Did piracy kill the amiga?

[Mrs Beanbag]

also CPU-wise Amigas were drastically underpowered compared to contemporary PCs. They didn't need it so much for 2d games but when CPU intensive 3d games became the norm all those custom chips were for nothing. A1200 was released in 1992 with a CPU that was available from 1984!

[jbenam]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

also CPU-wise Amigas were drastically underpowered compared to contemporary PCs. They didn't need it so much for 2d games but when CPU intensive 3d games became the norm all those custom chips were for nothing. A1200 was released in 1992 with a CPU that was available from 1984!

Exactly, if Commodore wasn't such a skinflint they should've put a 030 with at least 2MB Chip + 4MB Fast in the A1200!

By comparison, the 600 should've had a 020 (EC020, like the A1200) and the A4000 should've been available in 040 and 060 flavours, instead of 030 and 060!

The 060 was the only real competitor to the Pentium and could've made the Amiga way more desiderable for workstation/office use. Obviously the 060 should've trickled down to the consumer models (A1800? ) after 1-2 years for it to stay competitive.

[Paul_s]

Originally Posted by jbenam

Exactly, if Commodore wasn't such a skinflint they should've put a 030 with at least 2MB Chip + 4MB Fast in the A1200!

By comparison, the 600 should've had a 020 (EC020, like the A1200) and the A4000 should've been available in 040 and 060 flavours, instead of 030 and 060!

The 060 was the only real competitor to the Pentium and could've made the Amiga way more desiderable for workstation/office use. Obviously the 060 should've trickled down to the consumer models (A1800? ) after 1-2 years for it to stay competitive.

I think a lot of your (nice) wishlist was probably more down to cost. As the Amiga was put into the 'games console' arena the majority of games only really needed a 68000/1MB ram to run sufficiently.

Just look at the cost of storage over the years... I'm sure CPU/RAM prices were just as pricy back then.

[Mrs Beanbag]

the A600 was a mistake... not that it was a bad machine per se, but the timing of its release didn't make any sense. That should have been the A500plus. It wasn't just pointless to release it with AGA coming up in the rear, it was positively harmful for A1200 sales. Anyone who just bought an A600 would be rightly pissed off that they could have kept their money to spend on something so much better. Which is also i think partly why so few people bothered to make AGA games.

Either A600 should have been released much earlier or it should have been AGA machine. A1200 motherboard easily fits in A600 case anyway if it weren't for the joystick ports which are easily relocatable.

There was no thought to upgrade paths or even interoperability. They didn't implement any standards so you couldn't just buy any standard RAM upgrade, and not only that but each model had different expansion ports so 3rd parties had to produce different ranges for A500, A600, A1200 &c, no wonder they were so expensive.

At least A4000T had AT-compliant motherboard. (Sadly not ATX.) But why A600 and A1200 motherboards are not interchangeable, you'd think it would have saved them money. There was no joined-up thinking.

Originally Posted by Paul_s

As the Amiga was put into the 'games console' arena the majority of games only really needed a 68000/1MB ram to run sufficiently.

Well, quite. Most of the people i knew who had Amigas only got them to play games, they had no loyalty to them (not like us weirdos), so as soon as PCs started having impressive titles like Quake nobody was going to hang around with our outdated hardware, the number of Amigas that must have just been chucked in the bin makes my toes curl to think about it.

In console terms, i think the Amiga had quite a good run.

[vxm]

Originally Posted by Vot

1) The initial engineering effort that went into the chipset design was never reproduced.

On the other hand, the original development team was not bored with the compatibility issue. I think that was their beneficial.
That said, try to keep afterwards backward compatibility should not be a simple walk in the park.

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by vxm

That said, try to keep afterwards backward compatibility should not be a simple walk in the park.

oh i don't know, modern PC graphics cards still implement VGA, they could just as well implement AGA instead.

[Hewitson]

They do, but if you tried to run an early 90's demo that banged the hell out of the VGA, would it work properly?

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

Well, quite. Most of the people i knew who had Amigas only got them to play games, they had no loyalty to them (not like us weirdos), so as soon as PCs started having impressive titles like Quake nobody was going to hang around with our outdated hardware, the number of Amigas that must have just been chucked in the bin makes my toes curl to think about it.

