English Amiga Board - View Single Post - Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

coder76 · 22 April 2024, 07:41

Even if Commodore did all the right things, Amiga would not likely have survived as a mainstream platform for longer than about 1996-97, when the first 3D cards came out for the PCs, and you couldn't use CPU only for 3D gfx any longer.

3D gfx with texturemapping works somehow with 320x200 resolution and 256 colors with CPU only, but when going to resolutions 640x480 and above plus 16/24 bit color, it starts to get very slow even with a very fast CPU, if done only with a CPU.

So Commodore would have needed to develop an own 3D acceleration unit into their custom chipset, or else abandon their whole chipset, and use standard PC components. Since Motorola also stopped producing their m68k CPUs, Commodore would also have needed to make a swap in CPU architecture. Not to mention how much it would have cost to upgrade AmigaOS to support all these new things.

22 April 2024, 07:41	#3762
coder76 Registered User Join Date: Dec 2016 Location: Finland Posts: 168	Even if Commodore did all the right things, Amiga would not likely have survived as a mainstream platform for longer than about 1996-97, when the first 3D cards came out for the PCs, and you couldn't use CPU only for 3D gfx any longer. 3D gfx with texturemapping works somehow with 320x200 resolution and 256 colors with CPU only, but when going to resolutions 640x480 and above plus 16/24 bit color, it starts to get very slow even with a very fast CPU, if done only with a CPU. So Commodore would have needed to develop an own 3D acceleration unit into their custom chipset, or else abandon their whole chipset, and use standard PC components. Since Motorola also stopped producing their m68k CPUs, Commodore would also have needed to make a swap in CPU architecture. Not to mention how much it would have cost to upgrade AmigaOS to support all these new things.