Top 3 worst ideas in Amiga history?

[delshay]

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.

when using anologue joypad i  have four buttons (gravis anologue pro). when using digital joystick (modifyed) i have two fire buttons.

[Karlos]

Not the same. I'd like to see 3.9 run on a 1.3 kickstart rom.

I'd like to see MacOS9 run on a MacOS7 rom equipped classic. Equally not going to happen, is it?

[Painkiller]

1. TV was the primary display device to use with an Amiga... Overscan maddsness etc.
2. Lack of memory
3. Not having internal HDD in every machine with WB installed

[Thorham]

1st -- The Amiga 2000

Are you serious? And just how were people going to use accelerators, scsi controllers, networking, audio cards and graphics boards in one box? Without the A2000 there wouldn't have been an early machine with good expansion capabilities. Bad idea? No. Perhaps it could've been made better, but bad is a big word.

The same goes for the interlace idea that someone else seems to think is bad. In the early days the chipset could only output 15 Khz displays, and most monitors (and TVs) could only handle 15 Khz input. Without interlace there would be no way to go over 256 pixel high displays (283 with overscan), and that's why interlace is a good idea. Not including 31 Khz output modes from the start (if not too expensive), now that's a bad idea.

[B00tDisk]

No.

Yes.

[Hell Labs]

I'd like to see MacOS9 run on a MacOS7 rom equipped classic. Equally not going to happen, is it?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Quadra_950:hammer: And that's not the only one.

[tone007]

Lame!

[Hell Labs]

Lame!

Your monitor is not a mirror.

[tone007]

blurp blurp blurp

Your keyboard's not a urinal!

[quarkx]

No.

What?
please elaborate. The A2000 (although not pretty) is the best even today for versatility, upgrade ability, and available parts. No other Amiga has the flexibility that it has. The A3000D was a very small chassis, and no room for a 5 inch Drive bay, it also brings more price for accelerator cards and such. The A4000 also does not have the room inside, and upgrades are 3-4 times as expensive. The A2000 was a very important Amiga to prove it was more than just an expensive gaming machine, it proved to the world that Amiga was a very serious computer.

[tone007]

Well, you've forgotten the 3000T and the 4000T, but lets take a step back.

Cost wise, are you saying it'd be cheaper to buy a Picasso II board for an A2000 than it would be to buy one for an A4000?  No, they cost the same because most of the hardware the A2000 can use is usable in the A4000 as well.

Accelerator cards are comparably priced across the range as well, depending on the processors.  The A2000, however, requires an accelerator card to be useful, while the A3000 has a 68030 built in, and the 4000 wasn't available with anything less (not counting the odd prototype '020 card.)  If you want a 68030 in your A2000, you're spending $100-$200, putting your A2000 in the price range of an A3000 machine. Going up the range, 68040 cards are available for all and are similarly priced (though a 3640 is cheaper than any '040 card you'll find for the 2000,) and '060 cards are expensive for any machine (but easier to find for the 3000/4000 range.)  Those Blizzard 2060's aren't growing on trees.  Oh, and if you want 2MB of chip RAM in your A2000, you're spending another ~$100 for a MegAChip.

The A2000 is expandable, yes, and they require a bunch of it to be useful.

edit: I'll take a step back myself and say I'm not agreeing with those who said the A2000 was a bad idea.  It was clearly superior to the A1000 in terms of expandability, but it was most definitely surpassed by later machines.

[quarkx]

Well, you've forgotten the 3000T and the 4000T, but lets take a step back.

Cost wise, are you saying it'd be cheaper to buy a Picasso II board for an A2000 than it would be to buy one for an A4000?  No, they cost the same because most of the hardware the A2000 can use is usable in the A4000 as well.

Accelerator cards are comparably priced across the range as well, depending on the processors.  The A2000, however, requires an accelerator card to be useful, while the A3000 has a 68030 built in, and the 4000 wasn't available with anything less (not counting the odd prototype '020 card.)  If you want a 68030 in your A2000, you're spending $100-$200, putting your A2000 in the price range of an A3000 machine. Going up the range, 68040 cards are available for all and are similarly priced (though a 3640 is cheaper than any '040 card you'll find for the 2000,) and '060 cards are expensive for any machine (but easier to find for the 3000/4000 range.)  Those Blizzard 2060's aren't growing on trees.  Oh, and if you want 2MB of chip RAM in your A2000, you're spending another ~$100 for a MegAChip.

The A2000 is expandable, yes, and they require a bunch of it to be useful.

edit: I'll take a step back myself and say I'm not agreeing with those who said the A2000 was a bad idea.  It was clearly superior to the A1000 in terms of expandability, but it was most definitely surpassed by later machines.

Actually, I was talking desktop models, but, I think we are on the same page here. You have to remember that Commodore built the A3000, on the fact that people were buying all the cards for the A2000 (in one of the computer Chronical episodes) they state that they looked at all the upgrades people were putting into the A2000 and designed the A3000 around that.
But, for the time, the A2000 was ALMOST perfect for the market. Much better that the A2000 that the German team put together (which infact was an A1000 with 3 Zorro slots) and it didn't work at all until Dave got his hands on it.)

