Amiga's Downfall?

My pleasure! And check the link I just added - really good (and long!) article on the history of the Amiga

[lordofchaos]

Originally Posted by Aegis

My pleasure! And check the link I just added - really good (and long!) article on the history of the Amiga

Nice one, will do

Originally Posted by mc6809e

The problem for Commodore wasn't Motorola. The problem for Motorola was Commodore. Had any of the 68000 based machines of the 80's really taken off, Motorola would be where Intel is today.

I'm not sure I agree with this, to my knowledge the Motorola processors were more costly to produce than it's rivals..Even if Commodore had more success there was no guarantee Motorola could keep competing with Intel and it's savage costing. We all know Motorola eventually recovered enough to lick it's wounds but it took a long long time...

[mc6809e]

Originally Posted by lordofchaos

I'm not sure I agree with this, to my knowledge the Motorola processors were more costly to produce than it's rivals..Even if Commodore had more success there was no guarantee Motorola could keep competing with Intel and it's savage costing. We all know Motorola eventually recovered enough to lick it's wounds but it took a long long time...

Of course the chips were more expensive -- they were selling fewer of them!

The fewer the chips sold, the more fixed costs dominate and the higher the per-chip costs.

Intel was flush with cash and put a lot of money hiring good material and electrical engineers. This allowed them to win the MHz race with Motorola. Had Motorola the same resources, they'd have followed a similar path IMO.

[lordofchaos]

Originally Posted by mc6809e

Intel was flush with cash and put a lot of money hiring good material and electrical engineers. .

Yeah fair point, would loved to have seen Motorola win the war but like you say Intel had more cash than sense, and the people to use it

[rare_j]

After VGA and decent sound cards became commonplace in PC's the Amiga needed to come back better and it didn't.
So I would guess the lack of anything to compete with VGA was the turning point.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by rare_j

After VGA and decent sound cards became commonplace in PC's the Amiga needed to come back better and it didn't.
So I would guess the lack of anything to compete with VGA was the turning point.

AGA was too late and too little indeed. Also the 14 Mhz processor was a too small step plus not upgrading Paula... too little, too late is the problem of the A1200 really. In 1992 the 486 became state-of-the-art and an 68020 simply didn't cut it anymore to stay ahead of the game.

Well, it took Commodore 2 years to get get the A500 to market in 1987 (the year VGA debuted in the IBM PS/2) - it was five years later in 1992 that AGA arrived in the A1200 and the A4000 - by then Commodore had already largely lost the battle.

Mismanagement and poor marketing doomed the Amiga - they never really pushed for better specced hardware - the A1000, A500, A2000, A500+, CDTV and A600 all shipped with the 68000 with only the A3000, A1200 and A4000 designed as faster, more capable machines - and the 3000 and 4000 were well out of most people's price range.

Crazy when you think Commodore (with Motorola) were on the bleeding edge of processor capabilities at the time - Commodore engineering had the first working prototype 68030 from Motorola and had also specced the Amiga line for the '040 before anyone other than Motorola had it running an OS:

Originally Posted by Dave Haynie

At the A3000 launch, we had to get permission from Motorola to even show the '040 board, because no one outside of Motorola had managed to get an OS running on the '040 yet. We actually got that permission right before the debut, but our management got cold feet and didn't show it.

Originally Posted by An old article on the 80386 vs 68030

Other things being equal, an 80386 and a 68020 will perform at roughly the same rate: bloody fast.

A 68030 at 25 MHz will probably be faster than any 80386 you find. How much faster, though, will depend a great deal on your software and compiler.

If your application is primarily number crunching, a fast math coprocessor is essential and its presence or absence will probably swamp other aspects.

Originally Posted by Wikipedia on 80486 vs 68040

The Motorola 68040 was often positioned as the 486's equivalent in features and performance; however its performance lagged behind production 486 systems. The 486 had the ability to be clocked significantly faster without suffering from overheating problems.

[mc6809e]

Originally Posted by rare_j

After VGA and decent sound cards became commonplace in PC's the Amiga needed to come back better and it didn't.
So I would guess the lack of anything to compete with VGA was the turning point.

