Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[ImmortalA1000]

I did remember one thing that did disappointment me, and thousands of others, back then. The A1200 units sent to stores were like 99% no HDD installed AND because it was designed badly the only way to add your own 2.5" IDE HDD inside it would invalidate the onsite warranty on your brand new £400 computer.

ALL notebooks in 1992 I ever saw had a panel you remove and just slot in the drive and close the panel. Add this to the fact that adding 4mb RAM to an A1200 with a silly trapdoor PCB cost twice as much as sticking 4mb of SIMMs inside your PC. Even on notebooks. It may have been expandable in theory but the cost/voided warranty issues meant there was never going to be 4mb HDD spec targetted A1200 games.

So yeah, that was disappointing because I actually wanted the A1200 + 20mb or 40mb HDD spec and this was a big problem. The RAM I could live without but I had a HDD on my A2000 and it's a bit crap going back to floppy only system. Classic Commodore cockup on both fronts. Maybe the A1200 was a Negan style "are we pissing out pants yet?" type response to the dated look of 32 colour games vs console/VGA/Archimedes competition but it was a cockup.

After 12 months of warranty (nothing went wrong IIRC) it had become obvious there were never going to be any AGA games that push the hardware to the limits and Commodore were dead 6 months after that anyway so I never bothered.

In reality the A1200 was as expensive to upgrade as A500, all because of a missing SIMM slot and stupidly designed position of IDE connector pins/lack of removable panels (but there was a removable panel on the rear of the A1200 so it isn't a cost issue with panels, just clueless motherboard/case design).

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by Korban

Tens of millions of "average users" disagreed.
People en masse changed to PC because it was the platform of choice for the average user. It had the software, hardware and price.

And yes I am sure they were very pleased whilst they had to manually fuck about with their Config.sys and Autoexec.bat files to make enough space in the lower 640kb to run the latest games.

People who bought a PC before Windows XP were clueless cocksuckers FACT.

Yanks had shit taste in everything in the late 80s, their shitty US cars, their shit soft rock bullshit music, their crap clothes. The fact they bought a PC doesn't mean it was good. Windows was a fucking mess before XP, using Windows 3.1 + DOS based pre 1995 PC was a mistake or they were the kind of morons who just played Solitaire in Windows 3.1

The 1992 486SX ISA PC (which is a 1994 High Street PC spec, 1992 high street store family PC was 286-16 AT BEST with shit Adlib and 14" SVGA crap) can run Doom better than Gloom on an A1200 sure but it can't do Turrican II, it can't do Lotus II, it can't Shadow of the Beast 1. And I haven't even got to the wanker special OPL2 based Adlib bullshit 'top of the range' for high street PCs.

This bullshit myth by clueless wankers that high street PC was better than A1200 in 1992-1994 can just get the fuck out of this thread and piss off to the clueless 'PC games that made Amiga look like shit" thread thanks

Only a prick who knows fuck all and didn't own the best hardware from 1980-2000 would ever say high street family PC was better than the A1200 at any time between 1992-1994.

The 16 colour pixel art of the unreleased Atari ST (and Amiga) game Curse of the Ancient Mariner rips those VGA DOS wankers a new one, it had better graphics/art than 256 colour wank from Sierra and Lucasarts spastics and that is a fact. It made those VGA games those clueless Yankers loved so much look like ZX Spectrum wank.

But then I guess most people are losers. The biggest selling car of the late 80s was the piece of shit overpriced Toyota Corolla, I guess that was better than a cheaper French/British small car that didn't handle like a piece of shit and sound like a bag of spanners under the bonnet? Methinks not. PC = Prick's Choice. Get over it, deal with it, you loved PC anytime before Windows XP then you were a clueless prick and your opinion should go and pollute the clueless 'PC games that made Amiga look like shit' when the reality was Rocket Ranger on a 1982 Commodore 64 is better than an late 80s £2500 'top of the range' PC FACT. Get over it already.

