@dipsomania

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dipsomania wrote: ... as for example the Animals when they decided on their own to build the infamous C16/Plus-4/C128, fighting with the so called "middle management".

C16/Plus-4 was an idea of top manager Tramiel to build a system that could compete with the price of the ZX81 / Timex 1000.

The C128 was a success, some say it helped C= to survive the time until the A500 was available, but it was to expensive for a C64 replacement.

The IBM-PC line of C= was successful and brought good money, until those real cheap system out of East Asia became available.

---

The story of C= is not a easy as some people think.

Kronos wrote:

... saving 5ct on C64 giving it the same hyper slow floppy support as the PETVC20 with its faulty ...

*SCNR*

@OneTimer1

C64 was the cash cow, not amiga and not PCs

that perhaps explained why Commodore started the C65-Project

@OlafS25

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OlafS25 wrote: C64 was the cash cow, not amiga and not PCs that perhaps explained why Commodore started the C65-Project

When the C65 development was started, it may have seemed a goof idea, when the A500 became available it was obsolete.

C65, A600, CDTV, CD32 ... when judged from the C= bubble they seemed to be good ideas but they failed in the market, when C= couldn't afford failures any more.

Last edited by OneTimer1 on 10-Sep-2025 at 06:29 PM.
Last edited by OneTimer1 on 10-Sep-2025 at 05:55 PM.

@OneTimer1

They (Bowen and another young engineer) started to develop the C65 in 1988-9 (after the A500...) mainly because NES was eating the C64 share market, although Commodore was still able to sell millions of them.
I remember they sold only a couple of million of C128 until 1990 and just 200k in 1985, so not too much I think. As OlafS25 said, basically C64s and PCs kept Commodore afloat until late 80s...
Correct, Tramiel gave the first impulse to develop C16/Plus4 as a kind of $99 version of the C64 in 1983, but I think he influenced the project only at the very beginning, he already left when the specs and various prototypes came out.

Last edited by dipsomania on 10-Sep-2025 at 09:23 PM.
Last edited by dipsomania on 10-Sep-2025 at 09:18 PM.
Last edited by dipsomania on 10-Sep-2025 at 09:11 PM.

@Hammer

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Hammer wrote: The credit for Steve Jobs' return to Apple is Gil Amelio. ... Steve Jobs used his personal relationship with Bill Gates for the rescue package.

Gil Amelio engaged Steve Jobs short term to provide some advice. It was the Apple chairman of the board Ed Woolard that should be credited with ousting Gil and the engagement of Steve as the interim CEO.

And I don't care what level of personal relationship Steve Jobs had with Bill Gates, Microsoft's board would have to approve the expenditure, and Microsoft needed Apple to exist during the then anti-trust suit by Netscape, lest they become an actual monopoly.

I guess that wasn't in Bryan Bagnall's books.

_________________
All the way, with 68k

@Hammer

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Hammer wrote: @cdimauro Quote: Kutaragi brought the first Playstation and all its innovations Most of PlayStation 1's innovations were done by external party IP i.e. LSI Coreware CPU and Toshiba GPU.

The same happened to Commodore as well in the last years, with the help of HP & VLSI.
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With a DSP ASIC background for SNES, Kutaragi provided good leadership direction for various entities to work together.

The leadership was important. Remember Intel's Andy Groove.
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Kutaragi stated that most of his Sony meetings are dominated by price vs performance debates.

This happened to Commodore as well. See also the last MEGA's post regarding the CDTV-CR.
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Quote: Please, tell me more about the Slow Mem which was worse than Chip and Fast Mem, the ECS (after FIVE years from the OCS) with its ridiculous 4 cycles Chip mem & registers access time for the 68020, the Amber chip (instead of integrating a scan doubler to che chipset), 1. 1MB ECS Agnus A in a 512KB Chip RAM + 512KB Slow RAM configuration can still access the slow RAM as Chip RAM. This feature only works for ECS Agnus A. 1989 era A500 Rev6A is the de facto Amiga configuration standard. A certain demo scene exploited the A500 rev6A ECS Agnus A's 512KB Chip RAM + 512KB Slow RAM configuration as 1 MB Chip RAM. Detect C0$ Slow RAM and ECS Agnus A existence and exploit CDTV-style's 1 MB Chip RAM.

Unfortunately, it was late. Hence, it didn't set the standard.

The standard for game companies was set by the 512kB Chip + 512kB Slow Mem. Everything extra was... extra, and not changing (cannot change) the core of the games.
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2. Amber chip with a high-speed serial frame buffer chips is a workaround for "read my lips, no new chips" with the Amiga graphics context.

Wasn't the ECS chipset... a new chipset? Wasn't it embedding support for high-resolution graphics? Wasn't it embedding support for the extra Ultra-highres bitplane & sprite (likely using VRAM)?

All of this was clearly against the supposted "read my lips, no new chips".

But the engineers preferred (!) to create a completely new, and expensive, chip for the scan-doubling functionality... which was then embedded on the AGA chipset. And, even worse, that required a consistent amount of external memory to serve the purpose.

