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Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: Digiman on April 18, 2011, 09:31:02 PM
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Because to me it was. A500 was a 1 month project for these guys not 12, and these are the designers who could improved things much better than the ECS/AGA delayed chipset surely.
C= West Chester and new man at the helm in 86 got it more wrong than anyone else IMO.
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Is this a question, or merely an expression of ones thoughts... :)
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Because to me it was. A500 was a 1 month project for these guys not 12, and these are the designers who could improved things much better than the ECS/AGA delayed chipset surely.
C= West Chester and new man at the helm in 86 got it more wrong than anyone else IMO.
Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda. Everyone knows that hindsight is 20/20.
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Someones been reading Brian Bagnall's book ;)
Both teams had an immense amount of talent - just think what could have been achieved if they had been working together and the engineers were in charge of what happened to the company!
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Because to me it was. A500 was a 1 month project for these guys not 12, and these are the designers who could improved things much better than the ECS/AGA delayed chipset surely..
Yep. I think you're correct. To me, it signalled a lack of seriousness towards research and research is exactly what was needed to keep the Amiga ahead of everyone else.
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Because to me it was. A500 was a 1 month project for these guys not 12, and these are the designers who could improved things much better than the ECS/AGA delayed chipset surely.
C= West Chester and new man at the helm in 86 got it more wrong than anyone else IMO.
The only reason the A500 was in West Chester was because the Los Gatos team rejected the "Fat" architecture as unworkable. They were wrong. And you clearly have not the slightest idea of how custom chip development is done, or how long it takes.
The problems with delivering new chips on time was never one of ability... we had in West Chester chip designers every bit as good as those in Los Gatos (and no, that's not me). The problem was high level, and corporate: Commodore spent big money on executive's salaries, not technology.
And yes, "the new guy", Marshall Smith, was useless. But he wasn't running West Chester, he ran Commodore. Had they not closed Los Gatos, the same problems would have existed. Not to mention that Los Gatos didn't even have proper IC CAD systems until C= supplied them.... they were hardly setting any IC design records.
It's also the case that, while the Los Gatos office was closed, the team was not sacked. They were welcome in West Chester. But that did mean leaving California. Of course, actually having been there, I might have a slightly different prespective. But hey, if you think Atari and the Tramiels would have done better.... my advice: find some less mind-altering drugs. Or ask some of my good friends from Los Gatos Amiga how the "Handy" was treated at Atari.
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Not to say that you are wrong, Dave, because I don't think you are and LORD knows you're knowledge of both Commodore and hardware vastly outstrips mine, but... you don't really think that the loss of the Los Gatos team was ever a good idea, do you?
To me, the loss of the Los Gatos team was like Queen Isabella dumping Columbus for a skilled captain without the knowledge of the trade winds. The new captain might know how to manage his ship, but that doesn't mean he has the wherewithall to complete the voyage to the Americas.
I don't say this to lessen the contributions of yourself or the rest of the West Chester team, but the Los Gatos Team had not only intimate knowledge of the product but the vision for where it was to go, not to mention it was "their baby." :)
In normal business situations like this, most businesses _bend over backwards_ to keep their prime players around, including accomodating them from across the country.
From my -- admittedly less knowledgable point of view -- this seems to reflect that Commodore was more interested in applying the C64 model inspired by Tramiel to the Amiga than the cutting-edge hardware model that it deserved. They should have been applying a premium amount of money to keep their edge over the competition and this should have included sucking up to the Los Gatos team by whatever means necessary.
But, once again, I admit limitted knowledge on the subject. :)
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Commodore made a fundamental mistake when they decided to go low end.
They earned a "game machine" reputation, which, long-term, had no legs to stand on.
From this point of view Chuck Peddle was correct... keep the business side growing while developing the low end.
At an early stage, this might have made a difference against IBM and future clones, but that's looking back at things...
My $.02...
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Keeping the golden egg, and throwing out the goose is never a good idea.
Still, from what I remember, at least commodore kept them on for a while, and was willing to let them move to west chester. Jack Tramiel only wanted the design, not the team.
Dave points out that "we had in West Chester chip designers every bit as good as those in Los Gatos". Which is interesting, what would commodores plans have been if the Amiga had fallen through, what would the west chester guys have produced?
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The only reason the A500 was in West Chester was because the Los Gatos team rejected the "Fat" architecture as unworkable. They were wrong. And you clearly have not the slightest idea of how custom chip development is done, or how long it takes.
I've been playing with an A2000 recently and one thing I've been pondering is why the FAT agnus wasn't always 1mb chip ram, rather than 512k chip + c00000.
Was the FAT agnus a copy and paste of the thin agnus (plus stuff) and it just took time to extend the dma with extra address lines?
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I would have to agree with OP.
Dave Haynie..... "we had in West Chester chip designers every bit as good as those in Los Gatos"
If this is the case why was there zero improvement in useful aspects of OCS chipset in 1985-1991. As far as I can see all they added was 1mb Chip ram then 2mb (this can be useful yes especially 1mb) but hey Shadow of the Beast runs in 512kb doesn't it?
Other than that we got some crazy 4 colour screen modes and double PAL etc. I see no evidence of any attempt to improve parallax scrolling rather than the crippled 2x 8 colour dual playfield mode or 64 usable colours on screen or even a speeded up EHB mode to make it usable.
