Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

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My solution to the 'Paula is outdated' complaint would be to give the Amiga what the Sound Blaster had that it lacked - a synth chip.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!

The Paula sound issue is a distraction. The original intent for AGA was bundled with $20 DSP3210.

Fast RAM equipped A1200 allows for 7 audio channels Turrican 2 AGA during gameplay.

CD32 has 16-bit 44.1 kHz stereo audio from the CD path. The same for CD32 FMV module.

OPL2LPT V2 could work with PCTask's LPT access. PCX 1.1 has Sound Blaster emulation.

With PiStorm-Emu68's compute power, GMplay or TiMidity PCM softsynth is easy.

$20 DSP3210 (12.6 MIPS and 25 MFLOPS FP32 @ 50Mhz, dual pipelines for integer and floating point) would have mitigated 3D math, fast MPEG1 decoder, DSP software bilt, and audio issues.

[Promilus]

My solution to the 'Paula is outdated' complaint would

It would not help. It's still 16b design wasting half of the bandwidth every time it does receive memory access, also AAA already did include improved version called Mary. So yeah, take a hint with your "Paula was still more than enough in 1992" attitude.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by hammer

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

Paula (along with the CIA chips) also did the disk drive, mouse and joystick ports, and serial port. That's as much as a multi-I/O card did on a PC and it had sound too!

Compared to a Sound Blaster card that you had to buy separately, Paula's sound was indeed 'free' (the external analog filtering circuit and stereo connectors weren't, but that's another matter). In any case, Commodore managed to pack all that and hardware accelerated graphics and a 32 bit CPU, keyboard, disk drive, mouse, multitasking GUI OS in ROM etc. into a package that cost way less than the minimum a PC needed.

Of course tradeoffs were needed to do that, but IMO Commodore kept the right stuff. PCs made themselves appear cheaper by not including a sound card. The Amiga's designers wouldn't do that to us - they knew that awesome sound was a top priority!

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by grelbfarlk

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

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Promilus

It would not help. It's still 16b design wasting half of the bandwidth every time it does receive memory access, also AAA already did include improved version called Mary. So yeah, take a hint with your "Paula was still more than enough in 1992" attitude.

What a load of techno-elitist nonsense. Nobody accused Sound Blaster of 'wasting half the bandwidth' by only using 8 bits of the ISA bus. Paula uses very few DMA slots in normal operation, hardly worth trying to jam extra stuff into it just to avoid 'wasting bandwidth'.

AAA didn't 'already include' anything - they couldn't get the chipset working properly and nobody knows what state the sound part was in. But typical of an Amiga fan to get upset about not being given the Moon on a stick.

But hey, reason #16 for being disappointed with the A1200, it didn't have AAA!

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Paula (along with the CIA chips) also did the disk drive, mouse and joystick ports, and serial port. That's as much as a multi-I/O card did on a PC and it had sound too!

Compared to a Sound Blaster card that you had to buy separately, Paula's sound was indeed 'free' (the external analog filtering circuit and stereo connectors weren't, but that's another matter). In any case, Commodore managed to pack all that and hardware accelerated graphics and a 32 bit CPU, keyboard, disk drive, mouse, multitasking GUI OS in ROM etc. into a package that cost way less than the minimum a PC needed.

Of course tradeoffs were needed to do that, but IMO Commodore kept the right stuff. PCs made themselves appear cheaper by not including a sound card. The Amiga's designers wouldn't do that to us - they knew that awesome sound was a top priority!

As for Amiga's hardware accelerated graphics, Chip RAM only 68EC020 @ 14 Mhz was already 52% of AGA Blitter. AGA had no native support for packed pixels.

VGA and SNES has hardware support for chunky pixels. VGA supports planar and chunky pixels.

VGA has some hardware assist features e.g. logic pixel operators and scroll.
A low cost Blitter designed in 1987 would be a bottleneck for faster barrel shifter equipped fast 386DX-33/386DX-40 and 486SX CPUs.

Since A1200's bulk of its unit sales are in 1993:

Australian market's November 1993 for the state of Victoria. From Australian Personal Computer magazine
https://i.ibb.co/58mf89F/APC-Nov-1993-prices.png

486SX-33 (4MB RAM, 125 MB HDD, SVGA monitor, SVGA card, 2 serial, 1 printer port, 1 game port, 1.44 FDD) has $1595.

