Will Amiga ever live again?

[Cyberus]

Will-i-am wrote:
Oh, BTW, my wife was addicted to Datastorm for several years until the disk stopped booting. Anybody got a good working copy I would be soo happy to give her one, 8-)

:lol::lol::lol:

Sorry...must.....resist....temptation..to snigger...at...sexual innnuendo......

[DonnyEMU]

Your facts are all just messed up..

In 1994-1996) I was doing software for the company that produced one of the first full screen animation products for windows. At the time we were doing the software with WinG, because Direct X was not a reality and most vga cards (remember the 486sx was popular then). Windows machines and PCs barely had linear memory frame buffers in their vga cards and most cards barely done 256 colors (8 bit, at 640x480). Most didn't have a Blitter function (much less the Amiga's BIMMER or sprites) and this was a serious problem for anyone trying to do double buffering or off-screen writes under windows at the time. Microsoft developed a "Hack" called winG for win 3.1 (which worked on a limited amount of VGA cards and drivers) and windows 95 was late to the market so no one had that, much less windows 95 compliant display drivers..

The Amiga software and graphics hardware (though lacking some in resolution) was WAY ahead of it's time. We hadn't heard of ATI much, nVidia at all or 3dFX back at that time. It wasn't till 96 that ATI even introduced 3d with it's rage 3d cards.

Back in those days we were talking about Tseng Chipsets (ET4000), Oak VGA, Cirrus Logic, etc.. with very limited capabilities. I never heard anything about Commodore adopting windows nt even on it's pc line of machines.

Even the regular Amiga's capabilities were still very much ahead of the game even though it lacked some color depth..

[mikrucio]

To me Custom chips are VERY important in a machine

The Amigas custom chips were the key elements in it's
power and success. They were developed to be used for a purpose, and you could directly program them(IMPORTANT)

Off the shelf parts suck, the world and the wintel peec is
crappy, For one thing the graphics are NEVER SMOOTH
you can always see directx glitches ( because they arnt programming the hardware directly they are programming directx( CRAP) no matter how fast your CPU is or graphics card.

AGA was good, and some of the later AGA games like clickbooms T-zero shows AGA power at it's peak.
Good luck tryn to do that with directx.( nightmare )
 
A good example of current day custom chip technology is
sony's PS2. built from the ground up using custom chips
sony asked to be made. like the amiga.

The ps2 like the amiga plays games very well and is flawlesly smooth. I think for a new amiga to be noticed the same approach to hardware design and development would be a big advantage...



Maybe one day who knows....

[MAD]

Hoya!

I agree but unfortunately no company behind Amiga has the financial power of Sony... :-(

Maybe we should ask them to buy Amiga and thus develop a Super New Amiga relying on custom chips? ;-P

Be funky

M A D

[Khephren]

But we are talking in the past tense, back then Commodore did have the power of sony (at least in the games arena).

Psersonaly the Guy who took over development of engineering (he came off the PCjunior I believe) should have been shot. He canned AAA for starters, and put in the very costly, and not all that usefull PCMCIA port. AKIKO was completed just a few months after the 1200 launch- it should have been in the A1200 as well as the CD32.

 There was to much cost cutting at commodore by this time,I guess that was down to their failed PC division, and the A600 (and just general mismanagement). But if you had got rid of the PCMCIA port and waited a few months,the saving there alone would have allowed a 28mhz 020, fast ram and maybe AAA and Akiko too. That machine would have been a beast!...I still love my A1200 though, just because you can expand it to hell and back! If Pleasance and Commodore UK had suceeded in their buyout, who knows where we would be today?

[Martyn]

drwho wrote:

downix wrote:

Remember, Commodore at that time was plotting on abandoning the classic OS for Windows NT.

This is a really good point. When you think about it, it's a good thing that Commodore went belly-up when it did. I am sure that none of us would have wanted to live in the radically changed, "post-intuition" world that could have come from the above mentioned event.

Actually, that is not true whatsoever.  CBM were planning on doing a console (that's the first thing hombre would have gone into) that didn't have an opertaing system at all (none of the games developers used it anyway, so what's the point?).  But your desktop/workstation amigas would still have been using Amiga(D)OS.

If WinNT was available for the CPU then they would have offered it as an option tho'.

Cheers,
Martyn.

[DIABLO_NEGRO]

DIRECT-X sucks my A2000 runs more stable than my AMD 2500+ and 512mb of pc3200 ram with windows XP pro!! windows sucks, Microcrap sucks even worse and that is what is going to be their downfall.

they feed us crap and we have no other choices, in the early 90's there was choices and that is what killed the amiga was the marketing of other companies and the fact the IBM said sure make as many clones of our stuff as you want.

I wish it was the other way around. :-o

[drwho]

I don't disagree with your argument, but, I think the reason that the Amiga in its original incarnation is no longer with us is part of a much bigger problem than whether or not Microsoft's products are any good or not.

