Sacking of Los Gatos engineers point of no return?

[Khephren]

The least a chunky mode would have done, was give us non dithered 3D. Most amiga flat shaded 3D games were in 16 (4bp) colours to keep the frame rate up. I think even without VRAM, we could have had 32 colour 3D.

@PSXPhil
"It is theoretical, but the only way that commodore could have succeeded would have been to head off the move to PC and console gaming."

The Amiga was in a dangerous place, between the PC and the consoles. It was also an ideal place- It could have replaced both, it did for me, for a long time. Over time, consoles have become more PC like (films, music,facebook, browsing etc)
And many PC's have attempted to become more console like (shuttle, XBMC etc).
In away, both have become more Amiga like.

The PC sounded like a jet engine, cost a lot, and came in this massive 1970's style case, not living room, or child bedroom friendly.

The consoles were lobotomized computers.

There was still a big gap for an amiga style computer.

[psxphill]

pre '94 games improved by chunky graphics"... Without some VRAM the improvements would have been minimal...

Doom wasn't the first game on the pc to take advantage of chunky graphics. Wing commander came out in 1990, commanche in 1992, x-wing in 1993.
 
You needed lots happening on screen to make a 2d game look good, an immersive 3d games can get away with less.
 
Doubling the chip ram bus by fitting double the number of chips as on AGA would have probably been enough bandwidth ( i.e. 8 x OCS bandwidth ). Also a dedicated texture mapper would be much quicker than using a CPU, so the requirement of huge bandwidth is lessened.
 
VRAM wouldn't help with effects like dual playfield.

[bloodline]

The least a chunky mode would have done, was give us non dithered 3D. Most amiga flat shaded 3D games were in 16 (4bp) colours to keep the frame rate up. I think even without VRAM, we could have had 32 colour 3D.

Well chunky doesn't make much sense below a byte, so it would have allowed 256 colour 3D... 32 colours needs 5bits which is difficult to work in chunky mode.

Chunky allows in a single memory write what takes O(biplanes) number of write in planar, ie a 256 colour pixel write on planar takes 8 memory writes... But only 1 on chunky. This is why I feel AGA was really a poor upgrade

@PSXPhil
"It is theoretical, but the only way that commodore could have succeeded would have been to head off the move to PC and console gaming."

The Amiga was in a dangerous place, between the PC and the consoles. It was also an ideal place- It could have replaced both, it did for me, for a long time. Over time, consoles have become more PC like (films, music,facebook, browsing etc)
And many PC's have attempted to become more console like (shuttle, XBMC etc).
In away, both have become more Amiga like.

The PC sounded like a jet engine, cost a lot, and came in this massive 1970's style case, not living room, or child bedroom friendly.

The consoles were lobotomized computers.

There was still a big gap for an amiga style computer.

Yeah, I basically agree with this.

[Khephren]

We are back to that old stomping ground, Commodore should have finished AAA
...which they had been working on since '89!

[psxphill]

Chunky allows in a single memory write what takes O(biplanes) number of write in planar, ie a 256 colour pixel write on planar takes 8 memory writes... But only 1 on chunky. This is why I feel AGA was really a poor upgrade

Worse still, while it's common for byte writes to 32bit ram to be handled by the bus using address strobes. To write to a planar pixel requires you to read all 8 bitplanes, modify them and then write them back.
 
It wouldn't have been completely insane for the original amiga chipset to use chunky graphics either. 32 colour mode would have been 8 pixels in 5 bytes, the blitter could be slightly modified to deal with that.
 
As commodore never had the appetite to move from planar graphics, it was basically los gatos that sealed the amiga's fate.

[Khephren]

As commodore never had the appetite to move from planar graphics, it was basically los gatos that sealed the amiga's fate.

It was to do with memory prices. Planar back then was more cost effective than chunky. The Amiga outperformed other platforms for a number of years, so they were obviously right.

Commodore had 7 years between the Amiga launch and AGA. Probably 3x what the original Amiga took to develop. They had mixed planar and chunky hardware on the drawing board for years. Adding extra chunky modes during that time can't be blamed on los gatos.

[gertsy]

......Commodore had 7 years between the Amiga launch and AGA. Probably 3x what the original Amiga took to develop. They had mixed planar and chunky hardware on the drawing board for years. Adding extra chunky modes during that time can't be blamed on los gatos.

Agree !.  I think Franko hit the nail on the head. It's all C= USA's fault...!

Los Gatos ha comido mi mano apagado
(:

[desiv]

Actually ECS was 1990. AGA was 92, which is probably what you meant

D'oh!  
And I even googled for the date! :lol:  Yeah, meant AGA there..

My basic premise was that I don't think it was a huge mistake, as you needed to be able to "predict" the market was going that way..
Not sure if Commodore saw that coming and didn't prioritize it or just didn't see it..
That said, I still think faster CPU trumps a true Chunky mode.  Doom type games ran playably on 030's and good on 040's..

