Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

Hammer why did you post scans of 1993 prices when the chatgpt quote was from 1991?!

Either way, most Amiga owners probably thought it was expensive and a luxury at the time, i always thought it strange you had to buy a ‘sound card’ for your IBM, though i guess they were business machines primarily, and on the few rare occasions i was shown DOS games they only had beeper sound.

And don’t forget comparing US prices will always be cheaper (where DOS gaming took off alot quicker) when comparing to the Amiga market which was majority European based.

1993 was a critical year for Commodore with a full sales year for the AGA platform.

AGA should been released in H2 1991 with just AA3000+ and A1000+ with recycled Ramsey/Fat Gary/4 TTL bridge chips and without PCMCIA.

Fat Gary was replaced by Gayle in A1200.
Fat Gary/4 TTL bridge chips and Buster was replaced by Budgie in A1200.
The 4 TTL bridge chips were replaced by Bridgette in the A4000.

This would give the AGA platform an extra full year of sales (i.e. 1992 and 1993) and avoid the A600 debacle. Commodore Germany's IDE demand is secondary.

Between PCMCIA/IDE vs AGA, I prefer AGA to be released in H1 1991.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by AestheticDebris

Of course it was a nightmare, but also perhaps the pinnacle of thinking from "The cathedral and the bazaar". By throwing loads of solutions out there, the better ones survived and innovation from all of them fed back into the next set of offerings. And ultimately the need to cope with that variety lead to DirectX.

Meanwhile the Amiga had Paula as it's cathedral and nobody had the time or money to build a better cathedral, so it was stuck with it even when things should have moved on.

Adding DSP at the front of Paula could have removed the four-channel issue i.e. DSP3210.

[Dunny]

Let's face it, Commodore lucked out with the original Amiga. They did the sum total of feck all with it besides trying to iterate as cheaply as possible to extract as much cash out of it as they could.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by TEG

Because of Defender of the Crown, SOTB, Lotus Turbo Esprit, Pinball Dream, etc... which set the level. It was part of the soul of the Amiga, what made the legend and why you wanted the machine.

Not to mention the trackers part with the dreaming amount of floppies samples which were circulating AND the incredible digits read in real time from floppies! This was mind blowing.

An Amiga without Paula wouldn't have been the Amiga.

[ Show youtube player ]

I had another one with the Money For Nothing intro.

My A3000 with external SCSI 2X speed CD-ROM (from the Macintosh market) could play back resampled CD music audio into Paula.

[ Show youtube player ]
Quick test audio MP3 on Amiga 500 Output Paula AHI 14bit Stereo ++ with "song player". Solved with compute power boost via Pistorm with Raspberry 3A+ (EMU68 RC2).


[ Show youtube player ]
Someone's A1200's Paula is in a 14-bit 56 kHz demo.

My A1200's Paula is in 56 kHz mode. The reason for my A1200 retro machine usage is to avoid the MS-DOS text user interface. Caffeine OS's GUI sits better with my Windows 11 gaming PCs.

Paula is a guaranteed standard for the Amiga platform i.e. "it just works".

Windows 11's two-button mouse WIMP is close enough to Amiga Workbench's two-button mouse WIMP which makes the transition between the two platforms very easy.

Furthermore, my A1200 has semi-modern RDP software to log into my Windows 11/Windows 2019 (for NAS roles) servers.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by hammer

without PCMCIA

No. PCMCIA is useful

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Dunny

Let's face it, Commodore lucked out with the original Amiga. They did the sum total of feck all with it besides trying to iterate as cheaply as possible to extract as much cash out of it as they could.

That sums it up pretty well.

[khph_re]

Originally Posted by Thorham

No. PCMCIA is useful

It was useful later for WiFi, Storage and CD-rom, but it was an expensive laptop part, and the CD-ROMS such as Squirrel were also expensive.

Better to have added a chip that supported a second IDE channel, and made room in the case for a CD-ROM. Turning the clock header into a proper mini expansion port would of allowed for network/Wifi.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Thorham

No. PCMCIA is useful

It wasn't a systems seller for the sales flopped A600 and caused an unnecessary delay for A1200's Budgie (integrated functions from Buster, Ramsey, and Bridgette).

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by hammer

When CD-ROM evolved into a popular storage media for distributing software, the Amiga desktop platform didn't officially evolve with it.

