Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[grelbfarlk]

ZORRAM

The important thing is that the A1200 was not MPC compatible. Even if you could make the argument that it's MPC1 at least for sound, though this kind of skips the fact that CD Audio would probably be 16bit 44100.

Levels
MPC Level 1

The first MPC minimum standard, set in 1991, was:

• 16 MHz 386SX CPU
• 2 MB RAM
• 30 MB hard disk
• 256-color, 640×480 VGA video card
• 1× (single speed) CD-ROM drive using no more than 40% of CPU to read, with < 1 second seek time
• Sound card (Creative Sound Blaster recommended as closest available to standard at the time[2]) outputting 22 kHz, 8-bit sound; and inputting 11 kHz, 8-bit sound
• Windows 3.0 with Multimedia Extensions.

MPC Level 2

In 1993, an MPC Level 2 minimum standard was announced:

• 25 MHz 486SX CPU
• 4 MB RAM
• 160 MB hard disk
• 16-bit color, 640×480 VGA video card
• 2× (double speed) CD-ROM drive using no more than 40% of CPU to read at 1×, with < 400 ms seek time
• Sound card outputting 44 kHz, 16-bit CD quality sound.
• Windows 3.0 with Multimedia Extensions, or Windows 3.1.

MPC Level 3

In 1996, MPC Level 3 was announced:

• 75 MHz Pentium CPU
• 8 MB RAM
• 540 MB hard disk
• Video system that can show 352×240 at 30 frames per second, 16-bit color
• MPEG-1 hardware or software video playback
• 4× CD-ROM drive using no more than 40% of CPU to read, with < 250 ms seek time
• Sound card outputting 44 kHz, 16-bit CD quality sound
• Windows 3.11 or Windows 95

But nope, even for MPC1, you needed a 386SX. Again A1200 fails.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Nothing can sustain Commodore. Commodore is dead. Dead because Jack Tramiel stormed out when he couldn't get his way. This was a good thing because we got the Amiga from it, particularly the awesome A1200. But to get it, Commodore had to suffer. Without that suffering they would have produced something different - probably closer to the ST or the C65.
.

Jack Tramiel has a 1986 Mega ST with a custom Blitter and an ST without a Blitter.

Jack Tramiel pulled another "Plus4 vs C64" product segmentation with the Atari TOS platform.

Jack Tramiel doesn't understand 3rd party games software development.

The record speaks for itself, Atari ST/MegaST/STe/TT/Falcon has about 2 million install base and this is on Jack Tramiel!

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

It wasn't because fans weren't impressed with the games. They failed because Commodore was dead and the Amiga was a retro computer. Why would you want an 'Amiga' that wasn't an Amiga? To use an OS that wasn't designed for modern hardware? To play those few games that didn't appear on the PC (but easily could)? The 'NG Amiga' route failed because most Amiga fans wanted to keep using the machines they loved - with everything that implies.

Classic Amiga chipset is Amiga's "VGA" legacy equivalent.

The nature of Amiga is governed by Commodore's Amiga AutoConfig.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

A tiny minority yes, but this didn't represent the average Amiga user. Like other home computers the Amiga was always desired for more than just playing games. 200,000 thousand copies of AMOS sold tells us that many fans were interested in creating games (and other software) as well as playing them. That's not an insignificant number. The demo scene and PD distributions like Fred Fish and Aminet also shows us that many people were using their Amigas to create stuff right from the start.

FYI, full AMOS was in British Amiga magazines' cover disks and CDs.

AMOS The Complier was released later.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

And nobody had a 68060 or PPC. That didn't come until well after Commodore was gone, and the few that did mostly had 'big box' Amigas like the A3000 and A4000. They were a tiny minority, but there were many others who didn't go to such extremes.

Apple's PowerPC switch was in 1994.

Amiga's 68060 experience started in 1995. Without the 68040 socket being mass-produced for the baseline Amiga, the 68060 had an uncompetitive platform price.

$100 68EC040/68EC060 with a working 68030-style cache control would be nice for the Amiga.

For Motorola, the BOM cost is the same for 68EC060 and the full 68060. Motorola made MMU a premium product segmentation while the X86 competition has MMU as a guaranteed standard.

