What if Commodore had lasted one year longer?

[khph_re]

If they survived for another year, then I guess they have some cash to get the CD32 into the U.S.

I guess the last Harrah would be an A1200 with fast ram, perhaps a price cut on the A600. If funds permitted the CD1200 add on.

They would still be gone by the next year or two I think.

[PortuguesePilot]

There's another thing we're forgetting here. We have already established that in the console front Commodore (like basically all the other ones) stood no chance against the might of Sony and their absolute winner, the Playstation so the console path (while it did seem to make some sense at the time, as the Amiga was recognized primarily as a game's machine here in Europe) was doomed by exterior conditions right from the get-go. Even if the CD32 was twice the machine it was (and given Commodore's financial and managerial state, it could never have been anything other than what it ended up being) it would have still failed. Look at more powerful machines and their fate: Atari Jaguar, Panasonic 3DO, SEGA Saturn, FM-Towns Marty (in Japan), NEC PC-FX (also in Japan), etc... They were ALL a lot better than the CD32 (which was basically revamped 1985 technology, literally) and they all headed the way of the dodo in the end. The CD32 stood absolutely no chance whatsoever. An extra year for Commodore would mean nothing in this regard. We're dealing here with hard reality and actual historic data and not with unrealistic and wishful "what if" scenarios that some posters seem to be unable to put aside.

So what about the computer side of things? We already discusses in some other thread that the Amiga fell too far from the PC's after Intel released the seminal 80486DX processor. If the Amiga was somewhat competitive with the 286/386SX (with the A500/A3000) and even competitive with the 386DX (with the A1200/A4000), the advancement in processing power of the 486DX chip and the advent of 3D acceleration (mainly of 3dfx) made any existing Amiga machine absolutely redundant. A 486 chip with 4MB of RAM (typical PC sold for home use in 1994) ran Doom fluently and was able to run other games (Terminal Velocity, BioForge, Screamer, etc) that the Amiga simply could NOT. The 3dfx cards brought 3D graphics that were even better than those of the Playstation (!!!) and began - AT THAT TIME - the idea that would turn into the whole "PC gaming master race" meme that still appears here and there on occasion. And that important thing that I mentioned above and that we were forgetting was THE INTERNET. The start of the World Wide Web as we know it today. The Amiga was a subpar machine for that, most Amiga models were not internet-ready and in the end were obsolete for was to become the mainstream. Hell, even today people still say "but will it run Doom?" as a sort of benchmark to niche hardware - even pregnancy tests! - and, as we all know, the Amiga - as a standard 500 or 1200 - does NOT run Doom. This should tell you a thing or two...

In short, the Amiga - and Commodore, by arrest - stood no chance whatsoever in the computer realm as well. It was just too dépassé. In a time and period where computing power and innovation seemed to make quantum leaps every 6 month period or so, the Amiga (basically a decade's old design) stood no chance at all. Believing otherwise is nothing more than naïve wishful thinking. Commodore was broke and had absolutely no means to do anything more than what they ended up doing and, in a strange way, the mere fact that they stood afloat until such a late date is just a testament of the Amiga's brilliance at its launch.

Even Escom and Gateway, when they bought the Amiga, they were just after the name - which still had some pull in the market, especially in Europe - and not the by then obsolete technology. If either brand would have prevailed and survived, they more than probably would have used the Amiga brand to promote gaming-set 'wintel' PC clones similar to those we would later see with Alienware, OMEN or ROG. And it wouldn't have been a bad thing, looking back... the Amiga we had known and loved so much was the hardware standard, was OCS and AGA coupled with a Motorola 680x0 processor. And that standard, by 1995, was obsolete and utterly surpassed. The future was Sony (consoles) and Microsoft/Intel. There was just no other way around it. It's why what happened, happened.

So, yet again, an extra year for Commodore would amount to absolutely nothing at all.

[grond]

Since the technology wasn't able to compete with the PC hardware exlposion, the only thing that could have saved the Amiga as a cheap all-in-one home computer would have been file format compatibility for Office stuff and, obviously, that wouldn't happen because it was Microsoft's biggest driving force in the market and they kept their file formats closed as long as they could to kill all competition.

[jbenam]

@PortuguesePilot
Very good points.

Yet again I have to reiterate that the right question to ask is not "what if Commodore did this in 1994" but "what if Commodore did this in 1985/1986". You would need YEARS of advantage if you wanted to stand a chance in 1995's market. Technical advantage that Commodore had in 1985 and then totally wasted.

Commodore needed to keep the pressure up and keep improving the Amiga. If Jay Miner's Ranger came out in 1986, you could've expected some form of advanced 3D by 1994, which would avoid having the Amiga slaughtered by the PlayStation in this alternate timeline. Maybe the PS1 would still have the technical edge, but at least the Amiga could have had a chance. Chance that neither a CD1200 with FastRAM or another fantastical Amiga, had.

