Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[grond]

No engineer would ever implement an 8 bit planar graphics mode and then not do an 8 bit chunky mode (planar was only invented to save graphics RAM for modes where #cols != 256 and sometimes 16).

No engineer would implement a 32 bit chipmem bus and then not make the blitter fetch 32 bits at a time.

Commodore's management was responsible for cutting down engineering budgets and wasting money on other projects just to kill them off before release (or let the market kill those other projects because nobody ever asked for the stuff). An A1200 type computer with AGA, 32bit blitter and chunky mode in 1990 would have sold well at a higher price than the A500's original price. It would have reached the same level of technical awesomeness in 1990 as the A500 did in 1987. The custom chips wouldn't even have become more expensive to produce than they were, all it would have required was a one-time development investment.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by Samurai_Crow

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.

I've been thinking about that for a while and I believe I know why this wasn't done. Page mode (fast or not) works by having memory accesses be sequential. But the Blitter uses multiple sources and a destination that can be anywhere in chip memory and fetches/stores memory between all of them in sequence.

Now, I'm not saying you can't design a Blitter that accesses it's different sources/destination in blocks of more bytes, but it's clearly a fairly big change from how it worked at the time. One that would only speed up certain types of blit, while leaving all others as slow as they used to be.

So perhaps it wasn't done because it would only accelerate certain 2D objects and textured 3D was not quite the big thing it eventually became. That changed about a year after AGA was launched, but still.

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).

Actually, smooth scrolling without special purpose hardware only requires three things: a fast enough CPU, the ability to point the display at different areas in memory and the ability to detect the vertical blank.

If you have these things, it's surprisingly simple.

Case in point: the Amiga can smoothly scroll with just the CPU if desired as it can switch where the screen is in memory and detect vertical blanks. It's hugely wasteful to move pixels about with the CPU, but it can be done. Other systems can also do it this way.

Perhaps early VGA cards didn't support V-blank detection or lacked the ability to change display memory location. As I understand it later cards certainly did support these things though.

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!

They didn't avoid those games at all. Pretty much all the Arcade games that got ported to the Amiga got ported to the PC as well. They just didn't scroll very well. Just to give one example: Golden Axe on a real PC scrolls quite poorly, with clear tearing visible all over the screen. It does run quite well in DOSBOX though for some reason.

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!

I mostly agree with this. Though, properly used, Adlib can actually sound really nice. Just don't have it do any form of drums as they're horrible. And those 256 colours were used to great effect in some PC games. Notably graphical adventures.

This is why marketing PC's with graphics and sound cards 'Multimedia PC' was such a stroke of genius. Here we have PC's that (essentially) have many of the features that the Amiga always had but we don't want to call it a games machine. So what do we do? We call it 'Multimedia' to pretend it was all for business and serious stuff all along.

Originally Posted by Hewitson

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

Well, I can only speak from my own experience - obviously - and it is certainly possible that the problem was with the PC's my friends owned and not the system overal, but it was not my experience that PC's did smooth scrolling well.

Case in point: in my experience Jazz Jackrabbit did not scroll 'smoothly' (at least not on the 486 level hardware I saw). To clarify: it did scroll finely grained (i.e. per pixel), but it didn't scroll consistently. Well, for me anyway - maybe it did for you. Some of the time it was fine, some of the time there were odd speed changes in the scrolling.

It didn't feel like it was properly vsync locked scrolling.

So to be clear: when I'm talking about smooth scrolling, I mean 'rock solid' smooth scrolling that has that smooth 'feel'. Merely moving the screen a finely grained per pixel increments and generally getting it right but sometimes not getting it right doesn't do it for me. Which also means that I think quite a few Amiga games fail here as well.

[Thomas Richter]

AA was "too little, too late". It was considered as a "minor tweak" of ECS, and was only that. For chunky, the DMA slot allocation would have to be redone. For a 32-bit blitter, the blitter engine would have to be changed, or some additional pipelining would have to be done - all tasks that were delayed in favour for AAA, which never went beyond a prototype phase.

But then again, the time for home computers was already gone, and the PC became useful for multimedia and offered a software collection - including professional applications - that attracted many more customers than the "games machine" the Amiga was considered to be.

