Commodore Amiga CD1200 - Rare Amiga Prototype (Oddware)
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- Опубліковано 4 жов 2024
- The story of the super rare unreleased Commodore Amiga CD1200 CD-ROM Drive and its surprising rediscovery over 20 years later.
Retro Computer Museum: www.retrocomput...
My retro gaming podcast: theretrohour.com
My Facebook: / kookytech.net
My Twitter: / danwood_uk
My Website: kookytech.net
Dave Haynie's Deathbed Vigil: • The Deathbed Vigil and...
Ravi Abbott CD1200 video: • Amiga HolyGrail CD1200...
Music: BrvtVs - Commonplace & Longzijun - Dreams
All trailers & gameplay footage belong to their respective owners.
A video about a long lost obscure piece of hardware has 17k views in under a week.. I think there are more people following the Amiga than many realize!
Now up to over 20k .. I think David Pleasance must be working his magic by now :)
Amazing story and video Dan!
There will never be anything as special as the Amiga again. Suche wonderful years...
Man, coming from a fellow Amiga kid (age 35), I am blown away with how friggin amazing the internet is! The fact you make these awesome videos and The Retro Hour Podcast, the fact David Pleasance is writing a book and can get funded by crowd funding technology , the miracle that is UA-cam, discoveries like these and the fact you can take a computer out of your pocket nowadays, snap a photo with it, share it to the world straightaway and have Beth from Commodore contact you.... Wow, we're living in an Amiga kid's future paradise!.. and the technology that's coming is even more exciting (AI, the blockchain revolution. singularity, autonomous transport, biotech marvels)... I love it! Thanks Dan for everything you contribute. Joe Betro (aka "pc joe")
What a great story, fantastic to see devoted people still going with Amiga. Me my self got my hand on a A4000 /030 and it has been laying in a garage for 20 years or so, Varta Death and all that stuff, but i did meet the right guy for the job. Very passionate about Amiga hardware. he actually pulled it off. Last night i got a powerup and yes, it did boot to workbench. Sound works. So, we saved an 4000 this year :)
Fantastic video! Thank you all so much for sharing this information and I hope to see more of it!
Very cool. Great to see how interested David is in engaging with and talking to the fans. Thanks for the vid.
Absolutely! He seemed like a very nice fellow, and with his connections it could hopefully happen that a recreation of the CD1200 might come into being.
I always find it tragic to hear from David Pleasance - how frustrating they had a such a good manager and they had to mess up his plans. That Mehdi Ali should have been dethroned. Grew up with a Vic 20 then Amiga. Always had a love for commodore products. Such a loyal fan base.
I have a tear in my eye, I miss Amiga and I miss the form factor for this type of computer
Damn, it's amazing what could have been, really hope you guys get it working, will be a marvel to see!
Reaaly cool. Its always amazing to me how rare things like these survive being tossed out in the end.
€150 but with accelerator support. Great find, great video!
I Would think £150-£200 would be good. What a find. I vaguley remeber these being mentioned back in the day, brings back happy and sad memories.
Dan you've made one of the most intriguing Amiga vids here - back to your best, thank you! 👏🏻
A weird bit of trivia about the Amiga 4000T:
Months after commodore went bankrupt and the court battle was going on a shipment of about 7 Amiga 4000T's just mysteriously showed up at the doorstep of NewTek.
They had been on a shipping dock for many months just being held up for reasons nobody found out. They all had very low serial numbers and were quite the beasts to use.
where are they now?
Awesome... Wish Commodore was still around today
I just dream of someone just remaking the Amiga computers again with all original hardware and the software on floppy disks and selling in shops. It would be amazing. I was a big Amiga fan in the day would rather play on a Amiga than today's consoles and computers.
Anyway great vid Dan so much amazing Amiga info in all you videos 👍.
Having been an Amiga user since 1986 and still having my original working A1000 and A4000 I would love to buy a new Amiga CD1200 CD-ROM/ DVD drive to go along with my recently purchased A1200. I would pay between 300 to 500 US dollars for one of these beauties. I don't see any technical problems with having the card that plugs into the expansion slot having two edge connectors and the logic to support both this card and a accelerator card. It's a technical exercise that more modern components might easily solve. With so many in the Amiga community who have experience in designing additions to our beloved machines along with creating new accelerator cards etc whats holding this project back but the usual naysayers who have always been around. It almost sounds like some are channeling the old dead and gone Commodore management team from West Chester, PA. What a total waste of space those guys where! Dan thank you and Ravi for this great video and also for both of you continuing to host the Retro Hour. Keep up the excellent work.