And also if this is true why was Commodore's answer to Atari ST the C128? Hardly Amiga 1000 chipset levels of genius? Let's face it if Commodore or Atari had not got hold of Amiga chipset then of the two machines which would people have bought for 400 bucks? Exactly! +4 was nothing special, the C128 made hardly any improvements to 1982 C64 as a games machine hell it couldn't even run VIC-II @ 2mhz in 128 mode and 2mhz compatible VDC had no sprites and no extra colours after 4 years etc.
Amiga was what stopped C= going bust after JT left, they were clueless beyond belief and projects that should have been canned made it into production.
To me it looks like the chip designers left at Commodore would have to reverse engineer the stuff, and they didn't get very far. And way before VGA 386/486 PC there were a few machines with 128 or 256 colours on screen around the time of A2000/500 so the writing was on the wall and we all know this is where we had to be (more than 32 colours on screen and better parallax) to compete with future machines.
The original designers came up with the following chipsets....
Ranger
Lynx
3DO
Which apart from VIC-II and SID Commodore engineers never really reached that level of technical superiority ever again really.
+4/C16 nothing special
C128 chipset less capable than similarly priced Atari ST with no custom chipset.
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What a lot of people seem to forget is that big corporations like Commodore were/are not run by the engineers - it's marketing and the accounts departments that have the final say.
I know - I've been there!
I'm sure if the CBM engineers were given free reign things would be very different today...
I'm also pretty sure that Dave Haynie knows what he's talking about...
Mike.
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I think what Dave is pointing out is that the ideas and expertise were there to develop the Amiga chipset (and I can believe that), the senior management were not keen to spend money on any new "Big Chips", so the WC team had to make inexpensive incremental upgrades to the chipset they had rather than anything new and exciting.
Having worked in a large organisation I know full well how good ideas and exciting new directions can be killed off by poor management.
It is my assessment of the situation, that the C= engineers did the best they could with the resources they had in a company with little vision and poor leadership. The tech industry moved too quickly for the Commodore, Atari and even the Apple management of the time could understand.
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Hmmm... methinks I'll let Toyah sum it up for me... ;)
[youtube]R1c1ed72arI[/youtube]
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I can't argue with that, and yes the ultimate blame does lay with with Commodore management. However I can't see any evidence from products outside the C64 and A1000 chipset that anything as good would ever happen again based on products/prototypes sold.
Cost/performance is the issue not ultimate performance too sure. Case in point, how difficult would it have been to put two Paula chips on the A4000/3000 motherboard for 8 channel sound? Given the price of these machines it should have been done (well a new sound chip to be honest but dual Paula would have been a cheap fix).
Hell working C65 prototype chipset had 256/4096 colours in 320x200 and pre-dated AGA didn't it?
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Ranger
Lynx
3DO
Which apart from VIC-II and SID Commodore engineers never really reached that level of technical superiority ever again really.
Most of the VIC-II and SID engineers had already left to form ensoniq by the mid '80's
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I can't argue with that, and yes the ultimate blame does lay with with Commodore management. However I can't see any evidence from products outside the C64 and A1000 chipset that anything as good would ever happen again based on products/prototypes sold.
You have no idea what projects were in development, what ideas were brought to the engineering management, what got cancelled, what got the green light only to be shelved once production costs became apparent.
Cost/performance is the issue not ultimate performance too sure.
Not sure what you are trying to say here, but Commodore strategy was low cost, high volume.
Case in point, how difficult would it have been to put two Paula chips on the A4000/3000 motherboard for 8 channel sound? Given the price of these machines it should have been done (well a new sound chip to be honest but dual Paula would have been a cheap fix).
That would be a nasty hack, which given Paula's intimate relationship with the system (interrupt controller etc) probably would have required a lot of work, just to make it work... Which would have added at least $10 BOM on to the design ($40 in retail), for some more sound channels, of which the Amiga already had more than most machines? How do you explain that to your manager?
In a company like Commodore, if something isn't broken... You don't fix it and you certainly don't make it more expensive.
Hell working C65 prototype chipset had 256/4096 colours in 320x200 and pre-dated AGA didn't it?
Never made it to production. It's a case in point, and is actually against your argument.
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With the extra hardware needed to kludge in an extra paula, it would probably have been cheaper to produce a new sound chip, especially as some work had already been done in that area.
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The saga continues with each reprint.
Can't disagree that it signalled a total lack of understanding of the technical detail and time required to develop something more than evolutionary.
A standard issue in many corporations today.
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Adding an extra Paula Sound Chip to just the A4000 as well as being impractical would also have made it incompatible with other Amiga models... :(
PS: Gertsy did John catch the 8:7am train !!! and where was he going ??? :D
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....
PS: Gertsy did John catch the 8:7am train !!! and where was he going ??? :D
He was going to a glass house to chuck some yonnies. Franko.. :)
Time to change that now that the who har is all over.
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What I want to know is where are the chipset designs ? Who would have them ? West Chester or los gatos ? or somewhere ?
What I cannot understand is why C< UK closed, when they were selling 'A1200's like hot cakes'. - and it was I remember.
Then C< UK management reverse their 3M bid - because they thought it was too low ( they could have won the bid as the only valid bid!)
