Classic Amiga Design Pet Hates

[the_leander]

My biggest one was the lack of a standard IDE connector for the CD rom drive of the CD32, which meant that when it went, you were SOL. This was compounded by the fact that neither the SX32 nor the SX32 pro (the one with the 68030 onboard) had proper buffering on their IDE lines, so you couldn't add a CD drive that way and use a hard drive at the same time. None of the IDEfix cards added the buffering since they were designed for the 1200 which had proper buffering of it's IDE.

[the_leander]

Simple, there where lots of 030/040/060 accelerators for the 1200, why didn't they fit a good 68030RC50 and 68882RC50 on it and for the last revision the 68060RC50 ?

In a word? Cost.

At the time of the 1200's release, the 030 in any variant was exorbitant. When the 030 accelerators first came out, they weren't a whole lot less than the price of a new A1200. As for the 060... Oh good lord. Do you remember the costs of accelerators fitted with those things even in 1998?! ROTFL.

They also could have done that with the A500.

Because the 030 hadn't even been released until after the A500 was in full production. And again, cost, at the time the 030 would have been so fresh it would have been warm still by the time it was delivered. The A500 was designed to fit within a budget, adding even an 020 as an option at the time of launch would have been hideously expensive. Remember the costs of the A3000 when it was launched? I do.

[the_leander]

No different to a PC of the day.

I totally understand that, but there was a reason that the A500 sold as it did and the A2000 and A3000's didn't: Price.

And yes, by the time of the A1200 they were still ahead in its price bracket, but it's technological edge had been severely eroded and even surpassed in some areas.

In the big box arena, a fully specced A4000 by the time of it's release was out of date within the price bracket (about a grand for the lower end model iirc). Graphics and sound on the PC was already more advanced than anything that AGA could put out, even if the software wasn't yet there. By the time of the release of the A4000T, the writing was truly on the wall.

Only with the inclusion of 3rd party graphics and sound cards could the Amiga compete and even then at the time there wasn't any RTG, so only specific programs could make use of these features.

Computing in those days was very expensive.

I know, I was there.

As for 1998 ....

By 1998 the market of supply and demand was such that because of the falling user base the makers of the 060 had to lift the price to stay alive.

I don't think I ever saw the 060's sell for any less than £200 for the A1200 and £350 for the A3/4000 during their lives. They always carried a significant premium over lesser accelerators.

Personally I would still pay those prices now if I could get a new Cyberstorm.... ar hum.

Heh, yeah.

*cough* Falcon 030 *cough*

Ok, it had a 16-bit data bus, but that was more for compatibility with the rest of the atari innards, not due to cost. The falcon was comparably priced to the A1200.

IIRC it was around £100 more. Admittedly by this time C= had all but squashed Atari. And as you say, the internals of the Falcon were not as advanced. I think that adding a full blown 030 to the 1200 would have pushed the price up beyond the Falcons, possibly not by a huge margin, but maybe enough to have let Atari back into the game.

Now, the one thing I think the 1200 should have had but didn't, but that the Falcon did, was a MIDI port. I would guess that it would have made it much more appealing to you Karlos.

My pet hate with the A1200 was that it didn't come with any fast ram, nor the provision to add any beyond the trapdoor. A single SIMM slot and requisite glue logic on the motherboard would not have broken the bank and would have made the machine far more capable out of the box.

Agreed 100%. But by this time the beancounters were fully in control of C=. Which is probably why it didn't even have a full 020 which would have made more sense imho.

[the_leander]

Please move to the PC Bashing thread. :madashell:

Why? It was a perfectly valid comparison for machines of that age.