Atari vs Commodore which one was stupider.

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Commodore, was far more incompetent!!

Atari had a massive struggle against the Amiga, and put up a damn good fight... even becoming technologically superior to the Amiga with the Lynx and the Falcon... though they didn't have the experience that the Amiga had and so couldn't develop the technology.

Commodore bascily rehashed the A1000 for 10 years... With only 2 improvments... the AGA chipset (a damp squib in 1992) which should have been released in 1987... and AmigaOS 3.0, which was the first step toward a professional Operating system.

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Lando wrote:
However these days Apple are releasing new Mac revisions at least every year, and high-end PC's are generally only cutting-edge for 6 months, so C= would have had to either keep up (impossible) or ditch the old Amiga chipset after about '97/98 and design their new machines with licensed chips from ATI or NVidia (again, like Apple), this would have been a very difficult transition (losing compatibility with all hardware-banging software) but necessary.

Had Commodore and the Amiga survived, then I imagine by 1997, when the need to switch to off the shelf parts occured (Assuming Commodore hadn't become a Graphics Chip vendor), the OS would have fully supported RTG and very few programs would have hit the hardware... NYX was not OCS/AGA compatible!

I expect Commodore would have moved the Amiga platform to the HP PA-RISC by 1995... and would have had to transition to x86 CPU's by 2001.

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Hyperspeed wrote:
What other machines used planar systems?

I think most machines actually had both modes...

I bet the Megadrive/Genesis did, you couldn't get smoother scrolling than Sonic The Hedgehog games.

Also, HAM modes, how would you explain this technology - I raise this since both the Amiga and Atari Jaguar could do them.

HAM mode is basicly a 16 colour mode, that uses 6 bits instead of 4. The two extra bits are used to tell the hardware hold the data from the pixel to the left of the current pixel, and then use the four pixels of the current pixel to adjust (modify)  either the red, bue or green component.

The pixel data was assigned as such:

00 xxxx : use color from palette index xxxx;
01 gggg : keep red and blue components from previous pixel, use gggg as green component;
10 rrrr : keep green and blue components from previous pixel, use rrrr as red component;
11 bbbb : keep red and green components from previous pixel, use bbbb as blue component.

By carefully selecting the 16 colours, and making sure that the colours are smoothly transitioning  (i.e. like in photos) then you can get very realistic images!

HAM is basicly a form of image Compression, where 12bits are compressed into 6bits.

Alien Vs Predator on Jaguar was a fps that actually played in HAM mode!

Somewhat pointless by the time the Jag was released... just add more  memory.

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Psy wrote:

If Sega came out with a computer version of the Saturn it probably would have sold better then the Saturn, as Sega could have brought built in 3D cheap to computer users.  Where was Commodore in 3D technology? As far as I know Commodore had nothing even on paper to give the Amiga 3D and back in 1995 built in 3D (at par with the Playstation and Saturn) would have been a huge selling point since neither Macs or PCs had it.

The Nyx had features to help 3D work... the AAA might have had some blitter modes to assist texture mapping (I seem to recall reading such).