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Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: runequester on February 10, 2010, 08:54:29 AM
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So what are your contenders for the worst 3 ideas in the history of the amiga?
Lets limit it to the Commodore era, and keep it at hardware/software as much as possible.
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Most of the really bad stuf has come post Commodore days, but in no particular order I'd have to say:
AGA being rushed. Most of the enhanced functionality it offers isnt even usable, or if it is compromises to the point of redundancy are in place. 32 and/or 64 pixel wide sprites are available for example, couldve been quite useful, but to use those modes screen must be shrunk and only 1 or 2 (no absolute rule, but as a general rule of thumb) are placable on the screen, the rest can only be used outside of the physical display... significant arcade gameing power, you just cant see it. The Amiga was for the most part so far behind by this time that getting AGA right was more important than having a system that on paper was on par with the graphics of other systems at the time, even if it took a while longer.
Akiko: I strongly believe that akiko shouldve been substituted for a small amount of fast ram (if trying to maintain a certain price point, but ideally both). The speed increase the system wouldve seen as a result wouldve been similar to what akiko could generate, but it also could be used for things other than chunky to planar conversions, and the speed wouldve been system wide. Would have resulted in a more balanced, and in the majority of cases, more powerful system.
And no.3 is a personal one.... me letting my friends try out the Settlers demo that came on one of the CU Amiga cover disks...... never before had my Amiga been so thoroughly hijacked :)
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1. worst idea: Not having a harddrive as standard like the PC. As games became bigger, they were required to be installed on the hard drive. Amiga's had superior games, thus a hard drive would have been even more suitable for Amiga than a PC. Games were not harddrive installable and it made Amiga look unprofessional. At the time, people using computers wanted their computers to look professional. For example, they wanted to use DOS commands to install their games to harddrives. Today it's the opposite.
2. worst idea: Using a Double Density floppy drive instead of a High Density drive like the PC. Games became bigger but Amiga's had no harddrives as standard and the double density drive made it even worse.
3. worst idea: AGA. It left something to be desired. The first thing I tried was to set the Workbench resolution to 256 colours and 640-512 screen resolution. As if the flickering was not enough, everything became extremely slow. They should have made it much faster, flicker free and it should have "killed" the A500 so everone started buying AGA Amigas.
4. worst idea: They should have made Workbench 3.1 with built-in functionalities for networking, Dopus Magellan 2, 256 colour icons and built-in fonts for different countries. Datatypes for jpg, wav, etc and later made mp3, avi, etc as downloadable updates.
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1. Butchering the A1200 to reduce cost
2. CDTV
3. Not marketing the CD32
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So what are your contenders for the worst 3 ideas in the history of the amiga?
Lets limit it to the Commodore era, and keep it at hardware/software as much as possible.
1. Failed to continue to develope CAOS.
2. AGA implementation (should have been on a card for Amiga big boxes and x86s).
3. Stayed with 68K.
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Hmm. I'll go with...
1. Delays on AGA - Sure, AGA wasn't a game changer in late 1992 when the underwhelming A4000 appeared, but the A3000+ in early-mid 1991 could have made a difference, especially with the 3000+'s DSP.
2. Repurposing the A300 as the more expensive A600. A product line with an A300, A1200, and A3000+ at the low-, mid-, and high-end market segments, respectively, could have been very competitive
3. No PAL Video Toaster. Imagine if the already-strong Amiga market in Europe were given a shot in the arm with a catalyst for a whole new productivity market.
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in no particular order:
the a600, cdtv, cd32.
aga being nerfed, the lack of chunky pixels and the performance hit was awful at a good screenmode/colour depth. Interlacing is the worst idea. Ideally there should have been some 3d support to maintain an edge over pc.
the 68020 failchip in aga machines, and the mysterious lack of fastram.
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Good stuff here, but I'd add the fact they didn't do anything to upgrade Paula. Clearly by the A3000's time, that should have morphed into a 16-bit or higher Hi-Fi chip that was backwards compatible.
And the fact that since the A3000, they were still confused about how to market AND didn't really have a pulse on who wanted to purchase what Amiga model. Too many Amiga's competing with each other and all were severely crippled hardware wise by the lack of Fast Ram, better processors, 15khz video, etc.
No affordable AGA upgrade path for old Amiga's too, "forced" us to re-purchase inferior products in order to 'keep up'.
Zip chip implementation in A3000.
Constantly rushed products which always forced us to purchase more and more accessories, peripherals, Kickstarts, Busters, Agnus's, RAM, etc. The Amiga really has always been somewhat of a money pit/experimental hobbyists type of computer - hasn't it? lol
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- A600.
- They never made a upgrade for Paula
- No chunky modes in AGA. Bitplanes are nice if you are playng with up to 64 colors. A 7 bit mode is nonsense and 8 bit modes are better handled in bytes than bits
- No built in support for MMU. Check on the eternal "memory protection" discussions that we always find here
- Lack of a Memory slot for the A1200. By the time it hit the market a RAM expansion board was nonsense
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1. Butchering the A4000 to reduce costs
2. AGA
3. Only one video slot in all big boxes except for the A4000T (If you want to use a video toaster, forget using a graphics card.
I was thinking of the PIV on number 3 above. Some people with toasters would maybe like to do more than just toast? Peggy Plus is another to play MPEG's? If it was fine with one slot as some may think, why did they put 2 in the 4000T? There may be some workarounds but should we always have to?
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3. Only one video slot in all big boxes except for the A4000T (If you want to use a video toaster, forget using a graphics card.
Why wouldn't you be able to use a graphics card with a video toaster installed? There are other Zorro slots available. Video slot scandoubler, however, could be a problem but most likely VT users are using 15khz output for at least some of their work anyway.
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Weren't there workarounds in the form of slot adapters w/ necessary video lines to address the multiple video card issue?
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Scrapping the A3000+.
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1: More modern looking Workbench (to attract Mac suckers).
2: Not looking into PPC support early enough.
3: CDTV.
Scrapping the A3000+.
So true...
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3: CDTV.
You've gotta admit the black CDTV keyboard is pretty awesome, though.
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1) Putting Mehdi Ali in charge of operations
The rest have been mentioned.
I actually liked the CDTV alot.
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1.) Putting effort into PC products (both with complete computers and Amiga addons / bridge boards) instead of focusing on the Amiga
2.) A600 expansion port with no CPU traces
3.) Putting Kickstart into ROM
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1) Putting Mehdi Ali in charge of operations
The rest have been mentioned.
I actually liked the CDTV alot.
I think it was a good idea, but they'd propably have done better at focusing on just CD rom drives for regular amiga's and getting that idea mainstreamed.
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1.) Putting effort into PC products (both with complete computers and Amiga addons / bridge boards) instead of focusing on the Amiga
2.) A600 expansion port with no CPU traces
3.) Putting Kickstart into ROM
...OMG! All excellent points and I totally agree. Especially the IBM clone business, which I always forget about. It would be interesting to hear from Amiga users from back in the day that actually had and used said Amiga/PC setups. I picked up a large haul of Amiga gear in the early 2000's and the guy did have a Mac emulation program with System, 6.02 in there. I think it also had the external Mac ROMS and drive dongle too if I am not mistaken. I have all the software bits, but not the hardware... I should give it a try some day. Looks like he used Quark with it. Never knew anyone that cared to run IBM stuff though.
And it will forever remain my opinion that Kickstart in ROM was a terrible idea. Sure, the machine boots a little faster with it in, but big deal. It's still pretty fast. Being able to truly change an OS without opening your computer is common sense 101 and true user friendliness IMO.
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1. Marketing
2. Marketing
3. Marketing
Although that might be summed up as C= executive staff.
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1. ECS and AGA. The true OCS succesor was to be based on Ranger.
2. Confusing products: CDTV, A600, A500+.
3. Computer + keyboard in a single piece was no longer sensible in 1992.
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My 2 cents:
1 The toy-like color scheme and preferences of OSes before 2.x. The early Amigas were never taken seriously by business and corporate types the first 5 years of production. Only the TI-99's color scheme was more toy-like and hideous.
2 The strange font system. The Amiga, despite it's many strong points, is still not the best for producing documents and printing.
3 There should have been a networking solution built-in from the beginning. Hindsight is 20/20.
4 Hard drive solutions, when they appeared, were too expensive. Already said.
5 Paula should have been improved as early as possible to CD quality sound. Also, already said.
People always mention the gaming ability or the multitasking (still excellent), or video output. I still love the dynamic ram disk and RAD:. The Amiga was the first comparitively inexpensive computer that could display photographic quality images in color. The OS was beautifully engineered to be near "real-time" and extensible and it is still unique and relevant in 2010, at least to me.
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I'll counter a few points I've seen - hard disks are now cheap, but they were expensive. There were A600HDs and A1200HDs, but IIRC they were £150 more expensive in the UK. Commodore's biggest failure was marketing, and marketing a hard disk should have been pretty easy. They could have continued to sell non-HD versions but people would be so convinced to go for the HD version that the non-HD version ought to have become a rarety. They should also have told developers say a year or two in advance that they intend to push HD Amigas strongly and they want developer support.
Whoever suggested 256-colour icons in WB3.1 should perhaps try running a 256-colour WB on a stock A1200. IIRC it really is sluggish even on the lowest resolutions.
AGA was a big disappointment, agreed. The successor to OCS/ECS should have given comparitively eye-popping graphics/animation and make people and developers want to upgrade to it. Instead, users didn't see anything compelling about the A1200 and developers saw it as a safer bet to continue to develop for A500s.
I disagree about computer + keyboard all-in-ones - I think that they are potentially marketable even today, though upgradability is a big question. However, manufacturers nowadays always seem to want to cram a PSU in there as well, which ends up being a wimpy one that dies in 2 years.
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They should have made it much faster, flicker free and it should have "killed" the A500 so everone started buying AGA Amigas.
