Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: jonnyboy on March 28, 2004, 01:30:13 PM
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So, what has Amiga now got to offer? It's certainly not what it had in the early '90s, when it was a computer with untapped potential that struggled to get past being labelled as a gaming machine, with the exception of some niche markets (e.g. Lightwave being used in Babylon 5).
In 1992, the A1200 was technically way in front of your average PC in almost every way, apart from raw processor speed. Workbench 3.0 made Windows 3.1 look rubbish indeed - it could multi-task and manipulate data much better than the Microsoft counterpart.
By 1998, the rest of the world had caught up. Now, I wonder two things. What would have happened to Amiga if Commodore hadn't gone down the pan and instead marketed it well? And what future could Amiga feasibly have now?
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The A1000 was way ahead of its time in 1985, and that was still true
with the A500/2000 between 86 and 89.
The A1200 was anice speedup for the Amiga-freaks, but it was allready
failing behind in many aspects.
It only had 2mb of shared (slow) memory, while PCs could be brought up
to atleast 4MB (often 16) by just adding the ICs/SIMMs. And all of that was
running at full CPU-speed, and non-shared.
A HD-floppies were allready standard in PCs, while it required obscure and expensive
modified drives for the Amiga.
A HD was also standard in PCs, and could easily/cheaply be bought.
The A1200 only supported expensive and small 2.5" HDs. The adapters
to 3.5" only appaered in spring 93, and they still costed extra, and not all 3.5"-HDs
would worked with the A1200.
16Bit-Audio was also not uncommon in PCs of that day.
And a bog-standard VGA would crush AGA for everything but 2D-games.
You are right about the OS.
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But once you'd bought your bog-standard A1200 it was still easy to upgrade. I think it was silly not to include even just a little bit of Fast RAM with the computer - it would have doubled its speed straight away.
Also, I think Amiga sound can almost hold its own nowadays: the standard Paula chip was still a standard feature, which PCs still don't enjoy nowadays.
I don't think HD floppies were that important at the time, and Commodore would have been wise to make Hard Disk versions more affordable more quickly - it was cheaper to buy a third-party one but you risked losing the rather good on-site warranty.
Given that 2D games were still far more popular than 3D ones in 1993, I think that AGA was better than VGA as well.
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Wasn't one of your points that the Amiga was (mis-)labeled as a gaming
machine ?
And AA was a pain in the compared to VGA when you wanted to
to serious stuff (except video).
I did buy an A1200 in late 1992, and there way allmost no games for it,
and even most of the old ones didn't work.
I did build myself a 386DX40 in spring 93, and there was stuff like Tie-Fighter,
which blow most of the AA games out of the water.
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jonnyboy wrote:
Also, I think Amiga sound can almost hold its own nowadays: the standard Paula chip was still a standard feature, which PCs still don't enjoy nowadays.
Don't they? :-?
I'm assuming you don't literally mean the Paula chip, but its sound capabilities, but I've never bought a PC that didn't come with onboard sound or a sound card.
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I think even the crappy VIA AC 97' chips which come on lots of motherboards easily outclass the Paula so much it is uncomparable...
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@jonnyboy:
Well, they don't leave you much in one piece about the Amiga, now do they?
You'd think they'd be hating the machine to the core, but no, they still cling to it. Maybe the Amiga is just a bit more than the sum of the parts? ;->
Regards,
Tjitte
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@jonnyboy:
Well, they don't leave you much in one piece about the Amiga, now do they?
You'd think they'd be hating the machine to the core, but no, they still cling to it. Maybe the Amiga is just a bit more than the sum of the parts? ;->
Regards,
Tjitte
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Regarding the A1200, I think it's a shame they didn't consider making the box a little bigger (preferably with a separate keyboard, and a small main box like some old Macs). That way you could have internal 3.5" IDE hard drives and a CD ROM, along with onboard SIMMs at a far cheaper price than it cost to add to the A1200. Given that simply adding RAM doubled the speed of the A1200, it's a shame that this wasn't more easily an option.
The PC had started to overtake the Amiga as a games machine (ironic that being a games machine was always supposed to be a bad thing for the Amiga!), but I found Windows 3.1 incredibly sluggish on 4MB 486s, even though I was only used to a bare A1200 at the time. It wasn't until RAM dropped in price that PCs started to become viable for anything other than games IMO (and Windows 95 took even more than 3.1, so I'd be looking at 32MB minimum - which IIRC cost about £800 in 1995!)
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I guess that would've been a better way to go with the A4000/030, which was a bit of an odd machine for a start. Although I guess to spend money on actually desigining a different case to the original A4000 would've been too much as well.
I think it was a good decision to stay with the A600's basic design (albeit correcting the silly ommision of the keypad!)
About it being mislabelled, I guess Commodore needed to provide something to which people related, but the "Desktop Dynamite" pack came out just too late. I bought the Comic Relief pack, which included just one game. Now all they needed to do was just bundle some other software instead, but I suppose the Comic Relief thing got them a plug on the BBC for free!
Maybe Commodore should've taken a little more trouble to make the AGA hardware a little better before releasing it. But I still say it was silly not to put any fastram at all in the machine. 512kb couldn't have cost too much by then.
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Er, it didn't have 512K, it has 2MB...
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A1200 could have more expansion slots, it could have included more stuff in and on it...
What is tried to be meant in the lines above had already been made by A4000. It has a 030 and EDO ram slots to be expanded.
But A1200 was not the way it was produced. It's something cheaper than A4000 and has much more to offer than cd32.
While judging please consider the dates and policies of the companies.
It might have happened or did not..maybe it is nature..you rise and fall..maybe it is fate..Amiga turned out to be concept that even the makers did not think of..they were not able to handle the potential of that creature whereas the WinPC stuff only promised. The users were not ready maybe...nobody could get what cd32 invention was just like they did not get how a great machine should be.
Seeing the facts beyond the timeline...that's all amiga's fault. And I feel lucky for the minority who has ever witnessed those days in which there were no rush for idiot game compatible video cards.
mdwh2 wrote:
Regarding the A1200, I think it's a shame they didn't consider making the box a little bigger (preferably with a separate keyboard, and a small main box like some old Macs). That way you could have internal 3.5" IDE hard drives and a CD ROM, along with onboard SIMMs at a far cheaper price than it cost to add to the A1200. Given that simply adding RAM doubled the speed of the A1200, it's a shame that this wasn't more easily an option.
The PC had started to overtake the Amiga as a games machine (ironic that being a games machine was always supposed to be a bad thing for the Amiga!), but I found Windows 3.1 incredibly sluggish on 4MB 486s, even though I was only used to a bare A1200 at the time. It wasn't until RAM dropped in price that PCs started to become viable for anything other than games IMO (and Windows 95 took even more than 3.1, so I'd be looking at 32MB minimum - which IIRC cost about £800 in 1995!)
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Will Amiga ever live again?
Of course. It only stays carbon-frozen until in the future scientists have discovered a cure.
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Well an A4000 could fit the bill for what I had in mind - except it was ridiculously expensive. I'm not sure why this was - presumably the Zorro slots(?), in which case I think a machine without those, and a lot cheaper, would have been worthwhile.
I mean, you could upgrade an A1200 with hard drive, CPU and RAM (and possibly CD ROM), and still get something for cheaper than an A4000/030. If these things had come as standard, and made use of cheaper 3.5" IDE, it'd surely have been cheaper still. Plus the money would have been going to Commodore, rather than 3rd party companies. Also, if things like CD ROM and memory were cheap optional extras, it would have raised the base level, and made software companies more willing to develop for them, instead of writing for a basic A1200 that maybe had a hard drive.
