Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by shelter

It was even the cheapskate 68EC020 they put in, so not even the full 68020,

Ok … that was actually a reasonable decision: if you go for the 020 in your low cost machine, then you should go for the EC Version, since the only difference is the amount of RAM it can address - an 16MB is quite ok for such a machine in 92.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

.


CBM was in that sense very similar to other "big tech" companies. They didn't innovate, they just bought the innovation from smaller other companies. Look at Kick 2.0 - v37. The biggest improvement was to get rid of BCPL and Tripos, and CBM just took the arp project and integrated that. They just took Arexx and shipped it. They took CrossDos and shipped it. My best guess is that something similar would have happened with RTG - they would have just picked a system, polished it a bit and would have integrated that. There wasn't sufficient man-power in-house to develop such a system.

No need to take kick 2.0 or other example. They bought Amiga technology at first which definitively prove your point.

[Promilus]

@Gorf - that's actually 8MB since there's a lot of reserved memory addresses, chipram and chipset registers, autoconfig area etc. Slightly more when you account all fragmented but not reserved space. Obviously it was enough back then and for any foreseeable future. A1200 got eventually more because there was no next model. If there was - there's hardly any reason to put 040 and 128Megs of RAM to A1200.

@sokolovic - well they aren't the only one and Amiga inc. wasn't the first one Commodore bought. Same happened to MOS technology. And they kind of forgot how to be inventive there. That's why it was WDC which came up with 16bit expansion for 6502. Widely used in Apple IIGS and SNES. And it still is produced!

[Karlos]

I have to admit I wonder how much of this entire thread is a case of "presentism". We all know and acknowledge the machine could've been better.

How could anyone genuinely be disappointed with the A1200 at launch? Anyone that already had a more powerful machine, was going to be looking at the A4000 as an upgrade, not the A1200. The A1200 was aimed at the same market as the A500, 500+ and A600. Compared to those machines, even without additional fast memory, it was a reasonable upgrade. With fast memory it was a much more capable machine and, unlike the A600, was designed to be upgradeable with faster CPUs.

My first machine was the A600, so for me the 1200 was great. And frankly I didn't give a TOS about what Atari was doing. Sure, in retrospect the Falcon is a lovely machine, but in 1992, its 16MHz 16-bit bus attached 030 was an even bigger joke than the chip ram only 020 in the A1200 and at least that could be fixed. In 1992 there was no competition between Workbench 3.0 and TOS. Everything it could do worth a damn was down to the DSP.

As for the IBM PC, well, the image of monotonous EGA boxes running barely functional GUIs and spending half their time in DOS was still pervasive enough for me to give it a wide berth.

So no, I was not disappointed, would do it all agsin and if there's one thing I would do differently it's pocket a Falcon when people sold them for peanuts after upgrading to PC.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Karlos

I have to admit I wonder how much of this entire thread is a case of "presentism". We all know and acknowledge the machine could've been better.

All? With one notable exception

How could anyone genuinely be disappointed with the A1200 at launch? Anyone that already had a more powerful machine, was going to be looking at the A4000 as an upgrade, not the A1200.

And was disappointed by the A4000 instead.

The A1200 was aimed at the same market as the A500, 500+ and A600. Compared to those machines, even without additional fast memory, it was a reasonable upgrade.

Only a tiny percentage of the A500 users back in the day thought so and upgraded to an A1200. The vast majority left the Amiga.

How could anyone genuinely be disappointed with the A1200 at launch?

To little, too late.
The problem was, that the former A500 customers had aged a couple of years and had higher expectations and more money as they were now young adults and not poor teenagers anymore.
And (younger) teenagers that were only interested in a pure gaming system, got now consoles instead - the market Commodore aimed at with the A1200, did not longer exist.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Karlos

The A1200 was aimed at the same market as the A500, 500+ and A600. Compared to those machines, even without additional fast memory, it was a reasonable upgrade. With fast memory it was a much more capable machine and, unlike the A600, was designed to be upgradeable with faster CPUs.

