Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[ztronzo]

Compared to the A500/A500+/A600/A2000 it was a huge improvement!!!
The name.. the design.. everything was so slick.. never disappointed. The A600 and A500+ models were the disappointment

[abu_the_monkey]

Originally Posted by ztronzo

Compared to the A500/A500+/A600/A2000 it was a huge improvement!!!
The name.. the design.. everything was so slick.. never disappointed. The A600 and A500+ models were the disappointment

glad it wasn't just me.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

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.

Indeed. Commodore was just shit, sadly. Not the engineers, of course.

[Sluggs]

No. I loved it. Bought it out of a catalogue.

Those were the days!

[oscar_ates]

This is a bit related to say CD32 was also shit. They chucked an akiko chip in it which nobody used. It has 1kb flash rom to save games. Still the old cheapest 68020LC cpu with only slow chip ram. Commodore was either too stingy or too greedy company and they were not knowing what they do. They should had checked the competition speed and compare it with what they chucked on the mainboard.

[TEG]

Originally Posted by 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.

There was huge improvements in the Workbench.

[Reynolds]

Noone should have to be disppointed about the A1200. It is just a milestone in the Commodore Amiga product range. Sadly one of the last ones. It had and has very good solutions, besides with the limitations at the same time, but product development is omething about this, having something better than the predecessors with every product release. IF there would have been enough time for the brand, we would probably have now A1400 or A5000 which has 16bit audio, 3D accelerated gfx, sata, USB, etc. We will never know where it would get with more time, better planning, more wise decisions.

[van_dammesque]

I wasn't a let down, it was a good step up from the A500+ and made the current games a bit better. It was also 2nd hand so it was a cheap (only) way of getting a new computer.
It tied me over in the second half of the 1990's as it was able to expand quite considerably.

If it were more powerful it would have been more expensive, maybe I'd not been able to get one.

We didn't have a crystal ball at the time but the A600 and CD32 were crap, the latter suffering from a killer game. We can always look at the likes of the Sharp x68000 to what a better A1200 might have looked like and it would have been the same fate unfortunately.

[oscar_ates]

IDE harddisk controller on Amiga 1200 was also badly designed and had signs of rushed. I remember buying an incompatible harddisk first and it did not work. Later bought a Seagate and it worked. As I remember, issue was some harddisks stop spinning when not used and the crappy ide controller did not detect this

[Cyprian]

Originally Posted by oscar_ates

IDE harddisk controller on Amiga 1200 was also badly designed and had signs of rushed.

I wonder why they did not add DMA to IDE port and pushed the CPU to transfer every byte between IDE and the memory

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by TEG

There was huge improvements in the Workbench.

Yes, indeed. Sorry, I forgot. The WB 1.3, 2.0, 2.1 and 3.1 I did buy. Still have the ROMs somewhere.

[eXeler0]

Ill repeat this again. If Commodore saw the CD32 and A1200 as the same platform then the chip-mem / no fast mem CPU limit was a stupid one and a big mistake because no one really develops games for game consoles with some add ons, (god knows SEGA tried).
The CD32 should have been less limited, Ill never change my view about that :-)
If you look at the A1200 as its own product, detached from the CD32 then it was probably fairly priced. Atari were more forward thinking at the time with the Falcon (030, DSP, chunky pixel) but we all know that wasnt a recepie for success.
Personally I found the A1200 very limited at the time when some people around me were buying 486 PCs but it was affordable and my plan was always to upgrade it as soon as Id saved up some cash.
I quickly got a Blizzard 1220 with 28MHz CPU, 4MB RAM, FPU and a small HardDrive. Thats when I started loving my A1200. I could play Frontier, Gunship 2000 at decent framerates, I could run Image FX, AdPro, Imagine etc. A whole new level of usability.

[sandruzzo]

They were o close to do another BIG Hit...!

