Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: runequester on December 26, 2010, 06:21:43 AM
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It's funny. I realize that we probably needed something more like super VGA, and it'd have been nice if we had gotten a more significant upgrade than what AGA was.
And we've all wondered about the AA prototype stuff Haynie showed in the Deathbed Vigil video.
But am I the only person on the planet, who doesn't think AGA was all that bad?
People sing the praises of VGA, but when I grew up, rather than in hindsight, plenty of VGA games looked similar or worse than even OCS/ECS games, let alone AGA. Games like Virocop and Banshee looked amazing, compared to similar offerings on the PC.
Sure, FPS games didn't run so good, but how much of that was processing power? When I see videos of people running Doom on an 040 it runs pretty slick. Memory glosses things over, but Doom was pretty choppy on a 386 back in the day. There's a few videos on youtube to remind you.
So eh. I know it's one of those things where you are supposed to hate it, but I think AGA was pretty cool :)
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For me it's a matter of worshipping mediocrity. I seem to find that really hard to do. Everytime i think about AGA all i can wonder is what could have been and what they gave us :rolleyes:
I agree that Banshee was amazing to look at and i also agree that the AGA games looked better than our IBM counterparts. My friend showed me what he thought was amazing graphics - Prince of persia. It was crap! :confused:
OK i know this might be more PC vs ECS/OCS and not AGA but i still think this is relevant to your point. Games always looked better on Amiga's than on PCs. Personally i think the beige box is partly responsible. Ugly looking case ugly graphics period.
But i disagree that Doom looked good because it didn't. I hate the fuzzy pixels and i hate the chunky looking feel of the game. Even today with Freedom i feel this way. There were far superior looking games than Doom. Please note i'm talking about the graphics not the gameplay. Doom is ugly.
I agree with you that AGA is good despite it's shortcomings in that i appreciate the Amiga's uniqueness compared to everyone else.
:)
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I don't hate it, though I do think that 8bpp is the point where planar bitmaps become officially Not Worth It. My problem with AGA is less with the thing itself and more with the way it's become the de facto minimum standard for most Amiga homebrew - some of us don't have an AGA machine, durnit!
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For me it's a matter of worshipping mediocrity. I seem to find that really hard to do. Everytime i think about AGA all i can wonder is what could have been and what they gave us :rolleyes:
I agree that Banshee was amazing to look at and i also agree that the AGA games looked better than our IBM counterparts. My friend showed me what he thought was amazing graphics - Prince of persia. It was crap! :confused:
OK i know this might be more PC vs ECS/OCS and not AGA but i still think this is relevant to your point. Games always looked better on Amiga's than on PCs. Personally i think the beige box is partly responsible. Ugly looking case ugly graphics period.
But i disagree that Doom looked good because it didn't. I hate the fuzzy pixels and i hate the chunky looking feel of the game. Even today with Freedom i feel this way. There were far superior looking games than Doom. Please note i'm talking about the graphics not the gameplay. Doom is ugly.
I agree with you that AGA is good despite it's shortcomings in that i appreciate the Amiga's uniqueness compared to everyone else.
:)
yeah, Doom did look fuzzy. What I meant was more in regards to speed. I personally think Breathless looked as good, if not better, though it required equivalent gear to run.
A lot of people get fussed over "You need an expensive amiga to run Doom!"
My original PC ran Doom okay'ish and cost some 1500 US dollars in the very late 90's. Thats pretty damn expensive :)
I think we're on the same page though. It could have been a ton more than it was, but what it was wasn't a bad thing. Given Commodore's self-destruction at the time, I guess we were lucky we actually got a new graphics chip at all :madashell:
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I don't hate it, though I do think that 8bpp is the point where planar bitmaps become officially Not Worth It. My problem with AGA is less with the thing itself and more with the way it's become the de facto minimum standard for most Amiga homebrew - some of us don't have an AGA machine, durnit!
Really?
According to the poll "Choose your main / most used Amiga" 50% of us use AGA based Amiga's as our most used Amiga's :rtfm:
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I don't hate it in itself, and I think some AGA games look amazing (Ruff 'n' Tumble springs to mind as an example).
I think what a lot of people resent is that it was too little too late, and that AGA was so quickly overtaken by other platforms' graphics hardware with no hope of an update from Commodore :(
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I don't hate it.
I was in awe of it when it first came out (I was 15). Yes, it could have been better and we know where corners were cut but that meant it was affordable!
(By comparison, look at modern graphics cards. You can buy the super-duper latest card for £600, or the 'ultra cut down version, don't bother cos it'll be slower than what you already have' for £100 - the only problem with AGA is that we were only given a cost-saving version, not the super duper version.)
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I don't hate it.
I was in awe of it when it first came out (I was 15). Yes, it could have been better and we know where corners were cut but that meant it was affordable!
(By comparison, look at modern graphics cards. You can buy the super-duper latest card for £600, or the 'ultra cut down version, don't bother cos it'll be slower than what you already have' for £100 - the only problem with AGA is that we were only given a cost-saving version, not the super duper version.)
Heck, I remember seeing VGA cards for 300+ dollars, and that was after they'd been out for a while.
I remember seeing an old add for the IBM EGA card from 1985 or thereabouts. It was 600 dollars, and you needed a special monitor on top of that :)
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Breathless made my jaw drop and I still love the game.
I think AGA was great, althoug, in the clear light of hinsigt, it did ofcourse have some lacks. But nothing that a scandoubler couldnt fix.
And yes, all this talk about expensive amiga gear, really makes me laugh, sort of, because a great PC also cost an arm and a leg. And especially in the 80/90s.
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Yeah Breathless was amazing. It looked fantastic and ran really fast even on an 030. The only thing I wish is that the enemies weren't all robots. Robots aren't scary ;)
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Breathless made my jaw drop and I still love the game.
I think AGA was great, althoug, in the clear light of hinsigt, it did ofcourse have some lacks. But nothing that a scandoubler couldnt fix.
And yes, all this talk about expensive amiga gear, really makes me laugh, sort of, because a great PC also cost an arm and a leg. And especially in the 80/90s.
yeah, our first PC was 1500 dollars, and was shite. A proper "gaming PC" was easily 2000 or more. This was very late 90's
Almost everyone I know who had PC's in the early 90's or late 80's paid 2000+ dollars for their machine, often having to add sound cards (and late 80's sometimes VGA) on top of that cost.
So when people complain that "amiga upgrading was expensive" I tend to laugh. Even if an 030 card was a thousand dollars, you'd still have money left over for software, extra joystick and a printer :)
People tend to assume that PC's always cost what they do now, where 500 bucks will get you a decent machine.
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I wish I could find a level editor for Breathless.. :) And if the code for it were to be released.. well then... :)
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I can say that I don't hate AGA, but then I never really met it. The 600 was the system that put the final nail in the coffin for the Amiga along the Norther coast of California. Within a couple of months of it's release, I could only find 1 store between San Francisco and the Oregon border that sold anything Amiga. That was in San Francisco, and it wasn't really a computer store so much as a video production house that happen to sell a little bit of Amiga stuff on the side.
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I love AGA, that's why I only have A1200s left in my collection these days, never understood why anyone who went from an A500 to an A1200 wasn't impressed at the time with AGA to me the difference was amazing... :)
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AGA is very fine to me.
Fast Workbench in 256 colors with the good patches, good JPEG pictures rendering in HAM6 with Visage, perfect VGA rendering in shapeshifter emulation with MUVED external driver.
All that from a 1993 chipset!
ECS is useless slow crap compared to AGA.
Would be cool though to have more than 2MB of chip RAM.
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AGA is very fine to me.
Fast Workbench in 256 colors with the good patches, good JPEG pictures rendering in HAM6 with Visage, perfect VGA rendering in shapeshifter emulation with MUVED external driver.
All that from a 1993 chipset!
ECS is useless slow crap compared to AGA.
Would be cool though to have more than 2MB of chip RAM.
Agreed 100%... :)
FBlit kinda gives you back your chip mem, but It would be great to have more than 2MB of real chip RAM... :)
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After using OCS/ECS for 5 years AGA was a definitive improvement - especially when used besides RTG on the same monitor.
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Aga ftw!
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Sold my A500+ to help fund the purchase of an A1200.
I was well impressed with the improvement that came from the change in graphics chipset.
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Agreed 100%... :)
FBlit kinda gives you back your chip mem, but It would be great to have more than 2MB of real chip RAM... :)
I use FBlit, but I am not sure if I use it the right way, I am not sure I get as much chip mem back as possible.
When do you run FBlit?
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I run Fblit very early on in the Startup-Sequence and it and the other patches I use leave me roughly 1,891,712 bytes free of chip mem when run on a 128 colour WB screen... :)
You can save a lot more if you reduce the number of colours on your WorkBench screen... :)
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hmm, well I do use 256 colors, maybe I should reduce the number of colors anyway.. :)
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@ yssing
Here's an example of my main miggies Startup-Sequence, placing the patches in the right order and running them at the right time makes a difference as to how well they work... :)
; $VER: Startup-Sequence_060+Blizkick 1.0 (31.08.06)
; Startup-Sequence for hard drive systems
C:+C/VInfo ;My Virus Checker Prog
C:+C/SetPattern ;Select Backdrop Picture (F1-F10)
;-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
; Remove OS 4.0 Partitions
;-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
C:Assign <>NIL: OS0: Dismount
C:Assign <>NIL: OS1: Dismount
C:Assign <>NIL: OS2: Dismount
C:Assign <>NIL: OS3: Dismount
C:Assign <>NIL: OS4: Dismount
;-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
; Create Vital OS Dirs
;-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
C:MakeDir RAM:T RAM:Clipboards RAM:ENV RAM:ENV/Sys
C:Copy >NIL: ENVARC: RAM:ENV ALL NOREQ
Resident >NIL: C:Assign PURE
Resident >NIL: C:Execute PURE
;-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
; Create Nessesary Assigns
;-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Assign >NIL: ENV: RAM:ENV
Assign >NIL: T: RAM:T
Assign >NIL: CLIPS: RAM:Clipboards
Assign >NIL: REXX: S:
Assign >NIL: PRINTERS: DEVS:Printers
Assign >NIL: KEYMAPS: DEVS:Keymaps
Assign >NIL: LOCALE: SYS:Locale
Assign >NIL: LIBS: SYS:Classes ADD
Assign >NIL: HELP: LOCALE:Help DEFER
Assign >NIL: Prefs: SYS:Prefs
Assign >NIL: C: SYS:C/+C ADD
Assign >NIL: Devs: SYS:Devs/+Devs ADD
Assign >NIL: L: SYS:L/+L ADD
Assign >NIL: Libs: SYS:Libs/+Libs ADD
Assign >NIL: Prefs: SYS:Prefs/+Prefs ADD
Path >NIL: RAM: C: SYS:Utilities SYS:Rexxc SYS:System S: SYS:Prefs SYS:WBStartup SYS:Tools SYS:Tools/Commodities add
Path >NIL: C:+C Devs:+Devs L:+L Libs:+Libs Prefs:+Prefs SYS:System/+System SYS:Tools/+Tools SYS:Utilities/+Utilities add
;-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
; StartUp Any System Patches
;-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
C:SetPatch <>NIL: SKIPROMUPDATES QUIET ;Standard Amiga Patch
C:+C/PatchControl.V2.3 ;PatchControl (Controls Any Added Patches)
C:+C/CMQ060_Move16
C:+C/BlazeWCP ;Patches Certain Blitter Routine
C:+C/FBlit ;FastBlit Patch (Speeds Up Blitter Routines)
C:+C/FText ;Patch For Faster Text Output
C:+C/MCP ;MCP (Multiple Patches)
RUN <>NIL: C:+C/TitleShadow ;Patch (Creates Window Title Shadows)
;-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
; BLIZZARD 060/PPC RemMap Rom Stuff
;-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
S:Bliz.PPC ;BlizKick Remap ROM 060/PPC
;-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
; Fast ATA3 Stuff
;-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
FailAt 10
C:+C/CheckLMB ;Check For Left Mouse Button
IF WARN ;If Pressed - Run ATA3 Prefs
SYS:Prefs/+Prefs/ATA3.prefs
ENDIF
C:ATA3.driver NOPART QUIET ;Start ATA3 Driver
C:Stack 8192
C:ATA3SetSplit ;Make Primary Slave NOSPLIT
;-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
; Protect From Writing To These Partitions
;-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
C:Lock <>NIL: Workbench: ON
C:Lock <>NIL: Store: ON
;C:Lock <>NIL: DH2: ON
;-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
; Usual Startup Stuff
;-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
C:Version >NIL:
C:AddBuffers >NIL: DF0: 15
FailAt 21
BindDrivers
C:Mount >NIL: DEVS:DOSDrivers/~(#?.info)
IF EXISTS DEVS:Monitors
IF EXISTS DEVS:Monitors/VGAOnly
DEVS:Monitors/VGAOnly
EndIF
C:List >NIL: DEVS:Monitors/~(#?.info|VGAOnly) TO T:M LFORMAT "DEVS:Monitors/%s"
Execute T:M
C:Delete >NIL: T:M
EndIF
SetEnv Language "english"
SetEnv Workbench $Workbench
SetEnv Kickstart $Kickstart
UnSet Workbench
UnSet Kickstart
C:AddDataTypes REFRESH QUIET
C:ConClip
C:+C/FPprefs ;FullPalette (Sets Up & Locks WB Colours)
IF EXISTS S:User-Startup
Execute S:User-Startup
EndIF
C:IPrefs
Run >NIL: C:+C/Birdie ? <ENV:Birdie.Prefs ;Birdie (Window Borders Patch)
Resident Execute REMOVE
Resident Assign REMOVE
C:LoadWB -DEBUG
Avail <>NIL: FLUSH
EndCLI >NIL:
LAB END
Echo "You Wanted to Stop Here"
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:) thank you. I think I got some of my chipmem back.. :)
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hmm, well I do use 256 colors, maybe I should reduce the number of colors anyway.. :)
IMO anything more than 16 colors on Workbench in AGA is wasteful: wasteful in chip ram and cpu speed. I used the MagicWB 8 color palette and found it a nice compromise between speed and appearance. In fact I personally think the "Amiga look and feel" is best exemplified by MagicWB, Magic menu, and MUI in a 4:3 screen mode.
Actually, I'm a little over eye candy on the gui, now just run the stock 4 color workbench: after all the gui is just a means to communicate with the computer. Most people still read the icon label text, and don't rely on the icon pictogram to determine what the icon represents, with the icon just representing the "clickable" region. In that case, pretty icons are pointless and possibly distracting.
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I like AGA, it's faster, more colourful and even more important: there are dozens of demos and intros for it :-)
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You know something I don't like all that eye candy either and now for the life of me I can't think why I run Workbench in 128 colours !!!
