Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by coder76

To me, it looks about the same speed. Despite that Amiga version uses a c2p routine, because it doesn't have chunky pixels.

https://amitopia.com/doom-in-action-on-68030-vs-386/

I ran the Doom time demo 3 test on my A1200 with 50MHz 030 and it achieved 20% faster frame rate than the 386DX-40 tested at thandor.net.

BTW Doom Attack is much nicer to play with a mouse than the original Doom with its fixed viewpoint, and looks awesome in composite on a big TV!

[Lord Riton]

Ow is that a long thread !

Sorry i didn't read every comment, so i will just answer to the original post:


When i got my Amiga 500, and i had put that one pinball game in the drive and then i saw and listened to exactly this: [ Show youtube player ]

It was real magic ! I was shocked even ! My commodore 64 definitively just died, but it felt great at the same time

I entered in a new era and dimension of Machines !

When i got my Amiga 1200, i was miles and more miles away from having those feelings i got from having my Amiga 500.

So yes, i was disapointed, but not by that much, because i knew the war vs the PCs was lost already. When i later saw Doom (not that much later) at a friends PC, i immediatly understood the Amiga was history.

[Weasel Fierce]

Originally Posted by Lord Riton

Ow is that a long thread !

Sorry i didn't read every comment, so i will just answer to the original post:


When i got my Amiga 500, and i had put that one pinball game in the drive and then i saw and listened to exactly this: [ Show youtube player ]

It was real magic ! I was shocked even ! My commodore 64 definitively just died, but it felt great at the same time

I entered in a new era and dimension of Machines !

When i got my Amiga 1200, i was miles and more miles away from having those feelings i got from having my Amiga 500.

So yes, i was disapointed, but not by that much, because i knew the war vs the PCs was lost already. When i later saw Doom (not that much later) at a friends PC, i immediatly understood the Amiga was history.

The Amiga was history regardless of Doom. The bankruptcy was in May of 94.

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by Weasel Fierce

The Amiga was history regardless of Doom. The bankruptcy was in May of 94.

Yes but that does not change the perception that LR had at the time, perhaps not even knowing the bankruptcy was coming. I saw Doom for the first time and pretty much immediately forgot everything that came before for a long time. I remember playing it non-stop for a week at a friend's house (on a 386 in a window the size of a mobile phone...). He used up all his savings to get the memory expansion needed to be able to play it.

And that is where I started to pine after a PC myself. And soon got it. But at the same time I remember that I did not want a PC to replace the Amiga, I wanted one additionally. But then the bankruptcy news reached me.

[Weasel Fierce]

Thats fair.
My experience moving to PC was that I still couldn't play any of the good games because our first PC sucked

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Weasel Fierce

My experience moving to PC was that I still couldn't play any of the good games because our first PC sucked

Heh, my dad had a 286 sometime in the 80s with a monochrome display. I tried two games on it and decided that I'm good with my C64

[gimbal]

Still some game devs made it work. Battle Chess and Prince of Persia were still infinitely playable on such a machine.

[ImmortalA1000]

I will simply answer the thread title. Yes and no.

[Cyprian]

Actually I'm an Atari guy (therefore I wasn't disappointed with the A1200 ) but I would see two things in Atari Falcon and the A1200:
- 8bit chunky video mode;
- faster memory bus, because 3,7Mhz Chip Ram in the A1200 and 8Mhz in the Falcon was a bit outdated. Even Atari Jaguar had a faster - 13Mhz memory bus.

[sandruzzo]

I think the biggest regret was about Commodore dropping the ball!

[ImmortalA1000]

Jack Tramiel took the ball with him.

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by Cyprian

Actually I'm an Atari guy (therefore I wasn't disappointed with the A1200 ) but I would see two things in Atari Falcon and the A1200:
- 8bit chunky video mode;
- faster memory bus, because 3,7Mhz Chip Ram in the A1200 and 8Mhz in the Falcon was a bit outdated. Even Atari Jaguar had a faster - 13Mhz memory bus.

Both the Falcon and A1200 had a compromised design due to backwards compatibility requirement. Both were not quite as technically advanced as the competition as their 1985 ancestors were. Both companies were finished within 12 months of each other.

I'm sure there is a lesson to be learnt there

[sandruzzo]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

Jack Tramiel took the ball with him.

Amen!

[oscar_ates]

AGA was created like a kind of Frankenstein monster style, gathering/scavenging parts from 1985 Amiga and not finished AAA chipset. I read from one of the Dave Haynie's interview that the new Amiga villain (coming after notorious Irvin Gould and Ali) Bil Sydnes let engineering to create/finish ECS Amiga 3200/3400 machines (in 1991 still old ECS) and nobody ordered even one unit. He in panic mode rushed the engineers to create AGA to save his a$$. Amiga 1200/CD32/4000 etc not even ran the proper Amiga FPS games in that time without accelerator boards. In 1992, you cannot release a machine with 68020 which is equivalent to 80286 and expect miracles. PC world already sailed from 286 to powerful 486 CPUs at that time.

[Dunny]

Well, I'm still playing around on my 1200 and my old PCs have all been sent to landfill so there's that.

[matt3k]

Didn't own a 1200 until late 90's so it was over by then. But given that it was better in every way than the 500. I would say I would not have been disappointed if I bought one when they first came out.

