions and 256 colour depth, but PC VGA games were managing to pull it off and AGA Amigas just weren't.

And that's comparing against PCs, which were still expensive and a bit crap for gaming. It's naive to assume that the key low end market was really about anything other than games and the consoles were absolutely eating into that market, being capable of pulling off better results for less effort. Maybe if Commodore had.seen that and pivoted the development of AGA to focus on a console first, binning off all the "computer" bits they didn't need, they'd have had the kind of graphics chipset they could have later integrated into a "proper" Amiga.

It's easy to see that a central focus was definitely lacking at Commodore though, given the number of wildly different and entirely incompatible machines they kept releasing. Even if you wanted to be faithful to Commodore, what you should buy was entirely non-obvious.

Well put together.

[Megalomaniac]

For adventures and strategy games, an A1200 matches a like-for-like PC, but by late 1992 those PC games were being designed around hard drives (and processors much faster than 14Mhz). For anything 3D, especially texture-mapped, the PC architecture was still probably ahead of a like-for-like AGA Amiga though, especially before you add fast RAM - and that proved to be where the non-console games market increasingly went. Not that a 14Mhz PC could do Doom-style games at a playable speed either. Still, a £700 machine with 030, 2+2Mb and a hard drive alongside AGA would have probably competed better in that market.

For 2D action game the A1200 trounces any PC, but the real competition was the SNES, which is much closer. That was much cheaper initially, though once you've bought 10 games for each that saving's been cancelled out - and of course the A1200 can do word processing and graphics design and 'serious' games that you might grow into. Commodore died before many pure A1200 games had been made, but what came during its short lifespan showed its potential in that area

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

For adventures and strategy games, an A1200 matches a like-for-like PC...

The problem is that we don't have many games for comparison. Star Trek: 25th Anniversary is one of the games and it's even HD only on Amiga. The Amiga port was released over one and half years after the PC version came out. The A1200 matched a 1991/1992 PC in theory, but by the time that games actually came out for it it was already outdated.

[SilentBob]

Not read all of the posts. But anyhoo, the A1200 is fine as long as you have a CPU accelerator. A vanilla A1200 is sorely lacking though. But who uses an unexpanded A1200 anyway? It has a lot of potential as it is.

[TEG]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

Not that a 14Mhz PC could do Doom-style games at a playable speed either. Still, a £700 machine with 030, 2+2Mb and a hard drive alongside AGA would have probably competed better in that market.

I think real time C2P (not like the faked one done by Akiko chip), would have been necessary too, to minimise cost of games conversion/programmation and so the adoption of the platform.

Mehdi Ali certainly thought of it but finally drop it

A1200 Origins

Mehdi Ali had received criticism from Commodore engineers over the years, but that's not to say that everything he did was wrong... Ali Knew how vital the low-end Amigas were to the survival of Commodore. By 1992, the major video game developers were programming primarily VGA games and not bothering to develop ports... By using the AGA chipset in a low-end Amiga it would be much easier to port those VGA games.

[CCCP alert]

Originally Posted by TCD

The C128 was the 'serious' machine aimed at businesses/education, but indeed released in 1985 parallel to the Amiga. A lot of people coming from the C64 would upgrade to the C128 and not really consider the Amiga (and marketing did a 'great' job at promoting the C128 over the Amiga).

C128 was another joke-tastic idea from Commodore. You had to spend £800 (C128+1571+1902) on a machine to run crusty old pathetic CP/M programs on the Commodore 190x monitors OR spend £500 on an actual 512k IBM PC compatible PC from Amstrad including monitor. Erm.....

It was a bad idea on every front (no 2mhz CPU for 40 column regular Joe TV mode AKA C64 style games and zero access to the Z80 if you choose not to boot into CP/M but you paid for a complex motherboard with twin incompatible processors inside it). In fact it is no more useful in real life than a Commodore 64 and a 64kb RAM expansion to be brutally honest. CP/M was a duff idea even in 1986, if it wasn't then Amstrad would have conquered the small business/professional market with a CP/M not PC compatible

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by AestheticDebris

The problem is that this bit just wasn't true with AGA. I mean, theoretically both were capable of similar resolutions and 256 colour depth, but PC VGA games were managing to pull it off and AGA Amigas just weren't.

Not sure what you mean by that. In what way were AGA games not 'pulling it off'?

Maybe if Commodore had.seen that and pivoted the development of AGA to focus on a console first, binning off all the "computer" bits they didn't need, they'd have had the kind of graphics chipset they could have later integrated into a "proper" Amiga.

