agami Quote:

I never gave it much thought until now, but a US-based Amiga fan definitely gets extra points. It was easy being an Amiga fan in Europe and even down here in Australia, but you lot in the US had to work for your fandom. There should be a special merit badge for any US Amigan who actually had an AGA machine, and then an extra badge for those who had a NTSC CD32.

More nations used NTSC than the U.S. including most of America (except Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay), Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Philippines, Myanmar, etc. In choosing to produce the NTSC CD32, CBM should have realized that only the U.S. and Canada were potential big markets and the Amiga as a gaming system had declined in these areas. At one time, CBM brought affordable personal computing and gaming to Japan with the VIC-1001 (Japaneses VIC-20). CBM nearly signed a deal with Nintendo for rights to their high quality arcade games before they made a console and Jack Tramiel nixing the deal late may have incentivized Nintendo to move into the console market. Commodore Japan left with Jack to Atari but the AmigaOS had Japanese language and localization support which was pretty far along at one point.

What was Japan for Commodore?
http://www.vorc.org/text/interview/ex/mtomczyk_e.html

CBM went away from trying to make the Amiga a personal computer and gaming computer and tried to make it a business computer after the 1983 video game crash and the great schism that saw Jack and about 35 CBM employees leave, much of the talent behind the C64 success. The new CBM did poorly at transitioning C64 owners to the Amiga. The Amiga caught on in Europe not as a business computer but as a low cost personal computer in the CBM tradition. CBM was in a great position to corner the global personal computer and gaming computer markets for generations but it was not to be as it was not united.

agami Quote:

Might not be the right time to bring it up, but I think if the US switched to 220-240V 50Hz AC power, and switched to PAL, and switched to the metric system (while we're at it) then things would've been easier for all concerned. Just sayin'.

We had Tesla's AC first and that standard could have been copied. A bigger global standard would have helped the Amiga in two ways. The Amiga 1000 would have been available in Europe earlier as a PAL version of the Amiga chipset would not have been necessary and a universal Video Toaster would have been more successful. As far as the metric system, my generation was educated about the metric system and it looked like the U.S. was starting to transition but stopped and went back. Metric is superior but conversions between systems is the biggest pain.

Nonefornow Quote:

In the US up until middle of 1990, the Amiga was big and a relatively popular system. The A1000 sold better in the US than anywhere else.

The Amiga original OCS chipset did not support PAL. Considering the Amiga likely cost around $50 million to develop and bring into production, the Amiga 1000 had initially disappointing sales. I found the following online but I doubt the 1985 numbers.

1985 100,000
1986 200,000
1987 300,000
1988 400,000
1989 600,000**
1990 750,000
1991 1,035,000**
1992 390,000
1993 155,000
1994 50,000
** totals inline with public C= sales statement

Another source states the Amiga 1000 only sold ~35,000 units in 1985, partially due to production and software problems, and was only selling 10,000-15,000 a month in February of 1986 (120,000-180,000 pace). Another source only has 600,000-700,000 total Amigas sold in North America which includes Canada where CBM was founded and likely where most of the NTSC CD32s went with some ending up in the U.S. The CD32 European sales were likely at a better pace than Amiga 1000 North American sales especially considering the CD32 was only out for 8 months and likely ran out of PAL units in some European markets. I guess the popularity is relative though.

I found some reviews of consoles.

CD32
Console Design 4/10
Console Durability 7/10
Controllers 1/10
Graphics 5/10
Audio 7/10
Media 10/10
Game Library ?
Gamer Value 3/10
Collector Value 6/10

http://www.videogameconsolelibrary.com/pg90-cd32.htm#page=reviews

The CD32 lacks the Game Library stat but there were 170+ games to the 3DO 200+ games which received a 5/10 below. From the review, the biggest let down is the poor controller and too many Amiga games without enough enhancements. The review is better than some of the competition including the earlier CD-i and later Jaguar CD. There are no ratings for the Sega Mega-CD which had ~150 games.

