What if Commodore had lasted one year longer?

[Amigajay]

I think we should have a thread called ‘what if Commodore died two years earlier’ , we could at least be grateful for the hardware we got thereafter!

In all seriousness i did read somewhere that the A500+ was only brought to market to build up a big enough userbase to shift A570 units (as we know A570 needed 1mb and KS upgrade) hence why it was delayed into 1992.

Then they had plans for 3 models of the drive to cover all bases when it turned out the delay would muck-up plans for the new model Amigas in 1992, funnily enough none of these 3 models included one for the Amiga 1200 by the time it hit most retailers! Another big Commodore cock-up!

[TEG]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Unfortunately I don't speak French so I'm not sure what it all meant. Anywhere I can get this info in written form?

Yeah, I put the link mainly to not forgot about this work. I will translate relevant parts and eventually try to reach him to have written infos if necessary. He say he gathered infos coming from Commodore employees as Lee Stanford, Richard Rainbold, Frank Hughes, Ned Attley, Michael Tomzik, John Figan, Neil Harris, Carlos Santasgostino, Andy Finkle and Gale Willington (not sure I spelled names correctly).

[Weasel Fierce]

These threads are always full of people who either maintain Amiga was doomed after it didn't take over the world in 1985 or that Commodore should "just have released mega-AGA with PS5 graphics and 2000 Zorro slots".

For a realistic release around 94, my bet is:

Amiga 1400 -
AGA (they didnt have time to do a new chipset and AGA was fine for their audience)
68030 and 4 MB fastRAM as standard (roughly Performa 560 specs)
Sold with a hard drive as standard.

Then an A4000 plus with 8 MB of RAM built in.

Both bundled with a good software collection UK style.

And work aggressively with software developers earlier to start pushing games for more expanded hardware as well as encouraging CD ROM adoption.


This won't stave off Commodores bad business practices or change the world, but its something that was achievable.

[duga]

Originally Posted by Weasel Fierce

These threads are always full of people who either maintain Amiga was doomed after it didn't take over the world in 1985 or that Commodore should "just have released mega-AGA with PS5 graphics and 2000 Zorro slots".

For a realistic release around 94, my bet is:

Amiga 1400 -
AGA (they didnt have time to do a new chipset and AGA was fine for their audience)
68030 and 4 MB fastRAM as standard (roughly Performa 560 specs)
Sold with a hard drive as standard.

Then an A4000 plus with 8 MB of RAM built in.

Both bundled with a good software collection UK style.

And work aggressively with software developers earlier to start pushing games for more expanded hardware as well as encouraging CD ROM adoption.


This won't stave off Commodores bad business practices or change the world, but its something that was achievable.

I've written this before somewhere else, regarding incremental upgrades of the A1200:

Date____Fast MB___CPU__Comment
Oct 1992 _1_______stock A1200 released with 2 MB chip and 020/14 onboard, 1 MB fast on trap door card. HDD is optional.
Apr 1993 _2_______stock
Oct 1993 _4______020/28 CPU upgrade, ready for Doom
Apr 1994 _4______030/40 CPU moved to trap door card. C= out of business
Oct 1994 _4______030/50 New owner, ready for Doom II
Apr 1995 _8______030/50 CD1200 peripheral released
Oct 1995 _8______040/25 New PSU included
Apr 1996 _16_____040/40 With fan
Oct 1996 _16_____060/50 Without fan
Apr 1997 _32_____060/60 Last A1200 release.
Oct 1997 _32_____PPC603 Release of A1600 with OS 4.0

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by Weasel Fierce

AGA (they didnt have time to do a new chipset and AGA was fine for their audience)

[...]
And work aggressively with software developers earlier to start pushing games for more expanded hardware as well as encouraging CD ROM adoption.

AGA was behind times in 1992, 030 would be in 1994, so what audience would that be? Hardcore Amiga enthusiasts? Fine, but these people were a tiny market (less than 1 mil A1200 sold) and so not many publishers got on board. Even less would 2 years later for a machine that is hardly any upgrade on something that was never that exciting to start with.