So true: you need a killing feature to make people upgrade. Upgrading is what keeps a company alive. Commodore was unable to do that, unlike Apple... People didn't want to upgrade.
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256-colour icons would be pointless in the extreme. There's no guarantee that their selection of 256 colours would be anything like the 256 colours the user has ended up getting as a consequence of their palette preferences and backdrop selection. You'd end up having to remap them anyway.
AGA was a dissapointment but I am not convinced it was entirely down to the chipset but the memory used. That A1200 clone that fit in a 5.25" CD bay (Index or Access something?) had significantly higher CPU -> chip ram bandwidth than any other AGA system. Maybe it was faster at blitting and filling too?
The thing that AGA lacked from the start was a proper chunky mode. There's almost no reason why you'd want to use 256 colour in a planar configuration. Chunky 8-bit screenmodes (including HAM8) would have been a hell of a lot more useful for gaming and art packages alike.
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1. AGA - The resolution in games stays same as OCS/ECS, 256 colors just ain't enough.
2.Paula - Stayed the same from 1985 to 1994, although I still love the 8 bit sound of it.
3. The odd missing ram in A1200...
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A couple of people have said networking should have been built in, I don't believe this is the case. When Amigas were in their prime, most home users' idea of networking was a modem. Ethernet wasn't much of a concern for home users (never mind that there were other standards competing,) and network adapters were available for businesses that may have needed them.
However, networking was built in, at least for small scale home use, ParNET and whatever else you felt like doing via the serial port. What other home computers of the time were shipping with (at the time) business class network adapters?
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There used to be a pretty cool networking solution that used an adapter on the floppy drive port. Not exactly a speed demon but IIRC it had very little CPU overhead as Paula did most of the work.
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3. Stayed with 68K.
Really? 68K was reasonably competitive to x86 during the time Commodore was around. Apple didn't move to PowerPC until 94. There were high end workstations on RISC architectures at the time, but those were largely competing for a different market than Commodore was in. The cost of an architecture switch would have been high and Commodore had made too many mistakes already to survive long enough to gain any benefit IMHO.
My top 3:
1. Not investing in the necessary R&D to stay ahead. When the A1000 was released in 1985, it was superior to the IBM compatibles and Macs that were available at the time. The A2000 had an edge over the Mac II in some respects (namely hardware acceleration), but had a much slower CPU. Later on, AGA was both too late and too limited to compete as others have already pointed out.
2. Trying to compete directly with the game consoles. A blitter makes sense for a personal computer, but the tile-based hardware common in game consoles of the time generally produced better results at lower cost. Combine this with the pricing advantages that charging developers licensing fees brings and this clearly wasn't going to work out. Further, the attempts solidified the perception that the Amiga was merely a gaming machine.
3. Not doing more to pursue "professional" markets. Apple survived because of their dominance in the desktop publishing market. The Amiga did well in video production, but that alone wasn't enough (I imagine desktop publishing was a much larger market at the time, lots of companies had internal art departments for print. I can't imagine too many did video production internally).
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There used to be a pretty cool networking solution that used an adapter on the floppy drive port. Not exactly a speed demon but IIRC it had very little CPU overhead as Paula did most of the work.
I forgot about that. IIRC it was able to link more than 2 Amigas, but was spendy everytime you wanted to add a node. What was it called and has anyone seen them on the used market?
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Every Amiga model should have had a built in RTC as standard, and a hard disk too. It would have made it the definitive business/office computer. Should have been marketed as such and bundled with appropriate software all as standard.
This would have also meant that more games would have been system friendly, with hard disk install options.
As for the old 1.3 colour scheme...I quite like it. Doesn't look like a toy to me.
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1 - The Atari STF(M) 1024 had an external hdd connector, the Amiga should've had that as well, instead of occupying the entire expansion port.
2 - Like the Atari 800xl and most computer-in-keyboard MSX'es, the A500 should've had a second 'expansion port' on the top (and the A2000 in front), to be able to have cartridge games like the Megadrive. Then, games could be much more arcade-like, probably even Neo-Geo like.
3 - Models that came out during/after the A3000 (A600, CDTV, A1200) certainly should've had 31khz video output as a standard option
4 - Since the A3000, HD disk drives should've been standard.
5 - IIRC Commodore delayed for some reason AGA (backwards compatibility issues, rivalling the existing Amiga's too much, that sort of thing). AFAIK it could've been introduced with the A3000 (hence it was slow when it actually was intruduced - outdated)
6 - The CDTV should've physically been an A3000 with CD drive (and with a normal tray, no caddy), and it should've been equipped with a (HD) floppy drive as standard, and the lcd screen should show cd track information. Oh, and it should've been marketed well as a kickass computer 8)
7 - I understand that computers 'back in the days' (in the late 80's), were not standardly equipped with hd drives, but surely, games SHOULD have been hd installable (OR should've been on cartridge).
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I forgot about that. IIRC it was able to link more than 2 Amigas, but was spendy everytime you wanted to add a node. What was it called and has anyone seen them on the used market?
Amiga-Link Disknet (http://www.bboah.com/index.php?action=artikel&cat=67&id=2921&artlang=en)?
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Really? 68K was reasonably competitive to x86 during the time Commodore was around. Apple didn't move to PowerPC until 94. There were high end workstations on RISC architectures at the time, but those were largely competing for a different market than Commodore was in. The cost of an architecture switch would have been high and Commodore had made too many mistakes already to survive long enough to gain any benefit IMHO.
My top 3:
1. Not investing in the necessary R&D to stay ahead. When the A1000 was released in 1985, it was superior to the IBM compatibles and Macs that were available at the time. The A2000 had an edge over the Mac II in some respects (namely hardware acceleration), but had a much slower CPU. Later on, AGA was both too late and too limited to compete as others have already pointed out.
2. Trying to compete directly with the game consoles. A blitter makes sense for a personal computer, but the tile-based hardware common in game consoles of the time generally produced better results at lower cost. Combine this with the pricing advantages that charging developers licensing fees brings and this clearly wasn't going to work out. Further, the attempts solidified the perception that the Amiga was merely a gaming machine.
3. Not doing more to pursue "professional" markets. Apple survived because of their dominance in the desktop publishing market. The Amiga did well in video production, but that alone wasn't enough (I imagine desktop publishing was a much larger market at the time, lots of companies had internal art departments for print. I can't imagine too many did video production internally).
The Amiga did PRIMARILY well in the game/homecomputer market ("we bought it to help with your homework (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfCdNrRNS4g)")
And personally I think there's still potential in the game/homecomputer hybrid principle.
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The worst idea was definately AGA. More resources should have been put into making AAA available when AGA came out. The A3000+ should have been the A4000. A4000 was filled with poor choices and feels like it was rushed out. For one, the loss of the flicker-fixer were just idoitic. When I upgraded from my A3000 to an A4000, I was so upset that my newer computer couldn't use the nice monitor I was using on my A3000 and I had to spend all this extra money on an expensive 1942 monitor.
The decision to put a HD floppy in the A4000 was good the fact the drive was 1.5 height left you with a completely useless 0.5 height drive bay. But to make matters worse, since the A1200 didn't come with an HD drive, no commercial developers used HD floppys. This left the HD drive in A4000s useless except for personal purposes and game were coming on 14+ DD floppies instead of a more reasonable 7.
Also the A1200 should have come with an 68030 as standard (or a 44 or 50Mhz 020). 25Mhz 020's were too slow in comparison to standard PC's and Macs of that time.
But really, I think the biggest problem was that ECS was just too good and AGA was not enough of an improvement. Developers mostly just targetted ECS machines as that market was bigger and as a result there was not enough incentive for many people to upgrade to an AGA machine. ECS thrived for much longer than it should have and AGA machines never sold as well as they needed too.
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Speaking of display stuff, considering you could support 6-bitplanes on ECS, I think EHB was a pretty stupid idea. Why not just have 64 distinct palette entries instead?
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The A1200 was broken in a few respects IMHO. I can pick numerous faults but there should have been at least the capability to add fast ram directly to the motherboard, without tying up the trapdoor slot.
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I forgot about that. IIRC it was able to link more than 2 Amigas, but was spendy everytime you wanted to add a node. What was it called and has anyone seen them on the used market?
Amitrix had a product called Amiga-link, when the German company that made it decided to discontinue the product, Amitrix tried to buy the rights to produce and make it themselves. The story according to Craig, is that they wanted way too much money for the rights, and they could not come to an agrement to satisfy both Amitrix and the manufacture, so Amitrix had no choice but to stop selling and supporting it.If it were up to Craig, they would still be manufacturing and upgrading it and supporting it today. it sad that they were so greedy, but Craig has many examples of Amiga products and hardware, that they would still be making today, if the owner's had not been so greedy.
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The Amiga did PRIMARILY well in the game/homecomputer market ("we bought it to help with your homework (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfCdNrRNS4g)")
And that is fundamentally the problem. It didn't make much sense to buy an Amiga strictly as a games machine. Too expensive compared to consoles and once the Genesis/Megadrive and SNES got on the scene, it was graphically outclassed. Now if there's something else useful you want to do with the computer besides playing games, you can justify the extra cost. If you're looking to do useful work you're likely to want the same platform as you use at your job. This gave computers that had success in professional markets a leg up in the home market even if they weren't as good for playing games.
Further, consumers tend to be stingy and buy low margin products. Professional users tend to buy higher-end stuff and will tolerate higher margins.
And personally I think there's still potential in the game/homecomputer hybrid principle.
To an extent I agree with you. Lots of people play games on their computers, not just hardcore PC gamers. However, for most of those people, gaming is a secondary function. They don't buy the computer to play games, but once they have it they end up playing games on it.
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The decision to put a HD floppy in the A4000 was good the fact the drive was 1.5 height left you with a completely useless 0.5 height drive bay.
