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

[Hattig]

Back in 1995/1996 Commodore should have for their low end machines used 3.5" IDE hard drives rather than 2.5". Bigger, Hotter? Yes. But much cheaper. Around that time a 3.5" 1.0GB hard drive was very affordable.
All Amiga's should have had a Buffered IDE as standard.

I think that going for a low-end desktop model with separate keyboard would have been a good idea as well - like the never-released Falcon040 computer from Atari (or an updated A1000, or a slimline case like a PS2). This would have had space for the cheaper 3.5" hard drive (although you could fit certain slimmer models inside the A1200 at a push, I certainly did!) and an internal power supply, but otherwise the innards would be a $600 A1200 rather than a $3700 A4000. It could have sold for $999, and maybe the budget would have squeezed to 4MB RAM and a 28MHz 68030.

[B00tDisk]

Back in 1995/1996 Commodore should have for their low end machines used 3.5" IDE hard drives rather than 2.5". Bigger, Hotter? Yes. But much cheaper. Around that time a 3.5" 1.0GB hard drive was very affordable.

A 1gb drive in 1996 would have added $302 to the price.  In 1995 (it depends on what time of the year  - HD prices were and are in freefall), that same 1.0gb HD would set you back $849.  Not precisely "very affordable".  $5000+ SGI workstations were "only" shipping with an 850mb HD.

All Amiga's should have had a Buffered IDE as standard.

Even back in 1992 when the A600 and A1200 were released, those 20MB and 40MB hard drives were a joke and badly outdated. By then the standard in a PC was already 120MB.

Yes.

[psxphill]

I would avoid the EC models and offer fully functional CPUs that can handle the ZorroIII bus that you also want to have available.

You wouldn't want that on an A1200/CD32 class machine. I'm not sure I'd have used Zorro3 on a high end machine either, pci was out in 1993.
 
If in 1993 Commodore had launched something equivalent to the PS1 then they would have made serious money. Unfortunately they didn't have the vision or the experience.

[clusteruk]

My Siamese System was available around then and showed the way, even running RTG over ethernet which was only 10mbit/sec it could outperform any Amiga graphics card, even having the Winblows OS getting in the way slowing things down.

Commodity plugin hardware support was the future, and that was on PCI only I am afraid. But as PCI I believe was basically Zorro enhanced and refined that is no biggy, ie auto config etc.

Commodore knew what to do, they were told by many engineers, they chose not to do it and perished because of it thinking they could compete with a games machine, fools.

Well dare I say it as I tried to get it done, 060 onto PCI Amiga card, plugged into cheap PC hardware with Siamese software and while AmigaOS was being ported to x86 use winblows as launch tool and driver system and get windows compatibility as well as Amiga and Mac.

Aargh those were the days, but we blew it, sorry. Still I am back for round two.

Steve

[psxphill]

With the exception of the Wii, every single games console since the PS1 (and quite possibly earlier) has been sold at a loss, with the game prices being hiked up to subsidise it.

That may be true for Xbox/Xbox360/PS3, I don't think that is true at all for Nintendo. Sega may have taken a hit on the Saturn, but I doubt they did on the dreamcast. I doubt Sony made a loss on the PS1, it was quite a simple design and they basically owned it all.
 
Although in the first stages of manufacturing, everything does cost a bit more while you're sorting out yields etc. But that would affect every electronic device ever made. It's less of a problem these days, with so many developers that will need consoles before the actual launch.

[the_leander]

That may be true for Xbox/Xbox360/PS3, I don't think that is true at all for Nintendo.

Nintendo have always been something of the odd man out.

Sega may have taken a hit on the Saturn, but I doubt they did on the dreamcast.

The Dreamcast was sold at a lower initial launch price than the original playstation at the time. I would be highly surprised if it wasn't being sold at a loss - in the UK it was being sold new in 2000 for £99...

I doubt Sony made a loss on the PS1, it was quite a simple design and they basically owned it all.

