Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by TCD

That nobody cares about this thread anymore. There was once a time when threads would get closed once they were fully derailed.

I'm glad it's not the case. Aside from occasional flare-ups bashing other plaforms and "Amiga fans" this thread is quite entertaining.

I get it it can be annoying for others to see it everyday but it's quite simple to just ignore it. There are heaps of recurring threads I have no interest in and do just that.

[TuRRIcaNEd]

Look, let's not split hairs here - the unpalatable fact is that from 1988 onwards, Commodore International was effectively rudderless in terms of management and direction. Medhi Ali saw the Amiga platform as an unnecessary extravagance because his assessment of CBM's situation completely ignored the European market. Having shitcanned AAA, he belatedly realised that he couldn't reconfigure CBM as a commodity PC builder faced with the already existing competition, and as such he tried to steer the company on a 180 despite having barely enough funding to do so.

Pleasance pulled off a marketing masterstroke in the UK and Europe with the A500 bundles, however if he was angling for a cut-down Amiga to replace the C64c, his nous must have briefly deserted him. The fact is (taking inflation and the growth of the computing market into account) that the A500 had *already* supplanted the C64. If he honestly believed that a proposed A300 would survive against the onslaught of Sega and Nintendo's marketing push into Europe, then history shows the folly of that notion.

The only logical path for CBM to follow was to shift the platform up into the market gap between the consoles and PC compatibles, however the A500 motherboard was hamstrung by the fact that its expandability was limited to two proprietary expansion slots. If the "home" Amiga platform was going to survive, it needed to start embracing the standards that would allow commodity PC hardware to interface with it, hence the adoption of IDE and PCMCIA. It was the right decision, unfortunately made too late.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

I'm glad it's not the case. Aside from occasional flare-ups bashing other plaforms and "Amiga fans" this thread is quite entertaining.

Regardless about it being entertaining for you, this thread is full of other threads and the initial meaning of the thread has been lost. That's why I used the term 'derailed'. It would be fine if the 'how to improve the A1200 and stuff' posts were moved to a topic with that name, but I for one actually enjoy reading what different people thought about the A1200 (as in: was it disappointing for them or not). This is just not possible with all the off-topic junk posts that keep piling up.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

That's what they hoped for.

You have no evidence that IDE and PCMCIA were the holdup.

Hint:
1. Gayle didn't exist during 1991's A1000 Jr. Look in https://bigbookofamigahardware.com/b...15&fileId=8468

2. A1200's Gayle is dependent on A300's Gayle. A1200's AA-Gayle reached "R5".

A1200 can't exist without A600's Gary design changes. A1200 is NOT A500p with AGA+Ramsey+68EC020+four TTL bridge chips+Fat Gary+CPU local bus edge connector.

A1200 is an A600 with AGA+Budgie+68EC020+keypad+Zorro II-like expansion bus with a 32-bit edge connector.

[TEG]

Originally Posted by hammer

$699 USD in 1987 would be 1992's $894.84.A1200 has a launch price of $599 USD which is 1987's $485.05 i.e. Atari ST's price range.Referencehttps://www.minneapolisfed.org/about...ion-calculatorA1200 has a healthy price margin for both Commodore UK and Commodore International.

Thanks for the calculator link

[TuRRIcaNEd]

Originally Posted by hammer

A1200 is NOT A500p with AGA+Ramsey+68EC020+four TTL bridge chips+Fat Gary+CPU local bus edge connector.

As above... The A500 form factor was a commercial dead end because the only expansion options involved proprietary slots. Case in point - to fit a hard drive to the A500 form factor required a peripheral that hooked into the left-hand expansion slot and implemented SCSI, over and above the cost of the hard disk - as such, the peripheral plus hard disk cost more than the original machine. In an era of PC peripherals using standard interfaces that were becoming increasingly inexpensive, that approach just wasn't going to fly by 1991.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Gorf

I guess that was just a retrofitted excuse for the press.
The fact that they did stop the A500+ after the A600 release, but not the C64 tells otherwise.

Also: the A500 was already less expensive than the C64+Floppy, and nobody would use the 64 without it in 1992.

