Amiga Prices

[vwestlife]

It is extremely weird, isn't it? In mid-80's there was definitely this trend of when the big players in the 8-bit market saw the writing was on the wall for their legacy platform they'd end up releasing one final swan song version which incorporated basically all the most popular wish-list items that users thought they wanted. Notable examples of this are, of course, the Apple IIgs, the Tandy Color Computer III... and the Commodore 128. Commodore already had the Amiga, they were dipping into the PC compatible market, the C128 was obviously intended as that "one last one for the road" for the C64 faithful. Sure, they'd keep selling these things as long as people were buying, but clearly it was for all practical purposes over... but then suddenly it wasn't again?

The original C128 was something cooked up in a hurry so Commodore could have something new to show at CES while they were waiting for the Amiga to be finished. (The only reason the Z80 got included was an "oopsie" when they discovered the C64's CP/M cartridge wouldn't work on it, so the fix was to build the equivalent of it into the motherboard.)

The real swan song was the C128D, the Amiga 1000-like desktop version of the C128.

 

[Quagmire]

P R E A C H. Amiga people are the weirdest weirdos of the retrocomputing world. I think the brand getting passed from owner to owner in the 90s will-they-won’t-they-ing the future of the platform fried some of the hardcore original users’ brains, so now you have people who keep trying to pretend it’s a modern full-caliber daily-driver OS. I don’t want to use YouTube on an Amiga, and if I have to run modern fully-custom hardware to do it, what exactly is the advantage over just using my MacBook? I got Ubuntu’s Unity DTE running on top of Arch on my main ThinkPad in the 2010s, I have proven my worth and paid my dues. Sometimes the mountain isn’t worth the climb.

I love the Amiga, I think it’s THE 16-bit platform, and in a just world the Atari wouldn’t have split the market and the IIGS would have just been a Mac, but that didn’t happen, and there are people out here paying serious cash to keep pretending like 1994 can be re-rolled. AND THATS NOT TO MENTION trying to charge money for firmware for a computer released forty years ago. Come ON.

I am very, very lucky to have a semi-local Amiga group (the North Texas AUG, I don’t remember their official name, it’s fairly informal) who are super welcoming and just happy to have new people into the thing they like, and who have been nothing but helpful—and who have given me frankly crazy deals on a CIB A500 and A1000. It seems like most of the original/older/core members already have their machines upgraded to the maximum, and now they’re content to talk about the stuff with new people. I honestly haven’t found much real hostility online, either, so things may have cooled off in recent years, but the vibe on, say, Amibay, still feels like it’s got some real ugliness lurking beneath the surface that I don’t associate with the broader retrocomputing community.

To be fair, also, the Amigans obsession with upgrades means there are more and cheaper options for processor upgrades than any other retro platform. If you want to accelerate an Apple IIGS, which you really need to as the later OS revisions start to get pretty heavy, you have to find rare, expensive period hardware, of which there are only three options, and they usually need to go to the shop before they’re ready to go. Meanwhile, there are six different FOSS accelerator/RAM/IDE driver boards for the A500 alone, and another couple modem closed-source ones.

Anyway, here’s your soapbox back, I think I’ve had my turn.

Just to add a little Amiga fluff. Back in the very late 80's - early 90's, my son who was then in his late teens/early twenties, had a parttime job with a local tv station doing graphics for some of their commercial spots. He swore by the thing. He piled all of his stuff in his old Ford pickup and headed home for the holidays and wanted me to upgrade his his memory. I check all over town and finally came up with the 2 chips and a quick trip to Radio Shack for the DIP sockets. The upgrade was successful and he said it was like manna from heaven. He's now an IT maven for a large medical corporation and has a hardtime even remembering that Amiga. He's the in the new out with the old type and isn't the least bit nostalgic about anything least of all computers.

 

[geoffm3]

The IIGS is proof that the C65 wouldn't have been successful even if launched five years earlier, and to waste time designing and making prototypes of it in the early 1990s was totally bonkers and the sign of a dysfunctional company.

I heard an anecdote that the whole purpose of the C65 project was to distract a single engineer at Commodore while other work on other projects progressed.

