Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Promilus

@Gorf - yes, but such DSP has to be properly placed in chipset... just slapping one to 68k bus ain't gonna solve a lot of things. DSP embedded in chipset and obviously with more DMA channels and faster RAM - that's the way to go...

AGA has already not enough bandwidth an ChipRam for VideoDMA and CPU and is slowing down the CPU ... so adding a DSP there would be a terrible idea.

To completely rework the Chipset, go full 32bit or better 64bit and give Alice some DSP functionality and Paula 16 channels at 16bit ... sure ... but that is nothing that could have been done in 90-92 by Commodore

Adding a DSP would at least mitigate some of the obvious or perceived deficits of the A1200.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Promilus

So let me get this straight... someone really expects that slapping DSP to 68k bus (instead close to what actually generates graphics) would solve the problems with inadequacies of Amiga hardware in terms of 3D gaming? How naive can you be?!

Only to some lesser degree.
It definitively would speed up raytracing, which was also quite big on the Amiga. It would also help in the video-processing field
And it would give the AGA machines multichannel 16bit sound capabilities - still using the same old Paula was pointed out as malus.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Yes, and what good did it do? Miner and co. kept trying to make it more 'cutting edge' with expensive VRAM and high resolutions.
...
But fans here would do the same - piss away expensive R&D on their 'dream machine' which would have so much stuff in it that it would be impossible to build, let alone be cheap enough to become popular. Then they would blame management for their own failure to produce a machine that the market wanted.

The Amiga needed o be cutting edge in 1985 to be a success later on.
Only starting from this high point allowed the development of the multitasking OS and the impressive gfx-capabilities that would make later low-cost machines a huge success.

Same would have been necessary for the next generation - but Commodore had lost the drive to do cutting edge technology. The result was a mediocre product that failed to replicate the success of the first generation.

The wrong people were in charge.

Steve Jobs explained the problem nicely:

[ Show youtube player ]

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

What sound issue?

Come again please, I could not hear you!

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Gorf

The Amiga needed o be cutting edge in 1985 to be a success later on.
Only starting from this high point allowed the development of the multitasking OS and the impressive gfx-capabilities that would make later low-cost machines a huge success.

Same would have been necessary for the next generation - but Commodore had lost the drive to do cutting edge technology. The result was a mediocre product that failed to replicate the success of the first generation.

The wrong people were in charge.

Steve Jobs explained the problem nicely:

[ Show youtube player ]

Echos Commodore's "read my lips, no new chips" directive during A3000's development.

After the original Los Gatos Amiga team was removed, there was an R&D winter between 1987 and 1988.

The unproven teams (who can convert workstation graphics for the masses) tried the Moonshot AAA in 1989 while AA and C65 were the backup plans.

Sales teams could have reported an increase of 256 color competition from PC VGA/SVGA (passed the 50% market share threshold in 1989, Dataquest) and SNES (1990 release). I remembered a Commodore sales rep answering questions about A3000's aging ECS from the press. Commodore sales rep made promises to address this issue. This is for the year 1990. A2410 (256 colors with foreign TIGA) was released in 1991.

1. C64's declining sales and C65's cancellation in 1991 by Irving Gould led to A300. Commodore UK "sales" advised Ali to develop the A300.

2. Commodore Germany's "sales team" demanded hard disk mass-produced Amiga after agreeing to A300's specification discussions. A300 specifications were largely driven by Commodore national-level managing directors.

3. Ali/Bill Sydnes declares IDE directive. PCMCIA was pitched in.

4. PCMCIA and IDE delayed the AA-based A1200 in 1991. PCMCIA would have impacted Fat Gary/Super Buster/Ramsey for cost-sensitive 32-bit A1200.

ECS-based A600 was developed (with Gayle replacing Gary, two TTLs for the bridge between Custom Chip and PCMCIA "memory only" mode buses) and released.

ECS-based "A1000Jr" was developed. No change for Fat Gary/Super Buster/Ramsey despite IDE (interface and extra chips) inclusion. Caused "more than six-months" delay.

