Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[hammer]

Originally Posted by OlafSch

More important MS stole ideas. The money was not to help apple but to help MS because they were in trouble because of the monopol they had in the market and politics threatened them to split the company.

[ Show youtube player ]

Steve Jobs on Picasso - "Good artist copy, great artists steal."

Take one to know one.

Windows 95's two-button mouse WIMP design debunked Apple's look-n-feel legal case.

The idea for WIMP GUI is from Xerox.

[coder76]

Even if Commodore did all the right things, Amiga would not likely have survived as a mainstream platform for longer than about 1996-97, when the first 3D cards came out for the PCs, and you couldn't use CPU only for 3D gfx any longer.

3D gfx with texturemapping works somehow with 320x200 resolution and 256 colors with CPU only, but when going to resolutions 640x480 and above plus 16/24 bit color, it starts to get very slow even with a very fast CPU, if done only with a CPU.

So Commodore would have needed to develop an own 3D acceleration unit into their custom chipset, or else abandon their whole chipset, and use standard PC components. Since Motorola also stopped producing their m68k CPUs, Commodore would also have needed to make a swap in CPU architecture. Not to mention how much it would have cost to upgrade AmigaOS to support all these new things.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Both approaches are hazardous. Commodore had multiple pet projects on the boil and as each one became ready they were supposed to market it, regardless of what the actual market was for it. But they couldn't afford to do that. Furthermore their marketing was often over-priced and ineffective due to the advertising companies not understanding the product (and/or just being plain incompetent).

The IDE directive originated from Commodore Germany which caused A300's scope creep which resulted in A600's release and A500's cancellation.

A600 suffered a sales flop which tanked Commodore's revenues into unsustainable P&L losses in 1992.

At fault: Commodore management. Specific fault, Commodore Germany.

Commodore Germany's management demanded hard disk-capable Amiga models.
------
There are triple-digit million dollars equivalent corruption from Commodore Netherlands.

At fault: Commodore Netherlands' management.

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AA3000+ AGA prototype didn't have an IDE controller, hence any "AA500+" derived from this design wouldn't have a Budgie (cost-reduced Buster/Ramsey) and Gayle (Fat Gary with IDE and PCMCIA).

AA500+ would have cut down Super Buster (one edge connector), Ramsey, Fat Gary, and AGA core chipset.

No IDE, no PCMCIA, and no Gayle for the cost blowout and delay.

There's less need for Budgie cost reduction when there is no Gayle-related cost blowout.

A500Plus with AGA could have been released.

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CDTV had a cut-down SCSI controller for the semi-custom CD-ROM drive.

Stop blaming engineers.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

By the time Commodore got a manager onboard who had the vision they needed, things were pretty dire and his options were limited. The A1200 was as good a result as could be expected under the circumstances - just a pity it wasn't implemented earlier when the company wasn't in such dire straits.

I agree on this point.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by coder76

3D gfx with texturemapping works somehow with 320x200 resolution and 256 colors with CPU only, but when going to resolutions 640x480 and above plus 16/24 bit color, it starts to get very slow even with a very fast CPU, if done only with a CPU.

Define "starts to get very slow even with a very fast CPU".

Tomb Raider 3 for Windows has 64-bit SIMD MMX software render.

1920x1080p 32bit color and texture Bilinear Filtering enabled are fast on Ryzen 5 7600X.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by hammer

Define "starts to get very slow even with a very fast CPU".

Tomb Raider 3 for Windows has 64-bit SIMD MMX software render.

1920x1080p 32bit color and texture Bilinear Filtering enabled are fast on Ryzen 5 7600X.

Clearly he isn't talking about Ryzen 5 7600X level performance. In the late 90s and early 2000s it became obvious that CPUs of the day would not be able to render fast enough at higher resolutions. I got a Voodoo card to run Tomb Raider because software rendering wasn't up to the task.

