Am I the only one who doesn't hate AGA?

[Digiman]

Maybe this is regional cost, but my first PC was just over 1500 US dollars for the cheapest junk machine the store had, compared to a bit under 500 dollars for my 1200. In 93 or 94, did an 030 card with a bit of RAM really cost that much ?
I never had one as a kid, so I don't know what they cost back then.
 
This was in Denmark, so I don't know if costs on PC's were noticeably cheaper in the US or UK.

Ummm well in the Xmas 1994 issue of Amiga Format, cheapest branded 040 I could find was £425 for EC040 and nearly £700 for an 060. That's 2.5 years after A1200 launch nearly.

An A1200+80mb HDD+ 4mb RAM+040 25mhz would have cost more than my 4mb 486/25 PC (less cost of monitor) if it even existed in 1993. Plus a PC is worth more a year later than 5 seconds after you have broken the seal on a boxed circuit board for your Amiga If Commodore had any sense they would have made a cut down 040 machine like the Macintosh LC40 (which was actually cheaper than Amiga 4000/040 and closer to the 4000/030 machine in price)

I priced up an 060+RAM for my A2000 and also a PPC card and it was cheaper to actually buy a PC both times I worked it out (94-96ish). And seeing as all I wanted to do was run Windows for my university studies guess how I spent my limited grant money...yep a Pentium PC with PCI graphics that had a more powerful blitter than AGA (and PCI bandwidth on PC bus was a massive improvement for PC gaming and emulation actually).

[arttu80]

The problem was not with Amiga it was with the way they sold it and the only 3 models for sale. There was a huge price gap between 4000/030 and A1200 14mhz crippled to 7mhz speeds with no Fast ram but not much performance difference. Blizzard made a 28mhz 68020 accelerator for peanuts and it made the A1200 faster than the A4000/030 see? And that's where the money was in 93/94, something faster than A1200 but cheaper than A4000/030 or entry level PC which is where the Amiga A1400 prototype came into it.

Most people buying Amigas didn't need Zorro slots at all, waste of money. Even Commodore knew this and that's why the A1400 protoype motherboard was designed, but never sold thanks to the CD32 being chosen (another turkey of a business decision). It's not my fault people saw Doom and Ridge Racer and thought "want!" but Amiga gave them no viable option to play the type of games they wanted to play, Lotus II is good, Sega Rally on Saturn is better. Without constant improvement Amiga was dying a slow horrible death and some of us knew it. I wanted Amiga to be around forever, how the hell did Apple survive with their crap from 1994 to invention of low-fi iPod??? Their computers were shit AND overpriced without any multitasking FFS.

In 1992-94 I had purchased new...

486 PC - because I wasn't going to spend £700 on an 060 just to emulate Windows for my studies via a card that would be worth sweet FA as soon as I bought it. Telling people to upgrade was a dead end for this reason, who knew I could have retired on the sale of a PPC Amiga 15 years later thanks to ebay :confused:

A1200 - well it was AGA and the only version remotely value for money with AGA. Sod rip-off 4000/030 prices. I did a lot of great things with it, hell I even did games testing for Acid Software


Playstation - Because it was the future and Ridge Racer is light years ahead as far as any other home racing game before goes.

Saturn - Might as well, after all Sega made the best coin-ops and Playstation would never see them.

And that's it really. If Commodore had sold the A1400 prototype during Xmas 93 instead of the rubbish CD32 joke then I would have got that too for £600 with a CD drive, 28mhz 020 at full speed and 4mb of RAM but no Zorro slots (who cares!). Because if every A1400 could be programmed the same way as a console (something DOS PC games programmers can never do) because all machines were identical we would have seen a lot more games like TFX (given away FREE by Ocean on a magazine CD because not enough 4000/030 machines ever sold to make it worth marketing it to Amiga-A1200 just too damned slow for TFX!)