ARMv4T integrated MMU has a very low cost. For PalmOS 5 handhelds, ARM925T (ARMv4T) CPU has integrated MMU with 120 to 144 Mhz clock speed displaced Freescale's 68000-based Dragon Ball @ 33 Mhz. Motorola/Freescale lost the smart handheld market to ARM.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

With nobody making Amigas anymore this isn't surprising. Publishers of expensive applications knew the (small) market for them would dry up rapidly, but they might generate a bit more interest by making their products available to people who previously couldn't afford it. This definitely did keep many Amiga fans on the platform.

The Amiga platform's graphics hardware next-generation switch is like a game console which is not like PC's partitioned graphics modularity.

When Amiga's best revenue years are in 1990 and 1991, managing the next-generation hardware switch is very important. This is balanced with criticism against A3000's aging ECS hardware during its 1990s release.

The key question is, how would you manage this situation?

-------------------------------

According to Dataquest November 1989, VGA crossed more than 50 percent market share in 1989 i.e. 56%.
http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/c...lysis_1989.pdf

Low-End PC Graphics Market Share by Standard Type
Estimated Worldwide History and Forecast

Total low-end PC graphic chipset shipment history and forecast
1987 = 9.2. million, VGA 16.4% market share i.e. 1.5088 million VGA.
1988 = 11.1 million, VGA 34.2% i.e. 1.51 million VGA.
1989 = 13.7 million, VGA 54.6% i.e. 3.80 million VGA.
1990 = 14.3 million, VGA 66.4% i.e. 9.50 million VGA.
1991 = 15.8 million, VGA 76.6% i.e. 12.10 million VGA.
1992 = 16.4 million, VGA 84.2% i.e. 13.81 million VGA.
1993 = 18.3 million, VGA 92.4% i.e. 16.9 million VGA.

PC owners with full 32-bit X86 CPU who didn't have VGA, they have the option to upgrade to a cost-competitive VGA card.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by hammer

Sound Blaster Pro 2.0 (Opl3) was introduced in 1991.

Sound Blaster 1.0 is 1980s competitor to Adlib.

Sound Blaster 1.0 was introduced in late 1989. It was an addon you generally had to purchase separately. Very few PCs came with it preinstalled. At that time the 'standard' PC sound card was Adlib, which also didn't come preinstalled in most PCs. Sound blaster was effectively just Adlib with one 8 bit PCM channel. It would take a while for it to become popular and for developers to make best use of it.

Meanwhile the Amiga had 4 channel PCM sound from day one in 1985. The release of the Ultimate Sound Tracker in 1987 gave Amiga music a big boost in quality and variety. By 1990 when the Sound Blaster was starting to become popular on PCs, the Amiga was already blowing it away.

Paula didn't receive any updates in 1992, but it didn't need any. The A1200's extra Chip RAM and faster CPU could do more with it. More importantly it maintained the standard sound format so users of older Amigas wouldn't miss out. None of the 'awesome sound but only if you have an MT-32' (which cost $550.00 in 1988) nonsense that occurred on PCs!

[hammer]

Originally Posted by grelbfarlk

ZORRAM

The important thing is that the A1200 was not MPC compatible. Even if you could make the argument that it's MPC1 at least for sound, though this kind of skips the fact that CD Audio would probably be 16bit 44100.

Levels
MPC Level 1

The first MPC minimum standard, set in 1991, was:

• 16 MHz 386SX CPU
• 2 MB RAM
• 30 MB hard disk
• 256-color, 640×480 VGA video card
• 1× (single speed) CD-ROM drive using no more than 40% of CPU to read, with < 1 second seek time
• Sound card (Creative Sound Blaster recommended as closest available to standard at the time[2]) outputting 22 kHz, 8-bit sound; and inputting 11 kHz, 8-bit sound
• Windows 3.0 with Multimedia Extensions.

MPC Level 2

In 1993, an MPC Level 2 minimum standard was announced:

• 25 MHz 486SX CPU
• 4 MB RAM
• 160 MB hard disk
• 16-bit color, 640×480 VGA video card
• 2× (double speed) CD-ROM drive using no more than 40% of CPU to read at 1×, with < 400 ms seek time
• Sound card outputting 44 kHz, 16-bit CD quality sound.
• Windows 3.0 with Multimedia Extensions, or Windows 3.1.

MPC Level 3

In 1996, MPC Level 3 was announced:

• 75 MHz Pentium CPU
• 8 MB RAM
• 540 MB hard disk
• Video system that can show 352×240 at 30 frames per second, 16-bit color
• MPEG-1 hardware or software video playback
• 4× CD-ROM drive using no more than 40% of CPU to read, with < 250 ms seek time
• Sound card outputting 44 kHz, 16-bit CD quality sound
• Windows 3.11 or Windows 95

But nope, even for MPC1, you needed a 386SX. Again A1200 fails.

