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#641 | ||
Registered User
Join Date: May 2017
Location: Dublin Ireland
Posts: 46
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Would have liked some better productivity video modes but that's hardware/cost thing. Last edited by activist; 29 July 2019 at 01:02. |
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#642 |
Banned
Join Date: Sep 2011
Location: Cardiff, UK
Age: 51
Posts: 2,871
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I couldn't get Quake to run on my 486DX2/66 PC without looking like a slideshow, so...
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#643 | |
Registered User
Join Date: May 2017
Location: Dublin Ireland
Posts: 46
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Quote:
I think was Doom he said. Not Quake Last edited by activist; 26 July 2019 at 15:47. |
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#644 |
Banned
Join Date: Sep 2011
Location: Cardiff, UK
Age: 51
Posts: 2,871
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I thought he was talking about how PC owners never seemed to complain when their current machine was too slow to play the latest games like Doom, or in my case, Quake (which I meant) because whilst Quake was slideshow slow on my PC when I first got it, I had to make do until the next upgrade. That's what I meant.
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#645 |
Registered User
Join Date: Jun 2015
Location: Germany
Posts: 1,926
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Perhaps one of the PC's biggest advantages in the 90s was that it allowed its owners to delude themselves with regard to the money spent on upgrades. Let's get a new graphics card, let's get a soundcard, let's get a new harddisk, let's get some more RAM, let's get a new motherboard - and let's always think of it as still being the one computer we spent a lot of money for a couple of years ago and ignore that by now we could have bought (or effectively did buy) an entire new computer. Installment purchases are so tempting...
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#646 | |
Registered User
Join Date: Jun 2009
Location: Dublin, then Glasgow
Posts: 6,381
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#647 |
Phone Homer
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: 5150
Posts: 5,816
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If people sat down in an office or such environment to use a PC for Word Processing or something and and the 486 PC had Windows 3.11 with Calmira II not much would be said now what do you think would happen if it was Workbench 3.x?
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#648 | |
Registered User
Join Date: Jun 2009
Location: Dublin, then Glasgow
Posts: 6,381
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Quote:
Essentially, both a Windows 3.11 machine, and a Workbench 3.1 machine with equivalent software, will offer similar levels of productivity in a modern office, i.e., very little. So I don't see what point you're trying to make. |
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#649 |
Phone Homer
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: 5150
Posts: 5,816
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I installed a Calmira II system on a 486 with 8mb about 10 years ago and it was a pretty sweet system and I don't think anyone would have difficulty navigating a win 95 style system I won't reply anymore for me this has just closed the whole argument.
No cut and paste etc that is definitely wrong I was cut and pasting with MS Works. |
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#650 | |
Registered User
Join Date: Jun 2018
Location: Victoria, Canada
Age: 56
Posts: 134
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![]() Though I think I see the point you're trying to make. If we take an above average office drone with above average computer/technical skills, sat them down with a well configured Windows 3.11 machine and a well configured Amiga Workbench 3.x machine, both with word processors, email, spreadsheets, presentation software, etc., I think after a period of adjustment, both the Amiga and the Windows machine would be on even ground and possibly the Amiga having the lead. |
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#651 |
Phone Homer
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: 5150
Posts: 5,816
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Please I don't want to reply again!?!
Calmira II |
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#653 | |||
Registered User
Join Date: Jun 2009
Location: Dublin, then Glasgow
Posts: 6,381
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#654 |
Registered User
Join Date: Jun 2019
Location: Sweden
Posts: 66
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If u ask if iam disapointed to own a 1200 right now NO
new stuff is released all the time someone should have a webpage where all new stuff are released i know there is somekind of upgrade to CD32 |
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#655 |
Registered User
Join Date: Feb 2011
Location: Italy/Rome
Posts: 2,344
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Would be interesting doing some sort of Hack into Winuae and make cpu able to go at full speed with Aga chip mem? Would be interesting to see how much performance we can gain with Aga?
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#656 | |
Registered User
Join Date: Feb 2007
Location: Melbourne, Australia
Age: 41
Posts: 3,773
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I honestly don't believe the A1200 caused Commodore's bankruptcy. They were in trouble long before that.
I do agree that not having fast ram slots was a huge oversight. The Atari STe, a machine with a very similar form factor to an A1200, was able to fit them in. Let's face it, there's room in the case for them. Commodore were just being tightasses, as usual. Quote:
Last edited by Hewitson; 27 July 2019 at 06:09. |
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#657 | |
Going nowhere
Join Date: Oct 2001
Location: United Kingdom
Age: 50
Posts: 9,018
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Quote:
No matter what people think of the machines themselves, the combined sales of A1200 and CD32 were ok, the PS1 was still a year off, but in all honesty, it would have been a delay into them going under because management was happy to pay themselves top dollar for not delivering top dollar performance. And where are the SIMM sockets going to go on the board? Yes they could have fitted them, but the only space is where the expansion boards go underneath, which would have removed further expansion. Commodore should have at least have designed and released cheap expansion ram boards either complete or with simm sockets on them, but they seemed to figure (quite correctly) that after market companies would sort that. Remember the 512k ram expansions for A500, how many had an actual official Commodore board? Probably very few because the after market alternatives were cheaper and did the same job. |
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#658 |
Banned
Join Date: Sep 2011
Location: Cardiff, UK
Age: 51
Posts: 2,871
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Agreed, Galahad. The many accelerator cards that came out for the A1200 also came with lots of RAM as an integral part of the upgrade, and since the A1200 came with 2Mb of Chip RAM as standard AND it was the maximum the AGA chipset could use, then that was Chip RAM sorted for good and all the cards had to do was to provide Fast RAM. Result? Sorted!
