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The thing that made Amiga so hackable, was also its downfall. It, like the C64 (and the rest of the 8-bit gen) that preceded it, had know, fixed, hardware. Th

The thing that made Amiga so hackable, was also its downfall. It, like the C64 (and the rest of the 8-bit gen) that preceded it, had know, fixed, hardware. The PC, and to some degree the ARM SoCs, have a layer of software abstraction sitting on top of mutable hardware. The fixed nature of the hardware allowed people to poke, prod, and time actions down to the clock cycle. But all this also meant that even the smallest hardware change would break existing software.

vidarh 10y ago
The AmigaOS also did provide a layer of software abstraction. While a lot of games and demos poked the hardware directly, a lot of system friendly Amiga software written in the 80's can be recompiled and run just fine on e.g AROS just fine with few to minor changes (most of the changes tend to relate to differences between AROS and AmigaOS) on anything from m68k original Amigas, throuh PPC, ARM or x86 "native" or hosted on a variety of OSs.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  But those very games and demos (the latter in particular) is what is being lamented in the quote.
  - vidarh 10y ago
    That may be so, but the point was that it was not really the cause of the Amiga's downfall. The Amiga hardware changed substantially over the years, and e.g. with AGA (the chipset in the A1200 and A4000) and when we started installing graphics cards, a huge proportion of the software simply ran unmodified and most applications were immediately able to take advantage of it. There was nothing like that in the PC world for the first few years of the Amiga's life cycle, and for games there continued to be nothing like that until years after Commodore went bankrupt. While most Amiga games certainly did hammer the hardware, unlike on the PC where games of the era also hammered the hardware, the small portion Amiga games that were in fact system friendly from the start was far greater on the Amiga in the early years than on the PC (e.g. some notable titles included Cinemaware's King of Chicago, as well as Ports of Call, and a number of Sierra On-Line games). The bigger problem apart from the ludicrous mismanagement at Commodore was that Commodore was too successful at marketing the low end Amiga's. The A500/500+ and then the A600/A1200 were the big sellers, not the higher end machines. These were price-sensitive buyers unwilling to spend money on graphics cards, because until first person shooters hit they had largely very little reason to. This made graphics card a far more niche expansion on the Amiga, where they were a luxury, than on the PC where you increasingly had to buy one to run what you wanted. It was first when first-person shooters hit that the planar graphics that had been a tremendous advantage with 2D games became a limitation overnight, that the Amiga suddenly was playing catch-up. The problem wasn't inability to update the platform, but it was exacerbated strongly by a chronic culture of underivestment in R&D which had been a hallmark for Commodore all the way back to their calculator days that certainly made the updates happen far slower than engineering wanted. Commodore survived as long as it did because their engineers, and those of the companies they bought along the road, pulled off crazy feats when their back was to the wall, but they were frequently unable to get even minor funding to complete projects even during the periods were the company was pretty much printing money - Commodore went on death-marches when they were facing existential threats and were cash-strapped instead, and eventually it caught up with them.

vidarh 10y ago

The AmigaOS also did provide a layer of software abstraction. While a lot of games and demos poked the hardware directly, a lot of system friendly Amiga software written in the 80's can be recompiled and run just fine on e.g AROS just fine with few to minor changes (most of the changes tend to relate to differences between AROS and AmigaOS) on anything from m68k original Amigas, throuh PPC, ARM or x86 "native" or hosted on a variety of OSs.

digi_owl 10y ago
But those very games and demos (the latter in particular) is what is being lamented in the quote.
- vidarh 10y ago
  That may be so, but the point was that it was not really the cause of the Amiga's downfall. The Amiga hardware changed substantially over the years, and e.g. with AGA (the chipset in the A1200 and A4000) and when we started installing graphics cards, a huge proportion of the software simply ran unmodified and most applications were immediately able to take advantage of it. There was nothing like that in the PC world for the first few years of the Amiga's life cycle, and for games there continued to be nothing like that until years after Commodore went bankrupt. While most Amiga games certainly did hammer the hardware, unlike on the PC where games of the era also hammered the hardware, the small portion Amiga games that were in fact system friendly from the start was far greater on the Amiga in the early years than on the PC (e.g. some notable titles included Cinemaware's King of Chicago, as well as Ports of Call, and a number of Sierra On-Line games). The bigger problem apart from the ludicrous mismanagement at Commodore was that Commodore was too successful at marketing the low end Amiga's. The A500/500+ and then the A600/A1200 were the big sellers, not the higher end machines. These were price-sensitive buyers unwilling to spend money on graphics cards, because until first person shooters hit they had largely very little reason to. This made graphics card a far more niche expansion on the Amiga, where they were a luxury, than on the PC where you increasingly had to buy one to run what you wanted. It was first when first-person shooters hit that the planar graphics that had been a tremendous advantage with 2D games became a limitation overnight, that the Amiga suddenly was playing catch-up. The problem wasn't inability to update the platform, but it was exacerbated strongly by a chronic culture of underivestment in R&D which had been a hallmark for Commodore all the way back to their calculator days that certainly made the updates happen far slower than engineering wanted. Commodore survived as long as it did because their engineers, and those of the companies they bought along the road, pulled off crazy feats when their back was to the wall, but they were frequently unable to get even minor funding to complete projects even during the periods were the company was pretty much printing money - Commodore went on death-marches when they were facing existential threats and were cash-strapped instead, and eventually it caught up with them.