Amiga 1000 - Too Expensive at Introduction or not Priced High Enough?

[MrMaddog]

5 hours ago, zzip said:

A "multimedia PC" was at mimimum just a 386 with VGA 640x480, a 1X CD-ROM and 8-bit sound card and a small hard drive..   Although they did raise the specs of that over time

True dat...  The CD-ROMs took full advantage of the specs but most games from the 386 era still had EGA graphics and PC speaker sound.  There were exceptions like graphic adventures & serious simulations that fully used VGA graphics and Sound Blaster cards.

 

But until the 486's truely took off, the Amigas & ST's were still better for late 80's-early 90's computer gaming...

 

[zzip]

16 hours ago, MrMaddog said:

True dat...  The CD-ROMs took full advantage of the specs but most games from the 386 era still had EGA graphics and PC speaker sound.  There were exceptions like graphic adventures & serious simulations that fully used VGA graphics and Sound Blaster cards.

There some games that used Ad-lib for sound, (but didn't support SB).   Since Adlib is bascaily a music synth,  the games would have these musical sound effects that were kind of weird.  But at least it still beat the harsh PC speaker sound!

[Geoff Oltmans]

I love these types of discussions. ha

 

I was an avid Amiga 500 user back in the late 80's/early 90's. I think midway through the 500's lifespan is the point (in the US at least) that the Amiga really gained a lot of popularity, which is not really saying much. ha. I think I recall reading that the Motorola dropped the CPU costs which helped drive down the costs of the Amiga quite about the time we got one. My parents paid about $500 for one at WaldenSoftware when it was still around. It didn't include a monitor so I was stuck with smeary composite video with the included 520 adapter on the hand-me-down composite video monitor from the TI 99/4A, then Commodore 64, then Amiga. We got a used Commodore 1084 a couple years later used but was still over $200 if memory serves.

 

By the time you added mass storage and a 1084S monitor, you were pretty solidly into PC money territory. But, it did for a while have better video and sound capabilities at a cheaper price point. It was pretty clear to me when I saw Wing Commander running on a PC with VGA and a sound card that the Amiga's days were numbered.

[Keatah]

5 hours ago, Geoff Oltmans said:

It was pretty clear to me when I saw Wing Commander running on a PC with VGA and a sound card that the Amiga's days were numbered.

I knew my Amiga days were numbered when my old man got a 286-12. And software for it being was being sold everywhere. Further cementing the finality was seeing the 386 come out and watching it climb the speed grade ladder. Each rung a hammer blow to the Amiga's stagnating 7MHZ 68000. 12, 16, 20, 25, 33, and finally 40MHz. The 486 came out and swept it away.

 

I didn't know much about the 386, just that the platform's performance was leapfrogging my Amiga 500 a-left anda-right.

[Daedalus2097]

And that's to be expected, given the A500 was released in 1987 and probably cost a tiny fraction of what that 486 cost. It's just a shame so many Amiga users weren't into upgrading the way PC users were. And a PC (with a hard drive and monitor) for the same cost as an A500 with a hard drive and a monitor in 1990 won't have been a particularly great Wing Commander experience.

 

There are trade-offs here and there of course, but considering CPU power, the Motorola families generally kept pace with the Intel CPUs - at a given clock speed, a 68030-powered Amiga could match a 386, an '040 Amiga a 486 PC and an '060 Amiga a Pentium PC. Graphics capability was a different story, as most people went for poorly-expandable machines because they were cheap instead of expensive machines that could be fitted with graphics cards like the PC. The Amiga's advantage gradually turned into a disadvantage when VGA started to become affordable in the early-mid '90s (a VGA card in 1990 cost more than an A500 for example), and people were still clinging onto their A500s.

[zzip]

15 hours ago, Keatah said:

I knew my Amiga days were numbered when my old man got a 286-12. And software for it being was being sold everywhere. Further cementing the finality was seeing the 386 come out and watching it climb the speed grade ladder. Each rung a hammer blow to the Amiga's stagnating 7MHZ 68000. 12, 16, 20, 25, 33, and finally 40MHz. The 486 came out and swept it away.

 

I didn't know much about the 386, just that the platform's performance was leapfrogging my Amiga 500 a-left anda-right.

Seemed like everytime in the late 80s, I'd open a Compute! magazine and see all these PC clone ads,  one month they have 10mhz PCs, next month they are selling 12mhz,  then 16mhz..  etc   It was happening so fast!   Definitely  felt like I was being leapfrogged.

 

But CPU clock speed is only one piece of the puzzle.   It took PCs several years to fully catch up in other ways 

[Keatah]

On 11/30/2022 at 11:25 AM, Geoff Oltmans said:

By the time you added mass storage and a 1084S monitor, you were pretty solidly into PC money territory. But, it did for a while have better video and sound capabilities at a cheaper price point.

Yes I generally agree. The Amiga was better out of the box. A wow point even. Look! At! This! Though I began to feel the hard limitations after having had it for 1-2 years. There wasn't any apparent (at least to me) method by which to upgrade video memory or sound capabilities. This sort of ability was present in PC since forever and the expandability would allow for evolution to happen.

 

My 486 was certainly unimpressive in the AV department when I unboxed it. The DOS gaming goodness would come later. But I was utterly blown into the 21st century with the speed of the first IDE drives and the goodness of Windows 3.1. A real OS for real tasks. I was doing serious work within the 1st hour of powering it up. Everything just made sense.

 

(Always seems like a solid useful computer costs about $1000 - $1600 no matter what..? Paid about that for the Apple II and disk dive. Paid about that for a recent i7 build.)

[Keatah]

On 12/1/2022 at 9:03 AM, zzip said:

Seemed like everytime in the late 80s, I'd open a Compute! magazine and see all these PC clone ads,  one month they have 10mhz PCs, next month they are selling 12mhz,  then 16mhz..  etc   It was happening so fast!   Definitely  felt like I was being leapfrogged.

There was even a time I told myself I would not buy a PC till it all settled down. Ha! We're still going at it today.

