Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[sandruzzo]

A1200 with few fixes would have been a Great Machine, but Commodore was more into Destroying Amiga than doing it's best...

[rmzalbar]

Yes. I got my first Amiga, an A500, in 1991 or so. It was already a bit long in the tooth. However, thanks mostly to killer apps such as Dungeon Master and Lemmings, it held its own as a prime entertainment machine.

In 1993 when I picked up my A1200, PCs had surged ahead in performance and down in price, and it was simply trampled completely into the dust.

Let's compare it to a typical VGA PC of the time:

- The IDE controller sucked
- The CPU sucked (horribly crippled by shipping with no fastram)
- The RAM sucked; see above
- The audio sucked
- The AGA graphics sucked

The AGA graphics were a particularly painful disappointment. They expanded the available colorspace and bitplanes but didn't accelerate the blit performance and memory bandwidth to match. As a result, running the AGA-enhanced modes could make it slower than an ECS Amiga. Games developers had to be careful with this, so AGA games were only minimally enhanced. There were no breathtaking killer app games in AGA as there were in the earlier OCS/ECS days.

By the time I bought the A1200, I was using my A500 for more than just games: Programming, homework, BBS systems, internet, and GEnie online services on a daily basis. In this regard, the A1200 provided two upgrades over the A500: IDE and doublescan video output. That last bit was important - If Commodore had tried to get me to buy another computer that would force me to squint at my desktop in interlace mode with a migraine in the 1990's, they would have failed.

The operating system on the other hand was quite good compared to the PC fare of the time. Internet access via SLIP/PPP worked very well and gave a great x-terminal-like experience. The community was intelligent and knowledgeable, and the public domain was filled with wondrous creations. Aminet!

The trap door provided much more powerful options than the A500 did - I added an M1230XA 50MHz accelerator which resolved the CPU and RAM concerns completely. I also managed to get two hard disks to (sometimes) play nice together through lots of experimentation with IDE signal termination. With these enhancements and with the decent OS, I was able to stick with the A1200 up to around 1998 or so, even past Windows 95 until Windows 98 when I finally built my first PC, a Celeron 300A @ 450MHz.

Do I think Commodore made mistakes specifically with the A1200? I don't think so. It was really a product of mistakes made long before it was developed. As Atari proved with the Falcon, having sufficient hardware would probably not have saved it - the brand was really already dead. And let's be honest, the price was right (I think I remember that I paid $399 WITH a 60MB hard disk, though that seems too low?)

Still, I feel the A1200 was Commodore's best overall machine when compared to the other Amiga models. I don't regret buying it, despite my disappointment with Commodore. The Amiga was my leg up into advanced home computing from the Commodore 64, and the things I experienced and learned from it I would never trade back.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by rmzalbar

Let's compare it to a typical VGA PC of the time:

Ok, let's compare it to a 386SX with cheap SVGA, which was a pretty typical budget PC around 1992/1993.

- The IDE controller sucked
- The CPU sucked (horribly crippled by shipping with no fastram)

This is kind of true. But our example SVGA PC was not really any better: it also ran a PIO mode IDE drive and had a 386SX, which has horribly crippled access to RAM by design.

- The RAM sucked; see above
- The audio sucked
- The AGA graphics sucked

The RAM could indeed have been better for the CPU. But again - our example PC didn't actually have all that much faster RAM, as it had a horrible bus to it.

As for the audio, this is just not true. A typical entry level PC in 1993 had either no sound at all, or at best an 8 bit Soundblaster. The 8 bit Soundblaster and Soundblaster Pro line are worse than Paula in just about every way. Now... Better sound hardware, such as the 16 bit Soundblaster or the Gravis Ultrasound did exist (both having been released in the 2nd half of 1992), but these cards were still rather expensive and certainly not part of the average PC. They also lacked in support for the first year or so.

AGA graphics were about on par with SVGA as found in cheaper PC's at the time. To be clear, there were SVGA cards available that were quite a bit better, but they were expensive and as such not very typical. Also note that it was definitely possible to make a PC that outperformed the A1200 in just about every regard (though smooth scrolling/properly V-synced games were somehow still very hard to get right on PC's). It's just that those were not low end 386 PC's. And personally, I don't think such a comparison is really fair by virtue of the price difference alone.

The AGA graphics were a particularly painful disappointment. They expanded the available colorspace and bitplanes but didn't accelerate the blit performance and memory bandwidth to match. As a result, running the AGA-enhanced modes could make it slower than an ECS Amiga. Games developers had to be careful with this, so AGA games were only minimally enhanced.