So this is hardly a "realistic take", especially from somebody who claims to have a fresh outlook on things.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Weasel Fierce

These threads are always full of people who either maintain Amiga was doomed after it didn't take over the world in 1985 or that Commodore should "just have released mega-AGA with PS5 graphics and 2000 Zorro slots".

I don't think that is the tenor here in this forum. There is a good consensus that in 1985 the Amiga was ahead of competition - marketing and production run up was the problem due to commodores financial situation.

For a realistic release around 94, my bet is:

Amiga 1400 -
AGA (they didnt have time to do a new chipset and AGA was fine for their audience)
68030 and 4 MB fastRAM as standard (roughly Performa 560 specs)
Sold with a hard drive as standard.

Even 2 MB Chip and 1-2 MB Fast would have been nice for a low end model.

As for AGA: no it was NOT fine for the audience, since the audience left the room...

We had all this in the "was the A1200 a disappointment" thread - undeniable fact is, that most users left for other platforms (mainly of course for the PC, even if it was still more expensive if you wanted better performance and gfx).

So Commodore was stuck with the "poor" crowd ... so the 1200 and AGA was only fine for those, who could not afford anything else, and many of them are therefor glad the A1200 exists - but the PC sales show that many more were willing to spend much more money but chose other platforms.

Then an A4000 plus with 8 MB of RAM built in.

2 Chip plus 4 Fast would have been enough (with options for better configurations)
But the A4000 - as any big box Amiga - was overpriced.
Commodore tried since the A2000 to sell the big boxes with much much higher margins opposed to the wedges ... while the chipset and features did not differ that much. A strategic mistake, since big-box owners where more willing to expand their system and are more likely to stay on the Amiga platform...

The 9:1 ratio wedge : big-box, was one of the reasons for the demise.

Both bundled with a good software collection UK style.

true

And work aggressively with software developers earlier to start pushing games for more expanded hardware as well as encouraging CD ROM adoption.

Also true - the problem was already visible with the CDTV, that was developed as a secret project outside of the usual hardware team, and also came as a total surprise to all software developers ... and with the CD32 almost the same mistake was repeated.

This won't stave off Commodores bad business practices or change the world, but its something that was achievable.

Yes ... but it would not have made any meaningful impact.

One more year of AGA Amigas under Commodore, no matter what configuration, would not have helped.

[TEG]

Originally Posted by pandy71

I'm fully aware of this but still - Commodore as owner of patents was responsible for direction - so even if they not created video capture devices they advertised Amiga as video desktop machine so they should be responsible for coordinating and co-creating technology in controlled by Commodore Amiga world.
Companies providing guidelines, do some standards - obviously this not happened. That's why i claim that Commodore had no vision about Amiga future.

I agree with this. When you look at Apple and how they pushed things in the publishing field they wanted to conquer (LaserWriter (1985)), you see that it was at another level than Commodore. Jobs was pushing hard, having a vision. Tramiel/Gould were more opportunists, money oriented, playing it by ear.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by duga

I've written this before somewhere else, regarding incremental upgrades of the A1200:

Date____Fast MB___CPU__Comment
Oct 1992 _1_______stock A1200 released with 2 MB chip and 020/14 onboard, 1 MB fast on trap door card. HDD is optional.
Apr 1993 _2_______stock
Oct 1993 _4______020/28 CPU upgrade, ready for Doom

why still a 68020?
At this point (or probably from the start) a 030 makes more sense ...
I guess Atari did not pay much more fur the 030 in the Falcon than C= did for the 020 in the A1200 ...
The 020 was already 9 (!) years old by then ... the 030 6 years!

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Gorf

why still a 68020?
At this point (or probably from the start) a 030 makes more sense ...


I guess Atari did not pay much more fur the 030 in the Falcon than C= did for the 020 in the A1200 ...

Guessing isn't good enough. How much more did Atari pay for the 030, and what effect would that have had on the retail price? Why did Atari go for the 030 just to cripple it with a 16 bit data bus and 24 bit address bus? Did they think the data cache would make up for it? Would it have made any difference when working in ChipRAM?

