Amiga vs console vs PC

[biggun]

AMIGA is and was good machine.

Look back at game like SWORD OF SODAN, HYBRIS, or XENON
These 512K memory and the 68000@7 Mhz was more than fast enough for them.
These games really made good use of the capabilites of OCS chipset with 512 KB.


Later AMIGA models were rarely used fully.
2MB Chipmemory was common even with later ECS AMIGA.
Now imagine how nice and smooth a  SWORD OF SODAN for 2 MB with 4 times the background images and the sprite animation would have looked?
It certainly would have looked breathtaking.
Or imagine a good STREET FIGHTHER port making maximum use of 2 MB Chipmem.

The AGA machines had 2 MB chipmem, 256 colors and faster CPU.

Regarding Audio:
For games 8bit audio samples with own volume per channel is great.
With own volume per sample this give great sound effects for games.

In theory more than 4 channels would have made coding easier.
But on the other hand a 68020 with fast-mem has more than enough computing power to mix many channels together in real time.

Imagine if games would have been designed for AGA machines with 2 MB fast and 2 MB chip.
The typical 2D game has enough free CPU to allow real time mixing of 8 channels modules.

So you can imagine now a SWORD OF SODAN with 256 colors,4 times the animation frames and 8 channel audio sound in the background.

Or imagine a 2D Game like XENON in 256 colors, with 4 times as many sprite animations, and super mixed sound.

If games would have been designed for AGA Amigas + fastmem then these type of games would have been possible.

[ElPolloDiabl]

Phase 5 went bankrupt in 2000 is this not some level of proof that the PowerPC was a bad choice.
If it was chosen for compatibility then in retrospect it would have been better to only go PowerPC for high end Amiga. You could have dropped most of the legacy hardware.

[biggun]

Just take a look at NEO-GEO

The NEO-GEO console had so many wonderful 2D games.
Take a look when these games game out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Neo_Geo_games

 
Most games game out after and years after the AGA amigas.

The AGA AMIGA could have run games in similar quality to the NEO GEO games.
If these games would have been designed to make use of 2MB chipmem and fastmem.

For all the 2D games you do not need much CPU power.
The 68020 of the A1200 was already oversized for the type of games.

In theory similar quality 2D games could have been come out for the CD32.
There was certainly market for these games.

[slaapliedje]

You mean 2 years before I guess ?

Oh, sorry, for some reason I grabbed the North American release date for the SNES, you're right, it was a full year that it was out in Japan.  But since I'm pretty sure the Japanese wasn't exactly a huge market for the Amiga, I compared the market of the North America, which I guess really was fading away as a popular Amiga place even then.  

Sad times those were.

slaapliedje

[paul1981]

Well we can forget AGA times as that was not cutting edge and 256 colour planar mode a knife in the belly so too little too late. ECS was an April fool gone way too far no?. AGA did nothing for solid polygon or 2.5D scaling graphics and the cpu needed to be 25mhz 020 AND 512K min 32bit Fast ram or empty simm slot to keep up with Doom or even SuperFX/SEGA SVP carts in mid 90s.

The Amiga 1000 was both radical and cutting edge A/V hardware but revolutionary in use due to multi-tasking GUI OS so it could do both so it's a redundant question. The most powerful computer==most stunning game graphics.

The problem was pathetic coding on games, did Outrun look like the SEGA 16bit console or 8086 EGA PC version? Exactly.

Unfortunately Commodore did not act like illegal monopolistic Ninbendo scum bags preventing independent releases on Amiga so could never compete with $100 NES CRAP as they made nothing on software and could therefore not sell hardware at cost.

To go from arcade perfect Marble Madness in 1986 to Ourun/SF2 turds from greedy UK nobheads is a joke but it's the story of Amiga. SNES can't do Lotus 2, Mega Typhoon or Shadow of the Beast but yanks/jap %&$#?@!%&$#?@!%&$#?@!%&$#?@!s still bought the slow boring Mario crap...go figure.

There was never much wrong with hardware but who wants to play ST ports like Chase HQ? If only C= had bought out Cinemaware and done CDTV versions of everything.....not NEC CD crap.

A500 says all about C= without Jack, 18 months to replace A1000 beatiful case, WORM Kickstart RAM and internal PSU & power switch with pig ugly looks, a ROM socket and Vic 20 style PSU with power switch on it. Designed by dicks 'managed' by diks = A500 project. They didn't even promote A1000 in 1986 waiting for 12 month late A500 turd.

