Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: Digiman on December 26, 2010, 04:00:04 PM
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Poll is for actual results :)
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Where's the option for "I like the chipset fine but hate the way it's damn near obligatory for new Amiga software?"
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Do you love everything about AGA chipset 100% without exception?
Yes, because it was what it was. Sure, I would have loved to see AAA too but then it wouldn't have been AGA. It would have been something new and would not have been AGA. Time ran out for Commodore - it's just a shame. As far as where the game market was heading back in the early days of VGA (in USA), I blame Ken and Roberta Williams for flooding the market. And their early games where for sh$t at first. 4 color CGA, 16 color EGA where quit costly even though they cought up quickly with remakes. But, you had to continually fork out more and more money for the updated versions of their games. And I have a ton of these boxed games just sitting on the shelves now. That's where AGA turned out to be the better value in hindsight. You bought it once! Although APOGEE had great free games at the time. Amiga had great productivity apps that COULD compete with MS Word/Excel, which is what I needed at the time, but just couldn't afford both an Amiga and a PC. And then Windows 95 came along..... Arg! I don't even have a big box PC (except my DOS box and my laptop) in the house anymore - since about 2005. Just 2 PPC Mac Mini's. Since about 200? I have less $$$ into my Amigas than I ever spent on PC hardware and software though - but that's getting into the Amiga scene very late - and...... loving it! The only thing I even NEED Windows for these days anyway is IE/Word/Excel/Frontpage and Paint Shop Pro. I wouldn't spend a dime on new games for the PC today. Never happen. I can amuse myself in the greatest way with OCS/ECS/AGA games of the past!
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Because I want to know if anyone who owns a CD32/A1200/4000 and can find no fault with AGA chipset upgrade ;)
For me the dual playfield kludge and single Paula chip was a let down, the rest was OK really as I was not writing games so couldn't comment on speed of blitting etc.
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The question is ludicrously weighted. There aren't many (inanimate) things you can honestly say you "love 100% without exception".
AGA was cool, but there are things about it I don't like. Lack of direct support for chunky pixels in 8-bit mode and a faster blitter. Between them they would have gone a long way to improving the machines capability out of the box.
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@gizmo - my only horror was that despite the upgrade we would still get no real parallax games like in arcades or consoles costing 1/3 of a stock A1200 and still not enough sound channels for most games to have music and sound effects. Superficially the rest was fine really at the time. ALL PC games were 256 colour by 1991 (look through by year on Home of the Underdogs website) so for PC users 256 colours was normal and so they got SF2 and Mortal Kombat in better quality than us even on 386 machines.
Add to that the games for consoles were programmed properly and used source graphics/sound files but Amiga games didn't you knew it was kind of doomed as a games machine like in the A500 days.
Not that it stopped me going out and buying one of the very first C= A1200s in the shops for £400 in 1992 with no freebies...just a mouse and PSU and Workbench disks :) I spent 50/50 on creative/gamesplaying tasks anyway.
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AGA is what the 3000 should have shipped with along with a 32 bit bus.
The 1200/4000/CD32 should have been AAA.
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I liked the graphics, but I'd have liked a bit better sound chip.
In the end though, it wasn't so bad, as we discussed in the other thread. Yeah, a PC with VGA, a sound blaster and a fast 486 processor could outperform the miggy, but the cost was ridiculous unless you were loaded or had rich parents.
So could a 3000 dollar machine outperform a 500 dollar machine? Certainly.
The amazing thing is that it didn't always do so :)
VGA was great for games without a ton of movement (adventure games f.x.) but scrolling could be pretty wretched.
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The question is ludicrously weighted. There aren't many (inanimate) things you can honestly say you "love 100% without exception".
AGA was cool, but there are things about it I don't like. Lack of direct support for chunky pixels in 8-bit mode and a faster blitter. Between them they would have gone a long way to improving the machines capability out of the box.
There are some people who are totally happy with the specifications of AGA. From a creative side I was split...still 8bit sound and still only 4 channels BUT HAM8 in super hi-res was awesome and animation speed was fine for low-res 256 colour etc.
Ditto with games, was fine with most things except the sound being identical (two Paula chips..hello??) and also they never addressed one of Amiga's weakest points...proper full colour parallax scrolling.
A faster blitter would have helped the parallax side, and using dual Paula chips the sound aspect. 8bit sound was fine. But outside of FPS games from 94 onwards like Doom it's not really a big issue not having chunky pixel mode.
I understand why they did it, and given my favourite Amiga game of all time is only possible on AGA I am split 50/50. There still is no better update to Asteroids, free or commercial, than Super Stardust AGA....a game which is a complete nightmare to actually get working properly on a DOS PC which still needs 100x the CPU speed to do any justice too!
btw I love my car 100%, there is nothing about my car I think is out of place or missing a feature and it is an improvement in every way from the previous model (which I am a big fan of too!) so as an analogy it does kind of work.
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I understand why they did it, and given my favourite Amiga game of all time is only possible on AGA I am split 50/50. There still is no better update to Asteroids, free or commercial, than Super Stardust AGA....a game which is a complete nightmare to actually get working properly on a DOS PC which still needs 100x the CPU speed to do any justice too!
It's still hard for me to believe that super stardust would run on as little hardware as it did, on the amiga side :)
btw I love my car 100%, there is nothing about my car I think is out of place or missing a feature and it is an improvement in every way from the previous model (which I am a big fan of too!) so as an analogy it does kind of work.
what car is that, just out of curiosity? :)
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But outside of FPS games from 94 onwards like Doom it's not really a big issue not having chunky pixel mode.
Any application in which pixels are individually calculated would benefit, including the vast majority of multiformat video playback software.
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Any application in which pixels are individually calculated would benefit, including the vast majority of multiformat video playback software.
Aren't we quite past the early 90s at that point though?
Not being snarky, but I have a hard time remembering anyone really doing video playback until mid to late 90's.
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I liked the graphics, but I'd have liked a bit better sound chip.
In the end though, it wasn't so bad, as we discussed in the other thread. Yeah, a PC with VGA, a sound blaster and a fast 486 processor could outperform the miggy, but the cost was ridiculous unless you were loaded or had rich parents.
So could a 3000 dollar machine outperform a 500 dollar machine? Certainly.
The amazing thing is that it didn't always do so :)
VGA was great for games without a ton of movement (adventure games f.x.) but scrolling could be pretty wretched.
I agree it wasn't so bad, if the still-born A1400/A1800 prototype from 93 wasn't booted for the CD32 project it would have been fine even in 94. 28mhz, fast and chip ram and a CD-ROM as standard in an Amiga 3000 type case for £600 would have been snapped up. Nobody in EU for home purchases cared about Windows then so it didn't have to be less than a PC, same cost would be fine if the software companies pulled their thumb out and wrote some proper Amiga specific code.
I remember paying out £999 for a 486 25mhz PC with SVGA but no sound card in late 1992 and £100-150 of that is for a monitor on PCs remember. But this machine ran Actua Soccer,Doom, SF2 and Screamer Rally really quite nicely in 320x200 mode, and would be £300 less than an A4000/030 by late 93 or earlier. The problem was A1200 to A4000/030 was too large a gap and CD32 a waste of time so we never ever got Amiga games companies exploring these type of games and so no FPS/3D driving/3D soccer/256 colour arcade speed beatem ups.