That would be a mistake. The console market was already overcrowded, as Sega and Atari found out. The Amiga's strength was that - like the PC and other home computers - it was more than just a console. Amiga users were maturing and wanted more mature games. Putting the enhanced chipset in a console first would also piss off more serious users who wanted to take advantage of the higher resolution and more colors.

But trust an Amiga fan to be consumed by console envy, feeling inadequate because their machine couldn't move as many sprites and layers around as quickly. Sure (some of) the consoles could do that better, but there was a lot they couldn't do as well or at all. Console manufacturers eventually resorted to putting enhanced chips in the cartridges at great expense, and ported games still suffered from severe compromises.

It's easy to see that a central focus was definitely lacking at Commodore though, given the number of wildly different and entirely incompatible machines they kept releasing. Even if you wanted to be faithful to Commodore, what you should buy was entirely non-obvious.

I think you are overstating it. For the average user the choices were pretty obvious. The A3000 and A4000 were far too expensive. The A2000/A1500 was practically 100% compatible with the A500, but also expensive. The CDTV was highly compatible with the A500 once you added a floppy drive and keyboard, but again there was no reason to choose it over an A500 (unless you wanted the CD drive and hifi styling).

The A500+ was just an A500 with KS2, up to 2MB chip and onboard rtc. Pop in a 1.3 ROM and it was almost 100% A500 compatible. The A600 was the same except with the modulator built in, IDE, and the rarely used numeric keys removed.

KS2 and ECS had already been introduced with the A3000 in 1990, and it was time to move on. Application developers and serious users were demanding it. KS2 ROM and 2MB Agnus upgrades were quite popular then, showing that users wanted them.

The A1200 introduced some incompatibilities due to the 68020 CPU and AGA chipset. But that was just an impetus for users to buy newer software that worked with it, which is what they would want to do anyway. It was also what the industry needed.

The only machines Commodore produced that could accurately be described as 'wildly different and entirely incompatible' were the TED machines (Plus 4 etc.), C64/128, and PC clones. TED machines predated the Amiga and were soon no more than a bad memory. PCs were for IBM compatible business use obviously. The C64 was legacy 8 bit. I doubt that many customers were confused about that. The C65 didn't make it into production precisely because Commodore management didn't think selling an entirely incompatible rival to the Amiga would be a good idea.

It's certainly true that Commodore lost focus after Jack left. But Mehdi Ali wasn't the cause of that, he was the cure. The reason most Amiga fans don't know that is that we only got one side of the story - the engineers' side.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by CCCP alert

C128 was another joke-tastic idea from Commodore. You had to spend £800 (C128+1571+1902) on a machine to run crusty old pathetic CP/M programs on the Commodore 190x monitors OR spend £500 on an actual 512k IBM PC compatible PC from Amstrad including monitor. Erm.....

It was a bad idea on every front (no 2mhz CPU for 40 column regular Joe TV mode AKA C64 style games and zero access to the Z80 if you choose not to boot into CP/M but you paid for a complex motherboard with twin incompatible processors inside it). In fact it is no more useful in real life than a Commodore 64 and a 64kb RAM expansion to be brutally honest. CP/M was a duff idea even in 1986, if it wasn't then Amstrad would have conquered the small business/professional market with a CP/M not PC compatible

Perhaps you are forgetting that Amstrad did indeed 'conquer' a subsection of the small business market with a CP/M machine - the PCW. They also did very well with the CPC home computer range, which also used CP/M. Between 1984 and 1991 Amstrad sold a total of 3 million CPCs and 1.5 million PCWs. Not bad for an OS that was 'a duff idea even in 1986' (the C128 was released in 1985).

Commodore had already released a Z80 cartridge for the C64 in 1983. It didn't do well because the C64 had no 80 column text mode and the 1541 disk drive couldn't read disks formatted in 'standard' MFM format.

However the C128 was advertised as being fully C64 compatible, so it had to run CP/M too. That's where the 80 column video chip and Z80 CPU came in. Turns out it was cheaper to put the Z80 inside the machine than have it on a cartridge, because the cart would require a stronger power supply that would cost more than the Z80 and support circuitry. So the Z80 was effectively 'free'.

The C128 was only supposed to be made for a couple of years until the Amiga got going, but it turned out to be more popular than expected. Having a C64 mode and a more professional mode is what made it attractive. 2.5 million were sold in 4 years, which is not bad (though towards the end the A500 was more profitable because they could sell it at higher price even though it cost about the same to make as the C128).

[oscar_ates]

Commodore failed to deliver a successful A500 follower machine. Bruce thinking has one flaw. PCs did not take off because of the name IBM but HD floppy disks, harddisk, powerful 386 or 486 cpus, vga/super vga high resolution chunky graphics. AGA machines released in rush mode because of diminishing c64 and amiga sales and rushing something does not generate good results. By 1992 damage was already done PCs took the lead. Aga machines also released very weakly so could not stand a chance against competition.

