why wasn't the Amiga more popular?
probably cus it cost too much and wasn't a compelling option to other home computer platforms available at the time
>>108393914It was actually similarity in the late 80's compared to the rest of the market.
>>108393964Was just about to say that
>>108393964popular* I mean
>>108393914Their marketing sucked donkey dicks and everything was moving towards MS-DOS. The Amiga had some niche uses where it did well, along with Commodore baby ducks who identified with the brand so strongly they were willing to stay loyal to the end. For most people, if they didn't have a reason to pay extra for a Mac, the exploding amount of cheap MS-DOS computers was the most bang for the buck. There just wasn't a very large slice of the market for the Amiga, which was made even worse by Commodore's marketing not reaching even those people.
fuck you, I'm gonna buy an amiga.
>>108393914why weren't you?
>>108393989>along with Commodore baby ducks who identified with the brand so strongly they were willing to stay loyal to the endUnironically most Amiga fags I know could not care less about Amiga and gave very little shits about the C64, even then only about demoscene and SID tracker music part.
>>108393914The cool kids of the neighborhood had a C64. But their dads had the Amiga you could look at sometimes.
>>108393989What timeframe are you talking about? There were like 10 competing microcomputer standards at the time, Atari ST was just as big as Amiga, purely in the 80's, Amiga even sold more than the Macintosh (not Apple II though).
>>108394134>less about AmigaCommodore*
>>108393914Commodore was the original tech Ship of Foolspicrel remind you of anyone?
>>108393914They didn't think different
>>108393914Commodore wanted to kill it, kind of like Microsoft wants to kill Xbox and Windows. Typical publicly-traded company behavior.
We don't need Commodore anymore. Amiga belongs to us, the users and content creators.
It was too expensive at launch and didn't have a high-res text mode like the PC to attract business people with money. Apple had also basically locked up the desktop publishing market with the Mac.The only real audience left was gamers and digital artists, both markets that Commodore was actually fairly unprepared to support due to lackluster system software during the first year or so.By the time the platform had matured, most gamers in the US were either on consoles or PC clones with EGA. Europe was a viable market but relatively low revenue compared to what you could get selling in the US.Oh also, it was run by retards.(I like the ST more personally)
>>108393914Because of it's video origins it lacked native non-interlaced high res square pixel graphics mode for productivity work, requiring expensive scan doubler to not die from a headache, and even when it was implemented in ECS, until AGA it sucked and was limited 4 colors.
>>108393914I was salivating at the prospect of having amiga every day, graphics, sound was insanely good...but I got c64 which was expensive af for easteuropoor kid like me so I had to wait. years went by and then suddenly there was wolf3d running on metal office machines.small rendering window on 286, shitty sound pcspkr and yet that game was amazing. amiga got forgotten.
Created by a jew
>>108395334As told by Amiga OS dev Randell Jesup:>be Commodore in 1993>FINALLY have a new chipset that makes Amiga competitive again>Mehdi Ali faffs about for months, fails to reserve fab time for xmas>"whatever, let's just produce more units of our OLD model.">stuck with tons of unsellable obsolete inventory>bankrupt the next yearhttps://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=206700&cid=16864964
for me it's the commodore 128d
>>108393914No high refresh monitor option I shit you not. You where stuck with TV refresh rates.
>>108395334>picrel remind you of anyone?That is identical to the end game of iRobot.
>>108394143Early 90s in the US. Europe had far more affinity for the ST and the Amiga line but in the US everyone was moving towards DOS. If you were a child immersed in some other computer's ecosystem, along with your friends, your child brain might remember the whole world being into your brand's system but that doesn't make it reality.
>>108393921retard, the ibm pc was 6000 dollars at launch
>>108393914Because few dickheads in Motorola fucked all what they could and dumped most advanced cpu of the time and gave up to garbage called x86. But that is very short explanation to your Question .Long explanation would take few hundred pages and since we are on 4chan .... Let's be honest who would read that here?....Yeah....so... Nah.
>>108398353"Pajeet management" is all that needs to be said.
>>108398289Clones had become just about affordable by the time Amiga was launched even for home use, even if the standard offerings sucked video/audiowise.
