Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[BigD]

Originally Posted by pandy71

This functionality was obvious and normal for Amiga users and it is quite obvious that it was not appreciated .

Agreed! It was most obvious with the apathy towards M$ Works and how substandard that suite was! Wordworth/PageStream with TurboPrint ran rings around it! I guess because the PC was "the standard" people put up with it! I remember killing a Windows 95 PC when borrowing it to print a report a Uni and it died while I was pushing it to multitask! Crazy! Dodgy hard drive but still!

[BigD]

@hammer

PC DOS has the superior Mortal Kombat 1 and 2 ports when compared to 16-bit Amiga ports.

Other than the fact most PeeCee idiots player it with a flight stick and expected their mate to play versus on a keyboard! The same people slagged off the Amiga as only a games machine!

[Cyprian]

Originally Posted by Promilus

The only real issue is... both PC and Atari ST were made from parts widely available. Amiga was not.

Custom ASICs:
- Atari ST: GLUE/MMU/DMA/SHIFTER/BLITTER;
- Amiga 500: PAULA/DENISE/AGNUS;


Off the shelf chips:
- Atari ST: 68000, 2xACIA,YM2149,MFP, WD1772, 8bit keyboard CPU, a bunch of 74x TTLs.
- Amiga 500: 68000, 2xCIA, 8bit keyboard CPU, a bunch of 74x TTLs.

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

The reason is you need 4 DAC08s* which aren't cheap, plus all the support circuitry. That's probably what the Lorraine prototype had in it.

However I think that sending I2S serial data out of Paula to an 'industry standard' external audio DAC would be a good idea. It would cost a bit more but be a lot more flexible and produce higher quality sound. This is similar to how AGA used a 'standard' external Video DAC with built-in color palette registers rather than try to integrate it into Lisa.

Issue is high cost for any I2S audio DAC back then (also if recall correctly first audio DAC's on CD usually using parallel interface) - first CD players use single DAC shared between channels to reduce overall unit cost significantly.

And seem 4x 8 bit DAC was lower cost for Amiga designers (Paula was probably not designed by Jay Miner) - they could use since very first time at a a cost of two 8 bit registers (lets say 74374) only 2 DAC's and sample interleaving - this was quite obvious choice if PWM audio level control was selected - place everything in time domain, use extensively sample interleaving, simplify analog part.

ICS/OCS/ECS/AGA use video DAC since very beginning (Denise RGB was last call choice and as such 12 bit limit due pin limit in 48 pin package).

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I also think it would be awesome to reproduce Paula with standard chips, like how the 6502 has been reproduced with standard logic gates. Obviously not cost-effective, but a great retro project!

I see no added value in this unless someone is able to reproduce hypothetical Paula distortions.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

* actually more than that because it has to pull both up and down. I'm not sure how Jay Miner would have done that - perhaps a current mirror selected with bit 7, then you only need a 7 bit DAC.

Usually this is done trough switching OPAMP from inverting to non inverting.

The datasheet says "interfaces to most 8-bit and 16-bit microprocessors" and "is easily interfaced to any bus-oriented system" with suggested applications ranging from music synthesis to audible alarms and FSK modems. This indicates that they intended it to be an 'industry standard' part, which is what it became. However if you look more closely you see that the bus control signals are specific to General Instrument's own CP1610 CPU. To use other CPUs you need a few gates to convert the bus signals. There were also customized versions that were slightly different. Nevertheless it's clear that the chip was designed for general purpose use, not a specific product.

In comparison, Paula was designed to work only with Agnus/Alice in the Amiga. Commodore never even hinted that it might be possible to use it on another architecture, and doing so would be rather difficult when there was no application information. Thus it would meet the definition of 'custom chip' even if Commodore didn't call it that.[/QUOTE]

Generally this was my point - Agnus+Denise+Paula work together as they are designed in such way but you can hook to them probably any 16/32 bit CPU - so we can imagine for example x86 as a heart of Amiga and proud stamp "Intel inside" on top of everything.

I just tried to point that some LSI's can be considered as standard logic same as TTL 74 family of the SSI's and MSI's.

[Promilus]

Originally Posted by Cyprian

Custom ASICs:
- Atari ST: GLUE/MMU/DMA/SHIFTER/BLITTER;
- Amiga 500: PAULA/DENISE/AGNUS;


Off the shelf chips:
- Atari ST: 68000, 2xACIA,YM2149,MFP, WD1772, 8bit keyboard CPU, a bunch of 74x TTLs.
- Amiga 500: 68000, 2xCIA, 8bit keyboard CPU, a bunch of 74x TTLs.