This is simply not accurate.

While it is indeed true that the Blitter was not sped up, bitplane memory bandwidth for AGA was increased over ECS by a factor of 4 (AGA bitplanes can be fetched from memory at rates of up to 28MB/sec rather than the 7MB/sec that ECS is limited to). As a result, almost all of the 256 colour modes have more available bandwidth than ECS has for it's 4 to 6 bitplane screens*.

Short version: AGA modes made the Amiga faster, not slower than ECS modes.

The extra available bandwidth for AGA allowed both the CPU and the Blitter many more chip RAM cycles, meaning that the machine could almost always actually blit more pixels per frame than ECS could, while displaying more colours on screen. As a bonus, AGA also had much bigger sprites, which were heavily used in some AGA only games.

All this combined allowed for games and demos that would never have worked on an A500, even if they had been reduced to 32 (or even 16) colours.

Strangely, apart from some programmers, no one really noticed when the games got more colourful and the numbers and sizes of objects on screen rose significantly. Just an example: Reshoot-R (recently released) features as many as 100 objects on screen and runs at full frame rate, while showing two or more on screen layers and transparency effects. That is unheard of on the A500. Another example: Street Racer for the A1200 (while not a particularly good game) is way nicer looking than any A500 racer. It's also really smooth, and has nice sprite scaling. Then there's Rygar AGA, which is a lot better than the attempt for OCS was (and yes, despite McGeezer being brilliant, that is also in no small part due to AGA simply being better than ECS). Last example: Super Stardust not only has more on screen colours, it also shows more and bigger asteroids on screen. Lastly, it features bigger and better animated bosses and better tunnel sequences.


Now please understand me here: I don't mind people not liking the A1200. You're free to have any opinion you like! But I am genuinely puzzled by the many people in this thread that keep repeating/saying things that are objectively false. More so as some AGA only stuff has been coming out on EAB recently shows that AGA is clearly significantly above what OCS/ECS could do.

*) the one exception here being super hires, which is exactly as slow in 256 colours as ECS super hires was in 4 colours.

[Overlord]

At the time I loved my Amiga 1200, but looking back it seems unfortunate that they would have put an 8-bit soundcard in it when it was going up against the SNES (released 1991) and the Playstation (released 1994). The IDE controller in it was woeful, to the point (from what I remember and I'm willing to stand corrected on this if my memory is failing me) where the workbench hard disk configuring tool thought it was a SCSI bus.

I found all this disappointing because both the C64 and the Amiga 500 were as advanced as any home computer on the market when they were released and far more advanced than anything at the same price. From what I understand Commodore had the support of loads of major software developers if the Amiga 1200 had been less of a let-down to them.

[NovaCoder]

I think they got it pretty close for the time and price.

In hindsight a few obvious changes for the better:

• Ditch the on-board CPU and empty FPU socket
• Swap to a cheaper 3.5 HD
• VGA output connector instead of the crappy old RF socket
• Amber
• Akiko (bonus points!)

[sandruzzo]

What about 3d game on Aga? I'm not talking about only wolf3d or wolf clone. How good is A1200 compared to avarege Pc?

And Again A1200 woth 030 50mhz and fast ram. how could be good compared with much powerfull Pc?

[NovaCoder]

Originally Posted by sandruzzo

What about 3d game on Aga? I'm not talking about only wolf3d or wolf clone. How good is A1200 compared to avarege Pc?

You mean, how good was a standard A1200 at doing a 3D game compared to a powerful PC in 1992? Answer.......it didn't compare!

The 486 DX2 66Mhz was out in 1992 which would have wiped the floor with the A1200 obviously

[ Show youtube player ]

A standard A1200 couldn't really compete with a 286 for doing 3D games back in 1992

You need to upgrade an A1200 with an 060 to get it close to a fast 486 for 3D games.

[ Show youtube player ]

[sandruzzo]

Originally Posted by NovaCoder

You mean, how good was a standard A1200 at doing a 3D game compared to a powerful PC in 1992? Answer.......it didn't compare!

The 486 DX2 66Mhz was out in 1992 which would have wiped the floor with the A1200 obviously

[ Show youtube player ]

A standard A1200 couldn't really compete with a 286 for doing 3D games back in 1992

You need to upgrade an A1200 with an 060 to get it close to a fast 486 for 3D games.

[ Show youtube player ]

Amiga 060 seems to be faster...

