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Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: lassie on August 09, 2012, 10:04:29 PM
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Hi why do you guys think commodore went under? one must think that all the Commodores and amigas they have sold over the years must have been giving them a lot of money in the bank.
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I heard something about how even thought the Commodore 64 was still selling really well that they stopped making them.
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I heard something about how even thought the Commodore 64 was still selling really well that they stopped making them.
They manufactured them until the end; April 1994.
In Sweden they stopped selling the C64 in 1992.
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Yes that old commodore 64 sold well here in denmark to. I got mine in 1992 :-)
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There is poor management and then there is Commodore's very poor management:
- They didn't keep up with the production processes of their custom chips and discovered at the last minute that everybody else's custom chips were able to clock faster than theirs.
- When they found out that it was going to be expensive to produce custom chips at a competitive clock speed, instead of forking out the cash and resources to get it done, they diverted funds away from the Amiga division and started an MSDOS PC compatible division.
- They also delayed the introduction of the A1200 and A4000 until the A600 was ready and discovered that the A600 was a total flop anyway and should never have been introduced into the AGA lineup.
There's probably more reasons but those are the main ones.
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CDTV and A600 shouldn't have been released at all.
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The c64 was one of commodores best machines. I saw them still be sold around 1993 here in the UK. Some were reconditioned because the demand for them was still strong. If there were reliable upgrade kits like you can get for the Amiga I think I would do it for my C64.
They also delayed the introduction of the A1200 and A4000 until the A600 was ready and discovered that the A600 was a total flop anyway and should never have been introduced into the AGA lineup.
I don't recall the 600 ever been advertised in the AGA lineup. But your right there were a lot of poor decisions made at Commodore.
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The c64 was one of commodores best machines. I saw them still be sold around 1993 here in the UK. Some were reconditioned because the demand for them was still strong. If there were reliable upgrade kits like you can get for the Amiga I think I would do it for my C64.
Did you not have a Commodore Magazine that ran until 1995 in the uk. Commodore Format i belive :-)
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Yeah. I bought them right upto the death. Still have a lot of my tapes laying around.
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Yeah. I bought them right upto the death. Still have a lot of my tapes laying around.
Cool :-) i have purchased some Commodore Format magazines from uk here the last couple of months, very cool magazine :-) A shame postage is so high to Denmark. most times it cost more to send them than the magazines them self
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Just plain dumb management wasting money on building computers like the 128, a600, CDTV and then doing a half a$$ed job on the s4000.
Commodore USA also entirely failed to market the Amiga line properly and probably overpriced the 1000 compared to a fully equipped 512ST.
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There are many reasons why Commodore failed here are my few:
- Lack of chipset updates. ECS is not even worth mentioning. No Paula update. No chipset support for high density floppies. AGA was released too late.
- Lack of professional software. Apple inc addressed this matter by setting up Claris. Commodore should have done the same or at the very least subsidised the development of professional packages such as Word Perfect.
- The Amiga 500 and 1200 were too expandable. The worst thing Commodore done was providing the A500 with a side connector that allowed pretty much anything available on their big box A2000 to be used on the A500. Although the A1200 corrected this matter to some degree by replacing the side connector with a PCMCIA slot hardware developers got around this by using the A1200 trapdoor slot. The A600 trapdoor slot was a step in the right direction for commodore as it only allowed RAM expansion.
- The Amiga 2000. Oh dear. First it was a expanded A1000 then a A500 with a massive expansion board. Simply adding double the RAM was not enough. The Amiga 2000 never should have left Commodore without a 68020+ processor and on-board SCSI. As many will agree the A3000 was a big box Amiga done right!
- Releasing/developing the following junk
CDTV - Designed to be user friendly. This was hardly the case with terrible disc caddy system, old 1.3 ROMs and no in-built floppy drive (when all Amiga software to that date was released on floppy) made no sense
A600 / C65 - Desperate attempts by Commodore in reliving the
C= 64 era
- Many more issues such as: poor marketing, lack of licensing the Amiga chipset to third party developers, not working with enemy Atari to bring down costs (by sharing components) and not moving to generic PC parts such as keyboards ultimately cost Commodore their business.
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There are many reasons why Commodore failed here are my few:
- Lack of chipset updates. ECS is not even worth mentioning. No Paula update. No chipset support for high density floppies. AGA was released too late.
- Lack of professional software. Apple inc addressed this matter by setting up Claris. Commodore should have done the same or at the very least subsidised the development of professional packages such as Word Perfect.