3DO
Console Design 6/10
Console Durability 7/10
Controllers 6/10
Graphics 7/10
Audio 9/10
Media 9/10
Game Library 5/10
Gamer Value 7/10
Collector Value 6/10

The 3DO system was good but also 75% more expensive. Games were often more expensive than Amiga games as well. It was conceived by Trip Hawkins, the co-founder of EA, and created by Dave Needle and RJ Mical so there was an Amiga connection. If they had taken Jeff Porter with them for cost reduction, the CD32 may have never existed.

Last edited by matthey on 10-Apr-2022 at 12:54 AM.

@number6

It’s really the term «Commodore store» that I find unlikely for 1998. The stores you describe though (just any store selling CBM computers), they still exist, but we hardly refer to them as «Commodore stores». We also don’t refer to any retailer of Apple products as Apple stores.

_________________
B5D6A1D019D5D45BCC56F4782AC220D8B3E2A6CC

@kolla

My fault for mentioning 2 entirely different points in time.
Advertising "as if" they were Commodore Amiga sellers was in the heyday.

My mention of the BPPC visit was years and years later obviously. The store had adapted to selling PCs by then. It just happened to have an owner devoted to Amiga who kept one spot open for continuing to show Amiga.
No doubt any signage referring to Amiga was long gone at that point.

#6

_________________
This posting, in its entirety, represents solely the perspective of the author.
*Secrecy has served us so well*

@matthey

There is always a lot of ambiguity in those numbers. Production units does not necessarily translate into sales.

The A1000 was announced with big fanfare in July 1985 in New York. But it was not widely available for sale until Sept / Oct of 1985.

Last edited by Nonefornow on 10-Apr-2022 at 03:14 AM.

@Thread

In any case the release of the CD32, and the lack of availability of it in the US, simply underscores the differences between the North American and European users. In N.A. the purpose of the Amigas was to be mainly a business machine, in Europe it was to be mainly a game machine.

@number6

Quote:

Quote: The A2500 remained in production after the release of the A3000, primarily because the original Video Toaster will not fit in an unmodified A3000 case.

Just to mention one issue.

Last edited by Nonefornow on 10-Apr-2022 at 03:16 AM.

@amigang By design it would be more logic than a A500 Mini. No keyboard. Just a console. Not more not less. But from its form factor and and its idea a A500 Maxi or a A600 type design with a real keyboard and AGA or better RTG would fit more into the picture I like to see. Also we have the mini out. So I voted pancakes.

Nonefornow Quote:

There is always a lot of ambiguity in those numbers. Production units does not necessarily translate into sales. The A1000 was announced with big fanfare in July 1985 in New York. But it was not widely available for sale until Sept / Oct of 1985.

Production units eventually translate into sales but when and how many may explain some of the variances. Either way, it looks like the Amiga had a pretty slow beginning.



The C64 and Apple II were easily outselling the Amiga and Mac. Amiga sales were disappointing until the Amiga 500 was introduced in Europe.



Even then, the next generation Amiga didn't exactly take over from the C64.

Nonefornow Quote:

In any case the release of the CD32, and the lack of availability of it in the US, simply underscores the differences between the North American and European users. In N.A. the purpose of the Amigas was to be mainly a business machine, in Europe it was to be mainly a game machine.

business=professional && CBM!=IBM

@Nonefornow

Quote:

Nonefornow wrote: in Europe it was to be mainly a game machine.

Generally it was sold as a home computer, for both work and play. But it was also sold as an office computer (‘cause most if my old "loot" was office equipment in a previous life), a multimedia creation tool, a multimedia appliance, and much more. Just look at where productivity software was created and you get the idea - the office software, the paint packages, the animation software, the kiosk software etc.

Last edited by kolla on 10-Apr-2022 at 09:01 AM.