What about 386sx/dx? What about the same price level of A1200, and A1200 +030 50mhz?

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by NovaCoder

I think they got it pretty close for the time and price.

In hindsight a few obvious changes for the better:

• Ditch the on-board CPU and empty FPU socket
• Swap to a cheaper 3.5 HD
• VGA output connector instead of the crappy old RF socket
• Amber
• Akiko (bonus points!)

The crappy old RF socket is what the majority of users used at the time! Don’t forget the majority of Amigas were used in front of the TV as game machines, and tbh this was one of things Commodore got right (being built-in) with the A600/A1200 instead of the bulky dodgy external TV Modulator in the A500!

Scart capable TV’s was extremely low in 1992, most people still had a RF connectors until way into the mid 90s depending on country, but it certainly wasn’t widely adopted enough for Commodore to consider it.

Processor and RAM used was decent for the price, its the custom chip-set that let the whole system down and the ‘only thing’ that let the system down for the price they had to keep it down to.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

Booting the Workbench disk is much different to having a complete installation of the OS available.

It's not much different. If the system needs fonts: or locale: etc. it just asks for the disk.

The Amiga was always designed to be fully functional when running from floppy disks. That's why we have separate assigns for important system files, rather than just shoving everything into a single subdirectory like Windows does. It's also why we have named disks and auto disk insertion detection.

And it was designed to do it efficiently. People used to complain about how slow the Amiga was bringing up icons from floppy disk. But try the same thing on a modern PC (each file on the floppy having its own icon) and it's even slower. Windows is only faster because it caches all the icons in a database - which works great until the database gets corrupted and all your icons turn into some default image. Windows also caches device drivers, and keeps all its settings in a huge 'registry' database that gets bigger every time a change is made (and takes the whole system down if it gets corrupted).

I'm sure Windows 1.0 would be capable of doing it.

So we are comparing AmigaOS3.0 to Windows 1.0 now?

Microsoft first presented Windows to the public on November 10, 1983. Requiring two floppy disk drives and 192 KB of RAM, Microsoft described the software as a device driver for MS-DOS 2.0...

Microsoft had promised in November 1983 to ship Windows by April 1984, but subsequently denied that it had announced a release date, and predicted that Windows would ship by June 1985.

Most business software had made the switch to Windows by then.

Not in New Zealand it hadn't. The first 'graphical' accounting software I saw was EasyLedgers. We sold the Amiga version and used it ourselves, which was a problem for my accountants because they were using an incompatible DOS package. Other DOS programs such as Lotus123 and Word Perfect were the mainstay of many businesses up until the mid nineties. And who can blame them? Windows sucked and productivity was much higher in DOS once you learned the keyboard commands. There was also a lot of proprietary software written for point of sale applications etc. that ran in DOS.

No, but neither could the Commodore A520.

But the A1200 has much better composite output than the A520. Is it as sharp as RGB on a good VGA monitor? No, but it's quite usable.

Note: the photo below was taken with my 'vintage' Sony DSC-S70 with a resolution of only 1.3 megapixels. The actual image looks a bit better...

[vulture]

I seem to recall that 68060 and Pentium were very comparable at specint/specfp ratings at the same Mhz. The difference in favor of the Pentium was at about 5%, the biggest problem was really the clock difference. During their first year or so, Intel's chips could hit 120Mhz, while the 68060 was still struggling at 66MHz or about until rev6 would surface.
That's regarding the Doom performance discussion.

[grond]

You guys look at it from a too technical point of view. Mom and dad would buy a budget Amiga to put into the kids' room but by the beginning of the 90s would buy a 486DX2 (spending a magnitude more money) to put into the living room because dad needed to learn dealing with that darn thing or otherwise it would start harming his career. Of course, the kids would use the PC in the hours between end of school and when dad came home and dad turned out to also like to play a bit. The moment computers became a hobby for grown men (on the outside...), computers for boys were doomed. Us, the home computer generation still lacked our own income to sustain our computer brands. And that was that...

[Tigerskunk]

These days it's kind of my favourite Amiga next to the A1000. Definitely the best keyboard Amiga.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by NovaCoder

You mean, how good was a standard A1200 at doing a 3D game compared to a powerful PC in 1992? Answer.......it didn't compare!

The 486 DX2 66Mhz was out in 1992 which would have wiped the floor with the A1200 obviously

[ Show youtube player ]

That video brings back a few memories. Struggling to get those VL bus cards working properly, overheating CPUs, incompatible RAM, hard drives that corrupted large files, and a constant stream of customers wanting to upgrade their systems because they weren't satisfied with what they had bought only a few months ago.

