Unreleased Amiga chipset better than anything today?

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by hammer

CD32 should have been 68020 @ 25 Mhz (5 MIPS), AT&T DSP3210 (50 Mhz, 25 MFLOPS FP32, 12 MIPS INT32), 1 MB 32-bit Fast RAM @ 25Mhz, and 2 MB 32-bit Chip RAM.

Right. So the CD32 should have been 4 times the price with a DSP chip nobody knows how to program and isn't present in any other Amiga? Got it.

Here's what happens:-

Developers don't use the DSP chip because they have neither the tools nor the experience. The 25MHz 020 and 3MB RAM still aren't enough to convince John Carmack that Doom should be ported to it. The machine is grossly overpriced compared to the competition (Sega Mega CD), so sales are very low.

It bombs just like the Atari Falcon did. Amiga fans then blame Commodore, not the guy from Australia who convinced them to build it.

So Irving Gould gets in his time machine and goes back to 1984, kills Jay Miner and helps Jack Tramiel produce the Commodore ST. The word 'Amiga' is erased from computing history.

By 1992 Commodore has a consumer machine with 68030 CPU, 4MB RAM, chunky 16 bit true color, and a DSP that can do 3D projections and play MP3 files in real time. They call it the Commodore Falcon. It bombs. Irving Gould then gets back in his time machine and sets the dial to 1981...

[Cris1997XX]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Right. So the CD32 should have been 4 times the price with a DSP chip nobody knows how to program and isn't present in any other Amiga? Got it.

Here's what happens:-

Developers don't use the DSP chip because they have neither the tools nor the experience. The 25MHz 020 and 3MB RAM still aren't enough to convince John Carmack that Doom should be ported to it. The machine is grossly overpriced compared to the competition (Sega Mega CD), so sales are very low.

It bombs just like the Atari Falcon did. Amiga fans then blame Commodore, not the guy from Australia who convinced them to build it.

So Irving Gould gets in his time machine and goes back to 1984, kills Jay Miner and helps Jack Tramiel produce the Commodore ST. The word 'Amiga' is erased from computing history.

By 1992 Commodore has a consumer machine with 68030 CPU, 4MB RAM, chunky 16 bit true color, and a DSP that can do 3D projections and play MP3 files in real time. They call it the Commodore Falcon. It bombs. Irving Gould then gets back in his time machine and sets the dial to 1981...

You got it slightly wrong, Irving Gould goes back to 1976 so that he could prevent Jack Tramiel from actually releasing the Commodore PET

[Wrangler]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Right. So the CD32 should have been 4 times the price with a DSP chip nobody knows how to program

Not completely true

[ Show youtube player ]

[Promilus]

Originally Posted by hammer

The only "32-bit" part with AGA is Lisa. Alice is 16-bit like the ECS Agnus counterpart.

As a dumb frame buffer use-case, a powerful CPU-driven Lisa can reach pretty high frame rates with Quake.

Yes, only Lisa and Budgie (obviously) handle 32b bit data bus. The rest of the chipset stays basically the same but the plus is CPU access 32b chipram without such glue logic as in A3k ECS.
As for "pretty high frame rates with Quake" obviously it has 2 problems. It hardly is "powerful CPU-driven" unless something like AC68080 or PiStorm and even then it does hit bottleneck (chip ram bandwidth) rather fast. And that's 8bpp textures iirc. Add better palette and higher resolution and *poof* there's no enjoyable framerate anymore.

Faster CPU wouldn't help. For a console of that time to live for several years to come it would require 2 things - great amount of MIPS which neither 020 nor 030 had and chipset with memory subsystem capable of handling polygon based graphics. AFAIK PS1 did use fixed-point arithmetic for 3d which contributes to some weird glitches. Didn't support hardware sprites either. But other than that it was able to do so much 3D thanks to good bandwidth and great performance on programmable units and it could emulate sprites on 2 textured triangles with capability of displaying thousands of independent on-screen sprites beating AGA several times over. And yes, beating crap out of AAA as well. But AAA-based console at least would have pretty powerful blitter capabilities to offset relatively slow (in terms of pure arithmetic power) 68k and ample amount of very fast chipram which would be hard to saturate at that time period.