 

But I never felt like I was being left behind. I reasoned that whatever I bought when I bought it, that that would be that. The fact that software was backward and forward compatible softened the impact of tech moving forward. I could still run Pentium 60/66 software on my 486. And 386/486 software on future hardware. In fact I've got a piece from that era that I still use today on the latest Win11 i9. Not for sentimentality reasons. But just because it works and its featureset suits my pretty little ass just fine'n'dandy.

 

On 12/1/2022 at 9:03 AM, zzip said:

But CPU clock speed is only one piece of the puzzle.   It took PCs several years to fully catch up in other ways 

That statement sounds to me like Amiga was some sort of standard and something to aspire to. I don't believe that being the case. I don't recall any PC advertisements comparing a new piece of hardware to be just like the Amiga. But I do remember several ads comparing Amiga to PC. Like running PC software or being compatible with certain databases. Or just putting in a PC-compatible bridgeboard. From the outset it seemed Amiga was aspiring to be PC-like!

 

Amiga fans tend to bring up in Amiga vs PC discussions that PC's hardware was not game/graphics oriented. That's just OOTB. They don't always acknowledge that PC was making strides. That it was in motion and developing new capabilities every year.

 

One needn't look further than the early MHz improvements, the video standards moving from CGA-EGA-VGA-SVGA, the Adlib and SoundBlaster boards. Everybody knows CGA and VGA and SoundBlaster.

 

And while I knew of PC's expandability I didn't completely understand the implications. I was so conditioned by 8 & 16 machines to not expect much. Yet turned out to be critical.

[Keatah]

 

 

On 12/1/2022 at 7:05 AM, Daedalus2097 said:

And that's to be expected, given the A500 was released in 1987 and probably cost a tiny fraction of what that 486 cost. It's just a shame so many Amiga users weren't into upgrading the way PC users were.

We were into wanting to upgrade. Make no mistake on that.

 

I clearly recall wanting to install a 7-14MHz upgrade kit. I was swimming in my head reveling what a 2x speed Amiga would be like. Everything'd be just so cool. Double the framerate in Flight Simulator. Half the time to finish a Digi-View image. The possibilities were limitless in what I was psyching myself up for.

 

In some Amiga publication, AmigaWorld maybe, I found this 14MHz kit. It was from a company I never heard of. It was something like $129 or $149, IDK. And it said it came with everything necessary. 14MHz 68010 processor and other hi-speed parts.

 

So I ordered it and it was essentially set of bare chips. The 68010 was socketed. So I put it in and nothing happened, then I put in the crystal and nothing happened either. Still dead. I didn't feel like desoldering chips for fear of fucking it up. So I just called it quits. The documentation was lousy and just didn't explain a damned thing. I just wanted to upgrade my rig. Not spend hours doing risky (to me at the time) soldering.

 

On the PC side of things we had these socketed chips that were like 1:1 replacements making a 486/33 a 486/133. Just like that, a simple plug in! And of course there were FPU upgrades. Most mobos had a co-processor socket. Came with VHS video tapes on how to do it. Test software. And all were forward/backward software compatible. These were products like Kingston TurboChip, CCT 486-586. PNY QuickChip 133, TrinityWorks PowerStacker 5x86, VisionTek Extreme CPU, Intel Overdrive and RapidCAD, Blue Lightning, 386-to-486, Evergreen 486 Upgrade, and more. And later sockets would support multiple speed grades from the get go. Took a PII 266 to PIII 1.4GHz on the same motherboard via a PowerLeap PL-iPT3. So many options. And Apple II had stuff too, like RocketChip and Zip-Chip. Most importantly all of these were available at local computer stores.

 

Believe me I so wanted to upgrade my Amiga, but the parts just weren't available. And the 500/1000 weren't upgrade friendly. A "no user serviceable parts inside" consumer class product.

 

On 12/1/2022 at 7:05 AM, Daedalus2097 said:

There are trade-offs here and there of course, but considering CPU power, the Motorola families generally kept pace with the Intel CPUs - at a given clock speed, a 68030-powered Amiga could match a 386, an '040 Amiga a 486 PC and an '060 Amiga a Pentium PC.

I tend to agree. But that wouldn't work for me. Too much hardware (read all of it) would need to be changed out in one fell swoop. And same thing with the software.

 

Much of my PC upgrading has been done piecemeal. Parts of my first 486 rig ended up in the Pentium III 1.4GHz I still keep today. And along the way I would temporarily cannibalize one machine and then when I could afford the proper part (to make a matched machine) I would return the part back. Moving from a 486 to Pentium II, I kept the sound card, video card, HDD, keyboard, and other odds and ends. ISA videocard till I could afford an AGP one. ISA soundcard till I could get a PCI one.. And even then that old ISA board was displaying stuff faster than ever! Amiga would not permit such piecemeal ridiculousness.

 

On 12/1/2022 at 7:05 AM, Daedalus2097 said:

Graphics capability was a different story, as most people went for poorly-expandable machines because they were cheap instead of expensive machines that could be fitted with graphics cards like the PC. The Amiga's advantage gradually turned into a disadvantage when VGA started to become affordable in the early-mid '90s (a VGA card in 1990 cost more than an A500 for example), and people were still clinging onto their A500s.

In 1992 I was able to get mid-grade SVGA card from STB (big name back then) for either $169 or $199. And it felt totally professional in every way. Worked with a 50MHz 486 through 1.4Ghz Pentium III and all in-between.

 

When I got my A1000 in fall of 85 I placed zero emphasis on graphics cards. I barely even knew what one was. I was still in the Apple II world where things that plugged into slots were all about adding new features and not speed. With PC graphics speed was always upgraded with each new card.

 

All in all I may have been happier in the Amiga World if I didn't try to upgrade the machine. If I didn't pay so much to the promises made in magazines.

[Daedalus2097]

And there's the thing. PCs, expensive as they were, were designed to be upgraded piecemeal. So were Big-box Amigas, and both commanded a high price. But CPU, hard drive, sound, graphics upgrades for them both were more or less plug and play (moreso on the Amiga than PCs of the era). Upgrading a "home computer" is generally going to be a more problematic proposition. Upgrading by pulling chips isn't ideal, but it was also extremely easy to end up with a dead PC by upgrading chips - Cache memory, CPUs, FPUs weren't always in ZIF sockets at that time. And such upgrades were usually crippled by the lack of fast RAM, unless the upgrade included that on the board too.