5. A600's IDE and PCMCIA weren't system sellers and A600's sales have flopped during 1992.

No Commodore national sales team ordered the ECS-based "A1000Jr" despite having an IDE interface (no Gayle).

Meanwhile, competitors already released ET4000AX in 1989 and SNES in 1990.

[Promilus]

Originally Posted by Gorf

AGA has already not enough bandwidth an ChipRam for VideoDMA and CPU and is slowing down the CPU ... so adding a DSP there would be a terrible idea.

To completely rework the Chipset, go full 32bit or better 64bit and give Alice some DSP functionality and Paula 16 channels at 16bit ... sure ... but that is nothing that could have been done in 90-92 by Commodore

Adding a DSP would at least mitigate some of the obvious or perceived deficits of the A1200.

020 has already limited bandwidth with no stock fast ram at all, adding dsp to the mix would hardly help. And even if you do mix them up you have to provide enough bandwidth to both. Setting up the scene in FAST RAM any copy over finished data to chipram and leave chipset pretty much unused except of audio streaming and display of graphic data... What's the point of having hw blitter and copper in the first place? If you want to just display pre-calculated data any decent 2D RTG chip will do especially when at ZIII or equivalent bus. On the other hand DSP close to blitter could help with a lot of things, 2D or 3D alike... Blitter and copper being turned into actual programmable unit (not just few ops in relation to CRT lines) with some hw bit and block memory operations is basically something Atari tried with Tom but got stuck with some bugs. But the potential of such solution was great and actually Carmack did talk about that...

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Promilus

020 has already limited bandwidth with no stock fast ram at all, adding dsp to the mix would hardly help.

Sure: FastRAM is a must in all scenarios

Setting up the scene in FAST RAM any copy over finished data to chipram and leave chipset pretty much unused except of audio streaming and display of graphic data...

PCs were quite successful with that method until the arrival of dedicated GPUs

And it is how almost all 3d-games are done on the Amiga as well, if you want to focus on this area ... only without the help of a DSP, which could speed things up (see Falcon)

We are talking about 91/92 and why the AGA machines were largely perceived as lagging behind or not as innovative as expected.

A DSP would have been a viable option to push things forward.
I would of course prefer Commodore being a different company and driving the development of the chipset further as soon as OSC was finished and having AAA in 89 and so on ...

But in a more realistic scenario a DSP would have been a good option for the AGA machines and the work to integrate one was already done, the parts were available and cheap.
Would a DSP and FastRAM solve all problems? No.
Would it be better to have one? Yes.

[babsimov]

Originally Posted by Gorf

Within the given constraints by management ("No new chips!") the A3000 motherboard was a very good design.

It's possible, I never had a 3000. On the one hand it was way too expensive for me and I saw no point in it with the ECS.

And while I love the outer design of the case, it has its quirks in the inside and of course they should definitely made provisions to fit a VideoToaster inside - this alone would have doubled the sales of the A3000 for sure (low bar).

I also really like the design of the 3000 case, probably the most beautiful Amiga. But reality showed that this box did not correspond to what the market needed.

I also agree that sales of 3000 would have largely doubled if the box had been designed to be compatible with the videotaoster.

The integrated flicker-fixer was of course a hack and should have incorporated the Hadley-Device, which would have given real high resolution options for CAD and ray-tracers ...

Maybe, but that too would have been a hack and would not have looked professional at all.

What the 3000 really needed was a new chipset. Possibly the AGA, but it would have been better if it was the AA+.
In hindsight, the AAA was a stillborn project, as it was far too ambitious for Commodore's resources and excessively expensive to produce even in its "low-end" version.

An AGA or better AA+ project seriously started in 1987 or 1988 could have been on the market for september 1990. I think. Especially AGA which is just a little hack of the ECS.

A follow-up AA3000 as soon as the chips were ready (a whole year before the A4000) would also have made some impact.

The technology was already there, but management missed the opportunity.

As said a little above, the 3000 should have been the AA3000 from the beginning in 1990 (with the DSP included).

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by babsimov

As said a little above, the 3000 should have been the AA3000 from the beginning in 1990 (with the DSP included).

