Early WORM drives and later MO drives were very cool when they came out. Unlike CDR and DVD-R MO media was protected and pretty much indestructible plus very reliable.

Scali wrote:

I wouldn't say it was a huge success, nor that it 'dominated' the gaming market. Initially the Amiga 1000 was a dud. It took the […]
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realnc wrote:

That didn't flop. It was a huge success and dominated the computer gaming market for years.

I wouldn't say it was a huge success, nor that it 'dominated' the gaming market.
Initially the Amiga 1000 was a dud. It took them 2 years to figure out that you need a low-cost machine (like the C64 was), and they finally launched the Amiga 500 to fill that niche.
...
Given the incredible technology that the Amiga housed, I would say it was the biggest flop ever.

You're out of your mind. The A500 was a huge success. Unless you were in the USA, I guess. But over in Europe, that thing was everywhere. A huge list of games. It was the #1 system for quite a while.

Saying it was a flop because it later disappeared is like saying the 386 CPU was a flop because no one uses it anymore. Or the NES; huge flop, it's dead now.

The Amiga 1000 was a flop for the same reason the original compact Mac was, a GUI with 256K of RAM is a joke.

The A500 was popular here in the US, just not as popular as the 10M+ units sold C64. Better consoles on the late 80's stole some of the Amiga user base. Back in the day I jumped from my C64 to a new 286 because of college, an Amiga was a non starter because of the Apps I needed. Since I have all the decent Amigas now I think they were better gaming machines then PCs until VGA games came around and side scrolling game popularity died down.

realnc wrote:

You're out of your mind. The A500 was a huge success. Unless you were in the USA, I guess. But over in Europe, that thing was everywhere. A huge list of games. It was the #1 system for quite a while.

I'm in Europe, most of my friends had PCs, only a handful had an Amiga (and some had an Atari ST instead). Pretty much all Amiga games were available in a PC version as well. Sure, the Amiga version was often better, but the PC version probably sold better, because that was the more popular platform.
I think part of the problem may have been that in the late 80s to early 90s, the first generations of office PCs were upgraded, and many employees could take their old PC home. That's how at least some of my friends got their first PC.

Compared to the C64, the A500 was nothing. Most of my friends had a C64 if they had a computer at all. And most of them moved to PC rather than Amiga.
Here are the sales figures: http://www.amigahistory.plus.com/sales.html
The Amiga 500 did relatively well (mainly in the UK and Germany, certainly not all of Europe), but everything else was certainly a flop (and I did say the Amiga as a whole).
The C64 sold between 22 and 30 million units, depending on who you asked (and that is just a single model, compared to an entire family of Amigas).
Or take the NES for example... almost 69 million units sold. Amiga's 4.8 million pales in comparison.
All in a time when the home computing/gaming market only got larger.
In fact, I see sources that claim the Atari ST sold 6 million units: http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=922
That would mean it even outsold the Amiga.
This article seems to support that the ST sold slightly better than the Amiga, in the early years: http://www.360doc.com/content/12/0124/10/2821 … 181627497.shtml
Combined with the fact that it stuck around longer, it could indeed have sold about as well as the Amiga, if not better.

So you basically just showed us the success of the Amiga, only to then call it a flop.

I don't get the logic here. It would seem that "flop" to you means anything that didn't absolutely crush everything else. That is NOT what a flop is. The Amiga was far, far, FAR from being a flop. It was a huge success. 5 million units sold? How is that not a success in the late 80's/early 90's gaming market?

There's a lot of successful systems with less sales than that. If you're looking for flops, look at stuff like VirtualBoy, Atari Lynx, Amiga CD32, Atari Jaguar, etc.

realnc wrote:

So you basically just showed us the success of the Amiga, only to then call it a flop.

The claim you made was literally "huge success".
The Amiga was a "moderate" success at best. But as I said, given its technical merits it should have obliterated the market. It barely made a dent.

realnc wrote:

How is that not a success in the late 80's/early 90's gaming market?

I have given two examples of huge successes: C64 and NES.
Both outsold the Amiga by a huge amount. Amiga is clearly not in the same 'huge success' category.

realnc wrote:

There's a lot of successful systems with less sales than that. If you're looking for flops, look at stuff like VirtualBoy, Atari Lynx, Amiga CD32, Atari Jaguar, etc.

You still seem to have trouble with the leap from "huge success" to "biggest flop".
Is everything black and white in your world?

Tiny CRTs. I don't know why, I just think they're hilarious and adorable. They're like reading one of those old sci-fi books where the author predicted a lot of the future trends vaguely right, but based it all off the technology of the era, and the end result comes across totally kitchy. I want to live in one of those worlds.

I'm still pissed that no one made a true multisync color CRT in the 5.5" cube format that was really common at the end of the '80s, that could handle both composite/s-video and VGA.

Also, digi-dashes in cars. Why did those go away?!