There is a reason but I just can't remember right now... this is my typical everyday Workbench... :)
(http://i995.photobucket.com/albums/af79/frankosamiga/Amiga%20Pics/WBGrab.jpg)
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@Franko
I like the Amiga and C64 icons, where did you get them from?
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I done them myself in DPaint... :)
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As I always used this as my backdrop no need to use many colours: (http://i94.photobucket.com/albums/l120/zipperi/RachelMonitor.jpg)
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I'm impressed.
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@ TiredOLife
If you want them I'll make a link on my CommodoreScotland site so you can download them, only thing is if I recall correctly there OS3.5 glow Icons but I could make the original IFF drawing available as well for you to edit into your own icons... :)
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It wasn't as big an upgrade as you could have expected after five years, but it's still an improvement to ECS. No need to complain about it, and "could've"s and "should've"s are just silly this far past it.
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never understood why anyone who went from an A500 to an A1200 wasn't impressed at the time with AGA to me the difference was amazing... :)
ISTR magazines slating a lot of AGA titles because they were little more than the OCS/ECS version with a gaudy background. But that's less a criticism of AGA and more about how it was actually used, IMO. There were a lot of amazing AGA titles which really did a great job of highlighting the benefit of AGA.
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You something I don't like all that eye candy either and now for the life of me I can't think why I run Workbench in 128 colours !!!
There is a reason but I just can't remember right now... this is my typical everyday Workbench... :)
(http://i995.photobucket.com/albums/af79/frankosamiga/Amiga%20Pics/WBGrab.jpg)
AGA Workbenches are beautiful :)
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I don't hate it in itself, and I think some AGA games look amazing (Ruff 'n' Tumble springs to mind as an example).
I think what a lot of people resent is that it was too little too late, and that AGA was so quickly overtaken by other platforms' graphics hardware with no hope of an update from Commodore :(
Ruff 'n' Tumble looks like an AGA game but is actually OCS/ECS. I thought it was AGA too until I tried it on my A500 and it worked! Hats off to the coders.
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@Franko
That would be great, thanks.
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@Franko
That would be great, thanks.
Ok... gimme a few minutes and I'll upload them and be back with a link... :)
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Ruff 'n' Tumble looks like an AGA game but is actually OCS/ECS. I thought it was AGA too until I tried it on my A500 and it worked! Hats off to the coders.
WTF?! Maybe AGA is rubbish after all! :lol:
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Just goes to show what can be done with crusty old OCS in the hands of talented coders. Its a shame we didnt see more from those guys.
AGA needed more features like hardware transparency, sprite scaling and rotation...
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@Franko
That would be great, thanks.
Here's the link, sorry it took so long but the nets pretty slow just now at my end... :)
Some WB Icons (http://www.commodorescotland.com/#/downloads/4544143499)
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@Franco
Cheers mate, much appreciated.
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I always liked AGA pretty well. One thing that suprised me was that quite a few of my amiga ocs games that for whatever reason wouldn't work on my a3000 worked perfectly on my 1200. After I got the vga adapter and an NEC 3d multisync monitor the image quality was almost as good as the 3000s vga output too.
I think for games and stuff like that ocs/ecs vs aga is a closer race since ocs/ecs were so good and aga wasn't faster enough because of planar graphics. But I have seen some demos and games that are great.
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ISTR magazines slating a lot of AGA titles because they were little more than the OCS/ECS version with a gaudy background. But that's less a criticism of AGA and more about how it was actually used, IMO. There were a lot of amazing AGA titles which really did a great job of highlighting the benefit of AGA.
This.
If you look at Super Stardust AGA and then realise you needed a 100mhz 486 to play it on PC it rams home just what was possible with AGA and effectively 7mhz 020 (no Fast ram = approx 50% LESS CPU processing power). 6 channel sound, 256 colour graphics, 50FPS arcade gameplay. WIN. Ditto for Lotus 2 on Amiga vs Lotus 3 on PC. But most of the time Amiga games were limited because they had to do an ST version first (because Commodore never marketed the A1000 properly and wasted 2 years) while Atari slit their throat in sales to home users with the original ST. Games companies are run on profit not tech specs!
Magazines didn't help though, when people went all out to make a game amazing looking/sounding like Sword of Sodan/Battle Squadron they scored it low but gave embarrassingly rubbish conversions like Chase HQ and original games like Xenon II (which only used 16 colours thanks to the crappy ST version coded in tandem) much higher scores.
And then everyone went nuts over 256 colour crap games on PC like Wing Commander (unplayable and looked shit on anything below a 486) and Heart of China/Rise of the Dragon (less enjoyable than Rocket Ranger/Wings/It came from the Desert etc). And then we had Doom. Doom is the only one worth a damn of the four promoted as 'PC gaming superiority' and thanks to AGA and slow crippled 14mhz 020 in A1200 with no Fast ram we couldn't play it. And because the 4000/030 was such an overpriced piece of shit we never would buy it. So again the problem is NOT just 8 bit planar 256 colour mode BUT Commodore needed an A1400 in 1992 with 28mhz 020, 2mb chip 2mb fast. Job done, perfectly possible to do reasonable Doom games with such a machine even with AGA in 128 colours (who'd notice 128 over 256 colours, Amiga artists were awesome when allowed to do graphics for Amiga FIRST and ST second...I should know I was one that worked on a few games!).
I think my only issue is after the 1985 A1000 chipset Commodore sacked the wrong people at Los Gatos (Hi-Toro/Amiga engineers) and replaced them with their own lame dick designers making the A500 (1987...identical A/V) and A2000 (identical A/V AND CPU type/speed) and NOT marketing the A1000 because the A500 and A2000 were supposed to be finished in months NOT YEARS. In 1992, 7 years later, AGA was the bare minimum given pushing 256 colour screens around is slower than 32 colour screens on Amiga 1000s from 1985. Sound was also a big mistake, 4x 8bit channels = not enough.
Remember A1200 was competing for gamer's money with Nintendo/Sega NOT PCs costing £1000. Compare PCs all you want but £100 Sega and Nintendo 16bit consoles is what embarrassed AGA not £1000 VGA Windows machines. Before 3D cards for PCs it wasn't a problem.
Commodore destroyed themselves, they let Needles and Mical walk (who produced Lynx and 3DO chipsets...both amazing for their time) and refused to ever use Ranger chipset finished by Jay in 1987 before he left. The A1200 was a step in the right direction and all they needed to do was make a 28mhz 020 version of the A1200 motherboard and add just 1mb Fast ram to it and sell it 12-18 months later. We got the CD32 instead and they went bust. They did actually come close to the A1400 (020 28mhz, 4mb RAM, A3000 style case) but CD32 took the last of their money and flopped (not surprising when SNES games looked better and a SNES was 75% cheaper AND made by a well known brand like Nintendo).
Or....AGA was OK and better than nothing as in the A600, but could be better. Report card with a grade 'C+' for Amiga 1200 not 'A+' as was the case of A1000 or 'B' for A500.
A1400 and A1400CD machines based on A1200 motherboard and 28mhz 020 and 4mb total ram (+CD for A1400CD and NO CD32 draining money from ailing finances of Commodore in 1993/4).
A4000/030 in the bin, waste of money even marketing that overpriced crap to gamers (majority of Amiga market share in sales).
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Just goes to show what can be done with crusty old OCS in the hands of talented coders. Its a shame we didnt see more from those guys.
Think what they could have done with AGA!
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I don't hate it in itself, and I think some AGA games look amazing (Ruff 'n' Tumble springs to mind as an example).
Ruff 'n Tumble runs awesome here on my OCS Amiga :)
As well as Lionheart, Elfmania, Jim Power and Fighting Spirit.
That's why AGA feels a bit like a let-down, the best looking Amiga games are all OCS original.
There's one very valid pro-aga point however, Doom needed a lot of megaherzes and megabytes, also on the pc (or a 3d accellerated chipset like on the Playstation and Atari Jaguar).
I remember that Doom didn't run smoothly on a friends' 486 66mhz with 4mb memory. Neither did it run smooth on my 486 33mhz with 8mb. It was all choppy and I have tweaked alot in my bios and config.sys/autoexec.bat to enable it to run that tiny bit faster (to a point that the whole system seriously crashed). I don't know whether it even ran at all on a 386.
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Wait one. This thread seems a misnomer. Who actually hates AGA?
Recognising that AGA is old and slow, acknowledging it's shortcomings or accepting that it was too little too late in terms of what else was being released around the same time is just being a realist.
You'd actually have to have some serious issues to hate it though.
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Ruff 'n Tumble runs awesome here on my OCS Amiga :)
Well I know that now ;) How did they make games look so good with so few colours?!
As well as Lionheart, Elfmania, Jim Power and Fighting Spirit.
That's why AGA feels a bit like a let-down, the best looking Amiga games are all OCS original.
Is that more to do with lazy coders not using AGA to its full potential, or was AGA really not much of an improvement?
There's one very valid pro-aga point however, Doom needed a lot of megaherzes and megabytes, also on the pc (or a 3d accellerated chipset like on the Playstation and Atari Jaguar).
I remember that Doom didn't run smoothly on a friends' 486 66mhz with 4mb memory. Neither did it run smooth on my 486 33mhz with 8mb. It was all choppy and I have tweaked alot in my bios and config.sys/autoexec.bat to enable it to run that tiny bit faster (to a point that the whole system seriously crashed). I don't know whether it even ran at all on a 386.
But did AGA really help with Doom? My 040 A1200 didn't run it very well until I added a graphics card.
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Wait one. This thread seems a misnomer. Who actually hates AGA?
Recognising that AGA is old and slow, acknowledging it's shortcomings or accepting that it was too little too late in terms of what else was being released around the same time is just being a realist.
You'd actually have to have some serious issues to hate it though.
I suspect that hatred towards the chipset is most likely displaced hatred/disappointment towards Commodore :(
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I don't hate it in itself, and I think some AGA games look amazing (Ruff 'n' Tumble springs to mind as an example).
I think what a lot of people resent is that it was too little too late, and that AGA was so quickly overtaken by other platforms' graphics hardware with no hope of an update from Commodore :(
Too little, too late. After about a week owning an A1200 (from an A500), it became obvious the biggest step up was 512k -> 2MB chip... There was a few nice bits and bobs... But it did suck.
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As a "bad" example of AGA:
Zool AGA (http://hol.abime.net/1634/screenshot)
Those backdrops are just ghastly!
Edit - fixed iPad autocorrect error ;)
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Copperlist not backdrop ;)
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As a "bad" example of AGA:
Zool AGA (http://hol.abime.net/1634/screenshot)
Those backdrops are just ghastly!
Edit - fixed iPad autocorrect error ;)
Personally I did prefer James Pond over Zool, but thats an other topic I guess.
Bloodline >> Well there are other enhancements on AGA over OCS, like higher resolutions and more colors..
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Wait one. This thread seems a misnomer. Who actually hates AGA?
Recognising that AGA is old and slow, acknowledging it's shortcomings or accepting that it was too little too late in terms of what else was being released around the same time is just being a realist.
You'd actually have to have some serious issues to hate it though.
Unless AGA is a collective term for A1200/4000/CD32.
In which case I have 66.666666666% 'hate' for it :roflmao:
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Bloodline >> Well there are other enhancements on AGA over OCS, like higher resolutions and more colors..
Agreed. I think people forget just how big a deal 1280x512 in 256 or HAM8 was at the time, PCs couldn't really do much more than 1024x768 in 256 colours unless you bought a very expensive highly specialised graphics card in 1992 when A4000 was actually launched. Which is fine for the A4000 potential purchasers.
Trouble is 320x256 rez is more than enough for games, even only a handful of Saturn games used a higher resolution like VF2. People weren't complaining about Ridge Racer only using 320x200 on the Playstation as a trade off to playing that amazing game at the time ;)
And that is where Commodore went wrong, priority was the A1200 and so should have made AGA address the fantastic abilities of SNES/Megadrive games with higher colour parallax modes/better sprites/sprite scaling like Lynx chipset by Mical and Needle/more sound channels (even if it meant using TWO Paulas) and other neat tricks was what they should have done if they wanted to be solvent in 1995 ;)
OCS in A1000 = best gaming graphics/sound of ANY console/computer AND best business graphics/sound. Slam dunk for A1000.
AGA needed to do the same, but it didn't even come close, there were things the 1989 Megadrive did the A1200 could never do as well let alone the SNES. It's not a technical issue either, it's an issue of lack of R&D and bad project management at Commodore under the broken wing of Mehdi Ali (spit)
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Bloodline >> Well there are other enhancements on AGA over OCS, like higher resolutions and more colors..
As I said, it did have a few nice bit's and bobs. But the more colours and higher resolutions came at a high performance cost... Two features that I did like were 4bit dual playfields and larger sprites... But a faster blitter would have been better than those.
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I would like to throw in my 2 cents here...
I've read all the posts here and I feel the joy from the people that like AGA and the disappointment from folks like Bloodline.
For myself, I remember the joy of seeing some AGA demos and the shock of the slowness of Workbench in higher colors...a mixed bag at best.
I think objectively -which I'm not sure that I can do well- AGA was the only option that Commodore had.
It wasn't 1985 anymore and ECS was pretty long in the tooth. Honestly, what other options did Commodore have?
Haynie talked about AA (or whatever) but the scant information provided pointed to incompatibilities with current software/OS (not a good thing).
AGA brought more colors, new resolution, and expanded Chip Memory which all were a good thing.
Revolutionary? Well, that is what this site and others are for. To have good people debating the merits long into the night...
In the end, I humbly believe that it was better than nothing and it extended the life of the Amiga for a short while. We can all look back and wish they would have done something different but that is a luxury of hindsight.
Happy Holidays!
-P
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You'd actually have to have some serious issues to hate it though.
I'm with Karlos here. Yes, AGA should have been incorporated by the time the A3000 was released, but I don't see what's to "hate". I'll admit though... owning an AGA capable machine (1200/4000/C32) is not on my high list of system ownership. My only real complaint video wise is that Commodore went "backwards" in thought by not including Amber in the last two computers. Once the A3000 had 31khz capability, that should have been the standard from there on out. IMO, that's one of the largest reasons many could never take the C= products seriously. Such a simple thing as a flickerless display and they totally overlooked that necessity, despite all the complaints and third party add-ons to correct their blunder.
One other thought about AGA is how it was implemented in the A1200. Looking back, you really can't help but see the major design flaw of utilizing a 14mhz 020 in that model. Completely stupid in hindsight. As others have pointed out, AGA was slow as anyone who's loaded a pretty picture on their wedged Miggy will attest. AGA was a great concept, but the hardware and architecture that supported it was severely underpowered, making 030+ ownership a must. Which is a ridiculous notion by the budget computer standard that Commodore themselves set. Hell, even Atari had the gee-whiz to pop an 030 in on their last wedge.