It's also true that it was third-party vendors who provided these expansions, and what a good idea that was as well, it got many manufacturers of computer hardware to become familiar with Amiga tech and even expand upon it. Quite a wise move of Commodore to allow this, as Apple would never do. |
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#659 |
Zone Friend
Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: London
Posts: 1,179
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There was space in the case for a 3.5 inch hard drive.
Laptop drives were so expensive, no doubt the A1200 could have been a serious computer for a lot more people. A1200 owners could have user PC owner's cast-offs cheaply, a 20mb drive made the OS very usable. Also, why was 4mb the most common RAM upgrade available? If a basic 2mb fast ram expansion option were available more cheaply this could have made a big difference. Just obvious missed opportunities really. |
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#660 | |||||||||||||
Registered User
Join Date: Jul 2015
Location: The Netherlands
Posts: 3,437
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I personally don't think so. However (and this is the important bit): there is no way to know for certain either way. Personally, I think this is part of why we keep going around in circles. As long as we keep talking about things that, at best, we can only guess about... I don't see how we'll ever reach any agreement. We both think very differently about this and are talking about stuff that's (sorry) hypothetical - not reality. Quote:
Many of these were also (as far as I can tell) really popular at the time. Just look at the hype (in magazines) that some of these games received. And yet, almost no one bought a faster Amiga to play such games better. Meanwhile, in DOS land it seems that people were buying faster PC's and better graphics cards long before Doom. Now, I can't be certain that this was because of those games, but I can remember the hype around Wing Commander and articles talking about what kind of PC to get to run it well. AFAIK the same just didn't happen with the Amiga. In fact... IIRC, when Wing Commander came out for the A500, people complained about the frame rate. Reviews didn't point out it ran much better if you bought an accelerator, instead marking it down for poor performance. Quote:
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However, chunky still doesn't get all the advantages you might think here regardless. Skipping transparent pixels also loses some bandwidth, because skipping pixels means using the bus less efficiently. See, it requires either knowing what's in the background (so reading it first - which negates the advantage) or writing in smaller packets when transparency is shown (which still requires the mask). Depending what you're drawing, this can be as bad as requiring byte by byte transfers. This is much less efficient as you really want your transfers to be as big as possible to optimise bandwidth usage. Block based drawing might technically spend more bytes on the bus, but they do their transfers in much bigger chunks and that might negate some or all of the above advantage. An interesting question then is: how did DOS games actually do their 2D drawing? I not 100% certain, but AFAIK there seem to be only two real world implementations that were used in large numbers: compiled sprites, or block transfers. The latter being more generic and more like the Blitter does it, the former allowing the programmer to be very specific with things such as transparency, but also less efficient in some ways as pointed out above (not to mention requiring sprite specific code for each animation frame - generated or hand written). A long time ago I did speak to someone who coded some simple PC games on VGA and he said they used a simple dirty rectangle approach and drew everything in rectangles very much like the Blitter would've. I can't remember exactly why they did it like that though. Would be interesting to see how common this was. Quote:
My problem here is that your way of arguing pro's and con's is that it borders on revisionism. The solution you called for does not actually exist. No one made VGA cards with a dual layer 16/16 colour mode. Real world chunky displays therefore did not have this advantage, which in turn makes me really uncomfortable accepting it as 'an advantage'. Quote:
I fully agree that AGA was not great. But 8 bit planar made perfect sense for the Amiga. It already had six bitplanes, adding two more is the natural choice to get to 256 colours. Quote:
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Truth is that it is fun to consider such things. But, in reality, none of us know how we really would've done things if we were a Commodore manager back in the day. We only know what to do because we know where we ended up. Had you been a manager back then, you wouldn't know that and thus may have made very similar mistakes. Quote:
Guess it's best I don't go building any hardware any time soon ![]() Quote:
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I just don't agree here. The PS2 was clearly declining in sales when the PS3 was announced (and later launched). The XBOX 360 was clearly pushed forwards due to poor XBOX sales at the time. Neither of these companies launched their next machine while the previous one was raking in record sales. The same thing actually happened before: Sony launched the PS2 after the PS1 had started to decline. And AFAIK it also happened again with the current consoles. As I pointed out before: in 1991, Commodore sold more Amiga's than ever before. This really is different from either Sony or Microsoft's time line, where both launched new products while the previous product was selling well below the figures of their best years. Quote:
![]() They should've just stuck with one direction. Jay Miner's ideas for the 1987 Amiga update were fascinating and would've been very nice to see. But instead they went all over the place. I don't think the 264 & 128 are that relevant in terms of Amiga development though. Both were designed (and IIRC released) before Commodore was even considering buying the Amiga Corporation. Quote:
Initially, there actually were 1, 2 and 4MB expansions. But the 1 and 2MB expansions soon died out. I guess they didn't sell? Last edited by roondar; 27 July 2019 at 13:56. |
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