PC games that made the Amiga look like Shit

[grond]

The most interesting statement in the article to me is:

"Now that the Amiga can compete with other platforms in the graphic arena (with a 256-color display), developers hope that Amiga owners will buy Amigas equipped with hard drives. According to Ted Morris of Westwood Studios (Dune II, Legend of Kyrandia), one of the major hurdles in porting titles to the Amiga is being able to squeeze a large MS-DOS game onto a floppy-only Amiga system. Two of Westwood's newer games for MS-DOS computers -- Lands of Lore and legend of Kyrandia II -- are simply too large to be converted for use on floppy-only Amigas. Nearly all developers agree that the more Amigas with hard drives, the better."

I have stated it many times but the biggest flaw of the A1200 probably is the slightly too small case and the choice of a 2.5" IDE port and harddisk. The A1200 should have been made to fit 3.5" harddisks and should not have been sold without a harddisk at all. Starting games from Workbench 3.0 instead of booting them from floppy would even have boosted the Amiga's perception as a productivity machine because, hey, who would have thunk, it even had a competitive operating system!

[Amigajay]

Imo Commodore missed a trick twice, firstly in 1991 they should have released CD drives for all Amiga desktops and budget machines alongside the CDTV. But again in 1993 alongside the CD32 for the A4000/A1200, in their shortsightedness they just saw potential sales taken away from the CD32 and not the bigger picture of more games attracts more buyers.

Would have benefitted consumers and publishers to have versions of one game for every Amiga on one CD-ROM.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by grond

The A1200 should have been made to fit 3.5" harddisks and should not have been sold without a harddisk at all.

Yep. At the very least sell them bundled by Commodore. It's not surprising why devs and publishers didn't really want to release a HD only game for AGA machines in 1994.

[Megalomaniac]

Commodore's excuse for not bundling hard drives with the A1200, that the retailers could then sell them with multiple hard drive sizes, felt a bit hollow - were they overcompensating from the mistake of bundling a too-small HD with the A600? Or just unwilling to take responsibility for choosing a standard size or brand?

As for CD-ROM drives, the CDTV was designed for 1Mb Chip RAM, so an Amiga with less was going to encounter compatibility issues. Even once the A570 did launch, only a minority of Amigas could use it immediately - and, of course, the A600 couldn't use it at all, I don't think they ever got an official CD-ROM option.

This article is from a US perspective, so largely ignores action games in favour of sims and adventures, but certainly for those styles of games, the A1200's usefulness was reduced by not coming with either hard drives or CD-ROM as a standardised immediately-available-bundled-from-retailers upgrade, if not something integrated into the design as a standard feature from day one (though it'd have to be CDs alongside floppies, not instead of)

[TCD]

Well, the majority of Amigas could actually use the A570 as they were A500s Which means it's either a) buy a CD drive for your existing Amiga or b) buy a new Amiga that doesn't support the drive. Commodore surely had some great ideas back when

[Megalomaniac]

Ordinary A500s needed a chip RAM upgrade to fully use CDTV software, and I think 1.3 was a bare minimum too? I know in a minority for disliking the A600 here, but the initial lack of CD-ROM support was another issue with it - though it was a bigger problem when the A1200 launched without it as an option. To reach Christmas 1993 with the only CD drive available to be the A570, which couldn't be used with any Amiga manufactured in the previous 18 months, was a colossal failure.

[oscar_ates]

Sierra's Nichols said: "Buying the re-packaged 8-year old technology of an Amiga 600 competes with the placement of the A1200 as new base machine, and is destructive to the market". This is also spot on, so much time/money wasted on dead end projects like A600, C64GS. Management was definitely awful, could not give a proper direction to R&D.

If they had managed to release A1200 with 28MHz 68020, 1MB chip 2MB fast and 100MB HD in 1991, things would have been gone in different direction.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by oscar_ates

If they had managed to release A1200 with 28MHz 68020, 1MB chip 2MB fast and 100MB HD in 1991, things would have been gone in different direction.

Note that they doesn't point the MHz capabilities, the lack of fast ram or the release date. The only thing missing for them is a standard HD. Even a 40MB HD A1200 with the same specs released in 1992 (in available at xmas without the A600 paraditing) would have maybe been sufficient because it would have set up a standard.