In the end, it was Commodore ineptitude and stinginess that killed the Amiga. Everything else kept leaping forward at a breakneck pace (remember where the PC was in 1985, literally 4 colours and stick figures, and where it was in 1994) while Amiga stood still.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by PortuguesePilot

There's another thing we're forgetting here. We have already established that in the console front Commodore (like basically all the other ones) stood no chance against the might of Sony and their absolute winner, the Playstation

I disagree. Commodore had a chance to hold the middle ground between dedicated gaming consoles (cheap to buy, expensive to feed, impossible to do any more than play games on), and PCs which were powerful but harder to use and more expensive to buy and feed. IOW, Commodore could have kept the home computer market alive.

(and given Commodore's financial and managerial state, it could never have been anything other than what it ended up being) it would have still failed.

Given that everything was exactly as it was you are right, but this thread is about how different it could have been if Commodore had lasted another year. Implicit in this speculation is the presumption that their financial and managerial state was not as bad as it was.

Look at more powerful machines and their fate: Atari Jaguar, Panasonic 3DO, SEGA Saturn, FM-Towns Marty (in Japan), NEC PC-FX (also in Japan), etc... They were ALL a lot better than the CD32 (which was basically revamped 1985 technology, literally) and they all headed the way of the dodo in the end. The CD32 stood absolutely no chance whatsoever.

Most of those machines failed because they never became popular anywhere but in Japan, and/or were dedicated machines with closed architectures that made them uninteresting to hobbyists. I have never seen an Atari Jaguar, a Panasonic 3DO, a SEGA Saturn, FM-Towns, or PC-FX - but I have seen and owned CD32s (oh how I wish I still had them now!).

You say the CD32 was 'literally' 1985 technology, but this is simply not true. In fact it's worse that that - it is a lie. But this is the kind of self-loathing deprecation that Amiga fans constantly engage in - always putting the Amiga down while holding up other platforms as being better in every way. Why do you keep doing it?

Your argument against the CD32 for having '1985' Amiga technology is backwards - this was an asset, not a liability. What sunk other gaming consoles was that they were not building on a legacy, and didn't share any compatibility with other popular platforms. When you bought a Jaguar or 3DO or Saturn etc, all you effectively got was the dongle needed to run your games. The machine itself was totally useless and uninteresting. If you wanted to try your hand at making games for it, you had to buy an expensive development system, sign NDAs and commit to a schedule - assuming the manufacturer deemed you worthy. So of course these machines garnered no interest outside of unthinking gamers who just wanted something to insert their cartridge or CD into.

There's no way I would have even considered becoming a console developer, not only due to the onerous condition I would be straightjacketed by but also because I had considerable knowledge and experience on a far more flexible and exciting platform - the Amiga. The CD32 was easy to develop for because I already knew the architecture and porting my code to it was a doddle. Had Commodore survived for another year and continued to sell the CD32 I might even have made money from it.

The CD32 was also far more useful than some exotic console. Hook up a keyboard and mouse and you almost have an A1200 with CD drive. Build a cheap floppy drive interface and you have the most compact AGA Amiga computer ever. Put all your favorite games on a CD, use the floppy for save-games etc., even network to other computers or get on the Web through the serial port. A big part of the CD32's reason for existence was to keep the Amiga computer platform alive.

No doubt there will now be a pile-on of Amiga fans excoriating me for believing in a fantasy, but to those nihilists I say - why did Microsoft produce the Xbox? And why did they put PC technology in it?

Originally Posted by Wikipedia

The Xbox had a record-breaking launch in North America, selling 1.5 million units before the end of 2001, aided by the popularity of one of the system's launch titles, Halo: Combat Evolved, which sold a million units by April 2002. The system went on to sell a worldwide total of 24 million units, including 16 million in North America; however, Microsoft was unable to make a steady profit off the console, which had a manufacturing price far more expensive than its retail price, despite its popularity, losing over $4 billion during its market life. The system outsold the GameCube and the Sega Dreamcast, but was vastly outsold by the PlayStation 2, which had sold over 100 million units by the system's discontinuation in 2005. It also underperformed outside of the Western market; particularly, it sold poorly in Japan due to its large console size and an overabundance of games marketed towards American audiences instead of Japanese-developed titles.

It wasn't to make money, not to beat the PlayStation or to crack the Japanese market. No, Microsoft produced the Xbox to ensure continuation of the PC as a gaming platform. The Xbox's successor, the XBox 360, was the sixth-highest-selling home video game console in history, and the highest-selling console made by an American company.

Originally Posted by Wikipedia

The Xbox 360 sold much better than its predecessor, and although not the best-selling console of the seventh generation, it is regarded as a success since it strengthened Microsoft as a major force in the console market at the expense of well-established rivals...

