Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by hammer

School kid's parents are funding home computer purchases.

They are now because you can't keep up with school work without access to a PC or the internet any more. Back in the day... different story.

The Amiga was a games machine first and foremost, and seen as such especially after the 500 launched.

Hands up you all who used an Amiga at school? Not many, huh.

My parents refused to fund an Amiga for me - I had to save up for it myself. That's why I pirated games, because they refused to buy them. I would probably have had more success asking for a Mac, but even then I was probably too young to have anything like that.

[malko]

Originally Posted by Dunny

[...] Hands up you all who used an Amiga at school? Not many, huh. [...]

Does using it for homework count ? but I was a student, no more a school kid.

[Turrican_3]

Originally Posted by Dunny

Hands up you all who used an Amiga at school? Not many, huh.

Not at school unfortunately, BUT asking parents to fund a home computer purchase to study was very common I'd say, heck I started doing that with the VIC20 and I guess it worked.

Specifically with the Amiga, thanks to Transformer I was able to avoid purchasing a PCs for a very good while. Performance was obviously, err, let's say not exactly spectacular... but on the other hand it wasn't like I was pushing the DOS side that hard, it was good enough for my coding homework.

An A1200 would have been obviously way better, but it didn't exist yet at the time (and big box Amigas were too expensive)

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by Turrican_3

Not at school unfortunately, BUT asking parents to fund a home computer purchase to study was very common I'd say, heck I started doing that with the VIC20 and I guess it worked.

My parents were very strict. Although a total technophile my stepdad absolutely refused to let me use computers at all if I had schoolwork outstanding, and computer studies was a no-go at the school for me. I used them at school once on a DTP package for the RM-280Zs.

They were a passing fad, you see?

Specifically with the Amiga, thanks to Transformer I was able to avoid purchasing a PCs for a very good while. Performance was obviously, err, let's say not exactly spectacular... but on the other hand it wasn't like I was pushing the DOS side that hard, it was good enough for my coding homework.

An A1200 would have been obviously way better, but it didn't exist yet at the time (and big box Amigas were too expensive)

Transformer was excellent. I could run all the software my PC-owning mates (all two of them) could run. Well, almost. Jet didn't work. But Jacaranda Jim did!

By the time I got a 1200 it was a gift from my GF to upgrade from my unexpanded 512k A1000. It was absolute heaven to use.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Dunny

They are now because you can't keep up with school work without access to a PC or the internet any more.

This is a software and hardware issue.

Many education-issued laptops are Chromebooks that can't boot Windows despite a common X86 CPU i.e. missing "Designed for Windows" UEFI ACPI. Chromebooks are not "PC".

The Amiga platform is not backed by a powerful Google.

Current mainstream platforms are ChromeOS/Android, Windows 10/11/SteamOS 3 (faking Windows gaming), and MacOS X ARM. They are all little endian. Vulkan API is little endian. These three platforms are backed by powerful corporations.

Originally Posted by Dunny

Back in the day... different story.

The Amiga was a games machine first and foremost, and seen as such especially after the 500 launched.

Hands up you all who used an Amiga at school? Not many, huh.

My government selective high school's art room had A2000s and switched to color Macs (loaded with Adobe apps and MS Excel/Word) instead of upgrading to A3000s.

Hint: where I did obtain a Mac ROM image for my A3000.

Originally Posted by Dunny

My parents refused to fund an Amiga for me - I had to save up for it myself. That's why I pirated games, because they refused to buy them. I would probably have had more success asking for a Mac, but even then I was probably too young to have anything like that.

My Dad is also a gamer i.e sports games of EA Sports Xbox type.

My family had two computers starting from 1991 i.e. my dad's work PC was brought home i.e. ex-corporate IBM PS/2 Model 55 SX (dated 1989, 3 years old), and our 1989 purchased A500 Rev 6A. Cinemaware TV Sports games are major games for my Dad. Corporate upgraded into 486DX PCs.

