Amiga.org
The "Not Quite Amiga but still computer related category" => Alternative Operating Systems => Topic started by: Psy on March 09, 2006, 04:01:14 AM
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Atari vs Commodore which company screwed up the most.
Atari
- Atari was a key player in the Video Game crash of 1984,
- Drove away talent
- The stupid 5200 controller
- Turned down Nintendo's offer of Atari handling the worldwide distribution of Nintendo products outside of Japan then Atari tried to fight the SMS and NES with the mothballed 7800.
- ST R&D lacked vision causing IBM compats to catch up.
- Lynx was poorly supported
- Cancelled the Falcon in order to bet the entire company in the success of the Jaguar
- Lost money hand over fist
Commodore
- 8-Bit computer incompatible with each other
- C64 ran into the ground with no signifigant upgrands.
- Drove away talent
- Amiga R&D lacked vision causing IBM compats to catch up.
- Worse marketing then Atari
- Lost money hand over fist
Well that's just a start for both, so who was the most incompetent?
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Wasn't Atari responsible for burying millions of cartridges of ET in a desert landfill because it was so crap?
I think the Jaguar was woefully underdeveloped as it was a 64-bit machine that couldn't do the 3D of Starfox on the 16-Bit SNES. Also the joypad was a little stiff.
At least the CD32 integrated a CD-ROM into itself (the Jag eventually got a Mega-CD style bolt-on CD drive).
I'm not sure Commodore marketed the Amiga poorly... after all the launch in '85 featured Andy Warhol and Blondie. What more could you ask for!?
Here in the UK there were Comic Relief charity bundles of the A600, the A1200 Desktop Dynamite pack featured a bundled licensed movie game (Dennis), they even put a CD32 advert on the billboard opposite Sega's London HQ!
I never saw a TV commercial for either Atari or Commodore though, which is odd.
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Hyperspeed wrote:
Wasn't Atari responsible for burying millions of cartridges of ET in a desert landfill because it was so crap?
Yes, 5 million ET carts, along with 5 million PacMan carts, and an uncounted number of other titles. PacMan was especially stupid as they had 12 million carts made when only 10 million consoles had been sold all total. It's amazing they managed to sell 7 million PacMan carts.
I never saw a TV commercial for either Atari or Commodore though, which is odd.
I saw those old ads Alan Alda made for Atari. Never saw a CBM ad.
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I've seen Amiga ads in England.
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moto
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I've also seen Amiga ads in the UK - around the early 1990s featuring an A500 running an EA flight sim, can't remember which one though!
- Ali
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I also remeber watching an advertisment of Amiga 500 here in spain around 1990 :-) those were good times...
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Commodore-Amiga was the most incompetent. They had more to work with, and still threw it all away. This is the computer industry. You can't keep selling the same machine with minor improvements for nine years and expect to survive.
I was still a teenager in 1992 and it was obvious to me, even then, that C= was doomed. I couldn't believe their stupidity in releasing the A500 (A1000 in a wedge design and 512K RAM), A500+ (A500 with a new ROM), A600 (A500+ with numeric keypad chopped off), A1200 (020 and AGA but the rest of the machine, including the blitter, sound and virtually everything else was the same as the then-ancient A1000), CD32 (an A1200 with a CD-ROM drive, same crappy 020 and no Fast RAM).
Everything Commodore released since the original A1000 was old before it even hit the shelves. There was nothing original or groundbreaking. They deserved to go bust a lot sooner than they did - they were very lucky to last until 1994.
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Commodore, was far more incompetent!!
Atari had a massive struggle against the Amiga, and put up a damn good fight... even becoming technologically superior to the Amiga with the Lynx and the Falcon... though they didn't have the experience that the Amiga had and so couldn't develop the technology.
Commodore bascily rehashed the A1000 for 10 years... With only 2 improvments... the AGA chipset (a damp squib in 1992) which should have been released in 1987... and AmigaOS 3.0, which was the first step toward a professional Operating system.
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Amiga R&D did not lack vision, they were stifled by management.
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Yeah, I watch the video of Haynie, and saw Miner that was upset about management of Amiga computer.
Commodore got money for many years by C64, old and stupid home-computer, really home, not as Amiga called home-computer but more then home.
Commodore got Amiga form Miner and think how to get cheap Amiga, for massive diffusion as a new C64, not as NEW generation of multimedia computer!
Commodore was blind since 1987, I'm not surprise that they get bunkrupt....and I'm not upset for they, Commodore was a bad "mother" for Amiga, otherwise I'm upset for a good "father" Miner, he made Amiga computer-dream.
Thanks to Miner. :cry:
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I think the Jaguar was woefully underdeveloped as it was a 64-bit machine that couldn't do the 3D of Starfox on the 16-Bit SNES. Also the joypad was a little stiff.
The Jaguar can do perfectly well 3d, far far better than the snes. Have you seen Doom running on it? It plays equal to high-end PC's back then.
