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

[Digiman]

ISTR magazines slating a lot of AGA titles because they were little more than the OCS/ECS version with a gaudy background. But that's less a criticism of AGA and more about how it was actually used, IMO. There were a lot of amazing AGA titles which really did a great job of highlighting the benefit of AGA.

This.

If you look at Super Stardust AGA and then realise you needed a 100mhz 486 to play it on PC it rams home just what was possible with AGA and effectively 7mhz 020 (no Fast ram = approx 50% LESS CPU processing power). 6 channel sound, 256 colour graphics, 50FPS arcade gameplay. WIN. Ditto for Lotus 2 on Amiga vs Lotus 3 on PC. But most of the time Amiga games were limited because they had to do an ST version first (because Commodore never marketed the A1000 properly and wasted 2 years) while Atari slit their throat in sales to home users with the original ST. Games companies are run on profit not tech specs!

Magazines didn't help though, when people went all out to make a game amazing looking/sounding like Sword of Sodan/Battle Squadron they scored it low but gave embarrassingly rubbish conversions like Chase HQ and original games like Xenon II (which only used 16 colours thanks to the crappy ST version coded in tandem) much higher scores.

And then everyone went nuts over 256 colour crap games on PC like Wing Commander (unplayable and looked shit on anything below a 486) and Heart of China/Rise of the Dragon (less enjoyable than Rocket Ranger/Wings/It came from the Desert etc). And then we had Doom. Doom is the only one worth a damn of the four promoted as 'PC gaming superiority' and thanks to AGA and slow crippled 14mhz 020 in A1200 with no Fast ram we couldn't play it. And because the 4000/030 was such an overpriced piece of shit we never would buy it. So again the problem is NOT just 8 bit planar 256 colour mode BUT Commodore needed an A1400 in 1992 with 28mhz 020, 2mb chip 2mb fast. Job done, perfectly possible to do reasonable Doom games with such a machine even with AGA in 128 colours (who'd notice 128 over 256 colours, Amiga artists were awesome when allowed to do graphics for Amiga FIRST and ST second...I should know I was one that worked on a few games!).

I think my only issue is after the 1985 A1000 chipset Commodore sacked the wrong people at Los Gatos (Hi-Toro/Amiga engineers) and replaced them with their own lame dick designers making the A500 (1987...identical A/V) and A2000 (identical A/V AND CPU type/speed) and NOT marketing the A1000 because the A500 and A2000 were supposed to be finished in months NOT YEARS. In 1992, 7 years later, AGA was the bare minimum given pushing 256 colour screens around is slower than 32 colour screens on Amiga 1000s from 1985. Sound was also a big mistake, 4x 8bit channels = not enough.

Remember A1200 was competing for gamer's money with Nintendo/Sega NOT PCs costing £1000. Compare PCs all you want but £100 Sega and Nintendo 16bit consoles is what embarrassed AGA not £1000 VGA Windows machines. Before 3D cards for PCs it wasn't a problem.

Commodore destroyed themselves, they let Needles and Mical walk (who produced Lynx and 3DO chipsets...both amazing for their time) and refused to ever use Ranger chipset finished by Jay in 1987 before he left. The A1200 was a step in the right direction and all they needed to do was make a 28mhz 020 version of the A1200 motherboard and add just 1mb Fast ram to it and sell it 12-18 months later. We got the CD32 instead and they went bust. They did actually come close to the A1400 (020 28mhz, 4mb RAM, A3000 style case) but CD32 took the last of their money and flopped (not surprising when SNES games looked better and a SNES was 75% cheaper AND made by a well known brand like Nintendo).

Or....AGA was OK and better than nothing as in the A600, but could be better. Report card with a grade 'C+' for Amiga 1200 not 'A+' as was the case of A1000 or 'B' for A500.

A1400 and A1400CD machines based on A1200 motherboard and 28mhz 020 and 4mb total ram (+CD for A1400CD and NO CD32 draining money from ailing finances of Commodore in 1993/4).

A4000/030 in the bin, waste of money even marketing that overpriced crap to gamers (majority of Amiga market share in sales).

[Digiman]

Copperlist not backdrop

[Digiman]

Wait one. This thread seems a misnomer. Who actually hates AGA?