[demolition]

Originally Posted by roondar

Case in point: in my experience Jazz Jackrabbit did not scroll 'smoothly' (at least not on the 486 level hardware I saw). To clarify: it did scroll finely grained (i.e. per pixel), but it didn't scroll consistently. Well, for me anyway - maybe it did for you. Some of the time it was fine, some of the time there were odd speed changes in the scrolling.
It didn't feel like it was properly vsync locked scrolling.

From what I remember, Jazz Jackrabbit did not do proper vsynced scrolling as we're used to from the Amiga. The PC could do it though as the DOS versions of Superfrog and Pinball Fantasies were playing just as smooth as the Amiga versions (using 60 Hz VGA mode).


I also programmed a few DOS intros myself where I used vsync to make it run smooth so I don't get why it wasn't common to do so. I used wait loops to check for vsync though and don't remember that you could set up interrupts to trigger on specific raster lines or vsync. If not, then that might be why people didn't bother with using vsync. Also, if the PC was too slow to keep up, it might be preferable to run without vsync instead of having it drop to half speed.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by grond

An A1200 type computer with AGA, 32bit blitter and chunky mode in 1990 would have sold well at a higher price than the A500's original price. It would have reached the same level of technical awesomeness in 1990 as the A500 did in 1987. The custom chips wouldn't even have become more expensive to produce than they were, all it would have required was a one-time development investment.

A 68020 based machine in 1990 would've been really nice. But also, as you point out, much more expensive. Consider this: the only Amiga's that ever sold in any great numbers were those that were priced under 500 UK pounds. I'm genuinely curious why you (and quite a few others) think this would suddenly change with better graphics hardware alongside it?

That said: let's assume that 24 bit colour palettes and 2MB RAM (which is really kind of needed for AGA as is) would've been feasible in 1990 for any form of reasonable price. Well, I'm still not sure that adding a 32 bit blitter and chunky mode would've really made as much difference as you think. It would essentially only double the Blitter memory bandwidth and allow the CPU to do easier 3D.

Why is that relevant?
A double speed Blitter still can't compete with the 16 bit consoles for 2D performance. For that it would need to be at least 4x the speed of the original. And in 1990, 3D performance simply wasn't as important - AFAIK no one did textured 3D. Even on systems that did have the bandwidth and chunky modes. Now, it's true that such a change would've made the transition to 3D chunky games that came later easier, but even then the main limit was CPU grunt - on the PC as well as the Amiga.

So such an A1200 (IMHO anyway), would still need at least the CPU replaced by 1993 at the latest. And probably the Blitter as well if I'm being honest.

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

AA was "too little, too late". It was considered as a "minor tweak" of ECS, and was only that.

I do wonder though, if it's such a little change then why did Commodore not have the ability to make these chips themselves?

But at any rate, it's the result that matters. Calling double the number of bitplanes and 4x the display fetch rate & sprite size "minor tweaks" might be true from a technical perspective, but not from a "what can we do with it" perspective. I agree that AGA was not a revolution, but it did make many things possible on Amiga that were essentially impossible before.

Such as running DOOM in 256 colours without adding extra graphics hardware. Albeit years later and with generally higher CPU requirements

But then again, the time for home computers was already gone, and the PC became useful for multimedia and offered a software collection - including professional applications - that attracted many more customers than the "games machine" the Amiga was considered to be.

I agree with this. As I said before, all the home computers failed around the same time, chunky mode or not. Fast CPU and fast graphics or not.

Originally Posted by demolition

From what I remember, Jazz Jackrabbit did not do proper vsynced scrolling as we're used to from the Amiga. The PC could do it though as the DOS versions of Superfrog and Pinball Fantasies were playing just as smooth as the Amiga versions (using 60 Hz VGA mode).

I also programmed a few DOS intros myself where I used vsync to make it run smooth so I don't get why it wasn't common to do so. I used wait loops to check for vsync though and don't remember that you could set up interrupts to trigger on specific raster lines or vsync. If not, then that might be why people didn't bother with using vsync. Also, if the PC was too slow to keep up, it might be preferable to run without vsync instead of having it drop to half speed.

