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Author Topic: What was the best thing that ever happened to the Amiga? Any era.  (Read 9986 times)

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Offline terminator4

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Re: What was the best thing that ever happened to the Amiga? Any era.
« Reply #29 on: November 19, 2008, 05:11:20 AM »
I still think piracy has some share of problems.  People buy hardware because of software applications.  If developer feels efforts will be pirated, he/she will move away from platform (iospirit for example).  Amiga market has been dwindling (getting smaller) late 80s to early 90s till today.  This meant that software sales were more critical at amiga platform than mac or pc.  Fewer amiga users, mean smaller platform, mean greater need to recover or make $ to sustain themselves in business.  making every sale count (after commodore's demise, how many companies can honestly make enough to live off amiga?)

Commodore: well i did mention that in my opinion A1200/4000 came too late and gave too little (should have been released more like 1989/90 not 92/93, with scsi and flicker fixers built in - connecting to TV was no longer cool but optional).
of course don't blame the few engineers left at commodore, but the management for not providing enough resources (people, money) :roll:
remember, Dave Haynie, in Deathbed Vigil or some other video talk about working on multiple projects and only one of them being approved by management? (lack of focus, management not understanding what they have).
imho of course :-D

I'll say the bad were 80% Commodore, 15% piracy, 5% pc taking over the world (remember apple also went out of business at one point). :lol: of course Commodore made pcs too, which is why i say pc 5% (pc compatibles).
 

Offline terminator4

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Re: What was the best thing that ever happened to the Amiga? Any era.
« Reply #30 on: November 19, 2008, 05:20:50 AM »
"Mac,PC, Ipod and Wii would be a failures as piracy is rampant on those leading brands."

any ideas on volumes sold of these compared to Amiga? (larger volumes can let you get away with piracy with more ease). here's some for amiga:
http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/sales.html
Also, Amiga might not have been popular choice in the office compared to pc.  (PC could afford to lose money to piracy, as it monopolized the market, and business still paid licence fees, thats how business sustains for instance micro$oft).
Commodore had a failed track record of taking advantage of business market (Amiga Unix, Amiga OS in business, with exception of Newtek Videotoaster).  I wonder if not having build in flicker fixer & vga monitors for business on A1200/4000 killed the Amiga? (companies always buy monitors)
Having no vga, but some rgb (still in early 90s) was silly imho.

anyway not trying to argue, just giving ideas behind my thinking.  Of course, everyone is entitled to their opinion. :-D
 

Offline B00tDisk

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Re: What was the best thing that ever happened to the Amiga? Any era.
« Reply #31 on: November 19, 2008, 06:12:26 AM »
Quote

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.
Back away from the EU-SSR!
 

Offline benJamin

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Re: What was the best thing that ever happened to the Amiga? Any era.
« Reply #32 on: November 19, 2008, 06:54:14 AM »
Quote
The demoscene.


Gets my vote, too.
Amiga.org - The site for MiniMig support and news.
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Offline marcfrick2112

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Re: What was the best thing that ever happened to the Amiga? Any era.
« Reply #33 on: November 19, 2008, 06:59:01 AM »
I second the A500. DrH. mentioned 'affordable' . For an 18-year old working part-time, it was 'barely affordable' , but what a blast it was!!

Number 2: Yes, NewTek, the Toaster, Lightwave, and everything. Newtek at least kept Amiga in the limelight for a bit longer, and certainly helped create some interesting hardware (PAR card comes to mind)

---------------
Marc Frick
---------------
A1200T / \'060, 256MB, CD-R, OS3.9
A4000 w/ WarpEngine / 82MB , OS3.1
A4000 16MB, OS 3.9
A1200 , \'030 / 10MB
A1200 (stock)

CD32 :)

...And a very sick 4000T
 

Offline stefcep2

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Re: What was the best thing that ever happened to the Amiga? Any era.
« Reply #34 on: November 19, 2008, 08:40:47 AM »
I say game piracy was the best and worst thing to happen to the Amiga. Don't forget at its height the Amiga was THE games platform, us serious users were a minority that only became a majority in the Amiga's twilight.

It shames me to admit it but i bought my first Amiga 500 to play games after i went to a user group of meeting of about 300(!) Amigans who were happily swapping pirated games.  No-one thought twice about it.  The choice for most of us  was: buy a Nintendo or Sega with expensive cartridges that we couldn't afford nor copy or get an Amiga that we could have pretty much whatever we wanted, often before the local retailers.  For a 14-17 year olds with no money it was a no-brainer really.  But it drove hardware sales to amazing heights.

But eventually, software developers started to hate the Amiga for the same reason.  I'd say only 10% of their software that was circulating was legitimate.  Ofcourse hardware advancement on the PC was a factor but the ease with which the platform could be pirated was very very important.  So the software developers went PC with CDROM which was expensive to copy: cd-burners were over $1000 Aus, but eventually the software houses ended up in the same hole when burners became cheap.  And thus PC ruled the roost, later overthrown by the Playstation which now was just as easy to pirate games for as opposed to the N64 which had the better games but on cartridge.

The most popular hardware platform was always the easiest to pirate games for.  At its height, this was the Amiga 500.

