The Amiga: Why did it fail so hard in the United States?

[atarian63]

 

That's strange, especially since you're out east. There were at least 4 Amiga dealers in my nearest proximity, frequented them all and would typically see the entire line of machines setup on display. Even A3000's & A4000's, but no doubt there *was* a shortage of A1200's for a while. The one machine I remember being really elusive at the time was the A600, but "nobody" really cared. The overpriced and under-spec'd A600 was doomed before the ink had a chance to dry in the mags talking about it. So much for the low-cost replacement to the A500.

That was the one we sold quite a few of (a600), a1200 just sat , along with a3000 etc. CD32 at the end did zero as well. We brought it in as a novelty by this late date though.

[high voltage]

the UK and Europe.

BREXIT...sorry couldn't help it

[+save2600]

That was the one we sold quite a few of (a600), a1200 just sat , along with a3000 etc. CD32 at the end did zero as well. We brought it in as a novelty by this late date though.

 

Goes to show you the difference geography makes. Do you remember what you sold the A600 at back then? Since most/all dealers around me didn't carry it, was always at MSRP or a little higher ($300-$329) as they would have to order it. I'd occasionally ask about them in case there was ever a deal to be had, but there never was. Would have picked one up had they been priced appropriately and to me, that magic price point would have been $199. Maybe I would have went as high as $249 on the old credit card, but not a penny more. lol

 

And the cost for the machine with a 2.5" HD built in, forget about it. Totally cost prohibitive then and more expensive than a base A1200. Hell, when I bought my hard driveless A1200 at $600, had no qualms partially cutting the case to allow the ribbon cable to exit the rear into an external DataFlyer enclosure. After purchasing that AND an expensive 3.5" HD, was still cheaper than going with a laptop drive and was able to get more storage for the money too.

[zzip]

Perhaps if you're crunching numbers all day or prefer a game of Chess. For action packed games, you need some sort of custom chipset even if it is called SVGA and designed by a group of companies instead of just one.

 

In particular I remember the PC version of Pinball Dreams. It was ported by someone who didn't know much about PC hardware, and thus it was lagging terribly on a 25 or 40 MHz 386 with a decent graphics card, compared to the smooth flow on the original Amiga version running on a 7 MHz 68000. Back then we used to think that the Amiga was at least 4-5 times as good as a 386, but it didn't take longer until someone else ported the sequel Pinball Fantasies to see that the PC more than enough kept up with the old Amiga, and probably it was playable on a lower spec than a 25 MHz 386 too, simply because the second game was developed by a team who knew the hardware.

 

The common 386 systems did not have local bus connectors for video cards. Video cards were 8 or 16-bit width and plugged into the ISA bus which ran at a fixed 8.133mhz no matter what the CPU clock was. That's why PC systems of that era had sluggish video.

 

The 486 got the VESA and PCI local bus architectures. These were 32-bit slots that ran the same speed as the CPU external bus (generally 25/33/40 or even 50mhz in rare cases). This vastly improved video performance. When PCs got local bus video, it was another nail in the Amiga and ST's coffin.

[Keatah]

The x86 architecture moved slowly and one step at a time. This allowed for migration and piecemeal upgrades. That was a huge plus. It let people and business move at their own pace. The Amiga didn't support that style.

[juansolo]

BREXIT...sorry couldn't help it

 

 

Please don't remind me that that nonsense is still happening

[atarian63]

 

Goes to show you the difference geography makes. Do you remember what you sold the A600 at back then? Since most/all dealers around me didn't carry it, was always at MSRP or a little higher ($300-$329) as they would have to order it. I'd occasionally ask about them in case there was ever a deal to be had, but there never was. Would have picked one up had they been priced appropriately and to me, that magic price point would have been $199. Maybe I would have went as high as $249 on the old credit card, but not a penny more. lol

 

And the cost for the machine with a 2.5" HD built in, forget about it. Totally cost prohibitive then and more expensive than a base A1200. Hell, when I bought my hard driveless A1200 at $600, had no qualms partially cutting the case to allow the ribbon cable to exit the rear into an external DataFlyer enclosure. After purchasing that AND an expensive 3.5" HD, was still cheaper than going with a laptop drive and was able to get more storage for the money too.

Pretty sure it was $299 ish we sold quite a few but could not get a restock quickly at all, interest in Amiga was starting to wane due to pc's (sad), we has 1 to show 1 to go on a1200, both just sat there. The whole market was in transition seemed like. We all wanted the non pc stuff to soldier on but it was becoming obvious that was not going to happen..

