Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[TCD]

I'm still not sure if David was just too stubborn to admit that the CD32 wasn't ready because there weren't many (I use that word loosely mind you) games for it or if he really believed the '32 bit CD console' hype would sell it. Either way Dangerous Streets was a huge mistake

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by TEG

Now I better understand why you have in mind but several points:
- According to the Data Sheet, Am7968/Am7969 is from 1994. Description of the chip:

First TAXI was before 1990 and this concept was very popular in military (quite obvious that using Taxi set + fiber optic large amount of data could be transmitted on relatively long distance - later they introduced FireWire as IEEE1394 for this).

Originally Posted by TEG

- I don't understand why Paula DMA make you think of multiplexing
[Edit] I realized you mean using the data lines for different things.

That said, it is true that the technology of multiplexing is know since long...

Paula use single DMAL line to signal DMA request into Agnus but similar principle could be used for other function - for example Denise use 4 pins to provide mouse functionality - 2 mouse ports are multiplexed with help of 74ls157 to feed Denise with quadrature pulses but what if instead 74ls157 a parallel to serial 74ls165 could be used so making 3 pins free - why this is important - Jay Miner complained in his Byte interview about lack of pins to provide RGB signals (as providing resistors in Denise would be inefficient they decided to output RGB digital so they can be converted to analog signal in external DAC) if mouse port would be implemented as single pin then we could have instead 12 bits RGB a 15 bit RGB (as such more colors).
Pin count is important...
RGA bus could be used also for DATA providing some functionality.

Originally Posted by TEG

I think the short answer to your question is the lack of R&D funding. In the same line, I always wondered why, having MOS Technology, they did not used it to make (a lot of) money by producing and selling components wanted by the market. I know they did that a little bit by producing logic gates when there was a shortage but it was under pressure.

This is even more interesting as obviously after Commodore fail, former CSG as GMT Microelectronics was active and quite successful (revenue 21 mln $ in 1999).

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by TCD

I'm still not sure if David was just too stubborn to admit that the CD32 wasn't ready because there weren't many (I use that word loosely mind you) games for it or if he really believed the '32 bit CD console' hype would sell it. Either way Dangerous Streets was a huge mistake

David was generally* a clever marketing guy, not a developper. I'm pretty sure he went where people (mis)guided him.
But for for sure that would be interesting to know the story behind packaging Dangerous Streets for the CD32.

*He told to French magazine Joystick something like "I can assure you that Rebel Assault (one of the most anticipated game of that time) is not coming to the CD32".
Very honest but not the best way to sell consoles.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Promilus

you are (again!) missing the point and pointing the obvious. Giving some kind of documentation is just BARE MINIMUM that EVERY h/w manufacturer has to provide.

This isn't actually true. The manufacture is under no obligation to supply any documentation. They could just say, as many OEM PC component manufacturers do, "Use the [encrypted] driver we supply and don't ask us how the hardware works."

You're not listening to reason... Again - look what Sony did to developers and them compare to what Commodore did to provide software on their platform. There's big difference.

Did you follow my links? Commodore supplied a lot more than just 'some kind of documentation' on the Amiga. They had a whole department dedicated to supporting developers. They produced software tools to aid in testing and debugging, and supplied pre-production machines to commercial developers so they could get their products out sooner - and much much more.

Because most of this was covered by NDAs and developers didn't generally blab about it, a lot of the support Commodore provided probably wasn't known to the average Amiga fan. This may have given people the idea that Commodore wasn't supporting developers much, which isn't true. You should consider the possibility that your narrative is based more on ignorance than fact.

Gail Wellington: far more than just a herder of CATS

Gail’s first assignment was to write a manual to describe how to write software manuals... Soon after completing that assignment, Gail was placed in charge of writing user manuals for third party software being published by Commodore. Gail observed a recurring problem in this role: the people writing the software and the people writing the manuals for the software weren’t in regular communication... Despite the fact that it might put her out of a job, she wrote a proposal whereby each technical writer would be paired with a QA person who would act as a liaison to the external developer... With that, Gail was appointed Head of Software Operations for Commodore UK.

