Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

I really think you should let people enjoy their memories without telling them how shit in your expert eyes they are.

"Enjoying the memories" is a lovely concept and certainly it'd be bad manners if somebody truly tried to spoil such a harmless and pleasant activity.

The problem is though, this thread is mostly anything but "enjoying the memories" and instead is all about trying to present an alternative-reality version of history in which amigarulez/pcsuxx - by any means necessary.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by hammer

For lower cost strong 2D 16-bit gaming, SNES says hi.

SNES is not a computer. Why would I want one?

PC's 2D Mortal Kombat 1993 port is an SNES beater while the Amiga version is stuck in Amiga OCS/ECS since the AGA install base is tiny.

Not one of my preferred genres, but it looks pretty good in videos I watched.

[ Show youtube player ]

The Amiga version was based on the Mega Drive version (same development team).

Some comments:

Man this version was so good. My friends and I had amongst us this version, the Genesis version, and the SNES version. The Genesis version was great. We thought the Amiga version felt ever-so-slightly better, but just barely, so the Genesis was really our favorite for having more buttons. The SNES version.. hmm.. hard to explain. We all thought it felt like some different fight game that just happened to have MK's graphics pasted on top. Like the people who converted it never played the arcade, only watched video of people playing. It just didn't play well.

This game (DOS CD Version) recently become available on gog.com. And that version pretty much arcade perfect. I bought it as soon as I noticed. But as a comment says below, Amiga version has best musics imo.

It wasn't an AGA game, but so what? That was a good thing IMO because it meant owners of older Amigas could play it too. AGA wouldn't have added anything to the Mega Drive assets (Mega Drive only got 32 colors).

In December 1993 CU Amiga gave it an overall score of 93%, with 95% for playability (the most important part).

Nintendo started to build SNES's install base in 1990, hence SNES arrived in Amiga's core European markets during Q4 1992, SNES is well positioned with a larger worldwide install base against ground zero AGA install base's Q4 1992 release.

Again, the SNES wasn't a computer. You were stuck with buying expensive cartridge games approved by Nintendo. The result was a lack of diversity and less interesting games.

Install base matters for 3rd party game studios' when they target platforms with maximize revenue.

For sure, but while maximizing revenue is good for the company it isn't necessarily good for users. If the Amiga had just been a games console like the NES I would have had zero interest in it no matter how much money they made out of it, and I bet that applies to most of us here.

16 bit Amigas were the "Atari ST" against Amiga AGA.

AGA had everything 16 bit Amigas had but with the option of more colors, bigger sprites, and higher bandwidth to make it faster at higher resolutions. It was evolutionary not revolutionary - which was a good thing IMO. The ST sucked in comparison to both OCS and AGA, but in the right hands OCS could look almost as good as AGA. Again, this was a good thing. It meant you could play OCS games on the A1200 without feeling stupid (unlike eg. playing CGA games on a powerful PC).

Apple delivered $999 USD Quadra 605/ LC 475 / Performa 475 with 68LC040 @ 25 Mhz.

I never saw that deal here, perhaps because most Macs were stupidly expensive and you could only buy them from a small number of authorized resellers (which a friend of mine happened to be). Other factors include that they only ran it for one year, and you had to buy the dedicated (NOT cheap) Mac monitor to use it. Even though the main unit itself was 'cheap' you would be paying through the nose for extra stuff for it, and the Mac wasn't a great platform for gamers or hobbyists.

There's a major reason why low-cost Raspberry Pi, Acorn's BBC Micro, ZX Spectrum platforms will not originate from Germany.

The BBC micro wasn't cheap. The ZX Spectrum was 'cheap' but not that great (except in comparison to the ZX81, which was really bad. I have fond memories of both, but I am also a realist. Compared to the Amiga the ZX Spectrum is a joke).

Raspberry Pi is from a different era. The broadsom SoC it uses was designed in the US, and the Pi is basically just that chip with a few other components and connectors on a small PCB. Practically no design effort required, and the OS is just Linux - nothing innovative. The only remarkable thing is how they promised a very low price but were constantly out of stock, then raised the price so it's not such a bargain now.

For A1200, Commodore selected an inferior dollar per MB laptop HDD solution.

