Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by TEG

You didn't say for which amount. Have you an idea?

This lack of fast Ram, especially on the CD32, is beyond understanding to me. The motor have a turbo, let's not activate it. Finally none of the stock popular machines (A500/500+ A1200 and CD32) did not benefit from the architecture elaborated by Jay Miner.

Sorry, that was for 1MiB. I'm not sure what the price was for systems manufacturers though.

[bubu7te]

Originally Posted by duga

020/14 with fast ram is about 2.3 times faster than chip ram only.
020/25 is 1.78 times faster than 14 MHz.

2.3/1.78 = 1.29.

020/25MHz + Fast RAM whould have been the better option
2.3 * 1.78 = 4.094

[lmimmfn]

A higher clocked 020 wouldn't have achieved anything in terms of PC games ported to the Amiga, a 1.5 Meg/.5 Meg combo would have been better.
A 030/50 wouldn't even run Doom at a reasonable framerate with decent graphical fidelity, I had one in 95(yes lttp but it was samn expensive even then at over £400 for a blizzard card eith 4 meg)

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by lmimmfn

A higher clocked 020 wouldn't have achieved anything in terms of PC games ported to the Amiga, a 1.5 Meg/.5 Meg combo would have been better.

You are right, just clocking the CPU higher wouldn't have helped. But splitting the RAM wasn't a good idea either. It would have raised the price significantly for little benefit. You get a faster CPU (for code that fits in that 0.5MB), but lose precious Chip RAM. Most game developers would rather have the latter.

The A1200 was designed in 1992. At that time a typical PC was a 386SX 16-25MHz with 1-2MB RAM and a low spec ISA bus video card. Typically it would not come with a sound card and speakers, that was extra stuff you had to buy. For 2D games (which was practically everything back then) an A1200 would easily beat it even without FastRAM.

But of course if you had a PC and were serious about playing games you would buy the extras, even though the PC already cost a lot more than an A1200. So the argument that Commodore should have included more stuff in the A1200 doesn't make sense. If PC users would spend $ on upgrades to play games, there was no logical reason that Amiga users wouldn't do the same - if they thought it was necessary (which for the vast majority of games it wasn't). Most A500 users upgraded to 1MB when games started using it, many also bought an external disk drive or two, and some even went further with hard drives etc. So upgrades were not a new concept to Amiga owners.

The market was evolving rapidly though, so you could argue that Commodore should have produced a machine powerful enough to last more than two years without needing major upgrades. Which they did with the A4000. What? It cost too much? Welcome to the real world, where you can't just wave a magic wand and get more powerful hardware for nothing. On release the A4000/040 was priced about the same as name-brand 486s. You couldn't expect it to be cheaper.

A 030/50 wouldn't even run Doom at a reasonable framerate with decent graphical fidelity, I had one in 95(yes lttp but it was samn expensive even then at over £400 for a blizzard card eith 4 meg)

If you bought a Blizzard card In 1995 to play Doom then you totally wasted your money - because no Amiga could run Doom until the source code was released on December 23, 1997. In 1998 you could get a Blizzard 030 with 8MB for £115, or with 16MB for £135. If that wasn't fast enough a bare 33MHz 040 board was £150, and a 50MHz 060 board was £270 (add £20 for 8MB). Even after spending that much you still weren't up to the price of a 16MHz 386SX with sound card etc., yet had the 68k equivalent of a fast 386DX, 486 or Pentium CPU.

Now compare that to what you had to spend to upgrade your 386SX. First you needed a whole new motherboard, and a CPU to go on it. You also needed new RAM because the 386SX had 8 bit SIMMs but you needed 32 bit SIMMs. Might also need a new PSU because the faster CPU sucks a lot more power, and perhaps a new case too if you had a 'slimline' model. In practice almost nobody did that - they bought a whole new computer instead.

The A1200 was far more expandable for a lot less money than a typical PC of the day. We are lucky that Commodore designed it this way rather than jamming more stuff onto the motherboard that compromised expandability.

[Promilus]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

The A1200 was designed in 1992. At that time a typical PC was a 386SX 16-25MHz with 1-2MB RAM and a low spec ISA bus video card. Typically it would not come with a sound card and speakers, that was extra stuff you had to buy. For 2D games (which was practically everything back then) an A1200 would easily beat it even without FastRAM.

