Atari vs Commodore which one was stupider.

[KThunder]

part of commodores problem was that they relyed on their chip fabrication plants for all their custom chips but by the time aga came around they had to outsource because they hadnt ugraded their plants.
mostek came out with the 6502 and numerous variants but never a good 16bit then 32bit successor. amiga should have used a mostek cpu 68000 comatible or not it would have been better. one of the reasons the c64 was less expensive than other 8bit was because mostek made most of the chips for it whilst other companies bought from 3rd parties.
as they upgraded their facilities amiga should have upgraded accordingly, aga should have been released in 90 with at least 1 or 2 chunky display modes and at least 16bit mono sound in addition to ocs ecs capabilities.

[KThunder]

atari never really was a serious computer threat, they had no big box systems so nothing was very expandable, and they only had what, one system with anything other than a 68000 cpu.
atari put all its eggs in the jaguar basket but didnt get the third parrty support it needed and got ripped in the gaming mags. it was a very capable system for the time.

saturn < 250,000 poly/sec
playstation < 250,000 poly/sec
n64 < 100,000 poly/sec
jaguar < 35,000 poly/sec
32x < 30,000 poly/sec
3do < 30,000 poly/sec

all above were estemated from chipset timing and estemated real game capabilities

jaguar had 3d matrix arithmetic hardware and hardware gauraud shading  that could easily exeed 53,000 poly/sec but could not texture map at the same time. texture mapped stuff had to run half in hardware half in software

btw jaguar, playstation, and saturn had 2d capabilities that were limited by the bus capabilities, and the jag ahad a full 64bit bus that was 1.74 times faster than the playstation bus. the n64 had a 32bit bus (even though it was the jag that was slammed in the press for not being fully 64bit)

[KThunder]

people are confused by the jag and saturn, because they had more than one cpu. the jag had a 32bit gpu with a 64 bit memory interface and bus and 32bit 68000 with a 16bit interface to ram. the jag also had an object processor and programmable blitter that were fully 64bit.
the 60000 wasnt really useless game ai, event handling, data flow etc were all possible with it using the gpu to calculate the 3d stuff, only problem being it used the bus a bit too much. since the gpu and dsp processors had local ram that problem was minimized alittle

the thing with the saturn is that with just one of its sh2 main cpus it was almost as fast as the playstation. the saturns dual cpu setup was a well designed system and with a decent programmer could be about 1.3 to 1.5 times faster with both cpus. that was with assebly though, both systems were easy to program with c wich was included in the developer kit, but did much better with assembly.

yes i know this stuff from personal experiance as i have programmed both. demos and stuff mostly. i goofed around with the n64 also but i didnt like the architecture or the playstation.

[KThunder]

btw since it was already stated by soimeone incorrectly here is what they have:

saturn:
sh2 32bit risc master 28mhz
sh2 32bit risc slave 28mhz
68000 16/32 bit sound processor 14mhz
vdp1 video processor 2dstuff mostly 28mhz
vdp2 video processor 3d stuff mostly 28mhz
scu dsp dma controller (also had a math coprocessor)

jaguar
tom asic contained:
64bit object processor
64bit blitter (hardware gauroud shading etc)
32/64bit gpu risc cpu

jerry asic contained:
32/16bit dsp risc cpu 26mhz

68000 32/16bit 14mhz

for the record (from me) the jaguar was as much a 64bit system as the n64 was. tom was 64bit, memory was 64bit graphic setup data transfer etc all 64bit

[KThunder]

i think commodores biggest mistake was not pushing the a3000ux  amiga could have been were every unix and linux system and server is right now. but commodore screwed up big time, and never followed up