I love 2.5" hard drives, and hate the much larger, noisier, more power hungry and less reliable 3.5" drives. Capacity never bothered me much. In 1989 I bought a second-hand 20MB MFM drive for my A1000 and it was plenty.

386DX-33's front-side bus is substantially faster than 1985 386's 12 Mhz 32-bit front-side bus.

The official speed of the ISA bus is 8MHz (6MHz in the original PC-AT). This limits the performance of any plug-in card, and DMA to them or onboard peripherals. This is the PC equivalent of AGA's 7MHz ChipRAM interface.

My i386DX-33's Q4 1992 motherboard supported Am386DX-40.

Wow, that's amazing!

Now tell us about which 386SX boards supported a 386DX CPU.

There's an extra margin when CPUs and GPUs are sold at a certain clock speed at retail.

Yeah, there's a margin between how fast the chip can actually go and its rated speed - but how big is it? You don't know. Over temperature and voltage variations it may be nothing, or even worse after the chips age and motherboard caps dry out (a malady that almost all PCs eventually suffer from).

Current PC's GPU and CPU vendors exploit this margin. AMD's embedded and laptop APUs have lower clock speeds when compared to desktop APU counterparts.

And they need to, because modern chips are pushed well beyond their power limit. Without constantly monitoring core temperatures and automatically throttling back they would burn up in seconds, despite having enormous actively cooled heatsinks.

I hate it. I hate the enormous power consumption. I hate how my Dell desktop PC sounds like a freight train when the load goes on and it speeds its enormous fan up. I hate how the case vibrates too. I hate the way my Windows 10 laptop pulses the fan in 10 second intervals, and pushes piping hot air out the side. I hate how the fans suck dust into the computer and clog up the floppy drive and heatsink fins (gave up trying to figure out how to dismantle my HP laptop to clean it and oil the fan bearings).

My A1200 is virtually silent and doesn't vibrate or get dirty inside.

Zorro III has about 12.5 MB/s bandwidth.

On the A3000 and A4000. Theoretical speed is much higher, but 12.5 MB/s is fast enough for most things.

Commodore didn't offer AGA motherboard upgrades for big box A3000s or A2000s.

Commodore didn't need to. If you wanted AGA you could just buy an A1200, like I did. If you wanted better graphics in your A3000 or A2000 you bought a graphics card, like I did.

Amiga's game console nature doesn't work for big-box desktop computers.

Sure it does. The true bitmap graphics, blitter and copper do a fine job of rendering GUI graphics - much better than a gaming console such as the Sega Megadrive. The hardware mouse pointer was also much better than the PC's flickery software sprite and jerky serial port communications, and the awesome draggable custom screens were never duplicated on the PC. HAM mode displayed photographic images without sucking up memory and disk space / CPU cycles like 24 bit PC displays did.

There are no "laws of physics" with profit margin expectations.

In a competitive market margins approach zero. This is a law of economics, which itself is based on physics (economics being 'the study of scarcity and its implications for the use of resources, production of goods and services, growth of production and welfare over time').

Your argument departed from Amiga 500's original mission i.e. power without the price.

The A1200 continued that principle.

A1200's Phase 5 PowerPC603e +Premedia 2 mini-addon card 1998 era upgrades weren't cost vs performance competitive against the new build Celeron 300A PC.

Which is why the vast majority of Amiga owners didn't buy that stuff. It was pointless when Amiga software didn't need it.

PiStorm32 Lite+RPi 4B entered into AM4 B550's cost range.

The record speaks for themselves.

And it's saying "Gee, what a difference 30 years makes!". The fact that you can put a PiStorm into your A1200 and get undreamt of performance for a few hundred bucks speak volumes about how expandable it is. All props to Commodore for doing that rather than giving us something that would soon become a dead end (386SX motherboard).

Software sells the hardware. My current gaming PCs have tons of compute-shaded 3D games and the "can of whoop-ass" Blender 3D raytracing with RTX 4090.

For sure. In 1987 Sculpt 3D was selling Amigas too. Before long there was an explosion of 3D rendering programs and utilities to go with them, and 2D art programs like the world famous Deluxe Paint, Art Department Professional etc. These apps thrived on the Amiga because every Amiga could run them from 1985 on.

I used my RTX GPUs for OpenAI-related software for mass voice lecture transcription contract work (with two RTX 3080 Ti factory OC models) and removed vocals from existing music for the "minus 1" use case.