Lorraine was bunch of standard logic, then Commodore went ahead and integrated it inside few ASICs... half of decade earlier than PC cloners begun integrating standard IBM PC components into actual custom north and south bridges. From a certain point of view Amiga guys already did what PC guys were planning (but to prototype, and it was WIP as some functionality didn't take ASIC form until A500 and later revisions of A2k). From other point of view should Commodore survive and maybe invest more into own semiconductor plant chipset most likely would look exactly like PC chipset during 486 era and later... On the other hand PAL or GAL chips are standard, off the shelf chips, but the logic they can hold might be quite unique. And so it happens quite a lot with Amiga products. So my point is... don't go into that mess and certainly never claim PC cloners did bad things by integrating many chips into few bigger ones just to "make it cheaper".

[hammer]

Originally Posted by BigD

@hammer


Other than the fact most PeeCee idiots player it with a flight stick and expected their mate to play versus on a keyboard! The same people slagged off the Amiga as only a games machine!

PC had "Gravis Gamepad" e.g. [ Show youtube player ]
DOS Mortal Kombat on a DOS 486 PC with a Gravis Gamepad Pro.

The "most" argument is flawed when the PC market is very large.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by BigD

Agreed! It was most obvious with the apathy towards M$ Works and how substandard that suite was! Wordworth/PageStream with TurboPrint ran rings around it! I guess because the PC was "the standard" people put up with it! I remember killing a Windows 95 PC when borrowing it to print a report a Uni and it died while I was pushing it to multitask! Crazy! Dodgy hard drive but still!

For 1993, Commodore International released two A1200 starter packs:
1. WordWorth AGA, Print Manager, Day by Day, and Personal Paint 4.
2. Elite II: Frontier, Total Carnage, Brian the Lion, Batman Returns, and Zool 2.

Elite II: Frontier needs CPU power and Fast RAM.

There are A1200 packs such as ChartBuster and Desktop Dynamite packs.

ChartBuster includes Nigel Mansells World Championship Racing, Trolls, International Sports Challenge, Paradriod 90, Cool Croc Twins, and Indianapolis 500.

Indianapolis 500 needs CPU power and Fast RAM.

In the same period, PC (at least 386DX-33) has texture-mapped 3D IndyCar Racing which is the successor to Indianapolis 500.

---

Desktop Dynamite pack includes Wordworth AGA, Print Manager, Deluxe Paint IV AGA, Oscar AGA, and Dennis The Menace AGA.

Most of these bundled games are in the "16-bit" era 2D experiences.

Reference
Amiga Shopper Issue 31, 1991 November.
https://archive.org/details/Amiga_Sh...ge/n3/mode/2up


A4000/030 reached 899 UKP at this point. Beaten by 486SX-33 and Commodore's own DT486DX-25 PC clones.

The PC had more than the bundled OEM "MS Works". PC has PageMaker 4.x and QuarkXPress 3.x. Windows 3.1 has Works 2.0 or 3.0.

"Hard disk" is common for both PC and Amiga.

A3000/030 reached 699.99 UKP and it's missing 289 UKP CD32 AGA card.

I purchased my Windows 95 Pentium 150-based PC in 1996 and it obliterated the Amiga. Works 4.0 is for Windows 95. In 1996, Claris Works 1.0 was given for free on various PC cover disks e.g. https://archive.org/details/PCPRO0796

Turbo Print is needed for maximizing the 9-pin printer's print quality and it's less of a problem for 24-pin or ink jet printers.

The Amiga platform has a very competitive price for professional software but when Amiga's gaming lost its powerhouse reputation, Amiga's professional application market couldn't sustain the Amiga platform. The PC world has moved on from a baseline Wordsworth / Page stream into an integrated knowledge-based system, automated document generation with an accounting system. Many workflow automation is built on top of MS Office products and this is the killer app.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

But the application doesn't manipulate the hardware directly. High level graphics commands and parameters are sent to the board through the driver, to be executed by the TMS310x0 chip. A driver could be written that takes this information and uses it to control totally different hardware.

But why am I telling you this? You know it already.

640x480 in 256 colors was 'quite disappointing compared to the Amiga' in 1987?

"stupid management directives not to advance the chipset" - is not correct. AGA was in continuous development from 1989 to 1992.

For comparison:

From NVIDIA's 1993 founding to NV1's 1995 release, the R&D process to product release time interval is about 2 years.

