Would it have made any difference if Commodore had made Amiga laptops?

[Dunny]

I do still have a 486 DX/2 laptop - a Panasonic CF-41 Mk1 - and the 640x480 screen on it is just beautiful, with no ghosting at all. Plays DOS games just lovely. That was manufactured in 94 so the display tech was available.

[Locutus]

Originally Posted by Dunny

Panasonic CF-41 Mk1

Isn't that a forerunner to the Toughbook line? That was a seriously expensive piece of kit back in the day.

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by Locutus

Isn't that a forerunner to the Toughbook line? That was a seriously expensive piece of kit back in the day.

Yep, it was known as the original Toughbook - metal case, high impact keyboard, trackball and CD drive under the keyboard. I picked mine up many years later but yes it was expensive at launch.

The point being that LCD display tech was available that could handle Amiga output at the time - ours certainly did, though I never saw games running on one, just a highres 640x512 AGA Workbench. I have a vivid memory of one of our techs having some equipment - probably a scope - hooked up to it because lowres wasn't displaying properly, but I'm pretty certain we figured that out before launch.

I worked as a coder, and made the demo disks we used for mailshot marketing. I'd love to find one, but I've not seen one in the wild since those days. Hell, I can barely find any mention of the company and we made quite a few Amiga peripherals.

[Retro1234]

Didn't Atari have some laptops?

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by Retro1234

Didn't Atari have some laptops?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_STacy

[malko]

Commodore did the portable C64 (SX-64), so why didn't they declined it as an Amiga ?

[Megalomaniac]

From Wikipedia it sounds like the SX-64 (a 'luggable' that could be carried but needed mains power, with no battery, as normal then) sold poorly. At $1000 and with different screen colours to the C64, it wasn't going to appeal to home users, and for business users it wasn't vastly cheaper than CP/M systems which came with far more software of a higher quality (and it was industry-standard) than what you could get for the SX-64. Not all upgrades were supported either, mainly due to the poor power supply.

I'm not sure an Amiga portable, with no Microsoft packages, would be any different against laptop PCs, or even the ST BOOK which sounds quite good for the time (though the STacy was a misstep). Who needed Angus and Denise in a laptop for working away from home, and what 1992 laptop screen of any cost could do justice to Amiga games?

[redblade]

Atari Laptop
Some nice Commodore adverts on that site as well

[malko]

A friend of mine had one BitD.
We had some great time playing on it



Regarding MS, why would have Commodore shipped a computer with a less performant OS ?

[Arc Angel]

Originally Posted by CCCP alert

Atari did an excellent, if limited to monochrome mode only, 1992 laptop called the ST Book, it sold practically nothing.

Acorn produced the A4 Archimedes 1992 laptop, again sold nothing really, but perhaps important relevant to desktop Archimedes computers sold in total.

The huge amount of engineering talent and time needed to make something as good as these and then to have maybe 2000 units sold doesn't really make sense. I doubt Commodore would have lasted any longer due to their existence.

They were probably a bit busy making something out of the stalled AAA chipse development anyway to make a laptop and IIRC the wholly/controlling share owned Eagle Pitcher LCD screen manufacturer in preparation for the cancelled Commodore LCD was let go during the Gould era so no commercial advantage for production.

Acorn also had the Stork ready.
The Stork would have been the RISC PC laptop, when the A4 was the Archimedes ( ARM3 24 Mhz, 12 Mhz memory bus ) laptop.
Some other portables have been in development, like the Gideon, as you can read here :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_A7000
The Stork is shown here :
https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/...tork-Notebook/
and here :
http://chrisacorns.computinghistory....ers/Stork.html
Gideon :
http://chrisacorns.computinghistory....rn_Gideon.html
There's been a BBC luggable 'thing', same spirit than the SX64, the LTM :
http://chrisacorns.computinghistory....MPortable.html

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by Dunny

I do still have a 486 DX/2 laptop - a Panasonic CF-41 Mk1 - and the 640x480 screen on it is just beautiful, with no ghosting at all. Plays DOS games just lovely. That was manufactured in 94 so the display tech was available.

The display technology to a sense, but the power requrirements of the board were too high to allow it running from battery. To make this possible, CBM would have needed to create CMOS variants of the custom chips. At least the 68K exists as a CMOS variant, but due to the brain-drain at MOS, nobody was probably able to redesign the chips.


Then, I wonder which customers such a laptop would actually find - the Amiga was mostly considered a games machine for hobbyists, and mobile back then was very expensive. After all, even the desktops that aimed the professional market were not selling as good as the low-end machines, thus creating an even more expensive machine would have made even less sense.