All of the 4000s I've seen have had standard-sized HD drives and a normal bay free.
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All of the 4000s I've seen have had standard-sized HD drives and a normal bay free.
I think a much bigger problem is the depth of the 5.25 inch bay. I have seen a few A4K's with CD drives protruding out of the front.
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I think a much bigger problem is the depth of the 5.25 inch bay. I have seen a few A4K's with CD drives protruding out of the front.
I can agree with that one. They didn't make drives to fit that spot until 10 years later.
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And that is fundamentally the problem. It didn't make much sense to buy an Amiga strictly as a games machine. Too expensive compared to consoles and once the Genesis/Megadrive and SNES got on the scene, it was graphically outclassed.
I've got both a Genesis and an Amiga, and I must say the games that get the most out of the Amiga hardware (like Elfmania, Fighting Spirit and Kid Chaos) deliver better gfx, BUT many Genesis games are better looking because they were well developed and were put on a cartridge (which saves A LOT of processing power and memory).
I really wonder what the Amiga all could do if it was successful in Japan, and it having a game cartridge option.
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1 - The Atari STF(M) 1024 had an external hdd connector, the Amiga should've had that as well, instead of occupying the entire expansion port.
2 - Like the Atari 800xl and most computer-in-keyboard MSX'es, the A500 should've had a second 'expansion port' on the top (and the A2000 in front), to be able to have cartridge games like the Megadrive. Then, games could be much more arcade-like, probably even Neo-Geo like.
3 - Models that came out during/after the A3000 (A600, CDTV, A1200) certainly should've had 31khz video output as a standard option
4 - Since the A3000, HD disk drives should've been standard.
5 - IIRC Commodore delayed for some reason AGA (backwards compatibility issues, rivalling the existing Amiga's too much, that sort of thing). AFAIK it could've been introduced with the A3000 (hence it was slow when it actually was intruduced - outdated)
6 - The CDTV should've physically been an A3000 with CD drive (and with a normal tray, no caddy), and it should've been equipped with a (HD) floppy drive as standard, and the lcd screen should show cd track information. Oh, and it should've been marketed well as a kickass computer 8)
7 - I understand that computers 'back in the days' (in the late 80's), were not standardly equipped with hd drives, but surely, games SHOULD have been hd installable (OR should've been on cartridge).
Oh, and added to this, the kickstart should've been cartridge based, so it could easily be replaced.
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Oh, and added to this, the kickstart should've been cartridge based, so it could easily be replaced.
I can't agree with that notion. It would have greatly increased the cost of buying a new kickstart ROM, relied on some dodgy edge connector that may end up having flaky contacts and the like.
Besides, changing the kickstart chips aren't exactly difficult on most amigas, since they are socketed and generally fairly easy to access, even on wedge models.
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I have not read the posts, but I'll submit one.
Releasing 99% of the software for STOCK Amiga systems. Gave no incentive to users to upgrade to run better software.
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Gave no incentive to users to upgrade to run better software.
Faster is a good incentive!
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I can't agree with that notion. It would have greatly increased the cost of buying a new kickstart ROM, relied on some dodgy edge connector that may end up having flaky contacts and the like.
edge connectors seem, however, to work fine with 100% of the gameconsoles back then. Yes, they can get a bit rusty, but not much. My Atari 2600, Mattel Intellivision and Philips Videopac still work perfectly. Sometimes the connectors can get a titbit rusty, but that's easy to fix for even the worst cases of compuphobes.
And besides that, the cartridge stays there for longer, the wearout should be much less than an avarage sega megadrive. I really don't see any problems there.
Besides, changing the kickstart chips aren't exactly difficult on most amigas, since they are socketed and generally fairly easy to access, even on wedge models.
For us technicians, certainly not indeed, but the avarage joe will begin to scream by the sight of computer innards.
A cartridge based kickstart combined with workbench disks would have lowered tremendously the treshold for many to upgrade.
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Faster is a good incentive!
well, not just that, but Amiga's with graphics cards, hard drives, AGA etc. Too much stuff was designed to run on 1.3, A500's with 512k RAM.
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edge connectors seem, however, to work fine with 100% of the gameconsoles back then. Yes, they can get a bit rusty, but not much. My Atari 2600, Mattel Intellivision and Philips Videopac still work perfectly. Sometimes the connectors can get a titbit rusty, but that's easy to fix for even the worst cases of compuphobes.
And besides that, the cartridge stays there for longer, the wearout should be much less than an avarage sega megadrive. I really don't see any problems there.
For us technicians, certainly not indeed, but the avarage joe will begin to scream by the sight of computer innards.
A cartridge based kickstart combined with workbench disks would have lowered tremendously the treshold for many to upgrade.
I don't know of anyone who didn't upgrade their OS because they had to remove the old kickstart chips and insert new ones. Macs had ROMs socketed on the motherboard as well.
Most non-upgraders were A500 gamers. 1 Mb, WB 1.3, OCS/ECS meant you could play anything worth playing on the Amiga, there was no compelling reason for them to upgrade. And later, when there was a compelling reason to upgrade their A500, it was to play Doom-on the PC. Doom and the lack of a chunky mode is what killed the Amiga's status as the games computer of choice. And OS upgrade made no difference to Amiga gamers, as the OS was hardly ever used to play commercial games, remember all those NDOS games discs.
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it was to play Doom-on the PC. Doom and the lack of a chunky mode is what killed the Amiga's status as the games computer of choice.
The first public version of Doom was uploaded to Software Creations BBS and an FTP server at the University of Wisconsin–Madison on December 10, 1993.
..and if Doom couldn't do it in four months, surely the bankruptcy of Commodore finished the job!
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Doom was huge... when I first saw it, I wanted to get a PC also.. it was such an awesome game. I played it at work way too much. LOL
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I agree that games like Doom changed the face of computer gaming for a lot of people.
But I just thought of another thing that continually frosts my balls about Amiga gaming: the fact MOST games did not take advantage of a controller that has more than 1 friggin' button! Think about this... the Amiga was designed to be a game machine first and foremost, yet we've been stuck with one button gaming ala the Atari 2600 for decades?!? I'm getting pissed just thinking about pushing 'UP' to jump... lol
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I agree that games like Doom changed the face of computer gaming for a lot of people.
But I just thought of another thing that continually frosts my balls about Amiga gaming: the fact MOST games did not take advantage of a controller that has more than 1 friggin' button! Think about this... the Amiga was designed to be a game machine first and foremost, yet we've been stuck with one button gaming ala the Atari 2600 for decades?!? I'm getting pissed just thinking about pushing 'UP' to jump... lol
but thats the same way it was on PC's though.. or do you mean using a different input device like mouse for movement?
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No, PC's have had multi-button games for a looooong time, but maybe not as far back as I am thinking. But wait... yeah, pretty much Gravis and Logitech, I remember having 2 buttons and that scenario was even standard on systems as far back as the Apple ]['s.
In any event, by the time the A500, CDTV, A1200 & CD32 came out, 2+ buttons for gaming should have been the standard. I'm just surprised that it wasn't the standard starting with the A1000.
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Hindsight makes us all visionaries, and who would have thought that many of us would still be using the same hardware 20+ years later, heavily upgraded, heaving at the seams, traces boiling from the heat dissipation of the increased bus frequencies pushed to the limit...
...but here's my 3:
1) Self-destruction batteries soldered onboard in sensitive areas (A4000 - adjacent to ram sockets; A3000 - middle of the fricking board; A500+... well, need I say more)
2) Lack of a user-files area by default on hard-drive OS installations. Software developers invariably used progfile: as the default save-to location. (Now try backing up all your documents from Maple V, Multiplot, Wordworth, Equation editor, Turbocalc, etc)
3) Lack of a ability to use A1200 processor upgrades with the A3/4000, even in a fallback 32-bit memory / ZorroII mode.
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System calls that had user supplied memory structures for internal system use. What were they thinking?
Letting Jay Miner walk out. And the rest of the crew. All management stuff that though.
Not thinking of Moore's Law. Making the system a one-off and expecting to do something entirely different in the future. If it was a bad idea in 1983 I don't know, but at some point it should have been clear that you would be stuck with the basics and had to expand on them forever.
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Thought of another one: the rollout price of a 256kb A1000. IMO, was too expensive and cost prohibitive for many of its prospective users - which were primarily loyal Commodore users of course. This is a tough thing to decide though - price it too low and people and professionals might not have given it a second look. Price it too high and people might rather go for an old standby such as Apple or IBM. Guess in all fairness, it was priced pretty well - but compared to the ST, no so much. I believe a 512kb system should have rolled out at around $1k, maybe $1.3k tops with some more software and a monitor. Better or more RAM solutions that were cheaper should have been made more available too, instead of rare or years later that were STILL too expensive for what they were.
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I have not read the posts, but I'll submit one.
Releasing 99% of the software for STOCK Amiga systems. Gave no incentive to users to upgrade to run better software.
Heck yeah. You never heard PC owners complain that Doom or Sim City 2000 would not run on their 286 with 2 megs of RAM.
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I've got both a Genesis and an Amiga, and I must say the games that get the most out of the Amiga hardware (like Elfmania, Fighting Spirit and Kid Chaos) deliver better gfx,
Kid Chaos is impressive given the limitations of the hardware, but I don't think it can match the better looking platformers on the Genesis like Sonic 3, Sonic & Knuckles or Vectorman. Elfmania is more colorful than your average Genesis game and the animation is quite smooth. They did a good job of pulling off some parallax with only a single playfield. So I'll give you that one. Fightin' Spirit doesn't seem particularly impressive though.
Really the only things the OCS video hardware had going for it for 2D games over the Genesis were color selection and the amount of RAM directly accessible by the video hardware. Any pixel can be any of the 32 colors in the palette and palette entries are 12-bit whereas on the Genesis a given tile/sprite is limited to using a single palette of 15 colors and the palette entries are only 9-bit. However, there are 4 such palettes and you choose which palette to use on a per-tile and per-sprite basis (so 61 colors onscreen unless you resort to "tricks").
