What if Commodore had lasted one year longer?

[Adropac2]

I remember as the biggest fan thinking Commodore as a brand just didn't mean anything at that point. Even if the A1200 and 4000 had arrived with better hardware I think it would have only prolonged the inevitable. The lure of better games from new cutting edge consoles and ever expanding pc's meant Commodore couldn't realistically do anything. It's only option was to be a pc or a killer console but that was surely never even a thought. With that approach it was to be expected really

[Turrican_3]

Surprised to see a single mention of Hombre.

While I'm sure it would have been extremely difficult to compete with Sony (and Sega), who knows, maybe a proper, modern 3D-capable system might have helped the company stay afloat.

I also like what Matt_H said.

After all Mr. Pleasance claimed the buyout failed due to Petro convincing the big investor withdraw its financial backing. So perhaps a healthy C= UK could have been able to bid without resorting to significant, external financial help and bring the IPs home?

[duga]

Cd1200

[eXeler0]

In this alternate universe we could also think that if Commodore had better finances leading up to 1994 then maybe, *maybe* they would have engineered the CD32 a bit more future proof rather than the ”last roll off the dice” effort we got.
And that could have had some sligth impact on their position in the market. (yea Im talking about the CD32s ability to run titles that actually looked like 32bit and not ’maybe better than 16bit megadrive”.

[RetroPassionUK]

full time PC manufacture..

[PerryRhodan]

It's a shame that VGA graphics cards and sound blaster sound cards didn't come out sooner on PC, if they had most of the earlier PC games would have been so much better. Xenon 2 Megablast springs to mind, with better graphics, but the speaker sound and music is terrible. Also, most of the earlier arcade ports on PC were rubbish compared to the Amiga.

[Matt_H]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

As for hardware, the A1200 failed to deliver on the 18 months it had under Commodore, another 12 months wasn’t going to bring in more sales than the previous 12 did.

I don’t think that was a shortcoming of the 1200 design itself, but of Commodore marketing/management in the way the 1200 was sold. They confused the market by releasing the 600 and 1200 within months of each other. Then they couldn’t afford to build as many 1200s as they wanted. So I think the market potential of the 1200 was never reached. But one thing they definitely should have done was ship all 1200s with a hard drive and clock.

I think a healthy Commodore’s 1993-1994 product lineup should have been:
CD32 - for games
A1200HD - home computer and low-end workstation (with onboard RTC and socket for FPU)
A1201 - official Commodore RAM expansion for the 1200 (e.g., the CD1200 trapdoor card w/ 4MB SIMM but without the CD drive)
CD1200 - official CD-ROM solution for A1200
A4000 - mid-range productivity workstation
A4000T - high-end video production machine
CD4000 - official CD-ROM solution for A4000 on Zorro III w/ SIMM slots

Game developers abandoned the Amiga for both market and technical reasons, but the technical reasons were because of 3 assumptions: that Amigas didn’t have hard drives, that Amigas didn’t have RAM, and that Amigas didn’t have CD drives. Obviously this was nonsense, but Commodore never really addressed any of these directly, leaving them to third parties with much smaller distribution and sales networks and thus perpetuating the myth of the Amiga’s lack of capability. This hypothetical product line speaks to those issues while unifying development around AGA and Akiko. The downside is that it might have precluded the development of A1200 CPU accelerators (“That’s where my CD drive connects!”). But I think it would have sustained the Amiga ecosystem through the bankruptcy and long enough for AAA and post-AAA systems to arrive.

[TEG]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

In this alternate universe we could also think that if Commodore had better finances leading up to 1994 then maybe, *maybe* they would have engineered the CD32 a bit more future proof rather than the ”last roll off the dice” effort we got.
And that could have had some sligth impact on their position in the market. (yea Im talking about the CD32s ability to run titles that actually looked like 32bit and not ’maybe better than 16bit megadrive”.

Yeah, a true c2p chip for example.


And I wonder, does anyone know if small 3D capacity would have been possible to add to the Amiga architecture? (matrix multiplier for example). I don't know if the 68881 is good/optimal for this kind of job.

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by TEG

Yeah, a true c2p chip for example.

Quite pointless, because it supports a quite outdated planar graphics system. A true "chunky graphics system", for example. Oh... wait.... we had that back then already, in the form of third-party extensions. Just not from CBM. It did not make the platform survive.

Originally Posted by TEG

And I wonder, does anyone know if small 3D capacity would have been possible to add to the Amiga architecture?

Guess what, we also had that. As third party extension. Ok, the CVision3D with its S3Virge chip is not really a 3D monster, but certainly, there was hardware. Just not by CBM.