>>108398353commodore fucked itself over >>108397623 basically said it allmoreover amiga 1200 used the same motorola cpu it's competition used (mac lc2) so you can't put it on motorola
>>108398289>>108398377Amiga 500 was about the same price a cheap PC at launch, half the price of a 'name' PC. Was a hell of a lot more interesting shit avail for the Amiga also.
>>108398437a500 was commodore's second most popular product after c64
>>108398452>c64was also most popular computer product ever, just taking the A500 as peak Commodore/Amiga if the discussion is about where it went wrong. Because they blew it post A500, for reasons already noted.
>>108398289This is the world I want to go back to. Shut out the entire rest of the world from computing.
>>108393914It was expensive, yet lacked compatibility.Additionally, it has "commodore" plastered everywhere."why do you need that much money for a commodore? we'll buy an ibm!"
>>108398437False, the Amiga 500 was $699 after the introductory pricing gave way. You would also need a monitor, and then you also needed the addon ram. this is per Gemini. So your total would have been $1150.At $1150, it was still a cool computer, but you had to be "in the know" or chance upon a cool shopkeeper. The magazines (that's where info came from back then) nearly always gave Amiga an "also ran" or gawkish step-sister treatment.
>>108398437PC graphic options until VGA became standard were useless or very proprietary and sound was even worse.
>>108398434Tandy AT&TApple ComodoreAtariIBMOnly IBM and Apple (barely) survived Motorola disregard on 68000 and shady deals with Intel!Do you understand that PC based on 68000 had graphic OS with mouse control back in 1985?Intel based x86 had non until Windows 3.1 in 1992.Motorola Who else Comodore same as atari crashed because of Motorola
>>108398670>You would also need a monitorIn practice a TV with SCART/RGB worked almost as well even for productivity stuff.
>>108398773wasn't an A520 standard with the A500?basically an RF modulator dongle, you could connect it to the ariel socket of a TV, or it also had composite video it. You could also buy a 1084S monitor, but it saf wasn't necessary.
>>108398814>wasn't an A520 standard with the A500?nope, I had to buy mine.
>>108398814Maybe it was bundled but it was absolutely useless for anything besides gaming.
>>108398891Not much difference between RF/composite/scart at standard pal/ntsc really.
>>108398920Theres a night/day difference between composite and RGB. Anything over 40 characters per line is completely unusable with composite, let alone RF.
>>108399072not true, there's very little difference, used all that shit when it was current. maybe with some super trash cables.
The Amiga failed because it had 15 KHz video output which forced it to use flickering interlaced video to show 640x400, making it horrible to use for anything serious like word processing or spreadsheets. By the time they caught up and gave it VGA-equivalent video output, it was too late.
>>108393989>who identified with the brand so strongly they were willing to stay loyal to the endThey identified with it so strongly that a megafan resurrected the dead company with as many of its IPs and even original people intact as possible to make more of the things.I will say one of the more interesting things about that is whether they're going to try to acquire the license for Amiga, since that didn't belong to the Commodore company anymore.
>>108399096Composite video by nature always has dot crawl that makes anything but ridiculous color combinations almost unusable. S-video is slightly better, but even then it's fuzzier than RGB. If you can't see difference between RGB and composite, your set does something wrong and doesn't pass the signal directly to the tube. Some later sets did that to allow color adjustments, those that are good generally do not allow other than contrast adjustment when displaying RGB.
>>108393914PCs (IBM and clones) we're crushing it and closed platforms could never be a match to them.
>>108399120Commodore sans Amiga seems like a bit of a fools errand. The (actual) Amiga owners afaik paid good money for their IP, can't see them giving it away. There are also some Italian guppys knocking out picrel. All v. confuse.
>>108399145Yeah man well I used all that when it was current tech and in my opinion difference is not that big. Things you said how 80x25 in unreadable or something over composite are simply not true.
>>108399222Yeah, well, I still do have an A1200 connected to a Salora 17L40 next to me and can switch between composhite and RGB, and if not totally unusable, composite is not something I would use for any extended period of time, whereas RGB on it is in practice as good as 1085 at least.
>>108399283Well use proper cables like RG59U instead of those thin chink ones you get for free which are not impedance matched or anything and see it for yourself.I never used those super cheap cables always made my own so maybe there's the difference. After all it's like 4€ in parts and 10 minutes soldering.
Arn't some autists still working on modern Amiga stuff? Though it's FAR behind even linux thanks to it being much smaller.