Yes, I agree if you put all the "High End" upgrades in it, you are going to spend a whole lot of money, but to get a 8 meg Scsi card,HD, CD-rom Drive and lets say a '30, and an amber board or even now an Indivision, it is much easer and cheaper than trying to get those upgrades for an A500, In fact, if you hunt a bit, you can probably pick up one with all these upgrades in it for a lot less than a stock A3000 or A4000. A A2000 Video Toaster unit is a whole lot easier to find than a "complete" A4000 Toaster and only about half to a third of the price.
I have seen a lot of A2000 's on Ebay with an '30 card go for less then $150, infact most people that sell the A2000 don't even know what they have in them, so if you are lucky enough to have a picture of the back of the unit, you can usually tell if there is an CPU card inside. Over the last 4 months, I have seen some Amazing deals on A2000 not sell on Ebay, because of this "stigma" that is somehow attached itself to the A2000. Just in November, December alone (and I had no cash) there was a complete Video editing studio with the A2000 Video Toaster, 4 monitors and a Sony VT editing station. Anotherwords a complete turnkey Studio with EVERYTHING, and the guy could not get $200. He had it listed 3 times with a last time BIN of $185. now the shipping would have been increadible, but those deals pop up all the time on the 2000.

[Ami_GFX]

Just in November, December alone (and I had no cash) there was a complete Video editing studio with the A2000 Video Toaster, 4 monitors and a Sony VT editing station. Anotherwords a complete turnkey Studio with EVERYTHING, and the guy could not get $200. He had it listed 3 times with a last time BIN of $185. now the shipping would have been increadible, but those deals pop up all the time on the 2000.

Interesting, I got almost $300 for my A2000 Toaster which was complete but just a stock Toaster 2000. And I thought the $159 buy it now price that I started the auction with was maybe a bit high.

The main disatvantage of the A2000 for me is the space they take up. One is good, two was too much. I could have picked up a Mac G5 in perfect shape last week for free but turned it down for the same reason: nowhere to put it, it was huge, even bigger than an A2000. The A4000D is much more ergonomic. And, in spite of it's shortcomings, I like AGA. The AGA desktop is disappointing but the AGA ham modes are beautiful and unique.

And back to the main theme of the thread, I would say the number one shortcoming, lack of foresight, of the Amiga is the difficulty of expanding memory. It doesn't matter what model, there is some hangup: On the A 2000, going beyond 8mb depends on the accelerator, On the A3000, the zip ram on the mother board is expensive and hard to find and there aren't many zorro III memory cards, 3 that I can think of off hand, and on the A4000, the motherboard uses inexpensive simms but going beyond 24mb(16mb ram +8mb slow zorroII ram,) requires an expensive accelerator with simm sockets or one of the 3 zorro III memory cards and the only one that shows up for sale very often is the Fastlane Z3. The A4000 has great compatibility with modern hard drives for a machine that old but it would be so nice if you could use 16 and 32mb simms on the motherboard instead of 4mb ones like some of the Macs made in the early 90s.

[quarkx]

Interesting, I got almost $300 for my A2000 Toaster which was complete but just a stock Toaster 2000. And I thought the $159 buy it now price that I started the auction with was maybe a bit high.

The main disatvantage of the A2000 for me is the space they take up. One is good, two was too much. I could have picked up a Mac G5 in perfect shape last week for free but turned it down for the same reason: nowhere to put it, it was huge, even bigger than an A2000. The A4000D is much more ergonomic. And, in spite of it's shortcomings, I like AGA. The AGA desktop is disappointing but the AGA ham modes are beautiful and unique.

And back to the main theme of the thread, I would say the number one shortcoming, lack of foresight, of the Amiga is the difficulty of expanding memory. It doesn't matter what model, there is some hangup: On the A 2000, going beyond 8mb depends on the accelerator, On the A3000, the zip ram on the mother board is expensive and hard to find and there aren't many zorro III memory cards, 3 that I can think of off hand, and on the A4000, the motherboard uses inexpensive simms but going beyond 24mb(16mb ram +8mb slow zorroII ram,) requires an expensive accelerator with simm sockets or one of the 3 zorro III memory cards and the only one that shows up for sale very often is the Fastlane Z3. The A4000 has great compatibility with modern hard drives for a machine that old but it would be so nice if you could use 16 and 32mb simms on the motherboard instead of 4mb ones like some of the Macs made in the early 90s.

I agree totally with you, I never said the A2000 was the BEST Amiga, but it certainly was no where even close to the top 3 worst Ideas of Commodore. I keep stating "At the time" the A2000 was a great machine, but the 3000 and 4000 were all improvements on it. I had 3 at one time, and have all sold them off due to space issues. Although I still say that for a newbe to Amiga, Start with an A2000, and slowly build it up. Much easier and cheaper to find cards for it, then let's say an A500. The price difference is not all that much between a stock A500 and A2000, but finding anything for an A500 (other than trapdoor Ram) is very expensive and hard. In fact I know of 3 Right now, that I can get for anyone very cheap and easy, I believe on is a factory A2500.

[Speelgoedmannetje]

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.


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.

You certainly know the stuff
I've never had any hands-on experience with bit-banging the Amiga, so everything I say is based on assumptions. Therefore, I assume that with a cartridge, a lot of game data doesn't need to be loaded into memory. So I assume that a lot more can be done with tricks to overcome the sprite limit.

[Boot_WB]

Originally Posted by tone007  View Post
No.

Yes.

Maybe?