The Amiga: Why did it fail so hard in the United States?

[youxia]

Propertiary hardware controlled by one company is a closed ecosystem. I don't recall anybody building clone Amigas.

 

Besides, even in the late Eighties it was all already done and dusted. When Amiga was born PC had ~50% market share, in 1991 it was over 80%.

[Bill Loguidice]

As soon as the Amiga lost its advantage in graphics and sound once VGA and Sound Blaster became more common on the PC side, there was no going back. While the Amiga 1200 was a reasonable upgrade, it simply wasn't enough because the platform still hadn't standardized on things like hard drives and didn't have a clear CD upgrade path. All the best stuff, all of the excitement, was happening on the PC side by that point, pushed by countless manufacturers using more or less shared commodity parts and near universal developer/publisher support. A company like Commodore was not going to be able to compete with that under any scenario, even if they had executed their business strategy perfectly. The PC was always "good enough" by the TGA/EGA days and was well beyond "good enough" after that. I know in my own case, while I would have loved to upgrade to an Amiga 1200 from my beloved Amiga 500, I was never going to do it because the PC platform by that time was leaps and bounds more appealing. In the US, the Amiga platform peaked with the Amiga 500/2000 and never brought a significant fraction of that audience over to the 1200/4000 (ignoring the 600/3000), and with good reason. Even the modest 386 PC we had was doing things the Amiga 500 couldn't (or wasn't), and certainly when we got a Pentium 90 PC, there was no way an Amiga 1200 was going to have any appeal left, again, especially in the US when it was all but impossible to find software post OCS/ECS. 

 

The Macintosh was able to survive in part thanks to a sustainable professional niche in desktop publishing (and other intangibles already discussed, like standardizing on hard drives within a reasonable timeframe), while the Amiga's video dominance was years too early to make a difference on the consumer side (and the ST's dominance in MIDI was obviously never going to be a consumer-facing success factor).

 

In terms of the clone question, I'm not sure even if Amiga or ST clones would have been practical if it would have made any difference for those platforms. We know that the Macintosh was cloned both unofficially and officially, but the latter ended up being a relatively short-lived experiment. Probably the greatest strengths - at least for a while - of the Amiga, ST, and Macintosh were the "single source" of the computers (translating to, among other things, easier buying decisions, greater compatibility, etc.). And certainly we know that the "single source" strategy was survivable - albeit with considerable difficulty at times - as evidenced by the Macintosh, so no, I don't think in this case allowing Amiga or ST clones would have made a difference, even if, again, it were even practical.

 

These "what ifs?" are always fascinating, but I always come back myself to the idea that even with near perfect execution (and avoiding costly industry adjacent hail marys like the CD32 and Jaguar), I don't see how either Commodore or Atari could have survived much past the mid-90s as anything other than PC clone makers. And as evidenced by companies like Gateway, that likely wouldn't have meant much in the end either. The fact that both Commodore and Atari survived into the early 90s as arguably somewhat lackluster - but still viable for a certain percentage of users - platforms is not necessarily a bad ending all things considered.

[zzip]

23 minutes ago, Bill Loguidice said:

I don't see how either Commodore or Atari could have survived much past the mid-90s as anything other than PC clone makers. And as evidenced by companies like Gateway, that likely wouldn't have meant much in the end either. The fact that both Commodore and Atari survived into the early 90s as arguably somewhat lackluster - but still viable for a certain percentage of users - platforms is not necessarily a bad ending all things considered.

I think Atari could have survived as a video game console maker if they had played their cards right in the crucial years between the crash and NES dominance.   Instead they went from a videogame company that also sold computers to a computer company that also sold videogames.

 

Commodore-  I think they were screwed no matter what, unless they went all-in on the clone maker route, but I have no idea how they'd fair vs Compaq, Gateway, Dell, etc.   Or maybe something else they could have done was put Amiga custom chips onto PC cards and beaten Creative and companies making "Windows Accelerators" to the punch.   But would they beat Creative at marketing?  I have doubts.

 

[Bill Loguidice]

2 hours ago, zzip said:

I think Atari could have survived as a video game console maker if they had played their cards right in the crucial years between the crash and NES dominance.   Instead they went from a videogame company that also sold computers to a computer company that also sold videogames.

 

Commodore-  I think they were screwed no matter what, unless they went all-in on the clone maker route, but I have no idea how they'd fair vs Compaq, Gateway, Dell, etc.   Or maybe something else they could have done was put Amiga custom chips onto PC cards and beaten Creative and companies making "Windows Accelerators" to the punch.   But would they beat Creative at marketing?  I have doubts.