I used my Amiga 500 until it eventually stopped working in 1993. That year games like Lands Of Lore, Day Of Tentacle, X-Wing and Myst were released for PC only. As a gamer I didn't even consider to get an Amiga 1200 anymore then. Might have been different in 1992 though.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

oh i don't know, modern PC graphics cards still implement VGA, they could just as well implement AGA instead.

But PC graphics cards, modern or not still have nagging incompatibilities that make a 1985 machine chuckle!

[Mrs Beanbag]

like the A1200 never had any compatibility issues...

[Hewitson]

Hate to say it but the Amiga had far more issues with software incompatibility than any PC. Before whdload if you had anything other than a 68000 or 68010 and you wanted to play a game you were unlikely to be successful.

[john1979]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

Hate to say it but the Amiga had far more issues with software incompatibility than any PC. Before whdload if you had anything other than a 68000 or 68010 and you wanted to play a game you were unlikely to be successful.

With relokick and disabled CPU caches I would say about a half of my collection worked without glitches. So I would agree with you for the most part.

The thread title is a little sweeping: "Did piracy kill the Amiga?" No obviously not. It's a bit much to suggest piracy has destroyed the sales of any machine. (Although the Sega Dreamcast would make for a more interesting debate on that question.)

"Did piracy damage livelihoods, reduce motivation to develop for the platform, and encourage developers to go elsewhere?" Yes, I think it did.

[Hewitson]

I wouldn't say it encouraged developers to go elsewhere. How many developers abandoned the Playstation because of piracy? My guess would be zero.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by john1979

"Did piracy damage livelihoods, reduce motivation to develop for the platform, and encourage developers to go elsewhere?" Yes, I think it did.

Originally Posted by Hewitson

I wouldn't say it encouraged developers to go elsewhere. How many developers abandoned the Playstation because of piracy? My guess would be zero.

Or the PC. I think that it's the user base and the resulting sales that interest publishers/developers. That means that the users go first and then games stop being developed for a platform. Piracy was very strong around 1990 on the Amiga, but that didn't stop people from developing games for it. I'm not saying that piracy has no influence on the sales of games on a platform, but I don't think it has a significant influence.

[h0ffman]

Bad management and poor future hardware development killed the Amiga. Also if you have watched from bedrooms to billions, you'll know that piracy didn't kill the Amiga developers, bad management and the console market did.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

Hate to say it but the Amiga had far more issues with software incompatibility than any PC. Before whdload if you had anything other than a 68000 or 68010 and you wanted to play a game you were unlikely to be successful.

I don't think so! I'm talking about the 95% of Amiga's sold i.e the budget range, if a game had A500/A1200 or whatever compatibility sticker on the front then it would work on those machines, you can't go expecting a 1986 game to work on an A4000 with no problems (it wouldn't of course be on the box that it would) It the machine you owned wasn't on the cover then you wouldn't buy the game.
That's not the point I'm making, the point is i buy games for my PC that cover the minimum spec, os, ram, dx etc and the game still doesn't work, even with patches, you just don't get that on any other system other than PC's (maybe Mac's too i don't know about that), it's pretty disgusting when you buy a retail game and it doesn't work (yes i've owned and built PC's since 1997) so i do know what i'm doing) you can't get your money back, because the product isn't faulty.

@MrBeanbag - i didn't mean backwards compatibility, if a game had a A1200 sticker on it then it would work on an A1200.

[vxm]

From AmigaOS V2.x, a beautiful effort has been made to facilitate the programming while preserving as much as it can to the compatibility with the old version.

But I wonder if Commodore, with its cost reduction policy, would not have done more harm than good for the viability of the platform by affecting the technology orientation and engineering.

[4mat_]

Speaking as somebody who did freelance work in the early '90s the amiga work had mostly dried up by the end of '92. It was all 16-bit consoles and PC after that, with the very occasional amiga conversion from another format when working in-house. (to be honest I can only think of 4 amiga versions I worked on in the '93-'94 era after which it was completly dead)

[Mrs Beanbag]

consoles of course, this is why they bothered to produce the CD32. but would they have been better just to create an A1200CD? Floppy disks were becoming less and less useful, already some games were coming on 3 or more disks.

[4mat_]

Not really, look how expensive writable media was in the early '90s. no, it was just a void of mostly embarassing catch-up titles after '92. ("Doom but on the amiga, sonic but on the amiga" etc) Shame but that's progress.