Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: runequester on February 03, 2011, 11:52:04 PM
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Inspired by the other thread..
Here's the ground rules: Speculate pointlessly about how to keep Commodore alive.
Suggestions should be at least somewhat realistic, and we assume that management is actually sane rather than trying to leech the company for funds as quickly as possible.
My random suggestions:
Advertise furiously. Its 1985 and you need to get across to everybody just what you have on hand. Compare mercilessly to the IBM's, Macs and ataris. Show them side by side.
Get more software developers onboard. Commodore wasn't terrible at this, but try to lure developers of PC office software onboard to get more stuff like amiga version of Wordperfect.
Do whatever is possible to keep costs of expansions down. In the end, amiga expansions weren't that unreasonable compared to PC stuff, but for a PC or Mac owner, adding a 700 dollar expansion to a 2000 dollar machine seemed reasonable in comparison. A 700 dollar expansion to a 600 dollar amiga felt like a ripoff even if it wasn't.
Limit ECS to the 3000. The cheap wedge machines dont need it.
As might be known, I rather like AGA. It'd have been nice if it could have been out a year earlier though, and there obviously needs to be something else on its way to replace it.
A better sound chip is priority though.
Ignore the CDTV. This is hard to tell in hindsight, but the world isn't ready for that stuff. Go with the CD thing though, and push to have CD ROMs accepted as a common expansion for amiga's. Push and encourage game developers to use them.
Cut down on the number of models: The 500+, 1500 and 2500 doesn't need to exist. Neither does the 030 version of the 4000.
The 600 should have remained the originally intended 300. Make it 1 meg ram, and limit other expansions. Ditch PCMCIA from it. If it can be made reasonably cheaper than the 500 with it, keep the hard drive interface.
3000 and 4000 comes with fast RAM on board, even a tiny bit.
1200 comes with 2 megs of fast RAM. If at all possible, take a line from the Falcon and use an 030, or a higher clocked 020.
Alternatively keep the 1200 with the same 020/14 and offer a beefier version with 030 and more RAM included (the one place where I'd offer up an additional model)
Consider VGA output and scan doubling internal, if it can be done cost effectively.
Dont worry about clone PC's. Put the weight completely behind amiga. In some cases, this involves subsidizing things that will drive sales of machines (f.x. expansion cards)
CD32. No clue. It seems to have sold well. Make it very ready for expansion as consoles are a super competitive market.
Blah blah blah :)
Share yours or tell me why mine are retarded :D
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Skip ECS and AGA entirely - introduce Hombre in 1991 and destroy Intel/MS and Apple entirely. Build a 17" 1084 Flatscreen CRT that can handle the Hombre displays. Build a machine that puts OCS and equivalent ROMS on a Zorro card for backward compatibility. Push the PPC line early.
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Your mention of hombre reminds me of the talk about "ranger".
A chipset that isn't as many colours on screen as VGA (256) is fine, if it can be out by 88 or 89.
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Wasn't the next killer graphics chipset called "hombre?"
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AAAARRRRGGGHHHH.... :(
You Did It... You Rotter... :(
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Wasn't the next killer graphics chipset called "hombre?"
it was. Ranger was supposedly created on paper by Jay Miner but rejected by Commodore due to [insert conspiracy here]
AAAARRRRGGGHHHH.... :(
You Did It... You Rotter... :(
:D
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Ranger was finished, the price of VRAM was the reason it could never be used before 1994ish on anything but a £2000 top of the line machine like the A4000/040. The article with the interview with Jay was posted on here with 3 page scans last year and he says it was finished.
Firstly do NOT stop promoting the A1000 in 1986 waiting for the identically performing A500 and A2000 until late 87! Keep the momentum up and shove it up Steve Jobs gay ass :)
Secondly do NOT force us into 7mhz for 7 years. Instead of blowing profits on an absolutely pathetic and useless ECS upgrade put the money towards a fast CPU and OCS with more chip ram. Super Denise was a complete waste of R&D.
Thirdly do NOT think that A1200+CD = SNES beater. AGA had OCS A1000 sound, 16 colour parallax dual playfield and rubbish sprites. Blitter was barely faster. CD32 killed Commodore off, the final nail in the coffin.