True.

I remember being uneasy when VGA came out while the Amiga remained stagnant with the A500.

But incremental upgrades like the A500 are typical of companies that live in fear. And that goes back to the relative failure of the A1000 in the face of competition from the AtariST. Had the A1000 taken off, Commodore would have confidently put more money into new development knowing the returns would be there. Weak A1000 sales caused them to doubt the future of the platform. In poker it's called "scared money" -- people become too conservative and make poor decisions.

One other problem was the lack of good development tools, but I'm not sure computer makers back then understood just how important those were to the success of a machine.

[mc6809e]

Originally Posted by lordofchaos

Yeah fair point, would loved to have seen Motorola win the war but like you say Intel had more cash than sense, and the people to use it

And thing is, Motorola actually had a great arch for what was to come later.

SIMD using the data registers.

The separation between between address and data registers simplifies OoO design.

Fewer rename registers are needed because there are plenty of real ones to begin with.

32-bit arch right from the start.

I do think Motorola missed an opportunity at the start by not including a special 32-bit transfer memory access cycle for consecutive word addresses. By the time the Amiga came out, memory was already twice as fast as what the processor could handle. A six cycle transfer, with four cycles for the first word and two cycles for the second, would have greatly helped. The arch already existed to handle 32-bit quantities.

[desiv]

Originally Posted by TheCyberDruid

AGA was too late and too little indeed. .

I used to think this, but watching some of the demos and newer game conversions recently, I'm not so sure.. At least the "too little" part.

I think a larger mistake was no FAST RAM on the 1200 and the cost of the faster CPUs.
Of course, you get into chicken/egg there. More Amigas means lower cost CPUs.

Perhaps Commodore should have become Commodore of old and bought Motorolla so they could get the CPUs cheaper.. ;-)

But an 030 1200 with some FAST RAM would have been decent for the time.
And an 040 would have been impressive.
Of course, what would that have done to the price of the 1200???

But too late? Yep..
If AGA was released around the time ECS was, things might have been really different..

desiv

[direktorn]

There are no single event that changed commodore or Amiga and I don't se any point in disussing it either.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by desiv

At least the "too little" part.

It was maybe not 'too little' indeed, but it was not like the original Amiga 'showed off'. There wasn't any new feature that would make it really interesting to upgrade (yes, it was still a nice update). There were plans for further upgrades already, but they were canned due to costs. 'Too little for the time' is indeed more appropiate

[Bamiga2002]

It's intriguing to discuss about things that fucked up the Amiga, and forums are meant for discussing about things. Interesting read thanks all

And Mehdi Ali did it!

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by direktorn

There are no single event that changed commodore or Amiga and I don't se any point in disussing it either.

With that attitude, what are you doing here? Discussing the pointless (since its all long in the past) is what we do to keep the memory alive.

[lordofchaos]

Originally Posted by gimbal

is what we do to keep the memory alive.

Hear, hear!

[Lord Riton]

You guys all talk about hardware, but what does really sell a computer, or not sell, are the games.

When i saw "Doom" running on the PC of my friend in 1992 or 93, i knew the Amiga just died.

[Paul_s]

As others have said it was mainly management...

But C= did have some wonderful machines in development (A3000+, Nyx...) Just a shame they were never released

Marketing in America region wasn't as good as in Europe where the bulk of Amiga sales were...

A500+ shouldn't have been released. Should have kept the original going (was their best seller!!)
CDTV should have been better equipped at release.
A600/1200 - again should have been better.
A4000 - cut back due to management.
CD32 - too little, too late.

More should have been put in towards the Nyx imo for the next gen mid-90's Amiga... everything released after the 1000 were mearly updates of the (awesome) original chipset...

[Galahad/FLT]

Certainly the Playstation had a massive effect, as did Piracy to a degree, but the biggest killer was Commodore themselves.

When the A1000 was released, there was NOTHING on the planet that could compare to it, nothing at all, it was the best home computer by galactic miles.

When the A500 was released, it was still the best machine bar none at its time of release.

