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Author Topic: How a Stupid Patent Killed the Amiga  (Read 8058 times)

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Offline ajlwalker

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Re: How a Stupid Patent Killed the Amiga
« Reply #14 from previous page: November 12, 2011, 06:38:40 PM »
Quote from: Matt_H;667553

...Another part of the question: Dave Haynie wrote in Deathbed Vigil that Commodore might have survived with 400,000 US sales - could they have made that many sales without the supply problems?


I would say it was doubtful, but there WAS a chance.

So far as I recall the CD32 sold 100,000 units in the UK in short order.  Probably a similar amount in Germany and the rest of Europe.

The US market is, what, six times bigger than the UK?  However, the Amiga wasn't the popular games machine in the US that it was in the UK/Europe.

I reckon they'd have matched the UK sales at least, and if they got some momentum and good titles out there, word of mouth could possibly have done the rest.

I maintain though that if CD32 would have been a success, then Commodore may have dropped the Amiga computer and carried on with the game console market.
 

Offline Haranguer

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Re: How a Stupid Patent Killed the Amiga
« Reply #15 on: November 12, 2011, 08:20:34 PM »
Commodore was in trouble way before the CD32.

First, they fouled up one Christmas by replacing the A500 with the A500+, and selling it packaged with games that wouldn't run because they hit the hardware, and the hardware had changed.

The following Christmas, they released the A600, which was a big step backward from the A500.  They also released the A1200, but there weren't enough parts.  Very few people wanted the A600 - most people wanted the A1200, so they put off their Amiga purchases.  By the time parts for the A1200 were available, Commodore had lost a second Christmas and was in trouble.

This, of course, came on top of the fact that they had terminated development on the A4000 and decided to sell the prototype instead.

It was only after that that the CD32 was even released.  If everything had gone perfectly with the CD32, they probably still would have gone bankrupt.

It takes a special set of skills to go bankrupt while selling the world's most popular computer (C64) and the world's best computer (Amiga), but Mehdi Ali stepped up to the plate.
 

Offline hishamk

Re: How a Stupid Patent Killed the Amiga
« Reply #16 on: November 12, 2011, 08:29:05 PM »
Anyone care to drop a hello to good ol' Mehdi?

http://meridianassociates.biz/professional.htm

From the bio:
"His prior experience includes serving as the President of Commodore International, where he accomplished a major operational turnaround."

Some turnaround, I'd say.
2x A1000, 2x A2000, 1x A3000, 4x A1200, 3x A500, 1x CDTV, 1x CD32, 2x Pegasos II, 1x EFIKA
 

Offline NorthWay

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Re: How a Stupid Patent Killed the Amiga
« Reply #17 on: November 12, 2011, 08:31:57 PM »
Quote from: weirdami;667520
What is a XOR cursor?


Not something C=/Amiga ever used to the best of my knowledge.

XOR (or Exclusive OR) as a bitwise operation has the inherent property that if you repeat it (i.e. do it twice) it is a NULL operation.
Why do you want that? Because then you can draw and erase an image in only two operations: Doing it once will show it on the screen (and "under" already existing graphics), doing it twice undoes it.

It also has another valued property in that it only uses 2 reads(source and data) and one write operation(source) per pixel.

The classic alternative to this is the save&restore with cookie cutter approach which is
- copy data under pointer to (static) buffer (read + write)
- cookie cutter bob paste (read source + data + mask(or generate mask from data if your display/hw fits) and write source)
- restore data under pointer from buffer (read + write)
Which is a whole lot more work and time as you can see, but it looks better visually.
I believe AmigaOS used a lot of this as late as 1.1.

Commodore (since 1.2 at least - someone correct me on mousepointer details) simply worked around this by using a hw sprite for the pointer.
 

Offline Haranguer

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Re: How a Stupid Patent Killed the Amiga
« Reply #18 on: November 13, 2011, 07:56:14 AM »
Quote from: hishamk;667579

"His prior experience includes serving as the President of Commodore International, where he accomplished a major operational turnaround."


Well, you can't argue with him.  He certainly turned the company around. lol