- The Amiga 500 and 1200 were too expandable. The worst thing Commodore done was providing the A500 with a side connector that allowed pretty much anything available on their big box A2000 to be used on the A500. Although the A1200 corrected this matter to some degree by replacing the side connector with a PCMCIA slot hardware developers got around this by using the A1200 trapdoor slot. The A600 trapdoor slot was a step in the right direction for commodore as it only allowed RAM expansion.
- The Amiga 2000. Oh dear. First it was a expanded A1000 then a A500 with a massive expansion board. Simply adding double the RAM was not enough. The Amiga 2000 never should have left Commodore without a 68020+ processor and on-board SCSI. As many will agree the A3000 was a big box Amiga done right!
- Releasing/developing the following junk
CDTV - Designed to be user friendly. This was hardly the case with terrible disc caddy system, old 1.3 ROMs and no in-built floppy drive (when all Amiga software to that date was released on floppy) made no sense
A600 / C65 - Desperate attempts by Commodore in reliving the
C= 64 era
- Many more issues such as: poor marketing, lack of licensing the Amiga chipset to third party developers, not working with enemy Atari to bring down costs (by sharing components) and not moving to generic PC parts such as keyboards ultimately cost Commodore their business.
Thanks for your answer :-) yeah it seems like they made a lot of mistake along the way.
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Yeah also stupid projects like the Plus4, c16 and all the other daft C64 variants!
I'd also say wasting money on the never released c65 project was also dumb!
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Hi why do you guys think commodore went under? one must think that all the Commodores and amigas they have sold over the years must have been giving them a lot of money in the bank.
because they failed to settle a dispute over a patent to Cad Soft for the use of their XOR cursor and as a result they were banned from importing CD32s (for the US market) during the 1994 xmas season. they were already living paycheck to paycheck at the time.
If the CD32 was a success on they US market then maybe they could have kept the doors open.
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Hi why do you guys think commodore went under? one must think that all the Commodores and amigas they have sold over the years must have been giving them a lot of money in the bank.
They wasted money because they had no vision and the management were having too much fun playing.
Cancelling the a3000+ and turning the a300 into the a600 was just plain ridiculous.
The a3000 & a500 plus has already shown the world that commodore were going nowhere. The A2000 & A500 were fine in 1987, but four years later they had basically done nothing. The original A1000 was developed from scratch in that time.
For commodore to have survived they really needed something like AGA in 1989.
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The CD32 imo was another dumb project, they should have focused on just making decent computers instead of being a jack of all trades - every major Computer maker that has ever tried making a console has failed:
Apple Pippin
Atari Jaguar
Amiga CD32
Panasonic 3DO
Philips CDi
Commodore CDTV
Tandy/Memorex VIS
in fact you could almost list the IBM PCjr in there too as it had a cartridge port for games.
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The CD32 imo was another dumb project, they should have focused on just making decent computers instead of being a jack of all trades - every major Computer maker that has ever tried making a console has failed:
Apple Pippin
Atari Jaguar
Amiga CD32
Panasonic 3DO
Philips CDi
Commodore CDTV
in fact you could almost list the IBM PCjr in there too as it had a cartridge port for games.
Do you collect Philips cdi and Atari jaguar also? i also have them :-)
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Do you collect Philips cdi and Atari jaguar also? i also have them :-)
Nope, wouldnt mind an Atari Falcon tho.
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Nope, wouldnt mind an Atari Falcon tho.
I know that those machines failed but mayby that is why i collect them :-) but yes a falcon could be cool to have
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The same reasons Scott Adams makes a living drawing Dilbert.
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Do you collect Philips cdi and Atari jaguar also? i also have them :-)
Ah, CDi.
Microware OS9 married to unfortunately proprietary Signetics components (including the 68070 processor that performed worse then a Motorola 68000).
AND crappy display quality.
Oh well, I liked the OS underneath the hardware.
Significantly better then AOS.
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For the same reason most companies fail. It's not a mystery inside an enigma wrapped in a riddle. It's the same reason Apple almost failed in the mid 90's, it's the same reason the Print industry, Airlines, and Auto industry are in trouble. And it's the same reason A-Eon will eventually fail.
They forget what their raison d'être is, they forget their 'Why'. They focus too much on the How and What, and the bottom line, and fail to adapt to the ever changing landscape.
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For commodore to have survived they really needed something like AGA in 1989.
And they probably would have, if management hadn't mucked around with engineering.
Commodore's collapse is a fascinating case study of executive incompetence. It should be taught in business schools.
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I agree and not here...
- Lack of chipset updates. ECS is not even worth mentioning. No Paula update. No chipset support for high density floppies. AGA was released too late.
Definitely, and I think this goes to the lack of money/interest Commodore had in R&D..
- Lack of professional software. Apple inc addressed this matter by setting up Claris. Commodore should have done the same or at the very least subsidised the development of professional packages such as Word Perfect.