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Really?
According to the poll "Choose your main / most used Amiga" 50% of us use AGA based Amiga's as our most used Amiga's :rtfm:
Yeah, and the rest of us (50% minus the UAE users, among them people like myself, who have neither the money for a 1200 plus all the necessary upgrades, let alone the obscene amounts of money a 4000 commands) get left in the lurch. That was, in fact, the very basis of my complaint :/
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I think most of us agree that AGA was not quite enough to put the Amiga back in the lead in graphics, but it kept Amigas in the race a lot longer than OCS or ECS could of done if the Amiga had stade at them.
Its a shame that AGA was under used in games but I think some people on here are forgetting that when it was used properly the gaphics blew away what could be on OCS/ECS.
(http://www.lemonamiga.com/games/screenshots/full/slamtilt_%28aga%29_11.png)Slam Tilt, Microcosm, Capital Punishment, super stardust, Theme Park, Myst, simon the sorcerer, sim city 2000, gloom, onEscape, napalm etc
Even to this day I still think the best pin ball game in feel, looks and stlye is Slam Tilt, its a MUST for any AGA owner out there!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXaAfLJuhrs (might have to load it up for a quick go!)
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I think most of us agree that AGA was not quite enough to put the Amiga back in the lead in graphics, but it kept Amigas in the race a lot longer than OCS or ECS could of done if the Amiga had stade at them.
Its a shame that AGA was under used in games but I think some people on here are forgetting that when it was used properly the gaphics blew away what could be on OCS/ECS.
(http://www.lemonamiga.com/games/screenshots/full/slamtilt_%28aga%29_11.png)Slam Tilt, Microcosm, Capital Punishment, super stardust, Theme Park, Myst, simon the sorcerer, sim city 2000, gloom, onEscape, napalm etc
Even to this day I still think the best pin ball game in feel, looks and stlye is Slam Tilt, its a MUST for any AGA owner out there!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXaAfLJuhrs (might have to load it up for a quick go!)
Slam Tilt is pretty damn awesome, and the music is rad too :)
Good responses btw guys. I think most of us have the same perspective on things.
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One of the stragest quirks with AGA...
Non flicker free display as standard, thus requiring a TV or scart enabled tv (outside of Europe these didn't exist)
PC's came with a Flikcer free display as standard.
So this hurt the brand. Instead of the preivuous luxury computing for a commodore price... you now settled for something that was almost as good as the PC.
And yes let's not kid ourselves. You needed a Full 386 33 mhz or ideally a 486dx2 66mhtz to play doom and all the games. I waited for those to come out before I got one of the PC's even then I still picked up a A4000/ 030 for $750 to run alongside the PC.
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As one of the people who went A500 to A1200, I was very please with AGA at the time.
Yes, there were some incredible OCS/ECS games, but I loved AGA.
And even now, when I look at some of the demos by TBL and such for AGA Amiga's with 060's, I think the problem was more processor than graphics....
desiv
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Aga works terribly slow. Even the Atari, in 1992, had 16-bit chunky pixel mode in Falcon. The biggest problem with this shit, is that it is regarded as something that must be in the Amiga. Makes me want to puke at the thought of writing complex algorithms, whose sole purpose is to be fast spreading bits after bitplans. Plus ham mode where the pixels depend on the previous pixels as a whole also unnecessarily complicated. Especially when compared with PC / Mac / Atari of those years where, thanks to chunky pixel 16bit modes, everything was getting pretty fast and straight.
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As one of the people who went A500 to A1200, I was very please with AGA at the time.
Yes, there were some incredible OCS/ECS games, but I loved AGA.
And even now, when I look at some of the demos by TBL and such for AGA Amiga's with 060's, I think the problem was more processor than graphics....
desiv
It always amazes me when people look at a 1200 with an 030 running Doom, and blame AGA for it being pokey, when the same game running on a PC needed a 486 to actually move at a decent clip.
Same deal for stuff like Wing Commander really. People ran it on their 486 with tons of RAM, and then complained that the amiga 500 ran it slow.
Really ?
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Well after AGA, the only real option was/is to go RTG. Maybe with some sort of AGA emulation, much like UAE which can do both.
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It always amazes me when people look at a 1200 with an 030 running Doom, and blame AGA for it being pokey, when the same game running on a PC needed a 486 to actually move at a decent clip.
Same deal for stuff like Wing Commander really. People ran it on their 486 with tons of RAM, and then complained that the amiga 500 ran it slow.
Really ?
Reckon some folk just like to try and put the Amiga down by unfairly comparing it to a PC with higher specs... pointless really... :)
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Well after AGA, the only real option was/is to go RTG. Maybe with some sort of AGA emulation, much like UAE which can do both.
Emulating AGA on an RTG card would break compatibility with hardware-banging AGA software, making it pretty useless for games. UAE doesn't even do this; RTG and AGA are separate just like on real hardware.
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It always amazes me when people look at a 1200 with an 030 running Doom, and blame AGA for it being pokey, when the same game running on a PC needed a 486 to actually move at a decent clip.
Exactly my point...
The big problem was that it cost much more to accelerate the Amiga..
I was able to buy a complete PC with a fast (at the time) 486 for less than the cost of the an accelerator for the 1200....
desiv
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Exactly my point...
The big problem was that it cost much more to accelerate the Amiga..
I was able to buy a complete PC with a fast (at the time) 486 for less than the cost of the an accelerator for the 1200....
desiv
Maybe this is regional cost, but my first PC was just over 1500 US dollars for the cheapest junk machine the store had, compared to a bit under 500 dollars for my 1200. In 93 or 94, did an 030 card with a bit of RAM really cost that much ?
I never had one as a kid, so I don't know what they cost back then.
This was in Denmark, so I don't know if costs on PC's were noticeably cheaper in the US or UK.
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I loved AGA I felt the Amiga 1200 was hindered by the lack of chip memory and under powered CPU. A1200 should have come with 040 and the A4000 should have come with 060, I know cost was the issue but I would have paid.
Games like Flashback, Zool, Banshee, Pinball Fantasies etc looked sexy in that era :)
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Reckon some folk just like to try and put the Amiga down by unfairly comparing it to a PC with higher specs... pointless really... :)
The problem was not with Amiga it was with the way they sold it and the only 3 models for sale. There was a huge price gap between 4000/030 and A1200 14mhz crippled to 7mhz speeds with no Fast ram but not much performance difference. Blizzard made a 28mhz 68020 accelerator for peanuts and it made the A1200 faster than the A4000/030 see? And that's where the money was in 93/94, something faster than A1200 but cheaper than A4000/030 or entry level PC which is where the Amiga A1400 prototype came into it.
Most people buying Amigas didn't need Zorro slots at all, waste of money. Even Commodore knew this and that's why the A1400 protoype motherboard was designed, but never sold thanks to the CD32 being chosen (another turkey of a business decision). It's not my fault people saw Doom and Ridge Racer and thought "want!" but Amiga gave them no viable option to play the type of games they wanted to play, Lotus II is good, Sega Rally on Saturn is better. Without constant improvement Amiga was dying a slow horrible death and some of us knew it. I wanted Amiga to be around forever, how the hell did Apple survive with their crap from 1994 to invention of low-fi iPod??? Their computers were shit AND overpriced without any multitasking FFS.
In 1992-94 I had purchased new...
486 PC - because I wasn't going to spend £700 on an 060 just to emulate Windows for my studies via a card that would be worth sweet FA as soon as I bought it. Telling people to upgrade was a dead end for this reason, who knew I could have retired on the sale of a PPC Amiga 15 years later thanks to ebay :confused:
A1200 - well it was AGA and the only version remotely value for money with AGA. Sod rip-off 4000/030 prices. I did a lot of great things with it, hell I even did games testing for Acid Software :)
Playstation - Because it was the future and Ridge Racer is light years ahead as far as any other home racing game before goes.
Saturn - Might as well, after all Sega made the best coin-ops and Playstation would never see them.
And that's it really. If Commodore had sold the A1400 prototype during Xmas 93 instead of the rubbish CD32 joke then I would have got that too for £600 with a CD drive, 28mhz 020 at full speed and 4mb of RAM but no Zorro slots (who cares!). Because if every A1400 could be programmed the same way as a console (something DOS PC games programmers can never do) because all machines were identical we would have seen a lot more games like TFX (given away FREE by Ocean on a magazine CD because not enough 4000/030 machines ever sold to make it worth marketing it to Amiga-A1200 just too damned slow for TFX!)
Commodore should have learned from the mistake made by Cinemaware, investing in CD gaming is a waste of time and leads to bankruptcy (and after disastrous CDTV AKA an A500+CD ROM was a flop for the same reason CD32 AKA A1200+CD would be. The games are the same!) unless you have seriously powerful hardware like Saturn and Playstation to back it up with cutting edge games not bloody A1200 games+cheesy CD music. Super Stardust CD32 is actually worse than the A1200/4000 disk version because of the CD soundtrack. Yuck!
All Commodore did is kill Amiga and it's technology, the reason it took 9 years for bankruptcy is because Amiga 1000 was lightyears ahead of EVERTHING. But they still managed it because once Jack Tramiel left Commodore didn't have a clue how to run a computer company (canning Commodore LCD, not marketing the A1000 for a year waiting for 2000/500, making Commodore 16 and Plus4 and 128 rubbish). Trouble is as much as Commodore deserved to tank Amiga deserved to outlive all of the competition.
@ others - As for comparing an A500 with a 486 PC nope, I was comparing something like F1GP on an A4000/030 and a 486 PC costing the same price, I think if you actually try this too you will see with your own eyes the PC playing speed runs rings around the Amiga version FOR THE SAME PRICE ;)
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I loved AGA I felt the Amiga 1200 was hindered by the lack of chip memory and under powered CPU. A1200 should have come with 040 and the A4000 should have come with 060, I know cost was the issue but I would have paid.
Games like Flashback, Zool, Banshee, Pinball Fantasies etc looked sexy in that era :)
Except a 33mhz 040 A1200 with 2mb Fast ram (essential!) would have cost you an extra £400+. I don't think you would have bought an A1200 for 800 bucks! An entry level machine was needed, but something above it and cheaper than the 4000/030 was needed too. Funny thing is the A500 was £499+VAT+modulator at launch making it pretty much 600 quid and 700 for 1mb version! And with 5 years worth of inflation then probably an EC040 @ 25mhz would have been the true successor to an A500 if you factor in inflation from a cost point of view. Desperation makes companies do funny things and not take high risk gambles like that. They had decided £399 was the limit and offered us the choice of 2mb RAM OR HD floppy drive on A1200. Games programmers said 2mb ram was better than 1mb A1200 and 1.76mb HD floppy. No reserve cash for Commodore after never improving the chipset for 7 years as far as games programming goes. Better sound was never even talked about!
Trouble is a SNES cost bugger all in 1992 with a superb version of SF2 for adults to play soon enough :madashell:
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Well I am enjoying this thread, but you guys are all geared towards gaming. AGA Chipset was A HUGE DEAL for Video Toaster 4000 and Flyer users. Many new effects, faster ram, color previews, etc etc... also you get HAM 8 in programs like Vista Pro for example. AGA really shines in these ways..
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Maybe this is regional cost, but my first PC was just over 1500 US dollars for the cheapest junk machine the store had, compared to a bit under 500 dollars for my 1200. In 93 or 94, did an 030 card with a bit of RAM really cost that much ?
I never had one as a kid, so I don't know what they cost back then.
This was in Denmark, so I don't know if costs on PC's were noticeably cheaper in the US or UK.
Ummm well in the Xmas 1994 issue of Amiga Format, cheapest branded 040 I could find was £425 for EC040 and nearly £700 for an 060. That's 2.5 years after A1200 launch nearly.
An A1200+80mb HDD+ 4mb RAM+040 25mhz would have cost more than my 4mb 486/25 PC (less cost of monitor) if it even existed in 1993. Plus a PC is worth more a year later than 5 seconds after you have broken the seal on a boxed circuit board for your Amiga ;) If Commodore had any sense they would have made a cut down 040 machine like the Macintosh LC40 (which was actually cheaper than Amiga 4000/040 and closer to the 4000/030 machine in price)
I priced up an 060+RAM for my A2000 and also a PPC card and it was cheaper to actually buy a PC both times I worked it out (94-96ish). And seeing as all I wanted to do was run Windows for my university studies guess how I spent my limited grant money...yep a Pentium PC with PCI graphics that had a more powerful blitter than AGA (and PCI bandwidth on PC bus was a massive improvement for PC gaming and emulation actually).
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The problem was not with Amiga it was with the way they sold it and the only 3 models for sale. There was a huge price gap between 4000/030 and A1200 14mhz crippled to 7mhz speeds with no Fast ram but not much performance difference. Blizzard made a 28mhz 68020 accelerator for peanuts and it made the A1200 faster than the A4000/030 see? And that's where the money was in 93/94, something faster than A1200 but cheaper than A4000/030 or entry level PC which is where the Amiga A1400 prototype came into it.
Most people buying Amigas didn't need Zorro slots at all, waste of money. Even Commodore knew this and that's why the A1400 protoype motherboard was designed, but never sold thanks to the CD32 being chosen (another turkey of a business decision). It's not my fault people saw Doom and Ridge Racer and thought "want!" but Amiga gave them no viable option to play the type of games they wanted to play, Lotus II is good, Sega Rally on Saturn is better. Without constant improvement Amiga was dying a slow horrible death and some of us knew it. I wanted Amiga to be around forever, how the hell did Apple survive with their crap from 1994 to invention of low-fi iPod??? Their computers were shit AND overpriced without any multitasking FFS.
In 1992-94 I had purchased new...
486 PC - because I wasn't going to spend £700 on an 060 just to emulate Windows for my studies via a card that would be worth sweet FA as soon as I bought it. Telling people to upgrade was a dead end for this reason, who knew I could have retired on the sale of a PPC Amiga 15 years later thanks to ebay :confused:
A1200 - well it was AGA and the only version remotely value for money with AGA. Sod rip-off 4000/030 prices. I did a lot of great things with it, hell I even did games testing for Acid Software :)
Playstation - Because it was the future and Ridge Racer is light years ahead as far as any other home racing game before goes.
Saturn - Might as well, after all Sega made the best coin-ops and Playstation would never see them.
