You have no idea what projects were in development, what ideas were brought to the engineering management, what got cancelled, what got the green light only to be shelved once production costs became apparent.
Not sure what you are trying to say here, but Commodore strategy was low cost, high volume.
That would be a nasty hack, which given Paula's intimate relationship with the system (interrupt controller etc) probably would have required a lot of work, just to make it work... Which would have added at least $10 BOM on to the design ($40 in retail), for some more sound channels, of which the Amiga already had more than most machines? How do you explain that to your manager?
In a company like Commodore, if something isn't broken... You don't fix it and you certainly don't make it more expensive.
Never made it to production. It's a case in point, and is actually against your argument.
All your comments go against you too.
I agree with A_N.
The c65 would have been a bottom feeder and yet had blitter and 256 col screens and A500 couldn't match chunk screens of C65. This added to your comment about how tricky 2nd Paula would have been is proof positive the people left had little idea how to improve OCS because I'm sure Miner/Needle/Mical trio wouldn't have taken 6 years for 50% improvement to 66% of the OCS chipset, Given Lynx & 3DO I'm sure they could have made something like AAA workable by 1992 as well. Sorry if this offends other engineers but Lynx battery powered chipset had sprite scaling/rotation....what did OCS Denise ever get replaced by? Exactly.
And actually 4 channels was just about fine in the 80s (even though 1979 Atari 400/800 had 4 too) but even then Archimedes/IIgs/Mac etc had much more sound channels as did some consoles and 4 is not even enough to replicate SFX+Music of md 80s arcade games. 10+ channels normal in 16bit consoles too by the time of Megdrive/SNES.
As for secret projects....based on how underwhelming AGA, AKIKO,VDC,TED were compared to talent responsible for SID,VIC,OCS well......explains a LOT, no disrespect but what Commodore employed was not at cutting edge genius level and regardless of costs C= were doomed whatever they did.
The truth is the guys who designed the legendary C64/OCS chipsets weren't even employed by Commodore a year later let alone their technical dominance emerge.
My comment about performance vs price/performance was after OCS C= never found anything like OCS/VIC+SID price performance as AAA = too expensive/performance. But then why should an A4000/040 have the same untouched 8bit sound chip as an A600 despite costing £1750 more? Ridiculous, I think $40 extra on a $3250 machine is a loss they could afford. Clueless.
And if you read EDGE #23 you will see the drop in profits is proportional to Amiga losing any technical edge on alternative hardware. They're lucky Archimedes games were programmed in an even worse way than US Gold Outrun. Archimedes wiped the floor with OCS ECS AND AGA .....even had better CPU than A1200 6 years before on Arch A310....and yet it was launched in 87 for less than A2000 from day one. Faster and 256 colour depth cued Zarch (Virus by Firebird on Amiga) games shows how far ahead Acorn was in 87 compared to new 32bit AGA in 1992 A1200!
So....pretty much my opinion is unwavering unless RJ Mical says otherwise seeing as Miner has passed away.
@Franko - general question to others who may agree or disagree
@everyone - YMMV