Yeah, Apple had a person whose job was "Software Evangelist" that worked the press and the vendors (and helped developers get what they needed).
Wordperfect for the Amiga was nice, but not enough..
- The Amiga 500 and 1200 were too expandable. The worst thing Commodore done was providing the A500 with a side connector that allowed pretty much anything available on their big box A2000 to be used on the A500.
What? Too expandable? The expansions they had were too expensive (more specifically the A500) and non-standard. No game developer (well, most wouldn't) would develop for anything other than Kick 1.3 and 1M RAM because it was all most users had. I'm considering the possibility that the pseudo-closed A500 (although it was the best seller) was also what killed the Amiga in the long term. No video upgrades (DCTV and HAM-E, while kual, don't count). Every PC had a video card which was upgradable, but the Amiga line, you had OCS. (Eventually AGA, but only for a percentage of the users. The upgrade was to buy a new computer..)
- The Amiga 2000. Oh dear. First it was a expanded A1000 then a A500 with a massive expansion board. Simply adding double the RAM was not enough. The Amiga 2000 never should have left Commodore without a 68020+ processor and on-board SCSI. As many will agree the A3000 was a big box Amiga done right!
Personally, they probably should have gone from the 1000 to the 3000, but it needed more like AGA graphics by then, preferably on a video card
- Releasing/developing the following junk
CDTV - Designed to be user friendly. This was hardly the case with terrible disc caddy system, old 1.3 ROMs and no in-built floppy drive (when all Amiga software to that date was released on floppy) made no sense
[/LIST]
- CD was fine, and no one wants a floppy in their entertainment center, but it needed to come WITH VideoCD. Requiring an add-on? That means basically no one will use that feature, including developers.
A600 / C65 - Desperate attempts by Commodore in reliving the C= 64 era
Agree. Although loved now, the A600 wasn't a good idea at the time. (Although better than the A500+)
- Many more issues such as: poor marketing, lack of licensing the Amiga chipset to third party developers, not working with enemy Atari to bring down costs (by sharing components) and not moving to generic PC parts such as keyboards ultimately cost Commodore their business.
I agree with poor marketing, but I don't see any good coming out of licensing the chipset out.
There would be no working with Atari, so that's not a big deal. And I don't think generic PC parts matter much.
Poor R&D and poor marketing were KEY tho, I agree there..
desiv
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Mehdi Ali!
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And they probably would have, if management hadn't mucked around with engineering.
In that time frame I don't think management was in control of engineering at all. When that happens you end up with projects like AAA.
I'm not convinced that Los Gatos would have been any better if kept around. Second system effect is difficult to avoid.
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What? Too expandable? The expansions they had were too expensive (more specifically the A500) and non-standard. No game developer (well, most wouldn't) would develop for anything other than Kick 1.3 and 1M RAM because it was all most users had. I'm considering the possibility that the pseudo-closed A500 (although it was the best seller) was also what killed the Amiga in the long term. No video upgrades (DCTV and HAM-E, while kual, don't count). Every PC had a video card which was upgradable, but the Amiga line, you had OCS. (Eventually AGA, but only for a percentage of the users. The upgrade was to buy a new computer..)
I might have been misunderstood. I was reflecting that a A500/A1200 can be upgraded to specifications that exceed those standard in big box Amigas (such as CPUs). If the A500/A1200 were aimed at the low end market they should have been engineered not to be upgraded apart from limited memory (no more than 2-4mb Fast) and kickstart ROMs.
As for bad products, do not forget the Commodore 128 - which apparently cost almost as much as manufacturing an Amiga 500. Why Commodore ever bothered with the C=128 is beyond me. Especially when the LCD would have opened a new market.
IMHO the C= 128 really should have been a Commodore 64 motherboard modified with a internal 64K REU, reset button, numeric pad and a burst mode serial port. The whole CP/M and other trash was not necessary once Commodore aquired the Amiga. Additionally launching the Amiga 1000 the same year as the C=128 lacked focus. No wonder people were confused. What was the future in 1985? 8-bit or 16-bit computers!
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Mehdi Ali!
+1
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One thing I'll never understand is why commodore insisted on on making PAL variants of their computers, why not simply make everything 60hz like in IBM land and be done with it! Then all software written for the machine will work in all markets, maybe add a 50hz video mode just for video editing, but standardize on 60hz for everything else.
Then you only need one monitor and one model for each computer line.
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Because PAL televisions couldn't display 60 Hz in the 80:s?
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Because PAL televisions couldn't display 60 Hz in the 80:s?
From the Amiga onwards tho they should have made monitors mandatory - you couldn't hook an IBM up to a tv!
