Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by TCD

Were they? I remember playing Under a Killing Moon and System Shock (along others) in 640x480 in 1994.

Of course, everyone didn’t suddenly drop VGA overnight, they still had to support lower spec machines. Even games like Lemmings 2 in 1993 was released on 5.25” floppy disks, despite them being basically obsolete unless you owned a X68000! I mean why would they unless the market was wasn’t there?

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by TCD

Were they? I remember playing Under a Killing Moon and System Shock (along others) in 640x480 in 1994.

Yes but you can play it with VGA indeed.
https://www.mobygames.com/game/681/system-shock/specs/

On a side note there weren't much multi support OCS/ECS/AGA games released in one package. IIRC, Alien Breed TA, Worms, Liberation Captive 2 were released like that but AGA version isn't a big improvement, except for some extra colors and sounds. No bigger sprites or smoother sub pixel scrolling.

I don't understand why publishers were making separate package for OCS and AGA games. A simple Amiga labelling with chipset recquirement (OCS/AGA or AGA only) like it was the norm on the PC market would have saved some extra cost for them. Commodore could have pushed for that, to prevent the problem of the non existing AGA user installed base at the beginning.

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by hammer

Hardware smooth scrolling on an 8086 with a VGA upgrade with Double Dragon 3. VGA has a page flip function and four ALUs (Arithmetic Logic Units) to assist the CPU during display memory writes.

VGA clones can improve these hardware functions further than IBM VGA.

Here you can read about panning and scrolling - as you can see largely this is done by register manipulation http://www.osdever.net/FreeVGA/vga/vgafx.htm#smooth

You are ignoring fact that Amiga is UMA architecture - VGA not. This has particular implication for physical memory organization - CHIP RAM in Amiga has different organization and dual role functionality.
Try to run x86 code from VGA video RAM then you will get slightly different picture (common for Amiga without FAST).

Originally Posted by hammer

PC would need CPU power for the Blit function. 3.5 Mhz Blitter is not a hard target to hit.

Tell this to Atari ST guys.

Originally Posted by hammer

VGA is more than Atari ST's graphics capabilities.

Atari ST and Amiga has different system architecture so VGA an offer different functionality.

Originally Posted by hammer

For these kinds of 2D game experiences, the Amiga 500 has the "power without the price" entry point. Amiga 1200 extends these kinds of 2D experiences beyond 32 colors without tricks, but it doesn't have a large install base e.g. Lion King AGA sales are limited by A1200's install base and attachment rates.

A1200 was too late and too little - if you read even this thread this is commonly shared opinion.

Originally Posted by hammer

A1200/CD32 with Fast RAM has the foundation for a strong 2D gaming experience, but the under 1 million install base is a major problem and Commodore doesn't have 1st party game developers to solve the chicken vs egg problem.

Doubt on this - without significantly redesigned chipset capabilities probably not much.

Originally Posted by hammer

DavidP executes his role is good for Commodore UK and it's Amiga's strongest Commodore division.

Yes, he was good marketing and good seller but not technical guy.

Originally Posted by hammer

Escom and Amiga Technologies GmBH stacked ex-Commodore Germany personnel didn't advance the Amiga when the Amiga custom chipset's technical effort was from the USA.

R&D in USA was most important yest products suc as A2000 was created in Germany and later adopted by US.

Originally Posted by hammer

Escom's Amiga Technologies GmBH was in partnership with Phase 5's PowerPC direction. Phase 5 is not proven for low-cost mass production and it shows.

Everything is in scale - final price too - Phase 5 was small company so small scale.

Originally Posted by hammer

It depends on the use case and market segment e.g. gaming GPUs are less suitable for FP64.

How this is related to topic?

Originally Posted by hammer

RTX 4090's FP64 has 1409 GFLOPS from ADIA 64's benchmark. It doesn't have performance/watt and performance/dollar for such a use case when compared to the Ryzen 9 7950X's AVX-512's 1375 GFLOPS.

How this is related to topic?

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

And 6 years later (in 1996) PC games were still being coded for standard VGA, introduced 9 years earlier. That's a similar time span to the Amiga (1985 + 9 = 1994).