IBM PS/2 Model 55SX (386SX-16 with 387 FPU) was later traded for a 386DX-33/ET4000-based PC clone in Q4 1992 i.e. the main reason is PC games. My A500 Rev 6A was traded into A3000 in Q1 1992 and my school friend abandoned his broken A500 Rev5 when his family purchased a 486DX-33 based PC. Due to IBM VGA, the IBM PS/2 Model 55SX is garbage for games. Commodore has no problems beating IBM VGA in games, it's SVGA clones.

During COVID-19 lockdown, this broken A500 Rev5 was later discovered to have a busted PSU and it was replaced, its chips repopulated my second A500 Rev 6A motherboard with ECS Agnus A. The broken A500 Rev5 was in storage since late 1992 and carried over to my new house in Y2000.

My parents are white-collar types with state government jobs i.e. government insurance and government legal.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Windows didn't have much choice there because it had to run on a variety of PC clones, therefore it needed to include as many drivers as possible.

For example, IBM OS/2 is biased towards IBM's printer hardware business.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

It's interesting to note that IBM, with its enormous clout and reputation, still couldn't draw customers away from Microsoft. Bill Gates must have been grinning from ear to ear.

IBM DisplayWrite died. I still have the original IBM DisplayWrite 4 package from my Dad's work. DisplayWrite 4 is text-based. IBM DisplayWrite 4's text-based UI wouldn't displace text-based UI Wordperfect.

WordStar and WordPerfect dominated PC's text-based UI word processing market and their leadership was weakened by MS Windows 2.x and WinWord(1989).

When my A3000 had Shapeshifter in 1995, MS Word and Excel for Mac were installed.

IBM OS/2 1.x targeted 16-bit 286 and IBM lost the leadership to Windows 2.1 386. The Mac ports of GUI Excel in 1988 and WinWord in 1989 and set the ideal storm situation for Windows 3.0's 1990 tsunami.

My ex-corporate IBM PS/2 Model 55SX had Windows 3.0 installed. I didn't bother installing IBM's OS/2 1.3.

From work, my Dad brought home Harvard Graphics, IBM DisplayWrite 4, and IBM PC DOS 3.30. PC DOS 3.3's double-density boot disk was used for my Transformer emulator on A500.

My Dad's work, Sydney WaterBoard has the IBM 386/486 PC fleet from 1990 to 1993.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

More importantly though it shows that if Big Blue couldn't pull it off, little old Commodore had virtually no chance.

IBM has its stupid moves e.g. 16-bit 286 focus for OS/2 1.x

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I don't think so. Windows 3.0 came out in 1990. Before that there were two separate variants Windows 286 and Windows 386. The 386 variant was only used on 386 PCs and is now quite rare, while the 286 variant worked on 286's and 386's. I suspect the 386 version was significantly more expensive too.

You're forgetting MS turned a blind eye to Windows software piracy. My Windows 3.0 is copied. My Dad switched to legal with Windows 3.1's release.

From https://www.intel.fr/content/dam/doc...ual-report.pdf
Intel reported the following
1. In 1994's fourth quarter, Pentium unit sales accounted for 23 percent of Intel's desktop processor volume.
2. Millions of Pentiums were shipped.
3. During Q4 1993 and 1994, a typical PC purchase was a computer featuring the Intel 486 chip.
4. Net 1994 revenue reached $11.5 billion.
5. Net 1993 revenue reached $8.7 billion.
6. Growing demand and production for Intel 486 resulted in a sharp decline in sales for Intel 386 from 1992 to 1993.
7. Sales of the Intel 486 family comprised the majority of Intel's revenue during 1992, 1993, and 1994.
8. Intel reached its 6 to 7 million Pentiums shipped goal during 1994. This is only 23 percent unit volume.

Before 1992, 386 dominated Intel's sales.