 

[Unknown_K]

Anything cheap enough for home use in the late 80's early 90's (pre internet) had to run on TVs of that era so you were resolution limited. NTSC in my opinion is what doomed the Amiga and Atari ST (which did have VGA but only monochrome).

Commodore spent a lot of time and money re-inventing the C64 with less features for some reason. The C128 was decent but they needed something with a hard drive, much more memory, and 1.44mb floppies plus a cheap monitor and then you're in Amiga 500 territory anyway.

 

[geoffm3]

The original C128 was something cooked up in a hurry so Commodore could have something new to show at CES while they were waiting for the Amiga to be finished. (The only reason the Z80 got included was an "oopsie" when they discovered the C64's CP/M cartridge wouldn't work on it, so the fix was to build the equivalent of it into the motherboard.)

The real swan song was the C128D, the Amiga 1000-like desktop version of the C128.

I think it was probably a bit silly for them to include CP/M support in the 128. By the time it had hit the market I don't think a lot of people really cared about CP/M all that much, at least that was the case in North America.

 

[geoffm3]

Anything cheap enough for home use in the late 80's early 90's (pre internet) had to run on TVs of that era so you were resolution limited. NTSC in my opinion is what doomed the Amiga and Atari ST (which did have VGA but only monochrome).

Commodore spent a lot of time and money re-inventing the C64 with less features for some reason. The C128 was decent but they needed something with a hard drive, much more memory, and 1.44mb floppies plus a cheap monitor and then you're in Amiga 500 territory anyway.

IMO, bitplane graphics are what did in the Amiga... once the likes of Wolfenstein and Doom came along the Amiga chipset was seriously lagging in video performance.

 

[Unknown_K]

VGA was the standard in 1990, and Amiga could not do it because it had custom NTSC chips that ages badly.

 

[geoffm3]

VGA was the standard in 1990, and Amiga could not do it because it had custom NTSC chips that ages badly.

Yeah, true ECS couldn't but AGA could (but only just and not very fast in high color resolutions) and was a couple years late to the game and still wouldn't have competed. They could have done chunky video modes with NTSC and been better later down the road. It was a memory optimization that ended up not being very useful in practice by the time the production computer came around with the dropping prices of RAM.

Then of course there was the ill-fated patent troll case which was the nail in the coffin.

 

[Unknown_K]

AGA could not do anything above 640x480 without flicker.

 

[geoffm3]

AGA could not do anything above 640x480 without flicker.

On a VGA monitor it can.

 

[geoffm3]

(or rather 640x400 it can) For DblNTSC

For DblPAL you can get 640x480... but in either case no where near the color res you can get with a modest Super VGA card or performance.

 

[geoffm3]

Ah sorry... you said over... duh! Yes, I agree that was the limit.

 

[oktology]

Accept it or not, but the only difference between an FPGA (hardware emulation) and software emulation is how you describe the hardware you clone.

It’s not, and it’s stubbornly ridiculous to insist this. Emulation runs as application software. FPGA is physical hardware. The fact that there are algorithms to burn the FPGA doesn’t mean the FPGA runs software any more than a circuit simulation of discrete logic means discrete logic is running software. The FPGA has no memory to store software. The FPGA has no ALU to run software. The FPGA does not execute code. The FPGA does not use discrete time-quantized processing. It is in no way equivalent in function or nature to a piece of software.

Would you argue that an EPROM isn’t real firmware because it is programmed? Is an EPROM an emulation? Actually, a better example: would you argue that a CF card in an IDE adapter is the same as a disk image? Because that is /exactly/ the same argument: claiming that programmed hardware is the same as a software emulation of hardware. Just the simple fact that you can TOUCH ONE OF THEM disproves this nonsense.

The argument that they are the same is a moral one, not a material one, and as such cannot be factual. It’s an opinion, and, as you pointed out immediately before doing exact the thing you said was annoying, an annoying one.

 

[Quagmire]

VGA was the standard in 1990, and Amiga could not do it because it had custom NTSC chips that ages badly.

VGA? I thing maybe EGA. VGA was extremely expensive back then and maybe just the engineering types had it.