[PerryRhodan]

The Sharp X68000 was an excellent computer and would have been a worthy challenger against both the Amiga and the earlier PC computers for best games machine. It's a shame it wasn't popular outside of Japan. It has some excellent shoot'em ups and platform games like Ghouls 'n' Ghosts, and in my opinion the best version of Xenon 2.

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[TEG]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

Quite pointless, because it supports a quite outdated planar graphics system. A true "chunky graphics system", for example. Oh... wait.... we had that back then already, in the form of third-party extensions. Just not from CBM. It did not make the platform survive.

RTG?

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

Guess what, we also had that. As third party extension. Ok, the CVision3D with its S3Virge chip is not really a 3D monster, but certainly, there was hardware. Just not by CBM.

Thx for the suggestion, I was not award of this product. Reference is here. Would be interesting to know if the S3 Virge chip alone would be "easily" integrated directly in the Amiga architecture which is very specific. I've some doubts.

Do you know if the S3 Virge was developed by Phase 5 or was a chip coming from the PC world?
[edit] I answer myself: it come from the PC world (S3 Graphics, Ltd)


In any case I was talking about CD32 embed capacities.

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

Guess what, we also had that. As third party extension. Ok, the CVision3D with its S3Virge chip is not really a 3D monster, but certainly, there was hardware. Just not by CBM.

AFAIK the S3 verge chip was launched in 1995, but I think products using it arrived more like in 1996 so in this alternate timeline it wouldn't have helped a lot. ;-)

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by TEG

Yeah, a true c2p chip for example.


And I wonder, does anyone know if small 3D capacity would have been possible to add to the Amiga architecture? (matrix multiplier for example). I don't know if the 68881 is good/optimal for this kind of job.

You can ask Dave Haynie about the DSP they wanted to use in the A3000+
In some alternate universe, the AGA machines, e.g. the CD32 would have had an 030 and that AT&T 3210 DSP for sound and some math calculations. (I mean, at least this is a piece of hardware Commodore were actually looking at in the early 90s). With fast mem and chunky pixel mode it would have rivaled the Saturn at least. But conversions would not be easy. It would be like that crazy quake port/rewrite for the saturn. Most probably wouldn't bother trying to maximize the DSPs full performance.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

AFAIK the S3 verge chip was launched in 1995, but I think products using it arrived more like in 1996 so in this alternate timeline it wouldn't have helped a lot. ;-)

Every time I see that name I shudder, remembering unsatisfactory 3D performance.

But I only wanted 3D for one game - Tomb Raider. I got a Voodoo card for the PC and while it did accelerated 3D graphics well, it was a pain to set up and use (it only did 3D, so you had to pass the video from your VGA card though it with a cable, and if the voodoo card hung you had no video).

So I did the obvious thing - I bought a Sony PlayStation. That way I could swap discs with my brother, and we took turns purchasing every other Tomb Raider game that came out. Goodbye PC gaming!

But what if Tomb Raider had been released for a 3D equipped CD32? I and my brother might have bought Amigas instead of PlayStations. I wasn't impressed by other PlayStation games, preferring adventure and strategy games to the cutesy 3D games with unrealistic graphics and shallow gameplay that proliferated on the PlayStation. IOW, I wanted more of the stuff we ere already getting on the Amiga. But those games dried up partly because they had to be distributed on 15+ floppy disks - because Amigas didn't have CDROM drives.

Commodore did the right thing with the CD32 - it was the only way they were going to make it in a market otherwise dominated by PCs. But they didn't figure that out until too late, and Sony filled the gap with the PlayStation. The A1200/CD32 could have been Commodore's true successor to the C64. But they listened too much to fans who wanted the Amiga to compete head-to-head with PCs, a fight it was bound to lose.

A games console could get away with not being a PC, but a personal computer couldn't. I kept up the fight with my A3000 until the new millennium, when I finally had to concede because it could no longer do what I needed. You remember those days, right? "This site best viewed with Netscape Navigator", people sending you Microsoft office documents, GDI printers that wouldn't work on the Amiga etc. It all became too much, so I sold my A3000 because even though it had the processing power it didn't have the compatibility.

Imagine if the Amiga had continued not as a wannabe PC, but primarily as a game playing and development platform, with an emphasis on user participation like older home computers did? Imagine if development information and tools continued to be made available to users at very low cost or free, encouraging innovative game design rather than the PC's endless variations of the same tired formula costing millions to produce? Imagine a hardware platform so well defined that coders could continue to enjoy 'banging the metal' for better performance without the price? This is what home computing was all about.

Computer manufacturers thought we wanted word processors and spreadsheets and accounting programs, but we didn't want that stuff at all. We wanted to have fun and be entertained and challenge our minds and be creative - not run a business! The Amiga was all that, and it still is. Imagine what position it might be in today if Commodore had realized that a little earlier - or if they had lasted a little longer.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

As for hardware, the A1200 failed to deliver on the 18 months it had under Commodore, another 12 months wasn’t going to bring in more sales than the previous 12 did.