 

That said, the A500 offered a much better way of upgrading the CPU through the side expansion slot. Naturally, because this is a full external device, they were more expensive, but there was nothing (other than perhaps cost) preventing the easy addition of far faster CPUs, lots of RAM and a hard drive. With the possible exception of having to upgrade the Kickstart chip if you had an early A500, it could all be done externally, no soldering, no pulling chips. Just plug & play.

 

An SVGA card for $199 in 1992 is probably pretty reasonable, the prices were tumbling dramatically around then. For example, a VGA Wonder 1MB for example was $399 at launch in 1991 and $219 by mid-1992, and the predecessor model with 512kB in 1988 was $699.

[Keatah]

As much as I love ragging on the Amiga it was still an informative and trailblazing system - in how I learned to do some things that carry over to today. Mostly on the application front. Not all was lousy.

 

7 hours ago, Daedalus2097 said:

And there's the thing. PCs, expensive as they were, were designed to be upgraded piecemeal. So were Big-box Amigas, and both commanded a high price.

I would tend to agree. I spent mega$ on the Apple II at the time and lucked out. The ecosphere would officially live from the late 70's through the mid-90's. And then beyond (like most micros) via hobbyist contributions. Along they way I would do many upgrades and expansions. The supply of software was like a tanker truck making its weekly visit.

 

7 hours ago, Daedalus2097 said:

But CPU, hard drive, sound, graphics upgrades for them both were more or less plug and play (moreso on the Amiga than PCs of the era).

I don't think I ever got excited over plug'n'play hardware. It just sort of happened, and I was happy when it worked. Was always prepared to mess with Berg jumpers and switches. But these days I fully expect everything to be 100% PnP. Naturally.

 

With so little upgrading happening in the world of my A1000 & A500, it didn't really matter.

 

7 hours ago, Daedalus2097 said:

Upgrading a "home computer" is generally going to be a more problematic proposition. Upgrading by pulling chips isn't ideal, but it was also extremely easy to end up with a dead PC by upgrading chips - Cache memory, CPUs, FPUs weren't always in ZIF sockets at that time. And such upgrades were usually crippled by the lack of fast RAM, unless the upgrade included that on the board too.

I tended to think of pulling chips, soldering Kynar jumper wires, or inserting daughtercards onto the motherboard to be at the extreme limits of upgrading. I personally wouldn't have gone any further back in the day. It wasn't too bad on the Apple II as instructions and documentation were  comprehensive. Pulling a RAM chip to connect the 16K card strap, swapping ROMS for upper/lower case,  swapping the keyboard encoder daughtercard, or soldering in a Shift-Key wire all came off without a hitch. As did installing the enhancement kit. Thanks to the superb hand-holding instructions.

 

A think I always ask myself when conducting modifications like those is, "Can I immediately reverse this step if I needed to? And how?" If the answer was no I simply wouldn't proceed without professional assistance - which was almost never.

 

7 hours ago, Daedalus2097 said:

That said, the A500 offered a much better way of upgrading the CPU through the side expansion slot. Naturally, because this is a full external device, they were more expensive, but there was nothing (other than perhaps cost) preventing the easy addition of far faster CPUs, lots of RAM and a hard drive. With the possible exception of having to upgrade the Kickstart chip if you had an early A500, it could all be done externally, no soldering, no pulling chips. Just plug & play.

Partly agree here. Cost could be mitigated and worked around by getting a summer job or something. But the availability of parts or complete solutions was next to impossible in my part of town. That was the main detractor by far, availability.

 

To put it mildly I was slaphappy and thrilled that I got the A501 and shortly thereafter a real bonafide 2400 baud modem that worked with the makeshift terminal software I got from some obscure source. Those were plug-ins of course. But that's all that was around here. Hard drive - mail order sight unseen. CPU accelerator - mail order sight unseen. Just wasn't happening. Half the ads I read were more like coming-soon previews. I wasn't sending $249 to a company I hadn't heard of before or had no in-store representation locally to me.

 

Meanwhile 6 miles away on the other side of town I would get stuck in traffic jams caused by having 3 bigboxes kittycorner to each other. Each one having a full 1/4^th of its floorspace packed with PC stuff. Aisles and aisles of peripherals of every possible design. Shit stacked so high you had to call an employee to come with those rolling safety ladders to get it down. HDDs. Modems. Faxes. Buffers. Printers and supplies. Routers. NICs. Game controllers. Memory kits. CD-ROMs. Graphics cards. Sound cards. A section of power supplies. 10 different kinds of keyboards. 20 different types of mice. The side wall sporting 25 different computer models. The back-end stacked high in monitors, of which all were in operation so you could compare on the spot. And half of all that was full of boxed software. In between everything would be small shit like cables and speakers and disks and drives and more cables. And wedged in there, somehow, would be a shelf of parallel/serial cards and SCSI interfaces and IDE extender boards. Underneath some shelving were beige cases, the big bulky stuff. At the checkout counter they had USB JumpDrives and all the under $10 stuff. Particularly omnipresent were those Norton or McAfee AV subscription kits or free AOL disks. Near the service counter (which was a vibrant microcosm in and of itself) might be a locked case with various speed grades of 3 generations of processors, 386-486-Pentium, and their respective drop-in replacement/upgrade kits. Motherboards too. And other hi-dollar small items like pocket digital cameras maybe. Across from the software section was a mini-library, books on every topic. One could stand there as long as they wanted and read the stuff - with the option to purchase it. Popular titles covered Windows, DOS, Office, Database, Word Processing, Spreadsheets, C, HTML, OS/2, BASIC, Upgrading & Repairing Your PC, This'n'That for Dummies, hint books, The Norton Bibles, and 30 different magazine publications to round it all out. It was like somebody had bought out a grocery store and replaced the food with tech. Every store was trying to outdo the other. Then it would spill into the parking lot for weekend summer specials!

