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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: Gulliver on December 01, 2010, 02:53:15 PM
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I was comparing the Amiga with its competitors back in those times in the hardware aspect.
Each machine is listed with its default factory configuration (third party expansions are not taken into account).
(http://img254.imageshack.us/img254/1762/comparison0.png)
Do you think the Amiga was superior in all aspects? :)
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Of course... :)
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Well, I woul have chosen for the cpu & bus speed of the Quadra, and the audio from the Falcon.
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Going by that chart, I'd have to say the Mac is the clear winner.
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Those specs are a little innacurate. 1024x768+overscan on aga ? X68030 also had 16 bit color (65536 colors) onscreen. Im sure there's other errors there too, but it's too late and Im not interested enough to find them :) As much as Id like to say otherwise, there are some areas that the amiga was completely humbled in vs. some of the other machines of the day.
Not that I care too much,... I love the amiga regardless.
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hmm, you've just proven that apples are superior to oranges and bananas. you should stand proud :afro:
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Yes probably I made a mistake or two on the chart, but despite those Mac lovers, I still think it was not the best machine. ;)
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The 4000T is nice, but the technology was already long in the tooth.
Also, calling Paula a DSP is pushing it and they didn't come with a CDRom.
To be fair, most only shipped with an 880k capable drive.
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Yes probably I made a mistake or two on the chart, but despite those Mac lovers, I still think it was not the best machine. ;)
I'm no Mac lover, but if you're talking hardware specification superiority, it's clear the 4000T is not the winner.
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The A4000 was towards the very end of the Commodore era when it was clear the company was sinking fast.
If you look earlier than that, it's pretty clear that the A1000 owned anything the competitors had at the time.
Other than the obvious A4000T, the only other machines in that list that interest me are the Falcon and X68030. The NeXT box would be kind of interesting but a bit meh.
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I still say OF COURSE, but then I'm totally biased, ignorant, thick and proud of it... :)
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@Heiroglyph
My brother´s A4000T when bought new came with the 1.76MB floppy and I believe it was a 2x cdrom reader.
Paula is more likely a poor man´s DSP ;) I didnt know where to put it.
@Tone007
I believe, there isnt a total winner or looser. It is that some aspects of some of the contenders were really good and others not so much.
@Karlos
I agree that back in the days of the A1000, it was the computer to have, every IT/geek guy was having wet dreams with it.
I wish I could have one of each, less the Next, which I dont find especially interesting.
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The A4000 was towards the very end of the Commodore era when it was clear the company was sinking fast.
If you look earlier than that, it's pretty clear that the A1000 owned anything the competitors had at the time.
Other than the obvious A4000T, the only other machines in that list that interest me are the Falcon and X68030. The NeXT box would be kind of interesting but a bit meh.
I've got a NeXT box right here... But for some weird reason it has a picture of a half eaten fruit on it :-?
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At the end of the day it's not really about which machine had the better hardware specs, it's really about what the all those clever coders & programmers wrote for it, that made each machine what it was... :)
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At the end of the day it's not really about which machine had the better hardware specs, it's really about what the all those clever coders & programmers wrote for it, that made each machine what it was... :)
Hmmm, no... I think what is boils down to, is which one did you get for christmas when you were ten ;)
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Yes probably I made a mistake or two on the chart, but despite those Mac lovers, I still think it was not the best machine. ;)
Well the Mac had Mac OS ... and a fixed frame buffer style of graphics. Shapeshifter ran Mac OS quicker on an Amiga than a Mac with the same CPU IIRC.
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Hmmm, no... I think what is boils down to, is which one did you get for christmas when you were ten ;)
They didn't have home computers when I was 10... :(
(at 10 I got my first electronic keyboard an old Bontempi (i think) reed organ, the ruddy fan was louder than the music... :lol:)
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I don't have time to do it, but it would be nice to see such a chart for 1990 too.
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Yes,as pointed out,most quikpak and amiga technologies 4000t's had 880K drives, but some true C= a4000t's had the HD floppy from the factory.None came with cdroms as standard.
Not sure when the quikpak 060 A4000T model came out,probabaly a good bit after 1994~ would of looked better in the chart in any case.
I Love the 4000t also but the mac is the clear winner with 128MB capable on board,16bit sound,and 24bit (16mil colors) gfx.I never could understand why most mac's used LC 68040's tho..
Of course you could go crazy expanding the 4000t and make it a nice machine.
I would be scared to see ther prices on these originally.
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I think this chart really goes to show had badly the Amiga hardware was becoming by 1994. Honest, I'm not trying to start a flame war but I'm just being realistic. I really have fond memories of the Amiga and of Commodore but it just wasn't competitive by the mid 90s. Some thoughts:
-AGA was just not good enough. It was late to the party and only extended OCS/ECS for a short time.
-Do you realize that Paula was roughly 10 years old by 1994!?
-8 Bit audio was an embarrassment compared to the plethora of sound cards of the PC world and the Mac's built-in audio.
-3DFX was testing their Voodoo 1 3D cards in 1994 for the PC. I remember seeing a demo of it on DOS/Windows 95 Beta at CES in Chicago in the summer of 94. AGA seemed quaint and backwards compared to 3DFX.
-Windows 95 would be released in August of 1994 and would kill Commodore and Atari and nearly kill Apple a few years later
-Apple's hardware was still stuck with System 7.x but the hardware was getting better and better
In the end, I think you can see the major problem here for Commodore and Amiga: Technology Product Cycle. The Amiga started theirs in 1985 and it was cutting edge but it was coming to an end in 1994/1995. Apple/Microsoft/PC were just starting theirs at this time but the big deal is that it gave them something to grow into. Apple was moving to PPC, Windows would get better and better (NT 4 was an amazing OS) and this would lead to Windows 2k/XP, and finally the PC world got PCI in '92 and folks like 3DFX were going to bring 3D acceleration to the masses.
What did Commodore have? AmigaOS was very mature but had no place to go. It was so tied to the hardware that any small change would kill legacy apps. Look what a mess it was going from 1.3 to 2.x/3.x.
AAA (or whatever) should have been started in 1988 and pushed hard by R&D so that as one TPC ended (started in 1985) Commodore could have transitioned to a a new TPC for the 90s.
AmigaOS 4 should have been developed along with AAA and included modern features like memory protection. By the late 80's, everybody in the computer world recognized that memory protection is a must for a stable, modern OS.
Microsoft developed NT (based on ideas from VAX) with memory protection (among many other things) because its where you had to go. Consumer Windows was always planned to intersect Windows NT and they did a great job of slowly getting everybody there.
Apple and Commodore had the same problem with their OS. You can't just 'bolt on' modern features and a rewrite kills your current apps that keep you in business. Apple's soap opera like quest for a new OS was certainly amazing and they just got lucky with Steve Jobs and NeXT.
Commodore was...well, Commodore. What worked in the 1980s for them failed in the 1990s...and here we are.
Cheers!
-P
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Commodore was...well, Commodore. What worked in the 1980s for them failed in the 1990s...and here we are.
Cheers!
-P
I agree with a lot of what you say in your post, but remember it's wasn't the lack of ideas and R&D that brought Commodore to it's knees, it was greed & downright theft by the likes of Mehdi Ali that ended Commodore... :(
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when you factor in software, the amiga certainly jumps ahead. BUt the earlier you set the clock, the more the amiga shines. In 85 or 86, there's just nothing like it.
