Amiga hardware superiority

[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...

[warpdesign]

Seriously:

 - no flicker/fixer
 - no chunky modes
 - dead slow graphics for anything with 256 colors/640x480 (I won't even talk about the 1024x768 video mode you're listing)
 - 8 bit sound, no input

As a production machine, it was behind anything else you mean ?

Btw, what about software support ? What did you have with this machine ?

[Paulie85]

I think at the time most people were a little disappointed with the AGA machines both in terms of specs and compatibility. Being an A500 owner I was hoping for an upgrade board for my setup which would have allowed better graphics and more speed(and an improved facelift for WB). Sadly this never really happened and I ended up buying a PC.

[Gulliver]

Do you think things improve if we go backwards?
Respecting the same innacuracies as the first chart, here is one from 1990

[mechy]

Sorry to quote this,but i didn't see a way around it..

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.

The A4000 was a old reworked design by 1994.For the time hardware sprites were still usefull for games.I had a 4MB picasso IV running 1024x768x24 in mid 95 which made the 4000t totally great,but that's irrelivant,were talking stock here..The A4000t had some better features which i think IT should be on the chart. scsi makes a big difference on amiga,with 6(controller couints as 1) devices,internal and external. scsi was ultra Low cpu overhead and many devices. Ide on even the 4000's was crap and stuck at 2-3MB/s and 2 devices.although not so much a performance issue,unless u like eaten motherboards was the 4000t had a lithium battery that didnt leak.It also has more zorro slots.For his chart it makes perfect sense to use the 4000t.

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.

 
All good stuff,but this was a simplistic chart,but probabaly worth noting.just cant show every feature easily in a chart like this.

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?

Uh hello, he wasnt comparing cheapest,he was comparing best for the time.
 

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

I have done all the above,but again this was about stock machines,not what you could put in them. we know a expanded 4000t could do well with 060/ppc and all the zorro goodies.
its all irrelivent to his chart.

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

again,this has nothing to do with the original message.

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

still off the track

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.

Now this is a usefull thing to add.. seems most people tend to think of a stock 1200 in these modes on 020/14mhz of course it crawls, but its somewhat useable(almost tolerable..hehe thankgod for the Picasso IV!!!!)  on a A4000 with 040/25mhz at the time.

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:

I completely agree here..they moved way way too slow. i can see the 2000/500 not being much an upgrade but the 3000 should of. They should of got farther away from the 500/2000 and made 3000 and up a real killer machine. i think money was tight in these years and they still had no crystal clear direction. haynie and the gang had some cool stuff in the works that was canceled by idiot managers iirc.

At the end of the day C= was caught sleeping on their laurels and upper management was the last nail in the coffin.I love all my amiga's and the 4000t is still a great machine,but it was suffering from old age even in 94.I still use it daily tho

[Karlos]

@Gulliver

You missed an important comparison row out on the table: at what rate can the joystick port be polled?

:whack:

[eb15]

Around the end of 1992 or so Dave Haynie was working on the AAA prototypes, which he showed (not-quite-working?) boards at the winter 1993 Amiga Developer conference held in Orlando, and supposedly Chris Green was recently hired to work on RTG graphics support in Amiga OS for it, but I never heard anything further happening than that.  C= management never had faith in the high-end computer sales and just wanted something they could sell mass market like the C64 as a consumer electronics item at stores like kmart.

[mechy]

I think at the time most people were a little disappointed with the AGA machines both in terms of specs and compatibility. Being an A500 owner I was hoping for an upgrade board for my setup which would have allowed better graphics and more speed(and an improved facelift for WB). Sadly this never really happened and I ended up buying a PC.

This makes no sense to me, why would u buy a cheap machine that had no proper expansion bus and then expect this(yes i know the side slot is technically zorro,and i know expansions were available(costly), why do you think the big box machines has zorro slots.You just bought the wrong thing.AGA was not great,but it was a far cry better than ecs.ecs was dog dirt slow.
all the big box amiga's had gfx card capabilities at the time.
common sense would of dictated to sell the 500 and go with a 2000 or better.even then used 2000's were pretty cheap.

I see this mentality thru the years with 1200 owners also.. they buy the cheapest machine  thinking they are saving $$,then whine about the lack of gfx card expansion and other shortcomings.the cheap machine is not always cheap if u care to expand it.You get what you pay for.but all water under the bridge these days.

[stefcep2]

One thing that I'd like to add is that Commodore's machines were really just the barebones framework that people could expand with the use of 3rd party hardware.  In fact the best hardware that ran on Commodore's machines was usually made by third parties like GVP and Phase 5.  (Even a lowly A500 could get a 68040 CPU upgrade).  There's a few considerations with that: if Commodore brought an A4000 with a 68060 and chunky display card, its unlikely that third parties would've bothered, this saved Commodore a lot of R and D dollars,  and it let people upgrade as and when they wanted. On a professional level, even though Commodore didn't provide networking solutions out of the box, movie studios managed to network dozens of Amiga's as render farms.

The other point people have emphasised is lack of memory protection.  This has become more of a consideration now than it was at the time.  At the time, every one knew that a single rogue task could bring down the OS, that in theory it wasn't very secure etc, and there was no multi-user support.  But it was just a peripheral fact at the time.

The user reality was that AmigaOS was very stable-in fact at the time, it was Windows 95 with its myriad of third party hardware that even with its MP was more known for crashing. And most Win 95 users had a single account they logged in as admins, and often without a password!

Programmers on the Amiga learned how to program within the limitations of no memory protection.  As for the users, look at all the software, artwork, music, video documents etc that were created on Aminet.  They wouldn't have bothered with Amiga if it crashed as frequently as the lack of MP might suggest.  Hell at one stage I'd say 90% of the software on people's machines were hacks, cludges, and cracked.  Yet it all still worked, and worked very well.