Jack Tramiel officially formed Commodore International’s software division in the United States in April, 1983 and put Sig Hartmann in charge. Sig’s first major initiative to increase Commodore’s presence in the software market was to launch 70 titles for under $100 each for Commodore’s new Commodore 64 computer. Commodore intended to announce this as part of the 1983 Summer CES show. Gail was already well established in the software business so Commodore UK was a major contributor to this initiative.

Commodore set up sales/marketing subsidiaries in Germany, The Netherlands, Italy, Sweden, Canada, France, Austria, Norway, Denmark, Australia and Belgium. These subsidiaries were 100% owned by Commodore but operated as independent companies... Gail’s role was to provide software sales and support to the independent distributors which were under John Baxter’s purview which included Thailand, India, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Turkey, Greece, Israel and South Africa. Her support role included things such as coordinating with distributors to help companies adapt software to the native languages in their local markets.

In the spring of 1985 while at a CeBit show, Bob Gleadow asked Gail to travel to Los Gatos, California for three weeks to work with Commodore’s Amiga development team. Commodore had purchased Amiga Corporation in August 1984 and their revolutionary Amiga computer wasn’t yet ready for production...

The Amiga launch event took place at Lincoln Center in New York, New York, USA on July 23, 1985... On the technical side of things, three brand new Amiga computers were connected to projectors that would be doing live demonstrations of the Amiga’s capabilities for the eager crowd. The Amiga video signals were being fed out to the projectors through Genlock devices... It was Gail’s responsibility during the event to coordinate the Amiga operators and the projector operators... Gail was involved in the production of the Amiga ballerina animation sequence, working with Island Graphics who created the animations.

Upon arriving back in the UK, Gail immediately began to strategize how she could ignite developer interest in the fledgling Amiga platform and she quickly recognized that a developers conference would be the perfect vehicle.

The UK Software company Mirrorsoft was one of Gail’s contacts and they were involved in English/Soviet trade. Incidentally, the popular videogame “Tetris” had been created in 1984 by Soviet software engineer Alexey Pajitnov and it was Mirrorsoft who would bring the first commercial release of Tetris to the market, including to the Commodore 64, in 1988. In early 1986 Mirrorsoft organized a meeting between Gail and a group of key engineers from the Soviet GKNT, the Soviet State Committee for Science and Technology, for Gail to present the Amiga.

Commodore Applications and Technical Support (CATS)

In October, 1986 Gail accepted an offer to return to the United States to become the Worldwide Amiga Product Manager...

Because nobody had back-filled Gail’s former position when she left the UK, Commodore’s international distributors were now left without a support system. To remedy this, Commodore’s Chief Operating Officer Henri Rubin chose to tap Gail’s knowledge and experience to form a new department in October 1987 named “World-Wide Software and Support Group”, which Gail then renamed to Commodore Applications and Technical Support, perhaps more well known as CATS.

CATS consisted of technical, administrative, marketing and evangelical staff. According to Gail, the unsung heroes of CATS were the technology group, headed by Carolyn Scheppner. Reporting to Carolyn were Dan Baker, Matt Blaze, Adam Levin, and David Junod. What made their job so difficult was that it was relentless and they never had an opportunity to finish anything. The documentation side of CATS could start on a project and work on it until it was completed. The technology folks were presented with a different technical problem to solve at any minute of any day. Before they’d finish helping one customer, there would be another one waiting.

Commodore Dynamic Total Vision (CDTV)

Gail was transitioned to the position of Director of Special Projects, reporting directly to Mehdi Ali. Her first project was to be the development and launch of Commodore’s CDTV home entertainment console... Gail would oversee the software side of things

Commodore knew the importance of having a strong software library to support any new hardware introduction so one of Gail’s project responsibilities was to get developers on board and have them start creating software. Gail had extensive contacts in the software industry... Gail would set up demonstrations of the CDTV at trade shows for external developers by appointment only. Initially, there wasn’t even a prototype CDTV for her to show off. Instead, she was using a mocked up version that consisted of an Amiga 500 and a separate CD player...

