Amiga hardware is back

http://amiga.com/news/index.php?art=26&PHPSESSID=ab90a18ca0eb272d0ab0ce3355b68648

Now the first question is, "will this become real?" and the second "will blitzmax support this platform?". Back to the future ...

Erm, someone needs to wake up and smell the 21st century.

I'll keep an eye on it, but still think it's about 10 years too late...

Yeah. And the Titanic will float again, too.

Some sunken ships are better off left alone.

It's pointless... and that's coming from a hardcore Amiga fan.

Its not pointless if Amiga come out with something thats as good as a PC, people like choices and it would sell simply on the face of it being something new.

It could be the new Apple.

They've got a bit of catching up to do.

Only 5% of the market ;-)

Well, in order to take it as a serious platform, they need a killer app. iTunes is the Macs killer app.

I really hope they do come out with something big. something new, something to challenge the norm.

only cause they purposely make itunes suck on windows

Amiga are only a small company these days... They have to outsource their hardware work and even the new OS 4 is developed by an external company...

My outlook these days is that it's pointless owning a machine unless it has a decent market share, because this effects the quantity and quality of software out there, the amount of community support etc. I would love to see a real enthusiasts machine like an updated Amiga take the market by storm, but there's just no way it will happen. I would love to be proved wrong on this one, but I doubt it.

I would be seriously tempted to buy the cheaper model as a little whimsy, but of course it will be twice the price in the UK which buggers that idea up. (After all, it's going to cost enough to switch to the Mac which (looks at Vista) really isn't up for debate.)

I'll watch with interest.

@Sledge - you're not the only one thinking of a Mac as a reaction to Vista!

I think it's entirely possible to launch a new platform, even in today's dominated market. The key thing is that the new platform must quickly find its niche; that's how the Mac made a comeback with iTunes. The only problem is that Amiga don't really have a good reputation for doing this; I mean, what was AmigaDE all about?

The real future of computing is in software; the OS is becoming less and less relevant.

They could surf on the hype created by the cell processor and make what Sony hasn't managed to do, running graphics on it, bundle it with a decent OS and dev tools. Or stack some Powerpc cpu together, parallel computing, in a time where SGI is almost stopping hardware it could work, especially if making it cheap and modular (if they want to survive the concurrency).

But I doubt they can pay the development of such platforms ...

I have the impression that (at leat for desktops) the killer Mac application is final cut, not itunes.

Since office application and Games and 3D is the domain of PC, creative video/image editing the one of Apple, what's left? The war on Media PC is raging, no hope on this one for a new comer, servers and embedded application is almost PC only as well. Advanced sound processing?

Yeah and bring back perfect VSync games that will run the same on all models!!

I think part of the problem is they keep following this power pc design. Old Amiga owners who might buy one for nostalgic value will want the original chipsets, but faster and better...not a pc design with an Amiga label slapped over it.

They should make an Amiga Laptop then! All your nostalgia in a compact/portable/power efficient box! Honestly the 2 last times I saw an Amiga being used was in electronic music concerts, amiga trackers are still rocking! That's a pretty small niche.

What is this going to be used for? I can't think of a single damn thing that this new Amiga is more suitable for than a low-end PC would also be.

It depends what software they have...

If they made a tidy amiga laptop with Hdd, wireless, updated the amiga-os to multitasking, the latest 6800 based chip and used a backwcompatable truecolor video card. And could run the oldies.
I would buy it for nostalgia :)

Or would i end up with a non intel, non osx mac??

lol :)

I am currently putting my old A1200 in an arcade cabinet. Surprisingly, it seems to breath a bit of life back into it.
Project X plays great in a Jamma cabinet.

Hello.


Eh?

Goodbye.

It did multitasking?! I cant really remember (it was a long time ago). I know it could run more than one program window at a time, but i thought it halted execution of that prog until in focus again, or used TSRs.

I only really ever ran 1 app at a time on my a500 anyway so not sure :/

-Edit-

OOh! aparently it could do proper time shared multitasking! http://www.powerprograms.nl/Articles/helloworld.html

heh, it was better than it thought (and i thought it was great :)

the Amiga was capable of true multitasking on 2mb while win95 was struggling to move on 16mb.