PS - I think it was 3M :-)
anyway. clueless.
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What I want to know is where are the chipset designs ? Who would have them ? West Chester or los gatos ? or somewhere ?
What I cannot understand is why C< UK closed, when they were selling 'A1200's like hot cakes'. - and it was I remember.
Then C< UK management reverse their 3M bid - because they thought it was too low ( they could have won the bid as the only valid bid!)
PS - I think it was 3M :-)
anyway. clueless.
Yes it is sad, Commodore UK could have made the Amiga a success and it would probably still be around today, instead we got Escom who were pretty clueless, Gateway who never really gave a shit, then the worst scurge to affect the Amiga ever, Amiga Inc who are just evil.
What a sad, wasted opportunity. With CUK the Amiga development would have been moved to Europe, where the Amiga was really adopted and it could still be a mainstream, viable platform today, such a crying shame.
Personally I feel Bill McEwan is the person who was the worst ever for the Amiga though, Amiga Inc really killed the Amiga, it could have survived post-CBM with the right team, but Bill and AINC just hammered nail after nail into the coffin and did everything possible to kill it, who knows why. But AINC were the worst thing to ever happen to the Amiga, they really killed it off.
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Yes it is sad, Commodore UK could have made the Amiga a success and it would probably still be around today,
Commodore UK had more marketing sense than CBM, which isn't hard. They also had stacks of money from selling A500's by the truckload, to people who mostly used them for playing pirate games.
If Commodore UK had continued the way they were going then it would only have been a temporary stay of execution. As Commodore collapsed the games developers were already leaving for the new CD consoles (hoping for less piracy).
There wasn't much room for serious software either, there were a few niche markets that did ok for a while but you have to be pretty serious to drop a couple of grand for a Toaster/TBC/etc.
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Bout C= UK:
Never understood why people hold them in such high regard Mr Pleasance was really nothing more then the Bill&Barry-Show of that time. Lots of hot words, no real clue. The might have had the money to buy C=, but that would be just pennies compared to what would have been needed to get Amiga back on track.
If you said Samsung instead of Escom, or even VisCorp instead of GateWay we might have something to discuss, but C= UK NOT getting their bid in is one of the few things that went right in the past 20 years of Amiga.
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I see no evidence of any attempt to improve parallax scrolling rather than the crippled 2x 8 colour dual playfield mode or 64 usable colours on screen or even a speeded up EHB mode to make it usable.
I'm not going to argue that ECS wasn't underwhelming, but you make it sound like improving parallax scrolling or speeding up EHB is just a simple hack on top of the existing hardware. It's not. 6-bit video modes on OCS/ECS (EHB, HAM, and dual-playfield) already use so much memory bandwidth that they have to steal half of the memory cycles from the CPU for bitplane fetch (when the CPU is accessing chip RAM, that is.)
If you locked the CPU out of chip RAM entirely you could get eight bitplanes' worth of memory access and have a 4-bit dual-playfield mode like AGA, but then you're stuck with only accessing chip RAM in vertical blank - you couldn't update the screen, work on an offscreen buffer, or even load in new audio samples during the frame (and God help you if your program was actually executing from chip RAM.) That works for consoles like the Genesis because they use tile mode, but the Amiga is a pure bitmap machine, and that'd just be unworkable.
As for "speeding up EHB," what you'd want there is a faster blitter - which you wouldn't get, because the blitter needs those cycles that are being taken by the extra bitplanes just as much as the CPU does! Whatever its other shortcomings, AGA had the right idea with doubling the chip RAM bandwidth (for bitplane fetch, anyway) - it seems that some of the other proposed chipsets were going to take it even further, though.
Point is, this stuff doesn't just happen by designer fiat. It's plenty easy for us to see these things in hindsight (and it was probably pretty obvious to the people on the ground back in the day, too,) but the engineers had to deal not only with the challenges of improving an existing design without breaking compatibility, but the challenges of working around management (who care more about financials than usability) and marketing (who wouldn't know what a bitplane was if you shoved it in one of their assorted orifices.) Considering those limitations, it's a bit more forgivable that ECS was just OCS with some of the arbitrary limits taken off.
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And yes, "the new guy", Marshall Smith, was useless. But he wasn't running West Chester, he ran Commodore. Had they not closed Los Gatos, the same problems would have existed. Not to mention that Los Gatos didn't even have proper IC CAD systems until C= supplied them.... they were hardly setting any IC design records.
This thread is really interesting, but I'd like to request a point of clarification, if I may. I thought Thomas Rattigan was the new guy in 1986? Was it Smith or Rattigan responsible for closing that facility?
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but C= UK NOT getting their bid in is one of the few things that went right in the past 20 years of Amiga.
I don't know if I'd go that far, I think they'd have done a better job than escom did. Although it was nice to be able to walk into a high street and buy an amiga monitor, lugging it across town was less fun :D.
I think commodore uk could have done a better job in charge of R&D than cbm did as well.
They didn't have enough money to get the Amiga through 1995 when PS1 & Windows 95 owned the market.
I personally think that ECS was a waste of resources, FAT agnus should have allowed 2mb of chip ram from day one and then they should have moved straight onto something that allowed chunky pixels and up to 8mb chip ram. I believe it would have been possible if it hadn't been for all the bad management decisions.
