Think about the possibility of "Apollo" going 2-3Ghz (or more!) ASIC some day (hello Thierry! ). The 68k-architechture would get a super speed boost!
And it's also cool the 68k is further enchanced by the Natami-team
Well, let's not get too far off into dreamland here, but it
would be neat to see it running in proper silicon someday
Well, just like you would use a car, many will use a computer. A Commodore Amiga computer even...but so, enthusiasts will always have their special thing and be proud of it, but general public uses a pc Amiga as a tool to get the job done. Commodore USA is not about retro hobby market, it's about making real business with a little bit of that Commodore spirit. And no other modern pc computer manufacturer offers a single bit of that spirit.
That is absolutely untrue. (For one thing, if CUSA is "not about the retro hobby market" as they've continually claimed, they sure do a lot of promoting to it. Almost like they can't sell to anyone else...) There is
nothing Commodore, spirit or otherwise, about this outfit or their products. They don't embody anything about what made the machines good, or even any of the things that made the company successful (vertical integration, competitive pricing.)
Nothing whatsoever.What we need is either a port of OS4 to x86 64 and 32bit flavour with multithreading and multiprocessing Kernal. Or Amithlon+++ with the same.
If it were that simple to support SMP on the Amiga OS, they'd have done it already. The problem of the whole system being a free-for-all of pointers passed around like needles at a junkie convention and that being the entire
basis for the message-passing system isn't just going to go away because you picked a different CPU to do it on.
But between A1000 and A4000 they made no improvement to the machines A/V until 1991. Improvements like more colours on screen in 320x200, more blitter bandwidth, HAM8. All could have been done before A500+. Sound was never improved, even dual Paula config would have been welcome in AGA.
Commodore failed to realise they were fighting two fronts. Mac+PC for £2000+ and £150 SNES+SEGA and finally. More money was lost to console sales than 486PC Doom £1000 setups, and by 1988/9 there were non x86 computers/consoles with 256 colours vs the A500 using 2.5 year old A1000 chipset for 5 years was a joke! (and a pig ugly case)
Oh, no argument there (well, except that I
like the A500's case,) my point was just that holding up the eventual introduction of an autoconfiguring expansion bus to the PC world as The Very Reason that PCs won out is silly when (A) that didn't even happen until after Commodore was gone and (B) the Amiga had one from the get-go. I will in no way dispute that Commodore's post-OCS R&D sucked.
(Oh, also, saying the TG16 had 256 colors is a bit of a stretch - it had 16 palettes of 16 colors, not a true 256-color mode.)