Commodore had great marketshare in two niches which if they could actually concentrate on and develop PCs for, they would have made a killing: Home Computing/Gaming and TV Production.

Instead, they tried to sell the same computer again and again at an age when office computers had caught up to them in either forte by 1991.

They died a deserved death, but I still love the Amiga 68K platform. It was AMAZING.

brostenen wrote:

The page states that it is made by ATI, for the Commodore PC 10/20 line of x86 machines. And that it has nothing to do with the Amiga AGA chipset. [..]

Oh yes sure, someone can clearly see the PCB with all the chips onto it - that was not exactly my point though.
Rather, that Commodore had a fairly good going PC line and the know-how to create something notable.
The additional Plantronics mode of that (ATI) card was nice, but technically not exactly uptodate, as usual when it comes to Commodore.

As for the irony part, the CBM decided to name the card "AGA". It gave it the name of an advanced future Amiga chipset, technology aside.
The company also made PC bridgeboards. Irrelevant whether or not CBM used its own chipsets.

My point was: Commodore had the know-how for both platforms, but didn't take advantage of that;
The Commodore PCs were doomed to stay gray boxes for office use,
wereas the Commodore Amigas never (barely) made it past TV stations and art departments (in a business sense).
It didn't have had to be this way. Both platforms could have had benefited from each other in some ways.

Jo22 wrote:

As for the irony part, the CBM decided to name the card "AGA". It gave it the name of an advanced future Amiga chipset, technology aside.

IBM did the same thing with the PCjr in 1983. They named the enhanced onboard CGA adapter the "Video Gate Array", or VGA.

Jo22 wrote:

My point was: Commodore had the know-how for both platforms, but didn't take advantage of that;

Indeed... They introduced a PC compatibility sidecar for the Amiga 1000 in 1986 already, so PC compatibility was always a feature of the Amiga line:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Sidecar
The Amiga 2000 was even designed to have ISA expansion slots directly on the motherboard.
But somehow they didn't manage to turn that into a success.

One of the main advantages of the Amiga, was the Zorro slot, because it had autoconfig. A kind of Plug And Play solution, that worked from the start. Haynie mentioned, that the only thing at that time, that came even close on the PC platform, was the EISA slot. Look at the Zorro slot, as an EISA slot in were every resource configuration requires no user input. Comes in both 16 and 32 bit versions, depending on Zorro version. He mentioned that the EISA was an elegant BUS solution, yet lacked that autoconfiguration to make it as good as Zorro. And if only they had started using PCI at that time, then the Amiga would have had an advantage in 1992/93. At least there are now PCI bridge boards for Amiga 1200's and Amiga 4000's that one can buy. And today you can use Voodoo and Radeon card's in an Amiga1200 that is put into a tower case. Just... If only they had gone the ways of PCI back then and if only Voodoo's were invented at that time. Then the computer landscape might have looked a bit different today.

brostenen wrote:

One of the main advantages of the Amiga, was the Zorro slot, because it had autoconfig. A kind of Plug And Play solution, that worked from the start. Haynie mentioned, that the only thing at that time, that came even close on the PC platform, was the EISA slot. Look at the Zorro slot, as an EISA slot in were every resource configuration requires no user input. Comes in both 16 and 32 bit versions, depending on Zorro version. He mentioned that the EISA was an elegant BUS solution, yet lacked that autoconfiguration to make it as good as Zorro. And if only they had started using PCI at that time, then the Amiga would have had an advantage in 1992/93. At least there are now PCI bridge boards for Amiga 1200's and Amiga 4000's that one can buy. And today you can use Voodoo and Radeon card's in an Amiga1200 that is put into a tower case. Just... If only they had gone the ways of PCI back then and if only Voodoo's were invented at that time. Then the computer landscape might have looked a bit different today.

While the Zorro slot was forward thinking it was also crippling due to lack of and price of hardware - Amiga accelerators and expansion boards were almost impossible to acquire where I lived and when you did come across one it cost an arm and a leg, and there was a reason for it.