Amiga may have had problems under the clueless morons running Commodore without the pure genius of Jack BUT it is nothing compared to the problems with ISA bus, DOS OS in reality, OPL2 + scratchy shit soundblaster sound PC had to deal with. Said it before and I will repeat, you didn't have to edit your s/startup-sequence when you got home with your brand new copy of Beast 1, Lotus II etc to make it run. On PC you did have to do exactly that if you wanted to run cutting edge games thanks to the way Dickhead's Operating System (DOS) worked even though you had 1mb or 4mb in your PC.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

I did remember one thing that did disappointment me, and thousands of others, back then. The A1200 units sent to stores were like 99% no HDD installed AND because it was designed badly the only way to add your own 2.5" IDE HDD inside it would invalidate the onsite warranty on your brand new £400 computer.

Only if you did it yourself rather have the dealer or authorized technician do it. And fair enough too, since it is easy to fry a computer by connecting things wrong or zapping the chips with static. This was no different to desktop computers of the day.

ALL notebooks in 1992 I ever saw had a panel you remove and just slot in the drive and close the panel.

Toshiba T1800 Maintenance Manual 1/01/1992

Removing the Hard Disk Drive

To remove the hard disk drive (HDD) follow these steps and refer to Figures 4-10 through 4-12:
1. Turn off the power to the T1800. Disconnect the AC adapter, and all external cables connected to the T1800.
2. Remove the battery pack, optional memory card, keyboard and top cover as instructed in sections 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 4.5 and 4.6.
3. Remove the three M2.5x4 screws securing the metal plate.
4. Remove the one M2.5x6 screw securing the HDD bracket to the bottom cover.
Refer to Figure 4-11.
5. Disconnect the HDD cable from the pressure plate connectors PJ6 and PJ5
on the system board. Refer to Figure 4-11.
6. Lift the HDD out of the computer.

Tell us how this is different from removing a hard drive from the A1200.

The A1200 wasn't a laptop. It was a home computer built down to the lowest possible price for poor people to afford, in the tradition of home computers like the ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, C64 etc. Laptops with removable hard drives were expensive, often costing $1000 more than an equivalent desktop PC, with the added insult of a cramped keyboard, crappy LCD screen, and a battery that only lasted a few hours at best.

BTW I recently bought a Toshiba 386SX laptop for NZ$50. Unfortunately the backup NICAD battery had leaked into the connector going from the power supply board to the main board, corroding the contacts. I cleaned it up as best as I could and it worked - for a while. The other problem it had was the floppy drive belt had stretched so it wouldn't read disks. Of course both the main and backup Nicad batteries were shot. Luckily the 85MB Conner 2.5" hard drive was good though, so it was still worth buying just for that.

Add this to the fact that adding 4mb RAM to an A1200 with a silly trapdoor PCB cost twice as much as sticking 4mb of SIMMs inside your PC. Even on notebooks.

Even on notebooks? Most laptops back then didn't take 'standard' SIMMs. My Toshiba took proprietary RAM cards that plugged into two ports similar to PCMCIA but different. I bet they weren't cheap. I bet the ports weren't cheap either.

In 1992 most desktop PCs used 8 bit SIMMs. The A1200 would have needed 4 of them. Where would they fit on the motherboard?

It may have been expandable in theory but the cost/voided warranty issues meant there was never going to be 4mb HDD spec targetted A1200 games.

Nonsense. The A1200HD/40 made the hard drive a standard feature. A hard drive could also be added externally via the PCMCIA slot, which required nothing more than a passive adapter if you didn't need autobooting. The Archos Overdrive allowed you to add a cheap 3.5" IDE drive at low cost, without voiding any warranties. Today we use Compact Flash cards with a cheap adapter that works similarly.

The warranty was not voided by adding a trapdoor RAM board. Many RAM boards had an RTC, some had a socket for an FPU, and some even threw in a faster 68020. Sure it cost more than a SIMM alone, but you got more, in part because you paid less for the base machine than if it had SIMM sockets on the motherboard. People who didn't need extra RAM didn't have to pay for useless sockets and a redundant RAM controller.