Interesting, I did think VGA could do it. But perhaps only some cards could?

Anyway, just to be clear - I was/am only speaking from personal experience. It's certainly possible these smooth games existed, but like I said - it's not what I saw. I can even remember Pinball Fantasies tearing at my friends house. Perhaps he didn't have a GFX card that properly supported the game though, that is certainly possible.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

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

Star Wars: Rebel Assault

"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!

By that statement, Bruce, you should rightfully include Microcosm for the CD32, as well! What a pile of limited "rails" gameplay, but gorgeous eye-candy crap that was! And FMV games were only 3D as it was perhaps the most convenient way to do 3D at the time, with high detail and lots of moving objects. But eventually, Doom, Quake and other 3D First Person Shooter games took over and killed the FMV game market, and the interactivity was pushed to the max. And with exciting single-player campaigns and multiplayer game modes, in full hyper-detailed 3D and realtime, the outlook for "3D games" (as you put it, Bruce) had never been brighter.

[roondar]

Microcosm was the worst let down I've ever played. It looked awesome, but played like crap. Actually, I'm struggling to think of a single FMV game that managed to play well.

As for 3D games: I concur, they took over most of the market and rightly so. DOOM was great fun (though I never liked the Quake series myself) and then the PSX/3DFX era hit and I was totally converted to the new order. There are few things that impressed me as much as Wipeout 2097 when I first saw it, or that one Unreal demo

[activist]

Originally Posted by roondar

I agree with this. As I said before, all the home computers failed around the same time, chunky mode or not. Fast CPU and fast graphics or not.

Would all home computers have failed if you started to see ID's 3D line of games on them? First. About 1991.

Would the pc ever have become 'useful for multimedia' without the graphics hardware that, lets face it, was driven on the back of these 3D games?

[Foebane]

There were two reasons why I switched to PC: Commodore's collapse, and Doom.

I always considered the Amiga to be a Commodore computer, as it had been for years, and despite the mismanagement and endless hardware releases, Commodore showed that they obviously had the most experience with the hardware, having the original developers on-staff. But when Commodore went bust, I just knew that either the hardware would disappear into oblivion, or be bought up by a company who just didn't understand it and never would upgrade it, for certain. Which is what happened, ultimately. And the Amiga never recovered and faded into the limelight of nostalgia. This would never have happened with the PC, being the most open platform and open and EVOLVING standard there is, with multiple third-party vendors for motherboards, graphics cards, memory and so on, with Intel and AMD providing the core CPU models and plenty of healthy competition and lower prices. Not to mention the power. No wonder the PC won out.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by activist

Would all home computers have failed if you started to see ID's 3D line of games on them? First. About 1991.

IMHO, yes. They did not fail because of 3D games. That was just the last straw that broke the camel's back. Home computers eventually failing had been a long time coming. You have to remember that by 1991, PC market share was already way above 50%.

As I see it, PC's won because they were in offices everywhere. People brought PC's into the home because they saw them in the office and thought it'd be useful to have Wordperfect or Lotus 1-2-3 at home. The PC getting better hardware for games after this started to happen was inevitable: once people had their PC in the home, they found it didn't just do Wordperfect but could also play some (at the time pretty bad) games. This in turn fuelled graphics and sound card growth and the rest is history.

But perhaps at least as important: in 1991, 3D acceleration was not what people were looking for. People wanted better 2D hardware. You're looking at this in retrospective. And everything seems easy to fix with the benefit of hindsight.

Do note I didn't think home computers would fail back in 1991. I don't do predicting the future well

Would the pc ever have become 'useful for multimedia' without the graphics hardware that, lets face it, was driven on the back of these 3D games?

The graphics hardware for PC's that got them 'useful for multimedia' was based on the 1987 VGA and 1988 SVGA standards. It had nothing to do with 3D games.

So, I'd have to say yes again.

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by activist

'Open'. By open you mean bribery, corruption, robbery and rip off on part of IBM, Microsoft and Intel right through the ages.
How else, how did it come to pass, that such a shoddy shambles of a computer architecture would become the standard.

