Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: Amithony on November 18, 2008, 10:14:13 AM
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I would have to say the amiga community, hardware, bestest games (civ, pirates, lotus turbo), funnest interface ever and the early competition with the XT clones. Bring those days back I say. Oh and of course, the SAM 440 (affectionately known as the SAMiga) :)
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Amithony wrote:
I would have to say the amiga community, hardware, bestest games (civ, pirates, lotus turbo), funnest interface ever and the early competition with the XT clones. Bring those days back I say. Oh and of course, the SAM 440 (affectionately known as the SAMiga) :)
I'll quote myself from an answer I gave to this question years ago:
The best thing to happen to the Amiga: Commodore
The worst thing to happen to the Amiga: Commodore
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The demoscene.
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bloodline wrote:
I'll quote myself from an answer I gave to this question years ago:
The best thing to happen to the Amiga: Commodore
The worst thing to happen to the Amiga: Commodore
This is brilliant! Almost like the Zen of Amiga thought. It says so much more than the 2 statements suggest on their own :)
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agreed on the commodore thing... :lol:
but i think the best thing was that the machines, particularly the early ones, were designed and built with true heart and soul of the guys involved. the kinda "we are going to change the world" sort of feeling. and it was a privilage to have been on the edge of that, even just as a user.
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EFIKAMIGA
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Jay Miner and the Amiga Dream Team...
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Newtek. Hands down. Most of the A2000 and up hardware would have never have been produced without the demand for the Toaster.
Thats not to say most Amigas had Toasters, just that the legitimate commercial demand commanded the development and production after 1990 that we would have never enjoyed otherwise.
In short, its the only reason it didnt die by C= mismanagement sooner.
Of course the European popularity shouldn't be discounted either.
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The Video Toaster and Lightwave 3D.
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The best thing that ever happened to the Amiga was the release of the Amiga 500. It was the first really nice Amiga machine, affordable, nice looking, easily expandable, with available software and built-in ROM. The Amiga boom happened not with the release of the Amiga 1000, or Amiga 2000, but after the Amiga 500, many people bought it and it was all around the homes, especially in Europe. Only if it have color TV output (not monochrome), like the A1000. Amiga 500 with 1MB is the winner (established as standard only some months later after it's release). A500 is the second most used Amiga model for me, after the microAmigaOne.
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Surely the release of the A1200.
I put mine in a tower and all that jazz, but now I could really do with a nice, quiet, compact Amiga and I wanna put a nice hd and an accelerator in a nice A1200 case.
I`m having my second honeymoon with the A1200 I think...
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I am the best thing to ever happen to the Amiga.
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Toni Wilen, WinUAE and WHDLoad....
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Tension wrote:
Surely the release of the A1200.
I don't agree. The A1200 is a nice machine, but it was too little, too late and therefor definitely not the best thing that happened to the amiga.
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I don't agree. The A1200 is a nice machine, but it was too little, too late and therefor definitely not the best thing that happened to the amiga.
Well yea they made a few mistakes with A1200, but it still was a nice machine. At the time they could easily have gone with a faster CPU maybe even a 68040 with a socket later to be ugradeable with 68060 and put simm slots inside the machine. This would have brought the price up quite a bit, but I think it would have been worth it. They should have also gone with a more traditional monitor output as the use of TV as a display had been long since forgotten + 50 and 60Hz monitors makes your eyes bleed ;)
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I've got to side with those who said New Tek and the Toaster were the best thing that happened. The Toaster provided the means to take the Amiga to professional settings that would have been impossible to crack otherwise. Apple became noted for desktop publishing, the Amiga for desktop video. Unfortunately the market wasn't large enough to sustain the sales needed to keep the company going.
The worst thing, CBM's marketing efforts which tended to confuse the public. You want a computer that's easy to use and CBM's marketing message that the next door kid was the only one smart enough to use it was, according to many, offputting!
Bob
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@ tone007,
Absolutely. *WE*, the consumer, were the best thing to ever happen to the Amiga. Too bad we are always the minority :-(
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I'd say the A500, Multitasking computing for the masses :-)
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Indivision AGA for my 1200..thanks Jens :pint: :-D
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Best thing that ever happened on my Amiga?
