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


empsolo

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Let's not forget that what made the PC, in part, popular amongst the public was the fact that IBM had the foresight to make the PC an open platform and even going so far as to sell really extensive tech manuals to users. This made customizability much easier for users. Yes, it may have led to the death of IBM's commercial division but it helped to solidify the PC as a platform as pc clones started hitting the market.

 

 

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Edited by empsolo
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Let's not forget that what made the PC, in part, popular amongst the public was the fact that IBM had the foresight to make the PC an open platform and even going so far as to sell really extensive tech manuals to users. This made customizability much easier for users. Yes, it may have led to the death of IBM's commercial division but it helped to solidify the PC as a platform as pc clones started hitting the market.

 

 

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I think "foresight" is a strong word. It was more to do with a compressed time to market than specifically wanting to have an open platform (and we know that IBM tried to correct much of that "mistake" with the ultimately failed PS/2 stuff). It's also arguable that it was as much Microsoft as it was IBM that the platform succeeded in the way it did. Without Microsoft having the "foresight" to have the loophole to re-sell DOS, it wouldn't have made as much sense to reverse engineer the BIOS and create systems with limited compatibility (although those obviously did exist for several years, but certainly defeated a lot of the potential benefits versus a true compatible).

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I think "foresight" is a strong word. It was more to do with a compressed time to market than specifically wanting to have an open platform (and we know that IBM tried to correct much of that "mistake" with the ultimately failed PS/2 stuff).

 

I agree that it wasn't so much that they intentionally wanted an open platform, but it does go to show that open platforms have an inherent advantage in marketplace adoption. They just don't provide the *creator* of those platforms with much of an advantage, which is why you don't usually see fully open platforms. In hindsight, though, it had to be a difficult balancing act for IBM. If they'd locked down the platform further than just the BIOS, it may not have even lasted through the 80's and we might all be using Amigas right now. (Or more likely, we'd all be using Macs.)

 

I actually wouldn't call the PS/2 a "failure", though, in the same way the Amiga was. The PS/2 left behind plenty of standards that lasted until very recently or that we even still use. My desktop still has PS/2 and mouse ports, for example, and everyone's computer still supports VGA for backward compatibility - SVGA and other graphics modes built on that too. Some business-oriented computers even still have VGA ports for things like projectors. The PS/2 line also popularized the 101 key keyboard layout that is still the standard today. (This was actually introduced a little earlier as an option on the XT and AT, but it wasn't standardized until the PS/2.) So the PS/2's got more of a legacy than even a lot of *successful* computers. Its failure was in trying to completely rewrite the standards that IBM themselves had created, but in the end a lot of those new standards were adopted industrywide anyway.

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Well, here's what I observed back in the day:

 

1) I was totally ignorant of the Amiga. That and there wasn't much information available about it.

 

2) North America considered a computer to be something with a sharp display that was compatible with what you used at the office.

 

I'm guessing you can see right away why this would hurt the Amiga. And it did.

 

If I hadn't seen an Amiga at a friend's house, I probably never would have run out and purchased one for myself. It was only after getting a demonstration of what it could do and why that was important for what I want to work on that I felt the need to get an Amiga computer. The level of ignorance about the Amiga in North America was shocking considering that it was invented there.

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Remember what the US marketplace looked like in the mid-late 80s

 

high-end: Mac, PC

mid-end: Amiga, ST

low-end: 8-bit systems

 

The low-end was priced like game consoles. The mid end could cost you hundreds or even more than a thousand in some cases.

 

The Amiga and ST weren't considered computers for professionals except in limited Spheres (Music on the ST, Multimedia on the Amiga). I think the idea was if you were going to spend a lot of money on a computer, you might as well get a PC that ran the same apps you ran at work. Plus Stigma. Atari was seen as a game company, how could they possibly make serious computers? I'm not sure if Commodore had a similar stigma.

 

Also the thinking around 83-85 was that game consoles were dead and people should buy their kids a computer like the C64 or Atari instead. The Commodore 64 sold lots of units based on this thinking. The other assumption was C64 users would want to upgrade to an Amiga.

