DigitalQuirk

For the record, the only point I'm trying to make is, that neither PC's nor their operating system were "Crappy," the people who bought them were not stupid nor were they "Lemmings." In fact, many Commodore 64 owners went to PC after Commodore basically alienated them with a new 16 bit system that could not make use of the disk drives and monitors which cost quite a bit of money. They made an intelligent decision; beating up on or trying to tear down one computer operating system and/or platform does nothing to make another better. Also, for the record, I was always jealous of how the Atari ST computers looked. Those were some of the coolest looking computers to ever grace a desktop; they made the Amigas (except for the A3000) look cheap and rather ordinary. If Atari sold PC's today in those kind of computer cases at reasonable prices, I'd bet they'd have a hard time keeping them in stock. I, for one, am tiring of the tower design.

Gee, why didn't I think of that? I should've just pulled out my big ole fat wallet that was overflowing with money and shelled out a couple thousand dollars for an A2000. Let's not forget that Commodore jacked up the price of the A2000 in the 90's due to the popularity of the Video Toaster. How nice of them to fleece their customers like that. Again, while certain elements of the GUI existed in the Kickstart ROM, nothing would happen - not even CTRL D - until the actual operating system loaded off a diskette. Oh, and I should correct you on something...PC's have been available with DOS burned on a ROM for quite some time now: http://www.drdos.com/dosdoc/romhtml/romch1.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROM-DOS Nothing really new with embedding the OS, except in the case of the Amiga, only elements of the OS, and not the OS itself, were embedded.

There is no built-in GUI in the Amiga. There are certain elements in the Kickstart ROM chip, but the GUI itself came off a diskette with the LOADWB command. Without that boot disk, you simply got either a (poorly drawn) picture of a hand holding a diskette (WB 1.x), or an animated image of a disk going into the computer (WB 2+). Interlacing the video to achieve high resolution was a hack; the display clearly flickered VERY badly when it was invoked. It was rarely used by anyone on a regular basis. The GUI up to and including WB 1.3 was also a hack; files that didn't have an icon created for them would NEVER show up in any folder or window. You'd have to drop to the CLI (command prompt) to get a directory listing to see those files. Quite frustrating with those seemingly empty yet full Fred Fish disks. No matter; the Amiga worked better working from the command line anyway. You had to do more than simply cut a trace and add the 512k memory expansion option. You also needed to upgrade the chipset; in paticular, the Fat Agnus chip needed to be replaced with a Fatter Agnus chip. Not exactly something you could walk into a store and buy, and certainly not cheap back in the day. This would leave you with no fast RAM, which caused problems with certain programs that needed it; so next you're looking at adding some fast RAM along with an external expansion solution for that memory, since your internal memory would be fully populated with that 512k expansion module. People such as yourself expressing how "Easy" it was only added to the frustration. There was nothing easy nor cheap about it. With the PC, all I had to do to get rid of that 640k limit was to boot with OS/2 which was technically superior to both Workbench and DOS. Not that I ever seen the 640k as a limiting factor, since DOS has been able to manage expanded memory for some time now ever since we had protected mode.

Everything good about the Amiga was a hack. HAM mode? A hack. High resolution graphics via interlacing? A hack. It also had its own memory limitations. My A500 only had 512k of chip RAM, and therefore had a 512k limit. That chip ram could not be expanded without replacing the entire computer. This resulted in limitations with the type of programs I could run. If multitasking and a GUI were the things that made the Amiga special, then I would like to direct everyone's attention to the Commodore 64. The Commodore 64 could truly multitask; that is, run two different programs at the same time. This was illustrated in the November 1996 issue of Compute!'s Gazette, page 94. Note that this was not "Task switching," something already covered in the April 1995 issue. The Commodore 64 also had a very nice GUI in GEOS. Both the multitasking and GUI worked on an unmodified C64, working with less than 64k of memory. I would imagine that, with sufficient memory and processor speed, both the multitasking and GUI could have been combined and implemented as was done in the Amiga. I do believe that is what gave the PC an edge over the Amiga. Up until the C128, all Commodore machines were backwards compatible. Many of your PET and Vic-20 programs could run on your C-64 (though not all), and all files were compatible. They even sacrificed disk drive speed in the 1541 to maintain this backward compatibility; something that definitely didn't hurt sales. The C-128 could run 100% as a C-64. Then along came the Amiga. Not one single bit of backwards compatibility. You couldn't even use the same monitor or disk drives. That, as far as I'm concerned, was Commodore's biggest mistake and contributed to their failure. While PC's to this day are still backwards compatible all the way back to 1981, the Amiga had a difficult time in being backwards compatible with itself. I cite the inability to run Amiga Basic programs on machines with Workbench 2.0 or later as an example. Quite frankly, Commodore would have been much better off making a 16 bit version of the C-64/128, give it GEOS as an O/S, and incorporate the Amiga's video chipset. Of course, this would've meant that they'd actually have to care about their customers.