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Yeah it's sort of a continuum, between 85 and 92 the Amiga had clear advantages over other systems, in 85 it was a world beater, in 92 it was still ahead in a number of areas, from 92 to 95 was the real transition from competitor to also ran.
Commodore wasn't willing or able to put enough money into the Amiga to maintain the lead it had in 85. Somehow they didn't understand that once you move out in front and make yourself a target you have to keep moving, others will be interested in your market and they *will* be spending money to catch you.
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I believe the Amiga as a hardware platform died because its strength of the 80s became its weakness in the 90s. And here I am referring to its Custom Chips, ie sound and graphics. If you really look at the hardware list above you realize that the GPU was not really that good. HAM was unusable and hi-res interlace will make your eyes water after a few minutes unless you heavily tweak the palette - leaving you with a 256 line resolution which even for that time it was bad.
In my opinion Commodore should have taken the pains to implement a hardware abstraction layer in AOS - together with a classic emulator. This would have been painful, but it might have saved Amiga from the PC & Windows. Look at Apple MacOS X which is really a heavily modified version of BSD, together to the move from 68x0 to ppc and now to x86.
But alas Commodore died a slow and painful death :-(
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Where are the prices? Without the prices it is all pie in the sky. A Misleading chart anyway, hardware sprites? who cares! 2mb chip ram <> 2mb VRAM of a 24bit card. Also the x68000 and Amiga sprites were insignificant compared to raw CPU speed of an 040 class machine etc. Also, a 1992 A4000 desktop, which is what should be on the chart as there is no difference to CPU/chipset between A4000D and A4000T just SCSI instead of IDE, is a better comparison as it may show deficiencies (if you update inaccurate points) but also shows the fact it was 12-24 months before the competition.
Didn't the 840AV have Appletalk too not a standard network adaptor?
You miss out the most important features too like the Quadra AV machines did real time (ie no need to pause a VCR/use a still image) audio and video capture for FMV out of the box.
Also what the chart doesn't show is the bottom end product (ie those competing with cheap 386SX machines in 1993 etc) from the companies stated. In 1992 Commodore had the A1200, Atari had the ST, I don't think Sharp sold the x68000 alongside the X68030, Next had nothing and the cheapest Mac was the Centris 6xx series desktop machines?
For those thinking I am biased against Amiga well I will add...
Take a 4000 desktop and add a Z-RAM 128mb capable Zorro III card, VLAB Y/C Zorro card, a Sunrize/Tocatta 16bit sound card and a Retina Z3 card to A4000D from 1992 and it is probably superior to the 840AV with not too much more cash. And while you are at it get yourself a 486SX Bridgeboard from Golden Gate with a cheap and chearful 1mb SVGA ISA card and you have the best system to cover all the bases IMHO
Also PPC was dead easy to fit in an A4000 but try getting a PPC card for the competition ;) Can you ever play Wipeout 2097 on a 680x0 Mac/Next Station/Falcon/Sharp X68030? I think not so in some way even though AGA is a kludge of an upgrade from 1992 the only system to run anything like Wipeout 2097 is Amiga :)
(of course it was cheaper to get a PSX on launch day than get a PPC Amiga!)
PS Max Resolution of AGA PAL = 1280+512 256 colours w/o overscan and 1440x576 with overscan. Important because the others don't have 1280 horizontal resolution.
PPS the chipset upgrade to A500Plus and A3000 was the most pathetic, nothing worth a shit was done to 320x256 or 640x512 colour resolutions, blitter was still the same making EHB slow as hell for games coding and sprites worse than a C64. We got a useless dog slow 1280x256 4 colour mode and some crappy VGA interlaced modes. This was a dark time indeed, very poor and it was this sort of thing that caused them to go bankrupt. AGA should have been here instead of ECS Denise/Agnus upgrades, and 14mhz CPU for A500 plus (with Paula/Agnus/Denise tacked onto a new 14mhz BUS to double output via a synchronised 56mhz system time instead of 7mhz via a 28mhz clock crystal on the motherboard)
ECS was the biggest mistake Commodore made, 5-6 years after A1000 (1987 A500 and 2000 have identical resolutions and colours to A1000 except a handful which don't display EHB fixed very early on, so another 2 years wasted there with ZERO improvements) we got ECS 'upgrade' :furious:
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I agree with a lot of what you say in your post, but remember it's wasn't the lack of ideas and R&D that brought Commodore to it's knees, it was greed & downright theft by the likes of Mehdi Ali that ended Commodore... :(
My friend, I could not agree more. :-)
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My friend, I could not agree more. :-)
You don't happen to know where the little turd is by any chance, it's so ruddy cold here I could do with building a bonfire with Mr Ali being guest of honour in the hot seat... :lol:
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I wonder what Aros would run like on an upgraded Quadra 950?
As the Morphos guys know, Mac's are a dime a dozen, probably two dozen for 68k Macs.
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As somebody else mentioned, a HAL would have helped Commodore/Amiga move the hardware without killing the software.
The Amiga 1000 was designed with a video game mentality where the hardware really doesn't change. If that is your foundation for development you can take many liberties that give you speed up front but cost you upgradeability down the road.
An AmigaOS that offered a true HAL along with memory protection and good support for virtual memory combined with upgraded hardware could have given the Amiga another ten years to grow.
At the time, I remember all the software was written in assembly and even coded for specific CPUs, like an 020, 030, 040, etc... You would never do that today as a software engineer. Granted, compliers are much better at optimizing code and CPUs are better at running code, but you don't want code tied to a specific CPU.
I mentioned in another post that Atari TOS was compiled strictly for the 68000. You couldn't even run TOS on an 010, 020, 030 because they were using instructions that were not certified by Motorola to be in next generation chips (010 and beyond). Motorola did not include them and so TOS was stuck with the 68000.
Atari had to rewrite TOS for their TT (030) line which caused compatibility issues.
The Amiga had the same problem to an extent with the OS and hardware. The OS was so tied to OCS/ECS that even moving to AGA lost apps written under 1.3 for ECS.
Which leads me to this...
I know AAA wasn't very far along in development but I wondered if there were any discussions on how to break the OS from the hardware and move to AAA. RTG was have been baby steps to a full HAL but the OS would have to have handled older software making calls to hardware that was no longer there. I wondered what they were going to do...
Does anybody know when Carl Sassenrath left Commodore? Who took over the AmigaOS Kernel after Carl left? Was it Bryce Nesbitt?
Cheers!
-P
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I wonder what Aros would run like on an upgraded Quadra 950?
As the Morphos guys know, Mac's are a dime a dozen, probably two dozen for 68k Macs.
Hmm... where do you buy your Macs from, I don't call £350 on ebay for this scabby old iMacG5 a dime a dozen... :)
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Seriously:
- no flicker/fixer
- no chunky modes
- dead slow graphics for anything with 256 colors/640x480 (I won't even talk about the 1024x768 video mode you're listing)
- 8 bit sound, no input
As a production machine, it was behind anything else you mean ? :)
Btw, what about software support ? What did you have with this machine ?
