Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by roondar

Which is exactly why I did not compare the A500 to them. I compared the A500 to the competition the A1200 had in the computer market: a machine roughly double the price.

If you've read this thread, you'll have noted that many people in it have claimed that the A1200 wasn't very good because PC's were as good or better. I pointed out about a thousand times that those PC's were much more expensive. And the reaction I got was essentially "who cares about price".

Enough said about these people the better then, because having a comparison about something and not taking the price into account is absurd, you may as well tell Top Gear to compare a Ford Fiesta to a F1 car and see which one is faster in a test!

Originally Posted by roondar

By the way, I got curious about PC pricing in 1987 so I looked it up. In 1987, you could buy a genuine IBM PS/2 model 30-002 with 256 colour graphics (in 320x200) for $1700. Nowhere near 3000 pounds (at 1987 rates that's about 1100 pounds or roughly twice the price of an A500). Note: the graphics card used in that PC was supported by many games: as early as 1988 you had 256 colour mode PC games.

A link would be nice, although don’t forget US PC prices were alot cheaper than in Europe as well don't forget to add tax and any import taxes they would have passed on, its never like for like, the first complete PC from a major company didn’t hit under £1000 until 1992 in the UK at least i never recalled anything VGA related under £2000 in the 80s, same for computers like the Apricot range, this is why computers like the Amstrad PCW sold so well as they were glorified word processors but were cheap in comparison to PCs (around £500/£600).

From looking, 688 Attack Sub was one of the first VGA 256 colour games in 1989, still didn’t hit the full 256 colours but the ability was there, but i imagine 0. something % of PC gamers actually had one back before 1990, certainly not mainly games supported it before 1990.
https://trixter.oldskool.org/2017/10...on-the-ibm-pc/

Originally Posted by roondar

I'm comparing the same price difference here as existed between the A1200 and "budget PC's". I do this because it has been pointed out ad nauseum in this thread that those PC's were "too close/better" in abilities compared to the A1200 for the machine to be worthwhile.

The Archimedes cost about 800 pounds on launch. The cheap PC's that were 'better' than the A1200 cost closer to 1000 pounds. The A500 cost 500 pounds on launch, the A1200 400 pounds.

See how that is the roughly the same difference? The way I'm comparing hasn't changed at all. I use the same standard for every machine.

Imo any machine that is twice the price is not in the same market, the 8-bit consoles still sold for years after 16-bit machines came out because they were in a budget console market, to compare a NES to Megadrive is unfair, to compare an Amiga to a X68000/VGA PC that is 2-4 times the price is unfair.

Originally Posted by roondar

Now, don't get me wrong: in the budget market, the A500 was very nice. But so was the A1200, despite all your protests. They were much more alike than you want to admit.

I didn’t say it wasn’t nice, so i don’t know why you think i thought that, i had a CD32 with SX1 so if anything i had more time to see its disadvantages! I said it wasn’t the machine people hoped for, it was a nice Amiga for anyone who hadn’t owned one yet or wanted a minor upgrade, for anyone else it was a disapointment.

Originally Posted by roondar

I didn't say the Archimedes was a better machine if you wanted to play games. I did, however, say that its lack of gaming ability was (IMHO) because of market situations - as the machine very clearly could provide games that were at least at A500 levels.

As for games on the system, you might want to recheck that. I Googled it and found and all of the games on your list were available in 1993 for the Archimedes. Incidentally, that was also the year when they were released on the Amiga. Apart from Heimdall, they required 1MB of RAM.

Interestingly, I found there were plenty of other Amiga ports on the system. Such as SWIV (1991), Lemmings (1991), Gods (1991), Pacmania (1991), Lotus 2 (1992).

Don’t believe what you read on Google or Moby Games or the like, believe me i have done my research, i put this together a while back - https://issuu.com/amigajay/docs/archimedes_compressed and to double check things places like ebay you can see stickers on the box and disk labels clearly stating 2mb.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

A link would be nice, although don’t forget US PC prices were alot cheaper than in Europe as well don't forget to add tax and any import taxes they would have passed on, its never like for like, the first complete PC from a major company didn’t hit under £1000 until 1992 in the UK at least i never recalled anything VGA related under £2000 in the 80s, same for computers like the Apricot range, this is why computers like the Amstrad PCW sold so well as they were glorified word processors but were cheap in comparison to PCs (around £500/£600).

