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AGA was much too little, too late. The premier AGA model, the A1200, even shipped without even a sliver of FASTRAM, making all programs compete for cycles with
by actionfromafar 3y ago
AGA was much too little, too late. The premier AGA model, the A1200, even shipped without even a sliver of FASTRAM, making all programs compete for cycles with the graphics chipset. An Amiga games with even, say, 64 kbytes of FASTRAM could have put compute code in there at twice the speed and even made use of the (rudimentary) instruction cache of the 68020. The A1200 was welcome and I loved it but it was a half-assed attempt and it showed.
- timbit42 3y agoWhich model wasn't the premier AGA model? The A4000? The A500 didn't have any fast RAM either. In fact, when you added the A501 RAM, that was slow RAM. So it doesn't surprise me the A1200 was the same.
- actionfromafar 3y agoIt's not surprising, but very sad. For very little cost they could have doubled the CPU speed of the 1200. For the A500 it made more sense to not have fast RAM, because the CPU itself was kind of slow. But the 68020 was noticeably slowed down by slow RAM wait states. Either the A1200 should have shipped with some (even miniscule) fast RAM, or AGA should have had higher bandwidth so the CPU wouldn't have had to wait for the RAM. A vanilla A1200 was an unbalanced machine. ...rant over. :-D Yeah, the A4000 is the "other" model. It's really neat, but alas it never sold in any numbers. It showed in that some AGA software I tried (demos? some game?) didn't work right on my A4000.