Sad but true:  Piracy made the Amiga, Piracy killed the Amiga.
 

Offline AmithonyTopic starter

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Re: What was the best thing that ever happened to the Amiga? Any era.
« Reply #35 on: November 19, 2008, 08:41:30 AM »
Quote

B00tDisk wrote:
Quote

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.


It was a nice machine... btw, who is the babe in the avatar?
 

Offline AmithonyTopic starter

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Re: What was the best thing that ever happened to the Amiga? Any era.
« Reply #36 on: November 19, 2008, 08:43:26 AM »
Quote

foleyjo wrote:
WHDLOAD


Yes, cant forget that one. :)
 

Offline Painkiller

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Re: What was the best thing that ever happened to the Amiga? Any era.
« Reply #37 on: November 19, 2008, 08:52:10 AM »
Quote

It was a nice machine... btw, who is the babe in the avatar?


Seriously dude you need to use internet for what it was meant for ;)

That has got to be Aria Giovanni!  :crazy:
 

Offline AmithonyTopic starter

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Re: What was the best thing that ever happened to the Amiga? Any era.
« Reply #38 on: November 19, 2008, 08:57:52 AM »
Quote

Painkiller wrote:
Quote

It was a nice machine... btw, who is the babe in the avatar?


Serioisly dude you need to use internet what it was meant for ;)

That has got to be Aria Giovanni!  :crazy:



ROTFL! Wowser! Is she single?
 

Offline stefcep2

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Re: What was the best thing that ever happened to the Amiga? Any era.
« Reply #39 on: November 19, 2008, 08:58:36 AM »
Quote

marcfrick2112 wrote:
I second the A500. DrH. mentioned 'affordable' . For an 18-year old working part-time, it was 'barely affordable' , but what a blast it was!!

Number 2: Yes, NewTek, the Toaster, Lightwave, and everything. Newtek at least kept Amiga in the limelight for a bit longer, and certainly helped create some interesting hardware (PAR card comes to mind)



Guys this idea that Newtek and Video Toaster and Lightwave made the Amiga is a very hard-core US-centric view of the events of the time.  The fact is there was never a PAL toaster, so NO-ONE in Europe or Australia or Brazil or India  (Bollywood was and is huge) had one. Thats most of the world.  

Secondly, the Amiga-Toaster-Lightwave combination cost a fortune, many thousands of dollars $5,000 US(?), cheap compared to the $100,000 that video/TV studios were used to paying, but well and truly outside the reach of 99% of users.  Studios that used this set up used several- in some movies I think 8- networked (screamernet)68060 A2000's with graphics cards and huge scsi drives, how many people had this?  Of the millions that owned an Amiga most would never know what a video toaster was.  Who actually bought an Amiga because of the video toaster?  Only a very very small percentage, and sure it gave the Amiga some "serious" credibilty, but most users never really bought one for the video toaster: at its peak the Amiga was a games machine all the way, a games machine that you could get games softeware for very very cheaply.  Thats what made the Amiga..
 

Offline darksun9210

Re: What was the best thing that ever happened to the Amiga? Any era.
« Reply #40 on: November 19, 2008, 10:20:55 AM »
yeah, i'll go with a the A500. its what i started with, its what my mates started with, and its want got commodore going in the public eye, and as much as it shames me to admit, i was part of the school playground diskswapping scene.
you could argue that an amiga, and bootable x-copy floppy was all you needed for gaming greatness. i went for an external floppy drive before the one meg ram upgrade.
my birthdays and christmases were easy for my parents and family. they'd just buy boxes of blank floppy disks.
my god those were the days.
being able to tell read/write errors by the noise of the drive. sorry, getting all nostagic. ... kids these days... don't know their friggin born!  :lol:

A500, A600, A1200x3, A2000, A3000, A4000 & a CD32.
and probably just like the rest of you, crates full of related "treasure" for the above XD
 

Offline Phantom

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Re: What was the best thing that ever happened to the Amiga? Any era.
« Reply #41 on: November 19, 2008, 10:25:25 AM »
Best thing: WE (as a community)
Worst thing: Medhi Ali
To Be A True Adventurer, You Ought To Play Real Text Adventures
 

Offline AmithonyTopic starter

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Re: What was the best thing that ever happened to the Amiga? Any era.
« Reply #42 on: November 19, 2008, 10:28:59 AM »
@phantom

Also a nice avatar! I was wondering what you thought of your 440?
 

Offline Phantom

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Re: What was the best thing that ever happened to the Amiga? Any era.
« Reply #43 on: November 19, 2008, 10:36:52 AM »
@ Amithony

ME???  :-D  :-D

It wasn't me...  :crazy:  :crazy:
To Be A True Adventurer, You Ought To Play Real Text Adventures
 

Offline AmithonyTopic starter

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Re: What was the best thing that ever happened to the Amiga? Any era.
« Reply #44 from previous page: November 19, 2008, 10:47:21 AM »
Quote

Phantom wrote:
@ Amithony

ME???  :-D  :-D

It wasn't me...  :crazy:  :crazy:



I noticed you had a SAM440ep in your signature. Mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of. :)

How is Chania? My father is from there.