3 ms·

Yes, the amiga was so good for it's time. It is crazy how commodore f*ked up.

icedchai 3y ago
It's their own fault: they basically did nothing for ~7 years. The chip set barely changed from 1985 until 1992 with AGA. ECS barely added anything, and AGA was too little, too late. The huge lead the Amiga had in the mid 80's was gone by the early 90's.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  If you look at some retro conferences, where former engineers take part in Q&A sessions, lots of it were caused by internal issues.
  - icedchai 3y ago
    Yes, I'm not blaming the engineers. The company was dysfunctional. The Amiga was still an amazing platform from 1985 to around 1992, when you could get cheap 386 boxes with SVGA and Soundblaster cards. After that point, there was really no way back.
- zozbot234 3y ago
  Commodore didn't exactly help matters, but the M68k platform was also a dead-end by the mid-90s. Which is why the Atari ST line also died around the same time. Meanwhile you started to have machines based on RISC architectures (or high-performance x86, of course) for which custom hardware chips as found in the Amiga were just not as relevant.
  - icedchai 3y ago
    True, but Apple had similar issues and were able to port their OS to PowerPC. Old apps still ran with an emulator.
    - zozbot234 3y ago
      Trouble is, most Amiga "apps" were games running on bare metal hardware with tight timing constraints, so emulation was not really a feasible solution. A similar situation to modern consoles, for which backwards compatibility often involves keeping the original hardware even on subsequent systems.
      - icedchai 3y ago
        True, true. Perhaps they could've had an "A1200-on-a-card" or something for the games.
- snvzz 3y ago
  >they basically did nothing for ~7 years. Much worse than nothing. Cancelled finished and near-finished projects by the Amiga teams. Reference: "Commodore The Inside Story: The Untold Tale of a Computer Giant", David Pleasance, ISBN 978-1913491659.

It's their own fault: they basically did nothing for ~7 years. The chip set barely changed from 1985 until 1992 with AGA. ECS barely added anything, and AGA was too little, too late. The huge lead the Amiga had in the mid 80's was gone by the early 90's.

pjmlp 3y ago
If you look at some retro conferences, where former engineers take part in Q&A sessions, lots of it were caused by internal issues.
- icedchai 3y ago
  Yes, I'm not blaming the engineers. The company was dysfunctional. The Amiga was still an amazing platform from 1985 to around 1992, when you could get cheap 386 boxes with SVGA and Soundblaster cards. After that point, there was really no way back.
zozbot234 3y ago
Commodore didn't exactly help matters, but the M68k platform was also a dead-end by the mid-90s. Which is why the Atari ST line also died around the same time. Meanwhile you started to have machines based on RISC architectures (or high-performance x86, of course) for which custom hardware chips as found in the Amiga were just not as relevant.
- icedchai 3y ago
  True, but Apple had similar issues and were able to port their OS to PowerPC. Old apps still ran with an emulator.
  - zozbot234 3y ago
    Trouble is, most Amiga "apps" were games running on bare metal hardware with tight timing constraints, so emulation was not really a feasible solution. A similar situation to modern consoles, for which backwards compatibility often involves keeping the original hardware even on subsequent systems.
    - icedchai 3y ago
      True, true. Perhaps they could've had an "A1200-on-a-card" or something for the games.
snvzz 3y ago
>they basically did nothing for ~7 years. Much worse than nothing. Cancelled finished and near-finished projects by the Amiga teams. Reference: "Commodore The Inside Story: The Untold Tale of a Computer Giant", David Pleasance, ISBN 978-1913491659.