CommodoreUSA CEO Interview Answers

[Darrin]

What is your opinion about the FPGA projects that are
recreating the old 8-bit and 16-bit machines on hardware FPGA
emulation?
As I said earlier, I like the Natami and Minimig projects and think they
are very interesting, and for that reason alone would like to bring
them under the Commodore umbrella some day.
Perhaps an FPGA PCIe card could be utilised as options on our
machines. There are certainly a lot out there, but they are too
expensive to provide as standard. Even then, one would argue that
emulation is preferable though.

So he has no idea what a standalone FPGA Minimig does except that he'd like to shut it down and fully control it under his umbrella.

[Darrin]

"The rainbow coloured ticker has huge appeal in the gay
communities, I know this first... hand... after visiting bars and
nightclubs in Amsterdam and San Francisco, wearing nothing
but a... wearing a dark purple T-shirt with huge Amiga ticker on
the chest. Are you considering the market appeal for "Amiga"
and rainbow ticker in the LGBT communities?"

Darrin, what a cute question you asked...   :knuddel:

Where did he answer that???!!!  

[Darrin]

I might have missed it, but where were the hundreds of thousands of sales to a high street retailer?

Ad company lies again?

[Darrin]

Towards the bottom.

Don't give up the day job.  

[Darrin]

However this is not the first time. Anybody remember the Commodore gaming PC line? And remember what happened to them.....

Oh yes.  And they didn't even piss off Amiga users.  Plus their prices were cheaper and included a Windows OS.

[Darrin]

if you think about it, if they were to produce their current computers with the same quality but at a more reasonable price, they could gain users and capital to become a bigger player in the computing world, if they did sell them for a more reasonable price they could get more people using them, and get more money and users to restablish their name among the younger generations, then eventually release a cusom OS like the Amiga OS as an alternative OS, people (already familiar with the computer by this time) could/would develop more software, and eventually it could have the potential to be a 3rd competitor in the Mac, Windows world.

But they wont, so that whole hypothetical above is pointless.

They'll also need to provide support without pushing that liability onto the resellers they hope to recruit.

I think Barry is in for a rude awakening when he discovers that there is a massive difference between running a furniture business and a computer business.

[Darrin]

Poor Ben comes here one more time to try and order us to accept Linux as Amiga.  Linux is Linux.  Slapping Amiga wallpapers on Windows 7 will not make that an AmigaOS either.

The simple solution for C-USA (as it always has been) is to stop abusing the Amiga name, stop insulting the existing AmigaOS solutions and just bugger off and try and sell their unsupported, overprices Commodore-USA PCs.  Actually, it seems their new plan (as I correctly predicted last year) is to have others sell their PCs, provide the support and hand over wads of cash for using the name.

The confusing thing is, why do they keep coming back here?  Why are they so hell bent in convincing us that they're the "Second Coming?  The only answer I can come up with is that they are DESPERATE for our cash.  I'm guessing that anyone who wants to join their reseller scheme is going to have to fork out around $10,000 so convincing just 10 of us to sign up is $100,000.  Convincing 10 of us to buy their existing models would probably reduce their dusty unsold inventory by 50%.

Just go away, sell your PCs and come back in 12 months and gloat if you're still around.

[Darrin]

That doesn't sound like someone who "would love to do all the various things the community want." That sounds like a cynical response to what appeared to be a pretty cynical ploy to begin with. You and your boss made an offer to the community and then you copped out. You really wanna show some goodwill, then _try taking leadership_ of your challenge.

It was obvious that they were not making a serious offer when they wouldn't answer any questions about what they were "capable" of  producing.  By not narrowing down the options they made sure there were too many ideas and that no one project whould reach the magic "500" number.

Even if one did, they would have found some reason not to do it and used it as an excuse to keep us quiet for a few months while they went about "business as usual".

[Darrin]

Let's be careful about heaping any praise upon Commodore Gaming as a "company", simply based on what you saw as value for the money.
Remember that they tried to pass themselves off as licensor of the Commodore IP:

Note to those unaware: They are defunct.

#6

Thanks for that info.  Very interesting.  It seems the industry is crawling with opportunists.  Mind you, for what C-USA wants, C-Gaming might have been within their rights to sub-license to them.

[Darrin]

No idea, but it was a moot point, since Ben van Wijhe (Asiarim) raised it's head at that point, and the rest of the licensing story between Asiarim and CUSA is history.
Now the case to determine the true licensor is in the courts, hopefully for the last time.

#6

Ask them to sort out who owns the Amiga ROMs and WB3.1 while they're at it.  

[Darrin]

VillageTronic !!! (which might actually be true .....)

LOL.  If only.

Is this the same company?
http://www.villagetronic.com/

[Darrin]

Commodore USA is currently a small company, with limited resources,

Ladies and gentlemen, finally THE TRUTH!  

So, no major factories in China (or Germany) so regardless of who took the famous photographs you all knew that you were lying to us.

No stacks of motherboards waiting to be shipped to your facilities in Florida for assembly.

No sales of 100,000s of units to highstreet stores.

No boxes of assembled computers, just empty boxes.

No "partnership" with Disney beyond buying advertising on a DVD.

No $30m advertising budget.

No 100,000s of orders.

No "new" Operating System.

No designers working on custom cases.

Lies, lies and more lies.

In hindsight, don't you think it would have been a lot easier to just state the truth?  Are you actually capable of stating the truth?  Considering the pack of lies (confirmed by you), should we believe any of those answers or any answers in the future?

Fancy telling us what Dammy's official position is within C-USA?  How about "Middleman"?  Home many people on the C-USA site have you asked to come here and post something positive?

[Darrin]

This is all sort of hypothetical, because even if they wanted to, CUSA has no development team of any sort.

It does make you wonder who produced the design for the C64x and if he actually got paid.

[Darrin]

So in that case they should have got one, or leave out the whole 'Amiga' thing and just find another name for their product.

Why stick an "Amiga" sticker on a x86 computer running Linux?  It makes no sense now and never did.

[Darrin]

To capitalize from Nostalgia. In the interview, there is no doubt that nostalgia is running the show, but if people want nostalgia, they may as well get the old Amiga.

Exactly.  That that's the issue they face.  It should have been obvious to them.