Comment by rasz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rasz | Hacker News Reader

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with fast ram. That pretty much means additional accelerator card because Commodore didnt bother to build fast ram memory controller into the thing. You couldnt just slap some simms or ram chips on a card, you needed additional logic. Cheapest contemporary Fast Ram cards were ~100 pounds + ~30 pounds a meg, half the cost of 270 pound Amiga A1200 in 1994. You could argue it still cheaper than PC, lets count.

A1200 bare system £276 https://archive.org/details/cuamiga-magazine-050/page/n28/mo...

4-8MB fast ram £200-400 https://archive.org/details/cuamiga-magazine-050/page/n49/mo...

340MB £380 pounds https://archive.org/details/cuamiga-magazine-050/page/n28/mo...

14 multisync monitor ~£320 https://archive.org/details/cuamiga-magazine-050/page/n52/mo...

~£1200-1400. 1994 £/$ exchange rate 1.55 = $1860-2170. To quote a classic I feel like Im taking crazy pills.

https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/7235w0/the_sp...

486dx2-66mhz, 256KB cache, 8MB, 1.44MB fdd, 350MB HDD, SVGA monitor/card, keyboard/mouse. $1840

And after all that, you'd still have a 68020 under the hood. You could, of course, spend an eye-watering amount of money on a 68040 accelerator... and then... you're still not going to beat the DX2/66. (Let's not even talk about the performance of AGA versus a local bus SVGA card)

It feels like I've heard so many Amiga users say that they finally broke down and jumped ship when Doom and the DX2/66 dropped. It really was a gamechanger. Before then it was possible to argue that a '040 Amiga 4000 still held its own against a DX/33 or maybe even a DX/50, but not this.

There were a lot of things that came together to kill the Amiga, mostly Commodore's mismanagement, mismarketing and complacency, but as the final blow to it being a viable computer with a future in the eyes of consumers, I feel like the DX2/66 was it. It would have killed the Mac too if Apple hadn't woken up to smell the coffee a few years prior and had Power Macs ready to go.

It was the DX2/66 and Doom that got me to jump!

512k Fast RAM Extension on the Amiga 500 was VERY common back in the days, as many games benefited from it.

>512k Fast RAM Extension

Has never been common on Amiga 500.

Perhaps you mean 512k SLOW RAM Extension.

Or CHIP RAM (after a motherboard solder-jumper adjustment) with the ECS Agnus common in late A500 models.

Fast RAM is not in the minimum requirements, but I don't remember how 10 FPS compares to Doom.

~8-10 fps is about what this game gets on an Amiga 500 without true Fast RAM.

Early 1990s me would have been more than happy with that.

> Early 1990s me would have been more than happy with that.

I was happy with 5 fps or less on the gameboy with Faceball 2000.

Back in the day, I was playing DooM 2 on a 386DX 40MHz and was very fine. And Rebel Assault on 14fps. Also, I managed to play DooM 3 on a GeForce 2 MX DDR (using the patch sets to allow it to run on Voodo cards).

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