@NightShade737: I think he meant an extra 512K memory of Fast RAM - basically a small cheap extra amount that may have helped get the speed up.
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Yeah sorry, I didn't notice the word "Cost".
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Also, I think Amiga sound can almost hold its own nowadays: the standard Paula chip was still a standard feature, which PCs still don't enjoy nowadays.
Not against MCP-T(APU) Sound Storm (e.g. X-BOX-I and NForce I/II). ALC650 chip (majority** of nForceII boards e.g. ASUS, Gigabyte) has 6 channels @20bit output and EAX1 acceleration. This particular AC97 chip murders Paula anyday.
**Statistics claimed from nForcershq.com’s survey (e.g. ASUS brand is the dominant).
I think that AGA was better than VGA as well.
AGA was proven less desirable in the long run e.g. with arrival of ID's Doom (1992) and Origin(now EA)'s Wing Commander. This is turn spurn other X86 PC games of similar era e.g. Rise of Triad, Indy Car, Mech Warriors 2, Duke Nukem 3D, Dark Forces 1, X-Wing, Decent, Tie-Fighter, DOOM2 and clones of DOOM. During falling prices of I386 clone boxes, Linux and Windows NT was born.
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I thought AGA was a graphics chipset where as VGA is a graphics standard...
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@NightShade737
VGA was a graphic chipset (e.g. found in IBM’s PS/2 boxes) and a graphic standard (for the cloners).
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Anywayz, if Commodore hadn't gone to the heavens, AmigaOS 7.5 would easily give MacOs X (10.3) a run for its money in responsiveness, boot up speed and ease of use. Windows? Did someone say Windows?!? As for the hardware, Commodore would sell 1400/G4 for 289 quid with: G4 processor at 1400+ MHz, Radeon 9000 graphics chip (with TV-OUT), Turtle Beach sound chip, ATA/133 bus, 6 USB ports on the back of the case, one or two PCI ports, no legacy ports, internal DVD-Rom/CD-R combo, AmigaOS 7 or 7.5, all the necessary applications for free (basic office suite, image processing, browser, Java). Wouldn't that be a winner?
--EDIT--
Forgot to mention... all this in a nice 1200-like case... The PCI ports would have a small profile riser. The desktop cases would be for the high-end models.
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Hammer wrote:
I think that AGA was better than VGA as well.
AGA was proven less desirable in the long run e.g. with arrival of ID's Doom (1992) and Origin(now EA)'s Wing Commander. This is turn spurn other X86 PC games of similar era e.g. Rise of Triad, Indy Car, Mech Warriors 2, Duke Nukem 3D, Dark Forces 1, X-Wing, Decent, Tie-Fighter, DOOM2 and clones of DOOM.
I thought the Akiko chip with it's chunky->planar conversion should be able to deal with this. Alas, I haven't seen much games supporting it.
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I think the mistake of Commodore in the long run was the design and implementation of the so-loved custom chips, themselves. OK, they were a hell of cool and impressive in the beginning but in the long run, the competition passed ahead of them. Atari could build computers for cheap using off-the-shelf components while commodore kept on spending millions on design, even in '92, when chips like VGA's and Sound Blasters were mainstream.
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Will Amiga ever live again?
short answer: no!
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[color=0000FF]I got my PegII today! :][/color][/b] [color=FF0000](Off topic.....or is it? ;D )[/color][/b]
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In name, only. As far as I'm concerned, the A1000 was the only "true" Amiga. The 500 was similar, but slower. It's funny to see DuneII run noticably faster on the 1000 than the 500. :-)
The 1200 was a HUGE disappointment for me. I mean, after seven years (!) the blitter wasn't made any faster, and the CPU roughly doubled in speed? I bought one, anyway, but boy, was I mad at Commodore. I was really surprised to see the release of the CD32; I thought the 1200 would be the last Amiga ever. Eventually, I deemed OS 3.0 to be the only nice thing about the 1200, and I still insist that the operating system, not the hardware, is what made the Amiga special.
The only future for the Amiga is the OS, but I'm not sure OS4 will live up to that. I won't get into why until I can confirm that OS4 works just like how I think it will work.
If I didn't have such shakey faith in other OS projects (such as AROS, SkyOS, NuOS, QNX, Linux...), I probably wouldn't still be watching what happens to Amiga. It's a morbid curiosity, I guess.
Gaddar: Regarding the A1200, I think it's a shame they didn't consider making the box a little bigger (preferably with a separate keyboard, and a small main box like some old Macs)
Commodore was cheap. Why do you think they put the "brick" on the 1200, and it doesn't even have a battery clock? IDE performance is disgusting, too.
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I thought the Akiko chip with it's chunky->planar conversion should be able to deal with this. Alas, I haven't seen much games supporting it.
The standard 'AGA'(e.g. A1200/A4000) doesn’t include such a chip i.e. only in CD32 console and a rare A1200<>CD32 add-on kit.
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Akiko was never that useful for C2P anyway. A far better solution would to have given AGA a real Chunky mode. Even a single lowres, 8bit Chunky graphics mode would have been bearable... a 16bit mode (like the Falcon's) would have been a dream come true.
I always remember the ST's being really lame... then Atari built the Falcon, which in terms of hardware, rocked (That DSP had us all dreaming...), but had a crappy OS and no decent games... I remember thinking that at the time.
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Maybe in name and even then only as a curiosity, but nothing more.
Amigacomputers were nice machines and I still like to fiddle around with them (A1200 & A2000), but they are now part of history. Any new machines will be nothing more than interesting for hobbyists...
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I would say it's not really dead, just look at the amount of stuff that still exists on the net for it, and the amount of Amiga stuff that sells via ebay etc.
I have a Amiga A1200 PowerTower, that is used all the time.
I think the question should be does the Amiga have a future... :-)
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to me, the REAL Amiga was the old model Amiga's... I run UAE under MOS & Winders whenever I want to use something thats closest to the real thing.. I dont have patience to run a old unaccelerated machine :/ so emulating is the next best thing.
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I have to agree with something Jettah said a few posts back, I think that the Amiga is more than the sum of its parts alone.
Like many folks, I started with the Amiga very early. I had owned many systems and also worked on larger systems professionally (PDP-8, PDP 11/23, VAX, Sun, SGI, etc), but none of them ever seemed to compare to the Amiga.
When people talk to me about the Amiga, they ask what it is that still drives me with the machine after all these years. I can't explain it to them. I don't know why tinkering with my StartupSequence is so much fun, I am not exactly sure what the attraction is to writing ARexx scripts for interprocess communications between my applications is. I don't exactly know why I get such satisfaction when I am goofing with C on the Amiga and I can make a new window that doesn't do anything. I am not sure why I think that it's important to mention to people that Datastorm is written in 100% assembly language. I am not sure why DPaint is still a great graphics application. I am happy that I know what blitter and copper means and that non-Amigans don't. It's unclear to me why, even though I think WinUAE is a wonderful emulator, I believe that nothing beats the experience of working on a real Amiga.
Maybe it's just that I don't want to be another regular guy, running Windows because it's what everyone else does or a Mac or Linux because it's the "next best thing".
Just my 2 cents,
Mike
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Hi
@drwho
I hate these "me too" posts, but I have to say: "You brought it to the point."
I also use the Amiga since 1988 and still love to work with it even in this XXX Gigahertz-times, I doesn't really know why, perhaps because the system is so transparent. I know what it does, and there are no hidden undocumented features (not many).