Or actually AAA/AA+

my point here was that the chips were already done and ready in spring of 91 and an AA3000(+) could have been released that year, if management would have allowed it.

But Commodore was busy burning money with the CDTV - very large sums of money

(I did a little research lately on the CDTV disaster and the damage it did was far greater than I would have expected ... they really went all in for that one ...)

[Promilus]

Originally Posted by Gorf

S
PCs were quite successful with that method until the arrival of dedicated GPUs

PCs weren't built around chipset handling unified memory for graphics, sound, peripherals and CPU ... That's the problem. But even PCs if had any "accelerators" those were embedded to device in expansion slot (like DSP for sound cards or 3D accelerator for 2D GPU, or PhysX accelerator), not sitting beside CPU.

And it is how almost all 3d-games are done on the Amiga as well, if you want to focus on this area ... only without the help of a DSP, which could speed things up (see Falcon)

That's how all of 3D games for PC were done up to mid 90s. Up to the point someone actually managed to create hardware acceleration for 3D and solid API for that. Because the first solutions were hardly solid (but there were different solutions... like Rendition Veritee V1000 which was based on RISC processor doing 3D stuff on own local memory). So as you can see it is way different than what amiga did provide back then. And when it comes to consoles - all of those had their computing cores fairly close to graphics unit. Exactly because it's way more efficient that way.

We are talking about 91/92 and why the AGA machines were largely perceived as lagging behind or not as innovative as expected.

And I say to you it's not something you can easily fix by slapping DSP beside 68k. At some point (if using 040 or 060) that DSP would've been a waste of resources anyway. On the other hand DSP embedded into chipset structure could've been used for many things even with existence of much more powerful main CPUs. But I would say AAA improved blitter&copper duo with very simple RISC processor was already damn good solution. Too bad they did not managed to implement it.

[babsimov]

Originally Posted by Gorf

Or actually AAA/AA+

AAA it was impossible anyway. We clearly saw that in reality, even in 1994 this chipset was not even finished and already obsolete.
And even in 1994 it was still over-expensive and unusable for entry-level models.
So in 1990 it would have been even more expensive to produce and therefore completely useless for anything.
In hindsight, it seems clear to me that Dave Haynie wanted to do too much with this chipset.
He wanted to make the dream Amiga chipset. But he forgot that Jay Miner always kept in mind that the chipset should remain as cheap as possible while offering the most possible.
The OCS offered this without problem. AAA was too far away from it. If the AGA was started in panic, it's because the teams in charge of the entry level made management understand that the AAA was useless to them.
Dave Haynie himself later admitted that he was probably too young and not experienced enough to be entrusted with the future of the Amiga. He would have needed a more experienced supervisor like Jay Miner.

Don't get me wrong, by reading the AAA specifications at the time, this chipset clearly made me dream and even more than the OCS in its time, but in fact it was just a dream chipset, but not realistic as reality show it.

The AA+ would perhaps have been possible in 1990, but on condition that Commodore worked on it from 1987/88 and seriously with sufficient resources. But for that it would have required competent management with a long-term vision. Which was not the case. Maybe if Rattigan hadn't been stupidly fired, things might have been different. Especially since he will win against Commodore and will receive several million in compensation.

my point here was that the chips were already done and ready in spring of 91 and an AA3000(+) could have been released that year, if management would have allowed it.

Yes, the management was totally incompetent.

But, 1991 was a bit late for the 3000. Ideally, the AA3000 should have been finished by September 1990, from my point of view. With an AGA model (optional DSP) for October/November. And of course with hard drive included, 20 MB would have been enough to stay cheap.

But Commodore was busy burning money with the CDTV - very large sums of money

(I did a little research lately on the CDTV disaster and the damage it did was far greater than I would have expected ... they really went all in for that one ...)

The CDTV was a project too far ahead of its time. But, Commodore could have just kept it as a research project, just for the Amiga teams to familiarize themselves with CDROM technology.

However, Philips made the same "mistake" with the CDI and it was not the success hoped for either.

[Promilus]

AAA it was impossible anyway. We clearly saw that in reality, even in 1994 this chipset was not even finished and already obsolete.