NV1 was influenced by ex-Sun GX quadrilateral 3D accelerator key engineer and NVIDIA's co-founder. NVIDIA burned through venture capital's cash and quickly released NV3 (RiVA 128) in Jan 1997.

NVIDIA had the advantage of AMD's experience CPU engineer and Sun GX quadrilateral 3D accelerator engineer.

"AGA was in continuous development from 1989 to 1992" is not true since DaveH claimed "more than 6 months" were wasted on ECS-based A1000Jr's development and product offering to the Commodore national-level sales teams.

Without "more than 6 months wasted", A1200's October 1992 release would be in the March-April 1992 release window and A600 would be AGA.

Since the Amiga has inherited a game console nature, A1000Jr's ECS is not modular and upgradable like on PC's VGA cards.

The Amiga design should have shifted into modular design after 1987's A500/A2000 release.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

The first prototype AA chipset was produced in late November 1990. Of course it was buggy. By February 1991 it was good enough to boot Dave Haynie's A3000 Plus. Soon afterwards Irving Gould announced in an interview with Amiga Computing magazine that a new chipset was coming and should be ready "this fall". By late March 1991 they had fully working AA prototype chips, but the engineers had a list of 10 extra things they wanted to put in it.

Remember, Commodore West Germany demanded hard disk capability and they refused to sell another Amiga model without hard disk capability.

AGA chipset still works without PCMCIA and IDE. CDTV's cutdown SCSI controller could do the job for the AGA-powered CD-ROM Amiga SKU.

AA3000+ doesn't have the Gayle (IDE, PCMCIA) chip. DaveH gave AA3000+'s PCB design to the Amiga community for AA3000+ PCB manufacturing.

Moving the SCSI from the Ramsey bus into Super Buster's Zorro bus exposes the bugs on Zorro III.

Due to Commodore Germany's demands, the priority changed to IDE 1st before AGA.

IDE was first developed by Western Digital and Compaq in 1986 for compatible hard drives and CD or DVD drives.

Commodore released the A590 in 1989 with 8-bit XT-IDE and SCSI support.

Commodore Colt (XT clone, US PC 10-III version) had 8-bit XT-IDE. The Commodore PC10-III was released in 1988 along with the PC20-III and Commodore Colt. IBM "PCJr" (XT) was crazy enough.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by hammer

Elite II: Frontier needs CPU power and Fast RAM.

No it doesn't, especially on the A1200.

I've played, and I'm not alone, countless hours on Frontier on a stock A600.

Dont over exagerate 1993 players expectations.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

No it doesn't, especially on the A1200.

I've played, and I'm not alone, countless hours playing Frontier on a stock A600.

Dont over exagerate 1993 players expectations.

I played Elite II Frontier on A3000 with 68030 @ 25 MHz and 386DX-33 PC. I recently played Elite II Frontier on stock A1200 and it needs a faster CPU or Fast RAM. PiStorm32 can be disabled by the keyboard button on boot.

PC's Frontier: Elite 2 (1993) are texture mapped.

[ Show youtube player ]
Shock A1200 shows a slideshow a Frontier: Elite 2. It's not up to SNES StarFox standard.

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by hammer

I played Elite II Frontier on A3000 with 68030 @ 25 MHz and 386DX-33 PC. I recently played Elite II Frontier on stock A1200 and it needs a faster CPU or Fast RAM. PiStorm32 can be disabled by the keyboard button on boot.

PC's Frontier: Elite 2 (1993) are texture mapped.

[ Show youtube player ]
Shock A1200 shows a slideshow a Frontier: Elite 2. It's not up to SNES StarFox standard.

Yeah but as Sokolovic said "Dont over exagerate 1993 players expectations."

I played many many months of Frontier on a stock 1200 and loved every minute. Framerate just wasn't that big of a deal because I'd never seen it running any better than that.

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by Dunny

I played many many months of Frontier on a stock 1200 and loved every minute. Framerate just wasn't that big of a deal because I'd never seen it running any better than that.

Same here.
Actually, I played it a lot fairly recently on my Amiga 500 with Aca 500+ (14Mhz), and it's speed is just about the same as A1200. And it was totally fine experience, even today, for me.

And I suppose, it was quite playable on A500, as long as you stay away from flying low on planets surfaces.

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by hammer

Intel didn't factor in software sells hardware and business software is a powerful use case factor.

This topic is about A1200 criticism. Stay on topic.

Originally Posted by hammer

AMD's RISC 29K CPUs are no different.

This topic is about A1200 criticism. Stay on topic.

Originally Posted by hammer

1987 VGA encapsulated 1986 MCGA.

This topic is about A1200 criticism. Stay on topic.