According to Dataquest November 1989, VGA crossed more than 50 percent market share in 1989 i.e. 56%.
http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/c...lysis_1989.pdf

Low-End PC Graphics Market Share by Standard Type
Estimated Worldwide History and Forecast

Total low-end PC graphic chipset shipment history and forecast
1987 = 9.2. million, VGA 16.4% market share i.e. 1.5088 million VGA.
1988 = 11.1 million, VGA 34.2% i.e. 1.51 million VGA.
1989 = 13.7 million, VGA 54.6% i.e. 3.80 million VGA.
1990 = 14.3 million, VGA 66.4% i.e. 9.50 million VGA.
1991 = 15.8 million, VGA 76.6% i.e. 12.10 million VGA.
1992 = 16.4 million, VGA 84.2% i.e. 13.81 million VGA.
1993 = 18.3 million, VGA 92.4% i.e. 16.9 million VGA.

1990 has the twin Windows 3.0 and Wing Commander releases impact.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Before 1990 the vast majority of PCs were 8086/8 or 286 based. I doubt IBM's '16-bit 286 focus' had anything to do with 'protecting their big iron hardware business'. More likely they just didn't want to split it into two products like Microsoft did.

[ Show youtube player ]
The Fall of OS/2

Bill Gates disagreed with IBM's OS/2 1.x's 16bit 286 focus and MS hired Dave Cutler (from DEC's VMS) in 1988 for the Windows NT project.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Doom 95 only existed because Microsoft was willing to pay to do it themselves (Carmack refused). IBM could have done the same if they wanted to - but why would they?

IBM failed to win the grassroots gaming PC. Microsoft's tactics are to win gaming PC, SOHO, and corporate.

Later, IBM attempted to win gamers with PowerPC 602-based 3DO M2 (killed by Japan Inc who told Panasonic to abort the M2 project), PPE-based Xbox 360, and CELL-based PS3. IBM PowerPC A2 competed against AMD's Jaguar.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I doubt that worried IBM at all. They weren't making toys. Besides, gamers would boot their machines into DOS to play games.

That excuse killed the demand factor to keep OS/2. A platform's demand factor is influenced by the "killer app" or "killer game" software.

Crysis for X86-64 for Windows XP X64 with up-to-date NVIDIA GeForce X64 drivers is "game over" for Windows XP 64bit for Itanium system.

OS/2 "Warp" is based on a "toy" i.e. Star Trek's Warp speed.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

The one time IBM attempted to entertain the gaming crowd it didn't end well (PCjr) so I'm not surprised they didn't give it much thought after that.

PCJr was crap since there a difficulty running existing PC software due to PCJr's low RAM issue.

Later, IBM attempted to win gamers with PowerPC 602-based 3DO M2 (killed by Japan Inc who told Panasonic to abort the M2 project), PPE-based Xbox 360, and CELL-based PS3. IBM PowerPC A2 competed against AMD's Jaguar.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Gamers might think the PC suddenly became built for games in the 90's, but that's not really true.

1. VGA's chunky pixels pixels are suitable for texture-mapped 3D games. IBM tied C2P with EGA.

2. Amiga's 1985 era 3.5 Mhz 16bit blitter is easy to beat by a fast 386DX (with hardware barrel shifter). VGA has some accelerated features e.g. four lane 8bit logical operators, page flip, and a hardware scroll. VGA is not Atari ST.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

The vast majority of PCs were still made for business use. Even today, purpose-built gaming PCs are rarely seen in most electronics stores.

That's a red herring when PC's Doom and Doom 2 units sold are in the 4 million range with another estimated 15 million floating copies (piracy). Do you think I paid for Doom in 1993? I copied it from BBS. I went legal during Doom 3 (during the original Xbox era)'s release and purchased Doom 64 from Steam. You're in lala land.

https://gameworldobserver.com/2023/1...gamediscoverco
Steam Deck sales could already reach 3-4 million units, with US, China, and Russia among top countries.

Steam Deck has no problems beating A500's 1 million units per year pace.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by hammer

https://gameworldobserver.com/2023/1...gamediscoverco
Steam Deck sales could already reach 3-4 million units, with US, China, and Russia among top countries.

Steam Deck has no problems beating A500's 1 million units per year pace.

What on earth does the Steam Deck have to do with any of this

[CCCP alert]

BYTE magazine calculated with blitter in A1000 is approx 50mhz 68000 performance under ideal conditions (but Lotus II ST vs Amiga FPS is 3:1 difference as best so maybe 25mhz 68000 at best).

