PC games that made the Amiga look like Shit

[sandruzzo]

Originally Posted by 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.

Let's do a step forward: what about with 030 28mhz? Could it still be competitive?

[Megalomaniac]

A 20Mb hard drive added £100 to the A600, so adding a bigger hard drive and fast RAM to the A1200 you'd be talking £550 minimum. That plus the processor being a 28Mhz 030 as well and I'd say that you'd be looking at £650 at a bare minimum. 1Mb being an uneven amount makes me think that it woulnd't be possible to further upgrade the memory without discarding the first 1Mb of fast RAM either, which is a minor concern.

My first PC hard drive did hit capacity after about a year, so I couldn't keep all my games on it permanently, but even 40Mb would potentially only fit 2 or 3 games if the big PC conversions being hoped for had happened - and that's before you consider creative users doing eg. raytracing. Is that really enough?

The A500+ - a year before the A1200, three years after 1.3, a year after the A3000 which meant serious software was being catered to KS2's significant improvements in that area - was a worthwhile and necessary upgrade, allowing the ECS to be fully exploited in future.

In my admittedly-controversial opinion, the A600 was the mistake - maybe if they'd delayed it to launch it alongside the A1200 as part of a wider range review, it might've made sense, but six months after the Plus it just alienated more people than it attracted. Some companies had to change hardware or software for the A500+, were now being forced to do so again for the A600, while Commodore knew full well that they'd have to do it again for the A1200.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

The A500+ - a year before the A1200, three years after 1.3, a year after the A3000 which meant serious software was being catered to KS2's significant improvements in that area - was a worthwhile and necessary upgrade, allowing the ECS to be fully exploited in future.

I mean if Commodore really thought that way there was at least some idea about where the machine would be positioned. Then it still doesn't make sense to drop it after about 6 months and release AGA just a year later. Besides that I don't think that the A500+ was actually marketed as a business machine using serious software.

[Megalomaniac]

A500s were always used for creative and productive software as well as gaming (and the keypadless unacceleratable A600 was a worse fit for that than the A500+, despite the cheaper hard drives), though admittedly games were probably the main market (though magazines covering everything always outsold magazines that only covered games). I agree that replacing the A500+ after 6 months was a mistake, but that's a debit against the A600, not the A500+. Nobody who hated Thatcherism blames James Callaghan for it. Was the 1.3 A500 a mistake?

[dreadnought]

I must say, I don't understand the idea that making the hard drive mandatory would make everybody buy such setup, as if the price difference wouldn't matter. But the HDD bundles were readily available to anybody who would want them. And computer purchases were usually well researched and thought about before, not impulsive, ad or shiny box driven ones.

The problem is the cheapest A1200 + 20HDD config would be somewhere ~530 pounds. Meanwhile, you could get a 386DX40, with monitor and 44GB HDD for ~700. This is really not a big price difference for somebody who's already spending a lot of money (not to even mention 386SX or used hardware). And on the other edge of the spectrum you had Megadrive/SNES which were really cheap.

And publishers wanted a big user base first and foremost, HDD maybe later. So this is a catch 22 scenario, you could try design more expensive setup with mandatory HDD, but shift a lot less units, or try to shift a lot of cheaper units and hope people will upgrade.

So I don't think Commodore really had much room to maneuver here. Sure, they made some mistakes regarding hardware design but on the other hand the market around them was closing in fast and they were trapped in their expensive custom chip design way. It's easy to criticize them from the vantage point of 2023, but I'm not sure many of us would be able to come up with better solutions back then.

[Karlos]

A mistake the A600 may have been, but for some of us t was the gateway drug to full platform addiction

My 1200 was my daily driver until 2007.

[sandruzzo]

Let's Remember that A1200 was a Home computer not a pure consolle, so you could do a lot more than snes, megadrive and so forth...

[TCD]

Originally Posted by sandruzzo

Let's Remember that A1200 was a Home computer not a pure consolle, so you could do a lot more than snes, megadrive and so forth...

Which makes it even more puzzling why Commodore didn't think a HD as standard would be a good idea.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

.

The problem is the cheapest A1200 + 20HDD config would be somewhere ~530 pounds. Meanwhile, you could get a 386DX40, with monitor and 44GB HDD for ~700. This is really not a big price difference for somebody who's already spending a lot of money (not to even mention 386SX or used hardware). And on the other edge of the spectrum you had Megadrive/SNES which were really cheap.

As mentionned before, the Frontier pack was 489£ with a 80Mb HDD, 5 games and 3 (good) productivity software just after xmas 1993.

http://www.bambi-amiga.co.uk/amigahistory/1200inno.html

Probably an A1200 with an HDD and no software would have been cheaper, as I suppose that the 5 games and the apps didn't come for free for Commodore.

Adding an HDD as a standard could indeed make the A1200 being a more serious solution than a basic 16bit console and therefore justify the price difference.

[sandruzzo]

A lots of unprofessional mistakes by Commodore....

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by TCD

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.

I think it was their only choice by this point, high end users were covered by Macs and other linux based machines, PC covered everything in-between bar the sub £500 market.