The original Amiga was the first computer capable of true multi-tasking. All the other machines simulated multi-tasking by using interupts.

It was the Mac that had the cooperative multitasking which meant that all apps were sort of modal and once they hogged the cpu without letting it go nothing else could do anything. The Amiga was the first with *pre-emptive* multitasking. Amiga also largely coined the phrase `multimedia`, had 4096 colors when PC's were still on 16, and 4 channel 8-bit sound when pc's only had beeps. Amiga's were cool. It is just so unfortunately how they continually fell behind the times and stopped being so cutting-edge. They pioneered a lot of things but then were swallowed up by all the copycats and people that built upon those things. Today I don't think I would consider buying one at all, it just doesn't support enough technologies that I've grown accustomed to on the Mac. If you think the Mac or Linux user-base and software base is limited, Amiga is far moreso. It's a pity, it was an absolutely brilliant line of computers and I spent many years totally happily exploring everything about them. But to think of buying some way outdated PPC cpu and some pretty wimpy graphics card with barely proper 3d drivers or OpenGL etc would be like taking several years steps back in time now.

We don't really know what hardware the new Amiga is using; we don't even know if it's going to be using Amiga OS4; Bill McEwan was saying that Amiga were developing OS5 (due to ownership legalities with Hyperion on OS 4)... so who knows what they will be announcing. Still, I'll believe it when I see it.

[edit]
Just noticed that they do say they are using PowerPC, but it could be any CPU. All of the new generation consoles are using PowerPC based CPUs, so it's not really that much of an issue.

Oh how your tune has changed, IntelMac boy! ; )

Considering they were still thinking that the 603 and 604 PPC chips were `fast` when Macs were way past that using G4's and G5's, I doubt they'll be using the top of the line stuff.

It depends on who they are targetting the machines towards. Not everyone needs a high spec computer; as a web developer, I mainly only use a text editor and Apache, then some OpenOffice stuff as well as some small graphic applications. My Mac Mini is generally overkill for what I need to do.

True but the whole thing about the Amiga was how powerful it was for the time. I think the best route would be to go with essentially a PC with a tightly controlled set of components, ala Mac, and concentrate on creating a killer Workbench and standard set of Apps.

True... It's not really about the hardware anymore. Even if you look at NextStep (what became OS X), that was capable on running on pretty much any hardware.

Believing that the future control was in hardware was the biggest mistake that IBM made with Microsoft.

But the Amiga was all about the hardware. Sticking an Amiga badge on a PowerPC or IBM-PC compatible misses the point. I mean, who is that meant to appeal to? Sure, it could come bundled with a version of workbench, but you'd have to be crazy to buy a home computer with an OS that has even less support than OSX and Linux in their early years.

I doubt that the current owners of the brand name have the skill or money to develop new Amiga-exclusive hardware, but that's what needs to be done. The 16-bit computers were a strange breed (as were the 8-bit computers before them) - sure, they functioned as computers, but for a huge number of families they also took on the role of console equivalent too. Some sort of PS3 with a built in keyboard and a workbench-like OS is the closest equivalent that I can imagine as a viable modern day Amiga.

My interest would be piqued by an elegant, non-bloated OS... this new Amiga had better boot damn fast and give users the benefit of the hardware they bought rather than sucking it up on fripperies. I'm not sure there's any other way for a new entrant to distinguish itself from the big players -- capitalise on actually being smaller.

I would like to see the next generation of home pcs have a 'hardware' OS, one that by default boots from say a 4-8GB solid state device with the harddisk(s) only for the user settings, user data and non-standard apps. Prehaps add an optional second SS device could work as cache or swap.

Imagine the boot speed then and unless you were upgrading / changing something to do with the kernel or hardware, you could lock it to become ROM (mabe even with a simple key on the front of the pc!). The os is then unbreakable by all nasties (including non admin users :)

I know this can be done in a way with linux and even XP with some hardcore configuring, but its not 'designed' by default to be used like that and isnt as efficient as it could be as a result.

If "amiga" or anyone else had something like this in mind (if the hardware and OS were up to scratch) no matter how unconventional the new system may be, regardless of wether they try and adhere to the amiga legacy or not (theres no point anyways as its easily emulated) then i would be very interested.