 

Then Nintendo proved that the console wasn't dead, and many of those 64 owners were actually using it as a game console only, and moved to NES.

 

Anyway, I think the Amiga and ST were pretty successfully their first couple of years. But after that PC clones came way down in price and could match Amiga spec-for-spec. That's when the writing was on the wall

Edited by zzip
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Okayyyy.... After reading some of these posts, it's time to clarify a few things about the North American market. I was using and selling PC hardware and software during the critical years that we're talking about here.

 

Many people seem to forget (or are told some kind of magical alternate history), suggesting that the PC was more capable than it really was in the early years. In fact, the PC began to be competition for the Amiga around 1990. And at that, only in some ways. The first thing is to ask yourself what you're using the machine for (games? O/S? data transfer? graphics? sound?).

 

 

Games:

 

- The PC from 1985 to 1989 was no competition for the Amiga in this arena (1990 was the beginning of the shift in advantage to the PC with 1992 being the killer with Wolfenstein 3D appearing on the scene for the PC).

- No, the NES and SMS did not make much of a dent on Amiga sales. They were too dissimilar. The Amiga was far superior and very different.

- Although the Genesis/MegaDrive was released in NA in 1989, it didn't really catch on until the release of Sonic in 1991. The Genesis and SNES made an impact on the Amiga to some extent, however many of the games on the Amiga were unavailable on the consoles of the day. The console and computer gaming markets were two different beasts back in the day.

 

 

Operating System:

 

- DOS and Windows 2 were no match for AmigaDOS 1.x

- Windows 3.x was no match for AmigaDOS 2.x. The PC didn't take a lead in the O/S department until Windows 95 (and even then AmigaDOS was far superior at multi-tasking and plug-and-play).

- Serial transfer speeds on the Amiga were far ahead of the PC until people started to upgrade to the 16550 UART. Most PCs didn't come with this as stock until the early 90s (keep in mind that modems were a big thing at this time).

 

 

Audio:

 

- The Ad Lib card was crap.

- The SoundBlaster card was also crap (noisy DACs and monophonic until the Pro in 1991).

- It was the SoundBlaster 16 that finally made the leap in 1992. Part of the issue with PC audio in the early 90s was a lack of decent software.

 

 

Number-crunching:

 

- This is where the PC excelled (no pun intended). The release of the first 386 PC in the latter part of 1986 was a clear processing leader.

- Note that few people could afford a 386. Most were still using XT and 286 systems -- even in 1989 (with a few using 386sx machines and fewer still using the DX).

Even with all that processing power, the O/S, sound, and graphics side of the PC was lacking. This was where finesse on the side of the Amiga had the advantage with the help of the custom chipset). The 386 had more power, but depending on what you were doing, you could see the CPU being bogged down with tasks that the Amiga's custom chipset would take care of easily. Contrary to what people in other parts of the world may think, customers in North America were price-conscious too and would settle for one or two notches down from the latest-greatest PC available at the time (in this respect, the PC clones and up-clocked older CPUs made a huge impact on what standards PC developers would write for).

 

 

Graphics:

 

- Yes, VGA came out in 1987. Now step into a time machine and ask around to see how many PC users had it (even in 1990). The lucky few that could afford it were in dire need of software that actually made proper use of it. Again in 1990, if you were lucky you might be able to use the 320x200 256-color MCGA mode (take a look at the hardware requirements of the software at the time). Amazingly, the best that most people were using in 1989 was EGA.

- VGA couldn't scroll smoothly. The Amiga could. This is fact. Aside from bitmap scaling, and still-frame color displays, VGA was lacking. The Amiga would continue to have the clear advantage in this department right up to around 1992 (and beyond if you include 3rd-party add-ons like the Video Toaster).

 

 

The year in which the PC began to take the lead is staggered depending on what kind of tasks you needed to complete. I distinctly recall the PC being horrible for audio, motion graphics, and O/S usage back in 1991. The Amiga made the PC look like a joke in every department except for placing the PC in a corner and making it crunch numbers. Businesses liked that and the North American computer market was mostly about business.