Even though Gail was successful at garnering early developer interest, there was a problem for external developers: CD was still a relatively new medium and it was prohibitively expensive to create one-off CDs. Once external developers had CDTVs in their possession to allow them to begin writing CDTV software, they had no way to create CDs so they could test their software. Commodore solved this problem by purchasing a CD mastering machine from Yamaha at a cost of $125,000 with which they could create CDs as a free service for their external developers. It was one of three CD mastering machines in the United States at the time it was purchased, the other two being owned by IBM and Apple.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

This isn't actually true. The manufacture is under no obligation to supply any documentation. They could just say, as many OEM PC component manufacturers do, "Use the [encrypted] driver we supply and don't ask us how the hardware works."

OEM PC vendors only perform QA, systems integration from Intel/AMD/NVIDIA reference designs and sell hardware. Large PC OEM vendors have hardware support contracts.

For modern open-source graphics drivers, refer to either Intel or AMD e.g. AMD supported Valve's Linux/DXVK/Proton Steam Deck. AMD had supplied Radeon hardware documentation for semi-custom platforms like MS's Xbox One/Series XS, Sony's Playstation 4/5, and Valve's Steam Deck.

For the Amiga PowerPC platform, System 54's modern GpGPU of choice is AMD's Radeon GCN. Vulkan API assumes little endian and the Amiga is big endian. Vulkan API is based on AMD's Mantle API and is influenced by AMD-based little endian game consoles. Vulkan wouldn't change for the Amiga.

Vulkan crushed NVIDIA's OpenGL NV_command_list extension alternative i.e. https://developer.nvidia.com/opengl-...V_command_list.
Valve made sure DXVK is the defacto standard for Linux gaming.


In the 1990s, Microsoft's Multimedia PC (MPC), Intel's PCI, and Legacy Plug and Play initiatives were defined by Microsoft and Intel, hence taking over the "gang of nine", hence "Wintel". The majority of OEM PC vendors do NOT oversee the PC platform.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFI_Forum
UEFI Forum's twelve promoter companies
AMD,
American Megatrends,
ARM,
Apple,
Dell,
Hewlett Packard Enterprise,
HP Inc., (includes Compaq)
Insyde Software,
Intel,
Lenovo, (formerly IBM's PC division)
Microsoft,
Phoenix Technologies.

With the exceptions of Apple and ARM from the list, these are the "PC" standard committee members. PC clone motherboards are dependent on PC BIOS/UEFI vendors like American Megatrends, Phoenix Technologies, and Insyde Software and CPU microcode firmware from Intel and AMD.

ISA bus adopted "Plug and Play" along with PCI. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_Plug_and_Play This evolved into UEFI Forum.

VESA still encapsulates "the gang of nine" with major additions e.g. Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, and MS. Refer to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_...ds_Association

Commodore has forked from Motorola reference designs with their custom platform i.e. Amiga custom chipset.

Microsoft's DirectX Landing Page https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/landing-page/ and shows the basic end-to-end implementation of a simple first-person 3-D game using DirectX (Direct3D 11.2, Direct2D, Windows.Gaming.Input, and XAudio2) in a C++ app. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sa...imple3dgamedx/
Microsoft's Visual Studio division is one of Microsoft's core competencies.

AMD's GPUOpen initiative. https://gpuopen.com/

Intel has industry-leading C++ compilers, optimized math libraries, and optimized code samples.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Did you follow my links? Commodore supplied a lot more than just 'some kind of documentation' on the Amiga. They had a whole department dedicated to supporting developers. They produced software tools to aid in testing and debugging, and supplied pre-production machines to commercial developers so they could get their products out sooner - and much much more.

For modern GpGPU with game development use case examples, refer to NVIDIA's Developer Program. For major game titles, NVIDIA will aid in software optimization for its GPUs.

Elf Mania's visual effect quality was rarely repeated. SNES has superior visual effect quality consistency.