AMDs A10 APU in a £350 PC in 2016 gave something between PS3 and PS4 gaming. Between A500/1200 vs MD/SNES and PS4 vs AMD A10 PC it was a slam dunk for PS1/PS2 vs PC for gaming due to high cost, Apple went back to overpriced rubbish by the time of Ridge Racer 4/Wipeout 3/Tomb Raider.

OS/2 2.0 32bit, which is what the AREXX for Kickstart source code deal with IBM was for in the ECS/AGA transition period when Amiga BASIC was replaced. It is a multithreaded and efficient multitasking OS kernal which shits all over anything before XP/2000 from MS. If you think different you know nothing about OS quality. Next Step was OS king, next best is 0S/2 32bit v 2.0'UNIX for x86, if you didn't agree your opinion is based on fantasy so who cares.

OS/2 2.0 onward runs Doom for DOS faster than MS DOS, IIRC faster than Win95 Doom. If you were a 486/Pentium gamer you should have got OS/2 just because it runs DOS games faster AND supplies a full 640k DOS RAM with no shitty Config.sys/Autoexec.bat editing bollox that made QEMM386 a very profitable DOS app sold to PC owners by Quarterdeck

Any Amiga game that doesn't trash the C coded libraries and OS kernal is amateur hour wank for people who might as well have bought an ST and saved £250 in 87 lol OS is for serious work to increase the machines productive/creative software sophistication.

Nobody had an answer for PS1 graphics/sound custom silicon at $300/£300, that's why all £500ish all in one style computers died off, it's not the MIPS vs SH204 CPUs of Saturn vs PS1 that was a problem. Even N64 only had ONE game remotely approaching the polygon throughput of Ridge Racer Type/4 called World Driver Championship, N64 was a smoke and mirrors post processing exercise hiding the inferior polygon throughput count with foggy blurry type effect to try and hide it, ALL N64 dev adverts mentioned "MUST BE SKILLED IN LOW POLYGON DESIGN" in EDGE magazine!

After Commodore/Atari left the market and Acorn axed their all-in-one budget models your choice was down to very overpriced 1996 Mac, cheap PC with a shit OS or weirdo option of Acorn RISC PC.

Once XP SP1 was out it was game over for any other rival computer format but a 3D graphics card for PC to play Need for Speed Most Wanted as well as new Xbox 360 cost as much as that console. AMD's A10 was really the only time there was a choice for games with under £500 to spend.

AMD's Oberon APU they designed exclusively for Sony's PS5 did real time raytracing from day 1, a Radeon/Nvidia card for an i7 etc PC capable of that cost £1000+ lol nothing changes. How much would a PC capable of Shadow of the Beast quality audio visuals cost you in 1989? MT32 was the price of an A500 when it came out and so were the VRAM based SVGA cards that weren't even out in 89 That's the sort of advantage A1200 needed for all game genres. Knights of the Sky on A500 vs EGA Amstrad 1640 PC (£649.99) is more or less the same frame rate but with beeper sound lol

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by CCCP alert

BYTE magazine calculated with blitter in A1000 is approx 50mhz 68000 performance under ideal conditions (but Lotus II ST vs Amiga FPS is 3:1 difference as best so maybe 25mhz 68000 at best).

Yep. And considering the price of a 25MHz system at the time that ability was a big deal.

The A1200 managed to include a 14MHz 020 for a price similar to the A500, significantly boosting the performance by using both the faster CPU and more bandwidth for blitting. The commercial CDTV multimedia title I developed loaded images twice as fast on the CD32 as on the CDTV, with no changes to the code (would have been even faster with AGA enabled and 2x speed CD).

By 1994 the A500 was being pushed to limits no one thought possible, with games so good you had to look closely to tell they weren't AGA. But even that wasn't the limit. Today we have 3D almost up to Doom standard at a reasonable frame rate, and 2D using HAM mode so well you would swear it was true color. Then you run the same game on a stock A1200 and it totally blows you away.

