Classic Amiga Design Pet Hates

[TheBilgeRat]

I think my biggest pet peeve is that every time an A3000(T) or A4000(T) comes up for sale I'm short on funds :lol:.

Honestly I think the biggest peeve is that my LED cluster on the A2000 doesn't sit flush with the front panel.

[Amiduffer]

Hi,

Ever try Final Copy or Final Copy II.

I was accused of having a laser printer back in the 80's because of these programs.

smerf

That's almost true with me too. I got a nice complement by a professor on the quality of the printing I used with Final Writer and an Okidata.

Annoying things:

Leaking batteries.

The internal design of the A4000D is horrible. The insane way that the PSU case bumps right up against the CD drive making it damn near impossible to hook it up without breaking the plastic connectors on the ribbon due to how tight the connection is. The extremely fragile power button stick that breaks when you look at it. The damn near impossibility to get at some of the tabs in the front panel without taking some skin off. The cheap quality of the metal casing.

Not designing space for a CD drive in the A3000D

[Gulliver]

Well my main complaints are basic AmigaOS related ones:

What the hell were they thinking when they created a Prefs folder with a million preferences program piled in it (actually fifteen prefrences programs on 3.0/3.1)?
Couldnt they simply created a centralized one with all the details much like ProDad p.O.S. or MorphOS have?
BTW, this complaint remains valid on 3.9 and even in 4.1. No one seems sane enough to fix this, or even acknowledge all this. They even make it worse. I hope no one ever releases OS5 or OS6, because we will need to take an internship just to get the grips on all the different preferences programs alone!

Funny facts:

OS version  +  Number of prefs programs
  1.0 =                           1
  1.3 =                           5
  2.0 =                          13
  3.0 =                          15
  3.5 =                          19
  3.9 =                          23
  4.0 =                          27
  4.1 =                          29
  4.1 Update 1/2 =             31
 

Oh, and the printing system... Where they doing drugs? I mean 3 preference programs to handle the printing prefs (Printer, PrinterGFX, and PrinterPS) plus more programs on the tools folder (GraphicDump, InitPrinter, PrintFiles and CMD). What an hilarious mess!
Couldnt they just come up with something simpler more centralized like Turboprint? You need to use seven, yes SEVEN different programs to manage your printing since AmigaOS 3.0, and nothing still changes about that either.

[the_leander]

No different to a PC of the day.

I totally understand that, but there was a reason that the A500 sold as it did and the A2000 and A3000's didn't: Price.

And yes, by the time of the A1200 they were still ahead in its price bracket, but it's technological edge had been severely eroded and even surpassed in some areas.

In the big box arena, a fully specced A4000 by the time of it's release was out of date within the price bracket (about a grand for the lower end model iirc). Graphics and sound on the PC was already more advanced than anything that AGA could put out, even if the software wasn't yet there. By the time of the release of the A4000T, the writing was truly on the wall.

Only with the inclusion of 3rd party graphics and sound cards could the Amiga compete and even then at the time there wasn't any RTG, so only specific programs could make use of these features.

Computing in those days was very expensive.

I know, I was there.

As for 1998 ....

By 1998 the market of supply and demand was such that because of the falling user base the makers of the 060 had to lift the price to stay alive.

I don't think I ever saw the 060's sell for any less than £200 for the A1200 and £350 for the A3/4000 during their lives. They always carried a significant premium over lesser accelerators.

Personally I would still pay those prices now if I could get a new Cyberstorm.... ar hum.

Heh, yeah.

*cough* Falcon 030 *cough*

Ok, it had a 16-bit data bus, but that was more for compatibility with the rest of the atari innards, not due to cost. The falcon was comparably priced to the A1200.

IIRC it was around £100 more. Admittedly by this time C= had all but squashed Atari. And as you say, the internals of the Falcon were not as advanced. I think that adding a full blown 030 to the 1200 would have pushed the price up beyond the Falcons, possibly not by a huge margin, but maybe enough to have let Atari back into the game.

Now, the one thing I think the 1200 should have had but didn't, but that the Falcon did, was a MIDI port. I would guess that it would have made it much more appealing to you Karlos.

My pet hate with the A1200 was that it didn't come with any fast ram, nor the provision to add any beyond the trapdoor. A single SIMM slot and requisite glue logic on the motherboard would not have broken the bank and would have made the machine far more capable out of the box.

Agreed 100%. But by this time the beancounters were fully in control of C=. Which is probably why it didn't even have a full 020 which would have made more sense imho.

[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.

[haywirepc]

I can't believe no one mention the need of a scandoubler...
 
Always seemed retarded to me to have included such incredible graphics capabilities into the amiga but need a hardware hack to handle the funky scanrates and to do decent resolution.
 
The 1200 should have had a scandoubler built in and regular vga out like the 3000.
 
The lack of a built in hd controller on the 500 always bugged me too. I couldn't afford a hard drive addon at the time, so I had to deal with
ten tons of floppy disks for everything. Part of the reason I went to a pc was because I could buy a whole 486 with a hard drive for the cost of
just a hard drive add on for the 500.
 
