chepe
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Posts posted by chepe
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9 hours ago, Keatah said:Dunno where "here" is at.
Finland...it was very much a Commodore country back then.
By ca. 1991, nearly all subadult boys in my town had a computer of some sort, most often C-64. Consoles were much less common, as for those you had to buy games (gasp!) instead of just copying...
I thought ST keyboard was quite good compared to what most other machines had at the time, of course nowadays it feels awful. I actually liked ST mouse, I thought it was more ergonomic than what it looked. Buttons in my mouse were super-stiff but for the low resolution it did not matter that much. I did not like Amiga 500 mouse at all, but A1200 mouse was better.
Oh don't get me started at what God-awful crap passes for a 'keyboard' today. It's as if all mobile devices available have made people forget what a GOOD keyboard feels like.
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59 minutes ago, Keatah said:Early Macs were almost anti-hobbyist., with the bus being closed off and whatnot. Not like the II series or PC. All I remember was that Macs were good at DTP. And that was all the rage for a while.
That was Jobs' doing, he wanted everything to be as simple as possible for the user, he did not want Mac to be expandable at all because options would 'confuse the buyer'. He was always like that of course but during the Mac era he took it to extreme and finally they had to get rid of him.
To the day I have actually almost never seen a desktop Mac. I think one guy had one back in the '80s, it was laughed at because it looked so stupid and had small b/w screen. "Birdhouse", it was called. Then I didn't see a Mac until in university which had few for some time. In general, Apple was not a thing here, their machines were just too expensive and had little games. I recall when our local computer rag reviewed Apple IIGS, I thought it looked really pretty and refined, but it was so pricey and had inferior specs to Amiga/ST, why would anyone buy it?
10 hours ago, zzip said:I don't blame them, but they were a little out of their league here. They made their money selling cheap consoles and computers to the home market. The 16-bit computers were just too expensive for that market. Even the "Power without the price" Atari ST line could cost you $1000 at launch. These were never going to be snatched up by parents in large numbers as Christmas gifts like the 2600 and C64 were.
Yes 16-bit market was fundamentally different from 8-bit market in that regard. RAM stayed relatively expensive through the '80s and kept the machine prices up. And software became more complicated and houses were less eager to port their stuff over multiple platforms. The market would not tolerate as many standards as it did during 8-bit era.
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6 hours ago, zzip said:in the Mid-80s, nobody knew how they computer market was going to shake out, it's why you saw both Atari and Commodore make PC clones, make attempts at Unix workstations, etc. None of these efforts really made a dent.
It's why I say now, Atari's best move would have been to focus on videogames and consoles, and keep Nintendo/Sega from gaining the foothold they did in Atari's effective absence.
But in 1984, that was so against the conventional wisdom at the time... consoles were dead, computers were the future. Well it turned out PCs were the future, and nothing Atari/Commodore could have done to stop that. And consoles were far from dead, but Atari lost their commanding lead in consoles trying to chase the impossible dream of competing against the market IBM created.
That is fair assessment. PC market, as many other markets, was naturally inclined towads duopoly. And by 1985, main players were already in position: PC and Macintosh. Other players were either late to that party (like Amiga and ST) or already flopped (like Tandy's 68000 machine). Of course it is obvious only in retrospect. But if we look at Macintosh: Mac had 1.5 year headstart to Amiga and ST and although its beginnings were hardly smooth sailing either, in that time enough software was made for it so it could estabilish itself. It's the software which sells hardware.
In Europe it was bit different. Leonard Tramiel said this in 1988 and I believe he was essentially right, applying same to Amiga too:
"What you wound up with in Europe was the PC, Mac, and ST all arriving at just about the same time. People had a fair, uniform comparison, 'Which of these machines do you want?' and they looked at the price and performance and people bought STs. In the U.S., we had to fight an I-don't-know-how-many-hundred-million-dollar propaganda campaign from Apple, and we didn't have hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on propaganda. Finally, the phrase, 'No one was ever fired for buying an IBM' I don't believe has ever been translated into German."
As for consoles, it seems to me that Atari Corp. always saw them, and the 8-bit machines, as legacy items with which they could generate bit of profit and revenue and they were happy at that. They were too late realizing that big money was in consoles. They almost made it with Lynx, but Jaguar was dollar short & day late.