 

So when you see mixed opinions about the Amiga vs PC or consoles, be sure to ask the person when they discovered the Amiga. Those that saw it between 1985 and 1988 would have been blown away. Those who saw it in 1988 or 1989 would likely have been quite impressed. And those who saw it between 1989 and 1991 were probably not terribly impressed (unless they were working with desktop video, audio sampling, 3D computer animation, or image-editing).

 

For any computer to have at least a four-year wow factor is pretty impressive in that industry at that time.

Edited by Nebulon
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Well, here's what I observed back in the day:

 

1) I was totally ignorant of the Amiga. That and there wasn't much information available about it.

 

2) North America considered a computer to be something with a sharp display that was compatible with what you used at the office.

 

I'm guessing you can see right away why this would hurt the Amiga. And it did.

 

If I hadn't seen an Amiga at a friend's house, I probably never would have run out and purchased one for myself. It was only after getting a demonstration of what it could do and why that was important for what I want to work on that I felt the need to get an Amiga computer. The level of ignorance about the Amiga in North America was shocking considering that it was invented there.

 

The Amiga was advertised reasonably well in magazines and on TV in commercials in the US. What I took issue with at the time, and still do, is that the ads featured little-to-no substance as to why the Amiga was the superior choice for its first four years or so. Instead of focusing on its multi-tasking, AV integration possibilities, ability to run PC DOS, Macintosh, and C-64 software (with the right add-ons), etc., it instead took a soft sell approach most of the time. That obviously didn't work unless you already followed the computer industry closely.

 

Of course, we all know that Commodore was never that great with advertising and had other institutional issues that were working against a computer like the Amiga. I still argue that even if Commodore (or Atari with the ST series) executed perfectly, we'd still have the same PC dominance and same relative outcomes for the companies. Existing for a few more years really wouldn't have changed much.

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Okayyyy.... After reading some of these posts, it's time to clarify a few things about the North American market. I was using and selling PC hardware and software during the critical years that we're talking about here.

 

Many people seem to forget (or are told some kind of magical alternate history), suggesting that the PC was more capable than it really was in the early years. In fact, the PC began to be competition for the Amiga around 1990. And at that, only in some ways. The first thing is to ask yourself what you're using the machine for (games? O/S? data transfer? graphics? sound?).

 

 

Graphics:

 

- Yes, VGA came out in 1987. Now step into a time machine and ask around to see how many PC users had it (even in 1990). The lucky few that could afford it were in dire need of software that actually made proper use of it. Again in 1990, if you were lucky you might be able to use the 320x200 256-color MCGA mode (take a look at the hardware requirements of the software at the time). Amazingly, the best that most people were using in 1989 was EGA.

- VGA couldn't scroll smoothly. The Amiga could. This is fact. Aside from bitmap scaling, and still-frame color displays, VGA was lacking. The Amiga would continue to have the clear advantage in this department right up to around 1992 (and beyond if you include 3rd-party add-ons like the Video Toaster).

 

 

The year in which the PC began to take the lead is staggered depending on what kind of tasks you needed to complete. I distinctly recall the PC being horrible for audio, motion graphics, and O/S usage back in 1991. The Amiga made the PC look like a joke in every department except for placing the PC in a corner and making it crunch numbers. Businesses liked that and the North American computer market was mostly about business.

 

So when you see mixed opinions about the Amiga vs PC or consoles, be sure to ask the person when they discovered the Amiga. Those that saw it between 1985 and 1988 would have been blown away. Those who saw it in 1988 or 1989 would likely have been quite impressed. And those who saw it between 1989 and 1991 were probably not terribly impressed (unless they were working with desktop video, audio sampling, 3D computer animation, or image-editing).

 

For any computer to have at least a four-year wow factor is pretty impressive in that industry at that time.