Only Amiga engineers make it possible...
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3. https://www.retroisle.com/commodore/amiga/Technical/Firmware/customchips.php From Dave Haynie But that year (1991), CSG was changing over from channelled gate arrays to sea-of-gates technology, and their first chips were running at 1/4 speed or so. Six months later, I had fast chips, but also the new Engineering Administration, which considered Gemini either an illegal research project, or "something from the last administration". So, no big pounding on the Zorro III bus was possible before the A4000 shipped. In all fairness, the Zorro III project was a large thing to bite off. When the PC Industry made EISA, there were hundreds of people involved: some to hammer out the specs, some to make chips, test, etc. At Commodore, it was basically just me for most of the life of Zorro III. Zorro III is mostly a solo effort by Dave Haynie, while the PC world has a large engineering resource pool for the chipset designs. Blame Commodore management for hiring engineers for Commodore's PC clones instead of having the "Amiga 1st" ideology. Apple didn't betray its in-house platforms like Commodore!

Have I said that management hadn't responsibilities?
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Commodore management's Acutiator rejection shows management's exit direction from the Amiga. From Commodore - The Final Years book On December 20, 1991, Dave Haynie and Greg Berlin finished their proposed spec for a fourth generation Amiga system architecture. They called the proposal Acutiator, which was a medieval term for a sharpener of weapons. They wrote, “One of the main design goals of the Acutiator architecture is to separate functions into modular pieces. This gives us the flexibility to design low-cost systems which make use of some subset of these components, or to use them all to create a ‘feature enriched’ machine for those customers willing to pay the additional cost.� The engineers wanted to allow the then-new Motorola 68040 processor to work with the next generation of Amigas. And of course, the architecture would work with the upcoming AAA chipset, as well as the more imminent AA. And because AAA was designed to work with different processor families, Haynie wanted his Acutiator motherboard to also handle different processors. Specifically, there were at least three major RISC processor families at that time and he wanted Acutiator to accept these RISC chips. Their architecture required three custom chips: EPIC, AMOS, and SAIL. In cost comparisons, Haynie calculated that the Acutiator architecture would add approximately $125 to a system (including the cost of a 68EC040 chip), resulting in a $300 retail price increase. This was a bargain, considering the user received a significant processor upgrade. Haynie proposed that Commodore should assign Scott Shaeffer, Paul Lassa, and himself to each create the three required gate array chips. He expected prototypes in 7 to 9 months, with the first systems shipping in 1992.

I've highlighted the relevant parts which show why it was good that this board/architecture was rejected.
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Without a cache-coherent chipset, Amiga couldn't exploit $100 68EC040-25 which is about the same price as Am386-40, i386DX-25 and 68030-25 (with MMU) from https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2013/04/102723262-05-01-acc.pdf DataQuest 1991, page 119 of 981 For 1992, 68EC020-16, $16.06 68EC020-25, $19.99 68020-25, $35.13 68EC030-25, $35.94 (missing MMU, not Unix capable, used in A4000/EC030) 68030-25, $108.75 68040-25, $418.52 68EC040-25, $112.50 (missing MMU and FPU, Commodore management rejected glue chips for Amiga) AM386-40, $102.50 R3000-25, $96.31 386DX-25, $103.00 80486SX-20, $157.75 (still has MMU for Xenix 386, Windows NT, and Linux) 80486DX-25, $376.75 80486DX-33, $376.75 80486DX-50, $553.25 80486DX2-50, $502.75 Q4 1992, I would select 68EC040-25/AGA Amiga ahead of the i386DX33/Am386-40 PC with a similar price range i.e. AU$1500 or US$1000.

This was already in discussion on the other, proper thread.

Just one thing to add here: Amiga did NOT need any (P)MMU to keep cache consistency. In fact, the OS had proper APIs for that: it was "enough" (!) to just use them.
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Quote: Super Buster and its "awesome" memory bandwidth, the FrankenPatchwork which AGA represents which was still a 16-bit chipset and most of the things left untouched, Akiko (crappy C2P WITHOUT using the integrated DMA controller), AGA was a rush job to save the system engineering administration's ego against C65's reveal. Corporate politics and "losing/saving face" (ego) are real.

Well, after more than one year that engineers have spent on discussions about just the SPECs of the Next Big Thing...
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Akiko C2P has to overcome upper management roadblocks.

No. From what I've read and it was reported, engineers decides on their own, without consulting and management approval.
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The idea about bitplane/chunky pixel conversion hardware started in the CDTV-CR project.

Well, it was implemented and, again, because the engineer cheated his manager.

Anyway, the important point here was that it wasn't the right solution and, even much worse, it did NOT use the ALREADY EMBEDDED DMA controller/channel which Akiko used for the CD-ROM I/O.
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The "read my lips, no new chips" with the Amiga graphics context was removed with the C65 reveal, hence AA3000's original Q4 1991 release was the fix against press criticism for A3000's lacking 256 color mode.

The C65 was revealed TWO YEARS BEFORE that the ECS was put in production.

You can draw the conclusions yourself...
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Quote: and Hombre with the HP PA-RISC with its ridiculous amount of caches. Commodore's PA-RISC selection is Hitachi PA/50. Hombre's L1 cache structure resembles PA/50's. Commodore's RISC selection is with the "cheap" RISC camp since Motorola 88000's asking price is anti-game console price.

That wasn't the point. The point is that this PA-RISC with its very very limited amount of caches would have been a complete disaster, since it was supposed to be not only the graphic processors, but the central processor has well.

I've already told you that the Atari Jaguar was a failure, and it had a CUSTOM RISC (so, specialized on this specific task -> much more efficient and with better performance) which was ONLY DEVOTED to the graphics (because the system had a main, separated, processor. And other custom processors for other tasks), and with DOUBLE the caches.