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I think at the time most people were a little disappointed with the AGA machines both in terms of specs and compatibility. Being an A500 owner I was hoping for an upgrade board for my setup which would have allowed better graphics and more speed(and an improved facelift for WB). Sadly this never really happened and I ended up buying a PC.
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Do you think things improve if we go backwards?
Respecting the same innacuracies as the first chart, here is one from 1990 ;)
(http://img560.imageshack.us/img560/4491/comp2.png)
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Sorry to quote this,but i didn't see a way around it..
Where are the prices? Without the prices it is all pie in the sky. A Misleading chart anyway, hardware sprites? who cares! 2mb chip ram <> 2mb VRAM of a 24bit card. Also the x68000 and Amiga sprites were insignificant compared to raw CPU speed of an 040 class machine etc. Also, a 1992 A4000 desktop, which is what should be on the chart as there is no difference to CPU/chipset between A4000D and A4000T just SCSI instead of IDE, is a better comparison as it may show deficiencies (if you update inaccurate points) but also shows the fact it was 12-24 months before the competition.
The A4000 was a old reworked design by 1994.For the time hardware sprites were still usefull for games.I had a 4MB picasso IV running 1024x768x24 in mid 95 which made the 4000t totally great,but that's irrelivant,were talking stock here..The A4000t had some better features which i think IT should be on the chart. scsi makes a big difference on amiga,with 6(controller couints as 1) devices,internal and external. scsi was ultra Low cpu overhead and many devices. Ide on even the 4000's was crap and stuck at 2-3MB/s and 2 devices.although not so much a performance issue,unless u like eaten motherboards was the 4000t had a lithium battery that didnt leak.It also has more zorro slots.For his chart it makes perfect sense to use the 4000t.
Didn't the 840AV have Appletalk too not a standard network adaptor?
You miss out the most important features too like the Quadra AV machines did real time (ie no need to pause a VCR/use a still image) audio and video capture for FMV out of the box.
All good stuff,but this was a simplistic chart,but probabaly worth noting.just cant show every feature easily in a chart like this.
Also what the chart doesn't show is the bottom end product (ie those competing with cheap 386SX machines in 1993 etc) from the companies stated. In 1992 Commodore had the A1200, Atari had the ST, I don't think Sharp sold the x68000 alongside the X68030, Next had nothing and the cheapest Mac was the Centris 6xx series desktop machines?
Uh hello, he wasnt comparing cheapest,he was comparing best for the time.
For those thinking I am biased against Amiga well I will add...
Take a 4000 desktop and add a Z-RAM 128mb capable Zorro III card, VLAB Y/C Zorro card, a Sunrize/Tocatta 16bit sound card and a Retina Z3 card to A4000D from 1992 and it is probably superior to the 840AV with not too much more cash. And while you are at it get yourself a 486SX Bridgeboard from Golden Gate with a cheap and chearful 1mb SVGA ISA card and you have the best system to cover all the bases IMHO
I have done all the above,but again this was about stock machines,not what you could put in them. we know a expanded 4000t could do well with 060/ppc and all the zorro goodies.
its all irrelivent to his chart.
Also PPC was dead easy to fit in an A4000 but try getting a PPC card for the competition ;) Can you ever play Wipeout 2097 on a 680x0 Mac/Next Station/Falcon/Sharp X68030? I think not so in some way even though AGA is a kludge of an upgrade from 1992 the only system to run anything like Wipeout 2097 is Amiga :)
again,this has nothing to do with the original message.
(of course it was cheaper to get a PSX on launch day than get a PPC Amiga!)
still off the track :)
PS Max Resolution of AGA PAL = 1280+512 256 colours w/o overscan and 1440x576 with overscan. Important because the others don't have 1280 horizontal resolution.
Now this is a usefull thing to add.. seems most people tend to think of a stock 1200 in these modes on 020/14mhz of course it crawls, but its somewhat useable(almost tolerable..hehe thankgod for the Picasso IV!!!!) on a A4000 with 040/25mhz at the time.
PPS the chipset upgrade to A500Plus and A3000 was the most pathetic, nothing worth a shit was done to 320x256 or 640x512 colour resolutions, blitter was still the same making EHB slow as hell for games coding and sprites worse than a C64. We got a useless dog slow 1280x256 4 colour mode and some crappy VGA interlaced modes. This was a dark time indeed, very poor and it was this sort of thing that caused them to go bankrupt. AGA should have been here instead of ECS Denise/Agnus upgrades, and 14mhz CPU for A500 plus (with Paula/Agnus/Denise tacked onto a new 14mhz BUS to double output via a synchronised 56mhz system time instead of 7mhz via a 28mhz clock crystal on the motherboard)
ECS was the biggest mistake Commodore made, 5-6 years after A1000 (1987 A500 and 2000 have identical resolutions and colours to A1000 except a handful which don't display EHB fixed very early on, so another 2 years wasted there with ZERO improvements) we got ECS 'upgrade' :furious:
I completely agree here..they moved way way too slow. i can see the 2000/500 not being much an upgrade but the 3000 should of. They should of got farther away from the 500/2000 and made 3000 and up a real killer machine. i think money was tight in these years and they still had no crystal clear direction. haynie and the gang had some cool stuff in the works that was canceled by idiot managers iirc.
At the end of the day C= was caught sleeping on their laurels and upper management was the last nail in the coffin.I love all my amiga's and the 4000t is still a great machine,but it was suffering from old age even in 94.I still use it daily tho :)
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@Gulliver
You missed an important comparison row out on the table: at what rate can the joystick port be polled?
:whack:
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Around the end of 1992 or so Dave Haynie was working on the AAA prototypes, which he showed (not-quite-working?) boards at the winter 1993 Amiga Developer conference held in Orlando, and supposedly Chris Green was recently hired to work on RTG graphics support in Amiga OS for it, but I never heard anything further happening than that. C= management never had faith in the high-end computer sales and just wanted something they could sell mass market like the C64 as a consumer electronics item at stores like kmart.
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I think at the time most people were a little disappointed with the AGA machines both in terms of specs and compatibility. Being an A500 owner I was hoping for an upgrade board for my setup which would have allowed better graphics and more speed(and an improved facelift for WB). Sadly this never really happened and I ended up buying a PC.
This makes no sense to me, why would u buy a cheap machine that had no proper expansion bus and then expect this(yes i know the side slot is technically zorro,and i know expansions were available(costly), why do you think the big box machines has zorro slots.You just bought the wrong thing.AGA was not great,but it was a far cry better than ecs.ecs was dog dirt slow.
all the big box amiga's had gfx card capabilities at the time.
common sense would of dictated to sell the 500 and go with a 2000 or better.even then used 2000's were pretty cheap.
I see this mentality thru the years with 1200 owners also.. they buy the cheapest machine thinking they are saving $$,then whine about the lack of gfx card expansion and other shortcomings.the cheap machine is not always cheap if u care to expand it.You get what you pay for.but all water under the bridge these days.
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One thing that I'd like to add is that Commodore's machines were really just the barebones framework that people could expand with the use of 3rd party hardware. In fact the best hardware that ran on Commodore's machines was usually made by third parties like GVP and Phase 5. (Even a lowly A500 could get a 68040 CPU upgrade). There's a few considerations with that: if Commodore brought an A4000 with a 68060 and chunky display card, its unlikely that third parties would've bothered, this saved Commodore a lot of R and D dollars, and it let people upgrade as and when they wanted. On a professional level, even though Commodore didn't provide networking solutions out of the box, movie studios managed to network dozens of Amiga's as render farms.