 

I agree technically with what you wrote, but it assumes that multimedia features were the deciding factor for people's purchases. They weren't. Many people justified a PC purchase in the late 80s with "I want to run the same apps I use at work" or "my kid needs it for college". It didn't matter if they were stuck with poor CGA or EGA graphics, it had the apps!

 

And yes early VGA was very slow because of the ISA bus. It wasn't until local buses like Vesa and PCI came around 1992 that PCs could do fast graphics. That was the point that PCs became compelling to me anyway. 93-ish

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Let's not forget that what made the PC, in part, popular amongst the public was the fact that IBM had the foresight to make the PC an open platform and even going so far as to sell really extensive tech manuals to users. This made customizability much easier for users. Yes, it may have led to the death of IBM's commercial division but it helped to solidify the PC as a platform as pc clones started hitting the market.

 

 

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Well supposedly the higher-ups at IBM thought these new-fangled 'microcomputers' were a fad that would soon be over, so they created the PC as their answer to the market and didn't care about taking steps to maintain competitive advantage because, hey! The market will be over within 5 years ;)

Edited by zzip
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So when you see mixed opinions about the Amiga vs PC or consoles, be sure to ask the person when they discovered the Amiga. Those that saw it between 1985 and 1988 would have been blown away.

 

 

I saw it in 1987 when the A500 was released, and I was not blown away. I disagree with about 90% of your post. PC standards in the 80's were adopted very quickly, just as they are today. This is something people often forget about the past in general, how fast things moved. In memory, everything seems frozen in time, but when you look at the timeline of EGA in 1984, VGA in 1987 and SVGA in 1989, I mean that is lightning quick. It didn't take more than about a year for any of those standards to be adopted by manufacturers. For example, the ATI VGA Wonder 16 was actually released in 1988, before VESA even standardized SVGA (it was an SVGA card). The S3 911 and 924 were both released in 1989. This is how both of those companies became what they were in the 90's, because people bought those early SVGA cards and manufacturers used them in their machines.

 

What "most" people actually used in their PC's at the time I can't really say because most people used computers in those days for a lot longer than we do today. But in general I think it's pretty irrelevant; a lot more people probably used C64's than Amigas in 1990 too, but I don't see how that matters. The new PC's that were being sold had these new standards baked in after a very short time. By the time I got my first PC in 1993, the cheapest bottom of the barrel PC you could get would have SVGA support, and more than likely integrated into the motherboard. My PC cost about $600 in 1993 and it had it. That doesn't happen unless the standards were adopted long ago and economies of scale have kicked in.

 

If you want an indication of what was really out there, go and look right now at how many CGA monitors you can find on Ebay. VGA is not backward compatible, remember, so nobody bought a VGA monitor for their CGA computer - they had to have a CGA monitor. Now go look at how many VGA monitors there are and what years they started showing up. I myself have a VGA monitor from 1991 in my attic that was owned by the previous owners of my house - who were in their 70's! So average people were clearly buying VGA computers right from the start - CGA is relegated to "classic" machines for the most part, or very low end machines from about 1988 onward (like my Tandy 1000RL, but it at least had Tandy graphics in addition to CGA. You really just couldn't have a CGA-only machine on the market at that point).

 

EGA wasn't as common simply because there were only two years between CGA and VGA, so you wouldn't have seen a lot of EGA machines out there. Those that were released would have been upgraded to VGA quickly.

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The PC was nice in that you could rip out the entire graphics sub-system and replace it with a new chipset, new video ram, new ramdac, new firmware. And a shiny new monitor to go with it all. Within limits of course. You most likely won't put a monochrome adapter or cga adapter into a pentium II, now will you? But it would work. Nor would you benefit much from SVGA going into a 286. It would work, but slow, and for some applications it might actually be usable. Like viewing forensic imagery, it doesn't matter if it takes 2 seconds or 20 seconds to draw the image. Though I suspect a forensics lab would have the budget to get a proper 386/486 in the first place. Just saying..

 

And with all the new sound cards coming to market, you could do the same thing.