It was still the way to go for the A1200. Doom gets used as a scapegoat on why the Amiga lost fans, but in reality most of us know Commodore were bankrupt by the time it hit most countries. Imo games like SFII were more of a catalyst to the gamers psyche, it was biggest game in the world in 1992, and having a crap port because of the sprite limitations of the Amiga made people buy a console for this and other games, stats show 1992 was the first year consoles outsold home computers in the UK, not the year before for Mario or Sonic, but when SFII hit.

The downfall for the A1200 and later CD32 was the inability to even play such games that an 1987 PC Engine or 1988 Sega Megadrive to play. This was even before the 3D gaming issues had even started with Doom.

HAD the A1200 launched with a much faster blitter, copper etc and had a decent port of SFII that year, then buyers may have not looked elsewhere.

[TCD]

Doom didn't matter indeed. By the end of 1993 Commodore was done. I don't think that the PC really covered everything above 500 pound at that point though.

So yeah, a decent SFII port bundled with an A1200 for Christmas 1992 might have been something to do for Commodore. SFII for the SNES was out for about 6 months though. Still not sure that the A1200 should 'compete' with the consoles which were significantly cheaper and rather aim to be a cheaper alternative to a PC. Of course by 1992 being able to play action games 'out of the box' would come as a big bonus.

[grond]

Originally Posted by TCD

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)

It would have been so easy: continue to sell the A500 (and may be come up with cost-reduced versions, NOT the A600 with its additions that made it more expensive but hardly more capable) and introduce the A1200 with 3.5" HDD in 1991 as the new desirable top-end Amiga. Within a couple of years the A1200 would have dropped enough in price to discontinue the A500. And the message that OCS is being phased out would have been clear from the start.

[grond]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

As mentionned before, the Frontier pack was 489£ with a 80Mb HDD, 5 games and 3 (good) productivity software just after xmas 1993.

http://www.bambi-amiga.co.uk/amigahistory/1200inno.html

Probably an A1200 with an HDD and no software would have been cheaper, as I suppose that the 5 games and the apps didn't come for free for Commodore.

And let's not forget that the harddisk was a 2.5" harddisk and thus twice as expensive as a 3.5" harddisk would have been.

[Karlos]

It's easy to pick fault with the A1200. My personal gripe is that it shipped with no fast ram as standard, which is still a hill I will die on. But all that said, the A1200 was the best computer I've ever had. I have faster, more capable machines but none have inspired me or have given me as much happiness to use, before or since. No PC, Mac, console, tablet or smartphone will ever hold a candle to it.

[sokolovic]

At least Amiga user (and publishers) were used to upgrade to fast ram.
The HDD was imperative by 1992/93.
We still have someone on another topic complaining of disk swapping in Amiga gaming by 2023. He probably don't know about Whdload or the fact that the Amiga is designed from the start to have HDD but still, it demonstrates how far the "lowest common configuration" plagued the Amiga until nowadays (not to speak about the 1 button only urban legend he's also mentioning)

[TCD]

There should be a game about it: "sokolovic vs. the 1 button joystick myth!"
Maybe an action-adventure platformer? Or a visual novel?

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by grond

And let's not forget that the harddisk was a 2.5" harddisk and thus twice as expensive as a 3.5" harddisk would have been.

The prices I quoted were from April (PC) and June (Amiga) of 1993, since the subject was A1200 launch. Of course for Xmas 93 they dropped, but it'd be the same for PCs, perhaps even by a wider margin.

Sure, 2.5" HDD was more expensive, but that was the reality and what would have been" is yet another what if scenario. But even if we adjust for that, the prices are still not good enough to ignore the vastly superior value for money you'd be getting from a PC. Both as a parent and a computer gamer. The latter distinction is important because a video gamer (ie arcade-type) was increasingly better served by consoles. The beauty of A500 was that it covered both bases for some time, and A1200 failed to do so.

So Commodore was really stuck between rock and a hard place. Imo releasing HDD-only A1200 would be suicidal. And talking about how they should release improved A1200 in 1991 is easy now, but I guess that if they could they probably would. But you don't just conjure chips out of thin air and their R&D clearly wasn't up to the task, justifably or no - who knows.

[lionagony]

I think the problem started in 1986 when the original Los Gatos team started leaving for various reasons mainly because of mismanagement. It's weird that people don't talk about Jay Miner's VRAM solution much that was shot down. Guys like RJ Mical and Dave Needle spent time on the Lynx when their sprite scaling techniques could have been used on the Amiga. Then they spent years on 3DO. All that knowledge could have gone into new Amigas. If the core team would have stayed together I think they could have leapfrogged everyone else again by 1990-1991 and this thread would be moot.

[sokolovic]

Dreadnought, History proves that releasing the A1200 without an HDD wasn't a clever move.
So, being in a "what if?" hypothesis, thinking that it would have been a clever move releasing it with a HDD doesn't seems absurd to me, especially when reading testimony of developpers saying that the biggest flaw of the A1200 was it lacks of HDD in standard. (Which is the reason of this what if discussion)

Of course, it would have probably changed nothing. But in your hypothetic world the Amiga was doomed anyway so I can understand why any hypothesis seems a dead end for you.

TCD, Yep, I cannot stand this constant criticism of the Amiga gameplay. By 2023 people that wants to play with a one button playability on the Amiga make it on purpose. They cannot argue then that this is an inherent flaw a of the Amiga gaming (and it wasn't that back then either).