I'm sorry but you do not know what you are talking about. An Amiiga 500 with 512k could get online and do some surfing. With 1MB (Which was a very cheap upgrade for the A500) you could easily go online with AMosaic and use Ami TCP/IP and I bet this setup was much better than a crap 286 PC running MS-DOS and using a DOS browser!!! (I am talking about 1994-5 timeframes herre, you can do more now) The reason you had to have more memory on the Amiga than a PC was because the Amiga was running a far more advanced pre-eptive multitasking OS and GUI interface, where the PC was using a archaic single tasking DOS! And it is amazing that you can do all that with only 512k! Get your facts together! AMosaic is going to need minimum Workbench 2.0; once you've booted with Kickstart 2.0 disks and loaded that into memory, then booted up with Workbench 2.0, there won't be any memory left on a 512k Amiga to do anything. I know; I tried switching to WB 2.0 on my A500 with 1MB of RAM, but went back to WB 1.3 because 2.0 used up too much memory to make it useful. I happen to know quite a bit about Amigas and their capabilities, so your attempts at bamboozling me will fail. My facts are, indeed, quite together. Perhaps with another megabyte of fast RAM, it's doable...but in an A500, one needed a controller that supported additional memory; my hard drive controller did not. Also, it wasn't like I could walk into any computer store and buy such a controller; by 1994, there was no store I could go to that carried Amiga hardware. Buying one used would have cost me at least as much buying an entire clone PC used with overall superior capabilities. Don't get me wrong; I think what the Amiga did in its day was very remarkable. However, I find the fact that a computer archetecture and operating system that pre-dates the Amiga eventually surpassed the Amiga in capability even more impressive; partly due to the incompetence and greed of management at Commodore, but also largely due to the open archetecture of the PC. With regards to my remarks about DOS being sophisticated, I was referring to the overall capabilities of the operating system. Modern-day DR-DOS and FreeDOS come with a very comprehensive and sophisticated set of tools that make DOS a very sophisticated operating system that can accomplish anything a modern day OS can do.

A PC with an 8088 processor and 640k of RAM can be turned into a web server using the free EZ-NOS server software. Also, the 80286 processor based PC's were released along the same time the MC68000 based computers were introduced; both processors were introduced back in '82. When I bought my brand new A500, it was competing against 80286 PC's. My '286 was technically not as advanced as my Amiga with only half the memory. By 1995, I had already sold my '286, bought and sold my '386, and was running my '486 system, having given up on Commodore just like Commodore's own CEO's did.