For 1993, buy a Commodore DT486DX-25 for less than 799 UKP. A4000/030 is priced above this.

MPC recommendations are for X86 PC clones. Apple roughly follows it.

1993 released CD32 roughly follows the 1991 MPC Level 1 i.e. 2 years late. During CD32's development, Commodore UK MD and Psygnosis wanted to upgrade CD32 with a "minimal marginal cost increase". CD32's FMV module wasn't designed as a CPU/DSP accelerator for Amiga 3D games.

Commodore had made sure that no out-of-the-box A1200/CD32 configuration would step on Commodore's full 32-bit PC's price and performance market placement.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Sound Blaster 1.0 was introduced in late 1989. It was an addon you generally had to purchase separately. Very few PCs came with it preinstalled. At that time the 'standard' PC sound card was Adlib, which also didn't come preinstalled in most PCs. Sound blaster was effectively just Adlib with one 8 bit PCM channel. It would take a while for it to become popular and for developers to make best use of it.

Meanwhile the Amiga had 4 channel PCM sound from day one in 1985. The release of the Ultimate Sound Tracker in 1987 gave Amiga music a big boost in quality and variety. By 1990 when the Sound Blaster was starting to become popular on PCs, the Amiga was already blowing it away.

Paula didn't receive any updates in 1992, but it didn't need any. The A1200's extra Chip RAM and faster CPU could do more with it. More importantly it maintained the standard sound format so users of older Amigas wouldn't miss out. None of the 'awesome sound but only if you have an MT-32' (which cost $550.00 in 1988) nonsense that occurred on PCs!

Again, your argument is flawed when the PC market is very large i.e. a single year with a "killer app" driven hardware upgrade cycle on the PC can overtake AGA's install base! This is an advantage when the PC's home market is attached to the USA superpower. The Euro currency exists for a reason.

Your New Zealand's weak currency experience sucks.

FYI, I selected the A500 in 1989 for "bang per buck" relative to 1989 PCs. A1200 is in the 1991 to 1994 context. Major Commodore national subsidiaries survived Commodore International's April 1994 bankruptcy.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by grelbfarlk

ZORRAM

The important thing is that the A1200 was not MPC compatible. Even if you could make the argument that it's MPC1 at least for sound, though this kind of skips the fact that CD Audio would probably be 16bit 44100.

The A1200 could never be MPC compatible, since the top requirement was an Intel CPU, and (though not stated because it was simply assumed you would know) 100% IBM PC compatibility. It also had to run Windows.

So any argument that starts with 'MPC compatibility' is silly.

But then,

The MPC program had mixed results primarily because of the vast number of PCs sold under different brands, and once Windows became ubiquitous on PCs, specifying minimum or recommended Windows versions and features was often clearer to consumers than the MPC nomenclature. As the standardized term failed to catch on, and as the Software Publishers Association turned away from consumer software in the late 1990s, interest in the MPC standard vanished. The problem of software labeling continues, especially in the field of computer games, where a multitude of 3D video cards has been manufactured with an extremely wide range of capabilities, and no common industry labeling standard to let consumers know whether their card is powerful enough to run a particular game.

But hey, "reason #14 why I was disappointed with the A1200!"

[grelbfarlk]

My A4000 is somewhere between MPC2&3.

It can run dos stuff somewhere between faster than a 486x and close to a Pentium.

It has a DVD drive, it doesn't have MPEG-1 hardware playback but it can play MPEG-1 in software at full speed.

16-bit 44100 audio, yada yada.

Video system that can show 352×240 at 30 frames per second, 16-bit color, pshaw, when it was just an A4000/040 stock, it could do that at 18-bit color.

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by Promilus

It's less relevant what percentage of PCs back then had 4 channel PCM audio. It's more relevant that there were much more PCs with that in absolute numbers than all Amigas ever. And 92 is release date of GUS. So... just compare those 2 solutions and the answer should be pretty darn obvious - doesn't matter how much you want to sugarcoat it, Paula was obsolete tech by then.

