23 March 2021, 17:06 | #381 |
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Regarding piracy, I remember back in 1989 to 1992 in a well known street in central Athens full of computer stores, there were 4 or 5 of them selling pirated games. They had dozens of catalogs to choose from. You wanted one and in minutes you had it. The xcopy monitors were in plain sight with no thought that this was illegal. They even had banners at some point about piracy and how it was wrong. What a joke. Although young I knew, from the beginning that it was wrong. However I bought many as I could not afford new ones. And then at home I used to remove or alter the pirates intros with my own messages or music and distribute them to my friends... oh I miss those days... not because of piracy ofcourse.
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23 March 2021, 18:30 | #382 | |||
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Oh yes they did!
Philips Computers Quote:
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Commodore had some misses too, but they also had some roaring successes. IMHO the Amiga was one of them (when compared to what Philips et al. produced). |
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24 March 2021, 10:00 | #383 | |
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So I DID know Philips computer hardware, I just forgot about it. Well, it was the very early 1980s! So you're right, I was wrong. But Commodore's mistakes still really irk me. Like the A600 felt crap to me, yet the later A1200 was a refined version and sorted all the problems the A600 introduced. |
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24 March 2021, 10:21 | #384 |
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There were also various computers available from Signetics (which was part of Philips at the time) such as the Instructor 50 and the Adaptable Board Computer.
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24 March 2021, 19:08 | #385 | |
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The A600 lost the numeric keypad, which didn't worry me because I never use it. Some people got upset about that because a few games needed it - but was that really such a big deal? On the plus side you got internal IDE, and a PCMCIA slot which had lots of potential. The angled keyboard and floppy drive were more ergonomic, and the white case with silver logo looked much nicer. Theoretically the A600 couldn't be accelerated because it had no expansion slot and the CPU was soldered in, but a way around that was soon found. I put a Viper 630 with 33MHz 030 and 4MB FastRAM into mine. I don't think the A600 was a mistake, not in the way that many of their other machines were - eg. the C128, Plus 4 - even the C64 was pretty messed up in comparison. |
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24 March 2021, 22:05 | #386 |
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25 March 2021, 09:37 | #387 |
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The market and most Amiga-users certainly disagreed. PCMCIA was superfluous at the time as there were hardly any expansions available for it and they cost so much that you would have been better off with a big box Amiga (a PCMCIA ethernet adapter cost half of what the A600 cost new).
A 7 MHz 68000 was already a bad joke at that time and accelerators that plug onto the 68000 CPU are certainly a kludge. The A600 was small in a time when computers in big bulky tower cases became fashionable. Needlessly small. The small form factor made it necessary to use 2.5" harddisk which where more expensive than 3.5" hdds by factors in a time when harddisks in general were expensive add-ons. The A600 certainly didn't help making hdds a standard in the Amiga world which was becoming a problem with only DD floppy disks and software distributing on 10+ disks. CD-drives and CDs as a distribution medium do not make much sense if users haven't even got hdds. Now if Commodore had turned the A500+ into an 020/32bit chipmem ECS machine with room for a 3.5" hdd (basically an ECS A1200 without PCMCIA but with more hdd space), I would consider this a good update and the ideal keyboard computer companion to the A3000. Just to be clear, from today's perspective the PCMCIA port in the two Amigas is very useful and I consider its presence as some sort of lucky coincidence. Commodore was again trying to sell a very basic hardware package by making it connectable to things other companies would sell to the A600 owner and not by putting more relevant stuff into the box and thus selling more themselves. |
25 March 2021, 10:31 | #388 |
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You mean the circuit boards that look like they have a square socket, and it plugs over the top of the existing CPU on the motherboard? Yeah, I always thought those things were poorly thought out, and they certainly look insecure, nor lock in place, and look like they could pop off the CPU at any moment.
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25 March 2021, 10:41 | #389 |
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The A600 shouldn't have been released at all. Instead they should've milked the A500 Plus another 6-12 months until the release of the A1200.