This isn't really a problem with AGA though, it's bad strategy from Commodore related to CPU performance in cheap home machine targeted models. People wanted what was the A1400 prototype, the price and performance was right for the time. With the lack of a real choice for home users between A1200 and OTT spec'd and priced A4000/030 the Amiga games design suffered badly and so we never got much innovation in 3D games or FPS fake 3D texture mapped games like Doom because there was no mass market machine. Sad thing is the 020 @ 28mhz was cheap enough and the 80386 not a very good chip so the window of opportunity was there all the time between A1200 launch and Commodore bankruptcy. And even 486 machines were stuck on an 11mhz 16bit bus via ISA too until Pentium machines with PCI were launched.
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I voted "yes" because as far as the original Amiga series went its the best that you could get. Yeah there are many shortcomings, things could have been done better, but it is what it is, And currently I don't own an AGA Machine, wish I still did. Looking forward to getting either an expanded A1200 or an A4000... but ultimately would rather have a Natami!!
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@gizmo - my only horror was that despite the upgrade we would still get no real parallax games like in arcades or consoles costing 1/3 of a stock A1200 and still not enough sound channels for most games to have music and sound effects. Superficially the rest was fine really at the time. ALL PC games were 256 colour by 1991 (look through by year on Home of the Underdogs website) so for PC users 256 colours was normal and so they got SF2 and Mortal Kombat in better quality than us even on 386 machines.
Add to that the games for consoles were programmed properly and used source graphics/sound files but Amiga games didn't you knew it was kind of doomed as a games machine like in the A500 days.
Not that it stopped me going out and buying one of the very first C= A1200s in the shops for £400 in 1992 with no freebies...just a mouse and PSU and Workbench disks :) I spent 50/50 on creative/gamesplaying tasks anyway.
Well, on the counterpoint, you couldn't be more correct. I wonder sometimes what game was THE BEST example of AGA. Just last night I discovered the game Flight of the Amazon Queen and loaded up both the DOS version in DOSBOX and the Amiga version UAE. The DOS version is a more complete game with speech. Very cool looking game. I'll probably play both versions through though. Consoles have really defined gaming for quit a while. I think 3D TV is really going to bring a whole new era of gaming. I gotta say that time is very convoluting to the memory. I have spent the last 20 years really concentrating on raising the kids and family life, constant school, and WORKING my A$$ off trying to secure a financial future (sheesh... still am - I gota tell ya, even though being born in 1956 has been a great time to be alive, financially I have gotten screwed in life by the markets time after time - but that point of view is left for an entirely different forum). I tend to forget when what certain technology came out in the computer world these days. I was into everything computer back in the day - except for Amiga - which I always wanted to play with. I remember looking for anything Amiga when eBay first came out (there was some great deals on Amiga back 15 years ago on eBay that I missed out on!) In the past 20 years, for me, it's been all about getting those MS certs, Enterprise IT, and networking - kinda lost track of everything fun. Enough about me!
Just messing around these days with Amiga is a lot of fun... never get time to spend on it though. I've had my Indivision AGA for a few months and still havn't done anything with it other than jam it in the 1200 and fire up an AGA game or two. So much to learn! I sometimes feel jealous of people that grew up with Amiga instead of the PC. Sorry, kind off track here!
I'm following where Netami is going though - might be a while till we actually get to buy it though. One nice thing about getting a little older is that I don't have to worry about getting my money back on every little dime I spend on computer toys. Sorry so long!
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Any application in which pixels are individually calculated would benefit, including the vast majority of multiformat video playback software.
What from 880kb floppy disks? :) 25FPS playback of 256 colour IFF anims is still possible from RAM I bet if all you are doing is blitting screens of 320x256 about the memory or changing the screen memory pointer. And with a 3.5" IDE drive probably still fine surely.
As games like Doom, Screamer Rally or Actua soccer are from the Pentium era of PCs then AGA stuck on the only mass market machine being a crippled* 14mhz 286 equivalent or the overpriced 4000/030 (outperformed by the 28mhz 020 Blizzard 1220 equiped A1200s) we were screwed anyway regardless of if you have chunky pixels or not. Doom plays fine full screen on a 486/33 with ISA graphics AKA 8 or 11mhz 16bit bus.
Amiga needed sales, sales = good games, good games of the time of A1200 launch were 256 colour true multi-layered parallax 2D games with plenty of sound channels from Sega and Nintendo. We only had the 256 colour graphics bit, so 66.666% fail then clearly. And we also had 90% pathetic programming making up our games and sometimes only 16 colours thanks to greedy software houses doing the dirty and porting to the Atari ST first and compromising the design.
*(no fast ram = 50% CPU speed potential)
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If I were to decide changes for the AGA chipset, I would have added a chunky 8-bit graphics mode like VGA mode 13h and tile/layer based modes like for video game consoles. I would also have wished for more sprites or a faster blitter, and an additional soundchip like OPL or any OPx for music and general MIDI compatability. In 1992 this would have given it an edge over PCs I think.
Of course, I don't know much about time/price constraints at the time, and I know little about the Amiga hardware design to be able to tell if such changes would be possible while retaining backwards compatibility.
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Voted no, because there are some things I don't like. Overall I think AGA is fine.
Like:
1) HAM8 and 256 colors.
2) Can display all color modes in all resolutions.
3) Has a relatively high max resolution: 1440x566 15 Khz, interlaced.
4) Can output 31 Khz video signals.
5) 64 pixel wide sprites.
6) Sprites can be any resolution.
7) Sprites can use all of the 256 available palette colors (using banks).
8) 32 bit chipmem.
9) Still has planar graphics modes.
Dislike:
1) 31 Khz modes are somewhat quirky, and best results are obtained with programs such as MonSpecsMUI (or MonEd and MonitorKiller).
2) No super hires in 31 Khz modes.
3) Chipmem is faster because of 32 bit access, but it's still not fast enough.
4) Chipmem should have been at least four megabytes if possible without breaking backward compatibility.
5) Still limited to eight sprites per scan line.
6) Blitter should have been improved.
7) Only planar modes are available, should have had chunky modes added.
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gezz your not still bvanging on about aga chipset gezz talk about silly remember the days way back get over it
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Let's put things into perspective here.
I remember a family member paid good money for a 286 with 1 Mb RAM, VGA, and no sound card back in '93. There were 486 systems available, but those cost a fortune. The A1200 was certainly more capable than that sorry old Olivetti; it had twice the RAM, a real sound system, PCMCIA instead of the PC's ISA, and a 32-bit CPU running at a higher clock speed.
From a consumer point of view, the A1200 wasn't really a bad choice.
Personally, I stuck with the '600 as my main computer until 1998, and never bought an AGA machine until I bought one as a retro system a few years back. ^^
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Don't understand why anyones got to compare the Amiga or AGA to anything else, seems kinda pointless moaning about AGA and comparing it to VGA and the like. The Amiga range is what it is nothing more nothing less... :)
Having owned just about every model at one point in time I can only say they were all good in their own way and I ended up sticking with A1200s cos I liked them the best mainly thanks to AGA. I've never actually looked at a PC or MAC with whatever kind of display it uses and thought "I wish the Amiga could do that"... :)
Why can't folk just accept the miggie for what it was and still is, something that's just a wee bit different from the rest of the crowd and simply make the best of what we were given by the late great Jay Miner & Hi-Toro... :)
(ok... who's nicked me medal...again... :()
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Let's put things into perspective here.