Frankly, I doubt that this was the reason. The IBM PC was designed as a "good enough" competitor of the Apple II because IBM wanted to get a foot into the consumer market. It became popular because "you cannot get fired if you order from IBM" in the professional market, and from there, they made their way into the homes.

So it was the professional market that drove the whole thing. Ironically, IBM lost its bet because others could mass-produce the same (shabby) architecture just cheaper after having a reverse-engineered BIOS.

[demolition]

If IBM would have had their way and been able to protect the PC design, the PC would not have gained the popularity that it did. It had to evolve in a somewhat decentralized manner, shaped by voluntary standards mainly focused on making it easier and cheap to manufacture and develop expansions as the price point is a key factor in putting PCs in people's homes.

If the only PC you could buy was from IBM, their only customers would be rich people and small business owners who could also use it for work. It may have been a somewhat shabby design, but it was good enough and that is all you need.

[grond]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

For chunky, the DMA slot allocation would have to be redone. For a 32-bit blitter, the blitter engine would have to be changed, or some additional pipelining would have to be done

I disagree, in my opinion as a chip designer myself those changes would have been small. DMA allocation would not have had to change, all it would have taken would have been some additional latches to realign the DMA data differently before going to the DAC. 8 bit chunky and 8 bit planar take exactly the same amount of data to be read and DAC'ed. The DMA slots would have been exactly the same, just reading from consecutive addresses and not from eight different memory locations. Doing it the planar way is actually more complicated than doing it the chunky way!

The same goes for a 32 bit blitter. A 32 bit blitter could simply have fetched 32bits at a time discarding the occasional unneeded 16 bits of graphics data for misaligned accesses (leading and trailing end). Even for microblits this would always have been at least as fast as the original 16 bit blits and would not have required any change in controlling the blitter. The blitter wouldn't even have had to change for blitting chunky data because the blitter doesn't care about the arrangement of the bits! Quite to the contrary you would have been done with one (longer) blitjob where you used to do "number-of-bitplanes" blitjobs.

Of course, back in the 80s all microchip development was far more demanding than today where you only need to change a few lines of VHDL but nevertheless these changes would have been small if Commodore had had any interest at all in a seriously enhanced product. As you correctly stated, AGA was really just a small patch to keep an obsolete product in the market.

If Commodore really had wanted to overhaul the original Amiga architecture, they also would have had to add 16 bit audio and faster floppy DMA. I believe these changes would have been more significant than an 8 bit chunky graphics mode and a 32 bit blitter.

In the past I think it was often stated that Commodore had lost the original schematics to the Amiga custom chips and that this was the reason why they couldn't do a proper update. Of course, this may be an unfounded rumour or I simply remember this wrong.

[sandruzzo]

Another problem with A1200, was its' market placement. Was it A Home computer? Consolle? Multimedia machine? Commodore did a very poor clear market strategy.

With HDD, a little fast ram, some HW teawks, Maybe, people who used computer to work could have better understand Amiga...

[grond]

Originally Posted by roondar

A 68020 based machine in 1990 would've been really nice. But also, as you point out, much more expensive. Consider this: the only Amiga's that ever sold in any great numbers were those that were priced under 500 UK pounds. I'm genuinely curious why you (and quite a few others) think this would suddenly change with better graphics hardware alongside it?

I think that the price difference between the keyboard type Amigas and the big box Amigas was too big. The A2000 was so much more expensive than the A500 which basically could do the same as the A2000 unless you really wanted to do video editing and such. The A3000 was ridiculously expensive and the A4000 only a bit better because it was mostly a stripped down A3000 but with AGA.

The added processing power of the big box Amigas was devalued by the low and hardly increasing base line Amigas because little software made use of it. While (with some imagination) an A4000/040 could compete with a 486, there were too few of them. If the keyboard Amigas had increased in power over time while more or less keeping the introductory price of the A500, the big boxes would have appeared more attractive and the step up in price less frightening. Remember, I wasn't saying that selling the same tech more expensive would have made everything better, I'm saying more tech for more money and features that would have made sense to buyers (e.g. no PCMCIA which only much, much later started to make sense).