And there lies one of its biggest problems. If you just consider the A500 then the A1200 is a good upgrade. I can only imagine that a good few people forked out money to 'upgrade' their A500 to a A500+ or A600 before the end of 1992. I don't think those were flocking to the shops to get an A1200. Plus by the end of 1992 there were basically no games for the new machine around.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I thought the argument was more models are better?

I know you thought that!
Now you see there is no merit to it.

As for wasting resources, many of those models were the same base machine with different drive combinations (eg. 20MB or 40MB hard drive). I'd say that was a pretty efficient way to create different models.

you don’t say! … so the A1500 was not really a genuinely different model?

And just a different motherboard with the same chipset and same cpu is not really innovative?

Fascinating…

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by TCD

And there lies one of its biggest problems. If you just consider the A500 then the A1200 is a good upgrade. I can only imagine that a good few people forked out money to 'upgrade' their A500 to a A500+ or A600 before the end of 1992. I don't think those were flocking to the shops to get an A1200. Plus by the end of 1992 there were basically no games for the new machine around.

My first Amiga was the A600, which was a birthday gift at the time is what got be back into computing after maybe 5-6 year loss of interest. And I absolutely did flock to buy the A1200 that same year having saved up for Xmas.

I then enjoyed having two machines, a serial cable and midi syncable trackers.

I never upgraded the A600. At one point I had it connected to the A1200 via ParNET with a minimal boot floppy in the drive. Once booted it basically assigned for itself a bunch of locations on the A1200 hard disk so that I could use all the same samples and run various applications without swapping floppies all day It was a bit faster than floppy and much more flexible (though I'm sure floppy DMA used less CPU).

[oscar_ates]

A1200 was too little to be a game changer in 1992. It was anemic for the 3d games which pc was excelling. There were much better 2d games and excellent arcade ports on console arena. So it was disappointing. As years passed more and more people jumped ship to pc, Playstation and other consoles

[Karlos]

The claim that almost no A500 owners upgraded to 1200 needs verification.

The best estimates I've seen for A500 is just under 5 million units sold.
The best estimates I've seen for A1200 is just under 1 million units sold.

This supports the general view that the machine was not as compelling as the A500 was but given when it was released, I'd be surprised if almost anyone that was not already an existing owner or otherwise a fan of the platform, for all of the reasons already stated (better consoles, emergence of PC, etc).

All the "too little too late" observation is hindsight. People with better / more serious machines won't have bought one to be disappointed with, they had the 4000 for that trip. The console crowd moved on.

My contention is, the vast majority of the people who bought the 1200 both knew its specification beforehand and were still happy enough to shell out on it. A further contention is that the majority of them were existing users or reasonably familiar with the platform.

Anyone saying "I bought it and it was rubbish" is talking through a lens I doubt they viewed it through at the time, otherwise why buy it? Not good enough for 3D games? If that's your sole metric then sure, you're going to be disappointed but unless I'm going senile, not many people were as bothered as we seem to like to portray in retrospect. Sure, Doom changed the landscape forever but seriously that was 1993 and you needed a reasonably expensive PC at that time to do it any justice. Comparing the a1200 to a 486 given their 1993 price points is laughable

The early 90s were a great time for home computer enthusiasts. I don't know where this jaded morose view of it all has emerged from except the old man cynicism we all develop with age.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Karlos

And I absolutely did flock …

Did not know one person could flock …

[oscar_ates]

A4000 was a kind of downgrading for the A3000 owners. It was not a compelling machine especially with the A3640 crap

[A500]

Originally Posted by sandruzzo

All is gone. We have Aga as it is. We should enjoy it with all its strong and weak points, and squeez all out of it!

Hear hear! (turns A1200 on and starts Turrican II AGA)

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Karlos

The best estimates I've seen for A500 is just under 5 million units sold.
The best estimates I've seen for A1200 is just under 1 million units sold.

