Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[nobody]

People didn't buy the A1200 because:
1. If they wanted the best and the most games the PC had them.
2. If they needed some productivity the PC was better
3. The PC was more cheap.
4. If they needed good games at even less money the consoles were there, cheaper than PCs and Amiga.

So it was lose-lose for Commodore. They didn't do anything better than the competition. It is so simple.

[Gilbert]

I wish someone would make a successor to the A500 now. But it has to actually be like an Amiga. I've seen that Vampire A600 and that's not in the right spirit at all IMO. Like fitting a jet powered engine to a mini.

Originally Posted by matthey

I had bought a 3000 and looked at the 4000 when it came out but it was a downgrade with a 68ec030 (no MMU) with no FPU or slow and expensive a3640, no SCSI, ugly limited box, etc. The AGA was ok. It looked gorgeous and the possibility to play AGA games was nice but I didn't want to have to buy an accelerator and SCSI card to get back to the capabilities of my 3000. I ended up buying a CV64/3D for my 3000 instead. Although it is incompatible with most AGA games, it is many times faster and has chunky. It blew AGA away for productivity and the RTG is pretty seamless. The few RTG games were faster with the gfx card. Yea, it would have been better if C= had made a better, faster, chunky, upgradeable integrated gfx solution with RTG but they didn't. I wasn't disappointed with the 1200 at the low end of the market as AGA had appropriate capabilities there. It was also fairly expandable although I thought the base processor should have been a low clocked 68030 CPU with memory socket (the CD32 too). I thought the 3000 and 1200 were right from a marketing perspective and the 4000 and 600 all wrong. The 3000 could have had AGA and the 1200 should have been more mass produced to lower costs instead of sharing production with the 600 so C= management even messed them up. All the big box Amigas from the 4000 on should have used the same motherboard, standard tower cases and standard power supplies.

They could have probably cranked up the clock speed of a standard 68000 (maybe doubled it for compatability) and by saving money here, then added more graphics features, sprites etc, made hardware scrolling more useable (Amiga hardware scrolling was always a bit difficult). Look at a game like Fast Striker in Maniac mode on the Neo Geo. Looks almost like a modern bullet-hell schmup and no slowdown.The Neo Geo just has a 12mhz 68k and a load of sprites - that's all. You needed a massmarket base spec that sells. Something that looks impressive, sells! AGA was just not powerful enough for the time it was released. The Megadrive was 3 years old and comfortably outguns it in most games. Games are what sold the Amiga to most people in the first place and made it popular.

Strange though because i can see how the A1200/CD32 were huge improvements on the C64GS and CDTV. They didn't go far enough though.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by nobody

People didn't buy the A1200 because:
1. If they wanted the best and the most games the PC had them.
2. If they needed some productivity the PC was better
3. The PC was more cheap.
4. If they needed good games at even less money the consoles were there, cheaper than PCs and Amiga.

So it was lose-lose for Commodore. They didn't do anything better than the competition. It is so simple.

Sorry but post is laughable, the Amiga held its own software wise until end of 1994 after Commodore had gone.

The PC was not cheap at all, sorry that is BS of the highest order.

Consoles themselves were cheaper, but games were twice the price of the Amigas, you soon got the money back after 10 games.

[matthey]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

The A600 did outsell the A1200, and being cancelled machine doesn't automatically mean people will buy it, people didn't buy the A1200 because it wasn't a big enough leap.

I believe there were more reasons than "wasn't a big enough leap". Initially, the 1200 probably would have sold better if it had better compatibility (never underestimate the value of compatibility with computers). Also, AGA games were slow to be released and most were just slight upgrades from ECS titles.

AGA with HAM8 looked close enough to high end PC graphics cards at the time but it was only a minor upgrade in 2D performance. C= stuck with old underpowered processors and did not jump on the HD bandwagon while the PC world performance for fps games grew exponentially and costs of commodity hardware shrunk through competition and economies of scale. Even if AGA had twice the bandwidth, twice the gfx memory speed and chunky gfx it would probably not have kept up. The 68k CPU was also losing the economies of scale battle to the x86. It was relatively easy to shrink the chip dies with enough cash flow in those days (difficult and expensive today but the economies of scale still apply). It is interesting that most of the AGA performance and compatibility limitations can be removed in FPGA (or an ASIC). Likewise, the 68k CPU can be made much higher performance and more compatible than the 68040 or 68060 with today's technology. It makes sense once again to go back to integrated gfx like the Amiga used with the limitation on die shrinks and heat produced from a physically small computer.