From the Amiga onwards this was IMO a big mistake!
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The A3000 had a scandoubler and A600/A1200/A4000 should have had that too. They should have excluded the RF output on the A600/A1200 and maybe the composite output too (with 15 KHz RGB and 30 KHz VGA left).
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- The Amiga 500 and 1200 were too expandable. The worst thing Commodore done was providing the A500 with a side connector that allowed pretty much anything available on their big box A2000 to be used on the A500.
Amiga 500 expansions (except 512 kB ram expansion) were rare and insanely expensive.
CDTV - Designed to be user friendly. This was hardly the case with terrible disc caddy system, old 1.3 ROMs and no in-built floppy drive (when all Amiga software to that date was released on floppy) made no sense
Commodore never invested to the OS development anyway. But then Commodore always was a hardware company that never understood the software.
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They could've had a big chunk or the biggest of the video / animation / CAD / Gfx whatever and also game markets if they had ended the AAA project in time. If so, AAA could've played 24bit video from an HD right in 1990!
This sums it up for me: "Commodore's collapse is a fascinating case study of executive incompetence. It should be taught in business schools.".
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The A3000 had a scandoubler and A600/A1200/A4000 should have had that too. They should have excluded the RF output on the A600/A1200 and maybe the composite output too (with 15 KHz RGB and 30 KHz VGA left).
Commodore could have used EGA Monitors as the standard on the 500/2000 and VGA on the 3000/4000 but still used OCS/ECS and AGA. This would have likely saved money and allowed the Amiga to be taken more seriously due to not being another plug into a TV job.
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BTW, corruption was probably an even bigger problem, they couldn't have been that stupid, could they ?
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Hi why do you guys think commodore went under?
Because of internal corruption.
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The saddest day of all....
Friday April 29, 1994, at 4:10 P.M.
Commodore International filed for liquidation
in order to be protected from its creditors
Friday April 29, 1994, at 4:10 P.M.
Commodore's official statement follows:
"Commodore International Limited announced today
that its Board of Directors has authorized the
transfer of assets to trustees for the benefit of
its creditor and has placed its major subsidiary,
Commodore Electronics Limited, into voluntary
liquidation. This is the initial phase of an
orderly liquidation of both companies, which
are incorporated in the Bahamas, by the Bahamas
Supreme Court."
Whilst they hoped the action would be short lived
it was not and sadly meant the end of Commodore.
Happens.... Business is a risk when you need to
draw on massive amounts of capital. Even when
the product is fine and selling well the smallest
of debt can push a company over. This was a
business issue in the end. And sadly Amiga
users suffered at the time, and also during
the many false hopes that followed. And I guess
we still live in hope. The fact that there was
such a healthy following and still is, is the
real tragedy.
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Commodore's mistakes were many. I'll list a few that contributed to their downfall.
1. They tried to replace the C64 during the height of it's sales with the Plus 4, which didn't have sprites, and, quite frankly, wasn't as good.
2. When they released the CDTV, they refused to allow games to be published for it (at first, anyway), and wouldn't let it be displayed near toys or games in retail outlets because they wanted people to think it was "serious".
3. Then they tried to replace the C64 with the C128. If they'd done this 2 years earlier, it might have worked, but they released the C128 a few months before releasing the A1000.
4. Having released the A500, and despite it's sales still being astronomical, Commodore tried to discontinue the C64. Public pressure forced them to bring it back, so they gave it a streamlined case.
5. They replaced the A500 with the A500+, at Christmas, without warning, and packaged it with games that wouldn't run on it. Mehdi Ali was CEO.
6. The following Christmas, they replaced the A500+ with the A600 (a downgrade, in my opinion), while advertising the A1200 loudly. While there were plenty of A600s, there weren't enough parts to supply the number of A1200s demand required, so people bought PCs instead, just in time for Doom. Mehdi Ali was still CEO.
The CD32 didn't have anything to do with it. It had barely been released by the time Commodore went into receivership on 28 April, 1994 (the day after my birthday). If it had been, it wouldn't have saved them. Mehdi Ali was still CEO.
If Commodore hadn't gone bankrupt, they planned to discontinue Amiga OS, and sell computers that ran Windows NT. They didn't respect their product, and they didn't respect their customers. That's why they went bankrupt.
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duga: Are you Swedish or what?
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CBM was plagued by mismanagement that caused things like the Amiga 600 to be obsolete by the time they were built. If you think about it, the 600 is not too bad and we have managed to make upgrades to it, but if you think about it I have to say that one thing I think commodore could have done differently was being at the forefront of innovation in computers, all the time. If they had taken the Amiga line and adapted it for very good expandability, such as:
Allowing the CPU slot the full memory bus width of the 32-bit standard (for a system max of 4GB)
Having AGA upgrades for the older Amigas
Introducing ECS and AGA at the same time, with the 3000 and 600 being relegated to lower cost versions of the A4000 and A600. This would've allowed AAA to take place.
