[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Photon

The battle is on even today, with Apple computers refusing to be a platform and swapping out the CPU type and removing support for standard graphics APIs.

Even today the goal is still the same - to make money. If they could do that without any hardware at all they would. But even today customers tend to shy away from handing over their money for nothing tangible in return. The battle therefore becomes convincing customers that they need new hardware. This is quite a quandary because modern PCs are ridiculously powerful and last for decades - how can they make money out of that? The answer is bloatware. Make the software bigger and slower so you need a more powerful machine to run it, while convincing the customer that they really need the bloat.

But this is completely irrelevant to us. The Amiga got off that merry-go-round 30 years ago. For us it's not a matter of creating more powerful hardware to handle the bloat, but making software work better on what we have.

The Hombre platform sounds like something that would replace the native chipset, and if so it would have changed the Amiga platform to another.

Yes, and it would not be the Amiga we know and love, so what's the point?

By 1995 the World had Windows 95, removing the last advantage the Amiga had over PCs. From that time on having more powerful graphics in the Amiga was pointless, since the OS couldn't scale to match it. And having an Amiga at all was pointless because no new software was being produced for it. Even if it had survived it would have been a Cinderella.

But today it's different. The Amiga is now a retro computer. We don't want to change it into something else. Even if this fictional Hombre chipset was capable of what is claimed, it's irrelevant. Something like the Vampire's SAGA or a slightly enhanced replacement for the original chipset is more than enough for most of us. I run my A1200 on a 32" LCD TV in PAL composite, and it does everything I want it to just like it did 30 years ago (actually even better, since the LCD TV has a sharper picture and flicker fixes interlace).

Even with tons of support, engines, shaders and hand-holding everywhere, RTX is still terribly slow. It's not used to ray-trace full frames, as polygon acceleration or a 3D rendering program would. Even full-scene antialiasing polygons can be too much for costly gaming PCs.

But hey, everything was too slow when first introduced, right? The important thing is to convince people that they need it, so they will fork out even more money when it gets faster!

And of course GPUs still use Blitters, but mostly for clearing and copying; they're not good enough for much else. Ask a modern GPU to draw some lines, or fill individual polygons and not others, and you have some work ahead of you, because... PCs are just for gaming?

That might explain why the Windows GUI seems to have gone backwards. Apparently fancy themes with more than a few pale lines and flat rectangles of barely distinguishable color are too hard for modern systems!