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Reply 200 of 426, by appiah4

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brostenen wrote:

Some more pricing. This time from late 1993. I found something of good quality, namely Compaq and some Amiga in the same magazine. Clearly you would be able to get more on the Amiga platform, if you compared it specifically to Compaq. Amiga4000 was in the price range of Compaqs at that time.

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The value proposition of the SX/25 is unbeatable in this regard, goes on to show why Amiga died so fast once 486SX/DX became affordable.

Retronautics: A digital gallery of my retro computers, hardware and projects.

Reply 202 of 426, by brostenen

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appiah4 wrote:
brostenen wrote:

Some more pricing. This time from late 1993. I found something of good quality, namely Compaq and some Amiga in the same magazine. Clearly you would be able to get more on the Amiga platform, if you compared it specifically to Compaq. Amiga4000 was in the price range of Compaqs at that time.

The attachment PC.jpg is no longer available
The attachment Amiga.jpg is no longer available

The value proposition of the SX/25 is unbeatable in this regard, goes on to show why Amiga died so fast once 486SX/DX became affordable.

Nahh... You needed at least a dx2-66 in order to beat the Amiga 4000 completely.

On the other hand. If you only wanted to game at the cheapest possible way, then you would get 2,5 Amiga1200's for the price of one Compaq. And then have some left for a lot of Cola. The danish word "moms" is the same as the English word "Vatt". You know, sales tax. And in this case, the Amiga prices are included Vatt.

21.125,00 danish kroner for the DX2-66, and 5.500,00 for an 1200 and a monitor.

EDIT:
In the december edition (1993) of the same magazine, PC prices for a non-compaq and standard cheap clone machine without any special features, have dropped by some. Looking at 486dx33-VLB motherboards, you can see that a motherboard have dropped to aprox the same price as a complete Amiga1200 without monitor. You still needed a case and everything else for the PC, in order to have a working machine. The price for a complete 486dx40 machine, without monitor, would be roughly the same as an Amiga4000 without monitor. These are not Compaq machines with special triflex arcitecture or anything. Just the cheap run of the mill clone machine.

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Don't eat stuff off a 15 year old never cleaned cpu cooler.
Those cakes make you sick....

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Reply 203 of 426, by brostenen

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Going on further in price investigation.....
These prices are from that same magazine again, and the issue is the Jan. 1995 edition. Of course there are no sightings of any Amiga anymore, as I do not think that Escom had bought the Amiga yet. Prices are beginning to get low on PC's in 1995, and the magazine (originally a diehard Amiga magazine), still have plenty of toturials for the Amiga, accelrators/accesories for the Amiga and articels about the Amiga. Some 40% are now PC related at that point.

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Don't eat stuff off a 15 year old never cleaned cpu cooler.
Those cakes make you sick....

My blog: http://to9xct.blogspot.dk
My YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/brostenen

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Reply 204 of 426, by brostenen

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Aaaand.... There it was. The December edition 1995, finally had a sales add with an Amiga1200 again. Same pricetag as in 1993. I think we can all agree, that in december of 1995. The Amiga platform was simply not bang for the bucks anymore.

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Hope all the pictures I have provided, will give some insight to when the PC platform, began to offer more than the Amiga for the money they asked.

Don't eat stuff off a 15 year old never cleaned cpu cooler.
Those cakes make you sick....

My blog: http://to9xct.blogspot.dk
My YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/brostenen

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Reply 205 of 426, by SpectriaForce

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Unknown_K wrote:

Apple eventually took over the video and animation professional market from Commodore.

The Macintosh II must have been a serious competitor for the Amiga 2000 (both released same year).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_II

Reply 206 of 426, by SpectriaForce

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Scali wrote:

Not sure what that hackjob is, but here is an A1060 with original MFM HDD (a 'hardcard', see also http://theamigamuseum.com/wp-content/uploads/ … ar_Brochure.pdf), where the 5.25" disk drive is still in place, obviously (a PC compatibility sidecar without 5.25" drive would be pretty useless, since the Amiga uses only 3.5", and 5.25" was still the standard format for PCs in those days):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PamfEkIbQU

Lol, that sidecar is actually a PC XT that plugs into the A1000 😊

Reply 207 of 426, by Gernot66

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Long thread for a short answer

Because it was by far better as any doze, that's all.