Free BBS porn!
Yeah, going from 1200bps to 2400bps modem was AWSEOME!!!
:lol: :lol:
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The absolute manic obsession of the early adopters of the Amiga. Creating at the time some of the most amazing tools for the creative computer user, but only possible because of the genius of Jay Miner and the other original developers. Nowadays technology leaps are rare especially if you forget the Internet.
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Quake for the Amiga was one of the best things. Well I really enjoyed it anyway. :-)
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WHDLOAD
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save2600 wrote:
@ tone007,
Absolutely. *WE*, the consumer, were the best thing to ever happen to the Amiga. Too bad we are always the minority :-(
I don't think we were a minority I just think we preferred to use Dcopy or Xcopy than to actually buy the games
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A3000..... The only stock Amiga you can plug any Monitor into and plenty of upgrade options.
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Best things: Commodore buyout of Amiga (Atari wanted to rape Amiga for its technology). Release of Amiga 2000 for professionals, release of amiga 500 (for gamers, and other end users), release of Amiga 3000 (SCSI, flicker fixer, fast memory access, compared to A2000).
Worst things: Amiga1200/4000 (only b/c too little too late - blame Commodore).
Piracy (it killed software development back then and is doing the same today - i see and hear all a.org comments regarding OS4 hacking when i say this. hyperion must hate to see this.)
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Bloodline could not have put it better.
terminator4 wrote:
Piracy (it killed software development back then and is doing the same today - i see and hear all a.org comments regarding OS4 hacking when i say this.)
Not trying to go OT here, but you are joking right? If that really was the case, why didn't software development die off for other, dare I say, more successful platforms? Are you sure poor decision making and lackluster hardware development from Commodore didn't play a far more significant role?
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I agree with Adz.
I personally do not condone Piracy, BUT... Piracy is the lamest excuse ever for why people think hardware companies fail. Software piracy is nothing new to any computer. In fact, from both gaming and productivity standpoints, I'd say that, if anything - piracy has HELPED hardware sales more than it has hurt. The C64 & iPod quickly come to mind. The pittance of money a manufacturer gets from software licensing fees (unless we're talking about iPod numbers) is easily overshadowed by poor company management and horrible business decisions (like competing with yourself by introducing too many lines).
Only a failed Executive would blame piracy on why their company operated so poorly.
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... Piracy is the lamest excuse ever for why people think hardware companies fail.
Exactly... if that were true the Mac,PC, Ipod and Wii would be a failures as piracy is rampant on those leading brands. I saw more Mac and PC software copying than I ever saw on the Amiga. Matter of fact it's this ability to bring copies of work software home that many folks I knew bought a PC or Mac.
Amiga folk I knew got one becuase it was cool, not becuase I can just copy stuff from work or school. The sofware was priced reasonable compared to PC and Macs too.
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I still think piracy has some share of problems. People buy hardware because of software applications. If developer feels efforts will be pirated, he/she will move away from platform (iospirit for example). Amiga market has been dwindling (getting smaller) late 80s to early 90s till today. This meant that software sales were more critical at amiga platform than mac or pc. Fewer amiga users, mean smaller platform, mean greater need to recover or make $ to sustain themselves in business. making every sale count (after commodore's demise, how many companies can honestly make enough to live off amiga?)
Commodore: well i did mention that in my opinion A1200/4000 came too late and gave too little (should have been released more like 1989/90 not 92/93, with scsi and flicker fixers built in - connecting to TV was no longer cool but optional).
of course don't blame the few engineers left at commodore, but the management for not providing enough resources (people, money) :roll:
remember, Dave Haynie, in Deathbed Vigil or some other video talk about working on multiple projects and only one of them being approved by management? (lack of focus, management not understanding what they have).
imho of course :-D
I'll say the bad were 80% Commodore, 15% piracy, 5% pc taking over the world (remember apple also went out of business at one point). :lol: of course Commodore made pcs too, which is why i say pc 5% (pc compatibles).