Commodore should have learned from the mistake made by Cinemaware, investing in CD gaming is a waste of time and leads to bankruptcy (and after disastrous CDTV AKA an A500+CD ROM was a flop for the same reason CD32 AKA A1200+CD would be. The games are the same!) unless you have seriously powerful hardware like Saturn and Playstation to back it up with cutting edge games not bloody A1200 games+cheesy CD music. Super Stardust CD32 is actually worse than the A1200/4000 disk version because of the CD soundtrack. Yuck!

All Commodore did is kill Amiga and it's technology, the reason it took 9 years for bankruptcy is because Amiga 1000 was lightyears ahead of EVERTHING. But they still managed it because once Jack Tramiel left Commodore didn't have a clue how to run a computer company (canning Commodore LCD, not marketing the A1000 for a year waiting for 2000/500, making Commodore 16 and Plus4 and 128 rubbish). Trouble is as much as Commodore deserved to tank Amiga deserved to outlive all of the competition.

@ others - As for comparing an A500 with a 486 PC nope, I was comparing something like F1GP on an A4000/030 and a 486 PC costing the same price, I think if you actually try this too you will see with your own eyes the PC playing speed runs rings around the Amiga version FOR THE SAME PRICE

@ Digiman

Very much enjoyed your post, must say it was pretty much nut in a shell, thank you!

But even still I envied my friend, when he bought that odd little A1200 w/120Mb HDD late 1993, which cost him his life savings 7500FIM (aprox. $1500 at that time) , me having nearly stock A500 then! I even remember that I was little disappointed of that it didn't look like a powerful computer to me, well in retrospect it wasn't, but...Ah those demos and beautiful WB background graphics! I loved and dremed of AGA!

[Digiman]

Well I am enjoying this thread, but you guys are all geared towards gaming. AGA Chipset was A HUGE DEAL for Video Toaster 4000 and Flyer users. Many new effects, faster ram, color previews, etc etc... also you get HAM 8 in programs like Vista Pro for example. AGA really shines in these ways..

I agree, and when the A4000/040 was launched was it not the fastest "PC" money could buy? HAM8 in 1280x576 PAL overscan was something no PC or Mac could do. Funny really as HAM + Digi-View is what made jaws drop in 86/87.

But in the UK the 4000/030 was too expensive and too slow. And the A4000 was something like £2000 ($3000?) on launch day.

Plus thanks to Sony never developing the PAL chipset for Videotoaster it was no good to us here in Europe

[Franko]

@ others - As for comparing an A500 with a 486 PC nope, I was comparing something like F1GP on an A4000/030 and a 486 PC costing the same price, I think if you actually try this too you will see with your own eyes the PC playing speed runs rings around the Amiga version FOR THE SAME PRICE

Still don't get your point in trying to compare the Amiga to a PC, even with the above example you give what's the point, the Amiga is what is/was if you thought PCs were so much better then why did you buy an Amiga in the first place ?

You said it yourself if you'd not been such a skinflint and bought an Amiga accelerator you could have sold it to a numptie like me on ebay today for one hell of a good price...

I've posted my views on Medhi Ali & Commodore plenty of time here so suffice to say if I ever find the little turd I'll be up on a murder rap...

Quite simply I just don't see what the point is in comparing a machine that was based on custom built hardware to something that was cobbled together from off the shelf parts (whether it ran faster or not).

No one forced you to buy a PC cos you needed Windows to complete your studies, I went to college too and I told them if you want anything from me then you get it done on an Amiga and I did it my way...

I've never needed to use a PC in my life for business or pleasure (ran my own D.T.P. business on two A500s) and when I grow tired of the net these macs go back on ebay and I go back to my own wee world where the Amiga rules supreme...

Guess what I'm trying to say here is, if more folk had been like me and not followed the world of PCs and Macs just because your boss or studies insisted upon it then the Amiga might have still been manufactured today even if it wasn't through Commodore...

[Digiman]

@ Digiman

Very much enjoyed your post, must say it was pretty much nut in a shell, thank you!

