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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: freqmax on September 26, 2011, 01:20:16 PM
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This made me wonder..
"From this point on the former Amiga Corporation was a division of Commodore. Over the next few years many employees felt Commodore's management proved to be as annoying as Atari's, and most of the team members left, were laid off or were fired."
If Tramiel had bought the Amiga Corporation, is it likely his management style would been more successful than that of Commodore. It of course would required that Tramiel had the finance to fund further development.
If the Amiga team were rushing to find alternative funding than that of Atari once they heard Tramiel were in negotiations to buy that company there ought to be a reason :)
There's a third path, what if Amiga found funds to make it on their own?, or would it needed the distribution and marketing network of Atari, Commodore etc?
(or maybe Jobs would have bought Amiga ;) )
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i think if Jack was in control of Amiga it still would have fell behind the competition. Jack was all about "for the masses" which means he liked to get the computers out there as cheaply as possible. If you look at the C64 you can see a pattern. Sold a very large amount at a very low cost which meant Commodore made no profit. If Jack applied the same strategy to the Amiga it would never have made money so they wouldn't be able to do any R&D which was required at the time. Instead Jack would have preferred to use existing components off the shelf to save money. Which means no true innovation would occur. This strategy was OK for the era of the C64 but it would be a death sentence for the late 1980's and early 1990's. Commodore will still have gone bankrupt regardless of whether Jack was in charge or not.
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NextSTEP on the A3000 would have been amazing.
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NextSTEP on the A3000 would have been amazing.
Don't bore me with that NextSTEP crap. BeOS all the way!
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A few things here. Tramiel buying Amiga alone would not have guaranteed anything. Success at Commodore for the early computers was in the vertical integration and Amiga had none of that. Commodore had built that up during the calculator wars so even with a buyout its likely Amiga would have been quickly looking for another buyout by a larger company with more money and capabilities.
On the second persons point, Commodore under Tramiel may have been 'for the masses' and targeted to sell lower cost to the consumer, but that did not translate to Commodore not making profit on the 64. They didnt make much profit per unit, but that translated to more units sold and more profit, especially as competitors left the market meaning less competition against the 64. Technology is littered with 'boutique' brands bought out by the sucesfull mass marketers. Alienware's buyout by Dell for instance. Here was a maker of high end, high margin performance PCs bought by one of the low end consumer PC makers who does not make much per unit, but sells boatloads more units than Alienware ever could.
No one thing could have made Amiga succeed and I think it would not have done as well had it been purchased by an indavidual than having been purchased by Commodore with its chip manufacturing and, at least in the beginning, other profitable products to help fund R&D.
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A1200/A4000 were simply too little too late when they were released, IMO. Things may have ended up a lot differently if AGA was scrapped in favor of AAA or another more competitive in the market offering. When the internet took off, NIC's for Amiga's were still so prohibitively expensive compared to PC solutions, that didn't help any. Seeing Doom and Myst on the PC back then was a real game changer for me.
I remember those days very, very well. I can still remember vividly how much it pained me to box up my '060/RTG machine for sale when I realize the ship was sinking. Bought a Pentium 200mhz/Win 95 Acer Aspire with the cash from that, and I was Amiga free until I bought my SAM 440 when they first started shipping. All these years later, and with several MS certs under my belt, I still find Windows kludgy and unintuitive compared to even WB 3.1, lol.
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We'd be joking about the commodore jaguar instead.
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Don't bore me with that NextSTEP crap. BeOS all the way!
BeOS didn't exist back then.
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Commodore made a lot of mistakes... they overpaid the topmanagement and underfunded R&D, had no real concept or vision and spoiled money in different markets (f.e. by producing PCs). And they made their final error, the Amiga 600 (which created a lot of losses after they announced the A1200).
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I have to agree. We were still using our 500 and we were considering upgrading when the newer systems came out. However considering the price differences between the Amiga's and PC's at the time my family decided to go PC and we ended up buying a Packard Bell.
I don't think the CD32 helped very much either. And I do feel this the was straw that broke the camel's back.
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BeOS didn't exist back then.
Both NextSTEP and BeOS were around when Commodore went AGA so either one could have been used with the AGA chips. I choose BeOS.
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We'd all be using Amiga typewriters now.
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We'd all be using Amiga typewriters now.
They would have been reliable at least lol.