I remember Commodore failing to deliver... enough A1200s to meet demand. I could have sold at least twice as many if only they could have supplied them.

The CD32 would have bombed in the states, Commodore once again were misreading the market over there, should have chucked those units at the UK and Germany and maybe without the lawsuit we would have had those extra 12 months.

Like Sega with their Mega-CD?

By the end of 1993, sales of the Sega CD had stalled in Japan and were slowing in North America. In Europe, sales of Mega-CD games were outpaced by games for the Amiga CD32. Newer CD-based consoles such as the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer rendered the Sega CD technically obsolete, reducing public interest. In late 1993, less than a year after the Sega CD had launched in North America and Europe, the media reported that Sega was no longer accepting in-house development proposals for the Mega-CD in Japan. By 1994, 1.5 million units had been sold in the United States and 415,000 in Western Europe. Kalinske blamed the Sega CD's high price for limiting its potential market;

[Arne]

Hmm, I guess if Commodore had funds to keep afloat a year longer (resulting in some economy of scale price drops for the AGA architecture?), I think we would have also seen a few notable software developers staying onboard a bit longer making what they could out of AGA. More users might've had machines with a HDD, possibly a modem, maybe an accelerator later down the line (as it were, I only knew a few people with any of these). Perhaps the CD32 joypad would've become more of a standard, which might have helped late games. If people had adopted monitors, this would've affected the productivity software side.

At least I think we would've seen an AGA version of AMOS. Eventual ports of older PC titles for the A1200 and CD32 (Star Control II?). Certainly additional awkward Raycasting shooter games. Perhaps a good/classic exclusive title but probably not a "killer-app".

A hardware company might've looked at the larger userbase and attempted something I guess, probably too expensive and quickly outpaced. I think there were just too many ways to fail with hardware projects during this era and you only had one or two shots due to the cost.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Like Sega with their Mega-CD?

The US was Sega’s biggest market. Europe was the Amiga’s biggest market, big difference trying to sell CD systems at that point in time.

The Amiga game wise had already died in the States by 90/91, trying to release a gaming only Amiga CD system in the US was commercial suicide, but we all knew Commodore were long past thinking straight.

Like Hombre, they planned a CD64 for late 1995 directly in line for collision with the PSX in the West. The only chance for Commodore to survive at that point with decent hardware was a Hombre based computer to survive through a niche channel like the Mac at the opposite end of the scale not a console which were always side projects to their computer business.

[dreadnought]

You got to love these threads for some of the bravado on display. Sega was an experienced gaming giant, had a headstart on PSX & some killer games and yet utterly failed to beat it. Nintendo tried a bit later with superior hardware and world-beating franchises, and has also fallen flat.

But here comes Commodore, with zero 1st party titles and only wishful thinking about the 3rd, a console cobbled together from some random ideas and parts, and no money in the bank for some sort of promotion, and totally wins the day, thus saving the brand forever.

It makes for an amazing Hollywood movie script, but only that, I'm afraid.

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by TEG

RTG?

Obviously.

Originally Posted by TEG

Would be interesting to know if the S3 Virge chip alone would be "easily" integrated directly in the Amiga architecture which is very specific. I've some doubts.

I beg your pardon, but it *was* integrated into the Amiga architecture. You could buy cards with an S3 on it, along with software that drives it, and 3D software that uses its features.

Originally Posted by TEG

Do you know if the S3 Virge was developed by Phase 5 or was a chip coming from the PC world?

The S3 Virge was, of course, coming from S3. The "only" thing P5 did was to add some glue logic to access it from Zorro, and to provide software to drive it.

Originally Posted by TEG

In any case I was talking about CD32 embed capacities.

Why does it make a difference whether a chip is soldered on the mother board or plugged into the system as a Zorro expansion board?

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Every time I see that name I shudder, remembering unsatisfactory 3D performance.

Of course. The S3 was a "3D decelerator", as some people called it. But it was one of the earliest chips to the market that delivered 3D, was cheap to get and had some software support as well. So don't be quite so critical about this poor tiny chip...


Would it have helped? Of course not. I'm just trying to disprove the point of "a C2P chip would have made the difference" (it wouldn't, because it is quite unnecessary with sane graphics architecture, which was available off the shelf), and "3D would have made a difference" (it wouldn't, because it was available, and it didn't).


The whole point is: At this point, it was far too late already. There was no new technology coming for years except some minor evolutionary improvements, and those didn't make a change, and the customers haven't had sufficient money to support an RD department that could have made a difference.