So you were put in charge of making the 060 based amiga

[Nlandas]

I'd have put Dave Haynie in charge and gone to have a cocktail.

I suspect if Dave had been given more control over the direction of Amiga hardware, he'd have started to adopt industry standard components/standards. Perhaps, with backwards compatibility in a few models.

One of my favorite comic books series was What if......
E.g. What if.... Wolverine had killed the Hulk.

So, I propose... What if.... Dave Haynie had full control.

[KThunder]

take an a3000t add a zorro 3 rtg svga card, a 16bit sound card and a "a3640-2" with cache ram, fast ram slots and 060 compatibility.

then get to work making the a5000 with all of those built in to one neat small mobo.

[orb85750]

It [Draco] may have lacked a commodore chipset, but the fact is, AAA was so far from being finished that by the time it would have been ready it would have been hopelessly out of date. Draco, using off the shelf components for graphics and sound really was the only realistic way of doing things if Amiga was to stay in any way relevant past 1995.

It was more of an Amiga than anything I've seen since C='s fall with the exception of the Minimig.

Draco was very nice, but what could it do that my *older* A3000/040/VlabMotion/Toccata/Firecracker system couldn't do?  Are you saying that Commodore should have released a souped-up A3000 in 1996, as KThunder states above?

[Trev]

So lets say Commodore had built an 060 based amiga, before jumping ship to other hardware (or dying).

I would have included a Pentium-based bridge board or SBC for running Windows 95 side-by-side with Workbench. Wait, isn't that what Steve/clusteruk did, albeit in reverse? Yup. By 1997, an Amiga without a Video Toaster wasn't of much use to anyone but a hobbyist. (That's still the case, but we love them nonetheless.) EDIT: Even NewTek had moved LightWave to other platforms....

[dougal]

A5000:

8Mb Chip ram + 32Mb Fast ram (upgradable to 256mb with pc style simms)
Fast buffered IDE built in + SCSI II
Onboard LAN network card
Onboard RTG graphics (with scandoubled & flickerfixed VGA out)
1.76Mb Floppy drive
PS/2 Keyboard & Mouse ports
PCI Slots

A1600:

8Mb Chip ram + slots on-board for pc style simms up to 256Mb
Fast buffered IDE onboard
Onboard LAN network card
RTG graphics card slot
Onboard scandoubler/Flickerfixer
Case design for cd-rom

[the_leander]

Draco was very nice, but what could it do that my *older* A3000/040/VlabMotion/Toccata/Firecracker system couldn't do?

If you're playing that game, why bother with the A4000? Hell why bother with the A3000 when the A2000 was capable of everything that your system was.

 Are you saying that Commodore should have released a souped-up A3000 in 1996, as KThunder states above?

No I'm saying C= should have dumped developing their own chipsets and gone over fully to RTG using Draco as the starting point.

Keeping Amiga tied to slow, expensive, underperforming chipsets (as they were by the time of AGA) was only ever going to end badly.

[Amiga_Nut]

Why not simply have it deal with the sound?

Ah yes you could certainly use it for sound but was just wondering if using a DSP like the Motorola Falcon one, possibly as an optional plug in, could speed up geometry setup in 3D games to give you a unique advantage over 1996 PC gaming that's all.

Bit like SNES + SuperFX for Nintendo in early 90s. Then again most Falcon games look crap so........

[KThunder]

If you're playing that game, why bother with the A4000? Hell why bother with the A3000 when the A2000 was capable of everything that your system was.



No I'm saying C= should have dumped developing their own chipsets and gone over fully to RTG using Draco as the starting point.

Keeping Amiga tied to slow, expensive, underperforming chipsets (as they were by the time of AGA) was only ever going to end badly.

Thats basically what I was saying but in a way that Commodore could have done it back then. An 060 amiga with an rtg svga card at a good price point (something they couldn't do with the 4000) could have kept them alive to make the a5000. An "3640-2" could have been produced, if they hadn't put so much into the 4000, 4000t and AAA chipsets.


They didn't see that custom chips days for a single or even a couple computer lines were over.