Not sure how much that would help. Amiga had a ROM chip with a large part of the o/s on and that wasn't entirely a huge speedup.

Nope, they were still better at the end. What went wrong was that the IRS wanted 5 years back Taxes which they couldnt pay. It was nothing to do with the Hardware being worse than a pc. Dont forget, Comadore went backrupt a year before Win95 came out. (AT the Demise I had a 1200 with HD and Accelerator card, and it was loads faster than a 1994 pc. I was really annoyed when I had to buy a PC, which wasnt until 1999, five years after development had stopped on the Amega)

Go to one of the abbandoneware sites, and download (Or just look at the screen shots),the amiga 1200 version, and the Dos version of a 1994 (or earlier game), and then come back and say they had lost the edge

Edit: Mind you I am looking with rose tinted Glasses ;)

I'm with H&K... they were still way ahead. The Amiga 1200 wasn't exactly a quantum leap over the 500, though.

Solid State speeds have come a long way since then. Think of how fast pdas & mobile phones boot up, its practically instant (and some of these have far more 'bulk' than the original amiga os).
Something as big as windows or ubuntu would take some seconds of course but it'd be damn sight faster than magnetic media.

A 'decent' Amiga config was one where the accelerator card (an '030 in my case) copied the kickstart ROM into RAM (so you lost 0.5MB of usable RAM) to speed the OS up a bit.

I had 16MB in my Amiga 1200 and it was way more than I needed.

Commodore went broke purely because cbm usa was wasting money like it was going out of fashion; cbm europe was still making money.

Well the CD32 was on its way to being a success. It was the best selling CD based multimedia machine at the time until Commodore went broke. Anyway check:

Well the CD32 was on its way to being a success. It was the best selling CD based multimedia machine at the time until Commodore went broke. Anyway check:

http://amigaworld.net/modules/news/article.php?storyid=3047

Looks like the new Amiga is just a board wihtout any case and not too high spec either.

Wasn't it also the only CD-based console, at the time?! :P

Well, that Phillips jobbie may of been knocking around at the same time, can't really remember...

Nope. There was CDi, Mega CD, 3DO and also the PC machines with CD.

Nope, it went bancrupt because the IRS refused to accept that it was Based in Purta Rico and not the US, and crawled back 5 years Taxes that comadore had expected not to have to pay. This brought down Comadore US, not because it was wasteing money, but because it had to pay all it taxes in one go, which it couldnt do.

That's debatable -- it certainly doesn't mirror my experience and I hung on for a long time with the Miggy. If the A500 was ten years ahead of its time then the A1200 was about two or three years late... I couldn't believe the almost total lack of progress it 'showcased'. (I swapped my A500 for one purely because I was into tracking and the 2MB of chipram was therefore enticing, but I can't imagine why any 'normal' user would have cared.)


Meh. Compare any Miggy Doom clone with the genuine article: Game over; Compare Miggy flight sims with their PC counterparts: Game Over; Compare disk-swapsome Miggy adventure games with the HD installable versions the PC got: Game Over etc


That you were in the vast minority shows you exactly what did for the Amiga. The popular A500 model was so far ahead of its time that there was simply no culture of upgrading within the Amiga userbase... the only thing that approached any sort of standard was the 1/2 meg upgrade. Jeez -- Amiga users were scarcely acclimatised to buying software, let alone hardware. As a consequence the platform was totally unprepared for the oncoming jump to textured 3D.


Just look at the dates: The A1200 (which could barely match the SNES and Genesis) appeared in 92, followed by the CD32 in 93... the PlayStation arrived in 94. So let's be honest: The CD32 -- an A1200 with a CD drive and chip (AKIKO) that nobody used -- was well on its way to being wiped off the face of the Earth by Sony.

Realistically, the Amiga's commercial lifespan was defined by the time it took the competition to supersede the A500's specs. Arguments about CBM-this (and A4000-that, before anyone starts) are pretty much moot.

Apparently Commodore lost the hardware designs for the Amiga, so had to re-write and design everythng from scratch...