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25 March 2021, 12:11 | #390 | |
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25 March 2021, 12:17 | #391 |
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25 March 2021, 12:29 | #392 |
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25 March 2021, 12:45 | #393 |
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26 March 2021, 10:47 | #394 | ||||||||
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Within a few years PCMCIA cards became more popular and cheaper, validating Commodore's choice. The CNet CN40BC which I developed the first Amiga network card driver for was much cheaper than any 'big box' Amiga network card. Quote:
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But most A500 owners didn't have hard drives so few games made use of it. The vast majority of games were only 1 or 2 disks. Those that did come on a lot of disks were generally ported (badly) from the PC. I don't recall any games coming on 10 disks that would work on a A500 or A600 anyway. Quote:
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The only problem with the A600 was all those rumors of a AAA chipset etc. bouncing around that primed Amiga fans to expect something more, then they were disappointed by what actually came out. Perhaps if Commodore had explained that this was just the first of new line and hinted at the A4000 etc. - rather than leaving them thinking this was best we were going to get - they might have understood. |
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26 March 2021, 11:21 | #395 |
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The custom chipset, graphics, sound, blitter, and all, were unnecessary hindrances to upgrading the Amiga. They might work magic, but you couldn't teach them new tricks. Significant gains in performance would require complete redesigns of not just the processor, but of those specialized chips. And that'd be costly in terms of time and effort. Something Commodore wasn't able or prepared to do.
Some may claim the PC eventually shrunk down to 2 or 3 custom chips supporting a custom Intel x86 CPU. Except there was nothing custom about that. Those few chips were simply consolidations of many 10s or 100s of chips. And datasheets were readily available. They were so prevalent so as not to be custom, but industry standard parts. Same for the CPU. Intel published all sorts documentation and programming tools and references. Intel even had produced their own support chips in huge quantity and everything, again, was readily available. Little or no secrets. The PC's extreme modularity compared to a rather "fixed" Amiga was a huge advantage. If ever there were technical innovations in the PC was it. The PC not only allowed for piecemeal upgrade, thus spreading the cost out over time, it did the same with standards. All PCs had a certain level of graphics at a given time, Hercules, CGA, EGA, VGA, SVGA and more. The more money you put into it, the higher up the scale you could go. And software would allow you to pick your modes (within practical reason). I couldn't afford Targa graphics, but I could manage VGA and SVGA. So I got that. And all the earlier modes came with it. And software that would run on a 386 with EGA would also run on a 486 with VGA. Mostly. It was nice to have an upgrade path. And 486s gained an 8087 compatible co-processor on-chip. Another nice advance. Despite all the hundreds of thousands of hardware combinations there were many standards that allowed software and data interchange. If I had a PC I could exchange data and programs with any other PC as long as the specs were similar. And the standards evolved nicely, building upon previous iterations. This is extremely important for business as they migrate to more advanced hardware. |
26 March 2021, 12:04 | #396 |
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Thank god Commodore did not make any more Amigas to make more confusion. Think if they made some other sound chip or if there where more than ECS and AGA. God forbid. Commodore did all things right and now we have this beautiful retro platform. God bless.
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26 March 2021, 12:19 | #397 | ||
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By 1993, HD should have been mandatory for every Amiga hardware and software, at least the AGA ones. I really think that this logic to keeping the lowest common denominator and never expand is one of the thing that doomed the Amiga. Even in 2021 making an HD only game isn't generally an option for most of the (brave) developpers of Amiga games. That said, I loved the design of the A600 back in these days and even today. But it was clearly another big mistake from Commodore (and even in 1992 it was considered a mistake). |
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26 March 2021, 14:23 | #398 | ||||||||||||
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I mean, really, technology from 1985 that by 1992 had become old and most of the potential market already owned in the form of an A500 but now squeezed into a form factor that only allowed connecting laptop peripherals and hence the most expensive stuff on the market? And then expect it to sell just because of the ability to connect some rare and extremely expensive peripherals? What were they thinking? It's not like they were selling the newest iPhone and fanboys would be camping outside their shops to get it. Quote:
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They could have put a relevant upgrade over the A500 into a reasonably sized case and sold it at that price but low tech, expensive peripherals and no upgrade over what they had been selling for years? Anyone could see it wasn't going to work. Quote:
Last edited by grond; 26 March 2021 at 14:38. |
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27 March 2021, 01:53 | #399 |
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Ever since the PC came out all kinds of desirable software was being written for it. Practical software that solved real world problems.
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27 March 2021, 03:41 | #400 | |||||
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Its funny how Amiga fans were always complaining about how Commodore didn't give the Amiga stuff that PC's had, then when they did they got howled down for that too! Perhaps they should have just stuck to making PC clones and never let the Amiga see the light of day, then you would all be happy? Quote:
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