So you were put in charge of making the 060 based amiga

[the_leander]

I would have licenced the Draco and be done with it ....

/Thread

[the_leander]

Draco was great for its purpose (video), but it's not a full-blown Amiga.

It may have lacked a commodore chipset, but the fact is, AAA was so far from being finished that by the time it would have been ready it would have been hopelessly out of date. Draco, using off the shelf components for graphics and sound really was the only realistic way of doing things if Amiga was to stay in any way relevant past 1995.

It was more of an Amiga than anything I've seen since C='s fall with the exception of the Minimig.

[the_leander]

So that would be a minimum of 060 50mhz (which is about Pentium 100-120mhz performance I believe as the 060 is a clock doubled CPU IIRC)

Just a small point since the rest of your post isn't that bad, at 66Mhz the 68060 would kick out ~88Mips peak. An original Pentium clocked at 60Mhz did 100Mips.

Also consider that the maths performance was better on that original pentium even before the introduction of MMX.

[the_leander]

My point was gaming was going 3D with PC and PSX/3DO/Saturn and we needed something similarly powerful even in a base model and an 030 or 040 wouldn't cut it as custom 3D chipset was impossible from Commodore in 96. Even if base bargain PC in 96 was P75. Either that or licence PowerVR or something like that but I think 96 is too early for that kinda hardware really.

Your choices for 95/96 were S3 Virge, Matrox Mystique, ATI Rage or later in 1996 the Rendition Vérité V1000 or the 3dFX Voodoo pci.

PowerVR were around in 96 and they supplied Matrox with their m3d parts.

However for an all in one solution your best bet was probably the V1000.

edit: Possibly a DSP too, not too sure how well the one from the Atari Falcon would work with an 060 doing 3D games acceleration, maybe good for matrix manipulation for polygon game engines.

Why not simply have it deal with the sound?

[the_leander]

Draco was very nice, but what could it do that my *older* A3000/040/VlabMotion/Toccata/Firecracker system couldn't do?

If you're playing that game, why bother with the A4000? Hell why bother with the A3000 when the A2000 was capable of everything that your system was.

 Are you saying that Commodore should have released a souped-up A3000 in 1996, as KThunder states above?

No I'm saying C= should have dumped developing their own chipsets and gone over fully to RTG using Draco as the starting point.

Keeping Amiga tied to slow, expensive, underperforming chipsets (as they were by the time of AGA) was only ever going to end badly.

[the_leander]

Ah yes you could certainly use it for sound but was just wondering if using a DSP like the Motorola Falcon one, possibly as an optional plug in, could speed up geometry setup in 3D games to give you a unique advantage over 1996 PC gaming that's all.

Bit like SNES + SuperFX for Nintendo in early 90s. Then again most Falcon games look crap so........

With the exception of the S3 Virge in the list above, tbh as far as games go having the DSP there wouldn't really be a whole lot of benefit in it being there - any speed bump you might have been able to get out of it would almost certainly have been at the cost of development time. See the Sega Saturn verses the original Playstation for how that goes.

But for sound, now there you could do wonders with a half decent DSP.

[the_leander]

They didn't see that custom chips days for a single or even a couple computer lines were over.

QFMFT

I just picked the Draco since it was a working example of this line of thinking in action.

[the_leander]

Had they used Ranger chipset, completed by Jay in 88, instead of AGA and continued development it would have been OK, VRAM was getting cheaper fast in the 90s. VRAM was key to Diamond Viper/Stealth PC SVGA card's speed.

They still would have been screwed come 1995. They had nothing in AAA that would have come close to the Rendition V1000 or hell, even the Matrox Mystique in terms of graphics performance, and sound wise there were some superb consumer grade sound cards coming at this time that were more than a match for the Mary sound chip.

--edit--

Hombre might potentially have held its own if it'd been released in 96 within the games console market, but AAA - Acutiator? It was a dead end.

[the_leander]

 Easy enough, even Commodore could have released a Draco-like machine significantly earlier than 1996.

That they didn't only goes to show that Haynie wasn't wrong in his assessment of C= management as being a bunch of retards.

Take a gander at what the Mystique, or the V1000 offered in terms of graphics capabilities. That is what AAA would have been up against in 96.

It doesn't make for a remotely pretty comparison.

If it was to survive it had to go modular. It had to dump its games console roots.

[the_leander]

I wanted to respond to this more fully because it really deserved it.

(But recall what year the A4000 was released.)

I do recall the A4000 launch in 1992, I recall also the 1994 A4000T and the fact that even the Amiga magazines called C= out on that one as being too little too late and too expensive.

I recall both Dave Haynies and Jay Miner's reactions to it as well. Neither were that impressed.

[the_leander]

But for Quake style or solid textured 3D games (all the rage in 95/96) you needed a super fast CPU anyway so it didn't matter really, in 96 you would need an 060 machine to compete with 90/75mhz bargain bucket Pentiums.

Right up until the release of the RV1000 hardware 3d version of quake, or a little later the OpenGL release. At which point not only are you being outgunned in terms of raw cpu performance, but now you were being utterly pwnt by the 3d accelerators finally being given something to really chew on.

Hombre would never have been cost effective enough for a console rivalling computer anywhere near A1200 costs and Saturn/PSX was sold at a massive loss for years.

With the exception of the Wii, every single games console since the PS1 (and quite possibly earlier) has been sold at a loss, with the game prices being hiked up to subsidise it. There is no reason why such a tactic could not have been employed for Hombre. Certainly it was significantly less complex on paper than the abortion that was the Saturn.

Actually I think the problem in 1992 was the A4000/030. It was just too expensive for a middle range machine,

The A4000 was too expensive period. It only ever got worse as time went on, from the initial 030 model right up to the AT A4000 with it's 060. Ranger wouldn't have helped all that much. Chipsets of the type offered by the Amiga, even by 1992 were looking like a decidedly bad thing to do. Everything else was going modular. By 1994 PCI was out in force, Pentiums were the new kid on the block. A year later Macs had gone the same way.

The gig was up.

[the_leander]

That may be true for Xbox/Xbox360/PS3, I don't think that is true at all for Nintendo.

Nintendo have always been something of the odd man out.

Sega may have taken a hit on the Saturn, but I doubt they did on the dreamcast.

The Dreamcast was sold at a lower initial launch price than the original playstation at the time. I would be highly surprised if it wasn't being sold at a loss - in the UK it was being sold new in 2000 for £99...

I doubt Sony made a loss on the PS1, it was quite a simple design and they basically owned it all.

By todays standards sure, but the original playstation at it's launch was a supremely powerful piece of kit. I've no doubt that later versions like the slimline PS1 at a considerable profit. However even at the release of the Dreamcast, it was still being sold in its original format at a loss.

[the_leander]

The implication is that the console sales generally do become profitable in the long term, even without the hugely profitable software, so long as sales volume reaches expectations.

The development costs are finite, add to that that as the cost of components being reduced as the processes mature or are improved for lower failures per yield. Then of course, looking at the Playstation series you have the reduced component (the so called "Slimline") versions of the consoles which help no end in reducing the expense.

So yeah, it's more than possible for a console to become profitable hardware toward the end of its service life on a per unit basis, maybe even overall in cases like the original and maybe the second gen Playstations. But the pure profit by that stage has been rolling in for years through games and peripheral sales, not to mention now services such as Xbox live...

[the_leander]

When it comes to peripherals it's an interesting situation as you occasionally get approached by manufacturers to support their, sometimes quite mad: pads, sticks or in our case inflatable-wireless-motion-sensing-motorbikes... I kid you not

Still they make for some awesome splitscreen racing fun

I so want one of these. :lol: