Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[sandruzzo]

Aga should have been a Pumped version of ocs/ecs, with blitter and copper powerful enough to do cp2 even without changing chip-set design(planar mode).

Think about having the copper able to load 4 16bit register at once with 64bit burst mode, coupled with 16bit palette....

[squirminator2k]

Compared to other Amigas, I loved the A1200. We had a 500, 600, 2000 already when my dad bought the 1200, and I loved it. Most of my fondest gaming memories with the Amiga are on the 1200, and 4 of my 5 favorite games of all-time are games I first played on the Amiga.

Compared to the competition, though? Eep. With hindsight, it's easy to see Commodore cutting corners to rush things to the market. The AGA chipset was an improvement over earlier Amigas, certainly, but it couldn't compete with what the PC was doing, and by the time the A1200 hit the market home consoles had not-so-quietly overtaken the Amiga already without really trying.

Game devs of the time definitely put the AGA to good use, but they had to get very creative to pull that off - Commodore didn't make developing for the Amiga any easier, and I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that the relative ease of developing for, say, the SNES or the Mega Drive were a big draw for developer shwo had until that point had to grapple with the archaic way the Amiga continued to handle things.

Compared with home console, the A1200 couldn't hold a candle. Compared with PCs, the only place the Amiga was really competitive on a hardware level was audio, and it didn't take long for PCs to catch up there.

The Amiga definitely had its uses - I know a lot of SNES and Mega Drive games were developed in part using Amiga hardware and software - but the A1200 was really kind of it for the Amiga. I love it, I still have one and I adore the games I have, but it was definitely the last hoorah of a dying empire.

[Beastifus]

It may have been mentioned on one of the previous 61 previous pages, but the reason I dislike my A1200 is I can't effing type on it!

I understand what Commodore was trying to with making the keyboard "one set fits all", but it can't. And it sucks. That stupid little blank key next to the Enter and the other one next to the left shift completely makes it useless for typing/programming for me. I can't get used to it, even if I bind the keys to the same commands.

Is that an issue for anyone else that doesn't need those blank keys? I love the A4000 keyboard. It has a nice feel to it--of course a lot like the previous family.

[Arne]

I got my A1200 upon release here. While I don't remember being disappointed, I do remember it being a risky buy and by this time stuff on other platforms were beginning to look impressive. I never actually used AGA much on my machine, aside from having a 256 colour desktop image. Even so the A1200 made my old A500 feel clumsy. I had a HDD and Blizzard 1220/4 so it was a nice machine to work on and no PC offered a similar environment. I used mine up until the mid-late '90s. I didn't play much games compared to other people, and don't even remember having any AGA ones. AMOS didn't do AGA either.

Thinking back, I remember feeling that the A600 was a bit pointless by the time it came out, and that the A500+ upgrades were "boring", but maybe it would've worked to have a faster CPU A500 with nice HDD support and more memory... out at the right time, i.e., basically just increased convenience, whilst retaining well established developer support. Focus on that and hopefully benefit from economy of scale. In hindsight think I could've lived without a major graphics upgrade until 94-95 (perhaps instead investing in memory/HDD/monitor). Graphics were moving so quick mid '90s that it's hard to say what the timing and specs should've been.

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by Arne

Graphics were moving so quick mid '90s that it's hard to say what the timing and specs should've been.

True enough. We got a Pentium 120 at some point around '98 I think and that computer was pretty much outdated in a month. Everything started to snowball so hard, I would actually be really curious to see how a platform like the Amiga would have coped.

[Thorham]

I wasn't disappointed at all. When I upgraded from an A500 to an A1200 with hard disk (63MB!), everything was just better.

[Arne]

Originally Posted by gimbal

... I would actually be really curious to see how a platform like the Amiga would have coped.

I essentially just used my A1200 as a fast ECS machine, which was fine until the mid '90s. I think after that the Amiga could only have survived in spirit, i.e. peak multimedia capabilities, accessible for game/software development with a lively 'PD' community.

I suppose one of the more stable platforms during the mid to late '90s was the Playstation 1, though it was a pure gaming machine. It successfully fielded both hot must-haves: 3D and optical discs, and at an affordable price. It came out in (late) 1994 and survived at least 6 tough years. It very nearly supported 8 or even 16MB work RAM (had 2, +GPU, etc). Sony were also experimenting with 21MB floptical disks at the time. Original NA retail price was $300 but by 2000ish it was $100 (PSone).

As for development, Sony had the Net Yaroze initiative for hobbyists, and while the Playstation was apparently not hard to program for, the dev system was obscure and the process required an external PC. I think Sony's mindset was much more stale and corporate.

