Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[hammer]

Originally Posted by PortuguesePilot

From what I read in this thread about the "ideal Amiga in 1991/1992" it looks very much like a Sharp X68000 or a Sharp X68030... Which is interesting.

In spite of all of its hardware might, the Sharp beast ALSO folded under the "PC compatibles" weight roughly at the same time the Amiga did.

Sharp X68000 wasn't low cost or in the $1000 USD range.

The Giant Bomb page on the X68000 says it launched at 369,000¥, approximately $2,500 (US) at the time.

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

So you agree that a complete redesign would be needed.

Nope, you can do PAN without significant change - this is like introducing few minor improvements - more radical change can save silicone thus create more room for new features within same silicone budget.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

They were working on it, but couldn't get it finished in time. I don't know what their plans were (rumor was more sound channels) but I would rather have an A1200 with the standard Paula than nothing. What was so bad about it? This idea that Commodore should have been ashamed for not putting stereo panning in Paula is just more BS. So sounds come out one side or the other, big deal. Most Amigas were probably being used on TVs that didn't even have stereo sound.

There is patent showing direction - DMA engine will be complex, partially similar to something called nowadays "flexible DMA" - not sure if this bring what people need (i mean more complex programming with disputable benefits).

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

More armchair engineering.

Perhaps but this is how it works - if small improvements can bring significant performance boost then it is worth to be implemented.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

ECS introduced 31kHz video, which according to some is what the Amiga desperately needed to make it in the business world. Yet AFAICT Amiga fans completely ignored it. ECS also introduced 2MB ChipRAM. A lot of people did want that. And It introduced PAL/NTSC switching, which people wanted too.

2MB CHIP is adding bits to address registers - possible even in OCS (only package limits)

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

A3000 with AGA a half year later would certainly piss off all the people who already had one (or do you mean delay the A3000 until they had AGA? Might never have arrived if they tried to do that). A better idea would be a cheap Zorro-II/III graphics card and RTG, or even just a bridgeboard that allowed you to use any PC VGA card (on the A2000 too).

Speedup AGA design (i.e. instead ECS do AGA) and delay A3000.
Strangely there was no software to use PC bridgeboard with VGA as RTG...

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Still, I guess we can add "I was disappointed in the A1200 because the A3000 didn't have AGA in 1991" to the list.

Agree on that. A3000 should be first machine with AGA so blame A1200 for this.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

ECS introduced 31kHz video, which according to some is what the Amiga desperately needed to make it in the business world. Yet AFAICT Amiga fans completely ignored it. ECS also introduced 2MB ChipRAM. A lot of people did want that. And It introduced PAL/NTSC switching, which people wanted too.

A3000's ECS 31 kHz with 4 colors with 64 color palette is not competitive when compared to the PC's VGA clones.

A500 Rev 6A's ECS Agnus had PAL and NTSC software switching.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

A3000 with AGA a half year later would certainly piss off all the people who already had one (or do you mean delay the A3000 until they had AGA? Might never have arrived if they tried to do that).

1. Mainstream press's A3000 review criticized ECS aging graphics features.

2. Offer a lower cost AGA motherboard upgrade. There's no need to throw away the non-motherboard components.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

A better idea would be a cheap Zorro-II/III graphics card and RTG, or even just a bridgeboard that allowed you to use any PC VGA card (on the A2000 too).

Missing RTG software.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Still, I guess we can add "I was disappointed in the A1200 because the A3000 didn't have AGA in 1991" to the list.

Commodore wasted A3000's 32 bit Chip RAM improvements.

A3000 is the best candidate for AGA-on-ECS upgrade.

https://github.com/nonarkitten/amiga...-v0.5-(ReAgnus)

AGA introduced the fetch-mode for the bitplanes and sprites allowing bigger sprites, more colour depth (up to 8bpp) at resolutions up to super hires. It did not, however, fix this for everything, and the circa-1984 blitter and copper were left wanting. Willoe adds 2x and 4x fetch modes to every DMA channel. All of them.