Instead of CD32 get the bloody A1400 prototype into production FAST. Scrap the 4000/030....waste of time for the mass market and too slow and expensive to compete with 486 machines by 1993/4 which were half the price. A1400 = 2mb chip + 2mb fast, 28mhz 020, AGA, AKIKO and in a stylish A3000 style case. WIN! A1800 = same plus CD-ROM. A1400 = same speed as A4000/030 but HALF THE PRICE :)
That is all, the rest involves a blow torch, a pair of pliers, some rusty nails and a huge sledge hammer in a locked room alone with Medhi Ali :roflmao:
NB Hombre = Saturn levels of performance but at 200-300% the cost of a £299 Sega Saturn. Waste of development time again. Just buy out a company and stick PPC+Bvision in A1x00 line and A4xxx line to compete with Pentium MMX in mid to late 90s. It's good enough to play Wipeout 2 and Quake so what the hell, no need for R&D money down the toilet.
Also don't piss off RJ Mical and Dave Needle and you would have ended up by 1989 with Sega style sprite scaling and 16bit PCM sound chipset (Lynx) AND later on you would have had 3DO chipset which wasn't bad. They designed both together after leaving Hi-Toro thanks to the nobjockey manager who sacked most of the A1000/OCS designers and made the crap [ie identical performance] A2000 3 years later.
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Never hire Bill Syndes or Mehdi Ali. Problem solved.
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Clones, cross license with atari, anything to make the platform dependant on just one company.
Back in the day people used to talk about the war between Atari, Apple, Commodore, and IBM. What they didn't realize was that it was really IBM and its clones, with all of their manufacturing capability, against everyone else. IBM was one of many.
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Thirdly do NOT think that A1200+CD = SNES beater. AGA had OCS A1000 sound, 16 colour parallax dual playfield and rubbish sprites. Blitter was barely faster. CD32 killed Commodore off, the final nail in the coffin.
There's a lot of misinformation about the CD32.
What killed Commodore is that they couldn't make enough CD32s.
And the fact that they weren't allowed to import products into the US in Christmas 1993.
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The A1200 was released at a time when the Playstation and Saturn were about to be released, and when CD-ROMS started becoming quite common on PC's.
The A1200 spec should have included:
50Mhz 68030 with MMU as standard
4MB Fast Ram as standard (8MB optional)
Buffered IDE as standard
VGA Out (Scandoubled/Flickerfixed) as standard
CD-ROM as standard
Better graphics custom chips with basic 3D support
Better sound custom chips
Microphone input
With this setup the A1200 would have been a little more expensive but it would have blown the competition away.
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It was still the early age of home computers. Initially the Amiga was competing with the C64 and Atari plus a couple of others. By 94 it was Amiga vs PC vs Mac, with vanilla gamers going back to the console already. So maybe you've got 100k+ who actually want Amiga as a home computer. You would have to divide that into 2 preferably 3 system price points...
It probably would have been better to stick with big boxes (desktop/tower) this would have been a lot cheaper at the time. Maybe they could have copied the PC clone model: cheap looking, but powerful. I think what gave the PC it's final boost into orbit was the vast available cheap 2nd hand systems, if we had held out 3 more years we would have gained some users buying 2nd hand.
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I going to go for a more realistic approach of what could off happened/been done.
Sell the entire State side of the business, no Commodore USA/International, make the German Commodore HQ and maybe keep the UK HQ as well as during the closure of Commodore these two areas of Commodore where making a profit and they had quite a market still in Gemany and the Uk, both in the PC and Amiga business, so make the company more European focus and concentrate on marketing the machine there, still sell to the USA but only what's popular, first make the CD-rom add on for A1200, with complete Cd32 support,continue to market and sell cd32 as along as profitable, but get out of the games console market as soon as it not. introduce a Walker type product by 1995, same specs really, (68030, FPU, 2mb chip, 4mb Fast, AGA chip set, Cd-Rom, 250mb HD, Disk Drive, CPU / Zorro / PCI Slots) maybe to offer a lowest possible cost entry to Amiga do a version with out a Hard drive try and aim for that magic £399.99 price point, maybe approach ID to make Doom and Myth port to launch with the walker to prove it can do game like that (I think this would help convince people that Amiga could still do game, game market/home market was bigger in Europe for Amiga remember) also give developers of say Wordworth and their office sweep some money to ensure Windows office formats are supported and make a big deal about it is compatible, also start to sell just motherboards of the Amiga products so users and companies could develop their own Amiga. Maybe the A5000 could be the same board as the Walker with just a high end 040 or 060 added and 8gb+ fast mem to it, Maybe as well continue to try and make a low cost A1200 machine as possible and start marketing that in the Asian and Chinese markets might have been some big money in that. While all thats going on develop a real next gen Amiga, say similar to what the Amiga MCC was going to be and carry on to rule the world!