>>108399307The cable doesn't matter a damn, composite video itself by nature of the color encoding creates unstable color artifacts with thin lines that are very annoying to look at. Only way to make it not make your eyes bleed is to disable the color completely, that's why A500 only had the mono composite output by default.
What was it like to make gorgeous pixel art on the Amiga?
>>108398773>In practice a TV with SCART/RGB worked almost as well even for productivity stuff.>almost as wellThis is why I never take you Euroboomers seriously when you talk about your souped up toys. The Amiga looked like absolute dogshit on a TV when it came to text. Hell it looked like shit with an RGB connection to a proper monitor.The resolution was ass.
Diap test
>>108399343Almost as well meaning the tube being an inline-type and dot pitch usually being slightly lower than a "proper" monitor, but good enough for 640x512i or whatever you could overscan it to. The main problem is that it is interlaced at that res.
>>108399343idk never had any trouble with 80x25 text on tv's with rf modulator, had both amiga and atari, also had a2000 with proper monitor later on, really didn't that feel much different.like biggest ever difference for me concerning monitors was coming from crt to lcd way into pc era, the sharpness was unbelievable and I didn't have low end crt, it was 17" eizo.
>>108399343>Hell it looked like shit with an RGB connection to a proper monitor.What are we talking about? Even at 15kHz, a CM8833-II looks great over RGB for 512i.
>>108398353>dumped most advanced cpu of the timeThis is wrong. 68K was dominant on the VME bus platform and there were long contracts with Pentagon. 68K was also used in things like Palm Pilot and even hard disks as controllers.>Long explanation would take few hundred pagesAnd still be wrong.>and since we are on 4chan .... Let's be honest who would read that here?....And very much since this is 4chan you can be certain that many would read every single line of it and point out every single mistake in excruciating detail. You must be new around here to make such a monumental mistake.
>>108399691There was no development after 68060, the architecture was effectively abandoned even if contracts were fulfilled for a decade later.
>>108399885This, even Motorola themselves jumped to PPC.
>>108393914Amiga is too close to A nigga. The vast majority of Americans love African Americans and despise racism, they weren't gonna be caught dead with something with such a problematic name.
>>108399892They fell for the RISC meme.As soon as you are fully pipelined superscalar ISA doesn't matter.Considering compilers canbe beaten with hand crafted assembly to this day they should have kept 68k.
>>108393914Because Amiga software only ran on the Commodore Amiga, while PC software ran on any IBM PC-compatibleAs the speed of computers increased rapidly and prices started falling, you could get a PC that runs your PC software for significantly cheaper than anything IBM made. You could also get different form factors like laptops and even palmtops.Meanwhile in the Amiga land you could only run your Amiga software on a Commodore Amiga. Third parties were making plenty of hardware for it, but it was all add-ons. You couldn't buy a cheaper alternative or a portable version because Commodore wasn't making one and nobody else was allowed to do it either.
>>108400028african americans only discovered computing in late 00s, before that it was free of their bullshit
>>108399885>There was no development after 68060It was released in 1994 and later it was moved to a smaller node. They didn't have to develop the ISA to gain more performance, cache size increases and node upgrades would be plenty.>>108400029>Considering compilers canbe beaten with hand crafted assembly to this day they should have kept 68k.Man of culture!
>>108400467Why are you pushing the m68k so hard when even Amiga switched to PPC?
>>108400507Not by choice but by necessity.
it had software like WordPerfect and games likely someone wrote a book then sold amiga bought new amiga or pc and wrote another book
>>108400507>>108400771This is what Commodore actually planned for new Amigas:>Between 1992 and 1994, Commodore designed a new graphics chipset to power Amiga computers based on HP PA-RISC, called Hombre. The development effort apparently included HP and was based on a PA-RISC core to be available for 1995 production for a CD-based Game Machine, cable TV, MPEG and as a PCI-based graphics accelerator. The Hombre processor design was to be implemented in two chips:>32-bit PA-RISC 1.1, Integer-only>CPU chip (Nathaniel) with 32-bit PA-RISC core: RISC integer core based on PA-7150 at 125MHz, DMA interface, audio and CD interfaces, system, display and PCI buses>Video chip (Natalie) with graphics functions and buses>Both were targeted for 0.6µ, 3-level metal CMOS in 3.3V in 304-PQFP>50MHz system bus, 64-bit wide>with a 5-stage pipeline and 64-bit datapath
this shiet raycis
>>108401048Commodore didn't plan anything, Amiga department did. Commodore was hard at milking x86 clones.
