Am I the only one who doesn't love AGA chipset?

[Digiman]

Poll is for actual results

[commodorejohn]

Where's the option for "I like the chipset fine but hate the way it's damn near obligatory for new Amiga software?"

[giZmo350]

Do you love everything about AGA chipset 100% without exception?

Yes, because it was what it was. Sure, I would have loved to see AAA too but then it wouldn't have been AGA. It would have been something new and would not have been AGA. Time ran out for Commodore - it's just a shame. As far as where the game market was heading back in the early days of VGA (in USA), I blame Ken and Roberta Williams for flooding the market. And their early games where for sh$t at first. 4 color CGA, 16 color EGA where quit costly even though they cought up quickly with remakes. But, you had to continually fork out more and more money for the updated versions of their games. And I have a ton of these boxed games just sitting on the shelves now. That's where AGA turned out to be the better value in hindsight. You bought it once! Although APOGEE had great free games at the time. Amiga had great productivity apps that COULD compete with MS Word/Excel, which is what I needed at the time, but just couldn't afford both an Amiga and a PC. And then Windows 95 came along.....   Arg! I don't even have a big box PC (except my DOS box and my laptop) in the house anymore - since about 2005. Just 2 PPC Mac Mini's. Since about 200? I have less $$$ into my Amigas than I ever spent on PC hardware and software though - but that's getting into the Amiga scene very late - and...... loving it! The only thing I even NEED Windows for these days anyway is IE/Word/Excel/Frontpage and Paint Shop Pro. I wouldn't spend a dime on new games for the PC today. Never happen. I can amuse myself in the greatest way with OCS/ECS/AGA games of the past!

[Digiman]

Because I want to know if anyone who owns a CD32/A1200/4000 and can find no fault with AGA chipset upgrade

For me the dual playfield kludge and single Paula chip was a let down, the rest was OK really as I was not writing games so couldn't comment on speed of blitting etc.

[Karlos]

The question is ludicrously weighted. There aren't many (inanimate) things you can honestly say you "love 100% without exception".

AGA was cool, but there are things about it I don't like. Lack of direct support for chunky pixels in 8-bit mode and a faster blitter. Between them they would have gone a long way to improving the machines capability out of the box.

[Digiman]

@gizmo - my only horror was that despite the upgrade we would still get no real parallax games like in arcades or consoles costing 1/3 of a stock A1200 and still not enough sound channels for most games to have music and sound effects. Superficially the rest was fine really at the time. ALL PC games were 256 colour by 1991 (look through by year on Home of the Underdogs website) so for PC users 256 colours was normal and so they got SF2 and Mortal Kombat in better quality than us even on 386 machines.

Add to that the games for consoles were programmed properly and used source graphics/sound files but Amiga games didn't you knew it was kind of doomed as a games machine like in the A500 days.

Not that it stopped me going out and buying one of the very first C= A1200s in the shops for £400 in 1992 with no freebies...just a mouse and PSU and Workbench disks I spent 50/50 on creative/gamesplaying tasks anyway.

[Louis Dias]

AGA is what the 3000 should have shipped with along with a 32 bit bus.

The 1200/4000/CD32 should have been AAA.

[runequester]

I liked the graphics, but I'd have liked a bit better sound chip.

In the end though, it wasn't so bad, as we discussed in the other thread. Yeah, a PC with VGA, a sound blaster and a fast 486 processor could outperform the miggy, but the cost was ridiculous unless you were loaded or had rich parents.

So could a 3000 dollar machine outperform a 500 dollar machine? Certainly.

The amazing thing is that it didn't always do so
VGA was great for games without a ton of movement (adventure games f.x.) but scrolling could be pretty wretched.

[Digiman]

The question is ludicrously weighted. There aren't many (inanimate) things you can honestly say you "love 100% without exception".

AGA was cool, but there are things about it I don't like. Lack of direct support for chunky pixels in 8-bit mode and a faster blitter. Between them they would have gone a long way to improving the machines capability out of the box.

There are some people who are totally happy with the specifications of AGA. From a creative side I was split...still 8bit sound and still only 4 channels BUT HAM8 in super hi-res was awesome and animation speed was fine for low-res 256 colour etc.

Ditto with games, was fine with most things except the sound being identical (two Paula chips..hello??) and also they never addressed one of Amiga's weakest points...proper full colour parallax scrolling.

A faster blitter would have helped the parallax side, and using dual Paula chips the sound aspect. 8bit sound was fine. But outside of FPS games from 94 onwards like Doom it's not really a big issue not having chunky pixel mode.

I understand why they did it, and given my favourite Amiga game of all time is only possible on AGA I am split 50/50. There still is no better update to Asteroids, free or commercial, than Super Stardust AGA....a game which is a complete nightmare to actually get working properly on a DOS PC which still needs 100x the CPU speed to do any justice too!

btw I love my car 100%, there is nothing about my car I think is out of place or missing a feature and it is an improvement in every way from the previous model (which I am a big fan of too!) so as an analogy it does kind of work.

[runequester]

I understand why they did it, and given my favourite Amiga game of all time is only possible on AGA I am split 50/50. There still is no better update to Asteroids, free or commercial, than Super Stardust AGA....a game which is a complete nightmare to actually get working properly on a DOS PC which still needs 100x the CPU speed to do any justice too!

It's still hard for me to believe that super stardust would run on as little hardware as it did, on the amiga side

btw I love my car 100%, there is nothing about my car I think is out of place or missing a feature and it is an improvement in every way from the previous model (which I am a big fan of too!) so as an analogy it does kind of work.

what car is that, just out of curiosity?