 

That sort of thing simply did not exist for the Amiga.

[jhd]

12 hours ago, Keatah said:

Meanwhile 6 miles away on the other side of town I would get stuck in traffic jams caused by having 3 big boxes kitty-corner to each other. Each one having a full 1/4^th of its floorspace packed with PC stuff. Aisles and aisles of peripherals of every possible design. 

[...]

12 hours ago, Keatah said:

That sort of thing simply did not exist for the Amiga.

 

While I grew-up in a smaller city, the same principle applied. I did not know anyone with an Amiga, and I do not recall there being any local retailer that stocked them.

 

There was a small Atari dealer and at least one small Apple dealer (that mostly served the business market), and everything else was PC hard- and software.

 

I was (and still am) reluctant to buy something expensive via mail-order; if I could not purchase it at local retail, it simply did not exist in my universe. Sadly, the Amiga fell squarely into that category.  

 

 

[zzip]

On 12/3/2022 at 12:09 AM, Keatah said:

There was even a time I told myself I would not buy a PC till it all settled down. Ha! We're still going at it today.

 

But I never felt like I was being left behind. I reasoned that whatever I bought when I bought it, that that would be that. The fact that software was backward and forward compatible softened the impact of tech moving forward. I could still run Pentium 60/66 software on my 486. And 386/486 software on future hardware. In fact I've got a piece from that era that I still use today on the latest Win11 i9. Not for sentimentality reasons. But just because it works and its featureset suits my pretty little ass just fine'n'dandy.

At the time, I had just gotten an ST, so seeing the PC clone market ramp up the clock speeds so rapidly gave me anxiety about being left behind.

 

On 12/3/2022 at 12:09 AM, Keatah said:

That statement sounds to me like Amiga was some sort of standard and something to aspire to. I don't believe that being the case. I don't recall any PC advertisements comparing a new piece of hardware to be just like the Amiga. But I do remember several ads comparing Amiga to PC. Like running PC software or being compatible with certain databases. Or just putting in a PC-compatible bridgeboard. From the outset it seemed Amiga was aspiring to be PC-like!

 

Amiga fans tend to bring up in Amiga vs PC discussions that PC's hardware was not game/graphics oriented. That's just OOTB. They don't always acknowledge that PC was making strides. That it was in motion and developing new capabilities every year.

 

One needn't look further than the early MHz improvements, the video standards moving from CGA-EGA-VGA-SVGA, the Adlib and SoundBlaster boards. Everybody knows CGA and VGA and SoundBlaster.

 

And while I knew of PC's expandability I didn't completely understand the implications. I was so conditioned by 8 & 16 machines to not expect much. Yet turned out to be critical.

I would expect a good number of Amiga owners bought it because they were enamored with the system's multimedia capabilities.   So "catch up" would mean when PCs could match or exceed those capabilities.

But that took time.   On paper, the VGA standard in 87 exceeded the Amiga's capabilities,  but in practice not quite.  They were expensive and took some time to go mainstream and for the software to catch up.   Also graphic card performance on the ISA Bus was not great.  Soundblaster in 89 was another step where PC could produce digital audio just like the Amiga, but games were still using Adlib for some time.    It was the early 90s when the PC gaming scene exploded producing compelling original titles.  Prior to that PC was mostly getting inferior ports of Amiga/ST games.

[Keatah]

6 hours ago, jhd said:

There was a small Atari dealer and at least one small Apple dealer (that mostly served the business market), and everything else was PC hard- and software.

I clearly remember there being at least 12'ish Apple II dealers in my area. 1 or 2 were withing bike riding distance, the rest needed a 1/2 hour car ride. But they were bonafide Authorized-by-Apple shops. A Compu-Shop or two. Northbrook Computers, and a selection of generically named outfits that were just getting out of the era of desk-sized micros - think S-100 systems, North Star Horizon, CP/M setups, Cromemco, ProcessorTechnology, Compucolor, Morrow, digital, Vector Graphic. Just flip through a 1978 edition of Byte to see what I mean.

 

I got most of my Atari computer stuff from department stores, toy stores, Sears and JC Penny, or Minnesota Fats.

 

6 hours ago, jhd said:

I was (and still am) reluctant to buy something expensive via mail-order; if I could not purchase it at local retail, it simply did not exist in my universe. Sadly, the Amiga fell squarely into that category.  

I didn't have trouble or qualms about mail-order if it was from something well known like HeathKit. It was the companies I never heard of that deterred me. And rightfully so.

 

Now with Amazon, for example, I don't care what I buy. I can simply drop it off at UPS or Khol's for a complete hassle-free refund and exchange.

 

I still will not and never will support a crowdfunded thing or any kinda kickstarter.

 

I will buy expensive items through mail-order or online if I've been able see enough reviews or have watched someone dick'round with it on youtube.

 

I did order my first 486 through the mail. Paid via Money Order if I remember correctly (I'd have to look at the invoice). When PC parts were being sold grocery-store style I got most of them in person. It was the thing to do. We even planned outings and shopping sprees.

 

And as performance improved, things became more specialized and slowly became only available on-line. This was happening as early as 2002. I remember looking for an Asus Pentium-4 motherboard, and my best option was online. I also remember having gotten a Pentium 90 Micronics board, this through an industrial supplier pre-2000's.

 

As PC parts proliferated and speeds increased more and more frequently, the retail model couldn't handle it all, not without risk of having tons of unsold stuff laying around. Online direct from mfg or on-demand distributor became the only practical means. Can you imagine bigbox getting stuck with hundreds of NICs because everyone in the area has what they need? Now times that by hundreds for all the other parts.

Edited December 5, 2022 by Keatah

[zzip]

36 minutes ago, Keatah said:

I didn't have trouble or qualms about mail-order if it was from something well known like HeathKit. It was the companies I never heard of that deterred me. And rightfully so.

The thing that deterred me most from mail order was "Allow 4-6 weeks for delivery".   Kids today wouldn't believe that was a thing.    I didn't have the patience.   Only if I absolutely couldn't find it locally

[Keatah]

6 hours ago, zzip said:

At the time, I had just gotten an ST, so seeing the PC clone market ramp up the clock speeds so rapidly gave me anxiety about being left behind.