The Xbox 360's advantage over its competitors was due to the release of high-profile games from both first party and third-party developers... Xbox 360 versions of cross-platform games were generally considered superior to their PS3 counterparts in 2006 and 2007, due in part to the difficulties of programming for the PS3

An extra year for Commodore would mean nothing in this regard. We're dealing here with hard reality and actual historic data and not with unrealistic and wishful "what if" scenarios that some posters seem to be unable to put aside.

Any scenario that isn't exactly what actually happened is 'unrealistic' in one way or another. But "what if's" are exactly what this thread is about. Why should we be constrained by your 'absolutely nothing at all was different except for Commodore lasting another year' scenario?

So what about the computer side of things? We already discusses in some other thread that the Amiga fell too far from the PC's after Intel released the seminal 80486DX processor. If the Amiga was somewhat competitive with the 286/386SX (with the A500/A3000) and even competitive with the 386DX (with the A1200/A4000), the advancement in processing power of the 486DX chip and the advent of 3D acceleration (mainly of 3dfx) made any existing Amiga machine absolutely redundant....

Blah blah Amiga blah blah blah PC. We could rehash it here but it's off-topic. No 486 PC of the time competed in the same slot as the A1200 and CD32. Had Commodore understood that they might have marketed it better, but most people were obsessed with the notion of competing head-to-head against the PC. This wasn't going work - a fact that became obvious shortly after the original PC was released. Amiga made its mark by finding a different niche to occupy - which is still here today in 'hobby' and 'retro-computing'.

Look at any industry and you will see a similar story. People talk about having the freedom to chose, but they invariably chose the same as everyone else because that's the 'safe' option. IBM capitalized on the 'Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM' mantra. Clone manufactures instantly saw how it was going, then caused it to happen. At one time there were hundreds of manufacturers jumping on the PC bandwagon, including many famous names with other platforms. Now only a few players are left, with Microsoft as the gatekeeper (forget Linux with its miserable 2% share). Apple managed to scrape through the 90's with Microsoft's help - now they have 16% of the desktop market, a distance second. So there could be no room for the Amiga - no matter how good its hardware and OS - as a competitor to the PC.

But a manufacturer could still do well by cultivating a niche market. That's where the Amiga should have been - in the gap between mindless consoles and expensive PCs. But it wasn't going to compete by being as powerful as and cheaper than both, because in the end equivalent hardware costs the same no matter which architecture you choose. So Amiga fans who complain about Commodore's 'incompetence' in not producing an Amiga with the power of a 486 PC for the price of an A1200 simply don't understand economics, or the fact that it wasn't about hardware anyway, it was about compatibility.

On launch the A4000-040 cost the same as a similarly specced name brand 486 PC, and could have run Doom well if an optimized Amiga version had been produced. But nobody in the PC world was interested in porting their stuff to a different platform with a tiny userbase. The Amiga wasn't going to make any impact in that market. The A1200 sold well because it was in a different niche that the PC couldn't fill. Similarly with the CD32 - which everyone knew was a cut down A1200 with a CDROM drive.

"But that niche disappeared", you say. "PCs got so cheap that there was no market for something less powerful!". Yet here we are today with people buying Raspberry Pis (over 30 million sold by 2019) and even producing enhanced clones of retro computers like the ZX Spectrum and MSX. Turns out the niche wasn't gone, it was just unoccupied.

[grond]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

why did Microsoft produce the Xbox? And why did they put PC technology in it?

It wasn't to make money, not to beat the PlayStation or to crack the Japanese market. No, Microsoft produced the Xbox to ensure continuation of the PC as a gaming platform.

Bruce, thanks for this explanation. I haven't got a lot of interest in neither PC technology nor consoles so perhaps the idea you expressed above may have been obvious to many but it had never occured to me and I have to agree with you: it was not so much "MS Office" which put Windows-PCs in every home, it was gaming. If it hadn't been for occasional gaming during the covid plight, I would still be using my 2006 (?) Core 2 Duo that was thrown out of a friend's office many years ago. It sure was still good enough for my office use.

With less money wasted on non-sensical projects such as the C65 or the A600, more A1200 and CD32s could have been produced and sold at profit. Then perhaps Commodore would have lasted until the Playstation 1 made its debut and everyboy went into the 3D frenzy (roughly the one year outlined above). Commodore couldn't have had any 3D technology ready in time to compete with the Playstation in the gaming market and certainly didn't stand any chance in the productivity computing market either.

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

No doubt there will now be a pile-on of Amiga fans excoriating me for believing in a fantasy, but to those nihilists I say - why did Microsoft produce the Xbox? And why did they put PC technology in it?