 

I always speculated what it would have been like to go the Tandy Graphics and Sound route and try and make an Amiga Graphics and Sound on a card as an option for PCs (assuming that was even technically feasible), but again, ultimately that was a short-term solution for success rather than a longer term, sustainable solution. The PC market was geared to more open standards only a few years after the platform's introduction. I don't think anything could have really derailed that. And of course we know that markets always go from many participants to just a few (consoles, smartphones and tablets, etc.), so no matter what it would have come down to just a few platforms in the end. I think the better argument is what Commodore (or Atari for that matter) could have done to become what the Macintosh became and survive as the only other viable platform versus DOS/Windows. Although we can argue we have three PC platforms today with Mac, Windows, and Linux, it's very different with the way hardware and compatibility works than it did with different platforms in the past.

 

Ultimately, it wasn't really the hardware that mattered past a certain point, it was the software, i.e., DOS and then Windows. Microsoft was the one who made out the best on the PC side rather than a specific hardware manufacturer or manufacturers (see IBM, for instance). And it's not like when there was still a question what could replace DOS that an implementation of AmigaOS on Intel would have been worked either, as we have an example with GEM, which was both Atari ST and PC (acknowledging of course the lack of cross-compatibility, which wouldn't have been an option anyway, but certainly an eventual merging could have been envisioned). 

 

As for Atari, I agree that they could have done better on the console side had they not missed a generation, but the years from 1984 forward were a mismanaged mess in general. It's a miracle they lasted as long as they did considering how fast the industry evolved around them and with them in many ways still conducting business the old way, even during the Jaguar years.

[zzip]

25 minutes ago, Bill Loguidice said:

I always speculated what it would have been like to go the Tandy Graphics and Sound route and try and make an Amiga Graphics and Sound on a card as an option for PCs (assuming that was even technically feasible), but again, ultimately that was a short-term solution for success rather than a longer term, sustainable solution.

Well it depends.  Assuming they would keep funding R&D into the Amiga technology, they can keep refreshing their PC card lines every year or two like the other chipset manufacturers do.  So it could be long term if they managed to produce a successful product line.   Many of the well-known PC chipset makers started as small scrappy companies and were founded after the Amiga (S3, nVidia, ATI (now part of AMD), 3Dfx) so it was still anybody's game, and Amiga had a nice head start on the tech.

 

45 minutes ago, Bill Loguidice said:

And it's not like when there was still a question what could replace DOS that an implementation of AmigaOS on Intel would have been worked either, as we have an example with GEM, which was both Atari ST and PC (acknowledging of course the lack of cross-compatibility, which wouldn't have been an option anyway, but certainly an eventual merging could have been envisioned). 

By the early 90s, x86 CPUs were fast enough to run ST software under emulation, so  it would have been theoretically possible continue the ST platform on Intel with GEM and emulate the older stuff.   But from what I understand, ST GEM was an early fork of GEM with lots of customization from Atari, and PC GEM continued to evolve in a different direction.  And there isn't a ton of PC GEM software, so I'm not sure a GEM-based Atari PC would have appealed much to Atari fans or PC fans.   I think someone like Amstrad tried releasing a GEM-based PC and it landed with a thud?

[Keatah]

1 hour ago, Bill Loguidice said:

I always speculated what it would have been like to go the Tandy Graphics and Sound route and try and make an Amiga Graphics and Sound on a card as an option for PCs (assuming that was even technically feasible), but again, ultimately that was a short-term solution for success rather than a longer term, sustainable solution.

 

4 hours ago, zzip said:

Commodore-  I think they were screwed no matter what, unless they went all-in on the clone maker route, but I have no idea how they'd fair vs Compaq, Gateway, Dell, etc.   Or maybe something else they could have done was put Amiga custom chips onto PC cards and beaten Creative and companies making "Windows Accelerators" to the punch.   But would they beat Creative at marketing?  I have doubts.

I can't imagine any of these being successful. The PC hardware wasn't quite at the point where these would be simple drop-in installs. Neither was the process of integrating them into the Windows 3.1 environment. The 3D0 Blaster failed, it was 2 cards. And Jaguar card was overly complex, like "developer-complex". So no appeal on that one. Furthermore I believe (but don't recall) they imposed restrictions on general PC operation or reduced compatibility. And they were full-size cards. Something the industry was destined to move away from.

 

Whereas a PC-native graphics card or sound card were far simpler to install. And their size evolved downward once they got over the hump of those AWE32 footlongers.