This means a blitter that can run twice or four times as fast. A copper that can run twice or four times as fast. Disk access opening the door to PC floppies that aren't RPM nerfed. And audio playing at an insane 112kHz (CD audio eat your heart out).


https://www.buffee.ca/all-the-plans/

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by Promilus

Well Soviet Union along with many companies worldwide did produce 8086 microprocessor (and similarly same happened with 68000) - that's not something which turns 8086 into "standard part". And most of the components you did list plays same role and are made the same way as parts of Amiga chipset. So due to simple fact PC had clones those components are "standard parts" and for amiga the very same thing is "custom chip"? WTF? Akiko couldn't be used outside Amiga ecosystem? Why such claim? Possibilities exists, they are just generally unexplored due to low reward of doing such thing. And generally all those parts you did mention were designed for intel 8085 (8080 updated) but since intel was generally fairly compatible in 8086 were used also for those systems. That doesn't make them any more standard than anything Motorola made for their 68k systems along with 68881 and 68451...

Once again standard LSI can be used by various CPU's families - you can use 8253 or 8255 with Z80, 8086, 80386, 68000 etc - this make those LSI's standard - they are versatile, not bonded with particular family uniqueness. Why Akiko should be ever used with for example 386?
Of course you can glue even most specific solution but is there any practical justification? For example 8237(8257) is used by non Intel CPU's as DMA even if dedicated DMA solution exist within their family, same with some numeric processors ISA agnostic - it will be difficult to wire 80287 to 68030 and 68881 to 80386 but Weitek WTL 3167 can be hooked to both (MC68K require more glue logic) or another example UART - 16550 can be used similarly in Amiga and PC - this make it standard despite being LSI, similar for some network controllers, SCSI controllers, graphic controllers etc etc etc. So some LSI can be considered standard same as standard are RAM, ROM LSI's.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by pandy71

Partially - in fact each discussion can be started and stopped by single expression "read my lips no new chips"
.

FYI, I screen grabbed that Amiga Format's page with two green arrow markings on it. I used green marked Amiga Format's page in AW.net's forum.

Originally Posted by pandy71

nope - i didn't started anything - just few times decided to express my opinion (having back in my head that time can't be turned back) and sometimes correct misinformation (sadly you are source of this).

You claimed I didn't know corporate cost cutting behavior. You assumed.

Originally Posted by pandy71

sometimes correct misinformation (sadly you are source of this).

Bullshit.

Originally Posted by pandy71

I didn't assumed anything - my point was that even reasonable management (i mean people are skilled and they poses technical knowledge) quite frequently taking bad decision leading later company to problems...

You're NOT following this topic's purpose.

Originally Posted by pandy71

As i pointed earlier many (if not all) companies doing things like this.

It depends.

Intel has the leadership to rapidly evolve and defeat most "big iron" RISC competitors in the 1990s and push them out from the desktop computer market. "Only the Paranoid Survives".

PC clones can reach a certain price and performance point with 486 class CPU in the $1000 USD and $1500 price range in 1993. PC had a strong 256 color use case. PC clone chipset vendors focus on cost reduced super IO chips while delivering competitive performance.

SNES targets the low price segment and they are focused in delivering strong 2D +100 to 256 color gaming experience.

Originally Posted by pandy71

I provided real life example - you bombarding topics with images of random things to prove your point, i've wrote based on my personal experience not someone experience.

This topic is about A1200 criticism. Stay on topic.

My employment was part of the supply chain for Australia's vehicle manufacturers.

Originally Posted by pandy71

Nope, Apple was never HW company, they focused (probably right decision) mostly on software side - as such absent of HW graphic acceleration for very long time (i think even PC market was way more advanced)

Nope. Apple's Macintosh Display Card 8·24 GC for its Macintosh IIfx, featuring an AMD's 30 MHz Am29000 RISC CPU as its graphics co-processor. QuickDraw was accelerated by this graphics card.

Read https://lowendmac.com/1990/macintosh...y-card-8-24gc/

Macintosh Display Card 8·24 GC and Macintosh IIfx were released in March 1990. There's a 3 year interval from 1987's color Quick Draw and 1990's accelerated color Quick Draw.

