Commodore was the worst thing that happend to the Amiga

[Garyed40]

Personally I wish they could've stayed Independent What do you guys think?

Gary

[Brian]

Commodore was surely better than Atari buying them out. I think Commodore was good for Amiga for many years even though in the end it was it's downfall.

[coldfish]

Druid: "The Roman invasion was the worst thing that happened to England."

Its all ancient history.

[Skyrunner]

Apparently you realise that that was not possible. Had they stayed independent there would have been no Amiga.
Even if they had the money to do so, you really cannot know who and how would be running things.
Neeeext.

[MrZammler]

Make that: "The Commodore Management..."

[mwoof]

Make that: "The Commodore Management..."

Bingo! :-D

[Managarm]

I thought there was nothing wrong with Commodore... right upto the point they started marketing the CDTV not as a computer, but as some sort of general appliance like a toaster or a radio.

[HopperJF]

Commodore did great until around 1991 when Irving Gould got there and AAA was cancelled

The A1200 would have kicked ass as an 030 based 8Meg AAA machine for £399

[Hammer]

The core of 68K PC market was flawed i.e. Motorola was unable to keep pace with the other CPU vendors in the desktop market. Screwing (cut&paste) up the ISA standards are one of the main factors why the customers don’t stick with a particular platform. Motorola use to have PC vendors such as HP, DEC and SUN building 68K based workstations.  

Around 1992 time period, Motorola should have made 030/881 like 486DX like CPU to compete with Intel's bottom end 486DX i.e. making the solution cheaper with one chip packaging instead of two chip packaging. Secondly, one shouldn’t underestimate FPU’s contribution and influence on 1992 era 3D games.

[Hammer]

HopperJF wrote:
Commodore did great until around 1991 when Irving Gould got there and AAA was cancelled

The A1200 would have kicked ass as an 030 based 8Meg AAA machine for £399

This only delays the dying 68k core....

I rather see higher clocked EC020/881/effective chucky gfx/some fastram combination for early 3D textured games target.

[bloodline]

Had the AIM alliance decided to put 68k compatibility mode into the PPC, in the same way intel kept the pentium compatible with the x86... I believe the PPC would have had an equal share of the desktop market by now.

bloodline wrote:
Had the AIM alliance decided to put 68k compatibility mode into the PPC, in the same way intel kept the pentium compatible with the x86... I believe the PPC would have had an equal share of the desktop market by now.

Me too, but I'd reword it slightly.

"Had the AIM alliance decided to put 68k compatibility mode into the PPC, in the same way AMD made the Athlon compatible with the x86... I believe the PPC would have had an equal share of the desktop market by now."

I think we've both said on here before, that an Athlon-ized 68k would have been a run away success.

[srg86]

I think thats what the 68040 was supposed to be, a 68K equivalent of the 486DX, if only they had implemented the full 68882 into it's FPU rather than a subset.

srg

[bloodline]

mdma wrote:

bloodline wrote:
Had the AIM alliance decided to put 68k compatibility mode into the PPC, in the same way intel kept the pentium compatible with the x86... I believe the PPC would have had an equal share of the desktop market by now.

Me too, but I'd reword it slightly.

"Had the AIM alliance decided to put 68k compatibility mode into the PPC, in the same way AMD made the Athlon compatible with the x86... I believe the PPC would have had an equal share of the desktop market by now."

I think we've both said on here before, that an Athlon-ized 68k would have been a run away success.

Unfortuately, the key work here is "would".

It honestly can't see why no one thought the back investment of 68k software wasn't worth a few extra transistors (wouldn't have even needed much more than a simple microcode based emulator IHMO) in the PPC core... if you look at how much space was given over to the FPU... which is certain to be depreciated now with emphisis on alitvec... the mind boggles...

[minator]

Had the AIM alliance decided to put 68k compatibility mode into the PPC, in the same way intel kept the pentium compatible with the x86... I believe the PPC would have had an equal share of the desktop market by now.

The PowerPC was invented for Apple, they got 68K compatibility by doing it in software.  Doing it in hardware would of probably have proven as successful as Intel's attempt to do x86 compatibility in the Itanium (which they have removed because it's faster to do it in software) or the PPC 615.

The core of 68K PC market was flawed i.e. Motorola was unable to keep pace with the other CPU vendors in the desktop market. Screwing (cut&paste) up the ISA standards are one of the main factors why the customers don’t stick with a particular platform. Motorola use to have PC vendors such as HP, DEC and SUN building 68K based workstations.

No, they did their own in house RISC designs and the 68K couldn't keep up.
Motorola did do their own RISC design (the 88K series) but it never sold in sufficient numbers and died off.  Parts were reused in the PowerPC series though (the original PowerPC bus was straight ou of an 88K).

Intel also did a RISC design (the i860) but it never took off either.

--

Remember that the Amiga was never about high CPU speeds, everything intensive was done by the chip-set, had they of survived that strategy most likely would have continued.

Commodore's failure though was all interal.  Had they of got the AAA + DSP machine out in the early 90's it would have been an absolute killer - and Hombre would have later killed it.  If they had buit an Amiga with that technology things could have turned out very different.

Read this interview, it appears to be from 1997, interesting stuff...