Might not look like this from todays ward but it's a fact and the M68000 family is still (or would be still) much better as the rotten lathe controller designed in1949.

But to repeat what i often said customers was and are still stupid and simply believe the one who is most boasting and that was windoze, "what i use in my workplace must be better" and it was considered that the miggy is "no real computer" just because it was so small and powerful.

A real computer had to be clumsy, fail at least once a day and needed a re-install of windows weekly which already made it sweat without to run anything else, well like this i remembered my dad's PC, useless tard.
Then i bought my a "this is no real computer" and ohh what a difference, no more hassles just plug and play.

Guessing that we veterans lead the retro cumminity it's quite obvious that this opinion has become standard and it's true also.

I mean when you start DOSBox i.e. you get a machine you could never have afforded and neither was possible to drive in 1990, the rotten doze has cost 3000 SFr - naked! no peripherals no sound just PC speaker beeps and depending on your wallets size a so an so graphics card, mostly junk.
not even a 1000 SFr for the Miggy, plug it in your stereo and you got real Music and not only beeps connect it to a cheap monitor or even a TV set no graphics card needed, plug in a joystick or a mouse and start playing or get creative.

My 2nd A500 still runs and she will still function when i'm dust and ashes.
But i have a half of a dozend dead PC's already.
2nd machine because i saved her from death, she was a working horse in a copy shop up to 1996 and i found her in the garbage, i had another A500, an A2000 an A4000 and the rotten (or not so rotten) CD32.
And i would be still an "Amiga fanboy" i grant you.

Any more reasons needed?

The games was better, at least up to 93 look at all the tard and how sluggish they was made for the PC, "Defendwr of the Crown" looks even better on a C64 as the PC version it looks even better as (re-released, homebrew) Intellivision game.
It changed soon but they was major to the PC releases.

Well i even read today that one dislikes the textured ships of First Encounters *they look blocky" but in the end it's the same resolution as for the untextured FE2 on the miggy or on the atari.

I still hold two rotten Amstrad Joysticks (no-name clones of), what a stress each time youn have to calibrate them and after ten minutes of playing the calibration gets lost because the joystick gets warm from your hands and it has to be recalibrated .... and so on.
Plug a miserable digital stick into a miggy and you never had such stress.
Nonetheless the control for especially platform games was far better on the Amiga, commercial releases for the PC had often a less good control as a homebrew on the miggy, this could be still a reason to prefere an emulated Amiga version over the PC release.

However, i claim the Intel family is no real processor it's a lathe controller it was intented for this and it's still that, get's hickups of whatever sort if not feeded in small portions, only windows made something useful out of it but it's tard.

We all use it now but the day is close when the intel family dies it has reached its end point.

I claim "I thought Windows is a virus"

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Do you remeber the Ad for I5 with the aliens "Intel inside"?
when i first saw this advertise i thought "never they would use a lathe controller or they would materialise in midst of a sun when re-entering from hyperspace"

Besides ending the career in SimCopter will show off well what the devs thought about win and doze.
https://youtu.be/JFY-4YRfsYI?t=469

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Reply 208 of 426, by Gernot66

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a lot of stuff to read

maintainer of "Phoenix" (Pioneer Space Sim derivate)
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Reply 209 of 426, by jmarsh

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Gernot66 wrote:

Might not look like this from todays ward but it's a fact and the M68000 family is still (or would be still) much better as the rotten lathe controller designed in1949.

I'm confused why you're dissing a big-endian, Motorola produced CPU that was used in practically every computer line except "IBM compatible" PCs (even used in Amigas...), that has nothing to do with the x86 family of CPUs that dominate today's PCs?
Were you confusing "windoze" with early MacOS?