Well, I'm still not sure that adding a 32 bit blitter and chunky mode would've really made as much difference as you think. It would essentially only double the Blitter memory bandwidth and allow the CPU to do easier 3D.

Why is that relevant?
A double speed Blitter still can't compete with the 16 bit consoles for 2D performance. For that it would need to be at least 4x the speed of the original.

Where does the 4x figure come from? With a chunky mode, you would have ended up with much less wasted bandwidth for cookie cutting and unneeded graphics data, so yes, I think it would have competed fine with 2D consoles.

And in 1990, 3D performance simply wasn't as important - AFAIK no one did textured 3D.

An 8 bit chunky mode is also much faster at blitting text, window decorations and so on, because you don't have to touch eight different places in memory for a pixel but only one. Chunky also totally made sense for 2D graphics and workstation software (i.e. AmigaOS which, of course, was probably a greater obstacle for chunky than the hardware as it was too closely designed around planar bitmaps!).

[demolition]

Originally Posted by sandruzzo

Another problem with A1200, was its' market placement. Was it A Home computer? Consolle? Multimedia machine?

Yes to all three. Well, maybe not so much multimedia except for the CD-based models.



I am sure its versatility was one of the reasons for its success. Many of my friends shared their Amigas with their dads (which also fully or partly paid for it) since they would also be able to use it for serious stuff besides gaming. My dad paid 50% of my first Amiga. He didn't use it for games but word processing, accounting etc. If it could only do games, he wouldn't have been able to use it for much and he may not have been as keen on funding it.


An example of an unfocused design is the C128. Besides being a faster and more capable 'C64v2', it had to be ~100% C64 compatible since C64 had so much SW and to also cater for the business market they also threw in a Z80 CPU so it could run CP/M. This made it so expensive that it missed the target on all fronts. They also spent a lot of effort on making the big box Amigas PC-compatible since this was the holy grail in the computer business if you wanted to sell something to non-gamers, but at least here the PC hardware was not added into the base Amiga hardware so those of us who did not need it did not have to pay for it.


Raise of hands - how many around here have actually used the Z80 CPU in a C128 (other than just booting CP/M because you could)?

[roondar]

Originally Posted by grond

I think that the price difference between the keyboard type Amigas and the big box Amigas was too big. The A2000 was so much more expensive than the A500 which basically could do the same as the A2000 unless you really wanted to do video editing and such. The A3000 was ridiculously expensive and the A4000 only a bit better because it was mostly a stripped down A3000 but with AGA.

The added processing power of the big box Amigas was devalued by the low and hardly increasing base line Amigas because little software made use of it. While (with some imagination) an A4000/040 could compete with a 486, there were too few of them. If the keyboard Amigas had increased in power over time while more or less keeping the introductory price of the A500, the big boxes would have appeared more attractive and the step up in price less frightening. Remember, I wasn't saying that selling the same tech more expensive would have made everything better, I'm saying more tech for more money and features that would have made sense to buyers (e.g. no PCMCIA which only much, much later started to make sense).

Well, I didn't think you meant increasing prices to big-box Amiga levels. I was thinking more in line of adding say 200 pounds to the base model price. Perhaps I'm overly negative here but I'd still that even with better specs that would be a hard sell to the core audience at the time.

But who knows, I could certainly be wrong. It just feels to me that the main attraction to Amiga buyers always was the low end/cheap models. And if remember the 'market war' with the Atari ST correctly, even the minor 100 or so pound difference between it and the A500 was consistently enough to have the ST outselling the Amiga. AFAIK the Amiga never actually outsold the ST (though this part of my memory is flakey so I accept it could be very wrong).

Where does the 4x figure come from? With a chunky mode, you would have ended up with much less wasted bandwidth for cookie cutting and unneeded graphics data, so yes, I think it would have competed fine with 2D consoles.

That figure is based on the number of 32x32 squares the Amiga Blitter can draw compared to a Mega Drive's 32x32 sprite output. Which is about a quarter. I've not bothered with considering the SNES as that had trickery that is clearly out of reach of AGA + 32 bit blitter (such as three layer screens which would require more than 8 bitplanes and two layer screens which also would require over 8 bitplanes (256+16 colours)).

