Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[Promilus]

@dreadnought

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by hammer

Commodore didn't hire demo scene experienced programmers for their 1st party game studio team.

I wouldn't either. Most demo scene programmers were hackers. Their code wasn't great, and was largely cribbed off others. They were mostly kids who didn't have the discipline required to make commercial products.

I also don't believe that Commodore should have been developing their own games. Their job was to produce the hardware and OS, just like other computer manufacturers did. IMO what Commodore should have done is what John Sands did in New Zealand when they were selling the Sega SC3000 here - encourage users to develop and submit their own games, distributing them and paying royalties based on sales. This rapidly expanded the software library and got a lot of people into programming games who wouldn't otherwise have bothered - myself included.

Commodore should have produced a 'developer's edition' Amiga package for the same price as other packages, with freely distributable versions of the development tools. That would cost them little while turbocharging the development scene. The main reason I bought an Amiga was so I could program its amazing hardware, and I'm sure many others did the same (one reason the demo scene was so active). That needed to be cultivated!

Commodore wasted millions on extremely expensive ad campaigns that were not worth the money. This shows that they didn't really understand the home computer scene. IBM successfully marketed their PCs to businesses who just wanted a computer to do their accounts etc. Apple pitched the Mac to graphics artists and university students who just wanted a computer to create documents. Commodore tried to position the Amiga in those markets, when they should have promoted it as a home computer for hobbyists. Machines like the C64, ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC didn't come with BASIC for nothing. And while those machines - like the Amiga - were mostly used for playing games, where did many of those games come from? Hobbyists!

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by TCD

Ridge Racer was released with the original PlayStation.

Yep, and I was bored with it in 3 minutes. A great demo of the platform's 3D capabilities but not much else.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

And that one killer app at launch is more than what A1200 & CD32 managed during their entire life spans.

For me the 'one killer app' was Tomb Raider. Everything else paled in comparison. I bought many PlayStation magazines and tried out the latest game demos. 90% of them were pure garbage. My brother had a PlayStation too (actually before me). He bought it to play Tomb Raider. They bought one other game which his partner liked (I think it was called 'Croc'?) Today that machine sits in the cupboard. My PlayStation 2 is on permanent loan to a friend. After playing all the Tomb Raider games I lost interest in it.

If someone could port the original Tomb Raider games to the Amiga I would play them all over again. Sadly I don't think that will happen in my lifetime, even though we now have Amigas powerful enough to do it easily (getting 3~5 fps out of the Vampire 600 in PC Task, which believe it or not is actually playable!).

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Cyprian

Regarding games, there are some issues, similar to 1200, issues relate do the CPU. Different CPU with a different stack size, different instructions (some old are forbidden), instruction cache and data cache (not present in Amiga 1200).

Amiga has WHDLoad, Atari has Backward (old solution) and HAGA/HAGE(new solution)

KickStart 3.0 has a disabled CPU cache option.

Following the PC example, the Amiga should start with disabled CPU cache until Workbench 3.0 requests max CPU performance.

Some Amiga games use direct address into Kickstart 1.3's functions and it breaks on Kickstart 2.0 and 3.x.

Commodore UK released ReloKick 1.3 on Amiga magazine coverdisks.

WHDLoad is for hard disk with a Degrader/ReloKick combo use case.

Before WHDLoad, I used https://aminet.net/package/util/misc/Degrader and ReloKick.

Originally Posted by Cyprian

Anyway, 16bit has nothing to do with compatibility.

Falcon Microbox hard 32bit CPU path, it was ready to release in '92. Chipsets and motherboards were produced, you can try to buy them there: https://wizztronics.com/atari-microbox/

The Falcon Microbox prototype wasn't released by Atari.

AA3000+ prototype was later cloned by the Amiga community and its design was released by ex-Commodore engineer Dave Haynie.

Atari could have planned for product segmentation with 16-bit 030 Falcon and 32-bit 030 Falcon. Typical Tramiel's product segmentation mindset.

Originally Posted by Cyprian

That 16bit is much slower than 12~15MB/s 386 but is faster than 32bit A1200/A4000 bus:

My 386DX-33 has a motherboard cache.

In 1993, PCs 386DX-40 and 486SX-25/486SX-33 were in the price range of the A1200 with 030 @ 33 Mhz to 50 Mhz accelerators. Without access to Commodore's economics of scale, Amiga's 3rd party accelerators didn't have performance/cost for Doom-type games.