They would have f*cked it up either way clearly as Plus/4, C128 and A500 turds ateste

(Apple/Wintel/Nnbendo scum winning is worse...thanks dumb yank pr1ks consumers for playing Marble Madness ad DotC on your gay PC EGA/NES machines and ignoring A1000 or C64...priks...hell even the 520STM @ $399 DUMPED ON $4000 256K Mac)

Most sense I've read on here in a while.

[Sean Cunningham]

This is why we can't have nice things.

[KimmoK]

@psxphill

>The AA+ project was announced but the design work was never started.

AA+? AAA prototypes were already in the testing phase.

>AGA should have been upgraded to 16 voices, with 16 bit audio and 16 bit video

I think Amiga 8bit had enough quality untill late 90's. 16/24bit was/is needed for professional use.

>AA+ should have been FMV capable.

You mean as a standard? AGA needed the extra decoder.
 
>If they'd hit these milestones then commodore would have survived, but you can see how wildly they were off the mark.

Commodore died because of the losses in PC sales. Same for Escom.

Perhaps Commodore would have survived if it had focused on Amiga in early 90's.

IMO: the biggest handicap of A1200 and CD32 was the lack of fast RAM as a standard.

[psxphill]

>AA+? AAA prototypes were already in the testing phase.

AAA was purely for the high end. It was nowhere near finished. It was a zombie project that kept stumbling along because some people wouldn't let it die. IMO like the commodore 65 it would have died before it was manufactured, commodore worked a bit strange like that.

I think Amiga 8bit had enough quality untill late 90's. 16/24bit was/is needed for professional use.

The systems that it needed to compete against had 16bit audio. Whether you think it's good enough is irrelevant when someone is comparing between two products based on their specification.

You mean as a standard? AGA needed the extra decoder.

Yes, it needed some form of FMV. Not necessarily MPEG, like the CD32 FMV. The PlayStation managed with MJPEG.

Commodore died because of the losses in PC sales. Same for Escom.

That is an old rumour, but I don't see how. AFAICT commodore germany did the PC's on their own & they were one of the subsidiaries that survived.

Commodore international went bankrupt because they didn't pay the $10 million fee for the xor patent. They were prevented from importing anything until they paid the fine, which they couldn't because they couldn't import anything to sell (they were counting on CD32 sales).

To avoid commodore going bankrupt they would have needed something that people wanted to buy in 1992, but not enough people wanted to buy an A1200/A4000. It didn't have the same impact as the a500 or the c64 before it.

IMO: the biggest handicap of A1200 and CD32 was the lack of fast RAM as a standard.

Fast ram makes a difference to performance, but not enough. It would have made a huge difference to the price.

A500 says all about C= without Jack, 18 months to replace A1000 beatiful case, WORM Kickstart RAM and internal PSU & power switch with pig ugly looks, a ROM socket and Vic 20 style PSU with power switch on it. Designed by dicks 'managed' by diks = A500 project. They didn't even promote A1000 in 1986 waiting for 12 month late A500 turd.

When commodore bought Amiga, the A1000 it was nowhere near finished. They paid a lot for Jay Miner etc to actually finish the hardware and software.
Unfortunately Jay Miner didn't want to do a low cost version, so he declared that the Fat Agnus was impossible to manufacture. Commodore didn't really have a chance to get anything out quicker as they had to do it in house rather than have the original designers do it. As far as I can remember, they promoted the A1000 more than the A500.

[Fizza]

The systems that it needed to compete against had 16bit audio. Whether you think it's good enough is irrelevant when someone is comparing between two products based on their specification.

Audio bits are important but DAC's can be more so, 12bit with high quality DAC with 8-24 channels might be more cost effective and sound better than 16bit with cheap DACs, which was the scenario for the soundblasters at the time..

Fast ram makes a difference to performance, but not enough. It would have made a huge difference to the price.

This is the thing, I think price was something to be concerned with, but the A500 was initially £499, and the A1200 was £399. I would say that for £549.00 it would have still been bought at a configuration that put it in a better position technologically and therefore better overall value. A1200 was cheaper at release than A500 but yet sold a lot less. Given a £549 price target, or even £599, what could have been incorporated during design/manufacturing?