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Both NextSTEP and BeOS were around when Commodore went AGA so either one could have been used with the AGA chips. I choose BeOS.
Next STEP was written for 68k hardware, BeOS for RISC. There is an unfinished port of Haiku to Aranym so you may get your wish eventually.
BeOS did not exist until well after CBM went bust and a decade after Tramiel wanted to buy Amiga.
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Hello as a follower of both Amiga and Atari machines I don't think that Tramiels presence would have made things any different.
He was getting on in years even in the mid-80s, and my understanding is that he later delegated much of his responsibilities to his sons, who I believe were the main culprits responsible for Ataris downfall in the computer market.
The Jaguar could have been more successful, but it should have shipped with a CD drive, but developers were deserting Atari.
In 1994, CD was well on the way to becoming the standard media for software. Certainly this was the case by the time the Sony PlayStation shipped the following year.
Commodore at least had the CD-drive, but the hardware was too behind the curve for a "next-gen" console, marketed as a 32-bit console with graphics comparable to the more successful 16-bit Sega Mega CD, and no FMV as standard.
This was a similar scenario with the A1200, 256 colours and 2 megabytes of memory were simply not enough when it was released - even if was sold at half the price of PC's of the time.
The Falcon was a superior machine in many ways to the A1200, [I won't go into detail as that will surely spark another debate] but by this time most developers had already flocked away from Atari to develop for Amiga and PC, and later PC only, the Amiga won the war.
If it was Tramiel in charge and we seen an A1200 but better specced with Blitter and so on, things might have changed slightly but I think the Amiga platform as a whole was doomed to last much further than 1997 no matter who was in charge*. Microsoft would have made sure of that, along with the imminent Apple resurgence.
*Amiga as a commercial high-street product.
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What about the third path, where Amiga had gotten capital to develop the system on its own?
The system as it were would certainly not managed after 1997, but I count on that with proper development there would been a replacement in the same spirit but different hardware.
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What about the third path, where Amiga had gotten capital to develop the system on its own?
The system as it were would certainly not managed after 1997, but I count on that with proper development there would been a replacement in the same spirit but different hardware.
HiToro was good at inventing technology. It was not so good at upgrading it though. Jay Miner would have struggled to update the already existing technology which is probably why he never worked for commodore fulltime. His talents lied with inventing and not upgrading. An example of this is the pacemaker he made in the early 1990's. Dave Haynie on the otherhand was good at upgrading existing technology but i am quick to point out he worked for commodore and would never have been given the chance to work for Amiga without commodores ownership.
Bottomline. Hitoro (or is that Jay Miner?) was great at inventing but not so good with upgrading. Taking this into account I'm not sure what Hitoro would have done different if they had full control of their own company with lots of capital.
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All options are b0rked ;)
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There is an unfinished port of Haiku to Aranym so you may get your wish eventually.
Haiku for Atari Falcon 030 (http://haiku-files.org/unsupported-builds/m68k/)
Can be run on Aranym (http://aranym.sourceforge.net/) VM. (Once it's released that is)
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HiToro was good at inventing technology. It was not so good at upgrading it though.
I don't really know about that. I've seen interviews with Jay where he was talking about upgrades the Amiga needed...
If you look at Jay at Atari, he went from TIA to Antic/CTIA and then to the Amiga..
Yes, those are different systems, but that's because the place he was working was looking for different systems.
You can't blame Commodore for buying the Amiga and trying to milk the same basic design for years, as they did with the C64 (Well, you can blame them, but..), but I don't think you should draw the conclusion that he (and when I say "he", we're talking Jay and his team) wouldn't have been able to work on upgrades...
I think they probably could have...
If they would have had enough money to continue (some mythological group of different dentists with lots of money to save them..), I think the team could have designed great upgrades faster than Commodore did.
That said, you need distribution and marketing to sell computers..
Without Commodore, the price would most likely have been higher and it would have been harder to get an Amiga...
I think it's likely that Amiga wouldn't have made it as a company if they had just been given more money...
A better idea would have been, what if someone ELSE stepped forward who also had distribution and marketing...
Say, Tandy or even... (should I say it???) Microsoft.. (Hey, they've tried hardware several times over the years..)
Maybe IBM? (Don't laugh, they were just looking into OS/2 in 85.. Would have been an interesting idea and a way for them to get back at Microsoft..)
desiv
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it was teh PCjnr guy wat dun it.