Of course RAM on the motherboard would be stuck at 14MHz, whereas RAM on an accelerator card could be as fast as necessary to keep up with the CPU. In this way an accelerated A1200 could naturally be faster than the A4000 which had its 'fast' RAM on the motherboard, as well as not being limited to 16MB.

Within a few years accelerator cards were commonplace and getting cheaper and more powerful, allowing A1200 owners to match or exceed the power of an A4000 at much lower cost. Compare that to PC owners, who generally had to replace the entire machine every 2 years or so to keep up.

The point of the A1200 was to provide a cheap replacement for the A500+ that was faster and more capable out of the box, but also expandable without limit. The key to that was to not put stuff on the motherboard that could go in the trapdoor, and make the full 32 bit bus available to it (unlike the A500 and A600 which only gave access to the chip RAM bus).

So yeah, that was disappointing because I actually wanted the A1200 + 20mb or 40mb HDD spec and this was a big problem. The RAM I could live without but I had a HDD on my A2000 and it's a bit crap going back to floppy only system.

But you kept the A2000, right? It would be a while before AGA titles needing a hard drive appeared, and 2.5" drives were available if you desperately wanted one 'right now'. So what you really mean is you were too impatient to wait, and too stingy to add a hard drive to the cheap A1200 you got.

Classic Commodore cockup on both fronts. Maybe the A1200 was a Negan style "are we pissing out pants yet?" type response to the dated look of 32 colour games vs console/VGA/Archimedes competition but it was a cockup.

The general consensus of most Amiga fans is that before 1992 Amiga games were still looking good despite 'only' having 32 colors (actually many had more through use of the copper and/or EHB or HAM mode). More disappointing were games ported from other platforms that had less colors, such as the ST, or did a lazy job (eg. Silent Service II which squashed 256 VGA images into 16 colors for the AmIga 500 when they could have used 64). The main advantage of AGA was that VGA games could be ported to it without much effort.

As for the Archimedes, actually getting 256 unique colors on screen was almost impossible because it used a technique similar to extra half-bright for most of them. The small number of games produced for the Archimedes and their generally poor quality don't exactly make it a good example of an Amiga beater.

After 12 months of warranty (nothing went wrong IIRC) it had become obvious there were never going to be any AGA games that push the hardware to the limits and Commodore were dead 6 months after that anyway so I never bothered.

I understand the disappointment over Commodore's demise, but it's not true to say that no AGA games that 'pushed the hardware' were produced. Your problems were that a) you were too impatient, and b) you expected the improvement to be more visible. The fact is that while 256 colors sounds like a huge improvement (which it is) an OCS game can look almost as good when carefully crafted to fit within its limitations. A large part of AGA's advantage is not having to push the machine to the limit to get the effects you want.

In reality the A1200 was as expensive to upgrade as A500, all because of a missing SIMM slot and stupidly designed position of IDE connector pins/lack of removable panels (but there was a removable panel on the rear of the A1200 so it isn't a cost issue with panels, just clueless motherboard/case design).

Sorry, but that simply isn't true. The only official hard drive + Fast RAM expansion for the A500 was the A590. It was not cheap. It was awkward. It needed a separate power supply the same size as the A500's. It didn't take SIMMs, or an IDE hard drive. If you wanted a faster processor your only practical options were the even more expensive GVP combo, or a card plugged into the CPU socket.

The A1200 was cheaper to upgrade and much tidier than the A500. No heavy boxes hanging off the expansion connector. No extra power supplies that have to be sequenced in the right order. No hacky internal boards stuck in the CPU socket.

[Predseda]

For me the only dissappontment was the old audio, kept from 1985 Amiga 1000. I hoped for 8 voices.

[Weasel Fierce]

Things the 1200 offered over 500/500plus/600:

Faster processor - It mattered more than you might think. A lot of flight sims ran faster and smoother and it mattered a great deal for applications.

2 MB RAM in the box - When working with applications the difference between 1 MB and 2 is pretty noticeable. There's just a lot more space to work with, especially in Workbench.