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FYI @ above 32-bit processors are maxed out at 4 GBytes RAM.
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Matt H sums up the main point :)
Bill Syndes and his 'PCJnr' ideas killed the A600/A1200
I mean, we are getting use out of PCMCIA now, but it was a (very expensive) white elephent then. The money should have went on fast ram/processor. And they should have had high density floppies and a slimline CDROM slot.
And Mehdi Ali scuppered research money for AAA.
quoting Haynie 'revolutionary if released in 1990, pretty cool in 1992, ok in 1994' -bang goes your 16bit sound, chunky, and HAM10, 24bit hybrid mode, 4mb floppies etc.
Other things i'd change:
--Release the A500 first, give Atari and the other formats a severe kicking earlier on.
--Realise the Amiga is the only egg you have left in your basket, and throw money at it.
--Realise your mid way between consoles and PC's (for wedge Amigas at least) emulate both, buy the best games developers (get some exclusives), make sure you have a good office suite.
--Stop making them baige boxes! your not a PC manufacturer, your used by artists, musicians, gamers and hobbyists. Stand out from the crowd!
--If your going to update to ECS, make it worth updating to.
--Don't sack the original Amiga team, they had more good ideas in one product than commodore had in it's whole history. Some of the stuff Mical and Needle went on to do, we could have had!
But really, If we could change history, i'd have commodore not getting hold of Amiga at all. They did not understand it or promote it enough, or spend enough money on its development.
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Don't run a business "close to the edge."
Separate your R&D into venture capital.
Cut out the MM Fat.
Don't wait 6 years to bring out a "new" machine.
Know your market niche.
Be good to your Mother.
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Here's a what if for you: What if Amiga had went the operating system and software route (productivity and games) and dumped hardware and supported multiple platforms (including x86)?
Maybe then we wouldn't be stuck with the crappy Microsoft software that we have today and instead of them owning the market, it would be Amiga OS.
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I played ADoom on my 030 equipped Amiga 1200 yesterday. And it played just as good as Doom played on the PC back then.
IF Doom had been released for the Amiga at the same time as on the PC, I do think Commodore would have lasted longer and perhaps gotten enough money to get new chipset and stuff out. Doom sold PC:s!
Doom was probably the one and only reason that killed the Amiga 1200 so fast. Everyone I knew switched from their newly bought Amigas to PC when it came out...
Oh well.. playing ADoom made me somewhat angry about everything. Impressive version, but it makes you sad too when you think about what would have happened if it was released on the Amiga too...
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- Split Amiga into two divisions: Graphics card and Computer.
- Sell Gfx Card to IBM PCs & Others.
- Use funds to aggressively develop card.
- Continue to develop Amiga computer using advancing graphics.
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I played ADoom on my 030 equipped Amiga 1200 yesterday. And it played just as good as Doom played on the PC back then.
IF Doom had been released for the Amiga at the same time as on the PC, I do think Commodore would have lasted longer and perhaps gotten enough money to get new chipset and stuff out. Doom sold PC:s!
Doom was probably the one and only reason that killed the Amiga 1200 so fast. Everyone I knew switched from their newly bought Amigas to PC when it came out...
Oh well.. playing ADoom made me somewhat angry about everything. Impressive version, but it makes you sad too when you think about what would have happened if it was released on the Amiga too...
The problem was that you couldn't convince someone to buy an Amiga for games because no games were written for a 25mhz 030 Amiga until early '96. A lot of the market is permanently lost to PC. Then in 96 the internet was the big seller.
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Crunch point was the A1200, which did not meet expectations. A lot of my friends who had held on to their A500/+ switched after seeing how undernourished it was. Selling a machine that is hobbled to half speed out of the box goes way beyond dumb.
the sprite scaling the lynx got would have been handy for this, as would the 3DO tech. All of which was developed by original Amiga staff that short sighted commodore let go.
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- Split Amiga into two divisions: Graphics card and Computer.
- Sell Gfx Card to IBM PCs & Others.
- Use funds to aggressively develop card.
- Continue to develop Amiga computer using advancing graphics.
Very good suggestion!