The other point people have emphasised is lack of memory protection. This has become more of a consideration now than it was at the time. At the time, every one knew that a single rogue task could bring down the OS, that in theory it wasn't very secure etc, and there was no multi-user support. But it was just a peripheral fact at the time.
The user reality was that AmigaOS was very stable-in fact at the time, it was Windows 95 with its myriad of third party hardware that even with its MP was more known for crashing. And most Win 95 users had a single account they logged in as admins, and often without a password!
Programmers on the Amiga learned how to program within the limitations of no memory protection. As for the users, look at all the software, artwork, music, video documents etc that were created on Aminet. They wouldn't have bothered with Amiga if it crashed as frequently as the lack of MP might suggest. Hell at one stage I'd say 90% of the software on people's machines were hacks, cludges, and cracked. Yet it all still worked, and worked very well.
IMO, people are revising history with things that are more important today than they were back then. At the time, lack of MP was an irrelevant consideration for the vast majority of users, and I can honestly say that I knew no-one who bought a PC with Win 95 beacsue it had MP and the Amiga didn't. It might matter now, but for most it didn't matter then.
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One thing that I'd like to add is that Commodore's machines were really just the barebones framework that people could expand with the use of 3rd party hardware. In fact the best hardware that ran on Commodore's machines was usually made by third parties like GVP and Phase 5
Didn't you once slam my Phase-5 processor/rtg expansion equipped A1200 as a "frankenstein" rig ?
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This makes no sense to me, why would u buy a cheap machine that had no proper expansion bus and then expect this(yes i know the side slot is technically zorro,and i know expansions were available(costly), why do you think the big box machines has zorro slots.You just bought the wrong thing.AGA was not great,but it was a far cry better than ecs.ecs was dog dirt slow.
all the big box amiga's had gfx card capabilities at the time.
common sense would of dictated to sell the 500 and go with a 2000 or better.even then used 2000's were pretty cheap.
I see this mentality thru the years with 1200 owners also.. they buy the cheapest machine thinking they are saving $$,then whine about the lack of gfx card expansion and other shortcomings.the cheap machine is not always cheap if u care to expand it.You get what you pay for.but all water under the bridge these days.
I agree.
Commodore catered for two markets: home users (A500, later A1200) and pro users (A2000, later A3000, later A4000). This is exactly what Apple did when Jobs took over: Apple had a gazillion models, but he streamlined their product line into just two: Home with the iMacs, and Professional tower units with the G3 Power Mac. But Apple had a marketing department that made all that unambiguous. Commodore didn't.
This and the fact that Amiga had some of the most tight-arsed users in the history of computing, who didn't want to upgrade that 7 year old 1 meg A500, and cried when they couldn't get an AGA upgrade for it. Hell most A500 I see on ebay are stock 1.3 machines, people didn't even bother to upgrade the OS.
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@Gulliver
You missed an important comparison row out on the table: at what rate can the joystick port be polled?
:whack:
Yes, you are absolutely right. How on earth could I have missed that important feature!
LOL
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Going by that chart, I'd have to say the Mac is the clear winner.
with no hardware sprite??... i would say that is a big mistake.. so no winner.
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Didn't you once slam my Phase-5 processor/rtg expansion equipped A1200 as a "frankenstein" rig ?
I did.
And with a PPC CPU your machine literally has a brain transplant in it. Which didn't do much more than a fast FPU- until Os 4 came out. Ok so maybe its not a whole brain then, maybe just a cerebellum perhaps. And the RTG card worked on a different bus-a set of eyes from a different species communicating along a whole new visual pathway. Yep "frankenstein" seems apt.
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I agree.
Commodore catered for two markets: home users (A500, later A1200) and pro users (A2000, later A3000, later A4000). This is exactly what Apple did when Jobs took over: Apple had a gazillion models, but he streamlined their product line into just two: Home with the iMacs, and Professional tower units with the G3 Power Mac. But Apple had a marketing department that made all that unambiguous. Commodore didn't.
This and the fact that Amiga had some of the most tight-arsed users in the history of computing, who didn't want to upgrade that 7 year old 1 meg A500, and cried when they couldn't get an AGA upgrade for it. Hell most A500 I see on ebay are stock 1.3 machines, people didn't even bother to upgrade the OS.
Good point and true. I was dirt poor in the amiga days,but when i wanted something(Picasso IV) i went out and worked jobs/side jobs etc to get it.I paid $379 for it somewhere around late 95/early 96).It was the single best upgrade i ever had with the warpengine 040/40 at the time tieing it.We were always stuck with crippled software and such half the time designed to run on the lowest common denominator machines(020/aga or 000/ecs with 880K drives). Graphics card support came slow with alot of stuff,not only because there was slowly emerging rtg standards but half the people had machines that couldn't easily take a gfx card. Even worse we slowly adopted cdrom technology because again,the 500/1200 couldn't easily take them(exceptions being ones ppl bought scsi for..most ide/atapi stuff was proprietary early on)I can't help thinking if the 1200/500 had not been distractions using resources at C= that we may of had many more cool zorro expansions or at least higher spec machines.At a min. everyone would of probabaly went to at least 030/16mb machines.Then again,C= management could bungle a wet dream.
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This makes no sense to me, why would u buy a cheap machine that had no proper expansion bus and then expect this(yes i know the side slot is technically zorro,and i know expansions were available(costly), why do you think the big box machines has zorro slots.You just bought the wrong thing.AGA was not great,but it was a far cry better than ecs.ecs was dog dirt slow.
all the big box amiga's had gfx card capabilities at the time.
common sense would of dictated to sell the 500 and go with a 2000 or better.even then used 2000's were pretty cheap.
I see this mentality thru the years with 1200 owners also.. they buy the cheapest machine thinking they are saving $$,then whine about the lack of gfx card expansion and other shortcomings.the cheap machine is not always cheap if u care to expand it.You get what you pay for.but all water under the bridge these days.
I was 10 years old when I recieved my A500 and got attached to it as it had been a great experience to own one. My point is that I would rather have upgraded it than forked out on a new machine but this was not possible. Actually (unfortunately),common sense dictated I buy a PC as the Amiga was getting left behind and I waited quite a while before doing so.
And I'm not "whining" as you put it, I'm merely stating my assessment of the market at the time.
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Can you explain how a second processor that whilst not a 68K and is in no way attached to the original hardware except via the regular trapdoor edge connection signals qualifies as "frankenstein" ?
A lot of accelerators, mine included, also have a programmable SCSI I/O processor (http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ncr/scsi/NCR_53C720_SCSI_IO_Processor_Jun91.pdf) that shares the same memory bus as the 680x0. Are they frankensteins too?
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Can you explain how a second processor that, whilst not a 68K, is in no way attached to the original hardware except via the regular trapdoor edge connection signals qualifies as "frankenstein" ?
How it connects is irrelevant.
The PPC is not a 68K. The CPU IS the brain in a computer. The PPC is a foreign brain, inside a foreign body, connected to, communicating with and powered by original pathways, analogous to the peripheral blood supply and peripheral nervous system. Frankenstein all over.
