C65

[Psy]

Commodore was selling the C64 into the 90's thus why in 1989/1990 it started this C65 idea.  This is why I find it odd that they didn't early just slap early Amiga chipsets with VIC and SID modes onto a 65C816 CPU, port Amiga Dos and possibly workbench 1.x, it would have helped push C64 users towards the Amgia so they could retire the aging C64.

Instead Commodore made a bunch of C64 spinoffs with minor improvmens.


 

[Floid]

The way this piece of history fit into Commodore managerial logic is described pretty well in Bagnall's book.  I don't have it in front of me, but politics and licensing drove a lot of basic architectural choices in the 65xx machines.

It's got Herd in there describing the rough moment when someone realized 'Doh! Compatibility would make sense!'  (Somewhere around the Plus 4, and lo, the next major release was the 128.)

[Psy]

Floid wrote:
The way this piece of history fit into Commodore managerial logic is described pretty well in Bagnall's book.  I don't have it in front of me, but politics and licensing drove a lot of basic architectural choices in the 65xx machines.

It's got Herd in there describing the rough moment when someone realized 'Doh! Compatibility would make sense!'  (Somewhere around the Plus 4, and lo, the next major release was the 128.)

There was not only a issue of compatiablity to Amiga, the C64 was getting outdated by 1986, lets take a look at 8-bit video game consoles at the time.

C64 could do 16 colors, the Sega Master System could do 52 and NES could do 24. *all colors are at the same time

C64 ran at about 1Mhz, the Sega Master System at about 3.5 Mhz and the NES about 1.8 Mhz

Even Atari's 8-bit computers was kicking the C64s ass by then in terms of performance with the 800XE running at about 1.8 Mhz.

Yet Commodore just pumped out the same C64 in different cases (C64C,C64G and C64GS) without doing much to hold onto the large C64 user base (by either upgrading the C64 or migrating the users to the Amiga)

[Tomas]

All commodore did was basicly milk the 1985 design of amiga and packing it into smaller packages and maybe adding a tad extra ram in newer models. Commodore did basicly nothing! When aga came with the a1200, it was way too late and the pc was already starting to fly past the Amiga in many areas.

[Skyrunner]

It's not only that AGA was late. It's that when it was released to the masses, the machine (A1200) needed expensive  laptop hard drives, had no Fast RAM, no CDROM (yes, massive crappy games like Myst etc sold quite a few PCs), no in-built software modem... to name just a few problems that hindered Commodore from keeping its user base.
And after all, the above are things that most people ended up buying within a little time from buying the A1200 as its shortcomings were obvious. The A1200 should not have been meant to be another C64. Anyway that's history...

[SamuraiCrow]

@Skyrunner

The biggest flaw with the A1200 was that it came with a 68ec020 instead of an '030.  Maxis quit developing for Amiga after their crappy port of SimCity 2000 couldn't keep up with the Mac version.

In the end the second-biggest shortcoming (the lack of fast RAM) made people buy accelerator boards with newer memory than was available when the A1200 was developed, thus allowing the A1200s to last longer than their PC counterparts.

[Tomas]

The biggest flaw with the A1200 was that it came with a 68ec020 instead of an '030. Maxis quit developing for Amiga after their crappy port of SimCity 2000 couldn't keep up with the Mac version.

I dont think this can be blamed entirely on the hardware, as i heard that running it wihtin a emulated Mac using a Amiga gives better perfomance than the game running natively on the same amiga hardware running the emulator.
So to me it seems like crappy coding/porting is quite a bit of the reason of simcity2000 running so crappy on Amiga hardware.

But yeah, the cpu should indeed have been faster at that time and it should atleast have had more than 2 megs of ram and also a upgraded soundchip.

[Effy]

Then consider yourself lucky that the engineers at the Amiga factory decided, against their superiors, to release the A1200 with 2 Mb Chip and not with 1 Mb Chip as the plan was. Please correct me if I am wrong !!

[JLF65]

Effy wrote:
Then consider yourself lucky that the engineers at the Amiga factory decided, against their superiors, to release the A1200 with 2 Mb Chip and not with 1 Mb Chip as the plan was. Please correct me if I am wrong !!

The A1200 was designed to have either 1M on the mobo and 1M on a riser, or 2M on the mobo. The decision to go with 2M was because the price of ram dropped enough to make it less expensive than a separate riser board with the extra 1M.

[Skyrunner]

@Effy

I still have my original A1200 manual and it reads that the machine has 1MB of Chip RAM. I can recall being in the car, with my brand new A1200 on the back seat, waiting for my mom to drive me home, reading about this in the manual and freaking out! Of course when we got home I rushed the machine to tme 1084, loaded WB and relaxed

[Skyrunner]

@SamuraiCrow,Tomas

Yes, I completely forgot about the 030 that should have been there from day one.
But software like SimCity2000 and other similar from that era were definitely poorly programmed ports of PC software so there go all the benefits of the Amiga's custom chips. They were the equivalent of C64 poor ports from the early Amiga era. In both cases, programmers couldn't do the job properly.

[Psy]

But software like SimCity2000 and other similar from that era were definitely poorly programmed ports of PC software so there go all the benefits of the Amiga's custom chips.

That was mostly due to a realtivily small userbase that was mostly due to the lack of marketing of the Amiga.  In the late 80's Commodore could have taken on IBM compats with comparison ads showing how easier it is to play games on the Amiga, the better gaming experince and lower cost then PCs but Commodore couldn't because it was also in the PC market.

If Amiga had a larger userbase devlopers like Maxis would have taken more time in devlopment for the Amiga.

[Tomas]

Effy wrote:
Then consider yourself lucky that the engineers at the Amiga factory decided, against their superiors, to release the A1200 with 2 Mb Chip and not with 1 Mb Chip as the plan was. Please correct me if I am wrong !!

Damn good that the orginal plan was dumped..

[nadoom]

i wonder how much money they made on each unit?

do you think that commodore made more per unit than other manufacturers?

a lot ( if not all) of commodores problems seem to stem from greed, and lack of vision. Would we have been better off with jack tramiel in charge? <:( at least he had some bond other than making money in commodore.. he created it.

[Psy]

nadoom wrote:
i wonder how much money they made on each unit?

do you think that commodore made more per unit than other manufacturers?

I don't know

a lot ( if not all) of commodores problems seem to stem from greed, and lack of vision. Would we have been better off with jack tramiel in charge? <:( at least he had some bond other than making money in commodore.. he created it.

He took over Atari and Atari was able to make Commodore look competent. Sure Atari marketed the Jaugar but it was a mess from a design stand point and its hardware was buggy making it a nightmare to program for it, also Atari pulled the Falcon to focus on the Jaguar.

[Psy]

I wonder what would have happened if Warner sold Atari to Commodore instead?  Odds are there wouldn't be a ST and ST users would have been Amiga users beefing up the Amiga userbase.  While alot of talent left Atari during the time it was under Warner managment it could still have devloped games for the Amiga.