Perhaps one shouldn't be too hard on Commodore and Atari ultimately failing however. That was in fact what happened to most personal computer manufacturers of the era. PC as a platform became dominant, but individual IBM compatible manufacturers had it just as rough and most of them collapsed at about same timeframe as Atari and Commodore. Eventually even IBM itself had to quit PC making business. Apple survived - barely.
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On 2/27/2020 at 7:24 PM, tschak909 said:Simple answer? Severe budget cutbacks for the chip designers.
It was severe enough that the AAA work that had begun in 1988 only yielded the first rev of working chips in 1994 just a couple months before Commodore folded.
It is somewhat of a mystery to me where Commodore used it's money. Commodore had about twice the revenue of Atari, but Atari made more profit from the sales. Commodore had poor profit margins even in good years and when the collapse of sales came, the company folded nearly overnight.
I've read that Gould and his buddies leeched off the company a lot, but surely that would not explain everything.
On 2/26/2020 at 12:38 PM, Keatah said:The promise of the Amiga being PC compatible was another farce. "semi-PC compatible enough for the "boring" business stuff" wasn't good enough. At the time I wanted to run Alpha4 and a decent telecom package like ProComm. Only a PC would do it. Any PC, really, from a 286 through Pentium. And that means there were literally thousands of clones and name brand machines. Why spend money on the Amiga with a promise?
"PC compability" thing Commodore tried to push for business Amigas was weird. Why buy an already expensive machine, and an emulator card to crappily simulate a PC when you could just, well, buy a PC?
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Long-ish article from January 2017 about 'Praise You' single and his career in general. In the end he talks a bit about issues of old hardware, funny stuff. His unwieldy and huge sample collection was one thing which kept him in ST, as transferring it to other platform was huge amount of work and that platform might have become obsolete anyway in few years. But it seems he got around to it eventually. He also says that he has several spare Ataris and Akais which people whom have retired them have gifted him, so if he wants, he can keep his studio up for a long time...
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Yes the hard drive availability was huge advantage for PC and became ever more so as programs and games become bigger and bigger. Programmers could count on user having a hard drive. By contrast for Amiga/ST, things were limited by disk drives because few people had hard drives. As long as things fit comfortably on DD diskette, it wasn't that big a deal. But even here Amiga and ST lost their price advantage when you had to start figuring in cost of the monitor (better quality games weren't great on TV, to say nothing about utility programs or coding), hard drive, memory expansion...everything which was cheaper to do on PC.
As I said, failure to update mass storage was a big mistake for A1200. By then Amiga was more or less doomed anyway, but being clearly so gimped in many respects compared to gaming PC's of the era was last nail on the coffin.
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5 hours ago, zzip said:I don't think that was it at all. It was driven by non-gamers. People deciding that "If I'm going to spend all this money on a computer, then I want something that can run the same applications I use at work, so I can bring my work home". Followed by the clone market where you could have all that, but for a much cheaper price than IBM would charge you.
Another factor if parents were buying computers for their kids, maybe they didn't find a C64 expensive, but in the 16-bit era, the Amiga was a much bigger investment. I think parents said "If we're going to spend THAT much, we are going to buy a "real" computer". By the time the cheaper Amigas showed up, the PC was already becoming the dominant computing platform
PC's in the 80s were very weak for gaming, and I don't think they were anyone's first choice as a gaming system, at least not until the very late 80s/early 90s
As I said, I was comparing it to primarily gamer/hobbyist driven home computer market in Europe. So I guess the main question is, why didn't Amiga and ST break out in USA as gaming machines? Here, perception of PC was that it was an overpriced dinosaur with which you couldn't play proper games, only weird nerdy strategy games old guys liked to play. Only one of my school buddies had a PC as a home computer, everyone else had some Commodore machine and few had ST. It only began to change in turn of the decade, when Commodore generation had grown up and wanted something more advanced from their gaming machines.
I wonder if the difference is due to home computer revolution starting somewhat earlier in US. Maybe Amiga and ST had already missed their window in USA when they arrived and victory of PC and Mac was already inevitable.