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Do you think things improve if we go backwards?
Respecting the same innacuracies as the first chart, here is one from 1990 ;)
(http://img560.imageshack.us/img560/4491/comp2.png)
Well to be consistent why do you not compare a pentium (32 bit model) or at the very least 486 IBM on the chart. That is as bad as comparing a amiga 1200 to a IBM PS/2 pentium 90. Why make a chart at all if you compare dislike products. You are comparing high end apple, amiga, etc to low end PC.
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How it connects is irrelevant.
It is if you are trying to insist that it makes the hardware "frankenstein". It's about the most relevant factor there is.
The PPC is not a 68K.
It isn't? I was robbed! :lol:
The CPU IS the brain in a computer. The PPC is a foreign brain, inside a foreign body, connected to, communicating with and powered by original pathways, analogous to the peripheral blood supply and peripheral nervous system. Frankenstein all over.
You already said, pre-OS4 (not to mention MOS and ppc linux), it is implemented as a co-processor, not the CPU and to be fair, it's not a bad analogy. 68K code gets the PPC to do some processing for it. That processing can be just a couple of functions in an-otherwise entirely 68K application. Or, it can be pretty much the entire application, but it is still launched by the 68K and control is returned when it exits (not to mention any time it does a system call).
I notice you studiously avoided commenting on the SCSI script processor. Lots of accelerator cards have those. They are given a list of instructions by the 68K and they go away, do their work and return. Viewed implementation terms it's clear there's not a lot of difference between how they operate and how the PPC does in a 3.x environment, other than the fact the PPC is capable of doing rather more varied things than talking to SCSI devices and transferring data to and from memory. Unlike the very fixed-purpose SCSI controller, it functions, essentially, as a Turing-complete general purpose co-processor.
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@amiga92570
I was trying to look for a 1990 IBM PC model, and that was what I found. Other PC companies did better indeed. You are right that it does not represent the highest PC model at that time.
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What did Commodore have? AmigaOS was very mature but had no place to go. It was so tied to the hardware that any small change would kill legacy apps. Look what a mess it was going from 1.3 to 2.x/3.x.
That's an urban legend... DRACO ran AmigaOS3.1 quite fast without the need of custom chips.
BTW, 2.x to 3.x software transition was quite smooth. You had professional high quality software like ImageFX, AdPro, Photogenics, Lightwave, Cinema4D, Real3D, Imagine, Caligari Truespace, Bars'n'pipes, Pagestream... you could even paint with TrueBrilliance, and there were professional and affordable video solutions not available for any of the listed systems. Final Copy, Final Writer and Wordworth were excellent packages too.
In 1994 we were happily multitasking and most computer users didn't know what that meant and even claimed it was useless. And our applications were quite professional and most of them more affordable than similar programs in other systems.
AmigaOS 4 should have been developed along with AAA and included modern features like memory protection. By the late 80's, everybody in the computer world recognized that memory protection is a must for a stable, modern OS.
really? Win95 crashed much more easily than AmigaOS. And it crawled in hardware way faster too. And needed 8MB to be useable. By the late 80's most of people used monotask-OSes like MacOS or MSDOS+Windows. But most of them didn't have a clue about what multitasking meant and as you can suppose memory protection was an even more strange word for them.
Microsoft developed NT (based on ideas from VAX) with memory protection (among many other things) because its where you had to go. Consumer Windows was always planned to intersect Windows NT and they did a great job of slowly getting everybody there.
I think MS did a pathethic job with Win95. They should have marketed a NT workstation version as Win95 instead of creating that "thing". OS2 was simply superior and even allowed running Win3.1 apps too. It was not until WinXP that peecee users got a stable Windows system. Until WinXP you could hang Win95/98/ME as easy as AmigaOS3.x. Win95 with 4MB was unusable. Swapping floppy disks in my A500 was a less painful experience and usually more productive.
AGA in 1994 was not as bad as you may think, it allowed you to watch ham8 pr0n and animations smoothly. They should have improved more the CDXL format to take advantage of 030/040. Amiga was very cost effective solution.
Amiga also sported Autoconfig(tm) and it has worked very well until today.
A3000/4000 16MB limit was not really important until many years later. With 2MB of chipram you could do many things at once while other systems had to spent money in both gfx and normal ram. Even soundcard ram in some cases.
Amigas used to sound much better connected to a 1084s monitor than the old and crappy yogourt-like speakers used by 90% pc users in the 90s.
In 1994 AmigaOS was simply superior
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It is if you are trying to insist that it makes the hardware "frankenstein". It's about the most relevant factor there is.
I disagree and still do. And i'll paraphrase it:
The way the hardware connects is analogous to transplanting a foreign organ- in this case the CPU (ie the brain) and keeping it alive and communicating with the main body by pre-existing structures (ie the peripheral nerves and blood supply). I'd imagine this is how Dr Frankenstien might have transplanted the brain, and this is how modern organ transplants work.
It isn't? I was robbed! :lol:
Well yeah, its stating the obvoius but it need to be done. What you wrote initially i read as being analogous to saying: "If we ignore the fact that we've put a new (or second brain) into the body and kept that brain alive and communicating with the host body's blood and nerves, then its not a Frankenstein", which ofcourse is ignoring the very thing that makes it a Frankenstein the first place!
You already said, pre-OS4 (not to mention MOS and ppc linux), it is implemented as a co-processor, not the CPU and to be fair, it's not a bad analogy. 68K code gets the PPC to do some processing for it. That processing can be just a couple of functions in an-otherwise entirely 68K application. Or, it can be pretty much the entire application, but it is still launched by the 68K and control is returned when it exits (not to mention any time it does a system call).
Well thats why I called it a cerebellum. The PPC had autonomy for many lower-order functions, but ultimately decisions are made by the higher order cerebrum (or 68k.)
I notice you studiously avoided commenting on the SCSI script processor. Lots of accelerator cards have those. They are given a list of instructions by the 68K and they go away, do their work and return. Viewed implementation terms it's clear there's not a lot of difference between how they operate and how the PPC does in a 3.x environment, other than the fact the PPC is capable of doing rather more varied things than talking to SCSI devices and transferring data to and from memory. Unlike the very fixed-purpose SCSI controller, it functions, essentially, as a Turing-complete general purpose co-processor.
So is the question you are posing to me :"Why don't I regard Amiga's with scsi controllers Frankenstien's since i regard a PPC+Permidia A1200 a Frankenstein?
i don't know enough about the scsi controllers, other than that DMA ones are able to transfer data independently of the CPU. But as you say (and once again this is the point we are talking about), the scsi controller is something that has a single function, and doesn't actually do anything with the data itself other than moving it in and out of memory. It doesn't process the data, its not a brain, it won't affect the decision making "personality" therefore behaviour of the beast. Without a brain transplant, we don't have a Franeknstein's monster, we just have someone with an organ transplant.
I think the analogy works pretty well.