I wish I was a billionaire, or something. I'd buy the Amiga brand and bury it. Bury it good. It's over, ppl! ;)

big10p about summed it up for me. Amiga is dead, no amount of fanboyism will make it good again, etc. We'll never see it as a widespread home computer again, most likely.

It's stupid to compare doom on pc to amiga, the pc cost 2-3 as much and sucked arse at scrolling. Its easy to say the pc was better if you pick the 1 genre it was superior at; there's no way a pc of that time could have reproduced superfrog as well as the amiga did it.

The only reason Im going to agree with you, is all that "no one upgraded" stuff you said later. If you had upgraded, as PC Users did, then the Miggy Doom Clone (Hummmm, wonder who wrote it?), was a lot better than the the Bog standard pc version. What you are doing is compareing the Topend PC version, with the basic Amega. (Mind you, you are right)

And dont forget the Playstation was released after Comadore went bust, so who can tell what upgrades the cd32 might have had? Compare playstaion 1 release 1, with the cd32.

HAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHA!

...

Okay, to expand on that:

...that mattered. 2D games were approaching the end of their commercial popularity, man. What was the point of being good at 2D scrolling with the PlayStation era just around the corner? Amiga owners were not looking at Doom and saying "Very nice, but I bet it can't do Superfrog". They really, really weren't.

EDITED: Removed an amount of sarcasm, but seriously... Superfrog?!

Yes, what I hoped to get across was that the two things really were directly linked to one another. It was an overwhelmingly fixed hardware spec with a finite lifespan.

Of course, sooner or later somebody is going to mention this.

EDIT: Put double post to better use // fixed werdz

Give up Sledge - some 'belief systems' can't be broken, it seems. :P

Team17 created the best example of a Doom clone on the Amiga with Alien Breed 3D 2. Ironically, no Amiga could run it at a smooth frame rate. Top-end Amiga 1200's with 68060 accelerator cards enabled the game to be playable, but anything slower caused far too slow framerates. Doubly ironically, my Athlon 3700+ runs WinUAE so well that Alien Breed 3D 2 runs smoother than on any real Amiga.

I recall running ShapeShifter on my 68030 accelerated Amiga 1200. It was an almost perfect Mac emulator. Happily, Doom was released for Mac and ran quite well (given a small screen size). Had I ever bothered with an '060, it would have been full-screen playable.

The whole discussion is rather moot though, in this day and age. Mid-range x86 processors are several orders of magnitude faster than the home computers we all knew and loved. Even my phone is a good 100 times faster and has over 16000 times as much storage capacity as my first computer (Vic-20). The progress of technology has slowed somewhat in the past 2 years, but we are slowly entering an age where the holy grail (as far as I'm concerned) of realtime raytracing can be acheived on a machine costing less than £5K.

It's really this reason alone that leads me to question the viability of a new Amiga. Granted, the OS is solid and efficient, but that hasn't been a requirement of an OS for over 10 years. The main requirement is hardware and software support. If you can't run Excel, SAGE, SAP, PhotoShop, Final Cut or ProTools on it, what are you going to do with it? Any new Amiga is only ever going to enter the most hidden of niche markets.

POS, set-top boxes, pub quiz machines, information terminals and perhaps manufacturing automation control: these are the only things I can think of where a new Amiga could be put to use. I'd love to be proven wrong. Anything to let me get rid of Microsoft bloatware! :)

hahahahahah, I hope Mark Bans you ;)

To be fair Gloom was more of a Wolfenstein 3D clone. But thanks for mentioning it because now I will have to struggle against the urge to break out WinUAE and 'splode some space marines.

I agree that technicly it was more of a wolfenstien Clone, but it was presented as a Doomish clone.

LOL, to be honest, when I read from vinyl about AB3D being on WinUae, I had the same urge.

Never liked alien breed, myself, and especially not the 3d kind. Amiga just was never meant to do 3D at any decent speed. It's a pity because those few people that did try to bring out a 3d game unfortunately created pretty crap games, except for those few that only simulated a vague amount of 3d such as racing games.

