8 ms·

Amiga's final days as chronicled by the Village Voice 30 years ago

109 points by erickhill 3y ago

snakeyjake 3y ago
The Amiga was dead the second they put all of those whiz-bang chips in them that allowed them to do things that the PC and Mac couldn't do. One company cannot out-innovate thousands for long-- so everything the Amiga could do in 1985, the PC could do better by 1987 with ISA cards from thousands of different manufacturers. HAM in 1985 was great. VGA in 1987 was better. 2x 8-bit stereo channels in 1985 was great. SoundBlaster CMS in 1987 wasn't better, but it didn't take long before 16-bit audio hit the PC. Video overlay with the A2000 was great, and carved out a niche in AV production for decades. But again, VGA was better, ubiquitous GUI accelerators like the Mach32 made windows fly so fast the Amiga could only dream, and frankensteining accelerators into a closed "complete" system was not the answer people were looking for. Hell I had, and still have, my A2000 and remember the torturous pain of upgrading the video in it, with some apps that would only display on the built-in video because the add-in cards couldn't support the native graphics some apps that would work on both until you dropped in the accelerator file thingy and then they would only work on the add-in card, motherboard ram/chip ram/fast ram/expansion card ram/CPU accelerator RAM all of which could lead to incompatibilities or performance gotchas. Generally speaking, you stuck in a VGA card and CGA and EGA worked. When a faster card came out you stuck it in and loaded a TSR or drivers and things worked faster. Installed Windows? Get a card with Windows acceleration. 1280x1024@24-bits in 1992 while the Amiga was outputting TV resolutions. I installed a Picasso video card and performance worsened because I had paid for the then-astronomical 8MB "fast" RAM upgrade and whoops! video cards only worked with up to 6MB of fast ram and any configurations with more had to use segmented RAM which tanked performance. Some programs would only work with the Picasso drivers, some with the cybergraphics drivers, and others still with only EGS drivers. At almost the exact time this article came out I moved to PC, got to play Doom, and the rest was history.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  Yet, Apple.
  - BirAdam 3y ago
    Apple appeals to a totally different customer. They want something that they’d needn’t fuss with. The other Apple customer is the developer who’s forced into ownership so that he/she can sell to that first Apple customer. Edit: until this became the Apple way, Apple was on life support and headed for hospice. The market chose the appliance like computer and explicitly rejected tinkering.
  - snakeyjake 3y ago
    Apple had System 7. AmigaOS 2 (I think this was the first 32-bit amiga OS) was, and this is putting it kindly, primitive compared to System 7. Besides, in the early 90s when Amiga was dying Apple was also dying. They only survived because of extremely high-end desktop publishing and educational users buying IIfx's, Quadra 950s, and PowerMac 8100s, the fact that Apple moved to PowerPC (two months before this article was published) while Amiga was releasing the 4000T with a 68040, and their extremely desirable laptops. People like to dismiss Apple but there were many years in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s when Macintoshes were the absolutely, irrefutably, and unquestionably fastest non-UNIX workstation personal computers you could buy at any price. And then they became UNIX workstations.
    - zozbot234 3y ago
      > there were many years in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s when Macintoshes were the absolutely, irrefutably, and unquestionably fastest non-UNIX workstation personal computers you could buy Arguably true of PowerPC Macintoshes, but for quite some time the fastest m68k Macintosh you could buy was an Amiga running a Macintosh emulator.
      - snakeyjake 3y ago
        I too subscribed to Amiga World and remember that article. That was only true for a very brief period of time with Amigas using the 68060, which they never came from the factory with. I and, judging by their price on Amibay today, very few other people ever owned or used or even saw a 68060 accelerator card. At the time I could barely afford the 030 accelerator for my A2000 and could sell it today for the price of a 4090. Hmm......
- unwind 3y ago
  Nit: it was 4x 8-bit audio channels, of course.
- zozbot234 3y ago
  The Amiga was built to be a gaming console. How many gaming consoles take custom video cards?
  - tom_ 3y ago
    How many gaming consoles have a keyboard and a mouse and (as was much commented upon at the time) a multitasking GUI OS?
    - vidarh 3y ago
      The original Amiga design had none of those. All of those were added at a point where the game machine market had collapsed and Amiga was running out of money and/or the final pieces after Commodore had snatched them up. AmigaOS "famously" (to Amiga users) has weird inconsistencies because Commodore last minute had to license a BCPL based system to add the AmigaDOS subsystem which is inconsistent with every other part of the OS, for example, because the original system didn't have filesystems and the like in a working order and the company meant to provide it failed to do so. And so we were grumbling about having to deal with BCPL style "BPTR" pointers (had to be shifted to be dereferenced) for no good reason for years afterward.
  - Lerc 3y ago
    Yet the Zorro II and III busses were quite advanced for their time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoconfig https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoconfig
  - empressplay 3y ago
    The 500 was developed to compete in the 'desktop gaming' market but the original 1000 was designed as a productivity machine to compete with the Macintosh. Later 'expandable' Amigas were similarly targeted towards graphics professionals. The Amiga models targeted toward consumer gaming did not AFAIK have the ability to add a video card, being in the more classic integrated keyboard form factor.
