Some thoughts on why the Amiga didn't thrive

[nivam]

Regarding piracy, I remember back in 1989 to 1992 in a well known street in central Athens full of computer stores, there were 4 or 5 of them selling pirated games. They had dozens of catalogs to choose from. You wanted one and in minutes you had it. The xcopy monitors were in plain sight with no thought that this was illegal. They even had banners at some point about piracy and how it was wrong. What a joke. Although young I knew, from the beginning that it was wrong. However I bought many as I could not afford new ones. And then at home I used to remove or alter the pirates intros with my own messages or music and distribute them to my friends... oh I miss those days... not because of piracy ofcourse.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Foebane

Philips doesn't count, they didn't sell computers

Oh yes they did!

Philips Computers

Philips Telecommunicatie en Informatie Systemen (Philips Computers) was a subsidiary of Philips that designed and manufactured personal computers. Philips Computers was active from 1963 through 1992...

Philips computers were coupled with Philips monitors. Philips had far more success selling its monitors than its computers. Philips monitors continue being designed, produced and sold globally contemporaneously. Philips also had and has moderate success selling peripherals such as mice, keyboards and optical devices...

Philips also developed the CD-i standard but it flopped. Another experimental product was the Philips :YES, based on Intel's 80188. It also flopped.

Philips PCs were mostly equipped with motherboards designed by Philips Home Electronics in Montreal, Canada

Philips VG-8000

In 1982-83, Philips was working with Thomson on an European computer standard. As the project didn't make any progress, Philips left the project and joined the MSX standard.

The VG 8000, made in France, is the result. It is a very poor MSX computer and is not 100% compliant with the standard : no Centronics port, no Expansion bus, no Audio out, a poor keyboard and a non standard PAL connector. It was pretty expensive and didn't have any success.

Philips VG-8020

In contrast to its predecessor, the Philips VG-8010, the computer keyboard consisted of high-quality typewriter keys... Its interfaces also included a Centronics interface, a cassette connection, a video output, an HF antenna connection and two joystick ports on the front of the device.

There was a wide range of accessories for these Philips computer models, such as monitors, printers, floppy disk stations, joysticks, cassette recorders (D-6600 / 60P) and memory expansions of up to 144 Kbytes.

Due to a bug, the computer was not completely compatible with other MSX-1 systems

In summary, when Philips designed their own stuff it flopped. When they tried to follow a standard they screwed up. When they jumped on the PC bandwagon they were about as successful as most of the others who did (ie. not very).

Commodore had some misses too, but they also had some roaring successes. IMHO the Amiga was one of them (when compared to what Philips et al. produced).

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Oh yes they did!

Philips Computers


Philips VG-8000

Philips VG-8020

In summary, when Philips designed their own stuff it flopped. When they tried to follow a standard they screwed up. When they jumped on the PC bandwagon they were about as successful as most of the others who did (ie. not very).

Commodore had some misses too, but they also had some roaring successes. IMHO the Amiga was one of them (when compared to what Philips et al. produced).

You're right, I clean forgot about my friend's Philips G7000, which was basically a Magnavox Odyssey 2, but for the UK. It wasn't a bad Atari-like console for the time, but I remember it buzzed loudly, so we took it to my father who found out it was a faulty transformer, and he fixed it.

So I DID know Philips computer hardware, I just forgot about it. Well, it was the very early 1980s!

So you're right, I was wrong. But Commodore's mistakes still really irk me. Like the A600 felt crap to me, yet the later A1200 was a refined version and sorted all the problems the A600 introduced.

[Minuous]

There were also various computers available from Signetics (which was part of Philips at the time) such as the Instructor 50 and the Adaptable Board Computer.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Foebane

So you're right, I was wrong. But Commodore's mistakes still really irk me. Like the A600 felt crap to me, yet the later A1200 was a refined version and sorted all the problems the A600 introduced.

The biggest problem with the A600 was that people were expecting something like the A1200, not a more compact A500+. But I loved mine because it fixed the main problem with the A500 - it was too big! (one reason I never had one).

The A600 lost the numeric keypad, which didn't worry me because I never use it. Some people got upset about that because a few games needed it - but was that really such a big deal? On the plus side you got internal IDE, and a PCMCIA slot which had lots of potential. The angled keyboard and floppy drive were more ergonomic, and the white case with silver logo looked much nicer.

