Was A1200 to blame for Falcon's failure?

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

What would it need to qualify as a 'serious business machine at all'?

I could say a 31kHz monitor, separate 101 keyboard & desktop/tower case, HDD+fast CPU, IDE/FDD standards - out of the box. Compatibility with the software used by the competitor which at the time had dominated 80% of the market and solid on/off site support wouldn't hurt either.

But, I'm sure you can handwave it all away with some anecdotal "evidence" as per usual, so maybe a better idea would be to ask all the millions of people who did not buy it as a "serious business machine" at the time.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

COMMODORE “HAS TOP BUSINESS PERSONAL, HOME COMPUTER IN WEST GERMANY”

TCD has beat me to it

[TCD]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

But, I'm sure you can handwave it all away with some anecdotal "evidence" as per usual, so maybe a better idea would be to ask all the millions of people who did not buy it as a "serious business machine" at the time.

One could argue that the very same article that Bruce linked to shows as much.

[oscar_ates]

I do not buy the 16-bit data bus limitation related to memory size. What defines memory size is the address bits. Falcon had a 24-bit address line, which limits it to 16mb total memory size. 16 bit data bus crippled the memory bandwidth for 68030. Probably they did not finish the design properly and rushed it

[redblade]

Originally Posted by oscar_ates

I do not buy the 16-bit data bus limitation related to memory size. What defines memory size is the address bits. Falcon had a 24-bit address line, which limits it to 16mb total memory size. 16 bit data bus crippled the memory bandwidth for 68030. Probably they did not finish the design properly and rushed it

That's the thing, they could have just went with the cheaper 24-bit 68EC030 unless they needed the MMU for Unix, Even though they were working on Linux at the time in 1992, I don't think the hardware developers were thinking to keep it in for Linux, BSD or Mach. Maybe left over stock from the Atari TT machine?

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

I could say a 31kHz monitor, separate 101 keyboard & desktop/tower case, HDD+fast CPU, IDE/FDD standards - out of the box. Compatibility with the software used by the competitor which at the time had dominated 80% of the market and solid on/off site support wouldn't hurt either.

IOW, a PC.

Thanks for confirming what I have been saying all along - it wouldn't matter what the Amiga had in it or what it cost. Only one thing was a must-have - and the Amiga didn't have it.

Stupid Commodore for not going all-in on PCs and avoiding anything else (apart from milking the C64 for all it was worth and then some). Would have saved all that PC envy and heartache when Amiga fans got left in the lurch in 1994. Of course that would have made the World a much duller place, but we wouldn't know what we were missing so...

I could point out that the A1200 wouldn't be an A1200 if it had a separate keyboard, and that the A4000 had everything you listed 'out of the box' (as did the A3000 except for the then standard SCSI instead of IDE), but no doubt you will come up with some excuse for why this doesn't count.

I could also point out that a separate '101' keyboard was not a requirement for 'serious' use, and that a stock A1200 was quite capable of running 'serious' business apps such as EasyLedgers - an enhanced Amiga version of the PC accounting package produced by Sybiz Software.

You also may not know that Amigas were often sold with free onsite support, or that the majority of PC clones weren't.

Of course you had to throw in 'compatibility with the software used by the competitor which at the time had dominated 80% of the market', an impossible task for anything that wasn't a PC. And fair enough. My accountants weren't happy with me running my business on EasyLedgers because it wasn't 'compatible' with their much cruder DOS accounting package with undocumented proprietary data format written in QuickBASIC. I solved that problem with a simple data conversion program, but who else would be able to do that? Certainly not the average clueless businessman.

So all the quibbling about what the Amiga 'should have had' to be 'serious' boils down to one thing - it was an Amiga, not a PC. An ancient 4.77MHz PC-XT with monochrome monitor and 5.25" floppy was better than any Amiga.

But all this is off-topic. The Falcon 'suffered' from the same off-base complaints you heaped onto the A1200 - perhaps more so. I don't know if there was a good accounting package for it (would be hard to beat EasyLedgers) but the OS certainly wasn't as polished or functional (8.3 letter filenames, yuck! Funny nobody mentions that when talking about the PC being 'serious').

The truth is, despite having good specs on paper the Falcon sucked in reality, and that was all Atari's fault. The A1200 was more popular simply because it was a better machine - both cheaper and more powerful, and much better compatibility with existing software that meant it was worth upgrading from an A500. That's a testament to how much better Commodore was at designing computers than Atari. But trust Amiga fans to try to spin that as a fault.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by drHirudo

I have a Commodore Shareholder's brochure from 1992, where it says that the Commodore's Amiga Business is declining, while the Commodore PC's business is on the rise. Commodore had big business in the IBM-PC range, hence their negligence of the Amiga after 1990. PC was on the rise, Amiga and C64 on the decrease. And we all know how it ended.

