Amiga hardware superiority

[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.

[Karlos]

Can you explain how a second processor that whilst not a 68K and is in no way attached to the original hardware except via the regular trapdoor edge connection signals qualifies as "frankenstein" ?

A lot of accelerators, mine included, also have a programmable SCSI I/O processor that shares the same memory bus as the 680x0. Are they frankensteins too?

[stefcep2]

Can you explain how a second processor that, whilst not a 68K, is in no way attached to the original hardware except via the regular trapdoor edge connection signals qualifies as "frankenstein" ?

How it connects is irrelevant.

The PPC is not a 68K.  The CPU IS the brain in a computer.  The PPC is a foreign brain, inside a foreign body, connected to, communicating with and powered by original pathways, analogous to the peripheral blood supply and peripheral nervous system.  Frankenstein all over.

[amiga92570]

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

Well to be consistent why do you not compare a pentium (32 bit model) or at the very least 486 IBM on the chart. That is as bad as comparing a amiga 1200 to a IBM PS/2 pentium 90. Why make a chart at all if you compare dislike products. You are comparing high end apple, amiga, etc to low end PC.

[Karlos]

How it connects is irrelevant.

It is if you are trying to insist that it makes the hardware "frankenstein". It's about the most relevant factor there is.

The PPC is not a 68K.

It isn't? I was robbed! :lol:

The CPU IS the brain in a computer.  The PPC is a foreign brain, inside a foreign body, connected to, communicating with and powered by original pathways, analogous to the peripheral blood supply and peripheral nervous system.  Frankenstein all over.

You already said, pre-OS4 (not to mention MOS and ppc linux), it is implemented as a co-processor, not the CPU and to be fair, it's not a bad analogy. 68K code gets the PPC to do some processing for it. That processing can be just a couple of functions in an-otherwise entirely 68K application. Or, it can be pretty much the entire application, but it is still launched by the 68K and control is returned when it exits (not to mention any time it does a system call).

I notice you studiously avoided commenting on the SCSI script processor. Lots of  accelerator cards have those. They are given a list of instructions by the 68K and they go away, do their work and return. Viewed implementation terms it's clear there's not a lot of difference between how they operate and how the PPC does in a 3.x environment, other than the fact the PPC is capable of doing rather more varied things than talking to SCSI devices and transferring data to and from memory. Unlike the very fixed-purpose SCSI controller, it functions, essentially, as a Turing-complete general purpose co-processor.

[Gulliver]

@amiga92570
I was trying to look for a 1990 IBM PC model, and that was what I found. Other PC companies did better indeed. You are right that it does not represent the highest PC model at that time.

[Crumb]

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.

That's an urban legend... DRACO ran AmigaOS3.1 quite fast without the need of custom chips.

BTW, 2.x to 3.x software transition was quite smooth. You had professional high quality software like ImageFX, AdPro, Photogenics, Lightwave, Cinema4D, Real3D, Imagine, Caligari Truespace, Bars'n'pipes, Pagestream... you could even paint with TrueBrilliance, and there were professional and affordable video solutions not available for any of the listed systems. Final Copy, Final Writer and Wordworth were excellent packages too.

In 1994 we were happily multitasking and most computer users didn't know what that meant and even claimed it was useless. And our applications were quite professional and most of them more affordable than similar programs in other systems.

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.

really? Win95 crashed much more easily than AmigaOS. And it crawled in hardware way faster too. And needed 8MB to be useable. By the late 80's most of people used monotask-OSes like MacOS or MSDOS+Windows. But most of them didn't have a clue about what multitasking meant and as you can suppose memory protection was an even more strange word for them.

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.  

I think MS did a pathethic job with Win95. They should have marketed a NT workstation version as Win95 instead of creating that "thing". OS2 was simply superior and even allowed running Win3.1 apps too. It was not until WinXP that peecee users got a stable Windows system. Until WinXP you could hang Win95/98/ME as easy as AmigaOS3.x. Win95 with 4MB was unusable. Swapping floppy disks in my A500 was a less painful experience and usually more productive.

AGA in 1994 was not as bad as you may think, it allowed you to watch ham8 pr0n and animations smoothly. They should have improved more the CDXL format to take advantage of 030/040. Amiga was very cost effective solution.

Amiga also sported Autoconfig(tm) and it has worked very well until today.

A3000/4000 16MB limit was not really important until many years later. With 2MB of chipram you could do many things at once while other systems had to spent money in both gfx and normal ram. Even soundcard ram in some cases.

Amigas used to sound much better connected to a 1084s monitor than the old and crappy yogourt-like speakers used by 90% pc users in the 90s.

