30 June 2017, 09:16 | #41 | |
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30 June 2017, 09:27 | #42 |
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The 512kB extra RAM is actually one of the few things Commodore did provide (as the A501) from the beginning
I don't think anyone disagrees that Commodore made poor marketing choices, especially later on. They should have pushed upgrades to the systems much more. But as the topic was "from day 1", high-density floppies, hard drives and such simply were not a realistic option for the A1000. The technology was pretty much all there, just not utilized to the full extent by the market. |
30 June 2017, 09:40 | #43 |
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Exactly, the design of the A1000 was done in what 1982/3? and released in 1985, HD 3.5" floppies didn't exist until 1986, its ridiculous to say they should have included it!
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30 June 2017, 09:46 | #44 |
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I didn't say they should have included it. I said it was mistake to not use the already standard 720 KB disk format from 1984 (PC, Atari ST), which made it later difficult to adapt the new HD floppies format. I.e. if the Amiga 1000 used standard interface for floppies, many people in as early as 1986/1987 would have upgraded to HD floppy drive.
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30 June 2017, 10:02 | #45 | |
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Plus Amiga was not like PC, we didn't want to keep buying extra equipment, which why it was a budget computer compared to a PC. |
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30 June 2017, 10:29 | #46 |
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I'm sorry but the floppy drive wasn't an issue until the 1200 came out.. Then commodore wanted to avoid confusion of games being released on dd and hd disks. The problem was they should have adopted hard drives as standard from kickstart 2 onwards.. This would have negated the floppy disk anyway
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30 June 2017, 10:57 | #47 |
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Hard drives were too expensive for budget computers esp upto 1990 in the hundered of pounds, it wasn't until 92 when Commodore first put them in A600 models, still at a costly £500 for a measly 20mb hdd, when the £400 A1200 was coming out the same year, it took no genius to understand why these models bombed.
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30 June 2017, 11:02 | #48 |
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Especially small 2,5" hdds were EXTREMELY expensive. Fortunately, at least A1200 was capable to carry some 3,5" hdd models internally. My first HDD in A1200 was 512MB 3,5" IBM-DALA and comparing the price to its 2,5" equivalent was 1:3 at that time.
My first Amiga was A600 and I had to connect it to a 40MB obsolete second-handed 3,5" HDD which was put outside the computer. It was really uncomfortable. |
30 June 2017, 11:35 | #49 | |
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The Atari used a 1770-based controller but still didn't get HD floppy support until the MegaSTE, because it's not a matter of just swapping out the controller. I think what did cause the Amiga floppies to seem unreliable was partly the fact that the average Amiga floppy saw ten times more use than the average PC floppy, combined with the fact that games and demos used custom formats with little error correction and stretching the limits with regard to track lengths, sector sizes and number of tracks. OFS is quite a reliable format, designed to preserve data as far as possible even on bad media. |
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30 June 2017, 13:48 | #50 | |
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30 June 2017, 17:48 | #51 |
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IMO, the Amiga 1000 was very good for the time due to the influence of Jay Miner who was a visionary. It was ahead of its time so far that people (including management at C=) didn't understand the amazing future yet. C= just didn't upgrade it properly or fast enough and was clueless on how to market it.
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05 July 2017, 23:53 | #52 |
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I think the amiga 500 was good as it was. Except for the 4 channel sound, should have been six.
What amiga lacked was not really the hardware. amiga 500 was a great kit. It some sort of software standard guidelines. Commodore should have had a sort of "nintendo seal of approval" for games that held a certain standard. Like 2 button joystick support optional hdd install if its more than 2 disks. Some guidelines on how many diskswaps you are allowed to have. some routines for saves and such. probably something more i cant think of now. |
06 July 2017, 00:40 | #53 |
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Ok, I didn't read this thread, so maybe this was already mentioned before, but for me the worst feature of all the early Amiga models was the limitation to display only 50 or 60 FPS on PAL or NTSC and with the terrible interlace flickering, a real pain for your eyes. Without a flickerfixer these Amigas were just unusable. I could use my A2000 with a flickerfixer, the ECS Denise and the Euro36 monitor driver at 724*512@56, but that was still far from perfect, and Commodore never fixed it! I'm very glad to use WinUAE nowadays.
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06 July 2017, 01:01 | #54 |
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06 July 2017, 08:19 | #55 |
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I think NorthWay pinned lot of the shortcomings. If I have to pick the top two I would say:
* Blitter and sprites without a horizontal flip feature. This alone would have saved half of the RAM in most of the games * No Fast RAM. Even 32KB would have permitted to exploit the parallelism between CPU and Blitter. This was a distintive advantage of Amiga that was never used in games because not standard. This could have been implement with just 2 SRAM chips. |
06 July 2017, 11:33 | #56 | |||||||||
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These things seem to annoy you, fair enough, but I think you don't really understand what exactly you're annoyed at. Last edited by Daedalus; 06 July 2017 at 12:01. |
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06 July 2017, 15:15 | #57 |
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Some things off of my Amiga "It would be nice if..." pile
1. A faster CPU. Even in '85 when the first machine was released the 68000 was getting a bit long in the tooth. Fast forward to the release of 2000 and the 500 and it's already the thick end of 10 years old and 7mhz just isn't cutting it anymore. A 68020 might have been a bit too rich for the time but a 14mhz 68000 would have been a bit more like it and surely wouldn't have added a whole lot to cost of the BOM. 2. Fast RAM. To go with the above, there's simply no getting around this if we want to make the best use of it. 512k of Fast RAM for the 500 certainly would have increased the price of the machine by a fair bit, but would have been worth it. Giving the thing far better general application performance as well as mitigating the downsides of chipset memory contention for games. 3. More colour registers. This one really bugs me. We get 6 bitplanes but only enough registers for 32 colours. And even more annoyingly, they didn't even leave room in the address space to easily add more later. Which meant that we only got the poor man's option of EHB later down the line for ECS, as well as the slightly clumsy method of addressing the pallette required for AGA. 4. MS-DOS floppy disk support Okay, we got CrossDOS later with release 2.0. But this absolutely should have been there from day one. The benefits of directly reading media from the business computer in the US market, if not the world, seem glaringly obvious now. But even back then, somebody surely would have at least mentioned it while they were all sitting round the whiteboard throwing ideas around. I guess the bean counters won that argument, even though it wouldn't, I guess, have required any changes to the hardware? 5. More sprites. For games, more hardware sprites would have been nice. More's always better, right? However you could argue that you might never, ever, have enough sprites, regardless of how many there are. You could also argue that using blitter objects makes up for this deficiency* But, a mere 8, four colour sprites was already pretty stingy in '85 and multiplexing only gets you so much and only within certain scenarios. 6. More sound channels. Much like the above, you could argue that you could never have enough. But only 4?!?!? Adding that lot up gives us a machine that would have completely wiped the floor with the ST and the average IBM clone** typical of the time period and, I propose, would have been something that would have at the very least held its own against the Mega Drive and SNES in the later years even if it hadn't changed a single bit. B *which, it does. But only up to a point. **even more than it did already. Last edited by Old_Bob; 06 July 2017 at 15:22. |
06 July 2017, 15:31 | #58 | |
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Was my A1000 an ECS or an OCS chipset? |
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06 July 2017, 15:40 | #59 | |
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I'm blaming old age B |
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06 July 2017, 15:46 | #60 |
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I had never even thought about that until you mentioned it! I had always assumed that EHB was standard for all Amigas.
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