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> “PC games were perhaps not yet as colorful, zippy and funky as Amiga games” I recall the PC/VGA port of Xenon II Megablast being a revelation. That must have

by pavlov 3y ago

> “PC games were perhaps not yet as colorful, zippy and funky as Amiga games” I recall the PC/VGA port of Xenon II Megablast being a revelation. That must have been 1990 or 1991. It was as fast and colorful and excitingly busy as the Amiga version, and it ran on commodity 386 hardware that was produced by multiple vendors on every level. There was massive competition for CPUs, graphics chips, sound cards, motherboards, and everything else pushing prices down. Meanwhile Commodore was going it alone with custom chipsets and pinching pennies. Any advantage they had left wasn’t going to last. Today Apple is of course massively successful with that vertical integration model, but the difference is that 1) Apple has had the right executive talent for 27 years, 2) they’re willing to invest at every level to make the vertical integration benefits actually compound into the product. In comparison Commodore was relatively broke and seemingly packed with loser MBAs.

timbit42 3y ago
Commodore had great engineers but terrible management. Jack Tramiel didn't even use computers until he got an iPad later in his life. Jack would have been just as successful if he had been selling bicycles. After Jack left, Irving Gould was in charge and along with his henchman, Medhi Ali. They purposefully destroyed Commodore. Irving was getting old and it seemed he cared more about having more, expensive paintings in his home when he died than keeping Commodore going by giving their R&D any money. Thomas Rattigan was the best COO (and potential future CEO) Commodore ever had, but Gould fired him before he could do too much good. Without him, the Amiga 500 and 2000 would not have happened and the Amiga 500 is what kept Commodore going as long as it did. Over half of Amigas sold were the 500 model. Jack's biggest mistake was getting into a position where he needed someone like Irving Gould to invest money to keep his company from going under. In retrospect, it would have been better for Jack to go bankrupt and start over than let Gould have control. If Commodore had survived until today, their hardware would be the same as PCs and Macs, but they would have their own OS and the custom Amiga chipset might be a contender in the GPU space today.
livrem 3y ago
I loved Xenon II, but the PC music was terrible. I solved that by recording the music from a friend's Amiga, looped on two sides of a cassette tape, so I could listen to it while playing the game. It was the only game I ever bothered doing that with, but I did have a few other cassettes full of music recorded from Amiga and C64 that I listened to a lot (in the years before I had a PC with good enough sound card to listen to MOD or SID files).
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
cmrdporcupine 3y ago
The Amiga's whole architecture -- custom chips multiplexing bus access to the RAM, a common architecture for those kinds of machines in the 80s -- made no sense by the late 80s. CPUs got faster, RAM not nearly as much, and CPUs were more and more waiting on RAM and starting to build out complicated caching architectures, and none of that is friendly to the approach that Jay Miner took (with both the Amiga and the Atari 8-bits). Already by the mid-80s, Shiraz Shivji (designer of the Atari ST, and one of the designers on the C64) was pushing the timing limits of DRAM chips past their specs in order to do this sort of thing. I sometimes wonder what would have happened in Commodore had simply directed their late 80s efforts into making ISA video cards instead. The Amiga brand might have had some cachet there, though I doubt by that point they had the engineering talent to be competitive. Both Atari and Amiga made a push into cheaper 68k "workstation"-ish Unix machines in the early 90s -- running variants of AT&T Sys V R4 on the 68k-- with little success. In some ways they were just maybe 5-10 years too early on that type of thing, because desktop consumer-level Linux machines were a thing just a few years later and of course by the turn of the century Apple was selling a BSD-based Unix home computer to the masses. It's fun to imagine what would have happened if Commodore or Atari had just dropped their own operating systems and gone with a BSD. Looking back it's clear to me that Tramiel exiting Commodore and starting Atari Corp in 84 was a disaster not just for Commodore but for the industry. Not because Tramiel was any kind of tech visionary, but because here was no room in the market for two platforms competing in (somewhat) the same space at that point. In North America the Atari machines weren't much of a factor, but in Europe they definitely were, and they did better in productivity and studio music sectors than the Amiga, overall. If all the software development and retailing effort had gone into just one 68k "home computer", I think things would have been just overall better. And Tramiel would have been more aggressive on Amiga pricing.
- zozbot234 3y ago
  The Amiga had both chip and fast RAM, the latter was only accessed by the CPU. Not too different from GPU coprocessors today sharing unified access to some fraction of system memory. "Complicated caching architectures" use coherence protocols to ensure that things are kept consistent when required. *nix-like systems would have come with a lot of overhead back then. Perhaps you could've had MMU-based sandboxing and virtual memory as an optional feature, so that old applications and games could still rely on bare-metal hardware access.