@Bruce - yes, you are right. And yet all those overpriced crap consoles did sell much better than CD32... including ill-fated 32X add-on.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by Promilus

@Bruce - yes, you are right. And yet all those overpriced crap consoles did sell much better than CD32... including ill-fated 32X add-on.

To be fair, the CD32 wasn't helped with the Commodore bankrupcy. Before that, it was reported to sold quite well, better than Jaguar or 3DO in Europe at least. But it had only 8 month of lifespan...

[Promilus]

It was also banned in USA and part of the stock was confiscated due to unpaid salaries for workers. You really expect it to go well afterwards should Commodore survive?

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by Promilus

It was also banned in USA and part of the stock was confiscated due to unpaid salaries for workers. You really expect it to go well afterwards should Commodore survive?

I don't. But the point was that it wasn't such a bad idea seems it kind of met some "success" where it was released in its short lifespan.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by Promilus

It was also banned in USA and part of the stock was confiscated due to unpaid salaries for workers. You really expect it to go well afterwards should Commodore survive?

The American market had little impact on the Amiga hardware sales in the last few years, imo Commodore should never have even attempted to sell it (CD32) in North America, Europe was where the sales were, any fool could see the American Amiga market was productivity based, more fool Commodore to try and release a games console over there!

[grelbfarlk]

The American market was quite profitable for Commodore since they sold as many A4000s as they could produce to go into Toaster systems. In fact it was supporting so many Video Toaster sales that Newtek put the effort in to produce the Flyer NLE.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Promilus

@Bruce - yes, you are right. And yet all those overpriced crap consoles did sell much better than CD32... including ill-fated 32X add-on.

The 32X was much cheaper than a CD32, especially towards the end when it was selling for US$29.95.

However the 32X was released in December 1994, after Commodore was gone. So that means Commodore sold infinitely more CD32s than Sega sold 32X's in the same period.

The 32X was Sega's response to the Atari Jaguar, which was launched in November 1993 but didn't reach Europe until June 1994. Introductory price of the Jaguar in the US was $249, much cheaper than the CD32 at $399 - though the CD32 did eventually also sell for $249. Imagine if the CD32 had been 3 or 4 times that price - few would have wanted one even with a 68030 and DSP.

With a similar launch date and similar price the Jaguar would be the 32 bit console to compare CD32 sales to. By 1996 (3 years later) the Jaguar had sold less than 150,000 units. The CD32 sold 100,000 units in less than a year.

But the CD32 was really competing against the Sega Mega-CD, which was introduced in the US in October 1992 at $299 and the UK in April 1993 at £270. So once again the CD32 couldn't afford to be much more expensive or it would price itself off the market.

The Mega-CD was more important competition than up-coming 32 bit consoles because like the Amiga, it had a large user base to build on. The CD32 could run any A1200 game (and many A500 games too) so a good range of titles was assured. With other 32 bit systems who knew. The Sega 32X was a flop because few games were produced for it. A higher priced CD32 with few games made for it would suffer a similar fate.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Promilus

It was also banned in USA and part of the stock was confiscated due to unpaid salaries for workers. You really expect it to go well afterwards should Commodore survive?

'Should Commodore survive' implies not going bankrupt, which means not having CD32s impounded and being able to pay workers. If it hadn't been for CADtrak's patent trolling, the CD32 would have more successful.

What's disgusting is that Commodore was one of the few to challenge that totally bogus patent which should never have been granted - and they paid dearly for it. CADtrak didn't even care that they didn't pay up. It was more about making an example of them to frighten other manufacturers into submission.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

The CD32 could run any A1200 game (and many A500 games too) so a good range of titles was assured.

AFAIK you couldn't just add a disk drive to a CD32 and start playing disk based games. The SX1 launched in 1994 and wasn't that cheap either, so I don't really see that point about the CD32.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

'Should Commodore survive' implies not going bankrupt, which means not having CD32s impounded and being able to pay workers. If it hadn't been for CADtrak's patent trolling, the CD32 would have more successful.

Fair point.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by TCD

AFAIK you couldn't just add a disk drive to a CD32 and start playing disk based games. The SX1 launched in 1994 and wasn't that cheap either, so I don't really see that point about the CD32.

That's not what I was talking about. Obviously games for the CD32 would be distributed on CD, not floppy disks. But producing a CD32 version could be as simple as just putting the files on the CD, or you could enhance it with minimal effort. You could also release compilations of games (eg. all the Lemmings games on one CD).