Yes, VGA was very popular for a long time - without 3D market probably it could survive even longer as common, lowest denominator for graphic display technology.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I was knee deep in PCs at that time and I don't recall ever seeing an XGA card. 90% of PCs had a crappy ISA bus 'Super VGA' card such as Trident or Oak - whatever was cheapest. Game developers certainly couldn't rely on customers having anything better. The situation was just like the Amiga, only worse because you needed a much faster CPU to get acceptable results.

True, ISA and Trident was probably most common denominator for PC's.
PC problem was lack of HW standard - there was many competing HW standards so no standard at all. Amiga situation was quite clear - no CPU's other than MC68k family so at least some standard existed.

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

I don't understand why publishers were making separate package for OCS and AGA games. A simple Amiga labelling with chipset recquirement (OCS/AGA or AGA only) like it was the norm on the PC market would have saved some extra cost for them. Commodore could have pushed for that, to prevent the problem of the non existing AGA user installed base at the beginning.

Honestly, I suspect for the most part is because they were double-dipping. A lot of AGA releases were slightly upgraded versions of games people had already bought and publishers were hoping they'd go out and buy it again in AGA format for the upgraded graphics.

If the A1200 had been a big success and more users migrated too it, it's probable that over time it'd have been a less successful strategy and they'd have switched to selling combined versions to cut the number of SKUs.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

Of course, everyone didn’t suddenly drop VGA overnight, they still had to support lower spec machines.

Maybe you missed the 'were coded for' part of Bruce's post. He didn't say 'had a VGA mode'.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by TCD

Maybe you missed the 'were coded for' part of Bruce's post. He didn't say 'had a VGA mode'.

Certainly did! But surely you have to code for VGA to give it support it making a SVGA game? I don’t know the technicalities of it.

But after a quick check anyway i would 1996 was the first well supported year of SVGA only games, which ironically was the first year 3D cards started to be used for PC gaming.

[TCD]

Just found this quote that Metin Seven posted on Mastodon today:

In early 1993, Commodore hadn't released hardware specs for the new AGA Amiga computers. So me and my two game dev partners created a demo trilogy, using self-discovered AGA chipset features.

Whenever I read that the A1200 was 'released' in 1992 I think while that is technically correct it misses the point of when you could a) get one and b) find out who to use the new features. It's not surprising that there weren't that many AGA (let only AGA only) games in 1993.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by AestheticDebris

Honestly, I suspect for the most part is because they were double-dipping. A lot of AGA releases were slightly upgraded versions of games people had already bought and publishers were hoping they'd go out and buy it again in AGA format for the upgraded graphics.

If the A1200 had been a big success and more users migrated too it, it's probable that over time it'd have been a less successful strategy and they'd have switched to selling combined versions to cut the number of SKUs.

Well if they intended to double dip because Amiga users were dumb enough to buy a slightly enhanced version of a game they just bought some month before, then maybe piracy wasn't that much a problem on the Amiga.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by TCD

Whenever I read that the A1200 was 'released' in 1992 I think while that is technically correct it misses the point of when you could a) get one and b) find out who to use the new features. It's not surprising that there weren't that many AGA (let only AGA only) games in 1993.

Yeah only 44k were available in 1992, so most people missed out for that Christmas.

Funnily enough the first disk based AGA only game (Overkill) was released the same month (Sep 93) as the first CD32 AGA only game. Took way too long for that too happen for the A1200 to drive potential sales, obviously part faults at the publisher for not risking more on it, and no doubt Commodore for withholding hardware details and docs for devs quicker than they should have. But then we know AGA was cobbled together quicker than what they anticipated.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by pandy71

Here you can read about panning and scrolling - as you can see largely this is done by register manipulation http://www.osdever.net/FreeVGA/vga/vgafx.htm#smooth

You are ignoring fact that Amiga is UMA architecture - VGA not.

A programmer can access VGA's video memory e.g. https://www.timetraces.ca/nw/vga_mem.htm

Amiga is partly UMA since the custom chips (up to 21-bit address range for some ECS and all AGA) don't have full access to 68000/68EC020's 24-bit address range.