 

And in speaking of graphics, I discovered the Amiga through word of mouth on Apple II BBS postings in 1984/1985 timeframe. I was blown away by the purported capabilities of the custom chipset. It appealed to my vanity because I knew how much better Atari 400/800 and even "lowly" VCS games were compared to the Apple II. Those systems all had custom chips to make them better.

 

When the time came I discovered the Amiga to be a lousy games machine - mostly because there was no software available for it, and I didn't have any WaReZ buddeez that had the Amiga. But the Amiga was quite useful and educational when it came to me learning things like DeluxePaint and PhotonPaint and Digi-View. I wasn't disappointed at all.

 

I had the last straw with the Amiga when it came time to migrate all my Apple II text files and databases and stuff. It simply wasn't happening despite all the gymnastics. If it wasn't transferring over successfully, it wasn't importing, or converting. Something. Always fucking something. I had had it!

 

I went to the PC. And I was fully migrated in a day. All my graphics, all my text, all the database files. Bam! Done and done. There were multiple ways I could have done it, but I settled on method x. There were several conversion programs to pick from, but I settled on program y. I had like 6 different hardware solutions at the ready, I just arbitrarily picked a and b.

 

And just this past summer I archived something like 5 cartons of Apple disks via yet another 2 additional methods recently developed.

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I saw it in 1987 when the A500 was released, and I was not blown away. I disagree with about 90% of your post. PC standards in the 80's were adopted very quickly, just as they are today. This is something people often forget about the past in general, how fast things moved. In memory, everything seems frozen in time, but when you look at the timeline of EGA in 1984, VGA in 1987 and SVGA in 1989, I mean that is lightning quick. It didn't take more than about a year for any of those standards to be adopted by manufacturers. For example, the ATI VGA Wonder 16 was actually released in 1988, before VESA even standardized SVGA (it was an SVGA card). The S3 911 and 924 were both released in 1989. This is how both of those companies became what they were in the 90's, because people bought those early SVGA cards and manufacturers used them in their machines.

 

What "most" people actually used in their PC's at the time I can't really say because most people used computers in those days for a lot longer than we do today. But in general I think it's pretty irrelevant; a lot more people probably used C64's than Amigas in 1990 too, but I don't see how that matters. The new PC's that were being sold had these new standards baked in after a very short time. By the time I got my first PC in 1993, the cheapest bottom of the barrel PC you could get would have SVGA support, and more than likely integrated into the motherboard. My PC cost about $600 in 1993 and it had it. That doesn't happen unless the standards were adopted long ago and economies of scale have kicked in.

 

If you want an indication of what was really out there, go and look right now at how many CGA monitors you can find on Ebay. VGA is not backward compatible, remember, so nobody bought a VGA monitor for their CGA computer - they had to have a CGA monitor. Now go look at how many VGA monitors there are and what years they started showing up. I myself have a VGA monitor from 1991 in my attic that was owned by the previous owners of my house - who were in their 70's! So average people were clearly buying VGA computers right from the start - CGA is relegated to "classic" machines for the most part, or very low end machines from about 1988 onward (like my Tandy 1000RL, but it at least had Tandy graphics in addition to CGA. You really just couldn't have a CGA-only machine on the market at that point).

 

EGA wasn't as common simply because there were only two years between CGA and VGA, so you wouldn't have seen a lot of EGA machines out there. Those that were released would have been upgraded to VGA quickly.

 

Your post has more to do with product release dates than it does with reality. What you've stated does not accurately reflect reality.

 

PC standards were NOT adopted "lightning quick" as you say. There's clearly a gap in your memory of the time between 1987 and 1991.

 

VGA was not immediately adopted. It took years for it to reach critical mass and the software development of the time reflects this. My proof is in the sales numbers for the hardware and the software (of which plenty of PDF manuals and box images exist for you to go back and check the specifications on). Furthermore, very few people ran out and purchased a 386 when it first came out. The vast majority were still using 286 machines (or even XTs with CGA or EGA until around 1989).