Theoretically the A600 couldn't be accelerated because it had no expansion slot and the CPU was soldered in, but a way around that was soon found. I put a Viper 630 with 33MHz 030 and 4MB FastRAM into mine.

I don't think the A600 was a mistake, not in the way that many of their other machines were - eg. the C128, Plus 4 - even the C64 was pretty messed up in comparison.

[Lord Aga]

Originally Posted by Frogs

Best graph ever. Totally readable.
Must have been made on a superior PC machine.

[grond]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I don't think the A600 was a mistake

The market and most Amiga-users certainly disagreed. PCMCIA was superfluous at the time as there were hardly any expansions available for it and they cost so much that you would have been better off with a big box Amiga (a PCMCIA ethernet adapter cost half of what the A600 cost new).

A 7 MHz 68000 was already a bad joke at that time and accelerators that plug onto the 68000 CPU are certainly a kludge.

The A600 was small in a time when computers in big bulky tower cases became fashionable. Needlessly small. The small form factor made it necessary to use 2.5" harddisk which where more expensive than 3.5" hdds by factors in a time when harddisks in general were expensive add-ons. The A600 certainly didn't help making hdds a standard in the Amiga world which was becoming a problem with only DD floppy disks and software distributing on 10+ disks. CD-drives and CDs as a distribution medium do not make much sense if users haven't even got hdds.

Now if Commodore had turned the A500+ into an 020/32bit chipmem ECS machine with room for a 3.5" hdd (basically an ECS A1200 without PCMCIA but with more hdd space), I would consider this a good update and the ideal keyboard computer companion to the A3000.

Just to be clear, from today's perspective the PCMCIA port in the two Amigas is very useful and I consider its presence as some sort of lucky coincidence. Commodore was again trying to sell a very basic hardware package by making it connectable to things other companies would sell to the A600 owner and not by putting more relevant stuff into the box and thus selling more themselves.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by grond

A 7 MHz 68000 was already a bad joke at that time and accelerators that plug onto the 68000 CPU are certainly a kludge.

You mean the circuit boards that look like they have a square socket, and it plugs over the top of the existing CPU on the motherboard? Yeah, I always thought those things were poorly thought out, and they certainly look insecure, nor lock in place, and look like they could pop off the CPU at any moment.

[duga]

The A600 shouldn't have been released at all. Instead they should've milked the A500 Plus another 6-12 months until the release of the A1200.

[grond]

Originally Posted by Foebane

You mean the circuit boards that look like they have a square socket, and it plugs over the top of the existing CPU on the motherboard? Yeah, I always thought those things were poorly thought out, and they certainly look insecure, nor lock in place, and look like they could pop off the CPU at any moment.

Yes, but that's the only way to do it in the A600. The problem is with the A600, not with those accelerators.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by grond

Yes, but that's the only way to do it in the A600. The problem is with the A600, not with those accelerators.

And the A1200 too, I gather?

[lmimmfn]

Originally Posted by Foebane

And the A1200 too, I gather?

no, the 1200 has the expansion port for accelerators.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by lmimmfn

no, the 1200 has the expansion port for accelerators.

Oh, OK.

As I said, the A600 was dodgy, it looked like a test for what the proper Amiga system (the A1200) should consist of, except we were the guinea pigs.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by grond

The market and most Amiga-users certainly disagreed. PCMCIA was superfluous at the time as there were hardly any expansions available for it and they cost so much that you would have been better off with a big box Amiga (a PCMCIA ethernet adapter cost half of what the A600 cost new).

The biggest problem with PCMCIA was that the standard wasn't finished 'at the time' and it was mostly only used in PC laptops that treated it like an ISA bus so properly implemented 'generic' cards were rare. But it didn't take long for Amiga hardware developers to figure out how to interface peripherals to it, which is actually quite easy if you ignore PCMCIA protocols and just treat it as a simple 16 bit bus.

Within a few years PCMCIA cards became more popular and cheaper, validating Commodore's choice. The CNet CN40BC which I developed the first Amiga network card driver for was much cheaper than any 'big box' Amiga network card.

A 7 MHz 68000 was already a bad joke at that time and accelerators that plug onto the 68000 CPU are certainly a kludge.

A 'bad joke' for some perhaps, but essential for those who wanted to play all those games that couldn't handle faster CPUs. The A600 was supposed to be a compatible replacement for the A500 with better styling using all smd parts to reduce size and cost, not a high-end model.