There was a late-'80s Oldsmobile Toronado (for you Europeans: floaty GM slug made before they discovered dampers) that had a touch-screen tiny CRT embedded in its digi-dash. I'm sure it was a terrible car in every respect but I want one just for that.

I guess the fully digital dashboards have gone away, but I still see digital instrument panels mixed in with the analogue gauges on modern cars.

Opel Astra GTE had it best, that digi-dash 😀

I only miss mainstream computer, that were part of your living room tv. Now it is a niche expensive market, like all in one computers in a keyboard and small desktop computer that look like a VCR, like MSX computers. Allso IBM model M and similar mechanical keyboards, now it is also a expensive niche market. I do not miss any old storage devices, and i think that soon all my retro and modern data will be on USB sticks.

CD-i anyone? No? Ok then! 😉

Actually purchased one fairly recently, with video cartridge, and still made me happy to see The 7th Guest and Lost Eden run that smoothly on a big TV and have an intro movie to Litil Divil. And the Zelda games are a thing to behold 😉

Digital dashboards are back on a lot of cars, actually, they're just displaying analog gauges with their LCDs in most configurations. (Then again, some digital dashes back in the 80s had simulated analog gauges, too.)

A Model M is cheaper today from Unicomp than it ever was from IBM, not adjusting for inflation. (Then again, it's cheaper, as in lower quality, than it ever was from IBM.) Adjusting for inflation, there's very few modern mechanical keyboards, even the high-end ones, that are as expensive as an IBM Model M.

Bernoulli Box. The principle of how it works is interesting. Once upon a time it was faster and more convenient than tape cartridges for backups, but not as well-known as later Iomega removable-media storage products.

realnc wrote:

What was a flop was the Amiga CD32.

Amiga 1200 - same: few software, short life-time, waning hardware from the start

Scali wrote:

So yes, the Amiga received quite a few games

It have received more than 1000 ones, what's not a few.

I doubt the Amiga was the best-selling platform for most games.

Amiga may be called as leading 16-bit home computer in USA and Europe from time of 500 model to ~1989 year. Even if there were more of IBM PC at homes, on hardware level they were lower and had worse game ports.

Well the Amiga 500 came out in 1987 so it did not have a lot of years to claim huge success specially because the x86 architecture started to scale really well and offering performance increases of great magnitude within each generation. The C64 started in 1982 and the best competitor it had in europe was the ZX Spectrum. The Spectrum was not popular in the US so that leaves the Apple II to compete in the US market. When the C64 was released the IBM PC world was business oriented, a totally different market so unlike the Amiga the C64 killed eveything else for home use. Good features and relatively affordable made it the computer of the day, not only in the US but also in the rest of the world.

Another reason that made the Amiga 500 a success in Europe was also the slow adoption of IBM PC compatibles in Europe. I think only in late 80's IBM compatibles started to really appear in mass but it wasn't still an impressive platform for gaming. So the Amiga did well for who could afford it and who couldn't was still running 8bit C64's and ZX Spectrums. Early 90's and PC's were now surpassing the Amiga and the open architecture just gave the Amiga no chance. Closed systems were doomed. Even Steve Jobs failed to understand this, blaming the Apple II for draining so much company money that should be invested in the Lisa first and Macintosh later while the Aplle II was the only thing that actually made money.

BTW, FM Synthesis a flop? WTF?

carlostex wrote:

Well the Amiga 500 came out in 1987 so it did not have a lot of years to claim huge success specially because the x86 architecture started to scale really well and offering performance increases of great magnitude within each generation.

Exactly. I think the 'golden age' of Amiga is very short, around 1989-1992 or so.
Early Amiga games were very poor, and after ~1992, the PC had clearly taken the lead, and many popular games were not even released on Amiga anymore (eg Wolfenstein 3D, but as early as 1990, Test Drive III was a PC-only title, where the first 2 versions were big games on Amiga).

carlostex wrote:

I think only in late 80's IBM compatibles started to really appear in mass but it wasn't still an impressive platform for gaming.

I tried to separate the two. Yes, the Amiga did generally have the best version of games... but the PC was quite popular despite the poor quality of the games. A lot of people didn't even seem to care. It never even occurred to many of my gaming PC friends to buy a sound card until I showed them my Sound Blaster Pro. They seemed to be fine with the PC speaker, didn't know any better. I was 'spoilt' by my C64 and Amiga, and even the Sound Blaster Pro was a let-down for me. At least it wasn't as bad as the PC speaker.

carlostex wrote:

Closed systems were doomed. Even Steve Jobs failed to understand this, blaming the Apple II for draining so much company money that should be invested in the Lisa first and Macintosh later while the Aplle II was the only thing that actually made money.

The problem with the Apple II was that the architecture was utter crap for getting it into the future with anything resembling backwards compatibility, due to too much being tied to being CPU-driven. This got to the point where the IIGS had a single-chip implementation of the //e chipset, and then a timing controller that essentially existed to slow the IIGS CPU down to 1 MHz for any I/O, or when the video controller wanted access to video RAM.