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I personally think that ECS was a waste of resources, FAT agnus should have allowed 2mb of chip ram from day one and then they should have moved straight onto something that allowed chunky pixels and up to 8mb chip ram. I believe it would have been possible if it hadn't been for all the bad management decisions.
To be fair, the Chunky Pixel craze didn't really kick in (that is- become apparent that it was going to be the way to do things in Computer Games) until Doom in 93. (Wolfenstein was a sign, but Doom really did it).
ECS was released in 92.
It would be interesting to know whether Commodore was taking about Chunky designs at all seriously before that.
I agree, more chip RAM should have been an option.
desiv
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It's funny how after all this time folk still ask these questions and with the benefit of hindsight suggest a lot of what ifs and if only's... :)
We all know the story and who was to blame, it would be much better to support and encourage current & real Amiga teams & projects like NatAmi, AROS, MorphOS, MiniMig, X1000 etc... rather than mull over the past and sit here procrastinating on just what should have been done... :)
Hindsight and opinions of the past while interesting aint gonna benefit no-one in our dwindling community. Seems to me as much as I love everything Commodore & Amiga, that all the time taken to make these posts about the Amigas past history would be much better spent on encouraging the aforementioned "live" projects and keeping them in the spotlight and generally encouraging the few developers we have left... :)
Just my two bobs worth... ;)
(either that or bash the hell out of CUSA again just to liven the place up a wee bit... :D)
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...it would be much better to support and encourage current & real Amiga teams & projects like NatAmi, AROS, MorphOS, MiniMig, X1000 etc... rather than mull over the past and sit here procrastinating on just what should have been done... :)
We can't do both?? :)
I see this as the same type of interest in reading "alternate history" type books. What ifs...
It is fun to read a book that imagines that Babbages Difference Engine WAS built and used and there's a whole culture around it..
Doesn't mean I can't also SLAM Ada Lovelace as a really weak programmer..
er.. :confused:
That analogy didn't actually work very well.. But you get the point.. :roflmao:
desiv
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We can't do both?? :)
I see this as the same type of interest in reading "alternate history" type books. What ifs...
It is fun to read a book that imagines that Babbages Difference Engine WAS built and used and there's a whole culture around it..
Doesn't mean I can't also SLAM Ada Lovelace as a really weak programmer..
er.. :confused:
That analogy didn't actually work very well.. But you get the point.. :roflmao:
desiv
Very true... :D
And even with that analogy I get your point... ;)
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It would be interesting to know whether Commodore was taking about Chunky designs at all seriously before that.
Probably not and that is why they failed.
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we are well in to Amiga 'fantasy football' land with this thread (again!)....but it is Amiga.org...so why not? :)
I would probably not have bothered with ECS (!), and plowed all resources into AGA, bring it out better and earlier.
Instead, I'd have given ECS machines a HD disk drive, and more ram and a 14mhz 68k.You'd get better graphics, better sample quality and less disk swaps that way. Maybe some NV ram for game saves/direct WB boot sans floppy. That's it, and cost reduced OCS down to one chip.
Other upgrades could be done in software, by just nosing outside the company for five minutes. such as Bill Williams HAM for games mode, and use of TFMX or Octalyser for extra sound channels. These things already worked on OCS 7mhz. So your 14mhz OCS could advertise 256 col, 8 sound channels (just don't tell anyone it's software only).
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You have no idea what projects were in development, what ideas were brought to the engineering management, what got cancelled, what got the green light only to be shelved once production costs became apparent.
Not sure what you are trying to say here, but Commodore strategy was low cost, high volume.
That would be a nasty hack, which given Paula's intimate relationship with the system (interrupt controller etc) probably would have required a lot of work, just to make it work... Which would have added at least $10 BOM on to the design ($40 in retail), for some more sound channels, of which the Amiga already had more than most machines? How do you explain that to your manager?
In a company like Commodore, if something isn't broken... You don't fix it and you certainly don't make it more expensive.
Never made it to production. It's a case in point, and is actually against your argument.
All your comments go against you too. ;) I agree with A_N.
The c65 would have been a bottom feeder and yet had blitter and 256 col screens and A500 couldn't match chunk screens of C65. This added to your comment about how tricky 2nd Paula would have been is proof positive the people left had little idea how to improve OCS because I'm sure Miner/Needle/Mical trio wouldn't have taken 6 years for 50% improvement to 66% of the OCS chipset, Given Lynx & 3DO I'm sure they could have made something like AAA workable by 1992 as well. Sorry if this offends other engineers but Lynx battery powered chipset had sprite scaling/rotation....what did OCS Denise ever get replaced by? Exactly.
And actually 4 channels was just about fine in the 80s (even though 1979 Atari 400/800 had 4 too) but even then Archimedes/IIgs/Mac etc had much more sound channels as did some consoles and 4 is not even enough to replicate SFX+Music of md 80s arcade games. 10+ channels normal in 16bit consoles too by the time of Megdrive/SNES.
As for secret projects....based on how underwhelming AGA, AKIKO,VDC,TED were compared to talent responsible for SID,VIC,OCS well......explains a LOT, no disrespect but what Commodore employed was not at cutting edge genius level and regardless of costs C= were doomed whatever they did.