 

The S3 and Mach-8 chipsets were garbage. Hardware-accelerated VGA wasn't refined until years later. I spoke to one of the engineers at ATI at the time and he admitted that they were struggling to match the abilities of the Amiga's blit operations. And again, it goes back to software support. How much PC software was actually taking advantage of the VGA and SVGA graphics modes. Show me a PC in 1989 that could scan, display, or even print 4096-color images. There weren't any.

 

Even in 1995, Plug-and-play didn't work properly for over a year. And up until the release of Windows 95, PCs had one of the worst memory management schemes in the world. Windows 3.1 was little more than cosmetic overlay on top of DOS. The industry was temporarily divided between whether to go with Widows or OS/2.

 

As for your comments about 1993, I don't disagree with you at all. In fact my comments fully support what you've said about 1993. By the time '93 rolled around, the PC had the lead. In fact I state that it was in the PC's favor by 1992 and already starting in that direction in 1990).

 

EGA was very very common and despite your erroneous logic regarding how many of which type of monitor you'll find on eBay, EGA was dominant standard from 1987 to 1989. You're not finding many CGA and EGA monitors because most either were recycled or went into the trash.

 

So, inversely, I disagree with 90% of your post.

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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.

 

 

You didn't like the port of Marble Madness on the Amiga? Really? Really?

 

Marble Madness Amiga:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKDbzqTFYF0

 

Marble Madness PC:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gIaDYXeS9o

 

 

What year was it that you got an Amiga?

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With this talk of early graphics chips, a minor factoid exploded in my head. So with great fear of going off-topic I'll make mention that the Riva-128 was the highest performing 2D chip readily available on the PC. It outperformed many, if not all, the offerings from Matrox, S3, ATI, Alliance, Cirrus, IBM, NEC, Toshiba, TSENG Labs, and more. Only high-end pro boards costing 5 and 10 grand from like Evans & Sutherland or SGI could compete in its 2D arena.

 

Successor chips like the TNT2 Ultra and GeForce series never reached the Riva's 2D performance either. The Riva-128 was best at home in Win98/DOS setups and was the fastest DOS-VESA card one could buy. OS'es after that started dropping support for "legacy" hardware. And new APIs and graphic standards like D3D / OpenGL were catering to new chips. What a sleeper!!

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You didn't like the port of Marble Madness on the Amiga? Really? Really?

 

Marble Madness Amiga:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKDbzqTFYF0

 

Marble Madness PC:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gIaDYXeS9o

 

 

What year was it that you got an Amiga?

 

Wait I minute. I *DID* like Marble Madness. It was other ports that I likened to be written in basic. I don't know how many crap defender ports or pac-man ports I'd seen. I don't even wanna call them ports, more like me-too remakes.

 

At the time there were so few games available (to me) that my hate was becoming overpowering. I couldn't escape it! It was embedded like WhiteCastle stench in my sweat.

 

I think I had the A1000 in Sept/Oct 1985. And later around late 1987, the A500. I'd have to check my diary, but suffice it to say I was an early adopter of both rigs.

Edited by Keatah
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Wait I minute. I *DID* like Marble Madness. It was other ports that I likened to be written in basic. I don't know how many crap defender ports or pac-man ports I'd seen. I don't even wanna call them ports, more like me-too remakes.

 

At the time there were so few games available (to me) that my hate was becoming overpowering. I couldn't escape it! It was embedded like WhiteCastle stench in my sweat.

 

I think I had the A1000 in Sept/Oct 1985. And later around late 1987, the A500. I'd have to check my diary, but suffice it to say I was an early adopter of both rigs.

 

Ah! Okay. Yeah, I totally see what you're saying on the bad ports. Even over and above ports there were soooo many very awful terrible games for the Amiga intermixed with the good ones that I can easily see how someone could walk away thinking that the games selection was crap-o. Let's face it, a lot of developers didn't know how to program the thing. Thankfully, in my case, I happened to see some genuinely impressive stuff on the Amiga the first time it was demoed to me.

 

As for the Riva.... Yup, we sold zillions of those cards. That and the Voodoo series.