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"Mac,PC, Ipod and Wii would be a failures as piracy is rampant on those leading brands."
any ideas on volumes sold of these compared to Amiga? (larger volumes can let you get away with piracy with more ease). here's some for amiga:
http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/sales.html
Also, Amiga might not have been popular choice in the office compared to pc. (PC could afford to lose money to piracy, as it monopolized the market, and business still paid licence fees, thats how business sustains for instance micro$oft).
Commodore had a failed track record of taking advantage of business market (Amiga Unix, Amiga OS in business, with exception of Newtek Videotoaster). I wonder if not having build in flicker fixer & vga monitors for business on A1200/4000 killed the Amiga? (companies always buy monitors)
Having no vga, but some rgb (still in early 90s) was silly imho.
anyway not trying to argue, just giving ideas behind my thinking. Of course, everyone is entitled to their opinion. :-D
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Retro_71 wrote:
A3000..... The only stock Amiga you can plug any Monitor into and plenty of upgrade options.
I'll second this. The 3000 should have been the standard by which all future Amigas were built. Sigh. Ah, what should've been.
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The demoscene.
Gets my vote, too.
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I second the A500. DrH. mentioned 'affordable' . For an 18-year old working part-time, it was 'barely affordable' , but what a blast it was!!
Number 2: Yes, NewTek, the Toaster, Lightwave, and everything. Newtek at least kept Amiga in the limelight for a bit longer, and certainly helped create some interesting hardware (PAR card comes to mind)
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I say game piracy was the best and worst thing to happen to the Amiga. Don't forget at its height the Amiga was THE games platform, us serious users were a minority that only became a majority in the Amiga's twilight.
It shames me to admit it but i bought my first Amiga 500 to play games after i went to a user group of meeting of about 300(!) Amigans who were happily swapping pirated games. No-one thought twice about it. The choice for most of us was: buy a Nintendo or Sega with expensive cartridges that we couldn't afford nor copy or get an Amiga that we could have pretty much whatever we wanted, often before the local retailers. For a 14-17 year olds with no money it was a no-brainer really. But it drove hardware sales to amazing heights.
But eventually, software developers started to hate the Amiga for the same reason. I'd say only 10% of their software that was circulating was legitimate. Ofcourse hardware advancement on the PC was a factor but the ease with which the platform could be pirated was very very important. So the software developers went PC with CDROM which was expensive to copy: cd-burners were over $1000 Aus, but eventually the software houses ended up in the same hole when burners became cheap. And thus PC ruled the roost, later overthrown by the Playstation which now was just as easy to pirate games for as opposed to the N64 which had the better games but on cartridge.
The most popular hardware platform was always the easiest to pirate games for. At its height, this was the Amiga 500.
Sad but true: Piracy made the Amiga, Piracy killed the Amiga.
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B00tDisk wrote:
Retro_71 wrote:
A3000..... The only stock Amiga you can plug any Monitor into and plenty of upgrade options.
I'll second this. The 3000 should have been the standard by which all future Amigas were built. Sigh. Ah, what should've been.
It was a nice machine... btw, who is the babe in the avatar?
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foleyjo wrote:
WHDLOAD
Yes, cant forget that one. :)
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It was a nice machine... btw, who is the babe in the avatar?
Seriously dude you need to use internet for what it was meant for ;)
That has got to be Aria Giovanni! :crazy:
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Painkiller wrote:
It was a nice machine... btw, who is the babe in the avatar?
Serioisly dude you need to use internet what it was meant for ;)
That has got to be Aria Giovanni! :crazy:
ROTFL! Wowser! Is she single?
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marcfrick2112 wrote:
I second the A500. DrH. mentioned 'affordable' . For an 18-year old working part-time, it was 'barely affordable' , but what a blast it was!!
Number 2: Yes, NewTek, the Toaster, Lightwave, and everything. Newtek at least kept Amiga in the limelight for a bit longer, and certainly helped create some interesting hardware (PAR card comes to mind)
Guys this idea that Newtek and Video Toaster and Lightwave made the Amiga is a very hard-core US-centric view of the events of the time. The fact is there was never a PAL toaster, so NO-ONE in Europe or Australia or Brazil or India (Bollywood was and is huge) had one. Thats most of the world.