It wasn't to make money, not to beat the PlayStation or to crack the Japanese market. No, Microsoft produced the Xbox to ensure continuation of the PC as a gaming platform.

Of all your bizarre rationalizations this one really stands out in this thread. Sure, MS cared so much about PC as a gaming platform that it made one of the most eagerly awaited PC games an Xbox exclusive for many years/sequels. That's some grand support strategy right there. And what followed was no better, since PC gamers had endure years of lousy ports, delayed (or no) exclusives, and hare brained MS schemes, such as Games for Windows Live.



Xbox was always meant as a competition to Japanese dominance in the console sphere, and consoles and (micro) computers were always separate fields. Despite no big help from MS PC gaming was doing just fine anyway, only in the recent years MS finally started righting the old wrongs with one unified release platform.


@grond: PC had dominated the market share well before PC gaming seriously took off in the early Nineties and didn't need the gaming to expand even further, thanks to the necessity for Internet access and also work-to-home software standards. Not that it harmed that expansion, of course, but it certainly wasn't a one key factor.

[Matt_H]

Originally Posted by Matt_H

The downside [of the CD1200] 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.

Just saw elsewhere in this thread that the CD1200 might have shipped with an 030 socket. That definitely would have been enough to sustain the platform until new systems arrived.


I'm seeing a lot of talk about how even if Commodore lasted another year the Amiga inevitably would have been slaughtered by the PlayStation. First of all, in this hypothetical timeline, Commodore goes bust in April 1995. But recall that PlayStation doesn't launch until the end of the year, doesn't break out of niche status until mid 1996, and doesn't become the presumptive 32-bit platform until early 1997.



In reality, during that same period - and beyond - there were still multiple Amiga magazines from mainstream publishers, and brick-and-mortar shops in Europe still carried at least some Amiga products. So despite Amiga/CD32 being perhaps technologically uncompetitive to the PlayStation's 3D performance there was still very much a mainstream Amiga market, though dwindling due to Escom and Gateway mismanagement.


So if Commodore had a whole additional year to establish a foothold for both games and productivity, imagine what the picture would look like. I think it would look a lot like what I described in my first two posts. Out of bankruptcy in time for the Christmas 1996 season, possibly with AAA machines, and an existing userbase with RAM, hard drives, and CD drives - a viable market for software with lots of graphics and audio.


Game changer.

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by Matt_H

Just saw elsewhere in this thread that the CD1200 might have shipped with an 030 socket. That definitely would have been enough to sustain the platform until new systems arrived.

Most likely not. We still have users in this forum who haven't upgraded 1200s to 030. ;-) So I doubt the numbers would had been anywhere near enough back then. CD1200 with 030 would have been sold for probably £300?
Also, in hindsight, we know Commodore didn't have much left to spend on the CD32 so its built from part already in the inventory.. (old stock rebranded C65 PSU) same chipset as A1200, akiko was a necessity obviously for the cd controller, same shitty 020 CPU.
Any changes to that spec would have meant C< needed to spend actual money on new stuff they didn't have in stock..
For the 030 CD1200 to really make sense.. the CD32 should have been based around a 030 + fast-mem or it just creates a divide.. Do you develop games for the CD1200 with 030 that run slow as hell on cd32? or do you create games for the cd32 as it was and get no benefit (in games) from the 030 you bought for your CD1200.
As neat as the CD1200 prototype looks, I dont think it would have made a noticeable difference.

[turrican3]

Originally Posted by Estrayk

There was nothing to do against clone pc's.
Silicon Graphics, Acorn (computer series), Atari, Commodore, Sharp (X68000), Fujitsu (PCx9xx), Tandy, Amstrad.......... they all fell


The Macs did not fall by a miracle.

the mac felt ... Bill gates saved it.

[TEG]

Originally Posted by PortuguesePilot

Look at more powerful machines and their fate: Atari Jaguar, Panasonic 3DO, SEGA Saturn, FM-Towns Marty (in Japan), NEC PC-FX (also in Japan), etc... They were ALL a lot better than the CD32 (which was basically revamped 1985 technology, literally) and they all headed the way of the dodo in the end.

Honestly the Jaguar and the 3DO were just... crap. I mean the rendering on the screen was not appealing, and the first games were disastrous. I remembered myself when I saw Cybermorph (Jaguar) and then Crash 'n Burn (3Do), it was so ugly! So I waited before buying as I thought my Amiga was still better and so... I never bought one of those.

Later came the Saturn, the rendering was OK but a bit under the Playstation. And Tekken was so enjoyable and then Ridge Racer.

So I think there's a soft underbelly of the 3D rendering and it's not all about power. I prefer Amiga blitter 3D than the Jag/3DO one. Perhaps an Amiga with real 3D capacity would have provide a rendering we never witnessed. I mean a specific and enjoyable one, even if it would not have been the best one. Something on its own as it did with its specific sound and HAM mode. And perhaps it would have been enough to make it survive.