I can give you a link, but it's on 'Google books' so I don't know if it'll work as it seems to be a generated one. https://books.google.nl/books?id=lj0...ummary_r&cad=0
Check page 6 "IBM Models Offer Diverse Capabilities". Anyway, I do agree that PC's were more expensive.

That was never the point I was trying to make. See, the person I replied to did point to better PC's (that were much more expensive) when he expressed his disappointment with the A1200. So him talking about the A500 and not mentioning that the same thing existed at the time (more expensive, but better machines) felt noteworthy to me.

So I pointed out these better, but more expensive machines did exist. That was all I tried to do: compare the two in a similar fashion.

From looking, 688 Attack Sub was one of the first VGA 256 colour games in 1989, still didn’t hit the full 256 colours but the ability was there, but i imagine 0. something % of PC gamers actually had one back before 1990, certainly not mainly games supported it before 1990.
https://trixter.oldskool.org/2017/10...on-the-ibm-pc/

I don't actually know how many people got into VGA games at what stage. All I know from watching people like LGR and reading forums (etc) is that in the USA this happened quite a bit earlier than in Europe.

But again, my point was not that these machines were used for games. My point was merely that you could get machines that did 'better' things than the A500 (if you didn't mind the extra money).

Imo any machine that is twice the price is not in the same market, the 8-bit consoles still sold for years after 16-bit machines came out because they were in a budget console market, to compare a NES to Megadrive is unfair, to compare an Amiga to a X68000/VGA PC that is 2-4 times the price is unfair.

This is more or less my point about the A1200.

I didn’t say it wasn’t nice, so i don’t know why you think i thought that, i had a CD32 with SX1 so if anything i had more time to see its disadvantages! I said it wasn’t the machine people hoped for, it was a nice Amiga for anyone who hadn’t owned one yet or wanted a minor upgrade, for anyone else it was a disapointment.

Well, I apparently misread you. It happens.

We simply disagree here. I had an A500 and loved the upgrade to my A1200. Didn't feel minor either - I distinctly remember that a computer merely having 256 colours was a big deal at the time and the A1200 offered that and was a lot faster than the A500 to boot.

But we don't have to agree, that's fine. As long as we're all on the same page I don't mind anyone's opinion.

Don’t believe what you read on Google or Moby Games or the like, believe me i have done my research, i put this together a while back - https://issuu.com/amigajay/docs/archimedes_compressed and to double check things places like ebay you can see stickers on the box and disk labels clearly stating 2mb.

That is actually really nice! There's far too little Acorn Archimedes information on the web. Similar things for the Amiga, C64, etc would be awesome

That said, there are actually plenty of games listed in that document of yours that did either required 1MB or ran on 'all Archimedes models', which means 512KB. For reference any game that says "A3000" will run on all earlier models just as well as long as they have 1MB of RAM. Just to name a few Amiga ports that ran with 1MB of RAM and were available at least in 1992 as seen in your adverts: Lemmings, Chuck Rock, James Pond, Swiv, Lotus 2, Populous, Nebulus, Gods, etc, etc.

Again, my point wasn't that the Archimedes was the number one games platform. It simply was that you could get very similar or better results out of the Archimedes as the A500 offered. Case in point: in the list above, Lemmings, Chuck Rock, Swiv, Lotus 2 and Populous all ran better than they did on the A500, sometimes quite substantially so (either by simply having better frame rates or sometimes having better graphics and/or sound).

[Retro1234]

Originally Posted by Gilbert

Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

Yes but I'm not allowed to say why

[roondar]

Originally Posted by Retro1234

Yes but I'm not allowed to say why

Oh come now, that's total nonsense. You already voiced your opinion several times. It's not your opinion that causes me to reply to you. You're free to think what you want.

What causes me to reply to you is things like silly comparisons between a 1992 budget computer and a Pentium@200MHz in 1997 and your tendency in this thread to post things that are factually wrong. Could be you simply don't know or don't remember, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be corrected.

[Retro1234]

O im in trouble again

[roondar]

Originally Posted by Retro1234

O im in trouble again

Kindly stop playing the victim.

[Retro1234]

Better not breath.......

[Hewitson]

Retro1234, you, along with everyone else here, are entitled to voice your opinion. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be corrected if it's wrong.

[CrazyPepsi]

Originally Posted by roondar

I had a lot more fun with my A1200 in 1992 than I did with my PSX in 1992. Wonder why

U dont say 1992

[jediknight]

i had an amiga 1200 from new as soon as it came out i loved it , but few months later i walked pass the same computer shop they had a pc 486/dx33 running star wars rebel assault in demo i couldn't stop watching the tie fighter scene the 3d amazed me i then sold abiga and brought that pc and never looked back the 3d graphics everything was better on the pc still is just a shame they didnt ever support a decent video chip that could play doom like a pc. then people would have kept there amigas.