How do you think that Hombre could have performed?

@bhabbott

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bhabbott wrote: @cdimauro Quote: cdimauro wrote: @bhabbott Which kind of innovations brought the Amiga engineers after the Amiga 1000? You know what kinds. I sense what you are really asking is why didn't they make the kinds of innovations you think they should have made.

I don't think that I'm the only one.
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To understand the engineers actions after the A1000 we need to look at what came before it. The C128 was launched on June 2, 1985 at the Chicago CES. At the show Commodore CEO Thomas Rattigan announced that 100,000 pre-orders had already been taken, and that 15% of C64 users were expected to upgrade to it within the year (which turned to be an accurate prediction). The C128 was much more successful than the engineers expected, eventually selling 4 million units by the end of 1989 (almost as many as the entire Amiga range up to 1994). The A1000 was released a month later with big fanfare. However it was expensive to produce so the price was well above most other home computers, and Sanyo had limited production capacity so they couldn't sell many even they had customers for them. With $55 million spent on advertising and only 70,000 sold they lost money on every unit. Reducing manufacturing cost was essential if the Amiga was to survive. The next model could have the OS in ROM (once it was finished) which removed one the expensive parts of the A1000. But that wouldn't be enough. Atari was doing well with the much lower cost ST, then introduced the 1040ST which was the first home computer to have 1MB for 'under' $1000. The lower cost Amiga would be competing against it and the C128. The Los Gatos 'innovators' who had designed the original Amiga were tasked with designing a lower cost A1000, but they stuck closely to the original design and were not able to save much. So the Commodore engineers at West Chester decided to work on their own lower cost model. A few of them dismantled a 520ST and compared it the A1000. The ST had far fewer parts. They figured that a form factor similar to the ST or C128 was what would sell to the masses. As well as making the keyboard integral they would need to integrate as much of the discrete logic as possible. Thus Fat Agnus and Gary were conceived. the 84 pin PLCC Agnus (the first PLCC and largest custom chip Commodore had made to date) integrated the clock logic, while Gary incorporated the expensive power-hungry PALs and other logic into a low cost low power gate array. When the Los Gatos Amiga team found out about the A500 they scoffed, suggesting that Fat Agnus wouldn't work and that removing the WCS was a mistake. This shows that Commodore's engineers were more innovative than Jay Miner's engineers. You may complain that they didn't innovate on enhanced features, but that was not what was needed. The A1000 got developers familiar with the Amiga's custom chips and OS so they would be able to produce software that made best use of it. By 1987 when the A500 was released a number of titles were showing what the Amiga could do, making ST users jealous.

Those are NOT the innovations that I was talking about, rather cost reduction measures -> obvious things for companies that must make profits.
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The A500 was not the machine to change the ends again, but to consolidate the architecture and bring the A1000's capabilities to the masses. It's just unfortunate that IBM released VGA with 256 colors in the same year,

256 colours were introduced one year before, with the MCGA.

Besides that, IBM introduced other graphic cards even before that. And, more important, there were OTHER systems besides the IBM/PC ones.

Last, but not really least, you can't sit and wait only because you introduced an incredible machine: competition will learn AND react. Which is exactly what happened...
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though it took several years to become popular and couldn't match the Amiga in action games until the 90's (when x86 CPUs got powerful enough to make up for not having a blitter etc.).

As it was reported, you don't need it.

Amiga was lucky because PC developers did not fully understood the capabilities of the machine, and it took several years to master it and show what it was capable of.

The Amiga required much less mastering, because it already provided plenty of features out-of-the-box, and with very good documentation.
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Please, tell me more about the Slow Mem which was worse than Chip and Fast Mem

SlowRAM was an innovation. You may scoff, but the Amiga needed a cheap way to get 1MB to counter the 1040ST. FastRAM wasn't cheap because it needed a dedicated DRAM controller. SlowRAM was practically free to implement, and made the expansion board cheap to manufacture. They added a RTC at the same time because the OS needed it for serious applications. This was also very cheap to implement because it only needed a few more pins on the trapdoor connector and Gary did the I/O address decoding.[/quote]
You did not need a new memory controller, rather a refresh controller for the DRAM in this daughterboard.

And you didn't need a very complex implementation. In fact, the current Slow mem implementation needed just a single, simple, and very cheap change: it should be enabled only when the refresh cycles started for the Chip Mem. That's it.
This way the Slow Mem would have been blocked only for 3 colour-clocks per raster line, leaving all other slots for the CPU to go perfectly in parallel with the Chip Mem accesses -> HUGE performance improvement for the CPU.

This if the goal was to have a separated memory only accessible for the CPU. Which I do NOT recommend for the machines of the time, which rather needed more Chip Mem. And Fat Agnus ALREADY SUPPORTED 1MB of Chip Mem!

That should have been the solution for the extra memory in the system, which would have opened the market for much better games (and multimedia applications).
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You say SlowRAM was worse than ChipRAM or FastRAM, but it was no worse than ChipRAM for code and non-custom chip data.

It was NOT accessible for the custom chips AND it was slow as the Chip Mem for the CPU, whereas it would have been more sensible to have either the first (VERY VERY welcome!) or the second.

But definitely NOT having none of them!
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Most games would compress data anyway to save memory, and didn't need that much actual ChipRAM.

Compressed data stays on disk(s) and NOT in memory (unless for the short time to decompress it to the right location).
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SlowRAM gave customers a 1MB expansion at the lowest possible price with performance equal to the base machine.

