5 ms·

In the nineties this would have saved the entire platform.

bluescrn 3y ago
Nah, might have helped give it a bit more life for another year or two, but even if the Amiga (and Commodore) survived the era of Doom (386/486s), it was never going to survive the arrival of Quake and Pentiums, let alone the arrival of GPUs that was to follow shortly after.
- vidarh 3y ago
  The thing is, Commodore might have been as little as months away from getting the next gen chipset to production if they'd had just a bit better sales through '92 and '93. They were producing samples '92 onwards but struggled to afford iterations. They were mismanaged enough that they might well have failed to leverage that and just failed a year or two later as you said, and it might very well be that even the best case of completing AAA[1] would just have bought them another extra couple of years. But Commodore had faced crunches like that several times and survived and bounced back massively. So who knows what things might look like if AAA had gone to market (with chunky graphics modes, and massively increased memory bandwidth) and bought them enough sales and by extension time to complete the next-iteration - Hombre[2] - as well. Though Hombre was based on PA RISC, so might well have ended up being the death-knell instead a bit later. Though their "backwards compatibility" story for it was based on options of either a "classic Amiga on a chip" or emulation, so maybe they'd have gotten to a sufficiently CPU agnostic position to be able to make further architecture switches survivable. It's fun to speculate. I'm a bit of two minds about it - I'd have loved the Amiga to have survived longer - I still miss it -, but I'm unsure if I'd have liked the direction Commodore would have taken it in with Hombre (which was being designed to also run Windows NT... Shudder). It's easier to have nostalgia when later iterations haven't ruined the original experience... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Amiga_Architecture_chipset https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Amiga_Architecture_ch... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset
bemmu 3y ago
It’s wild to me that now people are making something like this just for fun, while if this had actually been released at the time it would have been a best-selling game.

Nah, might have helped give it a bit more life for another year or two, but even if the Amiga (and Commodore) survived the era of Doom (386/486s), it was never going to survive the arrival of Quake and Pentiums, let alone the arrival of GPUs that was to follow shortly after.

vidarh 3y ago
The thing is, Commodore might have been as little as months away from getting the next gen chipset to production if they'd had just a bit better sales through '92 and '93. They were producing samples '92 onwards but struggled to afford iterations. They were mismanaged enough that they might well have failed to leverage that and just failed a year or two later as you said, and it might very well be that even the best case of completing AAA[1] would just have bought them another extra couple of years. But Commodore had faced crunches like that several times and survived and bounced back massively. So who knows what things might look like if AAA had gone to market (with chunky graphics modes, and massively increased memory bandwidth) and bought them enough sales and by extension time to complete the next-iteration - Hombre[2] - as well. Though Hombre was based on PA RISC, so might well have ended up being the death-knell instead a bit later. Though their "backwards compatibility" story for it was based on options of either a "classic Amiga on a chip" or emulation, so maybe they'd have gotten to a sufficiently CPU agnostic position to be able to make further architecture switches survivable. It's fun to speculate. I'm a bit of two minds about it - I'd have loved the Amiga to have survived longer - I still miss it -, but I'm unsure if I'd have liked the direction Commodore would have taken it in with Hombre (which was being designed to also run Windows NT... Shudder). It's easier to have nostalgia when later iterations haven't ruined the original experience... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Amiga_Architecture_chipset https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Amiga_Architecture_ch... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset

bemmu 3y ago

It’s wild to me that now people are making something like this just for fun, while if this had actually been released at the time it would have been a best-selling game.