But even still I envied my friend, when he bought that odd little A1200 w/120Mb HDD late 1993, which cost him his life savings 7500FIM (aprox. $1500 at that time) , me having nearly stock A500 then! I even remember that I was little disappointed of that it didn't look like a powerful computer to me, well in retrospect it wasn't, but...Ah those demos and beautiful WB background graphics! I loved and dremed of AGA!

Me too, but I knew money spent on accelerator or HD for my A1200 is money I would never get back...like buying big shiny wheels for my cheap car

I did want these things, and in 1996 I did find a cheapish Amiga 4000/030 which I did lots of programming on. But I had to sell that in 1997 to make a down payment on my house (still living in the same one!)

IF Commodore had made small upgrade to Amiga 1200 with optional CD drive too in 1993/94 I would have bought one. A1400 with 28mhz 020/4mb Ram/CD I would have paid the same price a 386/33mhz PC for (and so would everyone else who tried Mac OS 9 or Windows 3.0 they were rubbish!). And Maybe then games programmers would make games like Screamer Rally/Actua Soccer/Doom because ALL Amiga 1400s are the same so programmers can write better speed machine code than even some cheap 486 PC where everyone has different motherboard/processor/VGA card/sound card etc so programming is always less efficient on PC. You can make Doom run faster with optimisation for Amiga A1400.  

But because A1200 never upgraded the games never improved and we were stuck because CD32 is SAME AS A1200+CD drive (too slow in 1994 for 3D games we wanted).

When I saw Marble Madness in 1986 I had to buy Amiga though...and I still have this original Amiga today on my desk working beautifully.

[stefcep2]

I think people have got things a bit backwards when it comes why Amiga didn't get the same games the PC did.  Sure an A1200 with an 020 and AGA and fast ram was underpowered by then, but most games were written for an A500 spec anyway: there were very few AGA only games.  Why did this happen?  Because for every owner who bought an AGA machine probably 10x as many stuck with their OCS/ECS-which usually was an A500.  Hell, they wouldn't even buy a hard drive, so most games weren't even hard drive installable! Even a hard drive would have improved the quality and complexity of games, but no, people kept their floppy only A500's.  

AGA was never properly utilized till the end of its life beacsue the perceived install base was too small for the software houses to put the time and effort to write games to get the most out of it.  If they had, the next logical step would have been to write for A1200 AGA+hard drive +4 Meg RAM, then an A1200 '030 with 8 Meg ram +Cd ROM: the software would have driven the sale of hardware until AAA arrived.  

If  more people did buy an A1200, the software houses might have been convinced not to write their software to run on 512k A500.  In reality the infamous stinginess of the average  Amiga user who thought an A500 with 512 meg ram should run the latest release software for 12 years was to blame for AGA's market failure as Commodore's management was.

[Franko]

If  more people did buy an A1200, the software houses might have been convinced not to write their software to run on 512k A500.  In reality the infamous stinginess of the average  Amiga user who thought an A500 with 512 meg ram should run the latest release software for 12 years was to blame for AGA's market failure as Commodore's management was.

I agree with you 100% on that, out of a group of 16 of us only 7 ever bought the A1200s, 2 or 3 of the remaining A500 owners actually bought HD & or extra ram for them, of the 7 of us who bought the A1200s only 3 of us bothered to upgrade them...

I know some folk will say they couldn't afford too & that's fine, but of the folk I knew only one could genuinely claim that, the others were just too miserable to part with their cash and still moaned even though they'd spend their money on CD players and the like that they hardly ever used in comparison to their miggies...

If truth be told I'd say the some of the Amiga Community are some of the stingiest gits I've ever known...

[save2600]

Even a hard drive would have improved the quality and complexity of games, but no, people kept their floppy only A500's.