Originally Posted by hammer

Apple's Quickdraw has a unified ecosystem while it's separated on Commodore's OCS/ECS/AGA and Video Toaster's 2MB 24-bit frame buffer and it's hardware-specific Toaster software.

Quickdraw's performance scales with graphics hardware's capabilities.

This topic is about A1200 criticism. Stay on topic.

Originally Posted by hammer

PC DOS has the superior Mortal Kombat 1 and 2 ports when compared to 16-bit Amiga ports.

This topic is about A1200 criticism. Stay on topic.

Originally Posted by hammer

Before 68K Amiga's Star Wars Dark Forces port, I ran the Mac 68K version on A500/A1200-PiStorm-Emu68. If I had CyberStorm 060 and CyberGraphics 64 for my A3000, I would have run Star Wars Dark Forces for the MacOS 68K. Might as well buy a Mac at this point.

This topic is about A1200 criticism. Stay on topic.

Originally Posted by hammer

There you go again. You engaged in personal attacks and assumed I don't have corporate experience.

You started the personality-based flame war.

You assumed that if i don't share your point of view then it means that i personally attacking you so you started personality-based flame war.

FYI i don't share some point of view for some people in this threads yet only you feel to start consider disagreement as personal attack and started personality-based flame war...

But most important - you departed from this topic's - A1200 criticism subject. Stay on topic.

Originally Posted by hammer

Wrong. This topic is about the A1200, and by extension A1200 based CD32.

This topic is about A1200 vs world. A1000 was released around mid-1985 in limited numbers.

This topic is about A1200 criticism. So please, stay on topic.

Originally Posted by hammer

The technical implementation details wouldn't matter to the end-user and general PC market when the AIB vendor marketed the TIGA-based card as 8514 compatible.

But performance matters and technical details directly affecting performance.
Anyway this topic is about A1200 criticism. So please, stay on topic.

Originally Posted by hammer

TIGA is not important for IBM's dominated PC standards.

There are more 8514 clones when compared to TIGA.

I don't care about TIGA and I never participated in Texas Instruments Graphics Architecture's hype.

Rendition's MIPS-based Verite V1000 emulated VGA and it was slow i.e. not fast VGA competitive. Verite V1000's slow VGA impacted Quake and Doom.

This topic is about A1200 criticism. So please, stay on topic.

Originally Posted by hammer

Registers can be emulated.
Registers can be emulated.

Everything can be emulated but emulation is usually SLOW/SLOWER.
Anyway this topic is about A1200 criticism. So please, stay on topic.

Originally Posted by hammer

I didn't claim the K5 runs 29K instruction set. AMD marketed K5 as RISC with X86 decoders.

https://websrv.cecs.uci.edu/~papers/...LES/081401.pdf

To keep the K5 design pure, AMD says that no one associated with the Intel-derived designs was involved.


AMD borrowed heavily from the microarchitecture work that was done for the superscalar 29K, which was designed earlier, and much of the design team had 29K experience.


Two things that were used from AMD’s x86 experience are the compatibility test suites and validation methods that had been developed to test the clean-room 486 microcode.

To validate the design running real software, a Quickturn-based hardware emulator was used. Running on the hardware emulator, the K5 booted
DOS in July and Windows in August.

AMD believes that its investment in hardware emulation, which turned up
about two dozen subtle bugs, will pay off in chips that have few problems in
the initial silicon.

...
The overall style of the micro-architecture is most similar to that used by NexGen’s Nx586, in which x86 instructions are decoded only one at a time but are translated into RISC-like operations that are executed in parallel.



Quake's strong FPU requirement culled X86 CPU cloners.

K5 runs into the clock speed wall.



There's no point with 29K ISA since its R&D was terminated in late 1995.



AMD terminated 29K R&D in 1995 for the profitable X86 business.



The customers are interested in S/370 software running on IBM-provided hardware and support contracts.

According to Linus Torvalds, Transmeta's Crusoe native code has no concept of memory protection, and there's no MMU.



There was no misinformation when AIB vendors marketed 8514 compatible addon cards with TIGA chips.

NVIDIA's RTX GPUs have RISC-V CPU, but it's hidden by NVIDIA. Customers are only interested in its marketed use case. NVIDIA's CUDA influence and dominance are beyond TIGA.

This topic is about A1200 criticism. So please, stay on topic.

Originally Posted by hammer

For example, 8514's registers are published.

