Sacking of Los Gatos engineers point of no return?

[Khephren]

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?

[Khephren]

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

[Khephren]

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.

[Khephren]

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).

[Khephren]

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.

[Khephren]

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.

[Khephren]

We are back to that old stomping ground, Commodore should have finished AAA
...which they had been working on since '89!

[Khephren]

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.

[Khephren]

@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.

[Khephren]

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

[Khephren]

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.