Eliminate the PC Compatible division, and instead comission first party CPU emulation bridgeboards.
They also could've had the 68060 standard as soon as it came out, because I believe it predated the pentium.
They best road map would've been to then migrate to the 601 and 603 PPC processors with 040 and 060s available as compatibility bridges, unless the 68k line could be expanded.
Thats my opinion of their blunders
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Read the book. There's a lot of good ideas flying about but only a few hit the mark. The main reason in my mind is because they rode their platfoms into the ground and stifled the very creativity and R&D that made the Amiga 1000. Executives then came to think that the C= company was successful because of their leadership. Always a dangerous thing.
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Yes, Amiga jumped out in front and then just sat there waiting for the world to catch up and pass them. Commodore expected to get money from it's products forever without putting any money back in to improve them.
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BTW, corruption was probably an even bigger problem, they couldn't have been that stupid, could they ?
This is as close as any one has come in this thread. There were two crooks in charge of Commodore International Inc., by the names of Gould and Ali. They stole all of the company's cash assets, then drove it into the ground.
Look into the shareholder's meetings in the last year or so of Commodore's existence. Gould would call the meeting with almost no advance notice, in places like the Cayman islands (were no laws existed to stop this sort of corporate fraud). This will give you a quick and dirty idea of what went on.
How Gould and Ali managed to skirt the law, and not get arrested is amazing.
But, all this crap about poor aga, or chipsets, is just that - crap.
Commodore International was raped and pillaged, pure and simple.
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They didn't respect their product, and they didn't respect their customers. That's why they went bankrupt.
QFT.
The company was all over the place. The Plus4 and 16 were barking when they had a winning C64 design and they weren't as good. Even so, the C64 was a reliable money earner through the 80s.
I am sure that C= thought the A600 would be the C64 for the 90s, and that people would probably be buying them to connect to their TVs for a decade.
The A1200 and A4000 were two years too late. Even though an earlier release would have made the machines more expensive to buy, they would have been obvious upgrades for potential and current A500 owners - the A1200 especially at a couple of hundred dollars more.
E.g., 1990: £399 A500 (68k, 1MB), £599 "A1200" (A500 casing, '020 CPU, 2MB) - probably called the A700 or something.
And that's before we talk about the chipset debacle, and the issues with corruption that have been bought up in this thread.
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http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0973864966/lejos0e-20
Commodore (A Company On The Edge) Book ... AKA .. everything you wanted to know about commodore :) I finished it during my 2weeks holiday in the Med this year - highly recommend it!
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Commodore (A Company On The Edge) Book ... AKA .. everything you wanted to know about commodore :)
+1
I agree there, a great book.
The current revision doesn't have much on the Amiga (apparently the first edition had more?), but there is supposedly a follow up on the way that will cover the Amiga era..
Should be awesome!! :-)
desiv
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There is poor management and then there is Commodore's very poor management:
- They didn't keep up with the production processes of their custom chips and discovered at the last minute that everybody else's custom chips were able to clock faster than theirs.
- When they found out that it was going to be expensive to produce custom chips at a competitive clock speed, instead of forking out the cash and resources to get it done, they diverted funds away from the Amiga division and started an MSDOS PC compatible division.
- They also delayed the introduction of the A1200 and A4000 until the A600 was ready and discovered that the A600 was a total flop anyway and should never have been introduced into the AGA lineup.
There's probably more reasons but those are the main ones.
I'm not entirely sure all the delay of the 1200 and 4000 was the 600. larger delay was the shelving of the 3000+ project which was the first machine being made with AGA chips and the DSP chip that ended up being taken out in the final products and used by Apple in their AV line of Macs.
Also not sure the MS-DOS machines diverted any funds. Those to my recolection were a project by Commodore Europe and once released sold very well over there due to the good name Commodore had. Since most develpment of Amiga was in the US I doubt this had much effect on anything other than more income into Commodore as a whole.
That Commodore sat on the same basic custom chips capabilities with just small tweaks from the release of the A1000 in '85 through the 600 in '92 is probably the biggest influence in the decline.
It could be said they lost a lot of direction and made a lot of bad decisions along the way that all served in the small parts to slow down the company to a crawl.
Abandoning the Pet line for the home business when the Vic-20 came out, which disconnected Commodore from Business computing for so long that even when Amiga came out no one considered Commodore seriously as a business machine.
