What would an Amiga be today?

[sim085]

Hi,

I know some people may have already asked this question but I was wondering one thing. If Commodore did not get bankrupt and it still continued producing computers then what would be getting an Amiga?

Would we buying a PC branded as an Amiga such as there are PC’s branded as DELL and Scan? Would we be buying some super computer like some Sun or HP server? Or else would we be buying some game console like the Play station, Wii, and Xbox? Or maybe Commodore would have scraped the name in favour of their name?

Regards,
Sim085

[ZeBeeDee]

Commodore branded holographic screens would be nice ... maybe even total immersion computers/consoles with a nanoscopic super duper AGA (A^6) chipset we plug directly into our heads.

Must stop watching these sci-fi films ... getting too many wild ideas :lol:

[Varthall]

Probably it won't be much different than an A1.

Varthall

[ChuckT]

A Commodore 64 with a lot of memory and on steroids.

[Pyromania]

@sim085

Amiga OS 4.1.

[SamuraiCrow]

The AAA chipset was going to get canned and Commodore was thinking of dropping their own operating system in favor of the PowerPC version of Windows NT.  Even if they hadn't gone belly-up they still would have made a terrible mess of things and still gotten it wrong.  Management at Commodore towards the end was outright anti-Amiga and pro-PC.

My opinion:  Commodore was doomed in many ways at once.  It would have gone under one way or another anyhow.

[pan1k]

I think it would closely resemble an SGI. Custom high end graphic chipset, fast I/O bus and a unix-based OS.

[DBAlex]

@Varthall

Agreed.

OS4.1 w/ better CPU speed/architecture... Probably X86... Although I understand why its for PPC even if it seems daft now (PowerPC is obviously the next logical progression of the 68K family)..

4.0/4.1 really are all that *most* people would want in a modern AmigaOS (I'm talking OS not application wise here)... It's only the legal & hardware situation thats halting things.

[Tension]

That`s easy - It would be the PS3 without a shadow of a doubt.

The PS3 is the CD32 taken to it`s natural conclusion.

[bloodline]

SamuraiCrow wrote:
The AAA chipset was going to get canned and Commodore was thinking of dropping their own operating system in favor of the PowerPC version of Windows NT.  Even if they hadn't gone belly-up they still would have made a terrible mess of things and still gotten it wrong.  Management at Commodore towards the end was outright anti-Amiga and pro-PC.

My opinion:  Commodore was doomed in many ways at once.  It would have gone under one way or another anyhow.

I agree with you mostly... but Both Haynie and Ludwig have said that the PPC was not a choice for the future of Amiga... it was dropped early on in development meetings... HP's PA-RISC was the choice...

Custom Chipsets were on the way out, and yeah NT was in as far as Commodore was concerned. The Amiga as we know it would have faded out after the 1992 machines :-)

[little]

It depends, if they had released AGA with the A3000 (instead of the ECS) then the amiga could have competed with PC VGA graphic cards. But who knows if the top brass at commodore would had invested in a fully 3D chipset, if they did not they would have lost to 3D just the same as the amiga lost to 256 color graphics.

[amigadave]

bloodline wrote:

SamuraiCrow wrote:
The AAA chipset was going to get canned and Commodore was thinking of dropping their own operating system in favor of the PowerPC version of Windows NT.  Even if they hadn't gone belly-up they still would have made a terrible mess of things and still gotten it wrong.  Management at Commodore towards the end was outright anti-Amiga and pro-PC.

My opinion:  Commodore was doomed in many ways at once.  It would have gone under one way or another anyhow.

I agree with you mostly... but Both Haynie and Ludwig have said that the PPC was not a choice for the future of Amiga... it was dropped early on in development meetings... HP's PA-RISC was the choice...

Custom Chipsets were on the way out, and yeah NT was in as far as Commodore was concerned. The Amiga as we know it would have faded out after the 1992 machines :-)

The Amiga was doomed almost from the very start when so little chipset advancement was made between the A1000 and the A500/A2000 and again almost no graphic advancement from the A500/A2000 to the A3000.  As has been repeated over and over again, AGA was "too little too late" and the A4000/A1200 was almost an embarrassment to the Amiga community, as most of us knew very well that the PC and Mac were not only catching up by the time the A4000/A1200 was released, but that they had already surpassed them in many ways.  

Commodore management appears to never have taken the Amiga seriously and just made one bad decision after another and never fully funded the kind of development needed to keep the Amiga ahead of other platforms, where it should have stayed and could have easily stayed, if only they had not wasted all their development money trying to compete with the dozens of other PC manufacturers (where they lost horribly and killed the Commodore cash cow that had been created by the C64).

[Psy]

SamuraiCrow wrote:
The AAA chipset was going to get canned

I doubt it would have been very impressive by the time Commodore would have finally shipped machines with the AAA chipset.

and Commodore was thinking of dropping their own operating system in favor of the PowerPC version of Windows NT.  

Windows NT had worse software support then the Amiga at the time, what would haven been the bloody point?

Even if they hadn't gone belly-up they still would have made a terrible mess of things and still gotten it wrong.  Management at Commodore towards the end was outright anti-Amiga and pro-PC.

I thought Commodore didn't really make much money off IBM clones.

My opinion:  Commodore was doomed in many ways at once.  It would have gone under one way or another anyhow.

Well the CD-32 was selling, maybe Commodore would have become a game console company and then got crushed like Atari when the PSX finally launched.

[Dr_Righteous]

If Commodore hadn't tanked, they would likely rule the console game market. Instead of XBOX and PS3 we'd have the Amiga CD128 console (DVD128?).

The remaining line of Amiga computers would be high-end graphics stations and NL video editors. Lower end systems would be targeted at gamers and musicians.

And yes, I would definitely see a full line of Commodore x86 machines for Joe user. Remember they did have x86 based business machines.

Mostly I think Commodore would be where Apple is today, perhaps even more so. Perhaps they would have swallowed up Apple by now.

I don't think Amigas would ever have pushed out x86 PCs as the most popular platform tho. x86 got where it is today by being cheap and relatively open as far as hardware. Anyone can manufacture and sell PCs and parts. That's always been the edge.

In short, Commodore would be a combination of Sony and Apple.

[kreciu]

I can tell that for me Amiga could be only slightly faster, so my icons would show in screen is real time , and I could play mp3 and DVD's using some hardware "acceleration".

Other part of Amiga "future" is in mighty hands of programmers...

70% people could use a "notepad" for writing a documents, 15% could use FinalWriter from 1995 for putting the tables and pictures and basic formatting of fonts, rest could use PageStream 3.0.

Development of computers/electronics is a crap. Now, we can talk.



For me they could produce a A1200/4000 board even today, the same.

My old "CRAPPY" Amiga is taking amazing... 100W (maybe?), today mighty PC based on the most strict ecological crap is like 300W (some even 1000W) WOW. This is development!