[Celestron1]

On 1/27/2017 at 1:55 PM, Keatah said:

 

That was precisely my problem. During the weeks and months leading up to me getting the Amiga I rambled on about the processing power, the multi-chip custom chipset, the GUI, the whole package. I would have been THE perfect sale rep.

 

And then the bomb dropped. I bought the machine home, and tried desperately to impress my friends and even myself. I had like 1 or 2 commercial games, Marble Madness, and F/A 18 or something. And a couple of lame arcade game ports. I swear these ports could be written pixel for pixel, in BASIC, on a previous 8-bit machine. That bad. OR, perhaps, totally wasting what potential there was in the Amiga hardware.

 

I felt like a stage performer who had forgotten half the routine and was making stuff up impromptu. Nobody was laughing. And all I could do was push crap around on the desktop, show some hi-res pictures, and play some demoscene demos. Basically useless stuff. I was beginning to feel like I had been had.

 

And to make matters worse, my real work on the Apple II never transitioned smoothly to the new platform. And when it did, I couldn't find any application suitable for me. Word processing was actually smoother and faster on the II than this new state-of-the-art 16-bit rig.

 

The Amiga, unfortunately, didn't inspire my imagination with visions of science experiments and space travel. No space colonies, no fantasy lunar lander adventures. No astronomy or deep space adventures. Not like the Apple II and Atari 400/800 did.

 

I felt the Amiga had a lot of internal complexity and it was getting in the way of "pure processing". Simply too much excess baggage. And while a few years later I got an immensely more complex (by transistor count) 486 PC. I felt the PC was freewheeling. The processor power could be felt as 50MHz of number crunching force plowed through anything and everything. Fucking custom chipsets be damned. Do it in generic logic and software!

 

This is not a hate post. It is a post telling exactly how I recall and experienced the Amiga back in the day. If my experience was any different I would say so. The Amiga was good for one thing, for me, however. And that was the early paint programs in conjunction with digi-view digitizer. Not a game, not a wow! application. But quite intriguing to me at the time.

Late to the party, but true story here.  When I was a visual simulator engineer at the Johnson Space Center, I was asked to produce an icon tool bar to overlay at the top of the space shuttle (simulator) robotic control video monitors. So, the astronauts could view the (computer simulated) robotic arm through the monitors as they controlled the “arm” with a joy stick and selected operational functions from icons superimposed by the Amiga. Yup, around 1992, Amigas were part of the space shuttle simulator visual systems.  The package and support from Amiga (Commodore) were impressive. They provided C++ object libraries speeding the development of sprites and visual objects and the little computers were reliable.  Helping out the task of the object overlays was the availability of a side-car circuit board that provided a “green screen” effect; such that the Amiga would overlay visual objects over the shuttle simulator cargo bay video. This all worked really well. I don’t think Amiga marketing capitalized on this deployment one bit though

[Keatah]

It didn't. In my part of town we just had a couple of magazines to read. It was either games or high-priced hardware I could never afford. And I didn't learn of NASA having anything to with Amigas till years after the system became (naturally) obsolete. A shame.

 

I suppose all was not totally lost because I learned quite about about image acquisition on the platform. And used some of those skills while interning in electronics.

[chepe]

On 2/21/2017 at 4:19 PM, BillLoguidice said:

 

The Amiga 500 never included the RF adapter here in the US. Having been an owner of the A520 (I had a 10804S monitor, but wanted it to interface with other displays), at least on our US televisions, it absolutely wasn't worth the expense. Games were barely passable, but anything with text was an unmitigated disaster for obvious reasons. This was a monitor computer, plain and simple. Perhaps it worked a little better in PAL-land?

Perhaps, here in PAL-land most kids had TV's for their Amigas/ST's. They were cheaper and, well, could be used as TV's too. I saved up money and lobbied my parents a colour monitor though since my eyes were kind of a mess. Of course few used their computers to anything else than gaming. I liked to play strategy games and crpg's and stuff, and monitor made them so much better. Some of my friends thought I was weird because I wanted a monitor and commented how graphics with the monitor "looked too sharp"... ?

[chepe]

Maybe I could add perception of Amiga vs PC from other side of the pond: PC and Mac were horribly expensive in Europe during the '80s. Perhaps it was the tariffs or something. Ca. 1988, an XT would cost you about 10,000 Finnish Marks. Mac would set you back like 20k. By contrast, ST costed about 4000 Marks, and Amiga 500 was 5000. Sure enough, they did not come with monitor (which added maybe 1700 to the cost), or hard drive, but in home markets PC was not much of a factor early on. It was known here that Americans were more into PC's, but it was not well understood why - popular perception was that Americans were into dry, heavy-duty strategy games with crappy graphics and did not understood awesomeness of UK/European style shoot-em-ups.