 

4 hours ago, Bill Loguidice said:

Even the modest 386 PC we had was doing things the Amiga 500 couldn't (or wasn't), and certainly when we got a Pentium 90 PC, there was no way an Amiga 1200 was going to have any appeal left, again, especially in the US when it was all but impossible to find software post OCS/ECS.

Yes. I personally began taking a vague notice of PC's clock speed evolution around the 286-386 era. And complete realization that PC was the superior platform for pushing the boundaries around the 486 era. Give or take. It was all very nebulous and everyone had slightly different inflection points because the industry was growing rapidly and at different paces in different aspects.

 

Once the PC hit around 33MHz and then the DX2-50 clock doubling stuff - I was done holding out any hope on the Amiga. If ever there was a proverbial nail in the coffin or point of no return, it was this technology illustrated in this article.. Which I've referenced before. BYTE 1992 v17 n05 May - Intel Beats the Clock 486DX2 [o].pdf

And there were 10 years of speed and instruction set evolution to go with all those architectural improvements.

 

I tended to develop an OCD ADHD "thing" for cache on-board CPUs. How much (of the software) could fit in there and run entirely without accessing main memory? Turns out some, but not much. Today that's changing. With low-end CPUs having 16MB and more - an entire emulator and its rom can essentially stay on-die. By the numbers anyway. Who knows what's really really happening in there..

 

So. For a while I ran both Amiga and PC side by side. And the time spent doing parallel activities on both machines became more and more fruitless. Then my transitionary phase was complete. And PC was the gig going forward.

 

I had done similar with the Apple II and Amiga. But the Amiga never fully replaced the Apple II. Those ran side-by-side for years. The Apple had PrintShop, and AppleWorks, and I was intimately familiar with its filing systems and the Side HDD sub-system.

Edited September 30, 2021 by Keatah

[zzip]

5 minutes ago, Keatah said:

I can't imagine any of these being successful. The PC hardware wasn't quite at the point where these would be simple drop-in installs. Neither was the process of integrating them into the Windows 3.1 environment. The 3D0 Blaster failed, it was 2 cards. And Jaguar card was overly complex, like "developer-complex". So no appeal on that one. Furthermore I believe (but don't recall) they imposed restrictions on general PC operation or reduced compatibility. And they were full-size cards. Something the industry was destined to move away from.

Timing is everything.   In the 80s, graphics standards were still being set by IBM up until MCGA/VGA in 87.   But after that so-called SVGA was a loose standard with every chipset manufacturer putting their own spin on it with graphics drivers abstracting the details from applications.   For a time, there were a series of graphics card dubbed "Windows Accelerators" that added features such as hardware assisted drawing, blitting, etc..   the kind of stuff Amiga had been doing since 85.   And Amiga had digital audio 4 years before the first Soundblaster.   It would have been an opportunity to extend their know-how to the PC market.   Now whether or not they could their tech into a reasonably sized ISA card being overly complex, I don't know.   I was just pointing out that it was a possible path forward for the Amiga tech, but they would still have to battle all the other PC chipset makers, and win. 

[Keatah]

DOS-only games didn’t ever use these blitting and “Windows Accelerator” features did they? I don’t recall any. The only reason why some DOS-based games asked you about your graphics chip was for resolution, bit-plane, framebuffer access style , and VESA implementation/version.

 

All that just prior to more automated detection. That abstracting stuff.

[zzip]

31 minutes ago, Keatah said:

DOS-only games didn’t ever use these blitting and “Windows Accelerator” features did they? I don’t recall any. The only reason why some DOS-based games asked you about your graphics chip was for resolution, bit-plane, framebuffer access style , and VESA implementation/version.

 

All that just prior to more automated detection. That abstracting stuff.

Not from my experience in coding DOS games, it's hit or miss.  Maybe the graphics library you'd use supported some acceleration features with certain chipsets.   The Scitech Display Doctor stuff may have tried to do it in a more standard way, but I never really messed with that.

 

I think the reason games asked for your chipset is the autodetection might not be reliable.  Or maybe some VGA card owners liked to choose CGA because they are masochists ?

[mr_me]

12 hours ago, youxia said:

Propertiary hardware controlled by one company is a closed ecosystem. I don't recall anybody building clone Amigas.

 

Besides, even in the late Eighties it was all already done and dusted. When Amiga was born PC had ~50% market share, in 1991 it was over 80%.

Maybe a closed architecture.  A closed ecosystem would mean software publishers would be required to get Commodore's permission to publish Amiga software.  