See above on that.
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Games and apps that didn't push the bandwidth too high wouldn't be slowed by a noticeable amount compared to FastRAM.

Again, no. You haven't developed games on/for the Amiga, and you don't know how it worked out.

In fact, the bandwidth was NOT the problem. The PRIMARY problem was accessing the assets, which means the possibility to reference them from/in the Chip Mem.

Games are essentially dominated by the custom chips, and the CPU was mostly used as the slave for them, with a minimal part for the business logic.

You, as developer, definitely wanted to have almost all space in Chip Mem.
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In practice nobody but people like you got upset about it.

In practice, you were NOT a developer, you did NOT know what they really needed, and you talk of things that you've no clue of.
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Fans were happy to get 1MB cheaply for software that needed it, and it didn't make their machine any slower than it already was.

Right, but that was NOT the point: it was just (!) the consequence of very bad technical decisions.

Fans would have been way happier if the system was defined as per what I've explained.
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If they wanted more then they could always install a RAM expansion on the Zorro slot like A1000 owners did. In 1989 Commodore provided up to 2MB of true FastRAM in the A590, along with a 20MB hard drive and DMA SCSI interface. That turned the A500 into a very capable machine for 'serious' use. And yes, that was innovation too!

Fast was already available with the Amiga 1000, and SCSI controllers were EXTERNAL...
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the ECS (after FIVE years from the OCS) with its ridiculous 4 cycles Chip mem & registers access time for the 68020, the Amber chip (instead of integrating a scan doubler to che chipset), Super Buster and its "awesome" memory bandwidth, the FrankenPatchwork which AGA represents which was still a 16-bit chipset and most of the things left untouched, Akiko (crappy C2P WITHOUT using the integrated DMA controller), and Hombre with the HP PA-RISC with its ridiculous amount of caches.

No, the 4 cycle ChipRAM access was not 'ridiculous ' just because you had an 020 (which needed 3 cycles) running at a higher clock speed. By that logic anyone with an 060 would expect ChipRAM to be doing single cycle access at 50MHz. [/quote]
Nope. As Miner clearly stated, the chipset was designed to be a perfect match with the 68000 way of accessing memory.

However and after that, better processors were available, which were crippled by the chipset design.

What was needed, then, was to remove this hard-coded access pattern, and let the CPU (ANY) access it as fast as it was possible.
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Once the chipset was designed to work with that timing it had to keep it for compatibility,

What are you talking about? In which part of the Amiga Hardware Reference Manual is reported that the system had to stay as it is?

On the exact contrary, it was reported that details were provided, but Commodore did NOT guarantee that the system would have worked in the same way on future models. Commodore provided even some internal details about the Blitter's pipeline(ing), but it was clearly stated that it was an example, and that it was NOT guarantied that it would be the same on future Blitter implementations.

In short: developers should NOT take those details as something set in the stone. Rather, they had to FOLLOW THE GUIDELINES to be sure that their software continued to work on all future moderls.

So, and again: which compatibility problems you were talking about?
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just like ISA bus video cards did (which BTW were no faster than AGA - actually slower unless the ISA bus was overclocked, which might stop other cards from working).

You already got a reply on that, but I have to had a very important detail: 68k processors used asynchronous buses since the very beginning. They adapt themselves depending on the peripheral which they are accessing.

The Amiga had the custom chips working at 7.16 (NTSC, SECAM) or 7.09Mhz (PAL) with a two cycles access time. It had also two CIAs with 10% of clock access time. ROM and Fast Mem with the minimum access time that they allowed. And the 68000 was perfectly able to interface with all of them...
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Just because the engineers didn't implement what you think they should have doesn't make them bad engineers.

No, I've reported plenty of plain mistakes that they have made. Clear mistakes -> not because I'm telling it: they are FACTs.
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It's actually quite arrogant to suggest that you could have done a much better job.

I'm NOT an hardware / electronic engineers, and if I'm able to figure out their mistake, you can guess that the arrogance here is only about them trying to defend their "splendid" (!) work and always finger pointing to the management...
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You spew out 'Integrated AMBER' and 'DMA Akiko' as if these things would be a doddle,

Well, they were. And no, it's not only word here: you can ask to others their opinions, since you seem (!) to have completed forgotten (!!) the discussions on EAB...
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then dump on Dave Haynie for not managing to get real silicon running at the theoretical maximum speed of Zorro III.

How many revisions (read: new masks -> new chips) were needed and how much bandwidth was delivered with the final chip?
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Let's see your designs to do this - I'm sure the community would welcome them.

The community (of hardware developers) seems to have made better works of Commodore engineers.
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Should be a doddle with the chips we have today, right?

"AI" bots should help a lot people like me, which aren't hardware engineers. But I prefer to use my spare time to work on projects.
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Compare them to the OVERALL stupidities that Commodore engineers have made in just 9 years, and draw your conclusions... Hint: April 1994...

Ti was out of the home computer business with their tail between their legs by 1981.[/quote]
But it's still working on the chips market.
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Sinclair sold out to Amstrad in 1986 for a mere £5 million.

Good. At least they gained something...
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Amstrad stopped making home computers after the CPC Plus line flopped in 1990.

But it's still here, albeit busy on other things.
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the Acorn Electron was almost a complete disaster with missed launch dates, ULA reliability problems and less than half the performance of the BBC micro (partly due to using 4-bit RAM!).