Recognising that AGA is old and slow, acknowledging it's shortcomings or accepting that it was too little too late in terms of what else was being released around the same time is just being a realist.

You'd actually have to have some serious issues to hate it though.

Unless AGA is a collective term for A1200/4000/CD32.

In which case I have 66.666666666% 'hate' for it :roflmao:

[Digiman]

Bloodline >> Well there are other enhancements on AGA over OCS, like higher resolutions and more colors..

Agreed. I think people forget just how big a deal 1280x512 in 256 or HAM8 was at the time, PCs couldn't really do much more than 1024x768 in 256 colours unless you bought a very expensive highly specialised graphics card in 1992 when A4000 was actually launched. Which is fine for the A4000 potential purchasers.

Trouble is 320x256 rez is more than enough for games, even only a handful of Saturn games used a higher resolution like VF2. People weren't complaining about Ridge Racer only using 320x200 on the Playstation as a trade off to playing that amazing game at the time

And that is where Commodore went wrong, priority was the A1200 and so should have made AGA address the fantastic abilities of SNES/Megadrive games with higher colour parallax modes/better sprites/sprite scaling like Lynx chipset by Mical and Needle/more sound channels (even if it meant using TWO Paulas) and other neat tricks was what they should have done if they wanted to be solvent in 1995

OCS in A1000 = best gaming graphics/sound of ANY console/computer AND best business graphics/sound. Slam dunk for A1000.

AGA needed to do the same, but it didn't even come close, there were things the 1989 Megadrive did the A1200 could never do as well let alone the SNES. It's not a technical issue either, it's an issue of lack of R&D and bad project management at Commodore under the broken wing of Mehdi Ali (spit)

[Digiman]

Reckon some folk just like to try and put the Amiga down by unfairly comparing it to a PC with higher specs... pointless really...

The problem was not with Amiga it was with the way they sold it and the only 3 models for sale. There was a huge price gap between 4000/030 and A1200 14mhz crippled to 7mhz speeds with no Fast ram but not much performance difference. Blizzard made a 28mhz 68020 accelerator for peanuts and it made the A1200 faster than the A4000/030 see? And that's where the money was in 93/94, something faster than A1200 but cheaper than A4000/030 or entry level PC which is where the Amiga A1400 prototype came into it.

Most people buying Amigas didn't need Zorro slots at all, waste of money. Even Commodore knew this and that's why the A1400 protoype motherboard was designed, but never sold thanks to the CD32 being chosen (another turkey of a business decision). It's not my fault people saw Doom and Ridge Racer and thought "want!" but Amiga gave them no viable option to play the type of games they wanted to play, Lotus II is good, Sega Rally on Saturn is better. Without constant improvement Amiga was dying a slow horrible death and some of us knew it. I wanted Amiga to be around forever, how the hell did Apple survive with their crap from 1994 to invention of low-fi iPod??? Their computers were shit AND overpriced without any multitasking FFS.

In 1992-94 I had purchased new...

486 PC - because I wasn't going to spend £700 on an 060 just to emulate Windows for my studies via a card that would be worth sweet FA as soon as I bought it. Telling people to upgrade was a dead end for this reason, who knew I could have retired on the sale of a PPC Amiga 15 years later thanks to ebay :confused:

A1200 - well it was AGA and the only version remotely value for money with AGA. Sod rip-off 4000/030 prices. I did a lot of great things with it, hell I even did games testing for Acid Software


Playstation - Because it was the future and Ridge Racer is light years ahead as far as any other home racing game before goes.

Saturn - Might as well, after all Sega made the best coin-ops and Playstation would never see them.

And that's it really. If Commodore had sold the A1400 prototype during Xmas 93 instead of the rubbish CD32 joke then I would have got that too for £600 with a CD drive, 28mhz 020 at full speed and 4mb of RAM but no Zorro slots (who cares!). Because if every A1400 could be programmed the same way as a console (something DOS PC games programmers can never do) because all machines were identical we would have seen a lot more games like TFX (given away FREE by Ocean on a magazine CD because not enough 4000/030 machines ever sold to make it worth marketing it to Amiga-A1200 just too damned slow for TFX!)