I don't think I had anxiety or envy when it came to the clone market ramping up. It was more like the PC was moving in the direction I wanted. Doing celestial mechanics or generating ephemerides on an Apple II worked because it was better than paper and scientific calculator. Doing it on an 8086+8087 was 10x better. And on a 286+287 even more better. What could take hours, was reduced to 1 or 2, then half that, and half that again. By the 486 it would happen in near realtime. And i9 today? Faster than realtime - meaning thousands of charts per second, while idling - not that that's useful or anything. Just say'n.

 

It was this sense of progression and growth the Amiga was lacking. That the PC was evolving was evident when the 8086 became a 286, yet retained compatibility via MS-DOS.

 

6 hours ago, zzip said:

I would expect a good number of Amiga owners bought it because they were enamored with the system's multimedia capabilities.

I certainly was. And I enjoyed the popular paint programs of the time. I thought the blitter was god-like magic. It was something I hadn't really heard of before. Imagine having a custom made IC that could move parts of the screen around instantly while the CPU up and up did something else on its own. Nothing like it was available on the PC. It was a foreign and impossible concept on the Apple II. And the Atari 400/800 only hinted at such capabilities. I wasn't disappointed with the Amiga Chipset. Only frustrated later as there was no upgrade path.

 

When I bought my graphics card for the 486 I didn't even think about any advanced graphics features or giving up anything I got used to on the Amiga. I had to prepare myself to take a downgrade in everything but the resolution and color depth. And that's all I paid attention to. The CL-GD5422 chip does have a bunch of advanced features and blitting and all that. It just wasn't advertised much. Eventually software would use more and more of it. Then software would exceed the capabilities, then I was on the lagging edge, time to upgrade. Now hardware exceeds the software.. Back and forth. Back and forth. The cadence turned feverish for a while but has since settled and stayed that way.

 

6 hours ago, zzip said:

   So "catch up" would mean when PCs could match or exceed those capabilities.

But that took time.   On paper, the VGA standard in 87 exceeded the Amiga's capabilities,  but in practice not quite.  They were expensive and took some time to go mainstream and for the software to catch up.   Also graphic card performance on the ISA Bus was not great.  Soundblaster in 89 was another step where PC could produce digital audio just like the Amiga, but games were still using Adlib for some time.    It was the early 90s when the PC gaming scene exploded producing compelling original titles.  Prior to that PC was mostly getting inferior ports of Amiga/ST games.

When it came to sound I didn't care much. SB16 was good enough and remains so. My best legacy PC has SB AWE64 in it. In any case today's onboard audio exceeds anything I ever dreamed about. And its free! Hopefully graphics will (somehow magically) be that way too.

 

I do remember buying a SoundBlaster 16 from Wal-Mart in-store. Paid just under $200 for it. I would eventually upgrade it with the ASP chip and the WaveBlaster MIDI daughtercard. Still have it today.

[Keatah]

16 minutes ago, zzip said:

The thing that deterred me most from mail order was "Allow 4-6 weeks for delivery".   Kids today wouldn't believe that was a thing.    I didn't have the patience.   Only if I absolutely couldn't find it locally

The waiting wasn't a problem. Many times I'd forget about it and go launch model rockets or play with my trucks in the mud or something. Then all of a sudden a package arrived and it was a surprise all over again!

 

Nowadays we get instant SMS reporting every stop a package makes along its overnite trip 2U. With 15-minute alert that a delivery is about to happen.

 

[zzip]

16 hours ago, Keatah said:

And that's all I paid attention to. The CL-GD5422 chip does have a bunch of advanced features and blitting and all that. It just wasn't advertised much.

And I don't think it was used as much as we think.   The Windows drivers made it available to the OS APIs, but I always wondered if all the drawing features these cards advertised were used.  In DOS at that time, there was no unified way to access hardware acceleration.   Later toolkits came along like SDL that promised hardware acceleration in a cross-platform way, but everything needs to be set-up just right on the end-users PC for it to work or else it defaults to software.

 

That was one of my frustrations with PC early on,  I'd buy cards based on specs and features and then it seemed those features were underutilized.   For instance, I'd always be annoyed when the generic business desktop PCs at work would have better drawing performance than my well researched and hand-picked video card.  Then there was stuff like MMX/3D Now which they made quite a bit of noise about when it came out, but it seemed like very little software actually used it, at least in the beginning.

 

16 hours ago, Keatah said:

When it came to sound I didn't care much. SB16 was good enough and remains so. My best legacy PC has SB AWE64 in it. In any case today's onboard audio exceeds anything I ever dreamed about. And its free! Hopefully graphics will (somehow magically) be that way too.

A multi-channel sound card like AWE64 would free your CPU from doing audio mixing,  and that was not insignificant in those days.   I had an SB16 and GUS ACE in my 486.  Using the SB16 would always make the CPU load higher-  maybe as much as 20% when playing multichannel tracks.   There'd be almost no CPU load playing the same thing on the GUS.   In gaming this could make a big difference depending on how much audio mixing they needed to do.

 

So I never considered SB16 to be good enough, it was just baseline that guaranteed compatibility with just about everything

 

The onboard audio today is relatively boring compared to the soundcards of old.    However because CPUs are so fast, it's expected to just use software for mixing or emulating the OPL3 or wavetable synths of the past

 

17 hours ago, Keatah said:

I do remember buying a SoundBlaster 16 from Wal-Mart in-store. Paid just under $200 for it. I would eventually upgrade it with the ASP chip and the WaveBlaster MIDI daughtercard. Still have it today.

I had the ASP model as well, I bought it because it sounded like a cool thing to have,  but it was yet another thing that seemed underutilized.   I think maybe the Creative "environmental effects" used it (which I thought were pointless and I never used).  It never seemed to be used by anything else

 

17 hours ago, Keatah said:

The waiting wasn't a problem. Many times I'd forget about it and go launch model rockets or play with my trucks in the mud or something. Then all of a sudden a package arrived and it was a surprise all over again!