Now if you want two independent playfields (for parallax scrolling for instance), the color selection advantage of OCS is greatly reduced since each playfield is limited to a 7 color palette (+1 background color). The Genesis hardware doesn't have this problem. Also, the OCS sprite hardware is pretty lame compared to the Genesis. OCS supports 8 3-color or 4 15-color 16-pixel wide sprites per line. The Genesis supports up to 20 sprites or 320 pixels worth of sprites per line whichever comes first in sizes of 8,16 or 32 pixels wide with a limit of 80 sprites per frame. Genesis sprites always use a 15 color palette. You can work around these limitations to an extent using the blitter, but on OCS/ECS you'll probably run into bandwidth limits before you get into the neighborhood of what the Genesis hardware can do.
Fighting games are probably one area where OCS fairs pretty well as parallax isn't as important and you don't need many sprites. Further, all the RAM available to the video hardware allows you to do smooth animations on relatively large sprites.
Now the OCS hardware was a lot more flexible than the Genesis hardware making it much more appropriate for a general purpose computer. Making a GUI system work on the Genesis hardware would require some sacrifices and even then would probably perform poorly in comparison.
BUT many Genesis games are better looking because they were well developed and were put on a cartridge (which saves A LOT of processing power and memory).
Well it definitely does wonders for load times. I doubt it made much of a difference for per-frame processing though. The A500 had a reasonable amount of RAM. Enough that you can load all your data for a single level up front and then just work out of RAM. As for using less memory, that's definitely true, but the Genesis had a lot less of that (64K for the 68K, 64K for the VDP and 8K for the Z80) so it's a bit moot for comparing the two.
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I don't know of anyone who didn't upgrade their OS because they had to remove the old kickstart chips and insert new ones. Macs had ROMs socketed on the motherboard as well.
Macs had roms that were patched by the upgraded os at boot. pulling the roms and replacing them is only needed to run os versions newer than are supported, and is pointless. os 8.1 on an se/30 anyone?
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All of the 4000s I've seen have had standard-sized HD drives and a normal bay free.
Most of the early ones sold in European countries had the A2000 style 1,5 height mechanism. I've personally seen more of those than the 1" high ones.
Macs had roms that were patched by the upgraded os at boot. pulling the roms and replacing them is only needed to run os versions newer than are supported, and is pointless. os 8.1 on an se/30 anyone?
The AmigaOS also patches the ROMs at boot. Setpatch. Of course not quite the same, as you can't have a higher major version of workbench than is your kickstart..
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Speaking of display stuff, considering you could support 6-bitplanes on ECS, I think EHB was a pretty stupid idea. Why not just have 64 distinct palette entries instead?
Because there were only 32 colour registers and it was, like much of the amiga stuff, a cool hack you could do to the existing hardware without breaking things.
Which leads me to...
1. Too much attention on backward compatibility... You'd have thought they'd learnt from the 128! Have the balls to say "this is the next big thing" and have a revolution, not just evolution. This explains Paula, AGA, you name it...
2. Strategy. They didn't have a clear strategy, which meant marketing sucked. You can't market if you don't know what you're selling to whom...
3. Lack of R&D, closely linked with 1+2. The more I think what Dave Haynie and his team achieved despite commodore management, the more I am utterly amazed...
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Macs had roms that were patched by the upgraded os at boot. pulling the roms and replacing them is only needed to run os versions newer than are supported, and is pointless. os 8.1 on an se/30 anyone?
See: SetPatch ;)
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1) Goofball policy of : "Read my lips, no new chips" while developing A3000. Especially when you consider C= fabbed many of the parts they needed.
2) No DSP in A4000/A3000
3) Late to the party release of AGA.
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See: SetPatch ;)
Not the same. I'd like to see 3.9 run on a 1.3 kickstart rom.
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Not the same. I'd like to see 3.9 run on a 1.3 kickstart rom.
Me too!! Or 3.1 at least :lol:
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Elfmania was more a demo than a game: gameplay really suck... And gamedesign too: the characters'moves really look ridiculous, etc...
Megadrive may have had less colours stuff, it's true games. Not only technical demos. I won't say there weren't good games but the greatest technical achievements were well... just technical demos: gameplay really sucked most of the time.
And a lot of games had crappy technical stuff + bad gameplay (compare street fighter 2 on the megadrive vs any (even AGA) versions... no parallax floor, no all musics, no all sound effects, animation not smooth at all, and so on... and real bad gameplay)
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The cross-linking of functions between the custom chips.
Soldering NiCD clock batteries to the mainboards
Use of SMT custom chips in ANY model.
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See: Blizkick ;)
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So what are your contenders for the worst 3 ideas in the history of the amiga?
Lets limit it to the Commodore era, and keep it at hardware/software as much as possible.
Hi,
1st -- The Amiga 2000
2nd-- The sidecar
3rd-- Amiga 3000 without the AGA chipset or ide support.
Also the PC10 and the PC20 they invested to much money trying to compete with the PC clones, they should have just supported the Amiga by making productivity software.
smerf
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Well, everything I wanted to say has been said already :)
Paula not getting even a minor upgrade... ever..... I'm amazed at what the old girl can do, but still .....
Yup, wasting valuable time and money on PC clones....
Too many games, and a few apps. that refused to work on any Amiga with expanded RAM, faster proc., HD, etc. Multi-disk games that only supported DF0: (I mean, REALLY???) :furious:
Too few games that supported 2 (or more) button controllers. I still enjoy Deluxe Galaga with my 3rd-party CD32 controller.. you can change from music to SFX, adjust volume, skip tracks, pause... all from the controller....
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Hi,
1st -- The Amiga 2000
2nd-- The sidecar
3rd-- Amiga 3000 without the AGA chipset or ide support.
Also the PC10 and the PC20 they invested to much money trying to compete with the PC clones, they should have just supported the Amiga by making productivity software.
smerf
First, The A2000 was a great upgrade for businesses, way ahead of its time. The Video Toaster was one such card that without the A2000, would never have been made, in fact if Dave had not taken on the A2000(he was suppose to originally work on the A500), the Amiga would have died right there and then. The funny thing is that the A2000 is by far, the most expandable Amiga ever made and the upgrades are relatively cheap and easy compared to all the other models.
If you read the book "On the Edge" you would have a very different view on this.
The Colt, PC10 and PC 20 were all made by Commodore Germany, without any knowledge
or sanction from Commodore US, and all the higher ups. The only reason it even got out the door, was the fact that in Germany at that time, Commodore could sell anything they wanted to and the Germans would just buy it without question. That is why the C116 was only sold there, CBM used Germany as their dumping Zone for all the products they didn't think would sell anywhere else in the world, but they could sell them in Germany. After the Commodore PC's started to sell, they then released them in limited quantities elsewhere in the world.
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The funny thing is that the A2000 is by far, the most expandable Amiga ever made and the upgrades are relatively cheap and easy compared to all the other models.
No.
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No, PC's have had multi-button games for a looooong time, but maybe not as far back as I am thinking. But wait... yeah, pretty much Gravis and Logitech, I remember having 2 buttons and that scenario was even standard on systems as far back as the Apple ]['s.
In any event, by the time the A500, CDTV, A1200 & CD32 came out, 2+ buttons for gaming should have been the standard. I'm just surprised that it wasn't the standard starting with the A1000.
when using anologue joypad i have four buttons (gravis anologue pro). when using digital joystick (modifyed) i have two fire buttons.
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Not the same. I'd like to see 3.9 run on a 1.3 kickstart rom.
I'd like to see MacOS9 run on a MacOS7 rom equipped classic. Equally not going to happen, is it?
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1. TV was the primary display device to use with an Amiga... Overscan maddsness etc.
2. Lack of memory
3. Not having internal HDD in every machine with WB installed
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1st -- The Amiga 2000
Are you serious? And just how were people going to use accelerators, scsi controllers, networking, audio cards and graphics boards in one box? Without the A2000 there wouldn't have been an early machine with good expansion capabilities. Bad idea? No. Perhaps it could've been made better, but bad is a big word.
The same goes for the interlace idea that someone else seems to think is bad. In the early days the chipset could only output 15 Khz displays, and most monitors (and TVs) could only handle 15 Khz input. Without interlace there would be no way to go over 256 pixel high displays (283 with overscan), and that's why interlace is a good idea. Not including 31 Khz output modes from the start (if not too expensive), now that's a bad idea.
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No.
Yes.
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I'd like to see MacOS9 run on a MacOS7 rom equipped classic. Equally not going to happen, is it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Quadra_950:hammer: And that's not the only one.
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Lame!
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Lame!
Your monitor is not a mirror.
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blurp blurp blurp
Your keyboard's not a urinal!
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No.
What?
please elaborate. The A2000 (although not pretty) is the best even today for versatility, upgrade ability, and available parts. No other Amiga has the flexibility that it has. The A3000D was a very small chassis, and no room for a 5 inch Drive bay, it also brings more price for accelerator cards and such. The A4000 also does not have the room inside, and upgrades are 3-4 times as expensive. The A2000 was a very important Amiga to prove it was more than just an expensive gaming machine, it proved to the world that Amiga was a very serious computer.
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Well, you've forgotten the 3000T and the 4000T, but lets take a step back.
Cost wise, are you saying it'd be cheaper to buy a Picasso II board for an A2000 than it would be to buy one for an A4000? No, they cost the same because most of the hardware the A2000 can use is usable in the A4000 as well.