Secondly, the Amiga-Toaster-Lightwave combination cost a fortune, many thousands of dollars $5,000 US(?), cheap compared to the $100,000 that video/TV studios were used to paying, but well and truly outside the reach of 99% of users. Studios that used this set up used several- in some movies I think 8- networked (screamernet)68060 A2000's with graphics cards and huge scsi drives, how many people had this? Of the millions that owned an Amiga most would never know what a video toaster was. Who actually bought an Amiga because of the video toaster? Only a very very small percentage, and sure it gave the Amiga some "serious" credibilty, but most users never really bought one for the video toaster: at its peak the Amiga was a games machine all the way, a games machine that you could get games softeware for very very cheaply. Thats what made the Amiga..
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yeah, i'll go with a the A500. its what i started with, its what my mates started with, and its want got commodore going in the public eye, and as much as it shames me to admit, i was part of the school playground diskswapping scene.
you could argue that an amiga, and bootable x-copy floppy was all you needed for gaming greatness. i went for an external floppy drive before the one meg ram upgrade.
my birthdays and christmases were easy for my parents and family. they'd just buy boxes of blank floppy disks.
my god those were the days.
being able to tell read/write errors by the noise of the drive. sorry, getting all nostagic. ... kids these days... don't know their friggin born! :lol:
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Best thing: WE (as a community)
Worst thing: Medhi Ali
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@phantom
Also a nice avatar! I was wondering what you thought of your 440?
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@ Amithony
ME??? :-D :-D
It wasn't me... :crazy: :crazy:
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Phantom wrote:
@ Amithony
ME??? :-D :-D
It wasn't me... :crazy: :crazy:
I noticed you had a SAM440ep in your signature. Mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of. :)
How is Chania? My father is from there.
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I noticed you had a SAM440ep in your signature. Mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of. :)
Ahh... because I said that I will not buy a SAM a couple of months ago (in a thread here). :-D
How is Chania? My father is from there.
Really? Glad. :-D
If you didn't visit it before, try this summer. 8-)
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So you DONT have a SAMiga?
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Yes I have of course. :-)
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Is it the best thing that happened for the Amiga in recent history? :) (AROS may be the next from what i can tell.)
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ROTFL! Wowser! Is she single?
You might want to check www.ariagiovanni.com :love: ;)
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Painkiller wrote:
Well yea they made a few mistakes with A1200, but it still was a nice machine.
Being it a nice machine is not relevant. I have an A1200 as my main Amiga and I love it. But it is by far not the best thing that happened to the Amiga.
The A500 has been mentioned in this thread, as has been the videotoaster. Both of them I can accept as being extremely important milestones for the Amiga as a computing platform. The A1200 isn't. Without the A1200, Amigacomputers would still be loved as cultmachines from the past as much as they are loved now.
Without the A500, the Amiga would hardly have existed as a viable computing platform during the late eighties/early nineties.
Same for the videotoaster. Without it, the Amiga would not have had a fraction of the amount of succes in the videoediting business as it has had.
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A500 and demoscene are the best things that happened to amiga.
The worst things: the ultra-expensive A3000 (they could have redesigned the original custom chips to also output screens at 31Khz instead of inventing kludges like Amber to re-use the old chips used in A500/A2000. They could have put a proper scsi chip, they could have included IDE, they could have provided a decent case with space for 5 1/4 units and a beefier PSU, it should have had more colours. They could have added simm sockets instead of ultra expensive ZIPs.
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Crumb wrote:
A500 and demoscene are the best things that happened to amiga.
The worst things: the ultra-expensive A3000 (they could have redesigned the original custom chips to also output screens at 31Khz instead of inventing kludges like Amber to re-use the old chips used in A500/A2000. They could have put a proper scsi chip, they could have included IDE, they could have provided a decent case with space for 5 1/4 units and a beefier PSU, it should have had more colours. They could have added simm sockets instead of ultra expensive ZIPs.
These are, IMO, crap opinions. The closed up console-like case design of the A500 kept people from bothering to expand it, and it hobbled Amiga development for years. It was the target platform and nobody bothered to upgrade, except for those dreadful little trapdoor 512k expansions, so no-one bothered to develop beyond it. As to the demoscene? Those guys will code for TI calculators. The nature of the hardware doesn't really matter. I doubt very seriously if anyone purchased an Amiga based on how many passive animations with loopy techno music behind them they could watch. :roll: :roll: :roll:
The A3000 was so "bad" that Sun begged C= to let them license build them as their next-gen Unix boxes. IDE was {bleep}e at the time compared to SCSI, the 31khz output on the 3000 should've gone to all Amiga models, the Amber was brilliant. Zip chips were still quite common when the 3000 was designed, as well.
