Takers - One Woman's Opinion of the Amiga Mini

[danwood]

1. If it has no Paula chip it is no Amiga.

Never understand why you/others place so much significance on the Paula chip? It was just one of many components that made up the machine, yet some people seem to consider it THE defining feature of the platform. I don't think Paula was the amiga's most famous or 'killer' feature by a long shot.  The chip was outdated and CBM were slated for not replacing it when AGA was released.

[danwood]

I can tell you never made music on the amiga. Especially now that 8bit sound is cool again, many people in electonic scene going for that phat old skool sound. The amiga has awesome low end bass for some reason and if you try to use emulation on pcs with uae using Amiga trackers it just doesnt sound as good.

You 'tell' wrong then as I spent many a happy hour in ProTracker and Octamed soundstudio, but if someone asked me "What was the defining feature of the Commodore Amiga platform, what really set it apart from everything else?", a pre-emptive multitasking operating system, a unique set of custom chips (all of them, with Agnus/Denise probably the leading ones), killer graphics, unique coin-op quality games would all come above "the Paula sound chip" for things the Amiga was famous for.    Personally I consider the graphical capabilities of the Amiga much more impressive than the audio side.

The C64 was more famous for its sound chip than the Amiga, I've never really met anyone who considers the Amiga's biggest strength its audio capabilities, sure they were neat for a while, but by the time the a4000 hit it was pretty lame in comparison to other machines.  Even the Atari ST I'd say was more famous for music use than the Amiga.  Paula was decent enough but it was nothing unique really, by the early 90s it was decidedly average and by the time 1992 ticked around and the A4000/A1200 it was sub-par, it was an 8-bit chip in a 32-bit platform, sorry but it wasn't the most mind-blowing feature of the Amiga to me, or most people around by then.

Just baffles me I guess when I see people ask 'What makes an Amiga' and people start gushing over Paula as if that was the killer feature of the platform, never seen that outside of this forum!

[danwood]

And that was not because Paula was bad. Actually Amigas audio was much better.
But Atari came with MIDI port (for Amiga you had to buy it separately) and had cheap highres black and white monitor. The display and MIDI was the key to Atari's success in Audio.


IMHO: even today PAULA is ok for Audio, it's 14bit calibrated output is very good.
Most standard x86 sound chips have things like loud background noice that make the audio experience very poor.

Paula wasn't bad, it was ok, but personally I wouldn't even class it in the top 10 of amazing features of the Amiga, let alone the number 1.  The graphics and OS were much more ground breaking and alluring.