The CD32 was underpowered and the A1200 was underpowered. The Jaguar and the Falcon most definately NOT. (these machines were also created by former Amiga engineers)
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Lando wrote:
Everything Commodore released since the original A1000 was old before it even hit the shelves. There was nothing original or groundbreaking. They deserved to go bust a lot sooner than they did - they were very lucky to last until 1994.
CDTV - First CD Based Computer well ahead of its time!!! True it was just a CD based A500 but the main idea was original and groundbreaking..
The purpose of the A500 was that it was a cheap home computer.
As for the A1200 if they were so stupid why do people still use them today and spend loads of money upgrading them.
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The a500 was the most selled model of the amiga series!!!!. And i like more the keyboard shaped form of the 500,600, 1200 that the a1000 pcish case.
Just my two cents...
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Lando wrote:
Commodore-Amiga was the most incompetent. They had more to work with, and still threw it all away. This is the computer industry. You can't keep selling the same machine with minor improvements for nine years and expect to survive.
Indeed.
I was still a teenager in 1992 and it was obvious to me, even then, that C= was doomed. I couldn't believe their stupidity in releasing the A500 (A1000 in a wedge design and 512K RAM)
Am I mis-reading what you mean here? Are you saying that the A500 was a stupid move by C=?
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@Speelgoedmannetje
Problem with Falcon was that it was too expensive, too incompatible and too late. ST was already dying and users moving to PCs.
And in the end Atari didnt have enough money to push Lynx and Jaguar forward. Too few games.
@foleyjo
CDTV lacked in software support and in the end it was just A500 with ancient Kickstart 1.3.
Commodore was notorious to push various crappy 8bit machines in hope of a gold mine and it didnt change with A1000... They just took old design and rebadged in hope it generates more profit than loss.
I wouldnt say IBM was much better really... they took a nose dive in early 90s too and were pushed out from the PC business.
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Commodore messed up more, because they had something that could have been great.
Atari messed up badly early on, but never recovered.
Commodore never kept pushing the Amiga design. A 1985 design was still being sold in 1992. Management was too involved with their pet projects, and decent stuff was dropped through petty politics. AAA could have been great.
And messing around in the PC market was stupid.
But they never sold enough. They needed to sell 10m+ Amigas by 1990 for it to have a really viable future. The next generation chipsets needed to not be interfered with.
The ST did quite well despite being a quick design. Again, it was never going to go anywhere - the TT variants were never enough at the high end. There was nothing special about the hardware either.
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Commodore had their 8bit goldmine. It was the Commodore 64. The bestest selling 8 bit computer. The reason they kept it going for years is because people were still buying them and people were still making games and demos for it.
Surely it would be stupid to suddenlt stop selling the best selling 8 bit computer of all time.
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uncharted wrote:
I was still a teenager in 1992 and it was obvious to me, even then, that C= was doomed. I couldn't believe their stupidity in releasing the A500 (A1000 in a wedge design and 512K RAM)
Am I mis-reading what you mean here? Are you saying that the A500 was a stupid move by C=?
I'm not saying the A500 was a stupid move - it's the machine that made the Amiga the success it was - just that they had 2 years after the A1000 to work on it, and releasing the A500 with such minor improvements (Kickstart in ROM and a little extra RAM) was not enough. They should have spent more money on R&D, had AGA ready by '88, AAA by '91, and the next revision (AAAA?) by '94 - a 3-year gap between chipset revisions. This is what was needed to stay ahead (of Mac / PC) at the time.
However these days Apple are releasing new Mac revisions at least every year, and high-end PC's are generally only cutting-edge for 6 months, so C= would have had to either keep up (impossible) or ditch the old Amiga chipset after about '97/98 and design their new machines with licensed chips from ATI or NVidia (again, like Apple), this would have been a very difficult transition (losing compatibility with all hardware-banging software) but necessary.
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Lando wrote:
However these days Apple are releasing new Mac revisions at least every year, and high-end PC's are generally only cutting-edge for 6 months, so C= would have had to either keep up (impossible) or ditch the old Amiga chipset after about '97/98 and design their new machines with licensed chips from ATI or NVidia (again, like Apple), this would have been a very difficult transition (losing compatibility with all hardware-banging software) but necessary.
Had Commodore and the Amiga survived, then I imagine by 1997, when the need to switch to off the shelf parts occured (Assuming Commodore hadn't become a Graphics Chip vendor), the OS would have fully supported RTG and very few programs would have hit the hardware... NYX was not OCS/AGA compatible!
I expect Commodore would have moved the Amiga platform to the HP PA-RISC by 1995... and would have had to transition to x86 CPU's by 2001.
