Top 3 worst ideas in Amiga history?

[Karlos]

Oh, and added to this, the kickstart should've been cartridge based, so it could easily be replaced.

I can't agree with that notion. It would have greatly increased the cost of buying a new kickstart ROM, relied on some dodgy edge connector that may end up having flaky contacts and the like.

Besides, changing the kickstart chips aren't exactly difficult on most amigas, since they are socketed and generally fairly easy to access, even on wedge models.

[TheMagicM]

I have not read the posts, but I'll submit one.

Releasing 99% of the software for STOCK Amiga systems.  Gave no incentive to users to upgrade to run better software.

[tone007]

Gave no incentive to users to upgrade to run better software.

Faster is a good incentive!

[Speelgoedmannetje]

I can't agree with that notion. It would have greatly increased the cost of buying a new kickstart ROM, relied on some dodgy edge connector that may end up having flaky contacts and the like.

edge connectors seem, however, to work fine with 100% of the gameconsoles back then. Yes, they can get a bit rusty, but not much. My Atari 2600, Mattel Intellivision and Philips Videopac still work perfectly. Sometimes the connectors can get a titbit rusty, but that's easy to fix for even the worst cases of compuphobes.
And besides that, the cartridge stays there for longer, the wearout should be much less than an avarage sega megadrive. I really don't see any problems there.

Besides, changing the kickstart chips aren't exactly difficult on most amigas, since they are socketed and generally fairly easy to access, even on wedge models.

For us technicians, certainly not indeed, but the avarage joe will begin to scream by the sight of computer innards.

A cartridge based kickstart combined with workbench disks would have lowered tremendously the treshold for many to upgrade.

[TheMagicM]

Faster is a good incentive!

well, not just that, but Amiga's with graphics cards, hard drives, AGA etc.  Too much stuff was designed to run on 1.3, A500's with 512k RAM.

[stefcep2]

edge connectors seem, however, to work fine with 100% of the gameconsoles back then. Yes, they can get a bit rusty, but not much. My Atari 2600, Mattel Intellivision and Philips Videopac still work perfectly. Sometimes the connectors can get a titbit rusty, but that's easy to fix for even the worst cases of compuphobes.
And besides that, the cartridge stays there for longer, the wearout should be much less than an avarage sega megadrive. I really don't see any problems there.
For us technicians, certainly not indeed, but the avarage joe will begin to scream by the sight of computer innards.

A cartridge based kickstart combined with workbench disks would have lowered tremendously the treshold for many to upgrade.

I don't know of anyone who didn't upgrade their OS because they had to remove the old kickstart chips and insert new ones.  Macs had ROMs socketed on the motherboard as well.

Most non-upgraders were A500 gamers.  1 Mb, WB 1.3, OCS/ECS meant you could play anything worth playing on the Amiga, there was no compelling reason for them to upgrade. And later, when there was a compelling reason to upgrade their A500, it was to play Doom-on the PC.  Doom and the lack of a chunky mode is what killed the Amiga's status as the games computer of choice.  And OS upgrade made no difference to Amiga gamers, as the OS was hardly ever used to play commercial games, remember all those NDOS games discs.

[tone007]

it was to play Doom-on the PC.  Doom and the lack of a chunky mode is what killed the Amiga's status as the games computer of choice.

The first public version of Doom was uploaded to Software Creations BBS and an FTP server at the University of Wisconsin–Madison on December 10, 1993.

..and if Doom couldn't do it in four months, surely the bankruptcy of Commodore finished the job!

[TheMagicM]

Doom was huge...  when I first saw it, I wanted to get a PC also.. it was such an awesome game.  I played it at work way too much.  LOL

[save2600]

I agree that games like Doom changed the face of computer gaming for a lot of people.

But I just thought of another thing that continually frosts my balls about Amiga gaming: the fact MOST games did not take advantage of a controller that has more than 1 friggin' button! Think about this... the Amiga was designed to be a game machine first and foremost, yet we've been stuck with one button gaming ala the Atari 2600 for decades?!? I'm getting pissed just thinking about pushing 'UP' to jump...  lol

[TheMagicM]

I agree that games like Doom changed the face of computer gaming for a lot of people.

But I just thought of another thing that continually frosts my balls about Amiga gaming: the fact MOST games did not take advantage of a controller that has more than 1 friggin' button! Think about this... the Amiga was designed to be a game machine first and foremost, yet we've been stuck with one button gaming ala the Atari 2600 for decades?!? I'm getting pissed just thinking about pushing 'UP' to jump...  lol

but thats the same way it was on PC's though.. or do you mean using a different input device like mouse for movement?

[save2600]

No, PC's have had multi-button games for a looooong time, but maybe not as far back as I am thinking. But wait... yeah, pretty much Gravis and Logitech, I remember having 2 buttons and that scenario was even standard on systems as far back as the Apple ]['s.

