This reminds me of the Sinclair QL and Commodore Plus/4, which along with the original Macintosh, were all released or announced in January 1984. All three machines were targeted at the corporate/business sector, which is where the real money was, and which was then dominated by the IBM PC. All three machines were incompatible with their popular predecessors (Apple II, ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64), and were much criticised for this. In all three cases this was a deliberate decision intended to attract corporate buyers, who did not want their employees wasting time with games and other nonsense in the office.

Breaking compatibility made sense for new generation 16/32 bit machines, not so much for 8 bits. However, Tandy/RadioShack released their TRS-80 Model 4 and CoCo 2 in late 83, which ran previous models software, annnnnnnnnd didn't take the market by storm either.

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-08-19, 13:55:

Breaking compatibility made sense for new generation 16/32 bit machines, not so much for 8 bits. However, Tandy/RadioShack released their TRS-80 Model 4 and CoCo 2 in late 83, which ran previous models software, annnnnnnnnd didn't take the market by storm either.

Sorry for the necro, but I just recently learned that CoCo was also cloned a few times.
- Similar to the Apple II, maybe.
I found out when looking for TRS-80 CoCo emulators for my emulators thread.

https://www.cocopedia.com/wiki/index.php/TRS- … _Color_Computer

Here in old Europa, the Dragon 32 and 64 were at least software compatible to the Color Computer.
Or maybe, "backwards compatible" is a better description.
So all in all, it wasn't a failure for the platform, at least.

Speaking of failures, the Amiga A600 was never intended as a successor to the A500.
It rather was intended as a low-cost/maximum profits version.
Hence the SMD components and the lack of sockets.

Originally, it was called A300. The A300 model number was apparently printed on earlier PCB revisions.

It's mentioned in this video that I just found:

Commodore Amiga 600 - Why do I hate this computer? (Amiga Therapy Pt1)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdT8xmlo3HQ

After watching this, I slightly better understood the dilemma at Commodore.
But it also caused me unanswered questions.

Okay, so Commodore had lost competent engineers at the time and couldn't improve the proprietary Amiga chipsets anymore.
I get that.

But apparently, the company was still capable of creating new motherboards designs.
The A600 had a custom PCB, after all. A very cramped one, even.
So someone at Commodore had the skill set to make new PCBs, still.

Even if Commodore hadn't the power to improve the Aniga chips, the third-party market was still alive.
Even small companies had built bridge-boards, accelerator cards etc. for the Amigas.
Some of these accessories even included custom chips.

Why didn't Commodore make a contract with one or two of them?
Even at this point, I suppose Commodore had enough money or prestige to make it work.
I mean, being an official partner to the creator of the platform you make your products for is good public relations.

Edit: I just was thinking out loud. 😅
I guess no one can really answer this, except maybe the people involved back then.

You are underestimating the hubris of Commodore management I would think.. They didn't realize how far behind they really were probably even after the company shut its doors..

They were probably doomed anyway. Atari under Jack Tramiel also struggled after IBM-PC compatible swept the market in the 90s.

Who knows...
Apple somehow managed to survive...

Yeah, much bigger market share in US has something to do with this...

I think the major reason behind Apple's survival was targetting the Macintosh as a professional computer, the direct competitor to the PC.

For many years, Amiga meant 7 MHz CPU, 15 kHz video, and no HDD - good for games, but not for anything serious.
On the other hand, Macintoshes kept getting faster and faster CPUs, HDD, LAN, and video suitable for working 8 hours a day.

So it was the Macintosh that attracted professional software vendors - there was some DTP stuff, there was Photoshop...
It's an investment to thoroughly learn such tools, so people were willing to protect the investment by purchasing newer and newer Macintosh models.

Commodore was born out of fraud purported by both the founder Tramiel and main financer and fraudster Irving Gould. Atlantic Acceptance Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Accept … ration#Downfall "June 1965 in one of the biggest financial scandals in Canada at that time, with an estimated $65 million loss to investors" https://dfarq.homeip.net/irving-gould-commodore/. After getting rid of Tramiel Gould installed another crook Mehdi Ali https://www.commodore.ca/commodore-history/me … d-of-commodore/. Commodore management was only interested in cutting costs and extracting value.

My standard comments every time someone brings up Commodore:

'Commodore reported 7-year record revenue with good profit 4 years before going bankrupt. https://dfarq.homeip.net/commodore-financial- … tory-1978-1994/'

'C128 only sold on its name, scamming potential buyers into thinking it was a 2x better C64. Maybe 1% of owners ever ran it in C128 mode.'