I opened a computer shop in 1991 after I got laid off from Telecoms. Of course I wanted to stock up on the latest stuff even though it would eat into my startup capital, so I bought a 'flagship' 486SX-25 with 8MB RAM. It took 3 years to sell that thing! Nobody thought they needed a machine that powerful. Whenever a new more powerful CPU came out it was expensive - we're talking more than the price of an entire Amiga system just for the CPU alone. I learned to never stock 'bleeding edge' stuff because we would end up having to sell it at a loss.

Yes, the 486DX2-66 was released in August 1992 - but how much did it cost? There's no point comparing the A1200 to a machine that was unaffordable to most prospective Amiga owners.

A standard A1200 couldn't really compete with a 286 for doing 3D games back in 1992

You are right, the A1200 wiped the floor with a 286 for any kind of gaming.

You need to upgrade an A1200 with an 060 to get it close to a fast 486 for 3D games.

Let's be clear here. By '3D games' you mean one game (Wolfenstein 3D), right? Because in 1992 that's all there was, one shareware game for DOS. And frankly, while running around corridors shooting Germans was fun for a few minutes, the game had no depth. And everything that followed it was the same. I got Quake for my A3000 because I had an 060 and RTG so why not? What a boring game! If that was the only reason I had spent thousands upgrading my Amiga I would have been pissed.

But I guess it depends what you want out of a game. PC gamers today seem to more concerned about frames per second than anything else. You would think that with the power of a modern PC today's games would be truly immersive, but no - despite all the super-detailed 3D graphics and ridiculously high frame rates it's still the same boring old game. But they spend thousands putting in the latest CPU, graphics card etc., overclocked to the max with a water cooling system to (hopefully) stop the whole mess from melting down - for no obvious reason. It's like the real game is seeing if you can push more polygons around faster than the next guy, and the game itself is just to show how much bigger your... better your system is.

And then there are those of us who just want a bit of relaxed fun and don't care what the other guy has - so long as the games we are playing work properly. Did Doom really make all other game genres obsolete? Did it make Lemmings or Cannon Fodder or Dune II or The Settlers any less enjoyable to play? Of course not. But it sure stirred up a lot of PC envy amongst Amiga owners.

[grond]

Ultima Underworld came out in March 92. It ran well enough on my friend's 386. That was a technically great and totally immersive game.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Let's be clear here. By '3D games' you mean one game (Wolfenstein 3D), right? Because in 1992 that's all there was, one shareware game for DOS. And frankly, while running around corridors shooting Germans was fun for a few minutes, the game had no depth. And everything that followed it was the same. I got Quake for my A3000 because I had an 060 and RTG so why not? What a boring game! If that was the only reason I had spent thousands upgrading my Amiga I would have been pissed.

I disagree. First Person Shooters are the single best and finest gaming genre EVER created, and I will always stand by them, no matter what. Wolf 3D was just boring mazes, yes, but Quake is a LEGEND. Don't diss it!

[Tigerskunk]

All that 3D stuff was the hot shit in the mid 90ies, though..
And the Amiga couldn't really compete there..

Got my Pentium 75 in 1995, and never looked back (well, until a few years back, when I rediscovered the Amiga).

[Dunny]

I have to agree that Wolfenstein was amazing fun, and Quake literally blew everyone away. I have such great memories of playing Quake.

Ultima Underworld was just sublime. Full 3D (in a window that was small but didn't seem small) on a 386? Fantastic stuff. We played that for months.

[rmzalbar]

I will stand corrected on a few points:

Originally Posted by roondar

Ok, let's compare it to a 386SX with cheap SVGA, which was a pretty typical budget PC around 1992/1993.

I suppose my typical experience at the time wasn't cheap or poorly-configured PCs. Subjectively contributing, I also had become less interested in the euro-style of games the Amiga was increasingly focused on, and more interested in western-style gaming which was more flight sims and RPGs which the PCs of the time handled well in full VGA color. Sound cards of the time had lots of voices and sythesizer capabilities which were ugly when poorly used, but often gave them a leg up. I'd sometimes buy a game on the Amiga, only to have a friend buy the same game and it be better on his PC. Often this was due to low-effort porting activity, but I knew the writing was on the wall whenever that would happen.

Originally Posted by roondar

Short version: AGA modes made the Amiga faster, not slower than ECS modes.