This was certainly some factor, but I'd say also that the importance of music in games is vastly exaggerated, at least in discussions like this one. You could still play and enjoy most of them even without a soundcard, and with a basic-but-decent one nobody would care about some arcane details like PCM.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

The A1200 could never be MPC compatible, since the top requirement was an Intel CPU, and (though not stated because it was simply assumed you would know) 100% IBM PC compatibility. It also had to run Windows.

So any argument that starts with 'MPC compatibility' is silly.

But then,

But hey, "reason #14 why I was disappointed with the A1200!"

A1200 with a fast enough CPU can run Mac's Home Alone port, but that's leveraging Apple's Mac platform scale.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by hammer

Your New Zealand's weak currency experience sucks.

I'm pretty sure it wasn't only NZers who thought paying US$550.00 just to get reasonable sound was outrageous. Maybe rich Americans could afford it, but that uncovers another unpalatable fact - the majority of Americans couldn't. Only the huge population (compared to countries like New Zealand) made it look like PCs were a more popular household item there.

During the 1990's income inequality in the US increased. In 1990 the bottom 50% only earned 17.5% of the total (compared to 22% in Europe). By 1999 that had decreased to 15.5%. In 1992 over 20 million Americans needed food stamps to survive. They probably couldn't even afford $199 for an SNES.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I'm pretty sure it wasn't only NZers who thought paying US$550.00 just to get reasonable sound was outrageous. Maybe rich Americans could afford it, but that uncovers another unpalatable fact - the majority of Americans couldn't. Only the huge population (compared to countries like New Zealand) made it look like PCs were a more popular household item there.

During the 1990's income inequality in the US increased. In 1990 the bottom 50% only earned 17.5% of the total (compared to 22% in Europe). By 1999 that had decreased to 15.5%. In 1992 over 20 million Americans needed food stamps to survive. They probably couldn't even afford $199 for an SNES.

In absolute numbers, gaming 486 PCs exceeds the AGA install base.

If my family was a single platform focus, it would be 486 gaming PC just like my many other school friends' PCs.


https://i.ibb.co/0QfMNRb/APC-Nov-1993-prices-ET4000.png
Sound Blaster 2.0 has $135 AUD retail price.
Sound Blaster Pro has $220 AUD.
Sound Blaster 16 has $360 AUD.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by hammer

A1200 with a fast enough CPU can run Mac's Home Alone port, but that's leveraging Apple's Mac platform scale.

Home Alone was ported to the Mac?

But why would you do that when there was a native Amiga version?

I think they did a pretty reasonable job of converting the colors from 256 to 32. Unfortunately the game itself sucked, both on the Amiga and the PC.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by hammer

https://i.ibb.co/0QfMNRb/APC-Nov-1993-prices-ET4000.png
Sound Blaster 2.0 has $135 AUD retail price.
Sound Blaster Pro has $220 AUD.
Sound Blaster 16 has $360 AUD.

Paula has $0 (free with every Amiga!)

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

This was certainly some factor, but I'd say also that the importance of music in games is vastly exaggerated, at least in discussions like this one. You could still play and enjoy most of them even without a soundcard, and with a basic-but-decent one nobody would care about some arcane details like PCM.

Sure, PC gamers did that. Some even pretended to like it. But objectively speaking, PC speaker sucked. Playing games that should have had PCM sound with an Adlib card sucked too. Just try playing Doom with that configuration.

For even more 'fun' try it on a 386SX-16 with no sound card. I am going to do that as soon as I figure out how to get Doom onto my retro PC.

Doom with PC speaker sound
[ Show youtube player ]

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I'm pretty sure it wasn't only NZers who thought paying US$550.00 just to get reasonable sound was outrageous. Maybe rich Americans could afford it, but that uncovers another unpalatable fact - the majority of Americans couldn't. Only the huge population (compared to countries like New Zealand) made it look like PCs were a more popular household item there.

During the 1990's income inequality in the US increased. In 1990 the bottom 50% only earned 17.5% of the total (compared to 22% in Europe). By 1999 that had decreased to 15.5%. In 1992 over 20 million Americans needed food stamps to survive. They probably couldn't even afford $199 for an SNES.

That's a really disingenious strawman. Yeah, 20 million Americans were hard done by, but there were ~250 million of them overall. Also, you could apply this to pretty much every country. Trying to make out like only "rich" were buying PCs is also rather desperate when it's a well known fact it was mostly middle class. That's really obvious when you consider the simple fact that PCs and consoles have slowly penetrated all the stratas of society.

MT-32 was a luxury solution, same as GUS, and 98% of PC users were perfectly content with Soundblaster-level quality. Nobody was "outraged" about it.