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by jediknight

i had an amiga 1200 from new as soon as it came out i loved it , but few months later i walked pass the same computer shop they had a pc 486/dx33 running star wars rebel assault in demo i couldn't stop watching the tie fighter scene the 3d amazed me i then sold abiga and brought that pc and never looked back

Well done. What year was this? I'm gonna guess the 486 was at least four times the price of the A1200. Why would you expect them to be anywhere near comparable? Would you expect a £10,000 car to give a similar experience to a £40,000 car?

the 3d graphics everything was better on the pc still is just a shame they didnt ever support a decent video chip that could play doom like a pc. then people would have kept there amigas.

Perhaps, but as has been pointed out so many times, one is a cheap, entry level home computer, and the other is a high end workhorse. If you and all the other Amiga users had spend the same sort of money on their Amigas instead of treating it as a cheap games console with a keyboard, things might well have been different as so many more people would have Amigas that *could* be fitted with "decent video chips" for playing games like Doom.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by jediknight

i had an amiga 1200 from new as soon as it came out i loved it , but few months later i walked pass the same computer shop they had a pc 486/dx33 running star wars rebel assault in demo i couldn't stop watching the tie fighter scene the 3d amazed me i then sold abiga and brought that pc and never looked back the 3d graphics everything was better on the pc still is just a shame they didnt ever support a decent video chip that could play doom like a pc. then people would have kept there amigas.

I simply couldn't afford a 486/DX back in 92/93. They were something like 4x the price of the A1200 at the time and frankly, even the 400 pounds an A1200 cost took me a year of saving up every penny I could muster at the time. Perhaps this is why I'm arguing the price difference so much all the time

That said, a 486/DX33 was a great machine in 1993. If somewhat dodgy on the 'smooth scrolling' front in 2D games. First PC I ever saw that did that right was some Pentium MMX machine. To this day I still don't understand why scrolling smoothly was so difficult for PC's, a 386DX ought to have been able to handle it just fine with a processor that fast. But somehow they just didn't.

As for DOOM, well - it eventually did come out for the Amiga and runs well enough if you have a machine roughly equal to a PC that would run it well. Problem of course being that most Amiga users didn't buy a machine with a 40MHz 68040 in it.

But yeah - if you had the money, the 486 was an awesome machine at the time. Truth be told, for me the PC era began in earnest 1997/1998 - I got my first PC around that time and played a lot of Starcraft on it.

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

If you and all the other Amiga users had spend the same sort of money on their Amigas instead of treating it as a cheap games console with a keyboard, things might well have been different as so many more people would have Amigas that *could* be fitted with "decent video chips" for playing games like Doom.

But we didn't, did we? We can't go back and change that now - and almost nobody would change their habits even with knowledge of future events. The reason most people owned an Amiga was for the games. The vast majority loved it for the games with the added bonus that it could do productivity.

Very few people bought it and subsequently expanded it - it was way too expensive for the kinds of people that bought it as a gaming tool first and foremost.

[grelbfarlk]

Originally Posted by jediknight

i had an amiga 1200 from new as soon as it came out i loved it , but few months later i walked pass the same computer shop they had a pc 486/dx33 running star wars rebel assault in demo i couldn't stop watching the tie fighter scene the 3d amazed me i then sold abiga and brought that pc and never looked back the 3d graphics everything was better on the pc still is just a shame they didnt ever support a decent video chip that could play doom like a pc. then people would have kept there amigas.

And yet rebel assault is just the kind of game which could be done on the CD32 at least-the concept of a rail shooter with video playing in the background like Microcosm. Don't know if that particular game needed Akiko to do it, but it seems like it should have been close to doable with an HDD or a CDROM to stream the video.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by jediknight

i walked pass the same computer shop they had a pc 486/dx33 running star wars rebel assault in demo i couldn't stop watching the tie fighter scene the 3d amazed me i then sold abiga and brought that pc and never looked back

And you had to buy a new PC every few years to keep up, right?

Star Wars: Rebel Assault

"Rebel Assault is a gorgeous, fast-paced shooter that is a lot of fun to play. The problem is, the fun is too short lived" and without replay value. In April 1994 the magazine said that Rebel Assault "seems to have split gamers into two camps—those that absolutely love it, and those that absolutely don't", with some criticizing the "very limited and very repetitive" game play despite "incredible" graphics.