Strangely, apart from some programmers, no one really noticed when the games got more colourful and the numbers and sizes of objects on screen rose significantly.

I went and read up on the AGA chipset and you're right, there were more capabilities there than I realized. I'm not sure what contributed to my perception at the time - perhaps waning developer support. Part of the problem is the A1200's lack of fastram: developers were most interested in releasing titles that would slot into an unexpanded A1200 on a couple of floppy disks, so they could actually sell a few copies. PC developers were less concerned with such restrictions.

Originally Posted by roondar

Reshoot-R (recently released)
Street Racer
Rygar AGA
McGeezer
Super Stardust

I'll check out these titles.
I bought Reshoot-R last month - Great game

Originally Posted by roondar

Now please understand me here: I don't mind people not liking the A1200. You're free to have any opinion you like! But I am genuinely puzzled by the many people in this thread that keep repeating/saying things that are objectively false. More so as some AGA only stuff has been coming out on EAB recently shows that AGA is clearly significantly above what OCS/ECS could do.

I like my A1200 - heck, over the last few months I spend many hours bringing it out of storage, reworking the motherboard for damage caused by failed caps, deyellowing it, and setting it up with 3.1.4 and a CF card. The one remaining issue is a couple of the CPU expansion edge terminals need to be replated due to an accident back in the 90's where a kid we were babysitting filled the entire computer with Squirt soda while the computer was on (electrochemically deplating the gold.) They're working - clean and protected with Deoxit for now, but will need me to pay a visit to someone who has an electroplating kit for a permanent repair.

But, the question was, I think: Was I disappointed with the A1200 at the time? At the time, yes, due to the perceptions and environments I listed above. The current Amiga scene should not feel detracted by this.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by NovaCoder

You mean, how good was a standard A1200 at doing a 3D game compared to a powerful PC in 1992? Answer.......it didn't compare!

The 486 DX2 66Mhz was out in 1992 which would have wiped the floor with the A1200 obviously

[ Show youtube player ]

A standard A1200 couldn't really compete with a 286 for doing 3D games back in 1992

You need to upgrade an A1200 with an 060 to get it close to a fast 486 for 3D games.

[ Show youtube player ]

An A1200 could compete with a 286 for 3D games. Mainly because it actually has a faster CPU. Now... Wolvenstein 3D might pose something of a challenge to be sure. But after seeing the A500 Wolvenstein style game demo that was recently on EAB, I'm no longer convinced it can't be done at least as well as the 286 did it. More so as I've also recently seen Wolvenstein 3D on a 286 and it wasn't really all that smooth.

As to the 486DX/2.. Well, duh! Machines using that CPU cost so much back in 1992, I seriously hope they'd do better. They made the A4000/040 look downright affordable.

Originally Posted by grond

You guys look at it from a too technical point of view. Mom and dad would buy a budget Amiga to put into the kids' room but by the beginning of the 90s would buy a 486DX2 (spending a magnitude more money) to put into the living room because dad needed to learn dealing with that darn thing or otherwise it would start harming his career. Of course, the kids would use the PC in the hours between end of school and when dad came home and dad turned out to also like to play a bit. The moment computers became a hobby for grown men (on the outside...), computers for boys were doomed. Us, the home computer generation still lacked our own income to sustain our computer brands. And that was that...

This is exactly what I meant earlier when I talked about 1992 roughly being 'the end of the home computer era'. Home Computers were bought on the cheap and the A1200 is a continuation of this.

However, all of sudden people started buying much more expensive PC's en masse, while the Amiga core audience by and large kept buying budget machines. Had the Amiga crowd all decided to buy A4000/040's (or even A3000's for that matter) instead of sticking with the A500 replacement that the A1200 was, things might have worked out differently. But like you said, the core Amiga crowd tended to not have that much money.

As is, there simply was no market for high end 3D software on Amiga's - no one had the hardware to run these kind of games.

Originally Posted by grond

Ultima Underworld came out in March 92. It ran well enough on my friend's 386. That was a technically great and totally immersive game.

I agree it's awesome.

However, after seeing it in action and reading up on it, I also think that an AGA version would've been quite possible. Obviously this would not run nearly as smoothly on an A1200 as YouTube shows the PC version to be, but I'm certain it'd have run OK on faster machines.

And that there is really the point.

Many of the PC games of the early to mid 90's would've been quite doable on AGA. More so if coupled with a faster processor and a bit more RAM than the baseline A1200 had. But developers were (rightly) worried about market size and also (rightly) worried that too few Amiga users could/wanted to spend the money to run these games well. And so they didn't port them.