'c128 was a case of idle engineers with no plan/strategy gluing unsold garbage components (graphic chip left over from earlier failed project and Z80) to c64 and scamming public with misleading name. 2 CPUs, 2 graphic chips, 2 monitor outputs, all in one package.'

'128 was a scam. It was a way for Commodore to get rid of unused sunk cost R&D (MOS 8563). Buyers were promised C64, but twice the number so must be 2x better, received C64 with another almost separate computer glued to its ass. Second graphic chip requiring expensive monitor, second CPU. As a bonus manufacturing C128D was more expensive than Amiga 500!'

'C128 slapped together without any plan or adult supervision. You paid for 2 cpus and two graphic chips, one cpu only ran a reset routine?, and the second "graphic chip" had no graphic enhancements and required expensive monitor. Zero practical upgrades when running C64 software, no incentives to develop c128 native software. Price with floppy drive on par with Atari ST and 20% away from Amiga. As a bonus C128D was more expensive to manufacture than Amiga.'

https://www.reddit.com/r/vintageads/comments/ … w_much_you_get/ 'terrible ads. There was no real business software for C64 (VisiCalc/dbase/lotus123/WordStar), yet executives at Commodore pushed ad after ad with spreadsheet bar charts instead of capitalizing on games by promoting graphics and sound 😒 Even the one game ad didnt show actual screenshots, just box art with another fake spreadsheet graph.
Our computer supports high resolution 16 color graphics - just look at those 8 color text mode bars!'

'In 1983 C64 was $300, 1541 was $300, 180K Tandon TM100-1 PC floppy drive was $189. Why sell cheap floppy drive when you can sell one for the full price of your computer and double the profit? Commodore was manufacturing all mayor chips inside it after all ;-/
It got even worse when Commodore shat C128D out its engineering hole. 3 CPUs for the low low price of 3 CPUs, two doing nothing 99.999% of the time, all in all 85% of Amiga 500 price, 100% of Atari 520ST price, at 10% the power.'

'Commodore was so mismanaged its not even funny 🙁
Commodore 65 design started in 1989? Another pointless pet project like C128 (I had one, what a piece of shit, there was pretty much no c128 soft so you ran it in c64 mode all the time, at twice the price). They were already selling Amiga 500 in 89, and you could go out and buy 386DX 40MHz or first 486s. What were they smoking to come up with 3MHz 8bit computer when market moved on to 16/32 bit? Commodore didnt know what they had when they took over Amiga 🙁 and kept wasting money and R&D on pos like this.'

'Just to reiterate, post Jack Tramiel Commodore hired new CEO with industrial construction background (Marshall Smith) who knew F-all about computers or business. This new CEO canned completed and almost ready for production Commodore laptop project because Tandy CEO told him there is no money to be made in laptops (while selling HUGELY popular TRS-80 Model 100) http://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/ckb/secret/lcd.html ... This is like GM calling Musk, and convincing him to cancel Model 3 because there is no money to be made in ~30K electric cars, while selling Volt and planning Bolt.'

'C64 kept them afloat far longer than they should of lasted. They actually still sold ~150K C64 in 1994! Commodore went bankrupt because they kept selling 1981 released c64 and 1985 released Amigas all the way to 1994 with almost no upgrades. They did plenty of updates, like new C64 cases, or Amiga 600. A600 had same cpu, same mhz, same Dual Density floppy as 1985 A1000.'

'Tramiel had a thing for not keeping verbal agreements (suppliers being huge example). Whole C64 team was promised bonuses after release, instead they got "be glad you have a job" pep talk and the smart ones left.'

'Tramiel had a habit of firing good engineers 3 months after product release. Either directly, or by screwing them by moving to useless positions or taking bonuses away until people 'got the message'. Those who didnt get what was going on or didnt care about money/dignity were the ones who stayed as long term employees. Jack had an eye for suckers and people putting passion before common sense and self respect.
Whole C64 design team was effed out of promised bonuses and fired/left. People like Bruce Crockett (manufacturing), Al Charpentier (VIC) and Robert Yannes (SID) went to start Ensoniq (later sold to Creative), Chuck Peddle went to Apple, Bill Mensch hung around for two years of abuse. Same with Amiga team (Jay,RJ,Needle).