In any event, by the time the A500, CDTV, A1200 & CD32 came out, 2+ buttons for gaming should have been the standard. I'm just surprised that it wasn't the standard starting with the A1000.

[Boot_WB]

Hindsight makes us all visionaries, and who would have thought that many of us would still be using the same hardware 20+ years later, heavily upgraded, heaving at the seams, traces boiling from the heat dissipation of the increased bus frequencies pushed to the limit...
...but here's my 3:

1) Self-destruction batteries soldered onboard in sensitive areas (A4000 - adjacent to ram sockets; A3000 - middle of the fricking board; A500+... well, need I say more)

2) Lack of a user-files area by default on hard-drive OS installations. Software developers invariably used progfile: as the default save-to location. (Now try backing up all your documents from Maple V, Multiplot, Wordworth, Equation editor, Turbocalc, etc)

3) Lack of a ability to use A1200 processor upgrades with the A3/4000, even in a fallback 32-bit memory / ZorroII mode.

[NorthWay]

System calls that had user supplied memory structures for internal system use. What were they thinking?

Letting Jay Miner walk out. And the rest of the crew. All management stuff that though.

Not thinking of Moore's Law. Making the system a one-off and expecting to do something entirely different in the future. If it was a bad idea in 1983 I don't know, but at some point it should have been clear that you would be stuck with the basics and had to expand on them forever.

[save2600]

Thought of another one: the rollout price of a 256kb A1000. IMO, was too expensive and cost prohibitive for many of its prospective users - which were primarily loyal Commodore users of course. This is a tough thing to decide though - price it too low and people and professionals might not have given it a second look. Price it too high and people might rather go for an old standby such as Apple or IBM. Guess in all fairness, it was priced pretty well - but compared to the ST, no so much. I believe a 512kb system should have rolled out at around $1k, maybe $1.3k tops with some more software and a monitor. Better or more RAM solutions that were cheaper should have been made more available too, instead of rare or years later that were STILL too expensive for what they were.

[runequester]

I have not read the posts, but I'll submit one.
 
Releasing 99% of the software for STOCK Amiga systems. Gave no incentive to users to upgrade to run better software.

Heck yeah. You never heard PC owners complain that Doom or Sim City 2000 would not run on their 286 with 2 megs of RAM.

[MskoDestny]

I've got both a Genesis and an Amiga, and I must say the games that get the most out of the Amiga hardware (like Elfmania, Fighting Spirit and Kid Chaos) deliver better gfx,

Kid Chaos is impressive given the limitations of the hardware, but I don't think it can match the better looking platformers on the Genesis like Sonic 3, Sonic & Knuckles or Vectorman. Elfmania is more colorful than your average Genesis game and the animation is quite smooth. They did a good job of pulling off some parallax with only a single playfield. So I'll give you that one. Fightin' Spirit doesn't seem particularly impressive though.

Really the only things the OCS video hardware had going for it for 2D games over the Genesis were color selection and the amount of RAM directly accessible by the video hardware. Any pixel can be any of the 32 colors in the palette and palette entries are 12-bit whereas on the Genesis a given tile/sprite is limited to using a single palette of 15 colors and the palette entries are only 9-bit. However, there are 4 such palettes and you choose which palette to use on a per-tile and per-sprite basis (so 61 colors onscreen unless you resort to "tricks").

Now if you want two independent playfields (for parallax scrolling for instance), the color selection advantage of OCS is greatly reduced since each playfield is limited to a 7 color palette (+1 background color). The Genesis hardware doesn't have this problem. Also, the OCS sprite hardware is pretty lame compared to the Genesis. OCS supports 8 3-color  or 4 15-color 16-pixel wide sprites per line. The Genesis supports up to 20 sprites or 320 pixels worth of sprites per line whichever comes first in sizes of 8,16 or 32 pixels wide with a limit of 80 sprites per frame. Genesis sprites always use a 15 color palette. You can work around these limitations to an extent using the blitter, but on OCS/ECS you'll probably run into bandwidth limits before you get into the neighborhood of what the Genesis hardware can do.

Fighting games are probably one area where OCS fairs pretty well as parallax isn't as important and you don't need many sprites. Further, all the RAM available to the video hardware allows you to do smooth animations on relatively large sprites.

Now the OCS hardware was a lot more flexible than the Genesis hardware making it much more appropriate for a general purpose computer. Making a GUI system work on the Genesis hardware would require some sacrifices and even then would probably perform poorly in comparison.

BUT many Genesis games are better looking because they were well developed and were put on a cartridge (which saves A LOT of processing power and memory).

Well it definitely does wonders for load times. I doubt it made much of a difference for per-frame processing though. The A500 had a reasonable amount of RAM. Enough that you can load all your data for a single level up front and then just work out of RAM. As for using less memory, that's definitely true, but the Genesis had a lot less of that (64K for the 68K, 64K for the VDP and 8K for the Z80) so it's a bit moot for comparing the two.