Because Commodore did not include HD's as standard equipment, unlike the competition. And to upgrade your A500 to have a HD was cost prohibitive. Case certainly was never designed for one anyway. Had 2.5" drives been affordable and there was a place to install one internally without having to get a Shuffleboard and removing your internal floppy, that might have been different. But just as the argument of having certain capabilities built-in, the practically "unexpandable" A500 was doomed from the start that way. Just as the big boxes were, thanks to them being overpriced by early 90's standards

If  more people did buy an A1200, the software houses might have been convinced not to write their software to run on 512k A500.

I disagree with this because, by that time, it was already too late. Software houses had already seen the writing on the wall. And ultimately, it was C= fault for not knowing how to market their system(s).

I was an early A1200 adopter and guess what I had to do in order to add an affordable HD to my system? Purchase an ugly external box that housed a 3.5" HD w/ external power supply, with a bare naked IDE ribbon cable coming out the back of my system. Yeah, that was great. Didn't look half-assed at all (sarcasm). 2.5" drives were simply cost prohibitive. Was I being cheap? No. I was trying to be practical. By the time I ended my spending spree... I had nearly $1400 (before monitor) wrapped up in the stupid thing. Little wonder I bought 386 and then a 486 shortly after. Course now, the Windoze platform and its chinsey hardware isn't allowed in the house at all, but I digress. lol

[Swos]

I think people have got things a bit backwards when it comes why Amiga didn't get the same games the PC did.  Sure an A1200 with an 020 and AGA and fast ram was underpowered by then, but most games were written for an A500 spec anyway: there were very few AGA only games.  Why did this happen?  Because for every owner who bought an AGA machine probably 10x as many stuck with their OCS/ECS-which usually was an A500.  Hell, they wouldn't even buy a hard drive, so most games weren't even hard drive installable! Even a hard drive would have improved the quality and complexity of games, but no, people kept their floppy only A500's.  

AGA was never properly utilized till the end of its life beacsue the perceived install base was too small for the software houses to put the time and effort to write games to get the most out of it.  If they had, the next logical step would have been to write for A1200 AGA+hard drive +4 Meg RAM, then an A1200 '030 with 8 Meg ram +Cd ROM: the software would have driven the sale of hardware until AAA arrived.  

If  more people did buy an A1200, the software houses might have been convinced not to write their software to run on 512k A500.  In reality the infamous stinginess of the average  Amiga user who thought an A500 with 512 meg ram should run the latest release software for 12 years was to blame for AGA's market failure as Commodore's management was.

Going by some of the posts I've been reading on various forums it seems even today people seem to think new software should run on a A500!

[stefcep2]

Because Commodore did not include HD's as standard equipment, unlike the competition. And to upgrade your A500 to have a HD was cost prohibitive. Case certainly was never designed for one anyway. Had 2.5" drives been affordable and there was a place to install one internally without having to get a Shuffleboard and removing your internal floppy, that might have been different. But just as the argument of having certain capabilities built-in, the practically "unexpandable" A500 was doomed from the start that way. Just as the big boxes were, thanks to them being overpriced by early 90's standards

The A500 was hard to upgrade because thats not what it was designed for!  You were meant to use it, and when it could no longer keep up with the modern software you meant to get an A1200.  If you chose not to do that, AND still wanted to rum modern software, then you had to accept it was going to be awkward and expensive.  Instead people just went:"How do i get an AGA upgrade for my A500?"  Buy an A1200, thats how!

I disagree with this because, by that time, it was already too late. Software houses had already seen the writing on the wall. And ultimately, it was C= fault for not knowing how to market their system(s).

It was too late because not enough bothered to ditch their A500 and get an A1200, choose the hard drive option AT THE TIME OF PURCHASE and get a RAM upgrade later on.  The users killed the potential that AGA had as much as Commodore did.  Commodore was a  victim of its own success, the A500 was so far ahead of its time, people expected it to be start of the art for ever!

