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.
