Am I the only one who doesn't hate AGA?

[stefcep2]

hmm, well I do use 256 colors, maybe I should reduce the number of colors anyway..

IMO anything more than 16 colors on Workbench in AGA is wasteful: wasteful in chip ram and cpu speed.  I used the MagicWB 8 color palette and found it a nice compromise between speed and appearance. In  fact I personally think the "Amiga look and feel" is best exemplified by MagicWB, Magic menu, and MUI in a 4:3 screen mode.  

Actually, I'm a little over eye candy on the gui, now just run the stock 4 color workbench: after all the gui is just a means to communicate with the computer.  Most people still read the icon label text, and don't rely on the icon pictogram to determine what the icon represents, with the icon just representing the "clickable" region.  In that case, pretty icons are pointless and possibly distracting.

[stefcep2]

I think people have got things a bit backwards when it comes why Amiga didn't get the same games the PC did.  Sure an A1200 with an 020 and AGA and fast ram was underpowered by then, but most games were written for an A500 spec anyway: there were very few AGA only games.  Why did this happen?  Because for every owner who bought an AGA machine probably 10x as many stuck with their OCS/ECS-which usually was an A500.  Hell, they wouldn't even buy a hard drive, so most games weren't even hard drive installable! Even a hard drive would have improved the quality and complexity of games, but no, people kept their floppy only A500's.  

AGA was never properly utilized till the end of its life beacsue the perceived install base was too small for the software houses to put the time and effort to write games to get the most out of it.  If they had, the next logical step would have been to write for A1200 AGA+hard drive +4 Meg RAM, then an A1200 '030 with 8 Meg ram +Cd ROM: the software would have driven the sale of hardware until AAA arrived.  

If  more people did buy an A1200, the software houses might have been convinced not to write their software to run on 512k A500.  In reality the infamous stinginess of the average  Amiga user who thought an A500 with 512 meg ram should run the latest release software for 12 years was to blame for AGA's market failure as Commodore's management was.

[stefcep2]

Because Commodore did not include HD's as standard equipment, unlike the competition. And to upgrade your A500 to have a HD was cost prohibitive. Case certainly was never designed for one anyway. Had 2.5" drives been affordable and there was a place to install one internally without having to get a Shuffleboard and removing your internal floppy, that might have been different. But just as the argument of having certain capabilities built-in, the practically "unexpandable" A500 was doomed from the start that way. Just as the big boxes were, thanks to them being overpriced by early 90's standards

The A500 was hard to upgrade because thats not what it was designed for!  You were meant to use it, and when it could no longer keep up with the modern software you meant to get an A1200.  If you chose not to do that, AND still wanted to rum modern software, then you had to accept it was going to be awkward and expensive.  Instead people just went:"How do i get an AGA upgrade for my A500?"  Buy an A1200, thats how!

I disagree with this because, by that time, it was already too late. Software houses had already seen the writing on the wall. And ultimately, it was C= fault for not knowing how to market their system(s).

It was too late because not enough bothered to ditch their A500 and get an A1200, choose the hard drive option AT THE TIME OF PURCHASE and get a RAM upgrade later on.  The users killed the potential that AGA had as much as Commodore did.  Commodore was a  victim of its own success, the A500 was so far ahead of its time, people expected it to be start of the art for ever!

I was an early A1200 adopter and guess what I had to do in order to add an affordable HD to my system? Purchase an ugly external box that housed a 3.5" HD w/ external power supply, with a bare naked IDE ribbon cable coming out the back of my system. Yeah, that was great. Didn't look half-assed at all (sarcasm). 2.5" drives were simply cost prohibitive. Was I being cheap? No. I was trying to be practical. By the time I ended my spending spree... I had nearly $1400 (before monitor) wrapped up in the stupid thing. Little wonder I bought 386 and then a 486 shortly after. Course now, the Windoze platform and its chinsey hardware isn't allowed in the house at all, but I digress. lol

Most A1200's I've seen had a 40 mb hard drive.  The Commodore card box they came in had tick box for  models with hard drive and those without, some with 60 meg, so they definately were available with hard drive from Commodore.  

You didn't NEED that box, but I bet you chose to do it that way beacsue a big 3.5 inch HD was cheaper and faster-but the A1200 was never meant for big 3.5 inch drives, it was a compact all-in-one home computer, not a pro machine, thats what the A4000 was for, but A1200 users wanted pro-level machines for game console prices.  this is exactly how Apple markets is computers today: hard to expand iMacs for home users with lower specs, Mac pro for everyone else.  But Mac users are different; they accept that, Amiga users didn't.

I did the external tower thing as well, but that was to get a CDROM drive going, and Commodore was dead by the time CDROM was essential.  CDROM at the time of Commodore was bloody expensive, so if people were too tight to ditch the A500, why would Commodore push CDROM?

[stefcep2]

@2600.  The A1200 wedge design was for portable computing on the cheap: the built in composite out meant no monitor needed, just plonk it in front of a tv, and boot up.  Even with just 2 meg and no hard drive you would probably boot up faster than a hard drive PC with Win 3!  

The real shame was that too few users saw what the A1200 could do with a hard drive and extra ram:  Word Process, Spread sheet, database, video, art, animation, music, mutitasking GUI OS, and even 3D.  Everything that an expanded A500 could do and more, for less than an A500 upgrade.

I once cursed the limitations for expansion, of an all-in-one wedge design, but I now realise what i wanted the A1200 to be what it wasn't designed to be.  Thats what the A4000 was.

[stefcep2]

The A1200 was NOT marketed as a "half assed" (which is clearly what it would have been, had they even tried) portable machine here in the States as you're projecting.