[Karlos]

But outside of FPS games from 94 onwards like Doom it's not really a big issue not having chunky pixel mode.

Any application in which pixels are individually calculated would benefit, including the vast majority of multiformat video playback software.

[runequester]

Any application in which pixels are individually calculated would benefit, including the vast majority of multiformat video playback software.

Aren't we quite past the early 90s at that point though?

Not being snarky, but I have a hard time remembering anyone really doing video playback until mid to late 90's.

[Digiman]

I liked the graphics, but I'd have liked a bit better sound chip.

In the end though, it wasn't so bad, as we discussed in the other thread. Yeah, a PC with VGA, a sound blaster and a fast 486 processor could outperform the miggy, but the cost was ridiculous unless you were loaded or had rich parents.

So could a 3000 dollar machine outperform a 500 dollar machine? Certainly.

The amazing thing is that it didn't always do so
VGA was great for games without a ton of movement (adventure games f.x.) but scrolling could be pretty wretched.

I agree it wasn't so bad, if the still-born A1400/A1800 prototype from 93 wasn't booted for the CD32 project it would have been fine even in 94. 28mhz, fast and chip ram and a CD-ROM as standard in an Amiga 3000 type case for £600 would have been snapped up. Nobody in EU for home purchases cared about Windows then so it didn't have to be less than a PC, same cost would be fine if the software companies pulled their thumb out and wrote some proper Amiga specific code.

I remember paying out £999 for a 486 25mhz PC with SVGA but no sound card in late 1992 and £100-150 of that is for a monitor on PCs remember. But this machine ran Actua Soccer,Doom, SF2 and Screamer Rally really quite nicely in 320x200 mode, and would be £300  less than an A4000/030 by late 93 or earlier. The problem was A1200 to A4000/030 was too large a gap and CD32 a waste of time so we never ever got Amiga games companies exploring these type of games and so no FPS/3D driving/3D soccer/256 colour arcade speed beatem ups.

This isn't really a problem with AGA though, it's bad strategy from Commodore related to CPU performance in cheap home machine targeted models. People wanted what was the A1400 prototype, the price and performance was right for the time. With the lack of a real choice for home users between A1200 and OTT spec'd and priced A4000/030 the Amiga games design suffered badly and so we never got much innovation in 3D games or FPS fake 3D texture mapped games like Doom because there was no mass market machine. Sad thing is the 020 @ 28mhz was cheap enough and the 80386 not a very good chip so the window of opportunity was there all the time between A1200 launch and Commodore bankruptcy. And even 486 machines were stuck on an 11mhz 16bit bus via ISA too until Pentium machines with PCI were launched.

[kat0s]

I voted "yes" because as far as the original Amiga series went its the best that you could get.  Yeah there are many shortcomings, things could have been done better, but it is what it is,  And currently I don't own an AGA Machine, wish I still did.  Looking forward to getting either an expanded A1200 or an A4000... but ultimately would rather have a Natami!!

[giZmo350]

@gizmo - my only horror was that despite the upgrade we would still get no real parallax games like in arcades or consoles costing 1/3 of a stock A1200 and still not enough sound channels for most games to have music and sound effects. Superficially the rest was fine really at the time. ALL PC games were 256 colour by 1991 (look through by year on Home of the Underdogs website) so for PC users 256 colours was normal and so they got SF2 and Mortal Kombat in better quality than us even on 386 machines.

Add to that the games for consoles were programmed properly and used source graphics/sound files but Amiga games didn't you knew it was kind of doomed as a games machine like in the A500 days.

Not that it stopped me going out and buying one of the very first C= A1200s in the shops for £400 in 1992 with no freebies...just a mouse and PSU and Workbench disks I spent 50/50 on creative/gamesplaying tasks anyway.

Well, on the counterpoint, you couldn't be more correct. I wonder sometimes what game was THE BEST example of AGA. Just last night I discovered the game Flight of the Amazon Queen and loaded up both the DOS version in DOSBOX and the Amiga version UAE. The DOS version is a more complete game with speech. Very cool looking game. I'll probably play both versions through though. Consoles have really defined gaming for quit a while. I think 3D TV is really going to bring a whole new era of gaming. I gotta say that time is very convoluting to the memory. I have spent the last 20 years really concentrating on raising the kids and family life, constant school, and WORKING my A$$ off trying to secure a financial future (sheesh... still am - I gota tell ya, even though being born in 1956 has been a great time to be alive, financially I have gotten screwed in life by the markets time after time - but that point of view is left for an entirely different forum). I tend to forget when what certain technology came out in the computer world these days. I was into everything computer back in the day - except for Amiga - which I always wanted to play with. I remember looking for anything Amiga when eBay first came out (there was some great deals on Amiga back 15 years ago on eBay that I missed out on!) In the past 20 years, for me, it's been all about getting those MS certs, Enterprise IT, and networking - kinda lost track of everything fun. Enough about me!

Just messing around these days with Amiga is a lot of fun...  never get time to spend on it though. I've had my Indivision AGA for a few months and still havn't done anything with it other than jam it in the 1200 and fire up an AGA game or two. So much to learn! I sometimes feel jealous of people that grew up with Amiga instead of the PC. Sorry, kind off track here!

I'm following where Netami is going though - might be a while till we actually get to buy it though. One nice thing about getting a little older is that I don't have to worry about getting my money back on every little dime I spend on computer toys. Sorry so long!