AGA - People like to bag on AGA but the AGA version of Deluxe Paint was fantastic.

IDE on the motherboard - 600 has this. 500's did not, you had to add an external device for it.

Expansion slot. Far wider range of expansions were available even at the time and unlike the 500, you could just buy a RAM or processor expansion without any need to also have a hard drive interface bundled in.

PCMCIA - Not really useful at the time, but today allows anything from networking to compact flash card adapters. Trying to get files to and from a 500 is a nightmare.


Conclusion? The 1200 was the best wedge case machine Commodore ever made and depending on criteria probably the third best Amiga overall.

[logo]

"PCMCIA - Not really useful at the time"

It was very useful to plug my first CD-ROM Drive (Archos).
With a hard drive and a MTec 68030-28Mhz+68881-16Mhz card + 8MB of Fast RAM, my A1200 could reach a new level of Power and was very user friendly.

[TheLurker]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

And yes I am sure they were very pleased whilst they had to manually fuck about with their Config.sys and Autoexec.bat files to make enough space in the lower 640kb to run the latest games.

People who bought a PC before Windows XP were clueless cocksuckers FACT.

Yanks had shit taste in everything in the late 80s, their shitty US cars, their shit soft rock bullshit music, their crap clothes. The fact they bought a PC doesn't mean it was good. Windows was a fucking mess before XP, using Windows 3.1 + DOS based pre 1995 PC was a mistake or they were the kind of morons who just played Solitaire in Windows 3.1

The 1992 486SX ISA PC (which is a 1994 High Street PC spec, 1992 high street store family PC was 286-16 AT BEST with shit Adlib and 14" SVGA crap) can run Doom better than Gloom on an A1200 sure but it can't do Turrican II, it can't do Lotus II, it can't Shadow of the Beast 1. And I haven't even got to the wanker special OPL2 based Adlib bullshit 'top of the range' for high street PCs.

This bullshit myth by clueless wankers that high street PC was better than A1200 in 1992-1994 can just get the fuck out of this thread and piss off to the clueless 'PC games that made Amiga look like shit" thread thanks

Only a prick who knows fuck all and didn't own the best hardware from 1980-2000 would ever say high street family PC was better than the A1200 at any time between 1992-1994.

The 16 colour pixel art of the unreleased Atari ST (and Amiga) game Curse of the Ancient Mariner rips those VGA DOS wankers a new one, it had better graphics/art than 256 colour wank from Sierra and Lucasarts spastics and that is a fact. It made those VGA games those clueless Yankers loved so much look like ZX Spectrum wank.

But then I guess most people are losers. The biggest selling car of the late 80s was the piece of shit overpriced Toyota Corolla, I guess that was better than a cheaper French/British small car that didn't handle like a piece of shit and sound like a bag of spanners under the bonnet? Methinks not. PC = Prick's Choice. Get over it, deal with it, you loved PC anytime before Windows XP then you were a clueless prick and your opinion should go and pollute the clueless 'PC games that made Amiga look like shit' when the reality was Rocket Ranger on a 1982 Commodore 64 is better than an late 80s £2500 'top of the range' PC FACT. Get over it already.

Amiga may have had problems under the clueless morons running Commodore without the pure genius of Jack BUT it is nothing compared to the problems with ISA bus, DOS OS in reality, OPL2 + scratchy shit soundblaster sound PC had to deal with. Said it before and I will repeat, you didn't have to edit your s/startup-sequence when you got home with your brand new copy of Beast 1, Lotus II etc to make it run. On PC you did have to do exactly that if you wanted to run cutting edge games thanks to the way Dickhead's Operating System (DOS) worked even though you had 1mb or 4mb in your PC.

You must be a lot of fun at parties. Good lord I feel like I've been transported back to comp.sys.amiga.advocacy and the days of one SG...

Although you seem to have tried to insult people everywhere, tell me Immortal One, where would a shit taste Yank find themselves an Amiga 1200 in 92-94?