 

Nowadays we get instant SMS reporting every stop a package makes along its overnite trip 2U. With 15-minute alert that a delivery is about to happen.

Yup,  and you wonder why your package keeps getting shipped back and forth between Kentucky and New Jersey instead of being delivered to you

 

[Keatah]

2 hours ago, zzip said:

And I don't think it was used as much as we think.   The Windows drivers made it available to the OS APIs, but I always wondered if all the drawing features these cards advertised were used.  In DOS at that time, there was no unified way to access hardware acceleration.   Later toolkits came along like SDL that promised hardware acceleration in a cross-platform way, but everything needs to be set-up just right on the end-users PC for it to work or else it defaults to software.

Pretty sure the most of the 2D chips between 1992-1995 were marketed as Windows Accelerators with Win3.1 (and perhaps Win95) in mind. They had registers and routines and functions for drawing lines and boxes of the user interface, right on the chip. I don't think they had anything for generic VGA acceleration.

 

Drivers definitely sped up drawing of the UI elements in Win3.1. Applications could also use them to draw content inside each window, and they did. Windows also needed chipset drivers to gain access to higher color depths and resolutions.

 

2 hours ago, zzip said:

A multi-channel sound card like AWE64 would free your CPU from doing audio mixing,  and that was not insignificant in those days.   I had an SB16 and GUS ACE in my 486.  Using the SB16 would always make the CPU load higher-  maybe as much as 20% when playing multichannel tracks.   There'd be almost no CPU load playing the same thing on the GUS.   In gaming this could make a big difference depending on how much audio mixing they needed to do.

It'll be interesting to run some tests with SB16 enabled/disabled.

 

2 hours ago, zzip said:

So I never considered SB16 to be good enough, it was just baseline that guaranteed compatibility with just about everything

I don't think I knew any better. Any speedup efforts I undertook were graphics focused.

 

2 hours ago, zzip said:

The onboard audio today is relatively boring compared to the soundcards of old.    However because CPUs are so fast, it's expected to just use software for mixing or emulating the OPL3 or wavetable synths of the past

I don't know exactly what they do today. But I guess it's all digitized samples and mixing between channels. Seems like a lot of trouble to go through recreating or expanding on the complex standards of the past.
 

2 hours ago, zzip said:

I had the ASP model as well, I bought it because it sounded like a cool thing to have,  but it was yet another thing that seemed underutilized.   I think maybe the Creative "environmental effects" used it (which I thought were pointless and I never used).  It never seemed to be used by anything else

That and some speech synthesis/recognition tasks. There were also some enhanced codecs written for it. None of which went anywhere.

 

2 hours ago, zzip said:

Yup,  and you wonder why your package keeps getting shipped back and forth between Kentucky and New Jersey instead of being delivered to you

I always prefer to think it got stuck between packages when sorting. Or it fell out of the bin onto the floor of the truck and not detected till later. Or one machine read the zip code wrong, while another does likewise. Thus the package ping-pongs between the distro centers - until you call the local supervisor who then initiates a search and the package is delivered a week later.

[zzip]

3 minutes ago, Keatah said:

Pretty sure the most of the 2D chips between 1992-1995 were marketed as Windows Accelerators with Win3.1 (and perhaps Win95) in mind. They had registers and routines and functions for drawing lines and boxes of the user interface, right on the chip. I don't think they had anything for generic VGA acceleration.

 

Drivers definitely sped up drawing of the UI elements in Win3.1. Applications could also use them to draw content inside each window, and they did. Windows also needed chipset drivers to gain access to higher color depths and resolutions.

Yes the drivers made a difference in screen drawing, but I'm just wondering if they were always used to their full potential.  Like I'd see an inferior chipset perform better on windows, and maybe it just comes down to better drivers?

 

10 minutes ago, Keatah said:

I don't know exactly what they do today. But I guess it's all digitized samples and mixing between channels. Seems like a lot of trouble to go through recreating or expanding on the complex standards of the past.

Modern audio is PCM-only,  anything else (OPL3/FM) needs to be emulated.  today's audio can be as high as 32-bit 192 khz,  but it's questionable how much of that human's can perceive.   There can be multiple independent channels, or not and everything is mixed in software (check your specific chipset).   One other huge change is the sound on your motherboard may not be doing anything at all.   If you send the sound to your monitor over HDMI, then the DAC is in the monitor, it may have different capabilities than the one on your motherboard--   so I suppose that's one reason these complex soundcards don't make sense anymore, you may not even use them depending on how your computer is configured.

 

Another thing that's gone is MIDI.   Modern games don't use midi music, it's generally all digitized.   So if you want MIDI features you'll need a soft synth.

[Geoff Oltmans]

On 12/1/2022 at 7:05 AM, Daedalus2097 said:

And that's to be expected, given the A500 was released in 1987 and probably cost a tiny fraction of what that 486 cost. It's just a shame so many Amiga users weren't into upgrading the way PC users were. And a PC (with a hard drive and monitor) for the same cost as an A500 with a hard drive and a monitor in 1990 won't have been a particularly great Wing Commander experience.

 

There are trade-offs here and there of course, but considering CPU power, the Motorola families generally kept pace with the Intel CPUs - at a given clock speed, a 68030-powered Amiga could match a 386, an '040 Amiga a 486 PC and an '060 Amiga a Pentium PC. Graphics capability was a different story, as most people went for poorly-expandable machines because they were cheap instead of expensive machines that could be fitted with graphics cards like the PC. The Amiga's advantage gradually turned into a disadvantage when VGA started to become affordable in the early-mid '90s (a VGA card in 1990 cost more than an A500 for example), and people were still clinging onto their A500s.

To be fair, Wing Commander on an Amiga isn't a particularly great experience either. heh

[Keatah]

4 hours ago, zzip said:

That was one of my frustrations with PC early on,  I'd buy cards based on specs and features and then it seemed those features were underutilized.   For instance, I'd always be annoyed when the generic business desktop PCs at work would have better drawing performance than my well researched and hand-picked video card.

I had those "problems" too. Never could quite figure out why.