The truth is the guys who designed the legendary C64/OCS chipsets weren't even employed by Commodore a year later let alone their technical dominance emerge.
My comment about performance vs price/performance was after OCS C= never found anything like OCS/VIC+SID price performance as AAA = too expensive/performance. But then why should an A4000/040 have the same untouched 8bit sound chip as an A600 despite costing £1750 more? Ridiculous, I think $40 extra on a $3250 machine is a loss they could afford. Clueless.
And if you read EDGE #23 you will see the drop in profits is proportional to Amiga losing any technical edge on alternative hardware. They're lucky Archimedes games were programmed in an even worse way than US Gold Outrun. Archimedes wiped the floor with OCS ECS AND AGA .....even had better CPU than A1200 6 years before on Arch A310....and yet it was launched in 87 for less than A2000 from day one. Faster and 256 colour depth cued Zarch (Virus by Firebird on Amiga) games shows how far ahead Acorn was in 87 compared to new 32bit AGA in 1992 A1200!
So....pretty much my opinion is unwavering unless RJ Mical says otherwise seeing as Miner has passed away.
@Franko - general question to others who may agree or disagree :)
@everyone - YMMV
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The c65 would have been a bottom feeder and yet had blitter and 256 col screens and A500 couldn't match chunk screens of C65. This added to your comment about how tricky 2nd Paula would have been is proof positive the people left had little idea how to improve OCS because I'm sure Miner/Needle/Mical trio wouldn't have taken 6 years for 50% improvement to 66% of the OCS chipset, Given Lynx & 3DO I'm sure they could have made something like AAA workable by 1992 as well. Sorry if this offends other engineers but Lynx battery powered chipset had sprite scaling/rotation....what did OCS Denise ever get replaced by? Exactly.
And actually 4 channels was just about fine in the 80s (even though 1979 Atari 400/800 had 4 too) but even then Archimedes/IIgs/Mac etc had much more sound channels as did some consoles and 4 is not even enough to replicate SFX+Music of md 80s arcade games. 10+ channels normal in 16bit consoles too by the time of Megdrive/SNES.
My comment about performance vs price/performance was after OCS C= never found anything like OCS/VIC+SID price performance as AAA = too expensive/performance. But then why should an A4000/040 have the same untouched 8bit sound chip as an A600 despite costing £1750 more? Ridiculous, I think $40 extra on a $3250 machine is a loss they could afford. Clueless.
And if you read EDGE #23 you will see the drop in profits is proportional to Amiga losing any technical edge on alternative hardware. They're lucky Archimedes games were programmed in an even worse way than US Gold Outrun. Archimedes wiped the floor with OCS ECS AND AGA .....even had better CPU than A1200 6 years before on Arch A310....and yet it was launched in 87 for less than A2000 from day one. Faster and 256 colour depth cued Zarch (Virus by Firebird on Amiga) games shows how far ahead Acorn was in 87 compared to new 32bit AGA in 1992 A1200!
Lot of truth there, but a few not quite right
OCS sound was PCM sample based, most consoles were FM/PSG. SNES had proper PCM, megadrive had one PCM channel, but plenty of FM channels.
Archimedes were very powerfull, but processor driven. The CPU had to shoulder the weight of most of the tasks. It was not price comparable to other machines for running games, nor was the IIgs or Mac comparable to low end Amigas.
Of course once you get to high end, your comparisons with higher end mac/IIgs/kitchen sink are bang on. The chipset does not scale in it's abilities.
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Commodore UK had more marketing sense than CBM, which isn't hard. They also had stacks of money from selling A500's by the truckload, to people who mostly used them for playing pirate games.
If Commodore UK had continued the way they were going then it would only have been a temporary stay of execution. As Commodore collapsed the games developers were already leaving for the new CD consoles (hoping for less piracy).
There wasn't much room for serious software either, there were a few niche markets that did ok for a while but you have to be pretty serious to drop a couple of grand for a Toaster/TBC/etc.
true dude what comes down to is ibm compatible pcs have got the market for the biz use
in general to kkep compitblity with word ext got the games marekt well trully covered
Whats that leave consoles apprently sony wasint even going have console of there own
They made it for another company imagine commodore brought it
Mr haynie is cool i do wonder what happned to orginal people delvolped amiga
and whay the left the company oh yeah commodre brought the amiga but yuo thought
they wanted to be involved with here baby
seems to me you need leader to bring marketing and admin and engineers get there opio0ions and then make a descesion bit unfair calling anyone clueless negitve
sure they did there best should been guy top making right choices, but then maybe need some new guys in design to just have fresh ideas who knows bit late know hindight all can be
experst l whou7ld not be any good running amiga hehe , you have to be cold and clear thinking not get wraped up in emotion of the amiga to sometimes if get somone completly out the loop they going try ideas that might seem not amiga like but might worked for future
look phaze 5 did same goes for sam
steve jobs didnt just go no that anent mac way and hese moved it from being pc maker to
gaget maker too ipod ipad dude is good ideas guy for sure hope gets better too
seems i know hark on about this but you need a leader not a corpration
to bring about leading edge designs or just inique ideas
Mr honda was that in motorcycle world steve jobs bill gates etc
I think maybe sadley no matter what happned amiga was going go broke anyhow
Just its day was done everthing has a life to it even people
just enjoy what time it did have to shine and boy did it shine get on be postive
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We can't do both?? :)
I see this as the same type of interest in reading "alternate history" type books. What ifs...
