What if Atari allowed Jay his dream?

[amigaksi]

Certainly karma factor should be taken into account.  You can try very hard (your best), but results just come out the same-- karma.  

I would state that one good thing about IBM being the top seller was that IBM set standards that are in hardware whereas Microsoft is/was setting standards in software which are not as good.  Doing a MOV instruction to the VGA memory (A000:0000) to set a color at a pixel location is much preferred over calling some bloated API function.  Doing a IN/OUT instructions to read from ports 60H/61H would always beat out a GetMessage loop on same system.  Now without hardware standards, you basically have to rely on API calls and complicate any real-time system analysis and slow things down.  
Commodore and Atari had hardware standards but they threw them away when they upgraded to 68000 based systems.  They should have left the 6502 (and custom chips) in the 68000-based systems.  Just a theoretical scenario.

[amigaksi]

>Do you mean left the 6502 as a co-processor or main processor? I hope you mean the former, because the 68000 was the only sane future for Jay and crew (even Atari, Apple, etc)

The former since the 68000 was definitely a faster and more powerful chip and there was no upgrade to 6502 that could match it.  So they should have memory mapped the 6502 into the 68000 address space (64K chunk) and let old software continue to run in some mode like 8086/8088 DOS-based code still runs on Pentium 4 machines.  Of course the custom chips would also have to map in there as well so the old software does not see that it's running in a new-processor machine.

[amigaksi]

>Actually there is a 6502 in the Amiga... take a look at the keyboard controler chip.

>But there is no way the Amiga or Atari should ever have stuck with the 6502... You probably think there should have been a VIC and a SID in the amiga too...

Basic point was that it should have been an upgrade machine not a new machine so as not to alienate loyal fans/customers as well as software developers (at least).  Perhaps hardware developers would have to do some redeveloping but at least the system should have been backward compatible.

Then again, the CEO's karma played a major role so it was not meant to be (he didn't deserve it).  A normal goat always loses to a normal lion as the body attained through material nature sets it's limits to what it can attain (just an example).