I need to hear the follow up from Malcolm on how he got this treasure and see it working. Please get a follow up video for this.
What a pleasant surprise to see this video on this Saturday night. Awesome. Glad to see a piece of history. Great to hear from David again.
GREAT video! Nice detective work! I really enjoyed this!
I held the cd 1200 add on today at the museum i was over the moon and super super happy and even got the copy of the magazine i had as a child and just wow !!! What a day i loved it ❤️ amazing ! ❤
Jaw on the floor! Bloody amazing and, I was at the RCM, that weekend. I'd love to have one at the side of my A1200, and I'd be up for buying into one, just not sure of the price?
Great video Dan 👍
I love this.. couple of old blokes talking about their heritage and they are just so fond of the Amiga brand.. this is gold guyz
What an awesome video! Thanks Dan.
I was one of those proud owners of an A1200. My best friend at the time had a CD32 for the same Christmas as I received my 1200. When I heard about this it was an awesome thought to have the HD and floppy of the A1200 along with CD32 support. Later in 2004 I spent my first ever wage packet on a clone of this drive (I can’t remember the name, could have been Archos?) which emulated the Akiko in the supplied connector on the left PCMCIA port of the A1200 and was very clever. It had about 70% compatibility with booting CD32 games and I loved it! However it was so disappointing about the timing of the demise of Commodore meaning no release for the CD1200 and I always wanted one.
Unfortunately we were broken into and the A1200 along with drive were stolen 😥
So even though I don’t have an A1200 any longer I intend sometime to get one again somehow so would probably pay around £150 for one of these drives just in case and to support the effort for others to enjoy 100% CD32 compatibility on the A1200
I'd have to say the Amiga walker prototype is the holy grail of the Amiga range.
I love all these "I'll pay x amount for it"
I think the point is preserve what is there in this case.
Dan this was a fantastic video and as usual it's good to see David and of course Andy . I have a lot of time for Andy and David, well he's one of the nicest guys ever. Met him a long time ago when I was 14 and wanted to be just like him. Gave me some kind words that I'll always remember .
Sound bloke ...
This device HAS to be restored as best as we can and allowed to be appreciated as part of Commodores pretty dramatic and epic end.
Super find and loved the video and interview. I had forgotten Commodore had died in 1994 and I was certainly using my A1200 with a squirrel scsi to PC box which was my PSU, HDD and CD-ROM. Also an 030 accelerator. After finding and subscribing to your channel, I have found my A500, A590 and I am sure I had the add on HDD in the loft. Also found my A1200 and PC box to power it, my CD32 and 1084s monitor. Used to own a 17” multi sync (if that is the right term) monitor but that died and is now gone. If I can get these running, I would love one of these and would be happy with paying £100 to £150.
Just a note, also found my old Atari 800xl.
A very exciting video I discover. Thank you Dan for your investigation journalistic work!
Dan that was a great video, what luck at finding Beth! Personally I'd have one for sure, but I'd place the price ceiling at about £250 max. This is mainly because I've become disenchanted with Amiga projects like the Vampire, that only cater to the rich. Being an Amiga fan shouldn't require selling a kidney.
Fantastic, insightful vid!
What an great video! As an long time Amiga fan I thoroughly enjoyed this :)
Hardware resurrections are always the best sorts of things to see.
Very exciting stuff Dan. I have the Archos Overdrive PCMCIA for my A1200 but would buy one of these as if the price was around £150ish.
What an amazing video, Dan! Thank you so much for sharing this!
Cheers!
Oh man, if I *did* have an Amiga 1200 back then, the CD1200 would've been the last birthday and/or Xmas gift I'd ever ask for! What a beauty... perfectly matches up with the 1200 and bringing CD32 compatibility right to the table with the Akiko chip!
I sincerely hope to see a Kickstarter to help bring the CD1200 to reality! Even if I don't own an A1200 myself, I'd still support it anyway because Amiga projects deserve love and support!
Damn, what could have been. Still remember seeing this in the magazines of the time.