Upgrading these machines past the factory specs is always very expensive, thats a real down side if you ask me. Who cares if the entry point is so cheap if you need to shell out another 3 or 5 hundred bucks
to get a hard drive, accellerator and so on?
 
Steven

[amiga92570]

No different to a PC of the day. And the PC, trust me was crap. I priced out like for like before I bought my Amiga 1200 in 1993 and the PC was more expensive. And having experienced a PC of the day trust me you didn`t want to go there.

Computing in those days was very expensive. What ever you ran. The Amiga was way ahead of its competitors in multitasking, animations etc and thats why. The Amiga though was the only model that let you start modest and build to your own pace. Unlike the tinboxes and Macs of the day.

As for 1998 ....

By 1998 the market of supply and demand was such that because of the falling user base the makers of the 060 had to lift the price to stay alive. Personally I would still pay those prices now if I could get a new Cyberstorm.... ar hum.

scuzz
http://www.commodore-amiga-retro.com

Please move to the PC Bashing thread. :madashell:

[the_leander]

Please move to the PC Bashing thread. :madashell:

Why? It was a perfectly valid comparison for machines of that age.

[Karlos]

IIRC it was around £100 more. Admittedly by this time C= had all but squashed Atari. And as you say, the internals of the Falcon were not as advanced.

Well, the 16-bit bus was kinda sucky but the falcon's hardware had some decent capabilities. It could do 16-bit chunky mode IIRC, which beyond AGA's capabilities, Akiko or not.

I think that adding a full blown 030 to the 1200 would have pushed the price up beyond the Falcons, possibly not by a huge margin, but maybe enough to have let Atari back into the game.

Now, the one thing I think the 1200 should have had but didn't, but that the Falcon did, was a MIDI port. I would guess that it would have made it much more appealing to you Karlos.

Actually, not the MIDI, after all, MIDI interfaces for the amiga were cheap and you could make one yourself easily enough. One bit of hardware in the falcon that interested me was the DSP. It was probably that, more than the 030, that increased the price.

Agreed 100%. But by this time the beancounters were fully in control of C=. Which is probably why it didn't even have a full 020 which would have made more sense imho.

Yes, especially if you were adding SIMM sockets to the design.

[scuzzb494]

Please move to the PC Bashing thread. :madashell:

You obviously didn`t read what I wrote....

scuzz
http://www.commodore-amiga-retro.com

[ChaosLord]

It would have been nice if the controller ports were installed on the side or front, it was very frustrating to change the controller/mouse all the time playing games =).

The controller ports are on the front of the A2000.  But you refused to buy an A2000 so they tried switching them over to the side on the A3000.  But you refused to buy an A3000 also.  So Commodore concluded that easy access controller ports didn't really affect sales. =)

[ChaosLord]

no kerning, makes all of your printing look amaturish

Amiga kerns perfectly.  Use Pagestream.  Or any good word processor or DTP program.

[Moto]

You do realise there is a program on Aminet to let you do just that... Often appeared on cover disks. Personally I like the clicking given that the Amiga is so quiet. Like a heartbeat.

scuzz
http://www.commodore-amiga-retro.com

I like the clicking too.  It reminds me that I'm using an Amiga.

[mpiva]

Hi,

@Kthunder,

The reason Commodore had the disk drive constantly running was to recognize the insertion of a disk, then it would automatically load. Thanks to a smart programmer he was able to shut down the drive, and still have it determine if a disk was inserted. Workaround emmm yes, but then when you reload the Amiga Os the machine was really fast because you didn't have to hit the OK on the Insert disk 2 question like you did on other machines.

smerf

IIRC, NoClick came out during the AmigaOS 1.3 days and I think 95% of Amiga users used it.  It always amazed me that Commodore never thought to implement NoClick's functionality as standard in AmigaOS 2.x or even 3.x

[mpiva]

Well my main complaints are basic AmigaOS related ones:

What the hell were they thinking when they created a Prefs folder with a million preferences program piled in it (actually fifteen prefrences programs on 3.0/3.1)?
Couldnt they simply created a centralized one with all the details much like ProDad p.O.S. or MorphOS have?
BTW, this complaint remains valid on 3.9 and even in 4.1. No one seems sane enough to fix this, or even acknowledge all this. They even make it worse. I hope no one ever releases OS5 or OS6, because we will need to take an internship just to get the grips on all the different preferences programs alone!

  I don't really mind the number of Prefs programs.  To me, having a Prefs directory with a dozen different programs is really no different than having a Prefs program with a dozen different Tabs.  The real issue, I think, is the names of these programs.  Unless you've been an Amiga user for a while, the names are complete gibberish.  You have to rely more on what the icons look like than anything else.

  I understand there may be some legal issues with trying to change the names of some of these programs but, at the very least, Prefs should have subdirectories like, "Graphics", "Sound", "Printers", "Input", etc.  That would help a little bit.

[danwood]

make the damn floppy drive stop clicking!

I might be weird, but I like the floppy drive click!  Makes you know it's alive!