 

Any attempt to make a PC run quieter or cooler seemed to have the opposite effect. Adding fans didn't help, just added more noise and created more localized dead pockets. Add a fan and the pocket splits in two, one goes here, the other goes there. A never-ending battle that just gets louder and louder. Whereas a store bought PC was quiet and had one fan. Fucking overclocker mentality I suppose. I even followed the advice of sumguy on [H]ardOCP forum who said to reverse the power supply fans so they blow air inward. The thinking was the supply would have a more forceful pressure because the fans were more shrouded and air was forced rather than sucked. Can you imagine that load of bullshit! So I did it and my whole PC case was like 60C all of a sudden. Dear god!

 

I can only think that systems integrators in big name companies had more experience in picking parts that would work together than I did. So it seemed that matching/balancing is more important than blindly getting the highest spec parts.

 

Maximum PC (how I love to rag on that rag) inflated my ego with some kinda hi-pressure gas to make me feel smarter than I actually was. All to enrich the publisher and the companies that advertised with it. Not forgetting to mention tweaker utilities. The ones that'd let you adjust every setting that Windows didn't. Crap like TCP/IP tweakers adjusting MTU frame size and latencies or shrinking or expanding the disk cache size. Changing the way pre-fetch works in some nebulous way or off-loading DLL's faster so you can benchmark better on some obscure utility that no one knows about. None of which produced noticeable increases in internet speed or drive access times. Shit from SpeedGuide.net or DriverHeaven for example.

 

Real life experiences show they may increase performance by a percentage point or two, in a niche situation at the expense of slowing everything else down by 10%. Then you go to tweak those settings to compensate those losses. And soon you're re-installing Windows because everything is mysteriously unstable. None of it made sense - because you spent 1 hour doing Microsoft engineers could do in thousands of man hours.

 

The only useful tweaks I found useful and practical are appearance related or how something might function. Speed tweaks? NEVER!

 

4 hours ago, zzip said:

  Then there was stuff like MMX/3D Now which they made quite a bit of noise about when it came out, but it seemed like very little software actually used it, at least in the beginning.

MMX seemed all about marketing. None of it was really related to 3D cards or helped them do their thing in any meaningful fashion. I'm not sure I recall having a proggie that ran "X amount" fast, then switching over to an MMX machine and seeing it run "XXXX amount faster". Sure stuff ran faster on MMX chips, but the chips themselves had other architectural improvements and faster clocks. So one never knew how much was attributable to the 57 new instructions alone.

 

MMX wasn't a failure. Its instructions unceremoniously became part of everyday computing. I did like the happy campy marketing behind it. And I believe it gave consumers their first introduction to "moar instructions = moar performance". SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4.1, SSE4.2, EM64T, VT-x, AES, AVX, AVX2, FMA3, TSX AVX512, and more came next. Each subsequent addition getting less and less marketing attention.

 

3DNow! .. I don't think this went anywhere. I don't recall any game specifically requiring it. Some advertising around it said you didn't need a 3D card if you had it. I'm sure that's niche positioning and grasping at reasons to have it.

 

Nowadays I actually look at what new instructions a new CPU has. But that's just out of curiosity to see how the industry is progressing. Not because of need or because there could be a majik bullet hidden in one.

[Keatah]

52 minutes ago, zzip said:

Yes the drivers made a difference in screen drawing, but I'm just wondering if they were always used to their full potential.  Like I'd see an inferior chipset perform better on windows, and maybe it just comes down to better drivers?

In Windows I'd say pretty good and honest efforts were made. Various magazines (PC Magazine comes to mind) would run Windows' re-draw benchmarks. It seemed to be in the best interests of the graphics boards makers and chip makers of the time to optimize as best they could. But there came a time for all hardware to be phased out. No more efforts put into it. And I'm sure there were some dud combos along the way.

 

Like many things in the PC world, hardware is often obsoleted before it is used to full potential. And people and businesses move on when increasing effort yields less and less gains. But a new generation of hardware gives 10x improvement for seemingly little in software development efforts.  It's different than say like the Atari 2600 - which is still being optimized and pushed today. Atari 2600 hardware hasn't changed in half-a-century, thus letting a whole library of tricks to be developed. And this library of tricks is being filled by hobbyists. Not original or fake Atari. Nobody is pushing 2600 to make a buck.

 

53 minutes ago, zzip said:

Modern audio is PCM-only,  anything else (OPL3/FM) needs to be emulated.  today's audio can be as high as 32-bit 192 khz,  but it's questionable how much of that human's can perceive.

Might not be able to hear difference between 96KHz and 192KHz separately. No.

 

However when a system is called upon to produce many musical instruments simultaneously from multiple speakers - absolutely yes! There's harmonics that interact with each other. Instruments that interfere, cancel, reinforce, and more. There's scintillation and timbre colors to consider. You've got to have enough bandwidth to define each instrument and its location.

 

It's why mfgs are going through the trouble to beef up their DACs. BTW I am not an audiophile with a room full of analyzers and test sources. Will happily listen to 192Kbps MP3s all day long if that's all that's available.

 

55 minutes ago, zzip said:

One other huge change is the sound on your motherboard may not be doing anything at all.   If you send the sound to your monitor over HDMI, then the DAC is in the monitor, it may have different capabilities than the one on your motherboard--   so I suppose that's one reason these complex soundcards don't make sense anymore, you may not even use them depending on how your computer is configured.

Ha! Yes. First time I powered up a new HDMI rig I was surprised that audio came out of the graphics card! Woot!

 

They need to decide once and for all where to put those DACs. In the monitor. On the soundcard. In an external box. In the cable connector. Next they're gonna put 'em in the voicecoil driver itself. And cite some bullshit made-up advantage like saying no interference between DAC and speaker cone!

 

55 minutes ago, zzip said:

Another thing that's gone is MIDI.   Modern games don't use midi music, it's generally all digitized.   So if you want MIDI features you'll need a soft synth.

Today a soft-synth is fine. I never was too big a MIDI fan to begin with. I liked MIDI sound because it was something different. Not because it was higher quality and sampled. Some game soundtracks, no matter how good they are, need a break. So when doing DOS gaming I'd switch back and forth all the time.