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Yup, just to keep it in perspective I remember distinctly the PC market literally taking off around the VLB timeframe (1992).

Up until then I remember dog slow (S)VGA (OAK OTI077 anyone) or the masterpiece Tseng Lang ET4000 (introduced in 1991).

Wolf3d is a 1992 game, Doom came out Dec 1993.

The Amiga 500 was sold starting in 1987 (but likely until a price drop of 1988 wasn't as enticing [i am not referring to the UK batman bundle here, there was a drop before that]. ... I explicitly remember that time as the price drop itself (around 25%) made it possible for me to afford one, the shop was closing down and gave me the exact same specimen that not 1 week earlier had the old price ... and they threw in all floppies they had ... quite a deal at the time).

 

I remember clearly using it mostly for gaming (in EU the Megadrive wouldn't be sold until late 1990 .... so SMS/NES stood no chance).

In 1992 the A1200 came out but it was not exactly cheap.

 

Around 93/94/95 the pace of innovation on the PC market was furious and I was "updating" the rig every 2 months or so ... the final coffin was when I managed to put a Mach64 VLB (released in 94) on my 486 and show Lightwave 3D on it to my Amiga friends (taunting their A3000), their jaws floored wrt quick rendering, 16M color support etc.... I believe at the time the best Amiga gfx accelerators were Cirrus Logic based 5426/28/30 if memory serves.

Needless to say in 1996 moving to PCI and installing a 3dfx Voodoo and showing off Tomb Raider was in an on itself the greatest stroke of ego I ever had .... I repeated the exploit in 98 with a dual SLI Voodoo 2 .... honestly just because I could .... I stopped wasting money since but for a moment I was the only guy in town with an SLI setup .... again stroke of ego and nothing else. In a way I am grateful I don't have to update that often anymore!!!

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For me, I'd say that a lot of it came from using a PC at work, and naturally using one at home for play. I was more into BBS'ing at the time rather than gaming, so the DOS platform wasn't any problem. I hadn't even *heard* of Amiga until I attended a Allen-Bradley PLC programming course and the instructor was lamenting the folding of Amiga. We just looked at each other and wondered "What the heck is an Amiga?".

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ok, that's it. I'm going to put my asshole hat on:

 

Sigh, I just #@(@% love it when people who weren't doing professional computing chime up about how the machines like the Amiga and ST were "mid-end" machines compared to the PC and the Mac.

 

Do I really need to beat some facts into you, from someone who _KNEW_ the low level hardware better than most of you?

.. J

In terms of systems strength, the Amiga was competing not only against PCs, and the Macintosh (of which, only had AT MOST 512K of RAM in a fat-Mac, pre-Mac-Plus), BUT ALSO WORKSTATIONS, of which THEY ALL were utilizing a public tax-payer funded design by Andy Bechtolsheim, called the Stanford University Network computer (SUN). The companies who commercialized these things, Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, and others were using either variants of this architecture, or had built similar hardware on the same 68000 based microprocessor (Apollo comes to mind).

 

As 1985 approached, these machines had been upgraded to the 68020, most running at approximately 10-12MHz, and the 68030 would be announced during the summer of 1985 as a "micro-mainframe"... Just as the Sun-1 had been defined by the 68000, the Sun-2 by the 68020, the Sun-3 machines would be defined by the 68030. Sun would, at this point shift all of their research and development expenses toward the SPARC CPU and S-Bus architecture...but I digress...

 

These workstations were not available for mere mortals, as most people didn't have $20,000 of spare 1985 dollars floating around.

 

I am only posting the above as exposition, because many of you simply have never used these machines professionally to do real computing work.

 

------------------

 

So what did these machines give you?