How nice for you. And this has what do with the A1200, a home hobbyist's computer that we play with for fun? They say all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Your mass voice lecture transcription contract work sounds pretty boring to me. Your constant carping about how PCs are (supposedly) so much better in every way is even more boring.

Stock A1200 wouldn't make my team's workload to be lessened and increase productivity.

I dunno. Maybe if they had some fun every now and then their productivity might increase.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

this thread is mostly anything but "enjoying the memories" and instead is all about trying to present an alternative-reality version of history in which amigarulez/pcsuxx - by any means necessary.

This thread is titled 'Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?', which invites people to talk about how it did or didn't meet their expectations. Nothing about Amiga vs PC.

It would be great if we could keep it that way, but the trolls always butt in to tell us how the PC rulz / Amiga sucks - and then we have to defend our choice. This only seems to affect the Amiga. They don't barge into other retro computer forums to tell us how much better the PC was than a C64 or Amstrad CPC.

It's gotten so bad that we even have someone 'hammering' on about RTX GPUs running OpenAI software in 2024, as if not being able to match the performance of hardware that wouldn't exist for another 30 years was a factor in their supposed disappointment with the A1200.

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

"Enjoying the memories" is a lovely concept and certainly it'd be bad manners if somebody truly tried to spoil such a harmless and pleasant activity.

The problem is though, this thread is mostly anything but "enjoying the memories" and instead is all about trying to present an alternative-reality version of history in which amigarulez/pcsuxx - by any means necessary.

It's hard for me to believe there is any argument pro/contra left after 3300 posts about the subject.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

It would be great if we could keep it that way, but the trolls always butt in to tell us how the PC rulz / Amiga sucks - and then we have to defend our choice.

No you don't. You just have to accept that people have different opinions. Seems to be a concept too hard to grasp for some.

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

It's gotten so bad that we even have someone 'hammering' on about RTX GPUs running OpenAI software in 2024

Dude, that's Hammer for you.
He has been writing autistic tech posts that usually have nothing to do with thread subjects since I have been on Amiga forums.

Just don't answer.

[Cris1997XX]

Can you guys drop this goddamn argument already? Both the PC and the Amiga are shit, the end.

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by Tigerskunk

Dude, that's Hammer for you.
He has been writing autistic tech posts that usually have nothing to do with thread subjects since I have been on Amiga forums.

Just don't answer.

There's no denying that hammer's posting style, syntax, wild tangents, and occasional badmouth outbursts can be facepalm inducing, but if you can look past that the general gist of his arguments isn't actually that bad - and certainly not worse than what some of the resident Amiga cultists are regularly proclaiming here.

[sokolovic]

We're in the english Amiga board here, not a general computer tech forum.
You're supposed to encounters some Amiga enthousiasts or even cultist (the last Amiga model was commercialized 32 years ago.. We are all cultist in our kind of way from just coming and post here... ) especially when your all point is coming here in order to say how inferior and bad the Amiga is.

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

There's no denying that hammer's posting style, syntax, wild tangents, and occasional badmouth outbursts can be facepalm inducing, but if you can look past that the general gist of his arguments isn't actually that bad - and certainly not worse than what some of the resident Amiga cultists are regularly proclaiming here.

Don't know man.
To me it usually it just seems like some tech gibberish that's 95% completely not related to anything what's going on in the thread.

I have stopped answering to him 15 years ago, because it's like talking to a brick.

But you do you.

[paul1981]

Originally Posted by Gilbert

Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

Most Amiga users and magazines seemed to be very happy with the A1200 when it came out. I wasn't at all, and a look at the first games pretty much ended my association with Amiga gaming. I just saw the same games with more colours and a bit smoother. There was no wow factor. After that I stuck with the Amiga 500 (with half meg memory expansion) and my Super Famicom (Jap SNES).

Well, you're well within your rights to feel this way, and I'd probably agree that the A1200 wasn't a huge leap forward in this regard, but the A1200 is not a games console, and as a computer was quite the improvement over the A500.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I hate how my Dell desktop PC sounds like a freight train when the load goes on and it speeds its enormous fan up. I hate how the case vibrates too.

Sounds like inadequate cooling and/or old fans.