Originally Posted by Cyprian

RAM Bus Bandwidth for CPU 16bit access:
- Amiga 1200: Read: 2.2MB/s Write: 3.5MB/s (2 chipset cycles 3.5MHz per 32bit)
- Amiga 4000: Read: 2.3MB/s Write: 2.3MB/s (2 chipset cycles 3.5MHz per 32bit)
- Atari: Read: 5.4MB/s Write: 6.5MB/s (2 chipset cycles 8MHz per 16bit)

"16-bit" CPU front-side bus problem is an Atari problem. This PR problem is mocked by anti-Atari.

Originally Posted by Cyprian

RAM Bus Bandwidth for CPU 32bit access:
- Amiga 1200: Read: 4.5MB/s Write: 6.9MB/s (2 chipset cycles 3.5MHz per 32bit) (BusSpeedTest 0.19)

Reminder, A1200 has a 32-bit Fast RAM controller already baked in. By design, the A1200 can operate two 32-bit buses at the same time since the Amiga AGA is not dumb.

After looking at Falcon's schematics, the 030 front side bus is 16-bit.

Originally Posted by Cyprian

- Amiga 4000: Read: 4.6MB/s Write: 4.6MB/s (2 chipset cycles 3.5MHz per 32bit) (BusSpeedTest 0.19)

Not true for A4000/030.

Amiga 4000/030 BusSpeedTest
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys...m/aMw2s4s1dWQJ

And the same from an A4000/030 -- again, only testing motherboard memory.

11.Ram Disk:> nuke0:system/c/bustest chip fast
BusSpeedTest 0.19 (mlelstv) Buffer: 262144 Bytes, Alignment: 32768
========================================================================
memtype addr op cycle calib bandwidth
fast $077E0000 readw 185.0 ns normal 10.8 * 10^6 byte/s
fast $077E0000 readl 294.2 ns normal 13.6 * 10^6 byte/s
fast $077E0000 readm 272.9 ns normal 14.7 * 10^6 byte/s
fast $077E0000 writew 248.2 ns normal 8.1 * 10^6 byte/s
fast $077E0000 writel 248.2 ns normal 16.1 * 10^6 byte/s
fast $077E0000 writem 209.2 ns normal 19.1 * 10^6 byte/s
chip $00028000 readw 538.9 ns normal 3.7 * 10^6 byte/s
chip $00028000 readl 573.3 ns normal 7.0 * 10^6 byte/s
chip $00028000 readm 629.0 ns normal 6.4 * 10^6 byte/s
chip $00028000 writew 575.0 ns normal 3.5 * 10^6 byte/s
chip $00028000 writel 574.8 ns normal 7.0 * 10^6 byte/s
chip $00028000 writem 573.9 ns normal 7.0 * 10^6 byte/s

Those who can afford A4000/040, can afford unpopulated 040 WarpEngine and recycle A3640's 68040-25 CPU. A3640's CPU is socketed for this purpose.

-------------
A3640's basic design has evolved into A3660 with 68060 and Z3660 with yet another Z-Turn board ARM9-to-68K emulator+RTG and 68060 combo.

Z3660 with Z-Turn ARM9 FPGA board allows for 68060 with local FastRAM and RTG or PiStorm style ARM-to-68K emulator and RTG. Z3660 offers "get out of jail" from the expensive Motorola influence for big box A3000/A4000. https://github.com/shanshe/Z3660

Amiga 68K is getting out of Motorola's influence.

Amiga 68K platform has PiStorm original, PiStorm16 (WIP), PiStorm32, and Z3660 projects for the full exit from Motorola's influence. I'm aware of the PiStormST project.

Originally Posted by Cyprian

- Atari: Read: 5.4MB/s Write: 6.5MB/s (2 chipset cycles 8MHz per 16bit)

After looking at Falcon's schematics, the 030 front side bus is 16-bit and you can't reuse the built-in 030 for a simple 32-bit RAM expansion. Tramiel's product segmentation decisions made sure Falcon's built-in 030 CPU was jailed in 16 bits.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I wouldn't either. Most demo scene programmers were hackers. Their code wasn't great, and was largely cribbed off others. They were mostly kids who didn't have the discipline required to make commercial products.

Experience is the keyword for the employment filter. My argument's intent is for Elf Mania's visual effects to be open-sourced into Commodore's official game SDK. This minimizes the "reinvent-the-wheel" R&D discovery.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I also don't believe that Commodore should have been developing their own games.

1st party game developers enable use case exploration and hopefully discover optimized Blitter assist C2P code samples for Commodore's official game SDK. This minimizes the "reinvent-the-wheel" R&D discovery.