You are correct, I mistyped the name, but did provide a proper link to Arachne in my post. Documentation clearly states that: "Arachne for DOS will run on i8086 compatible CPU with as little as 475 KB of DOS memory (540 KB if you want PPP connection) and EGA or VGA video card. " It would have run fine on my '286. Naturally, more hardware means it will run better and do more...but it is still quite functional on a minimal '286 with 640k of RAM. Know how many web sites I could visit with my old Amiga 500 with nearly twice the memory? If you guessed none, you guessed right. I was quite painfully aware of what I needed to get my Amiga on the internet. At the time, I was a poor student. I built that '286 system for $100 and could do more with it than I could with my Amiga. I turned around and, after cleaning it up, sold it as a complete system for $200, and used that money to build myself a '386 system with 4 MB of RAM, VGA graphics, and a monochrome VGA monitor. With the $400 I got from selling that complete system, I built from scratch a '486 system with 8 MB of RAM and full color graphics, only running Windows when it was absolutely necessary. Although I could run Windows on that '286 with EGA graphics, it didn't really cost me anything more than my time to source the components necessary to build a newer system. Must've been a real oddball card. It is possible to run into that with such an open archetecture. By the way, that reminds me; do you know how many different monitors I could use on my Amiga 500? Only the ones that said Commodore would plug into it, and not all of them. Overpriced ones that always flickered at higher resolutions. Upgrading the video really wasn't viable on the A500 either; I think I recall perhaps one company that offered a rather pricey "Flicker Fixer" solution, that was about it. How I would've loved to simply change a VGA card just to use a modern monitor with it. There are many graphical interfaces available for DOS, though I never found them necessary. Even on the Amiga, I spent most of my time in CLI; on my Red Hat Linux box, it's the command prompt for me. Modern DOS offerings such as that from DR-DOS do, in fact, offer true pre-emptive multitasking. Your post gives me the impression that your DOS knowledge stopped somewhere in 1989 or so. I didn't see any point in following Atari after they killed their computer division, which was around the time when everyone was disappointed at the shortcomings of the Falcon; there was no support in stores nor in educational institutions, only amateur musicians with their MIDI setups continued to use their Ataris. When Commodore deep sixed, I saw the same thing over again...big disappointment with their Amiga 4000, they sat on some great stuff and let it go to waste. Again, with the exception of certain video and broadcast studios, nobody was using or supporting the Amiga anymore. The fact is, Commodore never cared about their customers; they kept overcharging us for an inreasingly inferior product and raped the 3rd party manufacturers on licensing until they lost a lot of 3rd party support and bled the company dry. Why would I commit more to a company than the people who are running it? Don't get me wrong; I agree that the Amiga Workbench and even Atari's GEM (a Digital Research product) had many advantages back in the day...and I can appreciate all operating systems. I just see all this DOS bashing as sour grapes, as it does have certain desirable qualities not found in any other operating system out there. Uneducated DOS bashing does not make GEM, Workbench, or the Mac OS any better.

The thing is, the apps were much better written and worked much better. It wasn't so much that the PC had more apps, but also that they were so much nicer to use. I came to rethink how I consider how "Powerful" a computer is. Is this measured by the speed of the processor? The amount of memory it has? The width of the data bus? Or, is real power measured by the sheer variety of tasks a computer can perform? I would think that an Amiga that could work as a web server would need to be quite powerful to do so; yet there are original 8088-based PC web servers that are up and running today with the DOS operating system. Web browsing would bring my Amiga 500 to its knees even with upgrades, but the Archane browser runs fine on a '286. A trap? I didn't think of it as a trap; I thought of it as liberation. My eyes were opened to the fact that buying a closed system such as an Atari ST or my Amiga was, in fact, the real trap. The only non-Commodore authorized hardware I was able to use was the modem, printer, and joysticks. Every VGA card I came across met the VGA standards and worked flawlessly with everything. I do recall some sketchy VESA local bus SVGA cards, but even those would kick back to the old VGA standards. The 8 bit 4 channel sound of the Amiga was perfectly fine for video games and diddling around, but what if you wanted to use your computer to generate and manipulate some high quality samples? With only 4 channels, even an amateur musician would become frustrated at such limitations. That's the thing about the PC; it could really be everything to everybody. Again, there were some sketchy sound cards out there, to be sure, but if you went with one of the known brands, there was never a problem. Interestingly, long after the death of the Amiga and the ST's, long after GEM and Workbench have ceased any further chance of being considered "Competitive," DOS lives on. It is still supported by IBM,, DR DOS, and, just like Linux, now sees continued strong support in the Free OS community as Freedos. It is fully capable of running a modern graphical Web browser, and even an original 8088 with DOS is capable of being turned into a web server. Run a graphical web browser on my Amiga? Only with substantial updates; even then, it's still going to pale in comparison with Archane running on a '286 with DOS. The truth of the matter is, DOS can do absolutely anything a GUI interfaced operating system can do, but much, much more efficiently. Yes, it can even multitask; it was capable of doing so before Windows (Windows used DOS extenders to achieve multitasking). A lot of the fallacies people have about DOS are addressed here. The fact that it continues to see use today on modern computer hardware all on its own ought to say something about the sophistication of this deceptively simple looking operating system.