It is fun to read a book that imagines that Babbages Difference Engine WAS built and used and there's a whole culture around it..
Doesn't mean I can't also SLAM Ada Lovelace as a really weak programmer..
er.. :confused:
That analogy didn't actually work very well.. But you get the point.. :roflmao:
desiv
yes u can if you want its free world apprently hehe
agree with franko thought too
yes talk about the past but not to point upsetting very people that put in blood sweet tears to make the hardware because if feel and am unamimous on this
To have opion is fine but unless u have abilty to do better better to close mouth
before talkie either that or buy something u think u like btter
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To be fair, the Chunky Pixel craze didn't really kick in (that is- become apparent that it was going to be the way to do things in Computer Games) until Doom in 93. (Wolfenstein was a sign, but Doom really did it).
ECS was released in 92.
It would be interesting to know whether Commodore was taking about Chunky designs at all seriously before that.
I agree, more chip RAM should have been an option.
desiv
Actually ECS was 1990. AGA was 92, which is probably what you meant :)
Doom was released the very end of 1993. By then, there wasn't really anything that could be done as the upper management had squandered it.
People like to jump on this or that technical detail to be the one true answer, but I dont think the answer lies there.
Watching the deathbed vigil, Haynie mentions that the 500 was still selling well when it was cancelled. CD32's sold very well, despite computer geeks being focused on specs. The problem was they couldn't get enough out there to sell.
The hang up on pure specs and processing power never made as much impact in the real world as computer geeks like to think. Otherwise, the nintendo would have vanished, windows would never gotten off the ground, and nobody would buy a gaming console today.
Most people don't really care about those things.
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Probably not and that is why they failed.
What pre-1994 games would have benefited from a chunky mode?
By the time Doom is out, Commodore is basically a done deal.
Unless we are figuring that Team 17 is going to beat ID software to the whole "first person shooter" thing, its purely theoretical.
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What pre-1994 games would have benefited from a chunky mode?
By the time Doom is out, Commodore is basically a done deal.
Unless we are figuring that Team 17 is going to beat ID software to the whole "first person shooter" thing, its purely theoretical.
It is theoretical, but the only way that commodore could have succeeded would have been to head off the move to PC and console gaming.
The only way they could have done that would have been if they'd produced a platform that was good for texture mapped 3d games.
By not realising this, they kept plugging away at 2d hardware because it was selling well. Something like hombre should have been out instead of AGA. However Commodore were used to it being cheap to produce and didn't invest.
They needed to produce something game changing, like the Amiga was compared to the c64. Nobody in control had the appetite or vision.
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What pre-1994 games would have benefited from a chunky mode?
With a decent blitter and some VRAM, all of them :)
By 1992, I was using the Blitter for almost everything... With sprites for some "effects"... I did often use dual playfields to increase visual complexity and reduce load on the blitter, but that was to cover the deficiency in the hardware :)
-Edit- Just want to add that the only real advantage of Planar Graphics over chunky is that they can more efficiently use the available memory... But once you have 2mb or more, that advantage is mute :(
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With a decent blitter and some VRAM, all of them :)
The original blitter would have worked more or less with chunky pixels, it would be just like having a 2 colour display. You'd have to be careful not to set a stupid shift when blitting, although that would be an interesting effect. Moving the blitter to 32bit would have made it more efficient.
AGA chip ram bandwidth would probably have been good enough, although it would be better if you could have enough bandwidth for dual playfield 8 bit or single playfield 16 bit without saturating the bus.
020ec would be good enough if a simple texture mapper was implemented in the blitter, you could use line draw hardware as the basis for the edge tracing and you just need a small texture cache and a line mapper.
The extra bandwidth would allow for high res productivity screens for the big box amigas & the 3d texture mapping would be useful for fast test previews in modelling applications.
Doom on the PC probably wouldn't have happened. It was just an expanded tech demo to show off what you could do with a fast processor and chunky pixels anyway.
If CBM had started this after the A500 was launched then they should have been able to ship it by 1991. It would have been expensive to make at first, but the money from the a500's would have made up for this. By positioning the cheap version as a cd based console that could have a floppy/keyboard added and sold it at the price of a megadrive + 32x + megacd then it would have made it more attractive to the masses.
So basically no CDTV/A500+/A600/A3000 & all the other projects that got canned.
Apart from new hardware there should only have been cost reduction changes made. So switch to surface mount etc, but keep all the expansions the same. This would have allowed processor & scsi cards etc to get very cheap.
The only other thing they would have needed was good marketing & not wasting money.
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The original blitter would have worked more or less with chunky pixels, it would be just like having a 2 colour display. You'd have to be careful not to set a stupid shift when blitting, although that would be an interesting effect. Moving the blitter to 32bit would have made it more efficient.
AGA chip ram bandwidth would probably have been good enough, although it would be better if you could have enough bandwidth for dual playfield 8 bit or single playfield 16 bit without saturating the bus.
020ec would be good enough if a simple texture mapper was implemented in the blitter, you could use line draw hardware as the basis for the edge tracing and you just need a small texture cache and a line mapper.