Those two videos touch on the Commodore culture of curb stomping until only the weak and dumb survive:

Oral History of Chuck Peddle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enHF9lMseP8

Oral History of William David "Bill" Mensch Jr. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ne1ApyqSvm0'

'Commodore made sure to fire designers promptly after every new product launch. C-64 custom chip designers founded Ensoniq in 1982, the year C-64 launched. Amiga team was "let go" before Amiga 1000 to 500 cost optimization redesign. This meant Amiga never got HD floppy controller - there was no one capable of upgrading PLL inside Paula.'

'CD32 was a repackaged Amiga 1200. It was the worst fifth generation game system. It featured such gems as Wing Commander running at 1 frame per second.'

'Commodore never made HD floppy controller, and the only HD capable Amiga (4000, 1992) had modified drive spinning at _half_ speed.'

'Amiga was dead man walking due to culture of clueless management at Commodore. Tramiel took pride in not knowing a first thing about computers, he would be as happy selling cars or meat. His replacement was even worse, not to mention rest of the management.'

'Commodore had a ton of reliability problems. Amigas came from factory with electrolytic capacitors soldered backwards! (and afaik they were also backwards on the factory diagram).'

'Commodore Amiga floppies used 32bit XOR checksum = 3% of undetected two bit errors!!
http://www.techtravels.org/amiga/amigablog/?p=280'

Can you tell Im a fan of Commodore? especially C128? 😜

Grzyb wrote on 2022-12-10, 11:48:

Who knows...
Apple somehow managed to survive...

And they tried their best to fail, lots of bad decisions and misreading the market starting with the original closed box Mac 128

Allowing the Apple 2 to expand into 16 bit and even 32 bit architecture as a compatible ecosystem without a speed cap likely would not have hurt them at all,
Even in the case of Mac only a few dollars of components kept Mac from being backward compatible with Apple 2 components and software emulation/compatibility

IBM PCs open, upgradable and compatible ecosystem was most of what the market demanded, even if IBM made the market accidentally

If Amiga / Mac would have low cost cross licensed to each other earlier to build market share it’s also questionable that it would have “hurt” either 68k machine especially if localized to the Euro zone where Apple basically didn’t exist.

You can be successful after massive numbers of failures as long as you do at least one thing very successfully, enough to cover for the missteps

Mac had a loyal customer base that viewed it as an aspirational visionary group, that was just enough for them to walk the line of bankruptcy without disappearing.

Putting a Z80 in the C128 was an interesting idea. It allowed the computer to run CP/M business/scientific programs, albeit slowly.

"Mom, I need this for school."

@ rasz_pl Thanks a lot for the explanation and the links! 🙂👍

Errius wrote on 2022-12-11, 16:16:

Putting a Z80 in the C128 was an interesting idea. It allowed the computer to run CP/M business/scientific programs, albeit slowly.

"Mom, I need this for school."

C128! I had got a second-hand C128D once when I was little..
It came with CP/M 3.

Unfortunately, CP/M-80 was already on the decline by the time the 128 was released, afaik.
It was all about MS-DOS on 8086 processors.
Anyway, Turbo Pascal 3 was available on both systems, at least.

What I liked about the C128/C128D was the fixed (repaired) floppy drive.
It a) had a light barrier b) a fast serial interface c) it was double-sided, too ?
In case of the D model, it's even built-in.

All the previous C64 floppy models were somehow crippled.

Ok, the 1541C had a light barrier, at least.
But it was often disabled by users in order to use a sense pin required for a parallel cable.

The most useful purpose for the C128 mode was GEOS, maybe.
The applications ran in either mode, but the C128 provided hi-res graphics and better floppy support..

Other than that, there was little software being made for C128 mode, sadly.
The Basic 7.0 alone was something worth that mode.

For applications, a separate .PRG file for 128 mode was all it needed, maybe.
All the remaining data could have been shared with the C64 version of the same application, maybe? 🤷‍♂️

rasz_pl wrote on 2022-12-10, 16:07:

'Commodore never made HD floppy controller, and the only HD capable Amiga (4000, 1992) had modified drive spinning at _half_ speed.'

Some A3000 variants also came with HD floppy drives - any idea how this was implemented?