Fans who express disappointment at the A1200 not having more hardware are missing the point. Like the original A1000 it was designed to do more with less. It just needed the right attention to make it shine, without jealously comparing it to the PC (which had its own way of shining).

I don't think it was reasonable to expect the Amiga (as we knew it) to make it into the 21st century. Every other home computer had limited lifespan before it became retro, and the Amiga would be no exception. That's not necessarily a bad thing. The retro PC scene lies on a continuum with no era standing out as worthy of preserving. The Amiga didn't change much between 1985 and 1994, which is a good thing both for retro enthusiasts and those of us who never stopped using it. Luckily we didn't suffer the paradigm shifts that other long-lived platforms did (except for PPC and OS4, but that was post Commodore and so can pretty much be ignored).

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by hammer

OS/2 "Warp" is based on a "toy" i.e. Star Trek's Warp speed.

What a stupid argument. Next you'll be saying that Apple turned the Mac into a toy with their 1984 Super Bowl ad.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by hammer

OS/2 "Warp" is based on a "toy" i.e. Star Trek's Warp speed.

How the hell is faster than light speed a toy?

[TuRRIcaNEd]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Fans who express disappointment at the A1200 not having more hardware are missing the point. Like the original A1000 it was designed to do more with less. It just needed the right attention to make it shine, without jealously comparing it to the PC (which had its own way of shining).

BANG. (^this)

I don't think it was reasonable to expect the Amiga (as we knew it) to make it into the 21st century.

In fairness, had CBM been less of a basket case post-1987, arguably it should have been. As CCCP Alert states, from around 1995 the most cost-effective future-proof home solution was a "cheap PC with a shit OS". I turned 16 in 1994 and my first "Saturday job" was at a local computer store (hired as a sales assistant, but that changed once they realised I could do most straightforward repairs). At the time some of my colleagues and I couldn't help but comment that Windows '95 took up an order of magnitude more disk space to do what Workbench '85 could do from the get-go (i.e. pre-emptive multitasking).

In an ideal world, Gould would not have shitcanned Tom Rattigan in 1987 and the two-pronged sales strategy begun with the A500 and B2000 would have been allowed to evolve. What a lot of folks seem to forget is that in 1987, the fact that every competitor platform effectively had performance bottlenecked by CPU was a major problem. Yes, the chipset that made the Amiga seem like it came from the future in 1985 eventually became the platform's undoing - but it needn't have panned out that way.

With the A500 poised to step into the market sector previously held by the C64 as the unit price came down, the opportunity was there to get the Amiga established as an affordable home machine with unprecedented creative possibilities as well as being a capable gaming platform.

Regardless of all the irritating one-upmanship and willy-waving that has plagued this thread, the simple fact is that in 1987 the only platform that enabled a home user to create an audio/visual presentation (without programming knowledge) and record the output to video tape with no extra hardware beyond a cable - and do so right out of the box - was the Amiga. And it could play games too.

In the late '80s that should have been enough for any half-decent marketing department to treat as a licence to print money. The contemporary Mac couldn't do it without extra hardware; the PC compatible platform couldn't do it at all - and even the base models of both were significantly more expensive.

And yes - CBM would have had to act quickly in the face of Nintendo and Sega's emphatic push into the US market in the late '80s. The A500 was more expensive than a NES or Genesis/MD (when it arrived); but the point was that it could do much more than play games at a far lower price than the competition, but when Irv threw Rattigan under the bus, CBM became rudderless and never truly recovered.

With 20/20 hindsight, a sensible long-term roadmap for the platform would have leveraged the creative potential of the A500 - which at the time was unmatched in terms of "bang-for-buck". Obviously as far as the US market was concerned, trying to hold on to the low-end in the face of Nintendo and Sega's onslaught wasn't going to work past a certain point, but if the A500 could have snagged a user base early enough, as the home computer market began to shift away from trying to compete with the consoles in favour of more powerful machines, there's a chance that the younger customers who cut their teeth on the A500 would have been inclined to stick with the platform.

