Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[Jope]

In a way I was disappointed with the AGA machines. The 4k always felt like an unworthy successor to the mighty A3000, and as we later found out, there was a good reason for that. :-)

Then again it was the best stuff we could get at the time, so naturally I wanted one. :-)

[nobody]

The funny thing is that you need the next higher Amiga model to work with features of the previous model.
68020+memory for EHB ECS games and 68030 for AGA games. The feature is there but you cannot use it because not enough memory, CPU, no HD etc.

[ruinashiro]

i wasn't disappointed at the time, except for no 16-bit audio as a musician, but became so with hindsight. to me, it was a huge upgrade over my a500, but looking back it seemed really poor for a machine released 5 years after the a500.

but i was also blinded to its deficiencies because of my amiga love. even the 24-bit palette was huge to me. but ever try to run a workbench in AGA 256 colors? totally unusable. much of the hardware, like people said about the blitter, wasn't really changed. i couldn't imagine myself releasing something that was supposed to be a major upgrade with features that performed so poorly.

i later put in a 060/66+PPC and ran MAME and realized how good a system the neo-geo was and went with that for my main gaming machine

[Stejjie]

I got my A600 just after (like a month or two) the 1200 was released - I knew about it 'cos I bought issue 42 of Amiga Format before I got my Amiga, which had a big, positive feature about 1200. So I guess my disappointment was not being able to afford one at the time, or subsequently during my first "Amiga period". My memory is it was largely very positively received at the time, and the briefest of brief looks on Amiga Magazine Rack confirms that.

Now I have an A1200, I must admit to being slightly underwhelmed at the step up from my 600 (or how I remember my 600 in any case); it just doesn't seem to be the generational-shift that it was touted to be at the time. And that seems to be confirmed by the stories of how rushed out AGA was etc.

I also wonder if it, in terms of the gaming competition, it fell between two stools: on one hand, it didn't seem able to chuck sprites around like the 16-bit consoles could; on the other, Doom was just around the corner on the PC and the 1200 had nothing with the wow-factor that Doom did and, prseumably, couldn't. Plus, on the productivity/business side, Windows PCs were becoming the standard and the Amiga didn't seem able to compete with that: I remember there being a big thing about whether the Amiga had a word processor/publisher that could compete with MS Word: it didn't, and I think that hurt it.

So I think there wasn't any killer app; any game or software that made the machine a "must have" either above existing Amiga machines, or from PCs or consoles. Can't help wondering if Commodore should've worked with software houses to encourage development of 2 or 3 killer apps at launch that would've made it a must-buy. (Also, would some kind of upgrade offer for existing Amiga owners have been worthwhile?)

One last thing: the 1200 never seemed to get a compelling bundle, like the Batman or Cartoon Classics (or Wild, Weird or Wicked?) packs were. Perhaps this is due to the lack of killer apps, but Commodore never seemed able to create an A1200 bundle that caught people's attention, that had classic games that showed off the machine's power and made you want to buy it.

A lot of that's from memory and the technical details may well be wrong (I'm not very 'up' on the technical side of things), but that's how I see the disappointments of the A1200. I'm still glad I've finally got one, though!

[nobody]

It should have the capabilities of Neo Geo to be a worthy successor to the A500. It should be a 2D monster

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by nobody

It should have the capabilities of Neo Geo to be a worthy successor to the A500. It should be a 2D monster

So a £400 computer with the need for extra components, keyboard, disk drive etc should have the same specs as a £600 console released the year before?!

[OlafSch]

@Gilbert

Disappointed? Yes and No. At that time it was seen as successor to A500 and I was not really disappointed because it had more ram, faster processor and of course better graphics. Looking at it from today of course it was too little too late. At that time I did not really look at other platforms but was a pure amiga fan owning different models up to A4000/30 with 4 MB RAM and Graphiccard and A1200 with HD so I was not really disappointed. Fast RAM would have been nice but ram at that time was worth a fortune so it was propably not realistic.

I disagree with some comments... more colours were urgent at that time because most new games were developed for VGA and nobody was anymore willing to develop in fact a new set of graphics for the small amiga market. The reality were cheap ports or more propably not supporting amiga anymore. AGA made porting PC games to amiga much easier again, if you look at old game magazines it is obvious that the situation at the beginning of 90s had changed, before amiga was game platform number one, in the 90s PC was first and then games were ported to amiga.

[edd_jedi]

When I first got my A1200 I was disappointed that a lot of old games didn't work. As an 11 year old with no pocket money my sole source of games were my two friends who had an A500+ and an A600. At least half the games they gave me didn't work. I found relokick after a while and that helped a little, but there were still a lot of games that didn't work. In fact I tried to trade my A1200 for a friends A2000, but my parents wouldn't let me (a couple of years later I traded it for a SNES without telling them!)