Look in the mirror with your misinformation, hypocrite.
----
In modern times, Apple's M3 40 core GPU has the second best RT performance mobile and pref/watt vendor beating AMD's desktop RX 7800 XT and mobile RX 7900M.

AMD needs desktop RX 7900 XT to barely overcome Apple's mobile M3 40 core GPU.

Refer to https://www.cgdirector.com/cinebench-2024-scores/

It's a no brainer to why AMD didn't win any new laptop with discrete graphics design wins in CES 2024. PC laptop vendors have shown no mercy on AMD's Radeon group.

Originally Posted by pandy71

Once Again 8514 is NOT TIGA - in case of TMS340x0 - API of 8514 is usually emulated trough TIGA API

One of TIGA's use case was 8514 compatible product i.e. an 8514 clone.

It was marketed like a 8514 compatible clone.
Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_8514 under the clone section

Clones

In the late 1980s, several companies cloned the 8514/A often for the ISA bus. Notable among those was Western Digital Imaging's PWGA-1 (also known as the WD9500 chip set), the Chips & Technologies 82C480, and ATI's Mach8 and later Mach32 chips. In one way or another, the clones were all better than the original with more speed, enhanced drawing functionality and overall improved video mode selections. Clone support for non-interlaced modes at resolutions like 800×600 and 1280×1024 was typical, and all clones had longer command queues for increased performance.

ATI Technologies: the Mach8, Mach32, Graphics Vantage and 8514/Ultra

Chips and Technologies: F82C480 B EIZO - AA40 and F82C481 Miro Magic Plus

Matrox: MG-108

Paradise Systems: Plus-A, Renaissance Rendition II

Desktop Computing: AGA 1024 (also capable of emulating TIGA standards)

NEC: Multisync Graphics Engine

IIT AGX and Tseng Labs ET4000 are also referenced as being IBM 8514 compatible.



AMD's K5 reused Am29K microarchitecture with X86 decoders and it's considered as a clone X86 CPU. The same for Transmeta's VLIW-based microarchitecture as an X86-64 clone.

"There's many ways to skin a cat".

For the PC market, a clone is a functional duplication from the original PC de-facto standard and the actual internal implementation must be a clean sheet design. It's not wise to copy IBM's designs without a "clean sheet" design.

My PC "clone" usage is consistent for both X86 CPUs and PC graphics cards and consistent with the mainstream PC clone definition.

[TEG]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

ECS introduced 31kHz video, which according to some is what the Amiga desperately needed to make it in the business world. Yet AFAICT Amiga fans completely ignored it. ECS also introduced 2MB ChipRAM. A lot of people did want that. And It introduced PAL/NTSC switching, which people wanted too.

ECS was introduced in 1990! It was way too late, this is why nobody cared.

Should have been available at least in the A2000 in 1987 when the Amiga software library was in construction and so it would have been took into account.

To put things into perspective, the ST which enjoyed all the successful HiRes software we know, was discontinued in 1993.

[Promilus]

Once again standard LSI can be used by various CPU's families - you can use 8253 or 8255 with Z80, 8086, 80386, 68000 etc - this make those LSI's standard - they are versatile, not bonded with particular family uniqueness.

You can use CIA, Paula and Denise with either of those as well. Why are you so determined to enforce such blatant lies?

Of course you can glue even most specific solution but is there any practical justification

Z80 comes from i8080 which is the basis for 8085 for which most of those add-ons were created, 68000 hardly uses intel "standard chips". What's your point exactly? Amiga doesn't use 8255 even if it is fairly easy to interface and "standard" ... but Amiga's CIA (or Commodore's CIA) is just as easily interfaced to any other CPU family and is ISA agnostic, just as Paula or Denise are. The one thing why commodore's stuff never became the same "standard IC" as the one from PC is... nobody f... king cared about that stuff! Those chips ain't anything else than Amiga custom chips!
The only difference is that amiga ICs were exclusive when both motorola, zilog, intel, amd etc. chips were widely used in different machines.

[Promilus]

Originally Posted by hammer

You're NOT following this topic's purpose.
.

