Dave Haynie Talks About Developing The Commodore Amiga

[persia]

I've looked at all the potential moves Commodore might have made, there were no moves that would have keep the company solvent until the turn of the century, let alone beyond.  They all died, Atari, Sinclair, Coleco, Acorn, et al.   The PC was establishing a dominance that would last 2 decades.

[WolfToTheMoon]

they should have made C128 with a 65816. Yes, it would be close to Amiga in some regards, but it would be able to tap into C64 market and software library, something that the A1000 couldn't and why it took a few years untill A500 for Amiga to take off.

Than a 32 bit compatible in the early 90s in lieu of C65.

[ElPolloDiabl]

And PC manufacturers followed Commodore. 1st Escom, then most of the others.
Amiga could have gone in several directions. Some of the 3rd party add on makers charge way too much. No cheap sound for example.

I would have preferred x86 at the time instead of the more expensive PowerPC. No one ever told me why PowerPC was chosen, except for the endian thing.

[Kronos]

They all died, Atari, Sinclair, Coleco, Acorn, et al.   The PC was establishing a dominance that would last 2 decades.

Lets see...

- Atari, far to small user base and an OS that was hard to modernize to 1990s standards

- Sinclar,Coleco, pretty much stuck in 8Bit land

- Arcon, well the Archimedes/RiscPC was quite o.k. and modern but the userbase was even smaller than that of the AtariST

C=/Amiga in the early 90s did not only have good enough HW, but also a large userbase, big SW-library and all that running an OS that was superior to the mainstream of that time (Windows3.1/95,MacOS7-8).

So yes, with proper managment Amiga could have a bigger marketshare today then Apple has.

[psxphill]

C=/Amiga in the early 90s did not only have good enough HW, but also a large userbase, big SW-library and all that running an OS that was superior to the mainstream of that time (Windows3.1/95,MacOS7-8).

Amiga was powerful hardware for the price in 1985, but by 1990 things had changed. By 1992 the consoles were beating it for games at the cheap end of the market and the pc was beating it for games and applications at the high end.
 
Windows 95 was ok compared to AmigaOS, it had a lot of things that we were missing.

[WolfToTheMoon]

So yes, with proper managment Amiga could have a bigger marketshare today then Apple has.

Not very likely, because by early 90s the biggest Amiga advantage and the reason why people bought it, the price/performance advantage, was largely gone, and so was the technical advantage. Apple appealed and was bought by upper classes and pros, that's probably the only reason why it survived - higher margins.

[psxphill]

Not a developer so not sure how it does it. Just that when it was finally done, PowerPC could run 680x0 code reasonably.

The emulator that Apple wrote for the PowerMac to run 68000 code was just really good.
 

they should have made C128 with a 65816. Yes, it would be close to Amiga in some regards, but it would be able to tap into C64 market and software library, something that the A1000 couldn't and why it took a few years untill A500 for Amiga to take off.

The C64 was mostly selling in Europe to run games that mostly required cycle accuracy and illegal opcodes. A 65816 wouldn't be very useful, even the C128 wasn't compatible enough & it was expensive.
 
The A1000 was also expensive and there wasn't a lot of software. Once the A500 hit and European games developers started pumping out games then things improved.
 
The A500 was another project that was basically one persons dream, there were other people in engineering who weren't coming up with great ideas. It's unfortunate that as part of fat agnus project they didn't manage to increase the bandwidth and squeeze some more colours in. The only improvement other than cost was 512k of slow ram, if they'd gone straight to 1mb chip ram it would have been better.

[Kronos]

Well Win95 was released over a year after C= went under, so we need to compare Win3.1 to  AOS3.1 a comparisons AOS wins hands down on thechnical merits. On the other side it was lacking in "completeness" and implementation.

HW wise there wasn't much difference between a 030 and 386 or a 040 and a 486, only that the later was crippled by the SW still running them in 8088 mode.

ECS/AGA GFX was lacking in resolution and color compared to most VGA-cards of that era but could more than compete on speed.

So yes, if C= had woken up in 1990 or so and had invested heavily in modernizing HW and SW Amiga could have come out ahead by 95.
They didn't do that and so we ended with a minimal HW-update to late and an OS full of great concepts but also bugs and outright holes.

[Kronos]

The emulator that Apple wrote for the PowerMac to run 68000 code was just really good.
 

The emulator Apple wrote for the 1st PPC Macs was a total turd, right to the point where those units ran native SW slower than a 68k running a the same code in 68k due to the OS still being (emulated) 68k.

Allmost killed Apple and it took them to the release of the 1st PCI based Macs over a year later till they added some JIT-like speedups (and having more of the OS in actual PPC code) to really regain a level of performance comparable to the x86s.

[psxphill]

Allmost killed Apple and it took them to the release of the 1st PCI based Macs over a year later till they added some JIT-like speedups (and having more of the OS in actual PPC code) to really regain a level of performance comparable to the x86s.

Yeah, they hired someone in with experience to do the JIT IIRC.