    - vidarh 3y ago
- wslh 3y ago
  My memory is very different about the timing. Not saying that your claim of sustaining innovation is not very complex. I remember that Microsoft continued with DOS for long and Windows <= 3.x (and a bit later too) was [quasi] just an UI on top of DOS. My main explanation in 2024 is that Microsoft is Microsoft, no matter what they sell. Microsoft is a business machine like nobody have seen before, they fail at zillions of projects and acquisitions but they continue to exist and growth! Think that Apple found their way very late on so business wise Commodore was doomed, it is not about the hardware. I remember in the late 80s joking to my friends spending money on a Sound Blaster and a CGA... VGA.... SuperVGA. I developed in assembler for the 68x line and just after I learnt some x86 I couldn't believe you need to know about offsets for pointers. But Microsoft is Microsoft and Intel was Intel. The 386 line changed everything. It is documented in the Andy Groove book. This is not personal with your comment but I think several times in HN the community doesn't understand the complexity about going to market and touching the really complex business reality. This goes far from using fancy programming languages, frameworks, etc. Even receiving huge investments.
  - tom_ 3y ago
    In my view it is entirely about the hardware. By the time the Amiga 1200 came out, PC makers could sell you a 33 MHz 486 with <10 cycle multiply, and VESA graphics card with convenient 1 byte/pixel graphics memory arrangement. Against this, muh blitter and HAM and dual playfield mode means nothing. Your dad's bitplane games might be smoother on the Amiga, meanwhile Wing Commander looks like nothing you have ever seen before and let's not even get on to Wolfenstein 3D. (As a kindness to Amiga fans, I am not even going to mention Doom or Syndicate.) The PC games ended up better, and RIP Amiga.
    - wslh 3y ago
      I am not saying that there was not a breaking point but I say that Amiga had enough time and its demise was not inevitable. This was much before Doom. As it is say in the thread they could see themselves as a game console and market that. Nintendo Switch is worse than PS5 but they remain in the market and they started selling game cards. May be Commodore needed a Mario and a Donkey Kong. I think the three coprocessors in the Amiga were a breakthrough before intel included the FPU. This is why I return to the business execution part. And also Commodore was confronting Microsoft and Intel directly. I also felt that Commodore was a good replacement for the Mac, it has WYSIWYG word processor, 3D software, etc.
- vidarh 3y ago
  > The Amiga was dead the second they put all of those whiz-bang chips in them that allowed them to do things that the PC and Mac couldn't do. Amiga wouldn't have existed, or mattered, in the first place without all of those whiz-bang chips in them, and wouldn't have survived the years it did without them even if some irrelevant version had happened without them. But that never would have happened to start with - Amiga, the company, was formed around the ideas of building a gaming system. Looking at the history of Commodore, it's also not at all clear that this was the issue - Commodore was a deeply dysfunctional company, and had been for many years before they even bought Amiga, with extensive problems around underfunding R&D, but then randomly yanking projects and lacking product direction. It became an issue certainly, because it meant that the dysfunction of Commodore was sufficient to kill the whole platform - a risk the PC hardware avoided thanks to clones, and the OS/hardware split of the PC platform avoided because even MS stumbling would've "just" have led to another OS winning out. But without the features of the chipset, nobody would have cared. It was almost only in the US the Amiga was seen predominantly as a "professional" machine that sold as a competitor to PCs in the early years, and it wasn't in the US Amiga sold. The bulk of the Amiga market was in Europe, especially the UK and Germany. Germany also did have a more professional market for the Amiga as well - with e.g. the A2000 being driven by demand from Commodore's Germany subsidiary, but not as the only thing. To such an extent that after Commodore International failed, the Commodore UK management tried to finance a buyout of its own parent company, and kept operating for as long as they could still scrounge up stock. [This US situation was created in large part because Tramiel, before he was fired and bought Atari, had seriously destroyed Commodore's US more 'serious' dealer market with price cuts without preparing the dealers followed by putting Commodore 64's in Kmart, and so when the Amiga was launched Commodore struggled to get sufficient distribution in outlets that could handle a much more expensive machine] > Generally speaking, you stuck in a VGA card and CGA and EGA worked. When a faster card came out you stuck it in and loaded a TSR or drivers and things worked faster. Installed Windows? Get a card with Windows acceleration. 1280x1024@24-bits in 1992 while the Amiga was outputting TV resolutions. This is very different from how I remember things. People were mocking the PC well after Commodore went bankrupt for how PC users had to muck around with drivers and weird command line settings while on the Amiga you just dropped driver in, and had cards that supported AutoConfig [1], which meant we would laugh at PC users whenever they mentioned IRQ's because all of that nonsense was automatic. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoconfig https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoconfig
- leptons 3y ago
