Does anybody remember how much the A501 was in 1987?

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

Well, show us your sources and calculations then, and people will be more likely to accept what you're saying.

Who needs sources if you have an opinion the size of Canada?

[ImmortalA1000]

I couldn't find any mags around the time the A501 was released but a few months after the RRP was listed as £115 so it probably was that at launch in the UK. I bought a 1mb side expansion for my A1000 before all this (1.5mb in total RAM when added) and it was a lot more than £115x2 believe me. This sounds about right.

By the time Dungeon Master came out for the Amiga the 520STFM had been forced up to £399.99 from £299.99 due to the DRAM supply problems of spring-summer 1988 and A500 dropped to the same price anyway and Dungeon Master is really the only 1mb game that early on that would sell systems and was also available on the ST (as a 512k game in this case). Turns out it doesn't really matter.

[Megalomaniac]

What would you say were the other early 'killer app' games for the A501, beyond Dungeon Master I can't think of much before 1991 that needed 1Mb (except the Immortal, but that's good rather than great). Indy 500 was improved on 1Mb systems by having the action replays, but my thinking is that it was stuff like Eye of the Beholder and Monkey Island in early 1991 which started to make it essential for 'serious' games, and Alien Breed was pretty much the first big 1 Meg only action game (complete with the infamous mocking laugh if you tried to load it on a 512k machine). Even stuff as late as Zool ran in 512k, so if you only wanted pure action games, it wasn't an essential upgrade until late 1992 (though all new Amigas had come with 1 Meg for nearly 2 years by then)

[Bruce Abbott]

According to Moby Games there were 6 games that needed 1MB released in 1988, 6 in 1989, 45 in 1990, and 68 in 1991.

About Dungeon Master, Wikipedia says:-

The Amiga version was the first prominent game to require 1 MB of RAM, likely causing many to purchase additional memory; at least one manufacturer of Amiga memory bundled Dungeon Master with its memory-expansion kit.

So 1988 would be the year to look at prices. Here's an advert in ST Amiga Format July 1988 for what appears to be a clone of the A501, selling for £89.99 without the real-time clock.

For a kid with no income that's a lot of money. However it wasn't expensive compared to other computer stuff. £90 was the price of 3 good games (eg. Defender of the Crown, Faery Tale Adventure, and King's Quest, which were £29.95 each). Datel's external disk drive cost £115, and a Star LC10 printer was £199.

So what was affordable to kids with no income? A box of 10 reasonable quality blank disks was £20, which was good for up to 10 pirated games. A RAM expansion cost the equivalent of 45-50 disks. In my experience the average Amiga user amassed around 500 pirate game disks over the computer's lifespan (not counting the original system disks that they wiped over with games). That's equivalent to 10-11 RAM expansions.

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

What would you say were the other early 'killer app' games for the A501

XCopy. You couldn't afford an external disk drive as well as a RAM expansion, but that's OK because copying to the same drive is much faster when you have more RAM!

"But XCopy isn't a game!", you say. But it was. It was a very realistic role playing game where you imagined yourself being an elite hacker sticking it to the Man by cracking the protection on his shitty games and distributing them for free to needy users (that's you). You would have bought any game that wasn't total shite if only they sold it for a reasonable price (£2.99 including the disk and packaging).

[ImmortalA1000]

Basically the only time Wikipedia got something right is when they listen to me lol which is why I left them behind decades ago Those founders of the site are so annoying to deal with!

Anyway, I was skipping through some issues of TGM (W H Smiths dropped the Spectrum in stores as early as 1989 lol) and I saw an advert in there for a late 88 or early 89 issue and the A501 was listed as £149.99. A500 was £399.99 inc free A520 so to play Dungeon Master on Amiga would cost £549.98! The ST at that time had either been or was again £299.99.

People forget the disappointment from the Amiga users at the shock news FTL could not make DM a 512k Amiga game. I remember it well because I had an ST and had already got bored with it by the time this news hit but some people were really not happy about it

However, Amiga games coding quality started to generally be more like Shadow of the Beast 1 and less like OutRun on Amiga.

If I find the magazine I will go on archive dot org and grab a screenshot of the advert from the PDF. I am done pissing about with crappy Google Chrome to read magazine PDFs and my research for my ST video is done now anyway, was reading TGM mags to pass the time

PS TGM is a shit magazine, they actually said OutRun Amiga is not too bad etc in the review. I am no coder but I guess they are also a lot thicker than me because just reading the specs in 1985 BYTE preview of Amiga you know OutRun ST, never mind Amiga, is a load of utter bollox coding. It's like saying Stalin and Hitler were 'a bit dodgey' FFS

[Megalomaniac]

Just because the official upgrade cost £150 in late 1988 doens't mean that it wasn't possible to upgrade to 1Meg for les than that, as Bruce's ad showed. Datel's hardware was generally good, so their version probably worked much the same as the A501.

The problem with reviews early in a machine's life is that, just because the machine's specs look good on paper, there's no proof that anyone will develop a rounded, playable game making full use of them. 75% for Amiga Outrun in early 1989 isn't ridiculous when you consider the lack of decent competition at that point, beyond Buggy Boy and Super Hang-On I can't think of any racers from that early which are better. The first Lotus was almost two years away at that time.

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

Just because the official upgrade cost £150 in late 1988 doens't mean that it wasn't possible to upgrade to 1Meg for les than that, as Bruce's ad showed. Datel's hardware was generally good, so their version probably worked much the same as the A501.

The problem with reviews early in a machine's life is that, just because the machine's specs look good on paper, there's no proof that anyone will develop a rounded, playable game making full use of them. 75% for Amiga Outrun in early 1989 isn't ridiculous when you consider the lack of decent competition at that point, beyond Buggy Boy and Super Hang-On I can't think of any racers from that early which are better. The first Lotus was almost two years away at that time.

I wanted to know the official launch price of the A501, which I had assumed was the first of its kind, but as I explained because Dungeon Master took so long to be released for 1mb Amiga vs 512k release for Atari ST it really made no impact to ST sales anyway and was never going to help Atari when their prices met in the middle with a £100 price change on both sides in Spring/Summer 1988.

[kamelito]

150€ from the time, we did a small discount because we bought 2 of them.

[Arne]

Looking in Datormagazin/DMZ 1987 issue 6, page 34, I see:
Amiga 500: 6495 SEK
501 Mem: 1495 SEK

Roughly /10 for modern euro. Tech here was a bit pricier than in the US though.
The rest of the magazine is about C64 stuff so I think this issue introduced the 500 here. I don't think they made or advertised A501-compatibles right away.

When I bought my trapdoor 512K in 1990+, it was not even much of an expense to a kid. Looking in DMZ 1991 issue 1, I see a 501-compatible for 375 SEK, a figure which roughly matches my memory. So, 1/4th of the price.

[Pyromania]

I think I paid around $100 or $120 for mine back in 1988.

[TjLaZer]

I remember them being $150 or more back in late 80's so I got a M.A.S.T. Micromegs for like $110 or so.