I'm not saying it was marketed as a portable machine ala a "laptop", but it nevertheless was easily portable, and as TV screens were ubiquitous, it was a very portable computer.  Its market was the home user/game player not the power user who wanted to start a branch of Industrial Light and Magic in their bedroom.  The problem here is that this user wasn't you or me or everyone else still mad enough to be on a forum like this all these years later.  We were fanatics, who wanted the power of an A4000 at the price of an A1200.  And the reason it came out with 2 meg chip was that RAM was very expensive at the time of the A1200's release and Commodore wanted to encourage third party hardware development of RAM boards and accelerators.  

It was supposed to be an evolutionary step up from the A500. And are you kidding about the A1200 and A4000? Umm.... remember the cost difference? Totally inexcusable. Even worse than the A500 and A2000. Commodore simply didn't know what they had or how to even price it. The Amiga was left to monkeys after the A1000 was designed. Pure and simple.

+10 Digiman!

Well how does the price compare say when Apple turned things around for themselves with their fruity iMac (even less expandable than an A1200) and the Tower Power Macs?  AFIR $1800 versus $3500 (sans monitor). The difference is the market perception:  Apple users who bought the iMac knew what they were getting and didn't ask for more. They weren't tinkerers, applying patches and hacks to get that last drhystone out of the machine.

From my reading there are differences in markets between countries as well:  The UK were mostly low-end users, the US pro-video users, and Germany probably a mix. It tends to explain people from the UK saying they couldn't get hard drive machines easily: was that due to Commodore not wanting to sell HD A1200's or people not wanting or not being able to afford to, and then being given what they want/can afford?  Here in Australia, every A1200 I ever saw on sale when people were getting out of Amiga had at least a 40 mb hard drive, many had RAM cards.

 Many of the relatively few Amiga users who upgraded to an A1200 knew that they wanted the capabilities of an A4000....and bought an A1200. The rest stayed on their A500's, so that remained the base for games programmers even after AGA had been out for years.  If more people upgraded to AGA, then that would have been the base, and with software ever pushing the limits if hardware and with economies of scale, later 68030's and even 68060's could have been affordable enough to make games like doom and ridge racer feasable, until AAA came out.  

In general-and the people here are an exception, we'd have to be to still be even thinking about Amiga- Amiga users were the biggest tightwads.  Yes Commodore made horrendous business decisions, but whereas PC users plonked $3,000 on a 486 PC to play Doom, Amiga user complained about the price of a hard drive!

[stefcep2]

. Can you play anything like Sonic 2 on a stock A1200? Apples and oranges, IMO.

There was a non-Sega demo out there.  Just to prove that it *could* be done.

[stefcep2]

If this is the demo you are talking about, I can only assume that you've never actually played Sonic.

possibly.  Anything done on megadrive *could* be done on an A1200 and probably better.  Its a licensing limitation, not a hardware one.  

BtW Sonic is simply boring.

[stefcep2]

No, there are a lot of things the Mega Drive can do which a stock 1200 can't, and that goes the other way around, too, of course. I'm not saying that one is necessarily better than the other, but for 2D action games like Sonic or any shoot'em up; lot's of sprites, fast and smooth scrolling tile layers, etc, the Mega Drive is definitely superior.

What?

Super Stardust.  Xenon.  XP8 AGA.  Project X.  Smooth scrolling, plenty-of-sprites-on-screen shooters.

The reason why a Sonic game might be smoother on the megadrive is the same reason the amiga suffered ports that were worse than on the megadrive:  the coders didn't give enough of a shit to code them properly for the Amiga, whereas a company like Sega whose mascot was Sonic would have pulled out all stops to make Sonic a flagship title: their survival depended on it.  Megadrive ports were farmed off to third parties that didn't optimize the games for Amiga.

For games requiring a lot of RAM for variables or raw CPU power, like detailed simulations or strategy games, the 1200 is obviously the better choice, but you'd never see a Thunder Force IV or a Sonic 2 on the 1200.

.

What?  It was all the stuff Amiga custom chips did with very little CPU power that set the Amiga apart.

And you'll never see Super Mario Bros on the megadrive, either.

Totally besides the point, but not a surprising thing to hear from someone who knows that he's losing an argument.

You implied that Sonic's absence on the Amiga due to AGA's technical inferiority was a  contributor to AGA's failure. I can honestly say I don't recall anyone saying:  "If Amiga only had Sonic..."  Doom, yes.  Mario, maybe.  Sonic, meh...It was a boring game

[stefcep2]

The problem with AGA was the needs of many users changed, and it wasn't just games.  Web browsing became graphics heavy and we needed larger screens with thousands of colors to view web pages as intended at decent speed and without scrolling all the time, people wanted to use 24 bit image processors and 3D renderers with windowing environments.  There were 24 bit boards before AGA came out for such reasons, but when I bought my A1200, i wasn't in to that software and couldn't afford the hardware-either on PC, MAc or Amiga.  The A1200 let me upgrade as and when I could.

Looking back on it though I now realise my A1200 was never designed to run the software I now wanted to run.  But the software that was designed for it, ran well:  On a multiscan mnonitor, Workbench in 8 colors and DBLPAL overscan is a good approximation to 800x600 and very nippy, DPaint 5 and Brilliance 2 run great in DBLPAL modes in upto 256 colors, wordprocesssing/DTP is fine in 8-64 colors, Scala, CanDo, Amigavision are fine for AGA multimedia.  But I now had Cinema 4D, ImageFx, Photogenics 5, Art Effect, Ibrowse, Mac emulators:  all of these were transformed by my Cybervision board.

I tried to hang on to AGA on an A1200 for as long as I could and used umpteen patches to speed things along-and it frustrated me no end that I couldn't use my software to its full potential because of AGA's limitations.