And that's it really. If Commodore had sold the A1400 prototype during Xmas 93 instead of the rubbish CD32 joke then I would have got that too for £600 with a CD drive, 28mhz 020 at full speed and 4mb of RAM but no Zorro slots (who cares!). Because if every A1400 could be programmed the same way as a console (something DOS PC games programmers can never do) because all machines were identical we would have seen a lot more games like TFX (given away FREE by Ocean on a magazine CD because not enough 4000/030 machines ever sold to make it worth marketing it to Amiga-A1200 just too damned slow for TFX!)
Commodore should have learned from the mistake made by Cinemaware, investing in CD gaming is a waste of time and leads to bankruptcy (and after disastrous CDTV AKA an A500+CD ROM was a flop for the same reason CD32 AKA A1200+CD would be. The games are the same!) unless you have seriously powerful hardware like Saturn and Playstation to back it up with cutting edge games not bloody A1200 games+cheesy CD music. Super Stardust CD32 is actually worse than the A1200/4000 disk version because of the CD soundtrack. Yuck!
All Commodore did is kill Amiga and it's technology, the reason it took 9 years for bankruptcy is because Amiga 1000 was lightyears ahead of EVERTHING. But they still managed it because once Jack Tramiel left Commodore didn't have a clue how to run a computer company (canning Commodore LCD, not marketing the A1000 for a year waiting for 2000/500, making Commodore 16 and Plus4 and 128 rubbish). Trouble is as much as Commodore deserved to tank Amiga deserved to outlive all of the competition.
@ others - As for comparing an A500 with a 486 PC nope, I was comparing something like F1GP on an A4000/030 and a 486 PC costing the same price, I think if you actually try this too you will see with your own eyes the PC playing speed runs rings around the Amiga version FOR THE SAME PRICE ;)
@ Digiman
Very much enjoyed your post, must say it was pretty much nut in a shell, thank you!
But even still I envied my friend, when he bought that odd little A1200 w/120Mb HDD late 1993, which cost him his life savings 7500FIM (aprox. $1500 at that time) , me having nearly stock A500 then! I even remember that I was little disappointed of that it didn't look like a powerful computer to me, well in retrospect it wasn't, but...Ah those demos and beautiful WB background graphics! I loved and dremed of AGA!
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Well I am enjoying this thread, but you guys are all geared towards gaming. AGA Chipset was A HUGE DEAL for Video Toaster 4000 and Flyer users. Many new effects, faster ram, color previews, etc etc... also you get HAM 8 in programs like Vista Pro for example. AGA really shines in these ways..
I agree, and when the A4000/040 was launched was it not the fastest "PC" money could buy? HAM8 in 1280x576 PAL overscan was something no PC or Mac could do. Funny really as HAM + Digi-View is what made jaws drop in 86/87.
But in the UK the 4000/030 was too expensive and too slow. And the A4000 was something like £2000 ($3000?) on launch day.
Plus thanks to Sony never developing the PAL chipset for Videotoaster it was no good to us here in Europe ;)
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@ others - As for comparing an A500 with a 486 PC nope, I was comparing something like F1GP on an A4000/030 and a 486 PC costing the same price, I think if you actually try this too you will see with your own eyes the PC playing speed runs rings around the Amiga version FOR THE SAME PRICE ;)
Still don't get your point in trying to compare the Amiga to a PC, even with the above example you give what's the point, the Amiga is what is/was if you thought PCs were so much better then why did you buy an Amiga in the first place ?
You said it yourself if you'd not been such a skinflint and bought an Amiga accelerator you could have sold it to a numptie like me on ebay today for one hell of a good price... ;)
I've posted my views on Medhi Ali & Commodore plenty of time here so suffice to say if I ever find the little turd I'll be up on a murder rap... :)
Quite simply I just don't see what the point is in comparing a machine that was based on custom built hardware to something that was cobbled together from off the shelf parts (whether it ran faster or not).
No one forced you to buy a PC cos you needed Windows to complete your studies, I went to college too and I told them if you want anything from me then you get it done on an Amiga and I did it my way... :)
I've never needed to use a PC in my life for business or pleasure (ran my own D.T.P. business on two A500s) and when I grow tired of the net these macs go back on ebay and I go back to my own wee world where the Amiga rules supreme... :)
Guess what I'm trying to say here is, if more folk had been like me and not followed the world of PCs and Macs just because your boss or studies insisted upon it then the Amiga might have still been manufactured today even if it wasn't through Commodore... :)
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@ Digiman
Very much enjoyed your post, must say it was pretty much nut in a shell, thank you!
But even still I envied my friend, when he bought that odd little A1200 w/120Mb HDD late 1993, which cost him his life savings 7500FIM (aprox. $1500 at that time) , me having nearly stock A500 then! I even remember that I was little disappointed of that it didn't look like a powerful computer to me, well in retrospect it wasn't, but...Ah those demos and beautiful WB background graphics! I loved and dremed of AGA!
Me too, but I knew money spent on accelerator or HD for my A1200 is money I would never get back...like buying big shiny wheels for my cheap car :)
I did want these things, and in 1996 I did find a cheapish Amiga 4000/030 which I did lots of programming on. But I had to sell that in 1997 to make a down payment on my house (still living in the same one!)
IF Commodore had made small upgrade to Amiga 1200 with optional CD drive too in 1993/94 I would have bought one. A1400 with 28mhz 020/4mb Ram/CD I would have paid the same price a 386/33mhz PC for (and so would everyone else who tried Mac OS 9 or Windows 3.0 they were rubbish!). And Maybe then games programmers would make games like Screamer Rally/Actua Soccer/Doom because ALL Amiga 1400s are the same so programmers can write better speed machine code than even some cheap 486 PC where everyone has different motherboard/processor/VGA card/sound card etc so programming is always less efficient on PC. You can make Doom run faster with optimisation for Amiga A1400.
But because A1200 never upgraded the games never improved and we were stuck because CD32 is SAME AS A1200+CD drive (too slow in 1994 for 3D games we wanted).
When I saw Marble Madness in 1986 I had to buy Amiga though...and I still have this original Amiga today on my desk working beautifully.
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I think people have got things a bit backwards when it comes why Amiga didn't get the same games the PC did. Sure an A1200 with an 020 and AGA and fast ram was underpowered by then, but most games were written for an A500 spec anyway: there were very few AGA only games. Why did this happen? Because for every owner who bought an AGA machine probably 10x as many stuck with their OCS/ECS-which usually was an A500. Hell, they wouldn't even buy a hard drive, so most games weren't even hard drive installable! Even a hard drive would have improved the quality and complexity of games, but no, people kept their floppy only A500's.
AGA was never properly utilized till the end of its life beacsue the perceived install base was too small for the software houses to put the time and effort to write games to get the most out of it. If they had, the next logical step would have been to write for A1200 AGA+hard drive +4 Meg RAM, then an A1200 '030 with 8 Meg ram +Cd ROM: the software would have driven the sale of hardware until AAA arrived.
If more people did buy an A1200, the software houses might have been convinced not to write their software to run on 512k A500. In reality the infamous stinginess of the average Amiga user who thought an A500 with 512 meg ram should run the latest release software for 12 years was to blame for AGA's market failure as Commodore's management was.
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If more people did buy an A1200, the software houses might have been convinced not to write their software to run on 512k A500. In reality the infamous stinginess of the average Amiga user who thought an A500 with 512 meg ram should run the latest release software for 12 years was to blame for AGA's market failure as Commodore's management was.
I agree with you 100% on that, out of a group of 16 of us only 7 ever bought the A1200s, 2 or 3 of the remaining A500 owners actually bought HD & or extra ram for them, of the 7 of us who bought the A1200s only 3 of us bothered to upgrade them... :(
I know some folk will say they couldn't afford too & that's fine, but of the folk I knew only one could genuinely claim that, the others were just too miserable to part with their cash and still moaned even though they'd spend their money on CD players and the like that they hardly ever used in comparison to their miggies... :(
If truth be told I'd say the some of the Amiga Community are some of the stingiest gits I've ever known... :)
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Even a hard drive would have improved the quality and complexity of games, but no, people kept their floppy only A500's.
Because Commodore did not include HD's as standard equipment, unlike the competition. And to upgrade your A500 to have a HD was cost prohibitive. Case certainly was never designed for one anyway. Had 2.5" drives been affordable and there was a place to install one internally without having to get a Shuffleboard and removing your internal floppy, that might have been different. But just as the argument of having certain capabilities built-in, the practically "unexpandable" A500 was doomed from the start that way. Just as the big boxes were, thanks to them being overpriced by early 90's standards
If more people did buy an A1200, the software houses might have been convinced not to write their software to run on 512k A500.
I disagree with this because, by that time, it was already too late. Software houses had already seen the writing on the wall. And ultimately, it was C= fault for not knowing how to market their system(s).
I was an early A1200 adopter and guess what I had to do in order to add an affordable HD to my system? Purchase an ugly external box that housed a 3.5" HD w/ external power supply, with a bare naked IDE ribbon cable coming out the back of my system. Yeah, that was great. Didn't look half-assed at all (sarcasm). 2.5" drives were simply cost prohibitive. Was I being cheap? No. I was trying to be practical. By the time I ended my spending spree... I had nearly $1400 (before monitor) wrapped up in the stupid thing. Little wonder I bought 386 and then a 486 shortly after. Course now, the Windoze platform and its chinsey hardware isn't allowed in the house at all, but I digress. lol
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I think people have got things a bit backwards when it comes why Amiga didn't get the same games the PC did. Sure an A1200 with an 020 and AGA and fast ram was underpowered by then, but most games were written for an A500 spec anyway: there were very few AGA only games. Why did this happen? Because for every owner who bought an AGA machine probably 10x as many stuck with their OCS/ECS-which usually was an A500. Hell, they wouldn't even buy a hard drive, so most games weren't even hard drive installable! Even a hard drive would have improved the quality and complexity of games, but no, people kept their floppy only A500's.
AGA was never properly utilized till the end of its life beacsue the perceived install base was too small for the software houses to put the time and effort to write games to get the most out of it. If they had, the next logical step would have been to write for A1200 AGA+hard drive +4 Meg RAM, then an A1200 '030 with 8 Meg ram +Cd ROM: the software would have driven the sale of hardware until AAA arrived.
If more people did buy an A1200, the software houses might have been convinced not to write their software to run on 512k A500. In reality the infamous stinginess of the average Amiga user who thought an A500 with 512 meg ram should run the latest release software for 12 years was to blame for AGA's market failure as Commodore's management was.
Going by some of the posts I've been reading on various forums it seems even today people seem to think new software should run on a A500! :(
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Because Commodore did not include HD's as standard equipment, unlike the competition. And to upgrade your A500 to have a HD was cost prohibitive. Case certainly was never designed for one anyway. Had 2.5" drives been affordable and there was a place to install one internally without having to get a Shuffleboard and removing your internal floppy, that might have been different. But just as the argument of having certain capabilities built-in, the practically "unexpandable" A500 was doomed from the start that way. Just as the big boxes were, thanks to them being overpriced by early 90's standards
The A500 was hard to upgrade because thats not what it was designed for! You were meant to use it, and when it could no longer keep up with the modern software you meant to get an A1200. If you chose not to do that, AND still wanted to rum modern software, then you had to accept it was going to be awkward and expensive. Instead people just went:"How do i get an AGA upgrade for my A500?" Buy an A1200, thats how!
I disagree with this because, by that time, it was already too late. Software houses had already seen the writing on the wall. And ultimately, it was C= fault for not knowing how to market their system(s).
It was too late because not enough bothered to ditch their A500 and get an A1200, choose the hard drive option AT THE TIME OF PURCHASE and get a RAM upgrade later on. The users killed the potential that AGA had as much as Commodore did. Commodore was a victim of its own success, the A500 was so far ahead of its time, people expected it to be start of the art for ever!
I was an early A1200 adopter and guess what I had to do in order to add an affordable HD to my system? Purchase an ugly external box that housed a 3.5" HD w/ external power supply, with a bare naked IDE ribbon cable coming out the back of my system. Yeah, that was great. Didn't look half-assed at all (sarcasm). 2.5" drives were simply cost prohibitive. Was I being cheap? No. I was trying to be practical. By the time I ended my spending spree... I had nearly $1400 (before monitor) wrapped up in the stupid thing. Little wonder I bought 386 and then a 486 shortly after. Course now, the Windoze platform and its chinsey hardware isn't allowed in the house at all, but I digress. lol
Most A1200's I've seen had a 40 mb hard drive. The Commodore card box they came in had tick box for models with hard drive and those without, some with 60 meg, so they definately were available with hard drive from Commodore.
You didn't NEED that box, but I bet you chose to do it that way beacsue a big 3.5 inch HD was cheaper and faster-but the A1200 was never meant for big 3.5 inch drives, it was a compact all-in-one home computer, not a pro machine, thats what the A4000 was for, but A1200 users wanted pro-level machines for game console prices. this is exactly how Apple markets is computers today: hard to expand iMacs for home users with lower specs, Mac pro for everyone else. But Mac users are different; they accept that, Amiga users didn't.
I did the external tower thing as well, but that was to get a CDROM drive going, and Commodore was dead by the time CDROM was essential. CDROM at the time of Commodore was bloody expensive, so if people were too tight to ditch the A500, why would Commodore push CDROM?
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Going by some of the posts I've been reading on various forums it seems even today people seem to think new software should run on a A500! :(
We aren't going to change the world of gaming at this point, unlike in the 80's when the amiga had more colors, and better sound than anything out there. So right now, yeah new software that can run on anything from an a1000 to a minimig etc. would be a good thing.
Or you could go the opposite direction and require an akiko chip (cd32) or an ec version 68020 or crash on anything else or some obscure rtg version.
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CDROM at the time of Commodore was bloody expensive, so if people were too tight to ditch the A500, why would Commodore push CDROM?
When did Commodore push CD-ROM? They barely got their CDTV out the door :)
I agree with much of what you're saying - but it's rather like the chicken and the egg scenario. C= got soooo much wrong. Easy to say in hindsight, but there were some obvious F-ups, even back then. The A1200's case CAN indeed handle a 3.5" HD as we all know, but it wasn't part of their plan. Hence the PCMCIA port. They were in portability mode for sure, but what the consumer ended up with was a half-assed wedge system that really didn't make a whole lot of sense during the time it was released. And pretty much, everyone knew it and that's exactly how it was received.
Had it truly been released as a portable system - fine. But it wasn't. It was released as a home-desktop "upgrade" to the A500 so many years later, even though C= themselves were well aware of their demographic (or not). Weak. Extremely weak IMO.
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@2600. The A1200 wedge design was for portable computing on the cheap: the built in composite out meant no monitor needed, just plonk it in front of a tv, and boot up. Even with just 2 meg and no hard drive you would probably boot up faster than a hard drive PC with Win 3!