[nobody]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

Sorry but post is laughable, the Amiga held its own software wise until end of 1994 after Commodore had gone.

The PC was not cheap at all, sorry that is BS of the highest order.

Consoles themselves were cheaper, but games were twice the price of the Amigas, you soon got the money back after 10 games.

It's clear that you didn't really have anything to do with the PCs. The PCs had much more and better games than the Amiga at the time (1994). Where were you? Have you seen X-Wing? Day of the tentacle?

About price. Can you give us a comparison of how much a 486 with VGA cost at 1994 and how much an equivalent Amiga 4000 with Hard disk and multisync monitor? Yes you need a multisync monitor to show all resolutions on the Amiga.

The consoles games were about double the price of the A500 games with much higher quality against the amateur Amiga software. Except if you refer to pirated copies that push the software houses away from the Amiga too.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by nobody

It's clear that you didn't really have anything to do with the PCs. The PCs had much more and better games than the Amiga at the time (1994). Where were you? Have you seen X-Wing? Day of the tentacle?

About price. Can you give us a comparison of how much a 486 with VGA cost at 1994 and how much an equivalent Amiga 4000 with Hard disk and mulitisync monitor? Yes you need a mulitisync monitor to show all resolutions on the Amiga.

The consoles games were about double the price of the A500 games with much higher quality against the amateur Amiga software. Except if you refer to pirated copies that push the software houses away from the Amiga too.

Having better graphics doesnt equate to having better games.
In the UK the Amigas biggest market, the first PC for sale under £1000 came out late 1993, a 386 25mhz and that still couldn't run Doom full screen.

A 486 in 1994 would have been more than £1000, same for the first Pentiums, I'm all for comparing oranges with oranges but an A1200 vs a PC that can run X-Wing full speed is not.
And why are you comparing PCs to a A4000 when we are talking about the budget A500-A1200 machines?

And you must be forgetting the dozens of games that got ported to the 16-bit consoles after originating from the Amiga, though I guess consoles must have got amature software too then

[matthey]

Originally Posted by Gilbert

They could have probably cranked up the clock speed of a standard 68000 (maybe doubled it for compatability) and by saving money here, then added more graphics features, sprites etc, made hardware scrolling more useable (Amiga hardware scrolling was always a bit difficult). Look at a game like Fast Striker in Maniac mode on the Neo Geo. Looks almost like a modern bullet-hell schmup and no slowdown.The Neo Geo just has a 12mhz 68k and a load of sprites - that's all. You needed a massmarket base spec that sells. Something that looks impressive, sells! AGA was just not powerful enough for the time it was released. The Megadrive was 3 years old and comfortably outguns it in most games. Games are what sold the Amiga to most people in the first place and made it popular.

The 68000 ISA would have been a limitation even if the 68020 ISA could have been better. A 68000 ISA only CPU could have been easily clocked up with a new design but it would be weaker per/MHz than the 68020 ISA. CPU performance and efficiency are more about being higher performance with a lower clock and less energy use (which also determines how much they can be clocked up). Lower clocked hardware is cheaper to design and manufacture. Also, the 68020 ISA is significantly easier to program with many limitations removed, especially for larger programs using more memory.

The Neo Geo hardware route was one of the few affordable choices when processor performance was a limitation. Now days it is easier to use BOBs (Blitter Objects) with a blitter and/or SIMD unit. It may not be as retro as a bunch of hardware sprites but it is easier to program and more flexible. This is the route the Amiga chose for sprite like objects but they didn't add enough gfx or CPU performance to keep improving it.

[NorthWay]

Originally Posted by Gilbert

Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

Yes. As with the A4000.