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It's a shame that Amiga and Atari both went downhill. I have the best of both worlds. An Atari 2600 for games and a Commodore 64/64c/128 computers. Getting ready to link it to Quantumlink and take it for a spin. :-) :-D
Either way. They were great computers for their time regardless of how things turned out. :-)
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Hyperspeed wrote:
I'm not sure Commodore marketed the Amiga poorly... after all the launch in '85 featured Andy Warhol and Blondie. What more could you ask for!?
Let's compaire Amiga marketting with Sega Genesis
- Sega made up words like "Blast Processing" that only ment the Genesis had the ability for the CPU to be working on one visible section of map while the graphics processor displays another. Cheap yes but back then when most consumers knew little thus such marketting tricks worked.
- Before the SNES Sega took every opportunity to show the public how much better the Genesis was to the NES. Amiga never really went into negative ads yet in the late 80's IBM compat were just begging to be bashed by ads for a superior computer. Most IBM compats didn't even have a desktop till Windows 3.1 and even then Windows 3.1 sucked more then GEOS that alot of years Commodore could have been poking fun at Dos on in TV ads.
- Spent far more on advertising then Commodore spent on the Amiga
And Sega was not even that smart back then.
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Psy wrote:
Hyperspeed wrote:
I'm not sure Commodore marketed the Amiga poorly... after all the launch in '85 featured Andy Warhol and Blondie. What more could you ask for!?
Let's compaire Amiga marketting with Sega Genesis
- Sega made up words like "Blast Processing" that only ment the Genesis had the ability for the CPU to be working on one visible section of map while the graphics processor displays another. Cheap yes but back then when most consumers knew little thus such marketting tricks worked.
- Before the SNES Sega took every opportunity to show the public how much better the Genesis was to the NES. Amiga never really went into negative ads yet in the late 80's IBM compat were just begging to be bashed by ads for a superior computer. Most IBM compats didn't even have a desktop till Windows 3.1 and even then Windows 3.1 sucked more then GEOS that alot of years Commodore could have been poking fun at Dos on in TV ads.
- Spent far more on advertising then Commodore spent on the Amiga
And Sega was not even that smart back then.
Another big advantage the Megadrive had was that it cost £130 in Dixons, while an Amiga was still £399. To parents looking to buy their kids a games machine, this fact alone made the choice for them. The A500 lost a lot of sales from 1990 onwards to the Megadrive (and later the SNES) purely because of price.
No Amiga hit the sub-£200 price bracket that mass-market really needs..
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Lando wrote:
I'm not saying the A500 was a stupid move - it's the machine that made the Amiga the success it was - just that they had 2 years after the A1000 to work on it, and releasing the A500 with such minor improvements (Kickstart in ROM and a little extra RAM) was not enough. They should have spent more money on R&D, had AGA ready by '88, AAA by '91, and the next revision (AAAA?) by '94 - a 3-year gap between chipset revisions. This is what was needed to stay ahead (of Mac / PC) at the time.
I'd have to disagree here, and say it's rather unrealistic. Part of the reason why the A500 did as well as it did was that it offered what it did at the price it did. C= would not have been able to hold that pricepoint if it introduced new technology in there. The A500 was still selling well in 1990. In fact, if you look at the UK sales figures, A500 sales increased year on year until it was dropped.
As it was the A500 was, if anything, too expensive. My parents certainly couldn't afford one, I had to make do with a Sinclair Spectrum +2 at Xmas 89.
If anything it was the A2000 that was the problem. The A2000 *should* of been a true sequal to the A1000.
However these days Apple are releasing new Mac revisions at least every year, and high-end PC's are generally only cutting-edge for 6 months, so C= would have had to either keep up (impossible) or ditch the old Amiga chipset after about '97/98 and design their new machines with licensed chips from ATI or NVidia (again, like Apple), this would have been a very difficult transition (losing compatibility with all hardware-banging software) but necessary.
I wonder if the computer market would of remained as competitive as it was in the 80's (that is several large companies with decent market shares), would progress move in the way it does now?
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part of commodores problem was that they relyed on their chip fabrication plants for all their custom chips but by the time aga came around they had to outsource because they hadnt ugraded their plants.
mostek came out with the 6502 and numerous variants but never a good 16bit then 32bit successor. amiga should have used a mostek cpu 68000 comatible or not it would have been better. one of the reasons the c64 was less expensive than other 8bit was because mostek made most of the chips for it whilst other companies bought from 3rd parties.
as they upgraded their facilities amiga should have upgraded accordingly, aga should have been released in 90 with at least 1 or 2 chunky display modes and at least 16bit mono sound in addition to ocs ecs capabilities.
