> Had a number of things gone differently Commodore might have been Apple. As a die-hard Amiga owner and fan, I've pondered this for many years but have come t

> Had a number of things gone differently Commodore might have been Apple. As a die-hard Amiga owner and fan, I've pondered this for many years but have come to the sad conclusion the mythical "handful of things" which, if done differently, would have meaningfully changed the fate of the Amiga simply never existed. The key reason is that many of the same things which made the Amiga so extraordinary in 1985, like custom graphics co-processors and designing the system around analog video standards also made the Amiga uniquely problematic to migrate to a RISC architecture like Power PC in the 90s. At the end, Commodore's unannounced (but in progress) plan was to migrate the Amiga platform to an HP RISC CPU, abandon analog video timing for 1280 x 960 digital RGB displays and run old Amiga software via emulation. I'm highly skeptical any such emulation would have worked sufficiently well to be considered "an Amiga." Even today, the authors of the incredibly advanced WinUAE Amiga emulator are still discovering subtle timing issues after 20 years of development. If the "new Amiga" platform couldn't run at least 90% of 68K Amiga games at 100% speed then it's not really an Amiga and instead a new and different computer platform. And if it's pretty much a new platform anyway, why not consider the PC or Mac? Apple only barely managed to survive the 90s transition and the Mac was nearly a 'plain vanilla' platform (no custom co-processors, no brilliant analog timing hacks, etc) so it was much easier to emulate on a RISC platform than the Amiga would have been. In 1993 a 68020-based Amiga could emulate a 68000-based Mac entirely in software and run PageMaker at nearly 100% speed, whereas a 1992 68020 Mac emulating an Amiga in software would have been unimaginable. So, we're left with a Catch 22. If we go back in time to the 80s and change the things about the Amiga platform necessary for it to survive the 90s industry transitions, we're also undoing the things that made the Amiga so special when it launched. Surviving the apocalypse of the 90s required surviving three separate 'extinction-level' asteroid impacts: 1. CISC -> RISC, 2. Analog video -> Digital video, and 3. Vertically integrated computer company -> Ecosystem of component vendors (mid-90s PCs had multiple vendors competing to be the CPU, operating system, graphics card and sound card). Neither Commodore nor Atari could have survived all three of those 'planet killers'. Even Apple WITH Steve Jobs, more money, a bigger, better brand and an emergency bankruptcy-preventing $150M loan from Bill Gates - barely survived. The first asteroid also took Motorola themselves out of CPUs (even Intel almost didn't get RISC-emulating-x86 CISC microcode working in time) and the third asteroid changed the entire playing field, causing even IBM to retreat from desktop. (and some would argue Apple only existed on life-support with the candy iMacs keeping the lights on until the iPod/iPhone really put the company back on its feet.)