And neither are you with all that unecessary PC crap either NEC or modern PCs. Modern consoles. And Hombre assumptions which are obvious white lies to anyone actually knowing that stuff except of you of course.

[abu_the_monkey]

the subject matter 'Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?'
if you were then it (the A1200) wasn't for you and that's ok.

what you wanted was a PC/MAC or one of the available game consoles.

the end.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by abu_the_monkey

the subject matter 'Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?'
if you were then it (the A1200) wasn't for you and that's ok.

what you wanted was a PC/MAC or one of the available game consoles.

the end.

I think that ship sailed 180 pages ago

[abu_the_monkey]

Originally Posted by TCD

I think that ship sailed 180 pages ago

yeah I know. lol

but for me, I wasn't disappointed with the A1200.

with commodore's lack of vision for the amiga? sure.

vision without action is a daydream, but, action without vision is a nightmare.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by abu_the_monkey

vision without action is a daydream, but, action without vision is a nightmare.

I think that's one of the best ways to describe the kind of problem that Commodore had. Of course the A1200 wasn't a bad machine and especially not for the price it sold, but it lacked what made the Amiga exciting in the late 80s.

[abu_the_monkey]

it lacked what made the Amiga exciting in the late 80s.

I can't argue with anyone on that

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by hammer

One of TIGA's use case was 8514 compatible product i.e. an 8514 clone.

Having programmed the TIGA, I can ensure you that the TMS340x0 is not at all compatible to the IBM 8514. It is really a very different horse. To give you a very simple argument, the TMS34010 does not even offer direct access to the frame buffer. As this impacted the design of PC graphics cards a lot, an IBM 8514 clone was often integrated on such cards.

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by hammer

FYI, I screen grabbed that Amiga Format's page with two green arrow markings on it. I used green marked Amiga Format's page in AW.net's forum.

You claimed I didn't know corporate cost cutting behavior. You assumed.

Bullshit.

You're NOT following this topic's purpose.

It depends.

My employment was part of the supply chain for Australia's vehicle manufacturers.

lol - trying to address this is not worth mine (and your) time - you win i loose - happy?

Originally Posted by hammer

Intel has the leadership to rapidly evolve and defeat most "big iron" RISC competitors in the 1990s and push them out from the desktop computer market. "Only the Paranoid Survives".

Intel tried many times to create x86 alternative and every time failed (432, 860) - in fact Intel was victim and hostage of the x86 popularity, unable to start something different incompatible with x86 and biggest Intel curse. This is fact.

Originally Posted by hammer

PC clones can reach a certain price and performance point with 486 class CPU in the $1000 USD and $1500 price range in 1993. PC had a strong 256 color use case. PC clone chipset vendors focus on cost reduced super IO chips while delivering competitive performance.

Yep, strong 256 colors with 64KiB page size - good luck with your 320x200.

Originally Posted by hammer

This topic is about A1200 criticism. Stay on topic.

Trying but with you shuffling partially true, partially not - information's this is difficult.

Originally Posted by hammer

Nope. Apple's Macintosh Display Card 8·24 GC for its Macintosh IIfx, featuring an AMD's 30 MHz Am29000 RISC CPU as its graphics co-processor. QuickDraw was accelerated by this graphics card.

Read https://lowendmac.com/1990/macintosh...y-card-8-24gc/

Macintosh Display Card 8·24 GC and Macintosh IIfx were released in March 1990. There's a 3 year interval from 1987's color Quick Draw and 1990's accelerated color Quick Draw.

So you confirm with above example that Apple was not good in HW at all (i mean in past they considered HW as less important than SW - perhaps this is not the bad approach) so fundamentally Apple approach was similar to PC. Apple philosophy was clear - not provide HW acceleration as standard in their products - for very long time this was same approach as in PC - lets do everything with CPU, substantial difference is that Apple provided neat API's to remove direct HW bit banging.

Originally Posted by hammer

Look in the mirror with your misinformation, hypocrite.

Obviously You are immature or with some social deficit - unable to participate in reasonable discussion without expressing emotions and trying to insult someone not agreeing with you - sorry - this is sometimes hilarious, sometimes annoying - i have mixed feelings.