386DX-40 (4MB RAM, 125 MB HDD, SVGA monitor, SVGA card, 2 serial, 1 printer port, 1 game port, 1.44 FDD) has $1450

386SX-33 (4MB RAM, 125 MB HDD, SVGA monitor, SVGA card, 2 serial, 1 printer port, 1 game port, 1.44 FDD) has $1385

Unlike the Amiga, PC's prices includes a monitor. For the Amiga, a user needs a monitor for non-gaming use case.

https://i.ibb.co/0QfMNRb/APC-Nov-1993-prices-ET4000.png
The next page has ET4000 for $145.
Sound Blaster 2.0 for $135.


https://i.ibb.co/jV4T43L/1993-QLD-PC...st-example.png
A4 System's 486SX-33 student package, 4 MB RAM, 1.44 MB FDD 130 MB HDD, 512 VRAM VGA, SVGA monitor, desktop case, 101 keyboard, mouse.
Price: $1545 AUD.
A4 Systems Price List Sept 1993 by A4 Systems, Brisbane, Australia.

Sound Blaster 2.0 is not expensive.

https://archive.org/details/Australi...ge/n3/mode/2up
Australian Commodore and Amiga Review, October 1993.
Page 4 of 84
A1200 barebone = $799
A1200 with 40 MB HDD = $995 AUD
A1200 with 85 MB HDD = $1349 AUD
A1200 RAM card with 0 MB = $249 AUD, just an adapter board for RAMs. This is not backed by Commodore's economies of scale.
From Western Australia state.

Page 12 of 84
GVP A1230 030 with No Co-Pro and 0 MB RAM =$876
GVP A1230/030 & 68882 40Mhz with 4 MB RAM = $1176

Page 42 of 84
GVP A1200 SCSI with 4 MB RAM = $895
GVP A1200/030 at 40 Mhz and 4MB RAM = $1195.00

A1200 with 40 MB HDD + GVP A1200 SCSI with 4 MB RAM = $1,871

Page 56 of 84
Phase 5 Blizzard A1200/4 with 4MB RAM and clock = $499

A1200 with 40 MB HDD + Blizzard A1200/4 (4MB RAM card) = $1,494.
A1200 with 85 MB HDD + Blizzard A1200/4 (4MB RAM card) = $1,848.

A1200 barebone + Blizzard A1200/4 (4MB RAM card)= $1,298. No hard disk. A1200 with 32-bit Fast RAM is about a PC with 386DX-16 to 20 and ET4000AX or Trident 8900CL.

Page 64 of 84
Seagate 2.5 inch, 128 MB IDE = $245.

A1200 barebone + Blizzard A1200/4 (4MB RAM card) + Seagate 128 MB HDD = $1,543. Needs a monitor for non-game use cases.


For Doom, A1200 barebone + GVP A1230 @ 40Mhz (add SIMM) + Seagate 128 MB HDD = $1,920. Needs a SIMM and monitor for non-game use cases.


80486SX is equivalent to 68LC040.

Your argument is killed by the real world.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by hammer

The Paula sound issue is a distraction. The original intent for AGA was bundled with $20 DSP3210.

The 'original intent' was for high-end machines to have DSP.

But pinning down that 'original intent' is tricky. Originally, AGA was a 'half-way-there' insurance policy in case AAA didn't work out - and they needed it! 'Originally' they had ideas of putting it in the A500, or perhaps a mid-range machine that would be 'almost as good as the A3000+' but much cheaper. Eventually those ideas coagulated into the A1200 (A500 replacement) and A4000 (A3000 replacement). The low end machine would not be getting DSP because it was built down to the lowest possible price. And once you give that up, where does it leave the high end?

CD32 has 16-bit 44.1 kHz stereo audio from the CD path. The same for CD32 FMV module.

Yep, which was touted by Commodore engineers as a reason not to worry about Paula. That 16-bit stereo audio track takes away a lot of the pressure, both on the sound chip and memory.

OPL2LPT V2 could work with PCTask's LPT access. PCX 1.1 has Sound Blaster emulation.

Good point!

With PiStorm-Emu68's compute power, GMplay or TiMidity PCM softsynth is easy.

Yeah, but they aren't retro enough for me. Besides, I just bought some OPL sound chips and am itching to use them!

$20 DSP3210 (12.6 MIPS and 25 MFLOPS FP32 @ 50Mhz, dual pipelines for integer and floating point) would have mitigated 3D math, fast MPEG1 decoder, DSP software bilt, and audio issues.

You may be right there. I don't know much about MPEG1 though, would it be enough?

[Promilus]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Paula (along with the CIA chips) also did the disk drive, mouse and joystick ports, and serial port. That's as much as a multi-I/O card did on a PC and it had sound too!

Compared to a Sound Blaster card that you had to buy separately, Paula's sound was indeed 'free' (the external analog filtering circuit and stereo connectors weren't, but that's another matter). In any case, Commodore managed to pack all that and hardware accelerated graphics and a 32 bit CPU, keyboard, disk drive, mouse, multitasking GUI OS in ROM etc. into a package that cost way less than the minimum a PC needed.