Funny how sledge has to resort to sarcasm, my point was that the Amiga was superior in some areas. As a side note doom was also 2d, ID didnt write a true 3d game until Quake, the reason the amiga sucked at doom games was because it used bitplane graphics compared to the PC's chunky mode. At the time the a1200 was released, the average PC was still using vesa gfx with 4-16 colours and no sound.

And don't forget the memory management issues we had to deal with on the PC versus the Amiga. I'm sure we all look back fondly on expanded/extended memory.

While the PC was 'worse' in having two types of memory to pick from above the 640KB barrier, the amiga also had to deal with Chip RAM vs. Fast RAM... the custom chips could only interface with the chip RAM IIRC.

Workbench wasn't bad, preemptive multitasking was nice too, but there was pretty much no memory protection -- a single bad app could hose everything.

Anyway: being a major Amiga fan back in the day, my thoughts on this latest revival attempt: *yawn*

Just let it die alright.

>Just look at the dates: The A1200 (which could barely
>match the SNES and Genesis)

The Amiga was faster, had more colours, better sound etc...

>appeared in 92, followed by the CD32 in 93... the
>PlayStation arrived in 94.

Faster or better isn't as important as being there first. CD32 was there, but contrary to the other CD consoles, it was fast, cheap and had the specs and penetration to be a hit.

>So let's be honest: The CD32 --
>an A1200 with a CD drive and chip (AKIKO) that nobody
>used -- was well on its way to being wiped off the face of
>the Earth by Sony.

Sony did nothing, they didn't need to. Playstation was not available in quantity for worlwide consumption until late 1995, at which time Amiga CD32 had been out of production for a year and a half.

Andy

It was a bit Red October, wasn't it. Sorry man. (But in my defence, sarcasm is very funny).

Perfectly true, it's just that the Amiga was either standing still in those areas (think of the soundchip -- why no improvement in the A1200?!) or going in the wrong direction (think of AGA -- 2D oriented and a strain even then due to more bitplanes). I'm not really sure what you're trying to prove: the Amiga wasn't able to hold its own in the market and the PC did come to dominate. It had been pretty obvious where computer games needed to go graphically since 1987 (Dungeon Master but free-roaming) so all that's left to debate is why CBM didn't go there. Which brings us to...

Not sure about that. That's the year Ultima Underworld (Hello! -- Dungeon Master but free-roaming!) was released and if you discount all the PC compatibles that were solely used in business I'd be surprised if a significant proportion of the remaining market wasn't tooled up for gaming. Titles like Ultima Underworld would not have been viable otherwise.

EDIT: Underworld not Underground -- you can tell I didn't have a peecee!

Ultima Underworld 1 and 2 rocked.

I had a 500 then a A1200 which was a great computer, then one day I saw Doom on a 486 DX66 and as soon as it was possible I build an AMD DX4 100 to play Doom and my A1200 was effectively retired...It had many great things but it couldn't compete with Doom, Heretic, Hexen, Screamer, UU I and II, Ultima 7 and 8 etc and so on...

Tell that to the Dreamcast. Or Xbox 360 while looking at Revolution (I'm not calling it Wii) sales. Or the Jaguar. Or Atari. Or the CD32.

Yet had nothing to match F-Zero's graphical punch, nothing to match Gunstar Heroes' glorious mayhem, routinely received lazy-ass ports of high profile arcade games that widened the perceived gap (see UN Squadron, Strider, Final Fight, Street Fighter II et al) and would offer up inferior imitations of console exclusives with a straight face (Speris Legacy anyone?) And don't forget, I was talking about the A1200 there -- supposedly 32-bit. It should have run rings around the 16-bit consoles, not struggled to keep up.

But I'm talking game design and execution also, not just technicalities (because you could shove a copper list backdrop behind anything to up the number of colours onscreen with the Amiga, but doing so means jack shit for the quality of the game): Show me the Amiga title that beats Kenseiden or Wonderboy III at what they do... those are Master System games, man. Very often the craftmanship just wasn't there on the Miggy, and when it was (Chaos Engine, Lotus Esprit, Lemmings etc) the other platforms either got decent ports or comparable titles.

Keep up fella. The original assertion was that the CD32 was on its way to becoming a success before CBM imploded, taking the console with it. I'm saying that's cobblers and it would have failed anyway, largely due to the PlayStation being light years ahead. I was commenting on a hypothetical situation.