The A600 was small in a time when computers in big bulky tower cases became fashionable. Needlessly small.

But some of us liked that. People who wanted a big box could have bought an A2000, and later the A4000. The A500 was mostly used for playing games, and therefore having a smaller machine closer to console size (but still with all the things you expected on an Amiga) made sense.

The small form factor made it necessary to use 2.5" harddisk which where more expensive than 3.5" hdds by factors in a time when harddisks in general were expensive add-ons. The A600 certainly didn't help making hdds a standard in the Amiga world which was becoming a problem with only DD floppy disks and software distributing on 10+ disks.

Hard drive prices were coming down rapidly, and since the Amiga didn't need need as much storage capacity as a PC the price of a useful capacity 2.5" drive wasn't much different to a 3.5" drive. Even if it was more expensive than the cheapest nastiest 3.5" or 5.25" IDE drive, a 2.5" drive was still cheaper than an A500 drive (A590 etc.) as well as being more convenient.

But most A500 owners didn't have hard drives so few games made use of it. The vast majority of games were only 1 or 2 disks. Those that did come on a lot of disks were generally ported (badly) from the PC. I don't recall any games coming on 10 disks that would work on a A500 or A600 anyway.

CD-drives and CDs as a distribution medium do not make much sense if users haven't even got hdds.

Right. That explains why the CDTV and CD32 couldn't run any titles!

Now if Commodore had turned the A500+ into an 020/32bit chipmem ECS machine with room for a 3.5" hdd (basically an ECS A1200 without PCMCIA but with more hdd space), I would consider this a good update and the ideal keyboard computer companion to the A3000.

In a bulky desktop or tower case, right? The A2500 already had that, and the A4000 was about to have even more.

Just to be clear, from today's perspective the PCMCIA port in the two Amigas is very useful and I consider its presence as some sort of lucky coincidence. Commodore was again trying to sell a very basic hardware package by making it connectable to things other companies would sell to the A600 owner and not by putting more relevant stuff into the box and thus selling more themselves.

Commodore did make a RAM expansion for it, and produced a version with hard drive installed for those wanted it. Anything else was probably better served by 3rd party manufacturers, just like was done in the PC world. The important thing was to keep the base price down so people could afford it. Unfortunately due to various reasons the A600 turned out more expensive to produce than the A500, but then it did have more functionality...

Originally Posted by Foebane

the A600 was dodgy, it looked like a test for what the proper Amiga system (the A1200) should consist of, except we were the guinea pigs.

It was a 'test', but it was also a well-designed product that became the basis for the next model. This is a very common practice in product design and there is nothing 'dodgy' about it, nor was the A600 itself 'dodgy'.

The only problem with the A600 was all those rumors of a AAA chipset etc. bouncing around that primed Amiga fans to expect something more, then they were disappointed by what actually came out. Perhaps if Commodore had explained that this was just the first of new line and hinted at the A4000 etc. - rather than leaving them thinking this was best we were going to get - they might have understood.

[Keatah]

The custom chipset, graphics, sound, blitter, and all, were unnecessary hindrances to upgrading the Amiga. They might work magic, but you couldn't teach them new tricks. Significant gains in performance would require complete redesigns of not just the processor, but of those specialized chips. And that'd be costly in terms of time and effort. Something Commodore wasn't able or prepared to do.

Some may claim the PC eventually shrunk down to 2 or 3 custom chips supporting a custom Intel x86 CPU. Except there was nothing custom about that. Those few chips were simply consolidations of many 10s or 100s of chips. And datasheets were readily available. They were so prevalent so as not to be custom, but industry standard parts. Same for the CPU. Intel published all sorts documentation and programming tools and references. Intel even had produced their own support chips in huge quantity and everything, again, was readily available. Little or no secrets.

The PC's extreme modularity compared to a rather "fixed" Amiga was a huge advantage. If ever there were technical innovations in the PC was it. The PC not only allowed for piecemeal upgrade, thus spreading the cost out over time, it did the same with standards. All PCs had a certain level of graphics at a given time, Hercules, CGA, EGA, VGA, SVGA and more. The more money you put into it, the higher up the scale you could go. And software would allow you to pick your modes (within practical reason).

I couldn't afford Targa graphics, but I could manage VGA and SVGA. So I got that. And all the earlier modes came with it. And software that would run on a 386 with EGA would also run on a 486 with VGA. Mostly. It was nice to have an upgrade path. And 486s gained an 8087 compatible co-processor on-chip. Another nice advance.

