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Yep, AGA was too little, too late. If they had put AGA in the A3000 (1990) they might've had a chance. The Amiga 3000 was my favorite Amiga, but it brought noth

Yep, AGA was too little, too late. If they had put AGA in the A3000 (1990) they might've had a chance. The Amiga 3000 was my favorite Amiga, but it brought nothing new: It was an integrated 2500 (which was just an A2000 with expansion cards.) You could've had all the pieces (68030 accelerator, flicker fixer, SCSI controller, etc.) years earlier. Things like the sound chip ("Paula") never changed for the entire life of the platform. By 1992, the 486 had been out for a few years. 386's with SVGA and soundblaster cards were getting pretty cheap. The writing was on the wall...

vidarh 3y ago
I loved my A3000 (we got it for work...) but it took two expensive expansions (a Picasso graphics card, and an ethernet card - both way overpriced compared to PC expansion cards) to make it competitive at the time. With that, though, it was still nicer to use than our PC's in '95-'96. First with Windows '95 that Windows became usable enough even with graphics cards. We ran X11 on most of our 486 PC's, and that felt better than Windows at that time, but so much less polished (I ended up gradually spending more and more of my time with Linux, and it's been the year of the Linux Desktop for me every years since ~'97 or so) Even then we hoped for a resurrection because it still seemed possible - I remember we tried pitching a software dev. project to Escom in '95, shortly after they'd bought the Amiga rights. I'd co-founded an ISP, and another Amiga fan among my co-founders and I were considering developing an alternative Amiga web browser back when it was still viable for tiny teams to do so. But of course Escom went bankrupt a year later, before we'd gotten anywhere with them. > If they had put AGA in the A3000 (1990) Yeah, I agree. The A3000+, in other words[1], only 2 years before AGA. Such a missed opportunity even in '91/'92 - it was faster than than the A4000 (better memory bus, SCSI instead of IDE), and had a DSP for 16-bit audio recording and playback or a modem.... And of course in being designed for the A3000 case it would've been oh-so-much prettier than the A4000 bulky PC style case. In classic Commodore style axed without a rational reason. That two year difference would've at a minimum given them the reprieve to possibly get AAA out (plagued by problems paying for test runs through '93)... What could have been... I still wish for the feeling of a modern "Amiga". I contributed code to AROS for a while, but it's "too Amiga" in the sense that it accurately reflects AmigaOS 4.x for the most part, but what I really want is something that matched a modernised version of my rose-tinted nostalgic view of Amiga, and I don't know if that's possible, but I occasionally wonder if a Linux-based AmigaOS-inspired desktop environment might get me there... (of course, finding time to do anything about that is another matter...) [1] http://www.bambi-amiga.co.uk/amigahistory/prototypes/a3000plus.html http://www.bambi-amiga.co.uk/amigahistory/prototypes/a3000pl...

vidarh 3y ago

I loved my A3000 (we got it for work...) but it took two expensive expansions (a Picasso graphics card, and an ethernet card - both way overpriced compared to PC expansion cards) to make it competitive at the time. With that, though, it was still nicer to use than our PC's in '95-'96. First with Windows '95 that Windows became usable enough even with graphics cards. We ran X11 on most of our 486 PC's, and that felt better than Windows at that time, but so much less polished (I ended up gradually spending more and more of my time with Linux, and it's been the year of the Linux Desktop for me every years since ~'97 or so) Even then we hoped for a resurrection because it still seemed possible - I remember we tried pitching a software dev. project to Escom in '95, shortly after they'd bought the Amiga rights. I'd co-founded an ISP, and another Amiga fan among my co-founders and I were considering developing an alternative Amiga web browser back when it was still viable for tiny teams to do so. But of course Escom went bankrupt a year later, before we'd gotten anywhere with them. > If they had put AGA in the A3000 (1990) Yeah, I agree. The A3000+, in other words[1], only 2 years before AGA. Such a missed opportunity even in '91/'92 - it was faster than than the A4000 (better memory bus, SCSI instead of IDE), and had a DSP for 16-bit audio recording and playback or a modem.... And of course in being designed for the A3000 case it would've been oh-so-much prettier than the A4000 bulky PC style case. In classic Commodore style axed without a rational reason. That two year difference would've at a minimum given them the reprieve to possibly get AAA out (plagued by problems paying for test runs through '93)... What could have been... I still wish for the feeling of a modern "Amiga". I contributed code to AROS for a while, but it's "too Amiga" in the sense that it accurately reflects AmigaOS 4.x for the most part, but what I really want is something that matched a modernised version of my rose-tinted nostalgic view of Amiga, and I don't know if that's possible, but I occasionally wonder if a Linux-based AmigaOS-inspired desktop environment might get me there... (of course, finding time to do anything about that is another matter...) [1] http://www.bambi-amiga.co.uk/amigahistory/prototypes/a3000plus.html http://www.bambi-amiga.co.uk/amigahistory/prototypes/a3000pl...