(Of course, one rarely-acknowledged irony is that several game developers and designers who went on to become legends at Nintendo and the like actually cut their own teeth on the VIC-20...)

Every other home computer had limited lifespan before it became retro, and the Amiga would be no exception.

True, but it had the potential to be more.

I think it's also worth pointing out that the Macintosh ceased to be a distinct hardware platform from the mid-2000s onwards, essentially becoming internally Wintel with a dongle on the motherboard as DRM for installing MacOS X. With the advent of the Apple M# ARM-based architecture this has changed somewhat, but if we're talking expansion and peripherals it's still more-or-less commodity PC hardware. MacOS X itself is no longer a bespoke technology so much as an (often frustrating) GUI built on top of a forked BSD Unix.

The Amiga didn't change much between 1985 and 1994, which is a good thing both for retro enthusiasts and those of us who never stopped using it.

I get where you're coming from, but (respectfully) I'm not sure I agree. AmigaDOS/Workbench got a lot of things right from the outset, some of which have yet to be matched by any modern OS (I'm thinking in particular of the seamless way user interaction with the CLI and GUI worked because it was designed from day one for the user to work with both in tandem - Windows, Linux and MacOS X still feel a bit awkward in comparison)

Ultimately, things happened the way they did and there's no changing that - however I couldn't help but raise a wry smile when I saw the "PC97" standard and noted that in terms of architecture it owed rather more to the Amiga design than an evolution of IBM's approach.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Thorham

What on earth does the Steam Deck have to do with any of this

The "most" argument is flawed for large PC market.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Thorham

How the hell is faster than light speed a toy?

Star Trek's warp speed is fiction.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

What a stupid argument. Next you'll be saying that Apple turned the Mac into a toy with their 1984 Super Bowl ad.

Look in mirror hypocrite.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by CCCP alert

BYTE magazine calculated with blitter in A1000 is approx 50mhz 68000 performance under ideal conditions (but Lotus II ST vs Amiga FPS is 3:1 difference as best so maybe 25mhz 68000 at best).

Gimped 68EC020 in the A1200 is about 49.7 percent of Alice's 3.5 MHz 16-bit Blitter.

https://powerprograms.nl/amiga/cpu-blit-assist.html
A1200 Blitter at 100%
A1200 CPU is 49.7%

Both 68020 and 80386 has hardware barrel shifters and matching 32bit ALUs. DSP3210 has its hardware barrel shifters @ 50 Mhz and higher.

High clockspeed 386 and 020/030 will beat 1985-era Blitter @ 3.5 Mhz 16-bit.

68000's IPC is crap and Amiga's Blitter was the patch. 68000 is good for hosting a 32-bit programming model OS.

Wake me up when 68000 @ 7.1 MHz can reach 3.5 MIPS on 3.5 MHz memory bus.

VGA is not Atari ST since VGA has its hardware accelerated features e.g. http://www.osdever.net/FreeVGA/vga/vgafx.htm

Originally Posted by CCCP alert

AMDs A10 APU in a £350 PC in 2016 gave something between PS3 and PS4 gaming. Between A500/1200 vs MD/SNES and PS4 vs AMD A10 PC it was a slam dunk for PS1/PS2 vs PC for gaming due to high cost, Apple went back to overpriced rubbish by the time of Ridge Racer 4/Wipeout 3/Tomb Raider.

Apple Mac has a sizeable business customers and stable high resolution graphics for business.

Amiga ECS's release was delayed to 1990. Amiga joined the losses camp along with late GUI comers like text-base Lotus 123, text base WordStar and text based WordPerfect.

-----------

AMD's A10 APU's IGP (with 8 CU 2.0, 737.3 GFLOPS FP32) is nowhere near the Radeon HD 7850 @ 900 Mhz class GPU in the PS4's IGP (with 18 CU GCN 2.0 and 1.843 TFLOPS). Xbox One has 12 CU GCN 2.0 and 1.3 TFLOPS.

