English Amiga Board - View Single Post - What if Commodore had lasted one year longer?

Promilus · 12 March 2022, 05:48

@pandy71 - given that both ECS and AGA have hard limit of 2MB CHIP RAM and AGA still have same blitter&copper performance I'd say that "new architecture" is overrated. It took Commodore quite a while to get "improved" chipset and even then it was sold (for "small amiga market") with just CHIP RAM which obviously wasn't good enough for 14MHz 020 - so at least 4MB of fastram @ stock configuration would improve things greatly (especially for CD32). It isn't about cost either - at the time A500 came out DRAM chips really were relatively expensive. In 90s it wasn't the case. Even newer VGA cards came out with 1MB+ (which reached up to 4MB in 1992 with cards like Ati Mach32). So while OCS - while released - demolished anything PC could throw at it and retain pretty nice price AGA wasn't PC killer. It was only still relatively cheap and had decent features. So during those few years Amiga microcomputers downgraded from "omg it destroys competition" to "oh, fairly cheap and good". Next few years wouldn't bring anything else than continuous downgrade relatively to what market had to offer. Should AGA be released in 1990 and AAA finalized in 1992/1993 it might be a bit different but it just didn't happen.

12 March 2022, 05:48	#127
Promilus Registered User Join Date: Sep 2013 Location: Poland Posts: 867	@pandy71 - given that both ECS and AGA have hard limit of 2MB CHIP RAM and AGA still have same blitter&copper performance I'd say that "new architecture" is overrated. It took Commodore quite a while to get "improved" chipset and even then it was sold (for "small amiga market") with just CHIP RAM which obviously wasn't good enough for 14MHz 020 - so at least 4MB of fastram @ stock configuration would improve things greatly (especially for CD32). It isn't about cost either - at the time A500 came out DRAM chips really were relatively expensive. In 90s it wasn't the case. Even newer VGA cards came out with 1MB+ (which reached up to 4MB in 1992 with cards like Ati Mach32). So while OCS - while released - demolished anything PC could throw at it and retain pretty nice price AGA wasn't PC killer. It was only still relatively cheap and had decent features. So during those few years Amiga microcomputers downgraded from "omg it destroys competition" to "oh, fairly cheap and good". Next few years wouldn't bring anything else than continuous downgrade relatively to what market had to offer. Should AGA be released in 1990 and AAA finalized in 1992/1993 it might be a bit different but it just didn't happen.