I was an early A1200 adopter and guess what I had to do in order to add an affordable HD to my system? Purchase an ugly external box that housed a 3.5" HD w/ external power supply, with a bare naked IDE ribbon cable coming out the back of my system. Yeah, that was great. Didn't look half-assed at all (sarcasm). 2.5" drives were simply cost prohibitive. Was I being cheap? No. I was trying to be practical. By the time I ended my spending spree... I had nearly $1400 (before monitor) wrapped up in the stupid thing. Little wonder I bought 386 and then a 486 shortly after. Course now, the Windoze platform and its chinsey hardware isn't allowed in the house at all, but I digress. lol

Most A1200's I've seen had a 40 mb hard drive.  The Commodore card box they came in had tick box for  models with hard drive and those without, some with 60 meg, so they definately were available with hard drive from Commodore.  

You didn't NEED that box, but I bet you chose to do it that way beacsue a big 3.5 inch HD was cheaper and faster-but the A1200 was never meant for big 3.5 inch drives, it was a compact all-in-one home computer, not a pro machine, thats what the A4000 was for, but A1200 users wanted pro-level machines for game console prices.  this is exactly how Apple markets is computers today: hard to expand iMacs for home users with lower specs, Mac pro for everyone else.  But Mac users are different; they accept that, Amiga users didn't.

I did the external tower thing as well, but that was to get a CDROM drive going, and Commodore was dead by the time CDROM was essential.  CDROM at the time of Commodore was bloody expensive, so if people were too tight to ditch the A500, why would Commodore push CDROM?

[KThunder]

Going by some of the posts I've been reading on various forums it seems even today people seem to think new software should run on a A500!

We aren't going to change the world of gaming at this point, unlike in the 80's when the amiga had more colors, and better sound than anything out there. So right now, yeah new software that can run on anything from an a1000 to a minimig etc. would be a good thing.

Or you could go the opposite direction and require an akiko chip (cd32) or an ec version 68020 or crash on anything else or some obscure rtg version.

[save2600]

CDROM at the time of Commodore was bloody expensive, so if people were too tight to ditch the A500, why would Commodore push CDROM?

When did Commodore push CD-ROM? They barely got their CDTV out the door  

I agree with much of what you're saying - but it's rather like the chicken and the egg scenario. C= got soooo much wrong. Easy to say in hindsight, but there were some obvious F-ups, even back then. The A1200's case CAN indeed handle a 3.5" HD as we all know, but it wasn't part of their plan. Hence the PCMCIA port. They were in portability mode for sure, but what the consumer ended up with was a half-assed wedge system that really didn't make a whole lot of sense during the time it was released. And pretty much, everyone knew it and that's exactly how it was received.

Had it truly been released as a portable system - fine. But it wasn't. It was released as a home-desktop "upgrade" to the A500 so many years later, even though C= themselves were well aware of their demographic (or not). Weak. Extremely weak IMO.

[stefcep2]

@2600.  The A1200 wedge design was for portable computing on the cheap: the built in composite out meant no monitor needed, just plonk it in front of a tv, and boot up.  Even with just 2 meg and no hard drive you would probably boot up faster than a hard drive PC with Win 3!  

The real shame was that too few users saw what the A1200 could do with a hard drive and extra ram:  Word Process, Spread sheet, database, video, art, animation, music, mutitasking GUI OS, and even 3D.  Everything that an expanded A500 could do and more, for less than an A500 upgrade.

I once cursed the limitations for expansion, of an all-in-one wedge design, but I now realise what i wanted the A1200 to be what it wasn't designed to be.  Thats what the A4000 was.

[commodorejohn]

Going by some of the posts I've been reading on various forums it seems even today people seem to think new software should run on a A500!

Not a stock 500 - requiring an modest accelerator, fast RAM, and a hard disk is semi-reasonable because most modern Amiga users (who aren't just using it for the games they used to play as a kid) can reasonably be expected to have that. But the chipset isn't something you can replace or upgrade - you have to get a computer with an AGA board to have AGA. (And, as has been pointed out earlier in the thread, too much AGA software relies on hardware-banging to use software emulation with a separate video card.)