There was some magic in this machine.

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by TEG

Honestly the Jaguar and the 3DO were just... crap. I mean the rendering on the screen was not appealing, and the first games were disastrous. I remembered myself when I saw Cybermorph (Jaguar) and then Crash 'n Burn (3Do), it was so ugly! So I waited before buying as I thought my Amiga was still better and so... I never bought one of those.

Later came the Saturn, the rendering was OK but a bit under the Playstation. And Tekken was so enjoyable and then Ridge Racer.

So I think there's a soft underbelly of the 3D rendering and it's not all about power. I prefer Amiga blitter 3D than the Jag/3DO one. Perhaps an Amiga with real 3D capacity would have provide a rendering we never witnessed. I mean a specific and enjoyable one, even if it would not have been the best one. Something on its own as it did with its specific sound and HAM mode. And perhaps it would have been enough to make it survive.

There was some magic in this machine.

I vividly remember the first time I saw both Jag and 3do in same shop. Alien vs Predator was pretty good on the Jag but it largely suffered from lazy ports much like the cd32. The full power of the Jag was never really used during its life cycle.
As for the 3do.. well, man do you remember the price of that thing. At least the Jag was very fairly priced.. I think the 3d0 was something like 2,5x that. I'm actually surprised it sold as well as it did. (Not great but honestly, considering the price, not terrible).
By then the CD32 already felt pretty sad because it was so obvious it was still in the 16bit era style of games, while all the new consoles were showing of 3d or at least decent 2.5d.

[TEG]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

The full power of the Jag was never really used during its life cycle.

The Jaguar was a pain in the ass to be programmed. The hard was buggy, too complicated and there was no real support or knowledge from Atari, I mean about how to program it.

The Saturn with these too processors was apparently not easy to program too and so it contributed to its failure. I don't know for the 3DO.

At the opposite the PSX had a good development kit.

So at the end I fear that a 3D Amiga would have face the same problem as the Jag, too complicated. But there was a community behind the Amiga. So perhaps it would have been different.

[Matt_H]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

Most likely not. We still have users in this forum who haven't upgraded 1200s to 030. ;-) So I doubt the numbers would had been anywhere near enough back then. CD1200 with 030 would have been sold for probably £300?

The way I imagine it in my hypothetical scenario, the 030 would have been a future upgrade. It's the fact that the socket is on the CD1200 trapdoor card that makes it viable - a known and easy way to get more horsepower on an "official" board that retailers are already familiar with and that users already have. Just pop in a chip.

Also, in hindsight, we know Commodore didn't have much left to spend on the CD32 so its built from part already in the inventory.. (old stock rebranded C65 PSU) same chipset as A1200, akiko was a necessity obviously for the cd controller, same shitty 020 CPU.
Any changes to that spec would have meant C< needed to spend actual money on new stuff they didn't have in stock..

Sure, Commodore was notoriously cheap, but why bother manufacturing new PSUs when you have a bunch on hand? The architecture for the CD32 was fine for what it was in late 1993. In the UK, it was outselling Sega and PC CD-ROM at the time Commodore went under, so if Commodore lasted another year that trend would have continued a while longer and created a viable userbase and market for developers to continue releasing titles.

For the 030 CD1200 to really make sense.. the CD32 should have been based around a 030 + fast-mem or it just creates a divide.. Do you develop games for the CD1200 with 030 that run slow as hell on cd32? or do you create games for the cd32 as it was and get no benefit (in games) from the 030 you bought for your CD1200.

I think the solution here would have been for hypothetical Commodore to release something like the SX-32 as their last product in early 1995. There's the CD1200 to turn a 1200 into a CD32, so there should be an equivalent product to turn a CD32 into a 1200 (hard drive, ports, floppy drive, 030/FPU sockets, SIMM slot. Scala and other third parties built embedded kiosk systems out of CD32s and SX-1s, so a more elegant solution could have sold to that market and to users looking for an upgrade. As to the different development targets (030/RAM vs 020), don't the current generation PlayStations and XBoxes have basic and more powerful configurations? Those platforms don't seem fractured. Same thing with this imaginary scenario.

As neat as the CD1200 prototype looks, I dont think it would have made a noticeable difference.

Maybe, but the computer press was going absolutely bananas for CD-ROM in 1994. If Commodore had an official answer to that market demand I think it would have confirmed the Amiga as a real and viable competitor.

[Galahad/FLT]

Personally, I think Commodore were going down no matter what, that they might have lasted another year is only a brief respite.

The problem as I saw it is that to those of us that were already Amiga owners, buying an A1200 or maybe even a CD32 was a very real possibility, but for those that never owned an Amiga, it was a tall order expecting them to embrace the CD32 over other consoles.