Instead of keeping to the plan of a low cost Sinclair competition, the expanding of the C116 into the Plus/4 was a huge bungle and went from a machine that would sell ($50-75 for a color computer with chicklet keys compares favorably with a black and white computer with membrane keyboard that shuts off the display when software loads) to a machine priced the same as the C64 that no one wanted.
Never releasing the Commodore LCD whcih at the time would have easily been the best portable computer around (and vaulted Commodore back into businesses) and instead leaving that market to Tandy with the Model 100.
Not having a plan to position CDTV. It compared favorably with the CDi and already had a library of software available which should have been a clear advantage over Phillips.
Cost reducing the 500 into the more expensive to make 600. Commodore cost reduced the C64 and 128 so they should have known how to cost reduce something by then.
Bungling numerous attempts at deals with the Japanese.
Not accepting a deal with Sun to have them sell Amiga 300UX machines as low end Sun workstations only to later enter into a deal with Nettek to let them rebadge Amigas as Video Toasters.
Not releasing the CD32 sooner so its sales might have had an impact and the money might have helped keep Commodore solvent.
Also have to remember things are a lot different now. After sale of a computer the company didnt make much money at all on it besides some software they sold under their brand and the hardware enhancements they sold until a new model came out. There was no app store to make Commodore able to keep making a continual income once the computer was in the customers hands.
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This is as close as any one has come in this thread. There were two crooks in charge of Commodore International Inc., by the names of Gould and Ali. They stole all of the company's cash assets, then drove it into the ground.
Look into the shareholder's meetings in the last year or so of Commodore's existence. Gould would call the meeting with almost no advance notice, in places like the Cayman islands (were no laws existed to stop this sort of corporate fraud). This will give you a quick and dirty idea of what went on.
How Gould and Ali managed to skirt the law, and not get arrested is amazing.
But, all this crap about poor aga, or chipsets, is just that - crap.
Commodore International was raped and pillaged, pure and simple.
This, plus the fact that the Gould and Ali stifled the engineering team wherever possible. Not investing in/canning AAA, and delaying AGA's release beyond any chance it had of competing with PC video cards etc.
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I think Commodores problem was that upper management really believed that they were better off selling PC-hardware developed by other companies under the powerful Commodore brand. They didn`t undestand that it was the technology what made Commodore successful.
The A600, 264 and CDTV where great, but they didn`t get the money and attention to bring them to the market fast, complete and with the right advertizing and software, because the money was wasted elsewhere.
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Comes down to one thing...the C64GS, or what they should have done with the C64 more precisely. Had they used the talented MOS Technology engineers to create a portable C64 with an option for a monochrome or colour machine to purchase in shops around 1990 they would be alive and well right now trust me.
Gameboy is a disgusting screened machine, sound is tinny even with £100 headphones used with it so pure dirt, graphics are not much better compared to C64 games (play Power Drift on C64 and compare it to the NES crap that looks like Pole Position on a VIC-20 FFS)
And yet if Nintendo could sell such a horrid machine with a screen that makes the games UNPLAYABLE due to vomit inducing pale green/yellow on dark grey super blur-o-vision screen that INSTANTLY BLURS ALL MOVEMENT ON SCREEN (Galaxian is a real joke cartridge for GB, you might as well disconnect the screen for all the good it does when playing that game!). It sold on the quality of the games, however as C64 absolutely rips GB a new one in every genre I'm sorry but even C= couldn't fark up such a genius machine with all the fruits of talented people who produced games on the C64 from 1982 to the early 90s.
So....they did something even worse, they never even thought of it....instead they spent millions re-tooling for high MBit carts for the C64GS and building a C64 console which can't use 99% of the amazing C64 software catalogue it had built up in the thousands since 1982.
If anyone ever read the Computer and Video Games magazine console guide take on the situation you would know what I am talking about. In summer 1990 C+VG when reviewing SNES/Megadrive/PC Engine/GX4000/NEOGEO/Gameboy/Gamegear/Lynx etc also reviewed the C64GS (Commodore 64 console with no keyboard but suspiciously the same height width and depth as Commodore 64 computer case) they said that they wouldn't recommend this machine BUT they did tell people to go and buy a C64 instead and play 100s and 100s of excellent games. Say what you want about me but when it comes to computer games expertise only one magazine in the world ever had the right to give an opinion and that was UKs CVG magazine, they were there when home computer/console gaming was born and they lasted right to the end of the last console generation and DirectX9 XP PC games. Commodore did nothing with their most envied possession, the Commodore 64 back catalogue of games. The C64 has more excellent games than EVERY console or computer produced from the start to the current day. Because Amiga games were such badly programmed sh1t like Outrun or Afterburner and only a handful of Shadow of the Beast quality games were made it doesn't even come close to matching the C64 experience.