But it created the ARM, which... is still (!) here.
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And that's just a few of the horror stories about home computer engineering. Commodore was by no means the worst.

Please, tell me what's still working nowadays of the Commodore heritage. Something of really relevant, of course.

@agami

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agami wrote: @topic Why is this even a debate? The role of Commodore's management in the company's failures and ultimate demise is definitive and complete. The proverbial buck stops with leadership. Commodore's was, to put it mildly, dysfunctional. Before you cry a river, it has been my experience that the leadership of most global public companies is dysfunctional, though the level of dysfunction varies and is only tested during a crisis. Apple were in the same boat during that time. However, their momentum generated enough inertia in key markets that in an opportune time they were deemed worthy of a bailout by Microsoft. Engineers are never to blame. If the organisation lacks or has the incorrect mix of engineers to deliver on its goals, it's the responsibility of management to hire the correct mix of engineers, and set them to their tasks. End of story.

So, you basically wanted to kick out their engineers, and hire completely new ones, since the existing ones were:
- unable to define even the specs (paper work);
- unable to work on existing projects;
- working on their own ideas;
- cheating their managers.

According to Eggebrechts, engineers were hackers and unprofessional.

So, the right solution was to kick them all out and start from scratch with, hopefully, good engineers...

@Hammer

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Hammer wrote: Zilog admitted their mistake was dumping backwards compatibility with Z80 CP/M, which annoyed many business users. Zilog's mistake benefited IBM's PC and Intel's x86. Intel learns the lesson from Zilog and made sure 80286 and 80386 were backward compatible with 8086/8086.

No, they are not fully compatible with 8086/8088.

There's a list of differences between the first processors of the family and the subsequent ones, which make them not 100% compatible.

Some are really subtle, BTW, so you can get into obscure issues which would make you crazy to figure out what's the root cause.

/OT

@Kronos

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Kronos wrote: @cdimauro Quote: cdimauro wrote: It's the opposite: it had a HUGE impact on performance, because the 68000 was blocked all times that there was a chip memory access.. No it wasn't, it was a minor impact in normal operation (when the chipset stayed within it's half of the cycles) and only got worse if and when when stressed.

Which means very often.

Trivial example: with a 640x200x16 colours screen the processor would be completely blocked almost all time when the graphic is displayed, waiting HUNDREAD of clock cycles before getting access to a few ones (IF there's no Blitter operation ongoing).

Unrealistic? Moving a window on screen (of any depth) could block the processor for even more time.

And talking about games (goodly written ones which were able to squeeze a lot from the system), it's even worse.

Which kind of experience have you had on low-level stuff like that, with the Amiga? I had plenty and I can talk of a lot of things and concrete examples which contradict your statement.
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How much would a separate bus cost at the time? 5 maybe 10$, sounds small but on a system with high volume and low margins that was a nogo.

Pay attention to the words: I've NOT talked about a (new) separate bus, but of KEEPING the buses. So, the existing ones.

Amiga already had two buses: one connected to the chipset, but another one connected to all other peripherals, which include ROM and Fast Mem.

As I've already explained on my reply to Bruce, it would be enough to keep the current Slow mem implementation, but enabling it only when the Chip Mem DRAM refresh was needed. With just a bunch of gates (maybe a single logical port. Just my guess, because I have no details here) you could have had the advantage of reusing the refresh circuitry, while keeping the separated buses on almost all time.

However, it wouldn't yet be the best solution, which was having 1MB of Chip Mem. Which Fat Agnus supported.
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If your A2000 had slow it was a B. And sure slow had no place in such a preices computer but it was the best they could do in short timeframe.

No, see above and on my reply to Bruce.
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Quote: But this HEAVILY crippled the Amiga games, unfortunately. No it didn't, most games were constrained by the size of chip (1MB CHIP for all A500 from the start, now that would made difference),

Again, see above. However, that's exactly my point talking about the best solution.
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the overall RAM available (the 512+512 requirement really only took hold from 1990 onwards) and the lack of space (and speed) per disk. I'd say spending the above 10$ on giving the A500 a full speed HD floppy would have had a much bigger impact on games.

Absolutely no: 1MB Chip Mem would have had a HUGE difference.
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But again f###ups are a reality, the A20 gate, saving 5ct on C64 giving it the same hyper slow floppy support as the a PET. SinclairQL running an 68k on a 8Bit bus and so on.

Right. The road to technological progress is paved with huge mistakes.

No more replies. Now I've to pack my stuff and go back home (vacation is basically over). I'll reply to the other threads (or to this thread, if other comments arrive) once I've some spare time.

Five posts in a row.
If this is not autism, my friends, then what?



WHAT!








/mega

_________________
I HAVE ABS OF STEEL
--
CAN YOU SEE ME? CAN YOU HEAR ME? OK FOR WORK

@dipsomania

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dipsomania wrote: Yes, they were brilliant and talented engineers but also youngsters, full of egos and weird, that lead to nonsense engineering decisions - because they felt cool putting questionable stuff (like CP/M in C128...)

The actual story is more complicated than what you may have heard. When the C64 was released in 1982 the box said it was CP/M compatible via an optional Z80 cartridge. Unfortunately Commodore had trouble getting the cart to work and didn't have it ready on launch. This came to the attention of the authorities, who prosecuted Commodore for false advertising and prevented them from selling machines in those boxes until they could actually deliver Z80 carts. This was both expensive and embarrassing for Commodore, so they vowed to not get caught out like that again.

