Dave Haynie Talks About Developing The Commodore Amiga

[Kronos]

Someone from engineering should have foreseen that AAA was going to be a disaster from day one.

I guess that depends on when "day 1" would have been...

AA was waaaaaay late and so was AAA/Nyx.

If engineering had it's way (and the resources) the A3000 would have gotten AA from the start (or shortly after), about 2 years before it went into the market with the A4000.

So with a little bit of willpower they might have had AAA ready in 94, at which point it would have been quite competetiv.

"The next big thing" was Hombre, some PA_RISC(?) design running WindowsNT, completling cutting of any connection with Amiga, and making C= soley depending on MS far worse than in the 8bit days with MS_Basic.
Sure would have sold o.k. on the HW base, but would have ended C= as being just another novelty PC-maker with maybe some extra live being donated by offereing the chips as a PCI-GFX-card going the successfull road gone by 3DFX, 3DLabs, S3, Matrox etc.

[Kronos]

The view that management sucked and engineering were perfect is overly simplistic and not true.

The point of having "managment" is to weed out brainfart projects (C65,A600,Plus4...) and steer resources towards (potential) money cows (like AAA-Amigas).

[Kronos]

All very educational, guys.

And the C65 a "brainfart project"?
No that was the C128.

There simply was NO point in an C64-incompatible 8bit after they allready had the far more powerfull Amiga line in stores.

There was some limited point in a C64-compatible upgrade, it's just that the 128 was overengineered, something much simpler at a rock-bottom price point could have made a ton of cash.

[Kronos]

They all died, Atari, Sinclair, Coleco, Acorn, et al.   The PC was establishing a dominance that would last 2 decades.

Lets see...

- Atari, far to small user base and an OS that was hard to modernize to 1990s standards

- Sinclar,Coleco, pretty much stuck in 8Bit land

- Arcon, well the Archimedes/RiscPC was quite o.k. and modern but the userbase was even smaller than that of the AtariST

C=/Amiga in the early 90s did not only have good enough HW, but also a large userbase, big SW-library and all that running an OS that was superior to the mainstream of that time (Windows3.1/95,MacOS7-8).

So yes, with proper managment Amiga could have a bigger marketshare today then Apple has.

[Kronos]

Well Win95 was released over a year after C= went under, so we need to compare Win3.1 to  AOS3.1 a comparisons AOS wins hands down on thechnical merits. On the other side it was lacking in "completeness" and implementation.

HW wise there wasn't much difference between a 030 and 386 or a 040 and a 486, only that the later was crippled by the SW still running them in 8088 mode.

ECS/AGA GFX was lacking in resolution and color compared to most VGA-cards of that era but could more than compete on speed.

So yes, if C= had woken up in 1990 or so and had invested heavily in modernizing HW and SW Amiga could have come out ahead by 95.
They didn't do that and so we ended with a minimal HW-update to late and an OS full of great concepts but also bugs and outright holes.

[Kronos]

The emulator that Apple wrote for the PowerMac to run 68000 code was just really good.
 

The emulator Apple wrote for the 1st PPC Macs was a total turd, right to the point where those units ran native SW slower than a 68k running a the same code in 68k due to the OS still being (emulated) 68k.

Allmost killed Apple and it took them to the release of the 1st PCI based Macs over a year later till they added some JIT-like speedups (and having more of the OS in actual PPC code) to really regain a level of performance comparable to the x86s.