@Kronos

Quote:

nor relevant as the higher 24bits will just get ignored.

Which begs the question --- why was the prototype changed, from the (apparently correct) UBYTE argument type to the (apparently logically incorrect) ULONG one?

@Kronos

If it still takes a UBYTE then the proper type would be uintt8. That's what should be there.

@OneTimer1

Quote:

It's a pitty you asked for the Amiga only.

Aren't you missing the obvious? Both the thread title and OP mention C64.

Quote:

Got a 80 characters per line GFX after 4 years, a better BASIC after 5 years and maybe a Z80 or 8086 card during the next years.

Sounds like a C128.

But without being exacly compatible to a C64 the crowd would get upset. Besides, the time of the 8-bitters was over in the mid 80's.

Quote:

PC case of course.

They already did that. I believe it was called the A4000D and A4000T.

Quote:

Keyboards, Interfaces and other things must have been as compatible with a PC as possible

What like, so a PC keyboard could be plugged in? The Amiga already came with a KB and mouse. The KB was Amiga layout. I don't recall PC mice being special back then but another serial bus wouldn't have hurt to plug one into.

Quote:

If I would have had Apple ... the Apple2e was clearly superior to the C64, the first Macintosh's did not have slots.

I know the Apple could draw lines so those Usborne games were superior in the Apple version comapred to the C64 version. But I didn't know the Apple had better graphics, sprites and sound against the VIC2 and SID.

Quote:

Back in 1995, with a lack of CPU performance in 68k, I would have switched to PPC, like Apple did.

There is one thing we are missing here. 68K, x86 and PPC aren't the only CPUs on the block.

In reality, if Commodore survived, it looks like the future Amiga would have ran on a HP PA-RISC and Hombre chipset. See here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PA-RISC

Last edited by Hypex on 31-Aug-2015 at 09:52 AM.

Hello,

I have often thought about this and if I had the chance, here's what I would do:

Bought Commodore and oust Irving Gould (even pay him for). It is likely that Jack Tramiel leave sooner or later, so bought Atari also to avoid the existence of the Atari ST.

Finance Jay Miner from the start in 1980 for his 68000 machine project, for a late 1983 release.

Adding as standard :
- A midi interface
- A low price SCSI controller
- A 2 colors 31 kHz hires mod with an inexpensive monochrome monitor for it.

The AmigaOS would be what originally planned (CAOS) with resource tracking. Maybe, if possible adding an optional memory protection from the beginning (but not used on the 68000).

The Amiga case would be larger than that of the original 1000, with two internal expansion port and one external. The keyboard is in shape similar of the Amiga 2000.

From the beginning Commodore announces that all its internal office work would be made exclusively on the Amiga and funds the porting of the best known office software.

Commodore don't enter in the PC market and remain exclusivly on Amiga and C64. But there is no C128/+4/C16 and others.

Marketing position the Amiga as a professional computer.

A network card and an AmigaOS network layer are sold for Amiga from the start, so companies can integrate the Amiga.

Also a scan doubler card appear very fast after Amiga release.

In 1984 work begin for the next chipset. Planned release, early 1987.

In 1985 Amiga range extends :

The original Amiga get 512 KO as standard. An entry-level model, like Amiga 500, appears, the external expansion port is compatible with the one from original Amiga, now renamed Amiga 1000 and sold now as midrange. An Amiga 2000 model is added with 7 expansion port, 1 video port, 1 MB of RAM, a 68000 at 16 mhz, one 20 MB SCSI hard disk and a scan doubler as standard.

The AmigaOS is updated to version 2.0.

In 1987, the range is enriched by the Amiga 3000, a high-end model with a new 32 bit graphics chipset. Tower case, 68020 + 68881 + 68451 20 mhz (on daughter card). The new chipset ACS (Advanced Amiga Chipset) keeps the OCS for compatibility with 6 bits. But, a new 256 colors mode (chunky) appears with a blitter and copper chunky 32-bit. The palette evolve from 4096 to 2621444. Of course there is Chunky HAM8. The chipset include a scandoubler and can display 15kHz or 31khz according to the resolution. The AmigaOS is now RTG and support 32 bit colors for easy future evolution.