 

In 1984 Commodore outsold all IBM PC and compatibles combined; different markets.  The office PC market was exploding in the late eighties, which is where IBM and compatibles were growing.  Apple was holding steady selling to schools.  Ecosystems were a big part of home consumer choices at the time; piracy was also part of that.  The Amiga did okay until about 1992.  Which is about when Windows 3.x computers started to get practical.  That's also not long after the SNES came out.

 

 

Edited October 1, 2021 by mr_me

[pacman000]

9 hours ago, zzip said:

Well it depends.  Assuming they would keep funding R&D into the Amiga technology, they can keep refreshing their PC card lines every year or two like the other chipset manufacturers do.  So it could be long term if they managed to produce a successful product line.   Many of the well-known PC chipset makers started as small scrappy companies and were founded after the Amiga (S3, nVidia, ATI (now part of AMD), 3Dfx) so it was still anybody's game, and Amiga had a nice head start on the tech.

 

By the early 90s, x86 CPUs were fast enough to run ST software under emulation, so  it would have been theoretically possible continue the ST platform on Intel with GEM and emulate the older stuff.   But from what I understand, ST GEM was an early fork of GEM with lots of customization from Atari, and PC GEM continued to evolve in a different direction.  And there isn't a ton of PC GEM software, so I'm not sure a GEM-based Atari PC would have appealed much to Atari fans or PC fans.   I think someone like Amstrad tried releasing a GEM-based PC and it landed with a thud?

If I remember right Atari’s own PC clone came with GEM, before Windows took over.

[carlsson]

Perhaps it is time for a side topic: Why did the Amiga do so well in Europe?

 

I know one of the reasons why: anything better was super expensive. Even the cheapest PC clone with VGA etc would have cost at least 50% more, perhaps twice, of what an Amiga 500 cost, if you only look at the hardware costs. While certainly consoles also were successful, it seems to me that in Europe there was a niche for inexpensive home computers that may barely have existed in America. I mean you can bring up proprietary hardware and lack of expansion options all day until the cows come home, but in reality the Amiga (and at least up to a certain point in time the Atari ST series) did well over here. If it had a lot of shortcomings and flaws attached to it, I can't see it fly on either market.

[zzip]

50 minutes ago, carlsson said:

 While certainly consoles also were successful, it seems to me that in Europe there was a niche for inexpensive home computers that may barely have existed in America.

I'm interested in why this was the case.   Why Europe stuck with computers while America returned to consoles.

 

I have my ideas.   Seems like there was pressure from both ends of the market.   On the high-end, despite the high price tag on PCs, people actually bought them in the US,  few people took Amiga or ST seriously as professional or business machines.     On the low end, cheap NES consoles made STs or Amigas a hard sell as a game machine.

 

Also the crash..  which supposedly barely happened in Europe.   The crash happened just as home computers were rising, so it seemed that most people either jumped to a computer or were bored and dropped out of the gaming scene for awhile.  By the time the drop-outs returned, NES was established, so many people seemed to have missed out the computer wave altogether.   So it never really became a cultural thing the same way it did in Europe.

[youxia]

1 hour ago, carlsson said:

If it had a lot of shortcomings and flaws attached to it, I can't see it fly on either market.

Being a closed design didn't really matter that much in this segment of the market at the time, because everything else was, so it wasn't really a shortcoming. It did matter in the long run, but at those crazy, ever changing times nobody was thinking 10-20 years ahead.

 

And Amiga 500 was pretty awesome, hardware and software wise, the undisputed Queen of the micro world for a few great years - say, 1987 to 1991-2. There was nothing else which could do so many different things for such a low price.

 

I guess there is some mix of reasons why it was bigger in Europe than US, but not sure you could pinpoint one as the main culprit.

[Bill Loguidice]

The reality is up until the mid-90s or so, the three major regions, North America, Europe, and Japan (ignoring regions like South America for now, which also were quite different), had very different computing and gaming appetites, although there obviously was some overlap, like with the success of the C-64 in North America and Europe, or the Famicom/NES in North America and Japan.

 

I always think of Europe as not only more fractured at that time, but also far more price conscious than we were in the US. It's one reason why Europeans were still on cassettes into the 1990s when essentially by 1984 we had standardized on disks over here in the US (and of course Europeans had more tolerance for inexpensive, low end, relatively lower performance platforms, whereas over here we absolutely ignored such options as a market by 1983/4). In Japan, there was something of a jingoistic attitude that still persists somewhat to this day, as well as obviously very different gaming tastes, which, in some cases, they were hesitant to share (or simply not trust there to be a market) with the outside world until more into the 1990s.