Recently I bought a Lenovo 3000j with a 3GHz CPU and 4GB RAM which should be plenty fast enough to run user-created games made with Tomb Raider Level Editor (bundled with Tomb Raider Last Revelation in 1999). However I found that on anything higher than 320x200 it was too slow. This is totally down to the poor performance of the integrated graphics controller.

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by hammer

You can't handle the truth. Amiga's demise speaks for itself.

ROTFL - you are not Jack Nicholson and i'm not (luckily) Tom Cruise - nevertheless this is all about your argumentation... poorly selected quotes of someone else...

Originally Posted by hammer

Your "misleading" attribution of me is misleading.

Sophistics (IMHO quite poor).

Originally Posted by hammer

You again post useless random information that's unrelated to the topic.

lol

Originally Posted by hammer

The A1000 wasn't a mass-production seller like the A500.

For the US market, 1985's $1,285 for A1000
$1626 in 1991.
$1676 in 1992.
$1725 in 1993

1987's $699 for A500
$837 in 1991.
$863 in 1992.
$888 in 1993.

A1200 entered the US market with $599 in Q4 1992 which is equivalent to $485.05 in 1987. Commodore went "Jack Tramiel" on its core customers.

And your point is? What are you trying to prove with those numbers?
Inflation rate? Gould greed?

Originally Posted by hammer

For "kick the OS" Amiga games, the A500 is mostly out-of-the experience with a game console insert game media and play experience.
CD32's CD-ROM drive has insert a game media and play experience.

So many things can go wrong between out of the box and using product "mostly" out of the box... - out-of-the-box experience is not "mostly" out-of-the-box experience

Originally Posted by hammer

Modern-day game consoles like Xbox Series S and PS5 support a keyboard and mouse.

lol you are truly unique - so much on staying on topic...

Originally Posted by hammer

It's obvious 68060 is no longer produced and it is outdated.

You again post useless random information that's unrelated to the topic.

I already posted an article on this issue.

You constantly posting useless random information that's unrelated to the topic, worse, frequently it is not related to Amiga at all...

Originally Posted by hammer

286 @ 16 Mhz based PC with fast VGA plays A500 ported games just fine.

PC's Prehistorik 2 has a parallax background. Prehistorik 2 wasn't ported to the Amiga until recent times and with RTG support.

[ Show youtube player ]
VGA has hardware functions for 2D games. For this example, PC hardware has an 8086 CPU and OAK OTI VGA clone.
VGA is more than Atari ST's graphic chipset solution.

You constantly posting useless random information that's unrelated to the topic, worse, it is not related to Amiga at all...

Originally Posted by hammer

In the early 1990s, game developers used VGA hardware functions when they ported Amiga games into PC VGA. PC's faster CPU is used in place of Amiga's 3.5 Mhz Blitter.

Congratulations, you just discovered Australia...

Originally Posted by hammer

Your 2D acceleration argument is pointless. What matters are the game results.

So true, especially nowadays when no one use HW graphic acceleration and everything is made on fast CPU...

Originally Posted by hammer

For 2D games, the A500 had the "power without the price" entry point from 1987 to 1990. Amiga's transition into the 32-bit 2.5D/3D gaming was a debacle. There's very little chance that the Amiga OCS's 2D game library will survive against SNES's strong +128 to 256 colors 2D game library while AGA's install base is small

The gaming PC's texture-mapped 2.5D/3D gaming dodged the SNES's strong 2D gaming steamroller.

And graphic accelerators dodged CPU driven graphics... nowadays new generation of graphic accelerators are on market in approx 2 year period - this means that Amiga was severely delayed - WE ALL saying this from many years... Hope even you can understand this.

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

You would be wrong about that. Without his vision Apple was nothing.

But successful innovation doesn't just need vision, it also needs practical implementation. The job of engineers is to provide that. Apple's problem was that Jobs insisted on his vision being implemented verbatim even when it wasn't practical. Commodore's problem was letting the engineers be visionaries and then just going with whatever they came up with.