Yup. Big box ekspansion cards were extremely expensive. Yet the 500 had an Zorro-1 slot as well. Those were still the cheapest one to buy stuff for. A 500 with 512k Ram ekspansion, monitor and sidecar harddrive were still cheaper than any x86 pc with the same kind of upgrades/features in 1988/89. The 2000, 3000 and 4000 were in a whole other league. On the other hand, they were intended for the professional market and not home use.

I have to look in the closet. I think I have an 1989/90 Amiga/Commodore price catalog somewere.

EDIT:
Nope... It is the 1991/92 Danish Amiga & CD-TV Cataloge.

Jo22 wrote:

My point was: Commodore had the know-how for both platforms, but didn't take advantage of that;

but they didnt, Commodore fired all Amiga/semi people as a cost cutting/executive dick waving measure

retardware wrote:

What a delight this news was back then! (At least for me) I was used to call it "Commonsore". […]
Show full quote

What a delight this news was back then! (At least for me)
I was used to call it "Commonsore".

These urine-stained bread boxes with their boring spriter games, these unbearable "Amigas" with their useless (due to the lack of serious, i.e. non-toy and non-gaming applications) and boring "Workbench" and that eye-pain and headache-inducing combination of low resolution and extreme flicker.

I was glad that the flood of this crap finally ended.

You must be talking about the later models and not the Amiga in general. The 1000 and 2000 were revolutionary in their time when first released. The Video Toaster systems were industry standards in the TV and video broadcasting markets. Commodore definitely screwed up royally on the business side of things, no question.

Yeah.... Let's compare....

1985:
PC were Dos based, and was only able to do just above 640k ram in 1985 (sadly no way near 5mb or 10mb or something like that), no GUI as a standard. That might have been avaliable as a third part application, yet Dos it was and Dos it ran out of the box. No sound card, and no GFX acceleration.

Mac.. Well... Black and white GUI. Sound though... Ram I am not sure of.

Amiga's came with 128k, then 256k of ChipRam. Was able to be expanded to 512k ChipRam and was happily expandable up to some 8mb of Ram in total. It had a colour GUI out of the box, and the operating system was a true multitasking operating system. It came with video acceleration out of the box, that was able to run without the use of the CPU, and it had sound as a standard with sample playback. And it had a dynamic Ramdisk that dynamically changed size, depending on what you threw in it. Like it started at 0kb and if you put a document at the size of 10k in it, then the RamDisk changed to 10k in size.

Can someone dig up prices on PC/Amiga/Atari/Mac in okt/nov 1985, just to see what you got for the money?

liqmat wrote:

retardware wrote:

What a delight this news was back then! (At least for me) I was used to call it "Commonsore". […]
Show full quote

What a delight this news was back then! (At least for me)
I was used to call it "Commonsore".

These urine-stained bread boxes with their boring spriter games, these unbearable "Amigas" with their useless (due to the lack of serious, i.e. non-toy and non-gaming applications) and boring "Workbench" and that eye-pain and headache-inducing combination of low resolution and extreme flicker.

I was glad that the flood of this crap finally ended.

You must be talking about the later models and not the Amiga in general. The 1000 and 2000 were revolutionary in their time when first released. The Video Toaster systems were industry standards in the TV and video broadcasting markets. Commodore definitely screwed up royally on the business side of things, no question.

I think this is still doing the A500 a disservice; The A500 released in January 87, at the time the fastest IBM pc was a 286 and the mainstream 286 had only 640K RAM, CGA/EGA graphics and no hard drive. The Adlib had not yet been released. Yet the A500 came out with specs that nearly equalled a mainstream 286 (in hindsight 7MHz 68K was a bit slow for the time but it still served well compared to a 286-12) and absolutely crushed it in multimedia tasks. At a time VGA was not even on the market yet the A500 could do 16/32 from 4096 colors on screen in 200p/400i via RGB. It could do four channel sample based STEREO audio. It could and did run 32-bit code. From an objective point of view, even the 2 year old refreshed OCS chipset in the January 1987 A500 was way ahead of the IBM PS/2 released in April 1987.