Commodore should have learned from the mistake made by Cinemaware, investing in CD gaming is a waste of time and leads to bankruptcy (and after disastrous CDTV AKA an A500+CD ROM was a flop for the same reason CD32 AKA A1200+CD would be. The games are the same!) unless you have seriously powerful hardware like Saturn and Playstation to back it up with cutting edge games not bloody A1200 games+cheesy CD music. Super Stardust CD32 is actually worse than the A1200/4000 disk version because of the CD soundtrack. Yuck!

All Commodore did is kill Amiga and it's technology, the reason it took 9 years for bankruptcy is because Amiga 1000 was lightyears ahead of EVERTHING. But they still managed it because once Jack Tramiel left Commodore didn't have a clue how to run a computer company (canning Commodore LCD, not marketing the A1000 for a year waiting for 2000/500, making Commodore 16 and Plus4 and 128 rubbish). Trouble is as much as Commodore deserved to tank Amiga deserved to outlive all of the competition.

@ others - As for comparing an A500 with a 486 PC nope, I was comparing something like F1GP on an A4000/030 and a 486 PC costing the same price, I think if you actually try this too you will see with your own eyes the PC playing speed runs rings around the Amiga version FOR THE SAME PRICE

[Digiman]

I loved AGA I felt the Amiga 1200 was hindered by the lack of chip memory and under powered CPU. A1200 should have come with 040 and the A4000 should have come with 060, I know cost was the issue but I would have paid.

Games like Flashback, Zool, Banshee, Pinball Fantasies etc looked sexy in that era

Except a 33mhz 040 A1200 with 2mb Fast ram (essential!) would have cost you an extra £400+. I don't think you would have bought an A1200 for 800 bucks! An entry level machine was needed, but something above it and cheaper than the 4000/030 was needed too. Funny thing is the A500 was £499+VAT+modulator at launch making it pretty much 600 quid and 700 for 1mb version! And with 5 years worth of inflation then probably an EC040 @ 25mhz would have been the true successor to an A500 if you factor in inflation from a cost point of view. Desperation makes companies do funny things and not take high risk gambles like that. They had decided £399 was the limit and offered us the choice of 2mb RAM OR HD floppy drive on A1200. Games programmers said 2mb ram was better than 1mb A1200 and 1.76mb HD floppy. No reserve cash for Commodore after never improving the chipset for 7 years as far as games programming goes. Better sound was never even talked about!

Trouble is a SNES cost bugger all in 1992 with a superb version of SF2 for adults to play soon enough :madashell:

[Digiman]

Maybe this is regional cost, but my first PC was just over 1500 US dollars for the cheapest junk machine the store had, compared to a bit under 500 dollars for my 1200. In 93 or 94, did an 030 card with a bit of RAM really cost that much ?
I never had one as a kid, so I don't know what they cost back then.
 
This was in Denmark, so I don't know if costs on PC's were noticeably cheaper in the US or UK.

Ummm well in the Xmas 1994 issue of Amiga Format, cheapest branded 040 I could find was £425 for EC040 and nearly £700 for an 060. That's 2.5 years after A1200 launch nearly.

An A1200+80mb HDD+ 4mb RAM+040 25mhz would have cost more than my 4mb 486/25 PC (less cost of monitor) if it even existed in 1993. Plus a PC is worth more a year later than 5 seconds after you have broken the seal on a boxed circuit board for your Amiga If Commodore had any sense they would have made a cut down 040 machine like the Macintosh LC40 (which was actually cheaper than Amiga 4000/040 and closer to the 4000/030 machine in price)

I priced up an 060+RAM for my A2000 and also a PPC card and it was cheaper to actually buy a PC both times I worked it out (94-96ish). And seeing as all I wanted to do was run Windows for my university studies guess how I spent my limited grant money...yep a Pentium PC with PCI graphics that had a more powerful blitter than AGA (and PCI bandwidth on PC bus was a massive improvement for PC gaming and emulation actually).

[Digiman]

Well I am enjoying this thread, but you guys are all geared towards gaming. AGA Chipset was A HUGE DEAL for Video Toaster 4000 and Flyer users. Many new effects, faster ram, color previews, etc etc... also you get HAM 8 in programs like Vista Pro for example. AGA really shines in these ways..