Accelerator cards are comparably priced across the range as well, depending on the processors. The A2000, however, requires an accelerator card to be useful, while the A3000 has a 68030 built in, and the 4000 wasn't available with anything less (not counting the odd prototype '020 card.) If you want a 68030 in your A2000, you're spending $100-$200, putting your A2000 in the price range of an A3000 machine. Going up the range, 68040 cards are available for all and are similarly priced (though a 3640 is cheaper than any '040 card you'll find for the 2000,) and '060 cards are expensive for any machine (but easier to find for the 3000/4000 range.) Those Blizzard 2060's aren't growing on trees. Oh, and if you want 2MB of chip RAM in your A2000, you're spending another ~$100 for a MegAChip.
The A2000 is expandable, yes, and they require a bunch of it to be useful.
edit: I'll take a step back myself and say I'm not agreeing with those who said the A2000 was a bad idea. It was clearly superior to the A1000 in terms of expandability, but it was most definitely surpassed by later machines.
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Well, you've forgotten the 3000T and the 4000T, but lets take a step back.
Cost wise, are you saying it'd be cheaper to buy a Picasso II board for an A2000 than it would be to buy one for an A4000? No, they cost the same because most of the hardware the A2000 can use is usable in the A4000 as well.
Accelerator cards are comparably priced across the range as well, depending on the processors. The A2000, however, requires an accelerator card to be useful, while the A3000 has a 68030 built in, and the 4000 wasn't available with anything less (not counting the odd prototype '020 card.) If you want a 68030 in your A2000, you're spending $100-$200, putting your A2000 in the price range of an A3000 machine. Going up the range, 68040 cards are available for all and are similarly priced (though a 3640 is cheaper than any '040 card you'll find for the 2000,) and '060 cards are expensive for any machine (but easier to find for the 3000/4000 range.) Those Blizzard 2060's aren't growing on trees. Oh, and if you want 2MB of chip RAM in your A2000, you're spending another ~$100 for a MegAChip.
The A2000 is expandable, yes, and they require a bunch of it to be useful.
edit: I'll take a step back myself and say I'm not agreeing with those who said the A2000 was a bad idea. It was clearly superior to the A1000 in terms of expandability, but it was most definitely surpassed by later machines.
Actually, I was talking desktop models, but, I think we are on the same page here. You have to remember that Commodore built the A3000, on the fact that people were buying all the cards for the A2000 (in one of the computer Chronical episodes) they state that they looked at all the upgrades people were putting into the A2000 and designed the A3000 around that.
But, for the time, the A2000 was ALMOST perfect for the market. Much better that the A2000 that the German team put together (which infact was an A1000 with 3 Zorro slots) and it didn't work at all until Dave got his hands on it.)
Yes, I agree if you put all the "High End" upgrades in it, you are going to spend a whole lot of money, but to get a 8 meg Scsi card,HD, CD-rom Drive and lets say a '30, and an amber board or even now an Indivision, it is much easer and cheaper than trying to get those upgrades for an A500, In fact, if you hunt a bit, you can probably pick up one with all these upgrades in it for a lot less than a stock A3000 or A4000. A A2000 Video Toaster unit is a whole lot easier to find than a "complete" A4000 Toaster and only about half to a third of the price.
I have seen a lot of A2000 's on Ebay with an '30 card go for less then $150, infact most people that sell the A2000 don't even know what they have in them, so if you are lucky enough to have a picture of the back of the unit, you can usually tell if there is an CPU card inside. Over the last 4 months, I have seen some Amazing deals on A2000 not sell on Ebay, because of this "stigma" that is somehow attached itself to the A2000. Just in November, December alone (and I had no cash) there was a complete Video editing studio with the A2000 Video Toaster, 4 monitors and a Sony VT editing station. Anotherwords a complete turnkey Studio with EVERYTHING, and the guy could not get $200. He had it listed 3 times with a last time BIN of $185. now the shipping would have been increadible, but those deals pop up all the time on the 2000.
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Just in November, December alone (and I had no cash) there was a complete Video editing studio with the A2000 Video Toaster, 4 monitors and a Sony VT editing station. Anotherwords a complete turnkey Studio with EVERYTHING, and the guy could not get $200. He had it listed 3 times with a last time BIN of $185. now the shipping would have been increadible, but those deals pop up all the time on the 2000.
Interesting, I got almost $300 for my A2000 Toaster which was complete but just a stock Toaster 2000. And I thought the $159 buy it now price that I started the auction with was maybe a bit high.
The main disatvantage of the A2000 for me is the space they take up. One is good, two was too much. I could have picked up a Mac G5 in perfect shape last week for free but turned it down for the same reason: nowhere to put it, it was huge, even bigger than an A2000. The A4000D is much more ergonomic. And, in spite of it's shortcomings, I like AGA. The AGA desktop is disappointing but the AGA ham modes are beautiful and unique.
And back to the main theme of the thread, I would say the number one shortcoming, lack of foresight, of the Amiga is the difficulty of expanding memory. It doesn't matter what model, there is some hangup: On the A 2000, going beyond 8mb depends on the accelerator, On the A3000, the zip ram on the mother board is expensive and hard to find and there aren't many zorro III memory cards, 3 that I can think of off hand, and on the A4000, the motherboard uses inexpensive simms but going beyond 24mb(16mb ram +8mb slow zorroII ram,) requires an expensive accelerator with simm sockets or one of the 3 zorro III memory cards and the only one that shows up for sale very often is the Fastlane Z3. The A4000 has great compatibility with modern hard drives for a machine that old but it would be so nice if you could use 16 and 32mb simms on the motherboard instead of 4mb ones like some of the Macs made in the early 90s.
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Interesting, I got almost $300 for my A2000 Toaster which was complete but just a stock Toaster 2000. And I thought the $159 buy it now price that I started the auction with was maybe a bit high.
The main disatvantage of the A2000 for me is the space they take up. One is good, two was too much. I could have picked up a Mac G5 in perfect shape last week for free but turned it down for the same reason: nowhere to put it, it was huge, even bigger than an A2000. The A4000D is much more ergonomic. And, in spite of it's shortcomings, I like AGA. The AGA desktop is disappointing but the AGA ham modes are beautiful and unique.
And back to the main theme of the thread, I would say the number one shortcoming, lack of foresight, of the Amiga is the difficulty of expanding memory. It doesn't matter what model, there is some hangup: On the A 2000, going beyond 8mb depends on the accelerator, On the A3000, the zip ram on the mother board is expensive and hard to find and there aren't many zorro III memory cards, 3 that I can think of off hand, and on the A4000, the motherboard uses inexpensive simms but going beyond 24mb(16mb ram +8mb slow zorroII ram,) requires an expensive accelerator with simm sockets or one of the 3 zorro III memory cards and the only one that shows up for sale very often is the Fastlane Z3. The A4000 has great compatibility with modern hard drives for a machine that old but it would be so nice if you could use 16 and 32mb simms on the motherboard instead of 4mb ones like some of the Macs made in the early 90s.
I agree totally with you, I never said the A2000 was the BEST Amiga, but it certainly was no where even close to the top 3 worst Ideas of Commodore. I keep stating "At the time" the A2000 was a great machine, but the 3000 and 4000 were all improvements on it. I had 3 at one time, and have all sold them off due to space issues. Although I still say that for a newbe to Amiga, Start with an A2000, and slowly build it up. Much easier and cheaper to find cards for it, then let's say an A500. The price difference is not all that much between a stock A500 and A2000, but finding anything for an A500 (other than trapdoor Ram) is very expensive and hard. In fact I know of 3 Right now, that I can get for anyone very cheap and easy, I believe on is a factory A2500.
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Kid Chaos is impressive given the limitations of the hardware, but I don't think it can match the better looking platformers on the Genesis like Sonic 3, Sonic & Knuckles or Vectorman. Elfmania is more colorful than your average Genesis game and the animation is quite smooth. They did a good job of pulling off some parallax with only a single playfield. So I'll give you that one. Fightin' Spirit doesn't seem particularly impressive though.
Really the only things the OCS video hardware had going for it for 2D games over the Genesis were color selection and the amount of RAM directly accessible by the video hardware. Any pixel can be any of the 32 colors in the palette and palette entries are 12-bit whereas on the Genesis a given tile/sprite is limited to using a single palette of 15 colors and the palette entries are only 9-bit. However, there are 4 such palettes and you choose which palette to use on a per-tile and per-sprite basis (so 61 colors onscreen unless you resort to "tricks").
Now if you want two independent playfields (for parallax scrolling for instance), the color selection advantage of OCS is greatly reduced since each playfield is limited to a 7 color palette (+1 background color). The Genesis hardware doesn't have this problem. Also, the OCS sprite hardware is pretty lame compared to the Genesis. OCS supports 8 3-color or 4 15-color 16-pixel wide sprites per line. The Genesis supports up to 20 sprites or 320 pixels worth of sprites per line whichever comes first in sizes of 8,16 or 32 pixels wide with a limit of 80 sprites per frame. Genesis sprites always use a 15 color palette. You can work around these limitations to an extent using the blitter, but on OCS/ECS you'll probably run into bandwidth limits before you get into the neighborhood of what the Genesis hardware can do.
Fighting games are probably one area where OCS fairs pretty well as parallax isn't as important and you don't need many sprites. Further, all the RAM available to the video hardware allows you to do smooth animations on relatively large sprites.
Now the OCS hardware was a lot more flexible than the Genesis hardware making it much more appropriate for a general purpose computer. Making a GUI system work on the Genesis hardware would require some sacrifices and even then would probably perform poorly in comparison.
Well it definitely does wonders for load times. I doubt it made much of a difference for per-frame processing though. The A500 had a reasonable amount of RAM. Enough that you can load all your data for a single level up front and then just work out of RAM. As for using less memory, that's definitely true, but the Genesis had a lot less of that (64K for the 68K, 64K for the VDP and 8K for the Z80) so it's a bit moot for comparing the two.