I agree, the Amiga's blitter would have done just fine with a chunky mode, and it would have improved performance in certain areas, but the question was " pre '94 games improved by chunky graphics"... Without some VRAM the improvements would have been minimal...
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The least a chunky mode would have done, was give us non dithered 3D. Most amiga flat shaded 3D games were in 16 (4bp) colours to keep the frame rate up. I think even without VRAM, we could have had 32 colour 3D.
@PSXPhil
"It is theoretical, but the only way that commodore could have succeeded would have been to head off the move to PC and console gaming."
The Amiga was in a dangerous place, between the PC and the consoles. It was also an ideal place- It could have replaced both, it did for me, for a long time. Over time, consoles have become more PC like (films, music,facebook, browsing etc)
And many PC's have attempted to become more console like (shuttle, XBMC etc).
In away, both have become more Amiga like.
The PC sounded like a jet engine, cost a lot, and came in this massive 1970's style case, not living room, or child bedroom friendly.
The consoles were lobotomized computers.
There was still a big gap for an amiga style computer.
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pre '94 games improved by chunky graphics"... Without some VRAM the improvements would have been minimal...
Doom wasn't the first game on the pc to take advantage of chunky graphics. Wing commander came out in 1990, commanche in 1992, x-wing in 1993.
You needed lots happening on screen to make a 2d game look good, an immersive 3d games can get away with less.
Doubling the chip ram bus by fitting double the number of chips as on AGA would have probably been enough bandwidth ( i.e. 8 x OCS bandwidth ). Also a dedicated texture mapper would be much quicker than using a CPU, so the requirement of huge bandwidth is lessened.
VRAM wouldn't help with effects like dual playfield.
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The least a chunky mode would have done, was give us non dithered 3D. Most amiga flat shaded 3D games were in 16 (4bp) colours to keep the frame rate up. I think even without VRAM, we could have had 32 colour 3D.
Well chunky doesn't make much sense below a byte, so it would have allowed 256 colour 3D... 32 colours needs 5bits which is difficult to work in chunky mode.
Chunky allows in a single memory write what takes O(biplanes) number of write in planar, ie a 256 colour pixel write on planar takes 8 memory writes... But only 1 on chunky. This is why I feel AGA was really a poor upgrade :(
@PSXPhil
"It is theoretical, but the only way that commodore could have succeeded would have been to head off the move to PC and console gaming."
The Amiga was in a dangerous place, between the PC and the consoles. It was also an ideal place- It could have replaced both, it did for me, for a long time. Over time, consoles have become more PC like (films, music,facebook, browsing etc)
And many PC's have attempted to become more console like (shuttle, XBMC etc).
In away, both have become more Amiga like.
The PC sounded like a jet engine, cost a lot, and came in this massive 1970's style case, not living room, or child bedroom friendly.
The consoles were lobotomized computers.
There was still a big gap for an amiga style computer.
Yeah, I basically agree with this.
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We are back to that old stomping ground, Commodore should have finished AAA :)
...which they had been working on since '89!
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Chunky allows in a single memory write what takes O(biplanes) number of write in planar, ie a 256 colour pixel write on planar takes 8 memory writes... But only 1 on chunky. This is why I feel AGA was really a poor upgrade :(
Worse still, while it's common for byte writes to 32bit ram to be handled by the bus using address strobes. To write to a planar pixel requires you to read all 8 bitplanes, modify them and then write them back.
It wouldn't have been completely insane for the original amiga chipset to use chunky graphics either. 32 colour mode would have been 8 pixels in 5 bytes, the blitter could be slightly modified to deal with that.
As commodore never had the appetite to move from planar graphics, it was basically los gatos that sealed the amiga's fate.
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As commodore never had the appetite to move from planar graphics, it was basically los gatos that sealed the amiga's fate.
It was to do with memory prices. Planar back then was more cost effective than chunky. The Amiga outperformed other platforms for a number of years, so they were obviously right.
Commodore had 7 years between the Amiga launch and AGA. Probably 3x what the original Amiga took to develop. They had mixed planar and chunky hardware on the drawing board for years. Adding extra chunky modes during that time can't be blamed on los gatos.
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......Commodore had 7 years between the Amiga launch and AGA. Probably 3x what the original Amiga took to develop. They had mixed planar and chunky hardware on the drawing board for years. Adding extra chunky modes during that time can't be blamed on los gatos.
Agree !. I think Franko hit the nail on the head. It's all C= USA's fault...!
Los Gatos ha comido mi mano apagado
(:
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Actually ECS was 1990. AGA was 92, which is probably what you meant :)
D'oh! :(
And I even googled for the date! :lol: Yeah, meant AGA there..
My basic premise was that I don't think it was a huge mistake, as you needed to be able to "predict" the market was going that way..
Not sure if Commodore saw that coming and didn't prioritize it or just didn't see it..
That said, I still think faster CPU trumps a true Chunky mode. Doom type games ran playably on 030's and good on 040's..
So, as much as even I sometimes would like to think AGA was too little to late, I don't really think that..
The problem was that Amiga users, in general, didn't buy faster CPUs....
As a result, software companies didn't really push games to take advantage of faster CPUs..
I know, chicken and egg syndrome...