The 4000 is a total another story. It really sucked compared to the 3000 in so many ways you were going backwards. They really cheaped out on the 4k as many in the club complained back in the day when it was released.

[ImmortalA1000]

I don't think anybody is disputing it's better than the A500 for the same price (well A600 or A500plus around this time specifically)

The real issue is the A500/2000 is no different to A1000 as far as games coding go, ditto with A500plus, ECS A2000 and A600 really. That's Summer 1985 to almost Winter 1992. If you think how much changed in the PC, Mac, £125-150 console world in that time the question is was it too little too late.

I think I said already but really the keyboard was the only thing I didn't like about my launch day A1200, it was waaaaaaaaaaay too similar to the cheap nasty £159.99 520STFM keyboards of 1991/92. It's the same keyboard quality as the Amiga 600 which was really meant to be the £199.99 A300.

Other than that it wasn't actually worse than my £999.99 486 25mhz unbranded cobbled together value PC I bought just 3 weeks before getting an A1200 for £399.99 on launch day in the UK ON BALANCE.

1992 Windows is the Toy Operating system, glitchy juddery crash happy piece of shit in 1992 even on a 25mhz 486 which was launched Summer 1992 onto consumer market. And DOS games needed a Computer Science degree to get the best ones working by editing your Config.sys/Autoexec.bat files to free up enough of the 640kb base RAM for DOS. People forget this shit all the time, they assume you just plop the disks in the drive one by one and install the game and it worked on PC. Bollox, did you have to edit S/Startup-script on your Amiga to make Shadow of the Beast 1 you just bought in the shop work? No you didn't You did have to edit your High Street PC DOS config.sys and autoexec.bat files all the time, if you didn't then the people who made those programs that did that for you (because if you do it wrong your PC won't boot) wouldn't have made a fortune and be constantly reviewed. Before Windows 95 PC didn't have a hope in hell of being a home computer/family computer. But people forget this because they didn't live it like me and watch pricks like Nostalgia Nerd (probably give him money the losers) and think it's all rosey and happy happy joy joy playing PC games in 1992/93. PC CD-ROM DOS games were the absolute worst for this.

I think the issue is nothing under £10,000 could do what an Amiga 1000 could do, by the time of A1200 this wasn't the case (and A500 vs 8 channel 256 colour £699.99 Archimedes of 1987). No 1992 PC could run things like Super Stardust (Pentium 120 min spec) but then an A1200 can never run F1GP like a 486 of 1992.

Dredd with just 1mb Fast RAM (which fixes the crippled 68020 problem of Commodore's 2mb Chip RAM only spec) gives Doom on a 386 a run for it's money and Doom didn't come out until the time of Pentium 90mhz with PC-I graphics etc IIRC.

The A1200 is silent, it is well built and has a quality heavy feel, the OS core is still superior for most things but it was a massive cock-up for C= to lose Text to Speech function.

There is also the slight issue that a 17" SVGA monitor cost as much as a 28" Sony Trinitron CRT TV in 1992 AND there was no TV output on PCs in the time of A1200 or even A500/1000 etc. What's so fantastic about playing Wolfenstein 3D on your 1992 PC with a shitty (and expensive) little 14" SVGA monitor and those SHIT desktop speakers? I'd rather play Fears/Gloom on a stock A1200 on a massive Sony/Panasonic CRT TV myself. YMMV


I did like my A1200, I didn't shed a tear for my 486 PC when I sold it in 1995 after the end of my need for it for my Computer Science degree course really. Yes Mortal Kombat looked better technically on my 1992 486 PC BUT I had to play it on a portable sized 14" SVGA monitor that came with my PC. I could play my Amiga stuff in RGB on my 28 inch Mitsubishi with great speakers (for a TV) in less than 256 colours, and the PC sound was wank. Adlib is by wankers for Wankers and Soundblast 1 is a scratchy piece of shit too.

THAT was the reality of getting a top of the range 486 at any price in the Autumn of 1992 vs a launch day A1200 the same time. So no, back then I was very happy with my A1200 in 1992, I wasn't happy with the pricks in sandals and their shit C coding 'skills' making the AGA games now that Cinemaware had gone bankrupt. All the arcade conversions worth mentioning were still crap/not even made for AGA either. But those are not problems you can fault the machine for, the best coders in the world never worked on the Amiga 1200, it was all the mediocre 'that will do' assholes left over that only an idiot would think was OK. Bit shit when pretty much all the console quality Amiga games on Amiga happen to run just fine on an A500/1000

[nikosidis]

No, not disappointed just happy that it is still alive. Merry Xmas and have a good night

[Karlos]

Trying to remain objective about the A1200 in hindsight is tricky. If I remember Xmas 1993, I had absolutely zero regret or sense of disappointment. It was an awesome upgrade over the 600 I'd had. The 600 was my first Amiga, but the 1200 allowed me to do so much more. I didn't even own a PC until the early naughties and didn't purpose build one for myself until end 2007.

All that time the A1200 was my main machine, upgraded by then to BlizzPPC/BVPPC and all the RAM I could shove in it.

[Cyprian]

Originally Posted by Ras Voja

Yes, gives us TT hi res mode, full 32 bit bus, Falcon DSP and std MIDI port in A1400 and it would save the day. Too bad Atari did not make a FreeMINT system out of it

actually they did - the heart of the MultiTOS (the OS released with the Falcon) is the MiNT kernel