In those days (when CD-ROM started to become popular as a distribution medium) CD-ROM drives were SCSI. Any Amiga with a SCSI controller could use them, including the A2000 with A2090 or A2091 etc. and the A3000. I have a "Fish and More" CD for the Amiga published by XETEC in 1990. This was served up to users on the BBS which we ran on an A2000 in my shop.

Fun fact - Commodore worked with Chinon (who made the 1541 drive) to develop a low cost CD-ROM drive with a motorized drawer attached to a cheap CD player mechanism, for the CDTV-CR. While this never eventuated, Chinon ran with the idea for PC CD-ROM drives. Commodore helped make PC CD-ROM drives better and more affordable! In 1993 BSC introduced the Tandem CD-ROM/IDE controller, which supported the proprietary Mitsumi CD-ROM drives used in PCs. The Archos OverDrive CD, interfaced an FX001D drive to the A1200 via the PCMCIA port.

Note that ATAPI didn't come out until 1995, after Commodore was gone. Before that PC CD-ROM drives used either SCSI or proprietary interfaces. Proprietary drives came with their own dedicated controller card. Later on sound cards came with several interfaces built in. To support all the different drives a sound card might have 4 separate connectors with interface circuitry for each one. How inefficient is that?

Officially, CD32 was separated from the rest of the AGA platform.

The A4000 had a slot for an internal CD-ROM drive.

Wedge-shaped Amiga form factor would find it difficult to include a 5-inch CD-ROM drive, 3.5-inch hard disk, and 3.5-inch floppy disk drive.

The laptop's slim CD-ROM drive could fit inside the A1200's case, but laptop parts usually have higher prices.

True. The A1200 was not designed to take a CD-ROM internally, but an external drive could be connected via SCSI (which several accelerator cards had) or the PCMCIA port.

Advantages of an external drive included eliminating extra bulk and weight inside the A1200, and wider application. CD-ROM drives were expensive. An external drive could be plugged into any Amiga (or PC. Mac etc.) which had a SCSI port, so you could share it between several computers.

I had an A3000 which also doesn't have room for an internal CD-ROM drive, so an external drive was my only option. Later, when I got a CD Writer (which was even more expensive), I put it in the same external case so I could use it on various machines.

Commodore could sell Amiga chipsets and license reference designs like AMD/NVIDIA's business model and the final assembly risk is on 3rd parties.

That would be pointless when Commodore couldn't even produce enough chips to meet demand for their own products. Besides, nobody (apart from a tiny number of 3rd party Amiga hardware producers) was interested in them.

AMD/NVidea's business model was based around the PC, which was all about 3rd parties making stuff to feed the 'industry standard'. Without that they were nothing. AMD and NVidea are the 3rd parties. What you are proposing is more akin to IBM selling VGA chips to 3rd parties so they can make PS/2 clones. Well they tried licensing the PS/2 design and how did that work out? Not too well, because the clone makers weren't interested in paying - they were quite happy just ripping off the original PC, which would go whichever way they wanted.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by hammer

It wasn't a systems seller for the sales flopped A600.

Actually it was. You could get a 2MB PCMCIA FastRAM card for just over £100, making the A600 a lot more useful. With an internal hard drive as well it was a lot cheaper than an A500 with A590. I had a similar setup on my A1000 (2mB FastRAM + 20MB hard drive) and it was sweet. With an autobooting hard drive and 1~2MB ChipRAM it would have been even better!

[TEG]

Originally Posted by hammer

Adding DSP at the front of Paula could have removed the four-channel issue i.e. DSP3210.

What would be the principle?

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Dunny

Let's face it, Commodore lucked out with the original Amiga. They did the sum total of feck all with it besides trying to iterate as cheaply as possible to extract as much cash out of it as they could.

Ah, so that explains the A3000 and CDTV then - not.

Personally I am in favor of 'iterate as cheaply as possible'. The A1000 needed that. If it wasn't for 'iterate as cheaply as possible' millions of people wouldn't have experienced the awesomeness of the Amiga.

But hey, reason #17 for being disappointed with the A1200 - it was too cheap!

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Note that ATAPI didn't come out until 1995, after Commodore was gone.

https://dosdays.co.uk/topics/images/ct1740_1.jpg
Sound Blaster 16 (CT1740) with a CD-ROM interface.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/F...laster_Pro.jpg
Sound Blaster Pro (CT1600) with a CD-ROM interface.

Creative Labs dominated the enabling MPC add-ons for the PC.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

The A4000 had a slot for an internal CD-ROM drive.

