> Yet, a Pentium MMX with 32MB of RAM in 1999 would stomp the Amiga...
On pure computing power, yes of course. But
- at which price compared to A1200 ? (of course in the case of the PC you have to include a reasonable sound card + reasonable graphic card. I could buy my Amiga as a teenager in 1993 for less than 500 € while any entry-level Pentimum MMX PC in 1999 would still be > 1000 €...)
- The OS was fantastic, very responsive despite the limitations of the hardware. Only when I left Amiga to switch to a supposedly much more powerful PC I experienced what meant "lagging" and "bloat"... (original Amigas didn't have an MMU and therefore both OS and apps were written carefully since there was no swap)
>while any entry-level Pentimum MMX PC in 1999 would still be > 1000 €...
It may looked so, but by 1999 you could get a Pentium MMX PC for 600-700 EUR in Spain (100-120,000 pesetas), cheap soundcarp and iGPU included. Cheap, but you could run Quake for sure. And MMX did wonders on multimedia decoding and emulation.
Yet, a Pentium MMX with 32MB of RAM in 1999 would stomp the Amiga...