The real shame was that too few users saw what the A1200 could do with a hard drive and extra ram: Word Process, Spread sheet, database, video, art, animation, music, mutitasking GUI OS, and even 3D. Everything that an expanded A500 could do and more, for less than an A500 upgrade.
I once cursed the limitations for expansion, of an all-in-one wedge design, but I now realise what i wanted the A1200 to be what it wasn't designed to be. Thats what the A4000 was.
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Going by some of the posts I've been reading on various forums it seems even today people seem to think new software should run on a A500! :(
Not a stock 500 - requiring an modest accelerator, fast RAM, and a hard disk is semi-reasonable because most modern Amiga users (who aren't just using it for the games they used to play as a kid) can reasonably be expected to have that. But the chipset isn't something you can replace or upgrade - you have to get a computer with an AGA board to have AGA. (And, as has been pointed out earlier in the thread, too much AGA software relies on hardware-banging to use software emulation with a separate video card.)
That means that by writing AGA-only software, you're excluding anybody who doesn't own a 1200 (pricey after upgrades) or a 4000 (obscenely expensive to begin with, plus expansion means finding Zorro III cards!) It'd be fine to have an enhanced AGA mode and a standard OCS/ECS mode, but apparently very few people can be arsed to do that. I suppose that those of us with neither could cross our fingers and wait for NatAmi to be available, but it'd be a lot nicer if modern Amiga programmers could just be a little more considerate of those of us whose Amiga setup consists of a 2000 nabbed from a senior citizen's attic and whatever inexpensive upgrades we could scrounge from AmiBay...
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Forget PC vs Amiga A500/600 though, the real truth is the people who had A500s got bored with terrible arcade conversions over and over and many moved onto Sega or Nintendo or even NEC games consoles which had far superior games. If you don't believe me then go and try via emulators the Megadrive/SNES/TG16/PC/Amiga and ST versions of SF2....the Amiga version comes 5th marginally beating the ST version. I would rather pay £50 for SF2 and know it is going to be the best it can possibly be on the hardware I run it (with zero loading times) than £30 for a lame dick conversion that makes me angry enough to stab the programmers through the face :angry:
It was probably too late anyway because games players were not going to ditch games of the calibre on the 16bit consoles on a new £400/$500 bare bones machine with the same sound and the same lame programmers writing games for Amiga. How many times did you buy an arcade conversion and then want your money back instantly? Exactly!
And only Commodore is to blame for lack of interest in A1200, first we had ECS in A500+ which was a joke as far as games players were concerned, and then even worse we had the A500/+ replaced with the less expandable A600 for serious users with crappy PCMCIA and super expensive 2.5" IDE drive cables. The only improvement was trapdoor accelerators for A1200 luckily.
The missing parts of AGA were just the nail in the coffin, as was those early releases that still looked and sounded like A500 games with a bit more colour in the foreground (and same crappy copperlists for backgrounds where every 16bit console would have lovely smooth parallax graphics and 6-10 channel sound). Apart from 6 channel sound on Super Stardust nothing new on audio side really.
Remember ALL games still had to fit on crappy 880kb disks thanks to Commodore not spending a few quid more on a HD drive for A1200 not just A4000!!
And sticking a 14mhz 020 crippled to 50% speed in the machines sold on the shelves they screwed themselves and us. Games companies could not do much more as far as 3D polygon games go than with an A500. A 28mhz full speed (ie with 1mb Fast ram as well) version should have been an option from day one! And the A1200 should have had SIMM sockets on the motherboard not bloody trapdoor circuit boards costing a fortune.
As for games not being hard drive installable? Well it would have taken companies 5 minutes to write an installer but thanks to all the shit coding on most arcade conversions piracy was rife (and quite right too, I wouldn't piss on Powerdrift for Amiga) so they kept ludicrous protection formats and so it was impossible. There is ZERO excuse for not making the disks unprotected and allow us to install games to HD using manual keyword protection routines. Software companies treated us like dirt and so we pirated their weak feeble efforts as befits the low quality of their programming.
And as for Windows boot up speed? Well in the time of A1000 to CD32 ALL games were DOS. And DOS is not slow to boot up even on the cheapest 3.5" IDE drive (about 5-10 seconds at most).
I will leave you all with one final note. In 1987 Zarch (AKA Virus on ST/Amiga from Firebird s/w) was made for the Acorn Archimedes and ran smooth as silk with 256 colour depth cuing to boot in 1mb of RAM (poss 512kb). 5 years later this game in this quality was not even possible to replicate on your A1200 WITH fast ram costing a total of £550!
Amiga sales success always relied on sales to gamers. Once that was lost then so was Commodore as a viable solvent company. The damage was done in 1990 when the A500+ should have been 128 colours, 6 channel sound and faster/better sprites and blitter. To little too late and now nothing.
Amiga deserved better after A1000/500 and so did we as the loyal Amiga gamers.
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Yikes. Digiman is letting rip :)
I fundamentally agree with you man. I just prefer looking at what was cool about it
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The A500 was hard to upgrade because thats not what it was designed for! You were meant to use it, and when it could no longer keep up with the modern software you meant to get an A1200. If you chose not to do that, AND still wanted to rum modern software, then you had to accept it was going to be awkward and expensive. Instead people just went:"How do i get an AGA upgrade for my A500?" Buy an A1200, thats how!
It was too late because not enough bothered to ditch their A500 and get an A1200, choose the hard drive option AT THE TIME OF PURCHASE and get a RAM upgrade later on. The users killed the potential that AGA had as much as Commodore did. Commodore was a victim of its own success, the A500 was so far ahead of its time, people expected it to be start of the art for ever!
Most A1200's I've seen had a 40 mb hard drive. The Commodore card box they came in had tick box for models with hard drive and those without, some with 60 meg, so they definately were available with hard drive from Commodore.
You didn't NEED that box, but I bet you chose to do it that way beacsue a big 3.5 inch HD was cheaper and faster-but the A1200 was never meant for big 3.5 inch drives, it was a compact all-in-one home computer, not a pro machine, thats what the A4000 was for, but A1200 users wanted pro-level machines for game console prices. this is exactly how Apple markets is computers today: hard to expand iMacs for home users with lower specs, Mac pro for everyone else. But Mac users are different; they accept that, Amiga users didn't.
I did the external tower thing as well, but that was to get a CDROM drive going, and Commodore was dead by the time CDROM was essential. CDROM at the time of Commodore was bloody expensive, so if people were too tight to ditch the A500, why would Commodore push CDROM?
AGA had very little potential, and even if it could games companies were not going to make 7 disk versions of games that had to fit all the extra higher quality sound and graphics onto the same stupid 880kb disk format. ALL PCs had 1.44mb HD drives by the time of A600 let alone A1200.
Secondly it's all fine saying there were hard drives for Amiga but most high street chains refused to stock them as they said they were too expensive (and they were too expensive because they were laptop technology....laptops cost £1000-1500+ in 1991/2). Plenty of companies shoe-horned 3.5" drives INSIDE the A1200 case too so it's bad decision from Medhi Ali Inc (tm)
What was never considered was selling people a slow 14mhz 020 and then selling it with only 2mb chip ram from high streets crippling it to barely double the speed of the A500! Why the hell was there no SIMM slots OR the base machine split between 1mb chip and 1mb fast ram IF the only option was to sell a machine that is crippled to 50% processing power until YOU buy an extra circuit board and YOU install it yourself. Look what happened...software houses ALL wrote games based on performance of 2mb chip only A1200! RAM WAS REQUIRED AS AN OFF THE SHELF OPTION TO GAIN TWICE THE SPEED SO SOFTWARE HOUSES WROTE GAMES FOR THAT PERFORMANCE LEVEL. HD is useless for all but those crap boring click based adventures that come on 12 disks!
The reality is in 1987 A500 was just about still king with only TG-16 console from NEC being superior for some games (like ALL Sega arcade conversions) and the unpopular Acorn Archimedes (CPU as fast as a 25mhz 030/256 colours/16 channel sound all in 1987 and costing just £800!) and in 1985 the A1000 was superior to every machine regardless of price. A500Plus was superior only to low end 8086PC and Atari ST but NOT Sega Genesis/Megadrive. And A600 was a joke we should forget as far as game sophistication goes (everyone gave up and got a Sega/Nintendo console now for sure) and then A1200 was too little too late to slam dunk any console on sale really. And expanding your A1200 to match a £999 25mhz 486 with 4mb RAM, 80mb HDD, and HD floppy without monitor would cost MORE! And the extra oomph would never be used and Outrun Turbo would still look like a turd even after spending £100s on your Amiga (unlike in PC land where the game improves with no modification).
Thanks to Commodore hardly ever improving games relevant aspects of the Amiga chipset and then selling turkeys like A600 to replace the A500 which could have 10mb RAM/50mhz 030/24bit graphics/faster SCSI drives/PC 286 hardware emulator all thanks to the Zorro 1 slot on side expansion.
People lost confidence with Commodore for years from the A2000 disaster to CD32 joke, you really expected people to come back and spend £400 on a machine that had no killer games? At least Amiga 1000 had Defender of the Crown and Marble Madness or The Pawn for cerebral types. A1200 had NO KILLER APP unlike all the consoles and the PCs so where was their incentive? AGA didn't give enough of an improvement for people to sit back and go "WOW" unlike when Defender of the Crown/Marble Madness was booted up on A1000 at various shows around the world :(
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How many times did you buy an arcade conversion and then want your money back instantly? Exactly!
Erm... Never... :)
You need anger management methinks... either that or you just nuts... :)
Remember ALL games still had to fit on crappy 880kb disks thanks to Commodore not spending a few quid more on a HD drive for A1200 not just A4000!
No silly boy... the option was there for the buyer to choose between an A1200 with or without an HD, it was only greetin faced numpties like you who were obviously too miserable to pay for the HD for your new super duper gaming machine that made that choice... :rolleyes:
You don't seem to have been a happy chappy with any of your Amigas so again I ask why on earth did you buy one...
Software companies treated us like dirt and so we pirated their weak feeble efforts as befits the low quality of their programming.
again more proof that you totally bammy... why the frig would you want to pirate crap software... you make less sense than me on one of me good days... :)
Do as I'm just doing have a quick ciggie then a pee and go off to bed, you'll feel much better in the morning... night, night... :)
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@2600. The A1200 wedge design was for portable computing on the cheap: the built in composite out meant no monitor needed, just plonk it in front of a tv, and boot up. Even with just 2 meg and no hard drive you would probably boot up faster than a hard drive PC with Win 3!
The real shame was that too few users saw what the A1200 could do with a hard drive and extra ram: Word Process, Spread sheet, database, video, art, animation, music, mutitasking GUI OS, and even 3D. Everything that an expanded A500 could do and more, for less than an A500 upgrade.
I once cursed the limitations for expansion, of an all-in-one wedge design, but I now realise what i wanted the A1200 to be what it wasn't designed to be. Thats what the A4000 was.
The A1200 was NOT marketed as a "half assed" (which is clearly what it would have been, had they even tried) portable machine here in the States as you're projecting. It was supposed to be an evolutionary step up from the A500. And are you kidding about the A1200 and A4000? Umm.... remember the cost difference? Totally inexcusable. Even worse than the A500 and A2000. Commodore simply didn't know what they had or how to even price it. The Amiga was left to monkeys after the A1000 was designed. Pure and simple.
+10 Digiman!
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Yep AGA was flawed. Difficult to program and not enough of an upgrade.
But you can't blame it for the eventual failure of the Amiga.
Perhaps the focus on he machine's gaming features is what lead the Amiga to its doom. I used to sell PC and frankly they stunk. I took years of development to get the basics that the Amiga started with.
256 color graphics? Not until VGA boards were introduced (and frankly they stunk until 2D and 3D acceleration was added).
Sound? Unless you count that built in speaker designed for error code beeps, you had to add something like a Soundblaster.
But most PCs had hard drives (a big advantage). And PC's were sold not as gaming platforms, but as productivity platforms. Good wordprocessors, spreadsheets, accounting software and other business packages made PCs useful tools for business.
Amiga marketing just wasn't focused on utility. And the machines with the expansion capabilities that looked like serious computers (ie the A4000) were way too overpriced.
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A1200+
28 MHz 020
1 MB Chip RAM
1 MB Fast RAM
30 pin SIMM Sockets on mobo
High Density internal floppy drive
AGA graphics
8 channel sound
£499/$750
That spec and price isn't too shabby and quite a realistic proposal for a 1992 launch.
Would it have been enough to save the ship?
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A1200+
28 MHz 020
1 MB Chip RAM
1 MB Fast RAM
30 pin SIMM Sockets on mobo
High Density internal floppy drive
AGA graphics
8 channel sound
£499/$750
That spec and price isn't too shabby and quite a realistic proposal for a 1992 launch.
Would it have been enough to save the ship?
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A1200+
30 MHz 030
1 MB Chip RAM
2 MB Fast RAM
30 pin SIMM Sockets on mobo
High Density internal floppy drive
AGA graphics w/ enhanced blitter/copper and true Amber 31khz VGA monitor compatibility with the stupid VGA adapter included or better yet, with the standard S-VGA output built-in
8 channel DSP sound at 16-bit equiv and Roland MIDI compatibility
£499/$750
That spec and price isn't too shabby and quite a realistic proposal for a 1992 launch.
Would it have been enough to save the ship?
Fixed those specs for you, but still... would have failed. A slower death maybe. But failure personified thanks to C= not evolving with consumer demand, trending and good old common sense.
I still think it's pure mental retardation that Tramiel became Atari's owner and C= was left in the hands of misc. generic failed computing execs. What a crock computing history has turned out to be. Even then, we all knew it was bad news. But it was allowed to happen. Once again: irresponsible capitalism and corporate politics ruined yet another couple of great "entities" that had more of an impact on computing in their demise, than when they were "alive".
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The A1200 was NOT marketed as a "half assed" (which is clearly what it would have been, had they even tried) portable machine here in the States as you're projecting.
I'm not saying it was marketed as a portable machine ala a "laptop", but it nevertheless was easily portable, and as TV screens were ubiquitous, it was a very portable computer. Its market was the home user/game player not the power user who wanted to start a branch of Industrial Light and Magic in their bedroom. The problem here is that this user wasn't you or me or everyone else still mad enough to be on a forum like this all these years later. We were fanatics, who wanted the power of an A4000 at the price of an A1200. And the reason it came out with 2 meg chip was that RAM was very expensive at the time of the A1200's release and Commodore wanted to encourage third party hardware development of RAM boards and accelerators.
It was supposed to be an evolutionary step up from the A500. And are you kidding about the A1200 and A4000? Umm.... remember the cost difference? Totally inexcusable. Even worse than the A500 and A2000. Commodore simply didn't know what they had or how to even price it. The Amiga was left to monkeys after the A1000 was designed. Pure and simple.