In 1982 the PC was in its infancy and CP/M was still a popular OS for business use, so a CP/M cart for the C64 made sense. Only problem is CP/M really needed 80 column text but the C64 only 40 columns, which made it a bit awkward to use. The C128 had 80 column text which made it a better match to CP/M. Also Commodore marketing announced that the C128 would be 'fully C64 compatible'. Guess what that meant? Yes, you guessed it - it would also have to be CP/M compatible!

Now Bil Herd enters the picture. The Z80 cart was poorly designed with a lot of power-hungry TTL chips on it. To accommodate this the C128 would need a new more expensive power supply. Herd figured that if he put the Z80 inside the C128 it wouldn't need all those chips, so power consumption would be lower and they could use the original cheaper power supply. He could then add the Z80 on the motherboard for less money than just having that larger power supply for a Z80 cart. IOW it was effectively 'free'.

Then Herd realized that he could use the Z80 to solve another problem they had with a particular C64 cart that wouldn't work in the C128 (once again they were trapped by their own advertising). The Z80 was pretty cheap back then, so putting in the C128 wasn't 'questionable' - it was smart.

You may also have heard that the 4MHz Z80 in the C128 only runs at an effective 2MHz, which is true. But the C64 Z80 cart is the same. Most Z80-based home computers didn't run at 4MHz effective clock speed either. The CPC is 3MHz. The ZX81 is 0.9MHz when the display is on. At 2MHz the Z80 has about the same computing power as a 1MHz 6502. The real problem was that CP/M 3.3 has a very inefficient text display routine on the C128 (the CPC is slow too).

The only 'questionable' thing was whether CP/M was still relevant in 1985. Amstrad introduced it with their 3" floppy drive addon for the CPC464 in 1984, and then the 664 and 6128 in 1985. These machines were quite successful. Then Amstrad made the PCW 'word processor' based on the same technology, which was wildly successful. So in 1985 CP/M wasn't dead. In fact it gave C128 users something to do other than just using it as an expensive C64 until C128-specific software was developed.

tl,dr - putting a Z80 in the C128 was a good idea given that it had to be CP/M compatible to meet advertising standards.

Quote:

In the 80s Commodore executives felt the Amiga was designed to be only a high-end system, Los Gatos team was even more intransigent about this - only D. Morse wanted Amiga as a game machine, but he left in 1985. Irving Gould pushed personally to make the A2000. Clearly Commodore wanted to distance itself from the world of games, after the infamous crash of 1984, at least until late 80s, when A500 started to invade the world.

That's only half the story. There were Commodore engineers who wanted low-end Amigas too, including a pure games machine called the A250. But the industry was more concerned about it being a good business machine (and IBM compatible too of course) which forced Commodore in that direction. Even then they mostly promoted it as a 'creativity' machine - which anyone who has used Deluxe Paint or Protracker can attest to.

Games weren't forgotten either, just not emphasized - which is fair enough. Sinclair launched their ZX Spectrum with a two page full color advert and order form. Guess what wasn't mentioned or even hinted at? Games. Of course being new it didn't have any, and they didn't make any for the launch. However It did say that the Spectrum offered 'professional level computing', and had a picture showing a man in a suit displaying a graph on-screen. Clearly Sinclair was not promoting it as a games machine, and to drive the point home didn't even put a joystick port on on it.

When the Amstrad CPC664 was launched in New Zealand in 1985, Bits and Bytes magazine's headline was "Amstrad shoots for the small business market". The introductory advert did mention games, but 3 out of 4 of the screenshots showed business apps.

So Commodore wasn't the only one to downplay the gaming side.

Gamers knew different of course. One look at the specs and they knew the Amiga would wipe the floor with other computers of the day in gaming. The A1000 had it all, colors, sprites, blitter, pcm sound, joystick ports, composite and RF output, and the keyboard that hid out of the way when playing games.

Quote:

The fact the "they used PCs for administration because they didn't believe in Amiga" is just a BS, they were already using mainly VAX/Unix machines and still some PETs, as a lot of other companies at that time. It was a nonsense to replace the IT infrastructure with machines that lacked of software. Amiga never had serious productivity software, I mean, to manage a billion dollar company like Commodore.

True, and even if they were using PCs so what? The Amiga was designed for creativity, not grunt office work. Relegating it to a 'desk job' would be a waste of its talents.

Last edited by bhabbott on 11-Sep-2025 at 10:01 AM.

@cdimauro

Quote:

cdimauro wrote: Trivial example: with a 640x200x16 colours screen

So? That mode was utterly useless for games and with apps you would still have blocked chip RAM access even if the system had real FAST making it pretty much useless for anything but a static picture.

Sure the could have done something slightly with just a little more time and budget, but with what they were given we got:
- cheap 1MB on the budget system
- 1MB base on the "pro" system with easy and affordable option to expand with up to 8MB of FAST

So simply not a real problem.

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

@cdimauro

Quote:

That wasn't the point. The point is that this PA-RISC with its very very limited amount of caches would have been a complete disaster, since it was supposed to be not only the graphic processors, but the central processor has well.

The PA-RISC in Hombre was to be a custom 50MHz implementation with added custom SIMD graphics instructions.

Hombre is listed as having 6K cache + texture memory. That's more than the Playstation.

The CPU would have done general processing and also geometry calculations, but at 50MHz I don't think it would have been much of a problem.