No, the 3000 was quite superior to any other Amiga, and was the last "balls-out" design the C= engineering team was allowed and funded to create. Everything else was a cheap, cut-down compromise afterward.
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CU Amiga Magazine
I find myself buying these off the Internet, it is such a nicely layed out great magazine, probably the best computer magazine of any platform ever.
The death of CU marked the death of the Amiga as a mainstream platform (in terms of user base)
(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/CUAmigaOct96.gif)
Nowadays "Macworld" reminds me of CU, but it doesn't come close
(http://i269.photobucket.com/albums/jj44/downarchive2/MacWorld0508.jpg)
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Best thing: the 500.
Worst thing: Medhi Ali.
CU? Good call! And not only because I used to freelance for 'em. But I'd prefer Amiga Computing (and not only because I used to freelance for them)
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B00tDisk wrote:
These are, IMO, crap opinions. The closed up console-like case design of the A500 kept people from bothering to expand it, and it hobbled Amiga development for years. It was the target platform and nobody bothered to upgrade, except for those dreadful little trapdoor 512k expansions, so no-one bothered to develop beyond it. [. . .]
Just to counter this statement factually: There were tons of sidecar expansions for the 500. GVP had plenty, as did other manufacturers, and the prices weren't unreasonable.
The only thing is that some of the hackish internal expansions were even more reasonable (no need for custom plastics or large PCBs to seat the edge-connector, just use wire-wrap sockets and slide in under the 68000 or whatnot), and the 500 was a budget machine, so maybe that's what some users remember...
The fact that game developers catered to unexpanded systems was sort of a separate problem, since any platform will have nontechnical users who won't expand their machines. In retrospect, marketing the 500+ as some sort of sweeping "second generation!" hardware to target (instead of "just another 500") might've kept some momentum, but that's getting off-topic.
Edit: See Apple putting "incrementally" improved hardware in a different case every few years for a good example of that kind of momentum. They have so many product releases that people who still have white plastic kind of understand that they won't have as much software support as if they had shiny metal.
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Best thing
Amiga Inc folding and the judge awarding Hyperion full control over AmigaOS
Oh, wait that hasn't happened....yet!
(http://www.georgemichaelforums.com/images/smilies/Halloween_Smiley_1.gif)
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Best - Umm maybe Aminet and the universities who have hosted it. Now if Aminet would have taken my advice (years ago) and added a porn section it would be indisputable.
http://aminet.net/pix/porno/ sadly does not exist today.
Still I think it is keystone, holding the culture together, in the post BBS era.
worst - ntsc and pal - heellooo VGA, IBM, Microboss
:pint: :roflmao:
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Best Thing: Bill McEwen.
Worst Thing: Bill McEwen.
Man's made me laugh so hard for the past 10 years or so and made me realize how ignorant I was, spending all this money I had on a dead platform.
Considering all the laughs and jokes I've had at his expense, not to mention his "business etiquette", I figure it was money well spent. :lol:
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Gotta admit Bill's press releases are funny. It took me a while to realise he was a comedian.
(http://i30.tinypic.com/10dy43m.jpg)
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@B00tDisk
These are, IMO, crap opinions. The closed up console-like case design of the A500 kept people from bothering to expand it, and it hobbled Amiga development for years. It was the target platform and nobody bothered to upgrade, except for those dreadful little trapdoor 512k expansions, so no-one bothered to develop beyond it.
Well, that must be a parallel world because people bought memory expansions (from 512k to 8MB), accelerators (that plugged under the 68000 chip or on the side expansion slot), hardware pc emulators that plugged in the trapdoor slot, hard disk controllers... and there was not much difference between the price of A2000 and A500 expansions.
A whole generation knew what Amiga was thanks to A500 and A500 saved Amiga and Commodore. With the prices of your wonderful A3000 there would be only 3 amiga users and no software would have been written.