 

With all of that in mind, we still ended up in the same place in all regions, again, because that's the natural path of these types of markets--consolidation (besides the world becoming more homogenized in terms of shared culture). So again, without SIGNIFICANT changes very early on, again, with a Commodore or Atari effectively displacing Apple for the "other" platform, there's very little that would have or could have changed with the progression that we got. All regions took slightly different paths and had slightly different schedules getting there, but they still all ended up in the same place.

And sure, the Amiga (and ST for that matter), did better in Europe than anywhere else in the world, but the Amiga did hold its own in the US. It was reasonably available and did have software in major retail outlets for a number of years. Especially for gamers or multimedia enthusiasts, it was the best computer you could have for several years, so we really shouldn't discount its relative success in the US. I think the biggest difference is that by the time the Amiga 1200 hit, it was no longer a viable platform in the US, while in Europe it thrived for a few years longer.

 

To put it another way, if you were a 1000/500/2000 owner and you got in early enough in the US, you really were lacking for very little in terms of support and software for a number of years, easily into the late 1980s and very early part of the 1990s. You could walk into any mall and get software (or even hardware for a time) at mass market stores, and in many cases certainly easier than you could for a Macintosh (especially games). By the time the 1200 was ready to go, the Amiga platform was clearly in its decline over here and PCs and compatibles were clearly and unequivocally dominant, with similarly clear advantages over what the Amiga platform could offer by that time. And with sub-$1000 PCs starting to become a thing, the Amiga no longer had a price advantage either to go along with the lack of the same volume and overall quality of software, especially on the productivity side. Europeans got there too, of course, it just took a few years longer.

[Hwlngmad]

1 hour ago, zzip said:

I'm interested in why this was the case.   Why Europe stuck with computers while America returned to consoles.

 

I have my ideas.   Seems like there was pressure from both ends of the market.   On the high-end, despite the high price tag on PCs, people actually bought them in the US,  few people took Amiga or ST seriously as professional or business machines.     On the low end, cheap NES consoles made STs or Amigas a hard sell as a game machine.

 

Also the crash..  which supposedly barely happened in Europe.   The crash happened just as home computers were rising, so it seemed that most people either jumped to a computer or were bored and dropped out of the gaming scene for awhile.  By the time the drop-outs returned, NES was established, so many people seemed to have missed out the computer wave altogether.   So it never really became a cultural thing the same way it did in Europe.

A big reason why Europe stuck with computers is that video game consoles did not have a major impact early on the way they did in the United States.  Europe had plenty of cheaper computer consoles that were well supported like the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC line of machines.  However, in the United States, video game consoles had been the much cheaper gaming/entertainment option until late 1982 / early 1983.  At that time everything changed as computer prices lessened and became the same or thereabouts as video game consoles.  That led to a massive surge in sales of machines like the C64 and others.  However, next gen machines like the ST and Amiga were massive jumps in price compared to machines like a C64, C128, any A8, and CoCo 2 and/or 3.  That left machines like the NES, Sega Master System, 7800, and others afterwards to undercut ST, Amiga, and even existing 8-bit machines as the cheaper (and better) gaming/entertainment option.  Video game consoles just didn't have as big of an impact in Europe until the late 80s, very early 1990s unlike the influence felt in the U.S. and Japan.  However, once video game consoles began to undercut Amigas and STs along with the technology superiority going to the PC and advancing at a rapid rate it just left very little chance for Atari and Commodore to survive.  Hell, even Apple barely held on until Steve Jobs returned to stabilize Apple's computer line, reinvigorate it, and take Apple into new product lines a la iPod, iPhone, iPad.

[carlsson]

1 hour ago, carlsson said:

Even the cheapest PC clone with VGA etc would have cost at least 50% more, perhaps twice, of what an Amiga 500 cost, if you only look at the hardware costs.

I tried to find some price benchmarks, but to most part I failed. Simply the companies selling Commodore and Atari computers didn't carry anything PC compatible, and those who did had no reason to advertise in Commodore oriented magazines.

 

However I recently did find one reference that is obscure for several reasons. It turns out that the Swedish importer of Spectravideo home computers at some point opened a subsidiary where they sold their own PC compatibles using the Spectravideo brand. For some reason that was possible because globally Spectravideo had ceased operations and I suppose their mother company Bondwell didn't bother or was unaware what the importers did with their brand on a market across the world. So here we have the brand new SVI PC, advertised in the end of September 1986 in three different configurations:

 

SVI PC I: 4.77 MHz 8088, 256K RAM, one 360K floppy drive, 5 expansion slots, 12" green monitor (Samsung), keyboard. 5990 SEK + 23.46% VAT = 7395 SEK.