Of course tradeoffs were needed to do that, but IMO Commodore kept the right stuff. PCs made themselves appear cheaper by not including a sound card. The Amiga's designers wouldn't do that to us - they knew that awesome sound was a top priority!

And most of the "up to date" PC soundcards back then had MIDI port with UART, CD-ROM interface and game port so your argument is absolutely hilarious. And commodore did include old Paula to AGA not because it was good enough. It's because they didn't come up with anything better on time... the best they could was mild upgrade to memory controller (DMA included) and display chip which is essentially all they did with AGA. Over 7 years of development since A1000. Once again - great success with Borat's voice!

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

The 'original intent' was for high-end machines to have DSP.

With Lew's statement, DSP3210 is for all Amiga models including bottom Amiga SKU.

AA3000+ is the prototype AA Amiga.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

But pinning down that 'original intent' is tricky. Originally, AGA was a 'half-way-there' insurance policy in case AAA didn't work out - and they needed it!

From 1989, AAA only has 1 year serious development.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

'Originally' they had ideas of putting it in the A500, or perhaps a mid-range machine that would be 'almost as good as the A3000+' but much cheaper. Eventually those ideas coagulated into the A1200 (A500 replacement) and A4000 (A3000 replacement). The low end machine would not be getting DSP because it was built down to the lowest possible price. And once you give that up, where does it leave the high end?

That's Bill Sydnes' PCjr mentality. Ali fired Bill Sydnes for his lies and mis-directions.

A1200 has "a healthy profit margin"(Commodore UK MD claim). This is illustrated by similar spec CD32 with 2X speed CD-ROM has 299 UKP while A1200 has 399 UKP price targets.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Yeah, but they aren't retro enough for me. Besides, I just bought some OPL sound chips and am itching to use them!

My view on ARM CPU is a PA-RISC big-endian RISC substitute. Both ARM and PA-RISC have good code density i.e. better than MIPS or PowerPC.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

What a load of techno-elitist nonsense. Nobody accused Sound Blaster of 'wasting half the bandwidth' by only using 8 bits of the ISA bus. Paula uses very few DMA slots in normal operation, hardly worth trying to jam extra stuff into it just to avoid 'wasting bandwidth'.

AAA didn't 'already include' anything - they couldn't get the chipset working properly and nobody knows what state the sound part was in. But typical of an Amiga fan to get upset about not being given the Moon on a stick.

But hey, reason #16 for being disappointed with the A1200, it didn't have AAA!

[ Show youtube player ]
AAA reached silicon.

The problem is AAA doesn't address the 3D math issue.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by hammer

AGA had no native support for packed pixels.

Yeah, in retrospect that was disappointing. But no Amiga did, and in 1992 we didn't see it as that much of a big deal. The main thing was getting 256 colors so the graphics didn't suffer. Converting it to bitplanes shouldn't be hard - or so we thought. Who knew PC developers would just stick with chunky and convert it on the fly? (shades of ZX Spectrum games ported to the Amstrad without making any effort to change the graphics)

If there was one thing I would have added to AGA it would be this, even it didn't work with sprites etc. Just give us 320x200 in 256 color 1 byte per pixel screen and don't worry if it doesn't fit with anything else!

A low cost Blitter designed in 1987 would be a bottleneck for faster barrel shifter equipped fast 386DX-33/386DX-40 and 486SX CPUs.

No. The blitter can be doing its work while the CPU is doing other stuff. I notice this when compiling. Moving windows around, scrolling text etc. doesn't slow it down, and the system still feels responsive even when the CPU is working hard out (unlike this PC I'm using now - 4GB of RAM and a 3GHz CPU - and it takes ages to open a simple window! I don't know what it's doing in there - guess the hamsters need a rest every now and then).

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

(unlike this PC I'm using now - 4GB of RAM and a 3GHz CPU - and it takes ages to open a simple window! I don't know what it's doing in there - guess the hamsters need a rest every now and then).

It's probably just Winblows being a bloated piece of crap.

[sokolovic]

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.

Mmmm... I disagree a bit, especially on these time, sound was important. One could sell a game just because it had some digitalised speech.

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

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!"

In 1992, the PC wasn't really the serious competition from a gaming perspective, that was the SNES. That was capable of 8 channel,, 8 bit stereo sound which could also have various DSP effects applied.

Of course if you were doing serious audio work, rather than just playing games, then you might well be on the PC. And while the default solution there was pretty awful, it was much easier to spend the money necessary to get the best audio available. Wasn't really that easy to do the same on the Amiga, even if you had the cash.