[oscar_ates]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

Ill repeat this again. If Commodore saw the CD32 and A1200 as the same platform then the chip-mem / no fast mem CPU limit was a stupid one and a big mistake because no one really develops games for game consoles with some add ons, (god knows SEGA tried).
The CD32 should have been less limited, Ill never change my view about that :-)
If you look at the A1200 as its own product, detached from the CD32 then it was probably fairly priced. Atari were more forward thinking at the time with the Falcon (030, DSP, chunky pixel) but we all know that wasnt a recepie for success.
Personally I found the A1200 very limited at the time when some people around me were buying 486 PCs but it was affordable and my plan was always to upgrade it as soon as Id saved up some cash.
I quickly got a Blizzard 1220 with 28MHz CPU, 4MB RAM, FPU and a small HardDrive. Thats when I started loving my A1200. I could play Frontier, Gunship 2000 at decent framerates, I could run Image FX, AdPro, Imagine etc. A whole new level of usability.

Your configuration would be fantastic to have as a base machine.who knows then amiga would stay alive for a while to release hombre

[TEG]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

Yes, indeed. Sorry, I forgot. The WB 1.3, 2.0, 2.1 and 3.1 I did buy. Still have the ROMs somewhere.

You were an advanced user!

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

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.

It make me wonder on how many engineers were dedicated to the hardware along the post A1000 period. We hear a lot about Dave Haynie, It gives the impression that there was only one person doing all the stuff.

[Weasel Fierce]

A related question:

What computer platforms other than Mac and PC survived past Commodore?

Not thinking hardcore work stations but consumer level.
There was BeBox (briefly). Anything else out there? NextStation is contemporary with late Commodore but they were never marketed for home users were they?

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by TEG

It make me wonder on how many engineers were dedicated to the hardware along the post A1000 period. We hear a lot about Dave Haynie, It gives the impression that there was only one person doing all the stuff.

Nah, the Amiga engineers had a lead engineer, Lew Eggebrecht. It was a simple case of Commodore engineers were no match for what Jay produced for them (Ranger 128 colour chipset design) or what RJ and Dave did for Atari Lynx (sprite scaling) and 3DO (almost Sega Saturn 3D performance using a £400 Acorn computer + their own custom chips) or technology they acquired when purchasing Amiga.

Also the CD32 AKIKO is like the "wonder bread problem" where they removed all the goodness out of the flour to make white bread and then added extra nutrients for the problem. If Commodore knew what they were doing they would have not wasted money making an AKIKO based system and just stuck 512kb of 32bit Fast RAM on the CD32 motherboard to let the CPU run at full speed.

The CD32 however is nothing like the A1200, no RGB when Sega/Nintendo consoles did provide RGB output, hideous design and colour, hideous build quality (seen better hinges on a public toilet than the CD32 CD lid, the volume control is inferior to most budget audio equipment of the 1970s too), no floppy port unlike CDTV, even more ludicrously expensive to add Fast RAM than A1200.

A1200 is a weighty beast, the styling and colour are nice, once the warranty sticker is meaningless 12 months later it was easy enough to add a notebook HD and the speed was fine given how slow a 20-40mb 2.5" IDE HDD throughput was in 1993 anyway. The only real aspect of the quality of the machine that let it down was a cheap feeling keyboard mechanism. It was a quality machine and it had on-site 'repair in the home' warranty that none of its rivals had, not even some high street Amstrad PCs etc had on-site warranty let alone Falcon/Archimedes.

The quality of software development on AGA games is the only thing that really disappointed me as an Amigan.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Weasel Fierce

A related question:

What computer platforms other than Mac and PC survived past Commodore?

Not thinking hardcore work stations but consumer level.

None that I can think of, so if there were any they were irrelevant.

Anything else out there? NextStation is contemporary with late Commodore but they were never marketed for home users were they?

No, they weren't. But the NextStation was discontinued in 1993 so it doesn't meet your criteria anyway.

[Tigerskunk]

What the 1200 was missing (apart from the aforementioned multi palette register for attached sprites) is a game that showed what it was capable of.

Like Defender of the Crown for the 1000 was and Shadow of the Beast for the 500.

The hardware as it is is more than capable and expendable enough, even without fast RAM (except for the workbench, where more RAM in whatever way is really needed).

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

None that I can think of, so if there were any they were irrelevant.

In Japan maybe ?