SVI PC I: Like the above, but with 640K RAM and two 360K floppy drives.  7990 SEK + VAT = 9864 SEK.

SVI XT: Like the above, but with 640K RAM, one 360K floppy drive and one 20 MB HDD (Winchester). 12990 SEK + VAT = 16037 SEK.

Bondwell portable: 512K RAM, 3.5" floppy drive, LCD. 8990 SEK + VAT = 11099 SEK.

 

Supposedly those prices were far below IBM, but possibly in line with other clones. The exchange rate at this point was nearly exactly 1 USD = 7 SEK.

 

Now let's go back to the Amiga scene. This clearly was before the Amiga 500, so all we have to compare with is the 1000 which was advertised in December 1986 at 9995 SEK including VAT though it is unclear if that included the monitor. An Atari 1040STF cost 12340 SEK (possibly with monitor). Interestingly enough, in the official price list from Commodore Sweden in November 1986, the new Amiga is completely missing. Perhaps they ran two separate price lists and the one I've seen was intended for the lower end (8-bit) of the market.

 

Assuming the 9995 SEK was with monitor, it meant at this point of time you could get an Amiga 1000 with 256K, or a 5150 compatible with mono graphics and 640K for the same money. If you needed it for business purposes, surely you would get the PC clone, and perhaps later add at least a CGA/EGA card and a different monitor whatever that cost.

 

Fast forward to December 1987, when you could get an Atari 520STFM for 3695, an Amiga 500 for 5990, an Atari 1040STF for 5195 or 6695 SEK together with SM-124, all prices including VAT. Obviously I have no price points for what a typical PC compatible - whether it was an 8088 with MDA/Hercules graphics, CGA, EGA or the brand new VGA graphics - cost at the time but the Atari 1040STF had dropped between 46-58% in price over a year, meaning that the price segment between a C64/NES and a PC clone had formed.

 

I really wish it was easier to research old magazines and other sources that may have resellers of PC compatibles. I did find some traces of information but the source won't let me review the entire material so I can't say for sure what I found:

 

November/December 1987:

Esselte 286S (Swedish brand, AT compatible) = 19950 SEK + VAT (which supposedly was very affordable for its capacity)

Sharp PC-7221 (AT compatible luggable with LCD) = 11850 SEK (assumed to be excl VAT but I can't say for sure)

IMPdata 386 PC (no idea about spec) = 26511 - 31845 SEK (??)

 

The exchange rate had improved (if you like) so now 1 USD = 6 SEK.

 

I did find a few references to unknown PC at 7990 SEK + possible VAT which would be nearly 50% more than an Atari 1040STF, if both included a monitor. Most probably that was a 8088 with CGA, but hey 68000 vs 8088 is pretty equal comparison.

 

If you already got a spare colour TV at home or perhaps a C64 monitor and looking to upgrade, clearly you could get a 520ST or even an Amiga 500 for a fraction of what even the simplest PC compatible on market cost at the time.

[youxia]

10 minutes ago, carlsson said:

If you already got a spare colour TV at home or perhaps a C64 monitor and looking to upgrade, clearly you could get a 520ST or even an Amiga 500 for a fraction of what even the simplest PC compatible on market cost at the time.

Price aside, there was no reason to get a PC (for a hobbyist-gamer) because up till 1990-91 most of the games & multimedia were inferior on this platform anyway.

[Bill Loguidice]

Just now, youxia said:

Price aside, there was no reason to get a PC (for a hobbyist-gamer) because up till 1990-91 most of the games & multimedia were inferior on this platform anyway.

Inferior in some cases still, yes, but by that time it was already a target for most developers and publishers, so you'd still have access to almost all of the latest and greatest games and then some. Far more than any other platform. And even though it didn't necessarily have full-blown support in every title, VGA was already a thing for several years by that time, as was Sound Blaster. It was still a very solid choice by that point. But I do agree that it wasn't until roughly a year later, 1992 - 3, that it truly came into its own as the ultimate computer platform with games that weren't possible/available elsewhere. By 1994 - 5, it was of course lights out, particularly with the beginning of the CD-ROM-based stuff grabbing all the headlines and then Windows 95 starting to make things even more user friendly on the consumer side of things.

[carlsson]

Yes, I agree on that matter too. While graphics and sound improved on the PC side around 1987-89, the "critical mass" probably was too small for most software houses, at least when it came to more action oriented games, to prioritize it. I know when it came to bigger, more complex games like adventure games, flight simulators and so on the situation was different, but on the other hand the Amiga had a fair share of those too.