  >2x 8-bit stereo channels in 1985 was great Amiga had 14 bit audio. No matter the audio, or the graphics capabilities, the Amiga still had a vastly superior operating system. AREXX was far, far ahead of its time. The multitasking was ahead of its time. Those are the things that kept me on Amiga for so long. No other computing platform really compared in the ways that Amiga really shined.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  And yet not only are modern computers special snowflakes, with exception of the desktop market only alive due to custom hardware used for AAA games on esports, we get whiz-bang chips on all of them. The only difference is that instead of Assembly and DMA configurations, we now use whiz-bang chips vendor specific APIs. Commodore and Amiga went down due to bad management. PC weren't much better unless people were willing to buy whiz-bang sounds cards from Creative Labs or AdLib, while coding for VESA cards wasn't much better without a wrapper library, as contrary to the previous BIOS standards, using Super VGA required drivers from the card vendor. Naturally not a problem for Windows 3.x games, but not everyone was that keen in adopting WinG from Microsoft.
ChuckMcM 3y ago
I bought an A1000 when it came out. I then became good friends with the original team in Los Gatos, CA as we worked through pushing it into new places. My "day job" was a Sun, and my Amiga could do more than my Sun 3/50 could and cost a lot less. One of the under appreciated challenges was that as amazing as the silicon was, it really couldn't run at a high enough frequency to give you both acceleration AND a 640 x 480 non-interlaced display. That lead to workarounds like the "flicker fixer" because in the US at least, often the 60Hz interlace of the display and the 60Hz power line frequency "modulating" fluorescent lights meant you got some rather annoying "beat frequencies" on your screen. I had a long persistence monitor but it was an artifact from a different age and not generally available. (also kinda lame for animations because smearing). I always lamented that Commodore was set up as a giant tax dodge rather than a computer company. And I got frustrated when Jean-Louis Gasse would announce some new "revolutionary" feature of Macintosh that the Amiga already had. It definitely would have been different had Commodore been a "real" computer company. I tried to get Sun to buy them but alas, by the time that was possible Sun was already running away from the desktop workstation into the server room where they hoped to make a stand against Windows NT.
- zozbot234 3y ago
  That limitation was not about frequency, it was about supporting widespread TV hardware. Flickering was inherent to how TVs worked at the time, but Amiga software did not sufficiently account for that. If they had used the interlaced modes correctly, i.e. as a minor tweak over simple scanline doubling rather than a true increase in vertical resolution, the flickering would've been a non-issue.
  - empressplay 3y ago
    The Amiga only displays one interlace field per 1/30th of a second -- that is to say that it is effectively 15(ish)fps in interlaced mode. It's only using a traditional 200 line output, just phase shifted for the second field. It's basically a hack. It flickers because the persistence of most CRT screens is less than 1/15th of a second, and so by the time you see the second field, the first field is already diminishing in brightness. IIRC Commodore released (or wanted to release?) a monitor that had a longer persistence.
squarefoot 3y ago
Obligatory mention of the famous "Deathbed vigil" video shot by Dave Haynie in 1994 in which he enters the almost abandoned Commodore HQ in west Chester PA with a camera. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaTjwo1ywcI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaTjwo1ywcI Some interesting hardware porn worth watching in there.
sunpazed 3y ago
The “European hacker-culture demo” from Ezra’s Amiga is likely State Of The Art or 9 Fingers from Spaceballs — both really cool scene demos: https://youtu.be/89wq5EoXy-0 https://youtu.be/89wq5EoXy-0 https://youtu.be/n4M7e79XTYk https://youtu.be/n4M7e79XTYk These easily run on an Amiga 500 ES from the 80s, and are stored on a single floppy disk.
- bgeeek 3y ago
  The demoscene was brilliant. People shared them sneakernet-style like games back then too, which speaks volumes for how good demos were. Very fond memories.
cable 3y ago
It's not surprising the Village Voice covered this - NYC had a rich cyberculture during the mid 1990s, fostered by the various BBS/ISPs (MindVox, Interport, Panix, etc) as well as a number of startups in Silicon Alley (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Alley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Alley).
jug 3y ago
Inspired by the article, this is the first definite and attributable mention of Commodore going out of business that I could find in comp.sys.amiga.advocacy https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.amiga.advocacy/c/FExLfAD53rc/m/UA-OsJXqcCoJ https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.amiga.advocacy/c/FExLfA... Of course, it was immediately labelled fake news! ;) > **********Start Buffer********************************************************* > * > *Recieved: from CBMVAX.COMMODORE.COM by zmail.tamu.edu (4.1/SMI-4.1) > * id AA20279; Thu, 28 Apr 94 13:32:11 EDT > *Date: Thu, 28 Apr 1994 12:32:08 -0500 (CDT) > *From: J...@CBMVAX.COMMODORE.COM > *To: j...@digcre.com > *Subject: Sorry to say... > * > * I regret to report the closure of Commodore Buisness Machines, Inc as of > *April 28, 1994. As a developer of Commodore Amiga(TM) products, we would like > *to thank you for your continued support. Any questions or comments should be > *redirected to Commodere UK. We will shortly be sending you an information > *packet on parts and software supply purchasing via Commodore UK. > * > * John Davidson, > * Production Manager, Commodore INTL, LTD. > * > ***********End Buffer*********************************************************** Edit: Wow, there's an easter egg web server on https://cbmvax.commodore.com/ https://cbmvax.commodore.com/ ! It's definitely ran by someone who is knowledegable about Commodore history! That's fun to know. <3
TimBuckToot 3y ago