As for wasted bandwidth, I partly agree. However, unless you want to do a pretty radical departure of how a Blitter works, a Blitter chip will draw in rectangles. This limits the optimisations you can do.

Now, with a chunky Blitter you can optimise. For instance, you can skip the extra word for shifting and you could fiddle around with not drawing pixels that are found to be transparent. Skipping the extra word is great, and in practice saves about 1/3 of the average bob size memory bandwidth so that is a nice optimisation. Skipping transparent pixels during output is harder to quantify, but at any rate only saves you part of the output step and you'd still need to check the input pixels for transparency. Which still means using a mask if you want to be able to draw all 256 colours you have.

Not outputting transparent pixels and allowing for any size rectangle without needing to shift are fine optimisations, so please don't get me wrong. I just don't think they're going to make an overall 2x improvement.

Granted, it is true you can save quite a bit when drawing in a chunky mode by using a 'compiled sprite' approach that is specific to the sprite you're drawing and 'knows' ahead of time exactly what pixels to save for restoring, which to draw and which to skip for transparency, but I personally don't think such an approach would translate easily into a hardware version.

That said, I am not a chip designer so I could definitely be wrong. Are there examples of Blitter like chips that did this? Later SVGA cards had Blitters which apparently were really fast. Did they do this?

An 8 bit chunky mode is also much faster at blitting text, window decorations and so on, because you don't have to touch eight different places in memory for a pixel but only one.

This is misleading, IMHO. It is true that a single pixel only requires 1 memory address to be touched in chunky vs 8 in planar, but no one would implement drawing things in this way for either chunky or planar. For planar it's pretty much the worst possible way of doing such things and it therefore should come as no surprise that this is not how Amiga OS does things.

In reality such window decorations and (AFAIK*) text would be drawn many pixels at once as that was way more efficient, regardless of chunky/planar architecture. In that case the overall memory you need to touch is exactly identical: drawing, say, an 8x8 pixel object on a 256 colour screen needs 8x8=64 bytes to be touched in memory for a chunky display and a non-chunky display alike (given a sensible generalised character drawing routine).

Edit: do note that the Blitter does 16 bits at a time, so 8x8 was indeed a poor match for it. But that has nothing to with chunky vs planar. You could draw with the CPU (like on the PC) and avoid this limitation altogether.

*) meaning: I'm not 100% sure how Windows draws text, but I'm certain Amiga OS does draw text in blocks and not individual pixels.

Chunky also totally made sense for 2D graphics and workstation software (i.e. AmigaOS which, of course, was probably a greater obstacle for chunky than the hardware as it was too closely designed around planar bitmaps!).

I'm not sure, but didn't Amiga OS 3 support RTG and non-planar screenmodes (not that they actually added an RTG driver or anything)?

Originally Posted by sandruzzo

Another problem with A1200, was its' market placement. Was it A Home computer? Consolle? Multimedia machine? Commodore did a very poor clear market strategy.

With HDD, a little fast ram, some HW teawks, Maybe, people who used computer to work could have better understand Amiga...

This was a problem with all Amiga's outside of the big-box ones. The A500 had the same issue, were people called it a toy even though it quite clearly could do many of the things a PC could at the time.

Originally Posted by demolition

Raise of hands - how many around here have actually used the Z80 CPU in a C128 (other than just booting CP/M because you could)?

Every C128 user ever as it boots into the Z80 on every cold start and reset

[swinkamor12]

In october 1992 386SX 25 MHz 1 MB RAM with SVGA mono monitor 14" but without HDD cost 370£.
SVGA mono monitor 14" cost 75£ which makes 295£ for base unit.
One can buy 1 MB SVGA graphics card for 50£ and 1 MB RAM SIMM for 20£.
It makes for base unit 365£ and is still less than amiga 1200 lauch price 399£.
Some people pay more? That's their problem, they may check prices.

On 386SX with affordable SVGA card Utlima Underworld and other Wolf clones work very well and this cpu is almost two times slower than 020 in 1200.

As I wrote it was very little needed to make 1200 good enough to make Commodore survive.

Just chunky pixel, slots for fast ram, simple mmu for 020.