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I agree with a lot of what you say in your post, but remember it's wasn't the lack of ideas and R&D that brought Commodore to it's knees, it was greed & downright theft by the likes of Mehdi Ali that ended Commodore... :(
I agree about Medhi, what a stupid c**t he was, but at £299 mail order in early 93 A1200 was a good product (the only bargain machine for sale). What was the final nail in the coffin though was from the idiot who put CD32 in production instead of the A1400 prototype machine completed in 93 (except AKIKO). Greedy US Gold/Ocean with crap coded gaes and then running to piracy ripe PC didn't hep Amiga
A1400 = 28mhz 68020, 2mb chip, 2mb fast, Akiko, AGA, CD-ROM but no zorro slots for £499. This would have cleaned up compared to £800-900 branded 80386DX 25mhz PCs in shops running jerk-o-vision Windows 3.1.
Also half price of 4000/030 but same performance and all in a smart Amiga 1000/3000 style slimline case and separate keyboard. Commodore incompetence strike 3.
(Strike 1= passing on Commodore LCD prototype, and 2= never using 128 colour 5x faster Amiga Ranger chipset completed by Jay Miner in 88)
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Well to be consistent why do you not compare a pentium (32 bit model) or at the very least 486 IBM on the chart. That is as bad as comparing a amiga 1200 to a IBM PS/2 pentium 90. Why make a chart at all if you compare dislike products. You are comparing high end apple, amiga, etc to low end PC.
1990 IS the time of 286 crap as far as branded machines for sale in high street shops to normal general public goes, 25mhz 386 machines cost more than Macs and that's a fact sorry. People did not want to send cheques for £1000/$2000 for some cobbled together 16mhz 386SX crap with PC speaker sound built in some small time shed of a backstreet business via 2" square adverts in black and white text lost in PCW magazine ;)
IBM 486? ha ha even the Amstrad PC2386 was $4500 with 20mhz 386 with 4mb RAM and 64mb hard drive, if IBM sold a 486 in 1989/90 it would have been more than a CRAY-1 my dear fellow (and they would have proved time travel is possible to the future and back ;) )
PC was not cheap, some of you forget just what a rip-off price those crappy PCs were in the very early 90s. PC sales rocketed due to hype/overpriced Mac only competition left by 1994 ;) If Commodore had sold their A1400 at Xmas 1993 they would have cleaned up at £500-600 for a 28mhz 4mb, 3.5" IDE hard drive, CD-Rom setup in a smart 3 box design like slimline PCs. They sold you CD32 toilets for £399 instead oops!
Oh and Wing Commander was shit! Feel sorry for the morons who spent £2000 on a 286 with various extras just to play that heap of dog shit game :roflmao:
PC2386 source (http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=mDoEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA7-IA3&lpg=PA7-IA3&dq=Amstrad+286+PC2000+price+%C2%A3&source=bl&ots=MAab6WLDD_&sig=7I5BHvcgh9SK0XruYlpXAld9dbo&hl=en&ei=Kej2TPOWOYPPhAewmYWIDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=Amstrad%20286%20PC2000%20price%20%C2%A3&f=false)
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You already said, pre-OS4 (not to mention MOS and ppc linux), it is implemented as a co-processor, not the CPU and to be fair, it's not a bad analogy. 68K code gets the PPC to do some processing for it. That processing can be just a couple of functions in an-otherwise entirely 68K application. Or, it can be pretty much the entire application, but it is still launched by the 68K and control is returned when it exits (not to mention any time it does a system call).
The problem is KS 2/3 does not run natively on PPC processors, and to me there never was a PPC Amiga because there was never PPC Kickstart/Workbench. So I can see where Stefcep is coming from to be honest. Hardware issues aside Commodore never lasted long enough and took far to long to settle on PPC as successor. Apple understood 060 was end of the line when making 040 machines...Commodore just couldn't make ANY decisions except bad ones...porting KS/WB to a new RISC CPU to combat PC advancement being a major one.
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I agree about Medhi, what a stupid c**t he was, but at £299 mail order in early 93 A1200 was a good product (the only bargain machine for sale). What was the final nail in the coffin though was from the idiot who put CD32 in production instead of the A1400 prototype machine completed in 93 (except AKIKO). Greedy US Gold/Ocean with crap coded gaes and then running to piracy ripe PC didn't hep Amiga
A1400 = 28mhz 68020, 2mb chip, 2mb fast, Akiko, AGA, CD-ROM but no zorro slots for £499. This would have cleaned up compared to £800-900 branded 80386DX 25mhz PCs in shops running jerk-o-vision Windows 3.1.
Also half price of 4000/030 but same performance and all in a smart Amiga 1000/3000 style slimline case and separate keyboard. Commodore incompetence strike 3.
(Strike 1= passing on Commodore LCD prototype, and 2= never using 128 colour 5x faster Amiga Ranger chipset completed by Jay Miner in 88)
I agree with you on the CD32, never saw the point in that machine, one of the few pieces of Commodore kit that I never bought.
Not sure though if any of the other prototypes would have seen the light of day though, too much dodgy dealings and fixing of the accounts books going on behind the scenes by certain shiesters by that time for anyone to have been able to save Commodore... :(
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The problem is KS 2/3 does not run natively on PPC processors, and to me there never was a PPC Amiga because there was never PPC Kickstart/Workbench.
All the more reason to regard it as a co-processor in a KS2/3 environment, rather than some alien incursion.
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Regarding the akiko, the C2P functions were rather pointless, even moreso in a faster machine. You actually have to write to the device and then read the planar data back and write it to chip ram yourself. On a 28MHz 020 you could have done the conversion in software by then.
The idea was good, it was just badly implemented. It should have been something that wrote the converted data to the allocated bitplanes in chipram without CPU intervention (except for initial setup).
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BTW, 2.x to 3.x software transition was quite smooth.
There is hardly any difference between 2.x and 3.x. It should have been called 2.2.
In 1994 we were happily multitasking and most computer users didn't know what that meant and even claimed it was useless.
Wasn´t this the year Linux was finally running X11 and OS/2 Warp 4 was rumored? The statement is true for 1987 however.
AGA in 1994 was not as bad as you may think,
AGA modes on new HW felt slow compared to the OCS modes on old HW when you were using e.g. Deluxe Paint.
it allowed you to watch ham8 pr0n and animations smoothly. They should have improved more the CDXL format to take advantage of 030/040. Amiga was very cost effective solution.
BTW, 2.x to 3.x software transition was quite smooth.
There is hardly any difference between 2.x and 3.x. It should have been called 2.2.
In 1994 we were happily multitasking and most computer users didn't know what that meant and even claimed it was useless.
Wasn´t this the year Linux was finally running X11 and OS/2 Warp 4 was rumored? The statement is true for 1987 however.
In 1994 AmigaOS was simply superior
I saw an 386 machine that was about as expensive as an Amiga 3000 in 1993. It was running OS/2. It did have CD quality sound, true color GFX, resolutions of 1024x768. This day changed my perpective on PCs.
I think Amiga lost the lead when the CD-ROM arrived. It could store much higher quality images and sound than the Amiga could reproduce. And Amigas were intolerably slow when convertig jpeg to HAM.
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Me eye's have gone I'm seeing double here...
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Re: Frankenstien flame war
The chipset and the Chip bus was the right brain of the Amiga and the CPU and it's Fast bus were the left-brain. What made the Amiga special was its custom chips being documented well enough to allow people to bang on them mercilessly without need for drivers.