EDIT : About the sound with ACS, my first idea was to keep Paula as it is, because for 1987 it was a very good sound chip, so it allow to concentrate to the graphic part of the chipset and reduce the developpement cost.
But, maybe, a cheap way to also improve sound is to merge two Paula in one chip. It allow 8 channel at 8 bit or 4 channel à 14 bit. Some years ago i have envisioned as a chips named Pauline or Paulina. Well i think now that's a good option to have for high end in 1987. So ACS i make the edit to include the Paulina chip in ACS as standard.
EDIT 2 : I think it's a good thing that ACS might be able to display 640x512 256 colors with good speed, and 800x600 16 colors (same speed as 640x512 256 colors) and 800x600 256 color but at half speed than 800x600 16 colors. I want the ACS to have in 1987 SVGA capabilities but with hardware acceleration (blitter/copper). So it's very ahead of it's time.
EDIT 3 : I think the ECS (as we know it) might be released in 1987 as a slight update for 68000 Amiga based line. Of course, then ACS is ECS compatible.


1988 work start on AAA chipset for 1990.

EDIT : some information about AAA : http://www.amigahistory.plus.com/amigaaaa.html

Early 1990 the range goes fully 32 bit. The 500 is replaced by the 700 with 68EC020 16 mhz, a hard drive as standard, all in the case of 500 to remain compatible with the external extension from 500. The 1000 is replaced by the 2100 with the 3000 processor daughter card (68020 + 68881 + 68451 20 MHz), a hard disk, two internal expansion ports and one external as standard. The 2000 is replaced by the 3000+ with a 68030 + 68881 25 mhz daughterboard. All models are equipped with the ACS chipset.
A new high end model appears, the Amiga 4000 with 68030 + 68882 33 mhz (on daughter card). The new chipset is AAA that is compatible with ACS, a DSP 3210 is also present.

AmigaOS is updated to 3.0


EDIT : To democratize the DSP 3210 usage, a zorro 3 board allows it's use on the ACS range. It allow his 8-channel and 16-bit and a software modem emulation and even more. For 700, an internal connector is specifically provided with a flap at the rear of the housing to incorporate a small map with DSP3210 and its modem connector. Or a better option is that the 700 have an internal connector like the 1200 (in addition to the external one). So, this one could have received the DSP board with expansion memory, a better 68020 or better. Even from third-party manufacturer.
Information about the DSP3210 and the Amiga : http://www.lemonamiga.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=12482&start=15&sid=338786b0555e8580097e825f1d1884d8


In 1992 the whole ACS range get an overhaul. The 700+ is now 680EC020 25 mhz. The 2100+ get processor card replaced by the one from 3000+. The 4000+ has a 68040 25mhz daughterboard. The 4100 has two AAA with VRAM as standard.

EDIT : The overhaul of the ACS range include the DSP 3210 expansion as standard, maybe for the same price as the ACS from 1990.


1994, the entire range is replaced by Hombre RISC 3D generation. The zorro port disappears in favor of PCI. The high-end have two PA-RISC as standard.

AmigaOS is updated to 4.0

EDIT : For the RISC entry level, the casing is a modified 500/700 casing with an CD reader at the top (It's open like the CD32 CD reader).

After that, the RISC generation would continue until today in the light of changing technology. The Amiga would had stay, at least 5 years technology ahead.

Also, maybe, consider to buy HP or at least the processor part to continue the PA-RISC until today.


Thank you for allow me to dream a little.



@OneTimer1 : Help from Apple ! Absolutly NOT for me.

All the Apple computers are not that good. Apple II (expect from the slot) are not better than Commodore 8 bits (PET/C64). The first Macintosh is black and white and monotask. Even an Atari ST is better, at least it's a color computer !
For me, i see Apple to be only good at marketing, but not very impressive with hardware (Specially for the high price they ask for). The Amiga was way better in every aspect than Macintosh. Commodore with a good marketing could oust Apple from the market fairly quickly and easily take its place..It's why i release, in my dream, the Amiga at the end of 1983, before Macintosh to remove from Apple the surprise effect. If the Amiga was out first, everyone would have seen that the Macintosh was a joke. Specialy for the price !