[oscar_ates]

I am on the other side of the opinion of Bruce and we are saying that commodore did everything wrong after A500 and it was the inept management of Irvin and Ali. A 1200 and CD32 did not save the day and they were too little too late, underpowered. That’s why pcs took off. But zealots side want to hear only one sided opinions here apparently like nothing happened and commodore was bankrupt out of the blue.

[CCCP alert]

Originally Posted by oscar_ates

I am on the other side of the opinion of Bruce and we are saying that commodore did everything wrong after A500 and it was the inept management of Irvin and Ali. A 1200 and CD32 did not save the day and they were too little too late, underpowered. That’s why pcs took off. But zealots side want to hear only one sided opinions here apparently like nothing happened and commodore was bankrupt out of the blue.

Which is contrary to the fact you needed a Pentium 120mhz PC to play Super Stardust at 50/60hz like a £400 A1200.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

SNES is not a computer. Why would I want one?

1. A500's majority use case is games.

The mid-priced gaming PC platform delivered "new 32-bit 2.5D/3D gaming experiences" that are above SNES's late "16-bit" 2D capabilities.

Like many others, my main selection criteria for gaming PC over PowerMac are games. Software sells the hardware.

In general, A500 couldn't get involved with A2000's Video Toaster niche anchor.

From 1987 to 1990, Commodore didn't deliver a single Zorro II slot equipped with Amiga SKU that slots between A500 and A1500/A2000. This SKU would have improved Zorro II addon card market's economics of scale.

For the UK 1993 market:

http://www.sunnyside.homelinux.org/s...uary_1993.html
386DX-40 without SVGA monitor is £500
386DX-40 with SVGA monitor is £770

486SX-25 without SVGA monitor is £555
486SX-25 with SVGA monitor is £825

All systems have 42 MB HDD, 1.44 MB FDD, 1 MB RAM, 102 KeyB, 2 serial, 1 parallel, 1 game port, and IDE controller.

£25 UKP per 1 MB increase. £100 for 4 MB RAM.


According to Amiga Format Issue 052, Nov 1993, page 2,
A1200/020 at 14Mhz with 2MB RAM has £295
A4000/030 at 25Mhz with 80MB HDD + 2MB RAM has £979
A4000/030 at 25Mhz with 80MB HDD + 4MB RAM has £1129
A4000/040 at 25Mhz with 120MB HDD + 6MB RAM has £2329

M1230XA with 68030 at 50Mhz and 4MB RAM is £499
Total price:
£1038 for 60 MB HDD
£1,178 for 120 MB HDD

VS

PC Format Nov 1993, page 120 of 166.
486SX25 with 4MB RAM + Cirrus Logic SVGA 1MB + 130MB HDD reached £999.

486DX33 with 4MB RAM + Cirrus Logic SVGA 1MB + 130MB HDD reached £1249.

In 1993, "writing is on the wall" for Commodore's uncompetitive Amiga offerings in the £599 to £1500 range.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Not one of my preferred genres, but it looks pretty good in videos I watched.

[ Show youtube player ]

The Amiga version was based on the Mega Drive version (same development team).

The superior Mega Drive version [ Show youtube player ]

The simple AGA version could have delivered an extra parallax background with four tiled 64-bit wide sprites backgrounds with 16 colors.

Refer to the Lion King AGA example.

If A1200 has a strong enough CPU with 32-bit Fast RAM, a PC VGA port could be possible.

[ Show youtube player ]
PC's Mortal Kombat 2 on 386DX example

[ Show youtube player ]
PC's Mortal Kombat on TX 486DLC-386 hybrid. This Youtube video has 386DX-40 vs 386DX hybrids TX 486DLC-40 and CX 486DX-40

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Some comments:

It wasn't an AGA game, but so what? That was a good thing IMO because it meant owners of older Amigas could play it too. AGA wouldn't have added anything to the Mega Drive assets (Mega Drive only got 32 colors).

Again, the simple AGA version could have delivered an extra parallax background e.g. four tiled 64-bit wide sprites for a background layer with 16 colors.

Refer to the Lion King AGA example.

[ Show youtube player ]
Mega Drive version shows greater than 32 colors e.g. 39, 42, 45, 46, 50,

AGA's 7-bitplane (128 colors) mode could have covered the SNES version.

AGA's 6-bitplane (64 colors) mode could have covered Mega Drive's 50-color version.