_________________
B5D6A1D019D5D45BCC56F4782AC220D8B3E2A6CC

@matthey

Nice graphs, you made them yourself? :)

_________________
B5D6A1D019D5D45BCC56F4782AC220D8B3E2A6CC

@matthey

Quote:

Production units eventually translate into sales but when and how many may explain some of the variances. Either way, it looks like the Amiga had a pretty slow beginning.

I can see how in 1985 there may have been 100,000 units produced, but only 35,000 sold.

Quote:

Even then, the next generation Amiga didn't exactly take over from the C64.

Nor the C128. Introduced on the same year as a "stop gap" until the Amiga was ready, the C128 in its three variants, ended up selling almost the same number of units as all the Amiga models.

Yes nice charts - It would be nice if you had C128 in there.

kolla Quote:

Nice graphs, you made them yourself? :)

They are from the ArsTechnica History of the Amiga series.

https://arstechnica.com/series/history-of-the-amiga/

@agami

Quote:

Selling an add-on into an existing user base is easier than marketing and selling a completely new device into a market that C= knew bugger all about.

Had there been a beige CD32 with a PCMCIA connector that could mate with an A1200 or even A600 then it would have made a reasonably priced CD add on. Of course connecting an Amiga to an Amiga may seem redundant. But a CD32 was cheaper than the $800 or so it cost to add a CDROM to my A1200, which was a towered solution, so more expandable.

Quote:

I was well and truly an Amiga fanboy by the time the CD32 came out. I remember seeing one at MYER running Pinball Fantasies and later at Maxwell's running Microcosm. Even back then it didn't appeal to me. And in reality I wasn't its target audience, though I'm not sure who would choose it over a Super Nintendo or Sega Mega Drive (Genesis) at the time.

I know. Amiga users would! LOL.

It appealed to me because it was an Amiga at heart. But I never bought one. And then I regreted it. I regret it because Brashes were seling them at $300 a pop! A whole stack to chose from! What was I thinking? Sure it had no keyboard. But I could buy an AGA machine for only $300! That's a third of what my A1200 demo model cost at Maxwells and the CD32 was new in box!


It would be hard to find one now. Not for that price. And I don't beleive in paying more than new price for an old amiga, that's ridiculous.

@matthey

Quote:

The CD-1200 was developed after the CD32 when there was no budget to produced it. Beth Richard gave a presentation at Amiwest 2013. The first link below is for the whole presentation which includes CDTV CR, CD32, FMV module and CD-1200 while the 2nd link is the part about the CD-1200.

Thanks, I knew I'd seen it somewhere.

@Nonefornow

Quote:

But few engineering mishaps just turned away a large number of consumers and prospect buyers. Starting when the ECS machines came out, Amiga as a brand was not able to maintain the market position.

I tend to think in retrospect ECS wasn't good enough. If you look at the market this was three years after VGA came out and the PC was gaining traction fast at that point. Sprites and dual playfields are nice but ECS didn't increase bitplanes nor add chunky and only offered EHB with 64 colours. The VGA modes it produced were limited to four colours, no better than CGA, and way slower. What's more, it took five years to come out! In the Amiga's prime years!

And then the Amiga sunk as a games machine, unable to match 256 colour VGA modes, nor be a pleasant experience using Workbench.

AGA, while considered too little and too late, only took two years to come out. And the difference between ECS and AGA is major! What the hell!?

@matthey

Quote:

Even then, the next generation Amiga didn't exactly take over from the C64.

No wonder. The Amiga was less compatible to a C64 than a C16. Commodore people are fairly strict. They like it to work in their C64 or it's no deal. The Amiga could have been a flop!

@Hypex

Quote:

It appealed to me because it was an Amiga at heart. But I never bought one. And then I regreted it. I regret it because Brashes were seling them at $300 a pop! A whole stack to chose from! What was I thinking? Sure it had no keyboard. But I could buy an AGA machine for only $300! That's a third of what my A1200 demo model cost at Maxwells and the CD32 was new in box! It would be hard to find one now. Not for that price. And I don't beleive in paying more than new price for an old amiga, that's ridiculous.

