Lots of good points...
AGA Sound - I read/watched recently where, I think it was Dave Haynie who said that a DSP and extra channels were originally planned for AGA, a deal with a sound chip maker who had no idea of how the Commodore engineers were going to use it in the system, but when the deal fell through, used that information to pitch it to Apple, who quickly introduced it into their Mac systems.. But count me as one who was disappointed to still be at 4channel 8bit, even with that lovely distinctive crunch that was a semi-secret music production trick.
One Button Joysticks - A hold over from the 8bit/C64 days unfortunately I would imagine, everyone who went from an 8bit system to the Amiga had a joystick that worked, it became the lowest common denominator and I think that's why it partly stuck. Commodore should have done better with pushing three buttons at the very least and then introducing a few more for ECS etc... Three buttons as standard would still have been sufficient even if extra buttons never became popular enough to be supported by default.
Sprites - Again, AGA maybe should have done better, but between 3D capabilities and improved sprites, I'd choose the former, it wasn't lack of sprite power that killed the Amiga as a games machine.
Amiga as a games machine pt1. - Moreso in the UK/Europe, the Amiga was, initially and up till around '93ish, regarded highly as a games machine that could also do serious stuff. In the UK, the Amiga did well in the semi-professional video market, even into the mid-late 90s so it did have a serious side to it too that many people don't really talk about these days, but in the US, it is my understanding that the Amiga was viewed as a serious machine almost exclusively, especially due to the Video Toaster.
I don't think the A500 had the same impact in the US as a games machine because the NES had gotten a much greater foothold of the games market, by some accounts badly wounding the C64 games market from around '86, so it wasn't as much of a logical step to get an Amiga to upgrade your NES, which was still at it's peak in '87/'88, unlike in UK/Europe where the C64/Spectrum/Amstrad market was still dominant around that time, and continued even into the 90s, the consoles only started taking hold from the Genesis onwards, so everyone looked at the Amiga/Atari ST as a super C64/Spectrum in '87/'88 and viewed from a home computer market standpoint, which was the games market too, as a natural progression. By this time Amiga's also looked better than NES/Master System, so probably was a reason for their lack of success at that time too.
Pt2. - Many people, including me, balked at the idea of spending £50.00 on a game even if it was plug and play and didn't mind at all loading a game from disk, I guess we all still remembered how long it took to load from tape in the 8bit days and still thought it fast.. Again, by this time, in the US with the dominance of the NES, I guess games players got used to instant loading so probably would look at the disk based Amiga as slow.
A1200 w/030 & RAM - Yes it would have been more expensive, but it would have been cheaper than paying for an 020 and then an 030, in hindsight Apple got it right, keep the price the same and keep upgrading RAM/CPU when they can be incorporated for the same price.. But 1Mb fast ram onboard would have been a great start at the very least..
If you finished reading all that, thanks