That said there were a few AGA enhanced or exclusive games that were among my favourites (Aladdin, Theme Park, Alien Breed 3D, Morph, Out To Lunch.)

[Predseda]

What I hated was the fact, that the new graphics, althought finally 256 colors, was FLICKERING again in Hi-res, which destroyed the whole effect. Not to mention obsolete sound chip, only 2MB chip ram and a weak processor.

Still, for me the best Amiga ever in price / value ratio. It was a step forward, but not big enough.

[Daedalus]

Nope, I thought it was a pretty decent machine, and while the AGA chipset could have been better, it was actually a massive improvement over the OCS and ECS machines, and was far better than just releasing an '020 version of the A600 (despite what some of the strange comments here say). Having a 24-bit palette was excellent for a start, and the overall improvements in speed meant it was a bit less clunky to use for applications than the older machines. And I wasn't into many of the really old games, so much of the gaming I did saw a big boost on the A1200 - things like Frontier, flight sims, Theme Park, Syndicate, Worms, all showed a massive improvement over the A500/600, and even SWOS lost the tiny delays it sometimes had on the A500 when a lot of action was happening in the box.

All of that made it a breath of fresh air over the 500 and 600, and meant it wasn't a disappointment at all. In fact, the only disappointment I had was that I couldn't program it out of the box, since there wasn't a BASIC supplied with it and I didn't know about ARexx at the time. But I read about ARexx and bought Blitz Basic, and that solved that.

[Predseda]

In fact, I was dissapointed until I bought my first accelerator, which was M-Tec 1230/28MHz with 8 MB fast. Then I started to be satisfied enough to stop complaining

[nobody]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

So a £400 computer with the need for extra components, keyboard, disk drive etc should have the same specs as a £600 console released the year before?!

Jaguar=200 $, 3DO=700 $ and Jaguar=3DO in capabilities how is that

[Locutus]

Jaguar != 3DO.

3DO could do texture mapping quite fine, ever looked at Jaguar 3D titles? now come on :-)

But okay, lets not make this a discussion about failed consoles ;-)

A1200 was my first computer, so i suppose cant be dissapointed.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by nobody

Jaguar=200 $, 3DO=700 $ and Jaguar=3DO in capabilities how is that

The jag is in no way in comparison with the 3DO in terms of 3d textured polygons, despite what some Atari fanboys have you believe!

But then the comparison is sort of like an Amiga vs PC , people don't but should take price in hindsight, as you say the 3D0 3.5x the price of a Jaguar, a similar thing to the Amiga vs PC in 1992.

[nobody]

Ok maybe the 3DO is a little faster in 3D than the jaguar but for 3x the price? Then compare the Jaguar with the A1200, they came at the same time and Amiga 1200 was 2x the price (also A1200 was 2-3 times the price of SNES that had better games)

[Amigajay]

The Jag came out a year later than the A1200, in a time where tech was advancing the fastest at any time before or since, new machines every year.
We all know the A1200 was underpowered, but the Jag was under supported, having a handful of decent games does not make the Jag a worth while buy, the A1200 was still a computer that had plenty of other reasons to buy.
Price was, as i said computers will always cost more because is a lot parts which cost more, a console is a cost reduced computer basically.

[nobody]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

The Jag came out a year later than the A1200, in a time where tech was advancing the fastest at any time before or since, new machines every year.

Neo Geo at 1990 650$, so 2 years later tech was advancing the fastest at any time before or since, the A1200 could have the same specs at the price.

[indigolemon]

I can't say I was disappointed by the 1200, at that point the Amiga was still the machine to have - so having the latest version was primarily a badge of honour in terms of playground bragging rights. I ended up becoming good mates with another classmate purely because he had one too, made game swapping much easier.

Regardless of the graphics chat, the thing that always struck me (and still does) is how - even with it's sound hardware from 1985 - the 1200 (and any Amiga really) dumped from a great height on any of the consoles my mates had - mainly Megadrive or SNES. If we had the same game, yes I'd need to wait for the floppy load, but then I was generally playing the better version of the game.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by nobody

Neo Geo at 1990 650$, so 2 years later tech was advancing the fastest at any time before or since, the A1200 could have the same specs at the price.

The AES was July 1991 outside of rental. But anyway i doubt very much they could have got anywhere near those 2D specs for a lesser cost, heck i never remember the Neo Geo getting a price cut!

But 2D specs wise, even the PS1 and Saturn cant handle the Neo-Geo ports it received without slowdown, and they were released in 1994!

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by nobody

Neo Geo at 1990 650$, so 2 years later tech was advancing the fastest at any time before or since, the A1200 could have the same specs at the price.

I'm very happy that the A1200 doesn't have the same specs. Amigas don't need the limited specs of consoles. Amigas are full blown computers. If you want console specs, buy a console.