A museum is definitely the right place for this. But why wasn't the guy in the Atari T-shirt escorted out of the building?
...maybe because the Amiga Lorraine was supposed to have been the basis for the Atari "Mickey" 16-bit gaming console set for a Christmas 1985 release and Commodore stole it from OG Atari Inc and Warner Communications...
@@TheJeremyHolloway it wasn't stolen. The developers turned down an offer from Jack Tramiel and went to Commodore.
Wrong. Amiga Corp was set to become part of Atari Inc since they couldn't repay their $500k development loan. Per the contract, Amiga was prohibited from selling themselves to Apple, Commodore, IBM, or TI. Amiga falsely claimed to Atari Inc that the Lorraine chipset didn't work and provided a $500k check which Commodore had fronted them as part of the $25 million sale which again was prohibited by the existing contract. Hence "stolen". What you are referring to was Jack Tramiel touring Amiga Corp after he had left Commodore and before he purchased the assets of Atari Inc's Consumer Division which later became his "Atari Corporation".
Fantastic video, I never knew this existed! It looks really slick as well.
That is flat out Astounding! As is the music.
I remember reading about this as a teenager when they reported the prototype: made a mental note in my head that I needed one at any price! Then forgot all about this until I saw this video 👍
Really great video and interesting to see a prototype from that era. Hopefully it can be brought back to working condition. Even though i was an atari man (ST/Falcon) i always remember the amiga fondly and loved the old bit of rivalry between the two camps. I wonder how many prototypes from that era have been lost in time
Had to re-watch the beginning of the interview I was totally distracted by the excellent Hubbard music!
I so appreciate this video. Very interesting information. If truly love to see a remanufactured CD 1200...! It would be on another level to see the homebrew scene make something amazing!
Great work. Hopefully Beth can get things up and running.
Thanks for creating this video! An amazing piece of history =D LOL @ the story of Merlancia industries!
what a great story
I can see sometime in the future all the missing bits are re-united. Some careful work follows and this baby is fired up and working.
Great video Dan, I remember seeing this thing pictured in magazines back in the day. I'd definitley be interested in picking one up if a new production run is mooted (£200ish something like that?), would fit in nicely with CD32 themed A1200 case and keycaps.
I remember being so excited seeing the cd1200, I had the A570 cd rom and an upgraded batman pack 500 at the time, always dreamt of that upgrade! Now own an ACA'd 1200 with scsi cd, squirrel etc and a cd32, but its just not the same as my childhood lustings!
Great video! There was something very special about the 'miggy in the UK, like it was the home of the last true home computer enthusiasts.
YOU GUYS MADE THE AWSOME GAMES AND SOFTWARE
I would be happy to buy one. I would go up to £250, perhaps more depending on functionality. It would be fantastic if this could be brought to life. I will definitely support it.
I had an Amiga 1200 and a CD32.
One fun thing that happened to the CD32, my brother was using it and touched the TV, the earth strap had come off inside the TV so a high voltage went through him and up the joypad and blew up the CD32. The interesting part was the CD32 still kinda worked, it would only boot the game it last had in the drive (with the CD in there). not even the CD32 boot screen would load and the game would crash at a certain point.
I ended up using CD32 as a CD drive linked via serial to a old PC to install windows 95 because it didn't have a CD drive... fun times.
Hello, I actually been reverse engineering amiga now for almost 2 years and I do have working prototypes that will use either same chips that you can use on my logic board I have also created clones of the amiga chips after dumping all chips. the plan is to have amiga on a chip solution as a kit that anyone can build without any emulation of anykind and some parts have been improved
I think it's always a good idea to include the same expansion port plus ALL other ports as the original machines even if you have made an FPGA version because it props up the already quite good third party add on market. Do you agree with that ? I'm just thinking that it keeps the Amiga alive far into the future
keep us posted :)
I call shennanigins.
Dazzle Software Yeah, I really enjoyed the video series you have on UA-cam about how you have done this. Amazing work dude!
where is that project now?
Wow this is cool. when I had my A1200, I had an Archos 'Zappo' PCMCIA interface CD drive that came packaged with some CD32 titles and a controller. I later sold that and got a real CD32.
I absolutely love this video. What a story!
Amazing video, would definitely pay £200 for it. CD32 prices are currently very high in the UK so this would be an essential purchase for A1200 users.
