Amiga 3000 Thoughts, Amiga World - An Answer To Critics

[Shot97]

While looking up a review from my go to American Amiga magazine Amiga World I came across this letter from the editor discussing the yet to be released Amiga 3000. For any revisionist's out there who like to point to Commodore U.S.A. as the sole problem... They should have done this, they should have done that... One so often mentioned is that Commodore should have done what it did in the U.K., marketed the Amiga as a games machine. Anyone who thinks this would have gone down in America has no understanding of the computer market or games market in this country. If Commodore had done such a thing it would have gone bankrupt far sooner in my opinion.

You have to understanding the two markets were very different. Games were bought in America, very expensive games, very detailed games, but what was bought (sometimes stolen) in Europe were not the same "types" of games. But that was not all the American Amiga user was interested in; Take any time to sift through an issue of Amiga World to see what interested the American Amiga user, and note just how different tastes were to the rest of the world.

Note here the excitement for the unreleased Amiga 3000. Why? Because at less than $4,000 it was cheap compared to the terribly expensive Apple and IBM offerings with technology that beat them. Note the magazine wants Commodore to go after the business market. This magazine was by no means a Commodore sympathizer, even in this very letter jabs are made at the company. Also notice the mention of dealers, a thing that did not exist in Europe and a thing Commodore were praised for restoring once Jack left.

You can of course say that Amiga World had it wrong. Of course the Amiga 3000 did go on to sell a good 200,000 plus units, mostly in America. That's a good 800 million dollars made right there. The market in America may have been smaller than in Europe, but it was not small. Especially when compared to the sales of other computers in America. The computers and the software were expensive, money was made, there was less piracy.

Should Commodore have gone after the gaming market? It's not like it was never mentioned. When they bothered to make ads games were always mentioned, it's just the bigger software stuff was the first to be mentioned. It is a computer after all, it can do what the NES did, and much more. But always remember the NES ruled America, there was no winning against that beast. Children, for the most part, did not want to play the Amiga games American users played. They wanted the NES... Perhaps it was not as the beast the Amiga was, but it offered the games kids here wanted. Having both the Amiga and an NES I have to be blunt and say the Amiga Batman is pretty crap compared to the NES Batman. Sidescrollers were not a strength for computers. In Europe the NES was very expensive, and while far more people had an NES than an Amiga in Europe (never discussed) there was a market for the young Amiga user there. Oh there was a market for the young Amiga user in America as well, but that was for expensive educational software, not side scrollers. The adult user was the main market in America, and they bought expensive software and expensive RPGs and the like.

So no, the answer was not for Commodore to release the Batman pack in America. You should all feel free to research this magazines response to the CDTV... Commodore daring to go back to the ways of the C64... How dare they abandon their dealers and sell that crap at Toys R Us... How dare they stoop to the level of a games machine when they worked so hard to shed it.

Should they have done it anyway? I don't think so, but for revisionists so eager to play "Captain Hindsight" it's best to keep in mind the opinions of those reviewing the Amiga back in the day, adults from back then. The Amiga 3000, the machine that answers the critics and sets the stage for a whole new Amiga family of computers. It would be the rest of the world that would go on to fail Commodore with that machine, not America. One read of this letter is all you need to know in order to start thinking a little deeper. Commodore was a complicated beast, there are no easy answers... But one thing is for sure, it's not what the internet currently spits out.

[Zippy Zapp]

Nice Post.

The revisionists of Computer History like to dismiss Commodore outright minimizing its contribution to the Personal Computer Development and evolution. It is sad to see that opinions within the Commodore user base do the same, mostly from overseas. They didn't live here to know what the Amiga was back then. Heck many of the arm chair hindsight quarterbacks were not even old enough to blow their own noses back then yet they know how it was in NTSC land.

[intric8]

If I were to play Captain Hindsight with unlimited funds, I wish the Amiga came with a built-in easily accessible midi port (eliminating the ST market right there) and created their own postscript capable printer (taking Apple's Macintosh head on). This would have made the Amiga the Creative's wet dream machine. Video, graphics, music and publishing - all in one box for far less than the singularly focused Mac, ST or souped up finicky PC clones that were almost never quite powerful enough to do anything, except maybe one thing at a time. And, frankly, some sort of deal with Microsoft to create Office products for the Amiga platform. I know that sounds blasphemous, but it would have brought over many more businesses - big time.

If I had control of the C= R&D department back then, that's what I would have wanted. You want to design a newspaper for your high school? Boom. You want to plug in your midi keyboard and record a new album? Boom. You want to create title graphics for the weather man? Boom. And a marketing push nationwide that told the story clearly and cleverly that the Amiga = Creativity and Getting Work Done.

Could someone have been able to cobble together an Amiga machine that could have done all that? Well... probably. But it would have been a very high-end 3000/4000 because you would need hard drives that could meet the needs of the content, and 3rd party adapters and printers to get to work ... and getting the machines to talk to the Amiga would not have been plug-and-play for the average user. Amiga's have midi capability already, but they require an adapter. The ST got musicians because of the off-the-shelf midi. And a few page layout packages did exist for Amiga, but there was no LaserWriter-type printer made by C= that could have competed with the Mac. I think there could have been, and I believe there should have been, an Amiga ready to do it all right off the shelf. Coulda woulda shoulda.

I do agree 100% that the gaming market was completely dominated in the US public by Nintendo, and eventually Sega then Sony. The PC Clone market started to turn its attention to (slow paced, space hungry) CD-ROM driven games like Myst. And by 1994, US consumers became so infatuated with 3D polygons. And by then, the R&D department at C= was in a death spiral.

