Is the Amiga architecture still relevant today?

[bloodline]

The penny pinching you have identified became a cancer in the Amiga Development... That is why the outdated AGA wasn't released until 92... When it needed to be out in 88...

Also communication between the dev teams in commodre was nonexistent!!! The CDTV team had no idea that the ECS chipset was even being worked on let alone ready to ship...

[Zac67]

Truly spoken... When it could've been:
- 1 MB chipmem (they just forgot to enlarge the registers!) & ECS capabilities with the first A500/2000s in 1987 + 8 bit lores graphics + chunky modes
- 32 bit chipset by 1990: 16 & 24 bit graphics in lores/hires, 16 bit audio, high density floppies, 32 bit blitter - even 8 MB chipmem

It would have been so easy to do, yet it didn't happen...

[Lockon_15]

Ah, ok, I looked at schematics. I basically forgot about DRAM...Agnus had to do the DRAM address translation (+refresh). That does explain it...Still, I think it's a bad compromise. I think it would have been worth it to add DRAM support to eg Gary in order to have cheap fastram...
 
But of course, that's in hindsight. Maybe Commodore thought cheap fastram sideport expansions would flouris?

Not exactly.
As Bloodline said, they had more important thing to care of.
Six months after A1000 debut, CBM was grasping to ensure liquid business since some massive loans were due settling. A massive fraction of revenue came from still actual 8-bit market, while A1000 sales were pretty discouraging, nowhere near the Atari competition. New CEO, Rattigan, cut the costs of perex and opex by splitting platform into 2 separate streamlines. Simpler and cheaper A500 was aimed at market penetration currenttly owned by C64 and A2000 shoot for performance/productivity line claimed by Atari. It would be nice to find some figures how much CBM saved on those A1000vsA500 and A1000vsA2000 ratios, but somehow it worked since just before launch of A500/2000 CBM reported profit.
 
Considering all issues of that specific time, I think that CBM might have done more damage after A1000 debut. They had second chance (1st goes to original Amiga team) with Rattigan, but greedy Gould fired him in split second. Not to mention the awful CBM marketing which blew every damn chance to expand userbase and increase organic market share.
 
IMHO, when we're discoussing what might been wise to do back then, I'll say that CBM might saved it's ass if they went IBM route. Licence chipset, open platform for 3rd party HW assemby and then apply more focus on SW development which would generate enough momentum of detailed concepts and ideas needing better HW. Unfortunatelly, when told about IBM route, those idiots understood only COMPATIBILITY.
 
Ahh...:furious:

[blakespot]

I've had a 486 with 16Mb RAM running Win95 (!) and a 68030/40Mhz A1200 with 8Mb Fast + 2Mb chip with 3.0 ROMs.  Concentrating on stuff that's vaguely hardware related, I'd say that the A1200 won out on:

• Displaying digital photos on a lovely HAM-8 screen rather than 256 colours

...I had a 486 66 with 16MB RAM running '95 -- that was decent back then -- and a few vidcards in that box over time.  It had no problem displaying truecolor 24-bit images uner 3.1.  What vidcard did you use..?




blakespot

[alx]

...I had a 486 66 with 16MB RAM running '95 -- that was decent back then -- and a few vidcards in that box over time.  It had no problem displaying truecolor 24-bit images uner 3.1.  What vidcard did you use..?

Hmm, not entirely sure, although I think it had 1Mb of graphics memory and was an ISA card.  I can definitely remember seeing dithering you wouldn't get with 24-bit colour.

At any rate I'd still say that, when it was released, a stock A1200 could better display still pictures (via HAM) than a PC with a mediocre graphics card.  Not that that's an immense achievement really - if anything it shows how much the Amiga's advantages over the PC had diminished by the time AGA came around.

[modrobert]

Evolution doesn't promote "the best", it promotes "good enough". Both in terms of hardware and software, the Amiga was effectively end of life by the time AGA was released.

I agree, though a straight quote from Darwin fits even better in my opinion. -"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change."

In other words the future looks bright for Linux...

[Raffaele]

The graphics were more advanced (SVGA I think?) and of course there was nothing like Wolfenstein or Doom on the Amiga! That's actually another thing: there were much more software, including games, which were of particular interest to us at the time.{/QUOTE}

You never heard of Breathless Amiga clone game of DOOM?

It had all features of DOOM, including textures, shades, light effects, jumps, and on basic Amigas it could be even shrinked in pixels down to 160x120 to grant playability, or enlarged if you had had CPU with muscles...

On accelerated Amigas Breathless game make use of more horsepower speed and it could even recognize graphics cards connected to amiga AFAIK...

Also to gain speed you could change textures from 1x1 pixels to 2x2 or 4x4 or even remove it and revert to solid rendering of surfaces without any textures.

Breathless was a real masterpiece but its existence was just barely known amongst amiga users due to the fallen of Commodore.