When I bought my 3000 in the Summer of 1990, there was exactly one Amiga dealer in my city of 500K people. And it was gone the next summer. Then when I went back to college in the fall, same deal there in a similar sized city. I had to buy all my gear through the mail, and I never met another Amiga owner at school. Toaster (yeah I hacked the case to make it fit), DCTV, audio capture, everything. Same deal when I bought my 4000 in '93, Toaster 4000, TBCs, AD516, Digital Broadcaster, and all software of course. Not too many people were going to drop that kind of money mail order, or want to order away for software vs. just going to the local Best Buy or whatever.

I'm saying all of this only to show that I was as Amiga as it got, but it was just a different market here. Home Computers (not PCs) - Commodore, Tandy, Atari, etc. - were out of the gaming scene pretty quickly after the NES took over. So what was the Amiga games scene in Europe was all consoles over here.

And PCs were much cheaper over here, apparently. '94 base 486SX-25 complete systems for like 900 bucks, DX2-66 under $1600, the new Pentiums under 2K. And an SNES was $90.

We bought PCs (unless you were nuts and spent a ton of money like I did) because that or a Mac was literally the only choice for the vast majority of people.

[Weasel Fierce]

Originally Posted by logo

"PCMCIA - Not really useful at the time"

It was very useful to plug my first CD-ROM Drive (Archos).
With a hard drive and a MTec 68030-28Mhz+68881-16Mhz card + 8MB of Fast RAM, my A1200 could reach a new level of Power and was very user friendly.

Good call!

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by TheLurker

When I bought my 3000 in the Summer of 1990, there was exactly one Amiga dealer in my city of 500K people. And it was gone the next summer. Then when I went back to college in the fall, same deal there in a similar sized city. I had to buy all my gear through the mail, and I never met another Amiga owner at school.

Back then living in the US sucked in so many ways.

And PCs were much cheaper over here, apparently. '94 base 486SX-25 complete systems for like 900 bucks

By the end of '94 the Amiga was gone in the US anyway, but was a typical 486SX really that cheap before then? I looked through the August 1993 issue of PC World magazine and yes, some 'base' models were selling for $900 (+ tax). For that you got ISA bus only with 2MB RAM and an unknown '16 bit' VGA card - but no sound card, no monitor, and perhaps no system software either. Once you added those essentials the price would be well over $1000. Looking at PC World's list of 'over the counter' prices of popular PCs we see a typical 386SX system with 2MB sold for ~$1300, and 486SX systems with 4MB were pushing over $2000. And even those machines probably didn't include a sound card.

Meanwhile the A1200 was selling for $499, and you could add a GVP A1230+ with 40MHz 030 and 1MB FastRAM for $379 making for a total of $878, cheaper than the incomplete 'base' 486SX PC.

But why should price matter? Americans were rich and could afford whatever they wanted. Which wasn't an Amiga. I mean, it didn't run PC software so what would you do with it?

[Predseda]

Thats correct point, it was already NOT a matter of money at that time.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by TheLurker

We bought PCs (unless you were nuts and spent a ton of money like I did) because that or a Mac was literally the only choice for the vast majority of people.

This. Even by 1992 almost nobody thought of the Amiga as a 'serious' machine mainly due it being marketed (if it was) as a games machine. The PC was never a games machine, but like mobile phones if everybody has one it becomes a games machine.

The 'but it would have cost too much' argument is interesting. By that logic the Neo Geo shouldn't have sold at all. Or high end sound cards for PC.

[TheLurker]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Back then living in the US sucked in so many ways.

By the end of '94 the Amiga was gone in the US anyway, but was a typical 486SX really that cheap before then? I looked through the August 1993 issue of PC World magazine and yes, some 'base' models were selling for $900 (+ tax). For that you got ISA bus only with 2MB RAM and an unknown '16 bit' VGA card - but no sound card, no monitor, and perhaps no system software either. Once you added those essentials the price would be well over $1000. Looking at PC World's list of 'over the counter' prices of popular PCs we see a typical 386SX system with 2MB sold for ~$1300, and 486SX systems with 4MB were pushing over $2000. And even those machines probably didn't include a sound card.

