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> 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

> 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.