Commodore didn't provide Blitter assist C2P when Commodore's solution was Akiko C2P. Smaller 3rd party Amiga developers with extensive demo scene background figured out Blitter assist C2P. Mainstream game developers didn't bother with Amiga AGA's packed pixel problem. A1200CD addon had Akiko C2P.

Microsoft ported Doom to Windows 3.1's Win32S/WinG (WinDoom) and Windows 95's DirectX (Doom95).

Commodore should have hired Amiga programmers with extensive demo scene experience for its 1st party game studio and published optimized game code samples. Offical support impacts mainstream game developers.

The Amiga lost Psygnosis' "techdemo" games support in 1993.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Because most of this was covered by NDAs and developers didn't generally blab about it, a lot of the support Commodore provided probably wasn't known to the average Amiga fan. This may have given people the idea that Commodore wasn't supporting developers much, which isn't true. You should consider the possibility that your narrative is based more on ignorance than fact.

PSX's Psy-Q SDK is superior since it's focused on game development.


Psy-Q was an SDK created by SN Systems Limited and Psygnosis.

[grelbfarlk]

I got talked into going to my nephew's football game.

He got put in as a goalie about 30 minutes in and let two past.

They lost, I've just been calling him A1200 since then.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

David was generally* a clever marketing guy, not a developper. I'm pretty sure he went where people (mis)guided him.
But for for sure that would be interesting to know the story behind packaging Dangerous Streets for the CD32.

*He told to French magazine Joystick something like "I can assure you that Rebel Assault (one of the most anticipated game of that time) is not coming to the CD32".
Very honest but not the best way to sell consoles.

PC's Star Wars: Rebel Assault requires 4 MB RAM.

Star Wars: Rebel Assault 3DO port has 3 MB RAM.

Star Wars: Rebel Assault Sega CD version was crap with 64 colors and 512 color palettes causing major artwork downgrades.

CD32 has 2MB RAM.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by grelbfarlk

I got talked into going to my nephew's football game.

He got put in as a goalie about 30 minutes in and let two past.

They lost, I've just been calling him A1200 since then.

Make sure that as a punishment he reads this thread. All 199 pages.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by grelbfarlk

They lost, I've just been calling him A1200 since then.

Your irrational hatred for the A1200 is very strange indeed.

[Promilus]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

This isn't actually true. The manufacture is under no obligation to supply any documentation. They could just say, as many OEM PC component manufacturers do, "Use the [encrypted] driver we supply and don't ask us how the hardware works."

System manufacturer (as a whole box...)? No? Sure not if they want to do everything by themselves. E.g. TheA500 ... obviously that's typical arm sbc architecture with linux or android underneath some emulator. So... surprise surprise 3rd parties still did manage to provide something. But if you want someone to write software for your platform you have to provide documentation. Not by law. But by fvking logic! That's what actually happens with Neo6502, ZX Spectrum NEXT, Agon Light, Commander X16 and Mega65! And they do provide all that Commodore did provide. So documentation, some compiler/debugger tools, maybe even SDKs. But that's bare minimum. To actually start if platform interest you. But by no means it counts as something which PROMOTES developing on those systems! And surely all software written for those platforms are just hobbyist stuff. Commercial developers have to at least smell money from the project. There were some during A500 reignt... but it was running dry pretty damn fast and Commodore hardly did anything to reverse the trend. With maybe exception of piracy but the only real solution at that time was that CD drive and look... they did provide machines for developers and what kind of exclusives CDTV did get? Aaaaahhh, famous bundles with (sometimes) fmv or additional music. Still not even close to PC CD-ROM Dune version vs original Amiga one, right? Right. So there goes that argument ...

Did you follow my links? Commodore supplied a lot more than just 'some kind of documentation' on the Amiga. They had a whole department dedicated to supporting developers.

Yeah, like the supposed meeting with Team17 etc. where they rejected all ideas and requirements of those developers?

They produced software tools to aid in testing and debugging, and supplied pre-production machines to commercial developers so they could get their products out sooner - and much much more.

Oh, that's probably the reason why neither A1200 and CD32 came out with great launch titles!