 

If the topic was "why did the Amiga that initially sold well in the US, suddenly bomb around 1991", I would accept it. After all we know that Commodore mostly reiterated the hardware from there on, and in combination with prices on PC parts rapidly begun to drop, its day were counted. The Amiga 1200 was a bit too late to compete with the games consoles, the Amiga 4000 probably too expensive with regards to the software support to compete with an average 386/486. That was little they could do about it, as you already noted Apple tried their best to maintain a proprietary ecosystem and themselves had some really rough years ahead of them.

 

On the other hand I have always thought that Apple products are grossly overpriced for their capacity, so it may have been interesting to see what would be the outcome if Commodore were licensed to make lower end Macintosh clones. After all there were 3rd party expansions that would turn your Amiga into a Macintosh, and at some point in time one of those provided better specs than even Apple could offer IIRC. Whether that would have been beneficial to Apple or in the long run had saved Commodore is doubtful but since the attempt to position the Amiga as a business computer on its own had been going on for 4-5 years without much success at that point, anything should have been tried.

[zzip]

11 minutes ago, Bill Loguidice said:

And even though it didn't necessarily have full-blown support in every title, VGA was already a thing for several years by that time, as was Sound Blaster. It was still a very solid choice by that point. But I do agree that it wasn't until roughly a year later, 1992 - 3, that it truly came into its own as the ultimate computer platform with games that weren't possible/available elsewhere. By 1994 - 5, it was of course lights out, particularly with the beginning of the CD-ROM-based stuff grabbing all the headlines and then Windows 95 starting to make things even more user friendly on the consumer side of things.

The specs looked good on paper, but if I compare most PC games in the late 80s to their Amiga and ST counterparts,  they are still usually (but not always) inferior.  Even if they use VGA, they don't necessarily use more colors than the ST/Amiga versions.   ISA graphics cards have a narrow bus and video ram on card, so you'd often see screen tearing that you wouldn't on ST/Amiga.   In the 80s AdLib/OPL sound was more common than soundblaster sound,  so they didn't sound particularly great either.   It really wasn't until the early 90s that PC got its act together as a game platform and shined on its own.   By then it also had local bus video like VLB and PCI to allow much faster screen updates.

[zzip]

57 minutes ago, carlsson said:

I tried to find some price benchmarks, but to most part I failed. Simply the companies selling Commodore and Atari computers didn't carry anything PC compatible, and those who did had no reason to advertise in Commodore oriented magazines.

Were their general purpose computer magazines?    I found the following ads that sell PC/Commodore and ST side by side in Oct 87 Compute! magazine,  for an idea of what the US equivalent prices were at the time.

 

I can see there are a number of sub-$1000 PC clones listed here.   It looks like a $500-$600 machine like the Blue Chip or Commodore PC10 got you an 8088 CPU running at 4.77mhz,  something equivalent to Hercules graphics (monochrome) or CGA,  a single 5.25 floppy,  no hard drive and no monitor.   It was much weaker than ST or Amiga, and the Amiga/ST packages prices included a monitor, but it shows how the price gap was narrowing already.

 

 

 

[carlsson]

15 minutes ago, zzip said:

Were their general purpose computer magazines?

Yes, but I don't have access to any scans of those unfortunately.

 

In the mean time, I moved on to researching much later dates. Still in December 1991, not a single reseller advertised PC compatibles alongside the Amiga and Atari computers, but the price levels were like this: (1 USD = 5.75 SEK at the time, and all prices including 25% VAT)

 

Atari 520STE 1 MB: 3995 SEK (including Turbo Pack)
Atari 1040STE: 3795 SEK (SM-144 add 1495 SEK)
Amiga 500: 3295 SEK (7695 including 1084 monitor and Panasonic printer)
Amiga 500+: 3989 SEK (8389 w/ monitor and printer)
Amiga 2000: 7495 SEK (11495 with 52 MB HDD)

 

Then something happened during 1992. Suddenly all sorts of PC compatibles emerged on the market at greatly reduced prices

 

In December 1992 we can paint quite a different picture:

 

Amiga 600: 2895 SEK (4595 w/ 40 MB HDD)
Amiga 500+: 2995 SEK (2795 for a factory restored one)
Amiga 2000, 1 MB RAM: 5195 SEK (5995 w/ 2 floppy drives)
Amiga 3000 (2 MB RAM, 52 MB HDD): 14195 SEK (15995 w/ 120 MB HDD)
Amiga 4000 (10 MB RAM, 120 MB HDD): 23995 SEK