[the_leander]

Ah yes you could certainly use it for sound but was just wondering if using a DSP like the Motorola Falcon one, possibly as an optional plug in, could speed up geometry setup in 3D games to give you a unique advantage over 1996 PC gaming that's all.

Bit like SNES + SuperFX for Nintendo in early 90s. Then again most Falcon games look crap so........

With the exception of the S3 Virge in the list above, tbh as far as games go having the DSP there wouldn't really be a whole lot of benefit in it being there - any speed bump you might have been able to get out of it would almost certainly have been at the cost of development time. See the Sega Saturn verses the original Playstation for how that goes.

But for sound, now there you could do wonders with a half decent DSP.

[Amiga_Nut]

Keeping Amiga tied to slow, expensive, underperforming chipsets (as they were by the time of AGA) was only ever going to end badly.

Had they used Ranger chipset, completed by Jay in 88, instead of AGA and continued development it would have been OK, VRAM was getting cheaper fast in the 90s. VRAM was key to Diamond Viper/Stealth PC SVGA card's speed.

[the_leander]

They didn't see that custom chips days for a single or even a couple computer lines were over.

QFMFT

I just picked the Draco since it was a working example of this line of thinking in action.

[the_leander]

Had they used Ranger chipset, completed by Jay in 88, instead of AGA and continued development it would have been OK, VRAM was getting cheaper fast in the 90s. VRAM was key to Diamond Viper/Stealth PC SVGA card's speed.

They still would have been screwed come 1995. They had nothing in AAA that would have come close to the Rendition V1000 or hell, even the Matrox Mystique in terms of graphics performance, and sound wise there were some superb consumer grade sound cards coming at this time that were more than a match for the Mary sound chip.

--edit--

Hombre might potentially have held its own if it'd been released in 96 within the games console market, but AAA - Acutiator? It was a dead end.

[orb85750]

If you're playing that game, why bother with the A4000? Hell why bother with the A3000 when the A2000 was capable of everything that your system was.



No I'm saying C= should have dumped developing their own chipsets and gone over fully to RTG using Draco as the starting point.

Keeping Amiga tied to slow, expensive, underperforming chipsets (as they were by the time of AGA) was only ever going to end badly.

(But recall what year the A4000 was released.)  Easy enough, even Commodore could have released a Draco-like machine significantly earlier than 1996.

[the_leander]

 Easy enough, even Commodore could have released a Draco-like machine significantly earlier than 1996.

That they didn't only goes to show that Haynie wasn't wrong in his assessment of C= management as being a bunch of retards.

Take a gander at what the Mystique, or the V1000 offered in terms of graphics capabilities. That is what AAA would have been up against in 96.

It doesn't make for a remotely pretty comparison.

If it was to survive it had to go modular. It had to dump its games console roots.

[the_leander]

I wanted to respond to this more fully because it really deserved it.

(But recall what year the A4000 was released.)

I do recall the A4000 launch in 1992, I recall also the 1994 A4000T and the fact that even the Amiga magazines called C= out on that one as being too little too late and too expensive.

I recall both Dave Haynies and Jay Miner's reactions to it as well. Neither were that impressed.

[tone007]

I may be able to offer a different perspective here as someone who'd never seen an Amiga in person until 2007.  Just call me part of the unwashed masses.  I recall 1992-1993 vividly, it was my first year of high school and I started shopping for a machine to replace my Apple IIe, which served me well during the last years of grammar school for printing reports, after my C64s died.  Back in '93, Amiga wasn't on the radar of myself or anyone else that I knew in good old NJ, USA, it was a faint memory from the 80s having seen screen shots on C64 game boxes.  In '93, I saw Windows 3.1 and Wolfenstein, and those were must haves! I didn't get my Windows 3.1 machine then, but I did get an 8088 as it seemed IBM compatibles were the way to go, and I played with DOS and burned up the phone lines with 300 and 2400 baud modems until I got a 486 at some point in 1994.

So basically, I would've had to have offered the '060 based Amiga with PC compatibility as standard, and pushed that point in advertising.