And the "operating system" from the guys in Redmont ? Who knows what the system does ? It's so easy for the bad guys to corrupt the system, because noone really knows what it does and where he has to look for the according informations. I need to write applications for Wind#*&% to feed my family, but I hate it.
Linux ? A nice OS, very usable for a low-cost server, but also not very handy.
Noster
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@drwho
I can't tell you how many people's eyes light up when I tell them that a new Amiga is coming out.
Of course not knowing its abysmal specs and high price tag helps.
People think, "Super Amiga, that's the ticket".
Its a pity Amiga couldn't have made a super chipset to out perform the consoles and 3d cards of today.
Hey, any possibility of creating a technology that works with multiple 3d Graphic cards? Keep adding them to go faster.
Of course the cost would be exorbitant but some people are willing to pay for the fastest game machine on the block and its easy to upgrade. I am assuming that apart from OS functionality the processor speed doesn't matter as much as the polygon count to a lot of people.
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"The Amiga computer still lives and will continue to live on in the hearts of those that truely love and adore her. To these people the Amiga computer will never die". These words were spoken by the famous DoomMaster himself. They are so true.
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by AmiMan on 2004/4/5 9:29:29
"The Amiga computer still lives and will continue to live on in the hearts of those that truely love and adore her. To these people the Amiga computer will never die". These words were spoken by the famous DoomMaster himself. They are so true.
wellcome back Doomy :-)
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@Doomy:
:lol: :lol: :lol:
You have alot of imaginary friends, or? :-)
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Last time I mentioned (in passing) Amigas on a non-computing forum:
One guy said "Goatboy for president!!" (Goatboy's my nick over there.)
And one guy said "Wait a minute... you made a post... on an Amiga?!?!"
No-one else commented, take from that what you will. :-)
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"Will Amiga ever live again"
It depends on the definition.
It never died in my eyes. It might be just a shadow of the previous glory, but it still is there/here.
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I'm working on making my 3- A4K machines talk to a couple recycled dual RISC Intergraph boxes, all loaded up with great 3D graphics capability. I see it as some kind of fun animation creation. I wanna make full length movies where I used to just sketch things out. Once they're all talking and swapping files and rendering at high speed on those lovely Cyberstorm boards I'll have a Frankenmiga! (yay) Oh, BTW, my wife was addicted to Datastorm for several years until the disk stopped booting. Anybody got a good working copy I would be soo happy to give her one, 8-)
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commodore marketing (period)
they were {bleep}e
for instance
The Commodore SX-64, the first portable color computer in the world. Released in the early '80s, these things were sold to business executives, but due to crappy marketing and bad business decisions, the SX-64's dissappeared before the general public had a chance to catch on.
History of the SX-64 (http://sx64.opsys.net/)
Bob Hill said:
The sx64 flopped because of Commodore marketing. The s in sx stands for single floppy drive. When Commodore introduced the sx64, they announced the DX64. The d in dx stood for Double floppy drives. I myself thought that sx64 was good, but would wait for the DX64. After 6 months to a 1 year later, Commodore dropped the sx64 due to poor sales. If they would have sold the DX64, it would have been a runaway success. The demand was build up, but they canceled the sx64 altogether. This is the kind of marketing that lead to a over one billion dollars in sales company to liquidation in less than three years when they had the most technically advanced computer on the market at that time.
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You can find Datastorm on Back To The Roots. It is one of the ones that has been legally released to the public AFAIK. You ca grab the .adf file and use something like adf2dsk or some other tool to unpack it to floppy.
Datastorm is in the middle of the page here:
http://www.back2roots.org/Games/ADF-Games/D/
Have Fun!!!
Mike
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TeeOneKay wrote:
[color=0000FF]I got my PegII today! :][/color][/b] [color=FF0000](Off topic.....or is it? ;D )[/color][/b]
Yes, it is. In certian lights, might be considered trolling.
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Commodore engineers should have been allowed to change over to off the shelf parts sooner. I heard it had been in the works. Just never saw the light of day.
AGA also could have been so much better than it was.
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More like the reverse, Commodore was engineering chipsets that could have been sold inside of PC's, not putting PC components inside of Amigas. Look at Hombre sometime, would have wiped the floor with nVidia, ATI and 3Dfx's products christmas 1995, when it was to arrive. As Hombre was to be on a PCI card, do you think Commodore wouldn't have sold the cards to PC vendors?
Remember, Commodore at that time was plotting on abandoning the classic OS for Windows NT.
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downix wrote:
Remember, Commodore at that time was plotting on abandoning the classic OS for Windows NT.
This is a really good point. When you think about it, it's a good thing that Commodore went belly-up when it did. I am sure that none of us would have wanted to live in the radically changed, "post-intuition" world that could have come from the above mentioned event.
-Mike
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Will-i-am wrote:
Oh, BTW, my wife was addicted to Datastorm for several years until the disk stopped booting. Anybody got a good working copy I would be soo happy to give her one, 8-)
:lol::lol::lol:
Sorry...must.....resist....temptation..to snigger...at...sexual innnuendo......
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Your facts are all just messed up..
In 1994-1996) I was doing software for the company that produced one of the first full screen animation products for windows. At the time we were doing the software with WinG, because Direct X was not a reality and most vga cards (remember the 486sx was popular then). Windows machines and PCs barely had linear memory frame buffers in their vga cards and most cards barely done 256 colors (8 bit, at 640x480). Most didn't have a Blitter function (much less the Amiga's BIMMER or sprites) and this was a serious problem for anyone trying to do double buffering or off-screen writes under windows at the time. Microsoft developed a "Hack" called winG for win 3.1 (which worked on a limited amount of VGA cards and drivers) and windows 95 was late to the market so no one had that, much less windows 95 compliant display drivers..
The Amiga software and graphics hardware (though lacking some in resolution) was WAY ahead of it's time. We hadn't heard of ATI much, nVidia at all or 3dFX back at that time. It wasn't till 96 that ATI even introduced 3d with it's rage 3d cards.
Back in those days we were talking about Tseng Chipsets (ET4000), Oak VGA, Cirrus Logic, etc.. with very limited capabilities. I never heard anything about Commodore adopting windows nt even on it's pc line of machines.
Even the regular Amiga's capabilities were still very much ahead of the game even though it lacked some color depth..
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To me Custom chips are VERY important in a machine
The Amigas custom chips were the key elements in it's
power and success. They were developed to be used for a purpose, and you could directly program them(IMPORTANT)
Off the shelf parts suck, the world and the wintel peec is
crappy, For one thing the graphics are NEVER SMOOTH
you can always see directx glitches ( because they arnt programming the hardware directly they are programming directx( CRAP) no matter how fast your CPU is or graphics card.
AGA was good, and some of the later AGA games like clickbooms T-zero shows AGA power at it's peak.
Good luck tryn to do that with directx.( nightmare )
A good example of current day custom chip technology is
sony's PS2. built from the ground up using custom chips
sony asked to be made. like the amiga.
The ps2 like the amiga plays games very well and is flawlesly smooth. I think for a new amiga to be noticed the same approach to hardware design and development would be a big advantage...
Maybe one day who knows....
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Hoya!
I agree but unfortunately no company behind Amiga has the financial power of Sony... :-(
Maybe we should ask them to buy Amiga and thus develop a Super New Amiga relying on custom chips? ;-P
Be funky
M A D
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But we are talking in the past tense, back then Commodore did have the power of sony (at least in the games arena).