Grzyb wrote on 2022-12-13, 15:30:

Some A3000 variants also came with HD floppy drives - any idea how this was implemented?

same drive spinning at half speed https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Amiga_3000_Hardw … Technical_Notes
>The two models from Commodore are the A3010, the Chinon FB354,
880KByte double density, and the A3015, the Chinon FB/FZ357A, 1.76MByte
high density. Note this is not the FZ357, without the A designation. The
FZ357A was designed specifically for Commodore and is out of production,
the FZ357 is actually still in active production and is found in many PC
clones. It is not compatible with the slow spin rate required by the Amiga
custom chipset.

http://jope.fi/drives/fz357/
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=55344

There used to be files on Aminet about modding some common drives, JU-144 was one of them.

rasz_pl wrote on 2022-12-10, 16:07:

Commodore was born out of fraud purported by both the founder Tramiel and main financer and fraudster Irving Gould. Atlantic Acceptance Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Accept … ration#Downfall "June 1965 in one of the biggest financial scandals in Canada at that time, with an estimated $65 million loss to investors" https://dfarq.homeip.net/irving-gould-commodore/. After getting rid of Tramiel Gould installed another crook Mehdi Ali https://www.commodore.ca/commodore-history/me … d-of-commodore/. Commodore management was only interested in cutting costs and extracting value.

...

You forgot to mention Commodore 16, 116 and especially Commodore Plus/4, computers made after C64, with similar architecture, but uncompatible... I would really like to ask those who approved these computers to explain their logic behind this... To make it even more ridiculous is that they even changed connectors for tape and joysticks when compared to C64, although they're the same.

I have Plus/4 in my collection, got it from one ex work colleague. Back in the day he asked for a computer and was really happy it was commodore, until he figured out it couldn't run C64 games 🤣.

Solo761 wrote on 2022-12-14, 11:10:

rasz_pl wrote on 2022-12-10, 16:07:

Commodore was born out of fraud purported by both the founder Tramiel and main financer and fraudster Irving Gould. Atlantic Acceptance Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Accept … ration#Downfall "June 1965 in one of the biggest financial scandals in Canada at that time, with an estimated $65 million loss to investors" https://dfarq.homeip.net/irving-gould-commodore/. After getting rid of Tramiel Gould installed another crook Mehdi Ali https://www.commodore.ca/commodore-history/me … d-of-commodore/. Commodore management was only interested in cutting costs and extracting value.

...

You forgot to mention Commodore 16, 116 and especially Commodore Plus/4, computers made after C64, with similar architecture, but uncompatible... I would really like to ask those who approved these computers to explain their logic behind this... To make it even more ridiculous is that they even changed connectors for tape and joysticks when compared to C64, although they're the same.

I have Plus/4 in my collection, got it from one ex work colleague. Back in the day he asked for a computer and was really happy it was commodore, until he figured out it couldn't run C64 games 🤣.

The C16, C116 and even the Plus/4 aimed at a very low price (or at least low production costs) so they had to have worse specs than the C64 and thus could not be compatible.

Designing a computer that is compatible to the C64 and has better specs is really tough. The whole system is built around the VIC II, which makes it hard to change anything like e.g. increasing the CPUs clock speed. And then the software made use of all the quirks of the VIC so to stay compatible you had to include all of those 'unintentional' features in your new machine.

One simple but expensive solution is building two machines in one, like the C128.

And yet, according to Wikipedia Plus/4 sold for $100 more than C64 at the time of it's release... C16 and C116 had less RAM than C64 and were priced less than C64.

All in all, they would have had better profits if they didn't waste money on C16/116/Plus/4 R&D than what they earned from them, especially since they were discontinued a year later.

Solo761 wrote on 2022-12-14, 12:40:

And yet, according to Wikipedia Plus/4 sold for $100 more than C64 at the time of it's release... C16 and C116 had less RAM than C64 and were priced less than C64.

All in all, they would have had better profits if they didn't waste money on C16/116/Plus/4 R&D than what they earned from them, especially since they were discontinued a year later.

Yes, they changed the route for the Plus/4 to be marketed as a business machine. And yet featurewise the C64 is still a better machine because of the SID and VIC. The many colors of the Plus/4 don't help him 😀

Computers like the Plus/4 (among others) always make me glad that I'm not older. I can only imagine if I was old enough in 1985 to ask my parents for a Commodore 64 for Christmas, I'd have most definitely been lumbered with a Plus/4 instead as all the stores were reducing them to get rid of them!

I bought myself a Plus/4 a couple of years back. The machine itself looks good but it's software library is incredibly poor due to most software developers targeting the cheaper Commodore 16 instead and the built-in "business" software is laughable. The Plus/4 never really stood a chance.