Problems started when the likes of Sega and Nintendo started getting traction with their new consoles (the UK was predominantly home computer fixated) the Megadrive and SNES.

Commodores answer? A600!

Other than 1 meg of chip ram, losing a keypad, the A600 whilst a neat little machine, simply wasn't what Amiga owners wanted, they wanted the next genesis of the machine.

The PC was starting to catch up, and overtaking with the likes of VGA, what Commodore needed to do was release a machine that would be like the A1000 all over again.

And what did we get? The A1200!

The A1200 would have been a great machine in 1990, but in 1992 when it got released, it wasn't enough.

The majority of people buying it were already Amiga owners, but look at the spec of the A1200, whilst its good, its not good enough.

The PC's were still better than the A1200 on its release, it was behind before it even got going.

Where was the 16bit sound?
Where was the expansion of 4 sound channels?
Where was the DSP?
Why did they improve the graphics and colour palette and then expect the same blitter to have to do more work and not suffer???

Many programmers and demo coders by the time of the A1200's release had taken the chipset as far as it could go, they'd reached and found the blitters limitations in the A500, the blitter should have been beefed up to cope with more data to move around.

2 meg of chip ram was an improvement, but still not enough.

CDTV, CD32 and a raft of Amiga machines no-one wanted also helped kill the Amiga as a force to be reckoned with.

Had the proposed Triple A chipset been released instead of AGA, things could very well have been different, because it would have sold in sufficient numbers that software companies couldn't ignore it, and, converting PC games to it wouldn't have been a daunting task.

Playstation didn't help, but if the right Amiga had been released when it should, I dare say the difference between the Amiga and Playstation would have been minimal, enough machines would have been sold to override the effects of piracy, and that only leaves Commodore themselves.

AGA was alright..... it should have been a damned sight more than just 'alright'.

[duga]

Originally Posted by Lord Riton

You guys all talk about hardware, but what does really sell a computer, or not sell, are the games.

When i saw "Doom" running on the PC of my friend in 1992 or 93, i knew the Amiga just died.

It was released in December 1993, half a year before Commodore's bankruptcy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_(video_game)


Commodore should have skipped PC business, killed the C64 before 1990 and never released the A600.


The Amiga died when Gateway 2000 bought the remains from Escom in 1997.

[mrbob2]

Nobody has mentioned the obvious reason.

The amiga died because it was an 80s computer.

Every single machine that contained its guts inside the keyboard was going to die eventually, spectrum, c64, bbc, amiga, atari...

Computers need to be easily upgraded, that is why computers evolved into the PC tower.

Windows dont own the "pc" neither do ati or nvidia, corsair or chillblast, these are big companies that each have millions of $$$ to develop new hardware. Amiga just tried to do everything with $100. Sure in 1980, computers went multi billion $$ machines, they were built with limited hardware and it was all restricted due to being inside a keyboard.

That era of computing could not last forever, so lets so amiga had thier time again, they would eventually use intel chips as they would have been more powerful that anything amiga could make, nvidia or ATI would make the GPU for the same reason and eventually as windows became the dominant stanard of OS, amiga workbench would be dropped. So the amiga would have evolved into a pc, and the amiga name would have been lost.

When i got my a500 it was an amiga, when i got my A1200 it was an amiga, when new machines were mentioned, having no backwards compatibility and running on powerPC chips, they were no longer amigas and that was the end.

So even if these power pc machines were made, i would not have been interested.

For me the amiga was the 500 and 1200, the games, the joysticks, the octameds and dpaints, that was the amiga.

Its the same as the spectrum 48k, you cant say well what it sinclair put in 1mb of ram instead of 128k in the +2 would it have kept going? of course not.

All these 80s machines were doomed, a limited lifespan because of the limited hardware expansion options and all owned my small companies.

Change the computer too much, and it no longer becomes the machine you recognise. s you loose your userbase.

Amiga was a computer, a machine with a soul, a heart. the PC is just a collection of electronics, a chimera, a mutant.

games like doom on the pc and tomb raider on psx were next gen and made powerful gaming easy, it was then when the death of the amiga was realised as it could no longer play todays titles.