I think Commodore made the right choice with the 68EC020. It was not only dirt cheap, but also smaller, less power hungry and more compatible than the 68030. 'Advanced' users were expected to replace it with a more powerful CPU via the expansion slot, making the on-board CPU redundant - and less to cry about sitting there doing nothing.

The 020 was already 9 (!) years old by then ... the 030 6 years!

And? The i386 was 7 years old, yet the 386SX (which was way more crippled than the 68EC020) was was the most popular CPU for new 'entry level' PCs in 1992.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by TEG

I agree with this. When you look at Apple and how they pushed things in the publishing field they wanted to conquer (LaserWriter (1985)), you see that it was at another level than Commodore. Jobs was pushing hard, having a vision. Tramiel/Gould were more opportunists, money oriented, playing it by ear.

When I look at Apple I see a company that would have gone bankrupt in 1995 if Microsoft hadn't bailed them out.

Yes, Steve Jobs was a genius - and a bully who alienated his most talented employees.

Steve Wozniak: No one wanted to work under Steve Jobs ever again

“Some of my very best friends in Apple, the most creative people in Apple who worked on the Macintosh, almost all of them said they would never, ever work for Steve Jobs again,” said Wozniak in an interview with the Milwaukee Business Journal at the Flying Car conference in Milwaukee two weeks ago. “It was that bad.”

But hey, if that's what it takes...

Tramiel had a vision too, and he also pushed hard - too hard for the other money-oriented opportunists on the board, which is why he too was kicked out of his own company. He then went full steam ahead with his vision to deliver a powerful 16 bit home computer 'for the masses, not the classes'.

Unlike Commodore - who just stuck with their original 'winning' Amiga formula - Tramiel constantly upgraded the specs of the ST. First he doubled the floppy disk capacity and made it IBM compatible, and added a built-in TV-modulator. Then he increased the base RAM, making the 1040ST the first affordable home computer to have 1MB. The STe increased the color palette from 512 to 4096 colors, added a blitter, PCM stereo sound, and SIMM slots for up to 4MB RAM on the motherboard. All this by 1989, when Commodore was still pushing the same tired old A500.

If constantly pushing out new and improved features is what customers really wanted, then the ST should easily have trounced the Amiga in sales. If you bought an Amiga in 1897 there was little reason to upgrade in 1989 because it hadn't changed significantly, whereas an ST user would have needed 2 upgrades by then. Customers much preferred this to having to put up with the same boring computer they had 2 years ago.

This constant improvement was how Atari managed to sell 3 times more STs than Commodore sold A500s in the same period. Then in 1992 they introduced the Falcon - which blew the A1200 out of the water with its powerful 68030, DSP and other advanced features, making it a best seller for Atari and ensuring its survival into the next Millennium.

[grelbfarlk]

Originally Posted by Weasel Fierce

These threads are always full of people who either maintain Amiga was doomed after it didn't take over the world in 1985 or that Commodore should "just have released mega-AGA with PS5 graphics and 2000 Zorro slots".

For a realistic release around 94, my bet is:

Amiga 1400 -
AGA (they didnt have time to do a new chipset and AGA was fine for their audience)
68030 and 4 MB fastRAM as standard (roughly Performa 560 specs)
Sold with a hard drive as standard.

Then an A4000 plus with 8 MB of RAM built in.

Both bundled with a good software collection UK style.

And work aggressively with software developers earlier to start pushing games for more expanded hardware as well as encouraging CD ROM adoption.


This won't stave off Commodores bad business practices or change the world, but its something that was achievable.

Which one of you has one of these:
https://bigbookofamigahardware.com/b...uct.aspx?id=19


It's cool if you nicked it, statute of limitations is long expired.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Guessing isn't good enough. How much more did Atari pay for the 030, and what effect would that have had on the retail price?

In this thread everything is pure guesswork.
But the difference would have not been more than 5-10$ per CPU - and no: there is no reason to multiply this amount by some factor, like C= probably did for the BOM. All other PC manufactures switched to fixed margins in the 90s.

And especially with the with the higher clock-rates Duga proposed it would have been probably harder to get 020s in volume anyways.

Why did Atari go for the 030 just to cripple it with a 16 bit data bus and 24 bit address bus? Did they think the data cache would make up for it?