Reply 210 of 426, by NamelessPlayer

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SuperDeadite wrote:

Towns was meant to compete with NEC mostly. It failed miserably though, and became mostly a school multimedia device.

FM Towns VS X68000. Is an interesting one, Towns had better CPU and CD-ROM. But X68000 has better graphics and sound hardware.

Oh, and X68000 Lemmings has 2 player mode with dual mice support as. Standard mice are also trackballs, so no tables required.

The X68000 supports dual mice too? Interesting, since the aforementioned two-player Lemmings mode was something I previously thought exclusive to the Amiga and ST versions, and the ST handicaps the second player because they have to use a digital joystick on the second port; the system simply can't handle a mouse on it.

bakemono wrote:
X68 has the best FM synth, the YM2151. But FM towns has a big advantage for sample playback though, with 8x 8-bit channels. X68 […]
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FM Towns VS X68000. Is an interesting one, Towns had better CPU and CD-ROM. But X68000 has better graphics and sound hardware.

X68 has the best FM synth, the YM2151. But FM towns has a big advantage for sample playback though, with 8x 8-bit channels. X68 only has one 4-bit ADPCM channel which is not so hot. I tried porting my MOD player to the X68 and encoding ADPCM on the fly, as described in Inside X68000, but it sounded pretty bad 🙁

Same for the X68000/X68030. Nobody's really gone into much detail on their respective custom chips, though.

The X68 has chunky graphics (with 16bpp), planar graphics (4 bitplanes), character-mapped graphics (1 or 2 layers), and sprites (128). All at the same time. It's jaw-dropping for 1987. Still above average in the early '90s. I'd say the only weak point was the 32KB of memory for sprite/tile graphics, compared to 64KB that Sega and SNES had. The resolution topped out at 768x512 on a 31KHz monitor, or 1024x424 / 1024x848 interlaced on a 24KHz monitor (these are what the PC-98 used). Later models had a 50MHz pixel clock so it could do 1280x1024 interlaced at 31KHz. The chunky graphics were limited to 512KB of VRAM though so anything above 512x512 had to drop down to 16 colors for the chunky layer. Alternatively, the chunky layer could stay in 64K color mode but it would only cover a 512x512 window.

Hmmm, what else? The 64K color mode is not necessarily direct-RGB. The top and bottom bytes of the color go through a lookup table (just like they would in 8bpp mode) which makes it possible to do some color-cycling effects. And the other layers (text/sprite/BG) have a separate set of tables for their palette.

Eight PCM channels on the FM Towns? That's double what Paula could do! Sounds like one of the planned AAA upgrades, come to think of it, until Commodore decided R&D for upgrading their custom chipset was too expensive.

Maybe there's some tracker software out there that can utilize that particular aspect of the FM Towns sound hardware. Perhaps you've already ported one.

The X68000's graphics system does sound pretty crazy for the era, enough to put a typical Mac II graphics card to shame. Sounds almost like having SVGA/XGA years ahead of the PC market. As for the color lookup tables, that does make me wonder what sorta demoscene trickery could be done with it...

Scali wrote:
Well, for me the original Links was a "killer app". Or at least, it was a game that was widespread among PC gamers, just because […]
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NamelessPlayer wrote:

Links 386 Pro is something that would've been off my radar (it's a golf game), but it apparently was quite a killer app that pushed people to upgrade back in the day - something the PC would be known for repeatedly in the '90s as hardware got exponentially faster, and game engines eager to take advantage of it.

Well, for me the original Links was a "killer app". Or at least, it was a game that was widespread among PC gamers, just because of its graphics and sound. Nothing to do with golf I guess 😀
Links is also the game that popularized the RealSound(tm) technology: reasonably clean sample playback on the PC speaker using a clever PWM technique.
For me personally, the C64 and Amiga were all about clever programmers doing all sorts of hacks to exploit the hardware in ways that their original designers never anticipated, to get amazing graphics and sound out of the machine. Links is one of the first games that showed: Hey, you can hack the PC as well.