Both AMD GPUOpen and NVIDIA have game-centric code sample libraries. Hint: Psy-Q.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Their job was to produce the hardware and OS, just like other computer manufacturers did. IMO what Commodore should have done is what John Sands did in New Zealand when they were selling the Sega SC3000 here - encourage users to develop and submit their own games, distributing them and paying royalties based on sales. This rapidly expanded the software library and got a lot of people into programming games who wouldn't otherwise have bothered - myself included.

That's old fashion.

Unlike other PC OEMs, Commodore maintains its ecosystem platform like Microsoft or Apple.

I'll argue for Commodore's Xbox team or at least Commodore's game SDK on par with Psy-Q game-centric SDK.

Sega Saturn SDK wasn't the best example of game SDK.

If you force "reinvent-the-wheel" R&D discovery on a game console platform, that's burning boilerplate development time.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Commodore should have produced a 'developer's edition' Amiga package for the same price as other packages, with freely distributable versions of the development tools. That would cost them little while turbocharging the development scene. The main reason I bought an Amiga was so I could program its amazing hardware, and I'm sure many others did the same (one reason the demo scene was so active). That needed to be cultivated!

What does the 'developer's edition' Amiga package contain?

PS; I'm influenced by Psy-Q game-centric SDK.

[TEG]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

When, with which product?

The C64 conception in general, HAM mode, OCS and Amiga OS conception in general.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Yep, and I was bored with it in 3 minutes. A great demo of the platform's 3D capabilities but not much else.

I played games like Destruction Derby (Sony's Psygnosis, think of Skidmarks in 3D) and Moto Racer.

PC's Moto Racer has a network multiplayer option while the PSX version has a split screen.

Ridge Racer up to 1,468,507 units sold in Japan and the United States.

Destruction Derby sold more than 1 million copies by August 1996.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

For me the 'one killer app' was Tomb Raider. Everything else paled in comparison. I bought many PlayStation magazines and tried out the latest game demos. 90% of them were pure garbage. My brother had a PlayStation too (actually before me). He bought it to play Tomb Raider. They bought one other game which his partner liked (I think it was called 'Croc'?) Today that machine sits in the cupboard. My PlayStation 2 is on permanent loan to a friend. After playing all the Tomb Raider games I lost interest in it.

If someone could port the original Tomb Raider games to the Amiga I would play them all over again. Sadly I don't think that will happen in my lifetime, even though we now have Amigas powerful enough to do it easily (getting 3~5 fps out of the Vampire 600 in PC Task, which believe it or not is actually playable!).

There's open source CroftEngine https://github.com/stohrendorf/CroftEngine

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

For me the 'one killer app' was Tomb Raider. Everything else paled in comparison.

Final Fantasy 7, 8 and 9

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

(getting 3~5 fps out of the Vampire 600 in PC Task, which believe it or not is actually playable!).

You can't be serious

[Promilus]

Playing 3d games at several FPS was a way to go in early 90s... Nowadays ppl tend to buy extremely expensive gaming equipment (eSport-like) to reach well over 200FPS with 144Hz refresh rate and the funny fact is... it doesn't necessarily help as the actual choppiness or occasional slowdowns are from that "1%" framerate which dips to <60 ... so as long as it is well over 60 100% of the time there should be no issues. And game developers doesn't necessarily fight those bottlenecks with framerate drops because the fact is... there's always some equipment which handles them well so what's the point. And that's why current sales of gaming PCs or consoles are looking still pretty good. And why gaming industry thrives despite many of the games being overly flashy and without actual artistry...

But regardless - PS1 did receive a number of titles which were great hit (despite Bruce being uninterested by them just like many ppl found Gloom or other amiga exclusive games rather dull), Amiga 1200 nor CD32 never did. Not at the launch, not later as well. One fairly original and unique title might be Napalm but that's pretty damn far after Commodore went bankrupt. Many of initially Amiga games found a way to PC DOS or Windows with SuperFrog, Worms, Settlers or few of Alien Bread games being no exception.

So going back to Amiga stuff... Dave Haynie didn't see Ranger chipset nor blueprints. Ok... several years later he didn't know that Hepler is working on PA-RISC chipset for Amiga either. And at the same time Dave himself was already working on something similar. So... that only proves commodore inter communication did suck a big time and management over R&D efforts was absolutely horrible. And I believe in one interview or meeting with fans Dave actually had an anecdote about one guy working on a closed project for months because nobody told him it was already dead... And as for Pleasance - he's not a technical guy. He understood technology rather poorly that's why he made many bold claims about amiga superiority. Although I think Commodore UK did play things fairly good at that time.