Psersonaly the Guy who took over development of engineering (he came off the PCjunior I believe) should have been shot. He canned AAA for starters, and put in the very costly, and not all that usefull PCMCIA port. AKIKO was completed just a few months after the 1200 launch- it should have been in the A1200 as well as the CD32.
There was to much cost cutting at commodore by this time,I guess that was down to their failed PC division, and the A600 (and just general mismanagement). But if you had got rid of the PCMCIA port and waited a few months,the saving there alone would have allowed a 28mhz 020, fast ram and maybe AAA and Akiko too. That machine would have been a beast!...I still love my A1200 though, just because you can expand it to hell and back! If Pleasance and Commodore UK had suceeded in their buyout, who knows where we would be today?
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drwho wrote:
downix wrote:
Remember, Commodore at that time was plotting on abandoning the classic OS for Windows NT.
This is a really good point. When you think about it, it's a good thing that Commodore went belly-up when it did. I am sure that none of us would have wanted to live in the radically changed, "post-intuition" world that could have come from the above mentioned event.
Actually, that is not true whatsoever. CBM were planning on doing a console (that's the first thing hombre would have gone into) that didn't have an opertaing system at all (none of the games developers used it anyway, so what's the point?). But your desktop/workstation amigas would still have been using Amiga(D)OS.
If WinNT was available for the CPU then they would have offered it as an option tho'.
Cheers,
Martyn.
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DIRECT-X sucks my A2000 runs more stable than my AMD 2500+ and 512mb of pc3200 ram with windows XP pro!! windows sucks, Microcrap sucks even worse and that is what is going to be their downfall.
they feed us crap and we have no other choices, in the early 90's there was choices and that is what killed the amiga was the marketing of other companies and the fact the IBM said sure make as many clones of our stuff as you want.
I wish it was the other way around. :-o
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I don't disagree with your argument, but, I think the reason that the Amiga in its original incarnation is no longer with us is part of a much bigger problem than whether or not Microsoft's products are any good or not.
I think the real issue has more to do with a growing need in the late 80's for a more unified desktop platform solution. Microsoft did have one thing that most other companies didn't, and that was an understanding of what was needed, whether or not they implemented it correctly is of little consequence really.
The point I am trying to make (poorly, I might add) is that someone was going to come up with the "we need a standard desktop platform" idea. We could just as easily be sitting here hating the Linux people, or the BeOS people or even Commodore if history had worked out a bit differently.
Although, the above argument certainly doesn't excuse C= from its obvious neglect in its handling of the Amiga market.
- Mike
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I was thinking about this a couple of days ago... a bit off-topic maybe?
I was talking to a friend of mine about the Amiga and was trying to define what was made the Amiga the Amiga.
There has been numerous discussions about this.. whether it's the os or the hardware or the combination...
I don't have an A-one or a Pegasos, so maybe that's why.. but i can't get the same feeling of Amiga anymore?
So i startet thinking about what med up the Amiga-feeling.
for me i think it's this:
1: The company, even though C= made some mstakes, it _sounds_ good "Commodore Amiga".
2: The time... i was young... from i was 13 to 17 i was gazing at them in the shops...
3: A lot of my friends had one, it made up a community...
4: You never forget your first love... And i an serious about this (not literally though). Just like you never forget your old Lego, or your first Transformer toy...
5: It's story... it's easy to empathize(?) or sympathize with the small, poor, defenseless one... and to cry when it's defenselessly crushed in the battle of the giants..
(Dramatic yea?) :-)
I wish that OS4 will bring back the Amiga-feeling, but right now i feel that it won't.
Just my thoughts... And maybe not THAT off-topic... It depends on what you mean with "live again"
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If Commodore wasn't such a tight-ass and pushed on to get the AAA chipset instead of AGA for the 4000, they would've kept themselves in business. The market outlook for the company should've been A3000 = AGA chipset and A4000 = AAA chipset (which included 8MB chipmem). Unfortunately, it was too little, too late. A terrible mistake was the A600, and the hard-pushed CD32 game system w/AGA proved their mistakes were too costly for future business and eventually took the company into bankrupcy. I saw the shocking news back in 1993 when their sales which they targeted for proved a major problem when they were up against CD-I, 3DO and Atari's short-lived Jaguar game system. Oh, and did I ever growled at PC clones when they first hit the markets.... :-x
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Shamron wrote:
1: The company, even though C= made some mstakes, it _sounds_ good "Commodore Amiga".
2: The time... i was young... from i was 13 to 17 i was gazing at them in the shops...
3: A lot of my friends had one, it made up a community...
4: You never forget your first love... And i an serious about this (not literally though). Just like you never forget your old Lego, or your first Transformer toy...
5: It's story... it's easy to empathize(?) or sympathize with the small, poor, defenseless one... and to cry when it's defenselessly crushed in the battle of the giants..
(Dramatic yea?) :-)
I wish that OS4 will bring back the Amiga-feeling, but right now i feel that it won't.
Just my thoughts... And maybe not THAT off-topic... It depends on what you mean with "live again"
I'd have to agree 100% I remember sitting in the amiga side of the central florida commodore user's group (I was part of the c64/128 group :-) ) and I would drool, this is back in late '86 early '87.
Oh and the smell you can always tell the smell of the amiga when it is running, call me crazy but there is a distinct smell when the system is on. And for me that is nostalgic!
:-) :-) :-)
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Hoya!
YES!!!!! I do agree.
The Amiga has a VERY special plastic scent!
Well, she's a girl after all ;-P
Be funky
M A D
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they should bottle that scent and sell it for PC's, that way running windows dosen't seem like such a waste of time!!
(not to mention a slap in the face!)
:lol:
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Only in the hearts of those that truely love her. Otherwise, no the Amiga died after the release of the Amiga 4000T. The so-called "Amigas" after the 4000T are NOT true Amiga computers.
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The Deathbed Vigil on the Amiga Forever 6 cd mentions that Medhi Ali(?) screwed everything up by not producing enough of a new model before Christmas. I know it sounds weird, but the Amiga was still a good seller even when Commodore went out of business. Commodore just weren't prepared for the Christmas rush on one or two occasions and this was enough to run them into the ground. Boy, were the laid off employees pissed off at Medhi for ruining the company in a matter of a couple of years!!!
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Hammer wrote:
The standard 'AGA'(e.g. A1200/A4000) doesn’t include such a chip i.e. only in CD32 console and a rare A1200<>CD32 add-on kit.
Eh? Add-on kit? Elaborate?
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This is a really good point. When you think about it, it's a good thing that Commodore went belly-up when it did
Actually Commodore use and influence on Windows NT - if the Amiga guys had anything to do with it at all - could have been the best thing to happen to Windows and Amiga.
Firstly Commodore were deeply interested in the PA-RISC
line of processors which were at the time (and still are in some respects) the dog's bollocks. We would have had what we now know as the PowerPC market on a different processor.
Secondly they would probably not have moved across if they could not sell the system as a real upgrade path - back then if you bought a Mac, you stayed with Mac (and there are Mac houses still around now that have been strictly Apple-only since the days of the Apple II). Therefore probably all the *GOOD* stuff that we see in XP (besides the bad dress sense, slight weight problem, and occasional bad breath :) would have been in NT much sooner. A more Amiga-like world.. on a PA-RISC Windows box.
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Does anyone actually ever stand up for Commodore?
I think they were a fantastic company, they diversified and made some
fantastic business machines, multimedia computers and games consoles.