I've heard about developers basically bit-banging PWM out of the PC speaker to play samples in some earlier games, though it's not CPU-efficient at all to do so and still sounds worse compared to how the Mac does it (also software-based and basically done in the blanking period between display frames).

I never really encountered much of that, though; later games just gave you very basic beeps and bloops as a very crude fallback to not having at least a Sound Blaster. It was the '90s, so I experimented with these settings more out of curiosity than anything, which also led to my distaste for the infamous CGA cyan/magenta/white/black palette that made me wonder why anyone thought this was a good idea compared to what even a lowly C64 could do.

Scali wrote:
Yes, I only know the Video Toaster from magazines here in Europe. It was quite a success story for the Amiga, and it was amazing […]
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NamelessPlayer wrote:

I suspect that's because most of those were former Video Toaster systems - the one niche where the Amiga had any particular relevance in the US.

Yes, I only know the Video Toaster from magazines here in Europe. It was quite a success story for the Amiga, and it was amazing hardware and software for its time. But they only made an NTSC version, so its use in Europe, where we use the PAL standard, was limited.

I suppose this also goes the other way: most games and demos were developed for the European market, and targeted PAL systems. I wouldn't be surprised if various games didn't even work properly on NTSC Amigas. I know most demos do not. The timing is different, and the resolution and aspect ratio are different.
So the US experience with an Amiga would have been different to the European experience.

And you'd be right, on both accounts. It's skewed enough to the point where the American Amiga audience actually prefers to import PAL systems because of this, though you can switch modes in the Early Boot Menu on Kickstart 2 and later, and the A4000 has a hardware NTSC/PAL jumper.

I've even contemplated replacing the tube lock switch on the A4000 with something that runs to the NTSC/PAL jumper in question, since there are some cases where you want to run in NTSC mode instead (Mac emulation with the Emplant board, NTSC versions of games - yes, they exist, they just don't seem to be archived nearly as well as the PAL equivalents).

What makes things far more difficult is finding a compatible display. Our SDTVs never had SCART or a similar RGB interface, and despite the colors on the RCA jacks, component video isn't RGB and requires a transcoder. On top of that, they won't hold vertical sync and will likely cut off the top and bottom lines if you tried feeding them a PAL-spec signal, even if you got past the color encoding differences.

That leaves us with finding old 1080/1084 monitors (which do both modes without further adjustment if you dial in the vertical hold just right), adapting a PVM/BVM, or getting a scandoubler like the OSSC that will then let us use 31 KHz VGA monitors. None of these options are what I'd consider cheap; if anything, my PEXHDCAP/SC-500N1 capture card is more affordable than most dedicated displays.

Scali wrote:
NamelessPlayer wrote:

Good luck finding an affordable 68060 accelerator for either the A1200 or A4000 nowadays, though. The closest I can think of is the A3660 board - a modified A3640 that still inherits a bunch of the A3640's flaws like no on-board RAM - and those still cost hundreds of dollars fully-built!

I think the Blizzard 1260 and the Apollo 1260 ones are the most popular.

I saw an A1200 with a Blizzard1260 with SCSI attachment, an Indivision AGA, a RapidRoad USB, a Disk-On-Module as opposed to the usual CF card, upgraded Kickstart ROMs, a transparent A1200.net case, and other things I can't quite remember back at VCF Southeast 2018.

I knew that thing must've been worth well over $1,000 in today's crazy market just for being AGA with a 68060, certainly not something I could've afforded.

Keep in mind that I just saw an A1200 (UK PAL system, if the keyboard's any indication) sell here on eBay for $510 + shipping. Add the cost of a 68040 accelerator, and you're probably over the typical $600-800 eBay selling price of an A4000 already, even if said '040 accelerator is likely to not have the slower memory access problems of the A3640.