 

But PC won as a gaming machine here too because people's tastes increasingly moved to 'American style' games. In the late '80s, 8-bit generation had grown up and scrolling shoot-em-ups were not going to cut it anymore. They wanted games like M1 Tank Platoon, Ultima VI, Secret Weapons of Luftwaffe, Civilization, Wing Commander...it was stuff which was no longer comfortable to play from floppy disks and RF television. By then every PC came with a hard drive. Even lowly EGA was actually better for playing this type of games because of superior resolution to Amiga/ST. When VGA equipped 386/386SX machines began to arrive, high-end gamers moved to them and never looked back. By then PC was already better playing 'grown-up' games than Amiga ever was. Those who wanted to play action games moved to consoles which were cheaper to buy and easier to set up. Sure the high-end PC's remained expensive but people coughed up money because the best games were there. Amiga and ST were left with either much crappier ports, or console style games.

 

In related subject, Commodore made a huge mistake with A1200 when it did not update mass memory. It had same 880kb double density drive as old Amiga and no hard drive. This was a huge limitation during an era when high-end games soon would require grocery bag amount of diskettes to install.

[zzip]

3 hours ago, chepe said:

It was known here that Americans were more into PC's, but it was not well understood why - popular perception was that Americans were into dry, heavy-duty strategy games with crappy graphics and did not understood awesomeness of UK/European style shoot-em-ups.

I don't think that was it at all.  It was driven by non-gamers.   People deciding that "If I'm going to spend all this money on a computer, then I want something that can run the same applications I use at work, so I can bring my work home".  Followed by the clone market where you could have all that, but for a much cheaper price than IBM would charge you.

 

Another factor if parents were buying computers for their kids, maybe they didn't find a C64 expensive, but in the 16-bit era, the Amiga was a much bigger investment.  I think parents said "If we're going to spend THAT much, we are going to buy a "real" computer".   By the time the cheaper Amigas showed up,  the PC was already becoming the dominant computing platform

 

PC's in the 80s were very weak for gaming, and I don't think they were anyone's first choice as a gaming system, at least not until the very late 80s/early 90s

 

[Hwlngmad]

1 hour ago, zzip said:

I don't think that was it at all.  It was driven by non-gamers.   People deciding that "If I'm going to spend all this money on a computer, then I want something that can run the same applications I use at work, so I can bring my work home".  Followed by the clone market where you could have all that, but for a much cheaper price than IBM would charge you.

 

Another factor if parents were buying computers for their kids, maybe they didn't find a C64 expensive, but in the 16-bit era, the Amiga was a much bigger investment.  I think parents said "If we're going to spend THAT much, we are going to buy a "real" computer".   By the time the cheaper Amigas showed up,  the PC was already becoming the dominant computing platform

 

PC's in the 80s were very weak for gaming, and I don't think they were anyone's first choice as a gaming system, at least not until the very late 80s/early 90s

 

Very much right on the money.  16-bit computers like the Amiga 1000 and Atari 520 ST were good computers, but were near the price range of PC compatibles.  And, even when cheaper systems like the Amiga 500 showed up, you had PC compatibles like the Tandy 1000 EX that were at the same price point, but with a ton more software.  Also, don't forget that PC compatibles means that companies like Packard Bell, Epson, and others entered the computer fray with their own PC clones, not proprietary machines.  That didn't help at all either.

[Keatah]

The modularity of the PC was a HUGE factor. All these options and features. Most of which could be added and changed piecemeal. This meant tons of flexibility and growth that could be had as necessary.

 

The standards and compatibility issue kind of took care of itself. 3rd party companies and clones saw this huge market or potential market - but in order to enter it, their product had to work inside that space. And that meant following certain rules. Drives and monitors made by various companies all had to have the same kinds of connectors. Videocards needed to be VESA compliant, or CGA/EGA/VGA compliant. Soundcards that were Soundcards that were SB compatible were also highly marketable. Without the willingness to follow a bottom basement standard, a product may well have not existed (in the market).

 

It was ok to push the envelope as long as you had that base compatibility. This what 3DFx did. Their cards were compatible with nearly everything thanks to the pass-through connector. A kludge, sure, but it was popular because you didn't have to trash your existing videoboard.

