Well the SCSI PCI cards came whit ROM that enabled you configure and boot from it,
Yes, but again, that's after the Amiga's intro..
PCI was introduced in 1993 and didn't become standard on PCs until 1994.
That's well after the A1200 was released...
What we are comparing is back when the Amiga had the edge.
In 1987, when the A500 was released, they had only just started releasing 386 based PCs (the first was the Compaq DeskPro 386 in 1986, and it was REALLY EXPENSIVE!!!).
So, most PCs were still XTs with 640k. Yes some people had more memory (me, I had a 286 inboard and 2M RAM), but it wasn't very common..
Yeah, 640k was more than the standard 512k, but the Amiga performed well with it's 512k, and the extra money to go to 1M wasn't much, especially considering what you had to pay to get above 640k on a PC, and there wasn't much software that could even use it...
As for PC CPU's they were seated in socket, so you can replace you 486SX whit 486DX, and you got small book describing how to set multiplayer and clock, it was easy, and sheep compared to this custom build accelerator boards or Amiga.
Totally agree, but again that was much later in the cycle.
1989 was when the first 486s were released (and again were outrageously expensive) and the Amiga was at the top of his game...
This should have been when Commodore realized that the next model (the A1200) had to compete with that level of power..
But the 1200 (which I love) came out only competitive because of the "power of the Amiga" (OS and custom chipset) and not the power of the CPU and RAM.
Big mistake, although like you said, it could have been acceptable if the CPU/RAM upgrades weren't that expensive.
But those early 030's and 040's were pretty darn expensive.
At LEAST Commodore could have allowed us to add FAST RAM to the A1200 without needing a board.. Even those 4/8M boards were spendy, when compared to just buying some chips for the PC. (and they took up your slot, so you get an accelerator later, the RAM you bought is useless..)
If you can't beat the current, then at LEAST make it easy to upgrade..
Imagine the 1200 released with a replaceable / clock upgradeable 030 (maybe initially running just at 14Mhz, but you could buy a faster 030/clock to get it to 30Mhz if you wanted at the time???) WITH a SIMM slot so you could easily add at least 2M of FAST RAM.
That would have made the initial Wolfenstein / GLOOMs at least competitive. And with those more reasonable, then people would have been more likely in a few years to go for the 040 board with 4M of FAST RAM (or more) at 30Mhz and up.
But for me at the time, the jump to an 030 was too spendy and not justifiable, and the 040's were so spendy that I was able to just upgrade my PC to 486 level for less.
(I was also starting to get paid for PC work by then, so having a newer PC at home was more beneficial than the Amiga..)
Oh well.. ;-)
desiv