This really skews the value proposition toward big-box Amigas over here, for anyone who wants to go all the way with upgrading one. The only challenge might be finding A3000/A4000 CPU boards, seeing as most of these accelerators are European designs, and those machines weren't big sellers over there, with their lofty workstation-level price tags and lack of a PAL Video Toaster.

Scali wrote:
NamelessPlayer wrote:

Also on that note: I've noticed that most of the comparison in here is between IBM-compatibles and Amigas, never Macs and Amigas. Perhaps it's because you can just emulate a Mac on an Amiga, same 68k CPU and all, but nobody ever mentions color 640x480 being the standard on Mac ever since the Mac II brought color and NuBus to the platform. There's even games like Prince of Persia that look better on Mac than both the PC and Amiga versions because of this.

I would say it's because the Mac was never a popular gaming platform. Probably a combination of its niche market positioning and pricing.

That didn't seem to stop Bungie, Ambrosia Software, Pangea Software and a bunch of other developers one bit, and Mac gaming really hit its stride in the '90s as they tried to push into the consumer market with more affordable LC and Performa systems, as well as the usual trickle-down from old Mac IIs and Quadras being gradually replaced by Power Macs, in turn replaced by later Power Macs and especially the iMac.

The Macintosh may have been the minority compared to all the IBM PC-compatibles, but they did see home use here - far more than any Amiga model, even the 500. Kind of a shame, because the Amiga was clearly superior at the time and Commodore should have marketed it better, particularly toward the desktop publishing market that would have played to its graphics-oriented strengths and ultimately wound up becoming Mac-dominant because of the LaserWriter, PageMaker, and then QuarkXPress.

I still think it's worth bringing up the Mac just because a beefed-up Amiga can easily emulate one, though, and this means tapping into all of those '90s exclusives or multiplats that were generally better than the PC versions of the time (Wolfenstein 3D, X-Wing/TIE Fighter, maybe System Shock and Absolute Zero too?), as long as they don't require a PowerPC CPU. (Besides, a used Power Mac G4 or earlier is still far, far cheaper than even the Amiga 500 around here, often selling for under $100, even under $50 depending on what model you want, just so long as it's not the MDD or TAM.)

...Actually, that makes me think: why isn't there a version of UAE specifically tailored to old Power Macs that lets them run AmigaOS 4 quasi-natively like it currently does under WinUAE on x86 IBM-compatible descendants, and like the Amiga itself does to the Mac under ShapeShifter or Fusion? I mean, if they're not going to just let AmigaOS 4 run natively on a Power Mac anyway like MorphOS does, that's the next best thing.

dkarguth wrote:

IDK if someone has already mentioned this, but the Amiga 2000 series had ISA slots as well as zorro slots. This meant that you could install a bridgeboard that let your Amiga double as a PC. There were bridgeboards with processors all the way up to the 386 or 486 if I'm not mistaken. The drawback is that all storage peripherals (floppy drive, hard disk, and cd-rom) were completely separate from the Amiga drives, so it was more like having two systems crammed into one case.

I'm well-aware, and even thought about using mine as a space-saving measure to have a DOS PC with real ISA slots and an Amiga in one box... if it worked. Still haven't assessed why it's braindead ever since a friend returned it to me with some trace repair work done, and it'd at least see the CPU and boot before I left it with him, albeit unstably due to corrosion on the addressing lines.

If anything, the bigger problem is how crazy expensive those bridgeboards are, and how Commodore themselves topped out at just a 386, with third-party Golden Gate bridgeboards being the 486 examples. I guess the Golden Gates are like OrangePC boards to Apple's own DOS Compatibility Cards on the Mac side of things, except those don't give you ISA slots.

Also, for reasons I don't understand, some of the ISA slots are missing the 16-bit section of the connector despite the traces and vias being present. Having more 16-bit slots would certainly help with expansion if someone made a Pentium II-class bridgeboard or better, and unlike the later A3000 and A4000 with their mere 4 card slots, the A2000 has 7 slots, three of which are just Zorro II, two of which are Zorro II + 16-bit ISA (and your bridgeboard goes in one of those slots), and the final two are 8-bit ISA only.

