The Commodore Time machine Thread.

[turrican3]

I would say to commodore to buy the best companies games like psygnosis, bullfrog, ect and to work hard on a chipset 3d and to don't launch cdtv or Amiga 600, 500+ but launch the 1200 with Cd-Rom+bus pci and let the Chinese company clone the amiga 1200.+ or - in 1990

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by Graham Humphrey

Don't release the 500+ and 600 within six months of each other! Madness. Should have released only one or the other. Then the 4000 and 1200 followed a few months later, releasing so many machines so quickly was bonkers.

Madness ??? THIIISS ISSS AMMIIGAAAAA !!!!!!

[FromWithin]

Well, well. Look who I found. He certainly "accomplished a major operational turnaround", but it doesn't say in which direction: from going up to going down.

[PaulyQ]

My take on this....

the A500 & A1200 where fantastic machines with a great user base, to expand upon this they should really have looked at the expandability of the aforementioned items. The ability to add a gfx card or sound card may have made all the difference.... especially if they tied that in with software publishers that would have made use of the hardware. To be fair a lot of this all came a little to late.

With the CD32 it really needed a killer title to launch it, but in the Playstation days that would have been difficult. The problem with C= was that they wanted complete control of their products from within(however badly managed it was) and didn't particularly seek out the correct 3rd party developers/partners for the time.

So in hindsight.....

Design the A1200 & A500/600 so that it was infinitely more expandable ... kludges galore where the order of the day to expand the machines (1 slot on the A1200 was just not enough and plonking a 68020 directly on top of a 68000 on the A600 with extra memory was a bit cack IMHO)

Tie the CD32 into a major marketing deal with a well known hardware manufacturer where the cost of the machine was low and the money was made on the software.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

[Carcenomy]

1. Never release the A500+, release the A600 earlier
2. Never enter the PC market... concentrate on the core business, not PCs that were even less expandable than the average A500 (see Commodore PC10)
3. Produce more CD32s for the christmas period
4. Finish the C65 and get it into production
5. Offer a step up on the 1200 in the compact machine segment - perhaps an 'A1800', with an '040 and integral CDROM drive perhaps?
6. Offer a PORTABLE AMIGA. Commodore had notebook technology, why didn't they use it fully? LCDs at the time could handle enough colours for the Amiga's video output...

I could go on, but all this thinking of how they could have done things better makes me cross.

[PaulyQ]

I SAID:With the CD32 it really needed a killer title to launch it, but in the Playstation days that would have been difficult. The problem with C= was that they wanted complete control of their products from within(however badly managed it was) and didn't particularly seek out the correct 3rd party developers/partners for the time.

Just looking at my half drunken rant there....... erm.... did they EVER pick the correct partners - look a the hoo hah going on at the moment!!

[potis21]

1985 - Open source the hardware, keep the Workbench, clearly document Custom chips and DMA bus, sell licenses

1990 - no A3000, but A3500 (030 processor, AA architecture deployed as modular (one card per custom chip (paula, Alice, Lisa), 32-bit addressing globally, 48 bit Data bus). Chip ram deployed on graphics module, Fast deployed near the processor (directly interoperating with it). Standard 36-pin memory. HW scanconverter embedded, MMU. Hard disk (SCSI)
Licensing of clones, revenues from SW licensing goes to development and leave margin for profit

Deployment of mpeg decoder, as a card (added as a daughterboard on Lisa board) Scalable video window - Output via the 23pin RGB - HW broadcast ready machine.

1993 - no 1200, more like 1700 - Boxed, using standard PC keyboard, PAL - NTSC video output w.HW scanconverter embedded (VGA capable) 040 - 060 upgradable and truly card-by-card compatible with A3500, MMU
Aquiring shares up to 33% of motorola, investing on further deployment of 68K architecture, added RISC extensions, providing (limited though) support for existing machines via accelerators and ROM upgrades on low cost (in return for the old rom - promotional)

1995 - A5000 - 68060 @75, AAAchipset 3D api implemented, Card-by-card compatible with previous desings, option to use AA instead of AAA for limited cost machine, modular OS and backwards compatibility in mind, invest on expanding multitasking abilities, CD - ROM and multimedia (as always), hw MPEG decoder implemented as CustomChip card, 16 bit audio,44.1 native,stereo - multiple buffers - declaration of supporting the new under development DVD format, native UDF support, mpeg2 HW decoder, option for encoder.

[FastRobPlus]

1983 - Sell Amiga to Franklin.

Problems solved.