Meanwhile the A1200 was selling for $499, and you could add a GVP A1230+ with 40MHz 030 and 1MB FastRAM for $379 making for a total of $878, cheaper than the incomplete 'base' 486SX PC.

But why should price matter? Americans were rich and could afford whatever they wanted. Which wasn't an Amiga. I mean, it didn't run PC software so what would you do with it?

I brought up PC price just as a response to what ImmortalA1000 was saying about it. Also keep in mind that what PC World lists isn't quite accurate, just because at that time there were tons of independent clone builders that had prices quite a bit less than the name brands. But yeah, it's not really the point.

I will say that that A1200 price you have there isn't useful for me, because I would require a hard drive and monitor. And since it's an AGA model, I either buy a 31Khz monitor and hope DblNTSC worked for all my apps, or buy a Multisync, as non-interlaced would be a requirement as well. For my setup I had the 1950 monitor so I was covered.

And there was a niche in the US of course then and for some time afterwards, and I was a part of that. But that niche required a big box Amiga, which were considerably more expensive. And I apparently had more money than sense, so I had a 3000 and a 4000. I think the 3000 was a better machine, as the stuff I was doing didn't really benefit from AGA, though Toaster 4000 did add some features over the original. The 3000s flicker fixer was such a nice feature to have as well. I had upgraded the 4000 with a Warp Engine/040 and moved the A3640 into the 3000, so I could use them both for Lightwave rendering. The 3640 had crappy memory access speeds though. Both had 16MB of Fast, 2MB Chip.

This really brings back some memories, wow. I'm getting off-topic here so apologies.

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by TheLurker

This really brings back some memories, wow. I'm getting off-topic here so apologies.

No worries man.
Welcome, and stop being a lurker.

I am very interested to hear how the things was in US, back in the day, and you give a nice info. Yeah.. consoles was "a thing" in the Europe too, but paralely, we were really blessed to have Amiga, Atari and other brands pretty popular here.

I am also curious why do you want to own Amiga so bad, considering that you never knew anybody that had Amiga? What sparks that love? What you used your Amiga for (since you have very powerful machines)? Professional work?

From the sound of it.. it looks like you did some 3D rendering..,, and some TV station videos, or something like that.

[TEG]

There was a real problem with the A1200. This was about graphic modes and desktop applications. @TheLurker allude about it.

The VGA mode (6400 x 400 x 4 colours) which appeared seems to be a good step forward to do advanced multitask and serious work. But unless to own a costly multi-sync monitor it was unusable because the Amiga was constantly falling back to a lower resolution when unsupported applications were launched. So the VGA monitor was instantly lost and the only solution was to reboot the Amiga.

So all those cheap, but sharp VGA monitors, which were flooding the market at the time, were not an option to work with an 1200 and so to compete with the PC on desktop applications.

It was a heartbreak for me because I had a bunch of applications and the multi-tasks Workbench of the Amiga was so much superior to the PC DOS but I was stuck in the 640x200x32 realm. So I bought a very costly multi-sync monitor and I was able to stay with my Amiga for some time, thinking that a 1200+ or something like that will come to solve those problems. But nothing came and graphics cards on the PC side were rapidly evolving, soon advertising 16 millions colours for some bucks. Unbelievable !

I think we can trace back the lack of competitiveness of the Amiga on the long run to the failed launch of the A1000. I'm in the impression that lost of profits at this moment have determined what happened next.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by TheLurker

keep in mind that what PC World lists isn't quite accurate, just because at that time there were tons of independent clone builders that had prices quite a bit less than the name brands.

It was the same here in New Zealand. But most of those locally assembled clones were really nasty, with random parts from various sources thrown together and no manufacturer's warranty to speak of. We did a bit of 'OEM' assembly in my shop too, but I preferred to buy complete machines from trusted wholesale assemblers because they were more experienced and provided good support (buying individual parts could be nightmare when one bit didn't work with another and both suppliers insisted the other was at fault).