And when it came time to upgrade, they (mostly) moved to other platforms instead..
For me, it was cost and software availability.
I could spend $400+ on an accelerator with RAM, but there were very few reasons (it seemed at the time) to do so...
Or I could piece together a PC. For me, as I had been helping people upgrade their PCs and keeping their old parts, it was very cost effective for me to do that...
So, I don't think it was really the chipset, and I don't think it was the "sacking" of the engineers at Los Gatos.
(In fact, it's possible that, even tho they were great at new idea design, they might not have been the best choice for upgrade/continuation design... Who knows..)
PC developers were designing programs for the computers people "would" be buying..
Amiga developers were designing programs for computers that users HAD already..
They needed to fix that..
I'm not even sure that was marketting per se, but some type of vendor/developer/Commodore interconnect that missed the boat..
desiv
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VRAM wouldn't help with effects like dual playfield.
Sure it could, as long as the chipset can store a full row of bits from a single read, then do another read for the second playfield and combine them before moving on to the next row. It would still mean the chipset would've been able to use 100% of the bus cycles on the read-only port for display DMA, and part of the cycles on the other port (for blitter, copper etc.), and still leave more cycles free for the CPU.
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@desiv
Commodore (engineers at least) knew that chunky was needed. Both Hombre and AAA had it.
But they were not given the funds to revision the silicon.
Faster CPU may trump Chunky, but at one hell of a cost.
The problem with the Amiga market, was that it was two markets. THe gamers and the computer users. The Amiga gamer market functioned more like the console market, tell your coders to improve, rather than tell your users to spend money. Means your games hit the lowest common denominator (ST/STe, same problem).
I don't think they needed to fix that, just needed provide hardware far enough ahead of the curve to give programmers something to dig into, and that would not look to dated by the end of the cycle.
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PC developers were designing programs for the computers people "would" be buying..
Amiga developers were designing programs for computers that users HAD already..
You sir, are right on the money.
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Faster CPU may trump Chunky, but at one hell of a cost.
So they had it in their sights.. Interesting..
Question tho is, how much of a difference would it have made?
If the A1200 would have had Chunky modes, but still 2M CHIP and a 68020 at 14Mhz, how much longer would it have lasted?
How would DOOM (Or Alien Breed 3d or) have run on said machine?
Or would the users still have needed a 68030 or better pretty soon anyway???
desiv
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i'm with you on that desiv. my ideal? 020/28, chunky and some fast. backed up with hd floppy. we could have got away with that...skin of our teeth ;)
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@desiv
Commodore (engineers at least) knew that chunky was needed. Both Hombre and AAA had it.
But they were not given the funds to revision the silicon.
Faster CPU may trump Chunky, but at one hell of a cost.
.....
I don't think they needed to fix that, just needed provide hardware far enough ahead of the curve to give programmers something to dig into, and that would not look to dated by the end of the cycle.
The Amiga's strength was always that you could achieve more because of the custom hardware & a modest CPU. By making the clever part yourself you can keep the cost down.
Commodore management didn't realise they needed to push the engineers to design something like this, they were too arrogant & greedy. Engineers can't fix the company from the bottom.
To have survived the playstation, you would need to have gotten reasonable hardware out to developers before the initial Playstation dev kits got out. So we're talking 1992 at the latest.
Commodore probably couldn't have stopped the playstation & PC from being huge, but there would definately have been a viable market for games. More viable than the Sega Saturn for instance.
Between 1987 & 1992 it would have been possible to design hardware that could have survived. Even as early as 1990 it was obvious what was going to happen but it was too late by then.
Whether they used vram or not is the least of the problem. Thats just a small implementation detail which you'd decide based on price/performance vs other alternatives.
Amiga was the hare and the PC was the tortoise. Commodore didn't know what to do with what they'd bought. They knew how to make things cheap, but had lost their hunger to dominate when Jack left.
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i'm with you on that desiv. my ideal? 020/28, chunky and some fast. backed up with hd floppy. we could have got away with that...skin of our teeth ;)
I'd probably trade the fast memory for a texture mapper in the blitter & CD drive as standard with HD floppy & RAM as optional extras. Unless the chip ram bus was too saturated at low res, but that would be very bad news.
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Yeah, was talking about the absolute last minute minimum :)
They did have a dsp for 3D at one point. Can't remember if that was for AAA or Hombre. It's all a long time ago.
Dunno about including a CD-ROM, they were still pretty expensive. Certainly include a slot for one though.
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D'oh! :(
PC developers were designing programs for the computers people "would" be buying..
Amiga developers were designing programs for computers that users HAD already..
Sadly this is not Commodore's fault but the difference between writing games for a system reliant only on CPU performance vs dedicated custom chip performance.
And it was the mentality of corporate computing for decades...your database is slow? Run it on a faster machine. Not elegant but very scalable.
Commodore needed the next big thing, C64 was great so was A1000 but the rest were minor blips technically speaking.
AGA did what it had to do but it was a stop gap, we didn't even get Lotus 3 for A1200 to speed it up, Lotus trilogy only compatible with CD32 not A1200+CD. We were reliant on the software houses.
End of the day Commodore needed a new radical cost/effective chipset. At least as powerful as Atari Jaguar or 3DO by 94.