That's a flawed argument when C64 and Floppy Drive have retail profit margins applied to each end-user devices.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by TuRRIcaNEd

As above... The A500 form factor was a commercial dead end because the only expansion options involved proprietary slots. Case in point - to fit a hard drive to the A500 form factor required a peripheral that hooked into the left-hand expansion slot and implemented SCSI, over and above the cost of the hard disk - as such, the peripheral plus hard disk cost more than the original machine.

ICD's AdIDE for A500 doesn't require an A590-style side addon. http://amiga.resource.cx/adcoll/adcoll.pl?id=adide&pg=1

Gary remained as is.

A500's case is larger than A1200's case.

I have both A500 Rev6A and A1200 Rev1D4. I could fit A1200's motherboard inside A500's case. An example from jurgen36, https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php...ighlight=A1700 This example also has 3.5 inch HDD.

A1200's case is directly based on A600.

Originally Posted by TuRRIcaNEd

In an era of PC peripherals using standard interfaces that were becoming increasingly inexpensive, that approach just wasn't going to fly by 1991.

PCMCIA memory card expansion market flopped and it was expensive when it was displaced by SIMMs.

The use case for system RAM expansion via PCMCIA memory card expansion is flawed.

A500's Zorro I edge connector acted like A1200's internal edge connector with 32 bit bus and Zorro II-like.

[TuRRIcaNEd]

Originally Posted by hammer

ICD's AdIDE for A500 doesn't require an A590-style side addon. http://amiga.resource.cx/adcoll/adcoll.pl?id=adide&pg=1

Doesn't matter. That's still a third-party peripheral. If the next-generation home version of the Amiga platform was going to survive, it needed to be expandable out-of-the-box, and the A500 form factor just wasn't going to cut it in that regard.

PCMCIA memory card expansion market flopped and it was expensive when it was displaced by SIMMs.

That's with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, and the socket was used very effectively by peripherals such as SquirrelSCSI and various CD-ROM solutions.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by TuRRIcaNEd

Doesn't matter. That's still a third-party peripheral. If the next-generation home version of the Amiga platform was going to survive, it needed to be expandable out-of-the-box, and the A500 form factor just wasn't going to cut it in that regard.

A500's case can envelop the A1200 motherboard with room to spare.

Originally Posted by TuRRIcaNEd

That's with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, and the socket was used very effectively by peripherals such as SquirrelSCSI and various CD-ROM solutions.

I have an Adaptec APA-1460 SCSI PCMCIA card that is useless for A1200.

[TEG]

Originally Posted by hammer

From Commodore the Inside Story - The Untold Tale of a Computer Giant by David John Pleasance

If it's true the company was really dysfunctional. I really wonder how this guy Mehdi Ali became a manager.

Originally Posted by Gorf

It is easy to say "just give me an Amiga for £200" - but what was he thinking this would look like and how would he sell it next to the A500, that he obviously wanted to keep as well.

I mean there isn't much you can take out of an A500 to actually save that much money ... smaller case and PCB , SMD ... fine. And then?
That's not nearly enough

One option I would explore would be to remove connectors (Disk Drive, Serial Port, Parallel port, composite, RF modulator perhaps) and just having a big "extension port" in the A500. I mean having all the connections available on the track from the pcb.

Attachment 82379

Or pins like in the A1200 clock port or today, Raspberry pi, fashion.

And you sell en extension module if the customer need all the connectors. So you fragment cost for him and make more profit with this modular approach.

Another way to make profit would be to see the A300 as en entry point to sell more after. Perhaps a subscription to games each month (you receive floppies) Commodore having a deal with games publishers.

Eventually you keep an hard drive connector and you sell an HD in a nice case (like the never released A1200 CDRom drive). You put a pass-through port on the hard drive case so a CDRom can be connected to the machine later.

I mean Commodore management had to think a bit on their model and not only to push boxes and make a prayer. But clearly they couldn't.

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by TCD

Regardless about it being entertaining for you, this thread is full of other threads and the initial meaning of the thread has been lost. That's why I used the term 'derailed'. It would be fine if the 'how to improve the A1200 and stuff' posts were moved to a topic with that name, but I for one actually enjoy reading what different people thought about the A1200 (as in: was it disappointing for them or not). This is just not possible with all the off-topic junk posts that keep piling up.

I'd say it's at least debatable whether these kind of posts are really off topic. For me the need of improving A1200 (or not) is closely tied to being disappointed with it (or not).