If the Playstation had been designed to be expanded/scaled into a full computer, perhaps via keyboard+floptical+memory add-ons, I think it would've been quite engaging to develop for (or rather, on) and it would've sufficed for doing light office/homework and early www browsing, though it would have needed a hires/monitor mode (max was 640x480 interlaced).

[squirminator2k]

Ultimately, the big problem is that PCs, Macs and home consoles were moving forward while the Amiga was still more or less in the same place it was in the 80s. More RAM and a half-finished AGA chipset wasn't really enough, and the CD32 only proved that further.

I love my A1200, I love the games I got to play - and still play - and I loved the creative outlet the Amiga offered through applications like DPaint and Scala (I did a lot of nonsense with Scala as a kid).

But Commodore didn't do enough to keep the Amiga competitive, and I think the A1200 was fairly solid evidence of that.

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by Arne

I suppose one of the more stable platforms during the mid to late '90s was the Playstation 1, though it was a pure gaming machine. It successfully fielded both hot must-haves: 3D and optical discs, and at an affordable price. It came out in (late) 1994 and survived at least 6 tough years. It very nearly supported 8 or even 16MB work RAM (had 2, +GPU, etc). Sony were also experimenting with 21MB floptical disks at the time. Original NA retail price was $300 but by 2000ish it was $100 (PSone).

Indeed and one of it's main selling points is that it was a stable platform, it did not suffer the massive hardware snowballing trainwreck that the PC underwent at the time. Ours lasted 10 years before it was finally retired.

I can only speculate at this point but SAY that Commodore would have come to their senses and put out a faster machine that might have underperformed compared to the PC but would have given a stable platform where the hardware would last you for half a decade at least... maybe it would have had a market. Not as a PC competitor but more like a console/PC hybrid. The work machine with classic Amiga gaming capabilities.

[Cobe]

I jumped from c64 to a1200.
Needless to say I wasnt disappointed.

[Amiga1991]

Originally Posted by PortuguesePilot

A figure like 8MB at the time was prohibitively expensive and would make the A1200 unaffordable and sink for lack of sales. I really hate to say it but 2MB was the right choice at the time, economically speaking. It should have been Fast RAM, though. Chip RAM was a legacy thing that should have been dropped...

As far as I know, Chip RAM was essential for the Amiga- the chipset used it! The problem was that there often wasn't enough left over for the CPU to operate at full potential. Fast RAM was reserved solely for the CPU, which is why it helped so much. That's why RAM was the big problem with the A1200, not the processor. Presuming an '030 was cost effective and you select it instead of an '020, you still need extra RAM. We know for a fact RAM on its own gave a big boost to the A1200's performance; adding an '030 on its own would just be a CPU operating even further below its potential than the '020 was.

It would be interesting if anyone has any idea, though, how much more expensive an '030 chip would have been for Commodore- obviously the accelerator cards were very expensive for consumers, but so were the '020 ones; I think most of that cost comes from the design and production of the boards rather than the chips, one reason why I don't think the idea someone mentioned earlier of including a separate CPU board would have been an improvement. And how much would it have cost to have an '020 clocked at 25Mhz rather than 14Mhz? I would like to know how much Commodore were actually saving.

Regarding expandability, there were plenty of products on offer for consumers, whether from physical shops or mail order- if you wanted CD-ROM drives, HD floppies, scanners etc. it was all there to see in the magazines, and my dad bought our A1200 from a store with fast RAM fitted. But the A500/A600/A1200 were not only smaller-cased machines which were always going to be less easy and cheap to expand than a big box machine, the customers they were aimed at didn't have a load of money to spend on extras, or a reason to want extra RAM or a better CPU. Nor would it have been useful for games developers to have a customer base for a new machine with a wide range of different CPU and RAM specs.

Originally Posted by Cobe

I jumped from c64 to a1200.
Needless to say I wasnt disappointed.

For me, the jump was only from an A500+ so it wasn't as exciting, but my jump to the A500+ had been even bigger. All I had known from friends' houses, at that point, was Speccys and Amstrads. Our own machines had been an Atari 2600 and a Commodore Plus 4 (had quite a bit of fun with both, though I was too young to get much out of them and we got the first Amiga at a good age for me; I was ten).