Full UMA has both GPU and CPU have full equal access to each other's memory address range capability.

A1200 with FastRAM, custom chips don't have access to Fast RAM.

Originally Posted by pandy71

This has particular implication for physical memory organization - CHIP RAM in Amiga has different organization and dual role functionality.
Try to run x86 code from VGA video RAM then you will get slightly different picture (common for Amiga without FAST).

That's not a virtue for absolute performance for each CPU and GPU component e.g. https://wccftech.com/sony-ps4-effect...u-gpu-scaling/

PS4 Pro includes a 1 MB DDR3 memory pool to stop background tasks from disturbing the game's GDDR5 access. PS5 has 512 MB DDR4 and GDDR6 split memory pools.

Most game console competitors in the 1990s have split memory pools e.g. CPU's memory and GPU's video memory.

For the PC DOS era, Quarterdeck has software called "VIDRAM" that enables VGA card-equipped PCs to reallocate VGA memory for an extra 64K (16 bit) on top of the base 640K memory.

Video memory for EGA/VGA modes is page-swapped in the 64K Axxxx window, and they can also map memory into the Bxxxx page where the legacy MDA and CGA text and graphics modes live. Within that area, a VGA card with 512K or 1MB can choose different regions of said memory to expose, but it can't linearly map those memory pages of RAM outside of one access window.

For the 32-bit PCI era, the video memory access window is up to 256 MB. 32-bit address range was quickly found to be limited. DirectDraw is Microsoft's games RTG solution.

Originally Posted by pandy71

Tell this to Atari ST guys.

I have and they replied with Mega ST (with custom Biltter) which is useless for games due to a tiny install base issue. Atari ST has no hardware scrolling. Atari STe was released in 1989 along with Amiga 500 Rev 6A.

Originally Posted by pandy71

Atari ST and Amiga has different system architecture so VGA an offer different functionality.

VGA latch copy hardware can assist software Blit. The latches can be used to perform 4-byte-at-a-time (one byte from each plane) block copying.

It comes down to price and offered gaming experience.

Originally Posted by pandy71

Doubt on this - without significantly redesigned chipset capabilities probably not much.

For graphics presentation, the Final Fight AGA alpha tech demo is good enough to rival the SNES version. AGA didn't "zero-sum" SNES's strong 2D competition due to AGA's low install base.

Other tech demos have shown Capcom-related content and AGA's potential e.g. [ Show youtube player ] [ Show youtube player ]
There is a higher programming difficulty curve when the Copper is used.

If a fast 32-bit PC only delivered a strong 2D gaming experience, it would be directly competing against SNES.

Originally Posted by pandy71

Yes, he was good marketing and good seller but not technical guy.

He was good at marketing, sales distribution channels, developer relations, and logistics.

Originally Posted by pandy71

R&D in USA was most important yest products suc as A2000 was created in Germany and later adopted by US.

A2000 includes Amiga's core OCS.

Originally Posted by pandy71

How this is related to topic?
How this is related to topic?

I replied to your assertion.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I was knee deep in PCs at that time and I don't recall ever seeing an XGA card. 90% of PCs had a crappy ISA bus 'Super VGA' card such as Trident or Oak - whatever was cheapest.

"90% of PCs had a crappy ISA bus 'Super VGA' card such as Trident" is debunked.

---------
[ Show youtube player ]

Pentium 133 with Trident TVGA 8900CL-B 1MB ISA playing Starcraft.

Let's see AGA with 100 Mhz 060 Rev6 play Diablo 640x400p.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

Funnily enough the first disk based AGA only game (Overkill) was released the same month (Sep 93) as the first CD32 AGA only game.

Going back to the thread title: I can see that people who bought the A1200 for gaming and then had to wait about 9 months for the first game to be released that used the hardware properly and wasn't available on the older machines would be disappointed. Having documentation ready for developers before the machine was released would most likely made a difference there.

[Promilus]

@TCD - it would not make a difference in the long run... Even if it would've result in twice as many A1200 sold it's not significant difference. Commodore would've sink that ship either way.
The only actual chance would've been getting something reaching A500 popularity and AGA based A1200 wasn't that.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by hammer

"90% of PCs had a crappy ISA bus 'Super VGA' card such as Trident" is debunked.
...
Pentium 133 with Trident TVGA 8900CL-B 1MB ISA playing Starcraft.

