Amiga hardware superiority

[bloodline]

At the end of the day it's not really about which machine had the better hardware specs, it's really about what the all those clever coders & programmers wrote for it, that made each machine what it was...

Hmmm, no... I think what is boils down to, is which one did you get for christmas when you were ten

[Hattig]

Yes probably I made a mistake or two on the chart, but despite those Mac lovers, I still think it was not the best machine.

Well the Mac had Mac OS ... and a fixed frame buffer style of graphics. Shapeshifter ran Mac OS quicker on an Amiga than a Mac with the same CPU IIRC.

[Franko]

Hmmm, no... I think what is boils down to, is which one did you get for christmas when you were ten

They didn't have home computers when I was 10...

(at 10 I got my first electronic keyboard an old Bontempi (i think) reed organ, the ruddy fan was louder than the music... :lol:)

[orb85750]

I don't have time to do it, but it would be nice to see such a chart for 1990 too.

[mechy]

Yes,as pointed out,most quikpak and amiga technologies 4000t's had 880K drives, but some true C= a4000t's had the HD floppy from the factory.None came with cdroms as standard.

Not sure when the quikpak 060 A4000T model came out,probabaly a good bit after 1994~ would of looked better in the chart in any case.

I Love the 4000t also but the mac is the clear winner with 128MB capable on board,16bit sound,and 24bit (16mil colors) gfx.I never could understand why most mac's used LC 68040's tho..

Of course you could go crazy expanding the 4000t and make it a nice machine.

I would be scared to see ther prices on these originally.

[Pentad]

I think this chart really goes to show had badly the Amiga hardware was becoming by 1994.  Honest, I'm not trying to start a flame war but I'm just being realistic.   I really have fond memories of the Amiga and of Commodore but it just wasn't competitive by the mid 90s.  Some thoughts:

-AGA was just not good enough.  It was late to the party and only extended OCS/ECS for a short time.

-Do you realize that Paula was roughly 10 years old by 1994!?

-8 Bit audio was an embarrassment compared to the plethora of sound cards of the PC world and the Mac's built-in audio.

-3DFX was testing their Voodoo 1 3D cards in 1994 for the PC.  I remember seeing a demo of it on DOS/Windows 95 Beta at CES in Chicago in the summer of 94.  AGA seemed quaint and backwards compared to 3DFX.  

-Windows 95 would be released in August of 1994 and would kill Commodore and Atari and nearly kill Apple a few years later

-Apple's hardware was still stuck with System 7.x but the hardware was getting better and better

In the end, I think you can see the major problem here for Commodore and Amiga:  Technology Product Cycle.  The Amiga started theirs in 1985 and it was cutting edge but it was coming to an end in 1994/1995.  Apple/Microsoft/PC were just starting theirs at this time but the big deal is that it gave them something to grow into.  Apple was moving to PPC, Windows would get better and better (NT 4 was an amazing OS) and this would lead to Windows 2k/XP, and finally the PC world got PCI in '92 and folks like 3DFX were going to bring 3D acceleration to the masses.

What did Commodore have?  AmigaOS was very mature but had no place to go.   It was so tied to the hardware that any small change would kill legacy apps.  Look what a mess it was going from 1.3 to 2.x/3.x.

AAA (or whatever) should have been started in 1988 and pushed hard by R&D so that as one TPC ended (started in 1985) Commodore could have transitioned to a a new TPC for the 90s.

AmigaOS 4 should have been developed along with AAA and included modern features like memory protection.  By the late 80's, everybody in the computer world recognized that memory protection is a must for a stable, modern OS.  

Microsoft developed NT (based on ideas from VAX) with memory protection (among many other things) because its where you had to go.  Consumer Windows was always planned to intersect Windows NT and they did a great job of slowly getting everybody there.  

Apple and Commodore had the same problem with their OS.  You can't just 'bolt on' modern features and a rewrite kills your current apps that keep you in business.  Apple's soap opera like quest for a new OS was certainly amazing and they just got lucky with Steve Jobs and NeXT.

Commodore was...well, Commodore.   What worked in the 1980s for them failed in the 1990s...and here we are.

Cheers!
-P

[Franko]

Commodore was...well, Commodore.   What worked in the 1980s for them failed in the 1990s...and here we are.

Cheers!
-P

I agree with a lot of what you say in your post, but remember it's wasn't the lack of ideas and R&D that brought Commodore to it's knees, it was greed & downright theft by the likes of Mehdi Ali that ended Commodore...

[runequester]

when you factor in software, the amiga certainly jumps ahead. BUt the earlier you set the clock, the more the amiga shines. In 85 or 86, there's just nothing like it.

[persia]

Yeah it's sort of a continuum, between 85 and 92 the Amiga had clear advantages over other systems, in 85 it was a world beater, in 92 it was still ahead in a number of areas, from 92 to 95 was the real transition from competitor to also ran.

Commodore wasn't willing or able to put enough money into the Amiga to maintain the lead it had in 85.  Somehow they didn't understand that once you move out in front and make yourself a target you have to keep moving, others will be interested in your market and they *will* be spending money to catch you.

[valeru]

I believe the Amiga as a hardware platform died because its strength of the 80s became its weakness in the 90s. And here I am referring to its Custom Chips, ie sound and graphics. If you really look at the hardware list above you realize that the GPU was not really that good. HAM was unusable and hi-res interlace will make your eyes water after a few minutes unless you  heavily tweak the palette - leaving you with a 256 line resolution which even for that time it was bad.

In my opinion Commodore should have taken the pains to implement a hardware abstraction layer in AOS - together with a classic emulator. This would have been painful, but it might have saved Amiga from the PC & Windows. Look at Apple MacOS X which is really a heavily modified version of BSD, together to the move from 68x0 to ppc and now to x86.

