Atari vs Commodore which one was stupider.

[itix]

@Speelgoedmannetje

Problem with Falcon was that it was too expensive, too incompatible and too late. ST was already dying and users moving to PCs.

And in the end Atari didnt have enough money to push Lynx and Jaguar forward. Too few games.


@foleyjo

CDTV lacked in software support and in the end it was just A500 with ancient Kickstart 1.3.

Commodore was notorious to push various crappy 8bit machines in hope of a gold mine and it didnt change with A1000... They just took old design and rebadged in hope it generates more profit than loss.

I wouldnt say IBM was much better really... they took a nose dive in early 90s too and were pushed out from the PC business.

[Hattig]

Commodore messed up more, because they had something that could have been great.

Atari messed up badly early on, but never recovered.

Commodore never kept pushing the Amiga design. A 1985 design was still being sold in 1992. Management was too involved with their pet projects, and decent stuff was dropped through petty politics. AAA could have been great.

And messing around in the PC market was stupid.

But they never sold enough. They needed to sell 10m+ Amigas by 1990 for it to have a really viable future. The next generation chipsets needed to not be interfered with.

The ST did quite well despite being a quick design. Again, it was never going to go anywhere - the TT variants were never enough at the high end. There was nothing special about the hardware either.

[foleyjo]

Commodore had their 8bit goldmine. It was the Commodore 64. The bestest selling 8 bit computer. The reason they kept it going for years is because people were still buying them and people were still making games and demos for it.
Surely it would be stupid to suddenlt stop selling the best selling 8 bit computer of all time.

[Lando]

uncharted wrote:

I was still a teenager in 1992 and it was obvious to me, even then, that C= was doomed.  I couldn't believe their stupidity in releasing the A500 (A1000 in a wedge design and 512K RAM)

Am I mis-reading what you mean here?  Are you saying that the A500 was a stupid move by C=?

I'm not saying the A500 was a stupid move - it's the machine that made the Amiga the success it was - just that they had 2 years after the A1000 to work on it, and releasing the A500 with such minor improvements (Kickstart in ROM and a little extra RAM) was not enough.  They should have spent more money on R&D, had AGA ready by '88, AAA by '91, and the next revision (AAAA?) by '94 - a 3-year gap between chipset revisions.  This is what was needed to stay ahead (of Mac / PC) at the time.

However these days Apple are releasing new Mac revisions at least every year, and high-end PC's are generally only cutting-edge for 6 months, so C= would have had to either keep up (impossible) or ditch the old Amiga chipset after about '97/98 and design their new machines with licensed chips from ATI or NVidia (again, like Apple), this would have been a very difficult transition (losing compatibility with all hardware-banging software) but necessary.

[bloodline]

Lando wrote:
However these days Apple are releasing new Mac revisions at least every year, and high-end PC's are generally only cutting-edge for 6 months, so C= would have had to either keep up (impossible) or ditch the old Amiga chipset after about '97/98 and design their new machines with licensed chips from ATI or NVidia (again, like Apple), this would have been a very difficult transition (losing compatibility with all hardware-banging software) but necessary.

Had Commodore and the Amiga survived, then I imagine by 1997, when the need to switch to off the shelf parts occured (Assuming Commodore hadn't become a Graphics Chip vendor), the OS would have fully supported RTG and very few programs would have hit the hardware... NYX was not OCS/AGA compatible!

I expect Commodore would have moved the Amiga platform to the HP PA-RISC by 1995... and would have had to transition to x86 CPU's by 2001.

[kd7ota]

It's a shame that Amiga and Atari both went downhill.  I have the best of both worlds.  An Atari 2600 for games and a Commodore 64/64c/128 computers.  Getting ready to link it to Quantumlink and take it for a spin.  :-)  :-D

Either way.  They were great computers for their time regardless of how things turned out.  :-)

[Psy]

Hyperspeed wrote:
I'm not sure Commodore marketed the Amiga poorly... after all the launch in '85 featured Andy Warhol and Blondie. What more could you ask for!?

Let's compaire Amiga marketting with Sega Genesis

- Sega made up words like "Blast Processing" that only ment the Genesis had the ability for the CPU to be working on one visible section of map while the graphics processor displays another.  Cheap yes but back then when most consumers knew little thus such marketting tricks worked.

- Before the SNES Sega took every opportunity to show the public how much better the Genesis was to the NES.  Amiga never really went into negative ads yet in the late 80's IBM compat were just begging to be bashed by ads for a superior computer.  Most IBM compats didn't even have a desktop till Windows 3.1 and even then Windows 3.1 sucked more then GEOS that alot of years Commodore could have been poking fun at Dos on in TV ads.