Yes I think the CD32 could have continued for another year, and certainly software companies were keen to support it, but few of them were keen to REALLY support it with titles that could only exist on the CD32 and none of the other Amiga machines.

The CD32 never got a KILLER title that really showcased the machine and that would make converting that game to A1200 a problem.

Sure, it was beating the Sega-CD/Mega-CD in Europe, but thats not much of a boast when that machine wasn't doing great in the first place.

I've said it before, if Commodore had released a dirt cheap CD-ROM system for the A1200, and i'm talking so cheap that buying one was a no-brainer for people, the Amiga could realistically have had PC versions of titles like Monkey Island 3 and the rest of the SCUMM games, with all the 256 colour graphics, all the speech, and pirating it on BBS's would have been a non-starter, the damned rips would have been massive, people would have likely bought them.

Had the Amiga A1200 got a cheap CD-ROM, it could have changed the direction of gaming on the Amiga, where technical WOW was no longer something it had to do, but it would also have meant that it wouldn't need to compete with Playstation when it arrived, because the games available for Amiga would not have translated well to Playstation, and were precisely what Sony didn't want, such was their desire to get publishers to go the 3D route as much as possible, and the reason for that was because they knew that whilst the Playstation had the edge with 3D games, the Saturn wiped the floor with it in the 2D arena.

And there were still enough independent developers on Amiga that it could have been viable.

Instead of the piss poor Championship Manager 2 the Amiga got, it could have pretty much got the PC version and not cut down.

As the Amiga audience matured, then the desire to have the latest platformer would have diminished.

Point and Click adventure games, stuff like Dune 2/Command & Conquer, the list of games that potentially could have appeared on Amiga was massive, and all achieved with a cheap CD-ROM.

But I think that would only have delayed the inevitable, because I just don't think enough new Amiga owners would have opted for Amiga over the competition.

By the time Commodore were on the brink of dying, Amiga owners were starting to move onto other pastures, and i'm not sure that what remained were enough to buy enough A1200's and CD32's to keep Commodore going.

Certainly the proposed AAA chipset was a long way off.

The Amiga was hampered by circumstance. It has a userbase that really wasn't that keen on upgrading their machines much beyond 512K and an extra floppy drive, whereas PC owners seemed to be more persuaded to keep upgrading and buying the latest additions.

If the Amiga had the same upgrading trajectory as the PC, it would have died sooner, because the key audience for the Amiga was for the A500, and for most they treated it as a games machine and not much beyond that.

This also filtered into Commodore, they treated the Amiga as another C64, a product to be exploited until it ceased to be profitable, or as profitable, and then move onto something else, it just so happened that doing the AGA chipset was a cheaper option than going directly to the AAA route which is the only reason the Amiga got to live on, because as we all know, had Commodore survived, the next chipset would have seen them abandon 68000 and the next generation Amiga would have been Amiga in name only and bore little resemblance to what was released in 1985.

I'm firmly of the belief that had Commodore released a CD-ROM soon after the A1200's release and made sure it was cheap, the plethora of newly released PC titles that could easily have been converted would have been done, and the Amiga would have had a wealth of titles that were originally killer titles for the PC, which would have lessened the impact of them not being made for Amiga.

Everyone seems to go gaga for Doom, but it was much more than that, there was plenty of other big name games the Amiga could have done, but storage concerns meant we never could get them.

[PortuguesePilot]

Originally Posted by TEG

Honestly the Jaguar and the 3DO were just... crap. I mean the rendering on the screen was not appealing, and the first games were disastrous. I remembered myself when I saw Cybermorph (Jaguar) and then Crash 'n Burn (3Do), it was so ugly! So I waited before buying as I thought my Amiga was still better and so... I never bought one of those.

Yes, they were quite bad looking in hindsight, at least compared to what the Playstation would offer a few months later and what was to emerge on the PC realm not long after. But you know what was even crappier than the Jaguar and the 3DO? Yup... the CD32. It's true. And don't just take my word for it. Research yourself. Google is (still?) your friend. Compare the technical aspects of all those consoles with one another and reach your own conclusions.

Originally Posted by TEG

So I think there's a soft underbelly of the 3D rendering and it's not all about power. I prefer Amiga blitter 3D than the Jag/3DO one. Perhaps an Amiga with real 3D capacity would have provide a rendering we never witnessed. I mean a specific and enjoyable one, even if it would not have been the best one. Something on its own as it did with its specific sound and HAM mode. And perhaps it would have been enough to make it survive.

There was some magic in this machine.