You certainly know the stuff :)
I've never had any hands-on experience with bit-banging the Amiga, so everything I say is based on assumptions. Therefore, I assume that with a cartridge, a lot of game data doesn't need to be loaded into memory. So I assume that a lot more can be done with tricks to overcome the sprite limit.
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Originally Posted by tone007 View Post
No.
Yes.
Maybe? ;)
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Speaking of display stuff, considering you could support 6-bitplanes on ECS, I think EHB was a pretty stupid idea. Why not just have 64 distinct palette entries instead?
Space on the IC, commodore were using a chip technology that was old by the time ECS was used, Denise would have had to have 32 more palette entry registers (each one 12bits wide? IIRC)! That uses up a lot of silicon, much cheaper in silicon to use a trick like EHB.
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The worst idea was definately AGA. More resources should have been put into making AAA available when AGA came out. The A3000+ should have been the A4000. A4000 was filled with poor choices and feels like it was rushed out. For one, the loss of the flicker-fixer were just idoitic. When I upgraded from my A3000 to an A4000, I was so upset that my newer computer couldn't use the nice monitor I was using on my A3000 and I had to spend all this extra money on an expensive 1942 monitor.
The decision to put a HD floppy in the A4000 was good the fact the drive was 1.5 height left you with a completely useless 0.5 height drive bay. But to make matters worse, since the A1200 didn't come with an HD drive, no commercial developers used HD floppys. This left the HD drive in A4000s useless except for personal purposes and game were coming on 14+ DD floppies instead of a more reasonable 7.
Also the A1200 should have come with an 68030 as standard (or a 44 or 50Mhz 020). 25Mhz 020's were too slow in comparison to standard PC's and Macs of that time.
But really, I think the biggest problem was that ECS was just too good and AGA was not enough of an improvement. Developers mostly just targetted ECS machines as that market was bigger and as a result there was not enough incentive for many people to upgrade to an AGA machine. ECS thrived for much longer than it should have and AGA machines never sold as well as they needed too.
@MPiva
when you say ECS you really mean the Original Chip Set, don't you?
I think that the most disappoining chipset was the ECS (the A3000/A600 chipset, relesed in 1990) not AGA.
ECS came out in 1990, 5 years later than OCS. The only improvements were genlock capabilities and the Shres and 31Khz modes. Since the latter were limited to 4 colors chosen from a 64 palette, they were not useful for games, and very limited for professional application. Also note that such modes on ECS (unlike AGA) use a palette encoding different from the standard Amiga palette making more difficult to have draggable screens with SHRES and other res. at the same time.
So in 5 years C= gave us only minor improvements, not suitable for the most successful Amiga applications, i.e., games.
AGA came out in 1992. I agree that is was not enough to keep up with other platforms, but with respect to ECS was a BIG improvement, released only 2 years later.
If ECS would have been released in 1988 and AGA in 1990, then AGA would have been a very good evolutionary step!
ok, my own 3 worst ideas/product
1. Not choosing a strategy, a market target. They want to market Amiga for professionals as well as for games. They also wanted to explore new markets (CDTV) too far ahead of itheir time
2. Not enough R&D, splitted between software or for hardware. Amiga started with the most advanced hardware and a very promising but still immature OS. Then C= developed a lot the OS (2.0 was a big improvement) and not enough the hardware (ECS and A600). Then tried again to do both. Probably it would have been better to concentrate either on
the OS (like Apple) or on the hardware (like console makers). best of all, of course, would have been to spend a lot more of their cospicuous profits in R&D :-D
3 ECS and (closely related) the A600
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In no order:
1) A600
2) CDTV
3) AGA based A4000
Unlike most people, I think that the CD32 was actually a good product.
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This is a really pointless thread, as everyone has their own separate ideas about what should and should not have been done by Commodore, but I might as well throw my own 2 cents in the pot.
1. Worst idea was selling the Amiga to any company in the first place and losing control of the company's future. I know that this is all unrealistic, but I wish Jay Miner and the group of great hardware and software people he had gathered together to create the Amiga could have somehow kept a controlling interest in the Amiga and just sold enough minor silent partnerships to make it into production. I believe that Jay and company would have done a much better job of staying ahead of the competition and doubt that they could have done any worse at marketing the Amiga than Commodore did.
I think Jay & company might have given us ECS and AmigaOS2.0 within 18 to 24 months after the initial release of the A1000. Although all Amigas would have retained the ability to display 15khz modes for compatibility with TV monitors, all models after the A1000 would have included flicker fixers and starting with the A3000, the OS would have the option of running in RTG mode. Video card drivers would be developed by every video card maker because by the time the A3000 was released the Amiga would have been so popular that it would have been competing head to head with the Intel PC compatible computers and Apple Macs because of number 2 below.
2. Second worse mistake that Commodore made with the Amiga was to allow the misconception that the Amiga was only a games machine to persist. Commodore should have either subsidized the creation of business applications, or developed them "In House". Money spent in this way would have made much more sense than wasting money on creating the A2000 with ISA slots and developing crappy bridge boards to allow Amigas to run MS-DOS, or Windows3.1 apps. Having better apps written natively for the AmigaOS which could run circles around any Intel PC clones that were available when the A1000 was first released would have made a much better impression and shown how superior the Amiga was in comparison to the PC or Mac. With the Amiga's hardware advantage at the time of it's first release, it should have blown away all of it's competition in every part of the software spectrum, including business software for the PC and music and desk top publishing on the Mac. By default of it's superior hardware capabilities, game designers/programmers chose to write games for the Amiga with no incentives from Commodore, but business application programmers of that time did not see the need for any of the Amiga's sound or color advantages and since Commodore had made no, or little effort to market the Amiga to businesses and corporations, there was not sufficient incentive for business app programmers to write their apps, or port their apps to the Amiga.
3. With the Amiga's huge advantages in creativity potential, Commodore should have pushed them into every school on the planet, just like Apple did, or attempted to do when they were getting started. Had Commodore beat Apple into the schools, it would have made a huge difference in what parents and kids themselves would have purchased while they were in school and after they got out of school. It also would have fueled the creative minds of millions of kids to create wonderful programs and computer generated music and art on those Amigas for everyone to see and listen to which would have been better advertising than anything Commodore ever did on TV or on the radio.
Hind sight always seems better and easier, but nobody really knows how things might have turned out if this or that had been done differently in the past.
As for those that list one Amiga model or another as one of the three worst Amiga ideas in history, I would have to disagree. Their timing may have been bad, or way too little way too late, but I can enjoy any of the Amiga models and would not call any of them completely useless, or crap. I rather like the CDTV's looks and it could have been a great idea if it had been marketed correctly at the right time. Of course coming after the A1000 it should have had more advanced capabilities too, not just the addition of a CD drive. The A600 is a nice little machine, if it could have been produced and sold for a very low price just for gaming, but it's lack of expandability and late release with virtually the same capabilities of the A1000 and A500 did not make sense.
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1. Butchering the A1200 to reduce cost
2. CDTV
3. Not marketing the CD32
agreed with u Fanscale
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Probly get flamed for this... But I actually find some use for the extra-halfbrite mode.... later versions of DPaint have an 'EHB' mode, maybe useless to many, but makes it fairly easy to add shadows to moving objects... since each color has a version that is half the brightness... Brilliant! (OK, not really, but I thought it was kinda cool...)
:hammer:
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Probly get flamed for this... But I actually find some use for the extra-halfbrite mode.... later versions of DPaint have an 'EHB' mode, maybe useless to many, but makes it fairly easy to add shadows to moving objects... since each color has a version that is half the brightness... Brilliant! (OK, not really, but I thought it was kinda cool...)
:hammer:
That, in my book, makes a perfectly legitimate use for the EHB. I would have preferred a direct 64-colour display but what can you do? Didn't a few games also use EHB?
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1. Butchering the A1200 to reduce cost
2. CDTV
3. Not marketing the CD32
CD32 is an interesting one, had Commodore known the first thing about console design and production they would have re-jigged the onboard memory to 1.5mb Chip .5mb Fast to produce a machine twice as fast.
Every console you care to mention has weird memory setups to maximise their speed, C= threw away 50% of the potential speed for the sake of either a SIMM socket (the N64 had a memory upgrade slot for the graphics, and the Saturn used RAM carts etc so this is not unusual) or solder in 256k or 512k of Fast ram as required.
The rest of it is kind of historic, by the time the A1000 was in shops in the EU IBM ALREADY had VGA finished, so technically when the A500 and A2000 machines were released with zero improvements (no parallax scrolling worth a damn, pathetic weak hardware sprites like the Atari 8 bits, insufficient sound channels) we all knew where this was heading. The A3000 and A600 with the same unimproved chipset abilities and the AGA with the same 8 bit sound with 4 channels and 8 bitplane(!!!) 256 colour mode were the final nail in the coffin to a company which lost its way since Jack was kicked out (in favour of that brown midget donk and the old codger funding things....yeah that was a good move).
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I'll go a step further than that and say releasing any machine with a 020+ without fast ram fitted was a mistake.
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I believe the lack of chunky screen resolutions killed amiga.By 1993 many software houses were releasing games for 256 colors,if you look at some of those adventures such as bloodnet,i believe that with clever design software houses could get away with the planar limitation (as in the case of bloodnet).
However most software houses did not have a dedicated hard core programmers to port stuff to amiga and optimize things for the amiga system.They just used the same engine with 32 color reduction (like most sierra games adventures) which are awfull (i mean the sierra ones) with the exception of king's quest 6 that programmers did a very good job at color reduction.
Lack of chunky modes prohibited companies from porting direct the so many 256 color games.So that eventually left amiga with no support from sierra,lucas arts,origin and many other big companies that moved on to pc.I think with 2-4 mbytes of fast ram and chunky format in 1992-1994 amiga could have survived.