That means that by writing AGA-only software, you're excluding anybody who doesn't own a 1200 (pricey after upgrades) or a 4000 (obscenely expensive to begin with, plus expansion means finding Zorro III cards!) It'd be fine to have an enhanced AGA mode and a standard OCS/ECS mode, but apparently very few people can be arsed to do that. I suppose that those of us with neither could cross our fingers and wait for NatAmi to be available, but it'd be a lot nicer if modern Amiga programmers could just be a little more considerate of those of us whose Amiga setup consists of a 2000 nabbed from a senior citizen's attic and whatever inexpensive upgrades we could scrounge from AmiBay...

[Digiman]

Forget PC vs Amiga A500/600 though, the real truth is the people who had A500s got bored with terrible arcade conversions over and over and many moved onto Sega or Nintendo or even NEC games consoles which had far superior games. If you don't believe me then go and try via emulators the Megadrive/SNES/TG16/PC/Amiga and ST versions of SF2....the Amiga version comes 5th marginally beating the ST version. I would rather pay £50 for SF2 and know it is going to be the best it can possibly be on the hardware I run it (with zero loading times) than £30 for a lame dick conversion that makes me angry enough to stab the programmers through the face :angry:

It was probably too late anyway because games players were not going to ditch games of the calibre on the 16bit consoles on a new £400/$500 bare bones machine with the same sound and the same lame programmers writing games for Amiga. How many times did you buy an arcade conversion and then want your money back instantly? Exactly!

And only Commodore is to blame for lack of interest in A1200, first we had ECS in A500+ which was a joke as far as games players were concerned, and then even worse we had the A500/+ replaced with the less expandable A600 for serious users with crappy PCMCIA and super expensive 2.5" IDE drive cables. The only improvement was trapdoor accelerators for A1200 luckily.

The missing parts of AGA were just the nail in the coffin, as was those early releases that still looked and sounded like A500 games with a bit more colour in the foreground (and same crappy copperlists for backgrounds where every 16bit console would have lovely smooth parallax graphics and 6-10 channel sound). Apart from 6 channel sound on Super Stardust nothing new on audio side really.

Remember ALL games still had to fit on crappy 880kb disks thanks to Commodore not spending a few quid more on a HD drive for A1200 not just A4000!!

And sticking a 14mhz 020 crippled to 50% speed in the machines sold on the shelves they screwed themselves and us. Games companies could not do much more as far as 3D polygon games go than with an A500. A 28mhz full speed (ie with 1mb Fast ram as well) version should have been an option from day one! And the A1200 should have had SIMM sockets on the motherboard not bloody trapdoor circuit boards costing a fortune.

As for games not being hard drive installable? Well it would have taken companies 5 minutes to write an installer but thanks to all the shit coding on most arcade conversions piracy was rife (and quite right too, I wouldn't piss on Powerdrift for Amiga) so they kept ludicrous protection formats and so it was impossible. There is ZERO excuse for not making the disks unprotected and allow us to install games to HD using manual keyword protection routines. Software companies treated us like dirt and so we pirated their weak feeble efforts as befits the low quality of their programming.

And as for Windows boot up speed? Well in the time of A1000 to CD32 ALL games were DOS. And DOS is not slow to boot up even on the cheapest 3.5" IDE drive (about 5-10 seconds at most).

I will leave you all with one final note. In 1987 Zarch (AKA Virus on ST/Amiga from Firebird s/w) was made for the Acorn Archimedes and ran smooth as silk with 256 colour depth cuing to boot in 1mb of RAM (poss 512kb). 5 years later this game in this quality was not even possible to replicate on your A1200 WITH fast ram costing a total of £550!
Amiga sales success always relied on sales to gamers. Once that was lost then so was Commodore as a viable solvent company. The damage was done in 1990 when the A500+ should have been 128 colours, 6 channel sound and faster/better sprites and blitter. To little too late and now nothing.

Amiga deserved better after A1000/500 and so did we as the loyal Amiga gamers.

[runequester]

Yikes. Digiman is letting rip
 
I fundamentally agree with you man. I just prefer looking at what was cool about it