Also note that Sierra asked Revolution Software to make a KQ6 conversion with an A1200 HD as a minimun. At the end, the game was released for 1Mb OCS Amigas on floppies and they canned the AGA version because the ECS version was perfect
Probably Sierra was overvaluing the basic recquirements for their games.

Interesting also to note that the reason why they canned Lands of Lore is because they didn't want to release it HD only.

Anything they said was simple logic. If you want to have PC conversion, just have what is standard on a basic PC : 256 colors mode and HD.
Strange that Commodore as an US based company didn't feel that it was a good idea to ask them what they wanted.

Anyway, thanks for the link, this article is very interesting IMHO.

[oscar_ates]

You are welcome! Indeed the even HD addition would be a thing. On the other hand also missed a lot of opportunities like having HD floppy drive and 256 color chunky mode. Mehdi Ali and uncle Irvin were clueless guy about technology and very short/narrow sighted. They kicked out Bil Sydnes because of A600 disaster and interestingly nobody touched the inept Mehdi to kick him out. Lew Eggebrecht replaced the Bil Sydnes but could not do much about Amiga losing the market share. Lew was the designer of the first IBM PC. I think at a time commodore wanted to become a PC company and acquired many ex-IBM ers. However PC market was already taken by the Taiwanese cheap clones.

[rare_j]

Even a 10mb hdd was useful.
I fitted one to my A1200 using a special 2.5 to 3.5 ide cable I bought out of an Amiga mag ad via mail order. It was £10 if I remember rightly.
The hard drive came out of my sister's old PC. I had to cut a hole in the A1200 case for the cable, and so I ended up with a 3.5 inch 10mb ide hdd hanging out the back of the Amiga. It was awesome. Workbench was crazy fast and I had all my programs and coverdisk software installed and even a few games.
It was a massive mistake on Commodore's part to make the A1200 use very expensive laptop drives only. The prices on those things were insane compared to the much more widely available standard desktop drives.
A few small changes to the case, and a 3.5" unit could easily have been accommodated. Massive own goal there.

[Megalomaniac]

Maybe Commodore prioritised the European action-game market, where the extra cost of a hard drive would not have been worthwhile, rather than the American adventure/sim/strategy market, where they would have? Perhaps they believed the US market was already lost by 1992?

Another issue is, which size of hard drive should it have been? 40Mb making the machine £500, or (say) 120Mb making it £600? Do you leave space to add a second hard drive, so that the existing one isn't useless if you need to upgrade? PC Day of the Tentacle needed 16Mb of hard drive space, Ultima VII needed 21Mb, AGA Amiga versions would probably need the same, so that'd be 40Mb gone pretty quickly. Once you get into the £600 price range, do you need to be adding fast RAM too? Are you killing off the chance of the machine being affordable for the parents of kids who'd want Aladdin and Banshee? An A1200 probably had to be cheaper than a 386SX system to be competitive, especially considering that PCs came with monitors.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

Maybe Commodore prioritised the European action-game market, where the extra cost of a hard drive would not have been worthwhile, rather than the American adventure/sim/strategy market, where they would have? Perhaps they believed the US market was already lost by 1992?

Another issue is, which size of hard drive should it have been? 40Mb making the machine £500, or (say) 120Mb making it £600? Do you leave space to add a second hard drive, so that the existing one isn't useless if you need to upgrade? PC Day of the Tentacle needed 16Mb of hard drive space, Ultima VII needed 21Mb, AGA Amiga versions would probably need the same, so that'd be 40Mb gone pretty quickly. Once you get into the £600 price range, do you need to be adding fast RAM too? Are you killing off the chance of the machine being affordable for the parents of kids who'd want Aladdin and Banshee? An A1200 probably had to be cheaper than a 386SX system to be competitive, especially considering that PCs came with monitors.

It was common to replace a game on your HD when it was finished. People weren't making collection of games on it since games were still in physical format.
So yes, a 40Mb, or maybe even a 20Mb would have been enough . Just set up the standard. People willing to expand their HD to be more confortable and doesn't Switch games on it would have done it.

But yes, apparently, Commodore was only listening Euro and especially UK devs. Now we know that it wasn't the good thing to do but probably, had they released an A1200 HD only and no A600 as US devs wanted, thing would'nt have been much different.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

But yes, apparently, Commodore was only listening Euro and especially UK devs. Now we know that it wasn't the good thing to do but probably, had they released an A1200 HD only and no A600 as US devs wanted, thing would'nt have been much different.

