RE: Amiga users didn't upgrade

[sokolovic]

There is probably a sociological reason also.
I tend to notice that US developpers/publishers were more kind of supporting expanded Amiga (and aimed toward a more mature audience). Almost every US made Amiga games are HD friendly and benefits from fast ram and accelerated cards. I guess that upgrading your Amiga was more common there than it was in Europe.

[TCD]

Just found this in Amiga Format 58:

The answer comes from David Pleasance. If I would read that I might reconsider if I want to buy a hard drive...

[sokolovic]

Ahaha.
It reminds me a fantactic interview of the Mr Pleasance. When asked when the CD1200 will be released he answered something like "I'm not sure but why would you want to add a CD drive to an A1200 ? Just buy a CD32."
Clearly the easy expanding abilities of the A1200 wasn't very commercially important for Commodore UK. There were selling toys, not computers.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

Clearly the easy expanding abilities of the A1200 wasn't very commercially important for Commodore UK. There were selling toys, not computers.

A few issues earlier in an interview with Mr. Pleasance he was asked why Commodore lowered the price of the A1200 even if they were selling well at that point. The answer was that they could be selling more at a smaller margin. That was at a time when Commodore was already in financial trouble. Reading now that he also didn't want to earn money for Commodore selling hard drives... well let's just say I don't agree with his business decisions

[Megalomaniac]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

There is probably a sociological reason also.
I tend to notice that US developpers/publishers were more kind of supporting expanded Amiga (and aimed toward a more mature audience). Almost every US made Amiga games are HD friendly and benefits from fast ram and accelerated cards. I guess that upgrading your Amiga was more common there than it was in Europe.

I wonder if this is the wrong way round. In the US people used consoles for arcade games and computers for sims / strategy / adventure games. American Amiga games were much more likely to be in genres which potentially benefitted from hard drives or faster processors (and were often designed around PCs which had them). European-made games in those genres (such as The Settlers, Beneath a Steel Sky, Birds of Prey) usually did use hard drives and accelerators (though the game in my name didn't), while US-made action games there were (such as Battle Squadron) generally didn't.

I've never quite known what to made of David Pleasance, but these quotes and decisions really make him look incredibly misguided, although I'm sure even if UK A1200 and CD32 sales had doubled it wouldn't've allowed Commodore US to survive long enough to keep A1200s in production for Christmas 1994, or get a new model out.

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by TCD

A few issues earlier in an interview with Mr. Pleasance he was asked why Commodore lowered the price of the A1200 even if they were selling well at that point. The answer was that they could be selling more at a smaller margin. That was at a time when Commodore was already in financial trouble. Reading now that he also didn't want to earn money for Commodore selling hard drives... well let's just say I don't agree with his business decisions

That does make sense though. Let's say you make a margin of £10 on every Amiga sold and sell 1000, that's £10,000. Now if you reduce the price so you'll make £9 on every Amiga sold but will sell 2000, that's £18,000. It's hardly uncommon that lowering the price makes more, as long as you can ship enough to meet demand and assuming demand increases enough to cover the drop in per unit profits.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by AestheticDebris

That does make sense though. Let's say you make a margin of £10 on every Amiga sold and sell 1000, that's £10,000. Now if you reduce the price so you'll make £9 on every Amiga sold but will sell 2000, that's £18,000. It's hardly uncommon that lowering the price makes more, as long as you can ship enough to meet demand and assuming demand increases enough to cover the drop in per unit profits.

Sure, but dropping the price from £400 to £350 (I think, would have to look it up) cuts more than 10% of the margin and when you compete with a £150 SNES and a £100 MegaDrive you don't win twice the amount of customers by doing it. I just mentioned it because it baffled me that Commodore didn't try to make money from selling the hard drives too as they often cost more than the A1200 itself.

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by TCD

I just mentioned it because it baffled me that Commodore didn't try to make money from selling the hard drives too as they often cost more than the A1200 itself.

There was no money in it. People didn't buy an A1200 wanting a hard drive (which were expensive), they were still looking for a "cheap" computer they could play games on and maybe a bit of word processing etc. By the time the A1200 came out, if you were serious enough about wanting a computer with a hard drive etc the PC and Mac were the only really viable options.