>>108393914>a-migapottery
>>108393914Mismanagement and bad corporate cultureUnfortunately, there still no modern offshots except MorphOS (stuck in ppc32 hell) and AROS (makes small progress, but no real compatibility and major breaking changes). The rest are selling overpriced FPGAs or raspberry pi with an Amiga Shell and emulator
>>108401182The answer is original hardware with modern accelerators like the PiStorm
>>108401209They don't seem to be able to solve the Chip RAM read speed issue and the SMI stuff is going nowhere.
>>108401182>>108401209>>108401376Amiga is dead, it's okay to play with the corpse and come up with new and nifty shit but don't force it. Enjoy what's there.
>>108397580Jay Miner was a Jew?
>>108398814Hi-res mode was B&W only on RF, you needed a monitor for colour.
Amigafags be like "If I buy a 68060 accelerator that costs almost as much as the computer itself and wasn't really even available in its commercial lifespan, I can run Doom at 10 fps. XD"
>>108398353Motorola didn't invest enough in R&D because they got fat and lazy off the 68000 cash cow.
>>108398920Fucking retard look at text on RF vs composite vs RGB.
>>10840182180x25 text on an average TV with RF is unreadable fuzz shit.
>>108397108even the Atari ST had 640x400 hi res mode and monochrome monitor for business software
>>108401801>wasn't really evenit either was or it wasn't >its commercial lifespanit definitely was
>>1084018014000T was manufactured till 1998 and came with a 68060. You could still get NoS 4000Ts in retail till around 2011 in NA.
there were mentally ill Euros who were still using Amigas as DDs into the 2000s, spending thousands on aftermarket accelerators and whatnot to get it to the performance level of a 486 PC
>>108401862>mentally ill EurosIts annuda 'Americans no understand Fun' episode.
Peddling a 7.1Mhz computer with 32 color graphics and 800k floppies in 1993 is going to screw you over good.
>>108401862a 68060 accelerator with the performance similar to a slightly higher clocked Pentium 1 didn't cost shit anymore in the early 00's you could get fully expanded Amigas for literally 50 eur in todays value in 2002
>>108401876>what is obvious trolling
>>108401876it's bait you retard
>>108401900what about PPC?
>>108398437Also totally lacking was all the professional software and hardware add-ons a PC could have.
>>108401925PPC accelerators in general were rarer so not as cheap but still pennies then compared to retail price or current price (even though we have so many PPC options now, from Mac accelerators to NPUs)
>1987>guy goes in store and sees Amiga running bouncing ball demo>"Ok. Does it run Lotus 123?">"Nope.">"Oh well, never mind then."
>>108401801>I can run Doom at 10 fps. XDAmiga never got a Doom release, kiddo. Carmack said the hardware isn't capable to run Doom.
>>108402045officially no but it hasn't stopped deranged Euros from trying to prove it was actually possible
I think because furries like it so much
>>108402085Proof?
Fuck you, US Gold and Tiertex. Just...just fuck you.
>>108402211>TiertexWe don't speak of the beast here.
>>108400507I am hardly pushing it. I used to be an embedded assembly programmer and the 68K was rather comfy. That is a long time ago so I don't have a pony in that race anymore. My point still stands: it would not be hard for Motorola to make major improvements, but, as was the case of Co mmodore, bad leaders are destructive.
>>108402295>I used to be an embedded assembly programmer and the 68K was rather comfy.I remember you!
>>108398765>Do you understand that PC based on 68000 had graphic OS with mouse control back in 1985?>Intel based x86 had non until Windows 3.1 in 1992.What part of "3.1" do you not understand? Windows 1 came out in 1985 too. Around the same time there were also VisiCorp's Visi On, Digital Research's GEM, and Tandy's DeskMate.
>>108402295digital foundry seem to critizise video filters maybe they are just opportunists that seen foundry lightsign at city or maybe they do not want it
>>108402305Sure that was me? Back in the day, compilers were really bad and there were countless assembly programmers. Igt was the only way to get real performance and avoid bloat. Compilers are still bad just less so, and compiler writers still bleat that the gunk emitted by their compilers are better than what assembly programmers can deliver. They are wrong.