Both approaches are hazardous. Commodore had multiple pet projects on the boil and as each one became ready they were supposed to market it, regardless of what the actual market was for it. But they couldn't afford to do that. Furthermore their marketing was often over-priced and ineffective due to the advertising companies not understanding the product (and/or just being plain incompetent).

By the time Commodore got a manager onboard who had the vision they needed, things were pretty dire and his options were limited. The A1200 was as good a result as could be expected under the circumstances - just a pity it wasn't implemented earlier when the company wasn't in such dire straits.

Well... look at NeXT - truly marvelous product from engineering perspective, engineered almost like non-Jobs vision and fail, similarly other products with at least debatable esthetics... Obviously people forgotten about failed Jobs ideas and remembering only good ones - truth is laid somewhere between - that's why i've wrote about overestimated Jobs visionary capabilities...

[paul1981]

Originally Posted by Thorham

Absolutely not.

25 years? Yeah, it's you. The difference between a very high end 25 year old peecee and even a 10 year old low end peecee is enormous. Current stuff isn't comparable in any way, shape or form. It's all so far beyond what was available 25 years ago.

You say 'far beyond'...Do you talk to yours so that you don't need a mouse or keyboard any more? Does it transmit the VDU straight to your eyes and the sound straight to your head?

You may scoff, but I'm still doing the same things on mine as I did 25 years ago. Yes, I know they're many times faster now, but I don't experience that in the things I do. You know, office docs, bit of photo editing, internet browsing, printing, audio editing/recording, sometimes a DVD etc.

[lmimmfn]

Originally Posted by TCD

The myth is that it was an 'investment'. It was part of a settlement because MS stole Apple code.

I was working in Apple at the time of that Mac World show in 1997(glad i got to experience it from Apple's perspective ) and we watched it live from the office in Ireland.
There were many things involved in the settlement amongst the cash injection from M$ were that Apple had to include Internet Exporer with every Mac, M$ would release new Office versions on Mac at the same time as on PC.

It was basically M$ doing everything to keep Apple in the game

"Apple Inc. (known as Apple Computer, Inc. at the time), which accused Microsoft in the late 1980s of copying the "look and feel" of the graphical user interface of Apple's operating systems. The courts ruled in favor of Microsoft in 1994. Another suit by Apple accused Microsoft, along with Intel and the San Francisco Canyon Company, in 1995 of knowingly stealing several thousand lines of QuickTime source code in an effort to improve the performance of Video for Windows.[52][53][54][55] After a threat to withdraw support for Office for Mac,[56][57] this lawsuit was ultimately settled in 1997. Apple agreed to make Internet Explorer the default browser over Netscape, and Microsoft agreed to continue developing Office and other software for the Mac for the next 5 years, purchase $150 million of non-voting Apple stock, and made a quiet payoff estimated to be in the US$500 million-$2 billion range."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macworld/iWorld#1987

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by paul1981

You may scoff, but I'm still doing the same things on mine as I did 25 years ago.

In that case you're right. There's nothing new at all, just more of the same.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by lmimmfn

It was basically M$ doing everything to keep Apple in the game

A settlement is legally binding. MS wasn't trying to keep Apple alive, they had to pay them. The timing was very fortunate for Apple, but I'm pretty sure that MS wouldn't have shed many tears if Apple would have ceased to exist.

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by TCD

A settlement is legally binding. MS wasn't trying to keep Apple alive, they had to pay them. The timing was very fortunate for Apple, but I'm pretty sure that MS wouldn't have shed many tears if Apple would have ceased to exist.