Probably because Tramiel was also stuck in the "good enough for the audience" thinking. Which did not work out either.

Would it have made any difference when working in ChipRAM?

No - that's why the suggestions above propose FastRAM

I think Commodore made the right choice with the 68EC020. It was not only dirt cheap, but also smaller, less power hungry and more compatible than the 68030.

"More compatible"? Not by any measures that did matter.

'Advanced' users were expected to replace it with a more powerful CPU via the expansion slot, making the on-board CPU redundant - and less to cry about sitting there doing nothing.

Yes - and this strategy was stupid and did not turn out to attract enough customers.

And? The i386 was 7 years old, yet the 386SX (which was way more crippled than the 68EC020) was was the most popular CPU for new 'entry level' PCs in 1992.

We are talking about 93 and 94 and later - see the timeline I answered to.

The Pentium "P5" came out in March 93.
But Intel was its own competition with the higher clocked 486 that was better received in the first years.
The 386SX was gone by then and 386DX was considered entry level.

Things moved very fast in the early 90s. Commodore would have needed to keep up with that pace to keep customers - they did not.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by grelbfarlk

Which one of you has one of these:
https://bigbookofamigahardware.com/b...uct.aspx?id=19


It's cool if you nicked it, statute of limitations is long expired.

Would have been nice - especially finally the right price range for a "big box" Amiga.
Still a at least year too late of course, but still the best thing they could have done (if it is real).

[Mathesar]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

A 14Mhz 68000 didnt cost much and should have been easy enough to implement into the design. Maybe throw in a midi port, because why not.

An Amiga (as we know it) is by design very much tied to it's chipram. A 14MHz 68000 on ECS makes absolutely no sense without any fastram.
If Commodore would have added a 14MHz 68000 to the A600 it would mean that the A600 would also need fast ram. And that is expensive; more complicated PCB, extra DRAM controller (Ramsey), extra DRAM chips.... Or some fastram slot like the A1200 has. (The PCMCIA connector probably does not cut it bandwidth wise).

Any lowcost Amiga is basically a chipram only affair because of this. Only the high-end Amiga's ever supported fastram out of the box.
So, my idea is that Commodore really needed a new, higher bandwidth chipset to build a more powerful lowcost Amiga.

[Promilus]

All that talk about faster CPUs etc. I guess not everyone knows that faster CPU and no fast ram = no improvement at all. If faster CPU all it has is slow access to chip ram it can't get much faster. Yes, cache might improve things a little bit but that's it. Now then even if you add up some fast ram - yes, calculations done by CPU for a program and data residing in fast ram are faster. But CPU has to copy all those data to CHIP ram so chipset can generate image. And chip ram access is pretty limited and nothing can make it faster because timings are chipset related and chipset itself can't be replaced as easily as CPU by adding turbo card.

Chipset itself still does access only 2MB of chipram. That's a hard limit. It doesn't matter if you get 500MHz 060 up there if all you can get is few MB/s access to 2MB shared memory. It definitively was better than ECS but by the time AGA was released it was nothing spectacular and was aging rapidly. And small amiga models (those which most of us had) didn't have capability to improve it's graphics at all. Such enhancements became possible later on with busboards (like mediator, g-rex etc.) but speed between processor and such cards wasn't quite like what PC offered few years back. Even now it is not (PCI solutions for amiga is just a prosthetic for a prosthetic on top of prosthetic).

Taking all of that into the account (and Motorola plans for 68k line were also known) should there be a "new amiga" it would not have 68k processor and it would have to have PCI slots. And such chipset was designed. I have absolutely no idea why you guys are thinking small additions to A1200 would make it viable solution for years to come. Such solutions were released and it was barely adequate (and obviously lagging behind PC progress pace).

