AAA a disaster just waiting to happen

[mantisspider]

HI guys,

does anyone know how far the AAA chipset actually went? what level of pre-production was it? just about to be made?

Its pretty worrying cos even the A5000 would have been a bad amiga direction. The only way amiga should have moved after the AGA was to put a PCI busboard to accept decent PCI graphics cards as standard.

[Karlos]

Watch the deathbed vigil video. You can see a couple in the labs, one was booted up.

[patrik]

@mantisspider:

Read this, it will answer your questions and inform you that the direction the ideas for hardware-development at Commodore had was not towards a disaster.


/Patrik

[mantisspider]

i just read that article, my eyes are blurry now.

yep looks like a road to disaster to me, sorry mate.
Relying on a 'nothing special' AAA chipset doesnt look too good.

During the AAA development, it was pretty clear AAA would be nothing special if it ever did ship, at least not in raw specs. In 1988, a 64-bit chipset that could do 1280x1024@60Hz, with 11 bits/pixel, would have been something. In 1994, the earliest ship date had C= not failed, it would have been an expensive also-ran (four chips for a 32-bit system, six for a 64-bit system, and you needed VRAM for performance).

Amiga systems needed to be able to stand toe to toe with the Macs and PCs for price and power. Relying on custom chips would make it not match the price war to power wars. Being able to use a plethora of 3rd party hardware would have gone along way to expanding the shelf life of the machines.

at last the AmigaOne is an Amiga going in the right direction. A powerful PPC operating system back in the 90s would have made the amiga as popular as the mac is now. lets just hope its not a case of "y2k y2late" tehehe i thought of that myself witty innit?!

[patrik]

@Mantisspider:

Read the part about the "Acutiator" again .

(edit):

Just do a search for "Acutiator" in the interview and read the entire answer it is found in.


/Patrik

[Jose]

Deadend or not it was the last custom chip to be made that way, I'd still like VERY much to see one working. It has nothing to do with competing with PC.
Just imagine what the demomakers would have done with a beauty like that  :-o  :-D
The modern Gfx card sitll lacks some functionalilty of the copper (at least I'm told not so long ago) by the way.
The sound system is probably not dated even today.
Sure standards are the way, but for the sake of the Amiga culture many people would still even buy it !!

[Karlos]

Theres nothing quite loke the copper anywhere. The copper was, and still is, totally unique.

We have got masses of programmable chips for gfx/audio etc, but the copper could basically be used to program the other custom chip hardware by loading their registers etc. This basic flexibility is what makes it special.

Modern chipsets are highly specialised and do their own jobs independently of one another. The only thing really coordinating them is the CPU.

[Tigger]

mantisspider wrote:
i just read that article, my eyes are blurry now.

yep looks like a road to disaster to me, sorry mate.
Relying on a 'nothing special' AAA chipset doesnt look too good.

In 1993 when the AAA was shown at DecCon, it outperformed both its PC & Mac competition.   Looking at the AAA chipset in 2003 and making comments about it being nothing special is fairly silly, when it was being designed (and when it would have shipped) it would have outperformed its competition.  

Amiga systems needed to be able to stand toe to toe with the Macs and PCs for price and power. Relying on custom chips would make it not match the price war to power wars. Being able to use a plethora of 3rd party hardware would have gone along way to expanding the shelf life of the machines.

Again, you are not looking at the computer in its historical context.   There wasnt a plethora of 3rd party PCI hardware (and the box was going to have PCI anyways).   AGP wasnt created yet, the amigas AGA graphics in many ways outperformed the then current VGA systems and AAA would have pushed it much further.  

at last the AmigaOne is an Amiga going in the right direction. A powerful PPC operating system back in the 90s would have made the amiga as popular as the mac is now.

AmigaOne doesnt have an OS shipping yet, I have issues thinking of an off the shelf board running PPC linux as the right direction for Amiga , but when the OS is completed we'll have a chance to evaluate at that time whether AmigaOne is the way to go.
    -Tig

[rayt]

hi

i dont know where i´ve read it(maybe here on amiga.org?), but afaik commodore planned to replace the zorro slots with pci slots in later amiga models.. i might be wrong though..

[adolescent]

You're timeline is all wrong.  At the time the AAA chipset was developed PCI was not a standard.  PCI wasn't available until 1994.  For instance Macs didn't have PCI until 1995.  So, I think a custom chipset solution at this time was acceptable.

[mantisspider]

man eyes are blurry again.

having a decent os10 mac emulation of the amigaOne will seriously go some way to getting the amigaOne some umph to begin with. There just isnt enough 3rd party software dev for a non released os4 atm.

[lempkee]

macOSX runs fine under Mac on linux..

but yes its under linux, but it works on the amigaone , but yes i know its linux...and yes i hate linux....but still its a decent option to thoose who want that.

[ChaosLord]

@lempkee

I hate linux more than you. :-x

[mantisspider]

@chaoslord

dude total chaos isnt like civ.

[ChaosLord]

@mantis

Dude, nobody in the course of recorded human history EVER said "civ is like Total Chaos".

There is NO game like Total Chaos.  It is unique.

A few differences between Civilization AGA and Total Chaos AGA

CivAGA runs in super duper mega ridiculously lores 1985 resolution mode 320x256.  

Total Chaos AGA runs in 1992 resolution 640x512.

CivAGA takes a VERY long time to play.

Total Chaos AGA takes only a couple of hours usually.

CivAGA has NO internet capabilities.  Total Chaos AGA does.

CivAGA has no digital speech that I can recall, thus making it harder to kearn all the different units.

Total Chaos AGA speaks the name of every unit when you click on it thus making it easier to learn.

CivAGA was not created by Amigans for Amigans.

Total Chaos AGA was created by Amigans for Amigans.

CivAGA hasn't been updated in 10 years.

Total Chaos AGA is updated every year.

I am sure there are at least 128 more major differences.