1982 technology home computer being recommended to people reading reviews of Sega/Nintendo 16bit game consoles? Would EDGE tell you to go out and buy an Atari Jaguar instead of an Xbox 360? That's the technological gap we are talking here, the games really were that good according to the king of games magazines from 1980 to this century!
So there you have it, not slitting medhi ali's throat on his second day of employment at Commodore and not making a C64 gameboy rip-off = FAIL! :roflmao:
(medhi ali doesn't deserve capital letters on his name)
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Commodore could have used EGA Monitors as the standard on the 500/2000 and VGA on the 3000/4000 but still used OCS/ECS and AGA. This would have likely saved money and allowed the Amiga to be taken more seriously due to not being another plug into a TV job.
The RGB port on the A500/2000 will use an EGA or CGA monitors. It looks really bad because those monitors are "digital" and predefined palette of 16 colors which don't map well to anything.
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The RGB port on the A500/2000 will use an EGA or CGA monitors. It looks really bad because those monitors are "digital" and predefined palette of 16 colors which don't map well to anything.
Ah ok, I didnt realise that.
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Hi why do you guys think commodore went under?
In two words? Moore's Law.
"Those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it"
Currently reading the Bagnall book and while C= toplevel was good at business they had few clues about technology. If they had, they would have invested in R&D and been willing to kill their own golden geese.
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On the other hand there was very little Commodore could have done to survive. Even if they took the money spent on beer and chips and put it into the Amiga it's hard to see them surviving. The 90's were converging on the PC. Custom chips on the motherboard were giving way to generic graphics cards which could be replaced. Window 95 was the final nail in the coffin. I remember an Amiga user's group meeting on the Windows 95 release day, the speaker was trashing Windows 95 right and left, and I knew the sun had set on C= and the Amiga.
But as I said, even though Commodore management was thoroughly incompetent it made no difference, there was no winning move.
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If they would have had a good management they would have invested their money in the new AAA but finally gone the "Apple-way", using standard-hardware with their own portable and adaptable OS. I also do not believe that custom chipsets had a chance with the fast developing PC market and the falling prices of standard hardware. Perhaps something like AROS but of course closed source.
But at that time (I can remember myself) I am not sure if most users would have followed this route (because of the hate against PCs by many)
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On the other hand there was very little Commodore could have done to survive. Even if they took the money spent on beer and chips and put it into the Amiga it's hard to see them surviving. The 90's were converging on the PC. Custom chips on the motherboard were giving way to generic graphics cards which could be replaced. Window 95 was the final nail in the coffin. I remember an Amiga user's group meeting on the Windows 95 release day, the speaker was trashing Windows 95 right and left, and I knew the sun had set on C= and the Amiga.
Of course the time with custom chips had to come to an end. The Apple way was the way to go; Power PC (during the 90's and later x86 around '05) and PC parts but with a much more efficient Amiga OS than Mac OS and Windows 9x.
In the 80's the Amigas number one feature was the custom chips.
In the 90's the Amigas number one feature was the OS. Remember that Windows (1, 2, 3, 9x, not counting NT) was a toy before Windows 2000.
Regarding Windows it got more bloated for every version up until Vista, now it's actually getting more efficient for every version (7 and 8). That should be something that Amiga users like.
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Amiga-Users will never like what MS does :-)
Expecially when I remember that I read that they killed "Amiga" by making a "friendly" call... I can believe these reports...
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The 90's were converging on the PC. [...]
But as I said, even though Commodore management was thoroughly incompetent it made no difference, there was no winning move.
I am not so sure about that. It`s hard to say what would have happened, if Commodore never sold PCs and had a 3D capable Amiga 1200 ready in 1992.
It`s hard to say what would have happened, if Commodore took the other route and abandoned Amiga in favor of x86 in 1988 and introduced a Commodore PC that was capable of running Workbench on MS-DOS and had a good video- and sound interface before Windows, SVGA and Soundblaster 16 would conquer the market.
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Comes down to one thing...the C64GS, or what they should have done with the C64 more precisely. Had they used the talented MOS Technology engineers to create a portable C64 with an option for a monochrome or colour machine to purchase in shops around 1990 they would be alive and well right now trust me.
No.
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This, plus the fact that the Gould and Ali stifled the engineering team wherever possible. Not investing in/canning AAA, and delaying AGA's release beyond any chance it had of competing with PC video cards etc.
Well, sort of - but having the money stolen from within does all that by itself, doesn't it?
A lot of people point to the book - nice piece of work, but does NOT hit on the real problems at all. Mainly, Gould and Ali, period.
