Will Amiga ever live again?

[mdwh2]

Regarding the A1200, I think it's a shame they didn't consider making the box a little bigger (preferably with a separate keyboard, and a small main box like some old Macs). That way you could have internal 3.5" IDE hard drives and a CD ROM, along with onboard SIMMs at a far cheaper price than it cost to add to the A1200. Given that simply adding RAM doubled the speed of the A1200, it's a shame that this wasn't more easily an option.

The PC had started to overtake the Amiga as a games machine (ironic that being a games machine was always supposed to be a bad thing for the Amiga!), but I found Windows 3.1 incredibly sluggish on 4MB 486s, even though I was only used to a bare A1200 at the time. It wasn't until RAM dropped in price that PCs started to become viable for anything other than games IMO (and Windows 95 took even more than 3.1, so I'd be looking at 32MB minimum - which IIRC cost about £800 in 1995!)

[mdwh2]

Well an A4000 could fit the bill for what I had in mind - except it was ridiculously expensive. I'm not sure why this was - presumably the Zorro slots(?), in which case I think a machine without those, and a lot cheaper, would have been worthwhile.

I mean, you could upgrade an A1200 with hard drive, CPU and RAM (and possibly CD ROM), and still get something for cheaper than an A4000/030. If these things had come as standard, and made use of cheaper 3.5" IDE, it'd surely have been cheaper still. Plus the money would have been going to Commodore, rather than 3rd party companies. Also, if things like CD ROM and memory were cheap optional extras, it would have raised the base level, and made software companies more willing to develop for them, instead of writing for a basic A1200 that maybe had a hard drive.

@NightShade737: I think he meant an extra 512K memory of Fast RAM - basically a small cheap extra amount that may have helped get the speed up.

[mdwh2]

bhoggett wrote:
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.

It's like listening to some old codger who tells everyone how things were much better back in the days of oil lamps, candles and goose-quill pens, just because he could get the finest smelling oil and the best candles and kept the fattest geese back then, and he's never seen anyone get better ones since.

Aren't you stereotyping just a bit from a vocal minority? All platforms have their fanatics (just look at Mac and Linux).

I don't see how these users prevent a market from growing - and if it does grow, the new users won't be like this, so these you speak of will be even more of a minority..

[mdwh2]

@bhoggett

What do you mean? I said "if it does grow", which means new users. If it doesn't, then it doesn't matter. I don't see that a small number of stuck-in-the-past users either represtent everyone here, or somehow have this enormous power over the marketplace.

[mdwh2]

Hyperspeed wrote:
As for AGA, we're talking not just about the graphics here but the
sound and the drive controllers.

To me AGA has not been beaten to this day as the finest chipset ever
made.

Yeah, yeah bring on the ATi Radeon X800 jokes etc. etc. but back in
1992 when the Amiga 1200 came out - AGA blew even the NeoGeo out of
the water and what games console even today can you print from,
program etc.

No consoles, but why don't PCs count?

I can't see any advantage AGA has now - an advantage was had by having a standardised chipset, and there is a gap perhaps for a computer that has the benefits of standard hardware like a console, but is still a computer. But I hope they don't put AGA in there! Any modern graphics card would do.

The world desperately needs a Peoples Computer to be sold in a little
colourful box like the Deluxe Paint, Oscar, Wordworth style combos of
the early 90's.

Surely there are plenty of PC companies doing bundles of PCs with software in this sort of style?

[mdwh2]

The good thing about screens/workspaces is that you can arrange it so that groups of applications share the same space.

For example, you might have a shell running a compiler along with a text editor, or you might have a text editor with a web browser. It would be nice to have these together in their own space, without say, your email client or IM clients getting in the way.

This is the problem with a task bar as it is usually implemented - I can't click on one icon, and suddenly have an associated group of programs/windows spring up (I'm on Windows 2000, I don't know how improved XP is here?)