FPGA Amiga

[moogaloonie]

Really, did people complain when 030/040 accelerators or new Amigas were introduced into the market?  The same arguments can be made - "we are fracturing our userbase!"

Uhhh yeah, there actually was some of that.  The accelerators were much more common in the US for 3D rendering than in the other markets where the Amiga was a dominant games platform, with said games usually being hard coded for the base 68k.  I even remember a game that would have required I remove my internal memory expansion just to run.  And when AGA was released a lot of development continued to focus on OCS/ECS because of the larger installed base.  Western users' requests to C= for MMUs and FPUs as standard were met with groans from European users who merely wanted the cost of the base machine to come down even further. Encouraging OS compliant software and RTG was always an attempt to keep the platform from fracturing along the various spec boundaries. Fear of fracturing the platform could be partially blamed for the long delay between AGA's completion and its eventual release or might have even factored in the reluctance and eventual failure to make the AT&T DSP board a commercial product. But I certainly do not remember there ever being a time when a potentially significant improvement to the Amiga's capabilities was met with an universally warm reception, whether it was an OS revision, a CPU evolution or even a display enhancement.

[moogaloonie]

I believe you here mean British users. Just consider where most CPU boards and other high end hardware for Amiga were made, where Amiga clones were made, where most productivity software was made etc.

I tend to think of the CPU boards (Phase5) that originated in Germany  before those that came from the UK (though I had a VXL-30 in my 2k, not  sure where that was from). I recall the BoXer was from the UK, but Escom  was German and wasn't Quikpak based in the US?
I tend to associate  the UK with the bulk of the games and for having great printed  magazines, but I don't associate the UK with any one major application...  Germany, especially Haage and Partner and proDad seemed the most eager  to see the Amiga become a serious business machine.
Honestly, Commodore were  blind to just how big of an issue the NTSC/PAL differences would be. US  users would love to have enjoyed the games played in the UK, but many of  them either didn't run at all or put important stuff at the bottom of the  screen where it could not be seen. That doomed the Amiga as games  machine in the US, where it would be competing with Sega who had the  advantage of their Japanese catalog being developed for the NTSC  standard (of course that also gave C= an advantage over Sega in the UK).
It  seemed to me that it was mostly the people working on 3D and video  software that wanted the Amiga to incorporate MMUs and FPUs, presumably  so they could justify their developing for those co-processors. The US and  European branches should have worked on tech jointly and marketing  separately.  To an extent, they did just this.  But IMHO, the CD32 was  simply not an appropriate design for NTSC markets.

[moogaloonie]

The NTSC/PAL thing was a pain in the butt, however, the later A500's and all A1200's could be booted into PAL mode and on the 1084 nothing was cut off the bottom. In my "group of gamers" 5 of us had PAL capable A500's and one didn't until I upgraded it. Also there were quite a few European games that were available in NTSC format in the late 80's, although if you  try to download a copy now it will probably be the PAL version. Seems most of the cracked versions were from Europe.

Oh, from a computer perspective, there were countless PAL games that were playable and plenty of NTSC titles too... But from a console perspective I think they were on the wrong track.  Consoles are normally connected to the TV, and only an Amiga user would have a 1084 handy.  People expect those things to "just work".  C= seemed to have nothing in place to guarantee the end-user experience, to make sure that CD32 titles were region appropriate and properly ported (saves, control etc.) from the desktop to console. They had produced a legit console, sure, but they were still treating it like a computer in allowing people to sort through software of varying quality and compatibility.

[moogaloonie]

Is this again becoming one of these "what-if" stories that makes your head hurt? A serious chip supply company runs a market analysis before launching a product. Motorola did, and the result was PPC and Coldfire. A serious computer hardware vendor makes a market analysis and picks the chip that fits best to their requirements, after having made a market analysis what the customer wants. CBM did not, and went bankrupt.

Any further questions like this?

Not how I remember that at all.  Maybe my tinfoil hat was too tight back then, but I recall PPC being joint design of Apple and Motorola with Apple effectively locking everyone else out of using it on the desktop. With the ColdFire cutting a lot out of the 68k line, and making it a less than ideal replacement, Apple essentially dealt death blows to the Amiga, The ST and Sharp's X68000 simultaneously. Not that Atari or Sharp would necessarily have produced a machine based on a future 680x0 but it was the nail in the coffin for both platforms nonetheless. I'm sure Apple realized that their platform had been driving that architecture forward significantly, so why should the Amiga always benefit equally from its evolution?

[moogaloonie]

That is such nonsense - what killed the Amiga, besides Commodore screwing up - was the INTERNET.

I tried to qualify my statement with "nails in the coffin".  Yes, all of those platforms were doomed or struggling by that time.  But the Amiga and Atari communities could have still produced accelerators based on future 68k chips and kept limping along for another decade or so. That the end of the 68k line did mean the end of the Classic Amiga I will stand by, as AmigaOS 4.x and MorphOS, were by necessity new platforms.  Had the 68k continued we'd not have wasted time and money on PowerUp/WarpUp and C= wouldn't wasted resources evaluating successor chips.   I have a PPC board and knew it was a stop-gap solution at the time. That an FPGA based 68k could extend the Classic Amiga well beyond 1995, possibly to 2000 or even 2005 speeds is why there's now new life in the classic platform.

I agree to an extent about the internet, but I was getting online with my 4k until at least 2000. It was things like not having the Intel Indeo codec to watch avi files that made it miserable. Otherwise I was happy with iBrowse and YAM and whatever else I was using then.

In my mind the Amiga was the best 2D computer and 3D is what killed it. CD32 was designed for competition with SegaCD and the TurboDuo, not so much the 3DO, Jaguar or Playstation. It was the debut of the original GeForce that led me to finally get an AMD box in 2000.

[moogaloonie]

PPC was originally IBM going to Apple and saying they could produce a chip, Apple wanted a second source and they didn't want to mess up their relationship with Motorola so they got IBM to bring Motorola in.

So you can't really blame Motorola for ditching 680x0 on the desktop and switching to PowerPC, they had a gun to their head.

I'd blame Apple first for possibly wanting to handicap the Amiga and Atari by abandoning the 68k knowing it might effectively kill it. I always look back and wish the 68k platforms had been a united front as far as Motorola was concerned because I still think it would have all been different if the ColdFire line had offered a full replacement for the 68k. Motorola had the StreamMaster reference platform using the ColdFire and VMLabs' NUON chip.  If AmigaOS could have just been ported to that...

But then we're just back to the flawed design of AmigaOS...  I think the only way it would have moved forward without memory protection would be to run instances of the Amiga atop another OS.  Each instance would run in a protected space and all could communicate as virtual Amigas... It wouldn't be emulation as they'd still be running on a real processor, but the lowest level of the OS would need be something entirely new and able to mature into the real UI over time.