Here you're entering the wishful "what if" scenarios I spoke above. And when someone goes down that path it's no longer a rational and factual analysis any more. Now, I can understand the pain that some of you seem to feel... There was no bigger wishful thinker than I was back in 1994. Even with all the signs and foreshadowing I still believed that Commodore would prevail, that they would get their act together and pull some "rabbit from the hat" (meaning: release a new Amiga that would obliterate both the 486 PC and the 32-bit consoles) and carry on being the greatest computer/gaming rig in the world... while in reality Commodore was broke and the Amiga wasn't the greatest at anything anymore. I only got my epiphany AFTER the fall of Commodore, Escom and Gateway and was "forced" to buy a 486 PC. I had dreaded Doom ever since it had came. It was a sort of pebble on my shoe (and was always used to undermine the Amiga on the mags and all that) so I resented it. But a colleague lent me a CD that had the shareware version of Doom and I thought "OK, let's see what all the fuss is about" and my eyes were opened...

Don't take me wrong! Once an amigan, always an amigan, I found out. There's a reason why I'm on EAB and not on Vogons or other vintage MS-DOS or 'wintel' boards... my epiphany made my heart hurt. Really bad. And the scar is still there. BUT my epiphany still carried through. After I played Doom for the first time, full-screen, full-buffer on a 486DX2@66MHz and a Sound Blaster 16 I finally understood everything that had happened to the Amiga and why it had happened. It's not like Doom was the epitome of it, but it was the final piece of a complex puzzle that suddenly made sense. I will one day die and I'll die loving the Amiga. But the Amiga stood no chance in hell against the new-gen PCs and the new-gen 32-bit consoles. It was just impossible. And this is a factual, rational, cold analysis of reality. Not a wishful thinking "what if" scenario.

Originally Posted by Matt_H

(...) Sure, Commodore was notoriously cheap, but why bother manufacturing new PSUs when you have a bunch on hand? The architecture for the CD32 was fine for what it was in late 1993. In the UK, it was outselling Sega and PC CD-ROM at the time Commodore went under, so if Commodore lasted another year that trend would have continued a while longer and created a viable userbase and market for developers to continue releasing titles.

If you've read my comment regarding software and games (it's my second comment on this thread, after my laconic first one), you'd understand that it really wouldn't. By 1993 the Amiga was still a respected house-hold name, big games were still being released and it could have been outselling the consoles and the PCs in the UK (but not in France, Germany, Spain, Italy and other major European countries) BUT by 1993 - this apparent success was the product of 1992's (sometimes 1991) labour. Games don't get made and published instantly. The big games that came to the Amiga were projects and work that started MONTHS and sometimes YEARS before. By 1993 proper, many developers and programmers were already quite sceptical of the Amiga for all the reasons I posted before, especially the more present and prevalent at the time - piracy and rise of PC's and the consoles' popularity - but also because of the perceived limitations of the Amiga standard and the announcement of new consoles up the hill. An extra year of Commodore selling 1200 and CD32 would alter nothing at all, would build no significant difference on the user base and the developers - who were already fleeing the Amiga as rats abandoning a sinking ship - would still be flocking towards the consoles and the PC. And I'm just considering the very little time that mediated between this and the arrival of the Playstation and the 3dfx cards to the European market... because I think it should be perfectly clear for everyone that any discussion about the Amiga after that is an exercise in futility.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

Xbox was always meant as a competition to Japanese dominance in the console sphere, and consoles and (micro) computers were always separate fields. Despite no big help from MS PC gaming was doing just fine anyway, only in the recent years MS finally started righting the old wrongs with one unified release platform.

What's the most popular OS today? (hint, it's not Windows).

At one time Microsoft dominated the OS market, and they intended to keep it that way. But then smartphones and powerful gaming consoles threatened to erode their market share, because with those two things most people don't need a PC. So they tried putting Windows on a smartphone - which didn't turn out well - and they entered the gaming console market with what was essentially a cut down PC.

Xbox (console)

Microsoft became concerned that game consoles would threaten the personal computer as an entertainment device for living rooms. Whereas most games consoles to that point were built from custom hardware components, the Xbox was built around standard personal computer components, using variations of Microsoft Windows and DirectX as its operating system to support games and media playback. The Xbox was technically more powerful compared to its rivals, featuring a 733 MHz Intel Pentium III processor, a processor that could be found on a standard PC. The Xbox was the first console to feature a built-in hard disk.

Even though Microsoft lost money on every Xbox they sold, it was a success because it kept the PC going as a gaming platform for the masses. Perhaps it would have anyway, but there's no doubt that hardcore PC gamers are a minority of PC users today - and might be an even smaller minority if the Xbox didn't exist. The Xbox was an important part of their 'Windows everywhere' strategy in their aim to keep customers using their OS.

But what has this got to do with the CD32? Amiga fans complain that the CD32 was 'nothing but a cut down A1200 with a CDROM drive' and this is essentially true - just as it was for the Xbox. The Amiga would never make it as a mainstream desktop computer, but getting millions of consoles out there with the same architecture would help to keep it alive. This was a smart move on Commodore's part - only unfortunately too late because they spent years trying to make the Amiga something it could never be.

