Was the Acorn A3010 better than the Amiga?

Well, was it?! (I have a feeling that I know which way this is gonna go...)

  • Yes of course, A3010 FTW!

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Not sure

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    6

Retro

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Watch the video and then argue it out in the forum. ;)

I think it was in some ways, in particular the 32-bit ARM CPU was far more advanced and waaay faster than the 16-bit 68K one in the Amiga. It had more colours and better sound, but no dedicated graphics blitter chip which significantly held it back. Oh and there was much better ecosystem support for the Amiga too, which is critical for success. I'd call it a tie, depending on what you wanted out of it.

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HEXdidnt

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Seems like it was far ahead of the Amiga in some respects - anything requiring filled vectors, sound/music, OS on ROM rather than disk - and a few steps behind it in others - lack of hardware scrolling being most obvious in its handful of games. I knew someone in high school with an Archimedes, and he was always very keen on singing the virtues of Zarch... And I can't help but think that some of 3D games which came along on the Amiga years later still only chugged along with a framerate not much better than FreeScape.

But I think Acorn's focus on the education market - aiming for the machine to be the successor to the schools' favourite, the BBC Micro - meant it never got the market share it deserved. My high school's IT department still made do a room full of BBCs, but shelled out for a couple of Apple Macintosh machines when they decided they needed something a bit more 'current'.

Meanwhile, the Amiga was pitched pretty much as a pure games machine from the very start, ensuring its popularity grew quickly among home computer users, and anything the Archimedes could do, productivity-wise, was similarly possible on the Amiga.

I reckon the Archimedes had the potential to have been better than the Amiga in some respects, but Acorn completely misjudged the way the home computer and education markets were going at the time... But, admittedly, this is coming from a guy who bought an A600 in preference to an A1200 purely because it would fit better on my desk...
 

Mort

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Probably a fairer comparisson with the ST vs the Archy - due to the lack of very impressive support chips that really made the Amiga a more unique system.
 

Retro

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Probably a fairer comparisson with the ST vs the Archy - due to the lack of very impressive support chips that really made the Amiga a more unique system.
That would make for an interesting video for sure. One probably exists somewhere.

Oh and please vote!
 
G

GCC

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The Amiga was a great computer of the time and still is. Lots of games out for it when i got my Amiga 500 also you could get lots of office base programs for it as well. Like art packages and databases also good to learn how to do music on it. Used bars and pipes a lot to do music on the amiga
 
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