Because most of this was covered by NDAs and developers didn't generally blab about it, a lot of the support Commodore provided probably wasn't known to the average Amiga fan. This may have given people the idea that Commodore wasn't supporting developers much, which isn't true. You should consider the possibility that your narrative is based more on ignorance than fact.

If there are no fruits to bare of those actions I can call those actions inadequate. Yes, I CAN! It's not ignorance. It's sad reality. They didn't even invest in VT platform so didn't see how useful it might be to attach themselves to it's success...

So this thread is about A1200, they absolutely f**cked up situation with A1000, then MAYBE they did something right when A2k came out but by the time A1200 came out it was all wrong again. Prove me wrong - with list of actual worthy apps made due to direct commodore's influence! No? Then screw you and your arguments!

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by Promilus

screw you and your arguments

Stay classy, eh? But, it does sounds like a fitting slogan for the Page 200 celebrations.

[Promilus]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

Stay classy, eh? But, it does sounds like a fitting slogan for the Page 200 celebrations.

Well how many times you can hear the same arguments over and over with absolutely no correlation with reality?

I say MOS IC manufacturing plant - underdeveloped, underinvested ... He says leakage and penalty. Reality check - AGA chips has to be outsourced to 3rd parties to manufacture and the company who took over the plant made business on it...

I say ranger, he says it wasn't ready or tested. Reality check - Jay himself in interview admits it WAS READY AND TESTED before he left C= for good.

I say r&d issues - he says it was all fine, they should focus on AA instead of AAA and it would be good. Reality check - there's already ill-fated C64GS development and C65 as well. AAA (or something like it) was actually more proper way to move forward, AGA was sidestepping and creating even bigger issue for the future. Also ... with no investment to IC manufacturing plants cost reduction by converging functionality of chipset into one or two actual chips (like PC) was impossible. So they did cut down cost in places which did hurt specification (and functionality of stock units). Really brilliant approach.

Missed opportunity with Video Toaster. Mismanaged A300 project. No actual incentive to buy CDTV as they had no idea what to do with it and since developers DID NOT provide any killer app for the launch ... Yeah

Missed opportunity with CD32 - again, too conservative specification and no killer apps at launch. Not secured any good titles going forward either.

But it is not important because Commodore did create CATS! They did everything right, we're just too stupid too see that!

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Promilus

But it is not important

Indeed.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Promilus

if you want someone to write software for your platform you have to provide documentation. Not by law. But by fvking logic!

Sure, but your implication that Commodore only provided this bare minimum of documentation is flat out wrong.

So documentation, some compiler/debugger tools, maybe even SDKs. But that's bare minimum. To actually start if platform interest you. But by no means it counts as something which PROMOTES developing on those systems!...Commercial developers have to at least smell money from the project. There were some during A500 reignt... but it was running dry pretty damn fast and Commodore hardly did anything to reverse the trend...

So Commodore didn't do enough to support developers because they didn't make the Amiga popular enough for them? That's a... rather peculiar argument.

As a CDTV and CD32 developer I was disappointed with the sales of both, but not during development. We had high hopes for the CDTV, and the CD32 would have done better if Commodore hadn't gone bankrupt.

The problem with the CDTV was that it was a concept the market wasn't ready for. CD-i had the same problem, despite years of development and support (the first 'authoring kits' were released in 1988). Philips poured a billion dollars into CD-i before calling it quits in 1994.

Originally Posted by Promilus

Yeah, like the supposed meeting with Team17 etc. where they rejected all ideas and requirements of those developers?

Not sure what you are talking about there, but according to Martyn Brown:-

Q: Who made the decision that which games will be released on CD32 too? And based on what?

MB: Commodore approached us about it so we had talks. The funniest thing was unveiling the controller in the boardroom; they even waited for the tea lady to leave the room before unveiling it.

Originally Posted by Promilus

Oh, that's probably the reason why neither A1200 and CD32 came out with great launch titles!

Guess what titles the PlayStation had on release in 1994?