Like Microsoft, Commodore made a lot of mistakes. For the Amiga those mistakes started in 1985 when they released the A1000 with 'IBM compatibility' via the Transformer. They compounded this mistake by producing the Sidecar for the A1000, then by putting ISA slots in the A2000 and producing various Bridgeboards for it. Those ISA slots continued to appear in the A3000 and A4000, increasing the cost and wasting valuable space that could have been used for Amiga cards.

Now putting ISA bus slots in the Amiga wasn't such a bad idea, if it had a 'bridge' interface included so PC cards could be used on the Amiga side. This could have been expanded to PCI when it came out, providing the Amiga with access to 'industry standard' high performance 32 bit video cards etc. much cheaper than dedicated cards made for the Amiga. Then nobody would be complaining about AGA not being good enough. But Commodore was too concerned about assuaging US customers' complaints about lack of PC software compatibility to see what they had in front of them.

Finally in 1992 Commodore realized that to survive the Amiga had to forget about trying to be a PC and play to its strengths. But by that time the mistakes had piled up and drained away development time and resources that should have been used to make a better gaming platform. And it wasn't just Commodore management that was to blame - the engineers also insisted on trying to create expensive pie-in-the-sky 'advanced' architectures aimed at competing in the PC market.

Commodore made a lot of mistakes, but considering their history it's understandable. After all, 'Business' was their middle name. They started out making business computers like the Pet - which was quite successful - and others that weren't. Then they produced the VIC 20 which was a runaway success despite its low specs - because it wasn't a business computer. This was followed by the C64 which was the most popular home computer of all time - again because it was a brilliant gaming machine - not a business computer.

But we see with the C128 and Plus 4 that Commodore wanted to produce computers that were more 'serious', and this continued with the Amiga. The A1000 was styled like the C128D, with a separate keyboard and desktop case designed to sit a monitor on top of. Then they split the design into the 'professional' A2000 and 'toy' A500, only to find the A500 selling way more as a gaming machine. If only Commodore had seen then where the future lay...

But hey, the World would have been a duller place if Commodore hadn't made those mistakes. I bought an A1000 rather than an A500 even though it was cheaper and arguably better, because I preferred the A1000's styling. If Commodore has stuck to what sold best we wouldn't have the variety of machines to enjoy, and those of us who wanted a more 'professional' computer would have had to buy a PC. Perhaps Commodore would have given up on computers altogether, like Sega and Atari did. And then we would not have gotten the brilliant A1200 or a CD32 that can easily be converted into a full computer, we wouldn't have gotten an OS to rival Windows 95 years before it, and we wouldn't be playing with all the exciting hardware addons etc. that are being created today.

In the end, Commodore's loss was our gain. Compare the Amiga to any home computer of the day (even PCs) and none match it for 'play' value - not just for gaming but also tuning and enhancing the hardware and OS, programming etc. Sadly we couldn't get that and have Commodore continue producing machines into the new millennium. But 2 out of 3 ain't bad.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

I'm firmly of the belief that had Commodore released a CD-ROM soon after the A1200's release and made sure it was cheap, the plethora of newly released PC titles that could easily have been converted would have been done, and the Amiga would have had a wealth of titles that were originally killer titles for the PC, which would have lessened the impact of them not being made for Amiga.

There wasn’t a big enough A1200 userbase to sell a CD-ROM drive in big enough numbers for publishers to take notice, heck publishers weren’t even making A1200 only games let alone a add-on that would sell probably no more than 10% (25k) of 250k.

Why do you think Commodore kept pushing back the CD1200, they knew it was better to get CD32 sales than dilute the market even more. Same with the A570, except with that they had warehouses of CDTVs they couldn’t shift, that it pushed that drive back past two models of Amiga (nearly three!).

If they made a CDROM drive for every Amiga in 1991 the standard would have grown alot faster. But as you say there was zero Commodore could have rectified in 1994 to recoup the situation money wise they were in, even a Hombre ready Amiga in 1994 wouldn’t have saved them.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by TEG

So at the end I fear that a 3D Amiga would have face the same problem as the Jag, too complicated. But there was a community behind the Amiga. So perhaps it would have been different.

Yes, it would have been different.

Lest we forget, a number of 3D titles were produced for the Amiga that relied on nothing more than 256 colors and a fast CPU, but the target market was too small. Even minimal 3D capability would have made a huge difference. The will and the talent was there, we just needed some hardware to make it viable. An A1200 or CD32 with 030 CPU, some FastRAM and a bit of 3D hardware would have hit the spot perfectly.

[Steve]

The thread should have been 'What if Mehdi Ali had never existed'