+10 Digiman!
Well how does the price compare say when Apple turned things around for themselves with their fruity iMac (even less expandable than an A1200) and the Tower Power Macs? AFIR $1800 versus $3500 (sans monitor). The difference is the market perception: Apple users who bought the iMac knew what they were getting and didn't ask for more. They weren't tinkerers, applying patches and hacks to get that last drhystone out of the machine.
From my reading there are differences in markets between countries as well: The UK were mostly low-end users, the US pro-video users, and Germany probably a mix. It tends to explain people from the UK saying they couldn't get hard drive machines easily: was that due to Commodore not wanting to sell HD A1200's or people not wanting or not being able to afford to, and then being given what they want/can afford? Here in Australia, every A1200 I ever saw on sale when people were getting out of Amiga had at least a 40 mb hard drive, many had RAM cards.
Many of the relatively few Amiga users who upgraded to an A1200 knew that they wanted the capabilities of an A4000....and bought an A1200. The rest stayed on their A500's, so that remained the base for games programmers even after AGA had been out for years. If more people upgraded to AGA, then that would have been the base, and with software ever pushing the limits if hardware and with economies of scale, later 68030's and even 68060's could have been affordable enough to make games like doom and ridge racer feasable, until AAA came out.
In general-and the people here are an exception, we'd have to be to still be even thinking about Amiga- Amiga users were the biggest tightwads. Yes Commodore made horrendous business decisions, but whereas PC users plonked $3,000 on a 486 PC to play Doom, Amiga user complained about the price of a hard drive!
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Its worth pointing out that there were more to computers than arcade games.
Nobody made PD games for the NES (ROM hacks I guess)
You couldn't play Civilization or Battle Isle on the master system.
Not a lot of people used their super nintendo for animation.
I never got the hang of writing a high school paper on the playstation.
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@thread
Group hug! ;)
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Interesting topic, so I thought I'd add my 2 cents... :)
Well, 1stly I think AGA suffered from 2 things. Firstly, it's base model ('020, no fast 2meg chip), was a little crippling. To take advantage of the improvements in aga it really needs cpu to be using fast ram. Not just for the added raw cpu grunt, but so aga itself isnt as crippled. A 68000 + ocs/ecs can get away with living on chip ram, an aga machine not so much.
Secondly Im not sure AGA really got much of a chance to show what it's capable of. Most of the more impressive amiga games are written specifically for the machine and with it's strengths in mind. By the time AGA was around and the "base" aga systems where typically good enough to let aga spread its wings the obsession for amiga coders was "doom on the amiga", and very few AGA games where written to its strengths.
If a 1 meg 68000 ocs/ecs machine can do things like Elfmania, Lionheart, Ruff n Tumble, etc. surely an aga machine with even a 68020 and a few meg fast ram could be capable of something beyond the snes/megadrive. It's a shame we'll probably never know for sure.
All this aside though, while Ive predominately used RTG based systems for a number of years now, aga, and the limitations it imposes I get a kick out of.Seeing how nice looking a Workbench I can make while using limited color depth and so on, while still having it fast enough, and functional. For practical use I much prefer using RTG, but AGA has it's own charms :)
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Having got rid of all my various franken towers over the years, all I want now is an A1200 wedge with some fast ram, network and buffered IDE hard drive, so i can push the hardware to see what i can get out of it.
I don't even need an SD/FF as an LCD TV will see to that problem.
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Its worth pointing out that there were more to computers than arcade games.
Nobody made PD games for the NES (ROM hacks I guess)
You couldn't play Civilization or Battle Isle on the master system.
Not a lot of people used their super nintendo for animation.
I never got the hang of writing a high school paper on the playstation.
I don't think comparing it to the NES, Playstation, SNES or Master system is fair. They were all "closed" and locked-out systems. It's much better to compare it with other video game/computer hybrids like the X68000 or FM-Towns series, both of which blow the Amiga away in terms of graphic and sound ability, without weird solutions like the copper, and still manage in the home computer department -- arguably not as good as the Amiga in that regard, but not far off, and definitely capable enough.
People wanting a good gaming experience were probably in majority of the Amiga market, and the sound and graphics were the unique selling point of the damn thing; there's no denying that Commodore overlooked that when they released AGA and lost the little edge they still had. If all you wanted to do was to play PD games, Civ and write school papers by 1992, you should have picked up a PC.
BTW, there are quite a few PD games for the NES (no, not only ROM hacks), and you can play Civ on a Super NES. Can you play anything like Sonic 2 on a stock A1200? :) Apples and oranges, IMO.
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. Can you play anything like Sonic 2 on a stock A1200? :) Apples and oranges, IMO.
There was a non-Sega demo out there. Just to prove that it *could* be done.
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There was a non-Sega demo out there. Just to prove that it *could* be done.
If this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAUxkYM5Evk) is the demo you are talking about, I can only assume that you've never actually played Sonic.
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If this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAUxkYM5Evk) is the demo you are talking about, I can only assume that you've never actually played Sonic.
possibly. Anything done on megadrive *could* be done on an A1200 and probably better. Its a licensing limitation, not a hardware one.
BtW Sonic is simply boring.
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I'm really surprised on how popular this thread is. It's been posted on really quick. I can hardly keep up with all the replies
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possibly. Anything done on megadrive *could* be done on an A1200 and probably better. Its a licensing limitation, not a hardware one.
No, there are a lot of things the Mega Drive can do which a stock 1200 can't, and that goes the other way around, too, of course. I'm not saying that one is necessarily better than the other, but for 2D action games like Sonic or any shoot'em up; lot's of sprites, fast and smooth scrolling tile layers, etc, the Mega Drive is definitely superior. For games requiring a lot of RAM for variables or raw CPU power, like detailed simulations or strategy games, the 1200 is obviously the better choice, but you'd never see a Thunder Force IV or a Sonic 2 on the 1200.
BtW Sonic is simply boring.
Totally besides the point, but not a surprising thing to hear from someone who knows that he's losing an argument.
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No, there are a lot of things the Mega Drive can do which a stock 1200 can't, and that goes the other way around, too, of course. I'm not saying that one is necessarily better than the other, but for 2D action games like Sonic or any shoot'em up; lot's of sprites, fast and smooth scrolling tile layers, etc, the Mega Drive is definitely superior.
What?
Super Stardust. Xenon. XP8 AGA. Project X. Smooth scrolling, plenty-of-sprites-on-screen shooters.
The reason why a Sonic game might be smoother on the megadrive is the same reason the amiga suffered ports that were worse than on the megadrive: the coders didn't give enough of a shit to code them properly for the Amiga, whereas a company like Sega whose mascot was Sonic would have pulled out all stops to make Sonic a flagship title: their survival depended on it. Megadrive ports were farmed off to third parties that didn't optimize the games for Amiga.
For games requiring a lot of RAM for variables or raw CPU power, like detailed simulations or strategy games, the 1200 is obviously the better choice, but you'd never see a Thunder Force IV or a Sonic 2 on the 1200.
.
What? It was all the stuff Amiga custom chips did with very little CPU power that set the Amiga apart.
And you'll never see Super Mario Bros on the megadrive, either.
Totally besides the point, but not a surprising thing to hear from someone who knows that he's losing an argument.
You implied that Sonic's absence on the Amiga due to AGA's technical inferiority was a contributor to AGA's failure. I can honestly say I don't recall anyone saying: "If Amiga only had Sonic..." Doom, yes. Mario, maybe. Sonic, meh...It was a boring game
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In general-and the people here are an exception, we'd have to be to still be even thinking about Amiga- Amiga users were the biggest tightwads. Yes Commodore made horrendous business decisions, but whereas PC users plonked $3,000 on a 486 PC to play Doom, Amiga user complained about the price of a hard drive!
You bring up lots of good points, but I can't help but wonder, had Commodore included HD's as standard equipment in their lower end machines (no option), how the general public would have received them. You talk about how developers always have the least common denominator in mind, well, had HD's been standard, imagine how the platform would have benefited. I still think there was too big a price gap between models though and Commodore were their own worst enemy that way as they molded their client base to be "cheapies" as such. I do remember the $3k-$4k price tags on some of these big box models though. Pretty funny when you think about Commodore's leasing program. :lol:
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What?
Super Stardust. Xenon. XP8 AGA. Project X. Smooth scrolling, plenty-of-sprites-on-screen shooters.
I won't say much about these games in terms of gameplay, but graphically they don't compare to Thunderforce IV, no, and sound-wise... The Mega Drive is miles ahead when it comes to game background music. With only four channels of sampled sound, while it might be the more desirable setup for many for just music production, the sound effects interrupting the music is so glaringly obvious.
The reason why a Sonic game might be smoother on the megadrive is the same reason the amiga suffered ports that were worse than on the megadrive: the coders didn't give enough of a shit to code them properly for the Amiga, whereas a company like Sega whose mascot was Sonic would have pulled out all stops to make Sonic a flagship title: their survival depended on it. Megadrive ports were farmed off to third parties that didn't optimize the games for Amiga.
There are no Amiga ports of Sonic 2 to compare, but right off the bat I can say that Sonic 2 wouldn't be possible on a stock Amiga 1200 because of its 10 channel crystal clear stereo sound, for example. Some will argue that 4 sample channels sound better (and I disagree) but from a technical point of view, no, the Amiga couldn't handle 10 channels of sound at that fidelity while trying to do what's happening on-screen in Sonic 2. I hate to speak in terms of number of audio channels and number of colors, but there you have it; not possible.
And no, I don't think the programmers were lazy, but they were crippled by the fact that to display more than 8 sprites, all with a single palette, they had to muck about a lot with the copper, and to have parallax scrolling background planes, they had to use a lot of tricks (hogging a lot of CPU), ending up with inflexible results in all practical cases. Getting 80 sprites on screen on a multi-layer multi-directional scrolling background on the Mega Drive is a breeze compared to the Amiga, meaning that developers could focus more on game logic than on getting stuff on the screen through seemingly magic tricks.
What? It was all the stuff Amiga custom chips did with very little CPU power that set the Amiga apart.
That wasn't at all unique for home computers at the time (and it was something game consoles had already been doing for quite some time). What set set the Amiga apart IMO was that it was able to compete with and even surpass game console/arcade hardware at the time of its release, while still being a usable personal computer. By the release of AGA, this edge was long lost, and AGA itself did very little to take it back.
And you'll never see Super Mario Bros on the megadrive, either.
While it's besides the point again, it's funny that you should mention it (http://devster.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=dev&action=display&thread=613).
You implied that Sonic's absence on the Amiga due to AGA's technical inferiority was a contributor to AGA's failure.
I didn't say anything about technical inferiority. I said that a game like Sonic 2 isn't possible on a stock Amiga 1200 as a reply to runequester's list of fallacious "You can't do X on Y" arguments, which doesn't mean to say that I think that the Amiga is inferor. There are things that can be done on the Amiga that the Mega Drive could only dream of. It was an odd move for Commodore, though, not to add features similar or even comparable to those of contemporary game consoles like the MD or the SNES, since most of their user base obviously wanted a machine to play games on.
I can honestly say I don't recall anyone saying: "If Amiga only had Sonic..." Doom, yes. Mario, maybe. Sonic, meh...It was a boring game
Your anecdotal recollection of the past doesn't mean anything in this discussion, and neither does your opinion of Sonic 2. The fact remains that Mega Drives/Genesis systems are still being produced, and Sonic 2 is almost always near the top in "all time best" charts along with Doom and some Mario games.
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IF only the Amiga had "blast processing" to go along with AGA :lol:
Sonic does suck though. Not much of a game there at all. Let's see how fast we can blow through a level, while trying to nab as many coins as possible. Yay. Yawn.
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I dont hate AGA. I hate that management delayed it so long that it wasnt competitive anymore by the time it came out. My 4000 is still my favorite Amiga alongside the 1000. I just wish the 4000 had come out instead of the 3000 which barely had any advantages in chipset over the 2500. The 3000+ would have been a much better machine to have out at that time to keep Amiga on top in capabilities.
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IF only the Amiga had "blast processing" to go along with AGA :lol:
Sonic does suck though. Not much of a game there at all. Let's see how fast we can blow through a level, while trying to nab as many coins as possible. Yay. Yawn.
Surely, you can come up with some better excuse to evade my actual point. Whether it sucks or not, I'm talking about Sonic not as a game, but as a technical display of things that stock 1200's can't do.
In my personal opinion, Sonic 2 is better than any game on the Amiga except maybe some of the Lucasfilm adventures. Not that it matters in this discussion, which, since the beginning, has been about technicalities. If it was about the general quality of games, we wouldn't even have a discussion; SNES, Mega Drive, TG-16, maybe even MSX would win hands down.
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Games like Kid Chaos and some of the stuff in Mr. Nutz (for 2 examples) show quite clearly that an aga machine would be capable of Sonic, especially being that theyre only ocs/ecs games and have similar speed scrolling with lots of parallax (more than sonic).
While conversions where often better for the megadrive, when the amiga was used properly it's a superior experience in my opinion. Movement is usually somewhat slicker in a well coded amiga game and sound is superior (you cant just judge sound on the number of audio channels, in nearly every other department the amigas sound wins hands down when compared to megadrive). Sword of Sodan was infinately better on the amiga for example,.. sprites had to be shrunk for the megadrive version due to technical restrictions,..... just one example of a decently made amiga game. As for being "crippled" by the amigas hardware, it's hardware is what it's hardware is. To get the best results out of it you have to program specifically for it, buch like any machine. Would you begrudge a megadrive game developer for using its sprites and other custom hardware ? It's hardly crippling and inflexible either,... the very nature of the amigas custom hardware makes it flexible and no-one can really say what it can and cant do due to that flexibility.
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(you cant just judge sound on the number of audio channels, in nearly every other department the amigas sound wins hands down when compared to megadrive).
I'm off for a long train ride in a few minutes, but I have some time to reply to this. In terms of musical ability on a system as limited in memory as a stock 1200, polyphony makes all the difference. The Megadrive sound is mostly synthesized by a couple of sound chips, and in no memory at all you can have a full and beautiful musical arrangement. The difference it makes musically should be evident from the difference in music quality between for example Sonic 2 and Kid Chaos, the latter being really horrible.
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Surely, you can come up with some better excuse to evade my actual point.
Nah, I wasn't trying to make an argument either way. Truth is, when it comes to arcade-type games, I've not seen too many examples where classic computer gaming outshines their console counterparts. Rarely, if ever happens. No need to go into all the 'why', 'if', 'ands' and 'buts', but I suspect it's a combination of what's already been spoken about: lazy programmers, bad ports and the fact that the hardware *is* different from consoles. Having your entire program dumped to ROM on a cartridge has its obvious advantages too. As far as Sonic having 10 channels of sound - whoopee. The sound out of a Genesis/Megadrive is heavily distorted and offends anyway. There's no denying though that being forced to choose either sound effects or music, is lame. I like what someone said a while back about Paula needing another channel or two. Would have been nice!