Despite all the hundreds of thousands of hardware combinations there were many standards that allowed software and data interchange. If I had a PC I could exchange data and programs with any other PC as long as the specs were similar. And the standards evolved nicely, building upon previous iterations. This is extremely important for business as they migrate to more advanced hardware.

[nikosidis]

Thank god Commodore did not make any more Amigas to make more confusion. Think if they made some other sound chip or if there where more than ECS and AGA. God forbid. Commodore did all things right and now we have this beautiful retro platform. God bless.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

A 'bad joke' for some perhaps, but essential for those who wanted to play all those games that couldn't handle faster CPUs.

I think there is even less games that couldn't handle faster CPU on the Amiga that games that didn't need numeric keyboard.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

But most A500 owners didn't have hard drives so few games made use of it. The vast majority of games were only 1 or 2 disks. Those that did come on a lot of disks were generally ported (badly) from the PC. I don't recall any games coming on 10 disks that would work on a A500 or A600 anyway.

Fate of Atlantis, Monkey Island 2, Simon the Sorcerer, Willy Beamish, Beneath a Steel Sky (15 disks !)... Mostly point'n'clicks but they were among the best games on the Amiga (and not always ported badly considering they do work in a 1985 hardware based machine).

By 1993, HD should have been mandatory for every Amiga hardware and software, at least the AGA ones. I really think that this logic to keeping the lowest common denominator and never expand is one of the thing that doomed the Amiga.

Even in 2021 making an HD only game isn't generally an option for most of the (brave) developpers of Amiga games.

That said, I loved the design of the A600 back in these days and even today. But it was clearly another big mistake from Commodore (and even in 1992 it was considered a mistake).

[grond]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Within a few years PCMCIA cards became more popular and cheaper, validating Commodore's choice. The CNet CN40BC which I developed the first Amiga network card driver for was much cheaper than any 'big box' Amiga network card.

How many were "a few years"? I was looking at PCMCIA network cards when I already had switched to a laptop PC in 1997 and they still cost 400DM. I had bought the A600 new in 1993 (i.e. four years earlier) for 300DM when Commodore was trying to get rid of them at any price.

I mean, really, technology from 1985 that by 1992 had become old and most of the potential market already owned in the form of an A500 but now squeezed into a form factor that only allowed connecting laptop peripherals and hence the most expensive stuff on the market? And then expect it to sell just because of the ability to connect some rare and extremely expensive peripherals? What were they thinking? It's not like they were selling the newest iPhone and fanboys would be camping outside their shops to get it.

A 'bad joke' for some perhaps, but essential for those who wanted to play all those games that couldn't handle faster CPUs.

Yes, sure, but who of those people had any interest to connect a network card or a 2.5" harddisk to their Amiga? The A600 just didn't make any sense at all.

The A600 was supposed to be a compatible replacement for the A500 with better styling using all smd parts to reduce size and cost, not a high-end model.

Yes, and that might have been a point. But why then not allow for any fastmem, any accelerator and instead provide connectors for the most expensive peripherals on the market, i.e. laptop peripherals? Laptops were sold to enterprise business people that didn't have to pay for their stuff themselves and were flying around in business class just because they could.

The A500 was mostly used for playing games, and therefore having a smaller machine closer to console size (but still with all the things you expected on an Amiga) made sense.

It would have made sense if there had been new customers to conquer. With the A600 they couldn't sell to the people who considered upgrading.

Hard drive prices were coming down rapidly, and since the Amiga didn't need need as much storage capacity as a PC the price of a useful capacity 2.5" drive wasn't much different to a 3.5" drive.

Say that again. In 1995 I paid 800DM for a 330MB 2.5" harddisk for my A1200. That was at least twice as expensive as a 3.5" harddisk would have been (more likely approaching a factor of 3). That was several years after Commodore had started the 2.5" nonsense. Knowing them they probably wanted to save a dollar on a more powerful power supply that might have been needed if people had wanted to run 3.5" harddisks instead of the 2.5" form factor.

But most A500 owners didn't have hard drives so few games made use of it. The vast majority of games were only 1 or 2 disks. Those that did come on a lot of disks were generally ported (badly) from the PC. I don't recall any games coming on 10 disks that would work on a A500 or A600 anyway.

