@ Digiman
The thing is your talking about the Amiga in terms of being nothing more than a games machine. I know a lot of folk see the Amiga this way but to me it was far from being a games console and comparing it against PCs of the time make no sense to me.
The Amiga for those who could be bothered to put their minds to it at the time was the only low cost viable solution for folk who wanted to create low cost videos and GFX and some even used it professionally for it's audio. I mean how many Amiga's did the Disney Studio's kit themselves out with or the Creators of Babylon 5 for example, if PCs at that point in time were really so good then why did the aforementioned examples choose Amiga... so if your gonna compare the Amiga to other PCs don't forget to include the good points too...
Lightwave exists thanks to Newtek, and that is thanks to Digipaint/Digiview and A500/A1000 users like us who bought their stuff
But B5 was rendered using cheap but very powerful PC based render farms. CPU speed was always an issue on Amiga to compensate for cost of custom chips in the design.
I don't consider the Amiga a games only machine at all, from 1986 to today I spend a lot of time doodling in dpaint, messing about with samplers, digitising huge animation sequences to RAM (until my 9mb A2000 died that is) and making 'interesting' anim brushes. I don't do office based stuff because I do office based stuff at work all day and so not interested to learn another package. And I had used my A1000 to do such stuff not because it was cheaper but because it was better at it than PC or it was impossible on PC and I actually liked using Workbench too with it's swanky multitasking
Trouble is though that Amiga was judged on it's games by new comers, I bought an A1200 because I wanted to experience AGA for myself (not what reviewers thought it could do) but other people would look at a game and think "looks a bit cack compared to my SNES/Megadrive" and forget about it. We needed a game like Defender of the Crown or Marble Madness on the Amiga 1000 really. This wasn't really possible because whilst there were some good improvements to the OCS/ECS capabilities it wasn't anything amazing that would generate sales, and most games were badly programmed anyway.
And the whole "buy your upgrades off some other company and leave us alone" attitude by Commodore to A1200 really pissed me off. It was Commodore's job to sell me 28mhz or 56mhz 020 versions of A1200s at cost price and have Fast ram inside the motherboard as an option at the shop. But they make you buy a new circuitboard from a middleman just to get the full speed of my 14mhz 020 inside my A1200. 3rd party peripherals=extra profit for the middle man. Bad for us and bad for games as software houses only write 2mb 50% speed A1200 games because of it.
They should have made A1200 and A1200+ (28mhz 020 version) model from day one and BOTH should have been offered with fast ram in the box if you wanted it.
People don't like buying extras, and true high street sales would not be in places like Silica Shop they needed to be selling in High St electrical stores in Dixons with all the options there.
14 or 28mhz sir?
2mb or 4mb sir?
The memory should be fitted directly to a SIMM slot behind a panel like a laptop did at the time, and the hard drive should have been designed to be used exactly like a laptop connects to them, a slot behind a panel you just slide the hard drive into and put the lid back. This way we could get our stuff and upgrade it ourselves OR the shop can hold just the bare models and they purchase their own memory/HDDs and sell at RRP or less as they want. WIN