I think the real issue has more to do with a growing need in the late 80's for a more unified desktop platform solution. Microsoft did have one thing that most other companies didn't, and that was an understanding of what was needed, whether or not they implemented it correctly is of little consequence really.

The point I am trying to make (poorly, I might add) is that someone was going to come up with the "we need a standard desktop platform" idea. We could just as easily be sitting here hating the Linux people, or the BeOS people or even Commodore if history had worked out a bit differently.

Although, the above argument certainly doesn't excuse C= from its obvious neglect in its handling of the Amiga market.

- Mike

[Shamron]

I was thinking about this a couple of days ago... a bit off-topic maybe?

I was talking to a friend of mine about the Amiga and was trying to define what was made the Amiga the Amiga.
There has been numerous discussions about this.. whether it's the os or the hardware or the combination...

I don't have an A-one or a Pegasos, so maybe that's why.. but i can't get the same feeling of Amiga anymore?

So i startet thinking about what med up the Amiga-feeling.

for me i think it's this:

1: The company, even though C= made some mstakes, it _sounds_ good "Commodore Amiga".

2: The time... i was young... from i was 13 to 17 i was gazing at them in the shops...

3: A lot of my friends had one, it made up a community...

4: You never forget your first love... And i an serious about this (not literally though). Just like you never forget your old Lego, or your first Transformer toy...

5: It's story... it's easy to empathize(?) or sympathize with the small, poor, defenseless one... and to cry when it's defenselessly crushed in the battle of the giants..
(Dramatic yea?) :-)

I wish that OS4 will bring back the Amiga-feeling, but right now i feel that it won't.

Just my thoughts... And maybe not THAT off-topic... It depends on what you mean with "live again"

[DanDude]

If Commodore wasn't such a tight-ass and pushed on to get the AAA chipset instead of AGA for the 4000, they would've kept themselves in business.  The market outlook for the company should've been A3000 = AGA chipset and A4000 = AAA chipset (which included 8MB chipmem).  Unfortunately, it was too little, too late.  A terrible mistake was the A600, and the hard-pushed CD32 game system w/AGA proved their mistakes were too costly for future business and eventually took the company into bankrupcy.  I saw the shocking news back in 1993 when their sales which they targeted for proved a major problem when they were up against CD-I, 3DO and Atari's short-lived Jaguar game system.  Oh, and did I ever growled at PC clones when they first hit the markets.... :-x

[DIABLO_NEGRO]

Shamron wrote:

1: The company, even though C= made some mstakes, it _sounds_ good "Commodore Amiga".

2: The time... i was young... from i was 13 to 17 i was gazing at them in the shops...

3: A lot of my friends had one, it made up a community...

4: You never forget your first love... And i an serious about this (not literally though). Just like you never forget your old Lego, or your first Transformer toy...

5: It's story... it's easy to empathize(?) or sympathize with the small, poor, defenseless one... and to cry when it's defenselessly crushed in the battle of the giants..
(Dramatic yea?) :-)

I wish that OS4 will bring back the Amiga-feeling, but right now i feel that it won't.

Just my thoughts... And maybe not THAT off-topic... It depends on what you mean with "live again"

I'd have to agree 100% I remember sitting in the amiga side of the central florida commodore user's group (I was part of the c64/128 group :-) ) and I would drool, this is back in late '86 early '87.
Oh and the smell you can always tell the smell of the amiga when it is running, call me crazy but there is a distinct smell when the system is on. And for me that is nostalgic!
 :-)  :-)  :-)

[MAD]

Hoya!

YES!!!!! I do agree.
The Amiga has a VERY special plastic scent!
Well, she's a girl after all ;-P

Be funky

M A D

[DIABLO_NEGRO]

they should bottle that scent and sell it for PC's, that way running windows dosen't seem like such a waste of time!!

(not to mention a slap in the face!)
 :lol:

[BoingBoss]

Only in the hearts of those that truely love her.  Otherwise, no the Amiga died after the release of the Amiga 4000T.  The so-called "Amigas" after the 4000T are NOT true Amiga computers.

[BigBenAussie]

The Deathbed Vigil on the Amiga Forever 6 cd mentions that Medhi Ali(?) screwed everything up by not producing enough of a new model before Christmas. I know it sounds weird, but the Amiga was still a good seller even when Commodore went out of business. Commodore just weren't prepared for the Christmas rush on one or two occasions and this was enough to run them into the ground. Boy, were the laid off employees pissed off at Medhi for ruining the company in a matter of a couple of years!!!

[odin]

Hammer wrote:
The standard 'AGA'(e.g. A1200/A4000) doesn’t include such a chip i.e. only in CD32 console and a rare A1200<>CD32 add-on kit.

Eh? Add-on kit? Elaborate?