Atari vs Amiga article

[psxphill]

Where they really that desperate to save a few microcent on copper tracks?

32 bit needs double the number of ram chips than 16 bit. Even if they halved the size of the ram chips it would still be more expensive.
 
The rumour is the prototype used a 68000 that could take upgrades (like an A1200) and they had designed a prototype 030 card. I imagine after the A1200 was released they knew they couldn't compete if they shipped with a 68000. Putting a full 030 in there instead of an EC020 in the A1200 gave you an increase in the perceived value. The 030 has more cache, they probably hoped that people would be able to write software that didn't need too much access to RAM.
 
Jack Trammiel was always about selling shoddy computers cheap. When he was at commodore it worked quite well, because his competitors used to charge a lot for shoddy computers. An industry of fast loaders for the c64 was created because they shipped it as soon as it sort of worked.
 
The Atari ST was never a competitor to the Amiga because he did the same thing after buying Atari.
 
The Falcon 030 had a chunky 16 bit colour mode, which AGA desperately needed. If commodore had not gone down the path of AAA in 1988 then AGA could have been better. They turned AA around in a year. AAA is a good example of second system syndrome.
 
It was game over in 1993 for home computers, the PC was taking them on with doom etc. A games console that offered similar games for a lower outlay would have sold well in some countries (until maybe Sony entered the market). I believe AGA with chunky 16 bit modes and texture mapping in the blitter would have been a game changer. Commodore just didn't think of doing it.

[psxphill]

Oddly, it seems to me that the thing that sort of killed both Atari and Commodore were the console wars. They both tried one last foray into the video game consoles, and it killed them.

Consoles did have an effect, but it wasn't until the PS1/Saturn that the Amiga really had no hope.
 
A PC with a CD drive, sound card, network card & VGA card could produce better games in 1992 than an A1200. People who managed to persuade their employers to put a "multimedia" computer on their desk weren't even having to pay the high cost of all that hardware.
 

Seems silly that it shipped with chip ram only which effectively halves the speed of the base machine.

Shipping with 1mb of chip and 1mb of ram would have been more expensive to and more expensive to upgrade the chip ram to 2mb and add more fast ram. So I think they made the right choice.
 
I'd have rather seen maximum of 4 or even 8mb of chip ram though.
 
AGA was too weak, the CPU speed shouldn't even have been an issue. The whole point of the Amiga architecture was using custom chips to take a load off the CPU so it doesn't have to be so fast. Shipping a slight upgrade to a 1985 chipset in 1992 was lunacy.

[psxphill]

Althought 32 bit chips would probably have been more expensive that 16 bit chips, at least as cent/bit is concerned, the total amount of RAM would affect the price more that width of the chips.

I can't find a hires picture of an Atari falcon motherboard, but the schematic suggests they use 4bit ram (which is likely for the time). You put 4 next to each other for 16bit, 8 next to each other for 32bit. If you use the same size ram then for 32bit you either have double the ram, or you halve the size of each chip. Either way having 16bit access to ram is considerably cheaper than 32 bit access.
 

However, you need a more sofisticated RAM controller and custom chips for 32 bit memory access. Maybe the design decision was made because they had 16 bits designs for custom chips etc. that could easily be added to the Falcon (reuse=lower development cost)? I would call that a lazy approach;)

They could have kept 16 bit custom chips (pretty much like AGA did), but the memory controller would need to be changed. It's no more complex, just more lines. They would need to do another spin of the hardware and relayout the motherboard. If they had changed to 32bit after development began then it's unlikely that they'd have ever shipped anything.
 

I found this development document for AAA. It looks pretty neat on paper and much, much better than AGA. It was cancelled in 1993 in favour of more advanced architectures. Probably a good thing by -93. But imagine an Amiga with this architeture in 89-91. Awesome!
http://www.thule.no/haynie/research/nyx/docs/AAA.pdf

It would have been too expensive. They weren't considering selling it in A500/A1200 type systems. It was when someone finally remembered that commodore was supposed to be selling high volume of cheap hardware that it got cancelled.
 
I'd take AGA with 16 bit chunky and a texture mapper in the blitter over AAA any day (texture mapping is not much more complex than line drawing). The problem was that nobody at commodore had the vision that cheap crappy 3d rendering would be such a big deal.

[psxphill]

8 16 bit sound channels is what the a1200/a4000 SHOULD have had...

More channels would definitely have been good. I'm not sure 8 would be enough, but having a left/right volume for each channel rather than 2 left and 2 right channels would have been a huge improvement.
 
I'm not sure that moving to 16bit would have helped the games market, which is the only one that really ever generated commodore any money.
 

They also haven't been able to emulate the DSP of the Falcon, from what I understand.

The falcon DSP should be relatively trivial to emulate these days, I guess nobody has tried very hard (which could be true).

[psxphill]

Sadly, there isn't a whole lot of Falcon specific software out there, whereas AGA actually had a fairly decent library.

I suspect that is the real reason they haven't tried too hard to emulate the DSP (and why nobody else has bothered either).
 
Although obscure systems can be more interesting.

[psxphill]

I'm just questioning if that saving would be worth it due to the decrease in performance.

That is very difficult to quantify. You'd have to know whether that was the reason that the Falcon only lasted a year, if it wasn't then spending any additional money on it would have been worse.
 
