What was the best thing that ever happened to the Amiga? Any era.

[B00tDisk]

Retro_71 wrote:
A3000..... The only stock Amiga you can plug any Monitor into and plenty of upgrade options.

I'll second this.  The 3000 should have been the standard by which all future Amigas were built.  Sigh.  Ah, what should've been.

[B00tDisk]

Crumb wrote:
A500 and demoscene are the best things that happened to amiga.

The worst things: the ultra-expensive A3000 (they could have redesigned the original custom chips to also output screens at 31Khz instead of inventing kludges like Amber to re-use the old chips used in A500/A2000. They could have put a proper scsi chip, they could have included IDE, they could have provided a decent case with space for 5 1/4 units and a beefier PSU, it should have had more colours. They could have added simm sockets instead of ultra expensive ZIPs.

These are, IMO, crap opinions.  The closed up console-like case design of the A500 kept people from bothering to expand it, and it hobbled Amiga development for years. It was the target platform and nobody bothered to upgrade, except for those dreadful little trapdoor 512k expansions, so no-one bothered to develop beyond it.  As to the demoscene?  Those guys will code for TI calculators.  The nature of the hardware doesn't really matter.  I doubt very seriously if anyone purchased an Amiga based on how many passive animations with loopy techno music behind them they could watch.  :roll: :roll: :roll:

The A3000 was so "bad" that Sun begged C= to let them license build them as their next-gen Unix boxes.  IDE was {bleep}e at the time compared to SCSI, the 31khz output on the 3000 should've gone to all Amiga models, the Amber was brilliant.  Zip chips were still quite common when the 3000 was designed, as well.

No, the 3000 was quite superior to any other Amiga, and was the last "balls-out" design the C= engineering team was allowed and funded to create.  Everything else was a cheap, cut-down compromise afterward.

[B00tDisk]

Crumb wrote:


The only thing A3000 had better was a FlickerFixer built in as standard. The rest was crap:
-zorro3 slower than A4000 Zorro

There was no A4000 when the A3000 was designed.  I guess since PCI-e is out now we can slag Z3 because it's slower?
:crazy:  :roll:
 

-chips that heat a lot (specially with A3640)

And yet all those A3000's survived with passive cooling.  Huh.

-incompatibilities with accelerators
-incompatibilities with scsi controllers built in accelerators

Yet there are Accelerators aplenty for the A3000 and people fit them and used them all the same.

-Same colours as an A500

GASP.  JUST!  LIKE!  ALL!  AMIGAS!  IN!  1990!  DOMDOMDOM.  Quick, McCloud, I think you're onto a real conspiracy down at the ranch there!

-Crap case that won't allow you to fit 5 1/4 units

Right, because 5.25 floppies are so useful.  

-No IDE

Listen carefully: IDE in 1990 was JUNK.

-Crap SCSI that has problems driving multiple devices

Wow so the 3000's that have multiple SCSI devices on them then are _______ (fill in the blank).

-ZIP memory: hard to find, hard to fit, prone to cause problems, expensive.

Hardly "hard to find" nearly 20 years ago.

-Weak PSU

Endemic of the entire Amiga line, but since they'll, you know, power up with them installed, they seem to work just fine.

-slow cpus as default

Right, compared to that powerhouse A1000, 2000 and of course the beloved A500, right?  {bleep}, even the "low end" A3000s crapped all over 1st gen Amigas in terms of speed :roll:

-Lack of SMD components and chips fitted in sockets: that's the cause of bad contacts, lack of reliability.

Jesus, JUST LIKE THE A500.  

All in all: you have to trash the entire A3000 to have a decent machine.

Snoooooooooort.  Sure thing buddy, just keep telling yourself that.  

use modern components taken from a reliable computer like A4000 :-)

The A4000 was compromised garbage.  {bleep}ty chipset, crap IDE, crap memory sockets (do a google search for "broken A4000 simm socket" some time) - all the legacy of R&D hobbled by corporate stupidity.