By todays standards sure, but the original playstation at it's launch was a supremely powerful piece of kit. I've no doubt that later versions like the slimline PS1 at a considerable profit. However even at the release of the Dreamcast, it was still being sold in its original format at a loss.

[B00tDisk]

The Dreamcast was sold at a lower initial launch price than the original playstation at the time. I would be highly surprised if it wasn't being sold at a loss - in the UK it was being sold new in 2000 for £99...

All consoles are sold at a loss, even initially when they are very expensive (e.g., playstation3, Xbox360, Wii).  Devs want to be the first with the most, so they tend to pay through the nose for licensing fees.

By the time the consoles in question have hit the sub-$100 mark and the five-guy barely-a-homebrew studio companies are making games for it, the "big three" will have more than made it up in volume.

[Vanilla]

Yes, old games and apps would not run,

You mean current applications and games wouldn't run? And all you'd have would be Workbench programs?

They would have needed to convert all the 68K into C or write a 68k emulator that would have sucked back then. More so since it would have to run in the OS, which would have been a lot of work.

And for what? To run on a CPU that had an average speed of 66Mhz? That would have turned the Amiga into it's enemy? I don't think so! The taboo wouldn't have been worth it,

[Zac67]

I would avoid the EC models and offer fully functional CPUs that can handle the ZorroIII bus that you also want to have available.

What have the EC variants got to do with Zorro III?
A 68EC020 lacks the 32 bit address bus, but '030+ shouldn't have any problems.

[orb85750]

All consoles are sold at a loss, even initially when they are very expensive (e.g., playstation3, Xbox360, Wii).  Devs want to be the first with the most, so they tend to pay through the nose for licensing fees.

Wait, how are you doing your accounting?  Sold at a loss after including all marketing expenses? or sold at a loss even before marketing $$ are taken into account?  You are not talking about the bare bones cost of manufacturing, right?

[AJCopland]

Wait, how are you doing your accounting?  Sold at a loss after including all marketing expenses? or sold at a loss even before marketing $$ are taken into account?  You are not talking about the bare bones cost of manufacturing, right?

Yup, post _manufacture_ and before marketing. Nintendo are the only exception having always sold their hardware at a profit. Even though the GameCube sold less than the Xbox and PS2 they still made more money from it than either competitor.

This is very well known stuff with consoles I'm surprised it still surprises people! They sell the hardware at a loss as they make all of the money from peripherals and gated development.

We cannot buy hardware direct from Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo without being able to demonstrate that we're at least in talks with a publisher, have previously released games OR have developers onboard who have previously released games. It can be a real pain for a startup just getting dev' kits.

Then you pay tens of thousands of dollar to submit your game to them for TCR/TRC testing, which will usually fail the first time so you'll re-submit until it passes. You do this for each territory that you release in, eg: EU/US/Asia and for each console. Once you've passed all of this you send your gold master to them to duplicate and they send you the discs which you pay for of course then when you sell it, they get slice of the profit.

If you think that's profit-tastico you should see how much they make on the peripherals!

Andy

[AJCopland]

My Siamese System was available around then and showed the way, even running RTG over ethernet which was only 10mbit/sec it could outperform any Amiga graphics card, even having the Winblows OS getting in the way slowing things down.

Commodity plugin hardware support was the future, and that was on PCI only I am afraid. But as PCI I believe was basically Zorro enhanced and refined that is no biggy, ie auto config etc.

Commodore knew what to do, they were told by many engineers, they chose not to do it and perished because of it thinking they could compete with a games machine, fools.

Well dare I say it as I tried to get it done, 060 onto PCI Amiga card, plugged into cheap PC hardware with Siamese software and while AmigaOS was being ported to x86 use winblows as launch tool and driver system and get windows compatibility as well as Amiga and Mac.

Aargh those were the days, but we blew it, sorry. Still I am back for round two.

Steve

I always wanted one of those Siamese systems back when I'd see them advertised

Andy

[B00tDisk]

Yup, post _manufacture_ and before marketing. Nintendo are the only exception having always sold their hardware at a profit. Even though the GameCube sold less than the Xbox and PS2 they still made more money from it than either competitor.