The fact it was a product from the Amiga line was the only thing that appealed to me. The overall product didn't seem to give me anything I didn't already have with my A1200, so no sale. Sure I didn't have a CD-ROM at the time, but any of the games I cared to play I already had or could get on floppy. Though if I saw that $300 price tag at Brashes, I'd probably snag one.

Many years later, I'd say around 2009, I was buying an old Nintendo LCD twin-screen Donkey Kong game as a retro birthday gift from this guy via the Trading Post. When I went to his house it was like stepping into a computer/video gaming museum. He had it all. We spent at least an hour geeking out and chit-chatting about the various pieces of hardware and game titles in his collection, and yes he did have a CD32.

I told him I wouldn't mind having one for my own paltry collection. He said if he's able to find one he'll let me know. Several months later he calls me to tell me he found a decent condition CD32, in a CD32 box no less, with a couple dozen games, and an SX-1 for, if memory serves, about $500. There was a small crack where the CD door hinge met the main enclosure which was fixable with super glue. I snatched that rare combo right up.

I already had some A1200s in my collection, all of which had at least an 030 and my main setup with an 040. I played around with the CD32 + SX-1 for a short while and then stored it away. Nice piece of Amiga history, but not much utility given the other available options. I was thinking of putting a TF330 in it and load it up with a whole bunch of games as a gift for my brother, but then I thought it'd be more practical to gift him an A500 mini.

_________________
All the way, with 68k

@Hypex

Quote:

Hypex wrote: I tend to think in retrospect ECS wasn't good enough. If you look at the market this was three years after VGA came out and the PC was gaining traction fast at that point. Sprites and dual playfields are nice but ECS didn't increase bitplanes nor add chunky and only offered EHB with 64 colours. The VGA modes it produced were limited to four colours, no better than CGA, and way slower. What's more, it took five years to come out! In the Amiga's prime years!

ECS was just a few hacks added on to OCS. The VGA modes were meant to be used for hires mononchrome applications such as CAD, desktop publishing and MIDI music, like the Mac and ST. In monochrome it was fast, but Workbench looked ugly in two colors. The Amiga already did 16 colors in hires without needing a special monitor, and people with A2000s just added a flicker fixer if they wanted to use a VGA monitor. The A3000 came with a flicker built in, which made ECS VGA modes even more redundant.

EHB was introduced with the OCS chipset, but wasn't very interesting either because the copper could already produce more colors without sucking bandwidth. Also some early Amiga 1000s didn't have it, so compatibility was an issue.

Chunky wasn't considered important until texture mapped 3D games started appearing, but they also needed a fast CPU. Ultima Underworld (released in 1992) needed a 486 to get reasonable speed, and it rendered to a window of about 1/4 of the lores screen area.

Putting 256 color chunky graphics into ECS would have been pointless for 68000 Amigas because the 7MHz CPU wasn't fast enough to do software texture mapping. Putting in a faster CPU would have made it a similar price to a PC, except without IBM compatibility - still pointless because the Amiga was only attractive while it was cheaper. The A4000 had the colors and the horsepower, but was the same price as a name-brand 486. When asked about porting Doom to the Amiga 4000, John Carmack famously said:-

The amiga is not powerfull enough to run DOOM. It takes the full
speed of a 68040 to play the game properly even if you have a chunky
pixel mode in hardware. Having to convert to bit planes would kill
it even on the fastest amiga hardware, not to mention the effect it
would have on the majority of the amiga base.

He was wrong about the A4000, but right about 'the majority of the amiga base'.

Quote:

And then the Amiga sunk as a games machine, unable to match 256 colour VGA modes, nor be a pleasant experience using Workbench.