But that's not the full story.

If Commodore was 'neglecting' the Amiga after 1990, where did the CDTV, A500+, A600, A1200, A4000 and CD32 come from? That's 6 models in 3 years vs 4 models in the previous 5 years.

According to Wikipedia the last PC that Commodore designed in-house was the diminutive slimline PC 50-III in 1991, which had a 16 MHz 80386SX CPU and 1MB RAM - not exactly a top of the line PC.

[Megalomaniac]

It's very difficult to justify spending £900 on a 4Mb Falcon with a 65Mb hard drive, you could get a reasonable 386 PC (or indeed an A4000/30 once that launched) for that kind of price range, which was superior in almost every way. The £500 version was crippled by the lack of RAM, hence what little Falcon software that was written mostly requiring more than 1Mb. The only area the Falcon was really strong was on music production, and did it really beat a souped-up ST config in that area?

It was fairly easy to justify spending £400 on an A1200 if you couldn't afford a £900 PC upfront - it was certainly better for all tasks than a cheapo 286 PC (unless you were 100% tied to a specific business task with a specific piece of software you couldn't get for the Amiga), despite not having a separate case. You could spend that extra £500 upgrading the A1200 later to get hard drive and fastRAM, and either a monitor or an accelerator, and end up with something of similar power to a 386 PC.

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

IOW, a PC.

Thanks for confirming what I have been saying all along - it wouldn't matter what the Amiga had in it or what it cost. Only one thing was a must-have - and the Amiga didn't have it.

Stupid Commodore for not going all-in on PCs and avoiding anything else (apart from milking the C64 for all it was worth and then some). Would have saved all that PC envy and heartache when Amiga fans got left in the lurch in 1994. Of course that would have made the World a much duller place, but we wouldn't know what we were missing so...

You asked a question and didn't like the answer - because as you know perfectly well, there isn't one. Hence all you can offer is this off-topic emotional word salad.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I could point out that the A1200 wouldn't be an A1200 if it had a separate keyboard, and that the A4000 had everything you listed 'out of the box' (as did the A3000 except for the then standard SCSI instead of IDE), but no doubt you will come up with some excuse for why this doesn't count.

I could point out that we were talking about A1200, not A4000. But, hey, it's easier to shift the goalposts and strawman instead of admitting that A1200 simply wasn't fit to be a "serious business machine" (because it was never meant to be of course). Sadly, your usual practice of using these disingenuous rhetorical devices makes engaging in a serious discussion with you impossible.

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

It was fairly easy to justify spending £400 on an A1200 if you couldn't afford a £900 PC upfront - it was certainly better for all tasks than a cheapo 286 PC (unless you were 100% tied to a specific business task with a specific piece of software you couldn't get for the Amiga), despite not having a separate case. You could spend that extra £500 upgrading the A1200 later to get hard drive and fastRAM, and either a monitor or an accelerator, and end up with something of similar power to a 386 PC.

I could ask how on Earth do you picture doing "all tasks" better than 286 PC could, on a bare, HDD-less A1200, connected to a TV? That really would be a sight to behold but, if I can agree with BA on one thing is that this is supposed to be a Falcon thread, so lets leave it for another occasion.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

Sadly, your usual practice of using these disingenuous rhetorical devices makes engaging in a serious discussion with you impossible.

You know there is a word for that kind of behaviour.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by TCD

And people wonder why Commodore Germany didn't want a super-cheap A300...

Anyway, it is an interesting anecdote that according to Chip magazine Commodore PCs sold very well in 1987 in West Germany, but that doesn't change the fact that the Retro Gamer A1200 summary is very poorly written.

Higher priced A500 Rev 9 could have surface mount chips, IDE, and PCMCIA.

A300 is for replacing C64c for countries with weak currencies.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

IOW, a PC.

Thanks for confirming what I have been saying all along - it wouldn't matter what the Amiga had in it or what it cost. Only one thing was a must-have - and the Amiga didn't have it.

Stupid Commodore for not going all-in on PCs and avoiding anything else (apart from milking the C64 for all it was worth and then some). Would have saved all that PC envy and heartache when Amiga fans got left in the lurch in 1994. Of course that would have made the World a much duller place, but we wouldn't know what we were missing so...

SNES (Mode 7), 3DO, and PC VGA have packed pixels.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I could point out that the A1200 wouldn't be an A1200 if it had a separate keyboard, and that the A4000 had everything you listed 'out of the box' (as did the A3000 except for the then standard SCSI instead of IDE), but no doubt you will come up with some excuse for why this doesn't count.