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@Hypex

Quote:

Hypex wrote: Sounds like a C128.

Of course, a slow transformation into a C128 like PC.

Quote:

But without being exacly compatible to a C64 the crowd would get upset.

I talked about two machines:
1st HC64 the Homecomputer
2nd PC64 the Personalcomputer

And if it was done right, the PC64 would have been more C64 compatible than the C128 in its C128 Mode.

Quote:

Besides, the time of the 8-bitters was over in the mid 80's.

Besides, the time of the mid 80ies was the time when the C64 sold most machines and even the C128 was sold over 5 million times without loss.

Oh maybe you missed it I mentioned the a 8086 (16bit) card as an alternative to Z80. Low cost variants like the 8088 could be squized into an 8 Bit system without much loss.

Quote:

They already did that. I believe it was called the A4000D and A4000T.

You forgot (or deleted) that I was talking about an A500 successor an A1200 like machine.

Quote:

Quote: Keyboards, Interfaces and other things must have been as compatible with a PC as possible What like, so a PC keyboard could be plugged in?

In the keyboard connector of the A500/A2000 successor I mentioned.

Quote:

The Amiga already came with a KB and mouse.

It might be an unknown to you, but i wrote:
PC case of course.

Quote:

Quote: Back in 1995, with a lack of CPU performance in 68k, I would have switched to PPC, like Apple did. There is one thing we are missing here. 68K, x86 and PPC aren't the only CPUs on the block.

True, but some CPUs had the wrong byte orders and others (MIPS, Sparc) where much more exotic than PPC, lacked performance or where discontinued earlier like the PA-Risc or Alpha.

Quote:

In reality, if Commodore survived, it looks like the future Amiga would have ran on a HP PA-RISC and Hombre chipset. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PA-RISC

All the links connecting the Hombre with the Amiga on wikipedia are leading to a quote from Dave Haynie, totally denying a relation with Amiga:

Quote:

Dave Haynie (January 24, 1995). "CBM's Plans for the RISC-Chipset". Gareth Knight. Retrieved January 31, 2010. "The initial schedule of 18 months was for the Hombre game machine hardware. There's no real OS here, just a library of routines, including a 3D package which would probably be licensed. The Amiga OS was not to have run on this system in any form." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset#cite_note-Haynie-1

@babsimov

Quote:

For me, i see Apple to be only good at marketing, but not very impressive with hardware (especially for the high price they ask for). ... The Amiga was way better in every aspect than Macintosh.

They had the office software and they had flicker free screen, something missing an the OCS/ECS machines.


Quote:

Commodore with a good marketing could oust Apple from the market fairly quickly and easily take its place..

But not without Office compatible flicker free hi res screens.

Quote:

If the Amiga was out first, ...

Even the Mac needed a long breath for its success, the Amiga could never compete with the Mac (or PC) in the office.

Quote:

the Macintosh 128K suffered from a dearth of available software compared to IBM's PC, resulting in disappointing sales in 1984 and 1985. It took 74 days for 50,000 units to sell. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh#1984.E2.80.9397:_Success_and_decline

@Hypex

Quote:

Hypex wrote: @cdimauro Quote: You can do it: use one of segment registers holding only the topmost 4 bits of the address, and then use the offset to provide the bottom 16-bits. Now I understand it and how it was to extend 16 to 20 bits it makes more sense. Except that 20 bits is rather odd for a computer compared to a more logical 24.

Well, think about when it was designed and released, and its primary goal: extending the (successful) 8085 to 16-bit, while being almost source-level compatible with it (read: much easier porting of existing software).
Quote:

Usually complexity means a superior design. But here is one example where complexity doesn't make it better and a simple linear access is the best way.

