Re: The Apple ][ was cool!

[Jason <tmr@c64.org>]

Jeff Thomas:
> Firstly in 1990, Atari successfully managed to create a similarly
> specified Amiga ‘knock-off’ (4,096 colour palette, 8-bit stereo sound,
> ‘Blitter’ (GFX) chip variant, 1Mb Ram standard, etc), the Atari
> 1040STe.

That doesn't sound right...  The STE only had the 256 colour palette
didn't it...?

> A price war broke-out between the two companies. Eventually, Atari
> leaves the market and focuses solely on the game console market with
> the Lynx and Jaguar.

That certainly isn't right, Atari shifted their focus to the Falcon.

>Commodore wasn’t left ‘undamaged’, the biggest mistake made was the
> unannounced launch of the Amiga 500Plus in December 1991, which had a
> newer chip set and operating system (Workbench 2.0). The biggest
> problem was ‘software’ incompatibility - suddenly more than half the
> games didn’t work.

For those interested, games that didn't use the Kernal jump table and
hit the ROM directly were fecked up 'cos the ROM moved around.  Anything
that made legitimate calls via the table was fine. =-)

The problem was with more than half of the games, and was somewhat
alleviated on 2Mb plus machines by using a "degrader", a program that
mounted a software-based 1.3 ROM.

> Commodore’s response to the PC threat? The Amiga 1200 for the home
> user.  Graphics got a badly needed boost from 32 colours (of 4,096
> colours) to 256 from a palette of 16.7 million.

Hot quite right, 64 colours on the stock (EHB mode) and the full 4,096
in HAM mode and the A1200 could do HAM-8.

> 2.5 Hard drives (and more expensive) were now shipped standard.

Not in the UK they weren't (says someone who fitted hundreds if not
*thousands* of the little beggars... =-)

> The floppy drive remained the same, single-sided format.

DS/DD - 880K per disk.

> And the sound chip stayed the same, 8-bit 4 channels. Lastly, the
> processor chip was only 14Mhz.

But 32bit, a 68020.

> Better technology was available at the time, but Commodore refused to
> use it citing costs as the reason.

Slapping a Blizzard or one of the many other boards added the option of
larger processors, more RAM and an FPU.

> Even Workbench seemed like child’s play in comparison to Windows 3.1
> on the PC.

If you mean it was easier to use then yes, if you mean it wasn't as good
then no.  WB2.x onwards was far easier to use than Win3.x, had the
multitasking and was just more *comfortable*.  Experience with customers
complaining of the difference when moving between the two...

> Where is the Amiga now? Taken over, by Gateway 2000 in America.

No, they sold it on to a small start-up a little while ago.
-- 
Jason  =-)
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