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I can't help thinking Amiga should have been primarily a console from day one. Essentially something like the AmigaCD32. I still have a Commodore Amiga 1000 i

I can't help thinking Amiga should have been primarily a console from day one. Essentially something like the AmigaCD32. I still have a Commodore Amiga 1000 in a box somewhere.....

EvanAnderson 7y ago
The team that created the Amiga was a lot of the team who created the Atari 8-bit computers, and the same can be said for those machines. (Atari did go on to make the 5200, not unlike how Amiga begat the CDTV and CD32.)
mprev 7y ago
That feels a bit like saying that the Tesla Roadster should have been a British style electric milk float. They both have electric power trains but it misses the point of what made the Roadster so interesting.
- boomlinde 7y ago
  As far as I understand it, the chipset was originally designed to support a game console and they only pivoted because of the video game crash. In a sense it's more like saying that what was originally designed to be an electric milk float should have been an electric milk float. That's also not an entirely fair because I agree that the Amiga makes more sense as a computer. As a game machine it was soon beaten by more specialized hardware that did exactly what action games at the time demanded really well and nothing else.
  - jacobush 7y ago
    Ehm, I agree that Amiga was a great computer, but it would have been a great games console at least up until Super NES. Only PS1 had it beat, and by then Commodore was dead. In fact, several arcade games were built on top of Amigas.
    - vidarh 7y ago
      They had a prototype console. Irving Gould nixed it when faced with the costs and risks of starting production coupled with the cost of cartridges of sufficient size for typical Amiga games.
      - jacobush 7y ago
        Still stupid. They should just have released it with small cartridges and let the market sort it out.
        vidarh 7y ago
        The projected investment would have made them unprofitable for at least two quarters at a time where they didn't exactly have stellar credit. It may have been a bad move, but they also would have taken a very substantial risk.
    - boomlinde 7y ago
      > In fact, several arcade games were built on top of Amigas. An exception that proves the rule, in the sense that they were all largely unsuccessful. Successful video game systems like the NES, PC Engine, Master System, Megadrive and SNES were all designed around tile- and sprite based video generation, like successful arcade games. Similarity to arcade game systems (and arcade ports) probably made them more attractive to consumers and thus more attractive to publishers and developers. Porting attractive arcade titles to the Amiga must have been an absolute pain because the Amiga doesn't particularly address their fundamental graphics model. You do everything with the blitter and copper and have to come up with clever ways to move lots of layers of tiles and characters around. What's trivial work on a system built these types of games (upload graphics and tile maps to VRAM, move sprites about and scroll tile layers by writing to a couple of position registers) becomes a puzzle on the Amiga.
      - jacobush 7y ago
        I think Amiga could have challenged that.

I can't help thinking Amiga should have been primarily a console from day one. Essentially something like the AmigaCD32. I still have a Commodore Amiga 1000 in a box somewhere.....

EvanAnderson 7y ago

The team that created the Amiga was a lot of the team who created the Atari 8-bit computers, and the same can be said for those machines. (Atari did go on to make the 5200, not unlike how Amiga begat the CDTV and CD32.)

mprev 7y ago

That feels a bit like saying that the Tesla Roadster should have been a British style electric milk float. They both have electric power trains but it misses the point of what made the Roadster so interesting.

boomlinde 7y ago
As far as I understand it, the chipset was originally designed to support a game console and they only pivoted because of the video game crash. In a sense it's more like saying that what was originally designed to be an electric milk float should have been an electric milk float. That's also not an entirely fair because I agree that the Amiga makes more sense as a computer. As a game machine it was soon beaten by more specialized hardware that did exactly what action games at the time demanded really well and nothing else.
- jacobush 7y ago
  Ehm, I agree that Amiga was a great computer, but it would have been a great games console at least up until Super NES. Only PS1 had it beat, and by then Commodore was dead. In fact, several arcade games were built on top of Amigas.
  - vidarh 7y ago
    They had a prototype console. Irving Gould nixed it when faced with the costs and risks of starting production coupled with the cost of cartridges of sufficient size for typical Amiga games.
    - jacobush 7y ago
      Still stupid. They should just have released it with small cartridges and let the market sort it out.
      - vidarh 7y ago
        The projected investment would have made them unprofitable for at least two quarters at a time where they didn't exactly have stellar credit. It may have been a bad move, but they also would have taken a very substantial risk.
  - boomlinde 7y ago
    > In fact, several arcade games were built on top of Amigas. An exception that proves the rule, in the sense that they were all largely unsuccessful. Successful video game systems like the NES, PC Engine, Master System, Megadrive and SNES were all designed around tile- and sprite based video generation, like successful arcade games. Similarity to arcade game systems (and arcade ports) probably made them more attractive to consumers and thus more attractive to publishers and developers. Porting attractive arcade titles to the Amiga must have been an absolute pain because the Amiga doesn't particularly address their fundamental graphics model. You do everything with the blitter and copper and have to come up with clever ways to move lots of layers of tiles and characters around. What's trivial work on a system built these types of games (upload graphics and tile maps to VRAM, move sprites about and scroll tile layers by writing to a couple of position registers) becomes a puzzle on the Amiga.
    - jacobush 7y ago
      I think Amiga could have challenged that.