I mean, just look at the game you mention. Essentially, it requires a 386DX to run properly* - which is machine that cost something like three times what an A1200 cost at the time it launched. PC owners bought into such machines, Amiga owners did not.

*) I did some Googling and found a retro PC forum thread asking about the minimum system for the game and the consensus was you needed a fast 386DX or a 486 for it to run well. It would run on a 386SX, but in the words of one of the posters "It is a 386dx/486dx-level game. You can play it on something lower, but the performance doesn't make for an enjoyable game."

Originally Posted by rmzalbar

I will stand corrected on a few points:

I suppose my typical experience at the time wasn't cheap or poorly-configured PCs. Subjectively contributing, I also had become less interested in the euro-style of games the Amiga was increasingly focused on, and more interested in western-style gaming which was more flight sims and RPGs which the PCs of the time handled well in full VGA color. Sound cards of the time had lots of voices and sythesizer capabilities which were ugly when poorly used, but often gave them a leg up. I'd sometimes buy a game on the Amiga, only to have a friend buy the same game and it be better on his PC. Often this was due to low-effort porting activity, but I knew the writing was on the wall whenever that would happen.

Well, I mostly agree with the writing being on the wall. However, as I mentioned above, I do think quite a few PC games could've had perfectly acceptable AGA versions. The problem had more to do with how much money Amiga users were willing (or able!) to spend on their new machine than the abilities of AGA or the A1200. The A1200 was cheap and, well, around on par with a 386SX. But these newer PC games very often required more grunt. Even a 386DX wasn't really enough for the best games, meaning you really needed to get a 486.

That means we're looking at competing with computers running the equivalent of a 68040. Granted, these PC's were priced much higher as well. But people still bought them and people did not buy the more powerful Amiga's. And IMHO, that's why we missed out on all the nicer PC games.

I went and read up on the AGA chipset and you're right, there were more capabilities there than I realized. I'm not sure what contributed to my perception at the time - perhaps waning developer support. Part of the problem is the A1200's lack of fastram: developers were most interested in releasing titles that would slot into an unexpanded A1200 on a couple of floppy disks, so they could actually sell a few copies. PC developers were less concerned with such restrictions.

I've been convinced for years that developer support was key. It's true there were AGA games out there. But many of the people using computers for games rather than consoles desired the types of games that were not available, or severely cut down.

Many of the game genres you list above, plus the 4x genre, were essentially missing from the AGA list as developers focussed primarily on action games. And many of the missing games could've been done in AGA form in a fairly good way - especially if the developers had allowed for a PC style "low end"/"high end" experience in their games, rather than focussing only on the low end. In this respect I guess the A1200 did cause 'damage' - it was not high end and the games quite a few people wanted to play required high end stuff.

Case in point: an A4000/040 could've run pretty much all of the games the PC had in the early 1990's quite well, with the possible exception of some of the later 3D stuff. For instance, an A4000/040 actually runs DOOM quite decently even when just using AGA.

So many games could've worked on AGA, quite a few even on a base A1200. We could've had a perfectly functional Master of Orion, or an AGA version of Dune 2 on the A1200. Or all those graphics adventures in 256 colours. They'd all do great on the A1200. Some of the older raycaster stuff, such as Wolvenstein 3D might actually have run 'ok' on an A1200. I could name more, but I think you get my point.

Then again... On the topic of games such as DOOM which required heftier hardware, would Amiga 500 users really have bought a new 'entry level' Amiga had it cost over 1000 pounds? I'm just not convinced most would've.

I'll check out these titles.
I bought Reshoot-R last month - Great game

Do note they're all action games like always on the Amiga

Oh and Street Racer primarily looks good. It doesn't play very well, sadly.

But, the question was, I think: Was I disappointed with the A1200 at the time? At the time, yes, due to the perceptions and environments I listed above. The current Amiga scene should not feel detracted by this.

More power to you. Like I said - I don't mind it when people were disappointed by the machine (or actively dislike it) and there are some valid reasons to dislike it. Now personally, I did like it and wasn't disappointed. But perhaps that is also because I could actually afford an A1200 and couldn't afford a 486.

In essence, all I really dislike is when this disappointment with the A1200 goes alongside comparisons to much more expensive computers. For the simple reason that the A1200 was a budget machine and that a non-budget and vastly more powerful AGA machine also existed. Now I admit that the A4000 was rather expensive, but so were quite a few of the machines I've seen compared to the A1200 in this thread.