Besides, I suppose all the boards regulars had already expressed their opinion by page 50 and any newcomers can still do so should they wish.

I'm generally against locking lively threads unless they are plagued by ad hominems and serious uncivility. Does it really matter whether a thread is derailed or not after 200 pages?

Of course you can always ask a mod to splinter this one or whatever, but I'm not sure it'd really make a big difference.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

I'm generally against locking lively threads unless they are plagued by ad hominems and serious uncivility.

Who said anything about locking? Clearly Bruce and hammer will have their 'discusssion' here no matter what. The question is if a dedicated thread would be better suited.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by TEG

If it's true the company was really dysfunctional. I really wonder how this guy Mehdi Ali became a manager.


One option I would explore would be to remove connectors (Disk Drive, Serial Port, Parallel port, composite, RF modulator perhaps) and just having a big "extension port" in the A500. I mean having all the connections available on the track from the pcb.

Attachment 82379

Or pins like in the A1200 clock port or today, Raspberry pi, fashion.

And you sell en extension module if the customer need all the connectors. So you fragment cost for him and make more profit with this modular approach.

Another way to make profit would be to see the A300 as en entry point to sell more after. Perhaps a subscription to games each month (you receive floppies) Commodore having a deal with games publishers.

Eventually you keep an hard drive connector and you sell an HD in a nice case (like the never released A1200 CDRom drive). You put a pass-through port on the hard drive case so a CDRom can be connected to the machine later.

I mean Commodore management had to think a bit on their model and not only to push boxes and make a prayer. But clearly they couldn't.

maybe ... at least for some markets like Eastern Europe

I still doubt the the UK perspective somewhat ... Pleasance was never a big-box-Amiga-guy, he was the games-bundle-guy. He was more or less selling the Amiga as a console. His enthusiasm for the Hombre project underlines that.
But I think he vastly underestimated the computer business growth in the UK ... it was huge like in any other western country - not only for businesses but also for home use. But PCs and Macs got all that business, because of the lack of a mid-range Amiga.

The situation in Germany was clearly different and Commodore Germany was quite right in saying, they couldn't sell anything without a hd anymore.

I highly doubt that race to the bottom was winnable and the aftermarket showed that: Escom managed to sell all produced A4000, but left a huge stock of A1200 ... even Microsystems Draco did sell and kept the company alive during the 90s

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by TCD

Who said anything about locking?

Well...

Originally Posted by TCD

There was once a time when threads would get closed once they were fully derailed.

[babsimov]

Originally Posted by hammer

Scanned original documents from
https://archive.org/details/Hombre_2...ge/n5/mode/2up

Commodore Amiga Hombre Chipset by Ed Hepler

Hombre Part 1 shows desktop and tower systems have Hitachi PA/50 add-on CPU.

https://www.openpa.net/pa-risc_processor_other.html
PA/50 reached 60 Mhz.

Commodore's baseline PA-RISC has a 4 KB L1 instruction and 2 KB L1 data caches. Nathaniel contains CPU and Rendering functions.

Hitachi's PA/50L and PA/50M have 8 KB L1 instruction and 4 KB L1 data caches.

The production segmentation is similar to Celeron's smaller cache vs Pentium II's larger cache.

https://www.openpa.net/pa-risc_proce...ther.html#harp
Hitachi HARP-1 processor is a faster version of the PA/50 processor. Hitachi HARP-1 has 8 KB L1 instruction and 16 KB L1 data caches. Up to 150 MHz frequency.

I had already looked at these links.
As I understand the documents on Hombre, the PA-RISC included in the chipset did not work at 125 MHz in any case.
The frequency of 50 MHz is the one mentioned. The PA/50 probably serving as the basis for the PA-RISC included in Hombre.
They explain that they took things out of PA-RISC to include the features they needed for Hombre. Which may explain why the caches are smaller than the normal PA/50.
As you said, the desktop version (like A4000) would have also included a complete PA/50.
I had looked a little into the comparative performance of RISC processors at the time.
In the document that I found, PA-RISC was the most efficient at equal frequency.
There was the Pentium compared and a PA/50 at 50 MHz was equivalent to a Pentium 60/75 MHz. Of course if I did my calculations correctly.
The link to the document (it is a document in French)


https://hal.univ-smb.fr/INRIA/inria-00073501v1

The comparative table is at the end of the document (page 153). It is not the 7150 generation which is compared, but the following one, it is the Pentium Pro which is indicated. I extrapolated from that for the pentium, maybe I was wrong.