A IV Evolution: A Ressha de Ikou 4
A.IV. Evolution (Hatsubai Kinen Gentei Set)
Crime Crackers
Geom Cube
Kakinoki Sh?gi
Kikuni Masahiko Jirushi: Warau Fukei-san Pachi-Slot Hunter
King's Field
Jikky? Powerful Pro Yaky? '95
Mahjong Gok? Tenjiku
Mahjong Station: MAZIN
Motor Toon Grand Prix
Nekketsu Oyako
Parodius
Ridge Racer
Special Collection Vol. 1
Tama: Adventurous Ball in Giddy Labyrinth
Twin Goddesses
Twinbee Taisen Puzzle Drama

Some real killer games there - like '3D' Tetris, two Mahjong games, a 'puzzle drama' based on a 1985 arcade game, a collection of adventure games previously released in 1993 for the PC-98, a slot machine gambling game, a baseball simulation game previously released on the SNES, a couple of 2D shmups originally released in 1988 on MSX and 1990 on NES, a pretty poor looking dungeon game, an fps with Wolfenstein 3D style graphics, and a 2D fighting game.

Can we say 'shovelware'? At least it did have Ridge Racer, a car racing game that wowed me for about 3 minutes before I became bored with it.

So this thread is about A1200, they absolutely f**cked up situation with A1000, then MAYBE they did something right when A2k came out but by the time A1200 came out it was all wrong again. Prove me wrong - with list of actual worthy apps made due to direct commodore's influence! No? Then screw you and your arguments!

Wow! Sounds like your disappointment with the Amiga goes way beyond the A1200.

[TEG]

Originally Posted by Promilus

Missed opportunity with CD32 - again, too conservative specification and no killer apps at launch. Not secured any good titles going forward either.

The lack of at least 2MB Fast memory in the CD32 is indeed an indication that the management had lost the capacity to read the market, even at a basic level.

Although it was making some sense, in the A1200, to not put Fast to do not conflict, at an electronic level, with future expansions ; in the CD32 it does not made sense. You don't buy a console to extend it. The concept being to be the more "plug an play" as possible and with the most power. C= attitude was like having a super weapon in the pocket (the fast ram architecture ready) since 8 years and not using it when they needed it the most.

But perhaps the console was made this way due to financial constraints and C= not enable, or not wanted, to pay for 4MB supply. If someone have the price of memory in 1993, it would be interesting to have an idea.

Would be very interesting too, to have details about how decisions were made during the period of the CD32. I don't think we know much about it.

[Promilus]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

So Commodore didn't do enough to support developers because they didn't make the Amiga popular enough for them? That's a... rather peculiar argument.

Show me one agreement to produce one decent exclusive game for one machine launch... or to build specific usable software to show off Amiga capabilities. No? Aa, ok...

As a CDTV and CD32 developer I was disappointed with the sales of both, but not during development. We had high hopes for the CDTV, and the CD32 would have done better if Commodore hadn't gone bankrupt. The problem with the CDTV was that it was a concept the market wasn't ready for.

Problem wasn't "market readiness". Some technologies like VR googles etc. were already back then but frequently troubled by technical difficulties, very high price and inadequate titles. Same with CD. But it's not like the market for CD miraculously appeared with PS1... again - if there's no solution at the market and you want to introduce it you have to MAKE the market. Just throwing stuff on it WILL NOT WORK.
When it comes to stuff like CD-i ... did you see what kind of games there were and how CD storage was used in games? That was the problem, hardly anyone knew how to actually deal with over 600MB of data so they were making crapware hoping that fmv will just magically make bad game into a good game. Naah...

Guess what titles the PlayStation had on release in 1994?

Yup, and despite of that it gave momentum for Sony in Japan despite overwhelming Sega and Nintendo dominance, but guess what - during European and NA launch it did get much, much better, right? Right... so? My point stands... Neither A1200 nor CD32 did receive anything quite like that. Ever.

Wow! Sounds like your disappointment with the Amiga goes way beyond the A1200.

Well I did write in few dozens of those 200 pages A1200 disappointment was not something which could be easily omitted - it was part of the process going from day 1 after acquiring Amiga Inc. And if I could sum it up it would be lack of clear vision what to do with it, how to sell it, how to advertise it and how to develop it...