The IBM PC wasn't as bad off in this regard, even though the original PC still had a 14.31818 MHz master clock (this is one thing that hurt the Amiga - well, I think it was 28.63636 MHz there - a lot of platforms were screwed by running everything in lockstep with the graphics pixel clock, because they couldn't easily go faster than that), for two reasons. First off, one of the launch video cards shipped with an alternate crystal - the 14.31818 MHz crystal made CGA cheaper, but MDA had a 16.00000 MHz crystal instead - and second, the PC actually had interrupts, timers, and DMA for stuff, which discouraged doing everything by counting clock cycles. (And, it helped that it only took 3 years for IBM to start changing the clock speed, which quickly broke cycle counting. Meanwhile at Apple, because of cycle counting being the only way to do a lot of things, the Apple II was stuck at a 1.020 MHz (not 1.023, due to long cycles being added) fundamental bus speed forever. There were ways of accelerating it, of course, involving either a large area of fast RAM mirroring system RAM (or, in the case of the IIGS, in addition to the "slow" system RAM) (N9 Apple Booster, M-c-T SpeedDemon, Saturn Accelerator II, AE TransWarp, Apple IIGS) or caching (Zip Chip, Rocket Chip, AE TransWarp II, Apple IIc Plus), but you'd have to slow back to 1 MHz to do any I/O.)

I'm not saying that closed systems weren't ultimately doomed at that point - the IBM PC did, after all, become the basis for the Macintosh - but the Apple II was itself doomed. Steve Jobs was wrong about when it was doomed (and its openness was part of why it lasted much longer than expected), but it was still definitely doomed. (And, also, we're actually moving back to closed systems, and an Apple one is leading the way...)

In any case, the Amiga may not have been as doomed if the CPU side were decoupled more from the graphical side (although it looks like the A3000 achieved this decoupling), and if AGA had come out sooner.

bhtooefr wrote:

In any case, the Amiga may not have been as doomed if the CPU side were decoupled more from the graphical side (although it looks like the A3000 achieved this decoupling), and if AGA had come out sooner.

I don't quite agree with this assessment.
If you argue that the PC didn't encourage cycle-counting because it had a PIT... well, that goes much stronger for the Amiga.
The Amiga's custom chips could run completely independently from the CPU. You had two CIA timers (instead of the single PIT on the PC), and on top of that you had the copper, which meant that you never even bothered to do any cycle-counting on the CPU in the first place.
The Amiga also had the concept of fastmem and chipmem, so the decoupling was designed into the platform from the start.

The Holographic Versatile Disc (HVD). I remember back in 2005 or so they announced that the technology would hit 1TB/disc and 1Gbit/s transfer speeds in 5 or so years. It didn't flopped exactly since it wasn't even released on the market, but I'd love to see it anyways.

Wavetable synthesis, seriously.

So, Sound Blaster AWE 32 and various wavetable daughter boards eventually brought wavetable sound to the masses, and then non-Creative cards like Diamond MonsterSound MX300 and Turtle Beach Montego Quadzilla followed Creative's example to feature wavetable connector. Alas, it was also the time when Redbook Audio (and soon MP3 audio) was replacing General MIDI in games. Soon, nobody cared about MIDI anymore. 🙁

Scali wrote:

I don't quite agree with this assessment. If you argue that the PC didn't encourage cycle-counting because it had a PIT... well, […]
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bhtooefr wrote:

In any case, the Amiga may not have been as doomed if the CPU side were decoupled more from the graphical side (although it looks like the A3000 achieved this decoupling), and if AGA had come out sooner.

I don't quite agree with this assessment.
If you argue that the PC didn't encourage cycle-counting because it had a PIT... well, that goes much stronger for the Amiga.
The Amiga's custom chips could run completely independently from the CPU. You had two CIA timers (instead of the single PIT on the PC), and on top of that you had the copper, which meant that you never even bothered to do any cycle-counting on the CPU in the first place.
The Amiga also had the concept of fastmem and chipmem, so the decoupling was designed into the platform from the start.

I think the Amiga was doomed just as soon as the PC gained momentum. The platform itself could have survived and served as a niche, but there's just no way to counter an open platform where countless configurations are possible and compatibility is ensured the way it was on the PC.
I don't agree with Scali's sentiment that the A500 was a failure though. Maybe not as big a hit as Commodore hoped, but it was a force to be reckoned with and it took 16bit by storm. Its successors certainly flopped however. I have to agree though that generally, the Amiga platform flopped after the A500 days' where numbered. Commodore was in big financial trouble and could not support the platform properly and even ended up releasing some questionable products.

Anyone remember the CDTV for example? Also, the A1200 and CD32 are the really obvious flops, especially the CD32. AGA sure was nice, however I think using a cost-reduced and downclocked 68020 as your main CPU in 1992 was not a very smart move. There was also the A600 which was a direct descendant of the A500, that wasn't a big success either.