One might say chipset moved into a expansion card would be fine. No it would not. While it would make possible to play old amiga games on new amiga system it isn't without it's own drawbacks. Let's assume ng amiga would be based on PCI and RISC processor. In which case Amiga compatibility card would be PCI as well. Then you got SB Live and Voodoo 2 banshee for new games. You connect your audio system to Soundblaster and your 17'' CRT with VGA connector to your Voodoo. Great! It works. Now you want to play something old... First - compatibility card would have it's own audio and video output. For video output to be compatible with new CRT there would have to be scandoubler and flicker fixer built in. And that's bare minimum - you'd have to swap cables or have second set of audio and video devices. Should there be internal switching on the card that would be more comfortable but cost itself for such card most likely would be greater than whole vanilla amiga. So what's the point?

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Gorf

In this thread everything is pure guesswork.

Not everything. It's possible that information on why Commodore chose the 68EC020 is out there somewhere. But an insinuation based on 'pure guesswork' is worthless. Actually worse than useless. Just another example of how Amiga 'fans' denigrate Commodore and the Amiga at every opportunity, with dubious logic and 'facts' that turn out to be only half true or flat out wrong - while giving other systems a pass. We should be celebrating what we got, not running it down.

We are talking about 93 and 94 and later - see the timeline I answered to.

Both the A1200 and Atari Falcon were released in 1992. The decision to use an 020 or 030 processor must have been made earlier than that, and would have been based on what they could get at the time. The idea that Commodore should have been clairvoyant enough in 1991 to know what the costs of 020 and 030 CPUs would be after 1994 is ludicrous.

BTW someone just put an Atari Falcon up on Trade Me (NZ auction site) with a reserve of NZ$2000. The reserve has already been met! That's how rare they are today (I have never seen one 'in the flesh', and I don't remember them ever being sold in New Zealand).

The Pentium "P5" came out in March 93.
But Intel was its own competition with the higher clocked 486 that was better received in the first years.
The 386SX was gone by then and 386DX was considered entry level.

In my shop we skipped the 386DX. Customers wanted the SX because they thought that being a later CPU it must be better. I gave up trying to convince them otherwise, because - as everyone in retail knows - the customer is always right!

I remember selling a 386SX 'multimedia' machine to a rich farmer's wife. A few years later she called me round to have it serviced, then accused me of selling her an under-powered system. I pointed out that I had given her spec sheets for three different options and recommended the 486, but she decided to get the 386SX instead because it was cheaper.

The attached scan I took from an article in the June 1994 issue of NZ PC World magazine. In it Rob Clarke suggests that the best policy is to buy the cheapest system you can get, and upgrade it regularly. This turns out to be much cheaper than buying a high-end system on the basis that it will have a longer useful lifespan.

I hate to say it, but he was right. When a new Intel CPU came out it was ridiculously expensive. Hard drives and RAM was also getting cheaper fast, and bus standards constantly improving. And of course software bloated at an even faster pace, forcing people to buy ever more powerful systems. The expression 'bleeding edge of technology' certainly applied.

In comparison, home computers and consoles tended to have much longer lifespans with fewer changes. Some of us appreciated that. It took me 2 years just to get familiar enough with the Amiga to start programming it in machine code. For commercial developers it was a race to get stuff out before the platform became redundant, resulting in a lot of bad ports and unpolished apps.

We live in a wonderful time now where old Amiga software is 'abandonware' or free and even open source, and new hardware is being produced to make our old systems better without losing compatibility. The Amiga will never get the popularity it once had, but we don't care. We are finally fulfilling the dreams we had for it in the 90's. Against all odds it has outlived many of its competitors where it really mattered - not in everybody's home, but in our homes.

Things moved very fast in the early 90s. Commodore would have needed to keep up with that pace to keep customers - they did not.

Commodore was losing Amiga customers no matter what. Most were kids who played on an A500 which their parents bought them (perhaps naively thinking it would help with their education). By the time they were looking at 'upgrading' they had played it to death and got bored with it, and now they were older and needed something more 'serious', ie. a PC.

In the other camp were older people like me and my friends, adults who had been playing with home computers as a hobby for many years. These were my 'loyal' Amiga customers who already had expanded systems but were interested in the A1200 because it had AGA. They eventually drifted onto the PC because they had no choice - including myself (wish I hadn't sold my A3000 with 060 and RTG etc. for a mere $1000 though... if only I had known what it would be able to do today!).

