@thread

As I said somewhere way back in this thread, objectivity and subjectivity make this a problematic question.

Objectively, AGA should be judged against ECS and OCS, not VGA, SVGA etc. In that context, AGA was OK. You could now paint in hundreds of thousands of colours, you had more colours on screen for gaming purposes and higher resolutions available for serious use. And if you were a professional user for whom display was key work factor already, you'd probably put an RTG card in your machine of some form by then anyway.

While there is no doubt that video hardware on competing platforms was starting to outperform it (and would soon totally outclass it), this that was true of every other component too. Sound, networking, even basic IO like serial and parallel were getting better (buffering etc) elsewhere.

However since little Amiga software ran on these competing systems to some extent, it's mostly a moot point.

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@Karlos

AGA certainly was not the big game changer but still important. Most games were using VGA (256 colors) already (and harddiscs) and first developed for PC (MSDOS), later ported to amiga (if at all). Xou needed completely new graphics for amiga if using ECS. Additionally A1200 had more resources (processor speed and RAM) and were mostly including harddiscs. But A1200 came too late and were comprable to PC at highest. Too little too late.

"Professional users" at that time did not need AGA, they certainly used A2000/A3000 or A4000 with graphic cards. AGA was important for games.

Last edited by OlafS25 on 23-Jan-2023 at 10:47 AM.
Last edited by OlafS25 on 23-Jan-2023 at 10:47 AM.

@OlafS25

It was a grave mistake to release it without 68030 and fast memory. 68020 cpu was too weak for 1992 which was a cpu from the year 1984. Most PCs at that time used 386 as a baseline which is equivalent to 68030 cpu. Except the static games like adventure and pinball games no game could use 256 colors in A1200 because of the slow memory bandwidth.

@Oscar12

You do realise that at the same clock speed the 030 has almost no real world performance gain over 020, right? The datacache is tiny and except for carefully crafted code, doesn't make a large difference. The benefit comes with higher clockspeed.

The 68020 was adequate for the A1200, what it truly lacked was fast ram.

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@agami

Quote:

agami wrote: @cdimauro Quote: What do you mean with "machine"? Something in the same category. The Commodore Amiga 1200 is a personal computer. Primarily a gaming focused SKU, but nevertheless a personal computer. Gaming consoles are a separate category.

I agree on the technicality of the point but the reality is very different. I know of many users that only ever used their Amigas to play games, directly on unexpanded machines, straight from floppy that never once booted workbench except perhaps to deal with coverdisks. Regardless of the intention of the machine, it was a games console to many. And as soon as it wasn't as good as X, Y or Z for that purpose, it was replaced.

Last edited by Karlos on 28-Jan-2023 at 12:39 PM.

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@Karlos

A reason why the A1200 should have had a hard drive by default out of the box! If it booted straight into Workbench then people would have been forced to use it, grow to love it and try out other programs other than cracked floppy games!

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@BigD

I think that would've been a much larger production cost increase than 1MB of on-board fast ram.

The "AGA spec should've included 1MB fast ram" is a hill I will die on.

Last edited by Karlos on 28-Jan-2023 at 06:10 PM.

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@Karlos

1MB? Geh…

So, we have this 32bit 68020 that in principle can address 4GB of RAM, but we only get the cheaper ec020 that is limited to 16MB of RAM, which for Amiga translates to 8MB… of which one can only add 4MB to the A1200 to not crash with PCMCIA… yes, it would totally make sense (CBM wise) to add just 1MB of Fast RAM on board, preferably in a way that would make third party ram expansion impossible :)

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@kolla

I did not say that it should be added in a way that would make expansion impossible. I'm saying that the base specification should have mandated that the minimum amount of fast ram in any AGA machine is 1MB such that the intended minimum CPU pairing that came with it doesn't embarrass itself. I'm sure it's not beyond the realms of possibility to design it such that fitting 4MB via the trapdoor simply supercedes the on board memory.

You only have to look at the empty FPU area on the motherboard and wonder what was being thought about in the minds of those controlling where the money was spent. An FPU was next to useless for the vast majority of users at that time.

I'm sure a full 020 would've been nice but I can see the extra address lanes making the motherboard layout more complicated and I'm sure my suggestion which would probably require 4 additional DRAM chips would be complication enough already.

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@kolla

Time was coming with great 3d fps and real time strategy games. Command and conquer, doom, tie fighter, tekken, Diablo, etc. Amiga 1200 was too weak for the upcoming nice games carnage

@Oscar12

Yeah everyone had that crystal ball by the end of the 80s except commodore, right?

Games followed the capabilities of the hardware. It wasn't until doom set the PC world on fire that people really started upgrading their machines because of a game and not because their terrible OS and applications ran as fluidly as the output of a terminally constipated rhino on their machines.

Last edited by Karlos on 28-Jan-2023 at 08:45 PM.

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@Karlos

Well we know the Mehdi Ali and his gang were definitely deaf and blind to see their toes.

@Oscar12

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

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There’s too much emphasis on Doom, let’s not forget that Doom (which actually was developed on a 68k system to begin with) was ported to a whole range of systems that also vanished. I’m one of those who supposedly shouldn’t have bought Amiga, since I bought my first computer in January 1994 - clearly I should have bought a PC, right? But PCs costed a heck lot more (3-4 times as much), required more space. And were quirky as f… with their 640k issues, irqs, highmem blabla crap, not to mention different games and software requiring a variety of different sound cards and whatnot. I had both family and friends with PCs and it was tedious! The A1200 was plug-and-play, and option of using the TV you already got. And most importantly, for me, it did the job - I could write all my home assignments on it, save on a msdos floppy and bring it to univ, where it could be read from any available system. And when I got the hang of DPaint, I even managed to earn money with the A1200.

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@kolla

Doom was designed on a monster Nextstation with 68040 not 14 mhz 68020

@Karlos

Quote:

I agree on the technicality of the point but the reality is very different. I know of many users that only ever used their Amigas to play games...

And I knew many people back then who only ever used their DOS/Windows PC to play games.
Even today, there are many people who have an exclusively gaming PC, and do all their other work on some other equipment, usually a more portable computing device.

Last edited by agami on 29-Jan-2023 at 09:13 AM.

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@agami

That really only took off once the PC didn't completely suck at it. Primary with VGA and beyond. There were some notable exceptions that were great even on older kit but the only dedicated PC gamers I recall from that era was post VGA/386.

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AGA was not good enough.
Amiga need chunky pixel in 1992.
Amiga developers will made playable DOOM even on 020
if only don't have to waste time on c2p.
Commodore bankrupt because AGA has not chunky pixel.
Rest is history.

@ppcamiga1

So does it mean that if we put an RTG board on a 020 Amiga we can now run Doom? LoL

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@pixie

Don't feed the troll. The fact is, like everyone else that bought an A1200 in 1992/3, it was a sweet machine. The only real criticism I have is the lack of fast ram by default since that's what games developers would've targeted. People are full of suggestions on how AGA should've been better but they forget that it was designed quickly and was never intended to be more than an incremental improvements over ECS.

Even with the bare minimum of 1MB fast, it would've been 4x faster than the A500/500+/600 it was intended to replace.

Sure, Chunky pixels would've been nice, but that is not what we had and I doubt a redesign on that scale would've been ready by 1992.

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