They didn't update all the chips. No 16-bit sound and no 64-bit blitter was a huge downer, as was no chunky screenmode.
They didn't make it (optionally) always-31KHz. Having mixed modes would forever make monitors a problem.
They didn't mandate harddrives as required. All machines should have shipped with one however small.
They didn't build it with fastmem. It could have been 1M+1M and gotten both speed and compatibility gains.
As for the 4000 it was not much different and still (non-DMA) IDE and a sluggish 68040.

It really was a stop-gap machine, but it felt so strange that it was leaning hard on the software side to fix up all the flaws (i.e. screenmodes) that was the least fixable when people killed off the OS.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

The A1200 launched in 1992.

Sorry, my fingers slipped there. I meant to write December 1992.

Originally Posted by Amigajay

The A600 did outsell the A1200, and being cancelled machine doesn't automatically mean people will buy it, people didn't buy the A1200 because it wasn't a big enough leap.

People didn't buy many A600s until it was discounted.

On the other hand, the A1200 sold so well that Commodore was having troubles keeping up production to fulfill demand.

I don't have raw numbers here, but AFAIK, the A1200 was the next-best selling Amiga ever.

[Signman]

In the early nineties I traded someone my 500 for a 386 pc. Right off the bat playing wolfenstein was a lot more fun. I had professional draw on the amiga and couldn't do crap professionally but with Corel Draw and some pc specific art/cad software on the pc, I did.

Also with vga graphics the screen environment got so much better. I am not much of a gamer, never was. Professionally, the Amiga didn't measure up.

Look at all the amigans to this day that use Doom as a benchmark for their amiga use. Where did that game come from?

[Stejjie]

Originally Posted by idrougge

I don't have raw numbers here, but AFAIK, the A1200 was the next-best selling Amiga ever.

Not sure about that: according to http://www.amigahistory.plus.com/sales.html, it's difficult to find detailed sales figures; but in Germany- up until December 1993 - the A600 comfortably outsold the A1200. Presumably that changed somewhat from 1994 onwards and I don't know how representative Germany was/is, but certainly for the first year or so of the A1200's life it was outsold by the A600 (which didn't have a massive headstart time-wise and presumably didn't have many 500/500+ owners upgrading to it).

[modrobert]

Originally Posted by Signman

Look at all the amigans to this day that use Doom as a benchmark for their amiga use. Where did that game come from?

Well, it was not PC...

Doom was developed on NeXT workstations, under the NEXTSTEP operating system. The Doom game engine was programmed in C, and the editing tools were written in Objective-C.

I loved the A1200, bought it close after launch with 80mb 2.5" hard drive and was really impressed with AmigaOS 3.1, it felt stable/mature compared to any shit the noisy PCs had to offer at the time which was Windows 3.1 booted from DOS.

Pure Amiga multitasking compared to Windows 3.1 silly task switching, no match. Also nice you didn't have to run chkdsk (or Norton Utilities) every damned time the computer hang or power failed, granted, booting the A1200 took a bit longer after fail, but at least automatic with FFS then. Remember, PC at this time only had FAT16, it was not until 1996 FAT32 came.

I read some rants about the A1200 keyboard, not sure why, I thought it was an improvement compared to A500. What's bad about it? It's not like I have any other 25 year old keyboards still going strong to compare with.

[TEG]

Another problem with the A1200 was the monitor. The PC was there with hight quality display devices and we were stuck with Commodore monitors and non standard resolutions.

There was the productivity mode but it was a joke. The resolution was so different in the X and Y axis that it was impossible to work with it. I remember once, I try to use it (the A1200 was delivered with a VGA adaptor if I remember well) but if you clicked on something using a different resolution, the VGA monitor was of course lost and you were stuck. The problem was here too if you drag down the screen.

And I confirm a previous post, the DX2/66 processor was the choice of the moment if you wanted power and it was affordable. We had one too and I was stunned when I saw the speed of ray-tracing programs on it! Ray-tracing for which the A500 was the first machine to bring this to the public, enable to compute such image in decent time (1 or 2 days).

[neil324]

I didn't see the A1200 as a next gen machine. So didn't buy it.