You do realise the settlement went both ways? It wasn't Microsoft accepting guilt? Apple had to ship IE as the default browser, Apple had to cross licence various parents.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by AestheticDebris

Apple had to ship IE as the default browser

For the first time I feel sorry for Apple, and I hate Apple

[oscar_ates]

What if Commodore UK had bought the Amiga rights? Would it be further developed? We know that Escom and Petro T. did not do much favor to amiga

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by oscar_ates

What if Commodore UK had bought the Amiga rights? Would it be further developed? We know that Escom and Petro T. did not do much favor to amiga

Whilst it’s what a lot of people (myself included) wanted at the time, what being one of the few subsidiaries that stayed in profit. In hindsight i don’t think they could have made it work. We could have had a couple more great years of Amiga games had the hardware continued to build that user-base, but to restart in 1995 when the 3D hype was in overload was pretty unlikely.

Even if HP and Commodore did Hombre before they went bankrupt would have made it late 1995 at the earliest, with this year delay and no doubt HP rethinking things Hombre would have been too late to the game.

It is what is as they say, they had their moment and it went, no rescue team could have brought it back at that moment in time.

[babsimov]

Here is an interview from September 1994 (in French) of David Pleasance about the future of the Amiga under the aegis of Commodore UK.

http://obligement.free.fr/articles/a...leasance_2.php

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by lmimmfn

It was basically M$ doing everything to keep Apple in the game

And not for some altruistic reason, but because getting their products onto other platforms gave them a greater hold over the market.

Microsoft agreed to continue developing Office and other software for the Mac for the next 5 years, purchase $150 million of non-voting Apple stock, and made a quiet payoff estimated to be in the US$500 million-$2 billion range."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macworld/iWorld#1987

I didn't know that. 0.5-2 billion would certainly have helped Apple stave off bankruptcy.

In the graph below we see that while sales increased dramatically between 1985 and 1995, profit remained low. Then Microsoft Windows 95 appeared on PCs while Apple's Copland failed, and Apple's sales fell dramatically causing them to lose $815 million in 1996 and $1,045 million in 1997. Their business model was clearly unsustainable and they were going down the drain fast.



When Steve Jobs came back in 1997 he said that Apple was only 2 weeks away from bankruptcy. That may not have been literally true because Apple had assets it could sell (and staff it could fire), but with sales continuing to fall and nothing to counter Windows 95 the business still wouldn't be viable.

According to Wikipedia Apple had cash reserves of US$1.2 billion, making the US$150 million investment largely symbolic. But if they were losing over $1 billion a year that cash wouldn't last long. The sudden return to profitability despite declining sales is also suspicious. From this I conclude that Microsoft did indeed inject a lot more than $150 million into Apple, and it did prevent them from going bankrupt.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by pandy71

Well... look at NeXT - truly marvelous product from engineering perspective, engineered almost like non-Jobs vision and fail, similarly other products with at least debatable esthetics... Obviously people forgotten about failed Jobs ideas and remembering only good ones - truth is laid somewhere between - that's why i've wrote about overestimated Jobs visionary capabilities...

Have we?

I haven't forgotten about how Jobs killed the Apple III's reliability by insisting on not having a fan in it, but that's what being a visionary is about - doing things that conventional wisdom says are unnecessary, impractical or impossible. I hate computers with noisy fans. Even quiet fans aren't good, as they suck dust into the machine (including into the floppy drive where it damages disks) and have limited lifespan. This Lenovo 3000j I recently bought sounds like a vacuum cleaner when it's running, which is very annoying (I sense that it's headed for the rubbish bin soon!).

But it wasn't Job's fault that the Apple III suffered from overheating - that's the kind of problem engineers are paid to solve. Commodore had a similar problem only worse - Gould let the engineers have their own visions, but they couldn't even solve the problems they themselves created!

The A1200 was in some ways visionary, as it pushed the idea of a smaller 'all in the keyboard' design when PCs were getting larger to fit the stuff that was going into them (including huge heat sinks and fans to keep the grossly overclocked CPU cool.). I'm glad they did that. A conventional box with separate keyboard would be boring, and wouldn't fit on my coffee table. This design meant the A1200 was able to bridge the gap between game consoles and desktop PCs.

