Top 3 worst ideas in Amiga history?

[Karlos]

Scrapping the A3000+.

[Karlos]

256-colour icons would be pointless in the extreme. There's no guarantee that their selection of 256 colours would be anything like the 256 colours the user has ended up getting as a consequence of their palette preferences and backdrop selection. You'd end up having to remap them anyway.

AGA was a dissapointment but I am not convinced it was entirely down to the chipset but the memory used. That A1200 clone that fit in a 5.25" CD bay (Index or Access something?) had significantly higher CPU -> chip ram bandwidth than any other AGA system. Maybe it was faster at blitting and filling too?

The thing that AGA lacked from the start was a proper chunky mode. There's almost no reason why you'd want to use 256 colour in a planar configuration. Chunky 8-bit screenmodes (including HAM8) would have been a hell of a lot more useful for gaming and art packages alike.

[Karlos]

There used to be a pretty cool networking solution that used an adapter on the floppy drive port. Not exactly a speed demon but IIRC it had very little CPU overhead as Paula did most of the work.

[Karlos]

I forgot about that.  IIRC it was able to link more than 2 Amigas, but was spendy everytime you wanted to add a node.  What was it called and has anyone seen them on the used market?

Amiga-Link Disknet?

[Karlos]

Speaking of display stuff, considering you could support 6-bitplanes on ECS, I think EHB was a pretty stupid idea. Why not just have 64 distinct palette entries instead?

[Karlos]

The A1200 was broken in a few respects IMHO. I can pick numerous faults but there should have been at least the capability to add fast ram directly to the motherboard, without tying up the trapdoor slot.

[Karlos]

All of the 4000s I've seen have had standard-sized HD drives and a normal bay free.

I think a much bigger problem is the depth of the 5.25 inch bay. I have seen a few A4K's with CD drives protruding out of the front.

[Karlos]

Oh, and added to this, the kickstart should've been cartridge based, so it could easily be replaced.

I can't agree with that notion. It would have greatly increased the cost of buying a new kickstart ROM, relied on some dodgy edge connector that may end up having flaky contacts and the like.

Besides, changing the kickstart chips aren't exactly difficult on most amigas, since they are socketed and generally fairly easy to access, even on wedge models.

[Karlos]

Macs had roms that were patched by the upgraded os at boot. pulling the roms and replacing them is only needed to run os versions newer than are supported, and is pointless. os 8.1 on an se/30 anyone?

See: SetPatch

[Karlos]

Not the same. I'd like to see 3.9 run on a 1.3 kickstart rom.

I'd like to see MacOS9 run on a MacOS7 rom equipped classic. Equally not going to happen, is it?

[Karlos]

Probly get flamed for this... But I actually find some use for the extra-halfbrite mode.... later versions of DPaint have an 'EHB' mode, maybe useless to many, but makes it fairly easy to add shadows to moving objects... since each color has a version that is half the brightness... Brilliant! (OK, not really, but I thought it was kinda cool...)

:hammer:

That, in my book, makes a perfectly legitimate use for the EHB. I would have preferred a direct 64-colour display but what can you do? Didn't a few games also use EHB?

[Karlos]

I'll go a step further than that and say releasing any machine with a 020+ without fast ram fitted was a mistake.