Nonetheless, IMHO, we should try to standardize the way the chipset accesses the functionality of certain features. This will allow for cross-compatibility between the Amiga-like OSs and would probably be best implemented as a collection of shared libraries added to AfaOS and AROS since these are the least common denominator of the Amiga platform at present.
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1990 IS the time of 286 crap as far as branded machines for sale in high street shops to normal general public goes, 25mhz 386 machines cost more than Macs and that's a fact sorry. People did not want to send cheques for £1000/$2000 for some cobbled together 16mhz 386SX crap with PC speaker sound built in some small time shed of a backstreet business via 2" square adverts in black and white text lost in PCW magazine ;)
IBM 486? ha ha even the Amstrad PC2386 was $4500 with 20mhz 386 with 4mb RAM and 64mb hard drive, if IBM sold a 486 in 1989/90 it would have been more than a CRAY-1 my dear fellow (and they would have proved time travel is possible to the future and back ;) )
PC was not cheap, some of you forget just what a rip-off price those crappy PCs were in the very early 90s. PC sales rocketed due to hype/overpriced Mac only competition left by 1994 ;) If Commodore had sold their A1400 at Xmas 1993 they would have cleaned up at £500-600 for a 28mhz 4mb, 3.5" IDE hard drive, CD-Rom setup in a smart 3 box design like slimline PCs. They sold you CD32 toilets for £399 instead oops!
Oh and Wing Commander was shit! Feel sorry for the morons who spent £2000 on a 286 with various extras just to play that heap of dog shit game :roflmao:
PC2386 source (http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=mDoEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA7-IA3&lpg=PA7-IA3&dq=Amstrad+286+PC2000+price+%C2%A3&source=bl&ots=MAab6WLDD_&sig=7I5BHvcgh9SK0XruYlpXAld9dbo&hl=en&ei=Kej2TPOWOYPPhAewmYWIDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=Amstrad%20286%20PC2000%20price%20%C2%A3&f=false)
This fellow will have to disagree. The IBM was sold at costco in 1990 (386 model) for $1300 dollars. I know as my brother and I both purchased one. The Cray is a silly comparison (we had one at Rockell where I worked, It took three floors in a high rise with all the drives, tapes, and memory). We had plenty of IBM computers of all models. You really think the average person would buy a 3000 in 1990? You are dreaming. I was making about $90,000 a year and did not buy one because of cost and I could not do work on it. Most personal use was limited to low end, so I guess the little chart will have to be redrawn to compare what different groups were buying. How about engineering, music, video, home use, gaming, etc. You may be to young to remember these things, so I can only assume you are trying to divulge your info from the internet, but you are clearly wrong.
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Crumb,
I'm honestly not trying to give you a hard time but allow me to comment:
That's an urban legend... DRACO ran AmigaOS3.1 quite fast without the need of custom chips.
I'm not sure what you mean by this statement. AmigaOS requires a number of custom chips to function properly.
BTW, 2.x to 3.x software transition was quite smooth. You had professional high quality software like ImageFX, AdPro, Photogenics, Lightwave, Cinema4D, Real3D, Imagine, Caligari Truespace, Bars'n'pipes, Pagestream... you could even paint with TrueBrilliance, and there were professional and affordable video solutions not available for any of the listed systems. Final Copy, Final Writer and Wordworth were excellent packages too.
You are mixing a number of arguments here in this section of text. While I would agree that the transition from 1.3 to 2.x was decent it was by no means smooth. If I cared more I could offer you a number of articles on OS 2.x that Amiga World ran at the time but suffice to say it was a painful move for all involved.
Commodore tried to motivate publishers by running ads for OS 2.x with the catch phrase "...and the list keeps growing..." or something to that effect. OS 2.x was a major shift in the AmigaOS technology and it was growing pains. The shift was good for Commodore and the Amiga at the time.
As you stated, there were many fine applications that upgraded and worked well with 2.x and beyond. In the end, some 1.3 applications did not work and their owners decided not to move beyond 1.3.
I think many developers saw the Amiga platform stagnate compared to PC and Mac and decided not to fund the upgrade of their applications.
As for 'affordable video solutions', yes, there were many of those available for the Amiga well before other platforms.
In 1994 we were happily multitasking and most computer users didn't know what that meant and even claimed it was useless. And our applications were quite professional and most of them more affordable than similar programs in other systems.
I'm not sure you are remembering 1994 correctly or your use of the word 'multitasking' is incorrect here. These are a few the operating systems/computers that allowed multitasking in 1994:
Windows 3.x
MacOS (First there was Switcher and then MultiFinder)
DOS (many application switchers)
CPM
Atari (Atari TT and Falcon with MultiTOS)
VAX
Unix
With the exception of VAX and Unix, a major program crash would take out the entire computer. However, people were happily multitasking on their computers. They were running more than one program at a time, cutting and pasting between them, and cursing when one program crashed and took down the entire system.
I'm not saying that every crash could bring down the system but Atari, Apple, and Commodore did not offer memory protection so its very easy for one program to bring down the whole machine.
If you want to completely trash AmigaOS 1.0 to 3.x, just write to memory location $4. That's it. Memory location 4 is the only absolute location in the system. You destroy that pointer and the AmigaOS is dead.
AmigaOS is a pre-emptive OS where just about everyone else on the list is co-op (excluding Unix and VAX) but we're just splitting hairs.
really? Win95 crashed much more easily than AmigaOS. And it crawled in hardware way faster too. And needed 8MB to be useable. By the late 80's most of people used monotask-OSes like MacOS or MSDOS+Windows. But most of them didn't have a clue about what multitasking meant and as you can suppose memory protection was an even more strange word for them.
I think MS did a pathethic job with Win95. They should have marketed a NT workstation version as Win95 instead of creating that "thing". OS2 was simply superior and even allowed running Win3.1 apps too. It was not until WinXP that peecee users got a stable Windows system. Until WinXP you could hang Win95/98/ME as easy as AmigaOS3.x. Win95 with 4MB was unusable. Swapping floppy disks in my A500 was a less painful experience and usually more productive.
Let's talk about what you've said here:
First, I am no way a fan of Microsoft but I also try to be fair person. When you take all things considered, Microsoft did an admirable job with Windows 95 (excluding ME). You may scuff and mock my post but at least hear me out.
The programmers at Apple and Commodore had it insanely easier compared to the programmers at Microsoft. Apple and Commodore controlled both the OS and the core hardware. If you have any idea how hard it is to write a kernel, imagine how hard it would be not knowing what type of core system it will be installed on.
The programmers for Windows had to write an OS that sat on top of DOS, had to work with thousands of different hardware configurations, remain backwards compatible, and unify a driver set (DirectX) for the very first time.
Seriously, that is an amazing set of goals to aim for. I'm not saying that you have to like Microsoft or that Windows 95 was the greatest OS ever. I'm saying that for all that it had to do, they did a decent job for their first time out.
To be honest, I used to bash Microsoft and Windows 9x just as much as anybody else. Then I had to write a kernel for hardware in college and boy does that help you to see the world a bit differently.
I would absolutely agree that the AmigaOS was much more stable than Windows 9x. However, IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN! Writing a kernel for a handful of platforms should be a piece of cake compared to the zillion configurations of the PC world.