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I think modularity argument is perhaps overstated a bit. Sure enough, it's true, of course, but 'golden age' of PC modularity did not IMO began until the '90s. And by that time PC had already won, even as a gaming machine. Many of the IBM compatibles sold had custom made cases etc. and were not anywhere as easy to expand. And before plug & play era, getting new stuff to work under DOS was not always so straightforward.
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Maybe I could add perception of Amiga vs PC from other side of the pond: PC and Mac were horribly expensive in Europe during the '80s. Perhaps it was the tariffs or something. Ca. 1988, an XT would cost you about 10,000 Finnish Marks. Mac would set you back like 20k. By contrast, ST costed about 4000 Marks, and Amiga 500 was 5000. Sure enough, they did not come with monitor (which added maybe 1700 to the cost), or hard drive, but in home markets PC was not much of a factor early on. It was known here that Americans were more into PC's, but it was not well understood why - popular perception was that Americans were into dry, heavy-duty strategy games with crappy graphics and did not understood awesomeness of UK/European style shoot-em-ups.
But PC won as a gaming machine here too because people's tastes increasingly moved to 'American style' games. In the late '80s, 8-bit generation had grown up and scrolling shoot-em-ups were not going to cut it anymore. They wanted games like M1 Tank Platoon, Ultima VI, Secret Weapons of Luftwaffe, Civilization, Wing Commander...it was stuff which was no longer comfortable to play from floppy disks and RF television. By then every PC came with a hard drive. Even lowly EGA was actually better for playing this type of games because of superior resolution to Amiga/ST. When VGA equipped 386/386SX machines began to arrive, high-end gamers moved to them and never looked back. By then PC was already better playing 'grown-up' games than Amiga ever was. Those who wanted to play action games moved to consoles which were cheaper to buy and easier to set up. Sure the high-end PC's remained expensive but people coughed up money because the best games were there. Amiga and ST were left with either much crappier ports, or console style games.
In related subject, Commodore made a huge mistake with A1200 when it did not update mass memory. It had same 880kb double density drive as old Amiga and no hard drive. This was a huge limitation during an era when high-end games soon would require grocery bag amount of diskettes to install.
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On 2/21/2017 at 4:19 PM, BillLoguidice said:The Amiga 500 never included the RF adapter here in the US. Having been an owner of the A520 (I had a 10804S monitor, but wanted it to interface with other displays), at least on our US televisions, it absolutely wasn't worth the expense. Games were barely passable, but anything with text was an unmitigated disaster for obvious reasons. This was a monitor computer, plain and simple. Perhaps it worked a little better in PAL-land?
Perhaps, here in PAL-land most kids had TV's for their Amigas/ST's. They were cheaper and, well, could be used as TV's too. I saved up money and lobbied my parents a colour monitor though since my eyes were kind of a mess. Of course few used their computers to anything else than gaming. I liked to play strategy games and crpg's and stuff, and monitor made them so much better. Some of my friends thought I was weird because I wanted a monitor and commented how graphics with the monitor "looked too sharp"... 🙃
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Not knowing much about the ColecoVision or Intellivision and marginalizing the Dreamcast says it all. Naturally, if I were writing a book from a European or Japanese perspective, things would be quite different, with the former having systems like the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC and the latter having systems like MSX and PC Engine, as just two pairs of examples, taking more prominent roles.
Hey, don't take it as bashing, I was just giving out examples how perspectives could be radically different elsewhere
Having said that, I still think Dreamcast is not anywhere close to top20. It was just sort of a flop, I'd say that even Sega Master System would have been better inclusion. Maybe inclusion of Dreamcast is bit of recentness bias, as it's something most readers would remember, whilst the '80s machines would be obscure to many.
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Again, I welcome you or anyone else to indicate which platform(s) should have been replaced for a featured chapter in the 20 in "Vintage Game Consoles." When doing so, be sure to keep in mind that the book can't be any longer than it already is and that each of the platforms chosen was chosen for its overall impact and influence (and not necessarily sales) in their respective eras (and obviously as told from a US perspective). Naturally, you'll specifically want to figure out what platform the ST was more important than in Generation Two, which is the section of the book it would have fallen into.