The Amiga was like a dream machine when it hit the market, most people I knew had C64's at the time and the Amiga was just light years ahead in terms of capabilities. A few people I knew had PC's and the Amiga absolutely left them in the dust for years, it only really seemed to catch up around 1993 once Doom hit and VGA / SVGA cards became somewhat more affordable, that was roughly eight years after the Amiga was released. All of that being said, I lived in a part of the world in the 80/90's where PC tech was very expensive at the time, and the humble Amiga was very reasonably priced in comparison, it had just enough wow factor initially to make you believe, with lots of custom chips to support that ambition. It was the sort of computer that was able to crossover into every space mostly. If you lived in the US, you were likely trying to decide between a Tandy PC and Apple or a console which were way more affordable on home soil and already had a large catalogue of titles and mainstream developer support and business use (for the PC). Where I think things went wrong for the Amiga, aside from Irving Gould and his rather hopeless management squad, was that the Amiga was marketed badly and poorly positioned in the US, with Commodore having a somewhat sketchy relationship with smaller computers stores across the country which almost guaranteed they got a bit less sunshine compared to other devices in store (thanks in part to Jack Tramiel and his aggressive price cutting tactics with the C64 in the early 80's). Europe, Australia, and South Africa all had brilliant marketing and distribution in comparison, and it was thanks to these markets the machine endured as long as it did. The Amiga however ended up fighting too many battles on too many fronts and had very poor strategic direction in general. They needed R&D badly and a decent amount of it to maintain a hardware advantage at a low cost price point, instead they got rid of many of their great hardware engineers and specialists when their initial project had finished so they could save a buck and ultimately seeded their talent to the competition... They should've had a VGA or better machine out to market by 1990, which they didn't and that was a major loss in terms of the hardware game. PAL and NTSC Amiga machines were also different beasts, with the PAL machines coming out on top in terms of resolution, compatibility and with more developer support in general. But it's real losing hands (and there were a few) were: 1. Too many frequent revisions of it's main product which were superseded shortly after - Amiga 500+ or Amiga 600 anyone? 2. No cartridge or card slot while fighting a battle against consoles for market share and not having the foresight to build a low cost standardized adapter that could've been used as one (via the almost never used SCSI connector). 3. Releasing the CD32 Console, but not releasing an Amiga 1200 CD drive or the same capabilities across their all their home desktops (i.e. Akiko chip and CD32 firmware). 4. Releasing an upgraded version of Workbench / bios which killed compatibility with a third of Amiga's back catalogue of software titles (that was bright). 5. Having different resolutions and cpu speeds between countries for the same product - believe it or not there's a way to separate voltage speeds from the CPU frequency, and to have resolutions that can be complimentary across PAL and NTSC regions (just ask Nintendo and Sega), and even more amazingly if you just add a spot of frame skipping into your NTSC title it can work just fine in PAL at full speed. 6. RGB 15khz is great, but not properly implemented to support higher resolutions, so everything looked a super flickery when you went high res - it was basically a feature you couldn't use or had to suffer through if you did use it (Until the Amber Chip appeared on the A3000 / A4000 range). 7. The HAM mode was revolutionary but was extremely difficult to use except for the odd digitized image - another feature that people couldn't use, and wasn't made easier to use... 8. Chip ram should've been the only RAM in the system and had a faster bus speed to support normal transport speeds across memory. It was bad because it was very limited. 9. No upgrades across the sound channels or quality / frequency. and lastly... 10. Commodore's main bread butter with the Amiga was with the desktop hobbyist home user - this segment should've been it's no 1 priority and been given first class treatment all the way. The UK and German offices understood this, but not in the US with the final nail in the coffin being the poor launch sales of the CD32 in the US (Went great in the UK). This was supported by a lack of killer titles upon release such as (Street Fighter 2, Mortal Kombat) and the general apathy to the Commodore brand in the US overall due to years of neglect and bad decisions. The beautiful Amiga died because of idiocy and neglect - Commodore was doomed to die, it was just a rotten shame that the Amiga computer line went with it.
simne 3y ago
For me more and more looks like, tight relations with silicon manufacture doomed them. If they have not so tight relations with hardware, they would show much more agile behavior to survive.
- simne 3y ago
  Many people don't care about anti-monopoly regulations, but they are not joke. IBM and Intel for decades deal with anti-monopoly regulations and managed to avoid ATT/GM like issues (extremely serious troubles, in simple language). People usually thinking, IBM distributed their soft as public domain and opened S/360 and allow clones, because they are good, but in reality, they used all means, to avoid 100% share of market, they intentionally made hidden moves to support semi-concurrents like AMD in 1980s, so anti-monopoly regulators didn't have enough foundations to issue things like made against ATT/GM. In early 1980s, Commodore was nearly monopoly of home PC market (IBM PC at begin was expensive business machine, and Macintosh was even more expensive, when first appear). And I have seen from other business behavior, they behave exactly same, when appear close to hit some crossbar (of profits, or of gross budget, or of market share) which they don't want to hit, because they feel good enough under this crossbar.