But of course if you had a PC and were serious about playing games you would buy the extras, even though the PC already cost a lot more than an A1200. So the argument that Commodore should have included more stuff in the A1200 doesn't make sense. If PC users would spend $ on upgrades to play games, there was no logical reason that Amiga users wouldn't do the same - if they thought it was necessary (which for the vast majority of games it wasn't). Most A500 users upgraded to 1MB when games started using it, many also bought an external disk drive or two, and some even went further with hard drives etc. So upgrades were not a new concept to Amiga owners.

The market was evolving rapidly though, so you could argue that Commodore should have produced a machine powerful to last more than two years without needing major upgrades. Which they did with the A4000. What? It cost too much? Welcome to the real world, where you can't just wave a magic wand and get more powerful hardware for nothing. On release the A4000/040 was priced about the same as name-brand 486s. You couldn't expect it to be cheaper.

There are 2 problems with that logic. First - was EC020+2MB chip and no fast optimal configuration for per price performance and second - A1200 was never really intended to be expandable more than typical turbo card offered at the time - so at most CPU, RAM and SCSI. It's hardly comparable to what more modular PC have been offering with easy cpu, ram, gfx, sound and storage interface replacement and add-on.

Yes, it was extremely expensive as well. But there is no point comparing A1200 to much more expensive 486 systems which were ALREADY THERE (and I did prove that to nonarkitten in different discussion along with pre-svga standard graphic chips having amiga blitter capabilities but in non-standardized form).

Now what harm would have been done to the market should A1200 come with 2MB of CHIP and 2MB of FAST on factory-mounted turbo slot ram upgrade board? And should EC020 be faster? Yes... you would have to adjust price to cover the expenses. Sure. But would that really make sale worse? Maybe with standard 2MB fast RAM and even faster CPUs starting titles would look much better than just few up-colored OCS titles? One thing is pretty certain - should developers have platform with no regular A1200 constraints it would be easier to make more impressive games WITHOUT the need to upgrade that new, freshly released platform with add-ons.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

I think DREAD proved that you could have had great FPS games on Amiga if the default spec for both A1200 and CD32 would have been 28MHz CPU + some fast RAM.

Absolutely.

Originally Posted by eXeler0

What doesnt run great is a straight *Port* of Doom.

Optimized ports such as Doom Attack run playable on a 50 mhz 68030, but it's not great (it's not great on a 386 either).

Originally Posted by sokolovic

Keep Reading that but that's not the case. Doom runs great with this configuration. Not in full screen 50fps but it is still very playable.

I used ADoom on my Blizzard 1230 MK4 back then, and it was playable, sure (with a bit of patience), but I wouldn't call it great.

[oscar_ates]

If the Amiga 1200 design was spot on, why it did not thrive and prevent the commodore to belly up? History says it was too little too late. Can you give an example of any good game that was a hit in 1993?

[TCD]

Here's a thread about the best selling Amiga games.: https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=103431
Only AGA game there is Alien Breed 3D from 1995 with 10,000 sales. Funnily enough a lot of games that sold rather well were for OCS and after 1992.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by oscar_ates

If the Amiga 1200 design was spot on, why it did not thrive and prevent the commodore to belly up? History says it was too little too late. Can you give an example of any good game that was a hit in 1993?

Probably because nothing could beat th IBM PC's open hardware and professional software library on top of good marketing.

[Weasel Fierce]

Originally Posted by Thorham

Probably because nothing could beat th IBM PC's open hardware and professional software library on top of good marketing.

So good it also defeated IBM after taking out the rest of the market, sans Apple.

[Weasel Fierce]

Originally Posted by oscar_ates

If the Amiga 1200 design was spot on, why it did not thrive and prevent the commodore to belly up? History says it was too little too late. Can you give an example of any good game that was a hit in 1993?

The A1200 could have dispensed blowjobs and it still would not have saved 1993 Commodore. The company structure was rotten from top to bottom

[Guyver4]

I think the A1200 had some good graphic modes and resolutions for image work for 1992. However it was also slow, lacked ram and was generally held back by the lack of progress in the chipsets.

I would say with the A1200 launch, if AGA was really the best they could do at the time, then they should have been a bit braver by putting up the price point and adding some off the shelf parts such as a DSP and say 1mb of fast ram. It would have helped the machine around some of its gaming/multimedia limitions and shown the public/developers some innovation and more value when you could get a PC for a few hundred more.