I remember a family member paid good money for a 286 with 1 Mb RAM, VGA, and no sound card back in '93. There were 486 systems available, but those cost a fortune. The A1200 was certainly more capable than that sorry old Olivetti; it had twice the RAM, a real sound system, PCMCIA instead of the PC's ISA, and a 32-bit CPU running at a higher clock speed.
From a consumer point of view, the A1200 wasn't really a bad choice.
Personally, I stuck with the '600 as my main computer until 1998, and never bought an AGA machine until I bought one as a retro system a few years back. ^^
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1987 - Everex 286 (no HDD) about $1000.00 - Seagate 20MB HDD - $250.00 + VGA Card - $250.00 (sold it for $900).
1991 - Treasure Chest 486SX system with 60MB HDD (out of Texas) - About $750 (still have it - I updated the MB and Processor 486/100MHz sometime later for about $150.00
2001 - Bought one other P4 PC (Sony - 2GB PC2700 ram - what a POS) - About $800 - sold it for $300.00
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Don't understand why anyones got to compare the Amiga or AGA to anything else, seems kinda pointless moaning about AGA and comparing it to VGA and the like. The Amiga range is what it is nothing more nothing less... :)
Having owned just about every model at one point in time I can only say they were all good in their own way and I ended up sticking with A1200s cos I liked them the best mainly thanks to AGA. I've never actually looked at a PC or MAC with whatever kind of display it uses and thought "I wish the Amiga could do that"... :)
Why can't folk just accept the miggie for what it was and still is, something that's just a wee bit different from the rest of the crowd and simply make the best of what we were given by the late great Jay Miner & Hi-Toro... :)
(ok... who's nicked me medal...again... :()
We do it because we're a bunch of sad and bitter tards who can't let go and accept that the World kept spinning the last 15 years. ;)
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We do it because we're a bunch of sad and bitter tards who can't let go and accept that the World kept spinning the last 15 years. ;)
Absolutely. Maybe Ace of Base will put out a new album soon too :)
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We do it because we're a bunch of sad and bitter tards who can't let go and accept that the World kept spinning the last 15 years. ;)
Thought as much... :)
Count me in with that group then cos it sure as hell passes the time a bit quicker, gawd 15 years eh... don't time fly when you've got somthing to moan about... :lol:
Now pass the big wooden spoon along to the next in line... ;)
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I purchased my 4mb 486 25mhz SVGA machine plus 1024x768 monitor for £1000 in Sept-Oct 1992 with my first grant check. There was no sound card true but playing F1GP on it was as fast as you can play it on an A4000/040 costing £2000 at the time right?
But that's just down to CPU mostly, never played F1GP on a 16mhz 286 OR an A1200 with Fast ram for a fair comparison to be honest so no idea how much chunky pixels make a difference. Also marketing suicide making the OTT 4000 with a crap 030 CPU card in it your next machine up from A1200.
As to the person asking why this thread again? I'm not really after changes/wish list/time machine. I am just curious how many people were happy with ALL aspects of the AGA upgrade over your previous Amiga (mine being an A2000 and an A1000 but A500 and A600 too).
So far it would seem, CPU speed issues aside, the actual areas people do have a problem with are.....
Identical sound to OCS
Identical blitter chip to OCS on a new 32bit bus
Identical planar arrangement of screen memory for all modes
Identical dual playfield mode (with 1 extra bit per field but same architecture)
I never really considered chunky pixel mode to be an issue for A1200 in 1992 because you were never going to get Doom games until Doom in 94 anyway, and had Commodore not tanked by April 94 then certainly Doom would still be impossible had they not released the A1400 (4x faster than A1200 as sold with 2mb chip ram) and stuck with the A1200 as we know it today.
This is why ESCOM went bankrupt. £400 for A1200 2mb 14mhz 020 running at effectively 7mhz speeds without Fast ram in 1995/96 was something only die hard fans would buy who missed out.
Like I said in 1992 there were no texture mapped games like Doom or Actua Soccer, only 2D stuff or solid 3D polygons like F1GP. And this is pretty much down to your CPU (always a thorn in Amiga's price/performance over PC) and hence nothing chunky pixel mode would have made a huge difference to.
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Chunky mode isn't just convenient for texture-mapped games, though. It's more convenient in pretty much anything when you're working with high bit-depth. Consider this: in planar mode, while operations like masking are quicker, drawing a blitter object requires (bits per pixel) number of identical blitter operations, one for each plane. Chunky mode doesn't reduce the the amount of data you have to move, but since each pixel is contained wholly in one chunk (one byte, in the typical case,) it can be done in one operation (well, minus the masking,) which drastically cuts down the overhead required for planar operations.
The only reason chunky mode was balky on the VGA was because there wasn't nearly as much hardware-assist as the Amiga had, and what there was was barely even documented until Michael Abrash (god among men) wrote about it - so for quite some time, nobody used it. Had an Amiga chipset been released that applied the same elegant DMA-oriented design philosophy to an 8bpp chunky mode, it would have blown the VGA completely out of the water.
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Why does Doom always come into the equation !!!
One of the crapiest games ever IMHO, but if your really want to see what can be done with an Amiga without RTG & this type of game then you really need look no further than Alien Breed 3D... :)
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Don't understand why anyones got to compare the Amiga or AGA to anything else, seems kinda pointless moaning about AGA and comparing it to VGA and the like. The Amiga range is what it is nothing more nothing less... :)
Having owned just about every model at one point in time I can only say they were all good in their own way and I ended up sticking with A1200s cos I liked them the best mainly thanks to AGA. I've never actually looked at a PC or MAC with whatever kind of display it uses and thought "I wish the Amiga could do that"... :)
Why can't folk just accept the miggie for what it was and still is, something that's just a wee bit different from the rest of the crowd and simply make the best of what we were given by the late great Jay Miner & Hi-Toro... :)
(ok... who's nicked me medal...again... :()
You are missing the point, Commodore ultimately tanked for two reasons...
AGA couldn't do some stuff a 1989 Megadrive, let alone a SNES, could do hence Amiga could no longer be king format for gamers. AGA was a plaster on the gaping wound that would ultimately lead to death of Commodore.
The other aspect is Commodore never gave you a fast processor. In the days of A1000 this was fine because Byte magazine rated the OCS chipset as similar to having a 50mhz 68000 computer so you didn't need much to beat a 286. But when AGA is a minor upgrade to OCS, and then people start wanting 3D games anyway never mind SNES quality sound/graphics on 2D Amiga game this lack of CPU speed AND average performing chipset hurt Amiga sales a lot.
My A1000 is the machine I will never sell, I have no problem selling anything else I own, and if I went bankrupt I would be sleeping on the streets with a boxed A1000 :roflmao:
But the point is as much of a fan as I am, I wonder if anyone else at the time it was for sale saw the 4000/030 as too expensive and AGA as just short of being enough of an upgrade. Is it just me who didn't get fleeced by all the bullshit claims and expectations in respected magazines? Even I knew that A1200 AGA flight sims would never look as good as those on 486 PCs despite the bullshit being peddled about AGA!
Badly programmed games I can do nothing about, that's something those company directors should hold their head in shame compared to the expertly programmed Japanese games on consoles using 100% of the machine's power.
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@ Digiman
The thing is your talking about the Amiga in terms of being nothing more than a games machine. I know a lot of folk see the Amiga this way but to me it was far from being a games console and comparing it against PCs of the time make no sense to me.