I think we all agree that linear addressing of memory is the best thing, but see above: please, contextualize it.
Quote:

Quote: It's not the same. At the same depth, packed modes are always better than of bitplanes, both for space (reduced alignment required) and bandwidth (again, better alignment and pixels are sequentially accessed). You prove my point. It should be easier for the hardware to read in all the bytes with a palette index ready to go. Some odd depths or non-2 multiples might not be as efficient.

Of course, but it's always much better than planar graphic.
Quote:

But I don't know how it combined the bitplanes either to get a colour index.

That's what the Amiga chipset does internally when it reads the bitplanes' content, to get the color index for every pixel.

With chunky pixels, essentially you already have all colors indexes, and the display logic has only to properly shift & mask them to extract the needed one each time.
Quote:

I'll check out that other site, but please, I already make a hobby of reading Amiga coding sites as it is.

I don't know how much time you have, but amigacoding.de has a lot of cool information which deserve to be read.
Quote:

Quote: Yes but, as I said before, you're asking for a new Blitter, which is more complex too It would be more complex. But that happens when you update hardware. Blitter was updated for AGA but not by much.

I don't remember of any update of the Blitter after the ECS chipset. Have you some information about it?
Quote:

Quote: For the OCS era bitplanes were fine, but at the end of '80s packed modes were a necessity. By that stage we were going from bitmaps and CLUTs to direct RGB values in a frambuffer so it made sense.

But at the time an 8-bit chunky mode was good because it required less space and bandwidth. That's why games like Wolfestein 3D and then Doom used it, and were so much successful, even with the already existing 16 or 32-bit packed modes.
Quote:

Except a hybird mode with red, green and blue bytes in their own planes.

That's one of the AAA modes, which frankly speaking I didn't like at all.

@umisef

Quote:

umisef wrote: @Kronos Quote: nor relevant as the higher 24bits will just get ignored. Which begs the question --- why was the prototype changed, from the (apparently correct) UBYTE argument type to the (apparently logically incorrect) ULONG one?

Exactly. Doesn't make sense to change the interface in a backward-incompatible way.

@cdimauro

Is it really incompatible ?

An 68k app calling with an ubyte will still get the correct result.

Sourcecode with an ubyte will be silently be extended to ulong by the compiler.

And since all API get called through registers one might say any argument defined at less than 32bit is an error.

_________________
- We don't need good ideas, we haven't run out on bad ones yet
- blame Canada

@Kronos: a 68K app can just load the low-byte of the register, leaving untouched all other bits: this is the source of incompatibility.

@cdimauro

Nope, as those upper bits get ignored and one should neverever expect D0 to keep any of it's contents when calling any library function.

_________________
- We don't need good ideas, we haven't run out on bad ones yet
- blame Canada

@babsimov

I agree with many of your ideas.
I would add two things.

1. I would have made the deal with Sun Microsystems to license Amiga OS for their Sun servers. If the cooperation had been good this would have laid the ground for Amiga as a server OS. It would also have required that the OS would have been forced to support a HAL, memory protection and multiprocessing. (multi core and thread). And also more focus on networking, which the Amiga was already good at in the early days.

2. I would have tried to prevent the Commodore PC department, and focused more on the Amiga OS and HW side.

3. A bit contradictory but I would also have encouraged some ideas of Fleecy Moss, such as app store and a hardware agnostic mobile OS, that he thought about even before apple went there.

Cheers

@Smurfen

1) so you would have turned AmigaOS into another sluggish and barely usable *nix just to sell some 1000 copies bundled to some random workstation ?

2) agreed

3) Barry never had any idea, nor good or bad. He just borrowed other people ideas without understanding them before doing the exact opposit of whatever made sense

_________________
- We don't need good ideas, we haven't run out on bad ones yet
- blame Canada

@OneTimer1

Quote:

OneTimer1 wrote: @babsimov Quote: For me, i see Apple to be only good at marketing, but not very impressive with hardware (especially for the high price they ask for). ... The Amiga was way better in every aspect than Macintosh. They had the office software and they had flicker free screen, something missing an the OCS/ECS machines.

