So were the Morph OS folks wrong all along?

[Belial6]

So, riddle me this.  What is so 'custom' about the 'custom' chipsets.  It seems to me that they were more 'proprietary' than anything else.  It seems that the only reason that they were called 'custom' was because the were not general purpose cpus, but chips designed around their task.

If that is the reason for them being called 'custom', then every PC in my house has 'custom' chipsets made by nVidia, Intel, or AMD.

[Belial6]

So, if Commodore had licensed them out to be graphics chips on other systems, the Amiga wouldn't have been as good?  It sounds like you value the Amiga more for what it didn't do than what it did.

[Belial6]

Custom chips are designed by a company for a specific product, the alternative is "off the shelf", where a company buys in chips designed by another company.

The Amiga's chipset was custom designed for the Amiga, it's CPU was an off-the-shelf part made by Motorolla for general sale.

That is kind of what I am getting at though.  Like psxphill said, some custom chips are good, and some are not.

There is no value to users in having a chip custom.  Being the only system running the chip does not increase the performance of that system.  The 'Custom-ness' of the 'custom' chipset did not improve the Amiga in any way.  It was the 'coprocessor-ness' of the 'custom' chipset that made the Amiga shine.

This misunderstanding of why the Amiga chipsets where good lead many Amiga fans down a self destructive path.  They start obsessing on having the system 'custom' for custom's sake because they have come to believe that custom = good and cots = bad.

With all other things being equal, cots > custom.  The only time that custom is a better choice is when it brings something to the table that out weighs the cost benefit (for manufacture as well as further R&D) of using cots parts.  The fact that the Amiga had a 68k showed that Amiga understood this.