If C= had produced an Amiga incompatible wonder computer would you have bought it?

[Digiman]

The A1200 and A4000 cost a lot of development time and the chipset took up a lot of space because they were trying to keep things compatible IMO.

C128 sold badly and wasn't a huge improvement, ditto A1200. So I get the point.

If Commodore had produced a machine with radically new technology that allowed triple parallax 256 colour screens with 256 hardware sprites with realtime scaling and rotation and 8 channel 16bit audio with realtime echo/reverb/modulation/filtering then YES.

I love my Amiga, but owning a C64 and Amiga was not a problem. Owning machine X + Amiga + C64 again not a problem.

Trouble is none of the OCS designers were in house employees ditto C64s VIC2 and SID designers. Maybe if they had ended up with the 3DO or Flair2 chip set rivals secured this would have been their 3rd wonder machine.

[Digiman]

Yeah, but the question was about an Amiga-incompatible system that was a step forward. Commodore's PC clones were basically just okay, nothing special even by PC standards.

PCs were useless machines in 1992, even a 80486 with ISA bus VGA and Soundblaster could barely replicate A500 games from 1986 apart from 256 colours on screen....until they moved *puke*

[Digiman]

can't say yes or no to this. It's about software support for me. will if get imagine, imageFX, lightwave?
what's the game publisher support? what's the OS like ,price? etc. Otherwise your left with a Sam Coupe or Acorn Archimedes.

It's quite clear OP is talking the same core market as C64 and A500 purchasers. NOT C128D or A2000/3000 users being professional. So around the £300-350 mark INSTEAD of a stock A1200 that 1000s bought in the hope of playing texture mapped 3D games not OCS games with a few extra colours twice as fast . The reference to the technical superiority is to show the trade off. A1000 was compatible with nothing else on launch day....didn't care myself......wouldn't have cared in 1992/93 if they had the same technological leap as C64 to Amiga.

Nobody cared if their Amiga was C64 compatible, which is why I could never have been conned into the Commodore 128D for £500 instead of £570 for an Amiga 500. The extra 384mb of RAM alone was worth more than the £75 difference.

I got a machine in both cases better than consoles available on launch day too and still both could do other things (graphics/db/music/financial/wp etc).

[Digiman]

Holy cow, that was one smoking A500!

384kb ooops :roflmao:

[Digiman]

Well the Acorn RISC based machine launched in 1987 with chunky pixel 256/4096 colour screens and 8 channel 16bit stereo sound and a CPU speed approx 16mhz 68030 speed.

A1200 was not cutting edge by a long shot, hell Acorn essentially built an Atari Falcon 7 years before Atari.

[Digiman]

Dont forget the joys of windows 3.1

Never used it, just played DOS games and wrote Dbase 3 databases, ran Dpaint PC and Imagine 2.0 rendering

[Digiman]

1977 C= PET
1982 C= 64
1986 C= Amiga 1000
1990 C= ALL machines same technology as A1000
1994 C= bankrupt after small advancements of AGA in 91/92

The rot started in 86 when Los Gatos was closed an A1000 not marketed in 86 due to the A500/2000 projects running late into 1987. Commodore failed to jump to a revolutionary paradigm by 92/93 unlike the half decade revolutions they ushered in all their computer producing past.

I don't know what it should have been, but not AGA which wasted resource on keeping chipset OCS compatible.

Perhaps they should have licensed the Acorn A3010 Archimedes design....Acorn would have been a cheap acquisition in 90/91. £399 bought you effectively an A4000/030 power machine in 92....sobering thought no? 80386 33mhz speed polygon games AND AGA quality 2D games technically on paper with 4x more sound channels in 16bit quality.

With a Commodore badge that machine would have attracted the talented games programmers it deserved too.

[Digiman]

Who gives a damn?  Terabytes of HD space, gigabytes of RAM, gigabytes of video card RAM.

S100 bus-based IMSAI users with 5mb hard drives, 24k of RAM and paper-tape readers would have viewed Amiga OS 1.3 as effete.  

Mac OS 1.0 ran in 128k; the A1000 shipped with 256 (but needed 512mb for apps as a practicality).  Was MacOS 4x better than the A1000 then?

1986 Workbench 1.1/1.2 was light years ahead of EVERYTHING this side of a UNIX server. Multitasking, different resolution screens per application to save memory, GUI that worked, 1:1 mapping of file location in GUI and physical location on disk, sophisticated text to speech, full access to Agnus/Paula/Denise features with OS still resident.

Then comes the killer..... IFF standard for sound, images and animation.

THIS is why nothing came close to Amiga in the mid 80s, NOTHING and why A1000 was the only machine in the history of personal/home computing to slaughter all in its path. As for memory it was application data NOT Workbench/Kickstart OS overhead that needed more RAM than inferior rivals, same reason you can't edit a 20 megapixel image on a 512mb Mac/PC. One single 21bit full PAL overscan image Digiview processed down to lo-res HAM from the buffer took more than the maximum RAM of a monochrome Mac costing 200% the RRP of A1000.

1984 Mac OS was barely more sophisticated than C64's GEOS + 1351 mouse and was silent and colourless so 128k was enough for that singletasking Apple fashionista £2500 wank. The 520ST ass raped the original Mac on every level possible (price/performance/speed,colour/OS,max res, appearace) within months...total wipeout....and STs 8mhz CPU is the only aspect it exceeds Amiga.

[Digiman]

What about the sharp X68000 series, they even blew away even the amiga's graphics

Too bad they were only sold in Japan.

Sharp x68000 was nice but technically limiting. It was basically designed to do games like SF2, Ghouls n Ghosts and Gradius specifically.