[ejstans]

The graphics were more advanced (SVGA I think?) and of course there was nothing like Wolfenstein or Doom on the Amiga! That's actually another thing: there were much more software, including games, which were of particular interest to us at the time.{/QUOTE}
 
You never heard of Breathless Amiga clone game of DOOM?
 
It had all features of DOOM, including textures, shades, light effects, jumps, and on basic Amigas it could be even shrinked in pixels down to 160x120 to grant playability, or enlarged if you had had CPU with muscles...
 
On accelerated Amigas Breathless game make use of more horsepower speed and it could even recognize graphics cards connected to amiga AFAIK...
 
Also to gain speed you could change textures from 1x1 pixels to 2x2 or 4x4 or even remove it and revert to solid rendering of surfaces without any textures.
 
A very masterpiece but it existence was just barely known amongst amiga users due to the fallen of Commodore.

No I had never heard of this 'Breathless', especially not in 1993. As it was apparently released in 1996, which is about when my Amiga gave up its ghost, that's little wonder! :p

[bloodline]

The graphics were more advanced (SVGA I think?) and of course there was nothing like Wolfenstein or Doom on the Amiga! That's actually another thing: there were much more software, including games, which were of particular interest to us at the time.{/QUOTE}

You never heard of Breathless Amiga clone game of DOOM?

It had all features of DOOM, including textures, shades, light effects, jumps, and on basic Amigas it could be even shrinked in pixels down to 160x120 to grant playability, or enlarged if you had had CPU with muscles...

On accelerated Amigas Breathless game make use of more horsepower speed and it could even recognize graphics cards connected to amiga AFAIK...

Also to gain speed you could change textures from 1x1 pixels to 2x2 or 4x4 or even remove it and revert to solid rendering of surfaces without any textures.

Breathless was a real masterpiece but its existence was just barely known amongst amiga users due to the fallen of Commodore.

Breathless highlighted the flaws of the Amiga hardware! it was released in about 96 or 97... and at that time a cheap PC was doing far better stuff...

[stefcep2]

Breathless highlighted the flaws of the Amiga hardware! it was released in about 96 or 97... and at that time a cheap PC was doing far better stuff...

Ofcourse the PC did. But answer this: what hardware development occurred, other than a CD ROM from the owners of Amiga after Commodore's demise?  Before Commodore died, PPC was where they were headed, new busses and new chipsets were planned and none of it ofcourse materialised..  What do you expect when all we got was bolt-ons to 7-10 year old architectures from third-parties.  A 7-year old planar chipset wasn't as fast as a new PCI/AGP card with built-in 3D functions and chunky screen-modes. Amiga had nothing as good as Direct 3D? What do you expect when the parent company has no in-house hardware and software developers, and it even takes several years for a relatively minor OS update to be written.

Its funny, as one of many active user at the time when all this was happening, we all knew the differences between a 486 and A1200 with an '030.  And we knew what was better and why.  Now we have people looking at the PC with rose-colored glasses, and telling us the Amiga would have been doomed even if Commodore wasn't.  Apple was shit-scared of Amiga, MS refused to write for it for the same reason. I know PC dealers today, who were also Amiga dealers, and unanimously they all agree that Amiga at its height was the superior home computing platform.  They tried telling Commodore's sales reps about Amiga's advantages of efficiency, multi-tasking, video capabilities, painting and animation in just 2-4 MB at time when the 486 needed 4 times that, when 32 meg simm cost over $1000, and a 1 gig HD was $1500, when PAL and NTSC output on a PC was an expensive waste of time, but no they wanted a games machine, they were never interested in pushing the productivity side.  Commodore, they say, didn't know what they had.

[the_leander]

Breathless highlighted the flaws of the Amiga hardware! it was released in about 96 or 97... and at that time a cheap PC was doing far better stuff...

In PC land, at around the same time, Quake had just been released. I played it on my mates PC at the time and was absolutely blown away by the graphics, the playability and the sheer fun of it. Later that year he was using Quakeworld and playing via dialup...

I remember breathless, it played like an absolute dog. Clunky, slow... Possibly the only FPS I ever played that was worse then Gloom. I played it about 3 months or so after I first tried Quake.

To say I was disapointed would be a grave, grave understatement.

[stefcep2]

.
 
Ahhh, anyway, I do maintain that this was not a good compromise! Had they chosen my way, the Amiga of 1987 would have been just about perfect, considering the constraints of the time! :lol:

Commodore's marketing was simple:
1.  A500, A600, A1200 cheapish games machine to play the 2D games that the were in vogue.
2. Anything with Zorro Slots: professional use, and 4 times the price for the privelage.

Not far off the Apple all-in-one Imac's Vs the expandable PPC towers that jobs introduced.  If only Apple had a multi-tasking OS to go with their PPC technology in the days of Win 95.

That also explains the short-comings in the wedge-machines.  Then when Commodore died, all that people could afford were the A1200, and so we all tried to turn them into A4000's which we all really wanted but could never afford

[the_leander]

Its funny, as one of many active user at the time when all this was happening, we all knew the differences between a 486 and A1200 with an '030.  And we knew what was better and why.  Now we have people looking at the PC with rose-colored glasses, and telling us the Amiga would have been doomed even if Commodore wasn't.