As to the demoscene? Those guys will code for TI calculators. The nature of the hardware doesn't really matter. I doubt very seriously if anyone purchased an Amiga based on how many passive animations with loopy techno music behind them they could watch.
It seems you don't know much about demoscene. The point of demoscene is creating art for the shake of it, not for money, just for your own pleasure. And Amiga allowed creative people to create and to have fun creating art. It was not about buying a computer to be an "art consumer", but an "art creator". I know lots of people who created great music and graphics and a new subculture appeared.
Demoscene was something thightly tied to Amiga since the beggining. What do you think the "boing demo" was? Why early WB versions included a drawer with "demos"? Are you sure nobody was impressed watching the capabilities of the amazing computer? Were you living in other planet?
I remember that I loaded some games to watch the cool cracktro, not to play it. And spend lots of hours with DPaint or creating crap mods, sleeping reading 68k asm books and crashing my computer when running my crappy programs,... and all that inspired by the scene stars.
The A3000 was so "bad" that Sun begged C= to let them license build them as their next-gen Unix boxes. IDE was {bleep}e at the time compared to SCSI, the 31khz output on the 3000 should've gone to all Amiga models, the Amber was brilliant. Zip chips were still quite common when the 3000 was designed, as well.
The A3000 used a brute force design instead of an elegant one. They could have redesigned the custom chips, specially denise to output video at 31Khz transparently (in fact you can overclock denise to output all Amiga graphics at 31Khz (including WB, my friend Frank Brana has experimented with his A2000 a lot of times doing that) but you'll probably fry it after some time and stuff won't be in sync). With a proper updated denise and some changes to agnus they could have provided 31Khz video simply changing a jumper. Instead of that they choose the brute force approach to save money recycling the chips used in A500/A2000 and created Amber. That crap design forces you to "digitalize" the output images and waste money in some local ram. They could simply have improved denise and the rest of the custom chips but instead of that they took the easiest and most expensive solution.
IDE may be whatever you want, but adding an IDE controller is dead cheap and would have opened the doors to cheap hard disks. Do you think that including an prototype of the scsi chip was a clever idea? Do you think it's normal that you need to perform so many hardware updates to fit Zorro cards and accelerators?
No, the 3000 was quite superior to any other Amiga, and was the last "balls-out" design the C= engineering team was allowed and funded to create. Everything else was a cheap, cut-down compromise afterward.
The only thing A3000 had better was a FlickerFixer built in as standard. The rest was crap:
-zorro3 slower than A4000 Zorro
-chips that heat a lot (specially with A3640)
-incompatibilities with accelerators
-incompatibilities with scsi controllers built in accelerators
-Same colours as an A500
-Crap case that won't allow you to fit 5 1/4 units
-No IDE
-Crap SCSI that has problems driving multiple devices
-ZIP memory: hard to find, hard to fit, prone to cause problems, expensive.
-Weak PSU
-slow cpus as default
-Lack of SMD components and chips fitted in sockets: that's the cause of bad contacts, lack of reliability.
An A4000T has much more quality and is better designed than A3000. It has a proper scsi chip for example. The only thing it lacks is a FlickerFixer (that you can buy easily).
All in all: you have to trash the entire A3000 to have a decent machine.
trash the roms. Trash the buster chip. Trash Ramsey, trash Dmac, trash the flickerfixer and built in gfx and buy a graphic card because otherwise gfx look so 80's, trash the scsi chip and fit a proper version or a proper controller, trash the case because you can't fit anything inside the supposedly expandable amiga and it heats a lot, trash the PSU as it's too weak,... I could go on.
A3000 are great when you realize standard configuration is too weak, put most of the original A3000 in the trashcan and start to use modern components taken from a reliable computer like A4000 :-)
BTW I actually own expanded A3000, A4000, A4000T, A500, A600, A1200...
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@Floid
A500 budget machine, kinda like sam440.
A3000 like A4000T, A1 and the future to be Amiga with pci slots at least.
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A3000+ would have been the best thing ever to have happened.
Ah well...