That said, it is a *very* clever design. The Blitter (which also does texture mapping) can read from the cache. This means it can get the geometry data directly without going to memory, saving a ton of bandwidth.

Quote:

I've already told you that the Atari Jaguar was a failure

It was always going to be, it was complex to program, they shipped bad tools and they seemingly didn't care about 3rd party developers at all. You have to wonder if they had lessons from Commodore management.

Quote:

and it had a CUSTOM RISC (so, specialized on this specific task -> much more efficient and with better performance) which was ONLY DEVOTED to the graphics (because the system had a main, separated, processor. And other custom processors for other tasks),

2 custom RISCs in fact, it would have been a very nice system if they hadn't rushed it to market without allowing the development team to debug it ...there was a nasty bug in the memory controller that appears to have somewhat hurt performance.

Quote:

and with DOUBLE the caches.

The Jag doesn't have any cache, it uses local memories, so more like DSPs.
So they'll run incredibly fast and then just stop until more code is loaded.

Quote:

How do you think that Hombre could have performed?

Depends on which version they made, there's a single 32 bit VRAM version or a better version with 64 bit VRAM + CPU RAM.

I think the 64 bit version would have been similar performance to the Playstation if not better, the 32 bit version lower performance. Both would have looked amazing though, they could use Ham8 as the background playfield.

Last edited by minator on 11-Sep-2025 at 09:25 PM.
Last edited by minator on 11-Sep-2025 at 09:19 PM.

_________________
Whyzzat?

@cdimauro

Quote:

cdimauro wrote: @agami So, you basically wanted to kick out their engineers, and hire completely new ones, since the existing ones were: - unable to define even the specs (paper work); - unable to work on existing projects; - working on their own ideas; - cheating their managers. According to Eggebrechts, engineers were hackers and unprofessional. So, the right solution was to kick them all out and start from scratch with, hopefully, good engineers...

That would be the last resort.

- The first thing leadership should do is align the existing engineers to the business goals.
- If there is some communication breakdown between leadership and engineers, then they should hire engineers who can speak the lingo but would be part of the broader leadership team to herd the proverbial cats.
- If most of the engineers are hackers, then they need to be balanced out with Implementers and Completer/Finishers. Following Dr. Meredith Belbin's Team Roles (first published in 1981). You can't have a team with only Plants.
- Create an R&D department and rotate hacker engineers in an out of R&D so they can have a creative outlet, and it creates separation between the two different styles of engineering so that when hackers are not on an R&D project, they are more likely to then work on implementation.
- R&D rotations are then used as a reward for implementation success. It would also require well written R&D proposals where they are encouraged to collaborate with business people to put together the R&D proposal.
- Any engineer that doesn't want to work in such an arrangement is too much of a liability and should absolutely be shown the door and replaced with an engineer that actually wants to do the work.
- Egos are fine, ambition is also welcome, but it is a business responsible to its shareholders, so there has to be discipline.

_________________
All the way, with 68k

@cdimauro

Quote:

No, they are not fully compatible with 8086/8088.

Don't assume. I already know Z80 is not compatible with 8088/8086.

Z80 CP/M standard was the business platform establishment before the x86 PC establishment.

"Own goal" mistake is on Zilog. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDgFXMKA6QU

Last edited by Hammer on 12-Sep-2025 at 06:30 AM.

_________________

@MEGA_RJ_MICAL

Quote:

Five posts in a row. If this is not autism, my friends, then what?

By now you should already know how forums are supposed to work.

_________________
Indigo 3D Lounge, my second home.
The Illusion of Choice | Am*ga

@cdimauro

Quote:

The same happened to Commodore as well in the last years, with the help of HP & VLSI.

The difference:

1. AA Lisa was designed by CSG LSI personnel and fabricated by 3rd party.

From Commodore - The Final Years book

As work progressed on the graphics chip, Lisa, it became clear that
the timeline was too ambitious. Jeff Porter set a more realistic
expectation of late 1990. As Porter predicted, CSG produced the first
prototype chips by late November 1990 and testing began.


CSG produced the first prototype chips. HP aided with mass production.


2. PlayStation's custom CXD8514Q GPU was designed by Toshiba.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_technical_specifications

32-bit Sony GPU (designed by Toshiba)


Quote:

Wasn't the ECS chipset... a new chipset? Wasn't it embedding support for high-resolution graphics? Wasn't it embedding support for the extra Ultra-highres bitplane & sprite (likely using VRAM)?

Full ECS has been operational since the internal 1988 A2000-CR prototype.

From Commodore - The Final Years book

On February 4, 1987, LSI head Ted Lenthe produced a development
schedule with prototype samples expected in May and the first 1000
production units in July. He assigned Hi-Res Denise the chip number
8369. Commodore engineer Bob Raible would perform the layout for
Hi-Res Denise, with assistance from Amiga engineers Glenn Keller
and Mark Shieu.

Engineer Victor Andrade became lead designer on another chip,
dubbed Hi-Res Fat Agnus, which received chip number 8372. A new
chip designer named Bill Gardei would provide simulation and testing
support.

Andrade and Raible would need to make a few tweaks on the Los
Gatos design in order to ensure plug-in compatibility. The West
Chester engineers wanted the new chips to be pin compatible with
the A500 and A2000-CR boards to make future improvements of the
systems easy, although the AmigaOS software would need to be
upgraded to work with the chips.