It might have been a different story if Commodore had been able to ship cheap Amiga's with hard drives in '87, but they didn't really seem interested in finding ways to drive the costs down then, when they could have made a difference.

[Megalomaniac]

Originally Posted by AestheticDebris

There was no money in it. People didn't buy an A1200 wanting a hard drive (which were expensive), they were still looking for a "cheap" computer they could play games on and maybe a bit of word processing etc. By the time the A1200 came out, if you were serious enough about wanting a computer with a hard drive etc the PC and Mac were the only really viable options.

It might have been a different story if Commodore had been able to ship cheap Amiga's with hard drives in '87, but they didn't really seem interested in finding ways to drive the costs down then, when they could have made a difference.

A hard drive massively improved the Amiga experience for serious tasks or adventure / strategy games. Aside from the A600HD option (which for me was too small a drive and too crippled a computer to be worthwhile), you could get A1200s with hard drives readily-installed by early 1993, £600 for an 80Mb drive included here (https://archive.org/details/AmigaFor...e/n66/mode/1up) which is about equal to the £499 a 512K A500 cost on launch in 1987, once you consider inflation, and much more affordable than any decent PC. I don't think the technology was available to make hard drives really affordable for the A500, they'd have to be internal and IDE wasn't around then. Besides, in 1987 there was no need, most PCs didn't use them for games and most serious tasks could be done using 2-3 disks tops, by 1992 there was a need, with Monkey Island 2 on 11 disks for a start.

With the benefit of hindsight, its a shame that more of us didn't buy upgrades - to stay cutting edge for PC games from 1987 to 1995 would cost you, conservatively, £3000 in new machines and upgrades - you could get an A500, A501, second drive, A1200 and hard drive / accelerator / fastRAM progressively over that time for that for half as much.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by AestheticDebris

There was no money in it.

I'm not so sure about that The only thing that we know for sure is that Commodore UK wanted to sell the A1200 like you describe and what the outcome of that was.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

Ahaha.
It reminds me a fantactic interview of the Mr Pleasance. When asked when the CD1200 will be released he answered something like "I'm not sure but why would you want to add a CD drive to an A1200 ? Just buy a CD32."

He was right. If you wanted a CD1200 you obviously had no clue about the numerous other CDROM solutions that would probably be better for you.

The only real advantage of the CD1200 was compatibility with the CD32. Downside was you couldn't use it with an accelerator card. That meant you would be throwing it away later if you wanted to keep your A1200 up to date.

Clearly the easy expanding abilities of the A1200 wasn't very commercially important for Commodore UK. There were selling toys, not computers.

The sad truth is that was the only way to sell them. People who wanted computers bought a PC. And they were right to do so.

For 3 years I tried to convince customers the Amiga was a better choice, but I was deluded. IBM was the industry standard and I was trying to sell them a machine that was incompatible. It wouldn't have mattered what the A1200 had in it, except perhaps an Intel CPU and ISA bus slots. The only way to sell the A1200 was to appeal to gamers and hobbyists who were happy playing with something different.

[TCD]

Just found this in Amiga Format issue 60:


Edit: As a bonus in the same article about the 'voluntary liquidation':

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

He was right. If you wanted a CD1200 you obviously had no clue about the numerous other CDROM solutions that would probably be better for you.

The only real advantage of the CD1200 was compatibility with the CD32. Downside was you couldn't use it with an accelerator card. That meant you would be throwing it away later if you wanted to keep your A1200 up to date.

The correct answer would have been "there is enough third party solutions" instead of "just buy a CD32" IMHO. You don't tell people that just bought your flagship computer that you won't support it anymore and that they just have to buy another machine.

Are you sure for the CD1200 about not being able to use it with an accelerator card ? IIRC it was supposed to be plugged on the PCMCIA port like the overdrive CD.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by TCD

Sure, but dropping the price from £400 to £350 (I think, would have to look it up) cuts more than 10% of the margin and when you compete with a £150 SNES and a £100 MegaDrive you don't win twice the amount of customers by doing it. I just mentioned it because it baffled me that Commodore didn't try to make money from selling the hard drives too as they often cost more than the A1200 itself.

The A1200 wasn't really competing against the SNES or Mega Drive. It was an alternative to an expensive PC. It was only a bit more expensive than a console but could do a lot more - making it much more appealing to the hobbyist who wanted to do more than just play games.