Second worst idea was the fact that amiga did not come shipped even with a 40mbyte hard disk.That killed platform as a game machine for big games.And companies weren't anymore interested to port games like Monkey island 2,or Fate of atlantis.
So for me no 1 mistake is lack of chunky pixels,and no 2 lack of hard disk.
How much more expensive could a 1200 be if it had chunky support (even with something like akiko) and 2 mbytes of fast ram and a hard disk of 60-80 mbytes?
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1. Releasing the A500 Plus but not telling anyone, and having backward compatibility issues with it.
2. A600 i think was a good idea, have it cost more than a A500 Plus was not
3. A1200 & A4000 should have been developed a little bit further, and had more features to say competitive.
4. THE BIGGEST OF THEM ALL:- Not using the Boing Ball as the official logo instead that stupid colour tick!
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Just my $.02 worth:
1. Transformer/Sidecar: Commodore made big promises to an already doubtful press and industry about IBM compatibility and the Amiga. With Commodore's history of vaporware and products that didn't quite measure up, these two items -I feel- severely damaged their Amiga creditability.
Transformer was a great idea on paper but a horrible failure for real world use. Having a chart to calculate how many *TIMES* slower your application would run on Transformer (if it ran at all) in the manual combined with Transformer's cost was just a disaster...no, I'm sorry, it was embarrassing.
Sidecar wasn't a bad product or idea if it hadn't been born out of the abortion that Transformer turned out to be. "Significantly less than $1000.00", as quoted by Commodore but the final price? $999.99. Wow, my cup runneth over!
In the end, this damaged Commodore's lackluster reputation even more...
2. Herding Commodore 64 users to the promised land: It amazes me that Commodore had this built-in crowd of Commodore 64 (and 128) users that numbered in the *tens* of millions but did hardly anything to migrate this base to their next machine.
Even Apple went out of their way to migrate Apple II users to Macs with Apple II cards, disk drive plug-ins, emulators, and converter software.
By not doing anything to salvage their investment in Commodore, it gave them no reason not to look else where and else where they did...
3. Marketing: I know you've all heard this before but look at bad the 128k-single drive- Macintosh really was but they marketed it like it was the second coming. Commodore's marketing was terrible for a new product launch.
Even the Atari ST's marketing was outstanding compared to Commodore's.
Apple: "The computer for the rest of us."
Atari: "Power without the price."
Commodore: Ah, did they have a slogan?
4. Icons/Graphics: Apple (Steve Jobs) understood that you have to have icons, windows, and graphics that look nice. You may argue for or against how cute they look but people *DO* judge a book by its cover especially when they don't understand how a computer works.
Workbench 1.0 through Workbench 1.3.0 looked like a brain damaged third grader designed the icons. With no set standard you had companies creating icons from hell that took up half the screen while others created icons smaller than the mouse pointer. Who thought creating icons that were wider than they were taller looked good? Stevie Wonder? Ack!
Apple lucked into Susan Kare but Commodore should have grabbed Jim Sachs from the beginning and hired him to do icons/windows/boot screens/manuals.
Just MHO,
-P
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All with all, the whole Amiga is just rubbish! Let's all ditch it!
;)
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Taking all of the things in this thread, but particularly inspired by amigadave's musings, I momentarily shifted into a universe where the biggest news of the decade was Amiga's abandoning of PPC for AMD64. Back in the 90s.
(Wait, wha... seriously? Yeah, as a corollary to the Amiga philosophy, 64-bit processing was a great idea and we should have been on it in the 90s -- and Intel just could not do it. But instead we hamstrung ourselves for almost 20 years on an architecture needing life-support and regular face-lifts and tummy-tucks, and really damn good PR. Could you imagine what x86 would look like if it were a person?)
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Well, i was in there from the beginning so believe me on this:
1. The price, too high for all models (the first a2000/a3000
and later a4000 i saw was in a tv broatcast studio)!
2. The a500 was great for gaming but BIG mistake making all the
games with ONE firebutton like the C=64 had (later/too late
corrected with cd32)
3. Sound chip should be 16bit in first place.
The only stuff that keeped me long time (until 1993/95) into the
amiga was the demo scene and games until they lost support from
companys b/c of high piracy just like the c=64...
cya
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1. No visionary management. Imagine what the company would have been like with the tyrannical perfectionist and visionary Steve Jobs. Actually, anyone who would have focused on bringing in the very best at a reasonable cost. I mean they had their own die-factory for goodness sake, they were not even that dependent on using others technology. The legendary bumblings of the most terrible management team and borad in the history of computing. They should make a movie about this or press charges.
2. Product placement and features. Example. The A600 is a great machine when the expectations are properly set as being a sub-A500 machine, but as a successor, it was a joke. The A3000 was great and should have evolved and almost did with the additional video card for UNIX, but again no vision. The A3000/UX could have been a game changer.
Amiga always had the engineering brilliance, the technical genius, but failed to put them together in a cohesive strategical and committed way.
3. No commitment to products. These half-baked launches, aborted programs, poor roadmap for products. Someone was just trying to turn a damn buck.
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1. No visionary management. Imagine what the company would have been like with the tyrannical perfectionist and visionary Steve Jobs.
(http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/110/ts32.png)
Introducing the New Commodore-Amiga TS32!
Actually I agree with everything you said there.
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I've often wondered how things would have turned out if the Amiga 3000 would have shipped with the AAA chipset.
What a powerhouse machine it would have been at the time, nice OS, advanced chipset, and UNIX to boot! Clever, huh?
:-)
P
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All these pages and no one's mentioned the death bringer Commodore PC Colt? Multi-Millions wasted on a poor clone when they should have been expanding development and marketing for the Amiga Technology.
When the Colt appeared, it was Commodore raising the white flag and laying prone to the rest of the industry. At that moment they traded innovation for the chance at a quick buck and doomed the company. All that and ticking off third party developers, was pretty much the one-two punch.
Plaz
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#I, 2, & 3 - Hiring Irving Gould!
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Introducing the New Commodore-Amiga TS32!
I... uh... I want to laugh but cannot because I am a little creeped out by it... :nervous:
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The A2000: overpriced and underpowered. The flagship Amiga of its time should and could have been so much better.
I'll think of 2 more later :)
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All these pages and no one's mentioned the death bringer Commodore PC Colt? Multi-Millions wasted on a poor clone when they should have been expanding development and marketing for the Amiga Technology.
When the Colt appeared, it was Commodore raising the white flag and laying prone to the rest of the industry. At that moment they traded innovation for the chance at a quick buck and doomed the company. All that and ticking off third party developers, was pretty much the one-two punch.
Plaz
If you read the book "On the Edge", you will see that the Commodore PC line was never given the "Green light" or thought of by Commodore head office in the US. Even Commodore North America thought is was a bad Idea, but Jack let it go because of the sales in Germany.Jack never did want to enter the PC clone market, just because he would have to buy the chips from intel or another source - a total waist of money since he had a perfectly go Chip fab at his fingertips.
It was totally made in in Germany, and was out the door before management (Jack) could kill it. The only reason it did survive, was because in Germany and most of Europe, Commodore sold everything it put its name on. That is why instead of killing things like the C116, it was only sold in Germany, because Germany was the "Dumping Ground" and people there just bought it up.
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The A2000: overpriced and underpowered. The flagship Amiga of its time should and could have been so much better.
I'll think of 2 more later :)
excuse me???
I'll have to disagree there.
in 1989 I got my A2000 because I wanted a more expandable amiga and the 500 wasn't it for me.
this purchase was THE most important of my entire career as it was really the turning point for me (even if I didn't realize it at the time).
I was able to eventually add HD's, memory, acceleration, DCTV, external storage, CD drive and god knows what else.
I learned computer graphics and animation from this computer and this propelled me to work on Emmy award winning projects..
mistake?
not for me
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Thought of another one: the rollout price of a 256kb A1000. IMO, was too expensive and cost prohibitive for many of its prospective users - which were primarily loyal Commodore users of course. This is a tough thing to decide though - price it too low and people and professionals might not have given it a second look. Price it too high and people might rather go for an old standby such as Apple or IBM. Guess in all fairness, it was priced pretty well - but compared to the ST, no so much. I believe a 512kb system should have rolled out at around $1k, maybe $1.3k tops with some more software and a monitor. Better or more RAM solutions that were cheaper should have been made more available too, instead of rare or years later that were STILL too expensive for what they were.
yes, price is a tricky thing but my experience is that once I saw the potential of Amiga (I recall going to an amiga convention in New York in the late 80's) - I saw LIVE, and my friend's LightBox (a pageflipping program later incorporated into DeluxePaint), and the Summagraphics tablet, the music programs, etc, etc....i just KNEW I HAD to have this computer.
this was the first computer I saw that I knew could be used by artists. at the time the Apple seems way to crude to me. just not good enough.
so I saved my money and bought my Amiga2000. It wasn't cheap but worth every penny.
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The A2000: overpriced and underpowered. The flagship Amiga of its time should and could have been so much better.
I'll think of 2 more later :)
The A2000 was certainly overpriced when it first came out, but this a common theme with new things: rake in money off of all the rich people who want the most powerful system. A year later it was $2000 with 020 and 50MB Hard drive. Compare that to Macs at the time they were about $3000-$5000.
I thought the A2000 was great, you could switch off the Accelerator and play all the arcade games. Switch it back on and do some more serious work.
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the only thing that should have been different with the 2000 is it should have had an '020 cpu out the door instead of releasing that later. The 1000, 500, and 2000 were really pretty much the same computer, with different form factors and expandability.
the 2000 was really ugly though. not sleek and cool like the 1000, 3000, or even the 500. as workhorses go the 2000 is a clydesdale thats been kicked in the face be a bull.