...let us all not forget the Amiga Walker.

Surprised it took this long for someone to mention it ;)

I don't deny that the worst thing to happen to the Amiga for for commodore to buy it, they sat on it for years doing nothing to upgrade the system until it was too late. If commodore had survived i'm pretty sure we'd be seeing lots of patent cases from them against MS around now, they had so many original ideas that took MS another 10 years to 'innovate'.

Okay - lets.

Exhibit A: Gloom. Had interactive terminals which allowed you to play a small "Defender" clone (underkill) in it. PC equivalent: None yet - although Doom 3 comes close.

Exhibit B: Alien Breed 3D. With the exception of the double barreled pump action shotgun, was every bit as much DOOM as the original DOOM was.

Exhibit C: Marathon (while technically a Mac game you could play it using shapeshifter) was hands down the best first person shooter ever.

Yeah. Except most flight simulators are about as much games as spreadsheets or word processors. Jetstrike CD32 ruled the flight game world - the only thing the PC had that was remotely as good was "Sopwith" and CGA graphics are only enjoyable for so long - besides which it wasn't speed limited, so unless you had a really slow PC you couldn't play it anyhoo.

Dunno. All the adventure games I played (Beneath a Steel Sky, BloodNet, Innocent until caught and so on) where all installable on my harddrive.

A lot of these comparisons seem to be the equivalent of saying, compare the ford escort to the ferrari, the ferrari was better...yes but it also cost a lot more.

Hey! I drive a Ford Escort! :P

I'm a paid up Gloom fanboy but you've lost me there. Is Gloom supposed to be better than Doom because it has a rudimentary (pelt along at the top of the screen, firing, to win) Defender clone in it? Shut up then.

Even if that were true on a top spec Miggy, which it isn't, almost nobody had one -- this is where I refer you back to the point about not enough people upgrading their machines to carry the Amiga into the 32-bit era proper. The double barrelled shotgun was introduced in Doom 2, by the way.

Run well on a stock A1200, did it?

That's a piece of hardware that most Amiga owners didn't have, though -- and we're back to the effect of (a lack of) upgrades again.

That'll be why I've never seen a copy of it anywhere ever.

Again, I'm not sure what the points in defence of the Amiga are supposed to achieve, Flamey. I owned (still own, in fact) a couple of the things and loved 'em to bits -- but I can't say you're right and Gloom was better than Doom because of one irrelevant frippery, and it never mattered that only a small percentage of users had hard-drives, and the A1200 specs were brilliant, and that the Amiga actually beat all the competition, went from strength to strength and that, in fact, I'm actually typing this on the latest model (a machine twice as powerful as PS3, natch) right now. Because, quite simply, none of it would be true.

JetStrike was written in AMOSPro.

And it 'ruled' the flight game world!

Well no it's better because it was a better game - it allowing for dynamically changing the walls texture makes it technically superior as well - never mind that you could play it with a VR headset and head tracker so you could look in a different direction to where you were shooting (oh - another Amiga first, how sad).

I don't know if you consider a Vanilla A1200 a "top spec" Amiga, but if you do what would my A4K be then?

Dunno - never really had one - that I used.

I don't know about "most Amiga owners". I know everybody I knew (which at peak times was probably about 500 people) had one. Without exception. Even my little sister had one in her A1200.

No. That'll be because it's
One of the most unknown underdogs ever.

I just thought your points where ridiculously unfair. Slanting the Amiga because a 1987 computer (the A500 which you state "most people had") could not run a game from 1993 (or later) is absurd. When Doom was released a PC that could play it, cost nearly twice as much (roughly £2600 GBP in Denmark) as an A4000 (mine cost about £1600 GBP), and six and a half times more than an A1200 (which debuted at £400 GBP in 1992).

So yeah, you're right that a PC in 1993 could play DOOM and by 1995 (when Amiga DOOM clones started appearing) the A1200 could "only" play Gloom and Alien Breed 3D (and maybe not even in full-screen). But for the £2200 GBP price difference, you could probably get a pretty tricked out Amiga - the fact that most people chose not to seems somewhat irrelevant to the merit of aforementioned games. Those of us who did spend more than a weeks salary on our computers, could most certainly play Alien Breed 3D as it was intended, on our "still half the price of a PC" computers.