From West Chester engineers, VRAM ECS was ditched and modified for the existing 16-bit DRAM-equipped A500 and A2000-CR.


1989 released A500 Rev6A PCB design is full ECS ready without any bodge wire hacks.

A500 Rev6A PCB design fully supports 8372B/8372AB and 2MB Chip RAM configuration along with Kickstart 2.0 512KB ROM.
https://www.amibay.com/threads/2megs-chipram-on-rev-6a-amiga-500-motherboard.89654/


Quote:

The standard for game companies was set by the 512kB Chip + 512kB Slow Mem. Everything extra was... extra, and not changing (cannot change) the core of the games.

That's policy.

During 1989, A500 Rev6A (with ECS Agnus A)'s install base was ramping up, hence A500's older Rev 3 and Rev 5 were dominant.

It would take 1989 and 1990 sales for the A500 Rev6A to be dominant over the older A500 Rev3/Rev5.

A500 Rev 6A's 512KB Chip RAM + 512 Slow RAM configuration with alternate 1MB Chip RAM access is built in.

Reference
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_share_of_personal_computer_vendors

A500 Rev 6A is the de facto Amiga standard sometime in 1991.

If a game targeted A500 Rev 6A (with 512KB Chip RAM + 512 Slow RAM and alternate 1MB Chip RAM access), it would break on older A500 Rev 3 and Rev 5.

A500 platform wasn't designed to have a partitioned graphics card upgrade i.e. horizontal graphics card that can be upgraded.


Quote:

I've highlighted the relevant parts which show why it was good that this board/architecture was rejected.

$300 retail increase is okay for countries with strong currencies.

Retail US$499 baseline + US$300 = US $799, which is AU$1100 range.
Retail US$599 baseline + US$300 = US $899, which is AU$1200 range.

My family is okay with spending the AU$1500 range 386DX33/ET4000AX PC in Q4 1992.
Roughly equivalent to US$1000 and UKP 750.

$125 BOM vs $300 retail estimate is using a familiar 2.4 ratio. This ratio can change.

Quote:

Just one thing to add here: Amiga did NOT need any (P)MMU to keep cache consistency. In fact, the OS had proper APIs for that: it was "enough" (!) to just use them.

For 68040-class CPUs with Amigas, data cache consistency needs a working MMU. 68EC040 can't be used with the current Amiga!

68020's instruction cache doesn't need an MMU.
68030's data cache has a cache suppression pin.

I have TF1260, can you guarantee 68EC060 rev6's suitability with Amiga?

Quote:

No. From what I've read and it was reported, engineers decides on their own, without consulting and management approval.

You just ignored the Commodore story drama.

Quote:

The C65 was revealed TWO YEARS BEFORE that the ECS was put in production.

Try it for Herni Rubin.


From Commodore - The Final Year,

The Amiga 500 would receive virtually no new improvements during
1988, although that was unlikely to hinder sales of the mass-market
machine

A sequel to the Amiga 500 would be developed by George
Robbins and released in 1989.

The foundation of the Amiga plans was an upgrade to the Amiga
chipset. These plans had been mired for months by disagreements
within the engineering team. As a result, Rubin did not believe
Commodore would be able to keep up with the rapid PC release
cycle and felt it would be at least 1989 before the engineers could
release a completely new computer. But in order to keep the highend
Amiga line current, Commodore would produce upgrade cards
for the Amiga 2000’s video and processor slots, namely the A2620
accelerator card.

The company would release a “new� machine in 1988 that was
merely the old A2000 with different adapter cards and faceplates.
Named the Amiga 2500AT, it would contain an A2286 bridgeboard,
the A2620 accelerator card, and a 40 MB hard drive with the A2090
card.

Rubin planned to release a brand new, high-end Amiga in 1989
with the moderately improved chipset and a Motorola 68030 CPU.
He even dubbed this the Amiga 3000 very early.

Finally, Rubin wanted a machine to continue the legacy of the
Commodore 64. Something truly inexpensive that would compete
with Nintendo and allow Commodore shelf space in mass-market
retailers and even toy stores across the US and Europe. The present
plans called for the C64D, but Jeff Porter also revealed the C65 to
Rubin.



From Commodore - The Final Year,

Meanwhile, by October, Porter was zeroing in on a power supply for
the A250. Robbins would continue designing the cartridge and Boyer
the main game system, right up until the January 1989 CES.

Remember Me?
As Commodore’s system engineering group raced forward with the
A250, under Irving Gould’s whip, there remained a curious omission.
Commodore already had a game machine under development in the
CSG group called the C65. On August 23, less than two weeks after
the Bahamas Technology Meeting, CSG head Ted Lenthe asked Jeff
Porter what this A250 thing was and why Commodore was
developing it instead of the C65

(SKIP)

In fact, Rubin had been told about the C65 in January but,
considering Rubin’s age and forgetfulness, Porter suspected he
hadn’t thought about it since then.


Jeff Porter hides C65 during CIC's Bahamas Technology Meeting.

Herni Rubin forgets about C65.

Irving Gould and the CIC executive board are not aware of the C65 project.

Last edited by Hammer on 12-Sep-2025 at 08:08 AM.
Last edited by Hammer on 12-Sep-2025 at 08:05 AM.

_________________

@pixie

Quote:

pixie wrote: @MEGA_RJ_MICAL Quote: Five posts in a row. If this is not autism, my friends, then what? By now you should already know how forums are supposed to work.

Five post