Sacking of Los Gatos engineers point of no return?

[Amiga_Nut]

I can't argue with that, and yes the ultimate blame does lay with with Commodore management. However I can't see any evidence from products outside the C64 and A1000 chipset that anything as good would ever happen again based on products/prototypes sold.

Cost/performance is the issue not ultimate performance too sure. Case in point, how difficult would it have been to put two Paula chips on the A4000/3000 motherboard for 8 channel sound? Given the price of these machines it should have been done (well a new sound chip to be honest but dual Paula would have been a cheap fix).

Hell working C65 prototype chipset had 256/4096 colours in 320x200 and pre-dated AGA didn't it?

[Khephren]

Ranger
Lynx
3DO

Which apart from VIC-II and SID Commodore engineers never really reached that level of technical superiority ever again really.

Most of the VIC-II and SID engineers had already left to form ensoniq by the mid '80's

[bloodline]

I can't argue with that, and yes the ultimate blame does lay with with Commodore management. However I can't see any evidence from products outside the C64 and A1000 chipset that anything as good would ever happen again based on products/prototypes sold.

You have no idea what projects were in development, what ideas were brought to the engineering management, what got cancelled, what got the green light only to be shelved once production costs became apparent.

Cost/performance is the issue not ultimate performance too sure.

Not sure what you are trying to say here, but Commodore strategy was low cost, high volume.

Case in point, how difficult would it have been to put two Paula chips on the A4000/3000 motherboard for 8 channel sound? Given the price of these machines it should have been done (well a new sound chip to be honest but dual Paula would have been a cheap fix).

That would be a nasty hack, which given Paula's intimate relationship with the system (interrupt controller etc) probably would have required a lot of work, just to make it work... Which would have added at least $10 BOM on to the design ($40 in retail), for some more sound channels, of which the Amiga already had more than most machines? How do you explain that to your manager?

In a company like Commodore, if something isn't broken... You don't fix it and you certainly don't make it more expensive.

Hell working C65 prototype chipset had 256/4096 colours in 320x200 and pre-dated AGA didn't it?

Never made it to production. It's a case in point, and is actually against your argument.

[Khephren]

With the extra hardware needed to kludge in an extra paula, it would probably have been cheaper to produce a new sound chip, especially as some work had already been done in that area.

[gertsy]

The saga continues with each reprint.  
Can't disagree that it signalled a total lack of understanding of the technical detail and time required to develop something more than evolutionary.
A standard issue in many corporations today.

[Franko]

Adding an extra Paula Sound Chip to just the A4000 as well as being impractical would also have made it incompatible with other Amiga models...

PS: Gertsy did John catch the 8:7am train !!! and where was he going

[gertsy]

....
PS: Gertsy did John catch the 8:7am train !!! and where was he going

He was going to a glass house to chuck some yonnies. Franko..

Time to change that now that the who har is all over.

[asymetrix]

What I want to know is where are the chipset designs ? Who would have them ? West Chester or los gatos ? or somewhere ?

What I cannot understand is why C< UK closed, when they were selling 'A1200's like hot cakes'. - and it was I remember.

Then C< UK management reverse their 3M bid - because they thought it was too low ( they could have won the bid as the only valid bid!)

PS - I think it was 3M :-)

anyway. clueless.

[danwood]

What I want to know is where are the chipset designs ? Who would have them ? West Chester or los gatos ? or somewhere ?

What I cannot understand is why C< UK closed, when they were selling 'A1200's like hot cakes'. - and it was I remember.

Then C< UK management reverse their 3M bid - because they thought it was too low ( they could have won the bid as the only valid bid!)

PS - I think it was 3M :-)

anyway. clueless.

Yes it is sad, Commodore UK could have made the Amiga a success and it would probably still be around today, instead we got Escom who were pretty clueless, Gateway who never really gave a shit, then the worst scurge to affect the Amiga ever, Amiga Inc who are just evil.

What a sad, wasted opportunity.  With CUK the Amiga development would have been moved to Europe, where the Amiga was really adopted and it could still be a mainstream, viable platform today, such a crying shame.

Personally I feel Bill McEwan is the person who was the worst ever for the Amiga though, Amiga Inc really killed the Amiga, it could have survived post-CBM with the right team, but Bill and AINC just hammered nail after nail into the coffin and did everything possible to kill it, who knows why.  But AINC were the worst thing to ever happen to the Amiga, they really killed it off.

[psxphill]

Yes it is sad, Commodore UK could have made the Amiga a success and it would probably still be around today,

Commodore UK had more marketing sense than CBM, which isn't hard. They also had stacks of money from selling A500's by the truckload, to people who mostly used them for playing pirate games.
 
If Commodore UK had continued the way they were going then it would only have been a temporary stay of execution. As Commodore collapsed the games developers were already leaving for the new CD consoles (hoping for less piracy).
 
There wasn't much room for serious software either, there were a few niche markets that did ok for a while but you have to be pretty serious to drop a couple of grand for a Toaster/TBC/etc.