The Amiga for those who could be bothered to put their minds to it at the time was the only low cost viable solution for folk who wanted to create low cost videos and GFX and some even used it professionally for it's audio. I mean how many Amiga's did the Disney Studio's kit themselves out with or the Creators of Babylon 5 for example, if PCs at that point in time were really so good then why did the aforementioned examples choose Amiga... so if your gonna compare the Amiga to other PCs don't forget to include the good points too...:)
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But the point is as much of a fan as I am, I wonder if anyone else at the time it was for sale saw the 4000/030 as too expensive and AGA as just short of being enough of an upgrade. Is it just me who didn't get fleeced by all the bullshit claims and expectations in respected magazines? Even I knew that A1200 AGA flight sims would never look as good as those on 486 PCs despite the bullshit being peddled about AGA!
Badly programmed games I can do nothing about, that's something those company directors should hold their head in shame compared to the expertly programmed Japanese games on consoles using 100% of the machine's power.
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Yeah, ME! ;-)
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Why does Doom always come into the equation !!!
One of the crapiest games ever IMHO, but if your really want to see what can be done with an Amiga without RTG & this type of game then you really need look no further than Alien Breed 3D... :)
Doom is a game as perfectly suited to a 486 PC as Shadow of the Beast was to Amiga 1000 or A500. It's around the time of A1200/4000 that the tables were turned forever over Amiga/PC gaming superiority. At the time there wasn't a single Mac/PC money could buy that could do what SotB did in 1989 using off the shelf computers you could purchase.
It artificially aged Amiga instantly because if you couldn't run Doom as well on a £2000 Amiga 4000/040 as a £750 486 PC what does that say about the technology behind it?
I may not be a huge fan of Doom but it's 3D and that's all there is too it, 2D games were no longer sophisticated enough, everyone wanted more realistic games in 3D apparently
Because AGA took 8x as much messing about to colour 1 pixel on a screen as PC VGA cards AND Amiga CPUs like in the A1200 were slow you would never see a £750 Amiga in 1994 being able to play any 3D games like Doom full screen in 320x200 mode at 25-30 frames per second.
AB3D on a stock A1200 is going nowhere as far as speed of running the thing is compared to Doom on a 40mhz 386 PC which people were giving away to charity at the time thanks to how AGA worked.
The launch game Ridge Racer also did this on Playstation and shoved a rocket up the arse of PC gamers spending thousands on Pentium PCs. As did early 360 games for PC owners spending £450 just on a graphics card to play the same games as a £300 games console.
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@ Digiman
Guess you missed my other post while you were typing this one...;)
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Don't know why I stepped into this one. At least I have boots on....
Back when it came it came out, it was OK. BUT love it is a wee bit strong....
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Don't know why I stepped into this one. At least I have boots on....
Back when it came it came out, it was OK. BUT love it is a wee bit strong....
Who said that !!!
Not strong enough if you ask me... :)
If someone pointed a gun at my Amiga or the ex and made me choose, I'd have no hesitation in my decision... ;)
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As games like Doom, Screamer Rally or Actua soccer are from the Pentium era of PCs then AGA stuck on the only mass market machine being a crippled* 14mhz 286 equivalent or the overpriced 4000/030 (outperformed by the 28mhz 020 Blizzard 1220 equiped A1200s) we were screwed anyway regardless of if you have chunky pixels or not. Doom plays fine full screen on a 486/33 with ISA graphics AKA 8 or 11mhz 16bit bus.
Amiga needed sales, sales = good games, good games of the time of A1200 launch were 256 colour true multi-layered parallax 2D games with plenty of sound channels from Sega and Nintendo. We only had the 256 colour graphics bit, so 66.666% fail then clearly. And we also had 90% pathetic programming making up our games and sometimes only 16 colours thanks to greedy software houses doing the dirty and porting to the Atari ST first and compromising the design.
*(no fast ram = 50% CPU speed potential)
Amiga needed sales, but MOST Amiga users said "why can't I run a Doom clone on my 1.3 A500 with 512 meg and two floppies?" I'm no talking about the enthusiasts that inhabit boards like this, I'm talking about the other 90% of Amiga users who never upgraded that A500 and then moved on to their consoles and later PC's. IMO Amiga users did as much damage in preventing the advancement of Amiga hardware and software as poor management did.
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I enjoyed my A1200 immensely when I bought it. There should never have been a 7 or 8 bitplane mode in it though. They should have gone directly to chunky for 8-bit resolutions. Also, they should have added page-mode support to the blitter.
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This is why ESCOM went bankrupt. £400 for A1200 2mb 14mhz 020 running at effectively 7mhz speeds without Fast ram in 1995/96 was something only die hard fans would buy who missed out.
You give Amiga way too much credit, ESCOM did not fail due to Amiga.
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I like AGA for a couple of games that don't work with ECS/OCS, and 256 color Workbench is nice if you're not in a rush. At 1024x768 on an Indivision, 256 color mode was pretty nice.
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You give Amiga way too much credit, ESCOM did not fail due to Amiga.
I meant if this is their idea of good business strategy type comment.... :)
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@ Digiman
The thing is your talking about the Amiga in terms of being nothing more than a games machine. I know a lot of folk see the Amiga this way but to me it was far from being a games console and comparing it against PCs of the time make no sense to me.
The Amiga for those who could be bothered to put their minds to it at the time was the only low cost viable solution for folk who wanted to create low cost videos and GFX and some even used it professionally for it's audio. I mean how many Amiga's did the Disney Studio's kit themselves out with or the Creators of Babylon 5 for example, if PCs at that point in time were really so good then why did the aforementioned examples choose Amiga... so if your gonna compare the Amiga to other PCs don't forget to include the good points too...:)
Lightwave exists thanks to Newtek, and that is thanks to Digipaint/Digiview and A500/A1000 users like us who bought their stuff :)
But B5 was rendered using cheap but very powerful PC based render farms. CPU speed was always an issue on Amiga to compensate for cost of custom chips in the design.
I don't consider the Amiga a games only machine at all, from 1986 to today I spend a lot of time doodling in dpaint, messing about with samplers, digitising huge animation sequences to RAM (until my 9mb A2000 died that is) and making 'interesting' anim brushes. I don't do office based stuff because I do office based stuff at work all day and so not interested to learn another package. And I had used my A1000 to do such stuff not because it was cheaper but because it was better at it than PC or it was impossible on PC and I actually liked using Workbench too with it's swanky multitasking :)
Trouble is though that Amiga was judged on it's games by new comers, I bought an A1200 because I wanted to experience AGA for myself (not what reviewers thought it could do) but other people would look at a game and think "looks a bit cack compared to my SNES/Megadrive" and forget about it. We needed a game like Defender of the Crown or Marble Madness on the Amiga 1000 really. This wasn't really possible because whilst there were some good improvements to the OCS/ECS capabilities it wasn't anything amazing that would generate sales, and most games were badly programmed anyway.
And the whole "buy your upgrades off some other company and leave us alone" attitude by Commodore to A1200 really pissed me off. It was Commodore's job to sell me 28mhz or 56mhz 020 versions of A1200s at cost price and have Fast ram inside the motherboard as an option at the shop. But they make you buy a new circuitboard from a middleman just to get the full speed of my 14mhz 020 inside my A1200. 3rd party peripherals=extra profit for the middle man. Bad for us and bad for games as software houses only write 2mb 50% speed A1200 games because of it.
They should have made A1200 and A1200+ (28mhz 020 version) model from day one and BOTH should have been offered with fast ram in the box if you wanted it.
People don't like buying extras, and true high street sales would not be in places like Silica Shop they needed to be selling in High St electrical stores in Dixons with all the options there.