As for AGA, we're talking not just about the graphics here but the
sound and the drive controllers.
To me AGA has not been beaten to this day as the finest chipset ever
made.
Yeah, yeah bring on the ATi Radeon X800 jokes etc. etc. but back in
1992 when the Amiga 1200 came out - AGA blew even the NeoGeo out of
the water and what games console even today can you print from,
program etc.
The world desperately needs a Peoples Computer to be sold in a little
colourful box like the Deluxe Paint, Oscar, Wordworth style combos of
the early 90's.
So what if Mehdi Ali made some mistakes, every one of those people is
responsible for what we have today and I'm indebited to them. The best
things don't last forever - "The brightest flame burns quickest".
Particularly if you wonder if Microsoft has been getting governmment
contracts and subsidies.
What Amiga Inc. need to do now is take a PowerPoint(Scala/Holywood)
presentation to Samsung and get a multi-million commision to build
Samsung AmigaOne.
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You mean Eyetech.
Amiga Inc. have nothing to do with hardware any more by the looks of things.
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One of the reasons why Amiga will never be anything again is the users. More precisely, the inability of a number of users to evolve their ideas past what they were 15 years ago.
It's like listening to some old codger who tells everyone how things were much better back in the days of oil lamps, candles and goose-quill pens, just because he could get the finest smelling oil and the best candles and kept the fattest geese back then, and he's never seen anyone get better ones since.
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I don't think the users are to blame for what happens in the corporate
world. We have no effect on the money in the accounts of businessmen.
The Amiga Community is not short of ideads though...
I prefer to use a different analogy: a gold prospector from the
Klondike reminiscing about the good old days when there was gold in
them thar hills.
All that needs to be done is for some brave soul in the management of
Amiga Inc. to sell (at a profit) the copyrights, patents etc. to a
large corporation with good distribution outlets.
And I don't mean Eyetech who are just a small repair shop in England,
I'm thinking some of the original bidders from the original Escom deal
- Samsung!
Why not even Motorolla? HELLO MOTO! Ariba Amiga!
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@Hyperspeed wrote:
I prefer to use a different analogy: a gold prospector from the Klondike reminiscing about the good old days when there was gold in them thar hills.
Not really, because gold doesn't devalue as technology advances. The Amiga did. What might have been cool 12-15 years ago is most certainly not cool now. Not the technology and not the ideas.
All that needs to be done is for some brave soul in the management of Amiga Inc. to sell (at a profit) the copyrights, patents etc. to a large corporation with good distribution outlets.
And why would any company in such a position want to buy all that junk? You can't sell something that has no value.
And I don't mean Eyetech who are just a small repair shop in England, I'm thinking some of the original bidders from the original Escom deal - Samsung!
What would Samsung want with it? The Escom deal was ten years ago. Why would Samsung want to buy technology that might have been of some interest then but has not advanced at all since then?
Why not even Motorolla? HELLO MOTO! Ariba Amiga!
Same problem as above. You can't sell that which no one wants.
It's time everyone in the Amiga scene, users as well as developers, accept that Amigas are no longer in the Premier League of computing, and that it is highly unlikely it will ever return there. The rest of the industry moves at amazing speeds these days, and the Amiga scene is just too small and primitive to be able to keep up, never mind regain a leading position.
Despite recent developments in the AmigaOne, Pegasos etc, Amigas are still falling further behind the rest of the industry.
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rest of the industry moves at amazing speeds these days, and the Amiga scene is just too small and primitive to be able to keep up, never mind regain a leading position.
It's not hard to be ahead of the pack, and provide unique value at the edges.
It's not that Microsoft or even Mac, for that matter, could be the leader in say 'metadata services'...to make up one area...
but they won't because they are a generic vendor, they have to make carefully weighted decisions about how to advance, and yet, not confuse or upset their very conservative target audience, who doesn't really want radical changes.
The point being....while being small is a disadvantage, it also has an advantage of sorts.
The key to amiga's success is to realize where it excels, and where it can only fail, and to concentrate on winning.
In a way, you sense this sort of pragmatism, when the community leaders talk about concentrating on embedded markets, and kiosks, etc.
However....I'll believe that when I see it. What the Amiga market, does have, is demonstrable market demand for a desktop solution in a kind of hobbyist, cult market. If they cannot capitalize on that natural market (and so far they have not)...then I question whether they can capitalize on any market, especially the markets they say they are going after, which are much more competitive than our little cult sphere.
What most people here want, is not a product that is in every way superior to mac, windows, linux, but just a product that has enough unique value, that our positions have some justification and that the amiga platform is a contribution and relevant to modern computing.
Many people here have the talent to take the amiga there, to concentrate on a specialized area and make it applicable.
but I do share your pessimism in once aspect: that success isn't actually going to happen.
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bhoggett wrote:
@Hyperspeed wrote:
What would Samsung want with it? The Escom deal was ten years ago. Why would Samsung want to buy technology that might have been of some interest then but has not advanced at all since then?
AmigaOne? :-)
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However....I'll believe that when I see it. What the Amiga market, does have, is demonstrable market demand for a desktop solution in a kind of hobbyist, cult market. If they cannot capitalize on that natural market (and so far they have not)...then I question whether they can capitalize on any market, especially the markets they say they are going after, which are much more competitive than our little cult sphere.
I think it's possible, but not likely. There are niche markets that the Amiga (and like) could supply to, but the tools needed for those markets don't exist and judging the way our community is heading, we never will. Unlike this community, most users need a computer that can meet a minimal standard. We don't meet that standard.
One example that could be capitalized on are the people out there who don't feel safe using a Microsoft based system, but at the same time don't/won't use linux. You could play on those fears to sell them a system, but the applications these people want (at a bare minimum) don't exist. (A lot of people I know wouldn't touch a system that didn't have an up to date browser or an office solution that could work with MS Office documents.)
If the fragmentation in the community could be minimalised and the talented people we have band together, the void of applications could be bridged. I doubt this will happen though.
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@HopperJF wrote:
AmigaOne? :-)
Yes? What about it? It doesn't contain any Amiga technology or anything else Amiga might be able to sell. As for Eyetech, let me put it this way: if Samsung wanted to release some sub-mediocre overpriced technology, they wouldn't need to go to Eyetech for it.
The reason no one else except Eyetech and Genesi has produced systems like these is not that no one else thought of it or no one else had the technology. It's because everyone else who thought of it realised it would be a waste of time and money.
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bhoggett wrote:
One of the reasons why Amiga will never be anything again is the users. More precisely, the inability of a number of users to evolve their ideas past what they were 15 years ago.
It's like listening to some old codger who tells everyone how things were much better back in the days of oil lamps, candles and goose-quill pens, just because he could get the finest smelling oil and the best candles and kept the fattest geese back then, and he's never seen anyone get better ones since.
Aren't you stereotyping just a bit from a vocal minority? All platforms have their fanatics (just look at Mac and Linux).
I don't see how these users prevent a market from growing - and if it does grow, the new users won't be like this, so these you speak of will be even more of a minority..
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@MarkTime
I hear what you're saying, but again I fail to see what Amigas would have to offer, even if you did target the niche markets.
Looking at embedded systems and kiosks, people are not after a user level OS. What is needed there is a developer friendly OS that gives a high level of stability. In all honesty I fail to see how AmigaOS or MorphOS would be more suitable than an embedded customised Linux solution. At the end of the day users of kiosks etc don't care what OS the system is running on, only that it does what it says on the tin and does it reliably.