Sure it was possible if R&D was focused on that. But if you let R&D to spread resources over ECS "A300", PC, C64GS, C65, AA and AAA that's the actual result.

[babsimov]

Originally Posted by hammer

Falcon's 16-bit 030 was mocked by anti-Atari and 1 MB RAM baseline configuration is previous generation.

The 1200 was also mocked by the anti Amiga at the time for its EC020, its lack of real innovation (not really more colors, no sound improvement and no DSP, obligation to have a FAST card to unlock performance of the CPU. In short, the 1200 was not free from more or less justified criticism either.

But all these are arguments of the time. Looking back, the Falcon was much more "next gen" in many aspects than the 1200 was.

Fast 386DX/486SX-25/486SX-33 PC games have 3 to 4 MB requirements that is in line with 3DO ($699 USD)'s 3 MB RAM (2 MB system, 1 MB VRAM).

Falcon 4MB RAM configuration is 599 UKP.
Falcon 4MB RAM configuration is 699 UKP with 64 MB HDD.
Falcon 4MB RAM configuration is 999 UKP.

PC's 16-bit color pack pixels are on a higher clocked 32-bit VLB and SVGA chipsets.

So, when I bought my 1200 with its 60 MB hard drive, i remember that, in my country, the price of the Falcon 4MB and 64 MB drive was just a little more expensive, but not much more expensive either. And he had 4MB instead of 2MB.
So why didn't I buy a Falcon ? Well, because what made me stay on Amiga was AmigaOS and I believed in Commodore's promise that a DSP card for 1200 would quickly come out.
But anyway, even without the DSP, it was impossible for me to have anything other than AmigaOS at home.

For games machine, no brainer for 3DO's 2 million unit sales murdered the Atari Falcon's 13,000 to 14,000 units.

Of course, but to a lesser extent, it is also true for the AGA generation. The market was not at all the same anyway.

The games market is larger than the desktop music composition market.

Just like the video market for the Amiga.
What really killed the Falcon was that Atari management wanted to change of market and move towards consoles. The Falcon was marketed by forcing from engineers. The concept was sold to a third party company which made clones which, it seems, found their market for a time.

Baseline A1200's 2 MB RAM (399 UKP with a healthy profit margin) is progress from the previous A500/A600 generation, but wasn't enough for games that are ported from 3DO and fast 386DX-33/386DX-40/486SX-25/486SX-33 PC games have 3 to 4 MB requirements.

The 1000+ was planned to have 4 MB if the price of RAM had allowed it.

Officially, Commodore thinks A1200 does not have game performance C2P and their solution is Akiko's C2P that was created within 1 day, hence locking out A1200 from chunky pixels PC game ports.

Commodore was focused on IDE mandate and PCMCIA modifications on A1000+ (turned into A1200) and didn't think about C2P despite AAA project having chunky pixels.

Wing Commander CD32 for A1200 was unofficially patched.

If A1200 had an extra 1MB Fast RAM, hardware assist C2P or optimized blitter assist CP2 as part of the official SDK, the outcome could be different.

Accelerated A1200 had commercial textured map 3D games from smaller game studios.

AGA marketing had 24-bit 16.7 million color palette and 18-bit lossy color compression display capability. In modern GPU marketing, delta color compression (DCC) is a virtue.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/10325...ition-review/8
NVIDIA's marketing delta color compression (DCC) for Pascal generation.

Direct3D GPUs have MPEG (lossy motion compression), lossy and lossless texture compression. Modern GPUs has AV1 and H265 motion compression.

Psygnosis wanted upgraded CD32 for a minimal marginal cost increase.
From Commodore the Inside Story- The Untold Tale of a Computer Giant by David John Pleasance.

About page 128

As a result of this, I was asked by Ian Hetherington (cofounder,
with Jonathan Ellis, of Psygnosis) to arrange a
meeting with Mehdi Ali at their studios in Liverpool.

(skip, read book for extra detail)

Ian explained to Mehdi that with a few seemingly quite modest design changes, the CD32 could have an
incredible boost in performance at very marginal additional cost. 