You would also have to know whether they could have hit the same release date by switching to 32bit. If it would have taken additional time and money then would it recover it. It's the same argument for any compromise in any computer. i.e. how many C64's would have been sold if they'd have fixed the slow floppy drives before shipping and how much would it have cost to fix? Yeah it's annoying that it was slow & some people were probably put off by it, but without the figures you can't calculate it.
 
I'd say that by the time the Falcon shipped there weren't enough people with ST's that were looking to buy another 680x0 based computer. The majority of Amiga owners wouldn't jump ship, it had a few interesting pieces of hardware but nothing that couldn't be added to an Amiga. Plus MultiTOS was awful when the Falcon was released.
 
 

How is that 3D? It's a flat world. If this is 3D then so is Dungeon Master.

Wolfenstein isn't flat, the walls have a height even though it's fixed. The graphics are effectively rendered in 3d, even though the player is limited to 2 dimensions.
 
There are plenty of 2d games where the player is limited to 1 dimension, we don't call those 1d games.

[psxphill]

therefore the games are two dimensional.

So http://www.easports.com/uk/fifa/fifa14/xbox360 is a 2d game?
 
wolfenstein has 3d graphics by any definition I can find.
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_computer_graphics
 

DM is 3D. It is 3D because you can only see what the camera is pointing at.

I think it's a stretch to say it's 3D, the way the graphics are drawn is not in any way like a traditional 3D render.
 
There is no http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_projection, afaik all graphics are just blitted.

[psxphill]

Two regular brown uniform guards are standing in a straight line in front of the player character, one hidden behind the other. Only when the closest enemy starts aiming at you (thus spreading his feet apart) can you see the enemy behind him by looking between his legs. This is a situation where x, y and z are all important to the outcome of it, not only in a visual sense. If you were to disregard the Z dimension of the game and only look at the upper half of the screen only, you wouldn't have seen the furthermost guard.

What you're describing could be implemented on the c64 with sprite priority, it doesn't make it 3d.
 
Isometric games also have x, y & z and aren't really 3d.

[psxphill]

It's pretty much my thought that if you as a player can move in more than just two dimensions, then it's 3D.

What the world understands as a "3D" game is different to implementing something in three dimensions. And language is supposed to be used to convey meaning to others.
 
What the majority would regard as "3D" it something that is 3D rendered as well as being able to move freely on the three different planes. Something that dungeon master fails at on all counts. You could use your same argument that pong was 3d, but the technology just wasn't there to display it.
 
Dungeon Master allows you to move one screen at a time, you don't have a character that walks around the screen. Therefore it's not a 3d game. Stuff like Mario 64 is a 3D game, you walk, you turn and you see yourself moving through a 3d rendered landscape. Dungeon Master is not that at all.

[psxphill]

It is to me. It's the world that makes it three dimensional, after all, if I close my eyes the world doesn't stop being three dimensional. What it looks like is completely irrelevant.

What it looks like is completely relevant. 3D is basically a marketing term. It doesn't just mean three dimensional.
 
3D TV's are actually stereoscopic, but 3D is catchier. It has other uses than fooling our brains into perceiving depth in the image.
 
For a game to be 3D you need to be able to freely move along three planes and freely rotate around two planes. It needs to give an impression of depth and not just look like a 2D photograph, which is what Dungeon Master looks like.
 
Doom is an interesting case, you can move in three dimensions but you can only rotate around one of them. The map has 3 dimensions, but it's like a voxel where the height is stored within a 2d matrix so you can't have one floor above the other. Only the rooms were rendered at run time, the barrels and enemies etc were just scaled sprites. At the time we called it 2.5D http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2.5D
 
In a world where Doom is considered 2.5D, Dungeon Master cannot be 3D.

[psxphill]

The deal with cheap crappy 3D rendering is that it allows making games from new perspective without game looking ultimately crappy. There were times when filled polygons were the state of art of 3D rendering...

Yes, that was my point. If commodore had realised that developing chunky bitmaps and crude texture mapping in the late 80's could have saved their company then things would have been entirely different.
 
I believe Hombre was started after they heard about the PlayStation, Sony were nearing the end of development in 1993 (they launched the console in 1994 but hardware of some form had existed for a long time prior to that). The Sega Saturn also wasn't a 3D capable console until they heard about the PlayStation.
 
I wouldn't expect a 3D Amiga released in 1991 to compete with the PlayStation in 1994, but it would have built a user base and commodore would have had money to keep developing new hardware. But in 1988 they decided that the future was AAA.

[psxphill]

AAA, and then Hombre, are you all still sure Dave Haynie was some kind of genius?
For crying out loud, couldn't they just get their act together and release some kind of upgrade?

Dave Haynie had nothing to do with AAA or Hombre, he got stuck with putting together the Nyx motherboard for AAA at the end when commodore were pretty much dead.

[psxphill]

I thought about putting Linux on my Amiga, but then thought "why bother, I already have an 8 core system that flies, and really I wanted my Amiga for... well Amiga stuff.

Back in the day I tried it on my 50mhz 68030 with 48mb ram and it was so slow it was just pointless, so I think you made the right choice.
 
Linux on the PS2 was equally disappointing.