So... PC was for everything (and also most business oriented stuff). Atari for a while was music synth oriented. Apple did try to find a way into schools with decent results and did excel for a while with DTP software. Amiga was kind of gaming machine and the unique feature of A2k/3k was 3rd party video toaster. How Commodore missed that golden opportunity for recognition in the field of TV and VHS is beyond me... AGA wasn't solution to stay afloat.... it was solution to not sink that bloody fast. Sure, if they made and effort and actually released AGA machine mid '91 (instead of end of '92) that might've boost up sales quite a lot for ~2 years and keep them afloat. But it didn't happen despite them being perfectly capable - if properly funded and organized - to make it reality. So... A1200 disappointment? Sure. In many ways. Was it enjoyable despite of that? Sure... in many ways. Could they have done things better? Yes. Could they have done things better starting from 90s? No... I don't think so, there was a chain of events which started with introduction of A1000 and the biggest hit was doing A500, biggest miss was taking a long time to do that and taking even more to get a worthy successor for A500...

[smellysocks77]

Originally Posted by BigD

People only got PCs because their Dads needed them for work! An early 90s PC came with M$ Works and little else of use! Compared to a useful TurboPrint and Final Writer/Wordsworth/PageStream equipped Amiga it was poor! People bought them anyway!

Indeed, all of them fine apps.
Unfortunately, none of them IBM compatible and one very disappointed Dad when he tried to edit that all important MS Word Doc he needed for Monday am.

Not saying you bought an Amiga 1200 to do Turbo Tax (you didnt). Not saying pay MS to port Word to Amiga.
But a bit of licensing or something for that propriety File Type by Commodore on behalf of these Amiga vendors may have saved poor students a PC purchase that bit longer and and made your standard 1200 that bit more saleable to your average computer illiterate.

It was all about being IBM compatible, right.

[oscar_ates]

From Redit interesting comment:

https://www.reddit.com/r/amiga/comme...d_lasted_into/

TheAnalogKoala
•
3y ago
•
Edited 3y ago
The Amiga was doomed almost as soon as it came out. I happen to be a chip designer myself and this comes from a place of love but the only way Amiga could have survived was with an assload of investment (way more than was made) in R&D and fab capability (and capacity) and they would have had to become a console company. Once the PC world caught up to Amiga there was no fighting it.

The custom chipset that made the Amiga so amazing was also an anvil around its neck. Commodore has outdated processing technology (still using NMOS logic long after it was obsolete) and coasted for years on an incredibly tight design.

The chips were hard to program for and forced you to program to the metal for good performance. This made backward compatibility almost impossible without including the original chips as cores in some new design. But, Commodore couldn’t do that since they had only a handful of chip designers at any one time, none as talented as Jay Miner. Besides, they were to busy doing cost reductions to do any real R&D.

Commodore milked the Amiga (and the C64) for as much cash as they could get. R&D just wasn’t in their DNA. The initiative at the end with HP was too little, too late. Commodore never had more than a skeleton crew of very dedicated and talented engineers, but it wouldn’t be enough.

If they had a lot more investment, and upgraded their fabs, and were successfully able to transistion the Amiga into a console (they tried, but too late) it might have lasted longer.

But, given their level of incompetence I don’t think so.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by oscar_ates

If they had a lot more investment, and upgraded their fabs, and were successfully able to transistion the Amiga into a console (they tried, but too late) it might have lasted longer.

Thank goodness that didn't happen. The idea of the Amiga becoming nothing but a game console is pure horror

[Promilus]

Design centered around amiga chipset would only last as a gaming console so ... where's the actual horror? 68k was EOP, from non x86 only ARM came out decent but I can hardly imagine Commodore engineers would invest into that. So you'd end up with PC-like Amiga with PA-RISC sh**ty processor and hardly backward compatible h/w and OS. AND of course gaming console as well...
Horror!

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I wouldn't either. Most demo scene programmers were hackers. Their code wasn't great, and was largely cribbed off others. They were mostly kids who didn't have the discipline required to make commercial products.

Exactly.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I also don't believe that Commodore should have been developing their own games. Their job was to produce the hardware and OS, just like other computer manufacturers did.