A1200 case:
1) make it fit 3.5" hard drives by design - no more overly expensive 2.5" Hard drives that delayed hard drive uptake, which eventually led to everyone shoehorning 3.5" drives in there anyway..
2) make the floppy drive enclosure a removable bay to enable the ability to swap out a CD Rom drive.

Motherboard/Chips etc..
1) IDE connector conveniently situated for above mentioned CD ROM
2) Allow external Floppy Disk connector to be switched to DF0 and boot.
3) CPU put on a daughter board that can be easily upgraded by user for use of incremental processor upgrades supplied by Commodore, from 7mhz 68000 (yes! see below) base config with options at time of purchase going up to 030 with FPU, then let the market figure out what it wants..
4) Two fast RAM slots with greatest capacity for price ratio - I would be sure how much supporting 256MB ram would add as opposed to, say, 16MB. With options at time of purchase for upgrades.
5) Upgrade serial port for faster transfer
6) Ethernet port.
7) 12bit audio with as many channels as costs allow.
Support for joysticks with 6 buttons as standard.
9) Chunky modes
10) RGB to SCART as standard and have modulator external, like A500, compatibility with it even better.
11) More sprites
12) With chunky mode, AKIKO can go bye bye, instead source 3D chip.
13) PMCIA - keep, but lower importance in cost/performance ratio than those above

A600:
Discontinued, machine totally cannibalized sales for A1200.
Instead: Offer 7mhz 680000 processor daughter card for A1200 without ram for cheapest end of the market, but still allowing for access to all upgrades.

Other things..
Software - Commodore securing licensed conversions of games/apps critical to market; ie: Wolfenstein, X-Wing, Cubase, Photoshop etc… It's worth reiterating that in the mid 90s, Amiga was using same processors and same clock rates as Apple Macs so the market was more open, thus seeing something like Photoshop on an Amiga wouldn't be as crazy as imagining it to happen nowadays.

Something like the above could have kept things going, with the possibility of 060 cards and possibly even the ability to upgrade the 3D chip, things could still be ticking quite nicely into the latter 90s for when the next major upgrade was to be released with PowerPC or whatever..

[slaapliedje]

Unfortunately Commodore did not act like illegal monopolistic Ninbendo scum bags preventing independent releases on Amiga so could never compete with $100 NES CRAP as they made nothing on software and could therefore not sell hardware at cost.

To go from arcade perfect Marble Madness in 1986 to Ourun/SF2 turds from greedy UK nobheads is a joke but it's the story of Amiga. SNES can't do Lotus 2, Mega Typhoon or Shadow of the Beast but yanks/jap %&$#?@!%&$#?@!%&$#?@!%&$#?@!s still bought the slow boring Mario crap...go figure.

There was never much wrong with hardware but who wants to play ST ports like Chase HQ? If only C= had bought out Cinemaware and done CDTV versions of everything.....not NEC CD crap.

A500 says all about C= without Jack, 18 months to replace A1000 beatiful case, WORM Kickstart RAM and internal PSU & power switch with pig ugly looks, a ROM socket and Vic 20 style PSU with power switch on it. Designed by dicks 'managed' by diks = A500 project. They didn't even promote A1000 in 1986 waiting for 12 month late A500 turd.

They would have f*cked it up either way clearly as Plus/4, C128 and A500 turds ateste

I have very often wondered what would have happened had Atari been able to get the Amiga design, instead of having to slap together the Atari ST.

Not that they were managed much better at that time, though it seems they went downhill after Sam took over.

Then again, I have once thought of an alternate history where Nolan Bushnell didn't get overwhelmed with running Atari and didn't sell it to Warner Communications, who then went on to pretty much make the whole video game industry crash.  

After reading about some of the back room crap, it sure seems to me that Commodore snagged Amiga from Atari, and then didn't know what the hell to do with it.  Again though, it's not like the Tramiels would have known, but maybe they would have done a bit better.  Oh well, something that's occasionally fond to ponder.  Hell for that matter, it sounds like me Jay Miner wouldn't have quit Atari in the first place if it weren't for Warner Communications.  The 'golden era' of Atari.  It was sad to see it become just another game publisher.

slaapliedje

[slaapliedje]

Also, a quick note to this discussion;

Seems to me that the Playstation IS more or less the continuation of the Amiga as a console.  At least in the fact that some of the greatest games made for the Amiga was made by Psygnosis, which then more or less went on to create the Playstation, sell it to Sony and become Sony Entertainment (or whatever they're called now).

slaapliedje