1. Missing Akiko's C2P.

2. A tiny few thousand A4000 units wouldn't change the AGA platform.

3. A4000's CD-ROM drive would need to be a SCSI or ATAPI variant and a related controller card. Unlike A3000, SCSI wasn't built-in with the A4000.

4. C= A4000T (with built-in SCSI) is very rare.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Note that ATAPI didn't come out until 1995, after Commodore was gone. Before that PC CD-ROM drives used either SCSI or proprietary interfaces. Proprietary drives came with their own dedicated controller card. Later on sound cards came with several interfaces built in. To support all the different drives a sound card might have 4 separate connectors with interface circuitry for each one. How inefficient is that?

PC has "de facto" standards e.g. Creative Labs dominated the MPC enabling add-ons.

ATAPI is to stop Creative Lab's growing market power.


https://cygnus.speccy.cz/download/datasheety/atapi.pdf
ATAPI revision 1.2 draft in Feb 1994.


https://archive.org/details/sony-ata...2.18b-mcnatapi
Sony ATAPI Device Driver package with 1994 year.


https://www.ardent-tool.com/docs/pdf/dwbook.pdf (IBM's Personal System Reference, IBM PC, 1994 to 2000 - withdrawn, November 2000, Version 2012)
IBM PC 330-486 was available in Nov 1994 with an optional IDE CD-ROM.

Some major Commodore national subsidiaries were still trading in 1994. Commodore Semiconductor Group was shut down before Commodore International's Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Commodore International's last quarter had an 8 million dollar loss and it was nearing breaking even. The end of 1992's losses was hard on Commodore International's finances. The A600 debacle is the major factor.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

True. The A1200 was not designed to take a CD-ROM internally, but an external drive could be connected via SCSI (which several accelerator cards had) or the PCMCIA port.

Advantages of an external drive included eliminating extra bulk and weight inside the A1200, and wider application. CD-ROM drives were expensive. An external drive could be plugged into any Amiga (or PC. Mac etc.) which had a SCSI port, so you could share it between several computers.

An external CD-ROM drive with a laptop PCMCIA card is not cheap.

I'm aware of A1200's 3rd party accelerator cards with optional SCSI controllers and they were not price competitive. Examples, GVP's https://bigbookofamigahardware.com/b...ct.aspx?id=132 and DKB's https://bigbookofamigahardware.com/b...ct.aspx?id=126

[sandruzzo]

@hammer
Why are you hammering us,with all these numbers again and again? We know them very well now thanks to you!

[hammer]

Originally Posted by sandruzzo

@hammer
Why are you hammering us,with all these numbers again and again? We know them very well now thanks to you!

Some Commodore national subsidiaries were still trading in 1994.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Actually it was. You could get a 2MB PCMCIA FastRAM card for just over £100, making the A600 a lot more useful. With an internal hard drive as well it was a lot cheaper than an A500 with A590. I had a similar setup on my A1000 (2mB FastRAM + 20MB hard drive) and it was sweet. With an autobooting hard drive and 1~2MB ChipRAM it would have been even better!

NOT at the cost of Commodore International!

Commodore International's last quarter had an 8 million dollar loss and it was nearing breaking even.

The end of 1992's $356 million loss was too hard on Commodore International's finances. The combined A600's scope creep and the A500's 1992 cancellation debacle have caused Commodore's revenues to dive as the major factor.

The hardware generation transition into the next generation is mismanaged.

[TEG]

Originally Posted by sandruzzo

@hammer
Why are you hammering us,with all these numbers again and again? We know them very well now thanks to you!

This is for exam preparation. There will be a test when we will arrive at page 300 of the thread. Be ready!

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by Thorham

No. PCMCIA is useful

Yes - useful but should be located in different address space (using FC0..FC2? or indirect addressing)

[hammer]

Originally Posted by pandy71

Yes - useful but should be located in different address space (using FC0..FC2? or indirect addressing)

A1200's PCMCIA defaults to "memory only" mode before switching to 64K IO mode.

[Karlos]

By the mid 90s, the PC was flat out better at everything (hardware wise) than the Amiga, except one. Being an Amiga. This is why myself and presumably others like me, stuck it out for so long, expanding it far beyond what was sensible when viewed from a purely financial perspective. Even when I finally had a PC, it was second fiddle for years, just there to deal with the ever bloated requirements of the web. I spent way more time coding and making music than gaming - particularly the wave of 3D games that propelled the PC forwards.

If it weren't for the lack of time due to work/life balance I'd probably still be at it.