Atari 520STFM: 1795 SEK (discount sale)
Atari 1040STE: 3495 SEK (so more expensive than a 500+ with 1 MB)

 

(1 USD = 6.80 SEK, so the exchange rate had galloped quite a bit right at the end of 1992)

 

Unspecified, obsolete PC: 1495 SEK (probably a 8088)

Commodore 386SX-25 (2 MB RAM, 40 MB HDD, SVGA): 5619 SEK w/o monitor
Commodore 386DX-33 (4 MB RAM, 120 MB HDD, SVGA): 8745 SEK
Commodore 486SX-25 (4 MB RAM, 120 MB HDD, SVGA): 8745 SEK
Commodore 486DX-33 (4 MB RAM, 120 MB HDD, SVGA): 11244 SEK
Commodore 486DX-66 (4 MB RAM, 213 MB HDD, SVGA): 19994 SEK
Commodore 386SX-25 Notebook (2 MB RAM, 60 MB HDD): 11244 SEK

Brother 386SX-20 (2 MB RAM, 80 MB HDD): 9994 SEK
Brother 386DX-33 (4 MB RAM, 120 MB HDD): 12494 SEK

OEM 386DX-40 (2 MB RAM, 42 MB HDD): 6869 SEK
OEM 486DLC-33 (4 MB RAM, 130 MB HDD): 10619 SEK
OEM 486SX-25 (4 MB RAM, 130 MB HDD): 9369 SEK
OEM 486DX-33 (4 MB RAM, 130 MB HDD): 12494 SEK
OEM 486DX-50 (4 MB RAM, 130 MB HDD): 15619 SEK
OEM 486DX-50EISA (4 MB RAM, 130 MB HDD): 18744 SEK

 

While the Amiga 500+ still was half price compared to a 386SX-25, the later would offer so much more computational power that it might be meaningful to spend the extra ~$385 + monitor etc to get a reasonably modern PC instead of a slightly improved version of a 5 year old home computer.

 

Despite the Amiga 2000 had dropped in price by 30% in the course of a year, from 7495 to 5195 SEK for the base model, it would seem both it and perhaps even more the 3000 and 4000 models by now had some really serious competition from the PC side. I'd love to find some reliable quotes from late 1991 to figure out how much the PC prices really dropped but this was a turning point even over here.

[zzip]

19 minutes ago, carlsson said:

While the Amiga 500+ still was half price compared to a 386SX-25, the later would offer so much more computational power that it might be meaningful to spend the extra ~$385 + monitor etc to get a reasonably modern PC instead of a slightly improved version of a 5 year old home computer.

The fact that the 386 had a hard drive could almost justify that extra price by itself.   It would cost something like $400-500 to add a 40mb hard drive to ST (including SCSI adapter + external case).

 

That was the other thing that sucked about having something other than PC in the early 90's.  Upgrade prices,  everything cost more to upgrade!   PCs could use cheap IDE drives with cheap IDE interface cards.  We had to buy much more expensive SCSI stuff.   PCs could have cheap internal modems, we had to buy the more expensive external, etc.

 

[youxia]

2 hours ago, Bill Loguidice said:

Inferior in some cases still, yes, but by that time it was already a target for most developers and publishers, so you'd still have access to almost all of the latest and greatest games and then some. Far more than any other platform.

When it comes to action games PC was not a contender in that period. For example, Carmack has only managed to implement VGA side scrolling in the late 1990, and you could play Shadow Of The Beast on  Amiga in 1989. Sure, there were some action games ports for DOS, but they were mostly abysmal. The fact that VGA and SB were available on the market doesn't mean all games have utilised them. Amiga's ports were often weak too, but still better, plus it had lots of properly coded ones and some brilliant originals.

 

PC fared better when it came to "serious" games (sims/rpg/strategy/adventure), but still most of them were earlier and/or better on 16-bit micros (eg Cinemaware games). It only pulled ahead when devs started utilising 256 colour in VGA games (eg Monkey Island in 1990), but these differences weren't often that great.

 

As for numbers, when you compare collections such as eXoDOS and Gamebase, Amiga is slightly ahead in these years. So, not sure why anybody circa 1987, who was interested mainly in gaming and fun multimedia stuff, would want to pay a huge premium for an inferior experience. Maybe, if they could foresee appearance of the likes of Ultima Underworld and Wolfenstein 3D on the horizon, but this was still years ahead and you'd need to swap most of the components in your PC anyway to play them anyway.