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> But the engineers played some tricks to extract maximum performance at minimum cost which left them kind of trapped.

That's interesting. If you have a moment could you expand on that? Thanks.

For instance, the video management that made it such a perfect fit for the broadcast video of the day made it difficult to later accommodate higher resolution computer displays.

I don't think the problems were particularly insurmountable; with the advantage they had, they could have redesigned everything twice over and still be competitive (which tbf they did, to an extent: the CD32 stuff they pushed towards the end was pretty cool).

It's just that Commodore leadership was fundamentally extractive, and saw personal computers more as consumer widgets than platforms. The financial side of things was a bit shambolic, and they trusted the wrong money.

It later revs of the OS (3.x), it did support graphics cards ("retargetable graphics.") These were only usable for applications that did not access the hardware directly, of course. And then you're obviously not taking advantage of any of the custom chips.

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