20 June 2024, 11:01 | #5101 | |
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20 June 2024, 19:06 | #5102 |
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21 June 2024, 04:18 | #5103 | |
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As for David Pleasance and Psygnosis upgraded CD32 for minimal cost increase, Mehdi Ali wasn't aware of competitive pressures on CD32's math power deficit, despite spending for the CD32 FMV module's $50 CL-450 SoC with a vision grandeur being a digital VCD player that departs from the core gaming business. Argonaut Games (UK) pushed for mass-produced "cheap RISC" (SuperFX, 16-bit custom RISC CPU) and Nintendo supported the request. Sony's Ken Kutaragi designed SNES's 16-bit SHVC-SOUND chip's S-DSP and was influenced by Nintendo's SNES visual DSPs and Mode 7. SNES's SHVC-SOUND solution has Sony SPC-700 microprocessor (based on MOS/CSG 65xx 8bit CPU, ), S-DSP, stereo 16-bit 32000 Hz digital audio DAC (NEC uPD6376) and 64 kb of internal RAM. Last edited by hammer; 21 June 2024 at 08:49. |
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21 June 2024, 04:48 | #5104 | ||||
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On a technical basis, your argument is bullshit.
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For AMD64 (X86-64), there's Windows XP x64 edition. AMD attached thier existing X86 sales channel and economics of scale with K8 AMD64. AMD K8 was the "gaming king" CPU before Core 2. The gaming PC argument is a very important factor. Quote:
IA-64 is Intel's 64-bit desktop computing path and replacement for IA-32 a.k.a i386. IA-64 includes a very slow IA-32 mode. Intel's Pentium Pro has gimped 16-bit X86 instructions in the past. Without the second source AMD's X86-64, Intel's IA-64, and IBM PowerPC 970 would be fighting for 64-bit desktop supremacy. Windows XP 64-Bit Edition for Itanium Systems is for personal desktop PCs. Like IBM MCA's attempt to assert control over the PC clone market, it's an Intel tactic to remove x86 cloner AMD. Quote:
1. IA-64 is a foreign instruction set (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing, EPIC, a VLIW variant) and it's nothing like IA-32. 2. IA-64 supports both little and big endian modes. Itanium's big endian mode targets HP's PA-RISC legacy. PA-RISC's big endian mode targets HP's 68K HPUX legacy. Itanium's instruction set is based on HP's research on VLIW https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium Quote:
Itanium preserves HP EPIC's three instructions per bundle. Like other semiconductor companies, Intel drank the VLIW cool-aid. Commodore's PA-RISC hitched their ride with HP's PA-WideWord which is ultimately, Intel's Itanium! The other major VLIW-based CPU designs are Transmeta Crusoe/Efficeon (faking IA-32/X86-64, no native MMU hence the MMU is emulated) and NVIDIA's Project Denver/Carmel (faking AArch64). NVIDIA had VLIW-based GeForce FX. ATI/AMD had VLIW-based Terascale and Northern Island series before Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture. 3. IA-64 has a slow in-order processing P5-like block for IA-32. Itanium with native big-endian AROS and userland 68K emulator would have run Amiga's 68K OS-friendly apps. You're wrong. Last edited by hammer; 21 June 2024 at 08:44. |
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21 June 2024, 05:54 | #5105 | ||||||
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Even in terms of the US market (which became the source of CBM's undoing in the late '80s to early '90s), their biggest successes up until 1985 were the VIC-20 and C64 - the latter being able to take advantage when the bottom fell out of the home console market catastrophically circa 1982. Strictly speaking, from 1982 to 1986 (when the NES was released en masse in the US), the C64 held the almost-unique position of being (arguably) the best affordable home gaming platform as well as being an effective home computing platform if the user so desired. It's generally accepted that the 1985 OG Amiga (later A1000) was a technical marvel years ahead of its time in several ways - but the business shenanigans around the bidding tug-of-war between Tramiel's Atari Corp. and CBM, along with CBM's "power vacuum" in terms of management and business strategy meant that the initial product was streets ahead of the competition in most technical regards, but the price point was too expensive for a "home market" machine (i.e. the sector where CBM traditionally performed the strongest) and the hardware was not really expandable enough for the business market. I'll always be of the opinion that Tom Rattigan's '86-'87 strategy of separating the platform into "home" (A500) and "business/professional" (B2000) product lines was the most logical and effective way to go. It's true that both Nintendo and Sega had committed to a big push into the North American market by then, however in 1987 all they had were their 8-bit offerings (namely the NES and Master System). As far as their 16-bit console offerings went, the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive was not released into that market until August 1989 and the Super Nintendo did not properly appear until September 1991. Why do I mention that? Because if Irv Gould had not reflexively shitcanned Rattigan in 1987 and Rattigan had been able to supervise a proper US promotional campaign for the A500 and B2000, it would be reasonable to wager that the A500 could have been positioned as a 16-bit successor to the C64 approximately