Welcome to the forums! You've posted some great ideas that the Atari executives should think about. In case you haven't read it, see the thread Question - FB2 Portable? However, a new full-sized 2600 with the ability to play carts would be an awesome product, IMHO. Damn the "dirty/old carts won't work liabilities" excuse! Thanks for the welcome! If Atari intends on being successful and great again, they need to stop looking at these so-called "Obsticles" as liabilities and start looking at them as business opportunities. An "Official Atari Cartridge Reconditioning Kit" may cost $2 to make, but would probably easily fetch $10-$15 as an "Official Atari product." Gotta keep the quality there, of course. Where others see road blocks, I see opportunities.

I started out with an Atari 2600, but because Commodores were used in our school, I went with a Commodore 64. When the affordable 16 bits hit the scene, it was the Amiga 500 vs. the Atari 520/1040ST. While I considered both of these technically superior to the '286 PC clones of the day, I deemed the Amiga 500 more technically advanced than the 16 bit Ataris. I couldn't understand how it was that these technically inferior PC's were beating the crap out of Atari, Commodore, and Apple in the computer market, until I was around 22. At the time, I was studying Information Systems in college. I had an Amiga 500 with 1MB of RAM, an external 880k disk drive, a 1084s monitor, a brand new USRobotics Sportster 14.4k modem, a used 20 MB hard drive, an Epson LX-810 printer, and I had upgraded my processor to a 68010. I also upgraded my Kickstart to 1.3 and workbench to 1.3 to support the hard drive. I was hitting a wall with my Amiga. I had long since tired of the games, preferring to connect to local BBS's with my modem in my spare time and downloading mail packets from Fidonet. I used a DOS emulator for running older DOS applications in my course, which was barely adequate and wouldn't support the high density disks we were using. I wanted to use the modem for faxing. I wanted to use a word processor with a spell checker. These things required further hardware upgrades to my Amiga that I simply couldn't afford. Heck, a used hard drive or hard drive controller would set me back $100 for either, and now my hard drive was flaking out badly. Doing so much work with PC's in school, I decided to budget $100 to put together a PC to take care of my school stuff and use the Amiga for other things. For $100, I managed to build a '286 PC out of used components that contained a 40MB hard drive, 640k of RAM, a 16 Mhz processor, a single 1.44MB 3.5" disk drive, an EGA graphics card, and an orange monochrome EGA monitor. It ran remarkably glitch-free. After installing DOS 6, I proceeded to install the free fax modem software that came with my modem. I was stunned. The free fax software, running under 640k of RAM with memory to spare, blew away the Amiga software that cost quite a bit of money to buy and required a couple of megabytes just to run. The free telecommunications software was better than the best on my Amiga. Where the Sportster barely broke 12 kb/s on the Amiga, it was connecting at just over 19 kb/s on the PC. The offline mail readers were better. It didn't stop there. I hooked up my printer to my PC next, as it could easily and quickly run WordPefect 5.1 with a spellchecker, among other very sophisticated features. I obtained a Lotus 1-2-3 knock-off; a very powerful spreadsheet. I had dabbled with spreadsheets in the past, but nothing as good as this. Suddenly, I had a very complex budget entered, and I was able to make forecasts and updates in real time. The PC was able to do much more than the Amiga with half the memory. Indeed, many of the applications were lean and mean. The DOS operating system looked deceptively simple. In fact, it was very sophisticated, with on-the-fly disk compression, multitasking with TSR's and task swapping, and a sort of GUI file manager called DOS shell. Sure, the multitasking wasn't exactly pre-emptive, but that didn't take anything away from the experience. I could still download in the background while reading my offline mail with the proper software. Indeed, in the final years I used my Amiga, I bypassed the GUI alltogether and dropped to the much more powerful CLI (Command Line Interface). My Amiga sat for months without being turned on, while my PC was hardly ever turned off. Then it occurred to me: While my Amiga was outdated, this '286 was still relevant. I could go anywhere and buy new hardware and software for my PC, while my Amiga 500 got left behind when the Amiga 1200 replaced it. While the Amiga was more technically advanced with its graphics and sound and was certainly a lot prettier to watch, when it came down to the nitty gritty get-er-done type of work, the PC was running circles around the Amiga. Indeed, my Amiga 500 needed a memory upgrade to 1 MB before it could do anything considered useful, while this '286 did perfectly fine with the 640k of RAM it had when it came out of the box. The other thing that occurred to me was the fact that PC's were quite easy to upgrade. While the Amiga's 8 bit sound was superior to the blips and beeps out of my '286, all I had to do was plug in a sound card; it was possible for me to get better sound in the PC with a cheap 16 bit sound card. There was no way to upgrade the Amiga's sound. If I wanted better graphics, I could plug in a VGA card which would rival the graphic abilities of the Amiga. There was no way of upgrading the Amiga's graphics. Hard drives and disk drives were bigger and cheaper. Next thing you know, Commodore went under. With it, they pretty much dragged the Amiga down with them. The future of the Amiga was quite apparent; there was no future for the Amiga. Local support vanished; 3rd party support dried up within the year. Epson made the case and motherboard of my '286; however, if they went out of business, my computer would still be relevant. I could use parts and software from another PC manufacturer. My whole computing experience was not dependant on a single company. It all became painfully apparent. No wonder everyone bought a PC. After using that '286 for a couple of months, the Atari ST's and the Amiga's did look like toys. They were fun, colourful, and entertaining...but the PC delivered where it mattered the most. Ultimately, it was the People's Computer and offered the best bang for the buck.

