A4000 on ebay - Doomy does it again!

[Damion]

ltstanfo wrote:
This is one of those long standing discussions in the AMIGA community that will never be settled.

A few simple (historical) facts:

A1000
A2000
A500
A3000

Now, around 1990 the first discussions were being held on what should come next.  There was a brilliant design that was to become the A3000+ that would have been *THE* revolution of the day.  Not only would it have had the famous DSP chip but would have had advanced graphics, etc... Well, as fate has it, C= scraps it but wants something new so in a VERY reduced form, we arrive at the A4000 (desktop).  When compared with the ill-fated A3000+ the A4000(D) is a piece of junk (IMO).  A great person to ask about the A3000+ (other than Dave Haynie) is one of our very own AO members... Tigger.  He actually got to play with a prototype when he worked at a software company in Nashville.  Since the A1200 is merely a simplified A4000, many people consider it in the same catagory.

Is this really fair?  Who is to say?  The A4000 / 1200 did bring AGA to the community but this chipset was already obsolete as the next generation of video chip was being thought of at C= (with no chance of happening) and other computer makers of the day were going to "standards" like NVIDIA or ATI.  Had C= survived, they would have gone the same route.  Designing your own video chipset is needless in the present.  Back in the 80s and early 90s it was a practical alternative.

In any event it's all history and as such can be debated all day long.  All we do know is what was planned vs what was released was not fair or balanced.  If any of you want to learn more about the A3000+ (other than asking Tigger to write about his experiences) chech out Amiga History or better still, read some of Dave Haynie's developer notes presented at the last DevCon.  NOTE - You will need a PDF viewer to read Dave's file.

Regards,
Ltstanfo

Nice writeup. AGA apparently worked fine, I wonder if any of the prototypes had a working DSP though.

SoftHut sold an A3000+ maybe 3 years ago... was only about $300 IIRC. Supposedly it booted AGA games no problem, but there was no DSP.

From a feature-set standpoint, the A1200/A4000 were fairly weak. The onboard IDE was pretty atrocious (non-dma), the system pretty much locks up while performing file transfers.  They're not so bad with a SCSI add-on, though.

[Damion]

On a more interesting note, Dave Haynie used to have a standing offer that anyone who had an A3000+ motherboard could send it to him and he would rig up the DSP to work (after C= demise).  I don't know how many took him up on the deal.

Wow. An AGA A3000 personally fixed by Haynie. That would have been so cool back then. (Still cool today, LOL.)

In a way, I wish I would have jumped on the A3000+ SoftHut had a few years back. Then again, it would probably just sit somewhere, and I can't help but feel a little guilty when I have a bunch of unused stuff laying around.

Plus, more than a few computers set up in your house and you become fairly unmarketable to most women. ;-)
 
cheers

Damion

[Damion]

I don't think Haynie said it was "crap", but there's a pretty good read on it from an old amiga.org interview.

I'll quote the relevant section here:

AA was a good solution for what it did, it just wasn’t enough to satisfy most people by that time. But hey, it did get finished, and that’s an achievement in itself.

There’s an A4000 story, which I’ll relate. The story begins in 1991, when Sydnes took over as VP of Engineering. I was working on the _real_ A3000+, the first prototype of which was the first AA machine ever, back when we called it “Pandora”. This machine was using mainly A3000 parts (I planned to revise it to the ‘040 bus once the AA stuff had been proven – custom chip lead times are many times that of gate arrays; we had the in-house gate arrays at the time that be turned over in about a month), though it had the AGA, and an AT&T DSP3210 subsystem. This would have delivered 16-bit audio I/O, software modem, number crunching 5x-10x faster than a 68040, etc. Not too shabby.

Ok, so Sydnes some in, and his first mission is to destroy the appearance that the former administration (Henri Ruben and Jeff Porter) were as organized and far along as they were. So he cancels all products, and turns the A3000+ into just a development system for programmers (Jeff Porter is able to keep the DSP development alive, I’m able to kludge two working DSP systems even with the DSP control logic, in one of the new custom chips, flawed).

Somewhere down the road, Sydnes and Ali, or perhaps their pet chimpanzee for all I know, decide they need a new computer, something more mid-level. Rather than revive the “A1000+”, which was Joe Augenbraun’s project to build an $800 AA-based, 25MHz entry-level machine for April 2002 release, he gets Greg Berlin to build a scaled-down A3000. This is dubbed the A1000jr (Sydnes claim to fame at IBM was that he was the manager in charge of the PCjr, the greatest failure in IBM PC history), and is basically an A3000 with 68EC020, two Zorro II slots, and ECS.

Now, this is ready to go in April. You have to understand Commodore’s working to know what happened here, but basically, C= was run like a cellular company. Each cell did it’s thing, and ran fairly independently of the parent (CIL, Commodore International Limited). This is why every company did marketing differently; different independent marketing companies. So now, to get their product, each marketing company places orders, and C= fills them as best as they can. But guess what absolutely no one ordered. If you said the “A1000jr” (real name as Amiga 2400 or something like that), you win the LBM Effigy, to be burned later. Nope, no one wanted a stripped down A3000 without AA graphics (or SCSI, or flickerfixer, or Zorro III, etc).

So now Sydnes is in a panic. So he calls on Greg again (Greg’s a good guy, one my oldest friends, just not in the best situation then) to start up the next thing, the A4000. Fast. This command came in May, they wanted to ship in September. So Greg takes the A2400 design, drops in the AA stuff from my A3000+ design, gets me in to fix it to run Zorro III, etc. Sydnes mandates IDE (ATA-1, I think is all you get), so that’s done, poorly, with a PAL (you couldn’t do good ATA in a cheap programmable part back then; you can today), so goodbye SCSI. Anyway, no joy, but there’s an A4000.

The ‘040 board, too, was a left over. Scott Schaeffer was our ‘040 expert (I had been the CPU guy, but had too much work to do, and we wanted the new CPUs out WITH the new system, not a year later), and had actually built an ‘040 board, complete with 128K of L2 cache, which was behind the scenes at the A3000 launch, but never shown. Tragically, it was deemed too expensive. Scott, Greg, Hedley, the cleaning woman, myself, my cat “Iggy”, etc. all new this new machine had to be ‘040 based. They wouldn’t go for doing it right. But it happens that Greg and Scott had realized that during the A1000jr project, too, and so Scott made “the cheapest possible ‘040 board known to man”, price being the only big issue. Guess what powered the A4000?

So me, no, I’m no A4000 fan. The A4000T was improved, if you can find one. It used a fairly standard PC case, something we really wanted – no more custom jobs. It had two video slots, it had the NCR53C710 SCSI from my A4091 board, I tweaked the audio a bit on it for quality and some good features (headphone jack, etc). But alas, not many were made.

Basically, a couple of arrogant dorks canceled projects that would likely have sold pretty well, in favor of inferior products. I'd be bitter too, especially knowing what could have been.

[Damion]

gizmo350 wrote:
@ -D-

Plus, more than a few computers set up in your house and you become fairly unmarketable to most women.

LOL, isn't it true though! :-)