14 or 28mhz sir?
2mb or 4mb sir?
The memory should be fitted directly to a SIMM slot behind a panel like a laptop did at the time, and the hard drive should have been designed to be used exactly like a laptop connects to them, a slot behind a panel you just slide the hard drive into and put the lid back. This way we could get our stuff and upgrade it ourselves OR the shop can hold just the bare models and they purchase their own memory/HDDs and sell at RRP or less as they want. WIN :)
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And the whole "buy your upgrades off some other company and leave us alone" attitude by Commodore to A1200 really pissed me off.
Exactly. Out of touch. Out of mind. Not even a Gaucho by any standards!
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People don't like buying extras, )
PC users didn't seem to mind. Amiga user OTOH....
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Do you love everything about it without exception is kind of silly. What I dont like about it is how late it was. Should have been the chipset in the 3000/600 and my understanding reading the histories it should have been. That would have put Amiga on track for AAA in the 4000/1200. Instead Amiga sat on now anchient chipsets while the rest of the industry continued to advance.
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PC users didn't seem to mind. Amiga user OTOH....
PC User goes from 386 to Pentium PC and Lotus III or SF2 improves automatically with higher sample rate for sound/smoother scrolling/faster 3D/smoother gameplay. Cost of upgrade is worth it for serious and gaming software.
Amiga User buys Blizzard 040 card for same £500. Lotus III is still ropey as hell compared to Lotus II game engine and SF2 is still the 5th worst conversion of the arcade in the world.
And this is if the games even work with an 040 (a big issue for OCS/ECS games actually). I wouldn't buy an 030 EVER because the 030 is a waste of time and does bugger all an 020 can't do as far as games coding is concerned and MIPS integer type CPU grunt. I had no interest in ray tracing on Amiga ever so FPU was waste of time and MMU isn't used by KS/WB, and if I did it would be on Lightwave PC on a super fast pentium x PC etc which was cheaper than PPC based A4000s anyway.
Maybe now you understand why people didn't want to blow money on hardware costing more than their A1200 purchased new which would be worth a fraction of its cost as soon as they broke the seal on the packaging. (unless you waited 20 years later and sell it on ebay today in 2010 for a small profit :) )
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Do you love everything about it without exception is kind of silly. What I dont like about it is how late it was. Should have been the chipset in the 3000/600 and my understanding reading the histories it should have been. That would have put Amiga on track for AAA in the 4000/1200. Instead Amiga sat on now anchient chipsets while the rest of the industry continued to advance.
Dave Haynie himself said AAA was too expensive for too little performance. And he was right. Why make something unique in the thousands that people like Diamond were doing better and manufacturing in the millions for cheaper like the Diamond Viper VRAM Stealth 64bit graphics cards for PCs? AAA would break hardware compatibility and needed emulation to provide OCS/ECS/AGA compatibility hence the cost.
I think you mean Amiga AA+ chipset, which only existed on paper but would give fixes for all the problems/omissions of AGA like chunky mode, faster pixel clock, even faster blitting and 16bit 4 channel sound. Also facility to read 1.76mb HD floppies.
Amiga had got to the stage that Sony got to in this console generation, they caved in and bought an off the shelf GPU from Nvidia from PC graphics card technology. Commodore would have had to do the same and just optimise it with better motherboard design compared to PCs of 1992. (Which is why the xbox 360 for $200 out guns a $1000 PC even now...clever motherboard design).
And I love EVERY ASPECT of OCS chipset in my A1000, can't fault any of it for a 1985 computer so the question is 100% valid. I loved every aspect of my C64 and also my Playstation1 :)
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Why does Doom always come into the equation !!!
One of the crapiest games ever IMHO, but if your really want to see what can be done with an Amiga without RTG & this type of game then you really need look no further than Alien Breed 3D... :)
I second that Franko!!! Doom is by far the most overrated game ever. I absolutely can't stand that stupid sorry sack of crap game. I get sick of people constantly talking about it all the time. In fact, I hate almost every first person shooter game ever created (except for Max Payne).
Sorry, this has nothing to do with this thread...I'll shut up now.
Barney
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Max payne is not an FPS its a TPS
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I second that Franko!!! Doom is by far the most overrated game ever. I absolutely can't stand that stupid sorry sack of crap game. I get sick of people constantly talking about it all the time. In fact, I hate almost every first person shooter game ever created (except for Max Payne).
Sorry, this has nothing to do with this thread...I'll shut up now.
Barney
Not really off topic... while you and I might not like Doom as a game, it did show where computer graphics needed to go next. I didn't and don't like Doom, but I can think of hundreds of games where the game has been improved by graphical advances set in motion by Doom.
I imagine we would have found people 30 years ago complaining that the 2D graphics (of which the Amiga was the pinnacle) were overrated and took away from the true gaming of the text adventure.
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PC User goes from 386 to Pentium PC and Lotus III or SF2 improves automatically with higher sample rate for sound/smoother scrolling/faster 3D/smoother gameplay. Cost of upgrade is worth it for serious and gaming software.
AFAIK upgrading a 386 to pentium was not a simple drop in replacement of the CPU. Indeed all the 386 PC's I'd seen-mainly HP- had the CPU soldered to the MB. So I have doubts as to the cost of this upgrade being a cheap one as you imply. Pentium PC's were $3000 plus at the time. A lot of money, but PC users did pay it.
Amiga User buys Blizzard 040 card for same £500. Lotus III is still ropey as hell compared to Lotus II game engine and SF2 is still the 5th worst conversion of the arcade in the world.
Lotus 3 ran fine on my Apollo 68040. Blizzard 040's were RC units-recycled CPU's and I don't recall them being 500 pounds. The 1260 boards were about 500 pounds . You wouldn't buy a 68060 to run Lotus or Streetfighter to get a better frame rate. You'd buy it to run a lot of serious apps.
And this is if the games even work with an 040 (a big issue for OCS/ECS games actually). I wouldn't buy an 030 EVER because the 030 is a waste of time and does bugger all an 020 can't do as far as games coding is concerned and MIPS integer type CPU grunt.
A 40/50 mhz 68030 is significantly quicker than a 68020, and AFAIR lets you use more RAM. And the MMU did come in handy for emulation, and virtual memory (gigamem).
I had no interest in ray tracing on Amiga ever so FPU was waste of time and MMU isn't used by KS/WB, and if I did it would be on Lightwave PC on a super fast pentium x PC etc which was cheaper than PPC based A4000s anyway.
OK so a faster CPU wasn't for you. (BTW Lightwave for Amiga never got a PPC version, so comparing the price of a ppc board to run software that didn't exist doesn't make sense.)
Maybe now you understand why people didn't want to blow money on hardware costing more than their A1200 purchased new which would be worth a fraction of its cost as soon as they broke the seal on the packaging. (unless you waited 20 years later and sell it on ebay today in 2010 for a small profit :) )
Amiga hardware did not depreciate anywhere near as quickly as PC hardware. The hardware always had better re-sale than a PC. I upgraded to a Cobra 40 mhz 68030 for $299, used it for a 2 years, sold it for $250, then bought an Apollo 68040 for about $400. Later added a CDROM, multiscan monitor. And with each upgrade there was an immediate boost in performance and amount software that I could run.
What I do know is that the Amiga market was made up some of the biggest tight-arses I've ever met. Buying an A1200? Nah too expensive, rather run the old 1 meg A500 and complain why I can't run Doom. Hard drives? Too expensive, but I'll complain about why all the disk swapping. Monitor? Nah just use the TV. Workbench 3.1? Nah 1.3 is OK.