I'd also add... dump AGA, Hombre or whatever not and as of 1200(which would then be a desktop, not a AIO) use commodity PC hardware cards.
Custom chipsets only for consoles(this way, the historical 1200 could be made into a cheapish console)
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Well, had such a path been adopted, I doubt that you would have seen any of those things, but this is all just speculation. We might as well as "how many Amigas could fit on the head of a pin?" :)
But all arguments in this thread benefit from hindsight. I don't think, back then, anyone appreciated fully how aggressive PC development was to become or fully appreciated the implications of Moore's law.
Two cents.
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I played ADoom on my 030 equipped Amiga 1200 yesterday. And it played just as good as Doom played on the PC back then.
IF Doom had been released for the Amiga at the same time as on the PC, I do think Commodore would have lasted longer and perhaps gotten enough money to get new chipset and stuff out. Doom sold PC:s!
Doom was probably the one and only reason that killed the Amiga 1200 so fast. Everyone I knew switched from their newly bought Amigas to PC when it came out...
Oh well.. playing ADoom made me somewhat angry about everything. Impressive version, but it makes you sad too when you think about what would have happened if it was released on the Amiga too...
An 030 plays doom quite well indeed.
I can't get behind "doom killed the amiga" though. Doom was released in the winter of 93. By then, Commodore had already f'ed themselves beyond recovery.
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Well, had such a path been adopted, I doubt that you would have seen any of those things, but this is all just speculation. We might as well as "how many Amigas could fit on the head of a pin?" :)
But all arguments in this thread benefit from hindsight. I don't think, back then, anyone appreciated fully how aggressive PC development was to become or fully appreciated the implications of Moore's law.
Two cents.
spot on with the 'head of a pin' :)
As for some of the arguments on here, they date from the actual era- not hindsight, and some from the engineers on the ground at the time.
The PC did not move that fast, anything it did, commodore could have bought off the peg as well. And moore's law was a known quantity.
It's more to do with faults at commodore's end (and atari before them) than the superfast PC dev. Besides, consoles had as much as an impact, if not more.
Sure, some of these responses are just blowing smoke...but I smoke, so that's fine!
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Commodore could have done what many companies have done since. Negotiate with creditors and file for Bakruptcy and reorganize management and put together a plan that would convince banks to keep them aflot. By the time Commdore was in trouble the computer industry had decided it wanted to be a Windows world. Any financial or tech experts likely consulted by bankers that could have proived a bailouy no doubt would advise that Commodore was becoming a computer company of the past.
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These threads appear every so often, sometimes without saying that you're meant to be going back in time to change things! There's always someone that thinks that CD-ROM drives were mass produced in 1992, and cheap!
Anyway, what I think is ...
The C64 was a major success, but what were they thinking with the Plus4? The Plus4 should have been a C64 with a faster CPU (2MHz for example), 128KB, 3.5" floppy and an enhanced VIC-II - maybe not to the level of the VIC-III that was never released, but I'm sure some extra colours wouldn't have gone amiss, nor an 80-column mode. This could have replaced the C64 in due course, whilst also being an affordable C64 upgrade for current owners during the years that the Amiga was quite a bit more expensive.
As regards the Amiga - the A1000 should have been promoted heavily. The A2000 should have had a faster 68000. The A500+ and A600 should have had faster 68000s. The A1200 should have come with fast RAM (1MB + 1MB). There should have been an A1400 with 28MHz 68020 and 4MB.
And they shouldn't have sacked all the engineers when they took over Amiga. Idiots.
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Commodore could have done what many companies have done since. Negotiate with creditors and file for Bakruptcy and reorganize management and put together a plan that would convince banks to keep them aflot. By the time Commdore was in trouble the computer industry had decided it wanted to be a Windows world. Any financial or tech experts likely consulted by bankers that could have proived a bailouy no doubt would advise that Commodore was becoming a computer company of the past.
If Apple could stick around, no reason Commodore could, provided better management had occured.
Of course, by 94 when you are closing the doors, it's too late :)
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The A1200 was released at a time when the Playstation and Saturn were about to be released, and when CD-ROMS started becoming quite common on PC's.
The A1200 spec should have included:
50Mhz 68030 with MMU as standard
4MB Fast Ram as standard (8MB optional)
Buffered IDE as standard
VGA Out (Scandoubled/Flickerfixed) as standard
CD-ROM as standard
Better graphics custom chips with basic 3D support
Better sound custom chips
Microphone input
With this setup the A1200 would have been a little more expensive but it would have blown the competition away.