But it wasn't IBM compatible so it had to be cheap. By the time you added a monitor and hard drive the price was getting up there. And there were other non-IBM systems to consider too, like the Atari ST and Acorn Archimedes. £50 off could be just the incentive you needed to make the 'right' choice. That could make the difference between being a top seller and hardly moving any at all.

The other factor to consider is that the more 'popular' a product is the easier it is to sell. The A1200 was new so they had to get as many out there as possible to reach critical mass, even if it meant making less profit initially. The A1200 had AGA, so developers should have been champing at the bit to produce stuff for it. But they would be hesitant to do so if sales were low. Then fewer AGA titles would mean less incentive to buy one, a vicious circle.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Then fewer AGA titles would mean less incentive to buy one, a vicious circle.

This. By 1993 the amount of full page game advertisements in Amiga Format had dropped significantly indicating that major publishers weren't as interested in the platform as a whole (not only AGA machines) anymore. Maybe focussing on bringing more games and software to the market that uses the new hardware would have been a better idea.

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

Are you sure for the CD1200 about not being able to use it with an accelerator card ? IIRC it was supposed to be plugged on the PCMCIA port like the overdrive CD.

Yep, it needed to plug into the trapdoor connector because it was more than just a CD drive. It also contained an Akiko chip for full CD32 compatibility, and the only way to add that was directly onto the CPU bus. And that's what set it apart from the 3rd party solutions. They didn't realise at the time I guess that so little software would use Akiko...

Nowadays there are more compact accelerators, but back then even the most basic RAM cards took up the entire space available in the trapdoor area, so even if the CD1200 has a passthrough connector (e.g., like the Mediator), it wouldn't have been useable.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

The correct answer would have been "there is enough third party solutions" instead of "just buy a CD32" IMHO. You don't tell people that just bought your flagship computer that you won't support it anymore and that they just have to buy another machine.

Heh-heh. In 1985 I bought an Amstrad CPC664. A mere 6 months later they brought out the CPC6128 with twice as much RAM. Did they offer an upgrade for 664 owners? Of course not.

Are you sure for the CD1200 about not being able to use it with an accelerator card ? IIRC it was supposed to be plugged on the PCMCIA port like the overdrive CD.

The Amiga CD1200 had an interface card that plugged into the the trapdoor slot. It had optional FastRAM, and Akiko for DMA and C2P. The CD drive was the same proprietary unit as in the CD32, with its own special interface (not SCSI, IDE or Mitsumi etc.). It was designed this way to be highly compatible with the CD32.

Apparently a 68030 CPU socket was planned for the production version. It probably would have been clocked at around 25MHz (same as the A4000-030), so too bad if you wanted to go faster. When (if ever) this would have come out is anybody's guess.

In 1994 AlfaData had their own 'CD1200' PCMCIA interface for Mitsumi CDROM drives. The interface + double-speed drive cost £239.90. In 1995 Amiga Technologies brought out the Q-Drive 1241 with 4x IDE CDROM drive, which also plugged into the PCMCIA port. SCSI was another option. Hisoft made the Squirrel PCMCIA SCSI adapter, and many accelerator cards had a SCSI option. Panasonic made a lovely portable SCSI CDROM drive that was quite cheap (you can still buy these on eBay). It had a PCMCIA SCSI interface too - I wonder if an Amiga driver could be been written for it?

The CD32 was originally priced at £299. The Amiga CD1200, if it ever got released, would probably have been about the same price. By that time many A1200 owners would already have RAM boards or accelerator cards which they wouldn't want to give up, so a PCMCIA CDROM drive would be more attractive.

[TCD]

Found this in Amiga Format issue 61 about the CD1200:


Not sure if it is a sales pitch or a warning

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by TCD

Found this in Amiga Format issue 61 about the CD1200:

Not sure if it is a sales pitch or a warning

Very interesting, particularly the expected price of £199.

The statement 'does not provide for further technological development' does seem to be a warning, though the reason given turned out to be unimportant (FMV).

It's hard to believe they were going to get these out before Christmas when the prototype was so crude.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

It's hard to believe they were going to get these out before Christmas when the prototype was so crude.

I think at this point (around May/June 1994) there was a lot of wishful thinking involved at Commodore.