[Shot97]

I so want to give creative people more credit than just "the ST had a built in MIDI port". As mentioned, a simple adapter was all that was needed for the Amiga, and it was in fact used by countless musicians, including B.B. King. I'd really like to give the creative musicians more credit with their mind on that one. Was it really because the ST was a tiny, smallest bit easier to hook a keyboard to? Was a $10-$20 adapter asking too much? Or was it that the ST was simply a cheaper machine all together? If these musicians were buying the ST not because of the port but because it had the ability but was cheaper, would having built in MIDI on the Amiga really have helped much? Musicians are not a stupid bunch, they are very aware of different technologies "if" that's something they're into. I mean plenty wouldn't be caught dead on a computer, or even a keyboard... But I've talked with plenty of people into synths, and oh boy do they know the smallest details of all that equipment. I've heard the MIDI thing before, I do believe the musicians that were made aware of the Amiga would have had no problem buying an adapter to use a keyboard with it. There is, however, a never ending market for cheap musicians that want the hand me downs, not the top of the line stuff, and the ST was cheaper.

[intric8]

I think it was the combination of the Midi port in addition to the incredible software that originated on the ST for musicians. Cubase and Logic Pro both have their roots on the ST, and are still used to this day... on Windows/OSX.

Why Cubase and Logic Pro were authored on the ST, I'm not sure. Maybe it was luck. But I do remember reading that at some stage Atari considered having the machines sold out of professional music stores. Not sure if that ever happened (might have been too niche a market, and too late) but interesting nevertheless.

To your point, though - yeah, probably not just the port. Back then the adapter was (I think?) around $100, and you're also right about the ST being cheaper. But the ST had "killer apps" for musicians that helped make the difference along with the cost savings. If you needed it as a part of your home studio, probably a no-brainer.

[Shot97]

I have recently come into contact with a big name in Amigalore; at least for me. He goes by Talin on the internet but you might know him as David Joiner from the software he wrote while working at the company Micro Illusions. They were all from him; He programmed them, he did the graphics, as well as the music. Quite uncommon for computer games in the 80's he didn't just write a simple jingle, he had music playing throughout the entire game. I'm collecting as much information as I can from this exchange and I'll be writing something special up on it in the future... In context to some talk about MIDI support on the Amiga; I felt this exchange would interest everyone.

For reference Mr. Joiner wrote the program Music-X, here is a video of him demonstrating it on the PBS show Computer Chronicles slightly before it was released.

Quoting from Talin in a direct reply to me:

"The story with MIDI is actually much more complex than most people realize. You see, the early Amiga models had a hardware bug which made the serial port unreliable at high data rates. Basically the problem was that the serial port hardware had only a one-byte buffer, and if you didn't grab that byte before the next byte came in then data would be lost. Unfortunately, the Amiga's four timer chips would generate a software interrupt at regular intervals, during which time the serial port could not be serviced. And while MIDI speed wasn't super-high, it was high enough that you'd get a dropped byte every 10 minutes or so depending on how many notes you were sending over. Note that this did not affect the higher-end MIDI adapters which had their own dedicated serial point, but those were considerably more expensive.

Now, for a long time I thought that this was a bug in my own code and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why I was getting these dropped bytes. I had many conversations with the AmigaOS team about this, it was Bryce Nesbitt who eventually figured this out, and he also wrote some code in AmigaOS to put the timers to sleep when they were not being used. This made the problem much better although it didn't entirely eliminate the effect since one of the timers was needed all the time for the OS. (Interestingly enough, there was another Commodore engineer whose name I can't remember, who told me "Your problem is simple, the Amiga can't do MIDI". However, none of the other Commodore engineers respected him - he refused to switch his personal development system over to AmigaOS 2.0 for example. He got fired a few months after that particular episode.)

But anyway, a lot of early musicians who were eager to use the Amiga had bad experiences with it because of this. So the Amiga never really caught on in the music world the way that the Mac and Atari did. I'm not sure to what extent price was a factor, considering that the Mac and Atari were doing about equally well and the Mac was quite a bit more expensive. (And didn't even have color!)"

[kovacm]

I did quick search for "atari" over your forum to see if there is anything interesting talk where I could give comment...

Why Cubase and Logic Pro were authored on the ST, I'm not sure. Maybe it was luck.

ST had flicker free (71KHz), high res monitor - something that no other computer had for years to come (e.g. 30% more pixels than 3 times more expensive, and slower, Mac), and yes, it was deadly cheap!
More about CuBase: Steinberg wrote their own "OS": MROS for ST - a multitasking OS that they use across all their software.

@Shot97 thanx for David Joiner comment on MIDI!

[Shot97]

I'm slowly putting together something I "hope" will be special regarding my conversations with him as well as some of his titles. His insight there, game changer. Everything makes a lot more sense now in regards to the ST taking off with musicians while the Amiga did not. But I will say, it's not from lack of sounding awesome! I just got hold of an adapter to hook up the Amiga to a keyboard and I've been making music on the Music-X. I'm telling you I haven't had as much fun on a computer in years, and it sounds amazing! - It has some issues/limitations, mind you, but I'm so in love with making music on the Amiga right now.

While the site itself may (obviously given the name) be focused on the Amiga, I hope you'll feel free to post any special Atari things you might come across in the "Retro Corner" area. I post in there all the time regarding Nintendo/Sega/DOS stuff. I'm always interested in any Atari stuff, it's just I don't happen to run across much of it. Even the few Atari related YouTube channels I subscribe to don't really seem to be making too many videos these days.