PSX launch = Sept. 9, 1995
In 1992/3
4mb RAM = £100-200
CD-ROM = £200ish
3D hardware acceleration = non existent before PSX/SATURN. Jaguar had none, 3DO also very late 1993 & $700
What C= should have done is put 1 SIMM slot or something for Sept 92 A1200 launch to allow 2/4mb Fast ram and leave trapdoor.
Cd32 = stillborn concept, £99 SNES = superior machine. A1400 with 28mhz 020/4mb/AKIKO @£399 IN 1993 was the machine we all wanted. CD1200 for £500 in 1993/94 would have wiped the floor with £1000-1500 486 4mb CD+soundcard PC. 56mhz 020 later??
Also Commodore should never have stopped their PC models, C= used to be a trusted name in corporate circles in the 80s.
So to recap
failures(R&D costs)
ECS DENISE/2MB AGNUS in 1MB A500/600.... complete waste of time
C16 & Plus/4 rubbish that was intended to replace VIC20 NOT C64
C128/C128D overpriced 8bit crap vs Atari 520STM @ £349 + £100 FDD
CD32 (400 bucks for inferior gamesto 16bit SEGA/Nintedo
Potential company saviours
A500 style machine in 85 to compliment A1000 in shops.
Jay Miner's Amiga games console
14mhz 68000 in 500plus without ECS
Commodore LCD completed prototype
A1000PN portable Amiga planned
A1400 and A1400CD completed prototype in classy 3 box design
AA+ chipset for 95 to replace AGA
Dual Paula on A1200/4000 .... technically simple and instant 8ch stereo sound
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The problem was that you couldn't convince someone to buy an Amiga for games because no games were written for a 25mhz 030 Amiga until early '96. A lot of the market is permanently lost to PC. Then in 96 the internet was the big seller.
Also 030 = rubbish. 020 @28mhz in Blizzard 1220 proved this. 1993 PC 486 33mhz 4mb = £600 with monitor. A1200+25mhz 030 4mb = £500-550 ;) 28mhz 020 = £100 less and same performance. £150 less if designed on motherboard like for A1400 prototype :)
A4000/030 = slowwwww and toooo expensive for A1200/500 market hence PC dominated.
£500 A1400 4mb 28mhz 020 desperately needed by C= users in late 93. A1400 sales figures=better games option.
edit remember 486=040 levels of performance. 030 was a terrible minor improvement in performance/mhz for general gaming CPU. 486 FPU was awesome too btw not that gaming uses FPU.
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Never found a PC at that price point in those days. Maybe it was different in the UK. Our first PC was about the equivalent of 1200 us dollars in 98 or 99, and that was the cheapest piece of crap the store had.
As an aside, once PCI became a standard, commodore if still around could have jumped on it, to take easy advantage of cards like the voodoo. 3D gaming for the win.
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CD32 (400 bucks for inferior gamesto 16bit SEGA/Nintedo
Dave Haynie disagrees with you, for what its worth :)
Apparently the CD32 sold well, at least in the UK and had developer interest. He pinned the fact they couldn't produce enough of them for the 93 christmas season as a big reason Commodore didn't have enough cash flow to stay alive.
Yeah, it'd have needed significant upgrade quick, but that was doable.
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I think that Commodore since the early 80s lacked focus. They would never decide to attack one particular market, but have wasted funds chasing everything....the 8-bits, the Amiga, the PC, the media center / set top box, the console market.
I think they would have done much better especially in the 90s, had they've decided to focus on one market and push heavily into it, be it Amiga or the PC clones.
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Also 030 = rubbish. 020 @28mhz in Blizzard 1220 proved this. 1993 PC 486 33mhz 4mb = £600 with monitor. A1200+25mhz 030 4mb = £500-550 ;) 28mhz 020 = £100 less and same performance. £150 less if designed on motherboard like for A1400 prototype :)
A4000/030 = slowwwww and toooo expensive for A1200/500 market hence PC dominated.