I can't wait to see some developments on this.
I think all of us that owned an Amiga back in the day, are shocked and sad that it never became the dominant platform. :(
Shapeshifter showed we had a better machine than the Mac back then, PC-Task and various GVP and even the Siamese system proved we could have done so much more .
After my Atari 800XL , (I even bought the 5 1/4 floppy drive from Silica systems in Selfridges! ) the Amiga seemed s advanced, I got the A500 (Rom 1.3) and after a few weeks carefully cut some solder track to covered my "Slow fast Ram" expansion card to 1MB of "Chip Ram."
I then got the A1200 on its release, with a GVP12430+ trapdoor card, and 1MB RAM (Damn that GVP RAM was dear), added a 68882 (The only thing that accelerated was AIBB Beachball raytrace to around 9 seconds)... Then read an article in CU Amiga about the Micronik? Expansion card and tower, (it added 3x Zorro 2 card slots) in an ATX Tower and cost around £400, I ended up with one and loved it, added a CD ROM, then picked up a Cheap A3000, added an 060 and Cybervision 64/3D.
Hell the Amiga is probably my first love, these days I have a few Macs (MacBook Pros, 5,1 and 6,1 Mac Pros) and love them but if I saw a kitted out 040 A4000T I would be tempted.
RIP Amiga, you should have kicked the Mac and PC's But!
It's at times like this I wish I could go back in time and make sure the right people got in charge of Commodore so the company would have survived and flourished. I wonder what cool stuff we would have seen then.
This would definitely sway my decision about getting an A1200, as well as this drive. I've been looking to begin a collection of sorts, and have only started with re-establishing the devices that I had in the 80s and 90s (1000, 500, 2000 so far).
I use to sell all this stuff in Oklahoma when I owned a computer store.. I still have one of everything in storage...even the amiga cd computer.. one day I will pull it all out...even have all the commodore vic-20, 64, 64c, plus 16, etc and drives and printers in storage..
Dan Wood/Ben Heck collab to bring this back to life?
Lol well they have had Ben Hack on Retro Hour so maybe they could speak about it 🙂
Think hainye be more your man for this
He's actually on it now as is another ex Commodore engineer these are the guys that made what you see in the video so yes they essential are "it" :)
isn't Ben Heck still working on the Ninjaendo, excuse me, Nintendo Playstation prototype console?
I remember wanting one of the CD Rom Add ons, I think I saw it previewed in Amiga Format
If they re-created something that would work as per CD32 as add on for the 1200, I would definitely buy one!!!. Price point, £300 ish maybe?
Someone will have to donate a CD32 so that the Akiko ASIC can be reverse-engineered.
douro20 how much software actually used the Akiko?
Don't know
Stefan / douro20 - in other tab we are discussing same. What exactly was akiko doing and was it used in any games.
Link to discussion? AFAIK, Akiko did some specific things to drive the CD drive itself. I don't think there was ever any commercial game / software that required the Akiko. It's possible one of the 3D games (Gloom?) *could* use Akiko, but didn't require it.
i would back this around 200 as well id love a silver one for my LE 1200 case
i would buy that for sure, i`m certain there would be a big following. I would expect to pay around £200 for a full plug and play machine to add to the A1200, it would be amazing.
Mega! Mega! Mega!! Awesome, amazing, wonderful! Thanks guys for this story finally given for such a long awaited white elephant, and we get to see Davids reaction. I remember seeing this in magazines and I even saw third party devices which had a similar design. Yes with just a little bit more money, CBM UK could have a pot of gold on their hands. But they argued this would compete with CD32 sales, and so rather than do that. So this is a bit like the Ben Heck SNES prototype, only this time they could clone a mould of this shell, and sell it to A1200 owners as a Christmas sidecar addon. Maybe someone will build a real CD-Rom into the case, and there you go, its done deal. Or it could make a nice pop-up ashtray or something.
Nice Sanxion remix playing in the background :)
Amazing! Very informative as always. If ever any Kickstarter Amiga 1200 CD project start I'll be very interested. My Two Amiga A1200 (One a NOS) will be waiting :)
Dan another amazing interesting video , I saw the first 2 mins before breakfast this morning and couldn't wait to come home from work to watch the rest of it. Also LOVE the retro hour but in my opinion to do it every fortnight would be better as just don't get the time to watch it every week. However the retro hour is amazing and I love it !!! Also do you seek retrohour stuff like t shirts or hats ect. Keep it up dan!!!
still rocking my commodore 750w power supply from 2007 of course ive ripped out the "Ice Cube" cooling component still rock solid!