A4000 wasn't a mid-price optimized for modular gaming Amiga.

A4000 is missing the Amber flicker fixer and SCSI.

There's a large price gap between A4000/030 and A1200.

A4000/030 is priced like a 486SX-33-based PC during 1993.

Cost-reduced A4000 should have a modified daughter board with a single Zorro III slot and 68LC040. This is just for playing Doom-type games and it wouldn't step on the full A4000's Video Toaster SKU.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by oscar_ates

I do not buy the 16-bit data bus limitation related to memory size. What defines memory size is the address bits. Falcon had a 24-bit address line, which limits it to 16mb total memory size. 16 bit data bus crippled the memory bandwidth for 68030. Probably they did not finish the design properly and rushed it

Backward compatibility with Atari ST's 16-bit data bus. Atari ST games have the CPU handling most of the Amiga Copper roles and it's timing sensitive (lack of resource tracking). The Amiga isolated most of the graphics/audio functions within the custom chips domain which allowed the Amiga to have higher CPU upgrade freedom. As long as the Amiga CPU accelerator has a "turtle mode", good backward compatibility can be achieved.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

That is a bit crazy, although if you factor in a monitor plus all the HDDs and accelerators A1200 most likely would top the 386 price.

The bigger error though is to try classify as a serious business machine at all*, which it clearly wasn't. They also say Commodore's intention was to "dominate the videogame and business machine market again" - again? They were arguably big in the former, but the latter is fantasy. But then, the whole write-up is full of similar hyperboles.

*anecdotes about somebody's uncle's business being run on one need not apply

For 1993, the 68030 @ 50Mhz accelerator with A1200/HD's total price rivals 486SX-25 or 33-based PC clone from Gateway 2000.

3rd party Amiga 68030 @ 50Mhz accelerator vendor doesn't have economies of scale.

[Megalomaniac]

I've seen elsewhere that there was a Falcon utility (called Backwards, IIRC) which supposedly achieved about 70% compatibility with ST games. This on paper would put it above the A1200, but the issue is that ST games released after the Falcon (though admittedly there weren't a huge amount of these( weren't compatible with the Falcon unless specifically recoded for it (totally different sound hardware, for a start), whereas almost all Amiga games released significantly after the A1200 did work on it (including probably 90% of budget reissues, even if the original release didn't) so overall the A1200 is probably more compatible.

[Rob68K]

I got to play with a Falcon before most people and the first thing I did was identify what it could do really well that nothing else could at that time..... so I sampled the first minute ( the most 1 partition of the hard drive could hold ) of 'Heavy Fuel' by Dire Straits at CD Quality, played it back REALLY LOUD and blew my f*cking mind.

I think that sample stayed on there all the while we had the thing.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

It's very difficult to justify spending £900 on a 4Mb Falcon with a 65Mb hard drive, you could get a reasonable 386 PC (or indeed an A4000/30 once that launched) for that kind of price range, which was superior in almost every way. The £500 version was crippled by the lack of RAM, hence what little Falcon software that was written mostly requiring more than 1Mb. The only area the Falcon was really strong was on music production, and did it really beat a souped-up ST config in that area?

It certainly did. The ST ruled, and was the cheapest alternative in, the MIDI sequencing market. The Falcon tried (and certainly had the capability) to do the same thing for the next epoch in computer music: hard disk recording.

Not to mention that it was comfortably faster, colourful and had a DSP for real-time effects.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

According to Wikipedia the last PC that Commodore designed in-house was the diminutive slimline PC 50-III in 1991, which had a 16 MHz 80386SX CPU and 1MB RAM - not exactly a top of the line PC.

Key point: in-house.

Commodore was wasting lots of resources on in-house PC designs, which made sense in the PC-10 era, when Taiwanese clone makers in the early 90s were making chipsets and complete motherboard designs much cheaper. They should have switched to off-the-shelf designs for their PC business years earlier than they did, concentrating on innovation in silicon where there were no Taiwan counterparts (the Amiga).

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by hammer

Cost-reduced A4000 should have a modified daughter board with a single Zorro III slot and 68LC040. This is just for playing Doom-type games and it wouldn't step on the full A4000's Video Toaster SKU.

Is that the Mac LC 475 you’re describing?

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by Predseda

I also have read the amount 144.000 for A1200s recently in Retro Gamer magazine. I wonder where this number comes from.

According to Petro Tyschtschenko’s memoirs, Commodore Germany published sales figures for the first time ever in the beginning of 1994. To that date, they had sold 95 500 A1200s.