Classic Amiga Design Pet Hates

[Karlos]

In a word? Cost.

At the time of the 1200's release, the 030 in any variant was exorbitant. When the 030 accelerators first came out, they weren't a whole lot less than the price of a new A1200. As for the 060... Oh good lord. Do you remember the costs of accelerators fitted with those things even in 1998?! ROTFL.

*cough* Falcon 030 *cough*

Ok, it had a 16-bit data bus, but that was more for compatibility with the rest of the atari innards, not due to cost. The falcon was comparably priced to the A1200.

My pet hate with the A1200 was that it didn't come with any fast ram, nor the provision to add any beyond the trapdoor. A single SIMM slot and requisite glue logic on the motherboard would not have broken the bank and would have made the machine far more capable out of the box.

[Karlos]

Leaky batteries and electrolytic caps mounted with the wrong polarity are two issues that are far beyond pet hates, these are serious design/production flaws that can spell an untimely end to your machine.

[Karlos]

IIRC it was around £100 more. Admittedly by this time C= had all but squashed Atari. And as you say, the internals of the Falcon were not as advanced.

Well, the 16-bit bus was kinda sucky but the falcon's hardware had some decent capabilities. It could do 16-bit chunky mode IIRC, which beyond AGA's capabilities, Akiko or not.

I think that adding a full blown 030 to the 1200 would have pushed the price up beyond the Falcons, possibly not by a huge margin, but maybe enough to have let Atari back into the game.

Now, the one thing I think the 1200 should have had but didn't, but that the Falcon did, was a MIDI port. I would guess that it would have made it much more appealing to you Karlos.

Actually, not the MIDI, after all, MIDI interfaces for the amiga were cheap and you could make one yourself easily enough. One bit of hardware in the falcon that interested me was the DSP. It was probably that, more than the 030, that increased the price.

Agreed 100%. But by this time the beancounters were fully in control of C=. Which is probably why it didn't even have a full 020 which would have made more sense imho.

Yes, especially if you were adding SIMM sockets to the design.

[Karlos]

Error: User bought the wrong accellerator.

The 68030 and 68060 cards don't have fans and don't need fans and fit nicely.

Pah, where's your sense of adventure? There was absolutely no mistaking when my A1200 was turned on. That damned 'orrible whiney fan on my Apollo 1240 turbo was so loud...