I am prepared to pay whatever! I also think there is somebody who should design the trapdoor board or at least be involved in its building/assembly and that is John "Chucky" Hertell, the guy is an hardware god lol! As for this CD1200, I remember seeing this in the magazines back in the day and it just looked amazing :) The future seemed so bright back then, I have always been a long-term Amiga and Commodore fan and nothing would please me more than to see something like this finished, realized into working hardware :)
This was 6 years ago - I guess Beth or the Retro Computer Museum never got any further along with the CD1200 - such a shame
waiting for teardown video
We went to the show in London where the CD1200 was being showcased and we very nearly managed to nick it from the Commodore stall. Unfortunately, we didn't manage to get it. But we did get away with the CD version of defender of the crown they had lying around :D
Very interesting mate . Awaiting that Xmas video can't wait !!
That is quite a finding. I'm sure this brings lots of memories (good and bad) to David Pleasance. About the croud funding project, I would go for the range between €100 - €200 for the full product. For the early backers I would go for €100.
Damn so sad this didn’t come out the market was wide open for it , I didn’t buy an A1200 this would of probably moved me to buy one.
Awesome.
Indeed, if anyone could help, that would be no other than Beth Richard herself, since she was part of the team that designed it.
She even mentioned it on a presentation at Amiwest 2013:
ua-cam.com/video/eOJ7XVQlnB8/v-deo.html
She was actually wondering where those prototypes went. I'm sure she'd be interested in looking at his one.
Way to go Dave !
Lots of stuff went into skips at the back of the Corby plant when it closed, had some good finds
PSU connector looks like the CD32 4 pin din Ground and 5 volt and 12 volt, would make sense as the CD32 power supplies were already being manufactured, although as Mr Pleasance jokingly pointed out it could be totally different spec with Commodores erratic design decisions
RetroCable.com I thought that too.
I'd be interested in one for my 1200 just for the novelty value really, since I already have a couple of CD32s. Up to £250 or so and I'd be in, although probably under £199 would be the sweet spot for a lot of people
Yep, about £150. How exciting, just the thought of it.
Wow I remember seeing this in Amiga Format. Wish it had gone to plan. Sadly we only have the prototype
I met the "Doctor" in California back in the early 2000's! Lol. He was an arrogant, bizarre character in a white lab coat and he also had a nervous tick. Merlancia gave a presentation at AmiWest with a guy using a sock puppet. I think I have some video of the event somewhere. And also some Merlancia business cards, including one with Dave Haynie's name on it!
I love these Amiga rarities; I actually have an Amiga Technologies joystick that was produced in the early 80's.
Amazing, It would be nice to see this addition for the Amiga 1200, I would try and keep the costs down as far as possible. - Remember technology has changed over the years and you can make things cheaper than the originals, for example If the Prototype drive is far to complicated/complex to mass-produce as-is, I would perhaps make a newer model that would be cheaper to mass-produce - and I would aim to keep it below £400(ish) total cost price.
Fantastic - simply an amazing story. Excellent interview. Personally, I would happily pay about 300 EUR for the Holy Grail.
Wow! Yep definitely, always wanted one back in the day. Would need to be £200 max though.
People think the Nintendo Playstation was big news, but everyone _knew_ the whole story of that. Finding a prototype was the real news event. The CD1200, until this was found, was basically vaporware that had had a single trade show and a bit of press. To see one actually existing is huge, and to hear the story behind it, moreso. Just as the Nintendo Playstation would have changed the entire gaming landscape if Sony and Nintendo's relationship hadn't broken down, the CD1200 is an example of what could have been. Imagine if Commodore had gotten onto CD-ROM early, and gotten it right. Of course, the CD1200 would have arrived too late to save the day, but it's a glimps of what might have been, if they'd developed and released it in a timely fashion. It would have stopped the whole debacle of stockists holding 1200s they couldn't sell as the CD32 was launching. 1200 owners would have had an upgrade path, but the CD32 would have been the new user standard. Everybody would have won.