[Kronos]

Bout C= UK:

Never understood why people hold them in such high regard Mr Pleasance was really nothing more then the Bill&Barry-Show of that time. Lots of hot words, no real clue. The might have had the money to buy C=, but that would be just pennies compared to what would have been needed to get Amiga back on track.

If you said Samsung instead of Escom, or even VisCorp instead of GateWay we might have something to discuss, but C= UK NOT getting their bid in is one of the few things that went right in the past 20 years of Amiga.

[commodorejohn]

I see no evidence of any attempt to improve parallax scrolling rather than the crippled 2x 8 colour dual playfield mode or 64 usable colours on screen or even a speeded up EHB mode to make it usable.

I'm not going to argue that ECS wasn't underwhelming, but you make it sound like improving parallax scrolling or speeding up EHB is just a simple hack on top of the existing hardware. It's not. 6-bit video modes on OCS/ECS (EHB, HAM, and dual-playfield) already use so much memory bandwidth that they have to steal half of the memory cycles from the CPU for bitplane fetch (when the CPU is accessing chip RAM, that is.)

If you locked the CPU out of chip RAM entirely you could get eight bitplanes' worth of memory access and have a 4-bit dual-playfield mode like AGA, but then you're stuck with only accessing chip RAM in vertical blank - you couldn't update the screen, work on an offscreen buffer, or even load in new audio samples during the frame (and God help you if your program was actually executing from chip RAM.) That works for consoles like the Genesis because they use tile mode, but the Amiga is a pure bitmap machine, and that'd just be unworkable.

As for "speeding up EHB," what you'd want there is a faster blitter - which you wouldn't get, because the blitter needs those cycles that are being taken by the extra bitplanes just as much as the CPU does! Whatever its other shortcomings, AGA had the right idea with doubling the chip RAM bandwidth (for bitplane fetch, anyway) - it seems that some of the other proposed chipsets were going to take it even further, though.

Point is, this stuff doesn't just happen by designer fiat. It's plenty easy for us to see these things in hindsight (and it was probably pretty obvious to the people on the ground back in the day, too,) but the engineers had to deal not only with the challenges of improving an existing design without breaking compatibility, but the challenges of working around management (who care more about financials than usability) and marketing (who wouldn't know what a bitplane was if you shoved it in one of their assorted orifices.) Considering those limitations, it's a bit more forgivable that ECS was just OCS with some of the arbitrary limits taken off.

[blanghorst]

And yes, "the new guy", Marshall Smith, was useless. But he wasn't running West Chester, he ran Commodore. Had they not closed Los Gatos, the same problems would have existed. Not to mention that Los Gatos didn't even have proper IC CAD systems until C= supplied them.... they were hardly setting any IC design records.

This thread is really interesting, but I'd like to request a point of clarification, if I may.  I thought Thomas Rattigan was the new guy in 1986?  Was it Smith or Rattigan responsible for closing that facility?

[psxphill]

but C= UK NOT getting their bid in is one of the few things that went right in the past 20 years of Amiga.

I don't know if I'd go that far, I think they'd have done a better job than escom did. Although it was nice to be able to walk into a high street and buy an amiga monitor, lugging it across town was less fun .
 
I think commodore uk could have done a better job in charge of R&D than cbm did as well.
 
They didn't have enough money to get the Amiga through 1995 when PS1 & Windows 95 owned the market.
 
I personally think that ECS was a waste of resources, FAT agnus should have allowed 2mb of chip ram from day one and then they should have moved straight onto something that allowed chunky pixels and up to 8mb chip ram. I believe it would have been possible if it hadn't been for all the bad management decisions.

[desiv]

I personally think that ECS was a waste of resources, FAT agnus should have allowed 2mb of chip ram from day one and then they should have moved straight onto something that allowed chunky pixels and up to 8mb chip ram. I believe it would have been possible if it hadn't been for all the bad management decisions.

To be fair, the Chunky Pixel craze didn't really kick in (that is- become apparent that it was going to be the way to do things in Computer Games) until Doom in 93.  (Wolfenstein was a sign, but Doom really did it).
ECS was released in 92.

It would be interesting to know whether Commodore was taking about Chunky designs at all seriously before that.

I agree, more chip RAM should have been an option.

desiv

[Franko]

It's funny how after all this time folk still ask these questions and with the benefit of hindsight suggest a lot of what ifs and if only's...

We all know the story and who was to blame, it would be much better to support and encourage current & real Amiga teams & projects like NatAmi, AROS, MorphOS, MiniMig, X1000 etc... rather than mull over the past and sit here procrastinating on just what should have been done...

Hindsight and opinions of the past while interesting aint gonna benefit no-one in our dwindling community. Seems to me as much as I love everything Commodore & Amiga, that all the time taken to make these posts about the Amigas past history would be much better spent on encouraging the aforementioned "live" projects and keeping them in the spotlight and generally encouraging the few developers we have left...

Just my two bobs worth...

(either that or bash the hell out of CUSA again just to liven the place up a wee bit... )