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atari never really was a serious computer threat, they had no big box systems so nothing was very expandable, and they only had what, one system with anything other than a 68000 cpu.
atari put all its eggs in the jaguar basket but didnt get the third parrty support it needed and got ripped in the gaming mags. it was a very capable system for the time.
saturn < 250,000 poly/sec
playstation < 250,000 poly/sec
n64 < 100,000 poly/sec
jaguar < 35,000 poly/sec
32x < 30,000 poly/sec
3do < 30,000 poly/sec
all above were estemated from chipset timing and estemated real game capabilities
jaguar had 3d matrix arithmetic hardware and hardware gauraud shading that could easily exeed 53,000 poly/sec but could not texture map at the same time. texture mapped stuff had to run half in hardware half in software
btw jaguar, playstation, and saturn had 2d capabilities that were limited by the bus capabilities, and the jag ahad a full 64bit bus that was 1.74 times faster than the playstation bus. the n64 had a 32bit bus (even though it was the jag that was slammed in the press for not being fully 64bit)
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KThunder wrote:
atari never really was a serious computer threat, they had no big box systems so nothing was very expandable, and they only had what, one system with anything other than a 68000 cpu.
The TT had a Motorola 68030 @ 32MHz
The Falcon had a Motorola 68030 with a 68040 in the pipeline.
Atari Transputer Workstation had a T-800 @ 20Mhz and 68000 @ 8Mhz
EST had a Motorola 68020 but was stuck in R&D and scraped for the TT
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Lando wrote:
Another big advantage the Megadrive had was that it cost £130 in Dixons, while an Amiga was still £399. To parents looking to buy their kids a games machine, this fact alone made the choice for them. The A500 lost a lot of sales from 1990 onwards to the Megadrive (and later the SNES) purely because of price.
But the Amiga had the advantage that it was seen by parents as a computer and not as a toy. Many of my friends got one "to do their homework" ;-)
Also, it's debatable how much the Megadrive ate into Amiga's sales, as Amiga sales still increased year on year after the introduction of the Megadrive.
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KThunder wrote:
(even though it was the jag that was slammed in the press for not being fully 64bit)
The jag was slammed coz it was actually 2 32bit processors not 1 64 bit processor making it difficult to program for
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By KThunder:
atari put all its eggs in the jaguar basket but didnt get the third parrty support it needed and got ripped in the gaming mags. it was a very capable system for the time.
saturn < 250,000 poly/sec
playstation < 250,000 poly/sec
n64 < 100,000 poly/sec
jaguar < 35,000 poly/sec
32x < 30,000 poly/sec
3do < 30,000 poly/sec
all above were estemated from chipset timing and estemated real game capabilities
EDIT:
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BlizzardVision - 2,000,000 (!)
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Saturn - 500,000
Playstation - 350,000
N64 - 200,000
32X - 150,000
Jaguar - 40,000
3D0 - ???
These were the figures I remember being bandied about at the time.
Remember, the 32X may have had a Doom port with a smaller window but comparing Iron Soldier (Jag) to MetalHead (32X) you get the impression the latter's 3D capability was way more advanced, particularly with texture mapping.
32X had Virtua Fighter in 3D polygons, and for Yu Suzuki to even contemplate this the 32X must have had a polygon quota at least comparable to the N64.
Jaguar Alien Vs Predator and Tempest 2000 were both real killers though and I haven't quite seen what Battlesphere has to offer.
The CD32 really was pushing it by not adding something new for console-heads to shout about. Akiko wasn't going to get that much attention when it should have been part of AGA.
What is meant by 'Chunky Pixel' anyway, I read it was a 1:1 pixel but then NTSC 640x480 is 1:1 (with overscan)?
EDIT:
We never did get a handheld/laptop Amiga...
:-(
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Hyperspeed wrote:
What is meant by 'Chunky Pixel' anyway, I read it was a 1:1 pixel but then NTSC 640x480 is 1:1 (with overscan)?
Assuming a 256-colour display, chunky screenmodes are those where one pixel on the screen can be written in a single go using one byte of data.
In contrast, the Amiga's AGA display in a 256-colour mode would require 8 separate writes of one bit each, to each of the eight bitplanes that make up the final display.
Taking a simple monochrome screen, one byte would equate to a horizontal line of 8 pixels, where the pattern of the line equates to the binary pattern of the value written to it (where 1s correspond to a dot, and 0s to a blank). E.g. a solid line would require a value of 255 (FF hex) to be written as this equates to 11111111 in binary, and a blank line would require 0 to be written as this equates to 00000000 in binary, with a stippled effect being obtained by writing alternate 0s and 1s as in 01010101 (byte value of 85 (55 hex)). The Amiga's native screenmodes are effectively made up of multiple monochrome-style "planes" of graphics, which are then layered together by the chipset.
The Akiko chip simplified the writing to all of these bitplanes and effectively gave the developer a chunky display to work with, where one byte written to change a single pixel would be split across the eight bitplanes via hardware, thereby speeding up screen updates vs doing the same operation in software.
I'm sure someone can explain that better than I've just attempted!
- Ali
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Actually InTheSand that was very good.
The term 'chunky' really is a bit misleading isn't it... and since the PC always used this method why did the Amiga deviate from this?