Would definitely buy one for USD $149 (awesome video by the way!!)
We had genuine A4000T at collage. It's what a learned to animate on. We also had Draco Amiga clones as well. They were the days.
Although this was a long fabled peripheral, if it had been launched it would likely have ultimately been doomed to failure due to the obvious design flaw; The interface occupying the trapdoor slot. Even at the time it was being previewed in the magazines there was wide dissent in the community that it was going to to block the only processor expansion slot. The official line from Commodore had been that it was impossible to use the PCMCIA slot for the drive as it did not carry the necessary signals. Some thought this was proven incorrect with the subsequent Squirrel based SCSI PCMCIA solutions, but it makes more sense if what Commodore meant was that it would have been impossible to get the signals necessary for the Akiko chip in there.
I suspect if the device had gone to market very quickly third party interface boards would have appeared that integrated a ram expansion and accelerator, and I think that would be an essential feature for any proposed Kickstarter today (maybe they would add an interface port to the Vampire 1200?). Either way, I can not see the point of producing the units with the existing interface. If the case was cloned and a conventional IDE drive was used it would make more sense to me. It is probably the best looking expansion Commodore had ever designed.
I just think it is another part of the very sad tale of how Commodore mishandled the Amiga. They managed to mess up the release of the A570 drive for the A500 to the point that they released it pretty much simultaneously as the incompatible A600 came out and the A500 was discontinued. They should have been knocking down the doors of the likes of Lucasarts to deliver CD versions of their point and click adventures, and having versions on the same disk that supported ECS and AGA machines. The CD drive option should have launched with the Amiga 1200. Commodore frittered away years of development through internal politics and outright indecision, and as a result lost what should have been an unassailable market lead. An Amiga 1200 launching with a 030, an additional Paula chip just for more channels of audio, spending £2 to address the missing midi interface, a CD drive option for £250 or so, and 2 megs chip and at least 512k of fast ram priced at around £500 to £600 for the system would have been a extremely appealing machine in the face of rough PCs at around £1500 and Macs at vastly more. It is like Mr Pleasance says, Commodore did not have a clue about the marketplace.
I do wonder if the clock port had originally been intended for the CD expansion, and the addition of the Akiko chip during the CD32's development in reaction to the rise of Doom style games scuppered this plan. That little plastic trapdoor on the rear of the machine always looked to me like it was waiting for a cable to be fed out of it, or a new CD interface connector to be added there. I think the size of the hole looks similar to the size of the connector on the back of the CD1200 prototype.
Amiga Rob I totaly agree. CDROM drivers where already cheap common devices on PCs back then. The real problem was that 486 Intel and Cyrix CPUs where running at higher clock speed than Motorola's 680x0 for less money. SVGA and Sound Blaster cards performed better and for less money than the Amiga chipset. And PC where very standardised, leaving each user free to configure the computer he realy needed.
Apple found itself in the same position and moved to PowerPC in a first step and then to intel based hardware and linux cores, which saved the brand.
Commodore was not able to adapt to the needs of the market. Paying an extra $200 for what appears to be another CDROM drive just because it's branded Amiga was not very appealing to the A1200 owner I was : I was fine with installing softs from pirated floppy disks to my internal hard drive! What I wanted was power and 3D! I wanted Doom as everyone else. By the way, my girlfried bought a 486@ 226MHz but as students we had no room for it so after a few years we sold it and used tha A1200 (+68030 acc.) to surf the web till 1999. That was the positive point of the A1200 : small footprint. No monitor (TV set), no tower. Adding a CD unit was what I needed. By the way, I now am the owner of an A600 (Vampire2) just because it's footprint is also smaller that tha a1200's one.
At the point the A1200 was released PCs were still pretty terrible, but most PCs had the architecture that could allow them to be upgraded in terms of graphics and sound, whereas the Amiga was stuck with what it had out of the box. Commodore made a big mistake by underpowering the A1200 and having no mid-range boxed machine to replace the A2000 and take on the multimedia PC market. A properly specced A1200 with a 030, decent memory, and which addressed the long identified issue of needing a planar screen mode and 31khz output would have been a good rival for PCs well into the Pentium era. If they had marketed the CDTV right, they could have released a followup AGA box based CDTV with FMV hardware that would have competed well against the multimedia PC market. The Amiga have the advantage of standardisation of video and audio hardware.