by pavlov 3y ago

timbit42 3y ago

Commodore had great engineers but terrible management. Jack Tramiel didn't even use computers until he got an iPad later in his life. Jack would have been just as successful if he had been selling bicycles. After Jack left, Irving Gould was in charge and along with his henchman, Medhi Ali. They purposefully destroyed Commodore. Irving was getting old and it seemed he cared more about having more, expensive paintings in his home when he died than keeping Commodore going by giving their R&D any money. Thomas Rattigan was the best COO (and potential future CEO) Commodore ever had, but Gould fired him before he could do too much good. Without him, the Amiga 500 and 2000 would not have happened and the Amiga 500 is what kept Commodore going as long as it did. Over half of Amigas sold were the 500 model. Jack's biggest mistake was getting into a position where he needed someone like Irving Gould to invest money to keep his company from going under. In retrospect, it would have been better for Jack to go bankrupt and start over than let Gould have control. If Commodore had survived until today, their hardware would be the same as PCs and Macs, but they would have their own OS and the custom Amiga chipset might be a contender in the GPU space today.

livrem 3y ago

I loved Xenon II, but the PC music was terrible. I solved that by recording the music from a friend's Amiga, looped on two sides of a cassette tape, so I could listen to it while playing the game. It was the only game I ever bothered doing that with, but I did have a few other cassettes full of music recorded from Amiga and C64 that I listened to a lot (in the years before I had a PC with good enough sound card to listen to MOD or SID files).

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

cmrdporcupine 3y ago

The Amiga's whole architecture -- custom chips multiplexing bus access to the RAM, a common architecture for those kinds of machines in the 80s -- made no sense by the late 80s. CPUs got faster, RAM not nearly as much, and CPUs were more and more waiting on RAM and starting to build out complicated caching architectures, and none of that is friendly to the approach that Jay Miner took (with both the Amiga and the Atari 8-bits). Already by the mid-80s, Shiraz Shivji (designer of the Atari ST, and one of the designers on the C64) was pushing the timing limits of DRAM chips past their specs in order to do this sort of thing. I sometimes wonder what would have happened in Commodore had simply directed their late 80s efforts into making ISA video cards instead. The Amiga brand might have had some cachet there, though I doubt by that point they had the engineering talent to be competitive. Both Atari and Amiga made a push into cheaper 68k "workstation"-ish Unix machines in the early 90s -- running variants of AT&T Sys V R4 on the 68k-- with little success. In some ways they were just maybe 5-10 years too early on that type of thing, because desktop consumer-level Linux machines were a thing just a few years later and of course by the turn of the century Apple was selling a BSD-based Unix home computer to the masses. It's fun to imagine what would have happened if Commodore or Atari had just dropped their own operating systems and gone with a BSD. Looking back it's clear to me that Tramiel exiting Commodore and starting Atari Corp in 84 was a disaster not just for Commodore but for the industry. Not because Tramiel was any kind of tech visionary, but because here was no room in the market for two platforms competing in (somewhat) the same space at that point. In North America the Atari machines weren't much of a factor, but in Europe they definitely were, and they did better in productivity and studio music sectors than the Amiga, overall. If all the software development and retailing effort had gone into just one 68k "home computer", I think things would have been just overall better. And Tramiel would have been more aggressive on Amiga pricing.

zozbot234 3y ago
The Amiga had both chip and fast RAM, the latter was only accessed by the CPU. Not too different from GPU coprocessors today sharing unified access to some fraction of system memory. "Complicated caching architectures" use coherence protocols to ensure that things are kept consistent when required. *nix-like systems would have come with a lot of overhead back then. Perhaps you could've had MMU-based sandboxing and virtual memory as an optional feature, so that old applications and games could still rely on bare-metal hardware access.