This means you can deck out both the PC and the Amiga sides of the system a bit, and it's especially important in the A2000's case since there isn't a built-in hard drive controller at all, meaning you'll probably be using up a Z2 slot just for a period-appropriate SCSI card or a Buddha Flash IDE controller.

Reply 211 of 426, by brostenen

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Yes, the Amiga was a serious gfx workstation (if it was a bigbox machine), yet Commodore died too early. Like... Photoshop was not mature enough, and Commodore blew it by advertising it wrong.

Nothing wrong with the platform it self.

Don't eat stuff off a 15 year old never cleaned cpu cooler.
Those cakes make you sick....

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Reply 212 of 426, by Scali

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SpectriaForce wrote:

Lol, that sidecar is actually a PC XT that plugs into the A1000 😊

More or less. Just the bare essentials for PC compatibility. The display is still handled by the Amiga (which is why it integrates so nicely, as you can see in the video: the PC output is shown in a window on the Amiga desktop).
I have always wondered what came first though... If you study the Sidecar or the Amiga 2000 bridgeboards closely, and then compare them to the Commodore PC compatibles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_PC_co … patible_systems
You will find that Commodore developed their own ASICs (they are built by their own MOS factory), as one of the first PC clone builders. For example, they used their own floppy controllers, and their own mouse port (it was compatible with the Microsoft bus mouse, and used a regular 1352 Amiga mouse).
So I wonder if the Amiga compatibility came first, and they then made full PCs out of that... or if they were working on PC clones anyway, and the Sidecar is a spinoff of that project.
Given the timeline, the Sidecar seems to be the first PC compatible product that Commodore ever released.

http://scalibq.wordpress.com/just-keeping-it- … ro-programming/

Reply 213 of 426, by Scali

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NamelessPlayer wrote:

I've heard about developers basically bit-banging PWM out of the PC speaker to play samples in some earlier games, though it's not CPU-efficient at all to do so and still sounds worse compared to how the Mac does it (also software-based and basically done in the blanking period between display frames).

I never really encountered much of that, though; later games just gave you very basic beeps and bloops as a very crude fallback to not having at least a Sound Blaster.

Well, it was rather CPU-intensive (just as the Covox Speech Thing was), but as PCs became more powerful, it was no longer an issue. By the early 90s, demosceners were starting to port tracker music to PC, by using software mixing and then playing over PWM.
This was also used in various games, such as Pinball Dreams and Pinball Fantasies. The PC version basically just played the original Amiga mods on PC, via PC speaker, Covox, AdLib (yes, digital sample playback via a hack), or SB.
With a fast 386/486, the overhead of software mixing and PC speaker sample output became negligible.

http://scalibq.wordpress.com/just-keeping-it- … ro-programming/

Reply 214 of 426, by BushLin

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While an upgraded A1200/A4000 fulfills many 90s fantasies, if I was buying an Amiga today to play games it'd be the A500 with just a 512KB RAM upgrade and a virtual floppy which takes an SD card.
Just like old PC titles run poorly on newer hardware the developers didn't foresee, many great Amiga titles were coded to target the A500 and later ones were still mindful that this was where their market was.

Screw period correct; I wanted a faster system back then. I choose no dropped frames, super fast loading, fully compatible and quiet operation.

Reply 215 of 426, by Scali

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BushLin wrote:

While an upgraded A1200/A4000 fulfills many 90s fantasies, if I was buying an Amiga today to play games it'd be the A500 with just a 512KB RAM upgrade and a virtual floppy which takes an SD card.
Just like old PC titles run poorly on newer hardware the developers didn't foresee, many great Amiga titles were coded to target the A500 and later ones were still mindful that this was where their market was.

