The Amiga had a much more wider variety of 3D software and a lot of it was easier to use. Plus if you had the money and wanted performance you could just buy an accelerator card with another CPU on it.
In practice most people never upgrade their video and sound card over a computer's lifetime. Networking? In the 1980s? It was kinda niche. Nearly every computer could use a modem. Those are external devices for the most part.
I think Motorola just did not sell enough of the 68040s for it to become cheap through mass manufacture. Also from what I remember the 68040 was about twice as fast as the 486 clock for clock. It was only truly beaten in performance when the 486DX2 66 and later came out.
Then Motorola got involved in PowerPC chip design, shit canned their own RISC architecture (88K), the 68050 project ran into trouble so they shit canned that too, focused remaining resources into the 68060 which came way too little too late to compete with the 486DX4 100 or the Pentium. Nearly no one used the processors so they were expensive like heck and only were used in add-on cards.
Most people who had the 386 in the begining had the SX model with a 16-bit databus. The 68000 had 32-bit registers from the onset. With a flat memory space. In like 1979.
The designers of the Amiga had initially started on the game console market. Jay Miner, the chief designer, had basically worked on the Atari 400/800 8-bit personal computer line. http://www.oldcomputers.net/at...
The Amiga sold several million computers which had the time was highly successful. Its main issue was lack of sales in North America. Basically Commodore had stiffed its retail store retailers in the C64 days with a lot of unsold inventory. The Amiga 1000 was sold was a "professional" machine in specialty computer stores and it found a hard time competing like that. When the cut down versions like the A500 came 2 years later in 1987, instead of selling them on plain regular retail stores, together with game consoles and the like, they never did.
The Amiga wouldn't have been available in 1983 to begin with. At that time people used mostly 8-bit micros back then. Commodore already had the C64/C128 in that niche. The 68000 processor would have been a lot more expensive. One could argue that both Commodore and Apple lost the personal computer market to the IBM PC in part because they did not make their 16-bit computers backwards compatible with the 8-bit computers like the IBM PC did.
He's talking about a trick people found to play sound samples on the C64 using a "bug" or should I say "feature" in the SID chip. I think you can even mix channels with the CPU but you lose machine performance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
You basically use a C64 cartridge to store the data and then just dump it. Of course it wouldn't be possible back then because of cart memory capacity constraints. But the sound hardware can do it.
Dude. The MT-32 was an external MIDI device. You could attach it to any machine with a MIDI port on it. You could get a serial to MIDI interface box on the Amiga for like $20. Of course no one would purchase something expensive like that for games when it cost more than the computer though. Unless you were a music composer, like Danny Elfman, you know, search him on IMDB. He used the Bars & Pipes sequence on the Amiga to compose a lot of his most well known tracks like the Michael Keaton "Batman" movie track.
Actually it took until the 386DX with a 32-bit bus to be faster the 68000 in actual use. I still remember that. A lot of 386 users used the SX which still had a 16-bit bus. By the time the 486 came out though, the performance difference was just too much to bear.
In the early Amigas there were plenty of cheap peripherals to add an hard disk to the Amiga. If you can call something that cost as much as an A500 cheap (it was not cheaper on the PC or the Mac). The problem was that those of us out in the sticks couldn't get them easily. From the A600 onwards the Amiga came with a built-in IDE disk controller and space for at least a 2.5" internal drive so it stopped being a problem.
With regards to office applications, you could find those in the Amiga as well. Like MaxiPlan in the early days or Final Calc near the end of its lifetime. At best you could argue that tiny text was harder to read on a an Amiga CGA like display.
It wildly depended on the manufacturer. On the Amiga I had good experiences with the KAO and 3M floppies and some other brand I can't remember. If you chose a white box manufacturer you would get what you deserved though.
It could not read Mac floppies. The Mac used a non-standard drive mechanism. Same reason why you could not read Amiga disks on a PC. Unless you have special hardware like the CatWeasel.
Yeah but MacOS wasn't preemptive multi-tasking. The underlying OS architecture was worse. Besides you had no optional command line prompt with UNIX like commands. That's a minus in my book.
The Amiga also had decent DTP software. Ever heard of PageStream? The main issue IMHO is that the original OCS Amigas were made for TV output so you couldn't do high resolution work in them without using an interlaced display. The Amiga 3000 came with a built-in "flicker-fixer" and VGA output but by that time it was too expensive and too late.
It is not true that you required assembly code to get the specialty hardware to do its tricks. There were other languages available like AMOS and Blitz Basic. Heck even some actual commercially viable games were sold and made with those tools.
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Yeah. It's called copyright. Publishing the code meant it couldn't be copied without a license.
The Amiga had a much more wider variety of 3D software and a lot of it was easier to use. Plus if you had the money and wanted performance you could just buy an accelerator card with another CPU on it.
I guess you didn't get to the part where they later replaced the PCs with DEC Alphas.
In practice most people never upgrade their video and sound card over a computer's lifetime. Networking? In the 1980s? It was kinda niche. Nearly every computer could use a modem. Those are external devices for the most part.