£500 A1400 4mb 28mhz 020 desperately needed by C= users in late 93. A1400 sales figures=better games option.
edit remember 486=040 levels of performance. 030 was a terrible minor improvement in performance/mhz for general gaming CPU. 486 FPU was awesome too btw not that gaming uses FPU.
never saw a pc new for that price. iv'e got copies of ACE magazines and they are never under a grand.
even when i got a pc years later, it was still 800 quid. agree with the 020 though,not sure the 030 was ever all that.
as for A1200 with an 28 020, ditch the pcmcia and it would free up some cash. I read years ago it cost almost $45 wholesale for that part.
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Out of curiosity. whats the fastest the 020s were ever clocked at?
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If Jack Tramiel met someone else than Irving Gould to help him stay afloat, there would have never been Atari (Jack Tramiel) to compete with Commodore.
The Amiga market killed Amiga
Price gouging from third party developers
Nonstandard Amigas due to Amigas constantly being upgraded (the Amiga 500 didn't have a hard drive).
Forced people from the C-64 market who were at a lower economic level to compete with ever evolving prices in the Amiga market which was much higher and broke users at a lower economic level.
Commodore should have done the first two layoffs earlier.
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Get more software developers onboard. Commodore wasn't terrible at this, but try to lure developers of PC office software onboard to get more stuff like amiga version of Wordperfect.
They got WordPerfect. What more do you want?
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I mean, we are getting use out of PCMCIA now, but it was a (very expensive) white elephent then. The money should have went on fast ram/processor. And they should have had high density floppies and a slimline CDROM slot.
I disagree. PCMCIA slot was much better idea than any proprietary expansion slot. It is just that A600/A1200 was never big success comparable to Amiga 500.
HD floppies could have been nice bonus but it would have been outdated by CDROM/CDRW.
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Though one, but let's give it a go.
First of all like AmigaNG I would ditch the plan for a USA HQ.
UK and Germany, combined with the Netherlands was by far the better option.
So I would have the UK as HQ, Germany for production and distribution.
Netherlands also for distribution to like North and South America, Asia and Australia, while Germany focuses on Europe.
I also would have started with finding partners and get them on the inside working with the Amiga team, like GVP, Phase 5 and all others.
After the A1000 I would have skipped ECS for the A500 and went for AGA right away.
They were already drawing up the plans in the early 80's.
I would have more focus and ideas on Workbench, keeping it fresh and modern.
I also would have fitted every model with at least 4MB's of fast ram and got rid of the 2MB chip limit.
Following the market with the introduction of new memory modules, I would have integrated these in newer models right away.
Straight away I would have combined chips into 1 chip, start making it smaller and if possible cheaper to produce.
With the introduction of newer pc's I would have integrated those connectors and bus bridged to the Amiga side, making it also capable of running DOS and later Windows.
With the introduction of CDROM I would have fitted every model standard with CDROM.
For the top models like the A3000/4000 I would have stuck to towers like the A3500 and A4000T.
The top models should have gone with the pc standard, thus making PCI the standard bus later.
Of course sound was what an Amiga was very good at, so I would have made it with the better sound, from 8 to 16 bits and then to 24.
Maybe even do the impossible and make it 32.
Following the pc trend, I would have started moving production to Asia and then press on with graphics and sound.
Then just maybe, things would have looked a lot more different and the Commodore Amiga might have been alongside the pc just like Mac's do these days.
Maybe even better, but I would have doubt it, Microsoft Windows and Office and all others software was a far bigger success than anything else and Workbench would have had to do a lot better than that.
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spot on with the 'head of a pin' :)
As for some of the arguments on here, they date from the actual era- not hindsight, and some from the engineers on the ground at the time.
The PC did not move that fast, anything it did, commodore could have bought off the peg as well. And moore's law was a known quantity.
It's more to do with faults at commodore's end (and atari before them) than the superfast PC dev. Besides, consoles had as much as an impact, if not more.
Sure, some of these responses are just blowing smoke...but I smoke, so that's fine!
Not to be argumentative, but... :)
As the PC industry began to specialize, it did move faster and faster. Graphics card development accelerated when certain companies made it their sole focus. Commodore, on the other hand, simply tried to do everything at once. Not a good strategy back then or even now. Which is why my suggestion was that it split off Amiga graphics into a specialized company.
And, with regards to Moore's law, I said "nobody _fully appreciated it_ back then." In other words, I was referring to the fact that Commodore didn't fully appreciate it, so instead of focusing on where they had the advantage (graphics) they tried to do everything.
Not claiming your points are invalid, just wanted to point that out.
Super off-topic: I notice your from Northhampton, UK. I've been to that part of the world. Beautiful country.