Nope, you simply spreading misinformation:

http://www.os2museum.com/wp/the-8514...cs-accelerator

Adapter Interface (AI)

IBM never published register-level documentation for the 8514/A (although several clone manufacturers did). The only documented programming interface was the so-called AI, or Adapter Interface. The AI was a software interface (implemented as a DOS TSR), deliberately not specific to the 8514/A.

Btw this topic is about A1200 criticism. Stay on topic.

Originally Posted by hammer

IBM's VGA design wasn't designed for low cost. ET3000 has ET3000AX 1108AF-0005 custom ASIC. ET3000 was released in late 1987.

IBM design was relatively low cost accordingly to IBM prices - also it is relatively cheap from engineering perspective , one ASIC, RAM, ROM, RAMDAC, bit of glue logic - cheaper than CGA or MDA in mass production.

But anyway this topic is about A1200 criticism. So please, stay on topic.

[sandruzzo]

@pandy71

Your reply is a masterpiece: But anyway this topic is about A1200 criticism. So please, stay on topic!! I love it!

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by hammer

"AGA was in continuous development from 1989 to 1992" is not true since DaveH claimed "more than 6 months" were wasted on ECS-based A1000Jr's development and product offering to the Commodore national-level sales teams.

Dave Haynie was on the engineering team that was developing AGA. They were working on it at the same time the ECS-based 'A1000Jr' was being developed. So while it may be true that 6 months work was wasted on that machine, it didn't delay the introduction of AGA. The only reason the A1000+'s spec was changed to ECS was that AGA wasn't finished! And the reason it wasn't finished was that the engineers didn't get it done on time.

Without "more than 6 months wasted", A1200's October 1992 release would be in the March-April 1992 release window and A600 would be AGA.

You don't get it. If the 'A1000jr' project had never been started it wouldn't have made a difference.

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by sandruzzo

@pandy71

Your reply is a masterpiece: But anyway this topic is about A1200 criticism. So please, stay on topic!! I love it!

Sorry but this is outcome of the life learned lessons - is someone not playing fair than i also no longer feel to be obligated play fair.

[Promilus]

@pandy71 - took you long enough to notice

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by Promilus

@pandy71 - took you long enough to notice

I assure you - i always notice such things and always trying to provide some credit of trust - the faster you deplete credit the faster you get my reaction, i can play same weapon if i need to do so.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by hammer

Remember, Commodore West Germany demanded hard disk capability and they refused to sell another Amiga model without hard disk capability.

Good policy. Commodore was an early adopter of IDE so they wouldn't have any trouble putting it into new models, despite the IDE standard not arriving until 1993. They way they implemented it in Gayle was so simple that any hobbyist can reproduce it with a few standard logic chips.

AGA chipset still works without PCMCIA and IDE. CDTV's cutdown SCSI controller could do the job for the AGA-powered CD-ROM Amiga SKU.

The CDTV's (optional plugin card) SCSI controller is not 'cutdown'. Amiga adopted SCSI early on because it was a standard which had a lot of support from the industry, as well as having wider application (IDE only worked with hard drives, and wasn't available until 1987 - by which time SCSI was well established on the Amiga). However by 1991 IDE was becoming a de-facto standard on PCs due to its lower cost, while SCSI was only being used in servers. Therefore it made sense to put IDE into the Amiga, especially the low-end models.

AA3000+ doesn't have the Gayle (IDE, PCMCIA) chip. DaveH gave AA3000+'s PCB design to the Amiga community for AA3000+ PCB manufacturing.

Commodore US engineers preferred SCSI due to its higher performance and because it was an Amiga 'standard'. This is just another illustration of how they were concentrating on the high end rather than than making machines for the market. They designed the stuff they themselves wanted and didn't care how much it cost. This is one reason the A3000+ was cancelled - a good call IMO.

Design of thee A1000+ was assigned to Joe Augenbraun, who developed the A590. He put IDE in the A1000+ because it was cheaper. But the A1000+ wasn't completed because the AA chipset wasn't ready for it.

There was talk of making an A500 with AA too, but they had already begun work on the A500+ with ECS chipset and KS2.0 in July 1990. This was supposed to come out in January 1991, but was delayed by Agnus chip production problems. The PCB design was finalized by April 1991, but the machine wasn't released until 1992. This timeline was typical for Commodore, and custom chip design/production was a constant problem. Even the C64 suffered from it. Though it only took a year to develop, several bugs were still there on launch and it took another year to fix them.

[oscar_ates]

Why so little changes took so much time? Even if you look AGA it was a decade almost and they added 3 bit planes more few sprites and a 32 bits off the shelf cpu