 

[geoffm3]

It’s not, and it’s stubbornly ridiculous to insist this. Emulation runs as application software. FPGA is physical hardware. The fact that there are algorithms to burn the FPGA doesn’t mean the FPGA runs software any more than a circuit simulation of discrete logic means discrete logic is running software. The FPGA has no memory to store software. The FPGA has no ALU to run software. The FPGA does not execute code. The FPGA does not use discrete time-quantized processing. It is in no way equivalent in function or nature to a piece of software.

Would you argue that an EPROM isn’t real firmware because it is programmed? Is an EPROM an emulation? Actually, a better example: would you argue that a CF card in an IDE adapter is the same as a disk image? Because that is /exactly/ the same argument: claiming that programmed hardware is the same as a software emulation of hardware. Just the simple fact that you can TOUCH ONE OF THEM disproves this nonsense.

The argument that they are the same is a moral one, not a material one, and as such cannot be factual. It’s an opinion, and, as you pointed out immediately before doing exact the thing you said was annoying, an annoying one.

I think what a lot of people get wrapped around the axle with this stuff is that a software emulation of an old machine or an FPGA implementation of same is largely irrelevant given the compute power of modern hardware. Either one can be equally as good... just because a software emulator isn't a hardware implementation doesn't necessarily mean it will be worse. Both are behavioral models.

FPGAs are a combination of programmable look up tables and flip flops (and some inverters), and not individual and, or, etc logic gates. Does it matter that an ALU design in FPGA doesn't look like one with discrete gates? Not really, the end result is what matters.

 

[krebizfan]

VGA? I thing maybe EGA. VGA was extremely expensive back then and maybe just the engineering types had it.

Looking at Nov 1990 Computer Shopper, upgrading a new system to VGA from its EGA equipped counterpart cost about $40. Okay, that was 640x480 and a minimal VGA display but still would be better than the typical budget EGA monitor. Going for 1024x768 with a much better monitor would cost another $250 or so but that would be a respectable display for close to a decade.

 

[vwestlife]

Just to add a little Amiga fluff. Back in the very late 80's - early 90's, my son who was then in his late teens/early twenties, had a parttime job with a local tv station doing graphics for some of their commercial spots.

This could've been him, demonstrating the Video Toaster in use at a TV station in 1991:

 

[Eudimorphodon]

VGA? I thing maybe EGA. VGA was extremely expensive back then and maybe just the engineering types had it.

I dunno, my memory is that EGA died pretty fast after VGA came out and the costs for a complete setup (card+monitor) were barely different as early as 1989? I think EGA cards were briefly desirable on their own as upgrades for people that already owned CGA monitors, since that combination would let you run games a lot better. (We had that whole generation of Duke Nukem/Keen/etc EGA titles that could run well on a 286s that might have been sold with CGA monitors because *until* VGA came out there was a significant price savings with CGA.)

 

[Unknown_K]

My new 286 Packard Bell came with a VGA monitor around 1990 or so (granted the dot pitch sucked). I remember buying it before graduating college in 1991.

Never knew anyone with a EGA back in the day, CGA or monochrome if you had a machine for a while or VGA. The local university had some EGA monitors on terminals used with a mainframe if my memory is correct, they were IBM color and very high resolution.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

Never knew anyone with a EGA back in the day, CGA or monochrome if you had a machine for a while or VGA.

Yeah, that was my experience too. I'm sure there must have been a few months in the, I dunno, 1988-ish timeframe where an EGA setup was the "just right" price/performance tradeoff, and of course a high-end computer from earlier might have it (but I rarely got to play with high-end computers), but the vast majority of XTs and low-end 286s I dealt with were CGA or Hercules, and then suddenly VGA was everywhere. The first EGA card I ever got to play with came from a 286 I picked up at a thrift store for peanuts in the early 90's, I ended up mating it with a cool black-cased Kaypro CGA monitor from a garage sale. (And ended up getting jaded about that CGA monitor+EGA combination because I got to learn how many rude programs there are that don't honor the switch settings and try using high-res modes *anyway*.)