Here's a thought?

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by Aegis

Yes, but sadly that whole living-room multimedia buzz was misreading the market - not just for for Commodore but for Philips and 3DO too. I get that it seemed like a natural fit for the Amiga hardware but just because you can do a thing... you know the rest

but now people buy Mini ITX PCs for that sort of thing, and Amiga would serve that market quite nicely.

[Aegis]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

but now people buy Mini ITX PCs for that sort of thing, and Amiga would serve that market quite nicely.

True, but the connected world we live in today is very much different - heck, even our TVs have ARM chips in them and browers/apps etc.

When the CDTV launched it couldn't play movies (other than CDXL), most of the software available for it was Amiga re-releases and it wasn't even really usable as an Amiga - it didn't have a reason to exist (other than to marry a CD drive to the Amiga) and the flood of multimedia software that Commodore was hoping would magically appear never did.

It *was* cool - but sadly it was also expensive and of limited real use.

[gilgamesh]

Cell phones are the new Amigas. Computing for the masses, user friendly, entertainment oriented, innovative and cheap (not). Kids love them.

Thus Android is the spiritual successor of AmigaOS.

[Aegis]

Originally Posted by gilgamesh

Thus Android is the spiritual successor of AmigaOS.

We'll have to agree to disagree there since there was way more I could could on my Amiga back in the '90s than I can do on an Android or iOS device.

That's not to say that the potential isn't there to do more on these things, just that the people that buy them are content browsing Facebook and running apps/playing games.

I used the Amiga as a creative tool and phones/tablets (excepting Microsoft's Surface) are way too clumsy and consumer-orientated for that.

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by Aegis

When the CDTV launched it couldn't play movies (other than CDXL), most of the software available for it was Amiga re-releases and it wasn't even really usable as an Amiga - it didn't have a reason to exist (other than to marry a CD drive to the Amiga) and the flood of multimedia software that Commodore was hoping would magically appear never did.

The idea was ahead of the technology, yes, they should have just made a "normal" Amiga with a CD drive, sell it as a console without keyboard/floppy drive... most of the people i knew who had an Amiga only used them for games anyway, well with the occasional playing around with Deluxe Paint or Octamed, but plenty of people bought external floppy drives anyway. They could have taken the opportunity to actually cut costs instead of creating this strange "luxury" product that no-one knew what to do with. Oh well.

And then if the CD32 hadn't needed that SX1 module to function as a computer, it could have been a replacement for the A1200 if bought with a keyboard/mouse/floppy drive.

Speaking of floppy drives, why didn't they support HD disks as soon as they became the norm... boggles the mind...

[Aegis]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

And then if the CD32 hadn't needed that SX1 module to function as a computer, it could have been a replacement for the A1200 if bought with a keyboard/mouse/floppy drive.

Actually a stock CD32 can (kinda) work as an unexpanded A1200 - you can plug a mouse and keyboard into it and run Workbench off of CD - it should've had a floppy drive port and a connector for internal IDE drives though (a socket for some fast RAM wouldn't have gone amiss either). They make pretty nice WHDLoad Amigas provided the games you want to play will fit into 2MB of Chip RAM.

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

Speaking of floppy drives, why didn't they support HD disks as soon as they became the norm... boggles the mind...

That was down to Paula I think - I believe that in order to read high-density disks the Amiga has to read them at half speed - it made sense to have one on the A4000 but games on HD disks would never have been viable without some revisions to the chipset (should have been done for AGA really).

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

Speaking of floppy drives, why didn't they support HD disks as soon as they became the norm... boggles the mind...

@Mrs Beanbag, this particular thing I remember quite clearly. While developing the 1200, Commodore actually asked a bunch of developers to choose between 2MB ChipRAM or a High density drive and apparently a pretty clear majority voted for the 2MB.

[gilgamesh]

Originally Posted by Aegis

I used the Amiga as a creative tool and phones/tablets (excepting Microsoft's Surface) are way too clumsy and consumer-orientated for that.

Most kids would tell you that the beige monster on your desk is incredibly clumsy. Didn't C= try their best to be consumer orientated? It's all about the perspective, I suppose.

[Aegis]

Originally Posted by gilgamesh

Most kids would tell you that the beige monster on your desk is incredibly clumsy. Didn't C= try their best to be consumer orientated? It's all about the perspective, I suppose.

To an extent... but I'm betting your kids aren't running modo and DaVinci Resolve on their phones

Commodore were a consumer electronics company - all they were looking for was a ready-made follow-up to the C64. What made the Amiga remarkable was what it could do *in spite* of the limited imagination of its parent company (thanks to its designers). I honestly think CBM would have been more than happy to sell something mediocre like the Atari ST - what they actually bought had considerably more potential than that.

[Mrs Beanbag]

yeah i think CBM found themselves lumbered with something they really had no interest in. I get the impression the entire "home computer" thing never really took off in the US the way it did in Europe, there you had PCs and Macs for adults to do serious stuff and consoles for the kids to play games on and never the twain shall meet... The failure to take the US market was perhaps the key failure, maybe they didn't think it was a battle they could win, that there just wasn't a market there for it.