A lot of older games which had little commercial value by themselves might be desirable as part of a collection. Discs could also easily be made to work on other Amigas with a CDROM drive for more sales.

[TCD]

Shovelware to the rescue!

[Promilus]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

That's not what I was talking about. Obviously games for the CD32 would be distributed on CD, not floppy disks. But producing a CD32 version could be as simple as just putting the files on the CD, or you could enhance it with minimal effort. You could also release compilations of games (eg. all the Lemmings games on one CD).

A lot of older games which had little commercial value by themselves might be desirable as part of a collection. Discs could also easily be made to work on other Amigas with a CDROM drive for more sales.

And that was a downside. First - you'd have to buy more expensive CD collection to get your hands on e.g. Worms or North vs South and second of all - you could NOT exchange games with your friends owning A500 or A1200 (at least not without expensive add-on for either of those or CD32 itself). And no, "enhancement with minimal effort" didn't really happen. And there were plenty of games which were available to make such enhancements, including both Dune from Cryo and Dune 2 from Westwood Studios.

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

'Should Commodore survive' implies not going bankrupt, which means not having CD32s impounded and being able to pay workers. If it hadn't been for CADtrak's patent trolling, the CD32 would have more successful.

Commodore were already haemorrhaging money at that point. Maybe if they'd had more cash they'd have hired lawyers better suited to arguing the case in court? Or just had cash to pay them off like everyone else did.

It was a crappy troll patent and it caused a lot of harm to the industry and it's very annoying that they got away with it, but it's not really even the final nail in Commodores coffin. The lid was pretty firmly shut by that point already.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

That's not what I was talking about. Obviously games for the CD32 would be distributed on CD, not floppy disks. But producing a CD32 version could be as simple as just putting the files on the CD, or you could enhance it with minimal effort. You could also release compilations of games (eg. all the Lemmings games on one CD).

A lot of older games which had little commercial value by themselves might be desirable as part of a collection. Discs could also easily be made to work on other Amigas with a CDROM drive for more sales.

But CD games were expensive and shovelling cheap and nasty disk games onto CD made the console look bad. Every single title needed to look like a premium product with maximum care and attention paid to it.

Nintendo knew this back in the 80s. It's why they limited publishers to releasing just five games on the NES per year. When you can't just shove something out as quickly as possible, you're more likely to take the time to put a bit more effort into making sure it's something that will sell at a higher volume (and preferably for an extended period of time) and that leads to higher quality titles that make the console more desirable to consumers.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by AestheticDebris

But CD games were expensive and shovelling cheap and nasty disk games onto CD made the console look bad. Every single title needed to look like a premium product with maximum care and attention paid to it.

Your memory is playing tricks on you IMHO. CD games were not expensive, especially on the CD32. And most of the quick and dirty ports we're sold at a bargain price.
I personnaly would have preferred more AAA titles on the CD32 but in any case, a CD game was cheaper than a cardridge one. (Edit : that's the whole purpose of the NeoGeo CD for instance : sold cheaper version of expensive cardridge games)

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

Your memory is playing tricks on you IMHO. CD games were not expensive, especially on the CD32. And most of the quick and dirty ports we're sold at a bargain price.
I personnaly would have preferred more AAA titles on the CD32 but in any case, a CD game was cheaper than a cardridge one. (Edit : that's the whole purpose of the NeoGeo CD for instance : sold cheaper version of expensive cardridge games)

Maybe compared to SNES/MegaDrive cartridges, but compared to Amiga games they were. Nigel Mansell, for example, came out on CD32 for £30 - a good £5 more than the disk release had been, despite being otherwise identical. Shovelling out the exact same game but on CD was very much a thing, not to mention that by the time the CD32 came out you could easily pick up budget Amiga games for a tenner, so why would you spend three times that to have an OCS floppy game slapped on a CD?

[sokolovic]

But the CD32 purpose was to take marketshare to the consoles, not to the others Amiga ?
And if you had an A1200 AND a CD32 (or a CD Drive) you still had the choice.
If you takes some games, even a shovelware could benefits from being ported straight onto a CD. Multi disks games like Beneath a Steel Sky for instance (and the game had some improvements too).
If I had the choice of playing BASS on CD rather than the 15 disks version on my A1200, I would have gladly paid a bit more, even for a straight port with no enhancements at all.