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A better idea would have been, what if someone ELSE stepped forward who also had distribution and marketing...
Say, Tandy or even... (should I say it???) Microsoft.. (Hey, they've tried hardware several times over the years..)
Maybe IBM? (Don't laugh, they were just looking into OS/2 in 85.. Would have been an interesting idea and a way for them to get back at Microsoft..)
desiv
I think any serious candidate would have to employ a management style that let's the development team to flourish. In that respect both Microsoft and IBM have proven they can't handle it. Maybe Apple would, but it would look nice, be horrible expensive and perform like crap but be easy to use ;), dunno about Tandy.
At the core seems to be capital, distribution, and management style.
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I think any serious candidate would have to employ a management style that let's the development team to flourish. In that respect both Microsoft and IBM have proven they can't handle it. Maybe Apple would, but it would look nice, be horrible expensive and perform like crap but be easy to use ;), dunno about Tandy.
At the core seems to be capital, distribution, and management style.
I take it you've read about the connection between AmigaOS and OS/2 then?
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Commodore made a lot of mistakes... they overpaid the topmanagement and underfunded R&D, had no real concept or vision and spoiled money in different markets (f.e. by producing PCs). And they made their final error, the Amiga 600 (which created a lot of losses after they announced the A1200).
Actually, their PCs sold extremely well in Europe (the market in which they also were originally conceived), so not spoiled money at all.
The 600 is another story but that's what happens when you bring in someone with a failed product (PCjr) who then decides that trying the same failed idea (lets try to sell a product with fewer features and capabilities and see how that floats in the market) might work if we just try it enough times.
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A better idea would have been, what if someone ELSE stepped forward who also had distribution and marketing...
Say, Tandy or even... (should I say it???) Microsoft.. (Hey, they've tried hardware several times over the years..)
Maybe IBM? (Don't laugh, they were just looking into OS/2 in 85.. Would have been an interesting idea and a way for them to get back at Microsoft..)
desiv
Tandy had distribution but no interest really in marketing and once you tapped all the Radio Shack distribution offered, you were strangled by it. Thats what hamstrung the Coco and TRS-80s over time as Atari and Commodore moved into department store chains, Toys R Us, Kmart, etc while those machines had to stay exclusive in only one chain of stores. Same would have happned to the Amiga that already did to the Tandy offerings already trounced by the 64.
Microsoft would have bought Amiga and shelved it as they saw much more money in Windows on Intel.
IBM would have bought Amiga and fumbled it.
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They should have fired Mehdi Ali and prized JLG away from Apple.
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So what company would been the best candidate in 1984?
And why? ;)
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So what company would been the best candidate in 1984?
And why? ;)
Trotters Independent Traders of course. ;)
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At least it would've (probably) had built-in MIDI ports - look how that kept the ST in widepsread use...
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The picture that I got from reading about Tramiel in the early years of Commodore doesn´t fit into what happened with Atari in the 90s. If 1984s Tramiel had AMIGA he wouldn´t have built the machine we love today. Tramiels Amiga would have had only 2 custom chips and no multitasking in the OS. It would have come out in January 1985 and shipped in March. Something like the Amiga 600 would have entered the market in 1988. Tramiels values would have been preserved by a new management. Tramiel retires. In 1990 Amiga would have had a DOS mode that could make use of all 4096 colors but most Software would have ignored that. In 1995 Amiga would have had its own x86 compatible CPU and Amiga would have ported Workbench to Windows NT. 1996 Amiga would have had realtime truecolor 3d animation at $2000. Sadly it wouldn´t be very popular due to poor marketing.
Oh and Atari would still be kicking Sonys ass and Playstation II wouldn´t have been built because of low market potential.
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i think if Jack was in control of Amiga it still would have fell behind the competition. Jack was all about "for the masses" which means he liked to get the computers out there as cheaply as possible. If you look at the C64 you can see a pattern. Sold a very large amount at a very low cost which meant Commodore made no profit. If Jack applied the same strategy to the Amiga it would never have made money so they wouldn't be able to do any R&D which was required at the time. Instead Jack would have preferred to use existing components off the shelf to save money. Which means no true innovation would occur. This strategy was OK for the era of the C64 but it would be a death sentence for the late 1980's and early 1990's. Commodore will still have gone bankrupt regardless of whether Jack was in charge or not.
