Amiga hardware superiority

[mechy]

Yes,as pointed out,most quikpak and amiga technologies 4000t's had 880K drives, but some true C= a4000t's had the HD floppy from the factory.None came with cdroms as standard.

Not sure when the quikpak 060 A4000T model came out,probabaly a good bit after 1994~ would of looked better in the chart in any case.

I Love the 4000t also but the mac is the clear winner with 128MB capable on board,16bit sound,and 24bit (16mil colors) gfx.I never could understand why most mac's used LC 68040's tho..

Of course you could go crazy expanding the 4000t and make it a nice machine.

I would be scared to see ther prices on these originally.

[mechy]

Sorry to quote this,but i didn't see a way around it..

Where are the prices? Without the prices it is all pie in the sky. A Misleading chart anyway, hardware sprites? who cares! 2mb chip ram <> 2mb VRAM of a 24bit card. Also the x68000 and Amiga sprites were insignificant compared to raw CPU speed of an 040 class machine etc.  Also, a 1992 A4000 desktop, which is what should be on the chart as there is no difference to CPU/chipset between A4000D and A4000T just SCSI instead of IDE, is a better comparison as it may show deficiencies (if you update inaccurate points) but also shows the fact it was 12-24 months before the competition.

The A4000 was a old reworked design by 1994.For the time hardware sprites were still usefull for games.I had a 4MB picasso IV running 1024x768x24 in mid 95 which made the 4000t totally great,but that's irrelivant,were talking stock here..The A4000t had some better features which i think IT should be on the chart. scsi makes a big difference on amiga,with 6(controller couints as 1) devices,internal and external. scsi was ultra Low cpu overhead and many devices. Ide on even the 4000's was crap and stuck at 2-3MB/s and 2 devices.although not so much a performance issue,unless u like eaten motherboards was the 4000t had a lithium battery that didnt leak.It also has more zorro slots.For his chart it makes perfect sense to use the 4000t.

Didn't the 840AV have Appletalk too not a standard network adaptor?
You miss out the most important features too like the Quadra AV machines did real time (ie no need to pause a VCR/use a still image) audio and video capture for FMV out of the box.

 
All good stuff,but this was a simplistic chart,but probabaly worth noting.just cant show every feature easily in a chart like this.

Also what the chart doesn't show is the bottom end product (ie those competing with cheap 386SX machines in 1993 etc) from the companies stated. In 1992 Commodore had the A1200, Atari had the ST, I don't think Sharp sold the x68000 alongside the X68030, Next had nothing and the cheapest Mac was the Centris 6xx series desktop machines?

Uh hello, he wasnt comparing cheapest,he was comparing best for the time.
 

For those thinking I am biased against Amiga well I will add...

Take a 4000 desktop and add a Z-RAM 128mb capable Zorro III card, VLAB Y/C Zorro card, a Sunrize/Tocatta 16bit sound card and a Retina Z3 card to A4000D from 1992 and it is probably superior to the 840AV with not too much more cash. And while you are at it get yourself a 486SX Bridgeboard from Golden Gate with a cheap and chearful 1mb SVGA ISA card and you have the best system to cover all the bases IMHO

I have done all the above,but again this was about stock machines,not what you could put in them. we know a expanded 4000t could do well with 060/ppc and all the zorro goodies.
its all irrelivent to his chart.

Also PPC was dead easy to fit in an A4000 but try getting a PPC card for the competition Can you ever play Wipeout 2097 on a 680x0 Mac/Next Station/Falcon/Sharp X68030? I think not so in some way even though AGA is a kludge of an upgrade from 1992 the only system to run anything like Wipeout 2097 is Amiga

again,this has nothing to do with the original message.

(of course it was cheaper to get a PSX on launch day than get a PPC Amiga!)

still off the track

PS Max Resolution of AGA PAL = 1280+512 256 colours w/o overscan and 1440x576 with overscan. Important because the others don't have 1280 horizontal resolution.

Now this is a usefull thing to add.. seems most people tend to think of a stock 1200 in these modes on 020/14mhz of course it crawls, but its somewhat useable(almost tolerable..hehe thankgod for the Picasso IV!!!!)  on a A4000 with 040/25mhz at the time.