109 points by erickhill 3y ago

The Amiga was dead the second they put all of those whiz-bang chips in them that allowed them to do things that the PC and Mac couldn't do. One company cannot out-innovate thousands for long-- so everything the Amiga could do in 1985, the PC could do better by 1987 with ISA cards from thousands of different manufacturers. HAM in 1985 was great. VGA in 1987 was better. 2x 8-bit stereo channels in 1985 was great. SoundBlaster CMS in 1987 wasn't better, but it didn't take long before 16-bit audio hit the PC. Video overlay with the A2000 was great, and carved out a niche in AV production for decades. But again, VGA was better, ubiquitous GUI accelerators like the Mach32 made windows fly so fast the Amiga could only dream, and frankensteining accelerators into a closed "complete" system was not the answer people were looking for. Hell I had, and still have, my A2000 and remember the torturous pain of upgrading the video in it, with some apps that would only display on the built-in video because the add-in cards couldn't support the native graphics some apps that would work on both until you dropped in the accelerator file thingy and then they would only work on the add-in card, motherboard ram/chip ram/fast ram/expansion card ram/CPU accelerator RAM all of which could lead to incompatibilities or performance gotchas. Generally speaking, you stuck in a VGA card and CGA and EGA worked. When a faster card came out you stuck it in and loaded a TSR or drivers and things worked faster. Installed Windows? Get a card with Windows acceleration. 1280x1024@24-bits in 1992 while the Amiga was outputting TV resolutions. I installed a Picasso video card and performance worsened because I had paid for the then-astronomical 8MB "fast" RAM upgrade and whoops! video cards only worked with up to 6MB of fast ram and any configurations with more had to use segmented RAM which tanked performance. Some programs would only work with the Picasso drivers, some with the cybergraphics drivers, and others still with only EGS drivers. At almost the exact time this article came out I moved to PC, got to play Doom, and the rest was history.