So, as much as even I sometimes would like to think AGA was too little to late, I don't really think that..

The problem was that Amiga users, in general, didn't buy faster CPUs....
As a result, software companies didn't really push games to take advantage of faster CPUs..
I know, chicken and egg syndrome...
And when it came time to upgrade, they (mostly) moved to other platforms instead..

For me, it was cost and software availability.
I could spend $400+ on an accelerator with RAM, but there were very few reasons (it seemed at the time) to do so...
Or I could piece together a PC.  For me, as I had been helping people upgrade their PCs and keeping their old parts, it was very cost effective for me to do that...

So, I don't think it was really the chipset, and I don't think it was the "sacking" of the engineers at Los Gatos.
(In fact, it's possible that, even tho they were great at new idea design, they might not have been the best choice for upgrade/continuation design...  Who knows..)

PC developers were designing programs for the computers people "would" be buying..
Amiga developers were designing programs for computers that users HAD already..

They needed to fix that..
I'm not even sure that was marketting per se, but some type of vendor/developer/Commodore interconnect that missed the boat..

desiv

[vidarh]

VRAM wouldn't help with effects like dual playfield.

Sure it could, as long as the chipset can store a full row of bits from a single read, then do another read for the second playfield and combine them before moving on to the next row. It would still mean the chipset would've been able to use 100% of the bus cycles on the read-only port for display DMA, and part of the cycles on the other port (for blitter, copper etc.), and still leave more cycles free for the CPU.

[Khephren]

@desiv

Commodore (engineers at least) knew that chunky was needed. Both Hombre and AAA had it.
But they were not given the funds to revision the silicon.

Faster CPU may trump Chunky, but at one hell of a cost.

The problem with the Amiga market, was that it was two markets. THe gamers and the computer users. The Amiga gamer market functioned more like the console market, tell your coders to improve, rather than tell your users to spend money. Means your games hit the lowest common denominator (ST/STe, same problem).

I don't think they needed to fix that, just needed provide hardware far enough ahead of the curve to give programmers something to dig into, and that would not look to dated by the end of the cycle.

[runequester]

PC developers were designing programs for the computers people "would" be buying..
Amiga developers were designing programs for computers that users HAD already..
 

You sir, are right on the money.

[desiv]

Faster CPU may trump Chunky, but at one hell of a cost.

So they had it in their sights..  Interesting..

Question tho is, how much of a difference would it have made?
If the A1200 would have had Chunky modes, but still 2M CHIP and a 68020 at 14Mhz, how much longer would it have lasted?
How would DOOM (Or Alien Breed 3d or) have run on said machine?

Or would the users still have needed a 68030 or better pretty soon anyway???

desiv

[Khephren]

i'm with you on that desiv. my ideal? 020/28, chunky and some fast. backed up with hd floppy. we could have got away with that...skin of our teeth

[psxphill]

@desiv
 
Commodore (engineers at least) knew that chunky was needed. Both Hombre and AAA had it.
But they were not given the funds to revision the silicon.
 
Faster CPU may trump Chunky, but at one hell of a cost.
.....
 
I don't think they needed to fix that, just needed provide hardware far enough ahead of the curve to give programmers something to dig into, and that would not look to dated by the end of the cycle.

The Amiga's strength was always that you could achieve more because of the custom hardware & a modest CPU. By making the clever part yourself you can keep the cost down.
 
Commodore management didn't realise they needed to push the engineers to design something like this, they were too arrogant & greedy. Engineers can't fix the company from the bottom.
 
To have survived the playstation, you would need to have gotten reasonable hardware out to developers before the initial Playstation dev kits got out. So we're talking 1992 at the latest.
 
Commodore probably couldn't have stopped the playstation & PC from being huge, but there would definately have been a viable market for games. More viable than the Sega Saturn for instance.
 
Between 1987 & 1992 it would have been possible to design hardware that could have survived. Even as early as 1990 it was obvious what was going to happen but it was too late by then.
 
Whether they used vram or not is the least of the problem. Thats just a small implementation detail which you'd decide based on price/performance vs other alternatives.
 
Amiga was the hare and the PC was the tortoise. Commodore didn't know what to do with what they'd bought. They knew how to make things cheap, but had lost their hunger to dominate when Jack left.

[psxphill]

i'm with you on that desiv. my ideal? 020/28, chunky and some fast. backed up with hd floppy. we could have got away with that...skin of our teeth

I'd probably trade the fast memory for a texture mapper in the blitter & CD drive as standard with HD floppy & RAM as optional extras. Unless the chip ram bus was too saturated at low res, but that would be very bad news.

[Khephren]

Yeah, was talking about the absolute last minute minimum
They did have a dsp for 3D at one point. Can't remember if that was for AAA or Hombre. It's all a long time ago.

Dunno about including a CD-ROM, they were still pretty expensive. Certainly include a slot for one though.