Things went downhill from there, though. AGA was too late, A1200 was too gimped and the A600 was a horrible mistake.

I've done my best to hold my tongue so far but seeing retardware's troll comment quoted again and again just triggers me. That post is the perfect example of user and nick harmony.

Two factors everyone seems to neglect whenever such comparisons are made: 1. IBM PC was established as the business computer and 2. Killer applications
IBM was already dominating the servers market and could provide serious business support. Guess what companies were buying? IBM PCs. Why? Because there was no other who could realistically support business (and by business I don't mean the local video club that was running some CP/M cataloging program on a CPC). Also what would you run on other platforms? Lotus 1-2-3 and Harvard graphics? You wished.

It's not a matter of specs comparison and which machine runs crysis better. Yes, the Amigas run circles around the PCs of that time but more and more people were getting PCs because games was not the only interest/deciding factor. The dad would choose a PC to do some work at home. And when the compatibles caught up it was game over for every other platform, no matter how many colors and sprites and audio channels it had.

So the demise of Commodore was a combination of terrible decisions and some "assistance" from the colossal IBM of that time. A better machine in potential can't make up for these.

Look, nobody's saying Amiga could have toppled IBM PCs - it would take a total idiot to not see that Amiga had no chance of winning the business market but they undeniably had every chance of securing a major foothold in home computing and multimedia and TV production. They just had to evolve their big box Amigas into workstations and their A500 into a stronger and more expandable home computer that smoked PCs in gaming.

They needed no killer apps for this, the hardware capabilities had already made certain that all software needed for the tasks were already being developed for them.

Instead they lost sight and re-released the 7MHz 68000 and OCS chipset in 1992, 5 years after its initial launch, as the second coming. In a year when PCs had VLB VGA cards with more video ram than the whole A600 chipram and clock doubled 66MHz 486 DX2 processors.

liqmat wrote:

You must be talking about the later models and not the Amiga in general. The 1000 and 2000 were revolutionary in their time when first released. The Video Toaster systems were industry standards in the TV and video broadcasting markets. Commodore definitely screwed up royally on the business side of things, no question.

Ironically enough, NewTek, the company that created the VideoToaster, is still around, and still active in the broadcasting world:
https://www.newtek.com/

They are still developing their 3D CGI tool LightWave3D, which was originally started on Amiga, and was designed for use with a VideoToaster, but was also possible to use on a standard Amiga:
https://www.lightwave3d.com/

Like I always have said. Between 1985 and late 1991, you got most for your money when buying an Amiga in Europe. That was just how things were. Here I am talking about the private market and not in the professional segment. There things were completely different. Yes it was the best for the money, if you worked in video production. It was the only viable solution for controlling the space shuttle's launch system. If you moved into the educational sector, or somewere that was about book keeping or anything else money related. Then the Amiga lost bitterly to the x86 based PC's. Yet on the home computer market, there were nothing like the Amiga anywere to be found for the money.

As mentioned... Games, games and games. That was what mostly drove the choice of hardware, when you wanted to buy a computer for your home back in the 1980's. And to some extend it is still games that drives the sales. And it was not until games like Settlers, Syndicate and those a like, that the PC slowly began to show it's teeth at the Amiga. And what did Commodore take note on? Nothing at all, until it was too late. That year was second half of 1991. Possible as long as the first quater of 1992.

appiah4 wrote:

the A500 could do 16/32 from 4096 colors on screen in 200p/400i via RGB.

