Atari vs Commodore which one was stupider.

[Psy]

Atari vs Commodore which company screwed up the most.

Atari

- Atari was a key player in the Video Game crash of 1984,

- Drove away talent

- The stupid 5200 controller

- Turned down Nintendo's offer of Atari handling the worldwide distribution of Nintendo products outside of Japan then Atari tried to fight the SMS and NES with the mothballed 7800.

- ST R&D lacked vision causing IBM compats to catch up.

- Lynx was poorly supported

- Cancelled the Falcon in order to bet the entire company in the success of the Jaguar

- Lost money hand over fist

Commodore

- 8-Bit computer incompatible with each other

- C64 ran into the ground with no signifigant upgrands.

- Drove away talent

- Amiga R&D lacked vision causing IBM compats to catch up.

- Worse marketing then Atari

- Lost money hand over fist

Well that's just a start for both, so who was the most incompetent?

[Psy]

Hyperspeed wrote:
I'm not sure Commodore marketed the Amiga poorly... after all the launch in '85 featured Andy Warhol and Blondie. What more could you ask for!?

Let's compaire Amiga marketting with Sega Genesis

- Sega made up words like "Blast Processing" that only ment the Genesis had the ability for the CPU to be working on one visible section of map while the graphics processor displays another.  Cheap yes but back then when most consumers knew little thus such marketting tricks worked.

- Before the SNES Sega took every opportunity to show the public how much better the Genesis was to the NES.  Amiga never really went into negative ads yet in the late 80's IBM compat were just begging to be bashed by ads for a superior computer.  Most IBM compats didn't even have a desktop till Windows 3.1 and even then Windows 3.1 sucked more then GEOS that alot of years Commodore could have been poking fun at Dos on in TV ads.

- Spent far more on advertising then Commodore spent on the Amiga

And Sega was not even that smart back then.

[Psy]

KThunder wrote:
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.

The TT had a Motorola 68030 @ 32MHz

The Falcon had a Motorola 68030 with a 68040 in the pipeline.

Atari Transputer Workstation had a T-800 @ 20Mhz and 68000 @ 8Mhz

EST had a Motorola 68020 but was stuck in R&D and scraped for the TT

[Psy]

uncharted wrote:

But the Amiga had the advantage that it was seen by parents as a computer and not as a toy.  Many of my friends got one "to do their homework" ;-)

Also, it's debatable how much the Megadrive ate into Amiga's sales, as Amiga sales still increased year on year after the introduction of the Megadrive.

yet Sega didn't have a problem with R&D (it had problem with infighting between Sega of Japan and Sega of America and general managment getting in the way). If Sega wanted to re-entre the computer market (it had a Z-80 computer back in the early 80's) back then it defenitaly had a strong enough R&D to come up with a Amiga killer, problem was Sega never really had to think of compitiblity much and it's hardware as all over the place: they used Z80, 68000, NEC V60 and v70, Intel i960-KB, Hitachi SH-2 and SH-4, Intel Pentium 3 & 4 (probably forgetting a CPU or two) and too many chipsets to list.  On the plus side if Sega did make a computer back then they would alway have had something in the pipe from the Arcade R&D even if it mostly likely would be totaly incompatible.

[Psy]

darksun9210 wrote:
but then did Sega want to do an 'Amiga Killer'?

its my limited understanding that Sega used Amigas for Genesis/megadrive development work.

The Sega dev kit being a hardware dongle that plugged into the sideport of the A500, and allowed programming of cartridge eproms, and running stuff.

quite if it allowed you to run say, sonic the hedgehog on an A500 i wouldn't know... ;-)

Yhea for the Genesis, by the time Sega was looking at the Hitachi SH-2 and 3D, the Amiga was no longer powerful enough for devlopment.

The AAA would have made the Amiga a 2D powerhouse, but even if it came out Sega would have had no use for it when they went 3D.

If Sega came out with a computer version of the Saturn it probably would have sold better then the Saturn, as Sega could have brought built in 3D cheap to computer users.  Where was Commodore in 3D technology? As far as I know Commodore had nothing even on paper to give the Amiga 3D and back in 1995 built in 3D (at par with the Playstation and Saturn) would have been a huge selling point since neither Macs or PCs had it.

[Psy]

Hyperspeed wrote:
Psy: When/what did Sega use Pentium chips for?

Very recently for the arcades Lindbergh
Here is a news article

Sega's R&D is not what is use to be so they no longer use exotic and custom componets but it looks like the Lindbergh still gives Sega devlopers lots of power.

It was things like Virtua Racing and Starwing that got polygon processing into the mainstream, I think everyone had been sleeping up until that point.

Virtual Racing was released in 1992 and Commodore went under in 1994 you would think they would have had something on paper give the Amiga real 3D capabilities.

[Psy]

Saturn was a real mess.  Two CPUs, two VDPs...  they really built that machine in a hurry once they found out what Sony was doing.  

Like KThunder pointed out the Saturn wasn't that much of a mess, infact Sega later turned the Saturn into a low cost arcade board.

Sega already had the technology to build a affordable 3D home computer (since people expect game consoles to have a lower price then computers) but even though Unix was already ported to the Intel i960-KB (that the Model 2 boards used) Sega had didn't have enough talent to devlop the drivers to get Unix to make use of the 3D capablities of the Model 2 board and of course customize Unix for home use (while still being optimized for the Model 2 boards) all ontop still devloping games which was where Sega made its money.

Atari and Commodore did have enough talent but not the same hardware Sega had.  Maybe if Bushnell never sold Atari, Atari would have had arcade hardware as powerful Sega's by then and have been able to put 3D technolgy into its computers by 1995.

[Psy]

Morax wrote:
I think the whole thing is just because lack of marketing and advertising. And about Amiga's beginning to become dated in the early 90's, compared to other hardware. Even if they DID make computers wich were a match for PC's of that time, or even the SNES, they wouldn't have come far by lack of marketing...

Both Atari and Commodore had these issues, they both had poor marketing and while they had good low end machines, when it came to higher end machines their specs looked a bit weak by the early 90's