If I visualise your description I get the display being made up a bit like placing consecutive bits of grease-proof paper over each other, each with something written on it.
I suppose every cloud has a silver lining and maybe the planar system of the Amiga had benefits...
What were they?
:-D
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Hyperspeed wrote:
I suppose every cloud has a silver lining and maybe the planar system of the Amiga had benefits...
What were they?
:-D
For one thing, scrolling - you could scroll the entire display just by writing to the Bitplane Pointer registers.
On the Amiga, what is on the screen can be anywhere in Chip RAM, while a VGA PC always displayed whatever data was at a0000000h, you had to write every damn byte again (move 64000 bytes of data to scroll one line).
Even at 32 bits per mov instruction that's 16000 operations to scroll a single line, while on Amiga, it was 2 instructions per bitplane (each bitplane has two address registers bplxpth, bplxptl).
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What other machines used planar systems?
I bet the Megadrive/Genesis did, you couldn't get smoother scrolling than Sonic The Hedgehog games.
Also, HAM modes, how would you explain this technology - I raise this since both the Amiga and Atari Jaguar could do them.
Alien Vs Predator on Jaguar was a fps that actually played in HAM mode!
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Hyperspeed wrote:
What other machines used planar systems?
I think most machines actually had both modes...
I bet the Megadrive/Genesis did, you couldn't get smoother scrolling than Sonic The Hedgehog games.
Also, HAM modes, how would you explain this technology - I raise this since both the Amiga and Atari Jaguar could do them.
HAM mode is basicly a 16 colour mode, that uses 6 bits instead of 4. The two extra bits are used to tell the hardware hold the data from the pixel to the left of the current pixel, and then use the four pixels of the current pixel to adjust (modify) either the red, bue or green component.
The pixel data was assigned as such:
00 xxxx : use color from palette index xxxx;
01 gggg : keep red and blue components from previous pixel, use gggg as green component;
10 rrrr : keep green and blue components from previous pixel, use rrrr as red component;
11 bbbb : keep red and green components from previous pixel, use bbbb as blue component.
By carefully selecting the 16 colours, and making sure that the colours are smoothly transitioning (i.e. like in photos) then you can get very realistic images!
HAM is basicly a form of image Compression, where 12bits are compressed into 6bits.
Alien Vs Predator on Jaguar was a fps that actually played in HAM mode!
Somewhat pointless by the time the Jag was released... just add more memory.
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uncharted wrote:
But the Amiga had the advantage that it was seen by parents as a computer and not as a toy. Many of my friends got one "to do their homework" ;-)
Also, it's debatable how much the Megadrive ate into Amiga's sales, as Amiga sales still increased year on year after the introduction of the Megadrive.
yet Sega didn't have a problem with R&D (it had problem with infighting between Sega of Japan and Sega of America and general managment getting in the way). If Sega wanted to re-entre the computer market (it had a Z-80 computer back in the early 80's) back then it defenitaly had a strong enough R&D to come up with a Amiga killer, problem was Sega never really had to think of compitiblity much and it's hardware as all over the place: they used Z80, 68000, NEC V60 and v70, Intel i960-KB, Hitachi SH-2 and SH-4, Intel Pentium 3 & 4 (probably forgetting a CPU or two) and too many chipsets to list. On the plus side if Sega did make a computer back then they would alway have had something in the pipe from the Arcade R&D even if it mostly likely would be totaly incompatible.
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but then did Sega want to do an 'Amiga Killer'?
its my limited understanding that Sega used Amigas for Genesis/megadrive development work.
The Sega dev kit being a hardware dongle that plugged into the sideport of the A500, and allowed programming of cartridge eproms, and running stuff.
quite if it allowed you to run say, sonic the hedgehog on an A500 i wouldn't know... ;-)
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darksun9210 wrote:
but then did Sega want to do an 'Amiga Killer'?
its my limited understanding that Sega used Amigas for Genesis/megadrive development work.
The Sega dev kit being a hardware dongle that plugged into the sideport of the A500, and allowed programming of cartridge eproms, and running stuff.
quite if it allowed you to run say, sonic the hedgehog on an A500 i wouldn't know... ;-)
Yhea for the Genesis, by the time Sega was looking at the Hitachi SH-2 and 3D, the Amiga was no longer powerful enough for devlopment.
The AAA would have made the Amiga a 2D powerhouse, but even if it came out Sega would have had no use for it when they went 3D.
If Sega came out with a computer version of the Saturn it probably would have sold better then the Saturn, as Sega could have brought built in 3D cheap to computer users. Where was Commodore in 3D technology? As far as I know Commodore had nothing even on paper to give the Amiga 3D and back in 1995 built in 3D (at par with the Playstation and Saturn) would have been a huge selling point since neither Macs or PCs had it.
