Sacking of Los Gatos engineers point of no return?

[desiv]

I personally think that ECS was a waste of resources, FAT agnus should have allowed 2mb of chip ram from day one and then they should have moved straight onto something that allowed chunky pixels and up to 8mb chip ram. I believe it would have been possible if it hadn't been for all the bad management decisions.

To be fair, the Chunky Pixel craze didn't really kick in (that is- become apparent that it was going to be the way to do things in Computer Games) until Doom in 93.  (Wolfenstein was a sign, but Doom really did it).
ECS was released in 92.

It would be interesting to know whether Commodore was taking about Chunky designs at all seriously before that.

I agree, more chip RAM should have been an option.

desiv

[desiv]

...it would be much better to support and encourage current & real Amiga teams & projects like NatAmi, AROS, MorphOS, MiniMig, X1000 etc... rather than mull over the past and sit here procrastinating on just what should have been done...

We can't do both??  

I see this as the same type of interest in reading "alternate history" type books.  What ifs...
It is fun to read a book that imagines that Babbages Difference Engine WAS built and used and there's a whole culture around it..
Doesn't mean I can't also SLAM Ada Lovelace as a really weak programmer..

er..  :confused:

That analogy didn't actually work very well..  But you get the point..  :roflmao:

desiv

[desiv]

Actually ECS was 1990. AGA was 92, which is probably what you meant

D'oh!  
And I even googled for the date! :lol:  Yeah, meant AGA there..

My basic premise was that I don't think it was a huge mistake, as you needed to be able to "predict" the market was going that way..
Not sure if Commodore saw that coming and didn't prioritize it or just didn't see it..
That said, I still think faster CPU trumps a true Chunky mode.  Doom type games ran playably on 030's and good on 040's..

So, as much as even I sometimes would like to think AGA was too little to late, I don't really think that..

The problem was that Amiga users, in general, didn't buy faster CPUs....
As a result, software companies didn't really push games to take advantage of faster CPUs..
I know, chicken and egg syndrome...
And when it came time to upgrade, they (mostly) moved to other platforms instead..

For me, it was cost and software availability.
I could spend $400+ on an accelerator with RAM, but there were very few reasons (it seemed at the time) to do so...
Or I could piece together a PC.  For me, as I had been helping people upgrade their PCs and keeping their old parts, it was very cost effective for me to do that...

So, I don't think it was really the chipset, and I don't think it was the "sacking" of the engineers at Los Gatos.
(In fact, it's possible that, even tho they were great at new idea design, they might not have been the best choice for upgrade/continuation design...  Who knows..)

PC developers were designing programs for the computers people "would" be buying..
Amiga developers were designing programs for computers that users HAD already..

They needed to fix that..
I'm not even sure that was marketting per se, but some type of vendor/developer/Commodore interconnect that missed the boat..

desiv

[desiv]

Faster CPU may trump Chunky, but at one hell of a cost.

So they had it in their sights..  Interesting..

Question tho is, how much of a difference would it have made?
If the A1200 would have had Chunky modes, but still 2M CHIP and a 68020 at 14Mhz, how much longer would it have lasted?
How would DOOM (Or Alien Breed 3d or) have run on said machine?

Or would the users still have needed a 68030 or better pretty soon anyway???

desiv