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Internet on board!
As far as Sonic having 10 channels of sound - whoopee. The sound out of a Genesis/Megadrive is heavily distorted and offends anyway. There's no denying though that being forced to choose either sound effects or music, is lame. I like what someone said a while back about Paula needing another channel or two. Would have been nice!
Yes, a few more channels on the Paula would have done it good, or a secondary soundchip, even just a simple PSG for sound effects.
As for the Mega Drive sound being heavily distorted, I think that this was a problem on some model 2 mega drives (as in dynamic distortion), but on the models that don't have this bug, the sound is excellent, and similar sound chips were used in professional grade Yamaha synthesizers like the FB-01 and the TX81z. While the Paula is definitely better at reproducing recorded sound (which I argue isn't priority #1 in action games), I'd argue that the YM2612 is more musically dynamic in a low-RAM setup like the A1200 or the Mega Drive. Amiga music often sounds stale and empty in comparison. I suggest you listen to this (http://freezedream.bandcamp.com/album/today), which was produced for and recorded from a Mega Drive, before you make any assumptions about its sound capabilities.
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I'm really surprised on how popular this thread is. It's been posted on really quick. I can hardly keep up with all the replies
Ditto... This thread reminds me why this site is so much effort :lol:
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moto
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I suggest you listen to this (http://freezedream.bandcamp.com/album/today), which was produced for and recorded from a Mega Drive, before you make any assumptions about its sound capabilities.
I'll have to give that a listen when I get home. Using a crippled PC at work here :(
BTW: I've owned several Model 1's, Model 2's and Model 3's throughout the years and am intimately familiar with how all of Sega's consoles sound. Currently have a model 2, 32X and CD unit (fugly combo if ever there was one). You're right about the 2 and 3 system though. Awful sound compared to the original! Video even took a slight dive too :(
Same with SID on the C64. C64c's SID sounds 'different' and to these ears, not always in the most flattering way.
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Considering Commodore's management, at least AGA came out of the door, with all its flaws...
But what was needed were AGA Amigas at more price points.
£399 - Amiga 1200
£599 - Amiga 1400 (28MHz '020, 2MB + 2MB, HD Floppy) "50% more for over twice the power!"
£799 - Amiga 2200 (28MHz '020, 2MB + 2MB, HD Floppy, External Case*)
... Amiga 4000 '030 ... Amiga 4000 '040
* The Amigas from 1992 onwards should have migrated to a small chassis (similar in size to the original PS2 for example) containing the hardware, and an external keyboard. The chassis would have had the motherboard and two 3.5" bays (two floppies or one floppy and a HD), and access for memory upgrades (SIMM slots) and trapdoor expansion.
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ignoring all PC related things... when the 1200/4000 came out,I had a 2000/030 with SCSI setup.
The 1200 setup was a severe downgrade despite AGA.
The 4000/040 setup was way to expensive for my then student budget.
.. and the 4000/030 a rather little upgrade where a graphic board would have gotten me much more.
Sad to say, I join the "to little, to late" club :/
Tom UK
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Well I know that now ;) How did they make games look so good with so few colours?!
color cycling is one of those techniques to achieve that. :)
Is that more to do with lazy coders not using AGA to its full potential, or was AGA really not much of an improvement?
I wonder that myself as well often enough..
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I'm a little surprised to hear that everybody has such trouble with the Genesis/Mega Drive - the sound on my model 2 is perfectly fine. Guess I just got lucky?
In any case, say what you want about whatever the console board does to it, but the Yamaha OPM is a damn fine chip. It's just a shame so few Genesis titles really utilized it to any significant portion of its potential.
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color cycling is one of those techniques to achieve that. :)
Plans for tomorrow: Re-play OCS games looking for colour cycling :)
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I now have time to answer this.
Games like Kid Chaos and some of the stuff in Mr. Nutz (for 2 examples) show quite clearly that an aga machine would be capable of Sonic, especially being that theyre only ocs/ecs games and have similar speed scrolling with lots of parallax (more than sonic).
..and animated backgrounds and foregrounds (not only by palette cycling), tons of animated pickups, 15 ring sprites bouncing around? Did you ever consider these technicalities when playing Sonic? Most of them are made possible with that humble CPU by using a tile-based graphics mode with 80 (?) discrete sprites.
While conversions where often better for the megadrive, when the amiga was used properly it's a superior experience in my opinion.
I respect your opinion but I think that it's biased. So is mine, probably, so let's stick to technicalities, shall we?
Movement is usually somewhat slicker in a well coded amiga game and sound is superior
Usually slicker? Most Mega Drive games run at full framerate AFAIK, just like Amiga games. If you're talking about character movement, I can only disagree with you and laugh.
Sword of Sodan was infinately better on the amiga for example,.. sprites had to be shrunk for the megadrive version due to technical restrictions,..... just one example of a decently made amiga game.
Wow, a single game port is better pulled off on the Amiga than on the Mega Drive... Just goes to prove your point, eh?
As for being "crippled" by the amigas hardware, it's hardware is what it's hardware is.
Did you bother reading the whole message? The Amiga displays 8 3-color sprites without help from the copper. I'm not saying that it's impossible to display more (or even particularly hard), but to quickly move around a lot of sprites on the screen requires either careful copper programming or fake BOB sprites, as far as I understand, which by comparison to the Mega Drive (where you have a whole bunch of colorful sprites, all with according x/y registers) is a lot of work (and in the case of BOBs, also CPU hogging). I'm not saying that the chipset is crippled, but developers are crippled by it if they try at more sprites. Time and effort spent simply putting things on the screen could be used to develop better games.
To get the best results out of it you have to program specifically for it, buch like any machine. Would you begrudge a megadrive game developer for using its sprites and other custom hardware ?
No, why would I? Of course you have to program according to the specifications of the machine, and in that regard, the Mega Drive is far superior when it comes to tile-based action games like Kid Chaos and Sonic.
It's hardly crippling and inflexible either,... the very nature of the amigas custom hardware makes it flexible and no-one can really say what it can and cant do due to that flexibility.
Again, I get the feeling that you didn't read most of what I wrote. I never said that the hardware is inflexible. I said that parallax scrolling layers, when pulled off on the Amiga at a decent enough speed to run a game engine on top, it's usually very inflexible (as evident from Kid Chaos, where it's just a very narrow repeating background pattern divided in vertical strips that scroll at different speed) I agree with you that OCS, ECS and AGA are all very flexible -- and that is their strength. The Mega Drive has very specific-purpose hardware which makes it better for scrolling tile-based games (which were quite a big share of the game market in the early 90s). AGA surpasses it in many other areas (for example you can have multiple transparent playfields simply by the bitplane paradigm, although you still have to copy a lot of data around to scroll them about), but for this type of game it's comparably awkward.
My original point -- you won't be able to port Sonic 2 to a stock A1200 -- can only be disproved in one way (and boy, do I hope someone does).
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Plans for tomorrow: Re-play OCS games looking for colour cycling :)
It's easy to spot :) The copper can change the color palette every scanline without keeping the CPU busy. It makes for beautiful gradients and quite flexible colors. I think Lionheart is the prime example, but the game itself is not so fun IMO. Had much more fun with Fire & Ice
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It's easy to spot :) The copper can change the color palette every scanline without keeping the CPU busy. It makes for beautiful gradients and quite flexible colors. I think Lionheart is the prime example, but the game itself is not so fun IMO. Had much more fun with Fire & Ice
That's not colour cycling in the normal meaning for computers.
The copper can make beautiful gradients, and certainly enhances Lionheart (which I found to be a good game myself). Fire and Ice had some neat copper effects too, the watery reflections at the bottom of the screen for example.
The Megadrive had very specific hardware to do 16 colour tiled graphics, where each tile can select its palette to allow for 64 colours total. Tile based graphics systems NEED sprites however. The Amiga did have BOBs and a Blitter, but I don't exactly know how many BOBs could be blitted per frame in, e.g., 32 colours.
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I'm pretty sure that's the "color cycling" Speelgoedmannetje was talking about, though.
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hey guys, lets keep it polite and friendly :)
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The Amiga did have BOBs and a Blitter, but I don't exactly know how many BOBs could be blitted per frame in, e.g., 32 colours.
It's pretty much a function of object size and number of planes versus the amount of blitter time available per frame. I don't have any specific numbers, though.
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It's pretty much a function of object size and number of planes versus the amount of blitter time available per frame. I don't have any specific numbers, though.
That's true - and restoring the background the BOB overwrote originally too, even if that is a faster block blit function.
The Megadrive's sprites (max 20 per scanline, although the hardware could manage 80 sprites) were up to 32x32 in size. Obviously AGA sprites were 64 pixels by anything, but in 16-colours you're limited to a mere 4 sprites on a scanline, requiring some software management to have more on a screen - not particularly stressful software, it was common on the C64 and so on to do this. AGA certainly could have benefited from more sprites, but at least there were BOBs.
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You know something I don't like all that eye candy either and now for the life of me I can't think why I run Workbench in 128 colours !!!
There is a reason but I just can't remember right now... this is my typical everyday Workbench... :)
(http://i995.photobucket.com/albums/af79/frankosamiga/Amiga%20Pics/WBGrab.jpg)
Workbench? 128 colors? humbug!
Ambient - truecolor
(http://www.morphos-team.net/screenshot_twozero.jpg)
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@ Iggy
Read the Post... I don't like silly eye candy... :)
To seen a hideous desktop like the one you posted I just switch on a MAC and say boak... :)
Ambient -truecolour !!! more like awe gawd my miggie now looks like any other crappy PC or MAC might as well gouge me eyes out... :)
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@ Iggy
Read the Post... I don't like silly eye candy... :)
To seen a hideous desktop like the one you posted I just switch on a MAC and say boak... :)
Ambient -truecolour !!! more like awe gawd my miggie now looks like any other crappy PC or MAC might as well gouge me eyes out... :)
I LOVE eye candy! I want a display that doesn't make me long for a crappy PC or Mac (yes I know I'm using a Mac, but NOT OSX).
BTW Franko, you're still using a Mac for internet access aren't you? Do you turn you displays down to 256 color when browsing (God that would look awful).
As NG hardware becomes more powerful and our emulation of your hardware is perfected you're not going to have much of an excuse to claim you want to keep those crappy workbench screens. Soon it should be possible to emulate all hardware (even that crappy AGA stuff).
Hell, if I was using an Amiga, I wouldn't be relying on AGA , I'd have an RTG card. And I wouldn't boot into one of those ugly Workbench screens. Even without a PPC you can run Scalos,. Workbench, AGA? F'ing ugly man.
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@ Iggy
OK so you love eye candy, you have my sympathies...;)
Dunno what you mean by "As NG hardware becomes more powerful and our emulation of your hardware" !!!
Do you actually make the hardware & write the emulators ???
I don't need an excuse, I wouldn't run an Amiga emulator if it were the last option left to me, simple as... :)
AGA may be crappy to to and your entitled to your opinion, just as I am entitled to my opinion that you don't have gibber some keech...;)
And as your not using an Amiga, your opinion doesn't count with me... :)
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@ Iggy
OK so you love eye candy, you have my sympathies...;)
Dunno what you mean by "As NG hardware becomes more powerful and our emulation of your hardware" !!!
Do you actually make the hardware & write the emulators ???
I don't need an excuse, I wouldn't run an Amiga emulator if it were the last option left to me, simple as... :)
AGA may be crappy to to and your entitled to your opinion, just as I am entitled to my opinion that you don't have gibber some keech...;)
And as your not using an Amiga, your opinion doesn't count with me... :)
You wound me more deeply than you realize Franko. In my time here interacting with you all I've found your posts valid, provacative and often damned amusing.
And I would never dismiss your approach to Amiga computing. But When I use a MAC, it isn't under OSX. And I believe we could broaden the narrow concepts of what so many of you think an Amiga is.
Even at this late date, I believe we have a chance of not just retaining our legacy systems, but introducing newer improved system decended/imspired by our favorite computer.
I don't care if you don't think my approach is valid. AROS, AOS4, and MorphOS supporter are the last line of defense in keeping the Amiga community under user control. Do I create emulators, dude up until a few months ago I was designing a new PPC motherboard (my area has always been hardware).
You all can cling to your misperception that only your aged legacy hardware is a valid base for an Amigan. But if your side wins, one day most people may associate Amiga with something sold by Barry Altman.
I can run most of your software now, I believe I will be able to run all of it soon, and I can run software your legacy hardware is incapable of running.
Why would you dismiss my approach to Amiga computing when you rely on a Mac running OSX to access the internet? At least when I access the internet I'm using OWB like any other self respecting Amigan.
And don't patronise me our attempt to diminsh my technical experience. My company was selling multi-user 68K based systems (that started with four users on the BASE system) for only $9999 when then Amiga4000s (supporting only one user) were selling for 3 times as much. And our systems could be equipped with standard vga cards, PC keyboards, and mice to support a additional user with a GUI ported to our hardware by Steve Adams (who had originally created it for Gespac).
I turn 50 at the end of this months. I owned all the original issues of Creative Computing (you know, back when they were advertising the Apple I). And my first system was a SWTPC computer. My expereience predates PCs and Amigas. I was one of the truly devoted Motorola processor fanatics and I am as disappointed as ANYONE on this site that we did not win that battle.
You guys keep playing with your toys.
I want something that continues to evolve (and yes I CAN help create it).
Take care,Jim.
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Whether I wound you or not is not my fault, sorry but when someone disses the Amiga like you have being doing here the I shall certainly voice my opinion as to how I feel about such views.
OK so you developed or have developed hardware, you miss the point entirely here, the original question asked by the thread starter was "Am I the only one who doesn't hate AGA" it was not asking about what your opinion was of everything that is wrong with AGA, that's in the other thread someone started.
I don't dismiss your approach to things, I do dismiss however your opinions on Amiga hardware and what has me using a Mac to be on the internet anything to do with my use of an Amiga. I've lived perfectly happily since 1982 using Commodore computers and until June of this year never being on the internet. Soon enough I shall be going back to living that way, so that should cheer you up at least.
I wasn't patronising you, I know next to nothing about you I was simply asking you a question which you have now answered, thank you.
What has being 3 years older than me go to do with things !. I'll keep using my Amigas which are far from being just toys but again it begs the question if you hate so much about the Amiga and all it's shortcomings and now consider it as nothing more than a mere toy then why the hell do you bother with it so much.
