Atari vs Commodore which one was stupider.

[Lando]

Commodore-Amiga was the most incompetent.  They had more to work with, and still threw it all away.  This is the computer industry.  You can't keep selling the same machine with minor improvements for nine years and expect to survive.

I was still a teenager in 1992 and it was obvious to me, even then, that C= was doomed.  I couldn't believe their stupidity in releasing the A500 (A1000 in a wedge design and 512K RAM), A500+ (A500 with a new ROM), A600 (A500+ with numeric keypad chopped off), A1200 (020 and AGA but the rest of the machine, including the blitter, sound and virtually everything else was the same as the then-ancient A1000), CD32 (an A1200 with a CD-ROM drive, same crappy 020 and no Fast RAM).

Everything Commodore released since the original A1000 was old before it even hit the shelves.  There was nothing original or groundbreaking.  They deserved to go bust a lot sooner than they did - they were very lucky to last until 1994.

[Lando]

uncharted wrote:

I was still a teenager in 1992 and it was obvious to me, even then, that C= was doomed.  I couldn't believe their stupidity in releasing the A500 (A1000 in a wedge design and 512K RAM)

Am I mis-reading what you mean here?  Are you saying that the A500 was a stupid move by C=?

I'm not saying the A500 was a stupid move - it's the machine that made the Amiga the success it was - just that they had 2 years after the A1000 to work on it, and releasing the A500 with such minor improvements (Kickstart in ROM and a little extra RAM) was not enough.  They should have spent more money on R&D, had AGA ready by '88, AAA by '91, and the next revision (AAAA?) by '94 - a 3-year gap between chipset revisions.  This is what was needed to stay ahead (of Mac / PC) at the time.

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.

[Lando]

Psy wrote:

Hyperspeed wrote:
I'm not sure Commodore marketed the Amiga poorly... after all the launch in '85 featured Andy Warhol and Blondie. What more could you ask for!?

Let's compaire Amiga marketting with Sega Genesis

- Sega made up words like "Blast Processing" that only ment the Genesis had the ability for the CPU to be working on one visible section of map while the graphics processor displays another.  Cheap yes but back then when most consumers knew little thus such marketting tricks worked.

- Before the SNES Sega took every opportunity to show the public how much better the Genesis was to the NES.  Amiga never really went into negative ads yet in the late 80's IBM compat were just begging to be bashed by ads for a superior computer.  Most IBM compats didn't even have a desktop till Windows 3.1 and even then Windows 3.1 sucked more then GEOS that alot of years Commodore could have been poking fun at Dos on in TV ads.

- Spent far more on advertising then Commodore spent on the Amiga

And Sega was not even that smart back then.

Another big advantage the Megadrive had was that it cost £130 in Dixons, while an Amiga was still £399.  To parents looking to buy their kids a games machine, this fact alone made the choice for them.  The A500 lost a lot of sales from   1990 onwards to the Megadrive (and later the SNES) purely because of price.

No Amiga hit the sub-£200 price bracket that mass-market really needs..

[Lando]

Hyperspeed wrote:

I suppose every cloud has a silver lining and maybe the planar system of the Amiga had benefits...

What were they?

:-D

For one thing, scrolling - you could scroll the entire display just by writing to the Bitplane Pointer registers.

On the Amiga, what is on the screen can be anywhere in Chip RAM, while a VGA PC always displayed whatever data was at a0000000h, you had to write every damn byte again (move 64000 bytes of data to scroll one line).

Even at 32 bits per mov instruction that's 16000 operations to scroll a single line, while on Amiga, it was 2 instructions per bitplane (each bitplane has two address registers bplxpth, bplxptl).