But the engineers didn't want that. They wanted a box big enough to take all the latest advanced hardware they were looking at stuffing in it. Style and ergonomics were the last things on their minds, as they imagined how incredible an Amiga with VRAM and DSP and a RISC CPU would be. Never mind that it would take years for coders to get the best out it, or that most developers would still ignore it because they had their hands full making stuff for the PC, or that it would cost so much that you might as well just buy a PC anyway.

Today desktop PCs are declining in popularity because nobody wants a big box huffing and puffing away in the living room where there's nowhere to put it. That's why most people today have a laptop or even just a tablet, and game consoles like the PlayStation 5 are popular even though they cost more than a typical PC (quite the change from the 90's when they were far cheaper). A full-size gaming PC with all the extra stuff is just too unwieldy, as well as too expensive for all but the most hardcore gamer to justify.

When it came to failed visions, Apple didn't need Jobs. The number of different machines kept multiplying as they tried to make one to suit every customer. Jobs cut through all this by making a chart with 4 segments. Did you want a portable or a desktop, for business or personal use? That's 4 combinations for 4 models, no need to make more! And then he concentrated on style.

The iMac was a breath of fresh air in a market crowded with boring boxes. My favorite iMac design is the G4 'Sunflower' - a bitch to work on but so stylish and practical in use. One day I hope to own one.

Why iMac G4 is still the greatest Mac ever made 20 years later

Apple could’ve taken the easy route and gone with a design that mirrored the original Bondi Blue iMac except with a smaller footprint (in fact Steve Jobs made a joke slide about that during Macworld San Francisco keynote). But no, Apple took a whole new approach, with the core components in a domed case, a chrome arm that stuck out from the top of the dome, and an LCD attached to the top.

The iMac G4 was dubbed the “sunflower” Mac, or the “iLamp,” a name inspired by the Luxo Jr. video short by Pixar. It didn’t look like a computer. To this day, the iMac G4 stands out in a mundane world of desktop computers—current Macs included. It was quirky, fun, and functional, but more importantly, the design proved that Apple’s success with the original iMac wasn’t a fluke.

Apple got the ergonomics right

The best part of the iMac’s design was the cantilevered metal arm that held the 15-inch LCD. It allowed users to precisely place the display in the best position—you could move it up or down, left or right, and you adjust the tilt, too. In an ode to the iMac G4, Christopher Phin wrote that the display’s arm was, “impossibly, magically smooth, and preposterously stable, like no other piece of engineering you’ve used before.”

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

This Lenovo 3000j I recently bought sounds like a vacuum cleaner when it's running, which is very annoying

Then why did you buy an old peecee that you know will be fan cooled?

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I sense that it's headed for the rubbish bin soon!

Or replace the noisy fans and remove the dust.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Today desktop PCs are declining in popularity because nobody wants a big box huffing and puffing away in the living room where there's nowhere to put it.

It's probably because of smartphones having become as powerful as they are now. For many people smartphones do what they'd typically use a desktop or laptop peecee for.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

game consoles like the PlayStation 5 are popular even though they cost more than a typical PC

I'm not exactly sure, but I highly doubt you can build a peecee that performs at PS5 level for PS5 money without second hand parts.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

A full-size gaming PC with all the extra stuff is just too unwieldy, as well as too expensive for all but the most hardcore gamer to justify.

How much is too expensive?

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Why iMac G4 is still the greatest Mac ever made 20 years later

It's certainly better than crApple's current lineup. Have you seen the prices of their RAM and SSD upgrades? Totally insane and people pay that

[grelbfarlk]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

The iMac was a breath of fresh air in a market crowded with boring boxes. My favorite iMac design is the G4 'Sunflower' - a bitch to work on but so stylish and practical in use. One day I hope to own one.

Why iMac G4 is still the greatest Mac ever made 20 years later

All this power and style comes at a price–the $1,799 iMac is a far cry from a sub-$1,000 consumer Mac for the masses.
In 2002 that's $3,924 NZD.