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Crumb wrote:
The only thing A3000 had better was a FlickerFixer built in as standard. The rest was crap:
-zorro3 slower than A4000 Zorro
There was no A4000 when the A3000 was designed. I guess since PCI-e is out now we can slag Z3 because it's slower?
:crazy: :roll:
-chips that heat a lot (specially with A3640)
And yet all those A3000's survived with passive cooling. Huh.
-incompatibilities with accelerators
-incompatibilities with scsi controllers built in accelerators
Yet there are Accelerators aplenty for the A3000 and people fit them and used them all the same.
-Same colours as an A500
GASP. JUST! LIKE! ALL! AMIGAS! IN! 1990! DOMDOMDOM. Quick, McCloud, I think you're onto a real conspiracy down at the ranch there!
-Crap case that won't allow you to fit 5 1/4 units
Right, because 5.25 floppies are so useful.
-No IDE
Listen carefully: IDE in 1990 was JUNK.
-Crap SCSI that has problems driving multiple devices
Wow so the 3000's that have multiple SCSI devices on them then are _______ (fill in the blank).
-ZIP memory: hard to find, hard to fit, prone to cause problems, expensive.
Hardly "hard to find" nearly 20 years ago.
-Weak PSU
Endemic of the entire Amiga line, but since they'll, you know, power up with them installed, they seem to work just fine.
-slow cpus as default
Right, compared to that powerhouse A1000, 2000 and of course the beloved A500, right? {bleep}, even the "low end" A3000s crapped all over 1st gen Amigas in terms of speed :roll:
-Lack of SMD components and chips fitted in sockets: that's the cause of bad contacts, lack of reliability.
Jesus, JUST LIKE THE A500.
All in all: you have to trash the entire A3000 to have a decent machine.
Snoooooooooort. Sure thing buddy, just keep telling yourself that.
use modern components taken from a reliable computer like A4000 :-)
The A4000 was compromised garbage. {bleep}ty chipset, crap IDE, crap memory sockets (do a google search for "broken A4000 simm socket" some time) - all the legacy of R&D hobbled by corporate stupidity.
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Bill McEwen!
err maybe not :)
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Wow, A lot of opinions flying around here, but no one is seeming to defend the obvious. The original A 1000. It proved at the time, that computers do have power, graphics and a bit of grace. Sure, it was expensive at the time, but no more than an IBM XT. Yes, it does have some faults. It could have used a bit more ram and the chassis a bit wider to accommodate expansion cards, but it got the unit out there and imaginations spinning. It also proved to C that there wass a market for this, and it paved the way for the rest of the line.
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When I started getting into the Amiga in the early '90s, with my floppy disk based CDTV, I loved these mags. My wife and I (then, she was my girlfriend) used to go into town every Sunday and buy the latest ones from Barnes and Noble. She wasn't even into the Amiga (and FWIW, my 3000 0WN3D her Performa, both with 040 CPUs) but she read the mags because they were so well written.
When AF and CU packed it in, I remember sitting there at my computer desk with the last issue of CU (IIRC), the one with the big Monty Python style foot on the cover, and I think I almost cried!
It was such a bummer.
Modern Mac mags are sometimes close, but spend far too much time fellating Apple and the latest Jobsian edict, be it soft or hardware.
I know we didn't pull it off, but we did sort of have the Apple store six years ago at Amiga. (this was when my job at Amiga was testing apps that people sent in, among other things.)
You submitted your apps, Amiga pimped 'em, both parties made money. OK, Amiga might not be at the 'made money' part of it yet, but I think it's safe to say that Amiga did, actually, think of it first.
Credit where it's due.
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Issues of CU from around 94 onwards look like they could still be sold today (if you ignore the floppies), the layout has aged very well and puts many current mags to shame
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Even at the tail-end of their lives CU and AF seemed to have way more actual content than any of the Mac magazines do now. MacWorld seems to be 80% adverts.
I don't know if it is still that case, but a few years back Mac Format and MacWorld both had circulation figures less than CU had when it was closed down. That to me is amazing considering the state of the Amiga market at the time.
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Personal POV: MorphOS. The most powerful and advanced Amiga system.
Rather objective POV: The best thing ever was the A500. It is just 'the Amiga' - back in the days it was pretty cheap, innovative, powerful and fun.