[Aegis]

This is why the Amiga never took off in the US: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/...istory-part-5/

[gilgamesh]

Wasn't the next C= computer going to be MIPS based with Windows NT? Maybe better management could have let C= survive a little longer, but not even Apple Macs could compete with the IBM PC (and now ARM based machines) in the long run. It has to do with open platforms, I suppose.

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by Aegis

This is why the Amiga never took off in the US: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/...istory-part-5/

That's why the Amiga 1000 never took off... it concludes by saying that the A500 saved the day, well it might be right there, but when i talked about the Amiga not taking off in the US, really i mean the A500 and onwards, which was far more popular in Europe than in the US.

Also, looking at that graph posted above, although the Atari ST got off to a much better start than the Amiga, it started declining as early as 1987, so i think there is more to this story than meets the eye.

The Wikipedia entry for Atari ST contains this statement:

Largely as a result of the price/performance factor, the ST would go on to be a fairly popular machine, notably in European markets where the foreign-exchange rates amplified prices.

interesting, even the Atari ST was also more popular in Europe than the US.

[Aegis]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

interesting, even the Atari ST was also more popular in Europe than the US.

As you said, 'home' computers (or computers for kids) were more of a European thing - botching the launch of the A1000 meant that Commodore lost a lot of credibility in the high-end PC market.

Also, as that article states, Commodore made some bad choices on how to sell and market the Amiga (the Sears deal would've been huge).

It's very telling that a lot of Americans aren't even aware of the existence of the Amiga. They remember the C64 and the Atari 800 but the Amiga and Atari ST were virtually unknown in the US.

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by Aegis

As you said, 'home' computers (or computers for kids) were more of a European thing - botching the launch of the A1000 meant that Commodore lost a lot of credibility in the high-end PC market.

Also, as that article states, Commodore made some bad choices on how to sell and market the Amiga (the Sears deal would've been huge).

It's very telling that a lot of Americans aren't even aware of the existence of the Amiga. They remember the C64 and the Atari 800 but the Amiga and Atari ST were virtually unknown in the US.

Recently I watched an "behind the scenes" episode by the Angry video game nerd / cinemassacre/ where he told the story about how he started out with short movies etc..
The most amazing thing to me was how he did the most bizarre tricks to pull off stuff that would have been dead easy on an Amiga with a genlock / chroma key.
It made me wonder how on Earth someone who is actively looking for a solution to such basic stuff somehow did not end up using an Amiga.
But I guess the anonymity of the product (in the US) that you talk about would explain a lot...

[Aegis]

It didn't help that the Video Toaster was sold as a turn-key solution by NewTek looking like this:



Even the keyboards had the Amiga logo stickered over

Here's another one:

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by Aegis

They'd also p**sed a ton of money away on the CDTV.

Only in Commodore terms. The money spent on the CDTV was what Apple spent on lunches.

[gilgamesh]

The Sinclair was a success despite being mostly a UK phenomenon. A small (by comparison) distribution area does not equate to failure.

The PC has some continuity because it is not built by one company but by an industry.
Amigas (and C64s) were much more like consoles in that respect. Development is not steady but happens in cycles. Manufacturers like Nintendo have to build a new machine from scratch with every iteration. The Amiga platform (despite being elegant and wonderful) was going nowhere.

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

The idea was ahead of the technology, yes, they should have just made a "normal" Amiga with a CD drive, sell it as a console without keyboard/floppy drive... most of the people i knew who had an Amiga only used them for games anyway, well with the occasional playing around with Deluxe Paint or Octamed, but plenty of people bought external floppy drives anyway. They could have taken the opportunity to actually cut costs instead of creating this strange "luxury" product that no-one knew what to do with. Oh well.

The unreleased CDTV2 actually lost the keyboard and mouse connectors but gained a floppy drive (and an LCD screen, among a couple of other things)

Not sure if it would have made any difference.If it was supposed to be a cost reduced version then I can't imagine that removing the keyboard and mouse connectors made up for the added cost of the LCD and floppy? (And 2MB RAM)

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by Aegis

As you said, 'home' computers (or computers for kids) were more of a European thing - botching the launch of the A1000 meant that Commodore lost a lot of credibility in the high-end PC market.

The thing is, if the A1000 had succeeded, would the Amiga still have turned out to be the computer we all love? Or would it have went down a completely different route to be another Apple that we'd all hate for the same reasons? Would we have got the A500 at all? Or would success in the US mean obscurity in Europe? Hard to say... but...

I have actually pondered doing a case mod on an A600 to put it into a neat little A1000-style case with the keyboard slotting underneath. I think that could have worked as a format, for a console you could also use as a computer, if you had the keyboard and mouse for it, and if they'd sold it with (at least) a two-button joypad like the NES and Master System had. Maybe they could have sold that in the US as a console AND in Europe as a home computer.