AmigaOS 3.1 source code leak - official statement

[psxphill]

It has a lot of gems. Inside, there is a nice word document about the path Amiga development was heading when CBM went Bankrupt. It shows that software wise, there was nothing really new in the works. That AmigaOS v42 was at very initial stages and it was AmigaOS 4, that was going to bring RTG as standard to bridge the gap between 68k Amigas, Haynie´s AAA and PA-RISC. And that PA-RISC with a 3D engine was the future (PPC was never even mentioned). And then there is a lot of hardware based on the CD32 that was targetted at different markets.

Everything you mentioned was well known for years, it's nice to have an actual document from the time though.

Commodore were pretty much dead when it was written, it took a little while longer for them to bleed out. The cd32 mpeg addon, the cd1200 and the cd33 (cd32 expansion module) is the only thing in that document that I ever saw. AAA was pretty much canned, I'd like to know how this ties in with the first chips coming back and the nyx prototype. AAA was always going to be a bad idea, AA earlier would have hands down been a better use of money. I will never know what they were thinking when they started.

Hombre is probably the least documented system, it seems to be written in some form of HDL and I only ever heard they had software simulations. The people involved aren't like the usual maniacal commodore engineers. The PlayStation was developed in a similar way, using a MIPS compatible soft core rather than PARISC.

I suspect if commodore had limped along for another year we would have seen the integrated 68020+AGA, but not much else & Sony would have eaten their lunch in the end regardless of what commodore did. They didn't even know Sony were coming, they were only thinking of 3do/Atari/Nintendo/Sega.

[psxphill]

I am sorry to burst your bubble, but the document contains details, what was out there was general information.

"Everything you mentioned was well known for years"

I hate to burst your bubble, but I stand what I said. The document contains a few things that hadn't been mentioned before, but you failed to mention them. There are a few interesting hardware fantasies in there, but we know that commodore built lots of hardware that they didn't ship.

John DiLullo who was credited as a contributor in the document doesn't seem to keen on the Amiga a few months later.

http://www.amigareport.com/ar205/p1-11.html

Well, to be fair *nobody* saw Sony coming. If Sony hadn't played their hand as brilliantly as they did, Sega might still be making hardware today.

Commodore needed a 3d console out in 1993 to put Sony off, if commodore UK controlled R&D then things would have been different. Sega knew Sony were coming as after the Nintendo partnership fell through they tried to do a deal with Sega, they also turned down SGI's Ultra 64 as well. Sega were arrogant, like commodore....

OT: I want to know if the UHRES in ECS/AGA that was removed in AAA, is what Jay Miner was going on about when talked about VRAM chips that had already been designed

http://www.thule.no/haynie/research/nyx/docs/AAA.pdf

"The ECS "Ultra hires" registers have been eliminated, as they were never supported in actual practice"

http://www.thule.no/haynie/chips/aa/regbits.pdf

[psxphill]

Commodore released the CD32 in September 1993 to compete with the Sega CD and the 3DO (which it did - for its short lifespan it was the top-selling CD platform in the EU). It was discontinued in April 1994 when Commodore went bankrupt.

The Saturn didn't hit Japan until November 1994 (mid-1995 in the US/EU) and the PlayStation didn't arrive in the US/EU until September 1995.

Neither the Saturn nor especially the PlayStation were implicit in the downfall of the Amiga/CD32 - that was all down to Commodore. As it was, they couldn't manufacture enough CD32s to meet demand because of their debt problems (they were having to pay for everything in cash).

I didn't say that the PlayStation was directly responsible for commodores demise. There were a lot of CD32's manufactured, you couldn't move for them in the UK before and after the bankruptcy. They couldn't be imported into the US because of the xor patent. Commodore's bankruptcy was more to do with the banks believing that they were worth more now than if they lent them more money to continue trading while the management spent money on planes/hotels/etc

The date that Saturn/PlayStation arrived in the EU/US is irrelevant. European developers had started getting development kits before commodore went under. People knew they were coming.

Sega didn't see 3D coming, they correct it with the Dreamcast but they choose PowerVR over 3DFX that EA wanted, so no EA games...
Kamelito

Yeah it was only Nintendo that realised how important 3D was going to be for games. They teamed up with Argonaut before the SNES launched to create the SuperFX. Sony will have known about it from when they were working with Nintendo on the "Play Station". Sony's technical experience with 3D was from SystemG for video editing.

[psxphill]

Was the PA-RISC to be the core CPU or to be a slave handling graphics. I read it as the latter, years ago -- but I may be mistaken.

It was the core CPU of the console. They mentioned putting the console chipset on a card, where the PA-RISC would just be a coprocessor for graphics. I'm not convinced it would have happened if commodore had survived, unless they could have beaten other graphics card manufactures on performance and price. Then maybe we'd have seen Hombre graphics cards for PC's.

It's difficult to know as Hombre was mostly just a wish list for what they were aiming for. It was likely two to three years away from completion and not much had been decided.

[psxphill]

Huh?

Maybe a copy and paste from Wikipedia will make more sense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset


Hombre is a RISC chipset for the Amiga designed by Commodore, intended as the basis of its next generation game machine called CD64.

Commodore also planned to build a 3D accelerator PCI card based on Hombre. Hombre was canceled along with the bankruptcy of Commodore International.

"In 1993, Commodore International ceased the development of the AAA chipset and began to design a new 64-bit 3D graphics chipset based on Hewlett-Packard's PA-RISC architecture to serve as the new basis of the Amiga personal computer series. It was codenamed Hombre (pronounced "ómbre" which means man in Spanish) and was developed in conjunction with over an estimated eighteen-month period.

Hombre is based around two chips: a System Controller chip and a Display Controller chip."

"The System Controller chip was designed by Dr. Ed Hepler, well known as the designer of the AAA Andrea chip. The chip is similar in principle to the chip bus controller found in Agnus, Alice, and Andrea of the Amiga chipsets. The chip features the following:
A 100+ MHz PA-7150 SIMD microprocessor
An advanced DMA engine and blitter with 3D texture mapping and gouraud shading
16-bit resolution sound processor with eight voices"

"The Display Controller Chip was designed by Tim McDonald, also known as the designer of the AAA Monica chip. It is similar in principle to the Denise, Lisa, and Monica chips found on original Amigas. In addition, the chipset also supported future official or third party upgrades through extension for an external PA-RISC processor.

These chips and some other circuitry would be part of a PCI card, through the ReTargetable Graphics system."


The PA-7150 would therefore be the main cpu in the "CD64", or mostly used for driving the graphics hardware when used on a PCI card.

My guess is that even the proposed 3d workstation would have been sold with only the PA-7150 for a cpu, although it seems likely that you could add another cpu as well.

IMO If commodore had survived then it's more likely a system with 68060, AGA and tseng labs graphics card (IIRC) and using PCI as well as/instead of zorro would have been what they actually released as Dave Haynie was tinkering with that and commodore historically only ship things based off skunk work projects (and if other things do ship then they stink).

It's a pity the February 1991 proposal to switch AA to 1 micron CMOS and implement 16/32 bit chunky modes with 4x memory bandwidth and 2x floppy bandwidth, was passed on. Probably because it would have made AAA irrelevant. The proposal appears to have been recycled as AA+ in 1992. http://www.ebay.it/itm/Commodore-Futures-Memo-HaynieMovingSale-055-/131445199320