EDIT: Just found this interesting article from 1990: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/...277-story.html. It says Motorla drastically reduced the price of their CPU chips by 50%; this meant buying 68030s (in lots of 1000) for around $50 a unit rather than almost $100. In those days, that would mean a 68030 costing Commodore about £30 each! It doesn't sound like much, does it. On the other hand, I don't know how much the '020 was, and obviously with every Amiga produced the unit price adds up to an ever greater difference. I also read an article on a Mac history site that said the difference between an '020 and an '030 wasn't very big in general peformance terms, so the performance gain in most everyday tasks might not have been considered worth it. Nevertheless, it seems CPUs weren't as big a part of the overall cost of a computer as I expected, and of course two years later when the A1200 launched the cost would be even lower.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Amiga1991

Presuming an '030 was cost effective and you select it instead of an '020, you still need extra RAM. We know for a fact RAM on its own gave a big boost to the A1200's performance; adding an '030 on its own would just be a CPU operating even further below its potential than the '020 was.

Yes, which would have made FastRAM almost essential to justify the cost, making the machine even more expensive.

how much would it have cost to have an '020 clocked at 25Mhz rather than 14Mhz? I would like to know how much Commodore were actually saving.

Probably a lot. Firstly the lower speed 'economy' CPU was probably a lot cheaper, then interfacing it to the AGA chipset would be easier at 14MHz, and it would run cooler so they could slip it into a spare spot on the motherboard that didn't have enough space for a fan or large heatsink. I bet the CPU itself was almost free compared to the engineering required for a premium processor.

Another advantage was compatibility - the number one issue for most users (especially those who had a large collection of existing software). The faster the CPU the more software would break, and having RAM above 16MB would break it even more. This was another good reason to produce the base unit with ChipRAM only.

Even with no FastRAM the A1200 is still much faster than an A500, and unlike the A500 adding RAM through the trapdoor makes it twice as fast again. This gave the customer a useful improvement over the A500 at a low introductory price, with the option of adding FastRAM for a good performance boost or an accelerator card for 'unlimited' upgrade potential (which is still true today!).

If Commodore had put a faster 020 or 030 CPU on the motherboard they they would have had to include FastRAM on the motherboard too to make it worthwhile. This would use up space that wasn't available unless they gave up the trapdoor slot. The result would be either very limited internal expansion capability, or a different case style to take the larger motherboard. Then if you upgraded to an even faster CPU all that (expensive) stuff would be redundant.

I for one am glad that they went for the all-in-one case style with trapdoor RAM/accelerator slot. It meant that you could have a nice compact unit like the A600 (whose styling I loved) with open-ended expansion limited only by your budget. Who would have thought that within a few short years you would be able put an 060 and/or PPC processor and 128MB of RAM into your lowly A1200? (let alone an FPGA board that could turn it into a completely different machine!).

Regarding expandability, there were plenty of products on offer for consumers, whether from physical shops or mail order- if you wanted CD-ROM drives, HD floppies, scanners etc... the customers they were aimed at didn't have a load of money to spend on extras, or a reason to want extra RAM or a better CPU. Nor would it have been useful for games developers to have a customer base for a new machine with a wide range of different CPU and RAM specs.

This is very true. We already knew from the A1000 and A500 that plenty of products would be produced to provide the upgrades people wanted. It wasn't long before owners were squeezing a 3.5" hard drive into their A1200 and/or bringing out a cable for connecting an external IDE drive - or if that wasn't enough simply popping the motherboard into a tower case. Amiga owners have always been innovative, and enjoy adding things to our machines. To some of us the lack of features in the base unit was a good thing, because it gave us more excuses to do so!

EDIT: Just found this interesting article from 1990: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/...277-story.html. It says Motorla drastically reduced the price of their CPU chips by 50%; this meant buying 68030s (in lots of 1000) for around $50 a unit rather than almost $100. In those days, that would mean a 68030 costing Commodore about £30 each! It doesn't sound like much, does it.

Sounds expensive to me. If Commodore was paying $50 a unit in 1000 up quantities the retail price would be much higher, perhaps around $150-$200 (rule of thumb in hardware design - multiply BOM cost by 2.5 x to break even). Add in all the other stuff needed to support it and the A1200 would have been much more expensive.

[vulture]

Guys, the A1200 was an entry, low cost system. Piling it up with 030s, tons of RAM, extra chips etc, would only make it less appealing in a pc-dominated world. They were right to bring HD and non-HD models, the only realistic thing missing, which probably wouldn't cost all that much, was either an onboard simm slot for fast-ram and/or (even better) some built-in fast-ram, 128k-256k to hold the code and boost the whole speed almost x2.

Having a better blitter and sound chip would also be great, but given the state Commodore was in at the time and their hurry to bring it to the market, honestly, that'd also be unrealistic.

It could be argued that another model, sitting between the A1200 and the A4000 could be made with more bells and whistles, ie 68030, 4mb fast ram and an HD-floppy, but that's a different story.