Dunno why you think that, PET/VIC/C64 were very good on features technically AND price. The C16 was meant to be sold for $70 which would be successful. Post Jack Commodore kept the C64 up to 1992 unchanged AND ade a complete hash with C128 and Plus4.
Trouble is when he was pushed out he lost a lot of liquid cash due to buying Atari AND Atari had no equivalent of MOS Technologies either so his hands were tied.
Jack knew a 7mhz 68000 with no worthwhile A/V improvements sold to people for 7 years = massive mistake and business suicide. Jack when working in Commodore ALWAYS made sure he had something technically ahead of competitors at the low end and high end of the market.
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They should have fired Mehdi Ali and prized JLG away from Apple.
Having thought about it, having JLG in charge CBM would probably still gone bankrupt but at least we would have had a kick arse OS and fancy new hardware to go with it.
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I dunno, like I always said the mistakes with A1000 sealed their fate and it was all much of nothing stuck with 32/4096 colours and useless hardware sprites until the too little too late A1200 and the tragic mistake of no SIMM slot to double CD32 processing speed via 1mb FAST RAM. (Nintendo did a similar thing with N64 VRAM user upgrade).
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the mistakes with A1000
What mistake?, I was under the impression that Amiga 1000 was really good. But Commodore didn't keep the steam up. And THEN the competition ate them. They could have launched the A500 earlier thoe!
But the A2000 maybe should have something more than space for Zorro-II to offer. Ev
er seen a new PC that didn't go 50% faster, cheaper, more flickery and gazzilion "integrated" stuff than the previous? ;)
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On the second persons point, Commodore under Tramiel may have been 'for the masses' and targeted to sell lower cost to the consumer, but that did not translate to Commodore not making profit on the 64. They didnt make much profit per unit, but that translated to more units sold and more profit,
Commodore actually made a huge profit on the c64.
This was partly due to vertical integration and partly due to their production team doing whatever it took to ship every machine.
By 1989 commodore should have had something new. They milked it for far too long, something Jack wouldn't have.
It's not certain that Jack would have bought the Amiga if he'd stayed at Commodore though, the Z machine would have probably been released instead.
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This was partly due to vertical integration
Stupid question, but what do you mean by that in this case?
and partly due to their production team doing whatever it took to ship every machine.
Why wouldn't they ship?
By 1989 commodore should have had something new. They milked it for far too long, something Jack wouldn't have.
This seems like a deja vu of how Apple handled the Macintosh and milked it until they had to hire Jobs for lots of money which did a complete overhaul with Mac OS X, Intel, and vision.
It's not certain that Jack would have bought the Amiga if he'd stayed at Commodore though, the Z machine would have probably been released instead.
What's the specifications for the "Z machine" ?
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I think by vertical integration he is referring to the Amiga being locked into its own technology. All the single components of the machine are tied into each other and cannot be separated which means if you wanted to update the machine you had to redesign and rebuild the entire machine and not single parts only which is very expense. I guess the IBM PC would have been horizontal meaning that every part of the machine was a separate entity and could be upgraded more easily.
At least this is what i think is vertical/horizontal integration so don't quote me on this :)
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Then laptops would be an example of vertical integration?, guess it saves costs per unit in volume. But cost when upgrade is needed.
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Then laptops would be an example of vertical integration?, guess it saves costs per unit in volume. But cost when upgrade is needed.
Not sure. I thought i knew what it was until i looked it up on wiki. Maybe he should explain what he meant as it could mean anything...
As i understand it laptops wouldn't be an example of vertical integration because the components they use are generic and come from various different sources whereas the Amiga was vertical as the hardware was custom so came from the same company.
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Not sure. I thought i knew what it was until i looked it up on wiki. Maybe he should explain what he meant as it could mean anything...
As i understand it laptops wouldn't be an example of vertical integration because the components they use are generic and come from various different sources whereas the Amiga was vertical as the hardware was custom so came from the same company.
vertical integration - think of it as cutting out the middle man.
When Apple made an Apple II computer they buy the 6502 from MOS (which is Commodore), so MOS gets percentage. Also they would purchase a crappy piezo buzzer from Radio Shack and used that for the sound, so Radio Shack gets a percentage.
When Commodore would make a 64 they "buy" the 6510 from MOS (which is Commodore) so they profit twice. Commodore also buys the SID chip from MOS for the sound, cha-ching, Commodore gets paid again...