In 1994 AmigaOS was simply superior

[stefcep2]

It is if you are trying to insist that it makes the hardware "frankenstein". It's about the most relevant factor there is.

I disagree and still do.  And i'll paraphrase it:

The way the hardware connects is analogous to transplanting a foreign organ- in this case the CPU (ie the brain) and keeping it alive and communicating with the main body by pre-existing structures (ie the peripheral nerves and blood supply).  I'd imagine this is how Dr Frankenstien might have transplanted the brain, and this is how modern organ transplants work.

It isn't? I was robbed! :lol:

Well yeah, its stating the obvoius but it need to be done.  What you wrote initially i read as being analogous to saying: "If we ignore the fact that we've put a new (or second brain) into the body and kept that brain alive and communicating with the host body's blood and nerves, then its not a Frankenstein", which ofcourse is ignoring the very thing that makes it a Frankenstein the first place!

You already said, pre-OS4 (not to mention MOS and ppc linux), it is implemented as a co-processor, not the CPU and to be fair, it's not a bad analogy. 68K code gets the PPC to do some processing for it. That processing can be just a couple of functions in an-otherwise entirely 68K application. Or, it can be pretty much the entire application, but it is still launched by the 68K and control is returned when it exits (not to mention any time it does a system call).

Well thats why I called it a cerebellum. The PPC had autonomy for many lower-order functions, but ultimately decisions are made by the higher order cerebrum (or 68k.)

I notice you studiously avoided commenting on the SCSI script processor. Lots of  accelerator cards have those. They are given a list of instructions by the 68K and they go away, do their work and return. Viewed implementation terms it's clear there's not a lot of difference between how they operate and how the PPC does in a 3.x environment, other than the fact the PPC is capable of doing rather more varied things than talking to SCSI devices and transferring data to and from memory. Unlike the very fixed-purpose SCSI controller, it functions, essentially, as a Turing-complete general purpose co-processor.

So is the question you are posing to me :"Why don't I regard Amiga's with scsi controllers Frankenstien's since i regard a PPC+Permidia A1200 a Frankenstein?

i don't know enough about the scsi controllers, other than that DMA ones are able to transfer data independently of the CPU.  But as you say (and once again this is the point we are talking about), the scsi controller is  something that has a single function, and doesn't actually do anything with the data itself other than moving it in and out of memory.  It doesn't process the data, its not a brain, it won't affect the decision making "personality" therefore behaviour of the beast.  Without  a brain transplant, we don't have a Franeknstein's monster, we just have someone with an organ transplant.

I think the analogy works pretty well.

[Digiman]

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...

I agree about Medhi, what a stupid c**t he was, but at £299 mail order in early 93 A1200 was a good product (the only bargain machine for sale). What was the final nail in the coffin though was from the idiot who put CD32 in production instead of the A1400 prototype machine completed in 93 (except AKIKO). Greedy US Gold/Ocean with crap coded gaes and then running to piracy ripe PC didn't hep Amiga

A1400 = 28mhz 68020, 2mb chip, 2mb fast, Akiko, AGA, CD-ROM but no zorro slots for £499. This would have cleaned up compared to £800-900 branded 80386DX 25mhz PCs in shops running jerk-o-vision Windows 3.1.

Also half price of 4000/030 but same performance and all in a smart Amiga 1000/3000 style slimline case and separate keyboard. Commodore incompetence strike 3.

(Strike 1= passing on Commodore LCD prototype, and 2= never using 128 colour 5x faster Amiga Ranger chipset completed by Jay Miner in 88)

[Digiman]

Well to be consistent why do you not compare a pentium (32 bit model) or at the very least 486 IBM on the chart. That is as bad as comparing a amiga 1200 to a IBM PS/2 pentium 90. Why make a chart at all if you compare dislike products. You are comparing high end apple, amiga, etc to low end PC.

1990 IS the time of 286 crap as far as branded machines for sale in high street shops to normal general public goes, 25mhz 386 machines cost more than Macs and that's a fact sorry. People did not want to send cheques for £1000/$2000 for some cobbled together 16mhz 386SX crap with PC speaker sound built in some small time shed of a backstreet business via 2" square adverts in black and white text lost in PCW magazine

IBM 486? ha ha even the Amstrad PC2386 was $4500 with 20mhz 386 with 4mb RAM and 64mb hard drive, if IBM sold a 486 in 1989/90 it would have been more than a CRAY-1 my dear fellow (and they would have proved time travel is possible to the future and back )

PC was not cheap, some of you forget just what a rip-off price those crappy PCs were in the very early 90s. PC sales rocketed due to hype/overpriced Mac only competition left by 1994 If Commodore had sold their A1400 at Xmas 1993 they would have cleaned up at £500-600 for a 28mhz 4mb, 3.5" IDE hard drive, CD-Rom setup in a smart 3 box design like slimline PCs. They sold you CD32 toilets for £399 instead oops!