But the Amiga market had a lot of inertia. I could have sold a ton of A1200s after 1994 if Commodore was still making them, as well as CD32s and whatever they brought out next. We really didn't want to drop our favorite computer, even if we had to get a PC for some stuff.

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by Mathesar

An Amiga (as we know it) is by design very much tied to it's chipram. A 14MHz 68000 on ECS makes absolutely no sense without any fastram.
If Commodore would have added a 14MHz 68000 to the A600 it would mean that the A600 would also need fast ram. And that is expensive; more complicated PCB, extra DRAM controller (Ramsey), extra DRAM chips.... Or some fastram slot like the A1200 has. (The PCMCIA connector probably does not cut it bandwidth wise).

Any lowcost Amiga is basically a chipram only affair because of this. Only the high-end Amiga's ever supported fastram out of the box.
So, my idea is that Commodore really needed a new, higher bandwidth chipset to build a more powerful lowcost Amiga.

You need to keep this within the context of alternate reality where C< decided that they would position the A600 as an actual upgrade to A500 instead of confusing ppl. who aleady had an A500 with 1MB RAM.
Obviously this wouldnt have come as a surprise to the engineers in this scenario. Lots of design ideas are shared between A600/A1200. So had they decided to make the upgrade steps a bit more clear then the A600 wouldnt have been identical to the model we got + double cpu clock without possibility to add fastram.
A cheap ass 16-bit clockport could have been added to both a 600 and 1200 in such scenario. Dont have the bandwidth numbers for pcmcia. Anyhoo, the 600 would then be something of an upgrade because then people could upgrade with 1 or 2MB fastmem and at least get doubled speed compared to A500 without accelerators. And the A1200 in this scenario would have been specced slightly higher to again provide a clear upgrade step from the A600. (A600 and 1200 releases were only 7 months apart).

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Both the A1200 and Atari Falcon were released in 1992. The decision to use an 020 or 030 processor must have been made earlier than that, and would have been based on what they could get at the time. The idea that Commodore should have been clairvoyant enough in 1991 to know what the costs of 020 and 030 CPUs would be after 1994 is ludicrous.

That is not what my original answer here in this thread referred to.
We were talking about hypothetical successor models in following years.

The attached scan I took from an article in the June 1994 issue of NZ PC World magazine. In it Rob Clarke suggests that the best policy is to buy the cheapest system you can get, and upgrade it regularly. This turns out to be much cheaper than buying a high-end system on the basis that it will have a longer useful lifespan.

That is not how the 90s PCs where sold here in Germany.
While Germany pretty much missed the PC hype in the 80s, people generally bought the latest model and newest CPU generation in the 90s.
With maybe the exception of the first Pentium that got beaten by higher clocked 486s. Although I remember very well playing Doom on a 60MHz Pentium P5 in 1994 at a friends home …

Edit:

As a reminder: ESCOM, the first new owner of Commodore, went even bankrupt because they thought 60MHz P5 were still a good idea in 1995 - but these were absolutely unsellable in Germany by then, because of newer Pentiums with 90MHz and more...

[duga]

Originally Posted by Gorf

As a reminder: ESCOM, the first new owner of Commodore, went even bankrupt because they thought 60MHz P5 where still a good idea in 1995 - but these were absolutely unsellable in Germany by then, because of newer Pentiums with 90MHz and more...

I thought it was Pentium 75 they bought? With only 50 MHz FSB compared to 60 MHz FSB for Pentium 60, 90 and 120 and 66 MHz FSB for Pentium 66, 100 and 133.

I can see the Pentium 60 story here though, so I'm probably wrong. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escom

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by duga

I thought it was Pentium 75 they bought? With only 50 MHz FSB compared to 60 MHz FSB for Pentium 60, 90 and 120 and 66 MHz FSB for Pentium 66, 100 and 133.

I can see the Pentium 60 story here though, so I'm probably wrong. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escom

You might be right and Wiki is wrong ... the important point is how customers reacted here in Germany to even rather small speed penalties.
Especially gamers that would have been a target group for Commodore...

And Germany was the biggest single market for Commodore - any low-cost-low-performance strategy had to fail here in the 90s.