So you were put in charge of making the 060 based amiga

[B00tDisk]

Commodity parts, commodity parts, commodity parts.  AGA "on board", 16 bit audio (even if it meant going with Reveal, Creative, Turtle Beach or Opti).  IDE.  One bay to the left, emtpy (for an additional HD or IDE CD-ROM).  Comes with 2mb Chip RAM, 4mb system.  HD not optional, 80mb is your standard.  This model will street at around $1099 or $1099.

The A1800 would be the same basic model, in a larger Mac Centris style case, a PCI riser with two slots, and an additional HD slot under the CD-ROM bay.  $2099 is my desired price.

Some folks may be wondering why I'm not suggesting a yottabyte of Chipram and AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA+ chipset capable of displaying the colour out of space or something: My aim is to make these the last "custom chipset" Amiga systems ever.  Putting that old hardware out to pasture.

With that said, if I have the time, I'm also having the OS re-written in a higher level language to make porting to PowerPC as seamless as possible.  The goal is that OS5 (the OS for my two above "dream systems" will be OS4 - more on that in a few) will be entirely portable, so the eventual shift to x86 will also be as seamless as possible.  OS5 will include a sandbox layer to run as many old apps as can be (system breaking shit like those boot off a floppy trackloading pal only eurogames...nnnnnnnotsomuch, no.  Not so much), but will be a new, unique OS unto itself, featuring MP (yes), VM (YES) and other modern resource management tools.

Anyway, the OS4 for the two systems above includes basic network extensions, maybe some rudimentary multi-user capabilities (let's say we store three profiles in some extra space in Kickstart, along with passwords).  I'm also on the horn to the Netscape guys for a quick and dirty port (since, again, I can do what I want).  Maybe throw a few dollars at iD for a DOOM or Wolf3d port, too.

These might not be the greatest seeming options, but this is a transitional system.  My goal is by 2000 to be entirely chipset independent, OS 1.3/2.04/3.1/4.0 are pleasant memories - and that's all.  OS5 and descendants are aggressively upgraded, and pimped out.  I'm also pursuing A/UX as a server OS and beefed up or towerized A1800s to run same.

Devcons, devcons, devcons.  I'm putting free machines in the hands of universities, I've got rock-n-roll tour style buses on MIT, Cambridge and CalTech campuses touting this thing left right and center.  I'm putting out slick flyers with every verbal misstep by Apple and Microsoft in big bold letters - "Bill Gates didn't even mention the internet in The Road Ahead...I guess you took the wrong road, Bill..." "Steve Jobs said '1984 won't be like 1984' - and released a computer that's next to impossible to upgrade as you like.  I guess Big Brother thinks it's OK to bully everybody." et cetera ad infinitum.

My promo videos are showing Wing Commander II and Strike Commander (remember, mid 90's = the golden age of flight sims on the desktop) running...then the screen getting dragged down and we see ol' classic Tut in DeluxePaint VII looking at us.  All the good guys who released great hardware for the old A= boxen from the get-go are being pumped up with free hardware, invites to devcons, and everything else I can think of to get them excited about the new hardware.

We're burying SGI, Apple is barely muddling through by trying to release clones, Microsoft is caught with its collective shorts around its ankles (all the while still releasing Office on our platform!) trying to get their own working browser (which as soon as we see NS frittering their marketshare away, we politely request a port of).  We've ditched our A/UX OS for "Workstations" and servers and have gotten a port of NextStep, and are hungrily eyeing NeXT as a corporate acquisition...

Around Y2k, we're strongly interested in the coming fad of "mp3 players" for the Christmas season.  Maybe this Jobs chap we hired when we bought his company can add some cachet to that project

[B00tDisk]

Back in 1995/1996 Commodore should have for their low end machines used 3.5" IDE hard drives rather than 2.5". Bigger, Hotter? Yes. But much cheaper. Around that time a 3.5" 1.0GB hard drive was very affordable.

A 1gb drive in 1996 would have added $302 to the price.  In 1995 (it depends on what time of the year  - HD prices were and are in freefall), that same 1.0gb HD would set you back $849.  Not precisely "very affordable".  $5000+ SGI workstations were "only" shipping with an 850mb HD.

All Amiga's should have had a Buffered IDE as standard.

Even back in 1992 when the A600 and A1200 were released, those 20MB and 40MB hard drives were a joke and badly outdated. By then the standard in a PC was already 120MB.

Yes.

[B00tDisk]

The Dreamcast was sold at a lower initial launch price than the original playstation at the time. I would be highly surprised if it wasn't being sold at a loss - in the UK it was being sold new in 2000 for £99...

All consoles are sold at a loss, even initially when they are very expensive (e.g., playstation3, Xbox360, Wii).  Devs want to be the first with the most, so they tend to pay through the nose for licensing fees.

By the time the consoles in question have hit the sub-$100 mark and the five-guy barely-a-homebrew studio companies are making games for it, the "big three" will have more than made it up in volume.

[B00tDisk]

Yup, post _manufacture_ and before marketing. Nintendo are the only exception having always sold their hardware at a profit. Even though the GameCube sold less than the Xbox and PS2 they still made more money from it than either competitor.

This is very well known stuff with consoles I'm surprised it still surprises people! They sell the hardware at a loss as they make all of the money from peripherals and gated development.

We cannot buy hardware direct from Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo without being able to demonstrate that we're at least in talks with a publisher, have previously released games OR have developers onboard who have previously released games. It can be a real pain for a startup just getting dev' kits.

Then you pay tens of thousands of dollar to submit your game to them for TCR/TRC testing, which will usually fail the first time so you'll re-submit until it passes. You do this for each territory that you release in, eg: EU/US/Asia and for each console. Once you've passed all of this you send your gold master to them to duplicate and they send you the discs which you pay for of course then when you sell it, they get slice of the profit.

If you think that's profit-tastico you should see how much they make on the peripherals!

Andy

All of this and more.  A sold console might (gross!) a company $10.  A spare controller, or "skin" for same?  $12.  Console production cost?  $100.  Accessory production cost?  $2.