@B00tDisk
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.
Well, that must be a parallel world because people bought memory expansions (from 512k to 8MB), accelerators (that plugged under the 68000 chip or on the side expansion slot), hardware pc emulators that plugged in the trapdoor slot, hard disk controllers... and there was not much difference between the price of A2000 and A500 expansions.
A whole generation knew what Amiga was thanks to A500 and A500 saved Amiga and Commodore. With the prices of your wonderful A3000 there would be only 3 amiga users and no software would have been written.
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.
It seems you don't know much about demoscene. The point of demoscene is creating art for the shake of it, not for money, just for your own pleasure. And Amiga allowed creative people to create and to have fun creating art. It was not about buying a computer to be an "art consumer", but an "art creator". I know lots of people who created great music and graphics and a new subculture appeared.
Demoscene was something thightly tied to Amiga since the beggining. What do you think the "boing demo" was? Why early WB versions included a drawer with "demos"? Are you sure nobody was impressed watching the capabilities of the amazing computer? Were you living in other planet?
I remember that I loaded some games to watch the cool cracktro, not to play it. And spend lots of hours with DPaint or creating crap mods, sleeping reading 68k asm books and crashing my computer when running my crappy programs,... and all that inspired by the scene stars.
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.
The A3000 used a brute force design instead of an elegant one. They could have redesigned the custom chips, specially denise to output video at 31Khz transparently (in fact you can overclock denise to output all Amiga graphics at 31Khz (including WB, my friend Frank Brana has experimented with his A2000 a lot of times doing that) but you'll probably fry it after some time and stuff won't be in sync). With a proper updated denise and some changes to agnus they could have provided 31Khz video simply changing a jumper. Instead of that they choose the brute force approach to save money recycling the chips used in A500/A2000 and created Amber. That crap design forces you to "digitalize" the output images and waste money in some local ram. They could simply have improved denise and the rest of the custom chips but instead of that they took the easiest and most expensive solution.
IDE may be whatever you want, but adding an IDE controller is dead cheap and would have opened the doors to cheap hard disks. Do you think that including an prototype of the scsi chip was a clever idea? Do you think it's normal that you need to perform so many hardware updates to fit Zorro cards and accelerators?
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.
The only thing A3000 had better was a FlickerFixer built in as standard. The rest was crap:
-zorro3 slower than A4000 Zorro
-chips that heat a lot (specially with A3640)
-incompatibilities with accelerators
-incompatibilities with scsi controllers built in accelerators
-Same colours as an A500
-Crap case that won't allow you to fit 5 1/4 units
-No IDE
-Crap SCSI that has problems driving multiple devices
-ZIP memory: hard to find, hard to fit, prone to cause problems, expensive.
-Weak PSU
-slow cpus as default
-Lack of SMD components and chips fitted in sockets: that's the cause of bad contacts, lack of reliability.
An A4000T has much more quality and is better designed than A3000. It has a proper scsi chip for example. The only thing it lacks is a FlickerFixer (that you can buy easily).
All in all: you have to trash the entire A3000 to have a decent machine.
trash the roms. Trash the buster chip. Trash Ramsey, trash Dmac, trash the flickerfixer and built in gfx and buy a graphic card because otherwise gfx look so 80's, trash the scsi chip and fit a proper version or a proper controller, trash the case because you can't fit anything inside the supposedly expandable amiga and it heats a lot, trash the PSU as it's too weak,... I could go on.
A3000 are great when you realize standard configuration is too weak, put most of the original A3000 in the trashcan and start to use modern components taken from a reliable computer like A4000 :-)
BTW I actually own expanded A3000, A4000, A4000T, A500, A600, A1200...
