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by micv 1939 days ago
I don't think it's fair to ding an early 80s platform for not caring about IBM compatibility. It wasn't anywhere near as dominant a standard then as it is now.

The Amiga couldn't talk to a PC screen with any amount of pin adapters anyway. It used a different frequency, which is seriously aggravating today if you want to fire up an old Amiga for nostalgia's sake.

It could read DOS discs with a driver iirc but the PC definitely couldn't read Amiga discs. It got extra capacity out of them (720k vs 880k) but at a definite cost in compatibility.
2 comments
WalterBright 1939 days ago
> I don't think it's fair to ding an early 80s platform for not caring about IBM compatibility.

The IBM was the dominant platform, and there were plenty of 3rd party keyboards, drives, and monitors available. The keyboards, for example, had the same keys but wouldn't work with the Amiga.

Running PC programs was not important, but being able to read/write the floppies in DOS format was very important.

Amiga was clearly trying to create a proprietary platform in order to charge premium prices for keyboards, etc. I thought this was a big mistake.

Whether that killed the Amiga or not, who knows, but as far as I was concerned it was a factor. It certainly drove me away from supporting it.

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ChainOfFools 1939 days ago
> Amiga was clearly trying to create a proprietary platform in order to charge premium prices for keyboards, etc. I thought this was a big mistake.

This is by no means a given, considering that Apple has succeeded fantastically by not only doing exactly this, but doing so in pursuit of margins Commodore-Amiga would have considered fatally aggressive.

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DerekL 1939 days ago
An Amiga outputs either NTSC or PAL, depending on the region it was made for. So with the right cable, you can just plug it in to a TV made before the mid-2000's. Later models also supported VGA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_video_connector

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aidenn0 1939 days ago
Its outputs include analog RGB, so if you had a VGA monitor that could sync to NTSC or PAL vsync signals, you could get a usable image. IIRC most monitors could not though.
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