Well, obviously the book is written from US perspective. Coleco was completely unknown here and I've not even heard of the Mattel console. However, if there is one machine which should not have been in the book it's Dreamcast. I flat out state that VIC-20, ZX81/Spectrum, maybe even ST were more important in developing of computer games than Dreamcast.
And yes ST was pretty popular as small time publishing machine too. It had one of the first really accessible laser printers.
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The 'scene' in Europe was radically different to that in USA (and indeed there were big differences nationally in Europe too) and often leads to misunderstandings. For starters, game consoles were not that popular in Europe before PlayStation era. I moved out from my hometown in 1994 and none of my friends had a 16-bit console. Few had Nintendo or some other 8-bit console, and GameBoys were popular. Almost everyone had a home computer and that's what was used on gaming. In my country, ST was maybe 4th or 5th most important gaming platform during the '80s (behind C-64, Amiga, PC and maybe SNES or MSX, in that order) so it is sorta hard for me to think that it wouldn't make it to top20. Although objectively, worldwide, it probably wouldn't because there were so many consoles and 8bit systems which sold more.
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Companies which survived have rewritten history quite a bit so "non-standard" platforms tend to be forgotten. I remember how Microsoft used to claim (maybe still does) that they invented graphic user interfaces. Once I saw red when estabilished technical magazine celebrated IBM PC release anniversary, claiming how it was "revolutionary" and "for the first time, brought computers to people's homes."
In Europe, particularly on continent, ST was the prime gaming platform for more 'serious' games up until ~1990 when PC w/VGA started to become affordable. Strategy games and flight simulators were usually better on ST than on Amiga. This is why I thought Atari missed a beat when they didn't upgrade CPU with STE (in 'STE under the hood' -thread). These games were popular and suffered less from piracy than arcade type games. A more powerful CPU would have enabled the platform to stay competive with PC for few more years.
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I always thought that interlaced mode looked pretty horrible. You could watch it for couple of minutes tops. It seemed to me of very little practical use.
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Yeah hard drive was an option (40, 80 and 120mb as I recall) but even smallest one added 50% to the cost so I presume most people chose the cheapest model, like me.
I don't recall any of the Amiga or ST users in my hometown who had a hard drive. Hmm, I think one guy had A2000 and he might have a hd? Not sure.
It was kind of a vicious cycle: most people didn't get hard drives so games developers designed the games just for floppies, which didn't give any incentive for people to invest on hard drives. It was OK for baseline Amiga/ST which didn't have memory or processing power for huge games anyway, but newer generation machines required better mass storage.
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If only you'd seen me back in the early 1990s in my computing college courses, I was quite the Amiga zealot and was happy to promote the Amiga every chance I could to everyone who was thinking of getting a PC for their college course. If I recall, there was even a moment where me and some PC zealot (who was a complete jerk in any case) had a loud argument in front of the whole group, mainly about the meaning of the term PC (was it a brand or a generic computing term). I would get quietly outraged at lecturers scoffing at the inflated prices of the higher-end Amigas, and I did everything I could to use my Amiga feasibly for the PC stuff (I used CrossDOS for PC compatibility, as I recall). Someone else I knew in the group had bought a cheap PC and brought in a box of his old Amiga games for me to have a look at, although I inadvertently almost got him in trouble by risking the lecturer (a complete asshole, everyone agreed) seeing the box and us engaging in disk swaps right there in a lecture. Really should've apologised to him for that, but didn't realise what I'd done at the time.
I didn't consider the PC to be any threat to the Amiga in the early 1990s whatsoever, as AGA had come out and at least there was no advantage to either platform, graphics-wise (please explain how VGA could be better than AGA). However, I had an Amiga 1200 and didn't count on the Motorola 68x series' low processing power compared to the Intel x86s of the time, and things finally began to turn me towards the PC once I saw Doom on a friend's PC and was blown away by how good it looked. I knew then, that the Amiga's days were numbered and the next Big Thing was on its way. Commodore going bust was the final nail in the coffin. Yes, despite what happened before, I was a turncoat.