By 1992 the lack of a protected mode was also starting to critically hurt the Amiga. Modern machines needed an MMU, locked off areas of memory and options for virtual memory. Unfortunately the Amiga got trapped in a rut where you could either do things or not do things. As PC applications started moving from DOS to Windows you had the option to either do things slowly on a lower end machine, or do them faster with a high end machine with more real memory. The PC market had pressure to upgrade and have more resource available to the developers, whereas the Amiga market always seemed to be resisting upgrading and wanting to hang on to a fixed platform for years on end, when the era of the C64 was long gone.
The resistance to implementing protected modes probably also influenced the poor choices on custom controllers for the CD based Amiga models, particularly on the CD32. Certainly by the time of the CD32 it would have made a lot more sense to implement the drive on an IDE controller. However, if they did that they would have needed to prevent developers hitting the hardware for disc access, as the device could have been on the same interface as a hard disk, which would have been risky. Implementing protected modes would probably have also made it difficult for developers to hit the hardware unless there was a way to leave protected mode without crippling IDE access. But then hitting the hardware was contrary to the idea of having protected modes anyway.
Commodore should have taken a similar route to what Phase 5 eventually did with the BVision; released an 50mhz 030 accelerator card with two decent capacity memory slots, and bought a damn off the shelf 3D chip and shoehorned it in alongside the Akiko. Make running Doom 1x1 full screen in 256 colours as the min target spec and wave cash at iD software to make the port, and then release it as the Christmas bundle for 1994. Rinse and repeat with higher spec 3d graphic chips..
It was a no-brainer that games were moving full 3d, even by '91/92...
@TheDJFizz I think you are making a good point. If they could have retrospectively added an accelerator/3D module to the bottom of the Amiga 1200 for a decent price it might have been more appealing to an existing owner than spending around £1500 on a competitive PC. I am not sure how much they could cram into the slot though. They probably would have needed to do an big box conversion with some kind of breakout card to get some more slots. Certainly by 1992/3 when it was obvious they were in financial dire straights, they should have been either delivering on any of the projects that had developed, or just getting product out there with off the shelf PC components to make up the shortfall in capabilities. I am not sure there was that much in the way of 3D chips at the time, it would have come down to putting in a SVGA chip of some form, I suspect, which beyond the chunky specific features and colour modes would have still been quite limited compared to the capabilities of the AGA chipset. If they could have got the AGA chipset outputting at 31khz maybe they could have worked out some kind of composite display, like the 32x did on the Mega Drive. But we are in the funny farm now! Still, you would have thought with all of those PC engineers at Commodore, they would have been well placed to pull it off!
Portugal Still Rocks Amigas . REAL A500+ and A600 ..
Hell If I still had the old gear I'd have definitely been interested but I hope that there are enough people looking to snatch a piece of this tech so see how well it worked and hypothetically whether it would've extended the Amiga's life because it should've lasted longer!
YES - would love one, Kickstart this rare gem
I'd pay for one, what ever it will cost. A must have piece of hardware. Most likely the price GadgetUK164 made, plus a tip for the hard work.
I would definitely buy one of these units for my A1200, 100%!
I would be willing to pay around £ 200.
Though if the price tag would be higher than that I would probably get one anyway! :-D
If development where to go through and progress forward a new option based on the old design, Without a shadow of a doubt I would buy one, A fair price in my mind per unit to the end user would sit around £200
It would be nice if the trapdoor expansion module could contain some modern hardware to reduce space and enable the addition of further memory (or memory bank) and possibly room to upgrade the CPU (similar to the vampire cards) or perhaps a real 060? (perhaps a bit too much?)
This sort of expansion could take a stock amiga and make it a wonderful rig for someone to enjoy the full amiga experience.
I have been a diehard amiga fan since i had my first 1200 back in the day, ive been gagging for a 4000 for years but im working with my rev 1.4 a2000 with some upgrades here and there.
If this where to be a reality i would invest again in a stock 1200 as well as buy the CD1200 and board in a heartbeat.
Side note, I really enjoy your work on UA-cam keep up what you do man, its appreciated!
and if you are ever in need of any soldering/PCB related assembly work, my time and iron is always open for work for any amiga enthusiasts/fans in need.
Peace out! :)
nice was on my wish list many moons ago :)