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Author Topic: Classic Amiga Design Pet Hates  (Read 13144 times)

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Offline Amiga_Nut

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Re: Classic Amiga Design Pet Hates
« on: June 15, 2010, 10:38:41 PM »
A500 - Modulator of low quality and external device. No on/off switch on A500 only on PSU.

A500 Plus - Stupid useless screen modes when what we all wanted was 128 colours in 320x256/512 which existed in 1987 thanks to Jay's work. Modulator. PSU

A600 - PSU on/off switch.

A1200 - Only chip ram on motherboard so 50% speed loss for all stock A1200s sold, and PSU on/off switch. Lack of upgraded Paula in AGA OR a dual Paula design (they put dual SID in C65 to address the fact Bob Yannes left and they were stuck with SID warts and all). Lack of chunky byte per pixel screen mode making 256 colour screens a real chore.

General stuff - No official C= CDROM drives for A1200. No Internet strategy at Commodore within Workbench 3 in 1994.

I would say horrible plasticy keyboards but as they're budget machines that's understandable, and as the A2000 and A1000 have excellent keyboards clearly it's a cost issue.
 

Offline Amiga_Nut

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Re: Classic Amiga Design Pet Hates
« Reply #1 on: June 15, 2010, 10:49:05 PM »
Quote from: KThunder;564732
cost was a huge thing but commodore had the 1200 selling for way under what anything else was and the 4000 selling for way above anything else.

If they had gone more for middle ground they could have added features to the 1200 and sold more 4000s


At 399 the original A1200 wasn't 'too cheap' at all. It had a 14mhz bare minimum 32bit CPU crippled to 50% speed as purchased due to all machines sold being 2mb chip ram, no CD-ROM package bundle from Commodore, no 16bit sound or increased number of sound channels. A1200 was NOT overpriced at all. Simm slot for internal simple fast ram addition, dual Paula and a proper chunky pixel mode was not too much to ask for 399 really. HD floppy drive also would have been nice, the price difference for the DD/HD units must have been peanuts anyway. Oh and it should have been A1200 in 92 and A4000 later in 93...NOT the other way round if they wanted an AGA machine to fend off bankruptcy.

But I agree, there should have been an A1300 or something with internal CD, 28mhz 020, and 2mb+1mb Chip + Fast ram as a standard machine. This would have helped a lot as games programmers then had a target machine intended for home buyers to aspire towards.

Also such a machine should have come with a fully functional internet browser and all the necessary networky black magic to make it work (and a non crippled serial port too allowing at least 33.6kb modems to work unencumbered).