[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Promilus

It does count.

It doesn't count as a chipset that existed.

It just reveals what exactly were CBM plans regarding amiga line.

Yes, we know that.

And with scrapping of Ranger (which was fairly revolutionary improvement over OCS despite the cost of VRAM which dropped quite nicely later on) it was fairly obvious they weren't interested anymore with something way better than PC at relatively low price.

There it is again. It's not good enough to just be 'as good as' a PC at lower price, it has to be 'way better'. Then the next year Commodore would have to design another new chipset to make the Amiga way better than what the PC had by then, and another, and another... - always at a lower price.

Now we see why Gould wasn't that interested in the Amiga's 'future'. With customers having that attitude, the only way to keep going would be to pour all the profits back into designing new Amigas that were so 'way better' than a PC that (a few) people would buy them. Because if it wasn't 'way better than' a PC you all would dismiss it and buy a PC instead.

Price itself was main objective when it comes to "small amiga" and that's why it was proposed to have cut down A1200 version with just 1MB of chip (fortunately it wasn't finalized).

Yes it was 'fortunate'. Fortunate that the design wasn't set in stone, and could evolve as the situation changed. But a 1MB A1200 wouldn't have been that bad, since it was designed to be easily upgraded. Another couple of things you might have noticed was the space for an FPU, and the separate PCB for the mouse port (suggesting they may have had a different case design in mind). The engineers were obviously keeping their options open.

The A600 is another example of this. It was originally designed to be nothing more than a cost-reduced A500+, but 'fortunately' someone had the sense to add a hard drive and PCMCIA slot - which made the machine far more interesting and useful. These features then made it into the A1200, which again was 'fortunate'.

With advances in silicon and design tools, new improved Amiga models could have been produced fairly rapidly. I recall one of Commodore's engineers saying that they could whip up a new design in a few months, rather the several years it used to take. But those new designs would still have to be tested and debugged, and the more radical the changes the harder it would be to get it right.

We can imagine Commodore managing to get AA+ machines out the door in the next year if they were financially able. After that, who knows? But even that would have been something.

Sure it did. That was 16bit CPU clocked nearly 3.54MHz with 128kB RAM... but ... not when there already was Amiga. It was rather stupid to start work on that in the first place.

I wouldn't say it was 'stupid', but I agree that with the Amiga being where it was the C65 was redundant. Still it would have been nice if Commodore was financial enough to still produce 'boutique' products that didn't have to be huge sellers.

It already is and that project is called Mega65. Biggest downside is it works on pretty large FPGA dev board (iirc bigger fpga than Vampire V4 and by extension Icedrake/Firebird family) which is expensive. Standalone computer is even more expensive (~600GBP iirc). There are some originals but it's prices are beyond insane

Ah yes, I remember that one now. Still not ready for sale yet, and not retro enough for me anyway. Perhaps someone will design a motherboard based on the original C65, with FPGAs just replacing the unobtainable custom chips. That way we could experience what a real C65 would have been like.