Will Amiga ever live again?

[jonnyboy]

So, what has Amiga now got to offer? It's certainly not what it had in the early '90s, when it was a computer with untapped potential that struggled to get past being labelled as a gaming machine, with the exception of some niche markets (e.g. Lightwave being used in Babylon 5).
In 1992, the A1200 was technically way in front of your average PC in almost every way, apart from raw processor speed. Workbench 3.0 made Windows 3.1 look rubbish indeed - it could multi-task and manipulate data much better than the Microsoft counterpart.
By 1998, the rest of the world had caught up. Now, I wonder two things. What would have happened to Amiga if Commodore hadn't gone down the pan and instead marketed it well? And what future could Amiga feasibly have now?

[Kronos]

The A1000 was way ahead of its time in 1985, and that was still true
with the A500/2000 between 86 and 89.

The A1200 was anice speedup for the Amiga-freaks, but it was allready
failing behind in many aspects.

It only had 2mb of shared (slow) memory, while PCs could be brought up
to atleast 4MB (often 16) by just adding the ICs/SIMMs. And all of that was
running at full CPU-speed, and non-shared.
A HD-floppies were allready standard in PCs, while it required obscure and expensive
modified drives for the Amiga.

A HD was also standard in PCs, and could easily/cheaply be bought.
The A1200 only supported expensive and small 2.5" HDs. The adapters
to 3.5" only appaered in spring 93, and they still costed extra, and not all 3.5"-HDs
would worked with the A1200.

16Bit-Audio was also not uncommon in PCs of that day.
And a bog-standard VGA would crush AGA  for everything but 2D-games.

You are right about the OS.

[jonnyboy]

But once you'd bought your bog-standard A1200 it was still easy to upgrade. I think it was silly not to include even just a little bit of Fast RAM with the computer - it would have doubled its speed straight away.
Also, I think Amiga sound can almost hold its own nowadays: the standard Paula chip was still a standard feature, which PCs still don't enjoy nowadays.
I don't think HD floppies were that important at the time, and Commodore would have been wise to make Hard Disk versions more affordable more quickly - it was cheaper to buy a third-party one but you risked losing the rather good on-site warranty.
Given that 2D games were still far more popular than 3D ones in 1993, I think that AGA was better than VGA as well.

[Kronos]

Wasn't one of your points that the Amiga was (mis-)labeled as a gaming
machine ?

And AA was a pain in the compared to VGA when you wanted to
to serious stuff (except video).

I did buy an A1200 in late 1992, and there way allmost no games for it,
and even most of the old ones didn't work.

I did build myself a 386DX40 in spring 93, and there was stuff like Tie-Fighter,
which blow most of the AA games out of the water.

[that_punk_guy]

jonnyboy wrote:
Also, I think Amiga sound can almost hold its own nowadays: the standard Paula chip was still a standard feature, which PCs still don't enjoy nowadays.

Don't they? :-?

I'm assuming you don't literally mean the Paula chip, but its sound capabilities, but I've never bought a PC that didn't come with onboard sound or a sound card.

[NightShade737]

I think even the crappy VIA AC 97' chips which come on lots of motherboards easily outclass the Paula so much it is uncomparable...

[Jettah]

@jonnyboy:

Well, they don't leave you much in one piece about the Amiga, now do they?

You'd think they'd be hating the machine to the core, but no, they still cling to it. Maybe the Amiga is just a bit more than the sum of the parts? ;->

Regards,

Tjitte

[Jettah]

@jonnyboy:

Well, they don't leave you much in one piece about the Amiga, now do they?

You'd think they'd be hating the machine to the core, but no, they still cling to it. Maybe the Amiga is just a bit more than the sum of the parts? ;->

Regards,

Tjitte

[mdwh2]

Regarding the A1200, I think it's a shame they didn't consider making the box a little bigger (preferably with a separate keyboard, and a small main box like some old Macs). That way you could have internal 3.5" IDE hard drives and a CD ROM, along with onboard SIMMs at a far cheaper price than it cost to add to the A1200. Given that simply adding RAM doubled the speed of the A1200, it's a shame that this wasn't more easily an option.

