Classic Amiga Design Pet Hates

[B00tDisk]

I'll pour out some haterade...even though most of it has already been served up.

A2000 no real difference between that and the A500 save the slots.  Should've had onboard SCSI.  But we got that in the 3000.

A3000 ZIP RAM.  Ugh.  30 pin SIMMs would've saved a lot of headaches.  Also: that godawful riser card instead of inline slots.  A4000 was guilty of the same crime.  The cost of that over the trouble it must've caused is ridiculous.

A4000: fixed the ZIP RAM issue...aaaaaand ditched SCSI.  WTF, guys.  WTF.

A1200.  Oh man where to start.  No Fast RAM?  Cut down 020?  Shitty 2.5" IDE interface?  And I mean it is shitty.  A1200 should've sported an 030, Akiko and a couple SIMM sockets - it might have given the Amiga a little more breathing room.  FPS's are by and large what ate the Amiga's lunch in gaming terms; if the HW to do those games had been ready to go when the 1200 came out.

Ah, what could have been...

Oh, I forgot: EVERYTHING ABOUT THE A600.

EVERYTHING.

[B00tDisk]

I happen to like the floppy drive click too and the automatic detection on insertion... I still have to use a lot of floppy disks in work, and it does my head in having to refresh the drive window every time because I forget the PC doesn't notice I've swapped the disk. I don't think Commodore can be faulted really for not including more stuff in the 1200 (030 and fast RAM for a start) because cost was such a huge thing. The A1200 was already a relatively expensive computer and an extra hundred pounds would've been enough to drive it totally out of the casual gaming market where the Megadrive and SNES were ruling.

I hated the floppy click.

And as to the cost thing?  Yeah, C= should've trodden into the Cadillac price range with the 1200 because Apple was already there, as were comparable PCs.  But by the time of the 1200, C= management was raping and pillaging the company.  They had to put up a good enough front (that they were interested in selling computers that were an advance over their old ones) to keep the investors' money coming in as they were sucking it dry.  Not going with 030 and Fast RAM meant more money for them.  Don't ascribe any kind of altruism to C= cost cutting.