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Psy wrote:
If Sega came out with a computer version of the Saturn it probably would have sold better then the Saturn, as Sega could have brought built in 3D cheap to computer users. Where was Commodore in 3D technology? As far as I know Commodore had nothing even on paper to give the Amiga 3D and back in 1995 built in 3D (at par with the Playstation and Saturn) would have been a huge selling point since neither Macs or PCs had it.
The Nyx had features to help 3D work... the AAA might have had some blitter modes to assist texture mapping (I seem to recall reading such).
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Psy: When/what did Sega use Pentium chips for?
I think if AAA had any 3D capability it would have been similar to the 3DO.
It was things like Virtua Racing and Starwing that got polygon processing into the mainstream, I think everyone had been sleeping up until that point.
Both Commodore and Atari made some peculiar decisions in terms of upgrade progression though... look at the A500/A500+/A600 and the Lynx I/Lynx II.
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Hyperspeed wrote:
Psy: When/what did Sega use Pentium chips for?
Very recently for the arcades Lindbergh (http://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=731)
Here is a news article (http://games.kikizo.com/news/200509/010.asp)
Sega's R&D is not what is use to be so they no longer use exotic and custom componets but it looks like the Lindbergh still gives Sega devlopers lots of power.
It was things like Virtua Racing and Starwing that got polygon processing into the mainstream, I think everyone had been sleeping up until that point.
Virtual Racing was released in 1992 and Commodore went under in 1994 you would think they would have had something on paper give the Amiga real 3D capabilities.
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Where can you buy The Deathbed Vigil on DVD/VCD?
Is it just pot luck on eBay?
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@ Hyperspeed
http://www.frogpondmedia.com/dbv/sales.html
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Wow, thanks Nitro!
I've just ordered the Euro PAL DVD with postage for 40 USD.
PayPal said D.Haynie will appear on my bank statement...
That's a bit like Jesus appearing on peoples' toast!
:-D
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@Hyperspeed
I waiting for the day, when someone has An A2000 on ebay with with an acid leak around the battery and you can clearly see daves face on the board. :-)
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:-D
Speaking of ghostly images, didn't Andy Warhol paint Debbie Harry on Deluxe Paint or something when the A1000 was released?
Was there any file or painting made public of this?
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KThunder: The jag was slammed coz it was actually 2 32bit processors not 1 64 bit processor making it difficult to program for
Jaguar was pretty easy to program, actually. The thing is, most of the work had to be done on the custom chips. The universally familiar 68000 wasn't that useful.
Jaguar was released way too late. Atari let the design just sit on the shelf for two years before its release. Also, 2MB of main memory wasn't that much with which to work.
I like my Jaguar, even though I only have two games worth playing. ;-)
Hyperspeed: The term 'chunky' really is a bit misleading isn't it... and since the PC always used this method why did the Amiga deviate from this?
Certain color-shifting effects are easier. Like, reversing the colors when selecting an icon. You only have to write to one bitplane, speeding things up a lot.
It's very unfriendly for 3D, though. Also, images that are saved in planar mode (like IFF), don't compress anywhere near as well as chunky formats, like GIF. Save some planar and chunky data and compress it. Most of the time, you'll notice a huge difference, in favor of chunky.
I presume that many people who insist on new custom hardware aren't that aware of planer vs chunky modes. The Amiga's way of doing graphics isn't useful, so you'd have to start from scratch, anyway. The Amiga was efficient in its heyday, of course, but these days, those kinds of techniques are obsolete and would really hold the system back in terms of performance, not to mention make software much more difficult to program. The only truly "custom" work needed for a new Amiga is a proper floppy controller. An Amiga 880k floppy to USB bridge would be an awesome think to have.
Even the Amiga's screens can be better emulated on a GPU using virtual textures, and mixing screens of different resolutions doesn't mesh well with modern monitors. There's no point to a new Amiga chipset.
Lando: For one thing, scrolling - you could scroll the entire display just by writing to the Bitplane Pointer registers.
For the most part, that has to do with the scanlines. Hardware sprites are based on the same principle. Planar bitmaps have little to do with it, unless you enjoy all sorts of weird psychedelic colors when moving individual bitplanes around out of sync with each other. Many systems can do playfields (parallax scrolling) just fine with chunky modes.
Psy: Virtual Racing was released in 1992 and Commodore went under in 1994 you would think they would have had something on paper give the Amiga real 3D capabilities.
Saturn was a real mess. Two CPUs, two VDPs... they really built that machine in a hurry once they found out what Sony was doing. Intel was also trying to push MMX on their CPUs just before 3D "accelerators" hit the scene. It's really quite amazing how short-sighted people were when it came to true, custom GPU architecture.
As for Deathbed Vigil, I bought it a long time ago and still haven't watched it. Don't ask me why. :-?