Of course not. It's a hardware vendor, but they should have ensured that their system has a self-sustaining ecosystem. That does not mean "develop software yourself", but to get contracts with game studios and application developers to create the critical mass of software. Atari did, for example, with LucasArts, and the result were four really brilliant games on the 8-bit machines ("Rescue on Fractalus", "Ballblaster", "The Eidolon" and "Coronis Rift") that showcased the capabilities of the machine.


Ok, frankly, CBM *did* invest a bit - they had Microsoft port their Basic from Apple to Amiga (including the bugs and design deficiencies). But this also showed how CBM viewed the system: As a "home computer" on which users would create their own software. They did not understand that the market worked differently now - in a sense, CBM might have considered the Amiga more as a "glorified C64" than a productive system or a games console (if you like), and that the market worked differently. The market size of hobby developers using Basic is too small.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Commodore should have produced a 'developer's edition' Amiga package for the same price as other packages, with freely distributable versions of the development tools. That would cost them little while turbocharging the development scene. The main reason I bought an Amiga was so I could program its amazing hardware, and I'm sure many others did the same (one reason the demo scene was so active). That needed to be cultivated!

I'm not sure that the "homebrew" scene would have come up with a sufficient supply of high quality software (of whatever kind). CBM thought "throw a BASIC at them, and they will do themselves", but that didn't work either. You need to find partners on the software side that *know* their business.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Commodore wasted millions on extremely expensive ad campaigns that were not worth the money. This shows that they didn't really understand the home computer scene.

Hold on, they *understood* the home computer scene, except that this scene was the dead end to begin with. C64 lived from it, but this age was over.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Commodore tried to position the Amiga in those markets, when they should have promoted it as a home computer for hobbyists.

That market is too tiny, and there is not sufficient money in it. Get the system to the professionals - for what the Amiga could do. Video production, genlock, graphics. The machine *was* amazing back then, but it lacked market traction. You don't get that by showcases, you get them by getting the right people on your side.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Machines like the C64, ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC didn't come with BASIC for nothing. And while those machines - like the Amiga - were mostly used for playing games, where did many of those games come from? Hobbyists!

No, that time was over when Amiga entered the scene. The volume is too low, and hobbyists do not have sufficient financial power to invest into the evolution of the hardware.

[smellysocks77]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I wouldn't either.

Ha ha

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Commodore should have produced a 'developer's edition' Amiga package for the same price as other packages, with freely distributable versions of the development tools. That would cost them little while turbocharging the development scene.

Hmm. 'A1200 Hobbyist Edition'. Mr. Pleasance be there why didn't I think of that.

Then again 99.9% users bought an Amiga to copy the games.
So targeting the Hobbyist/Enthusiast market like that wouldn't really be enough to sustain a (once) global corporate giant without major restructuring/selling off.
And all the Amiga fun is 68k isn't it. So all legacy.

Still. Would have been fairly cool, lots of creative fun. Something (68k) like that, nicely packaged, re-imagined and targeted would probably still sell today

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Yep, and I was bored with it in 3 minutes.

I'm sure you were. Unfortunately most people did enjoy the game. It was a major reason why the Playstation became very popular.

The 'Amiga users will never stop complaining about Commodore' and your very narrow 'For me it was great' narratives don't mix that well. But that is of course just my personal opinion.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by smellysocks77

Then again 99.9% users bought an Amiga to copy the games.

This came later, when there were games to copy. I'm talking about before then - the critical phase when a new platform has just been released and has not yet generated a large software library.

I bought an A1000 in 1987 (I would have bought one earlier if the PAL version was available in New Zealand). At this time, 2 years after it was released, only ~100 titles had been produced (compare this to the C64, which in 2 years had amassed ~750 titles). Of these 100 titles, very few were actually for sale here. So I had almost no games worth playing, and not much in the way of tools to develop my own - just Amiga BASIC, and the MetaComCo assembler which I purchased separately.

Many users were not buying the Amiga just to copy games. This is shown by the vibrant demo scene, the hacker scene (were they really doing it just to copy games, or was the hacking itself the main attraction?), and the popularity of PD distributions like Fred Fish and Aminet.

Then there was AMOS

STOS BASIC had sold a couple of thousand units in France in some bland, blue packaging.

It was a BASIC programming language with a range of commands to move sprites round the screen, add music and more. This made it ideal for creating games.

Peter and I looked at each other and we knew what to do: market STOS BASIC as a games creation tool, not as a programming language that had commands for writing games...

I created a registration form for STOS to go in every box, and offered a free newsletter to everyone who returned the card. We got thousands of cards back... I wrote a letter to our registered owners and said, if you buy STOS Compiler by mail order directly from us, we would also send them STOS Paint free of charge.

