kant explain wrote on 2023-12-23, 20:36:

The C64, nor the Amiga 1000/2000, were suitable for business computing. That was my basic argument from the getgo many pages ago. A person who states a PCjr is every bit as suitable for a business environment as a real PC on account of some aftermarket hacks is going to have an awful hard time convincing a prospective buyer to give it a go. It seems you argue every point regardless. Units have specific features out of the box. You claim it doesn't matter as an add-on can make it all seem kosher. Apples don't become oranges just because you skap orange paint on them.

That's completely nonsensical and arbitrary.
A PCjr is clearly a cut-down version of the IBM PC, so it is obvious what the differences are. Nevertheless, there's a difference between claiming "one machine can do 80c text and another machine cannot" and "you absolutely need 80c text, else there is no way to do any kind of business computing on the machine whatsoever".
Even for the PCjr it's difficult to make that point. You could get Lotus 1-2-3 on cartridge for the PCjr for example. And with the optional RGBI monitor, you could get the same 80c quality as CGA (which was considered poor compared to MDA, as it only had 200 lines). How exactly would that not be suitable for business computing in the same way you'd use Lotus 1-2-3 on a PC?

kant explain wrote on 2023-12-23, 20:36:

Was I conflating scan doubling and flicker fixing? Yes I was. My mistake. That doesn't change the fact that Commodore decided.the saddle the Amiga.1000/2000 (3000/4000 is a later model and no one gives a fuck) with substandard graphics with regard to data processing and such. It was a huge mistake imho. But it is wha it is. Some people could stare at that grainy shit. When I was EIGHTEEN I said no way. I never wore glasses or contacts either. And that was nearly 40 years ago.

Again, that's your completely arbitrary opinion, which means absolutely nothing.
What you think was "substandard" for the time is irrelevant, nor how important you think "data processing", whatever that means, for a computer platform in general.

Yep, Scali arguing the merits of the Peanut for business environments. And I never ever even once said a PCjr couldn't perform any business tasks. It clearly just wasn't a business class computer. Nor was a C64. Nor an Amiga.

If you're unfamiliar with the term data processing, well it's self explanatory. Using a computer to store and manipulate data. I don't think anyone would say an Amiga didn't have sufficient processing power to match or exceed many contemporary PCs. It was the emphasis on gameish features. Like interlaced video. Try hawking that to a person who's main goal is to use a computer for data processing i.e business tasks. Not happening. The computer, as it stood, was not geared for business computing. Substandard in this context meaning exactly that. Sorry to keep pressing your buttons. The Amiga has plenty of color and graphical capability. But crappy delivery. Groan I'm tired of this.

Lol, interlaced video is a 'gameish feature' now?
Interlaced video is completely useless for most games. There's only a handful of games that use interlaced mode. They are either not action games, or they use it as a novelty hack (like the game Agony).
Besides there is no 'the Amiga', there's a whole line of products, from low-end home computer machines to high-end business machines with MS-DOS compatibility and everything.

And to unofficially conclude this thread, it's the gameish console like attributes of the C64 that make it so adorable and irresistable. It seems clear to me. If anyone was asking.

Just another note. The 1084s, which was Commodore's "flagship" monitor, and developed for the early Amigas, while looked halfway decent on top of a 128 (my experience with it), was also a substandard component. Maximum vertical resolution of 256 lines (non interlaced), 512 interlaces, and a dot pitch of .42 mm. Hardly professional PC quality. Probably about the same as the PCjr monitor. What was considered good quality in the mid 80s was .31 or .28 mm. Could be had in I think all Princeton monitors, and you wouldn't have ro pay any or much more then a Tandy 1000 compatible monitor (all atrocious). Again some people didn't mind the course grainy text of some of these units. I fell in love with the Tandy CM-1 and VM-1 very early on. The Commodore 1084s wasn't atrocious. But definitely not cuttimg edge or especially worthwhile.

1084 was not a flagship monitor, just a mainstream product.

What was their high end monitor then? Please don't talk about 3000/4000 stuff like the other guy.

Anyone with half a clue about monitors knows that the perfect dot pitch isn't an absolute. Lower isn't always better.
The dot pitch is closely related to the targeted resolution. A monitor designed for 262-line modes requires entirely different dot pitches from one designed for 400-line, 600-line or 800-line modes etc.
Which is why the VGA standard didn't output 200-line modes as-is, but line-doubled them internally to 400-line modes.
Else you'd get really thin scanlines and big black bars in between, since you'd be using monitors with much smaller dot pitches than in the CGA/EGA days.
Anyone who's ever fed a PAL/NTSC signal directly to a multisync VGA monitor that is capable of 15 kHz will know exactly what I mean.
The 1084 is not a Commodore monitor in the first place. It's a Philips CM8833-derivative. This was a hugely popular monitor for a wide range of home computers, where a lot of rebagded variations exist, because all these computers were designed to output PAL/NTSC standard signals, and the Philips CM8833 was good at exactly that, for a reasonable price.