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I agree that the A2000 was priced too high for too long. I love the A2000, but it *is* essentially just an A500 with slots, a big box and a beefier power supply. Image and perception are everything though - the A2000 was a BEAST! In America, BIGGER is BETTER don'tcha know? lol
I remember shaking my head at the price of a barebones A2000 system in the late 80's and up until the early 90's when some retailers still had them for sale and outfitting them with 2091's, OS2.1, etc. They were never really deeply discounted, at least - to my knowledge - for a particular computer such as the A2000 to last 'that' long and continue to be a viable machine years later, amidst all the changes in computing, is nothing short of astounding. The damn thing literally grew with the computer user and the upgrade options were nearly endless. The A2000 was obviously a hugely successful concept for C=, especially from a gross margin point of view and around the time one would have thought they were starting to discontinue the model, you know they weren't going to be unloading 'em cheap for the Video Toaster and other speciality users at the time. From a business standpoint, I guess I would have done the same thing. At the end of the day, you can't really fault Commodore too badly here. IF you subscribe to the doctrine of not fixing that which is not broken that is. lol
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Does anybody else wonder if Atari would have done better with the Amiga technology?
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Does anybody else wonder if Atari would have done better with the Amiga technology?
Nope. They would have done exactly the same thing ultimately - just as they did with their ST line. I'd go so far as saying that Atari's brand name was already tainted to the point that hardly anybody at the time would have taken them seriously. Atari is Atari and that means console gaming and maybe their A8 line - but soon after the 2nd and 3rd generation 8-bit computer line (which were really all the same machines basically), they had already burned so many bridges with retailers that yes - they would have not stood a chance marketing anything as innovative as the Amiga. And when you look back at the ST days, C= did a much better job with the scant advertising and marketing than Atari ever did with any of their products at the time.
IMO - As only Nixon could have gone to China, only Commodore could have handled the Amiga.
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I agree somewhat, but you have to look at the big picture. IF Jack had not left Commodore, the Amiga would have gone to Atari. At that time, Atari was bleed money for Time-Warner, so even if they managed to get the 150XE out the door (I think that was the offical name for MICKEY), Atari soon would have folded up after that. POSSIBLY, Jack would have swooped in and bought it up, if he could have gotten it for JACK's terms, but, then the damage would have been done, and possibly, the Amiga technology would have died, or have been used in other ways. Now, CBM on the other hand (If Jack had stayed) would have bought Zlog, and have pushed the C900 out the door for a UNIX machine. It's really hard to say if the C900 would have carried Commodore into the '90's, but the big problem was Jack's lack of the future. He wanted Immediate results, and if it was selling good, then it will keep on selling. As a result, Commodore and MOS had no 16 bit processor (because it wasn't a priority of Jack's) and of course no 32 bit processor in the pipe.
Another huge mistake (once Jack left) was to kill the Commodore LCD computer, and sell off Commodore's LCD manufacturing plant (The ONLY LCD plant in America)
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1. Releasing the A500 Plus but not telling anyone, and having backward compatibility issues with it.
I just got an A500+ in a trade (in which I got totally screwed, thank Eric), but have never heard about any "backward compatibility issues" until now. Please tell me what issues the A500+ has. Mine has a AmigaOS3.1 Kickstart ROM installed in it.
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You know, that got me to thinking about how "silly" hardware Kickstart switchers really were. I mean, why Commodore couldn't have included the option to boot from whatever Kickstart you wanted with each new revision. "Cost" aside (which many of us paid for anyway in the form of a switcher and extra ROM), why couldn't they had combined 2+ Kickstarts in the latest revisions along with some code that would allow a user to choose his or her flavor right from startup? An Amiga user with a battery backed clock and NVRAM (like the A3000) could retain your preference so as not to "inconvenience" the user. I know the argument is moot in the grand scheme of things and would involve a complete turn-a-round in C='s philosophy and design, but... lol
And what AmigaNG was probably referring to were the incompatibility issues 2.x+ had with 1.3. I had an A1200 right as soon as they were released and I gotta tell you, the Boot Menu didn't fully help get some of my old programs to run. It wasn't until later that we had Kickstart disks and other Degraders for our 3.x machines. I remember feeling really disappointed back then because obviously, I had amassed quite the collection of stuff, like most all of us.
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I just got an A500+ in a trade (in which I got totally screwed, thank Eric), but have never heard about any "backward compatibility issues" until now. Please tell me what issues the A500+ has. Mine has a AmigaOS3.1 Kickstart ROM installed in it.
Some older games didn't like the KS2.0, 1MB Chipram, and/or ECS video it came with.
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I agree that the A2000 was priced too high for too long. I love the A2000, but it *is* essentially just an A500 with slots, a big box and a beefier power supply. Image and perception are everything though - the A2000 was a BEAST! In America, BIGGER is BETTER don'tcha know?
I don't know if anyone could have produced and sold the A2000 cheaper, but I do remember that I kept using my heavily modified A1000 for much longer than I wanted to because I could not afford an A2000 for probably about 3 years after I purchased my A1000 used in 1987. Then I finally found a used A2000 that I could afford from someone who was either giving up on the Amiga, or they were upgrading to an A3000, or A4000.
I don't agree with you that the A2000 is just an A500 in a bigger box with slots and a bigger PSU. Having those slots and an accelerator slot and the video slot was a huge improvement over the A500 which made possible the Video Toaster, the single most important add-on card that sold more Amiga computers than any other add-on in the Amiga's history, and kept the Amiga alive in the USA & Canada. In fact I will go so far as to say that Commodore USA probably would have gone bankrupt a year or two earlier if the Video Toaster/Flyer had never been invented and with Commodore USA failing, Commodore UK and other branches of Commodore outside of the USA would have failed shortly afterward as well.
Having Zorro slots allowed A2000's to use many different add-on cards, but most importantly, RTG video cards to try to catch up with video cards in Intel computers and since Commodore failed miserably at marketing the Amiga to businesses and developing business applications that could compete with Microsoft's DOS and later Windows apps, the addition of ISA slots and the creation of the 386sx Bridgeboard (although too little, too late) allowed some Amiga users to justify continuing to use their A2000's for a little while longer. Of course Commodore needed to complete and release the A2000 & A2500 much sooner than they did for them to have any chance of competing with the Intel boxes, but as long as they did not develop business apps and allowed the Amiga to be considered nothing more than a games machine or artist's tool, it did not matter how soon they released it.
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@save2600,
Yeah, one of the first things I bought for my second Amiga (an A2000) was a DKB MultiStart with 1.3 KS and 2.04 KS ROMs so I could continue using all of the games and programs I had bought for my A1000 which also had a DKB KwikStart ROM switcher with KS 1.3 & 2.04 ROMs.
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I just got an A500+ in a trade (in which I got totally screwed, thank Eric), but have never heard about any "backward compatibility issues" until now. Please tell me what issues the A500+ has. Mine has a AmigaOS3.1 Kickstart ROM installed in it.
OMG NO, it wasn't me! really! How could you all think such a thing...
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@AmigaDave: Yeah, the Kickstart switcher was a necessary evil for a while there. Not arguing that fact, just wondering had C= implemented true backwards compatibility, how that would have affected their perception with other users, Amiga or otherwise.
And yes, totally agree about the VT keeping C= alive for a little while longer. I eluded to that with the expandability capability of the big box Amiga's, especially the 16-bit centered A2000 (until you added a processor card that is) and how long it kept the system viable for all those years. Really is a wonderful system that way - the A2000. Any of the big boys really, when you think about it. I just give the A2000 slightly more props because of its age, its seemingly open architecture and PC capabilities if anyone thinks that played a significant role (I'm not sure it did, but I'm not saying that it didn't either). And when I say the A2000 is little more than an A500, I meant in its core design. Both were capable of the same things: 1mb Agnus, 9MB Ram, FF/SD optional, Zorro expanders optional off the bus, including accelerators, etc. And I do believe you can towerize or at least slap a Bodega Bay on an A500 to have Zorro slots and even a video card if I am not mistaken. Might not be 100% Toaster compatible though IIRC.
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Hey save2600, I've heard of at least one person using a Toaster on a 500, but with a home-made Zorro adapter, because the Toaster needs a video slot...:afro: Man, I wish I had some of those mad skills....Bodega Bay, no video slot, I bet it could be modded, tho.....
I don't even have a 2000, but I can repeat what some people have told me... Lots of expansion room, and built like a tank...
The array of Zorro cards boggles the mind....
Oh, maybe I should actually reply to the topic.... :razz:
I agree the whole Kickstart idea could have been done better... Would there have been a way to make the Kickstart flash memory of some sort, and update it via software? (firmware upgrades, etc) Although, TBH, firmware updates are a little scary for me.... only worked once, upgraded a Philips CD burner in my PC.....
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I just got an A500+ in a trade (in which I got totally screwed, thank Eric), but have never heard about any "backward compatibility issues" until now. Please tell me what issues the A500+ has. Mine has a AmigaOS3.1 Kickstart ROM installed in it.
It might be the 1MB chip ram, it affects some games. Otherwise try relokick to go to Kickstart 1.3.
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Hey save2600, I've heard of at least one person using a Toaster on a 500, but with a home-made Zorro adapter, because the Toaster needs a video slot...:afro: Man, I wish I had some of those mad skills....Bodega Bay, no video slot, I bet it could be modded, tho.....
I don't even have a 2000, but I can repeat what some people have told me... Lots of expansion room, and built like a tank...
The array of Zorro cards boggles the mind....
Oh, maybe I should actually reply to the topic.... :razz:
I agree the whole Kickstart idea could have been done better... Would there have been a way to make the Kickstart flash memory of some sort, and update it via software? (firmware upgrades, etc) Although, TBH, firmware updates are a little scary for me.... only worked once, upgraded a Philips CD burner in my PC.....
Ever hear of the "KickFlash" and the Flash Memory on the Deneb that can be used the same way to contain Custom Kickstart files and configured to load them instead of your Kickstart ROM image?