Dave Haynie Talks About Developing The Commodore Amiga

[WolfToTheMoon]

they should have made C128 with a 65816. Yes, it would be close to Amiga in some regards, but it would be able to tap into C64 market and software library, something that the A1000 couldn't and why it took a few years untill A500 for Amiga to take off.

Than a 32 bit compatible in the early 90s in lieu of C65.

[WolfToTheMoon]

So yes, with proper managment Amiga could have a bigger marketshare today then Apple has.

Not very likely, because by early 90s the biggest Amiga advantage and the reason why people bought it, the price/performance advantage, was largely gone, and so was the technical advantage. Apple appealed and was bought by upper classes and pros, that's probably the only reason why it survived - higher margins.

[WolfToTheMoon]

The C64 was mostly selling in Europe to run games that mostly required cycle accuracy and illegal opcodes. A 65816 wouldn't be very useful, even the C128 wasn't compatible enough & it was expensive.

Both C= and Amiga were big sellers in Europe.
65816 was compatible enough for Apple.
C128 sold a few millions, I think a nicer 65816 based system could have even sold more. MOS could have had developed a 32 bit CPU in house, freeing C= from shackels of Motorola and their pricing.

Amiga, as nice and as advanced as it was, lost Commodore 3 years of momentum and a lot of money untill A500 took off.
The PC model of backwards compatibility could have been applied on the C= 8(C64) -> 16(C65816) -> 32(6532) bit line. The C64 was the 2nd biggest platform in the 80s, it was foolish not to take advantage of that.

[WolfToTheMoon]

The view of an obvious C64 fan.
Frankly, rather than trying to morph the 8 bit C64 into a 16 then 32 bit machine, a investment in evolving than Amiga platform would have made more sense.
After all, the Amiga had an operating system.
To this day people with any sense focus on evolving that, rather than focusing on fixed hardware specs.

The morphing worked for PC, and in a way, for Apple.
Operating system can always be written, several million C64s sold by 85' and the software market around it are worth a lot more than an operating system, no matter how advanced.