You go ahead and help create the next Amiga and best of luck to you, but from the new thread you've just started it won't be much of an Amiga if you have your way especially when you say "by eliminating some backward compatibility". The X1000 and the stuff Commodore USA are doing have that corner of the market covered allready.
Sorry you hold the Amiga in such low regard but to me it's been the best home computer I've had the honour and joy of using and always will be until the day I shuffle off this mortal coil, but then that's just me and the way I like things... :)
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Whether I wound you or not is not my fault, sorry but when someone disses the Amiga like you have being doing here the I shall certainly voice my opinion as to how I feel about such views.
OK so you developed or have developed hardware, you miss the point entirely here, the original question asked by the thread starter was "Am I the only one who doesn't hate AGA" it was not asking about what your opinion was of everything that is wrong with AGA, that's in the other thread someone started.
I don't dismiss your approach to things, I do dismiss however your opinions on Amiga hardware and what has me using a Mac to be on the internet anything to do with my use of an Amiga. I've lived perfectly happily since 1982 using Commodore computers and until June of this year never being on the internet. Soon enough I shall be going back to living that way, so that should cheer you up at least.
I wasn't patronising you, I know next to nothing about you I was simply asking you a question which you have now answered, thank you.
What has being 3 years older than me go to do with things !. I'll keep using my Amigas which are far from being just toys but again it begs the question if you hate so much about the Amiga and all it's shortcomings and now consider it as nothing more than a mere toy then why the hell do you bother with it so much.
You go ahead and help create the next Amiga and best of luck to you, but from the new thread you've just started it won't be much of an Amiga if you have your way especially when you say "by eliminating some backward compatibility". The X1000 and the stuff Commodore USA are doing have that corner of the market covered allready.
Sorry you hold the Amiga in such low regard but to me it's been the best home computer I've had the honour and joy of using and always will be until the day I shuffle off this mortal coil, but then that's just me and the way I like things... :)
One of the things I learned in college was an important principle in scientific analysis - never make a false assumption.
I in no way hold the Amiga in low regard. I think it was one of the most creative, groundbreaking systems ever introduced, I just think that the development/evolution of the system was clearly botched.
AGA looks better, but its horrifiying to program and wasn't nearly enough of an improvement.
And I've answered your question, I don't hate AGA, I just wish that the next evolution in Amiga hardware had made the kind of drastic improvement the original Lorraine made (over every other computer).
Nope, don't hate it, just disappointed by it.
And again, your use of a Mac? Didn't you refer to them as 'crappy'? At least my Mac is running an Amiga compatible OS.
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Firstly, it seems some of you need to brush up on your amiga hardware. "Color" cycling was occasionally used, but it rarely had anything to do with why ocs/ecs games could look so colorful. They look colorful, because sometimes they are. It's entirely possible to have 200-ish colors on the amiga when using only 4 bitplanes, and I dont just mean copper gradients either. You can change register values multiple times duting frames if a person choses to. as for sprite hardware, you can also multiplex hardware sprites, making it effectively possible to have dozens of 64 pixel wide sprites simultaneously. The only restriction there that's not easy to over come is that per scanline youre limited to "sprite channels x pixel width" (ie, 64x4 for 16 color hardware sprites (256 pixels), or 8x64 for 4 color psrites). You can however have multiple sprites within that total width. This is just hardware sprites however, bobs of course are unlimited (memory aside).
Perhaps a little ironcally a week ago I mighnt have argued a megadrive vs aga point, but after getting a megadrive and 15 games for Christmas I found myself a little surprised at the lack of quality in a lot of the titles. Golden Axe for example is much better on the Amiga, both to look at, and in terms of movement.
At the end of the day I enjoy both machines, but Ive yet to see anything on the megadrive that AGA couldnt do, while the reverse isnt true.
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And again, your use of a Mac? Didn't you refer to them as 'crappy'? At least my Mac is running an Amiga compatible OS.
Dunno what your fascination is with me using a MAC is (must be a fetish or something...) however yes I do consider them as "crappy" in fact I'd go as far to say they are almost as bad as a PC and that coming from me is as low as I can call something... :)
Ooooh, na na na na na says Iggy "At least my Macs is running an Amiga compatible OS"...
well my haggis could duff up your haggis with it's three legs tied behind its back... so there... :p
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LOL, Franko. ;)
I'll set Horace the Cheese on the lot ov yer inaminit.
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In regards to the whole Ambient using true color gfx vs aga,... jeez ppl, grow the heck up. Of course a machine running hardware literally hundreds of times faster and with a gfx bandwidth difference just as extreme is going to be capable of nicer results. And on the other side of the coin a mac or pc isnt crap,.... they both do the same thing as a classic amiga, and these days not in too dissimilar ways, only that modern gear is so much more powerful that its silly. Just because your mac is crap running mac os doesnt mean the machine itself is crap. AROS installed on an industry standard pc suddenly gains character when AROS is installed on it. In fact it feels *very* much like a more powerful amiga system.
There's something wrong in the world when Im marvling at immaturity/stupidity. Iggy, disguise it all you like, you instigated this with your comparison screenshot,... it wasn't "innocent" as you may like to pretend,... it was yet another episode in your unending need to tell people how great mos is and that you have a 1.8ghz sonnet card (which incidently I couldnt be bragging about,... if people wanted to they could laugh at that weak a system much in the same way you mock weaker systems (I mean really,... its what,... 1/4 of the power at best of a new $50 cpu?). Franko, youre no better here with you insults of things you dont like, or havent even used if what you proudly claim regularly is true.
Seriously, its conversations like you 2 are having that make me wonder why Im here..... sure, disagree about things, no problem, but this whole head in the sand/pretend innocence/etc. type thing is infuriating. Ever thought of just enjoying your systems rather than having a big dick contest that you'll both lose violently in the world of computing outside of "amiga"?
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(http://i995.photobucket.com/albums/af79/frankosamiga/Amiga%20Pics/WBGrab.jpg)
I'm digging those icons and fonts.
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(By comparison, look at modern graphics cards. You can buy the super-duper latest card for £600, or the 'ultra cut down version, don't bother cos it'll be slower than what you already have' for £100 - the only problem with AGA is that we were only given a cost-saving version, not the super duper version.)
Oh, don't worry about this: when AGA came out, game publishers still targeted to 1 MB expanded A500 models, thinking this way they could reach the widest possible audience for the Amiga version of their games. So we may have gotten two version of the AGA chips, but games would have barely used them, throwing away any need for an upgrade.
Then, at the end of the 80s and beginning of 90s the "power of the GPU" was a total nonsense: it didn't exist, since you measured the power of a graphic chip by the widest available video mode. You could do 1600x1200? Well! You were more powerful than the one that did 1280x1024 only! And don't forget the Amiga architecture in general was years above the PC one, that started improving only when it found a way to keep backward compatibility with older software, virtualizing where virtualizable (and this process started with Windows 95, much more before than actual virtual machines existed). A faster AGA wuould have been just a faster blitter/copper thing, but nothing revolutionary as, for instance, the first 3dfx VooDoo chip was.
After all these years, I am quite disappointed by this AGA lovers/haters debate, since at the time we were all of the idea that hardware should have been used at 100% of their potential or even more, like some magic demo coders did on the C64 and the original Amiga models. It's good someone noticed we were wrong but please, stop this nonsense because it's ridiculous.
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yeah, our first PC was 1500 dollars, and was shite. A proper "gaming PC" was easily 2000 or more. This was very late 90's
I don't recall spending $1500 for Intel Celeron-A (Mendocino) + LuckyTech P6ZX3 (Intel 440ZX) + NVIDIA TNT2 M64 in the late 90s.
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It always amazes me when people look at a 1200 with an 030 running Doom, and blame AGA for it being pokey, when the same game running on a PC needed a 486 to actually move at a decent clip.
Same deal for stuff like Wing Commander really. People ran it on their 486 with tons of RAM, and then complained that the amiga 500 ran it slow.
Really ?
Doom runs fine on 386DX33 with on-motherboard L2 cache and full 32bit bus.
Doom running on 386SX33 with 16bit bus http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vETjEH0Vo9I
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Ruff 'n Tumble runs awesome here on my OCS Amiga :)
As well as Lionheart, Elfmania, Jim Power and Fighting Spirit.
That's why AGA feels a bit like a let-down, the best looking Amiga games are all OCS original.
There's one very valid pro-aga point however, Doom needed a lot of megaherzes and megabytes, also on the pc (or a 3d accellerated chipset like on the Playstation and Atari Jaguar).
I remember that Doom didn't run smoothly on a friends' 486 66mhz with 4mb memory. Neither did it run smooth on my 486 33mhz with 8mb. It was all choppy and I have tweaked alot in my bios and config.sys/autoexec.bat to enable it to run that tiny bit faster (to a point that the whole system seriously crashed). I don't know whether it even ran at all on a 386.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76Mq-CtYB3s
Doom 1 running full screen and smooth on 486 based laptop.
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One of the things I learned in college was an important principle in scientific analysis - never make a false assumption.
I in no way hold the Amiga in low regard. I think it was one of the most creative, groundbreaking systems ever introduced, I just think that the development/evolution of the system was clearly botched.
AGA looks better, but its horrifiying to program and wasn't nearly enough of an improvement.
And I've answered your question, I don't hate AGA, I just wish that the next evolution in Amiga hardware had made the kind of drastic improvement the original Lorraine made (over every other computer).
Nope, don't hate it, just disappointed by it.
And again, your use of a Mac? Didn't you refer to them as 'crappy'? At least my Mac is running an Amiga compatible OS.
http://emumiga.com/
A project that makes AROS X86 runs 68K Amiga programs transparently.
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I really don't understand why people are getting so angry about this.
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moto
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The problem with AGA was the needs of many users changed, and it wasn't just games. Web browsing became graphics heavy and we needed larger screens with thousands of colors to view web pages as intended at decent speed and without scrolling all the time, people wanted to use 24 bit image processors and 3D renderers with windowing environments. There were 24 bit boards before AGA came out for such reasons, but when I bought my A1200, i wasn't in to that software and couldn't afford the hardware-either on PC, MAc or Amiga. The A1200 let me upgrade as and when I could.
Looking back on it though I now realise my A1200 was never designed to run the software I now wanted to run. But the software that was designed for it, ran well: On a multiscan mnonitor, Workbench in 8 colors and DBLPAL overscan is a good approximation to 800x600 and very nippy, DPaint 5 and Brilliance 2 run great in DBLPAL modes in upto 256 colors, wordprocesssing/DTP is fine in 8-64 colors, Scala, CanDo, Amigavision are fine for AGA multimedia. But I now had Cinema 4D, ImageFx, Photogenics 5, Art Effect, Ibrowse, Mac emulators: all of these were transformed by my Cybervision board.
I tried to hang on to AGA on an A1200 for as long as I could and used umpteen patches to speed things along-and it frustrated me no end that I couldn't use my software to its full potential because of AGA's limitations.
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I really don't understand why people are getting so angry about this.
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moto
Me either.
Maybe it's because it's soooo cold in the northern hemisphere at the moment I guess they're trying to stay warm....
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Me either.
Maybe it's because it's soooo cold in the northern hemisphere at the moment I guess they're trying to stay warm....
I'm in the northern hemisphere too :)
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http://emumiga.com/
A project that makes AROS X86 runs 68K Amiga programs transparently.
Yeah! I am so digging this idea. The whole NG vs legacy arguement is damned silly. We already have really fast systems that implement and expand on all AOS operations and the hold back crowd still uses the "I don't want it if it won't run 100% of my software" or the "I'm waiting for the Natami because its a REAL Amiga not emulation" (yeah, right).
It will be very cool to see an NG system with all that wonderful eye candy, processing power, and modern features seemlessly run all the legacy software that everyone seems to think is so important.
If these guys don't watch out, CUSA hardware may wind up being every bit as Amiga as their own (and faster, more modern, cheaper, etc).
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@ fishy_fiz
Seriously, its conversations like you 2 are having that make me wonder why Im here.....
Don't worry I've been asking myself that same question for nearly 47 years now, the best answer I can come up with is, me dad obviously wasn't wearing a condom... :)
@ gertsy & motoroliin
It was early doors and I was still half asleep (I'd only woke up to go for a pee) when my big nose began twitching with an AGA dissing alert and me automatic defence reactions sprang to life... :)
Next thing you know two old codgers are battling it out in the latest episode of Grandad Wars - The Battle For AGA, and the result is the bloody battlefield of half chewed posts you see scattered here all over the org... :)
(PS:I'm in neither hemisphere... I'm currently floating gently in the upper stratosphere... :afro:)
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I have to apologize myself for formenting such strong contentions.
As I explained simply to Franko, its the Irish in me.
I like AGA, but I wanted us to rule the world! Oh, better go take the medication.
Jim
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Doom runs fine on 386DX33 with on-motherboard L2 cache and full 32bit bus.
Doom running on 386SX33 with 16bit bus http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vETjEH0Vo9I
There's obviously different definitions of "runs fine" in use here.
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I don't recall spending $1500 for Intel Celeron-A (Mendocino) + LuckyTech P6ZX3 (Intel 440ZX) + NVIDIA TNT2 M64 in the late 90s.
Well, you're down under, and I grew up in Denmark. Prices were likely rather different.
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So this thread has appeared again! it's been a few years since the last one :)
My answer is the same as then, AGA was cool but slow. I think we can blame the later commodore management for that, we all know by now what Haynie and crew wanted in there.
Even so, for viewing pictures, creating 2d artwork, and viewing 3d renders- it was cool, hundreds of thousands of colours in high rez cool (for 1992). Just a shame they never got workbench running in HAM/8.
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So this thread has appeared again! it's been a few years since the last one :)
My answer is the same as then, AGA was cool but slow. I think we can blame the later commodore management for that, we all know by now what Haynie and crew wanted in there.
Even so, for viewing pictures, creating 2d artwork, and viewing 3d renders- it was cool, hundreds of thousands of colours in high rez cool (for 1992). Just a shame they never got workbench running in HAM/8.
Wasn't there even tools for converting jpg to HAM8, or did I imagine that?
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Robots aren't scary ;)
That's your opinion...
(http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:FMgJEWBjUDMsiM:http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/Components/Photo_StoryLevel/071108/071108-robobunny-hlarge-9a.jpg)<---- Robo Bunnies :nervous:
I will kindly disagree. (Franko, feel free to chime in here)
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My answer is the same as then, AGA was cool but slow.
AGA would be cool if AGA would be appeared in 1990.
In 1992, AGA was crap.
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I agree that something better should have appeared by in the A500+.
But would AGA have been seen as so bad if it had more processor power backing it up, more RAM, and more disk storage? These were also problems that (I think) the base A1200 had.