I agree, and when the A4000/040 was launched was it not the fastest "PC" money could buy? HAM8 in 1280x576 PAL overscan was something no PC or Mac could do. Funny really as HAM + Digi-View is what made jaws drop in 86/87.

But in the UK the 4000/030 was too expensive and too slow. And the A4000 was something like £2000 ($3000?) on launch day.

Plus thanks to Sony never developing the PAL chipset for Videotoaster it was no good to us here in Europe

[Digiman]

@ Digiman

Very much enjoyed your post, must say it was pretty much nut in a shell, thank you!

But even still I envied my friend, when he bought that odd little A1200 w/120Mb HDD late 1993, which cost him his life savings 7500FIM (aprox. $1500 at that time) , me having nearly stock A500 then! I even remember that I was little disappointed of that it didn't look like a powerful computer to me, well in retrospect it wasn't, but...Ah those demos and beautiful WB background graphics! I loved and dremed of AGA!

Me too, but I knew money spent on accelerator or HD for my A1200 is money I would never get back...like buying big shiny wheels for my cheap car

I did want these things, and in 1996 I did find a cheapish Amiga 4000/030 which I did lots of programming on. But I had to sell that in 1997 to make a down payment on my house (still living in the same one!)

IF Commodore had made small upgrade to Amiga 1200 with optional CD drive too in 1993/94 I would have bought one. A1400 with 28mhz 020/4mb Ram/CD I would have paid the same price a 386/33mhz PC for (and so would everyone else who tried Mac OS 9 or Windows 3.0 they were rubbish!). And Maybe then games programmers would make games like Screamer Rally/Actua Soccer/Doom because ALL Amiga 1400s are the same so programmers can write better speed machine code than even some cheap 486 PC where everyone has different motherboard/processor/VGA card/sound card etc so programming is always less efficient on PC. You can make Doom run faster with optimisation for Amiga A1400.  

But because A1200 never upgraded the games never improved and we were stuck because CD32 is SAME AS A1200+CD drive (too slow in 1994 for 3D games we wanted).

When I saw Marble Madness in 1986 I had to buy Amiga though...and I still have this original Amiga today on my desk working beautifully.

[Digiman]

Forget PC vs Amiga A500/600 though, the real truth is the people who had A500s got bored with terrible arcade conversions over and over and many moved onto Sega or Nintendo or even NEC games consoles which had far superior games. If you don't believe me then go and try via emulators the Megadrive/SNES/TG16/PC/Amiga and ST versions of SF2....the Amiga version comes 5th marginally beating the ST version. I would rather pay £50 for SF2 and know it is going to be the best it can possibly be on the hardware I run it (with zero loading times) than £30 for a lame dick conversion that makes me angry enough to stab the programmers through the face :angry:

It was probably too late anyway because games players were not going to ditch games of the calibre on the 16bit consoles on a new £400/$500 bare bones machine with the same sound and the same lame programmers writing games for Amiga. How many times did you buy an arcade conversion and then want your money back instantly? Exactly!

And only Commodore is to blame for lack of interest in A1200, first we had ECS in A500+ which was a joke as far as games players were concerned, and then even worse we had the A500/+ replaced with the less expandable A600 for serious users with crappy PCMCIA and super expensive 2.5" IDE drive cables. The only improvement was trapdoor accelerators for A1200 luckily.

The missing parts of AGA were just the nail in the coffin, as was those early releases that still looked and sounded like A500 games with a bit more colour in the foreground (and same crappy copperlists for backgrounds where every 16bit console would have lovely smooth parallax graphics and 6-10 channel sound). Apart from 6 channel sound on Super Stardust nothing new on audio side really.

Remember ALL games still had to fit on crappy 880kb disks thanks to Commodore not spending a few quid more on a HD drive for A1200 not just A4000!!

And sticking a 14mhz 020 crippled to 50% speed in the machines sold on the shelves they screwed themselves and us. Games companies could not do much more as far as 3D polygon games go than with an A500. A 28mhz full speed (ie with 1mb Fast ram as well) version should have been an option from day one! And the A1200 should have had SIMM sockets on the motherboard not bloody trapdoor circuit boards costing a fortune.