The Sega Megadrive could only do 61 colors max (most games had less), but that didn't stop it from selling over 30 million units by 1997. VGA was a big deal for PC's, but not so much for the Amiga which always had plenty of colors. What the Amiga didn't have was a userbase large enough to justify producing games that used the hardware effectively, made even worse by rampant piracy. Iconic Amiga games were soon ported to the PC even before VGA became popular (eg. Defender of the Crown). Most games in the US were produced for the PC first, then lazily ported to other platforms. This meant that VGA graphics were simply color-reduced to 32 colors with (in most cases) no attempt to use the Amiga's advanced features.

Not sure what you mean by 'nor be a pleasant experience using Workbench' as I found my A1000 to be quite pleasant when using Workbench - certainly more pleasant than a PC in DOS or Windows.

Quote:

AGA, while considered too little and too late, only took two years to come out. And the difference between ECS and AGA is major! What the hell!?

Commodore's engineers were working on 'AAA', but the specs were a bit too optimistic for their skills. When it became obvious that it wouldn't be finished in time they quickly pivoted to AGA. By this time tools were available that made developing new chipsets easier, but Commodore's chip foundry wasn't up to the task so they went to HP for Lisa. Perhaps if they had been a bit less ambitious they could have produced AGA two years earlier, in time for the A3000.

@agami
If Jack Tramiel had signed the license with Nintendo, the CD32 could have had Donkey Kong. Follow the "What was Japan for Commodore?" link I posted above to see how close it was to happening.

bhabbott Quote:

ECS was just a few hacks added on to OCS. The VGA modes were meant to be used for hires mononchrome applications such as CAD, desktop publishing and MIDI music, like the Mac and ST. In monochrome it was fast, but Workbench looked ugly in two colors. The Amiga already did 16 colors in hires without needing a special monitor, and people with A2000s just added a flicker fixer if they wanted to use a VGA monitor. The A3000 came with a flicker built in, which made ECS VGA modes even more redundant. EHB was introduced with the OCS chipset, but wasn't very interesting either because the copper could already produce more colors without sucking bandwidth. Also some early Amiga 1000s didn't have it, so compatibility was an issue.

The custom chips were at first updated to support PAL and fix a few bugs. The developers looked at what they could add without significantly increasing cost. More addressable chip memory, a larger blitter size, EHB, and a little more programmability of the display are what they came up with. Most of what is new is removing limitations which progressed further with AGA. They were making incremental upgrades while the comprehensive upgrade was the experimental AAA which was impractical.

bhabbott Quote:

Chunky wasn't considered important until texture mapped 3D games started appearing, but they also needed a fast CPU. Ultima Underworld (released in 1992) needed a 486 to get reasonable speed, and it rendered to a window of about 1/4 of the lores screen area.

True. Chunky uses the CPU to move around pixels with brute force. Doom also required a 486 or 68040 for optimal game play. The 68030 was a little higher performance than the 386 and could be clocked higher so it can almost pull it off, especially with fast memory and chunky RTG. However, CBM was selling the cheapest possible and lowest performance systems which became the Amiga base.

bhabbott Quote:

Putting 256 color chunky graphics into ECS would have been pointless for 68000 Amigas because the 7MHz CPU wasn't fast enough to do software texture mapping. Putting in a faster CPU would have made it a similar price to a PC, except without IBM compatibility - still pointless because the Amiga was only attractive while it was cheaper. The A4000 had the colors and the horsepower, but was the same price as a name-brand 486. When asked about porting Doom to the Amiga 4000, John Carmack famously said:- The amiga is not powerfull enough to run DOOM. It takes the full speed of a 68040 to play the game properly even if you have a chunky pixel mode in hardware. Having to convert to bit planes would kill it even on the fastest amiga hardware, not to mention the effect it would have on the majority of the amiga base. He was wrong about the A4000, but right about 'the majority of the amiga base'.