Oops! You just proved my point.

Let's see AGA with 100 Mhz 060 Rev6 play Diablo 640x400p.

Why?

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

A smartphone is great to have in your pocket, but the screen is a bit too small for general computing work and they're not great for gaming. A laptop can be used on the table or on your lap, and can also have have a screen, keyboard and mouse plugged in and still take up less room than a conventional PC.

Wow, who would've thunk? Also, water is wet.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Most modern 'desktop' computers have the guts of a laptop in the screen, so they take up even less room. This is why people prefer them, not because they are cheaper (the higher-end models aren't).

Most? You should get out a bit more. Sure, AIOs are popular, but still a fraction of global desktop sales, simply because they are more difficult to upgrade and repair, thus being more costly in the long term and that's something that actually matters to businesses.

Plus, my point was that laptops are more prevalent now because they have become affordable, not the other way around. People wanted them as much in the 90s as right now, the difference is that back then only those with deep pockets could afford them. And if you want to pretend that this fact, and more importantly the rise of smartphones wasn't a major factor in desktop sales decline then go ahead, but just about every serious analyst in the world will disagree with you.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

There are two large department stores and one office supplies store here that sell computers. I had to hunt to find a single PC with a conventional case. Everything else was a laptop or all-in-the-screen machine. Apple's 'elitist' design has become the norm because that's what people actually want.

This is vintage Bruce Abbott Something something New Zealand - presto! global trends confirmed.

Plus, again: a) it's not a norm b) it did undeniably gain popularity but not because of Apple's visionairiness but simple economics of price.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Only hardcore gamers prefer a separate box, because then they can install a more powerful graphics card, overclock the CPU, and put in a water cooling system with lots of LEDs to make it look pretty. Then they look down on the unwashed masses who just buy a computer and use it, blissfully unaware of how poorly it performs without the very latest top-end CPU and graphics card etc. Why, most of them don't even know what a Ryzen 9 7950X is, let alone how much faster it is than their low budget P.O.S.

Sure, when cornered and out of any real arguments, let's reach out for the laziest, most tired, low hanging fruit anti-PC trope there is. Something I could do myself in the previous post re: Apple snobs, but I only mentioned the coffee shop hipsters as silly and unimportant.

So, while of course the dreaded pcmasterrace does exist, it's only a tiny minority amplified by the Internet megaphone, (sadly, just like any other extreme group in this world). Most other gamers just get on with their business playing on much more modest machines, something you would know if, again, you'd get out a bit more and eg looked at something like Steam's hardware survey, where the likes of Nvidia's humble XX60 line are the most popular GPUs.

So while there aren't obviously any hard figures for that, which makes it rather difficult to argue about, I think the global percentages of market share vs the amount of perceived snobbery are rather self-evident.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Here is Harvey Normans's only gaming PC:-
[...]
But PC laptops are all much cheaper than elitist Apples, right?

Here we go again, some truly disingeniously cherrypicked prices from NZ are supposed to reflect global trends. I'm sorry, but this is a way of arguing I thought was considered a no no even during the early internet squabbles.

I'm not going to waste time looking up some more real-world scenarios for you, plus explain why yours was largerly Apples vs walnuts comparison. Maybe just consider this very simple common-sense thing: if Apple computers are really so, so much better than PCs - and cheaper! - how come they only have about ~10% of global market share?

Smh...I mean, seriously, it's not for the first time I'm pretty amazed how somebody who's claiming to have been "knee deep in PCs" at some point can be so disconnected from the market and user realities.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I guess that was another reason to be disappointed with the A1200 - it had style instead of coming in a boring metal box with bland beige front panel.

Well I for one appreciated Commodore giving the A1200 a nice look and improved ergonomics. And it was cheaper too!