- Spent far more on advertising then Commodore spent on the Amiga

And Sega was not even that smart back then.

[Lando]

Psy wrote:

Hyperspeed wrote:
I'm not sure Commodore marketed the Amiga poorly... after all the launch in '85 featured Andy Warhol and Blondie. What more could you ask for!?

Let's compaire Amiga marketting with Sega Genesis

- Sega made up words like "Blast Processing" that only ment the Genesis had the ability for the CPU to be working on one visible section of map while the graphics processor displays another.  Cheap yes but back then when most consumers knew little thus such marketting tricks worked.

- Before the SNES Sega took every opportunity to show the public how much better the Genesis was to the NES.  Amiga never really went into negative ads yet in the late 80's IBM compat were just begging to be bashed by ads for a superior computer.  Most IBM compats didn't even have a desktop till Windows 3.1 and even then Windows 3.1 sucked more then GEOS that alot of years Commodore could have been poking fun at Dos on in TV ads.

- Spent far more on advertising then Commodore spent on the Amiga

And Sega was not even that smart back then.

Another big advantage the Megadrive had was that it cost £130 in Dixons, while an Amiga was still £399.  To parents looking to buy their kids a games machine, this fact alone made the choice for them.  The A500 lost a lot of sales from   1990 onwards to the Megadrive (and later the SNES) purely because of price.

No Amiga hit the sub-£200 price bracket that mass-market really needs..

[uncharted]

Lando wrote:

I'm not saying the A500 was a stupid move - it's the machine that made the Amiga the success it was - just that they had 2 years after the A1000 to work on it, and releasing the A500 with such minor improvements (Kickstart in ROM and a little extra RAM) was not enough.  They should have spent more money on R&D, had AGA ready by '88, AAA by '91, and the next revision (AAAA?) by '94 - a 3-year gap between chipset revisions.  This is what was needed to stay ahead (of Mac / PC) at the time.

I'd have to disagree here, and say it's rather unrealistic.  Part of the reason why the A500 did as well as it did was that it offered what it did at the price it did. C= would not have been able to hold that pricepoint if it introduced new technology in there. The A500 was still selling well in 1990.  In fact, if you look at the UK sales figures, A500 sales increased year on year until it was dropped.

As it was the A500 was, if anything, too expensive.  My parents certainly couldn't afford one, I had to make do with a Sinclair Spectrum +2 at Xmas 89.

If anything it was the A2000 that was the problem.  The A2000 *should* of been a true sequal to the A1000.

However these days Apple are releasing new Mac revisions at least every year, and high-end PC's are generally only cutting-edge for 6 months, so C= would have had to either keep up (impossible) or ditch the old Amiga chipset after about '97/98 and design their new machines with licensed chips from ATI or NVidia (again, like Apple), this would have been a very difficult transition (losing compatibility with all hardware-banging software) but necessary.

I wonder if the computer market would of remained as competitive as it was in the 80's (that is several large companies with decent market shares), would progress move in the way it does now?

[KThunder]

part of commodores problem was that they relyed on their chip fabrication plants for all their custom chips but by the time aga came around they had to outsource because they hadnt ugraded their plants.
mostek came out with the 6502 and numerous variants but never a good 16bit then 32bit successor. amiga should have used a mostek cpu 68000 comatible or not it would have been better. one of the reasons the c64 was less expensive than other 8bit was because mostek made most of the chips for it whilst other companies bought from 3rd parties.
as they upgraded their facilities amiga should have upgraded accordingly, aga should have been released in 90 with at least 1 or 2 chunky display modes and at least 16bit mono sound in addition to ocs ecs capabilities.

[KThunder]

atari never really was a serious computer threat, they had no big box systems so nothing was very expandable, and they only had what, one system with anything other than a 68000 cpu.
atari put all its eggs in the jaguar basket but didnt get the third parrty support it needed and got ripped in the gaming mags. it was a very capable system for the time.

saturn < 250,000 poly/sec
playstation < 250,000 poly/sec
n64 < 100,000 poly/sec
jaguar < 35,000 poly/sec
32x < 30,000 poly/sec
3do < 30,000 poly/sec

all above were estemated from chipset timing and estemated real game capabilities

jaguar had 3d matrix arithmetic hardware and hardware gauraud shading  that could easily exeed 53,000 poly/sec but could not texture map at the same time. texture mapped stuff had to run half in hardware half in software

btw jaguar, playstation, and saturn had 2d capabilities that were limited by the bus capabilities, and the jag ahad a full 64bit bus that was 1.74 times faster than the playstation bus. the n64 had a 32bit bus (even though it was the jag that was slammed in the press for not being fully 64bit)

[Psy]

KThunder wrote:
atari never really was a serious computer threat, they had no big box systems so nothing was very expandable, and they only had what, one system with anything other than a 68000 cpu.