This is very well known stuff with consoles I'm surprised it still surprises people! They sell the hardware at a loss as they make all of the money from peripherals and gated development.

We cannot buy hardware direct from Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo without being able to demonstrate that we're at least in talks with a publisher, have previously released games OR have developers onboard who have previously released games. It can be a real pain for a startup just getting dev' kits.

Then you pay tens of thousands of dollar to submit your game to them for TCR/TRC testing, which will usually fail the first time so you'll re-submit until it passes. You do this for each territory that you release in, eg: EU/US/Asia and for each console. Once you've passed all of this you send your gold master to them to duplicate and they send you the discs which you pay for of course then when you sell it, they get slice of the profit.

If you think that's profit-tastico you should see how much they make on the peripherals!

Andy

All of this and more.  A sold console might (gross!) a company $10.  A spare controller, or "skin" for same?  $12.  Console production cost?  $100.  Accessory production cost?  $2.

[Amiga_Nut]

I think that going for a low-end desktop model with separate keyboard would have been a good idea as well - like the never-released Falcon040 computer from Atari (or an updated A1000, or a slimline case like a PS2). This would have had space for the cheaper 3.5" hard drive (although you could fit certain slimmer models inside the A1200 at a push, I certainly did!) and an internal power supply, but otherwise the innards would be a $600 A1200 rather than a $3700 A4000. It could have sold for $999, and maybe the budget would have squeezed to 4MB RAM and a 28MHz 68030.

Another company, Checkmate Digital, their response was stick an "A1500" badge on the A2000 and threaten legal action. Both actions being those of a clueless company when what they should have done is taken their idea further.

For those who don't know, Checkmate Digital produced a replacement case for the A500 motherboard for a reasonable fee, this included everything needed to use the A500 keyboard in an external case, and put it in an Amiga 1000ish 3 box design. Was actually smarter looking than the Amiga 2000 tank-a-thon rubbish design too.

Wasn't perfect, but perfectly illustrates what was needed direct from Commodore to bridge the gap with A4000....A1200...A600 in 1992. Oh well. And if you had the AD-IDE and an internal 030 CPU board it is pretty much going to do what you want, and for a lot less than an A2000 actually.

[clusteruk]

Another company, Checkmate Digital, their response was stick an "A1500" badge on the A2000 and threaten legal action. Both actions being those of a clueless company when what they should have done is taken their idea further.

For those who don't know, Checkmate Digital produced a replacement case for the A500 motherboard for a reasonable fee, this included everything needed to use the A500 keyboard in an external case, and put it in an Amiga 1000ish 3 box design. Was actually smarter looking than the Amiga 2000 tank-a-thon rubbish design too.

My second favourite Amiga product we manufactured, Siamese was my proudest though.

Steve (Ex Director of Checkmate Digital)

[orb85750]

Yup, post _manufacture_ and before marketing. Nintendo are the only exception having always sold their hardware at a profit. Even though the GameCube sold less than the Xbox and PS2 they still made more money from it than either competitor.

This is very well known stuff with consoles I'm surprised it still surprises people! They sell the hardware at a loss as they make all of the money from peripherals and gated development.

We cannot buy hardware direct from Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo without being able to demonstrate that we're at least in talks with a publisher, have previously released games OR have developers onboard who have previously released games. It can be a real pain for a startup just getting dev' kits.

Then you pay tens of thousands of dollar to submit your game to them for TCR/TRC testing, which will usually fail the first time so you'll re-submit until it passes. You do this for each territory that you release in, eg: EU/US/Asia and for each console. Once you've passed all of this you send your gold master to them to duplicate and they send you the discs which you pay for of course then when you sell it, they get slice of the profit.

If you think that's profit-tastico you should see how much they make on the peripherals!

Andy

Where are you getting the manufacturing costs of the various systems to assert that all, except Nintendo, cost more to make at the Chinese factory than the (wholesale) selling price?