The effect Doom had on the Amiga likely would have been the same as on the PC which is to encourage people to upgrade their system performance, especially CPU performance. This doesn't mean people would buy higher end Amigas as many would upgrade to higher end PCs if cheaper. Yes, this is because the Amiga was more competitive as the low end but this was true because that is what they invested in. They were slow to increase their minimum spec, didn't buy higher end CPUs in quantity, didn't upgrade the custom chips fast enough and didn't use and buy faster memory in quantity. Once the Amiga custom chips couldn't give the Amiga the advantage vs a PC with higher performance CPU, the Amiga quickly went from low end to obsolete.

Ironically, Doom was created on a 68040 NeXT workstation.

bhabbott Quote:

The Sega Megadrive could only do 61 colors max (most games had less), but that didn't stop it from selling over 30 million units by 1997. VGA was a big deal for PC's, but not so much for the Amiga which always had plenty of colors. What the Amiga didn't have was a userbase large enough to justify producing games that used the hardware effectively, made even worse by rampant piracy. Iconic Amiga games were soon ported to the PC even before VGA became popular (eg. Defender of the Crown). Most games in the US were produced for the PC first, then lazily ported to other platforms. This meant that VGA graphics were simply color-reduced to 32 colors with (in most cases) no attempt to use the Amiga's advanced features.

The SNES had 32768 colors but used an upgraded 6502 architecture CPU so it often struggled. The Sega Genesis/Megadrive was like a more specialized and cost reduced version of the Amiga with better sprite hardware but also inferior in some ways. When the Amiga and Genesis came out, it was impressive to move many colorful objects on the screen. The Sega CD didn't come out until at least late 1992 in most markets with minor hardware improvements. The CD32 released in 1993 with 68020+AGA had a higher performance CPU, at least competitive custom chips and more memory than these competitors. A 486 PC in comparison was ok at 320x200x8 FPS games but often struggled at other types of games. Pentium PCs were the big game changer when they started to get cheap but that was mid-'90s.

bhabbott Quote:

Not sure what you mean by 'nor be a pleasant experience using Workbench' as I found my A1000 to be quite pleasant when using Workbench - certainly more pleasant than a PC in DOS or Windows.

Somebody needs to try an early version of Windows on a 286 before complaining about Workbench on an Amiga 1000.

bhabbott Quote:

Commodore's engineers were working on 'AAA', but the specs were a bit too optimistic for their skills. When it became obvious that it wouldn't be finished in time they quickly pivoted to AGA. By this time tools were available that made developing new chipsets easier, but Commodore's chip foundry wasn't up to the task so they went to HP for Lisa. Perhaps if they had been a bit less ambitious they could have produced AGA two years earlier, in time for the A3000.

AAA was impractical and would have been too expensive.

AA+ - 2 chips 200,000 transistors (AGA was 3 chips so this may have cost less)
AAA 32 bit - 4 chips, 750,000 transistors
AAA 64 bit - 6 chips, 1,000,000 transistors

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_AA+_Chipset

Lew Eggebrecht was turning things around but Bill Sydnes and the PC compatible "business" guys set the Amiga back at least a year. If AGA could have made it into the first Amiga 3000 in 1990 then AA+ probably could have made it into the CD32 in 1993 considering AA+ was originally planned to be released in 1994. It sill would have needed a faster CPU to take advantage of the chunky mode. A 68030@28MHz may have been enough to play some FPS games and shouldn't have cost too much more.

Last edited by matthey on 12-Apr-2022 at 08:58 PM.
Last edited by matthey on 12-Apr-2022 at 08:19 PM.

@Thread

Re-reading some Amiga World magazines.

The Dec 1993 issue reports that the release of the CD32 in the US was announced at the September 1993 World Of Commodore in Pasadena. The expected availability in the US was November 1993, and the national rollout was for January 1994 at CES.
Amiga World also reports that the manufacturing in the Philippines was cracking out 20,000 units a week.

Also according to the same magazine in Europe "CBM reportedly moved an encouraging 8000 units within days of CD32's release..."