Yes it did. Getting 81% from Cam Winstanley of AP is quite an achievement. Worms if memory serves, got about 50%, Rise of the Robots got 5%.

I really would have loved to see AAA in action... *sad* :O/

Well, here is the spec for the lower in machine:

http://www.amiga.com/news/?art=27&PHPSESSID=6c73410bd8e4fb9b863f36afaf1d14a4

It's a complete system and not just a board.

>I don't deny that the worst thing to happen to the Amiga
>for for commodore to buy it

As opposed to Atari buying it. Amiga ST with GEM, 128K RAM and a rubber keyboard. Be careful what you wish for!

>they sat on it for years
>doing nothing to upgrade the system until it was too late.

Commodore developed many upgrades, but people didn't buy. Many new AMIGA models were developed, but since the original was never designed to evolve, it was dificult to force it without breaking compatibility. When they did, nobody bought it. The AGA Amigas were a stopgap solution, but were designed to evolve.

The fact is that price was a major factor for Amiga buyers. An increase in the price to cover a better processor with MMU, FPU etc, and an OS rewrite to support it, just didn't make sense. Those who wanted an advanced Amiga would just purchase an A4000 and then upgrade as needed.


Andy

Well now we're down to a matter of opinion, and if that's what you think then fine -- I'm not going to tell you your subjective gaming preferences are wrong, because by definition they can't be. Objectively there are clearly some technical things that Doom does which Gloom doesn't, and objectively the things which remained exclusive to Gloom did not have sufficient impact to salvage its host platform's fortunes. And therein lies the point -- realtime minigames (etc) might be a cool technical achievement for an FPS, but they don't necessarily make for a killer app.

You have misunderstood the sentence. 'Even if that were true on a top spec Miggy' means 'Even if that were true on an A4000'. To specify, even on an A4000 Alien Breed 3D was certainly not 'every bit as much DOOM as the original DOOM was'.

I'm obviously talking anecdotally about my own territory, the UK -- YMMV and there's probably an interesting discussion in there.

Now you're just being a daft spazzy fathead for the sake of it :P I haven't slated the Amiga anywhere -- I've slated the idea that the Amiga died because CBM went under; The Amiga died because the A500 had run out of steam and the A1200 was underpowered (see next point).

This is a territorial difference, I think, and your logic may well be sound in Norway where people used their Amigas productively as computers (in which case they offered phenomenal value for money). In the UK, though, they were primarily games machines -- Doom signified the writing on the wall, but I think the vast majority migrated to the consoles until PC's became affordable. For bang-per-buck gaming the PlayStation was so vastly superior to the A1200 that it just wasn't funny. For anyone with remotely mainstream tastes you already had a better games machine in the form of a SNES or Genesis, and for the percentage of Amiga owners who weren't demo sceners from continental europe that's the only context that mattered. (Well, there's piracy too, but sticking with the Amiga solely because you could get free games doesn't say much about the platform.)

Yes it is, but traditionally 'ruling the world' means subduing at least a healthy proportion of the entire thing. One decent magazine review out of a dozen doesn't really cut it in the 'world ruling' stakes.

I went from a 1200 to a P133 in around 1995 and never looked back. I loved the amiga in the 80's but it was starting to show its age. Especialy when the apocalypse and Voodoo 3D cards came out.

The only really problem with the PC was that it was still Dos based and setting up games was a royal pain. Otherwise it was a dream upgrade. It was around this time that Photoshop first came out for the PC too, so all those Amiga 2D apps were obselete, same with 3D when you had 3D studio 4 and Softimage (even if it was running in DOS).

I too was a die hard Amiga enthusiast. I would love to see a new Amiga on the Market. When the 'One' came out I was very interested, but the price was just too high. I couldn't justify spending so much money. Good thing I chose not to because it was obviously just another flash in the pan. Probably like this new machine will be.

So, I just use my 'Amiga Forever' CD whenever I want to take a trip back into yesteryear.