I don't think that's totally true. I sold mostly A1200/HD-40's in my shop, only stocking a few floppy-only units for people who didn't want a hard drive or intended to install a larger one. I also offered hard drive upgrades with a trade-in, putting the old drives into floppy-only A1200s (I would transfer the customer's files onto the new drive with ParNet, so they got a hassle-free upgrade!)

I think the difference in the UK was that retailers wanted something attactive to sell at the lowest possible price. A1200 packs replaced the very popular A500 packs, with flashy box artwork and a bunch of bundled software titles - rather than a hard drive model in a boring white box with no extras. You and I might have bought the latter, but the majority of customers would go for the better presented and cheaper model.

Commodore UK wasn't dictating to the market, it was listening to it. This was a good thing. In the US Commodore seemed to think that if they just put machines out there people would buy them because the Amiga was so awesome. But Commodore wasn't alone there in the US. Magazines (particularly Amiga World) and users also had the same attitude.

[petran]

Originally Posted by TCD

I found the Gravis gamepad to be quite good. Not exactly SNES quality, but certainly good enough to play all kinds of platformers. The only 'naff' thing about it was the the stick you could screw into the d-pad.

I had one too and you could attach a small stick to the pad, giving it an arcade feel. Unfortunately that was not a good idea, as stick broke despite barely using it

[TCD]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

Strange that Commodore as an US based company didn't feel that it was a good idea to ask them what they wanted.

If Commodore actually would have asked *anyone* what they wanted things might have turned out differentely You just have a look a few posts above to see the common train of thought that 'make it cheap, it will sell' would be the way to go. Not saying that releasing a cheap machine isn't a good idea, but you need to make sure there is actually something that people want to do with that cheap machine.

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I don't think that's totally true. I sold mostly A1200/HD-40's in my shop, only stocking a few floppy-only units for people who didn't want a hard drive or intended to install a larger one. I also offered hard drive upgrades with a trade-in, putting the old drives into floppy-only A1200s (I would transfer the customer's files onto the new drive with ParNet, so they got a hassle-free upgrade!)

And that sort of service was fine in specialist computer shops. The bulk of sales were always going to be via the bigger name retailers and they wanted to shift boxes. I'm not convinced it was purely cost based for them though, if there had been a pre-boxed HD version they'd probably have sold it. Expecting them to train staff on how to install and configure a HD as part of the sale was ludicrous though.

No pre-built HD versions meant the bottom line target AGA hardware was disk based. It was massively short sighted on Commodore's part.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by TCD

If Commodore actually would have asked *anyone* what they wanted things might have turned out differentely You just have a look a few posts above to see the common train of thought that 'make it cheap, it will sell' would be the way to go. Not saying that releasing a cheap machine isn't a good idea, but you need to make sure there is actually something that people want to do with that cheap machine.

To be fair they did ask some the major publishing houses, the majority came back and asked for more RAM being the number 1 request followed by a faster CPU, so in that regard Commodore delivered the product for the same RRP as the A500/A600 6 months prior.

I think even if a HDD was suggested it would have feel on deaf ears to archive the price point they required.

They did of course offer official HDD upgrades and latter bundles for the A1200/A600 so the options were there, they just didn’t want to force (and rightly so on a budget machine) the price onto users and end up with Atari Falcon priced machines which nobody bought.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

To be fair they did ask some the major publishing houses, the majority came back and asked for more RAM being the number 1 request followed by a faster CPU, so in that regard Commodore delivered the product for the same RRP as the A500/A600 6 months prior.

Interesting. So some publishers suggested to release two follow up machines to the A500 in rapid succession? The A1200 kinda makes sense (too late though), but the A500+ and A600 were extremely short sighted.

I understand that Commodore didn't want to offer a more expensive machine as the standard option (and it's quite clear that people think that was the right choice), but given the outcome it seems to be clear that trying to aim for the low cost end of the market where the 16 bit consoles sat by 1992 might not have been the winning tactic.

[sandruzzo]

what would have been the final price of A1200 with 40-120HD + 1mb of fastmem as base machine? Could it have been still competitive as price/performance ratio?

[TCD]

The Frontier Pack featured a 80 MB HD for 489 pound around Christmas 1993 (that's at least the price I found). The pack also featured 5 games and 2 programs. So in 1993 a 450-500 pound bundle with a 40-80 MB HD and 2 MB fast RAM sounds plausible.