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

Mmmm... I disagree a bit, especially on these time, sound was important. One could sell a game just because it had some digitalised speech.

I'm not saying it was unimportant, only that its significance is vastly exaggerated here.

Originally Posted by Thorham

It's probably just Winblows being a bloated piece of crap.

No, it's just Bruce doing his thing and complaining about some PC software (which most likely he is unable to properly optimize) not flying on an old, low spec hardware. As if this never happened on Amiga *eyeroll*

[TCD]

Originally Posted by AestheticDebris

In 1992, the PC wasn't really the serious competition from a gaming perspective, that was the SNES.

Indeed. The 'problem' was that the Amiga 1200 was released at the very end of 1992 and after 1992 things started to move very fast. During 1993 games on the PC became increasingly 'competitive'. It was stated many pages ago, on the lower end you had the cheap consoles and on the higher end you had the PC in 1993. The target market for the A1200 was pretty small and the lack of software (games or otherwise) that made use of the new features while the older Amiga still got supported very well killed any buzz it had.

It surely didn't help that Commodore in a last ditch effort threw everything into the CD32 instead of adding a CD-ROM drive to the A1200 like they announced.

[Promilus]

I wouldn't say SNES had a big audio capability, sure there was DSP with 6502 core but due to constraints on cartridge memory SNES audio capabilities were hardly utilized, it was yet another reason to use some weird tricks and make actual music from basically just few bytes of data. (un)fortunately Nintendo did dump CD-ROM based add-ons to SNES (including Play Station), if they went forward with the initial idea that'd be basically game over for Amiga in gaming market.

Now soundcards on PC. Sure there were plenty of cheap ones (including some clones) with not so great quality but by the time A1200 was released there were pretty decent ones in affordable price level. And - to no surprise - they did support PC CD-ROM titles with proper soundtracks played in the background... with speech during cutscenes and so on. And soon PC gaming industry became a lot more creative. All while Amiga developers were still trying to fit their games into floppies and running on 2MB chipram equipped A1200 ...

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by abu_the_monkey

what exactly was the base model (absolute minimum spec) PC at the time the A1200 was released?

There is no formal base model - i can say as service technician working those time in shop selling PC (brand like Hyundai but also made for customer order from widely available parts) it was everything from 286@12MHz to 386DX and later 486DX.
Wide spectrum of various PC's - obviously those cheaper 286 equipped units was more frequently bought as home PC with sometimes mono VGA monitor later it become replaced by 386SX and finally when AMD released cheap 386DX@40MHz this become dominant home PC base model.
However in terms of audio there was no base very long, even in Windows 95 there is no formal requirement for having audio on board (or as card).
First audio standard for PC was founded by Intel in well known AC'97 standard (established in 1997). Practically since 2001 every PC has some audio functionality on board - this is like 15 years after Amiga.

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.

Nope - it is relevant as Amiga market is 100% with outdated 4channel 8 bit PCM Paula capable to operate in DMA mode up to 56KHz sample rate.
On PC situation was quite different and affordable technology closest to embedded in Amiga was Covox (in original form single channel, 8 bit PCM driven by CPU as printer port doesn't support DMA - this is odd as using 8254 and 8237 could be quite obvious solution for audio problem yet IBM screwed PC also on this).
Anyway my point was that audio PCM was standard on PC way later than 1995 - as i already pointed - first effort to standardization is made by Intel trough AC'97 - we can say that every PC is audio capable since 2000/2001.

I owned GUS - it was incompatible with Soundblaster, making lot of problem, not supported by every game for long time - PITA - popular only in PC demoscene for few years. As side effect you had various GUS versions, some of them trying to combine SB functionality in dedicated HW.
Once again Paula was obsolete for us and still tempting for many PC owners driving PC speaker in crude 6 bit software PWM to hear something other than beeps.
Btw never get why GUS was so problematic for developers but obviously it was problem for customers.

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

No, it has 4.

Amiga 8364R7 Paula dissection

Thx for this, It prove my point - silicone area could be substantially smaller if only 2 DAC's was implemented with sample interleaving and additionally it could open possibility to separate samples outside Paula to 4 independent channels.
Space that simply could be used for new functionality (like NCO, buffered UART, MFM encoder/decoder etc).

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by pandy71

Thx for this, It prove my point - silicone area could be substantially smaller if only 2 DAC's was implemented with sample interleaving ...

Silicon area would also been significantly smaller, if a contemporary 2mu process would have been used instead of Commodores old 7mu.

Since are in quadratic it would only need around 15% of the silicon area ... even with switching to CMOS, which roughly doubles the transistor count, it would still only need 30% ... leaving room for a lot of things ...