 

Grew up with the TIA, Pokey, SID, General Instruments AY series, Yamaha chips. So OPL3/FM seemed a natural evolutionary path. Doom, Descent, Raptor, Stellar7, Nova9, all define FM synthesis in PC gaming for me.

[zzip]

3 minutes ago, Keatah said:

I can only think that systems integrators in big name companies had more experience in picking parts that would work together than I did. So it seemed that matching/balancing is more important than blindly getting the highest spec parts.

Well these were corporate desktop PC that were meant to run in a slim desktop case-- not a lot of space for cooling.   These machines were not supposed to be high-performance gaming monsters they just had to run stuff like Word, Excel, Visio and Email well enough..  they shouldn't need much cooling.    It just irritated me that the Windows 2D performance was smooth as butter while mine was slightly choppy

 

24 minutes ago, Keatah said:

Real life experiences show they may increase performance by a percentage point or two, in a niche situation at the expense of slowing everything else down by 10%. Then you go to tweak those settings to compensate those losses. And soon you're re-installing Windows because everything is mysteriously unstable. None of it made sense - because you spent 1 hour doing Microsoft engineers could do in thousands of man hours.

 

The only useful tweaks I found useful and practical are appearance related or how something might function. Speed tweaks? NEVER!

The biggest tweaks I ended up going for was to fix how Windows always slowed down over time--  It was always nice and snappy when you first installed it, but 6-mos or a year down the  road, it took forever to load, forever to shutdown, etc.   It's some combination of many things you install, install a bunch of crap you didn't  need.  Much of what you installed would set itself to start at boot, even if you didn't need it.    Disabling those things helped a lot.   There was also this precache thing that was supposed to make things faster.   Ironically when the cache gets too large it starts making things slower I guess because it takes more time to search and its being searched constantly.    Android had a similar issue where there's a cache that would slow down your phone and consume more battery when it gets too big.  You had to go into your devices service menu to clear it, but once you did, it started behaving like a new phone again--  faster and 'amazing' battery life

 

That's about the extent I'd tweak windows.   I think I always found the registry to be too cryptic for me to get too deep into it.

 

36 minutes ago, Keatah said:

MMX seemed all about marketing. None of it was really related to 3D cards or helped them do their thing in any meaningful fashion. I'm not sure I recall having a proggie that ran "X amount" fast, then switching over to an MMX machine and seeing it run "XXXX amount faster". Sure stuff ran faster on MMX chips, but the chips themselves had other architectural improvements and faster clocks. So one never knew how much was attributable to the 57 new instructions alone.

 

MMX wasn't a failure. Its instructions unceremoniously became part of everyday computing. I did like the happy campy marketing behind it. And I believe it gave consumers their first introduction to "moar instructions = moar performance". SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4.1, SSE4.2, EM64T, VT-x, AES, AVX, AVX2, FMA3, TSX AVX512, and more came next. Each subsequent addition getting less and less marketing attention.

I remember there were a few open source programs that would detect if your CPU supported MMX/SSE,  they would compile in SSE instructions.   Otherwise you get a vanilla build with no MMX/SSE support that could run on any CPU with presumably worse performance..  which begs the question if you needed special builds of open source software, how was the closed source software dealing with it?  Where they detecting it at runtime and running the code, or just not including it?   IDK what they were doing.

 

42 minutes ago, Keatah said:

3DNow! .. I don't think this went anywhere. I don't recall any game specifically requiring it. Some advertising around it said you didn't need a 3D card if you had it. I'm sure that's niche positioning and grasping at reasons to have it.

3D Now! was simply AMD's marketing name for their version of MMX.   I think it was compatible with MMX with some extra added instructions.

 

47 minutes ago, Keatah said:

Nowadays I actually look at what new instructions a new CPU has. But that's just out of curiosity to see how the industry is progressing. Not because of need or because there could be a majik bullet hidden in one.

One issue with adding new instructions is most software won't use them,  at least for some time.   First the compilers have to get up to speed, then those processors have to gain enough market share..   most software is compiled to run on some low common denominator CPU.

 

There was an interesting Linux distribution called Gentoo that would recompile everything on your system with compiler optimization flags for your specific CPU rather than a lowest common denominator CPU.   presumably it got some performance gains that way,  I don't know how much.

[zzip]

20 minutes ago, Keatah said:

Might not be able to hear difference between 96KHz and 192KHz separately. No.

 

However when a system is called upon to produce many musical instruments simultaneously from multiple speakers - absolutely yes! There's harmonics that interact with each other. Instruments that interfere, cancel, reinforce, and more. There's scintillation and timbre colors to consider. You've got to have enough bandwidth to define each instrument and its location.

 

It's why mfgs are going through the trouble to beef up their DACs. BTW I am not an audiophile with a room full of analyzers and test sources. Will happily listen to 192Kbps MP3s all day long if that's all that's available.

My understanding of digital audio is you want the sampling rate to be twice the highest frequency you intend to sample.   Recently watched a video of someone who went through the math on this and it was pretty convincing.   They say humans can't hear above 20,000, so that's why the 44.1khz sampling rate of CDs persisted so long (good for frequencies of up to 22,050hz).   Given that,  even 96khz seems excessive.    It would be interesting to see if there's blind tests where people can tell the difference between 44.1, 96 and 192

 

29 minutes ago, Keatah said:

Grew up with the TIA, Pokey, SID, General Instruments AY series, Yamaha chips. So OPL3/FM seemed a natural evolutionary path. Doom, Descent, Raptor, Stellar7, Nova9, all define FM synthesis in PC gaming for me.

Back when I had my Atari 800XL,  I was trying to shape wave forms to make it sound more like real instruments-  like piano, trumpet, guitar etc..   But it turned out I could only take that so far.   I guess for that reason FM synthesis was never good enough for me.   I wanted the computer to sound like it was playing real instruments, and FM was usually a poor representation of that.   That's why I quickly jumped to a wavetable card..  OPL3 always sounded kind of weird to me.