This promotion was a roaring success: we sent out thousands of letters and 36% of those people bought the Compiler!

We came up with the idea of a competition called The 1989 Gameswriter Of The Year Award with a £5,000 (US$7,500) prize to promote STOS further and encourage owners to create great games and send them in to us. The winning games would be published by Mandarin Software....

I got a phone call one day from Bob Katz who handled the marketing at Atari. He asked if they could bundle STOS with every Atari ST for a big promotion they were doing. They weren’t offering much money per computer sold, but after talking with Meash and Diane O’Brien, the sales director, we gave the go-ahead: more people getting hold of STOS meant more sales of the Compiler and other add-on products.

AMOS The Creator

Francois Lionet started work on an Amiga version of STOS. We decided to call it AMOS...

We got a great cover feature in the house magazine Amiga Computing in the May 1990 issue… ..and we got some terrific reviews in various magazines which helped propel sales.

According to this article, “AMOS has more support than any language I’ve ever seen. There is an AMOS PD disk collection (over 300 disks!) in Europe and a separate one in Australia.”

...40,000 copies of AMOS were eventually sold worldwide.

If 40,000 copies were sold, imagine how many more were pirated!

Clearly there was a lot of interest in game development among Amiga users. Those 300 AMOS PD disks didn't come from commercial software houses.

Now it may be that in the Amiga's heyday 90% of users were only consumers, but that still left 10% who weren't. And perhaps only 1% would produce commercial quality software, but with ~4 million systems sold this represents ~40,000 developers. That is a resource that Commodore should have have tapped into more, rather than leaving it up to 3rd parties.

[Promilus]

Now it may be that in the Amiga's heyday 90% of users were only consumers, but that still left 10% who weren't. And perhaps only 1% would produce commercial quality software, but with ~4 million systems sold this represents ~40,000 developers. That is a resource that Commodore should have have tapped into more, rather than leaving it up to 3rd parties.

It's funny to see that after you were just proving they did everything they should've for developers

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Promilus

So you'd end up with PC-like Amiga with PA-RISC sh**ty processor and hardly backward compatible h/w and OS. AND of course gaming console as well...
Horror!

Yes, horror. A 'PC-like' Amiga that wasn't PC compatible - what was the point?

Let's face it - no matter which way you slice it the Amiga's days were numbered. The only way it could survive a little longer was by building on the strength of its existing legacy and user base, which was bound to dwindle.

Even as system sales were at their peak, developers were complaining about rampant piracy cutting into their profit margins. Developers on other platforms were becoming less interested in the Amiga because there weren't enough users willing to buy games. It wasn't so much the hardware that was the problem, but the lack of potential market for their product. Games were also getting more sophisticated, requiring much higher effort that demanded millions of sales to justify the investment. Only the few most popular platforms were worth developing for, and that group was shrinking.

By the mid 90's the console market had become overcrowded. What could an Amiga that wasn't an Amiga add to get ahead of the pack? Nothing. It would have to rely on its unique computing features. But after 1995 that was gone too. The 'computer illiterate' masses were now buying PCs with Windows 95, which the entire 'personal computer' industry was set up to support.

If Commodore was able to operate on lower sales it could have survived at a least until the new millennium. But it wasn't. Years of bad product choices, expensive ineffective marketing and mounting debt took their toll. The few good products they produced didn't compensate enough, and the sales numbers required to service the debt were too high. The A1200 was a good product, but it couldn't make up for the bad ones that came before it.

Of course butt-hurt Amiga fans will blame Commodore for that, but we should remember that without Commodore there would be no Amiga. Nobody else was foolish enough to put the investment into realizing it. We should also remember all the other home computer manufacturers who fell by the wayside as the market consolidated. Commodore actually survived longer than most, and achieved greater success.

Instead of getting upset about what the Amiga might have been that didn't eventuate, we should celebrate what it did become and enjoy it. Who cares if there are only a few thousand of us? That small community is still as vibrant as it ever was. Who cares that the Amiga can't do as much as a modern PC? It still does plenty enough to keep us interested.

A machine with PA-RISC sh**ty processor and hardly backward compatible h/w and OS would not have helped. It would be an outlier. The big advantage of all the Amigas Commodore produced is that they are all part of the same family. Even the CD32 can easily be turned into the equivalent of an A1200. This binds the community together and makes our efforts more worthwhile. The only exception to that is NG 'Amigas' with OS4, which have done the opposite. A PA-RISC based 'Amiga' would have made it worse.