THERE IS NO WAY THAT YOU WOULD GET THE SAME LONGEVITY FROM A PC FOR THE SAME MONEY. The software ( Windows, games and apps) would force you to upgrade the hardware to the tune of thousands, or you'd need to bin your PC. This concept never caught on in the same way with Amiga users, so all we got was games that were made to run in 512k off two floppy drives.
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People seem to remember pc prices incorrectly. In 1995 I paid about $800 AUD for a Pentium mmx 200 + 32meg ram, 8 meg diamond viper video card, sb16, etc. This was much, much faster than an '060 based amiga and cheaper as well. Having said this I still enjoyed the amiga more, but I thought Id mention it seeing as people are quoting ridiculously innaccurate prices. Now as for longevity, that's aso a crock. A person simply needs to run software suited to the specs. Would someone expect to play amiga quake on a stock a1200, or would they instead use software that works well on thier machine? A p200mmx is still more usable (in terms of performance) than any a1200... again, a person simply needs to chose appropriate software for the hardware (as with any computer, amiga included).
The whole "need to upgrade, bin, buy new, etc." to keep using a pc is complete BS. Sure, it dates quickly compared to amiga gear, but that's simply because PC gear *did* advance constantly. A pc didnt become less usable simply because there's constantly faster gear out there.
Now as for Doom,... I cant agree with people here. Doom rocked. Still one of the best fps games out there. Well designed levels, great enemies, great weapons. It was more than a well crafted bit of code, it was a well crafted game.
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Incidently a $1000 PC absolutely destroys a $200 console. Even $ for $ the gap is quite small these days. A pc that considerably outdoes a ps3 in all areas can actually be bought for less money than a ps3.
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Despite my last 2 posts I do very much enjoy the classic amigas. Theyre my favorite machines and probably always will be, but it bugs the heck out of me reading some of the garbage people write just because something isnt to thier tastes. It sounds like a lot of amiga people still cling onto things that were only partially true 15-20 years ago.
There's no need to justify your hobbies by making up garbage and contorting the truth about other options. Just enjoy it for what it is.
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I second that. The prices were very close. Internal upgrades were a lot cheaper than an external hard drive or cd-drive though. 2.5inch hard drives were also very pricey and only 4200rpm in speed.
The main problem was that escom folded and community carried onwards like a headless chook. Some people wanted 68k to continue, but we needed to move to a new cpu. PowerPc was chosen, but there was no heavyweight driving the ship.
Mac went to the brink too, but they marketed themselves back with a simple computer that could 'surf the net'.
If the price of the hardware wasn't a factor then it must have been software (and marketing).
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"Do you love everything about AGA chipset 100% without exception."
I hereby call this poll asking request a silly thing....
No vote for me.
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The whole "need to upgrade, bin, buy new, etc." to keep using a pc is complete BS. Sure, it dates quickly compared to amiga gear, but that's simply because PC gear *did* advance constantly. A pc didnt become less usable simply because there's constantly faster gear out there.
Not in the sense that it suddenly stopped working or started getting slower, but unfortunately it did mean that companies started writing software for newer, more powerful hardware, with less (if any) care taken on making sure it functioned acceptably on the older stuff. Just look at Windows - the growth in system requirements just to run the thing is exponential from generation to generation. Application software is usually better, but not by a whole lot.
Now as for Doom,... I cant agree with people here. Doom rocked. Still one of the best fps games out there. Well designed levels, great enemies, great weapons. It was more than a well crafted bit of code, it was a well crafted game.
This. DOOM was a kickass game back then and still holds up all right today, and holding a grudge and going "well who needs you, anyway?" because it was a factor in the PC-superiority argument back in the day is just silly.
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I think you mean Amiga AA+ chipset, which only existed on paper but would give fixes for all the problems/omissions of AGA like chunky mode, faster pixel clock, even faster blitting and 16bit 4 channel sound. Also facility to read 1.76mb HD floppies.
I don't think reading the 1.76mb HD floppies had anything to do with that. My A4000 will do that, and I'm pretty sure it's not the AA+ chipset...
Amiga had got to the stage that Sony got to in this console generation, they caved in and bought an off the shelf GPU from Nvidia from PC graphics card technology. Commodore would have had to do the same and just optimise it with better motherboard design compared to PCs of 1992. (Which is why the xbox 360 for $200 out guns a $1000 PC even now...clever motherboard design).
I'd have to say a lot of that has nothing to do with clever motherboard design, it has more to do with having no major operating system overhead. Not to mention since a console is a standard piece of hardware, unlike a PC that has all sorts of variations, the developers can optimize the hell out of their code to make it run faster.
slaapliedje
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AGA = :knuddel:
Much better than the A1000 it replaced chez moi :lol:
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Is this very silly discussion still going on? Good! I'm all up for sillyness.
Why are you guys still comparing later generation X86 hardware with Amigas?
And PC and consoles. Were do you think some of their best design ideas were cribbed from?
Frankly, the only reason I not voting my total devotion to AGA, is I would have liked to see the Amiga move to PCI and RTG and continue to kick both the Mac and the PC in the ass.
And yes, maybe if there had been another major buyer for PPC processors (other than Apple) development of that technology wouldn't have slowed down.
The really frightening thing is that even without a major plqayer we're still here and hardware and software is still being developed. Is it just a hobby? Well frankly that's what personal computing started out to be for me. Do you know how many people I had to convince in the early days that I had to cionvince that they didn't need a computer to balance their checkbook? Hey, we were all convinced that one day everyone would be using them, but what for? That took a long time AND the process of elimination (of bad idea/software) to get to where we are today - with real ptactical utility and valid justififable trasons for perchasing and using a computer.
A hobby? Well I use an NG system everyday and use my multicore X86-64 system, on average, about once every week or two. I'm posting this on it right now and if you've seen my Ambient screenshot on the other threads you know the display is just as good as PC, Mac, or Linux can offer. So if I can use it for the same practical uses as any other modern PC, is it a hobby?
Maybe in part it still is, besause unlike the shepple I'm willing to still do a little hacking, learn a little about my system, and use something other than a mainstream system. Come to think of it, that what a lot of users of alternative systems (like the Amiga) were willing to do. If you have to devote more time to it and your still considered a hobbist is that even fair. Hey, I guess if I can't avoid it, I'll wear the badge with pride, I was one of the hobbists who help figure out what made computers practical (you punks).
Pat yourself on the back Amiga users. EVERYTHING out there computers, tablets, cell phones, etc does not have a display that looks like an early PC. It ALL resembles Amiga.
And get over this inferiority complex. Some of the brightest people I know are developing in our Market. Do you really think MorphOS would look that good with only a few hundred paying licensees if it wasn't being maintained by some brilliant minds? How in the world did something as slick as AOS4 get written by primarily two guys (do you know how many programmers Microsoft employs)? AROS? Well, kudos guys. I really doubted that you'd ever be able to pull that one off and it looks like you'll suceed. And the Natami., well I've had my differences with Gunnar, but he Thomas and the rest off the team are sharp and they are going to produce something impressive. Then thers Clone A, Replay, Minimig, hey this rant could go on a long time.
We are still here and development continue. If you want to call it a hobby I would not be insulted by that. Several of the richest people in our country started out as computer hobbyist. Do we have a future? As sure as Microsoft, Apple, and Intel can still make mistakes, of course we do.