As for games not being hard drive installable? Well it would have taken companies 5 minutes to write an installer but thanks to all the shit coding on most arcade conversions piracy was rife (and quite right too, I wouldn't piss on Powerdrift for Amiga) so they kept ludicrous protection formats and so it was impossible. There is ZERO excuse for not making the disks unprotected and allow us to install games to HD using manual keyword protection routines. Software companies treated us like dirt and so we pirated their weak feeble efforts as befits the low quality of their programming.

And as for Windows boot up speed? Well in the time of A1000 to CD32 ALL games were DOS. And DOS is not slow to boot up even on the cheapest 3.5" IDE drive (about 5-10 seconds at most).

I will leave you all with one final note. In 1987 Zarch (AKA Virus on ST/Amiga from Firebird s/w) was made for the Acorn Archimedes and ran smooth as silk with 256 colour depth cuing to boot in 1mb of RAM (poss 512kb). 5 years later this game in this quality was not even possible to replicate on your A1200 WITH fast ram costing a total of £550!
Amiga sales success always relied on sales to gamers. Once that was lost then so was Commodore as a viable solvent company. The damage was done in 1990 when the A500+ should have been 128 colours, 6 channel sound and faster/better sprites and blitter. To little too late and now nothing.

Amiga deserved better after A1000/500 and so did we as the loyal Amiga gamers.

[Digiman]

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!



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!



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?

AGA had very little potential, and even if it could games companies were not going to make 7 disk versions of games that had to fit all the extra higher quality sound and graphics onto the same stupid 880kb disk format. ALL PCs had 1.44mb HD drives by the time of A600 let alone A1200.

Secondly it's all fine saying there were hard drives for Amiga but most high street chains refused to stock them as they said they were too expensive (and they were too expensive because they were laptop technology....laptops cost £1000-1500+ in 1991/2). Plenty of companies shoe-horned 3.5" drives INSIDE the A1200 case too so it's bad decision from Medhi Ali Inc (tm)

What was never considered was selling people a slow 14mhz 020 and then selling it with only 2mb chip ram from high streets crippling it to barely double the speed of the A500! Why the hell was there no SIMM slots OR the base machine split between 1mb chip and 1mb fast ram IF the only option was to sell a machine that is crippled to 50% processing power until YOU buy an extra circuit board and YOU install it yourself. Look what happened...software houses ALL wrote games based on performance of 2mb chip only A1200! RAM WAS REQUIRED AS AN OFF THE SHELF OPTION TO GAIN TWICE THE SPEED SO SOFTWARE HOUSES WROTE GAMES FOR THAT PERFORMANCE LEVEL. HD is useless for all but those crap boring click based adventures that come on 12 disks!

The reality is in 1987 A500 was just about still king with only TG-16 console from NEC being superior for some games (like ALL Sega arcade conversions) and the unpopular Acorn Archimedes (CPU as fast as a 25mhz 030/256 colours/16 channel sound all in 1987 and costing just £800!) and in 1985 the A1000 was superior to every machine regardless of price. A500Plus was superior only to low end 8086PC and Atari ST but NOT Sega Genesis/Megadrive. And A600 was a joke we should forget as far as game sophistication goes (everyone gave up and got a Sega/Nintendo console now for sure) and then A1200 was too little too late to slam dunk any console on sale really. And expanding your A1200 to match a £999 25mhz 486 with 4mb RAM, 80mb HDD, and HD floppy without monitor would cost MORE! And the extra oomph would never be used and Outrun Turbo would still look like a turd even after spending £100s on your Amiga (unlike in PC land where the game improves with no modification).

Thanks to Commodore hardly ever improving games relevant aspects of the Amiga chipset and then selling turkeys like A600 to replace the A500 which could have 10mb RAM/50mhz 030/24bit graphics/faster SCSI drives/PC 286 hardware emulator all thanks to the Zorro 1 slot on side expansion.

People lost confidence with Commodore for years from the A2000 disaster to CD32 joke, you really expected people to come back and spend £400 on a machine that had no killer games? At least Amiga 1000 had Defender of the Crown and Marble Madness or The Pawn for cerebral types. A1200 had NO KILLER APP unlike all the consoles and the PCs so where was their incentive? AGA didn't give enough of an improvement for people to sit back and go "WOW" unlike when Defender of the Crown/Marble Madness was booted up on A1000 at various shows around the world