Also consider that "mobile" back then in the 90s was something quite different from what mobile is today. We had around 2002 a university project jointly with IBM for equiping students with laptops. You could get some very high performance A31p thinkpad for a "reduced" price (it was still quite expensive, I don't recall the figures, but probably over 3000DM), and it had a "mobile running time" of approximately 2h. Thus, even for carrying it into a lecture, it was not good enough. There was a less performing model (a budget model R32 or so) which was "cheaper", but still high above the price of the Amiga. Its running time was not much better, probably around 3 to 4hs. Mobile Pentium 4 (probably a contradiction in terms - P4 was anything but mobile).



My best guess is that any "mobile" Amiga would be quite a "brick" with a running time of probably half the time (very roughly), and it would not be useful for anything practical were "mobile" would have been an advantage.

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

Then, I wonder which customers such a laptop would actually find

Like I said, we sold three of them. They were large and heavy. I do know that one of the Black Ash versions was sold to a travelling carpet salesman.

[CCCP alert]

Commodore did make laptops, x86 Windows/DOS laptops. Not sure how much was 100% Commodore/MOS from scratch or rebranded existing parts.

If you take a regular Amiga motherboard and try and make it a laptop that isn't a laptop it's more like Stacey by Atari and the PPC doo-dahs from Amstrad. The ST Book was not a wedge at all and nor was the Archimedes A4.

Laptops need bespoke fully redesigned motherboards, hence the cost to make them. No idea what sort of drain on the battery the Amiga design would need, but Commodore did have non Amiga laptops no thicker/worse runtime than most.

Ad agencies bidding for contracts on site using Animatics would have been a small group of niche buyers, no less niche than ST Book or A4 really.

[grond]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

the power requrirements of the board were too high to allow it running from battery. To make this possible, CBM would have needed to create CMOS variants of the custom chips. At least the 68K exists as a CMOS variant, but due to the brain-drain at MOS, nobody was probably able to redesign the chips.

That's one thing I wondered about when reading the original question. x86 CPUs and graphics chipsets weren't exactly modest when it came to power consumption. The A500, on the other hand, ran from what? A 2.5 Amps power supply? I thus thought that it would have been able to run an Amiga from 1990s battery technology.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

To make this possible, CBM would have needed to create CMOS variants of the custom chips. At least the 68K exists as a CMOS variant, but due to the brain-drain at MOS, nobody was probably able to redesign the chips.

CBM produced a CMOS version of the 6502, so they had the technology. Only problem is the custom chips were designed around NMOS and would need a lot of work to convert to CMOS, especially Paula. They didn't do it on desktop Amigas because there was no need to. However by 1992 they were using CMOS chips from HP and VLSI in AGA Amigas, and had the tools to get them into production in months rather then years.

They were also using TTL chips for 'glue' logic that could be changed to CMOS for more power reduction. The A1200 for example has four 74F245 bus tranceivers on the PCMCIA port that draw 75-110mA each when idle. Switching these to CMOS could save 0.3-0.4A @ 5V or 1.5-2 watts.

The CD32 power supply is rated at 17W. This is enough to power the motherboard, 2x speed CDROM and FMV cartridge etc.

I have a Toshiba T1800 laptop from 1991 that has a 386SX CPU, 2MB RAM, mono LCD and 40MB hard drive. No PCMCIA, no sound apart from PC speaker. The power supply's rated output is 18V @ 1.1A = 19.8W. This is only 10% less than the A600/1200 power supply which was rated for 22W output. According to the service manual the logic board, hard drive, floppy drive and LCD combined draw 2.7A @ 5V = 13.5W. The 12V NiMH battery is rated for 2.4Ah or 29Wh, for a theoretical running time of ~2 hours.

With a few changes a laptop Amiga could have been produced with similar power consumption to a contemporary PC laptop. The obvious machine to get this treatment would have been the A600, as it was compact and already had the PCMCIA slot and 2.5" hard drive. Perhaps that was part of the thinking behind its design.

Active matrix color LCDs started appearing in 1992. They were very expensive though. PC laptops with active matrix displays cost ~US$1000 more than those with a passive display. An Amiga laptop with all the stuff you would want for serious 'work' would be a similar price. A few of us might have bought one. One of my dreams back then was to have a laptop Amiga that I could take anywhere. Sit under a tree and enjoy coding in the open air on a nice summer's day!