Amiga hardware superiority

[Digiman]

Where are the prices? Without the prices it is all pie in the sky. A Misleading chart anyway, hardware sprites? who cares! 2mb chip ram <> 2mb VRAM of a 24bit card. Also the x68000 and Amiga sprites were insignificant compared to raw CPU speed of an 040 class machine etc.  Also, a 1992 A4000 desktop, which is what should be on the chart as there is no difference to CPU/chipset between A4000D and A4000T just SCSI instead of IDE, is a better comparison as it may show deficiencies (if you update inaccurate points) but also shows the fact it was 12-24 months before the competition.

Didn't the 840AV have Appletalk too not a standard network adaptor?
You miss out the most important features too like the Quadra AV machines did real time (ie no need to pause a VCR/use a still image) audio and video capture for FMV out of the box.

Also what the chart doesn't show is the bottom end product (ie those competing with cheap 386SX machines in 1993 etc) from the companies stated. In 1992 Commodore had the A1200, Atari had the ST, I don't think Sharp sold the x68000 alongside the X68030, Next had nothing and the cheapest Mac was the Centris 6xx series desktop machines?

For those thinking I am biased against Amiga well I will add...

Take a 4000 desktop and add a Z-RAM 128mb capable Zorro III card, VLAB Y/C Zorro card, a Sunrize/Tocatta 16bit sound card and a Retina Z3 card to A4000D from 1992 and it is probably superior to the 840AV with not too much more cash. And while you are at it get yourself a 486SX Bridgeboard from Golden Gate with a cheap and chearful 1mb SVGA ISA card and you have the best system to cover all the bases IMHO

Also PPC was dead easy to fit in an A4000 but try getting a PPC card for the competition Can you ever play Wipeout 2097 on a 680x0 Mac/Next Station/Falcon/Sharp X68030? I think not so in some way even though AGA is a kludge of an upgrade from 1992 the only system to run anything like Wipeout 2097 is Amiga

(of course it was cheaper to get a PSX on launch day than get a PPC Amiga!)

PS Max Resolution of AGA PAL = 1280+512 256 colours w/o overscan and 1440x576 with overscan. Important because the others don't have 1280 horizontal resolution.

PPS the chipset upgrade to A500Plus and A3000 was the most pathetic, nothing worth a shit was done to 320x256 or 640x512 colour resolutions, blitter was still the same making EHB slow as hell for games coding and sprites worse than a C64. We got a useless dog slow 1280x256 4 colour mode and some crappy VGA interlaced modes. This was a dark time indeed, very poor and it was this sort of thing that caused them to go bankrupt. AGA should have been here instead of ECS Denise/Agnus upgrades, and 14mhz CPU for A500 plus (with Paula/Agnus/Denise tacked onto a new 14mhz BUS to double output via a synchronised 56mhz system time instead of 7mhz via a 28mhz clock crystal on the motherboard)

ECS was the biggest mistake Commodore made, 5-6 years after A1000 (1987 A500 and 2000 have identical resolutions and colours to A1000 except a handful which don't display EHB fixed very early on, so another 2 years wasted there with ZERO improvements) we got ECS 'upgrade'    :furious:

[Digiman]

I agree with a lot of what you say in your post, but remember it's wasn't the lack of ideas and R&D that brought Commodore to it's knees, it was greed & downright theft by the likes of Mehdi Ali that ended Commodore...

I agree about Medhi, what a stupid c**t he was, but at £299 mail order in early 93 A1200 was a good product (the only bargain machine for sale). What was the final nail in the coffin though was from the idiot who put CD32 in production instead of the A1400 prototype machine completed in 93 (except AKIKO). Greedy US Gold/Ocean with crap coded gaes and then running to piracy ripe PC didn't hep Amiga

A1400 = 28mhz 68020, 2mb chip, 2mb fast, Akiko, AGA, CD-ROM but no zorro slots for £499. This would have cleaned up compared to £800-900 branded 80386DX 25mhz PCs in shops running jerk-o-vision Windows 3.1.

Also half price of 4000/030 but same performance and all in a smart Amiga 1000/3000 style slimline case and separate keyboard. Commodore incompetence strike 3.

(Strike 1= passing on Commodore LCD prototype, and 2= never using 128 colour 5x faster Amiga Ranger chipset completed by Jay Miner in 88)

[Digiman]

Well to be consistent why do you not compare a pentium (32 bit model) or at the very least 486 IBM on the chart. That is as bad as comparing a amiga 1200 to a IBM PS/2 pentium 90. Why make a chart at all if you compare dislike products. You are comparing high end apple, amiga, etc to low end PC.

1990 IS the time of 286 crap as far as branded machines for sale in high street shops to normal general public goes, 25mhz 386 machines cost more than Macs and that's a fact sorry. People did not want to send cheques for £1000/$2000 for some cobbled together 16mhz 386SX crap with PC speaker sound built in some small time shed of a backstreet business via 2" square adverts in black and white text lost in PCW magazine

IBM 486? ha ha even the Amstrad PC2386 was $4500 with 20mhz 386 with 4mb RAM and 64mb hard drive, if IBM sold a 486 in 1989/90 it would have been more than a CRAY-1 my dear fellow (and they would have proved time travel is possible to the future and back )

PC was not cheap, some of you forget just what a rip-off price those crappy PCs were in the very early 90s. PC sales rocketed due to hype/overpriced Mac only competition left by 1994 If Commodore had sold their A1400 at Xmas 1993 they would have cleaned up at £500-600 for a 28mhz 4mb, 3.5" IDE hard drive, CD-Rom setup in a smart 3 box design like slimline PCs. They sold you CD32 toilets for £399 instead oops!

Oh and Wing Commander was shit! Feel sorry for the morons who spent £2000 on a 286 with various extras just to play that heap of dog shit game :roflmao:

PC2386 source

[Digiman]

You already said, pre-OS4 (not to mention MOS and ppc linux), it is implemented as a co-processor, not the CPU and to be fair, it's not a bad analogy. 68K code gets the PPC to do some processing for it. That processing can be just a couple of functions in an-otherwise entirely 68K application. Or, it can be pretty much the entire application, but it is still launched by the 68K and control is returned when it exits (not to mention any time it does a system call).

The problem is KS 2/3 does not run natively on PPC processors, and to me there never was a PPC Amiga because there was never PPC Kickstart/Workbench. So I can see where Stefcep is coming from to be honest. Hardware issues aside Commodore never lasted long enough and took far to long to settle on PPC as successor. Apple understood 060 was end of the line when making 040 machines...Commodore just couldn't make ANY decisions except bad ones...porting KS/WB to a new RISC CPU to combat PC advancement being a major one.