Some Amiga fanatics never admit that amiga 1200 was underpowered overpriced shit and main reason why Commodore bankrupt.
Amiga community never be health as long as they do not accept reality.

[grond]

Originally Posted by roondar

Well, I didn't think you meant increasing prices to big-box Amiga levels. I was thinking more in line of adding say 200 pounds to the base model price. Perhaps I'm overly negative here but I'd still that even with better specs that would be a hard sell to the core audience at the time.

We can't know but that is what I think. I think the added features would have made it clear to the audience that the higher price was indeed giving them more than the A500 did and thus would have created a stronger desire to upgrade. There never was much reason to buy an A500+ or A600 when you already had an A500. Commodore could sell these models only to customers who had not already bought an Amiga from them. If they had upgraded the base configuration of the Amiga earlier, they could have sold more Amigas to the very same customers that already liked their computers.

When you already had an originally more expensive A500 bought in 1987 the fact that the A1200 was a cheaper machine and thus only a little more capable than the A500 (because technology had evolved for five years which mostly went into making the A1200 cheaper and not so much into making it more powerful) also made it a technically too small a step to upgrade and not switch to something completely different.

If the A500 sold for 500UKP in 1987, what would an A1200 in 1992 have been like that had justified a starting price of 500 UKP (or 600UKP accounting for devaluation of the Pound and inflation in general)? Certainly more exciting than the A1200.

It just feels to me that the main attraction to Amiga buyers always was the low end/cheap models.

The cheap Amiga models canibalised the expensive ones. Apple was doing pretty well with just expensive Macintosh models. But they had the software and good developer support. Commodore didn't spend a penny on that.

I just don't think they're going to make an overall 2x improvement.

Yes, probably, but a speed increase by a factor of 3 doesn't look too bad when comparing to a console's hardware that does a factor of 4.

This is misleading, IMHO. It is true that a single pixel only requires 1 memory address to be touched in chunky vs 8 in planar, but no one would implement drawing things in this way for either chunky or planar. For planar it's pretty much the worst possible way of doing such things and it therefore should come as no surprise that this is not how Amiga OS does things.

AmigaOS does a lot of line drawing with the blitter which means the blitter has to draw a line in eight bitplanes per vertical screen line where it would only have to do it in one byte per vertical screen line (OK, this is only true for 45°...0° with respect to a vertical line while horizontal lines would almost be equal to chunky modes in efficiency).

Of course, one could argue that a blitter would have been superfluous with a chunky mode because the CPU was much more suitable for drawing in chunky modes than in planar modes. But the important point is that you can blit chunky modes with a planar blitter without problems because actually there is no additional functionality required (not considering line drawing, of course). Only the line drawing mode would have required a hardware update of the blitter in order to make it deal with chunky graphics.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by swinkamor12

In october 1992 386SX 25 MHz 1 MB RAM with SVGA mono monitor 14" but without HDD cost 370£.
SVGA mono monitor 14" cost 75£ which makes 295£ for base unit.
One can buy 1 MB SVGA graphics card for 50£ and 1 MB RAM SIMM for 20£.
It makes for base unit 365£ and is still less than amiga 1200 lauch price 399£.
Some people pay more? That's their problem, they may check prices.

Yeah, right

They were nowhere near that cheap and you know it. FYI, I did check prices and even the 286 was still more expensive than that at the time. The 386SX started closer to 600 pounds. That's without a harddisk, with 1/2 the memory of the A1200 and with a mono monitor (which is just 'brilliant' for games).

On 386SX with affordable SVGA card Utlima Underworld and other Wolf clones work very well and this cpu is almost two times slower than 020 in 1200.

Claiming UU runs well when there's a video linked in this thread that shows it actually doesn't isn't very clever. UU is also not a wolf clone, which is why it doesn't run so well on a 386. Also: affordable SVGA cards were not fast and this was in fact a known problem. I already pointed this out several times.

Some Amiga fanatics never admit that amiga 1200 was underpowered overpriced shit and main reason why Commodore bankrupt.
Amiga community never be health as long as they do not accept reality.

And you apparently just can't stop with the thinly veiled personal attacks and posts filled with sheer nonsense.