Thinking back to those times, the PC clone scene was crazy. I spent a decade working 7 days a week trying to keep up with demand for repairs and upgrades. When XP came out in 2001 I finally got sick of it and rekindled my former hobby of radio control model airplanes. I closed the computer shop and we opened a hobby shop with full online presence (first in the country) while I wound down the computer business over the next year. Such a relief to deal with customers who weren't constantly complaining about problems with their products!

I will say that that A1200 price you have there isn't useful for me, because I would require a hard drive and monitor. And since it's an AGA model, I either buy a 31Khz monitor and hope DblNTSC worked for all my apps, or buy a Multisync, as non-interlaced would be a requirement as well. For my setup I had the 1950 monitor so I was covered.

Fair enough. I was quite happy using my A1200 on a TV, but like you I also had an A3000 with multisync monitor (and 060, RTG and Ethernet in later years). The A1200 was more my 'fun' machine.

And I apparently had more money than sense, so I had a 3000 and a 4000. I think the 3000 was a better machine, as the stuff I was doing didn't really benefit from AGA, though Toaster 4000 did add some features over the original.

If you were using that Toaster commercially then I would guess you didn't have 'more money than sense'. Most businesses had to upgrade their PCs every 2 years or so, and when you needed stuff done you didn't flinch from buying a high-end machine. If it was just a hobby then there were other hobbies that could cost a lot more. If you could afford it then why deny yourself?

This really brings back some memories, wow. I'm getting off-topic here so apologies.

No problem, that's why we are here!

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by TEG

The VGA mode (6400 x 400 x 4 colours) which appeared seems to be a good step forward to do advanced multitask and serious work.

But unless to own a costly multi-sync monitor it was unusable because the Amiga was constantly falling back to a lower resolution when unsupported applications were launched. So the VGA monitor was instantly lost and the only solution was to reboot the Amiga.

Mode promotion worked for the vast majority of 'serious' apps, but of course not for hardware-banging games. One solution to this problem was to do what many PC users do today, use two monitors! Games generally ran in low res and didn't need a sharp display, so you could just plug a TV or AV monitor into the composite output.

But the real problem was that the A1200 offered high scan rates at all. Put a new feature into your product and customers are bound to get upset then it doesn't work as well as they would like (in this case, not working 100% for everything with a cheap VGA monitor). Amiga fans are the worst for this. PC users accepted that their monochrome monitor would only work on MDA/Hercules, and that their cheap VGA monitor and/or card couldn't do all theoretically possible resolutions in non-interlace. But Amiga fans are never satisfied. Give them a taste of something and they always want more!

The A1200 was a low end model primarily designed to work with a TV or 15kHz monitor. Its composite signal is very good - much better than the A520 or A600. If Commodore hadn't put VGA scan rates in it then a few 'high-end' users might been disappointed, but most wouldn't know what they were(n't) missing.

So all those cheap, but sharp VGA monitors, which were flooding the market at the time, were not an option to work with an 1200 and so to compete with the PC on desktop applications.

More PC envy? You got your A1200 cheap, but you expect it to match a high-end PC? Typical attitude of the Amiga fan - want the Moon on a stick but think you should only have to pay for the stick.

It was a heartbreak for me because I had a bunch of applications and the multi-tasks Workbench of the Amiga was so much superior to the PC DOS but I was stuck in the 640x200x32 realm. So I bought a very costly multi-sync monitor and I was able to stay with my Amiga for some time, thinking that a 1200+ or something like that will come to solve those problems. But nothing came and graphics cards on the PC side were rapidly evolving, soon advertising 16 millions colours for some bucks. Unbelievable !

Even more PC envy.

I remember when Windows 95 came out (after Commodore's demise so the Amiga was already history) and most PCs of the time struggled to do 256 colors let alone full 24 bit. Vendors might have advertised super high resolutions but almost nobody used them. Most machines were set up in 640x480 or 800x600 because higher resolutions were too slow and used up too much memory, and cheap monitors of the day weren't sharp enough or big enough to do them justice.