The TT had a Motorola 68030 @ 32MHz

The Falcon had a Motorola 68030 with a 68040 in the pipeline.

Atari Transputer Workstation had a T-800 @ 20Mhz and 68000 @ 8Mhz

EST had a Motorola 68020 but was stuck in R&D and scraped for the TT

[uncharted]

Lando wrote:

Another big advantage the Megadrive had was that it cost £130 in Dixons, while an Amiga was still £399.  To parents looking to buy their kids a games machine, this fact alone made the choice for them.  The A500 lost a lot of sales from   1990 onwards to the Megadrive (and later the SNES) purely because of price.

But the Amiga had the advantage that it was seen by parents as a computer and not as a toy.  Many of my friends got one "to do their homework" ;-)

Also, it's debatable how much the Megadrive ate into Amiga's sales, as Amiga sales still increased year on year after the introduction of the Megadrive.

[foleyjo]

KThunder wrote:

(even though it was the jag that was slammed in the press for not being fully 64bit)

The jag was slammed coz it was actually 2 32bit processors not 1 64 bit processor making it difficult to program for

[Hyperspeed]

By KThunder:
atari put all its eggs in the jaguar basket but didnt get the third parrty support it needed and got ripped in the gaming mags. it was a very capable system for the time.

saturn < 250,000 poly/sec
playstation < 250,000 poly/sec
n64 < 100,000 poly/sec
jaguar < 35,000 poly/sec
32x < 30,000 poly/sec
3do < 30,000 poly/sec

all above were estemated from chipset timing and estemated real game capabilities

EDIT:
------------------------------
BlizzardVision - 2,000,000 (!)
------------------------------
Saturn - 500,000
Playstation - 350,000
N64 - 200,000
32X - 150,000
Jaguar - 40,000
3D0 -

These were the figures I remember being bandied about at the time.

Remember, the 32X may have had a Doom port with a smaller window but comparing Iron Soldier (Jag) to MetalHead (32X) you get the impression the latter's 3D capability was way more advanced, particularly with texture mapping.

32X had Virtua Fighter in 3D polygons, and for Yu Suzuki to even contemplate this the 32X must have had a polygon quota at least comparable to the N64.

Jaguar Alien Vs Predator and Tempest 2000 were both real killers though and I haven't quite seen what Battlesphere has to offer.

The CD32 really was pushing it by not adding something new for console-heads to shout about. Akiko wasn't going to get that much attention when it should have been part of AGA.

What is meant by 'Chunky Pixel' anyway, I read it was a 1:1 pixel but then NTSC 640x480 is 1:1 (with overscan)?

EDIT:
We never did get a handheld/laptop Amiga...
:-(

[InTheSand]

Hyperspeed wrote:
What is meant by 'Chunky Pixel' anyway, I read it was a 1:1 pixel but then NTSC 640x480 is 1:1 (with overscan)?

Assuming a 256-colour display, chunky screenmodes are those where one pixel on the screen can be written in a single go using one byte of data.

In contrast, the Amiga's AGA display in a 256-colour mode would require 8 separate writes of one bit each, to each of the eight bitplanes that make up the final display.

Taking a simple monochrome screen, one byte would equate to a horizontal line of 8 pixels, where the pattern of the line equates to the binary pattern of the value written to it (where 1s correspond to a dot, and 0s to a blank). E.g. a solid line would require a value of 255 (FF hex) to be written as this equates to 11111111 in binary, and a blank line would require 0 to be written as this equates to 00000000 in binary, with a stippled effect being obtained by writing alternate 0s and 1s as in 01010101 (byte value of 85 (55 hex)). The Amiga's native screenmodes are effectively made up of multiple monochrome-style "planes" of graphics, which are then layered together by the chipset.

The Akiko chip simplified the writing to all of these bitplanes and effectively gave the developer a chunky display to work with, where one byte written to change a single pixel would be split across the eight bitplanes via hardware, thereby speeding up screen updates vs doing the same operation in software.

I'm sure someone can explain that better than I've just attempted!

 - Ali