[Hedeon]

No. Were dirt cheap when C= folded. I got a nice 3 years out of it. Before I had enough money for a PC.

[Promilus]

@babsimov
A1200 class home computer based on Hombre doesn't have external PA/50
125MHz is a class for PA-7150 which has humongous cache compared to 1K L1D$ and 2K L1I$ in Hombre. Basically all HP PA-RISC processors were known for having abnormal cache size. So once L1 was integrated and relatively small they did include (again) external L2 with a size of few MB! And Hitachi also made such CPU
https://websrv.cecs.uci.edu/~papers/...LES/071104.pdf
PA/50 looks like trimmed down design with no L2 and less execution pipelines.
Reaches supposedly ~100MIPS which is level of 75MHz 060 afaik. Not bad, not great either. Not in XMAS '95 ... I'd say at time it would be a rather big struggle to gain some market share with 1. CPU performance was not so great 2. no backward compatibility, 3. In 96 PC did get a first VooDoo ... also there's quake (but afaik initially in only software rendering so as long as it was actually "tower/desktop" system with external CPU it just might work out. But... trying to sell "multimedia" or "cd console" without one and with fairly crippled PA-7150 inside - sorry Ed, but that was just no go...

[TCD]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

Well...

I just stated a fact there. I didn't ask for this one to be closed.
Just one example of a thread that did get closed in the past for off-topic posts: https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php...ed#post1094889

[babsimov]

Originally Posted by Promilus

@babsimov
A1200 class home computer based on Hombre doesn't have external PA/50

Yes, in the documents I understood that the 1200 version of Hombre did not have PA/50 in addition. I was talking about the version equivalent to the 4000.

125MHz is a class for PA-7150 which has humongous cache compared to 1K L1D$ and 2K L1I$ in Hombre. Basically all HP PA-RISC processors were known for having abnormal cache size. So once L1 was integrated and relatively small they did include (again) external L2 with a size of few MB! And Hitachi also made such CPU
https://websrv.cecs.uci.edu/~papers/...LES/071104.pdf

Thanx for the link.

The PA-RISC is primarily a workstation processor (as the 68000 was originally). What I've read makes me think it was a good choice. Maybe I'm wrong.

PA/50 looks like trimmed down design with no L2 and less execution pipelines.
Reaches supposedly ~100MIPS which is level of 75MHz 060 afaik. Not bad, not great either. Not in XMAS '95 ... I'd say at time it would be a rather big struggle to gain some market share with 1. CPU performance was not so great 2. no backward compatibility, 3. In 96 PC did get a first VooDoo ... also there's quake (but afaik initially in only software rendering so as long as it was actually "tower/desktop" system with external CPU it just might work out. But... trying to sell "multimedia" or "cd console" without one and with fairly crippled PA-7150 inside - sorry Ed, but that was just no go...

On the contrary, an entry-level performance of a 68060 75 MHz at Christmas 95 seems very good to me, especially in the price range of the 1200 with hard drive. Especially since Ed Hepler also said that there would be a DSP in addition.

If I remember correctly, many 1200 users at that time considered themselves lucky to already have a 030 card at 50 MHz. For my part I had a 020 card at 28 MHz and I was happy with it. So if I had an 1200 like 3D Risc home computer equivalent to 060 at 75 MHz, it would have suited me perfectly at that time, for the same price as i have paid my 1200 with HD in march 1993.

For compatibility it is possible that the SOC AGA and EC020 planned to reduce the costs of the CD32 is also included. The plans provided by Commodore seem to indicate this kind of compatibility http://obligement.free.fr/gfx3/commo...19931995_2.png

A 1200 like Hombre machine would have included 3D hardware, a high-resolution 24-bit display, 16-bit sound and more than enough CPU power for a home computer. It would have been the perfect medium between the PS1 and the high-end PC with 3D card. All for a price between the two.

And, of course, with a RISC version of AmigaOS as Commodore planned to call RISC/3D Operating System Release 1.0, as shown in this document from Commodore. I found it one day while surfing an Amiga site. Here the link to download the pdf file (Commodore future product 1993)

https://file.io/Jc62GlsV0GrV