Amiga – The Deathbed Vigil (1994) [video]
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The Amiga was a good product, the engineering team was solid: the love for the product did not translate into success.
Hype, marketing, advertising, business savvy, and anti-competitive practices are often far more important.
It describes the A3000 as the first AA-based (AA was called AGA by the time it went to market) machine that was never released, but the Amiga 3000 was actually an ECS-based machine with a 68020 or 68030 CPU, a hard disk, and a built-in flicker fixer for solid VGA output. It did reach market and sold modestly. I owned one. It could be described as slapped together from Amiga 2000 parts, I guess.
The A4000 is described as slapped together from A3000 parts, but it was actually the first AGA-based machine (followed by the 1200), with the whole new chipset and architecture, and a 68030 or 68040 CPU.
On another front, the CD32, at the time, seemed like such a ridiculous distraction to me, and stories at the time seemed to indicated Commodore lost money on the massive bet they made on it. But, in everything I've read, the company really bet hard on it, and many folks who tell the story from inside seem to believe the CD32 was a great idea and maybe should have been pushed even harder. I don't know what to think of it.
I loved my Amigas, and it was really heartbreaking to see Commodore fail so spectacularly, and seemingly because of extremely poor management. Reading the article yesterday about the various post-Tramiel CEOs was really interesting, and a story I'd never seen in its entirety. I mostly knew about the failures. Gould was well-known and well-hated at the time, the others and their various failings were less famous/infamous.
It's pretty good, and definitely had a lot of business details I didn't know, like the fact that Rattigan actually had the company on a recovery path before Gould ousted him.
Knowing about the unreleased A3000+ may help clear up the confusion:
http://www.amigahistory.plus.com/prototypes/a3000plus.html
Regarding the CD32, it was basically an A1200 with a CD drive. I think it had one CD32-only custom chip, I forget what it was called. In any case, it was possible to convert a CD32 into an A1200. The A1200 was a popular machine, I'm sure the CD32 would've lasted a little longer if Commodore didn't close, even if it was just lived on as a living room version of a desktop Amiga rather than as a pure games machine.
As an aside, I believe the first GTA game was originally being developed for the Amiga, but the Amiga version was dropped after Commodore went bust. If the CD32 needed a 'killer app', it may have found it in GTA.
That said, both the CD32 and the A1200 were a couple of years late IMO. I remember reading something from Dave Haynie saying that AGA could've been ready in 1990. If the CD32 was competing with the SNES and MegaDrive instead of the Saturn and PlayStation, I suspect it would've been a lot more successful.
EDIT: My memory may have mangled this Haynie quote (different chipset, different year:
http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/acutiator.html
I messed up on the quote, but considering OCS was released in 1985, 1990 for AGA doesn't seem too much of a stretch.
All classic systems had their weak points.
That's because it was a rush job.
http://www.thule.no/haynie/caos.html
> "And the initial Amiga UI has got to win the prize for ugliest 1.0 GUI ever."
That's highly subjective. Many users (myself included) see that early 1.x interface as iconic. Here's another example of someone who probably liked it (as the saying goes, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery):
https://www.chromeexperiments.com/experiment/chiptunecom-gui
One design issue with Amigas was lack of support for chunky graphics modes. I remember reading an interview with Jay Miner where he implied he'd have supported chunky graphics (alongside planar graphics) if he'd considered how much cheaper RAM would become.
ducks
http://www.morphos-team.net/intro
I wasn't an Amiga owner but still might get a hold of it. Looks nice.