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people are confused by the jag and saturn, because they had more than one cpu. the jag had a 32bit gpu with a 64 bit memory interface and bus and 32bit 68000 with a 16bit interface to ram. the jag also had an object processor and programmable blitter that were fully 64bit.
the 60000 wasnt really useless game ai, event handling, data flow etc were all possible with it using the gpu to calculate the 3d stuff, only problem being it used the bus a bit too much. since the gpu and dsp processors had local ram that problem was minimized alittle
the thing with the saturn is that with just one of its sh2 main cpus it was almost as fast as the playstation. the saturns dual cpu setup was a well designed system and with a decent programmer could be about 1.3 to 1.5 times faster with both cpus. that was with assebly though, both systems were easy to program with c wich was included in the developer kit, but did much better with assembly.
yes i know this stuff from personal experiance as i have programmed both. demos and stuff mostly. i goofed around with the n64 also but i didnt like the architecture or the playstation.
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Yes, he did and it's on the AmigaForever package I bought. Really cool to watch.
I don't know if the image was ever made public/available.
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btw since it was already stated by soimeone incorrectly here is what they have:
saturn:
sh2 32bit risc master 28mhz
sh2 32bit risc slave 28mhz
68000 16/32 bit sound processor 14mhz
vdp1 video processor 2dstuff mostly 28mhz
vdp2 video processor 3d stuff mostly 28mhz
scu dsp dma controller (also had a math coprocessor)
jaguar
tom asic contained:
64bit object processor
64bit blitter (hardware gauroud shading etc)
32/64bit gpu risc cpu
jerry asic contained:
32/16bit dsp risc cpu 26mhz
68000 32/16bit 14mhz
for the record (from me) the jaguar was as much a 64bit system as the n64 was. tom was 64bit, memory was 64bit graphic setup data transfer etc all 64bit
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Atari Inc is in financial trouble. NASDAQ plan to delist the company:
Reuters (March 9, 2006):
" Atari Inc. said on Thursday it has received notice from the Nasdaq that it has until August 30 to get its shares above $1 for a minimum of 10 consecutive business days, or lose its listing on the exchange. The financially troubled video game maker has been cutting costs and employees in an effort to get its business back on track amid a switch to new video game console technology that is weighing on sales. On Thursday, Atari shares closed at 77 cents on the Nasdaq."
When Commodore went bankrupt in 1994, I heard they left behind US$ 300 M unpaid debt.
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Saturn was a real mess. Two CPUs, two VDPs... they really built that machine in a hurry once they found out what Sony was doing.
Like KThunder pointed out the Saturn wasn't that much of a mess, infact Sega later turned the Saturn into a low cost arcade board.
Sega already had the technology to build a affordable 3D home computer (since people expect game consoles to have a lower price then computers) but even though Unix was already ported to the Intel i960-KB (that the Model 2 boards used) Sega had didn't have enough talent to devlop the drivers to get Unix to make use of the 3D capablities of the Model 2 board and of course customize Unix for home use (while still being optimized for the Model 2 boards) all ontop still devloping games which was where Sega made its money.
Atari and Commodore did have enough talent but not the same hardware Sega had. Maybe if Bushnell never sold Atari, Atari would have had arcade hardware as powerful Sega's by then and have been able to put 3D technolgy into its computers by 1995.
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I like the Saturn and Jaguar too. The Jag is worth finding just for Tempest 2000 and it's fantastic soundtrack/psychadelic visuals.
The Saturn conversion of Virtua Fighter 2 and Sega Rally were so arcade perfect the machine should have lived to a grander age. It did well, in terms of sales, in Japan.
As for Atari Vs Commodore, I think from the fact Amiga went PowerUP/G3 suggests Commodore gave the machine sufficient launch velocity (at least with it's wallet).
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i think commodores biggest mistake was not pushing the a3000ux amiga could have been were every unix and linux system and server is right now. but commodore screwed up big time, and never followed up
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I think the whole thing is just because lack of marketing and advertising. And about Amiga's beginning to become dated in the early 90's, compared to other hardware. Even if they DID make computers wich were a match for PC's of that time, or even the SNES, they wouldn't have come far by lack of marketing...
And I know, Commodore tried to make more sales out of ancient technology (C= 64 and A500), because people were still bying them, and developers still programmed for them, which is good in one way, but sometimes improvement isn't real bad at all. AGA was a good thing, so the A1200 finally could beat a Megadrive, graphics-wise, and could get close to a SNES. But it was 1 or 2 years too late, and the support for it from developers could have been so much better. How many true AGA-games were made, starting with the release of the A1200? And why the hell did it still have the same old sound-chip of the A1000?
