Amiga vs console vs PC

[psxphill]

It's sprite handling could have been improved, but from what I've read AGA wasn't a bad chipset with 030/Fast RAM so I think the Amiga's 2D capability wasn't uncompetitive in comparison.

AGA was better than ECS, but it was rushed and there were a lot of compromises. Games hardly ever supported optional peripherals, some games started making use of accelerators but that was mostly after commodore had disappeared & most developers had jumped ship anyway.

[psxphill]

Once Doom came out on the PC the final nail went into the Amiga as a gaming platform, imo.

Doom is commonly given as the reason. I started playing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_X-Wing at work, which predates Doom by a long way.

There were still c64, Amiga & arcade games I would play, but there was nothing like x-wing. Wing commander was as close as it got and the Amiga version of that was too slow.

[psxphill]

A1200 w/030 & RAM - Yes it would have been more expensive, but it would have been cheaper than paying for an 020 and then an 030, in hindsight Apple got it right, keep the price the same and keep upgrading RAM/CPU when they can be incorporated for the same price..

The 030 was unlikely to get much cheaper by the time the A1200 was launched and commodore didn't survive much longer in any case.
 
 With the A1200 they were relying more on outside manufacturers to build the chips etc, so their cut of the price was squeezed. They sold less because most people had moved on.
 
 Rumour has it they sat on AGA, if that is true then releasing it earlier might have helped them. But they needed to get it out in 1990 for the A3000 when people still cared.

[psxphill]

in the hypothetical, if 14mhz 020 in, say, 1991 would have been affordable, by 1992 28mhz 020 may have been the same cost, then by early 1993, maybe 25mhz 030 would have been possible etc.

 The 68020 was released in 1984, the 68030 was released in 1987. I imagine the price for both in 1991 was pretty similar to the price they were in 1993. I'm not sure commodore could have afforded to develop it either.
 
 AGA was the big problem, it needed to be out earlier & it needed chunky pixels. Commodore said there wasn't enough ram to do chunky pixels, but it was a lie. If the blitter had also been expanded with some simple texture mapping then we could have had doom style games with an 020, which was always the "Amiga" way of low spec cpu but high powered custom chips.
 
 Paula needed more than 4 voices. The PlayStation had 24 in 1995, so maybe commodore should have had 12?
 
 Although increasing the amount of voices on AGA is probably harder than chunky pixels or texture mapping because of the fixed dma slots.

[psxphill]

But for AGA ++ some great upgrades were in the pipe.
A twice as fast blitter and Chunky 16bit direct mode was planned.
Combined with a CPU with fastmem the AGA++ machines would
have been both great for 2D games and very good for 3D games.

The AA+ project was announced but the design work was never started.
Scheduled for 1994, it's fate was sealed when PlayStation prototypes showed up & commodore started Hombre.

ECS should have had chunky 8 bit pixels, simple texture mapping blitter and 8 voice sound (some form of fast matrix processor for doing 3d transforms would have been necessary too).

AGA should have been upgraded to 16 voices, with 16 bit audio and 16 bit video and gouraud shading added to the blitter (with upgrades to the matrix processor).

 AA+ should have been FMV capable.
 
If they'd hit these milestones then commodore would have survived, but you can see how wildly they were off the mark.

[psxphill]

>AA+? AAA prototypes were already in the testing phase.

AAA was purely for the high end. It was nowhere near finished. It was a zombie project that kept stumbling along because some people wouldn't let it die. IMO like the commodore 65 it would have died before it was manufactured, commodore worked a bit strange like that.

I think Amiga 8bit had enough quality untill late 90's. 16/24bit was/is needed for professional use.

The systems that it needed to compete against had 16bit audio. Whether you think it's good enough is irrelevant when someone is comparing between two products based on their specification.

You mean as a standard? AGA needed the extra decoder.

Yes, it needed some form of FMV. Not necessarily MPEG, like the CD32 FMV. The PlayStation managed with MJPEG.

Commodore died because of the losses in PC sales. Same for Escom.

That is an old rumour, but I don't see how. AFAICT commodore germany did the PC's on their own & they were one of the subsidiaries that survived.

Commodore international went bankrupt because they didn't pay the $10 million fee for the xor patent. They were prevented from importing anything until they paid the fine, which they couldn't because they couldn't import anything to sell (they were counting on CD32 sales).

To avoid commodore going bankrupt they would have needed something that people wanted to buy in 1992, but not enough people wanted to buy an A1200/A4000. It didn't have the same impact as the a500 or the c64 before it.

IMO: the biggest handicap of A1200 and CD32 was the lack of fast RAM as a standard.

Fast ram makes a difference to performance, but not enough. It would have made a huge difference to the price.

A500 says all about C= without Jack, 18 months to replace A1000 beatiful case, WORM Kickstart RAM and internal PSU & power switch with pig ugly looks, a ROM socket and Vic 20 style PSU with power switch on it. Designed by dicks 'managed' by diks = A500 project. They didn't even promote A1000 in 1986 waiting for 12 month late A500 turd.

When commodore bought Amiga, the A1000 it was nowhere near finished. They paid a lot for Jay Miner etc to actually finish the hardware and software.
Unfortunately Jay Miner didn't want to do a low cost version, so he declared that the Fat Agnus was impossible to manufacture. Commodore didn't really have a chance to get anything out quicker as they had to do it in house rather than have the original designers do it. As far as I can remember, they promoted the A1000 more than the A500.