(skip, read book for extra detail)

Well, it went exactly as expected. Mehdi was rude and ignorant, and clearly had no idea what Ian was talking
about. But instead of just admitting that, he more or less turned on Ian, as though he ‘must be crazy telling us how
to design our computers!’

Mehdi Ahi is not Sony CEO's Sony CEO Norio Ohga and Ken Kutaragi (technical director for Playstation).

[ Show youtube player ]
Steve Ballmer's Developers, developers, developers...

Of course the 1200 should have had fast and chunky mode, we agree. And also that management was as stupid as it could be.

That's propaganda from the Atari side. DSP32's FP32 is 3D game/workstation floating point format.

Atari fans should look at OpenGL's GLfloat which is 32-bit IEEE-754 floating-point value i.e IEEE FP32.

AT&T DSP32 array is targeting SGI's Intel's i860 array market.

http://www.bambi-amiga.co.uk/amigahistory/mikesinz.html
Commodore engineer Mike Sinz's view on DSP32

 It would also so really good speech and sound and math (talk about fast rendering times!)

Atari fans didn't read AT&T's marketing materials for DSP32 i.e. 3D and multimedia DSP accelerator.

IEEE FP32 is standard for PC's vertex OpenGL and Direct3D.

http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/c...tion_Guide.pdf
From page 19 of 140, AT&T marketed multiple DSP3210 as a 3D graphics workstation co-processor array. AA3000+ only has a single DSP3210.

From page 20 of 140, "DSP32C, 32-bit CMOS DSP (3-D Graphics Floating-Point Accelerator with Graphics Application Library)"

DSP32 was used as Quickdraw accelerator for Apple's Mac Quadra 840AV (68040 @ 40 Mhz, DSP32 @ 66Mhz) and Quadra 660AV (68040 @ 25Mhz, DSP32 @ 55 Mhz, $1399 USD). Quadra 840AV and 660AV was replaced by PowerMac line in 1994. Quadra AV has video in and video out i.e. Quadra AV and Adobe Premiere NLE combo directly targets Amiga's video market. Fast Amigas with Shapeshifter/Fusion/Emplant can run Adobe Premiere NLE.

Apple >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Atari.

The Falcon coders I spoke about DSP were long past the "propaganda". They were demomakers.
They are not saying that the DSP3210 was a bad DSP, just that this choice was quite curious in terms of software support for the time.
It would have been really interesting if the DSP had been included in the Amiga back in the day. There, we could really see which of the two DSP solutions was the most relevant and/or in which case each DSP performed better. We can really say a big thank you (no, not really) to Commodore management for this missed opportunity.

The recent recreation of the AA3000+ is a good thing, but I doubt that demomakers will seize this opportunity to show the potential of DSP on the Amiga.

[babsimov]

Originally Posted by Promilus

Sure it was possible if R&D was focused on that. But if you let R&D to spread resources over ECS "A300", PC, C64GS, C65, AA and AAA that's the actual result.

I misspoke. Maybe your right the AAA could have been finalized if Commodore had provided the necessary resources and had focused as much as possible on the project.
But it probably wouldn't have changed much, this chipset would have been a waste of time and resources in the end.

What I ultimately wanted to say is that we know that the production cost of the AAA was already too high in 1994 for entry-level products. This is why the AAA was only considered for the Amiga 5000 of 1995. The AA+ being for the entry and mid-range of 1995. So in 1990 the AAA would simply have been of no interest at the entry level or mid-range. In the books it is explained that in 1994 the production cost of AAA, if produced in large quantities and in its "simple" version (the cheapest) would have been 60 dollars. In a smaller quantity it would have been $120. We also know that the Amiga chipset which equipped the Amiga had a price of around 20 dollars, already in 1990.

So we see that the AAA in 1990 would probably have been around 100 dollars for its cheapest version. A price far too high for any entry-level machine to be marketed with that. And it's not me who says it, but the engineers in charge of the entry level who already in 1989/90 explained to management that they couldn't do anything with the AAA. This is why management accepted the AGA project.