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(http://gifsoup.com/webroot/animatedgifs/57746_o.gif)
Comes down to one thing...the C64GS, or what they should have done with the C64 more precisely. Had they used the talented MOS Technology engineers to create a portable C64 with an option for a monochrome or colour machine to purchase in shops around 1990 they would be alive and well right now trust me.
Gameboy is a disgusting screened machine, sound is tinny even with £100 headphones used with it so pure dirt, graphics are not much better compared to C64 games (play Power Drift on C64 and compare it to the NES crap that looks like Pole Position on a VIC-20 FFS)
And yet if Nintendo could sell such a horrid machine with a screen that makes the games UNPLAYABLE due to vomit inducing pale green/yellow on dark grey super blur-o-vision screen that INSTANTLY BLURS ALL MOVEMENT ON SCREEN (Galaxian is a real joke cartridge for GB, you might as well disconnect the screen for all the good it does when playing that game!). It sold on the quality of the games, however as C64 absolutely rips GB a new one in every genre I'm sorry but even C= couldn't fark up such a genius machine with all the fruits of talented people who produced games on the C64 from 1982 to the early 90s.
So....they did something even worse, they never even thought of it....instead they spent millions re-tooling for high MBit carts for the C64GS and building a C64 console which can't use 99% of the amazing C64 software catalogue it had built up in the thousands since 1982.
If anyone ever read the Computer and Video Games magazine console guide take on the situation you would know what I am talking about. In summer 1990 C+VG when reviewing SNES/Megadrive/PC Engine/GX4000/NEOGEO/Gameboy/Gamegear/Lynx etc also reviewed the C64GS (Commodore 64 console with no keyboard but suspiciously the same height width and depth as Commodore 64 computer case) they said that they wouldn't recommend this machine BUT they did tell people to go and buy a C64 instead and play 100s and 100s of excellent games. Say what you want about me but when it comes to computer games expertise only one magazine in the world ever had the right to give an opinion and that was UKs CVG magazine, they were there when home computer/console gaming was born and they lasted right to the end of the last console generation and DirectX9 XP PC games. Commodore did nothing with their most envied possession, the Commodore 64 back catalogue of games. The C64 has more excellent games than EVERY console or computer produced from the start to the current day. Because Amiga games were such badly programmed sh1t like Outrun or Afterburner and only a handful of Shadow of the Beast quality games were made it doesn't even come close to matching the C64 experience.
1982 technology home computer being recommended to people reading reviews of Sega/Nintendo 16bit game consoles? Would EDGE tell you to go out and buy an Atari Jaguar instead of an Xbox 360? That's the technological gap we are talking here, the games really were that good according to the king of games magazines from 1980 to this century!
So there you have it, not slitting medhi ali's throat on his second day of employment at Commodore and not making a C64 gameboy rip-off = FAIL! :roflmao:
(medhi ali doesn't deserve capital letters on his name)
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I know that those machines failed but mayby that is why i collect them :-) but yes a falcon could be cool to have
Ha, I have an Atari Jaguar as well, and have always wanted a Falcon. They were pricey when they came out, were very much like when the Amiga was first announced, with a lot of sweet features. I've try looking up to see if I can get a hold of one every once in a while, but no one ever wants to part with them. It's very much like Amiga users, they don't ever part with them, unless they decide to charge more than it'd cost to get a generic PC and emulate 'em. :(
I do need a Falcon and probably an A1200 with an A500 to round out my collection. I don't have a C64, but I was never a fan (I did love the Atari 8-bits though, which really with Jay Miner being the father of that... it's probably more related to the Amiga anyhow)
slaapliedje
On Topic; I recall when it happened that everyone had said it was due to management going to the Bahamas all the time and spending the money frivolously.
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Ha, I have an Atari Jaguar as well, and have always wanted a Falcon. They were pricey when they came out, were very much like when the Amiga was first announced, with a lot of sweet features. I've try looking up to see if I can get a hold of one every once in a while, but no one ever wants to part with them. It's very much like Amiga users, they don't ever part with them, unless they decide to charge more than it'd cost to get a generic PC and emulate 'em. :(
I do need a Falcon and probably an A1200 with an A500 to round out my collection. I don't have a C64, but I was never a fan (I did love the Atari 8-bits though, which really with Jay Miner being the father of that... it's probably more related to the Amiga anyhow)
slaapliedje
VRXbPw
On Topic; I recall when it happened that everyone had said it was due to management going to the Bahamas all the time and spending the money frivolously.[/QUO
cool what kind of games do you like for the jaguar :-) have you noticed you can buy many jaguar games new and sealed?
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In two words? Moore's Law.
Commodore had heard of Moore's Law, but wanted no truck with it.