Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by throwaway09223 869 days ago
The Amiga was dead a few years before Win95. The VGA chipset and the soundblaster killed the Amiga.

In the late 1980s I wanted an Amiga so badly. But by the early 90s I had a 486 with VGA and a sb16 and it was all over. The Amiga had a mere fraction of the PC's power by then.
2 comments
Keyframe 869 days ago
Indeed. Commodore killed itself and Amiga, and breakneck speed of PC advancement didn't help. Doom was just a side effect of it all. It left a trauma on Amiga community though, you can still see the community mentioning Doom to this day (see, it can run Doom?). Doom-envy is omnipresent to this day. There was another, rarely mentioned, which is nintendo-envy. NES and then SNES in particular had killer games where Amiga never came through in such capacity (platformers, it shined in other genres). Amiga was poor man's SGI at the time. It was great, fun, relatively cheap for what it offered. It could've been so much more if Commodore had a sense of direction and focus. Alas, here we are lamenting decades after on its fate.

Cachet it left is still strong. I recently (over few years back) tried to get ahold of Amiga again. I just wanted one endgame A1200.. now I have three A1200 - one with Blizzard 1230/030+fpu which is the best general purpose IMO, one with Blizzard 1260/060rev6 for demos (not that great compatibility for general purpose), and one with TF1260/060rev6.. and then two A600 (one stock, one with Furia030) and A500+, indivision addins etc., and a whole bunch of Commodore 1084s monitors. It was supposed to be only one A1200, damnit. Take it as a warning from a friend if you want to get one, they multiply fast.

link
megablast 869 days ago
Sure, but at a fraction of the price too. $500 compares to $2,000 at least.
link
throwaway09223 869 days ago
Nah. The Amiga 1200 debuted in 1992 for $600. 2MB RAM and a 14Mhz 68020. No monitor.

In 1992 you could get a 486dx 33MHz with 4MB for like $800 (a two year old chip) with similar peripherals. Way more than double the power for a marginal increase in cost.

The Pentium arrived a year later in 1993 and by 1994 we had the 486dx4/100MHz and Pentium/586 at similar clock speeds. This is around when doom arrived and Amiga was long since toast.

link