Being small might be an advantage if you're forward looking and carry no baggage, but that's not the Amiga scene. The Amiga scene is backward looking and carrying tons of baggage, and Amiga users are some of the most conservative in existence as this thread goes some way to prove. They don't want new and revolutionary. They want to return to what they had ten years ago or more.
Look what's on offer: a couple of pretty low-tech systems backed up with a couple of distinctly immature and non-descript operating systems, none of which offers anything unique or compelling. Buying in costs an arm and a leg, and requires that the user not be too demanding in his requirements (a modern browser or office suite being a bit too much to ask for, not to mention a practically non-existent networking infrastructure).
Except for the fanatical Amigan and the gadget meister, who'd want one and why?
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@mdwh2
What new users?
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@bhoggett
What do you mean? I said "if it does grow", which means new users. If it doesn't, then it doesn't matter. I don't see that a small number of stuck-in-the-past users either represtent everyone here, or somehow have this enormous power over the marketplace.
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What new users?
I've seen few MorphOS users who never had an Amiga. Can't say there are many but still... :-)
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To me AGA has not been beaten to this day as the finest chipset ever
There is an UAE. It supports up to 8MB chip ram. And if you prefer WinUAE chipset you have good choice of software too. You can run MSIE, Opera, Mozilla... You name it :-)
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Hyperspeed wrote:
As for AGA, we're talking not just about the graphics here but the
sound and the drive controllers.
To me AGA has not been beaten to this day as the finest chipset ever
made.
Yeah, yeah bring on the ATi Radeon X800 jokes etc. etc. but back in
1992 when the Amiga 1200 came out - AGA blew even the NeoGeo out of
the water and what games console even today can you print from,
program etc.
No consoles, but why don't PCs count?
I can't see any advantage AGA has now - an advantage was had by having a standardised chipset, and there is a gap perhaps for a computer that has the benefits of standard hardware like a console, but is still a computer. But I hope they don't put AGA in there! Any modern graphics card would do.
The world desperately needs a Peoples Computer to be sold in a little
colourful box like the Deluxe Paint, Oscar, Wordworth style combos of
the early 90's.
Surely there are plenty of PC companies doing bundles of PCs with software in this sort of style?
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Put it simply
NO
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I think if the Amiga is ever to live again, as a community we have to do several things to make it happen:
1) Stop the anti microsoft/intel/Apple bias. The original Amigas had a PC emulator from day one for a reason. The original Amiga was cool because it could emulate and run software from these other machines while still running it's own multimedia software that gave it the edge. We have to welcome these people from other camps instead of saying how bad these other machines are. While the Amiga really stop improving around the birth of vga cards, the other machines were just getting going.
2) We have to co-exist with the rest of the world and see what we can do with them. We have to realize though while AmigaWriter maybe a great word processor (and it is cool). It's not Microsoft Word let alone office. Bloated as it is people use it and open office (in terms of feature sets for a reason).
3) While the G3/G4 is popular on European soil and elsewhere, x86 processors are king in the USA. Not very many people run DOS or Windows 95 and 98 anymore and most Amiga people complain about problems with windows here because they don't have very recent hardware and software. Or they are lacking in knowledge of how to use the platform. I see nothing wrong with the idea of an amiga type OS on all CPUs.. Microsoft themselves got smart with .Net and created a runtime that is CPU independent.. One CPU isn't really better than the other anymore. Things are just darn fast everywhere. Moore's law has been surpassed. We need to think about "Amiga Everywhere" if the platform has a chance of coming back in one form or another.. (AmigaDE, MorphOS, OS4, AROS).. Most all old software is run through emulation of a 68k processor anyway.
4) How can we get Amiga back in the hearts and minds? Well how did linux become so popular that now it's competitive with Windows. Think about it folks an Open Source AmigaOS isn't a bad idea. Let the community guide it where it is supposed to, not some venture capital firm that just wants a return on their money. If venture capital firms guided Disney, the way they do today Snow White would have never have gotten made.. Think about it..
5) Stop the Civil war, we have red camps now and blue camps. God if they put a single united platform together, and forgot a moment about their limited profits and worked together, they might open a market that would be big enough to support both of them. Plus they all seem after the same thing, just different approaches.
6) Make the programming information available FREELY and openly.. Stop trying to make money off of a small if not close to dead horse. The only way people will port is if the information isn't closed off to them. I used to be able to go to barnes and noble and buy a rom kernal manual. Now that information is behind a password protected website or a purchaseable cdrom. Commodore sent me hundreds of pages per year for free. Would Amiga Inc. do the same? No! When you aren't as big as Microsoft or Apple you can't charge for this stuff and actually expect new software to get written. BeOS was successful in getting software written for it because it's sdk was available for free. You could get information easily.. If you want to get an idea of how easy it is, check out bebits.com sometime..
7) Finally, stop worrying about how compatible something is with something written back in 1991. Buy it based on potential now, and write software for it yourself.
8) Show the stuff you find cool about your machine off to other people. If they can get one and you have showed them something unique that they want to do then you won someone over.
9) Buy software from the small guys don't pirate it. They survive, you get more new stuff, you don't have to rely on one big company for everything you do..
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I am sorry folks AGA while cool is very close to what the original VGA standard was..
Today most graphics cards come with a GPU (A graphics CPU) and a vector processor just to do cinematic effects like you see in movies. AGA and even picasso96/Cybergraphx cards don't effectively support more than 2D acceleration and the texture mapping and effects Pixel Shaders and Vertex shaders just aren't possible today on an Amiga like they are on Nvidia and ATI cards (they need to be done through hardware not software for speed). You just have to see an Nvidia demo of an FX card to know what I am talking about.
OpenGL needs a big boost on the Amiga platform and not even OpenGL 2.0 is approaching direct X for 3d function. I have sat down and written shaders and they are very small pieces of code executed by a vector processor. They are fast and the Amiga doesn't support them and doesn't have anything like them even with the ported SDL libraries..
You guys need to examine more hardware and high end stuff and write code to be making statements about how good amigas are today, and not generalize until you have more facts in evidence.
I look forward to see how far OS 4 and MorphOS bring 3D.. We need new standardized APIs folks and better drivers and new code to compete in these areas.
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The Amiga software and graphics hardware (though lacking some in resolution) was WAY ahead of it's time.
Too bad Commodore let it stagnate for as long as they did. Given the performance of AGA, it could have easily been released a few years earlier and wiped the floor with everything else but outrageously espensive arcade CGI boards (which were basicly just daisy-chained CPUs).
For one thing the graphics are NEVER SMOOTH
you can always see directx glitches ( because they arnt programming the hardware directly they are programming directx( CRAP) no matter how fast your CPU is or graphics card.
That also infuriates me to no end. However, the reason is because of bad drivers that cut too many corners (like perspective correction), or the fact that PC game developers NEVER use VSync. They don't care if your monitor is running at 72Hz. They care that their built-in benchmarks return numbers like 160+ FPS.
Sad how Dreamcast and PS2 games look pretty damn good next to PC games, even today, because the developers program for smoothness instead of detail and wicked framerates. Anything beyond the refresh rate of your monitor wastes power and generates more heat.
I doubt PC developers will ever resolve this issue.
A good example of current day custom chip technology is sony's PS2. built from the ground up using custom chips
sony asked to be made. like the amiga.
Yeah, but they spent more than a half billion developing it, and when it was released, the dev tools sucked, so you had to buy an engine or program it in assembly to make it do anything useful. Sory REALLY screwed up the dev tools, probably because they obsessed so much on the hardware. Let's hope they don't repeat that mistake with PS3 (though they probably will, since PS2 still managed to demolish the competition for some dumb reason).