But alas Commodore died a slow and painful death :-(

[Digiman]

Where are the prices? Without the prices it is all pie in the sky. A Misleading chart anyway, hardware sprites? who cares! 2mb chip ram <> 2mb VRAM of a 24bit card. Also the x68000 and Amiga sprites were insignificant compared to raw CPU speed of an 040 class machine etc.  Also, a 1992 A4000 desktop, which is what should be on the chart as there is no difference to CPU/chipset between A4000D and A4000T just SCSI instead of IDE, is a better comparison as it may show deficiencies (if you update inaccurate points) but also shows the fact it was 12-24 months before the competition.

Didn't the 840AV have Appletalk too not a standard network adaptor?
You miss out the most important features too like the Quadra AV machines did real time (ie no need to pause a VCR/use a still image) audio and video capture for FMV out of the box.

Also what the chart doesn't show is the bottom end product (ie those competing with cheap 386SX machines in 1993 etc) from the companies stated. In 1992 Commodore had the A1200, Atari had the ST, I don't think Sharp sold the x68000 alongside the X68030, Next had nothing and the cheapest Mac was the Centris 6xx series desktop machines?

For those thinking I am biased against Amiga well I will add...

Take a 4000 desktop and add a Z-RAM 128mb capable Zorro III card, VLAB Y/C Zorro card, a Sunrize/Tocatta 16bit sound card and a Retina Z3 card to A4000D from 1992 and it is probably superior to the 840AV with not too much more cash. And while you are at it get yourself a 486SX Bridgeboard from Golden Gate with a cheap and chearful 1mb SVGA ISA card and you have the best system to cover all the bases IMHO

Also PPC was dead easy to fit in an A4000 but try getting a PPC card for the competition Can you ever play Wipeout 2097 on a 680x0 Mac/Next Station/Falcon/Sharp X68030? I think not so in some way even though AGA is a kludge of an upgrade from 1992 the only system to run anything like Wipeout 2097 is Amiga

(of course it was cheaper to get a PSX on launch day than get a PPC Amiga!)

PS Max Resolution of AGA PAL = 1280+512 256 colours w/o overscan and 1440x576 with overscan. Important because the others don't have 1280 horizontal resolution.

PPS the chipset upgrade to A500Plus and A3000 was the most pathetic, nothing worth a shit was done to 320x256 or 640x512 colour resolutions, blitter was still the same making EHB slow as hell for games coding and sprites worse than a C64. We got a useless dog slow 1280x256 4 colour mode and some crappy VGA interlaced modes. This was a dark time indeed, very poor and it was this sort of thing that caused them to go bankrupt. AGA should have been here instead of ECS Denise/Agnus upgrades, and 14mhz CPU for A500 plus (with Paula/Agnus/Denise tacked onto a new 14mhz BUS to double output via a synchronised 56mhz system time instead of 7mhz via a 28mhz clock crystal on the motherboard)

ECS was the biggest mistake Commodore made, 5-6 years after A1000 (1987 A500 and 2000 have identical resolutions and colours to A1000 except a handful which don't display EHB fixed very early on, so another 2 years wasted there with ZERO improvements) we got ECS 'upgrade'    :furious:

[Pentad]

I agree with a lot of what you say in your post, but remember it's wasn't the lack of ideas and R&D that brought Commodore to it's knees, it was greed & downright theft by the likes of Mehdi Ali that ended Commodore...

My friend, I could not agree more.  :-)

[Franko]

My friend, I could not agree more.  :-)

You don't happen to know where the little turd is by any chance, it's so ruddy cold here I could do with building a bonfire with Mr Ali being guest of honour in the hot seat... :lol:

[Heiroglyph]

I wonder what Aros would run like on an upgraded Quadra 950?

As the Morphos guys know, Mac's are a dime a dozen, probably two dozen for 68k Macs.

[Pentad]

As somebody else mentioned, a HAL would have helped Commodore/Amiga move the hardware without killing the software.

The Amiga 1000 was designed with a video game mentality where the hardware really doesn't change.  If that is your foundation for development you can take many liberties that give you speed up front but cost you upgradeability down the road.

An AmigaOS that offered a true HAL along with memory protection and good support for virtual memory combined with upgraded hardware could have given the Amiga another ten years to grow.

At the time, I remember all the software was written in assembly and even coded for specific CPUs, like an 020, 030, 040, etc...  You would never do that today as a software engineer.  Granted, compliers are much better at optimizing code and CPUs are better at running code, but you don't want code tied to a specific CPU.

I mentioned in another post that Atari TOS was compiled strictly for the 68000.  You couldn't even run TOS on an 010, 020, 030 because they were using instructions that were not certified by Motorola to be in next generation chips (010 and beyond).  Motorola did not include them and so TOS was stuck with the 68000.

Atari had to rewrite TOS for their TT (030) line which caused compatibility issues.

The Amiga had the same problem to an extent with the OS and hardware.   The OS was so tied to OCS/ECS that even moving to AGA lost apps written under 1.3 for ECS.

Which leads me to this...

I know AAA wasn't very far along in development but I wondered if there were any discussions on how to break the OS from the hardware and move to AAA.  RTG was have been baby steps to a full HAL but the OS would have to have handled older software making calls to hardware that was no longer there.  I wondered what they were going to do...

Does anybody know when Carl Sassenrath left Commodore?   Who took over the AmigaOS Kernel after Carl left?  Was it Bryce Nesbitt?  

Cheers!
-P

[Franko]

I wonder what Aros would run like on an upgraded Quadra 950?

As the Morphos guys know, Mac's are a dime a dozen, probably two dozen for 68k Macs.

Hmm... where do you buy your Macs from, I don't call £350 on ebay for this scabby old iMacG5 a dime a dozen...