Oh and Wing Commander was shit! Feel sorry for the morons who spent £2000 on a 286 with various extras just to play that heap of dog shit game :roflmao:

PC2386 source

[Digiman]

You already said, pre-OS4 (not to mention MOS and ppc linux), it is implemented as a co-processor, not the CPU and to be fair, it's not a bad analogy. 68K code gets the PPC to do some processing for it. That processing can be just a couple of functions in an-otherwise entirely 68K application. Or, it can be pretty much the entire application, but it is still launched by the 68K and control is returned when it exits (not to mention any time it does a system call).

The problem is KS 2/3 does not run natively on PPC processors, and to me there never was a PPC Amiga because there was never PPC Kickstart/Workbench. So I can see where Stefcep is coming from to be honest. Hardware issues aside Commodore never lasted long enough and took far to long to settle on PPC as successor. Apple understood 060 was end of the line when making 040 machines...Commodore just couldn't make ANY decisions except bad ones...porting KS/WB to a new RISC CPU to combat PC advancement being a major one.

[Franko]

I agree about Medhi, what a stupid c**t he was, but at £299 mail order in early 93 A1200 was a good product (the only bargain machine for sale). What was the final nail in the coffin though was from the idiot who put CD32 in production instead of the A1400 prototype machine completed in 93 (except AKIKO). Greedy US Gold/Ocean with crap coded gaes and then running to piracy ripe PC didn't hep Amiga

A1400 = 28mhz 68020, 2mb chip, 2mb fast, Akiko, AGA, CD-ROM but no zorro slots for £499. This would have cleaned up compared to £800-900 branded 80386DX 25mhz PCs in shops running jerk-o-vision Windows 3.1.

Also half price of 4000/030 but same performance and all in a smart Amiga 1000/3000 style slimline case and separate keyboard. Commodore incompetence strike 3.

(Strike 1= passing on Commodore LCD prototype, and 2= never using 128 colour 5x faster Amiga Ranger chipset completed by Jay Miner in 88)

I agree with you on the CD32, never saw the point in that machine, one of the few pieces of Commodore kit that I never bought.

Not sure though if any of the other prototypes would have seen the light of day though, too much dodgy dealings and fixing of the accounts books going on behind the scenes by certain shiesters by that time for anyone to have been able to save Commodore...

[Karlos]

The problem is KS 2/3 does not run natively on PPC processors, and to me there never was a PPC Amiga because there was never PPC Kickstart/Workbench.

All the more reason to regard it as a co-processor in a KS2/3 environment, rather than some alien incursion.

[Karlos]

Regarding the akiko, the C2P functions were rather pointless, even moreso in a faster machine. You actually have to write to the device and then read the planar data back and write it to chip ram yourself. On a 28MHz 020 you could have done the conversion in software by then.

The idea was good, it was just badly implemented. It should have been something that wrote the converted data to the allocated bitplanes in chipram without CPU intervention (except for initial setup).

[lsmart]

BTW, 2.x to 3.x software transition was quite smooth.

There is hardly any difference between 2.x and 3.x. It should have been called 2.2.

In 1994 we were happily multitasking and most computer users didn't know what that meant and even claimed it was useless.

Wasn´t this the year Linux was finally running X11 and OS/2 Warp 4 was rumored? The statement is true for 1987 however.

AGA in 1994 was not as bad as you may think,

AGA modes on new HW felt slow compared to the OCS modes on old HW when you were using e.g. Deluxe Paint.

 it allowed you to watch ham8 pr0n and animations smoothly. They should have improved more the CDXL format to take advantage of 030/040. Amiga was very cost effective solution.

BTW, 2.x to 3.x software transition was quite smooth.

There is hardly any difference between 2.x and 3.x. It should have been called 2.2.

In 1994 we were happily multitasking and most computer users didn't know what that meant and even claimed it was useless.

Wasn´t this the year Linux was finally running X11 and OS/2 Warp 4 was rumored? The statement is true for 1987 however.

In 1994 AmigaOS was simply superior

I saw an 386 machine that was about as expensive as an Amiga 3000 in 1993. It was running OS/2. It did have CD quality sound, true color GFX, resolutions of 1024x768. This day changed my perpective on PCs.

I think Amiga lost the lead when the CD-ROM arrived. It could store much higher quality images and sound than the Amiga could reproduce. And Amigas were intolerably slow when convertig jpeg to HAM.

[Franko]

Me eye's have gone I'm seeing double here...