 

The workstations had a nominal "megapixel" resolution, usually anywhere from 1152x900 to 1280x1024, or somewhere in between. These machines had 1-bit framebuffers, black and white pixels, and could barely move those pixels around, the framebuffers were bound to the speed of CPU to memory transfer, as they had no DMA for the video (it was deemed more important to maximize disk performance, and improvements in this area would come via companies like Silicon Graphics, who would not only implement 2D blitters for their graphics terminal and early IRIS workstation designs, but also future revisions of the SUN workstation (there was a blitter available in some models of the Sun-2 and Sun-3 line, but even then, these devices would only transfer maybe 3 and a half megabits per second across the Multibus.. VME bus devices fared better, but such was the result of innovation.)

 

The Mac, and PC had considerably less resolution, and were considerably slower, due to their bus designs. The original Macintosh had a 16 to 8-bit multiplexer which added wait states to memory access. This would not be fixed until the Macintosh II.

 

The Amiga, on the other hand, could move 4 megabits of data per second, equating to 1 million pixels, or a bit more than a standard 640x480 display, this was with 16 colors, and it had logic that did all of this, utilizing many parallel DMA channels, something that the workstation market would exploit independently, but with a much smaller base of customers, and therefore a smaller cost of part per volume ratio, they would have to charge much more for higher performance designs, than Commodore did, with its ability to sell directly to the large scale consumer market.

 

The Amiga, as it was in 1985 had the graphics speed to show video at a consistent 30 frames per second, at 320x200, in its HAM mode, of 4,096 colors, something that Eric Graham would demonstrate with Juggler, which was rendered to disk using his Spherical Geometry modeler. It had the ability to display many graphic resolutions, move data to and from custom chips with little or no CPU intervention, and thus kept the processor free for serious number crunching, and at 7.14MHz, (or 8MHz as in the Mac or the ST), these chips could do more per clock cycle, than the somewhat equivalent 80286 at the time, at 10MHz. '

 

So really, the Amiga, as it was introduced in 1985, was a WORKSTATION, dressed up in personal computer clothes. It gave so many the power and features of a workstation costing 10 times as much.

 

So please, STOP MUDDYING UP YOUR FUZZY ANECDOTAL VISIONS OF COMPUTING BY MIXING IN A BIT OF 1989, 1993, 1994, with 1985. It's aggravating, and incorrect, and only serves to further the idiotic marketing perceptions.

 

(With that said, you guys are right on other things, e.g. the cost of third party hardware due to similar reasons that I mentioned above for the workstation vendors)

 

-Thom

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just walked into this and here's my 2 cents remembering back

 

perception

 

The Amiga, as it was in 1985 had the graphics speed to show video at a consistent 30 frames per second, at 320x200, in its HAM mode, of 4,096 colors, something that Eric Graham would demonstrate with Juggler, which was rendered to disk using his Spherical Geometry modeler.

 

 

https://youtu.be/V_zuSrjRMWk?t=279

 

jumping quotes out of context

 

gary- "why do you like the amiga better than the IBM PC or a Mac or something like that"

lou- "well I could say its more fun, and it is that, but it is also more productive"

 

how do they demonstrate this? couple games, who brings them, the damn district manager of commodore

 

over half their sales pitch to a tv show is dedicated to a menace and battle chess, oh yea it multitasks and has a 123 workalike spread sheet and some other shit

 

ugh

 

I could play a reasonable game of battle chess and run a spreadsheet on the 8 bitter we already had, and that was an apple so you know the graphics were minimal and the sound was non existant, but that was pretty much the same on all 8 bit platforms ... but I could also play a pile of 16 bit games on my 189$ sega genesis released the same year as the video above

 

we like many people had quite the investment in our older 8 bit machines doing a fine job, for us it was 1994 before we upgraded computers, and by then commodore was shutting down house and a 486DX2/66 cd rom packard bell was less than a 2500 in price with a better monitor, and basicly on par tossing in a color inkjet hp printer

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My partner's dealership was in a University town.
We sold a dozen 3000 UX machines tops.
Several Amigas were sold to them with Video Toasters.
And a handful of profs bought them.
Meanwhile, the on campus Mac dealer sold a steady stream of machines including for entire labs filled with them.
Almost no one accepted the Amiga as a workstation outside of for video production.

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