I think we can trace back the lack of competitiveness of the Amiga on the long run to the failed launch of the A1000. I'm in the impression that lost of profits at this moment have determined what happened next.

The A1000 launched into a market full of PC clones. It was a 'high-end' home computer at a time when most 'low end' users were happy with a C64. Two years later that changed when the Amiga and ST showed what 16 bit computing could do for games. The A500 was very successful as a home computer. However by that time PCs had taken over in the US and classic home computers were dead.

The only way the Amiga could have competed against the PC in the US was to become a PC iteself. We know this because no other home computer in its class managed to make it in the US either, except for the Tandy 1000 which was a PC clone (actually a PC Jr clone - Tandy managed to succeed where IBM failed!).

[daxb]

Hmm... I bought a scandoubler for my A1200 in the '90 to connect a 31kHz (PC) monitor. That was common/worked fine and all provided monitors/resolutions are supported... PAL/NTSC/LowRes/HighRes/DBLPal/Multiscan/.... A bonus was that two monitors connected at once was possible.

[TheLurker]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

No worries man.
Welcome, and stop being a lurker.

I am very interested to hear how the things was in US, back in the day, and you give a nice info. Yeah.. consoles was "a thing" in the Europe too, but paralely, we were really blessed to have Amiga, Atari and other brands pretty popular here.

I am also curious why do you want to own Amiga so bad, considering that you never knew anybody that had Amiga? What sparks that love? What you used your Amiga for (since you have very powerful machines)? Professional work?

From the sound of it.. it looks like you did some 3D rendering..,, and some TV station videos, or something like that.

I was aware of the Amiga from the beginning - I remember talking about it on a BBS I used to dial up with my 800XL. I think that was a big reason why - you know the spiritual successor to the Atari 8-bits, Jay Miner and all that. But I didn't actually get one until 1990. It started off with a DCTV and an audio digitizer, making presentations with AmigaVision for people at college. After graduation bought a Toaster and snipped the case to make it fit. Made some videos for people, transferred people's old film to video with titles/sound, that kind of thing. Played around with Lightwave, but my 3000 was the 16Mhz model so it was slooow. Then I got the 4000/Toaster and got more serious. TBCs, AD516 for sound, even tried a Broadcaster for non-linear. And Lightwave, making animations for people for logos/commercials.

What people don't realize about Desktop Video back then was all the moving parts, and it was all analog. Not counting the computer, you had to have time base correctors, 3 VTRs for A/B roll, video cameras, lighting, several type of mics, yada yada yada. And S-VHS/Hi8 at a minimum, but TV stations really wanted Betacam SP or higher. So honestly, I just did enough gigs to pay for the gear mostly, and had my real job. By 1995/96 I didn't see a future for the setup anymore, as you could see digital was going to be the future and I wasn't using it much anyway, so to eBay it went. Toaster systems were still in high demand, so I got a good price for all of it, but I should have kept one of them. Ah well, hindsight is always 20/20. I still kept up with things on Usenet and have used WinUAE for many years now though.

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by TEG

There was a real problem with the A1200. This was about graphic modes and desktop applications. @TheLurker allude about it.

The VGA mode (6400 x 400 x 4 colours) which appeared seems to be a good step forward to do advanced multitask and serious work.

640x400 x 4 colours at ~VGA frequencies was an ECS feature, not an AGA feature. AGA allowed such modes up to 256 colours (though they were pretty slow). In 16 colours it was perfectly usable though.

So all those cheap, but sharp VGA monitors, which were flooding the market at the time, were not an option to work with an 1200 and so to compete with the PC on desktop applications.

I had an old VGA monitor for doing serious stuff and a TV for playing games on. Not ideal, but then I got a scandoubler, and also a 1084S, so still had 2 monitors but it worked well enough.

[Drittz78]

I really wished that the A1200 had a bigger library of titles that took advantage of the hardware. The other thing that went against it was the lack of buttons. It made fighting games pointless compared to the 6 button controllers for the SNES and Megadrive.