I think Motorola just did not sell enough of the 68040s for it to become cheap through mass manufacture. Also from what I remember the 68040 was about twice as fast as the 486 clock for clock. It was only truly beaten in performance when the 486DX2 66 and later came out.
Then Motorola got involved in PowerPC chip design, shit canned their own RISC architecture (88K), the 68050 project ran into trouble so they shit canned that too, focused remaining resources into the 68060 which came way too little too late to compete with the 486DX4 100 or the Pentium. Nearly no one used the processors so they were expensive like heck and only were used in add-on cards.
Most people who had the 386 in the begining had the SX model with a 16-bit databus.
The 68000 had 32-bit registers from the onset. With a flat memory space. In like 1979.
The designers of the Amiga had initially started on the game console market. Jay Miner, the chief designer, had basically worked on the Atari 400/800 8-bit personal computer line.
http://www.oldcomputers.net/at...
The Amiga sold several million computers which had the time was highly successful. Its main issue was lack of sales in North America. Basically Commodore had stiffed its retail store retailers in the C64 days with a lot of unsold inventory. The Amiga 1000 was sold was a "professional" machine in specialty computer stores and it found a hard time competing like that. When the cut down versions like the A500 came 2 years later in 1987, instead of selling them on plain regular retail stores, together with game consoles and the like, they never did.
The Amiga wouldn't have been available in 1983 to begin with. At that time people used mostly 8-bit micros back then. Commodore already had the C64/C128 in that niche. The 68000 processor would have been a lot more expensive. One could argue that both Commodore and Apple lost the personal computer market to the IBM PC in part because they did not make their 16-bit computers backwards compatible with the 8-bit computers like the IBM PC did.
He's talking about a trick people found to play sound samples on the C64 using a "bug" or should I say "feature" in the SID chip. I think you can even mix channels with the CPU but you lose machine performance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
You basically use a C64 cartridge to store the data and then just dump it. Of course it wouldn't be possible back then because of cart memory capacity constraints. But the sound hardware can do it.
Dude. The MT-32 was an external MIDI device. You could attach it to any machine with a MIDI port on it. You could get a serial to MIDI interface box on the Amiga for like $20. Of course no one would purchase something expensive like that for games when it cost more than the computer though. Unless you were a music composer, like Danny Elfman, you know, search him on IMDB. He used the Bars & Pipes sequence on the Amiga to compose a lot of his most well known tracks like the Michael Keaton "Batman" movie track.
I think the Amiga external display was more like $399 when I bought mine. I had a Phillips CGA monitor.
I guess you never saw an Amiga 3000 with a VGA monitor or even an Amiga 1200 with a multi-sync monitor.
The cheapest drive I can remember for the Amiga used a PC ST506 hard disk interface.
Actually it took until the 386DX with a 32-bit bus to be faster the 68000 in actual use. I still remember that. A lot of 386 users used the SX which still had a 16-bit bus. By the time the 486 came out though, the performance difference was just too much to bear.
We had spreadsheets, word processors, and DTP software on the Amiga. The problem was the display was not suitable for print in the early machines.
Here's Final Calc:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
In the early Amigas there were plenty of cheap peripherals to add an hard disk to the Amiga. If you can call something that cost as much as an A500 cheap (it was not cheaper on the PC or the Mac). The problem was that those of us out in the sticks couldn't get them easily. From the A600 onwards the Amiga came with a built-in IDE disk controller and space for at least a 2.5" internal drive so it stopped being a problem.
With regards to office applications, you could find those in the Amiga as well. Like MaxiPlan in the early days or Final Calc near the end of its lifetime. At best you could argue that tiny text was harder to read on a an Amiga CGA like display.
You can argue that RISC isn't RISC anymore. For several decades now. Heck ARM even has NEON SIMD instructions.
It wildly depended on the manufacturer. On the Amiga I had good experiences with the KAO and 3M floppies and some other brand I can't remember. If you chose a white box manufacturer you would get what you deserved though.
It could not read Mac floppies. The Mac used a non-standard drive mechanism. Same reason why you could not read Amiga disks on a PC. Unless you have special hardware like the CatWeasel.
What are you? French? :-)
That's probably one of the few places the ST sold more.
Yeah but MacOS wasn't preemptive multi-tasking. The underlying OS architecture was worse. Besides you had no optional command line prompt with UNIX like commands. That's a minus in my book.
The Amiga also had decent DTP software. Ever heard of PageStream? The main issue IMHO is that the original OCS Amigas were made for TV output so you couldn't do high resolution work in them without using an interlaced display. The Amiga 3000 came with a built-in "flicker-fixer" and VGA output but by that time it was too expensive and too late.
It is not true that you required assembly code to get the specialty hardware to do its tricks. There were other languages available like AMOS and Blitz Basic. Heck even some actual commercially viable games were sold and made with those tools.
There was also the A3000T but Commodore only sold a couple of those.
We got them in Europe. It's the North Americans that were daft. Especially considering it was designed and manufactured there in the first place.
The less holes the better.