[persia]

In 1985 Amiga had the potential to become a niche video/sound machine, unfortunately they were way too far ahead of the curve.  No youtube, no www, no cheap digital cameras.  The niche wasn't developed yet.  On top of that hardware and operating system updates were late or bungled.

[Hattig]

ECS/AGA GFX was lacking in resolution and color compared to most VGA-cards of that era but could more than compete on speed.

ECS did have 640x480@60Hz capability however, albeit in 4 colours IIRC. For business use that would have been fine at the time, I know it would have been going up against 16 colour Win 3.1 systems eventually, but most people were still using DOS at that time.

So yes, if C= had woken up in 1990 or so and had invested heavily in modernizing HW and SW Amiga could have come out ahead by 95.
They didn't do that and so we ended with a minimal HW-update to late and an OS full of great concepts but also bugs and outright holes.

The problem was the lack of hardware design investment after the original Amiga came out. ECS was a tweak, AGA was a bit of a hack.  Commodore recognised the value of a cost-down Amiga, the A600, but hadn't invested in the single-chip version of ECS, nor did they get it out at a suitable time - 1991 was probably a year too late. Commodore limited the range of Amigas too - A1200 and A4000/040 was either low-end, or very high end - the 030 version took a while to arrive and there was still a massive gap. An A1400 (A1200 in an A1000-style case, maybe 21MHz 020), as speculated at the time everywhere, was an obvious product (at £599 say) but never appeared. I think this was because they didn't have the money to do a proper job even in 1990.

Yeah, Commodore couldn't manage their way out of a paper bag filled with way out signs. Underinvestment and underselling the Amiga killed them. That foray into PCs showed a lack of commitment to their core range of computers. And that's just a small part of it.

[Niding]

I wouldnt say it was "too late" already by 90-92. At that time I had Amiga only while a few friends got the PC, and it was much more userfriendly than what my buddies had.
They had no problem agreeing with that back then, but in quite short period of time after that Amiga was left trailing in the dust.
I still remember tweaking the autoexec.bat and config.sys or whatever it was called when I needed to get hardware to work on the old PCs.
PCs was horrible back then, but it almost feels like Amiga has traded places with the PCs now in that regard, requiring some level of OS knowledge to get exotic (or programs with bad installers) programs to work.

Then again, Ive probarly become so spoilt with everything being plug and play these days, that I consider the minimum of tweaking requirement to be "horrible userfriendliness". The "problem" with this is that IF something doesnt work as expected the general OS/Hardware knowledge is so low that the user is left with a blank stare at the monitor instead of knowing how to work around it.

[psxphill]

I wouldnt say it was "too late" already by 90-92. At that time I had Amiga only while a few friends got the PC, and it was much more userfriendly than what my buddies had.

By 1991 Id had started writing wolfenstein 3d, if he'd written it for the Amiga then things would have been different. The momentum that game created was enough to kill the Amiga.
 
The Amiga would have needed chunky 256 colours in 1990 to have built any kind of market lead. If it weren't for AAA then I believe that something like AGA but with chunky graphics could have been shipped in 1990. Even if 256 colour mode was low res only and lacked smooth horizontal scrolling (depending on how you could graft chunky pixel fetching on to the bitplane fetching might upset the horizontal scrolling).

[WolfToTheMoon]

The C64 was mostly selling in Europe to run games that mostly required cycle accuracy and illegal opcodes. A 65816 wouldn't be very useful, even the C128 wasn't compatible enough & it was expensive.

Both C= and Amiga were big sellers in Europe.
65816 was compatible enough for Apple.
C128 sold a few millions, I think a nicer 65816 based system could have even sold more. MOS could have had developed a 32 bit CPU in house, freeing C= from shackels of Motorola and their pricing.

Amiga, as nice and as advanced as it was, lost Commodore 3 years of momentum and a lot of money untill A500 took off.
The PC model of backwards compatibility could have been applied on the C= 8(C64) -> 16(C65816) -> 32(6532) bit line. The C64 was the 2nd biggest platform in the 80s, it was foolish not to take advantage of that.

[Iggy]

Both C= and Amiga were big sellers in Europe.
65816 was compatible enough for Apple.
C128 sold a few millions, I think a nicer 65816 based system could have even sold more. MOS could have had developed a 32 bit CPU in house, freeing C= from shackels of Motorola and their pricing.

Amiga, as nice and as advanced as it was, lost Commodore 3 years of momentum and a lot of money untill A500 took off.
The PC model of backwards compatibility could have been applied on the C= 8(C64) -> 16(C65816) -> 32(6532) bit line. The C64 was the 2nd biggest platform in the 80s, it was foolish not to take advantage of that.

The view of an obvious C64 fan.
Frankly, rather than trying to morph the 8 bit C64 into a 16 then 32 bit machine, a investment in evolving than Amiga platform would have made more sense.
After all, the Amiga had an operating system.
To this day people with any sense focus on evolving that, rather than focusing on fixed hardware specs.