>>108402371Well if you've been in Amiga threads before and talked about m68k, I remember one anon being a embedded assembly programmer who sometimes showed up in discissions in those threads.
>>108402371Compilers were always commonly used on PC compatibles from the earliest days while 8-bit machines essentially mandated asm. Two of the biggest software packages of the 80s, Lotus 123 and WordPerfect, however were written in asm, at least the classic 8086 versions.
>Amiga Double DragonPlease don't.
the 68k was an amazing piece of tech for its time, without PCs the 8086 would be forgotten
>>108402596Of course not. Double Dragon is best played on the Speccy.
>>108402384>Well if you've been in Amiga threads before and talked about m68k,There is a strong connection between 68K and Amiga, obviosuly. I used to be a regular in /aig/.>I remember one anon being a embedded assembly programmer Mmmmmight be me.
>>108402871>I used to be a regular in /aig/.Yeah it's you kek.
>>108402596The programmer did good work elsewhere, he just was horribly rushed and had nothing but an arcade cab to play and memorise.
>>108402815the 8086 was not seen as a particularly great microprocessor when it came out, IBM went with it mainly because it would allow them to access >64k of memory without bank switching (even if the segmented memory setup is kind of bank switching anyway).
>>108402922from remarks made by the PC design team, it was a useful marketing advantage to have a 16-bit CPU and everyone had already seen what 8-bit microprocessors could do, nothing new there while 16-bit ones were new unexplored territory.
>>108402392I recall that WordStar was ported to the IBM PC in one all-nighter coding session in 1982. Since it was Z80 source code porting it was about as hard as writing in Flash or JavaScript.
the Atari ST was a popular office computer in Germany and was a cheaper alternative to the Mac
>>108393914Old man here. I had a PC and an Amiga 500 back in early 90s and I knew a lot of people with computers back when Amiga was popular. Simply put, Amiga was used as a gaming machine, generally used just with 3.5" disks and almost never with a hdd. They were the best for gaming at home. And people just used PCs for work stuff because they were cheaper, easier to find parts and compatible. I had a friend who did some rendering with Amiga 1200 but other than that, nobody that I knew used an Amiga professionally. We used to buy some Amiga magazines and they were only about games as well. Over the years, usage of Amiga computers just faded away. Compatibility sucked, you couldn't play half the A500 games on A1200. I'll leave explaining the business mistakes of the company to others.
Commodore didn't have a good relationship with parts suppliers or retailers. They also had no business plan beyond next Christmas season.
the Amiga's sampled audio was a prediction of the future, but it was also pretty character-less and music was only as good as the samples used. plus they took a lot of memory so most Amiga games didn't have much music in them.
>>108403306it's also a mere 4 channels of hardpanned samples unless you got clever and wrote a software mixer
>PC>literally a mobo with extension cards, graphics, sound, network, storage, etc>Amiga>but you're not allowed to use any extensions when talking about the Amiga
>>108403449The average person had a stock A500.
>>108403452The average person (IF they had a PC) was a basic XT or AT clone too turning that period.
Also Sierra adventures on the Amiga were terrible and they obviously did not give a shit about those ports of them.
i can't tell you Amiga kids could play Sid Meier's Pirates without "tobacco" being changed to "crops" like the gay NES version
>>108401209>>modern accelerators like the PiStorm>her Amiga doesn't have 256GB of NVMe storagelel
>>108393914As many people have pointed, when Amiga originally came out, it was very expensive and compatible with absolutely nothing except itself. Amiga didn't start selling until it was repackaged as A500 and sold at less than a third of its launch price four years later.
>>108403734Microprose had the world's most evil copy protection schemes though. sometimes they literally even fucked up people's disk drives.
>>108398289Yeah but at that time business-owners were retards who thought color screens were for fucking around and and monochrome was for "serious business" so they deliberately promoted inferior shit at higher prices just to prove how serious they were.
>>108395334Well yeah. It was owned by a penny-penching jew whom the White devs basically ignored while they produced cool shit. Then he kneecapped them and the company started falling behind, so then he brought in some other jew who wanted to liquidate the country and he fired the other jew because the penny pincher complained about the new jew's overuse of the company jet... then a jeet was put in charge and he turned the company into a designated shitting street, basically being an early example of tech enshitification.