Even better than that:
The Amiga could use any amount of bitplanes you wanted for the screen, up to 6 in total.
So you had 0/2/4/8/16/32 colour standard modes.
The 6th bitplane could be used for a 'halfbrite' mode, where a secondary palette of half the brightness was used, giving you a total of 64 colours.
An alternative way to use the 6-bitplane mode was HAM6, which allowed a total of 4096 colours on screen, by interpreting each 6-bit value as a colour instruction: it could either load a new palette entry, or load a new R, G or B value directly.
This could give you very good photorealistic images, arguably better than VGA's 256 colour mode. And in higher resolution, because it could be used in full overscan 360x576 interlaced mode:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hold-And-Modify

Scali wrote:

Ironically enough, NewTek, the company that created the VideoToaster, is still around, and still active in the broadcasting worl […]
Show full quote

liqmat wrote:

You must be talking about the later models and not the Amiga in general. The 1000 and 2000 were revolutionary in their time when first released. The Video Toaster systems were industry standards in the TV and video broadcasting markets. Commodore definitely screwed up royally on the business side of things, no question.

Ironically enough, NewTek, the company that created the VideoToaster, is still around, and still active in the broadcasting world:
https://www.newtek.com/

They are still developing their 3D CGI tool LightWave3D, which was originally started on Amiga, and was designed for use with a VideoToaster, but was also possible to use on a standard Amiga:
https://www.lightwave3d.com/

Don't forget that an Amiga were still controlling an US school district's heating system in 2015. That is/was one computer controlling 19 school's heating equipment. Read HERE...

konc wrote:

It's not a matter of specs comparison and which machine runs crysis better. Yes, the Amigas run circles around the PCs of that time but more and more people were getting PCs because games was not the only interest/deciding factor. The dad would choose a PC to do some work at home. And when the compatibles caught up it was game over for every other platform, no matter how many colors and sprites and audio channels it had.

I think the flaw of reasoning there is:
1) People didn't actually buy IBM, they bought IBM compatibles. IBM themselves were only successful in the beginning, but were soon pushed out of the market by clone builders. Around the time of the first Amiga, clones such as Compaq and Tandy were already eclipsing IBM.
2) Commodore also had two options for PC clones: they built their own vanilla IBM compatibles, which were actually very good. And they built PC compatibility add-ons for Amiga, giving you the best of both worlds.

Scali wrote:

total of 4096 colours on screen

Mmmmmm.... 4096 colours on Amiga in 1985.
And in contrast to 16 on PC in 1985 (EGA from 1984) and 256 on PC in 1987 (VGA, Mode 13).

Eventually David defeated Goliath too.... (He just needed to use an "upgrade")

Not to mention that in 1987 a VGA card alone cost as much as an entire Amiga, and then you still needed a specific VGA monitor, where an Amiga could be used on a standard TV set, or a relatively cheap PAL/NTSC standard broadcast monitor.

Scali wrote:

I think the flaw of reasoning there is: 1) People didn't actually buy IBM, they bought IBM compatibles. IBM themselves were only […]
Show full quote

konc wrote:

It's not a matter of specs comparison and which machine runs crysis better. Yes, the Amigas run circles around the PCs of that time but more and more people were getting PCs because games was not the only interest/deciding factor. The dad would choose a PC to do some work at home. And when the compatibles caught up it was game over for every other platform, no matter how many colors and sprites and audio channels it had.

I think the flaw of reasoning there is:
1) People didn't actually buy IBM, they bought IBM compatibles. IBM themselves were only successful in the beginning, but were soon pushed out of the market by clone builders. Around the time of the first Amiga, clones such as Compaq and Tandy were already eclipsing IBM.
2) Commodore also had two options for PC clones: they built their own vanilla IBM compatibles, which were actually very good. And they built PC compatibility add-ons for Amiga, giving you the best of both worlds.

I just checked prices from the first half of 1992, so the prices is in Danish kroners from that year....

Amiga 2000 = 8995 Kroners.
286 addon expansion card = 6649 kroners.
386dx40 PC with 4mb ram, 80mb harddrive = 7400 kroners.

Mind the PC was one of those low budget clones, build from parts in lesser quality, compared to the Amiga.
If you wanted an IBM, Compaq or anything good brand, you had to pay more than double.

You were even able to find Apple Macintosh bridge boards for the Amiga, and by software emulation alone,
the Amiga platform were the fastest Mac in town. Sure that would be insanely expensive in regards to Amiga upgrades.