Monkey Island 2? History Line? Actually the games I considered worth playing usually came on several disks.

Right. That explains why the CDTV and CD32 couldn't run any titles!

Starting a niche system (CD-based Amiga) within a niche that doesn't even have harddisks doesn't sound like it's going to be a success story. CD drives became popular when they were an add-on to computers that without exception had harddisks.

In a bulky desktop or tower case, right? The A2500 already had that, and the A4000 was about to have even more.

Yes, a lot of stuff was available in theory. I was talking about significantly and notably updating and improving the base configuration so that A500 users would have seen new stuff they wanted to have but couldn't run on their outdated configuration. Starting with the A3000 there shouldn't have been any new Amigas without a 32bit chipmem bus and the option of installing a harddisk. This would have been easy in an A500 case (I agree it is rather bulky) or a case that would have been only slightly larger than that of an A1200.

Commodore did make a RAM expansion for it

But no fastmem unless you are referring to some insanely expensive PCMCIA memory card. I'm not sure how fast those were but I think PCMCIA was behind the Amiga bus and thus also throttled like chipmem.

and produced a version with hard drive installed for those wanted it.

At prohibitive prices due to the 2.5" harddisks.

The important thing was to keep the base price down so people could afford it.

Which in my opinion was exactly the wrong thing to do. Ironically the A600 was very expensive (I believe its introductory price was more than 1000DM and thus what the A500 had cost 5 years earlier!) at the beginning and you didn't get anything worth the money. Even less so if you already owned an Amiga.

They could have put a relevant upgrade over the A500 into a reasonably sized case and sold it at that price but low tech, expensive peripherals and no upgrade over what they had been selling for years? Anyone could see it wasn't going to work.

Perhaps if Commodore had explained that this was just the first of new line and hinted at the A4000 etc. - rather than leaving them thinking this was best we were going to get - they might have understood.

And they would have had even less of a reason to buy it.

[Keatah]

Originally Posted by Steril707

I just remember that I could literally not understand why anyone would buy a PC when I saw one in the late 80ies in the shops I visited.

Ever since the PC came out all kinds of desirable software was being written for it. Practical software that solved real world problems.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

I think there is even less games that couldn't handle faster CPU on the Amiga that games that didn't need numeric keyboard.

Very few games that were worth running on the A600 required the numeric keypad, but many older games wouldn't work properly on a machine with a faster CPU or FastRAM (there were also a lot that wouldn't work in KS2 either, but that was easily fixed with a ROM switcher).

Fate of Atlantis, Monkey Island 2, Simon the Sorcerer, Willy Beamish, Beneath a Steel Sky (15 disks !)... Mostly point'n'clicks but they were among the best games on the Amiga (and not always ported badly considering they do work in a 1985 hardware based machine).

Fate of Atlantis and Monkey Island 2 were developed primarily for the PC, with the 256 color graphics reduced to 32 for the Amiga. Simon the Sorcerer had 9 disks. I hadn't heard of Willy Beamish before, but it was published by Sierra and the DOS version was VGA so I'm betting it too was a port of the PC version (which BTW came on 7 5.25" disks). You got me on Beneath a Steel Sky (I didn't realize that it had so many disks - I only played the demo and that was tedious enough!).

By 1993, HD should have been mandatory for every Amiga hardware and software, at least the AGA ones. I really think that this logic to keeping the lowest common denominator and never expand is one of the thing that doomed the Amiga.

The Amiga was doomed anyway because it wasn't a PC, but the A600 did have an IDE port and Commodore did sell it with a built in hard drive - so your complaint is off base.

Its funny how Amiga fans were always complaining about how Commodore didn't give the Amiga stuff that PC's had, then when they did they got howled down for that too! Perhaps they should have just stuck to making PC clones and never let the Amiga see the light of day, then you would all be happy?

Even in 2021 making an HD only game isn't generally an option for most of the (brave) developpers of Amiga games.

Nonsense. If developers today are producing floppy games it's because they enjoy the challenge of producing a retro title. But that's not all. Some of us like booting a game directly from floppy disk rather than having to install it on the hard drive where it just takes up space most of the time.

That said, I loved the design of the A600 back in these days and even today. But it was clearly another big mistake from Commodore (and even in 1992 it was considered a mistake).

The computer itself wasn't a mistake, only the messaging - and half of that wasn't Commodore's fault. Amiga users were their own worst enemies.