two-to-four years before the Japanese console titans had their 16-bit products ready for the US. Rattigan's strategy appears to have covered a lot of potential scenarios, but it began with getting a relatively affordable "home" version of the Amiga to market as early as was practical - well in advance of the 16-bit Japanese consoles as far as the US/Canada market was concerned. The USP of the "classic" Amiga platform was that it was a powerful creative tool out of the box; between DPaint and Noisetracker it was possible for an Amiga user to create smooth and impressive audio-visual work without needing to know how to code at all or having to buy any expanding hardware - which was damned-near unique at the time! I think it's worth pointing out that when it came to the introduction of the two new Amiga machines that came out of Rattigan's plan in 1987, it was far more a matter of "home" vs. "business" or "professional" use rather than "high-end" vs. "low-end" - because fundamentally, the hardware and chipset specs "out-of-the-box" were more-or-less the same, but what the B2000 offered was future expandability. In 1987, the A500 potentially offered a gaming experience well in advance of what Sega and Nintendo could offer for at least another two years - and on top of that, because it was a computer rather than a console it could provide creative capabilities for the user that no console could ever match. In other words, what the A500 and B2000 models represented was in combination a contiguous platform for both "the masses" *and* "the classes" if marketed properly. Obviously, this is wild-ass speculation, but I'd argue it's reasonable to consider it possible that had Irv Gould not been so paranoid and left Tom Rattigan in charge the strategy may well have paid off, and by the time Sega and Nintendo released their 16-bit offerings in America, the A500 could have had two years to build a user base which could then have provided a baseline for the platform as a whole to move upmarket and at least challenge Apple, if not the PC compatible sector. Quote:
In any case - when it comes down to it; as far as I'm concerned the question as to whether the A1200 was "disappoint[ing]" depends on the context. By which I mean - had CBM Intl (as in the US parent firm) been competently managed post-1987 and it had still taken until 1992 to release a machine with a comparable spec to the A1200, yes, that would have been very disappointing. However in real terms, what we're talking about is a company dealing with a toady CEO whose original business roadmap was predicated on killing the Amiga platform and re-tooling as a commodity Wintel PC supplier, only to belatedly discover that there was no way that proposed model could compete with the likes of Dell and Gateway in terms of scale. Having effectively gutted the hardware R&D budget over at least three years (and rendered the promising AAA architecture obsolete in the process), CBM's engineers were tasked not only with developing a (mostly) backwards-compatible - but significantly improved - chipset on a breakneck schedule, but also designing the "home" version of the platform in such a way as to take advantage of emerging standards such as IDE and PCMCIA while still keeping the cost of the base unit in 1992 equivalent to that of the A500 in 1987. In that sense, the A1200 ought to be considered nothing less than a minor miracle. |
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21 June 2024, 08:29 | #5106 | |
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For 1992, the A1200 aimed for $599 USD which is about $485.05 USD price in 1987. A1200's "guts" are about $399 retail CD32 level. There's a healthy profit margin with A1200. The person who priced A1200's budget has aimed for Atari ST's price range i.e. "PCJr mentality". Jeff Porter's "8 bit planes with 16 million colors" combined with Bill Sydnes's "A600Jr" = A1200. Bill Sydnes cuts the 32-bit compute power cost to the bone. A500 has a hardware premium over the Atari ST. 3DO's $699 price target in 1993 is closer to A500's premium price. LG released 3DO at $399 to price match Sega Saturn's $399. A minor hardware cost increase for A1200 would have $20 DSP3210-50, 1 MB Fast RAM (80 ns access FP DRAM about $25), and 68EC020-25 ($19 without discounts). A better configured "Falcon" for A1200. Reference https://www.minneapolisfed.org/about...ion-calculator. For 1987 to 1990, A500 has a sweet spot with enough premium hardware for a low enough price. As for A1200, when there's CPU power, AGA is a reasonably good low-cost entry-level SVGA-like chipset and faster than IBM's original VGA. $20 DSP3210 @ 50 Mhz would give AGA some FP32 math power beyond 486DX-66 or 68040-40. This is why other 32-bit 3D game consoles have fast MUL instructions as their cornerstone math power. Remember, early PC 3D accelerator Rendition Verite v1000 has a 25 Mhz MIPS-like CPU with a fast 1 cycle 32x32 MUL instruction, fast 1 clock approximate reciprocal instruction, hence 2 clock approximate integer divide, usual set of RISC instructions, "bilinear load" instruction and tiny cache for 4 pixels. No hardware for Z buffers. Last edited by hammer; 22 June 2024 at 16:49. |
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21 June 2024, 12:20 | #5107 |
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This thread should be called "were you disappointed with the A1200 in the 90's?" and most people compare the A1200 to what is available and what we know about it now.