That still would be just 1 out of 5 … here in Germany (one of the best markets for Commodore) only 95,000 A1200 where sold vs. 1,300,000 A500(+), A600
So only 1 in 13 or <8%

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by Gorf

Did not know one person could flock …

Well, I am somewhat on the spectrum so I was probably flapping if not flocking.

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by Gorf

That still would be just 1 out of 5 … here in Germany (one of the best markets for Commodore) only 95,000 A1200 where sold vs. 1,300,000 A500(+), A600
So only 1 in 13 or <8%

Sure, but who bought them? I think the probability is high that they were all existing users.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Gorf

I know you thought that!
Now you see there is no merit to it.

No, it wasn't me who was arguing that Commodore didn't bring out new models fast enough. I was just pointing out that the perception that Commodore didn't do anything to the Amiga for years and years is false.

you don’t say! … so the A1500 was not really a genuinely different model?

Yep. Which is why I didn't list it as such. It was just a base model A2000 with an extra floppy drive. Commodore NZ never sold them here, but you could order an A2000 with an extra drive and get the same thing (minus the 'A1500' label).

And just a different motherboard with the same chipset and same cpu is not really innovative?

There's more to innovation than just the chipset and CPU, but I wouldn't describe changing a 20MB hard drive to 40MB as 'innovating' (even though technically it meets the definition).

Designing a slimline motherboard with on-board VGA/serial/parallel and 286/386SX CPU on a plugin card was innovating. Perhaps they should have put that effort into producing a mid-range Amiga with similar form factor and features instead. Or perhaps not. The majority weren't going to buy an Amiga unless it was dirt cheap, and most of the few who were willing to pay more wanted a 'bog box' design.

I'm getting sick of these double-standards. When Commodore designs and manufactures a hard drive controller or accelerator card for the A2000 that's called 'not making any significant changes'. When a PC gets a 3rd party sound card, a faster CPU plugged into the same motherboard, or even just a bigger hard drive, it's 'innovating'.

But hey, anything to maintain the narrative of "Commodore bad, PCs good", right?

[Karlos]

We can all be disappointed with the A1200 in hindsight but who here genuinely bought one and was disappointed with it in 1992 (or 1993)?

Or is the question who was so disappointed with the machine in 1992 that they didn't bother? And be honest how many of those had made up their mind by then that they preferred consoles or a PC regardless? Saying the A1200 was a disappointment in that situation is disingenuous.

[StevenJGore]

For me, I jumped ship from an Atari ST straight to an A1200 with hard drive, with no experience of the A500 or other Amiga models that came before. I also bought a CD32 with FMV module. I wasn't disappointed with any of those things, in fact I thought they were amazing at the time.

For gaming, they lasted me until the Playstation was launched, and I was doing my university coursework on my A1200 (now expanded with full 68020 processor and 4MB fast RAM) until 1999 when I finally had to concede and get a PC because the A1200 just couldn't cope at that point.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by oscar_ates

A4000 was a kind of downgrading for the A3000 owners. It was not a compelling machine especially with the A3640 crap

Kind of. It did have some desirable things that the A3000 didn't though:-

1. AGA chipset.

2. Drive bay big enough to take a 5.25" device (eg. CDROM drive).

3. Power supply fan that didn't sound like an airliner taking off.

4. On-board memory easily upgradable with standard 72 pin SIMMs.

5. IDE interface (no more having to spend a fortune on SCSI drives!)

6. Faster CPU.

Even though the onboard memory speed wasn't the best, the 25MHz 040 was still much faster than the A3000's 25MHz 030.

It was also much cheaper than the A3000 when released. I definitely would have bought one if I didn't already have an A3000, but since I had invested so much in it (nearly NZ$10,000), when the A4000 came out I couldn't justify the expense. So I bought an A1200 instead for AGA, and later upgraded both of them with accelerator cards.