Geeze this is what I'm talking about ,

look I've got nothing against the amiga ,I've even got 2 (500 with TF536 , A1200 with TF1260).

But it seems like when people start talking about the platform its like reopening an old wound and inevitably it turns into a fanatical ideological debate about why the amiga shouldn't have died and how peecees as amiga fans childishly call them are crap and ataris should be thrown in the trash.

Then you go through the whole song and dance about Irving Gould and Mehdi Ali , what timeframes what should have been released to save the platform and what wish-list of specs it should have been sold with. Followed by the laments of what was lost and how maybe it could be brought back.

Maybe if amiga fans focused on just enjoying the platform and celebrating why they enjoyed it instead of sniping snarky comments about how the amiga was superior on other competing platforms youtube vids especially Atari STs then there would be alot less friction when it comes to people discussing Amigas on forums that aren't amiga centric and are more pc focused like vogons or atari focused like atariage.

To be fair C64 fans seem alot more chill but since we're talking about commodre here it seems to attract amiga fans as well like fireflys which inevitably leads to this sort of flame war.

The main reason this annoys me is because you see amiga forums with threads literally going on for like 1000 pages of just people screaming at each other about how the amiga should have been handled,
honestly it almost resembles a madhouse.

IBM 5153 - .31mm
IBM 5154 - .28mm
IBM 4863 (PCjr) - .42mm
1084s - .42mm

AppleSauce wrote on 2023-12-24, 00:39:

Geeze this is what I'm talking about ,

I know what you mean, and I'm definitely not in that camp.
S0me people desperately want me to be though.
It just seems that some people are still butthurt about the Amiga decades later. Now that is crazy.
And the C64-thing is even more crazy, given that it's the most successful single computer model ever sold. There's no denying its popularity.
It wasn't perfect, but clearly it hit a sweet-spot in the market that no other machine managed to hit before, or since.
No far-fetched argument about 80-column modes, or disk transfer speeds that had been solved shortly after release anyway, or whatever else will change that.
These things apparently didn't matter.

And it also annoys me that in 2023 people STILL say that Amigas can't read MS-DOS floppies, while that is exactly what I did on my Amiga back in the 90s. I used to download software on my PC, then transfer it via MS-DOS floppies to my Amiga, since the PC couldn't read Amiga floppies, but you could simply activate a device driver on the Amiga to read MS-DOS disks.

If you want to criticize the C64 or Amiga, at least stick to facts, and to realistic arguments. I don't think that's too much to ask.

1942. Target system Amiga 1200, dot pitch 0.28.

What's problem with 3000/4000 stuff? We are talking about hi-end 😉

AppleSauce wrote on 2023-12-24, 00:39:

The main reason this annoys me is because you see amiga forums with threads literally going on for like 1000 pages of just people screaming at each other about how the amiga should have been handled,
honestly it almost resembles a madhouse.

There was similar fight here not a long ago between Intel and AMD fans 🤷

kant explain wrote on 2023-12-24, 00:41:

IBM 5153 - .31mm IBM 5154 - .28mm IBM 4863 (PCjr) - .42mm 1084s - .42mm […]
Show full quote

IBM 5153 - .31mm
IBM 5154 - .28mm
IBM 4863 (PCjr) - .42mm
1084s - .42mm

Left out of this discussion is that all manufacturers offered monochrome which have a zero dot pitch and slow phosphors to ease eyestrain.

The so called “data processing “ was commonly done in monochrome .
And even if you had a high resolution Sun workstation monitor instead of a c64 hooked up to a tv you probably were still running monochrome even into the mid 90’s.

The idea that the resolutions available at the time had to be compared to modern sensibilities is pretty silly, not everyone was at NASA.

Wolfus wrote on 2023-12-24, 00:55:

There was similar figbt here not a long ago between Intel and AMD fans 🤷

Yea, I never got that... Intel and AMD both still make x86... Not quite a 68k, so why bother? 😀

rmay635703 wrote on 2023-12-24, 01:13:

The idea that the resolutions available at the time had to be compared to modern sensibilities is pretty silly, not everyone was at NASA.