actionfromafar 3y ago
Yet, Apple.
- BirAdam 3y ago
  Apple appeals to a totally different customer. They want something that they’d needn’t fuss with. The other Apple customer is the developer who’s forced into ownership so that he/she can sell to that first Apple customer. Edit: until this became the Apple way, Apple was on life support and headed for hospice. The market chose the appliance like computer and explicitly rejected tinkering.
- snakeyjake 3y ago
  Apple had System 7. AmigaOS 2 (I think this was the first 32-bit amiga OS) was, and this is putting it kindly, primitive compared to System 7. Besides, in the early 90s when Amiga was dying Apple was also dying. They only survived because of extremely high-end desktop publishing and educational users buying IIfx's, Quadra 950s, and PowerMac 8100s, the fact that Apple moved to PowerPC (two months before this article was published) while Amiga was releasing the 4000T with a 68040, and their extremely desirable laptops. People like to dismiss Apple but there were many years in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s when Macintoshes were the absolutely, irrefutably, and unquestionably fastest non-UNIX workstation personal computers you could buy at any price. And then they became UNIX workstations.
  - zozbot234 3y ago
    > there were many years in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s when Macintoshes were the absolutely, irrefutably, and unquestionably fastest non-UNIX workstation personal computers you could buy Arguably true of PowerPC Macintoshes, but for quite some time the fastest m68k Macintosh you could buy was an Amiga running a Macintosh emulator.
    - snakeyjake 3y ago
      I too subscribed to Amiga World and remember that article. That was only true for a very brief period of time with Amigas using the 68060, which they never came from the factory with. I and, judging by their price on Amibay today, very few other people ever owned or used or even saw a 68060 accelerator card. At the time I could barely afford the 030 accelerator for my A2000 and could sell it today for the price of a 4090. Hmm......
unwind 3y ago
Nit: it was 4x 8-bit audio channels, of course.
zozbot234 3y ago
The Amiga was built to be a gaming console. How many gaming consoles take custom video cards?
- tom_ 3y ago
  How many gaming consoles have a keyboard and a mouse and (as was much commented upon at the time) a multitasking GUI OS?
  - vidarh 3y ago
    The original Amiga design had none of those. All of those were added at a point where the game machine market had collapsed and Amiga was running out of money and/or the final pieces after Commodore had snatched them up. AmigaOS "famously" (to Amiga users) has weird inconsistencies because Commodore last minute had to license a BCPL based system to add the AmigaDOS subsystem which is inconsistent with every other part of the OS, for example, because the original system didn't have filesystems and the like in a working order and the company meant to provide it failed to do so. And so we were grumbling about having to deal with BCPL style "BPTR" pointers (had to be shifted to be dereferenced) for no good reason for years afterward.
- Lerc 3y ago
  Yet the Zorro II and III busses were quite advanced for their time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoconfig https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoconfig
- empressplay 3y ago
  The 500 was developed to compete in the 'desktop gaming' market but the original 1000 was designed as a productivity machine to compete with the Macintosh. Later 'expandable' Amigas were similarly targeted towards graphics professionals. The Amiga models targeted toward consumer gaming did not AFAIK have the ability to add a video card, being in the more classic integrated keyboard form factor.
  - vidarh 3y ago
wslh 3y ago
My memory is very different about the timing. Not saying that your claim of sustaining innovation is not very complex. I remember that Microsoft continued with DOS for long and Windows <= 3.x (and a bit later too) was [quasi] just an UI on top of DOS. My main explanation in 2024 is that Microsoft is Microsoft, no matter what they sell. Microsoft is a business machine like nobody have seen before, they fail at zillions of projects and acquisitions but they continue to exist and growth! Think that Apple found their way very late on so business wise Commodore was doomed, it is not about the hardware. I remember in the late 80s joking to my friends spending money on a Sound Blaster and a CGA... VGA.... SuperVGA. I developed in assembler for the 68x line and just after I learnt some x86 I couldn't believe you need to know about offsets for pointers. But Microsoft is Microsoft and Intel was Intel. The 386 line changed everything. It is documented in the Andy Groove book. This is not personal with your comment but I think several times in HN the community doesn't understand the complexity about going to market and touching the really complex business reality. This goes far from using fancy programming languages, frameworks, etc. Even receiving huge investments.
- tom_ 3y ago
  In my view it is entirely about the hardware. By the time the Amiga 1200 came out, PC makers could sell you a 33 MHz 486 with <10 cycle multiply, and VESA graphics card with convenient 1 byte/pixel graphics memory arrangement. Against this, muh blitter and HAM and dual playfield mode means nothing. Your dad's bitplane games might be smoother on the Amiga, meanwhile Wing Commander looks like nothing you have ever seen before and let's not even get on to Wolfenstein 3D. (As a kindness to Amiga fans, I am not even going to mention Doom or Syndicate.) The PC games ended up better, and RIP Amiga.
  - wslh 3y ago
    I am not saying that there was not a breaking point but I say that Amiga had enough time and its demise was not inevitable. This was much before Doom. As it is say in the thread they could see themselves as a game console and market that. Nintendo Switch is worse than PS5 but they remain in the market and they started selling game cards. May be Commodore needed a Mario and a Donkey Kong. I think the three coprocessors in the Amiga were a breakthrough before intel included the FPU. This is why I return to the business execution part. And also Commodore was confronting Microsoft and Intel directly. I also felt that Commodore was a good replacement for the Mac, it has WYSIWYG word processor, 3D software, etc.
vidarh 3y ago
> The Amiga was dead the second they put all of those whiz-bang chips in them that allowed them to do things that the PC and Mac couldn't do. Amiga wouldn't have existed, or mattered, in the first place without all of those whiz-bang chips in them, and wouldn't have survived the years it did without them even if some irrelevant version had happened without them. But that never would have happened to start with - Amiga, the company, was formed around the ideas of building a gaming system. Looking at the history of Commodore, it's also not at all clear that this was the issue - Commodore was a deeply dysfunctional company, and had been for many years before they even bought Amiga, with extensive problems around underfunding R&D, but then randomly yanking projects and lacking product direction. It became an issue certainly, because it meant that the dysfunction of Commodore was sufficient to kill the whole platform - a risk the PC hardware avoided thanks to clones, and the OS/hardware split of the PC platform avoided because even MS stumbling would've "just" have led to another OS winning out. But without the features of the chipset, nobody would have cared. It was almost only in the US the Amiga was seen predominantly as a "professional" machine that sold as a competitor to PCs in the early years, and it wasn't in the US Amiga sold. The bulk of the Amiga market was in Europe, especially the UK and Germany. Germany also did have a more professional market for the Amiga as well - with e.g. the A2000 being driven by demand from Commodore's Germany subsidiary, but not as the only thing. To such an extent that after Commodore International failed, the Commodore UK management tried to finance a buyout of its own parent company, and kept operating for as long as they could still scrounge up stock. [This US situation was created in large part because Tramiel, before he was fired and bought Atari, had seriously destroyed Commodore's US more 'serious' dealer market with price cuts without preparing the dealers followed by putting Commodore 64's in Kmart, and so when the Amiga was launched Commodore struggled to get sufficient distribution in outlets that could handle a much more expensive machine] > Generally speaking, you stuck in a VGA card and CGA and EGA worked. When a faster card came out you stuck it in and loaded a TSR or drivers and things worked faster. Installed Windows? Get a card with Windows acceleration. 1280x1024@24-bits in 1992 while the Amiga was outputting TV resolutions. This is very different from how I remember things. People were mocking the PC well after Commodore went bankrupt for how PC users had to muck around with drivers and weird command line settings while on the Amiga you just dropped driver in, and had cards that supported AutoConfig [1], which meant we would laugh at PC users whenever they mentioned IRQ's because all of that nonsense was automatic. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoconfig https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoconfig
leptons 3y ago
>2x 8-bit stereo channels in 1985 was great Amiga had 14 bit audio. No matter the audio, or the graphics capabilities, the Amiga still had a vastly superior operating system. AREXX was far, far ahead of its time. The multitasking was ahead of its time. Those are the things that kept me on Amiga for so long. No other computing platform really compared in the ways that Amiga really shined.
pjmlp 3y ago
And yet not only are modern computers special snowflakes, with exception of the desktop market only alive due to custom hardware used for AAA games on esports, we get whiz-bang chips on all of them. The only difference is that instead of Assembly and DMA configurations, we now use whiz-bang chips vendor specific APIs. Commodore and Amiga went down due to bad management. PC weren't much better unless people were willing to buy whiz-bang sounds cards from Creative Labs or AdLib, while coding for VESA cards wasn't much better without a wrapper library, as contrary to the previous BIOS standards, using Super VGA required drivers from the card vendor. Naturally not a problem for Windows 3.x games, but not everyone was that keen in adopting WinG from Microsoft.