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Sure, PC gamers did that. Some even pretended to like it. But objectively speaking, PC speaker sucked. Playing games that should have had PCM sound with an Adlib card sucked too. Just try playing Doom with that configuration.

For even more 'fun' try it on a 386SX-16 with no sound card. I am going to do that as soon as I figure out how to get Doom onto my retro PC.

Doom with PC speaker sound
[ Show youtube player ]

Trying to apply 2024 standards to 1992 is ridiculous. Yeah, the PC speaker sucks (also water is wet)....but Adlib is okay. It's just sound...it doesn't make a game, and if I had the choice in 1992 I'd much rather play Wolf 3D with minimal sound than whatever hot stuff was on Amiga this year.



In fact, I played multum of awesome Amiga games such as Monkey Island, EotB, BaSS, Neuromancer etc with minimal sound too. Trying to make out as if it's an absolute deal breaker is just silly.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by hammer

From
https://archive.org/details/A500_Tra...e/n27/mode/2up
Commodore Business Machines' A500 service training manual was held in the Australian state of Victoria in 1989.

The accuracy for the A500 training manual is on Commodore.

Interesting document. Appears to have been cobbled together from various sources, including information on the A1000 and some crudely drawn sketches perhaps made by the Australian technical support manager?

The diagram you refer to isn't exactly 'wrong', but could be misinterpreted. The two DAC channels sharing a stereo output are wired in parallel so their currents add. The output signal is the sum of currents in each of the two DACs. That's what this diagram is supposed to show, though it is somewhat ambiguous.

However on page 13 it says:-

Audio Block:
- 4 channels
- each channel has its DMA, DATA, FREQ, VOL REGISTERS
- D to A CONVERTER

If I was designing Paula, and assuming I had 2 pins spare, I would bring out each channel separately so they could be mixed externally. However the original Paula did not have any spare pins, in fact it didn't have enough - which is why an external MUX was used on the joystick ports. PLCC Paula (used in the A600/A1200/A4000) does have spare pins, but redesigning the chip to make this minor change would not have been easy since it was laid out by hand.

Rumour has it that they were working on an improved Paula for the A1200, but couldn't get it finished in time. I'm guessing the improvement had to do with something else though, perhaps a buffered serial port and/or HD disk data.

My solution to the 'Paula is outdated' complaint would be to give the Amiga what the Sound Blaster had that it lacked - a synth chip. Adding an OPL chip would have been a piece of cake. I am thinking of doing this myself via the clock port or even the parallel port (since I don't use a printer anymore). I see someone has already done it for the PC!

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Sound Blaster (not Sound Blaster Pro, Sound Blaster 16 etc.) had one channel of 8 bit mono PCM sound.

Paula has 4 independent 8 bit channels each with its own playback frequency. To achieve the same with Sound Blaster cards you would need 4 of them.

Sound Blaster did have one thing Paula doesn't though, 9 channel synth sound. So it could play music and still have one channel for digital (non-looping) sound effects. Only problem is the synth chip sounded like a toy music keyboard - because that's what it was made for.

The synth chip gave PC games a certain 'sameness' to their music. sometimes it was appropriate, other times not. The Amiga can produce any sound you want so long as it doesn't need more than 4 channels, or more using a bit of CPU time if you do.

It also had 12 CMS voices. Along with the 2 FM drum voices you forgot to mention that's 24 voices.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Paula has $0 (free with every Amiga!)

Nothing is free. Paula's cost is included in Amiga's asking price.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

That's a really disingenious strawman. Yeah, 20 million Americans were hard done by, but there were ~250 million of them overall. Also, you could apply this to pretty much every country. Trying to make out like only "rich" were buying PCs is also rather desperate when it's a well known fact it was mostly middle class. That's really obvious when you consider the simple fact that PCs and consoles have slowly penetrated all the stratas of society.

In 1993 only 23% of US households had 'a computer' (of any type). Most of them would not be the latest high-end gaming PC with Sound Blaster etc. so we can safely conclude that over 80% of households did not have one.

But hey, "reason #15 that I was disappointed with the A1200, more people had PCs!"

MT-32 was a luxury solution, same as GUS, and 98% of PC users were perfectly content with Soundblaster-level quality. Nobody was "outraged" about it.

Amiga fans were though - outraged that Commodore didn't make Paula 20 times better than anything you could plug into a PC!