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Comment by inigyou | Hacker News Reader

Calling it AGA gave a snicker to many people I'm sure

That's something many did not have. 85% sales were Amiga 500 and not upgradeable. IIUC possible to put Motorola 68060, but AGA required full replacement. And it remained something unseen. Something too late to crave for after bankrupcy. Something like unicorn. Like Roland for DOS gamers. We had SB clones on ESS chips, and they only had AdLib music. We were entering game configuration tools, and there was a choice of Roland. Supaplex had especially visible Roland choice. But nobody knew what is that Roland.

As far as I can tell, non-AGA graphics is also charming enough. For many years I only had EGA and many games were not runnable, they demanded VGA. AGA does not feel like much anticipated upgrade like VGA was. There are hardware clones like MiniMig that lack AGA support and it is passable. IIUC MiSTer FPGA has MiniMig core with same lack of AGA.

> We were entering game configuration tools, and there was a choice of Roland. Supaplex had especially visible Roland choice. But nobody knew what is that Roland.

I distinctly remember this.-

PS. In retrospect I wonder how it came to be that devs actually put in the effort/resources to code for such not-so-widely adopted hardware.-

Were Roland MIDI keyboards used by the developers to capture game audio tracks as played by musicians? Maybe they already had the driver code from that.

That's a cogent theory, also, in that I am sure many game composers used Roland hardware. So you were basically, "playing it back non-lossy" as "intended by the composer", in many ways.-

Was it so rare? I had A1200 and I think they were quite popular here in Europe. Don’t have any stats, though. My parents bought it used for me and the seller also threw in Monkey Island 2 on 11 floppies and that started my great love for point and click adventure games :) Later I’ve even added a hdd and cd-rom drive to it.

There are some per-model stats from Germany issued at the end of 1993 (so a few months before Commodore went tits up)[1], and they have ~1 million A500s, and ~100 thousand A1200s (plus circa 10k A4000s). So there's a fair few out there, but in the greater scheme of things, they're massively outnumbered by the original models (and, seemingly even the A600 outsold the A1200, at least at that point).

The A1200 was only released about a year and a half before the end of Commodore, and I doubt that there was a massive sales boost in the last few months, or the Escom phase of zombie-Amiga, so AGA is a smallish minority of Amiga in general.

[1] http://www.bambi-amiga.co.uk/amigahistory/sales.html

idk I had an a1200 in ex-ussr of all places. and upgraded it with 4mb+030 in 90s.

ECS/a600 was considered "meh" in our circles back then.

Where have you seen Amiga in "all places" of ex-USSR? Amiga is quite unknown computer here. Hard to find anyone aware of Amiga at all. OS/2 and Classic Mac awareness is not that rare.

Many people knowing the difference between A600 and A1200, and being from ex-USSR, sounds like wonder

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