It's all about marketing, look at the Sega Dreamcast: An excellent machine, with the potention of being a real multimedia-livingroom computer. Even superior than the Playstation 2 in some points, which came out a little later. But due to lack of support from the "big boys", who were focussed on the PS2 (because Sony did handle aggressive marketing-tactics, like saying the PS2 could handle 60 million polygons per second, even though it only has 4MB of video memory), it also eventually "lost"
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@Hyperspeed
the main benefits of planar modes show up in screens with few colors. For a screen with 4 colors, in planar mode you gain a lot of memory and speed. Planar was used long before the Amiga, the very first Macintosh (monocrome) used it. When OCS was designed, it could display at most 32 colors, so planar was absolutely the best choice. For 256 or more colors, apart from the ability to scroll separately the individual plane (which is good for special scrolltext-like effects but not much else), I would say planar has no benefit, but many disadvantages (apart from the aforementioned ones in the 3D, also for 2D BOBS chunky is better).
I don't think PCs have always used chunky: before VGA, there was CGA and other gfx standard with very few colors: I don't think those were chunky. Also, I have heard that old VGA board used to have a 16-color planar mode. Maybe it was part of the VGA standard and it's still there in the VGA boards... it would be interesting to know!!
my 2 cents
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i think commodores biggest mistake was not pushing the a3000ux amiga could have been were every unix and linux system and server is right now. but commodore screwed up big time, and never followed up
yeah, i think there was another point where some big company was looking at Workbench2 and the 3000/UX, as it was the only true 32bit pre-emptive yadda yadda yadda operating system on the scene at the time, and offered big $$$ to commodore to license it and the hardware. commodore turned them down basicly by slamming the door in their face, so they had to carry on releasing their unix systems with HP/UX, and their workstation systems had to run something call windows NT3.51....
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Yeah that is not true, they had an entire special dealer network of Amiga Unix dealers and special sales staff in this country. It was about half the cost of a competing Sun system. The thing is back then people bought Unix boxes very different today (linux was just a glimmer in someone's eye. The HP offer you mention doesn't really characterize Commodore's relationship with HP..
The were other issues like how a 68030 or 68040 would compete head-on with a SparcStation for CPU power. A major university in my area was considering purchase of Amiga Unix boxes and it almost happened. However since Commodore sold everything at bargain basement prices they couldn't afford to LOWER the price and when the other workstation companies were presented with their customers going to a "commodore" option they lowered their price or "donated" machines to schools to keep the marketshare.
So Commodore already swimming in red-ink had problems competing. The schools still went with Amigas but they wanted the ones with genlocks and multimedia production capability. Not the ones with Unix and the A2410 graphics cards which gave Amiga better resolution but removed the multimedia and video capabilities.. And kept their more high-end sparcs and used the "Commodore option" as leverage to get machines with more perceived CPU power..
Windows NT 3.51 was the windows NT multi-tasking kernal running ontop a single tasking windows 3.1 desktop. It was powerful thanks to the ex-digital folks that made the underlying technology but it wasn't till 96-97 that it started gaining steam. Way after Commodore's started demise..
So don't BLAME Commodore for this, they tried hard.. Also the amazing thing about most people chiming in with postings is they are talking about products that came 4-5 years if not 6 or 7 later than the Amiga (ECS, AGA)..
It's been years guys, but get your timelines right.. The Sega Genesis would have been at this same time line (if not a little after). Also everything was planar even most 8bit color vga cards till way after 1996. I know I used to work on windows software for them and at the time even into the first release of Windows 95 some didn't have a BitBlt function..
Oh and for the record Andy Warhol used Graphicraft not Deluxe Paint (it didn't exist at the time). Graphicraft became an Aegis product called images if I remember correctly.
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@darkcoder
EGA modes (16 colors) were often planar modes but there were also some chunky 16 col modes.
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ok cool. i was just under the impression, that when DEC were looking for an operating system and they saw amigaOS release 2. then asked to license it for their system. they would have paid for it and developed it for the alpha chip in house. done a little looking and i don't think it releated to AmigaUX just release 2 for a A3000...
i didn't know about the dealer network either.
sorry if i get a little muddled, but i'm trying to remember from a long time ago with no reference documentation to read up on..
one of those, what might have been.
wish some of my schools got amigas. all we had were RM nimbuses 80/186 running "lemons" or "trains". bleh :-(
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RM nimbuses 80/186 and BBC model Bs. AFAIK my primary school still uses them
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wish some of my schools got amigas. all we had were RM nimbuses 80/186 running "lemons" or "trains". bleh :-(
Yeah, me too, my "primary school" had an MSX-2, not that bad though, better than a BBC or 8086, but still...
I even wish the Amiga was more popular here in the Netherlands, stupid dutchies with their Nintendo's :crazy:
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Morax wrote:
I think the whole thing is just because lack of marketing and advertising. And about Amiga's beginning to become dated in the early 90's, compared to other hardware. Even if they DID make computers wich were a match for PC's of that time, or even the SNES, they wouldn't have come far by lack of marketing...
Both Atari and Commodore had these issues, they both had poor marketing and while they had good low end machines, when it came to higher end machines their specs looked a bit weak by the early 90's