I'm happy you felt this way but somehow most of the world, especially those interested in games, chose the blandness of the boring metal box (which, as we have gone over many times wasn't all that much more expensive than similarly specced A1200). Why could that be? A question for the ages. /s

[BigD]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

I'm happy you felt this way but somehow most of the world, especially those interested in games, chose the blandness of the boring metal box (which, as we have gone over many times wasn't all that much more expensive than similarly specced A1200). Why could that be? A question for the ages. /s

It always surprised me to be honest. Soundblaster tech was slow to take off and I remember my friends playing PC Flashback on their keyboard and Mortal Kombat on a flight stick! The only PC games that ever got my attention were Doom and C&C! Commander Keen was an absolute joke to me when we had so many great platforms on the 'miggy!

People only got PCs because their Dads needed them for work! An early 90s PC came with M$ Works and little else of use! Compared to a useful TurboPrint and Final Writer/Wordsworth/PageStream equipped Amiga it was poor! People bought them anyway!

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by hammer

A programmer can access VGA's video memory e.g. https://www.timetraces.ca/nw/vga_mem.htm

Of course it can! How without access to this memory space, CPU could directly modify frame buffer content.
But seem you don't get my point - i've proposed you to place in this memory space CPU code so PC can experience Amiga or Atari ST reality.

Originally Posted by hammer

Amiga is partly UMA since the custom chips (up to 21-bit address range for some ECS and all AGA) don't have full access to 68000/68EC020's 24-bit address range.

Whenever your code is located in CHIP RAM then it is UMA and this is default configuration for most Amiga configs.

Originally Posted by hammer

Full UMA has both GPU and CPU have full equal access to each other's memory address range capability.

In UMA graphics is prioritized over CPU.

Originally Posted by hammer

A1200 with FastRAM, custom chips don't have access to Fast RAM.

In out of the box A1200 there is no FAST RAM thus it is UMA only.

Originally Posted by hammer

That's not a virtue for absolute performance for each CPU and GPU component e.g. https://wccftech.com/sony-ps4-effect...u-gpu-scaling/

---cut rest---

Obviously you not replying with understanding of my point but as this is irrelevant from this thread perspective as you far from main topic.

Originally Posted by hammer

I have and they replied with Mega ST (with custom Biltter) which is useless for games due to a tiny install base issue. Atari ST has no hardware scrolling. Atari STe was released in 1989 along with Amiga 500 Rev 6A.

I don't expect different answer - it clearly shows what is standard and lack of standard.

Originally Posted by hammer

VGA latch copy hardware can assist software Blit. The latches can be used to perform 4-byte-at-a-time (one byte from each plane) block copying.

Sure it can help but this is possible only because different memory organization than in Amiga.

Originally Posted by hammer

It comes down to price and offered gaming experience.

Same as Amiga chipset.

Originally Posted by hammer

He was good at marketing, sales distribution channels, developer relations, and logistics.

But not technical - exactly as i've wrote earlier.

Originally Posted by hammer

A2000 includes Amiga's core OCS.

It is not about OCS but R&D where German CBM also participated with success.

Originally Posted by hammer

I replied to your assertion.

Nope - you replied to your self - as i pointed earlier - you completely going off topic, mixing time, technology and flooding this topic with irrelevant numbers, examples etc.

[oscar_ates]

Originally Posted by Promilus

@TCD - it would not make a difference in the long run... Even if it would've result in twice as many A1200 sold it's not significant difference. Commodore would've sink that ship either way.
The only actual chance would've been getting something reaching A500 popularity and AGA based A1200 wasn't that.

This 9months delay to release the chipset features to developers is unheard type of mistake, although I agree that it was too late to save the commodore ship since the twice sales would not save it from getting sunk. AGA like machine could be ok for year 1989-1990.

Compare 1994 CD32 performance with PS1 beast:

http://www.psxdev.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=21

PS1 has 33MIPS(CPU)+66MIPS(GTE)+80MIPS(DCE)+X?(GPU)+Separate SPU(512KB own RAM)+2MB Main RAM+1MB VRAM performance for both 2D/3D. Commodore could not compete with this beast on the long run anyway.

For 2D games look at the "Castlevania-Symphony of the Night" and "Silhoutte and Mirage", very nice games.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by oscar_ates

This 9months delay to release the chipset features to developers is unheard type of mistake

Absolutely. What were they snorting?