4 ms·

I don't think so. The factor that really killed C= beyond any hope of recovery was Motorola abandoning development of the 68k line of processors in favor of the

I don't think so. The factor that really killed C= beyond any hope of recovery was Motorola abandoning development of the 68k line of processors in favor of the PowerPC initiative, a few years later. And a LOT of stuff died as a result of that, not just the C= Amiga line. Though with Gassee at the helm, they might have been perceptive enough to pivot to the nascent ARM architecture, partnering with Acorn and picking up their abandoned Archimedes line, and thus owning the low-power gaming/multimedia space. (Keep in mind thst the 3DO was in fact ARM-based, so the technical affordances were there). But it's a long shot.

ido 8y ago
But they have already lost their performance edge by 1990. In 1985 the amiga was unprecedented in multimedia abilities and audio-visual performance. It was years ahead of the competition. And then commodore more or less just sat on it with very minor incremental improvements until by 1990 a 386 PC with VGA & a SoundBlaster pretty much closed the gap with a similarly priced & specced amiga 3000. That's why (well one of the reasons anyway) the next generation of games like Doom originated on the PC and not on the Amiga.
- zozbot123 8y ago
  > But they have already lost their performance edge by 1990. Sure, but they had a robust community of gaming and software developers on their side. Hence why they should have pivoted to the lower-power niche of the market - that's precisely where their pre-existing community could still be a decisive factor. High-end systems (x86, PPC) were a whole other ballgame, even in the mid-to-late 1990s. The console space is even more proof of this - mass-market consoles in the 1990s and to some extent the early-2000s were a lot closer to the 3DO than to anything based on x86 or PPC. Also, nitpicking but Doom itself was "originated" on the NeXT, not on x86-- and the NeXT architecture was quite comparable to Amiga both technically and in its focus on the multimedia space. If anything, it makes a better case for Amiga having lost their technical "edge" at some point.
  - dfox 8y ago
    To continue with the nitpicking: Although Doom was "originated" on NeXT the original NeXT implementation was only meant as debugging aid and did graphics output by essentially emulating VGA in user space and didn't support sound at all. Also NeXT is more or less normal Unix workstation with m68k CPU and framebuffer and does not have convoluted architecture with tightly coupled various multimedia accelerators that Amiga has. And while the Amiga's architecture was good way to get impresive performance in 80's it is also the reason why Amiga could not keep up in the 90's as removing all the NTSC video related stuff would break backward compatibility.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  That was down to management though. If they'd been bought by someone with more interest in what engineering were prototyping, I think it could have been saved, even that late. Even prospered with an engineering dept that had a budget. Dave Haynie has written extensively on the C= suicide (as he describes it), I think there's even a few posts on Quora. Lots that might have kept the edge were started, even prototyped and announced to developers. Course once developers start migrating away, it takes far more effort to get them back, if at all.
- mrec 8y ago
  > That's why (well one of the reasons anyway) the next generation of games like Doom originated on the PC and not on the Amiga. Well, for the specific example of Doom the Amiga's main problem was its planar graphics; great for scrolling platformers and SEUs, terrible for raycasters, since plotting a single 1-byte pixel takes 8 writes (one per bit) in a naive implementation. There were a lot of clever hacks to address this, but none of them could quite close the gap.
  - jfim 8y ago
    SEU in this context refers to Shoot 'em Up (or shmups), 2D scrolling shooter games like Gradius or TwinBee.

ido 8y ago

But they have already lost their performance edge by 1990. In 1985 the amiga was unprecedented in multimedia abilities and audio-visual performance. It was years ahead of the competition. And then commodore more or less just sat on it with very minor incremental improvements until by 1990 a 386 PC with VGA & a SoundBlaster pretty much closed the gap with a similarly priced & specced amiga 3000. That's why (well one of the reasons anyway) the next generation of games like Doom originated on the PC and not on the Amiga.

zozbot123 8y ago
> But they have already lost their performance edge by 1990. Sure, but they had a robust community of gaming and software developers on their side. Hence why they should have pivoted to the lower-power niche of the market - that's precisely where their pre-existing community could still be a decisive factor. High-end systems (x86, PPC) were a whole other ballgame, even in the mid-to-late 1990s. The console space is even more proof of this - mass-market consoles in the 1990s and to some extent the early-2000s were a lot closer to the 3DO than to anything based on x86 or PPC. Also, nitpicking but Doom itself was "originated" on the NeXT, not on x86-- and the NeXT architecture was quite comparable to Amiga both technically and in its focus on the multimedia space. If anything, it makes a better case for Amiga having lost their technical "edge" at some point.
- dfox 8y ago
  To continue with the nitpicking: Although Doom was "originated" on NeXT the original NeXT implementation was only meant as debugging aid and did graphics output by essentially emulating VGA in user space and didn't support sound at all. Also NeXT is more or less normal Unix workstation with m68k CPU and framebuffer and does not have convoluted architecture with tightly coupled various multimedia accelerators that Amiga has. And while the Amiga's architecture was good way to get impresive performance in 80's it is also the reason why Amiga could not keep up in the 90's as removing all the NTSC video related stuff would break backward compatibility.
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
That was down to management though. If they'd been bought by someone with more interest in what engineering were prototyping, I think it could have been saved, even that late. Even prospered with an engineering dept that had a budget. Dave Haynie has written extensively on the C= suicide (as he describes it), I think there's even a few posts on Quora. Lots that might have kept the edge were started, even prototyped and announced to developers. Course once developers start migrating away, it takes far more effort to get them back, if at all.
mrec 8y ago
> That's why (well one of the reasons anyway) the next generation of games like Doom originated on the PC and not on the Amiga. Well, for the specific example of Doom the Amiga's main problem was its planar graphics; great for scrolling platformers and SEUs, terrible for raycasters, since plotting a single 1-byte pixel takes 8 writes (one per bit) in a naive implementation. There were a lot of clever hacks to address this, but none of them could quite close the gap.
- jfim 8y ago
  SEU in this context refers to Shoot 'em Up (or shmups), 2D scrolling shooter games like Gradius or TwinBee.