[TEG]

Originally Posted by pandy71

Paula use single DMAL line to signal DMA request into Agnus but similar principle could be used for other function - for example Denise use 4 pins to provide mouse functionality - 2 mouse ports are multiplexed with help of 74ls157 to feed Denise with quadrature pulses but what if instead 74ls157 a parallel to serial 74ls165 could be used so making 3 pins free - why this is important - Jay Miner complained in his Byte interview about lack of pins to provide RGB signals (as providing resistors in Denise would be inefficient they decided to output RGB digital so they can be converted to analog signal in external DAC) if mouse port would be implemented as single pin then we could have instead 12 bits RGB a 15 bit RGB (as such more colors).
Pin count is important...
RGA bus could be used also for DATA providing some functionality.

I see more your point now, to applied it to even buses with slow signals or with few wires. I wonder if the balance between the cost and the gain of functionalities was evaluated. There is the problem of the risk too. I mean did they know at the time, if it was reliable.

And so now that remind me that the C64 floppy disk drive connector use the technic of serialization. It left a bad taste in their mouths. Perhaps this is the explanation

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by TEG

I see more your point now, to applied it to even buses with slow signals or with few wires. I wonder if the balance between the cost and the gain of functionalities was evaluated. There is the problem of the risk too. I mean did they know at the time, if it was reliable.

And so now that remind me that the C64 floppy disk drive connector use the technic of serialization. It left a bad taste in their mouths. Perhaps this is the explanation

If any previous experience was part of the decision here it would more likely be Atari's SIO bus - and it would have been a good experience with serial connections.
(SIO would be later cited as great inspirations for USB by its creator Joe Decuir)

More likely Jay Miner was trying to avoid mimicking Atari ideas for legal reasons ...

[TEG]

Originally Posted by Gorf

If any previous experience was part of the decision here it would more likely be Atari's SIO bus - and it would have been a good experience with serial connections.
(SIO would be later cited as great inspirations for USB by its creators)

More likely Jay Miner was trying to avoid mimicking Atari ideas for legal reasons ...

Oh! And I see SIO was designed by Joe Decuir. If you see a potential in the tech you can buy the patent or pay a fee to use it. An other option, especially if you have the creator at hand, is to redesign it.

[ Show youtube player ]

[Edit]
After watching Joe Decuir interview, I see what you mean Gorf. Jack sued personally Jay Miner for patents thief (Jack being at Atari) so Joe became invisible to avoid being involved and so left Commodore at the beginning of the Amiga adventure. Internals dissensions at C= played well into the hands of the competition.

JoeDecuir - "After that, I was not only out of there, but after 1984, in the middle of the year,
when Tramiel sued Jay Miner personally for theft of trade secrets and patent infringement,
I had to become invisible.
So I vanished from that space so that Tramiel wouldn't know I existed.
I had to become invisible for decades.
Four years ago, they had the Amiga 30 exhibit in Mountain View.
Me and Ron Milner presented the Amiga hardware.
I finally got to meet Dave Needle and RJ Michael and all these other Amiga heroes
that I didn't get to know because I wasn't allowed to.
Because I was going to get sued if Tramiel knew I existed."

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by TEG

I see more your point now, to applied it to even buses with slow signals or with few wires. I wonder if the balance between the cost and the gain of functionalities was evaluated. There is the problem of the risk too. I mean did they know at the time, if it was reliable.

It was possible definitely and i see potential benefits but also i can understand that it is easy today to see what was OK what was NOK - when Amiga was designed things was not so obvious and largely many things was just innovated - pioneered...

Originally Posted by TEG

And so now that remind me that the C64 floppy disk drive connector use the technic of serialization. It left a bad taste in their mouths. Perhaps this is the explanation

If i recall there was some issues with serial port in MOS VIA used for floppy communication thus bus need to be slowed significantly but high speed serial was standard - floppy internal speed is over 100kbps so not uncommon.

More details about C64 and 1541 slow intercommunication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commod...t_and_software