"Gorgeous graphics, very limited and repetitive game play" - where have I seen that before? - Oh yeah, just about every 3D game ever. But flashy graphics and full-motion video convinces people that they can afford an expensive PC after all, so it's all good!

just a shame they didnt ever support a decent video chip that could play doom like a pc. then people would have kept there amigas.

It wouldn't have helped. PCs always outsold Amigas by 5:1 or more, and once people discovered that they could play games on them too...

[Samurai_Crow]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

It wouldn't have helped. PCs always outsold Amigas by 5:1 or more, and once people discovered that they could play games on them too...

Actually, if the blitter ran in fast-page mode it could have filled non-textured polygon graphics at higher palette depth to keep up. But without commercial game engine support we'd have still not made it.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by roondar

That said, a 486/DX33 was a great machine in 1993. If somewhat dodgy on the 'smooth scrolling' front in 2D games. First PC I ever saw that did that right was some Pentium MMX machine. To this day I still don't understand why scrolling smoothly was so difficult for PC's, a 386DX ought to have been able to handle it just fine with a processor that fast. But somehow they just didn't.

To those of us familiar with the Amiga chipset it wasn't a mystery - the advantages of hardware scrolling, dual playfields, sprites, etc. were obvious. With a fast enough CPU you might be able to match it by simply blasting pixels onto the screen, but it's much harder to get right (if even possible with a slow ISA bus VGA card).

So what did PC game developers do about it? They simply avoided games that needed smooth scrolling. I suspect the move to 3D on PCs was partly because they couldn't do 2D games well. With 3D you can get away with low frame rates and jerky animation - and if not just buy a faster PC!

What's interesting is that for years the Amiga was dismissed as 'just a games machine' then finally the PC finds one genre it can do better and suddenly the Amiga is not good enough as a games machine! So PC advocates would pooh-pooh anything the Amiga was better at, while simultaneously playing up the 'superiority' of PC hardware.

For example, VGA doing 256 colors in 320x200. Does more colors make up for crappy scrolling and jerky animation? It does in PC Land. Can overscan make a game look better, or it just a gimmick? The PC can't do it, so it must be a gimmick. Sprites, Copper, Dual playfield? All gimmicks. 4 channels of 8 bit PCM sound? Not good enough. 2 channels plus a toy synthesizer? Way better! Switched joystick that didn't need recalibrating every time you used it? Too simple. Floppy drive that autodetected disk changes? Another gimmick. Preemptive multitasking? OS with full GUI in ROM? Gimmicks.

But if the PC had it - essential!

[donnie]

That reminds me how much pc sucked back in the day.

The fact that amiga was a set hardware standard, and not a moving target. Is what makes it so cool.

[Hewitson]

The PC had plenty of 2D games that scrolled smoothly. Jazz Jackrabbit is one that comes to mind.

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

To those of us familiar with the Amiga chipset it wasn't a mystery - the advantages of hardware scrolling, dual playfields, sprites, etc. were obvious. With a fast enough CPU you might be able to match it by simply blasting pixels onto the screen, but it's much harder to get right (if even possible with a slow ISA bus VGA card).

So what did PC game developers do about it? They simply avoided games that needed smooth scrolling. I suspect the move to 3D on PCs was partly because they couldn't do 2D games well. With 3D you can get away with low frame rates and jerky animation - and if not just buy a faster PC!

What's interesting is that for years the Amiga was dismissed as 'just a games machine' then finally the PC finds one genre it can do better and suddenly the Amiga is not good enough as a games machine! So PC advocates would pooh-pooh anything the Amiga was better at, while simultaneously playing up the 'superiority' of PC hardware.

For example, VGA doing 256 colors in 320x200. Does more colors make up for crappy scrolling and jerky animation? It does in PC Land. Can overscan make a game look better, or it just a gimmick? The PC can't do it, so it must be a gimmick. Sprites, Copper, Dual playfield? All gimmicks. 4 channels of 8 bit PCM sound? Not good enough. 2 channels plus a toy synthesizer? Way better! Switched joystick that didn't need recalibrating every time you used it? Too simple. Floppy drive that autodetected disk changes? Another gimmick. Preemptive multitasking? OS with full GUI in ROM? Gimmicks.

But if the PC had it - essential!

Good heavens, and to think that the only person who suspected this for all this time was you!

Which is weird because literally everyone who plays games now does so on PCs and console. If only they had understood why they were wrong!