Originally Posted by hammer

In modern times, Apple's M3 40 core GPU has the second best RT performance mobile and pref/watt vendor beating AMD's desktop RX 7800 XT and mobile RX 7900M.

AMD needs desktop RX 7900 XT to barely overcome Apple's mobile M3 40 core GPU.

Refer to https://www.cgdirector.com/cinebench-2024-scores/

It's a no brainer to why AMD didn't win any new laptop with discrete graphics design wins in CES 2024. PC laptop vendors have shown no mercy on AMD's Radeon group.

First this is way off topic, secondly we trying to compare comparable i.e. 3 groups of market here - Amiga, Mac, PC in tie between 1984..1994 i.e. Amiga timeline. I don't care about Apple HW and SW - it never get my attention and i never participated in Apple hype.

Originally Posted by hammer

One of TIGA's use case was 8514 compatible product i.e. an 8514 clone.

It was marketed like a 8514 compatible clone.
Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_8514 under the clone section

This is example of your misinformation - TIGA is not 8514 compatible - this is different API however you may translate 8514 API to TIGA API and use non 8514 compliant graphics HW to emulate 8514 functionality.
8514 clones are compatible at the register levels if not then they emulate 8514 trough different HW by using SW. There was few 8514 clones so you could do bit bang and expect same from IBM design and clone design.

Originally Posted by hammer

AMD's K5 reused Am29K microarchitecture with X86 decoders and it's considered as a clone X86 CPU. The same for Transmeta's VLIW-based microarchitecture as an X86-64 clone.

Are you sure? Any source of claim that 29K microcode was used to emulate x86 or perhaps 29K HW design with special, different than native 29K microcode was used to provide x86 ISA?
This is two different things - it is quite obvious to reuse good HW design but perhaps technical subtleties may lead to some modification - it doesn't mean that 29K run x86 binary code as 29K rune OWN code and was used as fast RISC CPU.

IBM in past, in some products used MC68000 modified at microcode level to emulate S/370 ISA but this not made MC68000 S/370 compatible CPU.

AFAIR Transmeta was never x86-64 clone - only x86 ISA was emulated.

Originally Posted by hammer

"There's many ways to skin a cat".

Well... if you say so - it s also many ways to provide misinformation especially if by mistake or not author of misinformation seem don't understand technical subtleties...

Originally Posted by hammer

For the PC market, a clone is a functional duplication from the original PC de-facto standard and the actual internal implementation must be a clean sheet design. It's not wise to copy IBM's designs without a "clean sheet" design.

My PC "clone" usage is consistent for both X86 CPUs and PC graphics cards and consistent with the mainstream PC clone definition.

?!? I'm lost - will you be able to rephrase above to be more clear and please avoid marketing BS... This is opposite to general knowledge about PC - IBM released technicalities and allowed for duplication without clean-sheet - only BIOS was copyrighted so PC market closely followed IBM design. EGA was continuation of CGA and VGA was continuation of EGA and VGA...

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by Promilus

You can use CIA, Paula and Denise with either of those as well. Why are you so determined to enforce such blatant lies?

? How you can use Paula without emulating some Agnus functionality - or Denise without Agnus - you need all 3 IC's connected together or you need to put lot of glue logic to emulate Agnus - only CPU can be different than MC68K. It could be hilarious to see some ARM or x86 based "Amiga" (yes, i'm aware of Pistorm).

Originally Posted by Promilus

Z80 comes from i8080 which is the basis for 8085 for which most of those add-ons were created, 68000 hardly uses intel "standard chips". What's your point exactly? Amiga doesn't use 8255 even if it is fairly easy to interface and "standard" ... but Amiga's CIA (or Commodore's CIA) is just as easily interfaced to any other CPU family and is ISA agnostic, just as Paula or Denise are. The one thing why commodore's stuff never became the same "standard IC" as the one from PC is... nobody f... king cared about that stuff! Those chips ain't anything else than Amiga custom chips!
The only difference is that amiga ICs were exclusive when both motorola, zilog, intel, amd etc. chips were widely used in different machines.