Me? I', an anarchist at heart and hope an open system (maybe ARM and Linux) takes them all down. But why couldn't it be ARM and AOS?
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I imagine we would have found people 30 years ago complaining that the 2D graphics (of which the Amiga was the pinnacle) were overrated and took away from the true gaming of the text adventure.
Indeed we did, people were trying to tell us all of Infocom's text adventures were better than Magnetic Scrolls' adventures :)
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I imagine we would have found people 30 years ago complaining that the 2D graphics (of which the Amiga was the pinnacle) were overrated and took away from the true gaming of the text adventure.
It's true I can recall when I had been used to playing plain text adventures on my old Vic20 then buying the C64 and people started to write text adventure with line draw GFX to jazz them up a bit, that I was in horror that there was no need for this as you imagination should be creating the images... :lol:
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AFAIK upgrading a 386 to pentium was not a simple drop in replacement of the CPU. Indeed all the 386 PC's I'd seen-mainly HP- had the CPU soldered to the MB. So I have doubts as to the cost of this upgrade being a cheap one as you imply. Pentium PC's were $3000 plus at the time. A lot of money, but PC users did pay it.
No I'm talking about the ever dropping price of PCs being a plus and a minus point. The plus point is you just sell your dodgy old 386SX 16 to some n00b and put it towards a 486-25 machine. And as my 4mb 486-25 only cost about £50 more than an A2000 68040 accelerator when you remove the price of the monitor it was actually cheaper anyway.
But people upgrading to a new faster PC could keep their old games and revisit them, A500 users buying an A1200 could play the same games at A500 speed with the same faults (like Lotus III for example) so where is the incentive to either accelerate your A2000/1500/500 or even buy a new A1200 until new cutting edge games to make your jaw drop appear? None :)
Lotus 3 ran fine on my Apollo 68040. Blizzard 040's were RC units-recycled CPU's and I don't recall them being 500 pounds. The 1260 boards were about 500 pounds . You wouldn't buy a 68060 to run Lotus or Streetfighter to get a better frame rate. You'd buy it to run a lot of serious apps.
The point is Lotus III ran dog slow on Amiga floppy machines (only CD32 Lotus III ran as fast as Lotus II) and was really frustrating to see. And the point there is that adding even a 68060 to your A2000 would not improve the speed of Lotus III BUT if you had a 286 and later bought a 486 your could dig out Lotus III and enjoy it with improved speed and hence playability. That was the point, you think Amiga mass market was people running serious software? I think not, it was to games players foremost.
And unlike when buying a new PC or an accelerator card for my ST the games wouldn't improve at all on Amiga except for stuff like Starglider/Flight Simulator II etc.
A 40/50 mhz 68030 is significantly quicker than a 68020, and AFAIR lets you use more RAM. And the MMU did come in handy for emulation, and virtual memory (gigamem).
Doesn't matter 8mb+2mb was enough even up until Windows 95 and beyond PC era (1997-98?) for games programmers. The point was mhz for mhz the 030 was a poor choice. A 28mhz 020 cost about £100-125 less in 94/95 than a similar speed 030 board. And as 020 does nothing an 030 can't do as far as games programming goes it shows the proposed Amiga 1400 with 28mhz 020 and Fast ram and CD-ROM for £600 in 1994 was a much better buy than the overspeced and priced 4000/030 that was too damn slow for serious work and zorro+£1000 price too much for gamers to buy into.
This led to Amiga 3D games being produced based on A1200 spec (ie Nintendo Star Fox for SNES level if you are lucky!) compared to texture mapping routines on PC 3D games being experimented with.
OK so a faster CPU wasn't for you.
A faster CPU WAS for me and every gamer but not via brown boxes from unrecorded sales of mail order companies that Ocean et al would never see and hence never develop for. IT HAD TO BE VIA SALES OF SPECIFIC MODEL OF AMIGAs like the A1400 prototype.
It had to be in an affordable machine too and quickly, Commodore messed up badly by going for a crippled CD32 with no fast ram possible (unless you bought something that turned it into an A1200 for more than the cost of a damned CD-ROM drive for an actual A1200) instead of the A1400/A1800 prototypes. Both 28mhz 020 (so same speed as 25mhz 030 accelerators costing about 150 bucks) with fast and chip ram to maximise CPU speed and would be sold for £400 without CD and £500-600 with CD all in an Amiga 3000 style slimline case.
This never happened so we got the same old crap and games like TFX which were finished were never even released as sales of accelerator cards is not necessarily to games players and difficult to prove so games companies ignored them.
Amiga hardware did not depreciate anywhere near as quickly as PC hardware. The hardware always had better re-sale than a PC. I upgraded to a Cobra 40 mhz 68030 for $299, used it for a 2 years, sold it for $250, then bought an Apollo 68040 for about $400. Later added a CDROM, multiscan monitor. And with each upgrade there was an immediate boost in performance and amount software that I could run.
Except unlike the 25% who were only interested in accelerating serious software I had no interest in owning an 040 based A1200 if Lotus III/Power Drift/SF2 were all going to be crap unlike our PC cousins who would see imrpovements in ALL game styles when they did upgrade.
And most people sold up around 1996ish or a year later, and my A4000/030 was worth just £175 back then so that's a load of crap too. Rare machines may be worth a lot now on ebay but that doesn't count.
What I do know is that the Amiga market was made up some of the biggest tight-arses I've ever met. Buying an A1200? Nah too expensive, rather run the old 1 meg A500 and complain why I can't run Doom. Hard drives? Too expensive, but I'll complain about why all the disk swapping. Monitor? Nah just use the TV. Workbench 3.1? Nah 1.3 is OK.
The reason most people didn't buy an A1200 is because
1. Commodore didn't have a clue what they were doing and left out some pretty vital things like decent parallax/better sound/no HD floppy support/CPU crippled until you invest another £150 in a RAM board (where were the bloody SIMM slots!?).
2. The games still looked way to similar despite all the '32 bit power' hype. 3D games were barely improved unlike when we went from wireframe 3D on C64 to solid 3D on Amiga. 2D games STILL looked inferior to 1989/90 Megadrive AAA titles let alone the £150 SNES and it's superb 256 colour SF2 ports.
I did buy an A1200 but this was for my love of animation and digitiser work.
THERE IS NO WAY THAT YOU WOULD GET THE SAME LONGEVITY FROM A PC FOR THE SAME MONEY. The software ( Windows, games and apps) would force you to upgrade the hardware to the tune of thousands, or you'd need to bin your PC. This concept never caught on in the same way with Amiga users, so all we got was games that were made to run in 512k off two floppy drives.
Well it was Commodore's job to upgrade the CPU. 7mhz 68000 in A1000, 12mhz in A500 and 16mhz in A500+/A600. Without a faster CPU the thing that demanded more power from PC games was 3D games like Falcon or F15 etc.
A500/A500+/A600/A1000 owners had limited CPU accelerator options and games companies would never write games for accelerators costing more than an A500 anyway. Like I said if Commodore had upgrade the machines in an evolutionary fashion for the base model the games would have improved.
Only an idiot ran the latest version of Windows if at all, and anyway Win 95 onwards is where this is an issue and by then Commodore had been dead 2-3 years.
(ESCOM's crappy A1200 for £400 scam in 1995 was doomed to fail, it was an iffy price/performance in 1992 when launched let alone 1995!)
