Am I the only one who doesn't love AGA chipset?

[giZmo350]

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!

[giZmo350]

@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!

[giZmo350]

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

[giZmo350]

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!   ;-)