One of my friends was a huge Amiga buff. He was always excited when new Amiga models came out. First came Amiga 500+ and he was totally going to buy it. I was like "hmm, seems pretty useless upgrade for a lot of money?" Well before he got to realize his dream, A600 came out and he went bonkers, I'm gonna buy that instead! And I was like, "Isn't that just A500 on smaller case?" Fortunately, A1200 came out almost immediately afterwards so he didn't get the chance waste his money on those boondoggles.
I first noticed PC was winning ca. 1989 (though at first I didn't think it would last). Games like Fighter Bomber were much better on AT or 386 PC with VGA or SVGA. PC sounds were joke but it wasn't a big deal on strategy games and AdLib was already affordable and gave acceptable sound quality. Then Wing Commander came out and slew the Amiga and ST. I played WC on A1200 but it was clearly worse looking than on PC and also very unstable for some reason.
Part of the reason was demographic. Kids who had started with 8-bit machines in early '80s were growing up, getting jobs and more income and could afford high-end systems. Something like 386SX was decently affordable for many and you could play games which either didn't exist on Amiga/ST, or were crap on them. PC's were still more expensive but there was little option, you wanted to play the top games, you coughed up the money.
Big part which for some reason isn't mentioned often were hard drives. Very early it became customary that every PC came with a hard drive. It made them much more expensive because even 20MB hard drive costed quite a lot back then, but it gave developers a big advantage in terms of 'lowest common denominator'. You could put in much more sounds and graphics as games were meant to be played from hard drives. It didn't matter that most people had small hard drives - a 4 to 8 megabyte game would still easily fit and people could just uninstall them once they got bored and install something else. One of my friends had an XP. I noted that my ST was as good or better in most respects. More powerful CPU, better sounds, better graphics (EGA had good resolution but horrible colour palette). However he had a hard drive...I was just so envious because it made playing much more convenient. Playing AD&D RPG's, all the battles and cities would load in seconds. When I played same games on ST, loading took up like a minute, and you had to swap disks all the time, it was pain. And it wasn't even the worst, my Amiga friend had Monkey Island II which took like 10 diskettes. Even with 2 disk drives, it was horrible to play. That's why immediately when I saw A1200 specs, I knew that it wasn't enough. There was no hard drive or even HD disk drive. Better AGA graphics would not help as there was no space to put them into. Also CPU was kinda meh, a budget version of 68020.
I always dreamed of Hard drive for my ST, but I couldn't afford it. TV was killing my eyes so I had to invest my meagre money on colour monitor.
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Yea FotI was better (it was after all, made by SH as successor to Falcon). Alas it required 1MB memory for full graphics and sound, and I had only 512kb...
I guess my point is that while backwards compability is nice to have, it's killer applications which sell the machine. Why didn't Atari at least release their own joystick for STE to get things going?
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Anyway, back on topic: I think regardless what Atari did with the ST, they would have eventually been defeated by the PC. Even a STE with a 256 color mode wouldn't have helped in 1990 - developers already switched to the Amiga or video game consoles. I liked the ST and the Falcon, but the STE not so much. Atari did very little to help the STE and those enhanced joystick ports were useless until the arrival of the Jaguar pads.
Yeah, PC would have probably won anyway, regardless of what other platforms did. In fact, in the end it was consumers who won the home computer wars. PC market became so cutthroat and competive that even big PC manufacturers couldn't take it. IBM had to give up its own creation, and Compaq which looked absolutely undefeatable in the '90s folded.
That said, I do believe that with better choices Commodore and Atari could have made it for few more years at least. I maintain that CPU upgrade would have been must for STE to make it more attractive. And yea it's puzzling that analog joystick ports were not employed at all. Not only they'd have made it competive with console controllers, also they would have been great in flight simulators which was very popular genre at the time. Many people bought ST to play Falcon (well at least I did).
AGA was a good step-up in spec for the Amiga, even if it was flawed in places, and it allowed the Amiga to be evenly-specced with the PC, except maybe sound. It's just a shame the AA chipset never got finished.
Sure AGA wasn't bad per se, but it wasn't in any way groundbreaking. No PC user was going to look at AGA and think "wow if only I had all that". Especially as it was bolted on otherwise unremarkable machine.