The ps2 like the amiga plays games very well and is flawlesly smooth.
Note the lower resolution of PS2 games. I personally prefer to run games at 800x600 with 6x antialiasing, while my dad runs 1600x1280. I think my games look better, and they definately run smoother.
DIRECT-X sucks my A2000 runs more stable than my AMD 2500+ and 512mb of pc3200 ram with windows XP pro!! windows sucks, Microcrap sucks even worse and that is what is going to be their downfall.
I had a 2600+ that crashed like crazy until I replaced the RAM (both sticks were bad). Now it's rock stable.
PC3200 tends to be very, very unreliable, even from the best vendors. I'm never buying Corsair memory again. Even their RMA modules gave me problems with my P4.
Boy, were the laid off employees pissed off at Medhi for ruining the company in a matter of a couple of years!!!
Those engineers were the only reason the Amiga was great. Commodore didn't do a damn thing right.
Does anyone actually ever stand up for Commodore?
They knew they had a great computer and sat on their asses. Then, they started working on an ill-fated "cheap" Amiga, even though the A500 pummeled the PC and Mac in terms of price/performance. Then, they ran out of time on AAA and relesed AGA in an attemt to slow losses. I was very distressed to see the A4000 refresh Workbench windows slower than the A1200.
To me AGA has not been beaten to this day as the finest chipset ever
made.
Well, I for one was VERY disappointed with AGA. After 7 years, the "new" chipset was pretty much a freshened OCS/ECS with roughly twice the overall OCS performance with the same color modes. So much for Moore's law! Even with the fast memory upgrade, I felt my 1200 was too slow to be worth the money I paid. Of course, I bought it anyway since it is better than the A1000 it replaced, but I was still mad.
It also couldn't compete with VGA modes, and the blitter was the same speed, which made 256-color mode undesirable and HAM-8 useless. There was also NO excuse for a multimedia computer to use the same 4-channel 8-bit sound. 8 Chanels would have been great, even in 8-bit.
Oh yeah, and don't forget the low-density floppy drives. What's the point of 256-color graphics if you game comes on 10 floppies? Amigas are still infamous for swapping, even under UAE.
AGA blew even the NeoGeo out of the water and what games console even today can you print from, program etc.
What are you smoking? AGA can't handle dozens of sprites at 60Hz. The blitter isn't near fast enough.
So what if Mehdi Ali made some mistakes
So what if they lost a quarter billion dollars in two years?
Ali is now my dad's boss, BTW, and he's just as effective at management today as he was 10 years ago! I don't think my dad will still have a job by the end of the year.
Particularly if you wonder if Microsoft has been getting governmment contracts and subsidies.
Microsoft understood very early that you can make more money making software for multiple platforms. Commodore didn't do **** to improve the Amiga chipset. After all, they bought it -- they didn't even design it.
One of the reasons why Amiga will never be anything again is the users. More precisely, the inability of a number of users to evolve their ideas past what they were 15 years ago.
Well, what's left of them. When there were 100,000 Amiga users around, things could have gone somewhere. But, with all the talented people having gone to the PC and game machines, a community of 1,500 die-hards isn't going to do anything.
It's not hard to be ahead of the pack, and provide unique value at the edges.
Try getting "value" from an $800 AmigaOne, when you can get a much faster PC (sans OS) for around $300.
They don't want new and revolutionary. They want to return to what they had ten years ago or more.
Exactly. I still hear people moan about pull-down screens when a task bar or dock is far, far better.
Any modern graphics card would do.
Especially since nobody hard-codes the chipsets anymore. Developers don't care what chipset is being used. All they care about is that the target hardware supports the 2D/3D API calls they are using. What's the point in complaining about custom chips if all you're going to do is use a variant of OpenGL?
The original Amiga was cool because it could emulate and run software from these other machines while still running it's own multimedia software that gave it the edge.
No computer is judged by its ability to run software written for other computers. Apple had PC emulation, too, and it didn't boost sales one bit.
Bloated as it is people use it and open office (in terms of feature sets for a reason).
In name only. Everyone at my college submitted their student newspaper articles in Microsoft Word format (requiring us to upgrade every year just so we could read the disks). How many people did anything more sophisticated than writing a simple WordPad-type document? NOBODY. You don't need a full-blown word processor to use nice fonts and margins, but still, MS Word is still the best-selling word processor, and many computers come with it pre-installed.
One CPU isn't really better than the other anymore. Things are just darn fast everywhere.
Endian order is the biggest hurdle, but many CPUs (like MIPS) can run in both modes. When will PowerPC and X86 wise up?
Well how did linux become so popular that now it's competitive with Windows. Think about it folks an Open Source AmigaOS isn't a bad idea.
Note the type of people who use Linux, and note that Linux is just a kernel. It's pretty much useless for ordinary people without Gnome/KDE, and both desktop systems are so backwards it boggles the mind.
Stop the Civil war, we have red camps now and blue camps.
Has anyone considered that the reason why there are reds and blues, is because NEITHER is good enough?
Commodore sent me hundreds of pages per year for free. Would Amiga Inc. do the same? No! When you aren't as big as Microsoft or Apple you can't charge for this stuff and actually expect new software to get written.
Documentation is the key to survival. Yesteryear, computer companies were just bad at it. Today, they don't bother. It sickens me.
Hell, if you buy an XP-based computer these days, the revovery CD is on the hard drive. They don't even give you an OS CD anymore! :-x
Finally, stop worrying about how compatible something is with something written back in 1991. Buy it based on potential now, and write software for it yourself.
Amiga was in such a good situation a few years ago. All software was 68K and emulation was the only answer. Moving on to a new, hardware-independent platform and using emulation or compatibility would've sewn up all the legacy problems. Instead, they decided to shackle the machine to PPC. Once you go PowerPC, you're stuck with it.
AGA and even picasso96/Cybergraphx cards don't effectively support more than 2D acceleration and the texture mapping and effects Pixel Shaders and Vertex shaders just aren't possible today on an Amiga like they are on Nvidia and ATI cards
AGA wasn't even designed to do 2D alphas, let alone 3D.
OpenGL needs a big boost on the Amiga platform and not even OpenGL 2.0 is approaching direct X for 3d function.
Too bad good drivers cost a fortune. Reasonable 3D on a new Amiga probably won't come around for another 4-5 years.
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Will Amiga ever live again?
Depends what you mean by live, and based on that definition you may even find that it never died.
(Amiga = the Amiga platform.)
Will Amiga systems be successful?
That depends on how low your expectations are. I look at the new systems as life preservers, enough to keep the community afloat until........until we have a cunning plan.
Will Amiga reach its former heights?
Well, obviously no. You'd need to sell millions apon millions and Eyetech are even fretting over a measly 10 thousand units.
Will Amiga ever have the number of users it once had?
No, of course not. Lucky if you get 1% of old users back and even then out of curiosity.
Will it ever be as powerful as other systems?
No. Eyetech and Genesi will never be able to keep up with even PowerPC chips, and the PowerPC chip will be lucky to even keep up with x86 clones.
Will it ever be a cheaper alternative to other systems?
No. Unless it sits on the shelf for a couple of years.
Then why get one???
Well this all comes down to the Amigan philosophy.
