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

[Amiga_Nut]

Well forgetting the top end model, which they could kludge together with all sorts of nice Zorro II/III cards, the base model would have to do what your average PC did.

I think my first PC was 1992, and that was 999 bucks for a 486 25mhz clone. I think by 1996 most people were on machines capable of VideoCD software playback thanks to MMX.

So you would need....

A CPU as capable as the minimum average spec of the time PC people were getting after giving up on their beloved Commodore to ever come back. Not just for games, but for doing raw filled 3D and texture mapping cheats like in Doom and Quake. 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)

Graphics, whatever you do if you don't have a native byte per pixel mode you might as well carry on going bankrupt, super fast VRAM chunky mode for 320x256 AND 640x512. A 32bit blitter as powerful as those in the VRAM PCI cards in PCs. Rest doesn't mean a whole lot. And AAA was MORE EXPENSIVE than buying things off the shelf from people like Diamond.

Sound, 8 channel 16bit sound with variable panning, NOT 4 channels wired left/right.

A space to slot in an optional cost price CD-ROM unit like laptops of the time had.

For serious stuff, fix the bloody TCP/IP, finance a decent browser....ie slap Netscape around until they write one for you for a fee, and make sure your serial port can handle 56k modems

That's about it really, without coaxing someone like RJ Mical to do you something similar to the 3DO chipset forget anything else really, and accept that 3DO, PSX and Saturn WILL piss all over you and you have lost the advantage you had in the 80s with A500 vs Sega Megadrive/Genesis. Still an 060 and fast chunky native graphics mode would be enough to do an identical version of shitty game of the decade Resident Evil and actually a pretty nice version of Tomb Raider.

End of line.

[Amiga_Nut]

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.

I think I remember the 060 being clock doubled internally, but couldn't remember the exact performance between 060 <> Pentium. Still 060 is best we had before going PPC so not much choice really.

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.

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.

[Amiga_Nut]

Big box:

Dump Zorro, PCI only. 5 slots minimum. If it's very low additional cost include 1 or 2 Zorro slots.

SCSI was somewhat expensive, make it optional. EIDE (MW-DMA!) as standard.

Separate CPU & RAM card, no RAM on mainboard. Memory map allows up to 1 GB of RAM on the CPU board.

Move graphics chipset to PCI/Zorro card to make it optional later on.

Having Zorro slots would mean you can cut a deal with Sunrize for 16bit sound saving development costs, ditto for 24bit graphics card with much higher resolutions for photo manipulation like in Photoshop or high resolutions for DTP and 20" monitors etc etc. Add a PPC and Blizzard3D and you are rocking for peanuts dev costs. This would mean very little updates to WB needed as the drivers are there already rather than the PCI cards.

[Amiga_Nut]

What you could also have done was to fit 28mhz 020 and 1mb fast 32bit RAM in the A1200 to replace the A600 type entry level system in 1995/6 too. This would be good enough for basic Doom/Wing Commander type games if programmed properly.

Again make a standard slot for A1200+ and 'A1600' to take a CD-ROM module sold at cost price to encourage competition with PC-CD market too.

[Amiga_Nut]

Why not simply have it deal with the sound?

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........

[Amiga_Nut]

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

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.

[Amiga_Nut]

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.

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. 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. Had Commodore committed a large enough order to Motorola for 060s it would have reduced the cost massively, R&D costs for Hombre would have dragged on for 1-2 years after release and even then maybe not viable using a cheap 030/040 CPU.

At least with Ranger we would have had upgrades superior to AGA earlier, ideally instead of the lame ass ECS 'upgrades' and if they had invested in it early enough with a console style 64/32mb VRAM archictecture as a go between Chip and Fast ram it may have been enough to bring in the sales because A500/600 lost a lot of ground to SEGA and Nintendo in 1990/91 due to no decent parallax(2x8 colour playfields was pathetic), only 4 sound channels, no HD floppy drive to reduce disk swapping, only 32 colours as EHB was slow as hell on OCS/ECS, weaker sprites than a C64 in some respects etc etc.

Ranger was done and gathering dust since 88, they probably lost the plans in an office move knowing Commodore!

I think the problem was Commodore, even the C65 prototype managed 320x200x256 colours with a blitter on board in mid 1990...so why did it take them another 2.5 years to get AGA/256 colour mode into an Amiga?

Actually I think the problem in 1992 was the A4000/030. It was just too expensive for a middle range machine, they needed an 020 28mhz 2mb chip & 2mb fast ram machine in 1992 using the A1200 motherboard as is and just shove it in an Atari Mega ST/A1000 style slim case with external keyboard for £499 or £599 with basic slow CD-ROM etc. A 28mhz 020 is pretty much same speed as a 28mhz 030 really and all you pay extra for is case plastics, external keyboard from A4000 and some RAM. I'm sure 499 or 549 was very do-able. But your choices were 1000+ bucks for 4000/030 or crippled A1200 with no edge connector/zorro and cheap $1 keyboard for 399. Hell you could get 33mhz 020s too and probably clock them up to 40mhz with a fan. Bad marketing, they hoped the accidental success of the A500/2000 would repeat itself AFTER PCs had caught up with superior chunky VGA mode and multiple 16bit DACs on board as well as far faster CPUs as standard and PCI bus architecture rivalling the A4000 on every Pentium PC let alone A1200.

[Amiga_Nut]

I think that going for a low-end desktop model with separate keyboard would have been a good idea as well - like the never-released Falcon040 computer from Atari (or an updated A1000, or a slimline case like a PS2). This would have had space for the cheaper 3.5" hard drive (although you could fit certain slimmer models inside the A1200 at a push, I certainly did!) and an internal power supply, but otherwise the innards would be a $600 A1200 rather than a $3700 A4000. It could have sold for $999, and maybe the budget would have squeezed to 4MB RAM and a 28MHz 68030.

Another company, Checkmate Digital, their response was stick an "A1500" badge on the A2000 and threaten legal action. Both actions being those of a clueless company when what they should have done is taken their idea further.

For those who don't know, Checkmate Digital produced a replacement case for the A500 motherboard for a reasonable fee, this included everything needed to use the A500 keyboard in an external case, and put it in an Amiga 1000ish 3 box design. Was actually smarter looking than the Amiga 2000 tank-a-thon rubbish design too.

Wasn't perfect, but perfectly illustrates what was needed direct from Commodore to bridge the gap with A4000....A1200...A600 in 1992. Oh well. And if you had the AD-IDE and an internal 030 CPU board it is pretty much going to do what you want, and for a lot less than an A2000 actually.