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The custom chipset has been mentioned a few times recently on a couple threads and I thought I would comment on it.
The custom chipset wasn't the reason Commodore, or the Amiga had trouble, because it was Commodores chipset, as in not only did they own it they owned Mos tech which produced it all the way up to AGA.
"Vertical Integration" was the reason the Vic and C64 were less expensive than the competition, had generally better chipsets, and the c64 had a custom 6502. It was the reason Commodore could take on the Amiga chipset in the first place and sell for less than most of the competition, whilst having better features etc.
The problem came because Commodore didn't put enough money into Mos tech. By '85 rather than produce a 16bit cpu they went with a 68000 (the 16bit 65816 which is 6502 compatible works pretty dang good in the Apple IIgs and snes) And by the time AGA came around they couldn't fabricate some of the chips so they had to outsource.
So much of the cost savings of having your own chipfab were negated by the early '90s and commodore had to charge more and more while giving less and less in features. The cpu manufacturer of most of the 80s computers didn't plan ahead. The computer company that holds a guiness world record for the most systems sold of any single computer line, died.
As much as I like the 68000 the Amiga should have had a 65816 style 16bit chip. By the 90's they should have transitioned over to a 32bit 6502 compatible risc chip. All the ram and chipset components should have been Mos tech produced. And the Amiga chipset and OS should have been licensed out and chip fab services as well.
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My answer to the post above from the other thread... it's probably more appropriate to discuss this here
Whatever happened to Terbium?(WDC's 32 bit 6502 evolution)
But your idea is interesting... 65816 was shown to be roughly comparable to early 68K Motorolas. It's probably much cheaper as well. But since Lorraine was based on 68000 it would mean building a whole new chipset basically. I do not think that's likely to have been approved.
But 65816 maybe should have been used in the 128 or a similar C= branded machine.
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Thats the thing though, the chipset probably wouldn't have had to be changed much at all. And they should have been able to handle it easily. The 68000 has a 16bit interface and kinda funky control bus setup but nothing too weird. I have seen 68020's connected to Apple II's so even if a little glue logic was required for OCS it could be completely fixed by ECS.
The amiga could have been a c65 in 1985 with the amigaos. Kindof like the Apple IIgs. and the gs sold more than the mac did until Apple killed it.
I don't think the terbium got enough funding and died. WDC does embedded stuff now mostly i think.
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What would have kept Commodore alive? Tough question. I think its a range of things
1. Not having paid so much for Amiga. I know, we all love Amiga and are probably happy that they got the money per share they got. But Commodore should have known they were in a weak position. They didnt have the money to pay Atari and were about to lose their work. They did not have to pay so much for Amiga which would have left more money for advertising which is something that would have helped more more product as well as for further development post aquisition.
2. Not sitting on development while other companies are moving forward around you. Amiga 1000, 500/2000, 3000 all are not a large change from the 1000. The 3000 timeframe should have have been when the 1200/4000 were released. Histories seem to show that they could have been released in that timeframe but mismanagement caused delays. 1200/4000 in the 3000 timeframe could have put the AAA machines in the 1200/4000 timeframe and Hombre/move to standardizided PCI type hardware in the bankruptcy timeframe. Not sitting on the original Jay Miner group chipset for so long would have kept Amiga competitive and ahead of Mac/PC for a much longer time.
3. Don't compete with people with lowest install base. The fighting with Atari was a fight for last place. Winning against the person at the back of the race still puts you at the back. Amiga 1000 should have been positioned against the Mac at a minimum (color and multitasking vs black and white and single tasking) not the IIGS and STs which were on life support from their birth.
4. Don't cancell things that will sell! When your own people are already getting orders for the LCD which is not on sale yet it shows there is a market hungry for it. Don't decide based on a competitor not to bother selling it when you already have spent to make it and almost have it ready for market.
5. Don't compete against yourself. C64 vs Plus/4, Amiga 2500 vs 3000, 500 vs 600. They should have been more carefull not to position products in the same market for the same price, and not even waste time developing products that would end up if released in the same price point and market C65 vs 500. It confuses customers and a confused customer is free to go elsewhere.
6. Educate your customers. "an educated consumer is our best customer". Don't assume people will realize what good multimedia, multitasking, Object Oriented Programming (Amiga Vision) etc is. Teach them what these things are and why they need it, and that your competition doesn't have it. Don't just expect the word to sell your product for you.