As a direct effect Commodore is able to sell the 64 for less than the Apple II. As a side effect, Commodore was also able to offer a better product - remember the crappy Apple II buzzer?
Actually, I don't think the Apple II used a Radio Shack piezo buzzer, but it sounded like it did.
They did use a Ensonic chip in the IIgs which, coincidentally, is a company with ties to MOS and the SID.
Commodore acquired MOS by buying a bunch of their goods on credit (which is typical for a company), then being such a slow payer that it made MOS financially shaky. Rather than pay MOS what they owed them, they just outright bought MOS. That is how Jack Tramiel built his vertically integrated company. Pretty shrewd.
Reminds me of a guy who sold the worlds largest computer company an OS that he did not even yet own...
Would they of been better with Jack? Hell ya....
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HiToro was good at inventing technology. It was not so good at upgrading it though. Jay Miner would have struggled to update the already existing technology which is probably why he never worked for commodore fulltime. His talents lied with inventing and not upgrading. An example of this is the pacemaker he made in the early 1990's. Dave Haynie on the otherhand was good at upgrading existing technology but i am quick to point out he worked for commodore and would never have been given the chance to work for Amiga without commodores ownership.
Bottomline. Hitoro (or is that Jay Miner?) was great at inventing but not so good with upgrading. Taking this into account I'm not sure what Hitoro would have done different if they had full control of their own company with lots of capital.
Actually before Jay left, the Ranger chipset had better capabilities than AGA.
1024x1024 7bit color.
It also used dual ported VRAM so I doubt it would slow down the way AGA does in higher resolution modes.
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I think by vertical integration he is referring to the Amiga being locked into its own technology. All the single components of the machine are tied into each other and cannot be separated which means if you wanted to update the machine you had to redesign and rebuild the entire machine and not single parts only which is very expense. I guess the IBM PC would have been horizontal meaning that every part of the machine was a separate entity and could be upgraded more easily.
At least this is what i think is vertical/horizontal integration so don't quote me on this :)
wrong
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wrong
OK then, explain it to me.
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Actually before Jay left, the Ranger chipset had better capabilities than AGA.
1024x1024 7bit color.
It also used dual ported VRAM so I doubt it would slow down the way AGA does in higher resolution modes.
Still they didn't implement something similar.. doh. Makes me wonder what the money was spent on..
68040 + Ranger-like and some neat soundchip would been really nice.
vertical integration - think of it as cutting out the middle man.
Make and use your own products?
As a direct effect Commodore is able to sell the 64 for less than the Apple II. As a side effect, Commodore was also able to offer a better product - remember the crappy Apple II buzzer?
Actually, I don't think the Apple II used a Radio Shack piezo buzzer, but it sounded like it did.
They did use a Ensonic chip in the IIgs which, coincidentally, is a company with ties to MOS and the SID.
Regarding the Apple IIGS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_IIGS#Influence_on_later_computers), it seems to gotten most things that the C64 lacked for an outrageous price ;)
"The inclusion of a professional-grade sound chip in the Apple IIgs was hailed by both developers and users, and hopes were high that it would be added to the Macintosh; however, it drew a lawsuit from Apple Records. As part of an earlier trademark dispute with the record company, Apple Computer had agreed not to release music-related products. Apple Records considered the inclusion of the Ensoniq chip in the IIgs as a violation of that agreement. Though the IIgs was allowed to keep the Ensoniq, Apple has not included dedicated hardware sound synthesizers in any of its Macintosh models since (though of course, third-party products exist)"
Doh!!
A record company forbidding a computer + synth chip because it's music. The only connection is music. But there's a difference between records, and chips. Guess that may be why Apple sound capability at sucked.
Something that makes me wonder is if the 65C816 2,8 MHz clock could been replaced with a 16 MHz clock. Or if other chips limited a such trick.
Something slight OT, I read is that the Motorola management officially ordered Chuck Peddle to stop his 25 US$ processor project. Guess what he did..
Guess it all boils down to: Management screws up great engineering.
And that still apply.
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Speaking of the ranger what kind of incompatibilities could we have expected?
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I think any Ranger (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Ranger_Chipset) incompabilities could been fixed with a RTG (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReTargetable_Graphics) layer. Or a new AmigaOS release. However bit-bang software would suffer.