You're wrong with "AGA wouldn't have added anything to the Mega Drive assets (Mega Drive only got 32 colors)" assertion.

Amiga's AGA install base build-up was late while SNES's install base build-up started from 1990.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

In December 1993 CU Amiga gave it an overall score of 93%, with 95% for playability (the most important part).

The Amiga platform is not isolated from other platforms.

Mega Drive install base = 30 million
SNES install base = 60 million.
AGA install base = less than 1 million

The results speak for themselves.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Again, the SNES wasn't a computer. You were stuck with buying expensive cartridge games approved by Nintendo. The result was a lack of diversity and less interesting games.

Again, software sells the hardware. Exclusive games sold Nintendo platforms.

The mid-priced gaming PC platform delivered "new 32-bit 2.5D/3D gaming experiences" that are above SNES's late "16-bit" 2D capabilities.

A500's original value proposition was "power without the price".

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

For sure, but while maximizing revenue is good for the company it isn't necessarily good for users. If the Amiga had just been a games console like the NES I would have had zero interest in it no matter how much money they made out of it, and I bet that applies to most of us here.

Amiga vs other platforms, the record speaks for themselves.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

AGA had everything 16 bit Amigas had but with the option of more colors, bigger sprites, and higher bandwidth to make it faster at higher resolutions. It was evolutionary not revolutionary - which was a good thing IMO. The ST sucked in comparison to both OCS and AGA, but in the right hands OCS could look almost as good as AGA. Again, this was a good thing. It meant you could play OCS games on the A1200 without feeling stupid (unlike eg. playing CGA games on a powerful PC).

AGA's 8 hardware spites engines' color capability are the same as OCS/ECS's.

The difference is the sprite width which is 4X larger i.e. AGA's 64 bit pixels wide sprites.

Other platform such as 3DO and Sega Saturn evolved their sprite engines to handle texture distortion features. Both 3DO and Sega Saturn has textured quadrilateral 3D system.

AGA install base = less than 1 million.

3DO install base = more than 2 million. The key original Amiga team leadership team beaten Commodore.

3DO's Doom results weren't good for multi-platform comparisons since 12.5 Mhz ARM60 CPU has about 12.5 MIPS. PCMR (PC Master Race) mocked it.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by hammer

For the UK 1993 market:

http://www.sunnyside.homelinux.org/s...uary_1993.html
386DX-40 without SVGA monitor is £500

With 1MB RAM, no mouse, no sound card and no operating system. VGA card brand and model are not specified, so we can bet it's a cheap nasty one - not an ET4000AX that's for sure. But hey, at least it has 'a' VGA card, right? That 42 MB hard drive's gonna fill up fast too. The OS alone will use up close to 20MB, and since all your games and apps need to be installed on it...

Add £170 for a generic 14" interlaced SVGA monitor (because you can't use your TV or 1084 monitor from the old A500), £25 for another 1MB RAM, £20 for a crappy serial mouse, £100 for MSDOS 5 and Windows 3.1, and £119 for an 8 bit sound card and speakers.

That comes to a total of £934 + VAT = £1092.78, for the cheapest crappiest 386DX-40 you can buy. Oh, and better add a good amount for freight too. That case, keyboard and monitor are bulky and heavy!

And after all that, not only will it not run Doom, it won't run your favorite Amiga stuff either!

According to Amiga Format Issue 052, Nov 1993, page 2,
A1200/020 at 14Mhz with 2MB RAM has £295

Well there you go, £295 vs £1100+. One of these might be within the budget of a low paid worker, the other not. In 1993 £1100 was a serious amount of money (equivalent to £2200 or NZ$4400 today).

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by oscar_ates

I am on the other side of the opinion of Bruce and we are saying that commodore did everything wrong after A500 and it was the inept management of Irvin and Ali. A 1200 and CD32 did not save the day and they were too little too late, underpowered. That’s why pcs took off.

Nonsense. PCs were taking off regardless.

Inept management sure. What Commodore should have done was:-

1. Not purchase the Amiga.

2. Not produce the TED series or C128.

3. Push the C64 and PC clones until 1990, then...

4. Sell off the business to some sucker while it still looked good on paper.

5. Enjoy early retirement in the Bahamas.

[sokolovic]

£295 for a working computer out of the box seems indeed a very good price. There was no equivalent in the PC market at this price range as proven unpurposely by Hammer.