I guess in the end I feel that if you are going to compare Operating Systems you have to take into account the hardware it has to run on. Apple and Commodore never had to address the issues that Windows developers had to address.
AGA in 1994 was not as bad as you may think, it allowed you to watch ham8 pr0n and animations smoothly. They should have improved more the CDXL format to take advantage of 030/040. Amiga was very cost effective solution.
Amiga also sported Autoconfig(tm) and it has worked very well until today.
A3000/4000 16MB limit was not really important until many years later. With 2MB of chipram you could do many things at once while other systems had to spent money in both gfx and normal ram. Even soundcard ram in some cases.
Amigas used to sound much better connected to a 1084s monitor than the old and crappy yogourt-like speakers used by 90% pc users in the 90s.
In 1994 AmigaOS was simply superior
It may not seem like it but I am a huge fan of the Amiga and of Commodore. I owned most of the best machines by Commodore and wonder 'what if' like most of you. AutoConfig was brilliant but by 1994 Paula was outdated...
In 1994 AGA was too little too late. Doom and Wolfenstein 3D were huge and for the first time PC games made the Amiga look dated.
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Something Amiga did was to give graphics, video, multitasking and cpu-performance with a low price tag. Macs had a serious price tag and no acceleration to boot. x86 just sucked in all departments.
Amiga was integrated such that databuses could work in parallell. Co-chips does things without bothering the cpu etc. Macs and x86s were all peek & poke more or less. Multimedia sucked as a consequence.
Commodore had some really interesting projects like the Hombre (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hombre_chipset) project (speaking of PPC WB). The hinder.. management greed?
As said earlier, in 1985 Amiga screwed the competition.
Memory protection would also been really useful.
In 1994 we were happily multitasking and most computer users didn't know what that meant and even claimed it was useless. And our applications were quite professional and most of them more affordable than similar programs in other systems.
Says quite much.
DOS, huh? ;) Win95 no stabiity or quick response. Infact the first PC were bought with the intention to use it as a PPP<->Ethernet proxy due Ethernet card prices for Amiga. Atari ST lacked the cool graphics and sound of Amiga (asfair). At the comparable time Amiga had power graphics and stereo. PC had amber text and beep.
ISA bus vs Zorro was also a hands down.
Agree with digiman that a port of KS/WB to PPC or PA-RISC etc.. would have left the m68k obsolescence behind.
(What is AKIKO btw?)
Finally a fan photo of Medhi Ali! ;)
(http://www.unitechelectronics.com/medhiAli.jpg)
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Crumb,
I'm honestly not trying to give you a hard time but allow me to comment:
I'm not sure what you mean by this statement. AmigaOS requires a number of custom chips to function properly.
I think what he means is exactly what he said. Draco ran OS3.x without custom chips ( as does amithlon). Not sure how that could be made clearer.
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I think what he means is exactly what he said. Draco ran OS3.x without custom chips ( as does amithlon). Not sure how that could be made clearer.
I'm pretty sure the Draco's have real CIA chips, the rest of the OS is patched... Not sure how interrupts were dealt with, they must have had an interrupt controller set up like Paula :)
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It may not seem like it but I am a huge fan of the Amiga and of Commodore. I owned most of the best machines by Commodore and wonder 'what if' like most of you. AutoConfig was brilliant but by 1994 Paula was outdated...
In 1994 AGA was too little too late. Doom and Wolfenstein 3D were huge and for the first time PC games made the Amiga look dated.
Well, Doom wasn't out when AGA came out, but the writing was certainly on the wall. A VGA style chipset was what had been needed.
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I think what he means is exactly what he said. Draco ran OS3.x without custom chips ( as does amithlon). Not sure how that could be made clearer.
Your selection of examples is very interesting:
Are you suggesting that Amithlon does not emulate the custom hardware the AmigaOS needs to function?
You might want to research how it (and UAE derivatives) work:
"The emulator, developed by Bernd Meyer, is based upon the authors' experience with the WinUAE JiT emulation, but features some dramatic changes to increase emulation speed (at the loss of compatibility). The slim-line ISOLinux distribution is used to boot directly into the Amiga emulation, removing the need for users to interact with a host operating system. This simple, yet effective change resulted in many users favouring Amithlon over AmigaOS XL as the emulation of choice."
Please read further about it here: http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/emulators/amithlon.html
Draco did use custom chips:
2 CIA chips
1 Kickstart Rom
Paula (according to a post on Usenet that I found)
I would consider these custom chips.
You can read further here:
http://www.amiga-hardware.com/showhardware.cgi?HARDID=43
and here:
http://amiga.resource.cx/mod/draco.html
Cheers!
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@Pentad
I can assure you the DraCo never used Paula, it used a modified Tocatta soundcard. Cia chips, are not custom chips, but generic 68000 auxiliary chips sold at electronic shops. And kickstart roms are nothing more than eeproms/proms that you can probably buy at your local electronics shop.
So you see the DraCo had no custom Amiga chipset at all. They relied on a heavily modified kickstart, that was patched upon boot.
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Seriously:
- no flicker/fixer
- no chunky modes
- dead slow graphics for anything with 256 colors/640x480 (I won't even talk about the 1024x768 video mode you're listing)
- 8 bit sound, no input
As a production machine, it was behind anything else you mean ? :)
Btw, what about software support ? What did you have with this machine ?
Classic Amigas has 14bit audio hack.
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My PC at the time blew the doors off all of those machines.
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My PC at the time blew the doors off all of those machines.
/me readies mil-spec tranquillizer gun. One dart already chambered...
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Going back to the OPs original chart...
Wasn't the Falcon priced around the same as an A1200? It seems a little unfair to compare a £350 machine to, in the case of the 4k £1000+ system.
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Going back to the OPs original chart...
Wasn't the Falcon priced around the same as an A1200? It seems a little unfair to compare a £350 machine to, in the case of the 4k £1000+ system.
I seem to remember Power Computing selling them for a bit more than a base A1200 around '93. Can't remember the exact prices though, something like £300 for the A1200 and £350 for the Falcon. Don't quote me on those though.
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@Pentad
I can assure you the DraCo never used Paula, it used a modified Tocatta soundcard.
Quite... But no one was talking about audio, Paula is a very specific and unusual interrupt controller (which AmigaOS relies on)... Though I can imagine that it would be quite easy to handle that aspect with off the shelf parts.
Cia chips, are not custom chips, but generic 68000 auxiliary chips sold at electronic shops.
Pop down to Maplin and pick me up a dozen MOS6526s cheers... Oh wait the company that made them went bankrupt in 1994... That's sucks, if only I could remember the name of that company...
Do your research ;)
And kickstart roms are nothing more than eeproms/proms that you can probably buy at your local electronics shop.
So you see the DraCo had no custom Amiga chipset at all. They relied on a heavily modified kickstart, that was patched upon boot.
True.
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I seem to remember Power Computing selling them for a bit more than a base A1200 around '93. Can't remember the exact prices though, something like £300 for the A1200 and £350 for the Falcon. Don't quote me on those though.
I agree it's unfair to compare the A4000 and the Falcon, vague memories of the Falcon costing about £100 more than the A1200... I remember arguing with some poor chap at school about how much better the A1200 was and for quite a bit less... I was a nasty zealot :(