Indeed, there are a number of problems that plague compatibility:
1) Kickstart 2.0 and later are not 100% backwards compatible. Some games require Kickstart 1.x (1.3 being the most common, I don't know of any software that specifically needs an earlier version).
2) AGA is not 100% backwards compatible.
3) A lot of software assumes you are using a 68000 CPU at 7 MHz, and anything faster can throw off the timing, and break the software (especially using cached memory).

The Amiga 500+ and 600 suffered from 1), which could be solved in two ways:
I) You could use a SoftKick solution, where a Kickstart 1.x image was loaded in memory (costing 512k), and then the computer was restarted. This works quite well in practice, even on a stock 1mb machine, since most software that requires 1.3 is old, and doesn't need more than a 512k Amiga.
II) You could insert a real Kickstart 1.x ROM into the machine. You could use a hardware solution where you basically insert a small PCB with two Kickstart sockets into the original socket, have both the 1.x and 2.x ROM in there, and use a simple switch to select which to use. Best of both worlds.

The Amiga 1200 and 4000 suffered from all three issues. You could disable the CPU caches to slow the machine down, which worked in some cases. But some software wouldn't work no matter what you did.
Today, this is more or less solved by the WHDLoad project. Aside from just making software run from a harddisk, it also contains all the patches and workarounds required to make the software compatible with any Amiga configuration you can think of.

But why go through all that trouble when you can just get a real A500 with Kickstart 1.3 and 1mb of memory? That's the 'original', and will run all classic Amiga software out there.

http://scalibq.wordpress.com/just-keeping-it- … ro-programming/

Reply 216 of 426, by j^aws

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Infamously, Commodore snatched Jay Miner's Amiga from the hands of Atari in a last minute deal. So, does anyone think that in the hands of Atari, the Amiga platform would've done better? The Atari ST was blessed with standard MIDI ports, for example. Can you imagine Cubase et al also flourishing on the Amiga platform as well?

Reply 217 of 426, by brostenen

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j^aws wrote:

Infamously, Commodore snatched Jay Miner's Amiga from the hands of Atari in a last minute deal. So, does anyone think that in the hands of Atari, the Amiga platform would've done better? The Atari ST was blessed with standard MIDI ports, for example. Can you imagine Cubase et al also flourishing on the Amiga platform as well?

The way Jack Tramiel did business? Nope. The Amiga would have been a way different thing today if that happened.
On the other hand, it might have saved the Amiga well into today. Who knows. One thing is certain. No AtariST.

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Those cakes make you sick....

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Reply 218 of 426, by j^aws

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brostenen wrote:
j^aws wrote:

Infamously, Commodore snatched Jay Miner's Amiga from the hands of Atari in a last minute deal. So, does anyone think that in the hands of Atari, the Amiga platform would've done better? The Atari ST was blessed with standard MIDI ports, for example. Can you imagine Cubase et al also flourishing on the Amiga platform as well?

The way Jack Tramiel did business? Nope. The Amiga would have been a way different thing today if that happened.
On the other hand, it might have saved the Amiga well into today. Who knows. One thing is certain. No AtariST.

No ST, one less competitor. And the Atari Falcon was no hardware slouch either - also too little, too late for Atari.

Reply 219 of 426, by rasz_pl

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j^aws wrote:

Infamously, Commodore snatched Jay Miner's Amiga from the hands of Atari in a last minute deal. So, does anyone think that in the hands of Atari, the Amiga platform would've done better? The Atari ST was blessed with standard MIDI ports, for example. Can you imagine Cubase et al also flourishing on the Amiga platform as well?

I dont think original Amiga R&D team would of fared any different under Tramiels Atari. His most likely first order of business would be screwing them out of bonuses/firing ones unwilling to work for scraps. C128/CDTV definitely wouldnt of happened tho, and A600 would come out as A300(no stupid pcmcia) at old C64 price point. Oh, and HD floppy would be a thing (even C64 got its 1581 under Tramiel). I agree that Amiga descended hardware might of been a thing today under Atari, as an eight generation gaming console for example.

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