Oh and Amiga Space Harrier and Outrun should have been pretty much arcade perfect but for some real sloppy conversion work and minimum improvement on Atari source code.

[Digiman]

Oh please.  Look, I'm just as fond of memories of the Amiga as anyone else around here but Apple was years from making fashion accessory computers.  The Lisa, then later the Mac, were an attempt to put what Xerox was doing at Palo Alto on the desktop of ordinary people.  If they hadn't bothered, nobody else would have, and we'd be having this discussion in VI or some other godawful text-only medium.

Yeah, the 520 sure was a winner - that's why it ... uh, I'm sure I can think of something it did better which is why it's still around and the mac didn't last except oh wait it isn't and the mac did.

And finally: the original 128k Mac did have sound Virginia.

It's one thing to say "Man, the Amiga was a neat computer".  At the time you couldn't have convinced me I'd have the point of view I do now.  Except, you see, I grew up and can look objectively at the way things really were, not from inside the Amiga Reality Distortion Sphere where no other computers exist or if they did they were rough-edged abacuses made out of iron that delivered hepatitis and painful electrical burns when people tried to use them.

Well clearly I would love to hear about this personal/home computer better than Amiga 1000 between 84 and 87....go ahead Mr expert :roflmao: Even the 1982 C64 had advantages like longer filenames over Win PC <94

Sorry but I will take the opinion of a real expert of the time like Guy Kewney of PCW Magazine, he used and reviewed just about every machine made in the 80s and 90s.

Apple is only around today thanks to massive cash injection in shares from Gates due to potential court case over Win95....that and iBollox range.

Morgan UK still make their low tech/excessive profit/style over substance cars independently, doesn't mean they made better cars than their rivals in the 80s. Same deal with retro computer companies.

[Digiman]

Same here, emotionally it seems like a waste.  Maybe someday in the future when the exponential increases stop and software becomes more mature then the next best way to improve it will again be to optimize for speed, memory, and disk usage.

Franko - I agree with you, the extreme frugality when using computer resources was/is necessary on older systems like the Amiga.  I was just trying to defend my profession a bit to say that modern bloat isn't necessarily sloppiness but rather the result of shifting priorities that resulted from the faster hardware being available.

If the software industry had held on to the "Amiga way", we may have slightly snappier OS's and more free hard drive space now,  but there would be whole classes of applications that people currently enjoy that wouldn't be possible to write like that.  Ironically, modern 3D games would be one of those.

Bloat has always been the ethos in the corporate industry since the 80s.....write your application to achieve its core function, if it's slow buy a better box to execute it on. Until machines stop getting more powerful each successive generation this is the most economical way to do it.

[Digiman]

...uh, long filenames are nice, but they hardly make up for everything else kludgy and terrible about the Commodore DOS filesystem. And I say that as someone who likes the C64.

"Most economical," maybe, but that doesn't make it good.

Hey, try naming 200 picture files with just 8 characters. DOS on C64 is basic sure but you can replace it......but MSDOS was stuck with 8 character files until Win95 kludge to hide.

[Digiman]

Frequently it does.  The application that works is more "good" than the application that doesn't work.  The application that exists genrerally works, while the application that doesn't exist does not.  Thus the application that has been written is more "good" than the one that hasn't been written.

If I can cut the development time in half by using bloated code and thus be able to write two applications instead of one, then the second one that being economical made possible is pretty much always going to be better than it would have been if we had not gone for economy.

Much of my code at work is bloated.  My team puts very little effort into optimizing on first run of applications.  Why?  Because the applications requested have 20% chance of never actually being used.  Sad, but true.  Many of the applications are requested so that the person requesting them can look like they are doing work.  We still have to write them, but they won't get used.

The other factor is that my and my teams time is worth more than the cost of buying faster computers.  Add to that that most speed slowdowns are on the user side, not the computer side.  Things like waiting for input.  Finally, the rate that new applications that get heavily used end up with so many change requests in the first year that trying to heavily optimize the code would mean that by the time the optimization has been done, it is no longer needed.

That doesn't mean that we never optimize.  We put our optimization resource to the places that will get the most bang for the buck.  At optimization time, we look first at applications that cannot scale well to meet demand.  Then we look at applications that are heavily used.  Then we look at applications that are just slow.

An application that takes the unreasonable time of 60 seconds to save a document is not going to be high on our list if it is only used twice a year for a semi-annual recording.  You can say that the application isn't "good", but it is WAY more "Good" than if it didn't exist at all, which would be more likely if heavy optimization were the requirement.

Only time program code is optimized is in embedded devices or handheld devices. Otherwise its too expensive to pay for 10s or 100s of hours of programmer time if £300 gets a new CPU. Also time costs companies more...unreleased code is useless to a company.

Outrun on Amiga is an example. Licence cost a fortune and what we got was the quickest development via updating Atari ST 68k ASM source, cheap. finished quicker so can get faster return on investment.

It is crap for us yes, but business is different and profit & revenue are the only concerns for corporate entities. Being unique is as good as it gets.

[Digiman]

Not as much crap for us than if the game was never written at all because the Licensing + complete rewrite would have been more expensive than what would allow it to be written.

I think we all agree Outrun was bad publicity for Amiga when potential puchasers were put off, yes it would have been better if it was never made.

[Digiman]

Or you could run Windows NT in 1993.
 
However your point proves that spending time perfecting software is actually a waste.

NT workstation was quite horrible to use on slow domestic IDE drives and couldn't play DOS games. OS/2 v2 was much better than MS stuff even for DOS gaming