A friend had gone the 386/486 route, but I was not keen on spending £1k/£2k on a computer. Money was not a problem either.

I dropped out of gaming until the PS1 landed.

[nobody]

I am holding a magazine from 1996 and I see the A4000/040 was double price than a Pentium 166 MHz, 16 mb ram, 8x CD, HD 850mb, monitor, svga 1mb and 16bit soundcard.
What were they thinking

PS. A1200 magic pack+blizzard 1230 IV, 8mb ram, 850mb HD, 8x CD and multisync M1438=above Pentium 166 cost

PS2 Cyberstorm MK II, 68060/50mhz almost same price with the Pentium full computer

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by modrobert

Remember, PC at this time only had FAT16, it was not until 1996 FAT32 came.

FFS isn't much better than FAT to be honest. Glad we have PFS now.

Originally Posted by TEG

There was the productivity mode but it was a joke. The resolution was so different in the X and Y axis that it was impossible to work with it.

Productivity is bog standard 640x480.

Originally Posted by TEG

I remember once, I try to use it (the A1200 was delivered with a VGA adaptor if I remember well) but if you clicked on something using a different resolution, the VGA monitor was of course lost and you were stuck. The problem was here too if you drag down the screen.

You have to use mode promotion. Without it, you get the mess you describe. I use my A1200 with a VGA adapter, and use double PAL exclusively. Only rarely do I have problems.

Originally Posted by nobody

What were they thinking

Indeed.

Originally Posted by nobody

PS. A1200 magic pack+blizzard 1230 IV, 8mb ram, 850mb HD, 8x CD and multisync M1438=above Pentium 166 cost

I still MUCH rather have the A1200 Peecees back then sucked monkey butt (not anymore, of course).

[modrobert]

Originally Posted by Thorham

FFS isn't much better than FAT to be honest. Glad we have PFS now.

Well, at least you didn't have to partition hard drives bigger than 32mb. Remember having DOS with C:, D:, E:, F: at work at the time to handle a 120mb hard drive using FAT16, each partition at 32mb max. There was some trick later with DOS 5.0 which changed that, but it still sucked.

Originally Posted by Thorham

I still MUCH rather have the A1200 Peecees back then sucked monkey butt (not anymore, of course).

Agreed.

I got an A1200 in 1993 and I was over the moon. Wasn't hard as I was moving up from a BBC Model B so the A1200 was super amazing to me.

I was able to play games with graphics that were almost real to me (compared to what I had been used to this is). Not only that I could also do my school work on it using a real WIMP interface (remember when it was called that!!) as it came with Wordsworth, sure it was a terrible earlier version, but much better than what I had been using before AND I could do clipart with it!

Was it the best machine at the time? No probably not, the PC was better in most regards and had chunky rather then planer graphics. But I couldn't afford one. The Amiga offered me everything the PC could do but cheaper and I could still connect it to my 14" TV. With the PC I would have had to have a monitor as well, and they were amazingly expensive. If I remember a 486PC was £1000-£1500 which is why I ended up with the £399 A1200. I was never disappointed with it, I'm still not.

I was lucky to get the A1200, my father wanted to spend less as the A600 "looks the same" (I think those were his words, ahhh the computer illiterate haha )

[TEG]

Originally Posted by Thorham

Productivity is bog standard 640x480.

Yup. I'm confuse with Super-High Res (1280x256). So the problem was the lack of colours, 4 instead of 256 for this resolution on the PC at the time.

Originally Posted by Thorham

You have to use mode promotion. Without it, you get the mess you describe. I use my A1200 with a VGA adapter, and use double PAL exclusively. Only rarely do I have problems.

Thanks for the info, should have been managed by default by the machine.

[daxb]

I switched from A500 to A1200 in 1996 and knew what I got. A much better system. So wasn`t disappointed. PC at that time was just a laugh (e.g. Win95/98) and a bad choice.

It was/is not necessary to use an Amiga monitor for A1200. Scandoubler/Flickerfixer exists already. I still use ScanMagic1200 (internal) with a standard CRT monitor. Nearly every monitor driver works (depends on monitor specs).