And not talking specifically about Amigas, but as a C64/C128 successor. Seems like an obvious plan, full backwards compatibility with their 8 bit machines, plenty fast and cheap, up to 16 MB RAM, they were granted half of the licensing cost by WDC... Yet it never happend! And I think it would make for a very powerful entry level machine in the late 80s and early 90s... certainly more impressive than C65, which to me made little sense by 91'. A GUI based OS like GEOS could have been used/licensed by C=...
Commodore couldn't have managed their way out of a hat.
Content to sit back on their money earners, they stopped innovating and, surprise surprise, a few years later they were bust.
Just this morning I was thinking that C= should have reduced the C64 to a single chip (including the VICII,SID,6502,Serial,etc) by the late 80s so that they could sell it for cheap in developing countries for a profit. It could also have been clocked higher because said chip would have been fabricated on a far more modern process than the original C64. Your idea of using the 65816 is similar. An enhanced C64 for the late 80s/early 90s, with the C64's flaws (relatively slow CPU, mud-inspired colour palette) designed out.