Z80 comes from 8080 but it is different than 8080. Amiga not use 8255 but some Amiga expansion boards use 8255. And yes, pointed that CIA's is pretty standard LSI. And for example Z80 family I/O IC's was NOT widely used on other HW than Z80 (i mean Z80 CTC, PIO, SIO etc)
My point was that you limited standard to SSI and MSI logic, mostly 7400 family where my point was that some LSI are also standard i.e. largely ISA agnostic. And there is large portfolio for those standard LSI's (VLSI's, ULSI;s etc). IC's like Gayle, Gary are practically useless out of Amiga - you can use them but probably same functionality can be achieved easier, Akiko is very similar, perhaps C2P conversion has some added value but if this is worth something out of Amiga?

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

Having programmed the TIGA, I can ensure you that the TMS340x0 is not at all compatible to the IBM 8514. It is really a very different horse. To give you a very simple argument, the TMS34010 does not even offer direct access to the frame buffer. As this impacted the design of PC graphics cards a lot, an IBM 8514 clone was often integrated on such cards.

TIGA was the software interface standard that TI used with their TMS340x0 chips. But a 'TIGA' card could use any hardware that was able to run TIGA code. It could even be implemented entirely in software, since applications never touched the hardware directly.

Wikipedia says:-

The (limited) success of the graphics cards paved the way for products based upon various derivatives and clones of IBM's 8514 architecture.[citation needed] Part of the effort to make graphics accelerators useful required TI to convince Microsoft that the internal interfaces to its Windows Operating System had to be adaptable instead of hard-coded. Indeed, all versions of Windows prior to Windows 3.0 were "hard-coded" to specific graphics hardware.

A device-independent graphics language is what the world would eventually need, but in 1989 it wasn't. CGA/EGA/VGA hardware was the standard. The BIOS had nothing to help programmers other than setting the card registers up for a particular screen mode. After that they were on their own - and that's how PC coders liked it. Games were working with bitmaps and just wanted the fastest possible access to the (dumb) frame buffer. Any special effects such as hardware scrolling or split screens had to bang the VGA registers directly.

Until Windows 95 became established, mainstream PC graphics was a hardware standard that both games and apps could (mostly) rely on because manufacturers made sure that their chips were compatible. Any differences between them would be handled by the application itself.

The Amiga and other home computers were the same, each having its own graphics hardware 'standard'. However the Amiga also had a ROM-based OS with an efficient API that could be used to avoid working directly with the hardware. Of course that API was optimized for the hardware underneath, and the OS internally expected that hardware to be there so replacing it with something different was difficult.

In the future this would have to change, like it did with Windows. Luckily Commodore managed to avoid this by going bankrupt and stopping development of the Amiga, so today we don't have to worry about whether our Amigas have compatible graphics hardware.

It's funny how some Amiga fans today still suffer from extreme PC envy, to the point where they hold up the IBM 8514 as an example of why the A1200 was so disappointing. But no PC fan back then was concerned about it. So long as they had VGA in 320x200 with 256 colors they were happy (since the alternative was crappy EGA or even worse CGA). The A1200's graphics were in many ways better than a typical PC of the day, yet many fans perceived it as being worse. Why? Perhaps because PC VGA games had more colors than OCS, and new games were coming out on the PC first and then being badly ported the Amiga (if at all). To counter that the A1200 had to be light years ahead of a high-end PC, which of course it wasn't and couldn't be.

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

TIGA was the software interface standard that TI used with their TMS340x0 chips. But a 'TIGA' card could use any hardware that was able to run TIGA code. It could even be implemented entirely in software, since applications never touched the hardware directly.

TIGA is for "TI Graphics Adapter", and yes, it comes with a standard API, and a standard set of graphics primitives in the form of a software library. But the library runs on the TMS chip and not host-side, so - I afraid no. TIGA was nothing like "OpenGL" or "DirectX" became to be. The "loadtiga" command of the A2410 card contains that library and loads it on the TMS, and the "a2410.device" is a user of this library.



Back then, this was a very advanced concept (and the TMS a very fine chip), just on the expensive side, and its host interface sucked.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

It's funny how some Amiga fans today still suffer from extreme PC envy, to the point where they hold up the IBM 8514 as an example of why the A1200 was so disappointing.

The 8514 was quite disappointing compared to the Amiga - back then. However, the larger PC market changed that rather quickly while CBM management was asleep and issued stupid management directives not to advance the chipset.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

To counter that the A1200 had to be light years ahead of a high-end PC, which of course it wasn't and couldn't be.

When the Amiga started, it actually was *quite* ahead of the PC (maybe not lightyears, but noticably). When it came under CBM management, that changed and around the time of the A1200, it was pretty close, and no longer ahead of anything else, also thanks to such great management decisions. Of course also because the machine was perceived, and advocated and marketed as a toy, so "serious users bought serious boring machines" that were quite behind at the beginning.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by TCD

I think that's one of the best ways to describe the kind of problem that Commodore had. Of course the A1200 wasn't a bad machine and especially not for the price it sold, but it lacked what made the Amiga exciting in the late 80s.

This happens to everything. I remember the first time I saw a color TV in the early 70's. I wasn't a golf fan so the program on air shouldn't have excited me, but those colors! I stopped watching TV many years ago and today it only gets used with the computer. I look at the latest 80" OLED TVs at the local department store and they are impressive - but not enough to buy one.

If you didn't have an Amiga in the late 80's the A1200 would have been just as exciting as the A500 was in 1987. But because you had "been there, done that" it was just more of the same. The PC was a bit different, and so was exciting if you weren't familiar with it.

I bought an IBM JX in 1990, 3 years after getting the A1000. Despite being totally inferior to the Amiga, I found myself becoming more interested in it. I bought an extra internal floppy drive, upgraded the BIOS and DOS to 3.3 (now supporting 720k 3.5" disks, woohoo!), and expanded the memory to 512k by soldering chips over the existing ones on the RAM board. Bought a serial mouse and had to hack the driver to get it working. Then I wrote a paint program mimicking Deluxe Paint, using the JX's 16 color (PC JR/Tandy) 320x200 graphics mode.

But why would I spend so much time on such a crappy machine, when I had an Amiga which was so much better? Because I had never owned a PC before so it was new and exciting!

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

When the Amiga started, it actually was *quite* ahead of the PC (maybe not lightyears, but noticably). When it came under CBM management, that changed

This is not correct. Sure it had better gaming/animation hardware, but it wasn't ahead of the PC in other areas.

IBM introduced the PC-AT in 1984 with a 6 MHz 80286 (equivalent to or slightly faster than an 8MHz 68000), EGA graphics with sharp 640x350 flicker-free graphics in 16 colors, 1.2 MB floppy drive, 20 MB hard drive and up to 512kB of RAM on-board. It was much more expensive the A1000, but also much more capable.

When Commodore bought the Amiga in 1984 it only had composite video output with insufficient resolution to do hires properly. Its multitasking GUI OS was incomplete and full of bugs, and it didn't even have a DOS. Compared to the PC-AT it was a joke for anything except TV games. Commodore took that design and give it RGB output, added DOS and stabilized the OS so it was actually usable as a computer which could rival the PC.

The A1000 sold for the same price and was much better than the IBM PC JR, but the PC JR wasn't 'the PC'. In fact the PC industry treated it as a joke (which it deserved). But the PC industry also treated the Amiga as a joke. What, no text mode? Where's the hard drive? Why does it flicker in hires?

and around the time of the A1200, it was pretty close, and no longer ahead of anything else, also thanks to such great management decisions. Of course also because the machine was perceived, and advocated and marketed as a toy, so "serious users bought serious boring machines" that were quite behind at the beginning.

Just as the PC-AT was ahead of the A1000 in computing capability, so a 386 was ahead of the A1200. But that's an unfair comparison because the A1200 was designed to be a low-end machine and was priced way below the cost of even the cheapest PC. The machine to compare would be the A4000, which had similar specs to a typical 486 of the time. And yeah, it cost about the same as a name brand 486 with similar specs too, but that's hardly surprising. An A1000 with 512k and 20MB hard drive would have cost about the same as a PC-AT too.