[Promilus]

Either way it all comes down to:
1. 68k was EOL and it was impractical to continue that line. It was well known in 92 already. So... Amiga 68k HAD NO FUTURE NO MATTER WHAT!
2. PC clones did gain ground by 3rd parties taking over the direction in which it should evolve. It did happen in Amiga as well but mostly in case of RTG when Commodore was still alive and with next CPU path (PowerPC) as well as more PC-like subsystems (pci, usb).
Again - it might've been better to lose the grip and let Amiga hw companies to push the changes while getting some royalties in exchange with no financial burden of developing things by Commodore itself. And with that they'd have to just use small r&d hw team and focus on software to provide decent support in AOS. In that particular form there is a risk Amiga and PC would essentially blend over time into one platform. And that's the one thing Bruce like good Amiga fan would absolutely hate.

[TEG]

Originally Posted by Promilus

Again - it might've been better to lose the grip and let Amiga hw companies to push the changes while getting some royalties in exchange with no financial burden of developing things by Commodore itself. And with that they'd have to just use small r&d hw team and focus on software to provide decent support in AOS. In that particular form there is a risk Amiga and PC would essentially blend over time into one platform. And that's the one thing Bruce like good Amiga fan would absolutely hate.

Or Commodore buying and integrating the companies which were doing good Amiga hardware. Do we have a list of which companies Commodore bought? I'm not sure they do that at least once after the Tramiel area.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by oscar_ates

Commodore failed to deliver a successful A500 follower machine. Bruce thinking has one flaw. PCs did not take off because of the name IBM but HD floppy disks, harddisk, powerful 386 or 486 cpus, vga/super vga high resolution chunky graphics.

BS.

PCs did indeed take off because of the name IBM, but that was back in the early 80's. By the time the Amiga arrived the PC was firmly established as the preferred platform. After the Amiga was released the PC was attracting just as many games and many more apps - even before it had a powerful 386 or 486 CPU, 3.5" HD floppy, SVGA graphics and a sound card. The PC had won before the Amiga had even left the starting gate.

I like how you sneaked the word 'successful' in there. Commodore did indeed have machines that met all your specs, and they weren't 'successful' either. They had a 386DX-33, a 486SX-25, and a 486DX-33 with 8 MB RAM, SVGA video, 3.5" HD floppy and 150MB hard drive. In later years I used one of these to run the BBS in my shop (Why? Because the Amiga 2000 couldn't run the latest PC BBS software that people wanted us to use - and besides it was a waste of a good Amiga!).

But I assume you meant a successor Amiga with equivalent specs. In which case you're still wrong. The A4000 had everything you listed (and more!) except chunky graphics, which you could add with a graphics card (and many A4000 owners did). But what's the point of chunky graphics if no software uses it? The only 'essential' reason for chunky graphics was textured-mapped 3D games. There weren't many of those around in 1992.

However there were many PC games and a few apps that used chunky graphics (no other choice if you wanted more than 16 colors) which would of course only run on a PC. And since most new stuff was being produced only for the PC, a PC was the obvious choice. Why would you buy anything else?

Now you may say the reason the PC got that software is that it had chunky graphics, 486 CPU etc., but in most cases that wasn't true. The real reason is that 90% of computer owners had a PC. That's why games were still being produced with CGA and EGA graphics and PC speaker sound into the 90's. Many games were ported from the Amiga to the PC, few the other way around. The reason? Simple numbers. The A4000 didn't move the needle simply because there weren't enough of them to make a difference. Even if it had been released in 1989 with chunky graphics it wouldn't have been enough - because it wouldn't sell in large enough numbers and wasn't a PC.

AGA machines released in rush mode because of diminishing c64 and amiga sales and rushing something does generate good results. By 1992 damage was already done PCs took the lead. Aga machines also released very weakly so could not stand a chance against competition.

What you call 'rushing' I call focusing on getting the job done. Yes, the 'damage' was already done, but the Amiga's days were numbered anyway.

In any market where compatibility is a major factor, only one or two platforms generally survive. The Amiga was not ever destined to be one of them, and there's no realistic thing Commodore could have done to change that. It shares that fate with many other platforms of the day, from cheap home computers to high-end workstations.

But none of this has any bearing on how good (or bad) the A1200 was. I have quoted 3 people who know a lot more about it than we did who said it was good. The only 'bad' thing was not getting it out a bit sooner. But at least Mehdi Ali got that ball rolling before it was too late to produce in large numbers. The limiting factor became Commodore's financial state, which Ali also deserves credit for improving. Without him AGA Amigas probably wouldn't have made it out the door at all.