The Local Wal-Mart still has a bunch of these, branded as PlayPal, for around $20 Cdn. I bought one when the price hit $20. Looks like a mix of Sega Master System and Sega Game Gear games; and not a paticularly good mix either. For instance, there's two versions of Columns, but no Space Harrier or Hang On. Still, for $20, it's definitely worth it. I figure they're not selling very well because: 1) They're hidden at the bottom of the controller display for 3rd party XBox and Playstation controllers, and 2) There's no way of knowing, by looking at it, that there's an LCD screen, or if it's backlit. I researched these quite a bit when they were selling for around $60. At that time, I discovered there was a "Low cost" version, something like $30, that didn't have the LCD screen. Can't find that anymore. It is one of the better half-assed attempts I've seen, I will admit; but to fetch the price they were asking, they would've need to go with better packaging and incorporated some of the better games.

My brother bought me a Flashback 2 this past holiday season. Because of this, I created this account. What should the FB3 be? To be perfectly honest, I think it should be a FB2 with a cartridge port and the games sold seperately on cartridges that would hold 15, 30, or even 40 games each. Think about this for a moment. From a business perspective, it makes perfect sense. You already have the hardware, and the product has proven itself in the market. Last time I checked over the holidays, everyone was sold out of the flashback 2. I would expect that it has already paid for itself and is profitable. It's a solid system. Very well-designed. The elements needed for adding a cartridge port are already present, so creating a Flashback 3 with a cartridge port would be very easy since it's already been done. A remold of the top cover would be the most difficult part. Before releasing this kind of FB3, Atari ought to be ready with brand new paddle controllers, upgraded and built as well as the new joysticks. They also ought to have some new multi-game cartridges ready to sell. The timing of the release of the new paddles, FB3, and cartridges would be critical. I know, as Atari fans, you're probably thinking, "I can already hack in a cartridge port in my FB2, and I'd really want a more sophisticated Atari." However, consider that the majority of people only remember the 2600. Only geeks like us remember the 400/800, ST, and other Atari game consoles. To build a successful base for their business, Atari needs to stick with the 2600, make it into a low cost, high quality "Retro" system, heavy emphasis on the retro (including the carton it ships in; thanks, by the way, Atari; I love the box). Most people wouldn't attempt to hack in a cartridge port, but would buy an Atari that could play the old carts and new ones. Another thought occurred to me; why not also release a "Cartridge reconditioning kit" to sell alongside the FB3, essentially a mock cartridge slot with a stiff, absorbant, and perhaps just ever so slightly abrasive material inside that the customer would wet with "Cleaning solution" (rubbing alcohol) and then insert and remove that old classic cartridge a few times. The market is there. The FB2 has demonstrated this. Atari needs to come back with not just another game system, but a whole array of products that interact and work with each other, completely penetrating and saturating this market. Paddles. Trackballs. Cartridge reconditioning kits. Cartridge programming kits. New games. The Flashback 3 needs to be what the original 2600 was, plus everything people wanted it to be. Keep the quality high, retain the "Retro" look of the products and packaging, and Atari could very well have another "Cash Cow" so they could afford to re-release the classic computer systems in smaller quantities to satisfy us geeks.