 IMO, people are revising history with things that are more important today than they were back then. At the time, lack of MP was an irrelevant consideration for the vast majority of users, and I can honestly say that I knew no-one who bought a PC with Win 95 beacsue it had MP and the Amiga didn't.   It might matter now, but for most it didn't matter then.

[Karlos]

One thing that I'd like to add is that Commodore's machines were really just the barebones framework that people could expand with the use of 3rd party hardware.  In fact the best hardware that ran on Commodore's machines was usually made by third parties like GVP and Phase 5

Didn't you once slam my Phase-5 processor/rtg expansion equipped A1200 as a "frankenstein" rig ?

[stefcep2]

This makes no sense to me, why would u buy a cheap machine that had no proper expansion bus and then expect this(yes i know the side slot is technically zorro,and i know expansions were available(costly), why do you think the big box machines has zorro slots.You just bought the wrong thing.AGA was not great,but it was a far cry better than ecs.ecs was dog dirt slow.
all the big box amiga's had gfx card capabilities at the time.
common sense would of dictated to sell the 500 and go with a 2000 or better.even then used 2000's were pretty cheap.

I see this mentality thru the years with 1200 owners also.. they buy the cheapest machine  thinking they are saving $$,then whine about the lack of gfx card expansion and other shortcomings.the cheap machine is not always cheap if u care to expand it.You get what you pay for.but all water under the bridge these days.

I agree.  

Commodore catered for two markets: home users (A500, later A1200) and pro users (A2000, later A3000, later A4000).  This is exactly what Apple did when Jobs took over: Apple had a gazillion models, but he streamlined their product line into just two: Home with the iMacs, and Professional tower units with the G3 Power Mac.  But Apple had a marketing department that made all that unambiguous.  Commodore didn't.  

This and the fact that Amiga had some of the most tight-arsed users in the history of computing, who didn't want to upgrade that 7 year old 1 meg A500, and cried when they couldn't get an AGA upgrade for it.  Hell most A500 I see on ebay are stock 1.3 machines, people didn't even bother to upgrade the OS.

[Gulliver]

@Gulliver

You missed an important comparison row out on the table: at what rate can the joystick port be polled?

:whack:

Yes, you are absolutely right. How on earth could I have missed that important feature!
LOL

[A1260]

Going by that chart, I'd have to say the Mac is the clear winner.

with no hardware sprite??... i would say that is a big mistake.. so no winner.

[stefcep2]

Didn't you once slam my Phase-5 processor/rtg expansion equipped A1200 as a "frankenstein" rig ?

I did.  

And with a PPC CPU your machine literally has a brain transplant in it.  Which didn't do much more than a fast FPU-  until Os 4 came out.  Ok so maybe its not a whole brain then, maybe just a cerebellum perhaps.  And the RTG card worked on a different bus-a set of eyes from a different species communicating along a whole new visual pathway.  Yep "frankenstein" seems apt.

[mechy]

I agree.  

Commodore catered for two markets: home users (A500, later A1200) and pro users (A2000, later A3000, later A4000).  This is exactly what Apple did when Jobs took over: Apple had a gazillion models, but he streamlined their product line into just two: Home with the iMacs, and Professional tower units with the G3 Power Mac.  But Apple had a marketing department that made all that unambiguous.  Commodore didn't.  

This and the fact that Amiga had some of the most tight-arsed users in the history of computing, who didn't want to upgrade that 7 year old 1 meg A500, and cried when they couldn't get an AGA upgrade for it.  Hell most A500 I see on ebay are stock 1.3 machines, people didn't even bother to upgrade the OS.

Good point and true. I was dirt poor in the amiga days,but when i wanted something(Picasso IV) i went out and worked jobs/side jobs etc to get it.I paid $379 for it somewhere around late 95/early 96).It was the single best upgrade i ever had with the warpengine 040/40 at the time tieing it.We were always stuck with crippled software and such half the time designed to run on the lowest common denominator machines(020/aga or 000/ecs with 880K drives). Graphics card support came slow with alot of stuff,not only because there was slowly emerging rtg standards but half the people had machines that couldn't easily take a gfx card. Even worse we slowly adopted cdrom technology because again,the 500/1200 couldn't easily take them(exceptions being ones ppl bought scsi for..most ide/atapi stuff was proprietary early on)I can't help thinking if the 1200/500 had not been distractions using resources at C= that we may of had many more cool zorro expansions or at least higher spec machines.At a min. everyone would of probabaly went to at least 030/16mb machines.Then again,C= management could bungle a wet dream.

[Paulie85]

This makes no sense to me, why would u buy a cheap machine that had no proper expansion bus and then expect this(yes i know the side slot is technically zorro,and i know expansions were available(costly), why do you think the big box machines has zorro slots.You just bought the wrong thing.AGA was not great,but it was a far cry better than ecs.ecs was dog dirt slow.
all the big box amiga's had gfx card capabilities at the time.
common sense would of dictated to sell the 500 and go with a 2000 or better.even then used 2000's were pretty cheap.

I see this mentality thru the years with 1200 owners also.. they buy the cheapest machine  thinking they are saving $$,then whine about the lack of gfx card expansion and other shortcomings.the cheap machine is not always cheap if u care to expand it.You get what you pay for.but all water under the bridge these days.

I was 10 years old when I recieved my A500 and got attached to it as it had been a great experience to own one. My point is that I would rather have upgraded it than forked out on a new machine but this was not possible. Actually (unfortunately),common sense dictated I buy a PC as the Amiga was getting left behind and I waited quite a while before doing so.
And I'm not "whining" as you put it, I'm merely stating my assessment of the market at the time.