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We should get fatboy slim to do the music for an ST home brew. I bet if the game was fun he would do it
Fatboy Slim doesn't strike me as 'ST aficionado' in same sense as we here. He likely just needed a computer for his music and that's what was available(or somebody recommended it) and he liked to work with it. If he had bought say, Yamaha CX5M instead, he would probably swear by Akai and MSX today
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CUSTOM CHIPS ALL THE WAY, BABY! The Amiga BURIED the Atari ST for that reason alone!
Custom chips are fine & dandy if you can afford them - but to really get ahead of curve you have to take enormous technical risk, or invest tons of moolah. Commodore itself couldn't afford to develope modern chipset in the '90s, they could only produce more budget-friendly AGA which was obsolescent when it arrived.
Heck, even modern era video game consol giants have trouble keeping up. Playstation 4 is basically just a crappy PC on Sony case.
It's funny reading people talking about ST as 'not real Atari'. Here in Finland, Atari = ST, 8-bit Ataris were virtually unknown. Nobody had them. 8-bit scene was 90% Commodore, with MSX taking up most of the rest.
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I think it's Notator.
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He recently retired the STs. Here is an article about it:
While he talks about it in the article, we see that in interviews 2-3 years later he still hasn't completely retired his home studio. Here's another one, at 1.35 we see his Atari again:
What he did do was to stop hauling tons of vinyls for live performances.
Many musicians tend to be very conservative. Once they find some way of making music they like and which sounds 'right' for them, they are often reluctant to give it up. And funny thing is this isn't limited to just say classic music where you just have to have authentic Amati violins or 17th century pipe organs etc. Recently passed Lemmy Kilmister did, to the end, everything pretty much the same he did in the '70s. Same (or similar) bass guitars, same amps, same consoles and so on. He even kept the same people in his road crew whenever possible - Lemmy's friends who visited Motörhead backstage like 10 or 20 years later, were astonished to see how everything was just like in previous visit.
In some genres this is taken to extreme, like in Black metal world - music is recorded using old track recorders or even C-cassettes and fanzines are printed with old Xerox photocopiers because that is The Way, dammit.
I read that this isn't Norman Cook's original ST, apparently his old machine broke down sometimes in 2000's. By then ST was already a relic even in music world, but he didn't want to change but bought couple of extra ST's and monitors. His current machine is 520STFM with 1MB memory.
I think there are couple of other holdouts who still use ST. It was mentioned somewhere that Cabaret Voltaire still produce their music with ST.
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Btw, I remember someone claiming that much of ST software was hard-coded for 68000 which made backwards compability difficult (supposedly even 68010 would have given compability issues) and discouraged Atari from upgrading CPU, leading for 16-bit bus for Falcon etc. Any truth in that? Hows the software compability between ST and TT?
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The Amiga: Why did it fail so hard in the United States?
in Commodore Amiga
Posted
In fairness, it's not like A1200 was so expensive. It costed like 1/3rd of average gaming PC. It would have costed about a same to buy new video card, sound card and extra memory for your gaming PC.
OTOH, you got what you paid for. That bog-standard A1200 had no hard drive and was inferior in most other respects too.
Well, whole point of Amiga was to offer something different from PC. If they couldn't do it, then what's the point? Just make IBM compatibles or design new hardware for them.
I suppose they could have done same as Mac and just put adopt the OS for PC hardware.
Though, I don't think games are good example of this. I don't think many people who had Amiga missed their C-64 games. Most games became obsolete too quickly. Uridium was great on C-64, but when you can play Xenon on Amiga, would you really load up C-64 version of Uridium even if you could?
In general, story of the gaming machines seems to be that they can sell a lot quickly but have much less staying power. Lot of the very popular gaming machines became quickly outdated and had their sales collapse nearly overnight. Ability to 'migrate' seems much less relevant there than in serious work. Maybe you want to be able to read your old text or CAD files many years later in your new machine, but do you really need to migrate your save points from Pool of Radiance you played 5 years ago? Probably not (unless you're me). If you look at history of ST, most of them were sold as gaming machines, but in 'serious' niche roles it survived much longer. You could still see them in studios well into '2000s, and last TOS version of Calamus came out, what, 2015 or so?