The 386sx25 is £380 with a 42Mb HD but you have 1Mb ram, no sounds card, no OS, no mouse, no speakers, no monitor.
Doesn't seems a bargain to me when compared to the A1200 at that time.

[PortuguesePilot]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

£295 for a working computer out of the box seems indeed a very good price. There was no equivalent in the PC market at this price range as proven unpurposely by Hammer.

Indeed. And it was quite competitive with the PC all the way through. In the early days (1987 to 1990) the Amiga kicked the nuts of basically EVERY home PC in terms of gaming, even the 100,000€ VGA+386 ones that no-one had (people had IBM 5150 or similar clones. 5160 or similar at best). Go and check PC games of that period and specs and see for yourself the difference between the Amiga and the PC in terms of gaming (not only graphics, but also sound and fluidity).


Only after 1993/4 did the PC catch up and eventually surpassed the Amiga in terms of gaming. These are verifiable facts and not mere opinion.


But guys like Hammer always existed. They were few in number in 1989 but a lot more numerous by 1994. They don't behave like us. I think they never had anything else than PCs. They never had an 8-bit Spectrum or C64, they never had a 16-bit Amiga or ST. They never owned a console... They only ever had PCs. This shaped the way they view computing. For them, the numbers are what matters. It's the ONLY thing that matters. It's ALL that matters. The numbers. Their puny 8088 processors were 16-bit when most computers and consoles of the time were 8-bit. Aha! PCs have 8 more bits than everyone. It doesn't matter that the games suck on it, all that matters is that it has double the bits! The common PC of the time had 640KB of RAM. AHA! Most other computers have 48, 64 or tops 128KB! Let's not even talk about consoles that have 4KB or 8KB at best! The PC got them beat! It has waaaaay more KBs! Waaay more KBs! It doesn't matter that we play Bouncing Babies or Alley Cat, all that matters is that PC is MOAR POWAFUL!

Then came 1985/7 and the ST and Amiga joined the party. Suddenly other computers were 16-bit as well. Suddenly they had 256KB and quickly 512KB RAM. Suddenly they had strong, vibrant colours that made CGA and even EGA cower in the corner. Suddenly they produced sounds that weren't just beeps or bops. Oooops! What's this? Couold these computers be BETTER than the all-mighty PC? Clearly they were much better at gaming, especially that Amiga thing with its odious blitter that makes everything seems as fluid as a stream of water, but as we all know games don't count. Lets see what really counts: the NUMBERS! By 1991 several people already ditched their XT clones and had 386 processors and VGA cards and some times 1MB or even 2MB of RAM so yeah, our processors are 32-bit while you peasantry are still clinging to your 16-bit machines! VGA is capable of 256 colours on-screen while you sorrow-asses are still pulling 32, 64 or 128 at best. AHAH! PC wins again! Look at our RAM numers! Wanna compare? And we have HDDs while you still only use low-density floppies! HAHAHA! What does it matter that our games run slower than a slug or more jittery than a wild cat? Sound? Music? Who the heck needs that? We have double the bits, double the colours and double the RAM. PC rulez!

You get the picture.

In psychology we informally refer to these individuals as suffering from the "little dick syndrome". They need to overcompensate their perceived flaws with numbers. "Yeah, I have a small dick but I make 7 figures a year." or "yeah, I may be only 1,60m tall but I drive a Porsche 911" kind of guy. The PC übermensch of those days were this sort of guy. I always get reminded of them every time I read Hammer's post. It's kind of amusing, TBH.

[oscar_ates]

Originally Posted by CCCP alert

Which is contrary to the fact you needed a Pentium 120mhz PC to play Super Stardust at 50/60hz like a £400 A1200.

I would suggest to read the arstechnica's commodore history series instead of trying to re-write the history. Especially the part 10:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/...-of-commodore/

"But a little shareware game came out in 1993 that made every single side-scrolling arcade game seem obsolete overnight. It was DOOM, and it used all 256 colors in VGA’s chunky modes (including a new undocumented 320x240x256 mode) to create a simulation of a 3D world. It wasn’t full 3D, of course, but it was a quantum leap for gamers. Games like DOOM used powerful 386 and 486 CPUs to make up for the lack of graphical acceleration"