PPS the chipset upgrade to A500Plus and A3000 was the most pathetic, nothing worth a shit was done to 320x256 or 640x512 colour resolutions, blitter was still the same making EHB slow as hell for games coding and sprites worse than a C64. We got a useless dog slow 1280x256 4 colour mode and some crappy VGA interlaced modes. This was a dark time indeed, very poor and it was this sort of thing that caused them to go bankrupt. AGA should have been here instead of ECS Denise/Agnus upgrades, and 14mhz CPU for A500 plus (with Paula/Agnus/Denise tacked onto a new 14mhz BUS to double output via a synchronised 56mhz system time instead of 7mhz via a 28mhz clock crystal on the motherboard)

ECS was the biggest mistake Commodore made, 5-6 years after A1000 (1987 A500 and 2000 have identical resolutions and colours to A1000 except a handful which don't display EHB fixed very early on, so another 2 years wasted there with ZERO improvements) we got ECS 'upgrade'    :furious:

I completely agree here..they moved way way too slow. i can see the 2000/500 not being much an upgrade but the 3000 should of. They should of got farther away from the 500/2000 and made 3000 and up a real killer machine. i think money was tight in these years and they still had no crystal clear direction. haynie and the gang had some cool stuff in the works that was canceled by idiot managers iirc.

At the end of the day C= was caught sleeping on their laurels and upper management was the last nail in the coffin.I love all my amiga's and the 4000t is still a great machine,but it was suffering from old age even in 94.I still use it daily tho

[mechy]

I think at the time most people were a little disappointed with the AGA machines both in terms of specs and compatibility. Being an A500 owner I was hoping for an upgrade board for my setup which would have allowed better graphics and more speed(and an improved facelift for WB). Sadly this never really happened and I ended up buying a PC.

This makes no sense to me, why would u buy a cheap machine that had no proper expansion bus and then expect this(yes i know the side slot is technically zorro,and i know expansions were available(costly), why do you think the big box machines has zorro slots.You just bought the wrong thing.AGA was not great,but it was a far cry better than ecs.ecs was dog dirt slow.
all the big box amiga's had gfx card capabilities at the time.
common sense would of dictated to sell the 500 and go with a 2000 or better.even then used 2000's were pretty cheap.

I see this mentality thru the years with 1200 owners also.. they buy the cheapest machine  thinking they are saving $$,then whine about the lack of gfx card expansion and other shortcomings.the cheap machine is not always cheap if u care to expand it.You get what you pay for.but all water under the bridge these days.

[mechy]

I agree.  

Commodore catered for two markets: home users (A500, later A1200) and pro users (A2000, later A3000, later A4000).  This is exactly what Apple did when Jobs took over: Apple had a gazillion models, but he streamlined their product line into just two: Home with the iMacs, and Professional tower units with the G3 Power Mac.  But Apple had a marketing department that made all that unambiguous.  Commodore didn't.  

This and the fact that Amiga had some of the most tight-arsed users in the history of computing, who didn't want to upgrade that 7 year old 1 meg A500, and cried when they couldn't get an AGA upgrade for it.  Hell most A500 I see on ebay are stock 1.3 machines, people didn't even bother to upgrade the OS.

Good point and true. I was dirt poor in the amiga days,but when i wanted something(Picasso IV) i went out and worked jobs/side jobs etc to get it.I paid $379 for it somewhere around late 95/early 96).It was the single best upgrade i ever had with the warpengine 040/40 at the time tieing it.We were always stuck with crippled software and such half the time designed to run on the lowest common denominator machines(020/aga or 000/ecs with 880K drives). Graphics card support came slow with alot of stuff,not only because there was slowly emerging rtg standards but half the people had machines that couldn't easily take a gfx card. Even worse we slowly adopted cdrom technology because again,the 500/1200 couldn't easily take them(exceptions being ones ppl bought scsi for..most ide/atapi stuff was proprietary early on)I can't help thinking if the 1200/500 had not been distractions using resources at C= that we may of had many more cool zorro expansions or at least higher spec machines.At a min. everyone would of probabaly went to at least 030/16mb machines.Then again,C= management could bungle a wet dream.