The PC had started to overtake the Amiga as a games machine (ironic that being a games machine was always supposed to be a bad thing for the Amiga!), but I found Windows 3.1 incredibly sluggish on 4MB 486s, even though I was only used to a bare A1200 at the time. It wasn't until RAM dropped in price that PCs started to become viable for anything other than games IMO (and Windows 95 took even more than 3.1, so I'd be looking at 32MB minimum - which IIRC cost about £800 in 1995!)

[jonnyboy]

I guess that would've been a better way to go with the A4000/030, which was a bit of an odd machine for a start. Although I guess to spend money on actually desigining a different case to the original A4000 would've been too much as well.
I think it was a good decision to stay with the A600's basic design (albeit correcting the silly ommision of the keypad!)
About it being mislabelled, I guess Commodore needed to provide something to which people related, but the "Desktop Dynamite" pack came out just too late. I bought the Comic Relief pack, which included just one game. Now all they needed to do was just bundle some other software instead, but I suppose the Comic Relief thing got them a plug on the BBC for free!
Maybe Commodore should've taken a little more trouble to make the AGA hardware a little better before releasing it. But I still say it was silly not to put any fastram at all in the machine. 512kb couldn't have cost too much by then.

[NightShade737]

Er, it didn't have 512K, it has 2MB...

[gaddar]

A1200 could have more expansion slots, it could have included more stuff in and on it...
What is tried to be meant in the lines above had already been made by A4000. It has a 030 and EDO ram slots to be expanded.
But A1200 was not the way it was produced. It's something cheaper than A4000 and has much more to offer than cd32.
While judging please consider the dates and policies of the companies.
It might have happened or did not..maybe it is nature..you rise and fall..maybe it is fate..Amiga turned out to be concept that even the makers did not think of..they were not able to handle the potential of that creature whereas the WinPC stuff only promised. The users were not ready maybe...nobody could get what cd32 invention was just like they did not get how a great machine should be.
Seeing the facts beyond the timeline...that's all amiga's fault. And I feel lucky for the minority who has ever witnessed those days in which there were no rush for idiot game compatible video cards.  

mdwh2 wrote:
Regarding the A1200, I think it's a shame they didn't consider making the box a little bigger (preferably with a separate keyboard, and a small main box like some old Macs). That way you could have internal 3.5" IDE hard drives and a CD ROM, along with onboard SIMMs at a far cheaper price than it cost to add to the A1200. Given that simply adding RAM doubled the speed of the A1200, it's a shame that this wasn't more easily an option.

The PC had started to overtake the Amiga as a games machine (ironic that being a games machine was always supposed to be a bad thing for the Amiga!), but I found Windows 3.1 incredibly sluggish on 4MB 486s, even though I was only used to a bare A1200 at the time. It wasn't until RAM dropped in price that PCs started to become viable for anything other than games IMO (and Windows 95 took even more than 3.1, so I'd be looking at 32MB minimum - which IIRC cost about £800 in 1995!)

[Speelgoedmannetje]

Will Amiga ever live again?

Of course. It only stays carbon-frozen until in the future scientists have discovered a cure.

[mdwh2]

Well an A4000 could fit the bill for what I had in mind - except it was ridiculously expensive. I'm not sure why this was - presumably the Zorro slots(?), in which case I think a machine without those, and a lot cheaper, would have been worthwhile.

I mean, you could upgrade an A1200 with hard drive, CPU and RAM (and possibly CD ROM), and still get something for cheaper than an A4000/030. If these things had come as standard, and made use of cheaper 3.5" IDE, it'd surely have been cheaper still. Plus the money would have been going to Commodore, rather than 3rd party companies. Also, if things like CD ROM and memory were cheap optional extras, it would have raised the base level, and made software companies more willing to develop for them, instead of writing for a basic A1200 that maybe had a hard drive.

@NightShade737: I think he meant an extra 512K memory of Fast RAM - basically a small cheap extra amount that may have helped get the speed up.

[NightShade737]

Yeah sorry, I didn't notice the word "Cost".