5 ms·
As someone who lived through that era, I agree, the 486 murdered almost all of the competition (and nearly even killed Macintosh). Practically everyone I knew w
by empressplay 3y ago
As someone who lived through that era, I agree, the 486 murdered almost all of the competition (and nearly even killed Macintosh). Practically everyone I knew who played console games bought a 486 to play games on instead (and also that newfangled Internet thing didn't hurt, which was much nicer on a 486)
Further, Commodore made a big bet on the CD32 but 3DO was already out there, Sega Saturn was coming out and PlayStation was looming (and would have finished Commodore off had it lived another year)
Like Atari Corporation, Commodore failed to innovate enough and the result was not unexpected.
- vidarh 3y agoCD32 was not so much of a big bet as a hail mary while hoping to buy enough time for their other chipsets to be completed. They clearly did see a big future there - up to and including the point where their last chipset (Hombre) was planned to be usable either as a standalone chipset for consoles or set-top boxes or as a chipset for a larger computer (or a high end graphics card). But the CD32 is little more than a CDTV-like variant of the A1200 with a quick and dirty attempt at mitigating the by then disastrous miscalculation of not having any chunky modes in AGA by adding chunk-to-planar conversion in hardware into Akiko (CD32 specific chip that otherwise served to cost-reduce a bunch of glue logic and controllers for the CD-ROM and game ports), but it was very basic (write 32 8-bit chunky pixels to Akiko registers; read 8 32-bit words for 8-bitplanes worth of 32 pixels back out).