[pandy71]

Strangely to some participants in this topic i share hammer point of view on DSP - AT&T DSP3210 was cheapest DSP on market, delivering additionally float and speed (normally DSP in those times was fixed point and not so fast in overall) - having DSP3210 on board will open for Amiga for example JPEG/MJPEG real time decode (and perhaps encode) so making FMV possible. Even with 8 bit Paula if proper signal processing applied (beyond regular CPU capabilities but possible with DSP) quality close to 16 bit could be delivered, also it was possible to create virtually more channels (also providing proper panoramic channel layout).

At the beginning of 90's there was no match for price/performance for DSP3210 (not sure about Japanese DSP vendors for example NEC DSP's like 7720) but either Texas Instruments or Motorola DSP's was way more expensive than AT&T (and price difference was like 3..5 times on AT&T favor).

[babsimov]

As I said, in no way am I saying that the DSP3210 would not have been a big advantage for the Amiga and a more than welcome addition. Dave Haynie also explains well, in fact, that MPEG and JPEG decoding would have been one of the things that the DSP would have allowed. As well as a software modem (a 2400 bds would have been included as standard). As for sound, he explained that there was a 16-bit audio codec included in the AA3000 for at least 8 channels 16-bit.

It is precisely because I always regretted that the Amiga never had DSP that I wanted to find out what a DSP could provide. And the only real example we had at the time (besides the NeXT one) was in the Falcon. And already the Falcon's DSP 56001 allows for a lot of great things.

But, in fact, we'll really never know if the DSP3210 would have made any real difference to the one included in the Falcon. The example of the DSP3210 in the MAC is not really telling, because I don't have the impression that Apple has really done anything to promote its mass exploitation. All I've read is that Photoshop filters use it, but that's it. It seems like a big waste to me. I am convinced that if the DSP3210 had been included in the Amiga, the community would have used and exploited it in many areas and even in unexpected areas (demomakers are creative).

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by babsimov

The CDTV was a project too far ahead of its time..

But was it?
I would argue the time for such a device actually never came.

But, Commodore could have just kept it as a research project, just for the Amiga teams to familiarize themselves with CDROM technology.

I fully agree.
The mistake was the forced release along with the preorder of hundreds of thousands of CD-ROM drives from Matsushita ....

However, Philips made the same "mistake" with the CDI and it was not the success hoped for either.

I assume Commodore got wind of the CD-i and skipped any marked research. They took it for granted that there is a huge market for such a device, if Philips is doing it, and wanted to beat them at their own game.

Which brings me back to what Steve Jobs said in the video above:
Management had no clue what makes a great product, they did not understand their customers and they would not even use such a device on their own.

P.S.:

I love the design of the CDTV and the initial thought was "that's hot!"
And CD-ROM with its 600MB was fascinating at the time.
But in a matter of days after I read the first articles about it, I realized I would not need or even use such a device ... at least not without keyboard and floppy and then the whole purpose of that device is in question.

[sandruzzo]

Power is nothing without control Don't forget that professional developer don't like complexity con its hard to exploit. it require a lot of time, effort and above all Money.

A 020 28mhz + blitter and copper enhanced at 32bit 28mhz would have been great...

Please, remember PS3S' cell processor: on power a true beast on real life a Nightmare

[Gorf]

The insane lineup of CDTV products, that must have cost Commodore a fortune:

• CDTV istself
• CD12XX Remote Control
• CD1200 Trackball Controller
• CD1221 wireless Keyboard
• CD1252 wireless Mouse
• CD1253 wired black Mouse
• CDTV Brick (Prototype?)
• CD1300 Genlock Module
• CD1321 SCART Module
• CD1411 black Floppy Drive
• 1084S-D2 black Monitor
• 363713-02 PAL Video Module
• 363713-01 NTSC Video Module
• CDTV SCSI Modul
• A570 CD-ROM for the A500 (to get rid of the preordered drives...)

And yet we argue in this thread, if the use of a bunch of TTL chips on a motherboard was too expensive ...

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Gorf

• A570 CD-ROM for the A500 (to get rid of the preordered drives...)

The fact that they released the A570 after they stopped making the A500 and it being incompatible with the A600 that was available at the time still blows my mind.