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22 June 2024, 08:19 | #5108 | |
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There seemed to be quite a battle in the /X BBS door scene for the fastest zippy search, surely some of those could have been used in SQL. (Yes I know SQL is a lot more than text search of table fields). They could have used A1200's in Video stores in the early 90s as a DB system or any store. |
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22 June 2024, 09:01 | #5109 | |
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Here is an answer I got from ChatGPT (that has been turned on end of 2021) about performance comparison of Win95, OS2 and AmigaOS in the 90's :
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22 June 2024, 10:00 | #5110 | |
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And, as much as people berate Win95 it had both preemptive multitasking and virtual memory support, putting it slightly ahead of AmigaOS technically. PC hardware in general was still behind the Amiga though, which lead to stuttering when you loaded files from floppy disk etc (although having a hard drive made this a lot less of an issue). Both of them were substantially nicer to use than OS/2 though which, in my experience at least, was utter frustration. |
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22 June 2024, 10:25 | #5111 | |
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- Win95 apps on Win95 OS; - OS/2 apps on OS/2 OS; - Amiga apps on AmigaOS. So there is no point in saying that Amiga cannot run Win 3 applications or that OS/2 can only run a subset of them. |
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22 June 2024, 10:37 | #5112 | |
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Lack of memory management disqualify it for me. And as @AestheticDebris say, lack of virtual memory is another problem I think. Database often need a lot of resources. |
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22 June 2024, 15:37 | #5113 | |
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MMU wasn't a guaranteed deployment for 32-bit 68K CPUs when compared to IA-32 (i386) CPUs. In 1992, Am386-40 was priced like 68030-25 and 386DX-25. Last edited by hammer; 22 June 2024 at 15:54. |
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22 June 2024, 15:57 | #5114 |
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I see their was a 40Mhz of the 68030. Do you have an idea of the price at the time? P.S. For ignorant like me, Am386 was AMD clone of the Intel 386. |
22 June 2024, 16:33 | #5115 | ||||
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User response was often sluggish too. It got better in XP, then worse in later Windows versions as all pretense of efficiency went out the window. To speed up operation Windows 95 etc. used several techniques. One was cashing icons so they could be displayed faster. Windows 98 had a bug where when the icon cache file reached a certain size it would get corrupted and all your icons would change to one (random) icon image. To fix it you deleted the icon cache, then you got to see how slow it was when not cached. Made the Amiga look fast! I recently acquired a PC motherboard with 386SX-16 CPU and 16MB RAM. Windows 95 runs fine on it, but takes about 5 minutes to boot. Every time you click on something it has to think about it for a bit. Strangely my relatively modern laptop with 4GB does the same thing in Windows 10, but worse. In comparison my A1200 is a breeze. Even the stock A500 is much faster! Quote:
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22 June 2024, 16:33 | #5116 |
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22 June 2024, 16:40 | #5117 |
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Can't remember where I heard it recently but the A300 went off the rails was because Commodore couldn't cost reduce the machine enough.
One major part of cost reducing a computer is doing massive production runs, due to Irving and Medhi's ridiculous bonus checks this would never happen. Jack Tramiel obviously didn't piss the company resources away and hence the C64 sales dominated the sales of rivals so much it's like comparing VCS to Vectrex/Coleco sales. You want to survive the console threat you need a CEO who doesn't piss away CBM profits and make it impossible to replicate power/price of something like a console/C64 via massive up front bulk raw material purchasing/productions runs. 75% of the A1000 to A500 cost reduction is down to less RAM (no 192kb WORM daughterboard for Kickstart) and the massive drop of DRAMs in that 24 month period an the massive middleman profit margins of A1000. Gould's Commodore were total fail in minimising production costs. |
22 June 2024, 16:47 | #5118 | ||
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22 June 2024, 17:31 | #5119 |
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And because of that we're now stuck with legacy crap that prevents us from having proper memory protection
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22 June 2024, 17:34 | #5120 |
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I fixed it up for you. Anyhow, Apple *did* give the Mac virtual memory, despite using a 68K. So it was clearly possible, but it requires more programming discipline CBM had.
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