[Karlos]

We are all unduly harsh on the A1200 because we all recognise it's shortcomings in hindsight. I challenge anyone that got one back in 92 to say they were disappointed at the time. Big box owners knew it wasn't an upgrade over anything but a 68000 OCS/ECS system and not at all if expansion cards were needed. It would be some years before Zorro board expansions appeared.

I may decry the lack of fast ram as a poor decision but as bhabbot and others have pointed out, the trapdoor slot allowed it to be upgraded way beyond the original specification. I was still using my A1200 as my main everyday machine until 2007, so I'd clearly be lying if I said I was disappointed with it. Yes, it was temperamental at times, yes it absorbed money I could ill afford at the time in upgrades but, subjectively, it gave me an experience unmatched by what were objectively more capable machines. I built a machine many times more powerful, with a good, open OS (so no need moan about the self inflicted pain of windows) to but as capable as it was, it just wasn't the same to use. For me, the Amiga was (and is) fun to use. The same cannot be said for most modern systems (again in my subjective opinion).

[Weasel Fierce]

Originally Posted by Karlos

We are all unduly harsh on the A1200 because we all recognise it's shortcomings in hindsight. I challenge anyone that got one back in 92 to say they were disappointed at the time.

Shoot, nobody I knew considered even the 600 to be a disappointment at the time. Its like people being mad about poor arcade ports because nowadays we can play the arcade version at our leisure.

[TCD]

I looked up some launch time articles from when the A1200 was released to get an idea what the feeling towards the machine at the time might have been and this bit from Amiga Computing January 1993 (page 34) is quite interesting:

Maybe looking at the hardware specs alone isn't that telling as to why the A1200 didn't turn things around.

[Karlos]

It probably won't be a popular opinion but in my view the A600 was the mistake. And that was my first machine, so I have to cut through the nostalgia pondering and be objective: You already had the A500+ which lacked IDE but made up for it with the regular expansion ports. The 600 has become expandable since, despite the best efforts of the engineers to cost reduce the system by limiting it.

I also think the A4000 was a huge disappointment. At least when you consider the plans for the upgraded 3000. The 4000T was nice though.

[sokolovic]

Considering the sales and the library of the A1200 vs its direct contender, the Falcon 030, it seems that Commodore made the best choice no matter how many here saying that the Falcon is better (but didn't bought one when it was available).

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

Considering the sales and the library of the A1200 vs its direct contender, the Falcon 030, it seems that Commodore made the best choice no matter how many here saying that the Falcon is better (but didn't bought one when it was available).

I didn't think the Falcon was better or worse, I was just different. I didn't particularly like TOS and the Falcon has its own silly design choices (the 16 bit data bus on the 030, for instance) that hobbled the machine. Yet the things people have been able to get machine to do are remarkable. Seeing a quake 3 renderer on the 030 with an entirely rewritten fixed point engine for the DSP was amazing.

[Thomas Richter]

From my personal experience: I saw the A3000 when it came out at the CeBit fair in Germany, and I wondered why I (or actually anyone) would want it. I had my A2000, and that was an expandable machine. Once I had the money, I went for a GVP accelerator instead. The A2000 with the GVP board was more powerful than the A3000.

Then came the A4000 and A1200, and again, what they offered I could also get by expanding my A2000 with a graphics card, and got more powerful graphics than what AGA would deliver, so why throw away my equipment I had already (the GVP 030 and the harddisk) just to buy for more money a less powerful machine?

The trouble was, whenever CBM was offering more advanced machines, the advancement was so minimal compared to what I had, and what was available as third-party product for the machine I already had, I didn't feel the need to invest into CBM hardware. I looked elsewhere, for a product with a better performance/price ratio.

Zorro III was nice, but not that much better that it was really essential. The A3000 flicker fixer I installed as add-on into my A2000 when I got a VGA monitor. The AGA chipset was nice, but behind what I could get as a graphics card at the point I had the money for it.

CBM was simply always behind engineering compared to third party products and its competitors - pretty much early on. The A1000 was an amazing machine when it came out, but everything after that were just "minimal adjustments", too small for a quickly growing market.

[abu_the_monkey]

For me the a1200 was a revelation, all be it, it was an a1200 with 20mb hd and a 4mb fast ram card (with fpu) think it was an amitech hawk or something, so not the stock machine and 'it' was a massive upgrade to the single floppy 1mb ocs A500. not a fair comparison I guess but just my experience.