The point is gamers got bugger all benefit for 2D games on Amiga if they did invest in an accelerator, a thing which was only popular of base model Amiga's AFTER A1200 launch anyway. A1200 was only sold by Commodore for 18 months, so regardless of how many accelerator cards were sold games companies did not commit to a dead platform (Amiga was dead the minute Commodore filled for chapter 11 etc in the eyes of the software houses).
And as ALL the big box Amigas were overpriced and underpowered accelerator card sales for those machines were of no concern and pimple on the ass of the games buying Amiga user base.
PS You can do Doom on a standard Amiga 500, it's just the game window would be 80x50 pixels ;)
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Incidently a $1000 PC absolutely destroys a $200 console. Even $ for $ the gap is quite small these days. A pc that considerably outdoes a ps3 in all areas can actually be bought for less money than a ps3.
Only because of Sony forcing Microsoft into a very long life cycle with 360 and Wii proving old tech=massive profit potential. Launch day of console not earing end of life cyle haf a decade later.
In 1990 a $1000 PC couldn't replicate Gauntlet 4 or Thunderforce 3 from Sega console and in 2006 a $1000 PC couldn't do 1920x1080 30fps quality games like Xbox 360.
Rubbish, I challenge you to find me a £250 PC (PS3 price) that plays Gears of War in 1080p better than PS3/360. Win7 licence alone is £70 and another £60 for case and decent PSU let alone an off the shelf machine with a real graphics card (min £100 alone) and then you will need a Bu-Ray drive too....already spent all our PS3 cash without even a m/b CPU RAM or HD I think no? ;) Like I said cheapest bare bones i7 wthout monitor + Windows = £600-700.
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Games were a big deal on the amiga, but I dont know anybody who ONLY used it for games.
Everyone I knew were into something else as well, whether it was writing stuff for school, some coding/programming, plenty of graphics and music stuff, demos etc.
Especially when you factored that amiga app's tended to be pretty cheap in comparison to PC app's.
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Only because of Sony forcing Microsoft into a very long life cycle with 360 and Wii proving old tech=massive profit potential. Launch day of console not earing end of life cyle haf a decade later.
In 1990 a $1000 PC couldn't replicate Gauntlet 4 or Thunderforce 3 from Sega console and in 2006 a $1000 PC couldn't do 1920x1080 30fps quality games like Xbox 360.
Rubbish, I challenge you to find me a £250 PC (PS3 price) that plays Gears of War in 1080p better than PS3/360. Win7 licence alone is £70 and another £60 for case and decent PSU let alone an off the shelf machine with a real graphics card (min £100 alone) and then you will need a Bu-Ray drive too....already spent all our PS3 cash without even a m/b CPU RAM or HD I think no? ;) Like I said cheapest bare bones i7 wthout monitor + Windows = £600-700.
An i7 isnt required to outdo either xbox360 or ps3, an i5, am3, or even core2 based cpu is significantly more powerful.... here in australia a ps3 is $469....
quad core 3.2 ghz athlon2 = $100
mobo = $45
blu ray/dvd burnber combo drive = $50
4 gig ddr3@1333 = $45
500 gig sata drive = $45
gf 450 1gig video card = $115
Total price is $400 australian, a far cry from 6-700 pounds "minimum" (in fact its about 1/3rd or less. I guess including casing and keyboard,mouse, etc the prices are on par, but the pc is much more powerful and a lot more versatile).
I actually own an xbox360, and really enjoy it, but Im not going to pretend pc gear is comparitively bad value because it simply isnt.
Also the arguement wasnt for 2006, it was for now. If it was for 2006 then the xbox360 wouldnt be $200 (although I have no problems in admitting that its only in the last year or so that pcs are price competitive for gaming).
Incidently most ps3/xb360 games arent 1080p.
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An i7 isnt required to outdo either xbox360 or ps3, an i5, am3, or even core2 based cpu is significantly more powerful.... here in australia a ps3 is $469....
quad core 3.2 ghz athlon2 = $100
mobo = $45
blu ray/dvd burnber combo drive = $50
4 gig ddr3@1333 = $45
500 gig sata drive = $45
gf 450 1gig video card = $115
Total price is $400 australian, a far cry from 6-700 pounds "minimum" (in fact its about 1/3rd or less. I guess including casing and keyboard,mouse, etc the prices are on par, but the pc is much more powerful and a lot more versatile).
I actually own an xbox360, and really enjoy it, but Im not going to pretend pc gear is comparitively bad value because it simply isnt.
Also the arguement wasnt for 2006, it was for now.
Incidently most ps3/xb360 games arent 1080p.
I don't want a $45 motherboard and I'm not sure about your video card choice either.
But most of your arguement is sound.
I'd substitute the last Phenom X3 ($69.95 in my country) as it has an L3 cache and clocks easily to 3.3 Ghz (and that fourth core isn't going to do anything for gaming).
Oh! And you forgot to quote the price for the case, powersupply, keyboard, mouse, operating system, and monitor (unless you were planning on using your HD tv). That about doubles your price.
So unless you can figure out how to house everything, power it, get it bootstrapped and running, and be able to enter commands or move the mouse pointer without these components your estimates wrong.
:laughing:
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Sure, but the total of the parts is somewhat under the ps3 price. Including a case and keyboard/mouse to the price brings it on par as I already said. Sure there's better options, but there's also worse ones (Ive not chosen the cheapest gear here). I guess the only ommission is an OS, but we all know how many ppl actually buy their oses dont we ? There's also legally free options. As for the component choices they werent specifically chosen, it was just a random system to show that $ for $ pc hardware is competitive with consoles (especially ps3). Video card is ok, and quite easily best card for that money. ATI has nothing comparable in this price range (even 5770 is more expensive, while being considerably slower). Personally Id go for a 460, but that's another $50.
Also a ps3 doesnt come with a tv/monitor and a pc can just as easily be connected to a tv.
Now just to clarify, I dont say these things as a pc gamer, because Im not a pc gamer. I use my xbox360 much, much more for games. When it comes to games on a pc Im more of a retro/emulation fan which hardly needs even a budget system like what Ive mentioned. The whole point of it is that it gets a bit frustrating hearing the same old, quite frankly rubbish arguements over and over again. Chances are though unfortunately that these responses will fall on deaf ears (this is not a go against anyone, I just mean that Im sure I'll hear the same crap again by people who like to for no particular reason I can see, talk trash about things the dont like and/or understand).
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Sure, but the total of the parts is somewhat under the ps3 price. Including a case and keyboard/mouse to the price brings it on par as I already said. Sure there's better options, but there's also worse ones (Ive not chosen the cheapest gear here). I guess the only ommission is an OS, but we all know how many ppl actually buy their oses dont we ? There's also legally free options. As for the component choices they werent specifically chosen, it was just a random system to show that $ for $ pc hardware is competitive with consoles (especially ps3). Video card is ok, and quite easily best card for that money. ATI has nothing comparable in this price range (even 5770 is more expensive, while being considerably slower). Personally Id go for a 460, but that's another $50.
Also a ps3 doesnt come with a tv/monitor and a pc can just as easily be connected to a tv.
Yeah, its close. I just wanted to point out that you are going to spend more (its inevitable).
But what you're failing to point out is its not just a gaming platform, its a functional computer.
Games are fine. But I want internet access, productivity software, video/audio/photo editing software and all the other varied things no console will ever do.
AND I can assemble it myself and NO ONE can come along and decide to deleat a feature I PAID for.
You gotta admit Sony's move was offensive (I e-mailed them that immediately after the decision - never got a reply).