Originally Posted by CCCP alert

OS/2 2.0 32bit, which is what the AREXX for Kickstart source code deal with IBM was for in the ECS/AGA transition period when Amiga BASIC was replaced. It is a multithreaded and efficient multitasking OS kernal which shits all over anything before XP/2000 from MS. If you think different you know nothing about OS quality. Next Step was OS king, next best is 0S/2 32bit v 2.0'UNIX for x86, if you didn't agree your opinion is based on fantasy so who cares.

Meaningless. Killer app or killer game software sells the platform.

The Amiga had timed exclusives game packs.

Originally Posted by CCCP alert

OS/2 2.0 onward runs Doom for DOS faster than MS DOS, IIRC faster than Win95 Doom. If you were a 486/Pentium gamer you should have got OS/2 just because it runs DOS games faster AND supplies a full 640k DOS RAM with no shitty Config.sys/Autoexec.bat editing bollox that made QEMM386 a very profitable DOS app sold to PC owners by Quarterdeck

Your argument killed the need for OS/2 while Doom95 runs on Windows 95. There are many other DirectDraw/Direct3D Windows 95 games.

A dose of reality for OS/2
https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=88039

Hello, I installed OS/2 on the Pentium 2 build, but it seems that only few DOS games are working properly, most of them are crashing with a DosRaiseException error, of which I can't find any info online.

Now, for those who know OS/2, executables come with a lot of properties that I can change in order to make them run DOS differently, but I can't find anything online on which settings I should alter for Duke Nukem 2, Shadow Warrior, Bio Menace and a lot other games, to not make them crash anymore!

You're in dreamland.

https://news.microsoft.com/1996/01/0...etail-outlets/

The Games for Windows 95 CD offers users hours of exciting gameplay, featuring the hottest games developed for Windows 95. The CD includes fully playable samples of the following titles:

Al Unser Jr. Arcade Racing (Mindscape Inc.)
Arcade America (7th Level)
Atari 2600 Action Pack (Activision Inc.)
Battle Beast (7th Level)
Beavis and Butthead in Virtual Stupidity (Viacom New Media)
Commodore 64 15-Pack (Activision)
DogZ (PF. Magic)
DOOM for Windows 95 (id Software)
Double Switch (Digital Pictures)
Endorfun (Time Warner Interactive Inc.)
Full Tilt! Pinball (Maxis)
Fury3 (Microsoft)
Havoc (Reality Bytes)
The Hive (Trimark Interactive)
Ice & Fire (Zombie)
Locus (Zombie)
MechWarrior 2 (Activision)
Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure (Activision)
Pressure Drop (Starhill Productions)
Return Fire (Time Warner)
Shanghai: Great Moments (Activision)
SU-27 Flanker (Strategic Simulations Inc.)
TriTryst (Virgin Interactive Entertainment)
Under Pressure (Starhill Productions)
Zork: Nemisis (Activision)

PS; Activision has been purchased by Microsoft.

In Jan 1997, GLQuake was released for Windows 95/NT.

OS/2 Warp doesn't have heavy hitters like DirectX Starcraft and Diablo.

My 1996-1997 selection for Windows 95 PC is mostly due to DirectX games. 3DFX Voodoo has its influence during 1996.

Steam OS 3.x (based on ArchLinux) has better traction due to Valve's DirectX support with Valve-driven improvements for Proton and DXVK. OS/2 is a joke.

[TEG]

Originally Posted by hammer

[ Show youtube player ]
The Fall of OS/2

Thanks for this excellent video. So Commodore copied IBM marketing worst idea. Perhaps they had the same advisor?

IBM's mind-numbingly pointless decision to sponsor the Austin Texas-based college football Fiesta Bowl from 1993 to 1995. This sponsorship, which cost IBM millions of dollars, made absolutely no sense from the start. Who exactly were they reaching as in search of stupidity puts, it was unclear what benefit IBM derived from slapping the name OS/2 on a second tier sporting event. No demographic information seemed to exist that indicated that people who watched the Fiesta Bowl were also highly interested in 32-bit OS.

And there wasn't much proof that watching a college football game would make people more inclined to rush home and demand computer resellers stock up on OS/2.