ChuckMcM 3y ago

I bought an A1000 when it came out. I then became good friends with the original team in Los Gatos, CA as we worked through pushing it into new places. My "day job" was a Sun, and my Amiga could do more than my Sun 3/50 could and cost a lot less. One of the under appreciated challenges was that as amazing as the silicon was, it really couldn't run at a high enough frequency to give you both acceleration AND a 640 x 480 non-interlaced display. That lead to workarounds like the "flicker fixer" because in the US at least, often the 60Hz interlace of the display and the 60Hz power line frequency "modulating" fluorescent lights meant you got some rather annoying "beat frequencies" on your screen. I had a long persistence monitor but it was an artifact from a different age and not generally available. (also kinda lame for animations because smearing). I always lamented that Commodore was set up as a giant tax dodge rather than a computer company. And I got frustrated when Jean-Louis Gasse would announce some new "revolutionary" feature of Macintosh that the Amiga already had. It definitely would have been different had Commodore been a "real" computer company. I tried to get Sun to buy them but alas, by the time that was possible Sun was already running away from the desktop workstation into the server room where they hoped to make a stand against Windows NT.

zozbot234 3y ago
That limitation was not about frequency, it was about supporting widespread TV hardware. Flickering was inherent to how TVs worked at the time, but Amiga software did not sufficiently account for that. If they had used the interlaced modes correctly, i.e. as a minor tweak over simple scanline doubling rather than a true increase in vertical resolution, the flickering would've been a non-issue.
- empressplay 3y ago
  The Amiga only displays one interlace field per 1/30th of a second -- that is to say that it is effectively 15(ish)fps in interlaced mode. It's only using a traditional 200 line output, just phase shifted for the second field. It's basically a hack. It flickers because the persistence of most CRT screens is less than 1/15th of a second, and so by the time you see the second field, the first field is already diminishing in brightness. IIRC Commodore released (or wanted to release?) a monitor that had a longer persistence.

squarefoot 3y ago

Obligatory mention of the famous "Deathbed vigil" video shot by Dave Haynie in 1994 in which he enters the almost abandoned Commodore HQ in west Chester PA with a camera. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaTjwo1ywcI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaTjwo1ywcI Some interesting hardware porn worth watching in there.

sunpazed 3y ago

The “European hacker-culture demo” from Ezra’s Amiga is likely State Of The Art or 9 Fingers from Spaceballs — both really cool scene demos: https://youtu.be/89wq5EoXy-0 https://youtu.be/89wq5EoXy-0 https://youtu.be/n4M7e79XTYk https://youtu.be/n4M7e79XTYk These easily run on an Amiga 500 ES from the 80s, and are stored on a single floppy disk.

bgeeek 3y ago
The demoscene was brilliant. People shared them sneakernet-style like games back then too, which speaks volumes for how good demos were. Very fond memories.

cable 3y ago

It's not surprising the Village Voice covered this - NYC had a rich cyberculture during the mid 1990s, fostered by the various BBS/ISPs (MindVox, Interport, Panix, etc) as well as a number of startups in Silicon Alley (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Alley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Alley).

jug 3y ago

Inspired by the article, this is the first definite and attributable mention of Commodore going out of business that I could find in comp.sys.amiga.advocacy https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.amiga.advocacy/c/FExLfAD53rc/m/UA-OsJXqcCoJ https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.amiga.advocacy/c/FExLfA... Of course, it was immediately labelled fake news! ;) > **********Start Buffer********************************************************* > * > *Recieved: from CBMVAX.COMMODORE.COM by zmail.tamu.edu (4.1/SMI-4.1) > * id AA20279; Thu, 28 Apr 94 13:32:11 EDT > *Date: Thu, 28 Apr 1994 12:32:08 -0500 (CDT) > *From: J...@CBMVAX.COMMODORE.COM > *To: j...@digcre.com > *Subject: Sorry to say... > * > * I regret to report the closure of Commodore Buisness Machines, Inc as of > *April 28, 1994. As a developer of Commodore Amiga(TM) products, we would like > *to thank you for your continued support. Any questions or comments should be > *redirected to Commodere UK. We will shortly be sending you an information > *packet on parts and software supply purchasing via Commodore UK. > * > * John Davidson, > * Production Manager, Commodore INTL, LTD. > * > ***********End Buffer*********************************************************** Edit: Wow, there's an easter egg web server on https://cbmvax.commodore.com/ https://cbmvax.commodore.com/ ! It's definitely ran by someone who is knowledegable about Commodore history! That's fun to know. <3