Exactly. Even the original IBM PC's CGA standard was specifically designed to be used on televisions. And the whole machine was designed around that, which explains the oddly specific CPU clockspeed of 4.77 MHz. That is exactly the NTSC base frequency of 14.31818 MHz divided by 3.
That was just a way to try and keep the cost down, of this oh-so-'professional' platform.
The uptake of EGA and VGA was initially very slow because the requirement for a specific monitor increased the price a lot (probably the reason why EGA had a mode to use it on a CGA-compatible monitor).
EGA as a standard failed pretty much entirely for that reason. It was too expensive to upgrade existing systems, and a lot of people would still buy a monochrome screen with Hercules because it was much cheaper.
It was only when VGA had been on the market for a while that cheap VGA clone cards and affordable monitors made it an option for the average user, although obviously still far more expensive than a home computer or game console that used standard NTSC/PAL screens.

Wolfus wrote on 2023-12-24, 00:55:

AppleSauce wrote on 2023-12-24, 00:39:

The main reason this annoys me is because you see amiga forums with threads literally going on for like 1000 pages of just people screaming at each other about how the amiga should have been handled,
honestly it almost resembles a madhouse.

There was similar figbt here not a long ago between Intel and AMD fans 🤷

Yeah I'm not suprised and I wish they didn't.

rmay635703 wrote on 2023-12-24, 01:13:

Left out of this discussion is that all manufacturers offered monochrome which have a zero dot pitch and slow phosphors to ease […]
Show full quote

kant explain wrote on 2023-12-24, 00:41:

No I only remember you from vcf.org where you were banned. I recognize your screen name from there. And also recognize your nast […]
Show full quote

No I only remember you from vcf.org where you were banned. I recognize your screen name from there. And also recognize your nasty disposition. Stinks when you're wrong I know.

Cannot Wolfus speak for himself?

IBM 5153 - .31mm
IBM 5154 - .28mm
IBM 4863 (PCjr) - .42mm
1084s - .42mm

Left out of this discussion is that all manufacturers offered monochrome which have a zero dot pitch and slow phosphors to ease eyestrain.

The so called “data processing “ was commonly done in monochrome .
And even if you had a high resolution Sun workstation monitor instead of a c64 hooked up to a tv you probably were still running monochrome even into the mid 90’s.

The idea that the resolutions available at the time had to be compared to modern sensibilities is pretty silly, not everyone was at NASA.

Those were vintage specs I posted. No one was comparing anything to modern. What are people talking about???

Scali wrote on 2023-12-24, 01:20:

Exactly. Even the original IBM PC's CGA standard was specifically designed to be used on televisions. And the whole machine was […]
Show full quote

rmay635703 wrote on 2023-12-24, 01:13:

The idea that the resolutions available at the time had to be compared to modern sensibilities is pretty silly, not everyone was at NASA.

Exactly. Even the original IBM PC's CGA standard was specifically designed to be used on televisions. And the whole machine was designed around that, which explains the oddly specific CPU clockspeed of 4.77 MHz. That is exactly the NTSC base frequency of 14.31818 MHz divided by 3.
That was just a way to try and keep the cost down, of this oh-so-'professional' platform.
The uptake of EGA and VGA was initially very slow because the requirement for a specific monitor increased the price a lot (probably the reason why EGA had a mode to use it on a CGA-compatible monitor).
EGA as a standard failed pretty much entirely for that reason. It was too expensive to upgrade existing systems, and a lot of people would still buy a monochrome screen with Hercules because it was much cheaper.
It was only when VGA had been on the market for a while that cheap VGA clone cards and affordable monitors made it an option for the average user, although obviously still far more expensive than a home computer or game console that used standard NTSC/PAL screens.

The CGA card had composite out. The color burst signal isn't specific to televisions (14.77mhz /4). Either ntsc/composite monitors or tvs used it. The IBM PC never had any specific means connect to a tv. Even if so, it was only intended as a stop gap.

You're leaving out every graphics scheme prior to ega/pgc. Tandy 2000, TI Professional, TelevidTelevido Telecat, Persyst BOB, Sigma 400, HP Vectra, Hercules InColor, the mono text and hi-res color available for the Tandy 3000 (and 1200). Many different options were out there. EGA was undercut shortly after by VGA.

And as stated previously, you had to go outside IBM for a monitor + card combination usually. Or buy a clone. Sometimes it got pricey. But the Atari ST was cheap enough. The Amiga had blase graphics (at hi-res) and it's monitors were lower class. Not professional grade. Which is fine you get what youbpay for. But the PC world just had so many options. With the Amiga you were stuck. That's just tje facts.

This thread feels so nostalgic for me. Reminds me of the early days of the internet where we'd argue nonstop about the little details of our hobbies. It's actually refreshing compared to how most online arguments these days devolve into mudslinging over American politics. Lol.