And a lot of those justifications worked great right up until you had to do any heavy duty work, at which point the Amiga was insanely overpriced for the job. I do not deny that the PC was a pig in terms of OS's available at the time. However to deny that AmigaOS was EOL, when even the engineers who were actually working on the next gen gear have admitted such is laughable.

As has also been pointed out, AAA (Nyx, and later hombre) would have been woefully underpowered in every respect compared to the PCI addon cards it would have had to go up against. Hell, even AGA looked damn tired compared to midrange PC gear.

Apple was shit-scared of Amiga,

For about 18 months until they realised that C= weren't going to do crap with it.

MS refused to write for it for the same reason. I know PC dealers today, who were also Amiga dealers, and unanimously they all agree that Amiga at its height was the superior home computing platform.  

And it's height was already a memory by the time AGA was released!

They tried telling Commodore's sales reps about Amiga's advantages of efficiency, multi-tasking, video capabilities, painting and animation in just 2-4 MB at time when the 486 needed 4 times that, when 32 meg simm cost over $1000, and a 1 gig HD was $1500, when PAL and NTSC output on a PC was an expensive waste of time, but no they wanted a games machine, they were never interested in pushing the productivity side.  Commodore, they say, didn't know what they had.

What you're ignoring is that the costs to get a high end amiga that could take on and beat a mid range PC of the day was substantially higher then the cost of that PC. It also ignores the fact that a pentium PC could utterly monster any A4000 or A1200 you cared to lob at it on every level.

[bloodline]

@stefcep2

It doesn't matter that the Amiga lacked development after '92 The topic of this thread askes if the amiga architecture is relevant today, what I (and others) point out is that the Amiga architecture wasn't even relevant in '92... As someone who was writing software for the amiga at the time, I remember the hoops one should have to jump through to do any that looked even remotely modern.

Yes the amiga has some cool hardware to do some specific effects, but this hardware was to compensate for the level of technology at the time... As chip technology improved the amiga architecture became a bottleneck, the Commodore engineers were working hard to rid themselves of it, and produce something at least comparable to off the shelf chips... But commodore folded.

[Karlos]

You never heard of Breathless Amiga clone game of DOOM?

It had all features of DOOM, including textures, shades, light effects, jumps, and on basic Amigas it could be even shrinked in pixels down to 160x120 to grant playability, or enlarged if you had had CPU with muscles...

That's not true though, now is it. Breathless had a very simple orthogonal map structure that had more in common with Wolfenstein 3D than Doom. In fact, I'd say from an engine perspective it essentially was Wolfenstein 3D with variable height floors and zone lighting.

Doom, OTOH, had a complete 2D BSP based engine that allowed a plan view of the map to have any arbitrary geometry.

What Breathless had going for it was the fact it was one of the first, if not the first game of it's class to use C2P rather than chunky display emulation. In the long run, that gave it a significant advantage on faster machines.

On accelerated Amigas Breathless game make use of more horsepower speed and it could even recognize graphics cards connected to amiga AFAIK...

Also to gain speed you could change textures from 1x1 pixels to 2x2 or 4x4 or even remove it and revert to solid rendering of surfaces without any textures.

Breathless was a real masterpiece but its existence was just barely known amongst amiga users due to the fallen of Commodore.

Alien Breed 3D 2 was technically way more advanced. Like Doom, it allowed for arbitary geometry (though it required you to do the job of a BSP tree generator when creating levels, manually subdividing your map into convex zones) and unlike doom, it allowed two levels of floors in the same zone, allowing the creation of bridges. The use of vertex illumination (goraud shaded) and support for polygon models was also more advanced. Lightsourced sprites were also supported. The water refraction effects were peerless on the amiga.

The principal problem was that it was also very, very slow.

[gizz72]

@stefcep2

It doesn't matter that the Amiga lacked development after '92 The topic of this thread askes if the amiga architecture is relevant today, what I (and others) point out is that the Amiga architecture wasn't even relevant in '92... As someone who was writing software for the amiga at the time, I remember the hoops one should have to jump through to do any that looked even remotely modern.

Yes the amiga has some cool hardware to do some specific effects, but this hardware was to compensate for the level of technology at the time... As chip technology improved the amiga architecture became a bottleneck, the Commodore engineers were working hard to rid themselves of it, and produce something at least comparable to off the shelf chips... But commodore folded.

Greetings,

...and 17 years later, we're still all discussing about it's relevance. A memory to some, yet it sticks like ROM. Oh, the Irony of it all! Any relevance of the Amiga's Technology today is all irrelevant. Without the support of the people who still uses it, is relevant. I say, use today's technology to develope a better or new Amiga architechture which takes advantage of faster machines of today. Like for example Windows 7.... yeah right! I mean emulation for backward compatibility, that's the reason why there's winuae, running on PSP, and so on.. Moving along... Sometimes it never hurts to look back once in a while.

Regards,

GiZz72