TimBuckToot 3y ago

The Amiga was like a dream machine when it hit the market, most people I knew had C64's at the time and the Amiga was just light years ahead in terms of capabilities. A few people I knew had PC's and the Amiga absolutely left them in the dust for years, it only really seemed to catch up around 1993 once Doom hit and VGA / SVGA cards became somewhat more affordable, that was roughly eight years after the Amiga was released. All of that being said, I lived in a part of the world in the 80/90's where PC tech was very expensive at the time, and the humble Amiga was very reasonably priced in comparison, it had just enough wow factor initially to make you believe, with lots of custom chips to support that ambition. It was the sort of computer that was able to crossover into every space mostly. If you lived in the US, you were likely trying to decide between a Tandy PC and Apple or a console which were way more affordable on home soil and already had a large catalogue of titles and mainstream developer support and business use (for the PC). Where I think things went wrong for the Amiga, aside from Irving Gould and his rather hopeless management squad, was that the Amiga was marketed badly and poorly positioned in the US, with Commodore having a somewhat sketchy relationship with smaller computers stores across the country which almost guaranteed they got a bit less sunshine compared to other devices in store (thanks in part to Jack Tramiel and his aggressive price cutting tactics with the C64 in the early 80's). Europe, Australia, and South Africa all had brilliant marketing and distribution in comparison, and it was thanks to these markets the machine endured as long as it did. The Amiga however ended up fighting too many battles on too many fronts and had very poor strategic direction in general. They needed R&D badly and a decent amount of it to maintain a hardware advantage at a low cost price point, instead they got rid of many of their great hardware engineers and specialists when their initial project had finished so they could save a buck and ultimately seeded their talent to the competition... They should've had a VGA or better machine out to market by 1990, which they didn't and that was a major loss in terms of the hardware game. PAL and NTSC Amiga machines were also different beasts, with the PAL machines coming out on top in terms of resolution, compatibility and with more developer support in general. But it's real losing hands (and there were a few) were: 1. Too many frequent revisions of it's main product which were superseded shortly after - Amiga 500+ or Amiga 600 anyone? 2. No cartridge or card slot while fighting a battle against consoles for market share and not having the foresight to build a low cost standardized adapter that could've been used as one (via the almost never used SCSI connector). 3. Releasing the CD32 Console, but not releasing an Amiga 1200 CD drive or the same capabilities across their all their home desktops (i.e. Akiko chip and CD32 firmware). 4. Releasing an upgraded version of Workbench / bios which killed compatibility with a third of Amiga's back catalogue of software titles (that was bright). 5. Having different resolutions and cpu speeds between countries for the same product - believe it or not there's a way to separate voltage speeds from the CPU frequency, and to have resolutions that can be complimentary across PAL and NTSC regions (just ask Nintendo and Sega), and even more amazingly if you just add a spot of frame skipping into your NTSC title it can work just fine in PAL at full speed. 6. RGB 15khz is great, but not properly implemented to support higher resolutions, so everything looked a super flickery when you went high res - it was basically a feature you couldn't use or had to suffer through if you did use it (Until the Amber Chip appeared on the A3000 / A4000 range). 7. The HAM mode was revolutionary but was extremely difficult to use except for the odd digitized image - another feature that people couldn't use, and wasn't made easier to use... 8. Chip ram should've been the only RAM in the system and had a faster bus speed to support normal transport speeds across memory. It was bad because it was very limited. 9. No upgrades across the sound channels or quality / frequency. and lastly... 10. Commodore's main bread butter with the Amiga was with the desktop hobbyist home user - this segment should've been it's no 1 priority and been given first class treatment all the way. The UK and German offices understood this, but not in the US with the final nail in the coffin being the poor launch sales of the CD32 in the US (Went great in the UK). This was supported by a lack of killer titles upon release such as (Street Fighter 2, Mortal Kombat) and the general apathy to the Commodore brand in the US overall due to years of neglect and bad decisions. The beautiful Amiga died because of idiocy and neglect - Commodore was doomed to die, it was just a rotten shame that the Amiga computer line went with it.

simne 3y ago

For me more and more looks like, tight relations with silicon manufacture doomed them. If they have not so tight relations with hardware, they would show much more agile behavior to survive.

simne 3y ago
Many people don't care about anti-monopoly regulations, but they are not joke. IBM and Intel for decades deal with anti-monopoly regulations and managed to avoid ATT/GM like issues (extremely serious troubles, in simple language). People usually thinking, IBM distributed their soft as public domain and opened S/360 and allow clones, because they are good, but in reality, they used all means, to avoid 100% share of market, they intentionally made hidden moves to support semi-concurrents like AMD in 1980s, so anti-monopoly regulators didn't have enough foundations to issue things like made against ATT/GM. In early 1980s, Commodore was nearly monopoly of home PC market (IBM PC at begin was expensive business machine, and Macintosh was even more expensive, when first appear). And I have seen from other business behavior, they behave exactly same, when appear close to hit some crossbar (of profits, or of gross budget, or of market share) which they don't want to hit, because they feel good enough under this crossbar.