IMHO Amigans consider themselves the underdog. Amigans identify strongly with the prominent computer of their youth sorta like musical taste. Amigans triumphed over the ST and the PC owners in many aspects in the early nineties and considered themselves unique. Amigans identified with the underdog and the success story that was Amiga. Some people think they can do it again, or at least have fun trying. If its a matter of being a mini-me-too, then that's just fine as well. Everything old is new again, and exciting times playing catch up can be had.
That's why I think people use Linux too, they identify with their community and are willing to put up with its shortcomings, while attempting to bridge the gap and beat Goliath. We all know Windows is good enough, but I'll be damned if I knowingly make Bill Gates richer. You can get close to Windows, on a miniscule budget, which says a lot.
Will Amiga ever have a decent browser, a decent Office Suite and decent development tools?
YES!!! Because when left to their own devices and unshackled by corporate considerations Amigans band together to make what seems impossible, possible. It wasn't Amiga that made it possible, IT WAS AMIGANS THAT MADE IT POSSIBLE!!! Its only a matter of time, and a final OS4 release combined with new uA1 hardware may just prove the catalyst.
I think that the only way to get ahead of the pack in terms of hardware, is to jump onto someone else's proprietry hardware, and build a new Amiga based on one of the next gen PowerPC consoles, like Sony's or Nintendo's. In this case the move to PPC was merely step one, ie Amiga ONE. I want Amiga TWO on kickass console hardware(with higher specced options). With a single hardware base we wouldn't be in the gfx and sound support mess we have now. I wish the companies would get out of the hardware game altogether and leverage what is already out there more. I know, x86 is out of the question, almost like conceding defeat for some, but there must be other PPC alternatives. Surely, Eyetech and Genesi can't be the only people making PPC hardware. I don't care if they're just resellers. Let others with the muscle produce the hardware and leverage it.
I think we should just support the current hardware on the A1 TO THE MAX for now and not expend too much effort on supporting everything under the sun, for instance, the uA1s built in sound and graphics, as well as 3d, and that will be fine until we can figure out what to do about producing a killer Amiga TWO in a couple of years. It'll be fun for a while just to see what can be done with the new machines, even if we can't directly hit the hardware.
If you buy a new Amiga, intend to join in on the fun, because we're in for quite a ride, bumpy or otherwise for many years to come. And in that regard THE AMIGA AIN'T DEAD!!! It really can't get any worse than it has been either.
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Cheer up, Bill Buck. You know what they say.
Some things with Amiga are bad.
They can really make you mad.
Other things just make you swear and curse
When you're posting on a newsgroup
Don't grumble, give a whistle!
And this'll help things turn out for the best
...AND...
Always look on the bright side of Migs (whistles)
Always look on the light side of Migs (whistles)
If the Amiga scene's jolly rotten
Then there's something you've forgotten!
And that's to play a game and dance and sing
When you're OS core dumps
Don't be silly chumps
Just play a mod and whistle, that's the thing
And always look on the bright side of Migs (whistles)
Come on! ...Always look on the red side of Migs (whistles)
The Court Case is quite absurd
And DE's the final word
You must always face the curtain with a bow
Forget about your sin
Give Amigans a grin
Enjoy it-- It's your last chance anyhow!
So always look at the blue screen of death
A-just before your PC draws its terminal breath
Windows is a piece a $hit
When you look at it
Amiga's a laugh and A1's a joke, it's true
You'll see it's all a show
Keep 'em laughin' as you go
Just remember that the last laugh is on you
And always look on the bright side of Pegs
(C'mon Bill, cheer up!)
Always look on the bright side of Pegs (whistle)
Always look on the bright side of Pegs (whistle)
(Worse things happened at Be, you know.)
Always look on the bright side of Migs (whistle)
(I mean, what've you got to lose? You know, you come from nothin', you're going back to nothin', what you lost? Errrr...Money!)
Always look on the blue side of Migs (whistle)
(Nothing will come from nothing... you know what they say. Cheer up, ya ol' bugger! C'mon, give us a grin.)
Always look on the blue side of Migs (whistle)
(There you are. See? It's the end of the Court Case. Incidentally, this songs available at Amiga.org.)
Always look on the bright side of Migs (whistle)
(Alan: Some of us've got to live as well, you know. Who do you think pays for all this rubbish?)
Always look on the bright side of Migs (whistle)
(KMOS'll never make their money back, you know. I told him, I said to him, Garry, I said, you'll never make their money back.)
Always look on ...
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Waccoon: maybe you can get Ali to register here and answer a few questions?
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Live again?
It never died. It never will.
(AOS will not be back in the desktop PC mainstream like it once was, but I would predict that there will be some new activity around it for the next few years to come, after that ... who knows, most likely things continue as usual ... some try to keep on killing it but they still fail in doing it ...)
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I still hear people moan about pull-down screens when a task bar or dock is far, far better.
I completely disagree, A task bar is fine for a few programs but once you have multiple programs and multiple windows the buttons shrink so much you can't tell which is which.
I don't like the dock at all for tracking programs, so much so I use a pager which breaks things up into different screens. Much faster and friendly than any task bar type approach, Exposé works well if you have more than one program on a screen. The Dock is only good for launching programs and that's all I use it for.
BeOS had multiple ways of tracking programs including both a vertical task bar which works better than a horizontal one (though you could also do that) and a pager.
The Amiga used screens, MorphOS has screens but it'll give you a list so you don't have to keep clicking between them. Screens can also be in any depth / resolution you want which can be very useful.
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in answer to the question...
I think so but in a smaller more dissident, fractured, splintered way.
:-)
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A task bar is fine for a few programs but once you have multiple programs and multiple windows the buttons shrink so much you can't tell which is which.
It doesn't have to work just like the Windows task bar. I wish Linux people would stop trying to make their systems look and feel like Windows.
Screens can also be in any depth / resolution you want which can be very useful.
I wish more OSes used vector graphics. Hard-coded resolution is such an ancient idea. It drives me nuts when someone makes a GUI for 640x480 and doesn't let you resize the window (most GUI toolkits are very backwards, too. I'm starting to hate XUL less these days).
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The good thing about screens/workspaces is that you can arrange it so that groups of applications share the same space.
For example, you might have a shell running a compiler along with a text editor, or you might have a text editor with a web browser. It would be nice to have these together in their own space, without say, your email client or IM clients getting in the way.
This is the problem with a task bar as it is usually implemented - I can't click on one icon, and suddenly have an associated group of programs/windows spring up (I'm on Windows 2000, I don't know how improved XP is here?)
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@mdwh2 wrote:
This is the problem with a task bar as it is usually implemented - I can't click on one icon, and suddenly have an associated group of programs/windows spring up (I'm on Windows 2000, I don't know how improved XP is here?)
It works with Linux, but XP doesn't add anything to this aspect that Win2k didn't have.
Personally, I've never missed draggable screens. The only use I had for them was to switch between Amiga programs that ran at different resolutions and colour depths, either because of the program's supported resolutions being hardcoded, or because of the Amiga's chip memory constraints.
After I switched to using graphics cards, I never missed draggable screens at all.
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This is just my personal view which I have never been shy about before but why now.. Has anyone seen the hardware scaling and 3d mapping in demos of the new Windows "Longhorn" UI..
http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/longhorn_4015.asp (http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/longhorn_4015.asp)
There are more than a few sites with the demo video of this.. It will further differentiate Windows from the Mac and Linux. It uses Direct X and it's use of the GPU to create a 3D user interface of course it will require a new generation of graphics cards for most users.
I really hope that Amiga folks take notice and are thinking about a 3d future for the Amiga platform..