 

That is something the Amiga and ST didn't have. Changes to increase performance usually meant a whole new motherboard - which in itself posed other restrictions. Not to mention the cost of starting over.

[chepe]

I think modularity argument is perhaps overstated a bit. Sure enough, it's true, of course, but 'golden age' of PC modularity did not IMO began until the '90s. And by that time PC had already won, even as a gaming machine. Many of the IBM compatibles sold had custom made cases etc. and were not anywhere as easy to expand. And before plug & play era, getting new stuff to work under DOS was not always so straightforward.

[chepe]

5 hours ago, zzip said:

I don't think that was it at all.  It was driven by non-gamers.   People deciding that "If I'm going to spend all this money on a computer, then I want something that can run the same applications I use at work, so I can bring my work home".  Followed by the clone market where you could have all that, but for a much cheaper price than IBM would charge you.

 

Another factor if parents were buying computers for their kids, maybe they didn't find a C64 expensive, but in the 16-bit era, the Amiga was a much bigger investment.  I think parents said "If we're going to spend THAT much, we are going to buy a "real" computer".   By the time the cheaper Amigas showed up,  the PC was already becoming the dominant computing platform

 

PC's in the 80s were very weak for gaming, and I don't think they were anyone's first choice as a gaming system, at least not until the very late 80s/early 90s

 

As I said, I was comparing it to primarily gamer/hobbyist driven home computer market in Europe. So I guess the main question is, why didn't Amiga and ST break out in USA as gaming machines? Here, perception of PC was that it was an overpriced dinosaur with which you couldn't play proper games, only weird nerdy strategy games old guys liked to play. Only one of my school buddies had a PC as a home computer, everyone else had some Commodore machine and few had ST. It only began to change in turn of the decade, when Commodore generation had grown up and wanted something more advanced from their gaming machines.

I wonder if the difference is due to home computer revolution starting somewhat earlier in US. Maybe Amiga and ST had already missed their window in USA when they arrived and victory of PC and Mac was already inevitable.

[zzip]

10 minutes ago, chepe said:

Many of the IBM compatibles sold had custom made cases etc. and were not anywhere as easy to expand. And before plug & play era,

Only the PS/2's   They did this because they wanted to kill off the clone market.  But people largely rejected the PS/2s in favor of clones.   Oh and the PCjr, but that died a quick death too.    The original IBM-PC /XT/AT had a full range of standard ISA slots.

 

13 minutes ago, chepe said:

And before plug & play era, getting new stuff to work under DOS was not always so straightforward.

that was the price of owning a PC,  we just learned to deal with it.

[zzip]

3 minutes ago, chepe said:

I wonder if the difference is due to home computer revolution starting somewhat earlier in US. Maybe Amiga and ST had already missed their window in USA when they arrived and victory of PC and Mac was already inevitable.

Kind of this.   When the ST first released,  it made waves in the US, it was outselling the Amiga.   But the momentum didn't last.   Atari found that Europe and especially Germany was more fertile ground, and that's where they spent their marketing money.  

 

I'd say the PC looked inevitable in the US by 1988.

 

Also at some point the cost advantage flipped.   When the ST came out, Atari's slogan was "Power without the Price",  and they were certainly delivering on that.   But at some point it just became cheaper to deal with PC hardware when the economies of scale got going.

 

For instance, want to add a hard drive to your ST?   Ok, you need a third party HD Controller for $100 and up,  you need a more expensive SCSI drive (or else you need even more boards to convert it), you probably want the more expensive external drive.   And you need an expensive, proprietary ACSI cable, and you probably want to add a hardware clock while you are added so your timestamps are correct

 

Want to add a hard drive to a PC?   buy a cheap internal IDE drive with $4 ribbon cable.   Done!

 

Need more speed?  A higher-clocked x86 CPU that drops into your current Mobo was probably cheaper than any of the solutions that increased your ST to a measly 16mhz. 

 

[chepe]

Yes the hard drive availability was huge advantage for PC and became ever more so as programs and games become bigger and bigger. Programmers could count on user having a hard drive. By contrast for Amiga/ST, things were limited by disk drives because few people had hard drives. As long as things fit comfortably on DD diskette, it wasn't that big a deal. But even here Amiga and ST lost their price advantage when you had to start figuring in cost of the monitor (better quality games weren't great on TV, to say nothing about utility programs or coding), hard drive, memory expansion...everything which was cheaper to do on PC.

As I said, failure to update mass storage was a big mistake for A1200. By then Amiga was more or less doomed anyway, but being clearly so gimped in many respects compared to gaming PC's of the era was last nail on the coffin.