[Old_Bob]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Probably a lot. Firstly the lower speed 'economy' CPU was probably a lot cheaper, then interfacing it to the AGA chipset would be easier at 14MHz, and it would run cooler so they could slip it into a spare spot on the motherboard that didn't have enough space for a fan or large heatsink. I bet the CPU itself was almost free compared to the engineering required for a premium processor.

There's a small piece I remember coming across in an old Byte (I think) issue on Google books that has the volume pricing for all the Motorola chips. I can't remember which issue, sorry, but the things were pretty much jellybean parts by 1991/2. IIRC, the difference in pricing of the faster 020 models being little more than a few cents. A cooling fan, or even a simple heatsink isn't needed on a chip at that speed, either. This would be a trivial change to the design, IMO.

The real kicker is the Fast RAM, of course. How much would 2mb have added to the A1200's bill of materials at the volumes that C= would have been buying the parts in?

B

[sandruzzo]

If Commodore would have put 020 on the card with as little as 512k of fastram, it would have been a hell of a difference, since It would have allowed Commodore itself, and other sellers, to be able to customize A1200.

Come on, settling some OCS issue, back in the day would not had been so expensive to do

[grond]

Originally Posted by vulture

Guys, the A1200 was an entry, low cost system. Piling it up with 030s, tons of RAM, extra chips etc, would only make it less appealing in a pc-dominated world. They were right to bring HD and non-HD models, the only realistic thing missing, which probably wouldn't cost all that much, was either an onboard simm slot for fast-ram and/or (even better) some built-in fast-ram, 128k-256k to hold the code and boost the whole speed almost x2.
...
It could be argued that another model, sitting between the A1200 and the A4000 could be made with more bells and whistles, ie 68030, 4mb fast ram and an HD-floppy, but that's a different story.

That's why putting the CPU on a CPU card and spending 1-3$ for the required connector would have been a wise idea. Commodore could have offered any configuration from a naked 020 up to 030s+882 with fastmem as the market demanded it and could have slowly shifted from selling mostly 020s to selling more 030s with high clock frequencies without having to change the base model.

In the Escom-years Amigans fantasised about an A1300 all the time (even though almost everybody already had a 1230...). Amiga Technologies could have turned that into a reality without much effort if Commodore had put the CPU on a CPU card right from the start.

When the A1200 was new, 030s were not outdated processors. They weren't at the top of the pile but they were absolutely reasonable CPUs. My PC friends had PCs ranging from a 25 MHz 386sx to a 33 MHz 486 when I had a 50 MHz 030. Of course, then came along the 486DX/2 and then the Pentium which made the 030 look very modest but that was some time after the A1200 was new.

[roondar]

I never knew this at the time, but during the Escom period, apparently many of the A1200's were sold with bundled accelerators directly by Amiga Technologies (during this thread and others on EAB I saw some adds for those combinations). Even the 68040 ones were quite doable, price wise.

So in retrospect, yeah - including a CPU board would've been a very good idea.

[Havie]

On a slightly different tack - I always preferred the shape of the 1200 to the 500. Nice clean lines and just looked more modern in my eyes so definitely was not disappointed with it! Plus upgrades such as hard drives, accelerators, memory all went inside the case so didn't have stuff sprawling across the desk and kept everything nice and neat.

[Mafoo]

I remember being disappointed with the games that came with the Desktop Dynamite package, but spent hours with DPaint IV. When it got towards the end, I remember writing a letter to Commodore/Amiga Tech saying there was plenty of good PD software which could be tapped into to build much better bundles and they should lay off Amiga Power (man, I loved that mag). Jonathan Anderson even rang me about it, lol.

From a hardware perspective, I wasn't disappointed as it was an upgrade from my brother's A500. In retrospect though, it was too little too late from Commodore- but they had form for trying to squeeze too much out of old hardware rather than pushing for further innovation (how long did the C64 get recycled for?)

I upgraded to a Blizzard 1230 MkIV in 1996 and spent so much time using programs like Cinema 4D, OctaMED and anything I could try from coverdisks that I couldn't consider my years with Amigas a disappointment.

I remember 'slim' 3.5" hard drives being advertised, getting myself an 810Mb one.

Got back into Amiga a few years ago, bagged myself an 060 last year just as prices went crazy after having a beauty of a Blizzard 1230 for a while.

[Spriteer]

I was expecting an AAA-Amiga and we got A1200. At first I was kinda ok with A1200 but I was still expecting Commodore to launch those AAA machines. That was the holy grail I was looking for. I thought A1200 and A4000 was just a stopgap before the serious launch to the next level of computing.