Quote:

Commodore with a good marketing could oust Apple from the market fairly quickly and easily take its place..

Quote:

But not without Office compatible flicker free hi res screens.

Yes, they have office software because they have a better marketing than Commodore at the time.

The flicker free argument is also right at the time. But i remember doing things with Prowrite at the time that a Mac can't do (color image in a text and follow the pic contour).

But i agree with you in the reality Apple and the Macintosh with a good marketing get the office market and leave only the video and game market to Amiga.

It's why, in my dream story, one of the first things i add to Amiga (as you can read in my post) is a 2 colors hires mode at 31 khz and a cheap monitor to go with (like the Atari ST do).

So, it's why i say, NO need help from Apple for me. By the way, even without a flicker fixer, as i say, the Amiga can do office work way better than Mac, and of course with multitask. Commodore make the mistake to not do a proper marketing campaign to gain a good support from office software companies. At Amiga launch, office companies start to port they software to Amiga, but rapidly leave, because Commodore don't do a good marketing to support the Amiga.

Quote:

Quote: If the Amiga was out first, ... Even the Mac needed a long breath for its success, the Amiga could never compete with the Mac (or PC) in the office.

Of course Amiga could have compete with PC/MAC for office task. Remember Jean Louis Gassée telling Apple fear the Amiga when it was release :

http://www.digibarn.com/collections/systems/amiga1000-proto/

When he found BE, he said that the Bebox is what the Amiga would become if Commodore have correctly managed the Amiga. And Hombre with the possibility to add 2 PA-RISC processor tends to prove that he had correctly envisioned the future potential of the Amiga.

Besides, he had been approached by Commodore to become CEO.

Quote:

the Macintosh 128K suffered from a dearth of available software compared to IBM's PC, resulting in disappointing sales in 1984 and 1985. It took 74 days for 50,000 units to sell. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh#1984.E2.80.9397:_Success_and_decline

But Apple with good marketing allow the Mac to stand in office market.

From my point of view, i regret that MAC or PC is now the only standard, because from the start the Amiga is a much better computer than these at any hardware or software level for the time. The Amiga deserved a better future.

I hope you can understand this point of view.

Thanx

@Smurfen

Quote:

Smurfen wrote: I would have made the deal with Sun Microsystems to license Amiga OS for their Sun servers.

IMR Sun never wanted AmigaOS, so you would have payed them a lot of money porting it to SPARC.

@Kronos

Quote:

Kronos wrote: @cdimauro Nope, as those upper bits get ignored and one should neverever expect D0 to keep any of it's contents when calling any library function.

So, it doesn't make sense the change of type to long if the implementation is the same.

BTW, this means that the *Pen APIs limit the Amiga o.s. to use a 8-bit chunky mode at most: no more than 256 colors (with LUT) and not even 16 or 32-bit packed modes.

@umisef

All prototype get changed i bet all play station and x box do not look same as the prototype did

_________________
maybe i am dyslexia

An Apple a day keep bill gates away

@Kronos

Quote:

1) so you would have turned AmigaOS into another sluggish and barely usable *nix just to sell some 1000 copies bundled to some random workstation ?

No, on the contrary, it would have been a way to avoid sluggish *nix systems in servers by using a lean, mean server version of Amiga OS.

@Smurfen

After you've made it multiuser,after you've hardened the security, after you add virtual memory, after you add all the server functionality, you should be happy if Amiga server is anywhere near as fast as Unix....

@mcbone
or that is the question....


@Smurfen

AmigaOS was designed to run on limited HW with little RAM (inital plans were 128k upped to 256k later on but upon release everybody upped again to 512k) with just a floppy drive standard.

Within these restraints the developers made concious design descions to include multitasking and a GUI, just as the left out MP or a (full) HAL to make it useable for it's intended purpose (home/personal computer in pre-internet times).

Adding those 2 would have meant upping the RAM to atleast 1MB just for basic operation (and RAM was really expensive in those days). Even more to make it fully useable.

_________________
- We don't need good ideas, we haven't run out on bad ones yet
- blame Canada