[Keatah]

16 minutes ago, chepe said:

I wonder if the difference is due to home computer revolution starting somewhat earlier in US. Maybe Amiga and ST had already missed their window in USA when they arrived and victory of PC and Mac was already inevitable.

 

Maybe. I used my Apple II+ and //e for gaming and productivity quite a bit from the late 70's to the late 80's. I appreciated the brand's staying power and stability. Something I hadn't felt with Atari or Commodore.

 

I also wanted to get the most out of the stuff I purchased. And that meant expanding and upgrading whatever I could. On the Apple II this would be addition of RAM, a Z80, modem, soundcard, clock, lowercase chip, 80-columns, extra drives and even a hard drive. The system grew around me and with me. Fine. An Atari 800 or C64 owner could do similar.

 

My upgraded system performed well enough in most all areas allowing me to skip over machines that came out in 1985-1991. At which point in time I got into the PC. It was a no-brainer at that point. The PC had slots exactly like my Apple II did. And I had nothing but success in customizing and expanding using those slots.

 

Granted I did succumb to getting an A1000 and A500 just for the graphics, as it was state-of-the-art at the time. But it fell by the wayside because I couldn't easily and cheaply expand the damned thing. And no I knew had one. Seems expansion was an exercise in falling down a rabbit hole.

 

I wanted to use a parallel port based Digi-View video digitizer. Got it. And it worked. When I switched to the A500 I found I needed a gender-changer to keep using it. And I had to give up using a parallel printer. Or switch cables or buy a switch box. As there was only one LPT port.

 

With the PC I could run a Snappy Digitizer (unofficially the PC version of Digi-View), a Zip Drive, and my old parallel printer. All because I could add-in extra parallel ports for like $25. No ABC switching needed.

 

With the PC I started out with a basic 1MB VGA adapter, using modes like 320x200, 640x480, 800x600, and a whopping 1024x768. With later cards I could do 1600x1200 and more. This easy expandability across several OS'es and generations of software was (to me) invaluable. And that included other features like 3D and new memory technologies and faster speeds.

 

 

 

[zzip]

16 hours ago, chepe said:

As long as things fit comfortably on DD diskette

That's the other thing,  even upgrading that to a 1.44mb disk was too expensive on the ST (not sure about the Amiga), and I think they were standard equipment on PCs by the late 80s

[ChildOfCv]

21 hours ago, zzip said:

 

21 hours ago, chepe said:

And before plug & play era, getting new stuff to work under DOS was not always so straightforward.

that was the price of owning a PC,  we just learned to deal with it.

Yep.  I remember changing the jumpers to choose ports, IRQs, and DMAs, especially on the Sound Blaster.  Early attempts at PnP were a disaster too.  We used to call it "Plug and Pray".  It took several generations to get that down to a usable level.

[Keatah]

Maybe the damn thing just sucked.

 

Regarding plug'n'play, I stuck with manually configuring or at least taking note of what the settings were what till the Core i3/5/7 rigs with PCIE came out. Playing with such settings was simply rolled into the cost of PC ownership and required learning if you were doing any kind of tinkering.

 

I don't think true-to-its-word "plug'n'play" happened till USB 2.0 worked out its bugs.

[Keatah]

5 hours ago, zzip said:

That's the other thing,  even upgrading that to a 1.44mb disk was too expensive on the ST (not sure about the Amiga), and I think they were standard equipment on PCs by the late 80s

 

I didn't even know they had 1.44MB for the Amiga. I can't imagine all the mods needing to be done to an A500 to make it work (back then). It's not like today where such an interface could be hobbyist-made with CPLD and micro-controllers.

 

The PC was much simpler and more versatile, not being locked-down by custom chips. Multi-I/O boards sold for like 20$ and supported all kinds and sizes drives and floppies. It's like the entire I/O subsystem was on a replaceable & upgradeable card.

 

And then they put a "Super I/O chip", generic name, on the mainboard while maintaining the versatility and option to add your own.

 

Extend that all to videocards and soundcards too.

Edited February 25, 2020 by Keatah

[+save2600]

49 minutes ago, Keatah said:

 

I didn't even know they had 1.44MB for the Amiga. I can't imagine all the mods needing to be done to an A500 to make it work (back then). It's not like today where such an interface could be hobbyist-made with CPLD and micro-controllers.

Amiga HD floppy drives actually handle 1.76mb... and require nothing more than a compatible drive and OS3.x. Maybe even 2.x come to think of it, as the A3000 came with a high density floppy. PC drives can be used with varying results and some third party software.