What the hell was the Amiga Jr?

[Tomas]

Marco wrote:

Tomas wrote:
Was it not the commodore c65?

No, the C65 was actually a very good project, it was an update to the C64 rather than a downgrade to the Amiga, it basically gave the C64 almost Amiga like graphics and sound capabilities, had an integrate 3.5" Floppy, 128K RAM (expandable to 8Mb) a 128K ROM, res up to 1280x400, 6 channel audio, even had a trapdoor expansion port like the 500/1200, this page has some info:

http://www.zimmers.net/cbmpics/c65.html

You are probably right.. The ram specs just seemed similar. But i disagree strongly with C65 being a good project.. I might have been a good project in the 80s, but this was aimed for the 90s and you already had Amigas with much better specs and the c65 was outdated compared to pretty much everything.
Why not just promote the Amiga as the new succedor to the c64? Why should people buy low end c65 when they could have had an Amiga? I highly doubt the c65 would have been significantly cheaper either.

[Marco]

Yes, that is the major tragedy of the C65 and much of the reason why it was cancelled, it was simply too expensive and too late. It would have probably cost almost as much as an Amiga, IIRC the 128s were so expensive to produce they were being sold at a loss (to preserve the 'image' of the Amiga - not that it had much of one outside of Europe due to a catastrophic lack of advertising) and subsidised by Amiga sales. Really Commodore should have completely killed all 8-bit development the instant they got ahold of Amiga and just pushed Amiga all the way. Selling PC clones wasn't exactly a good business idea either.