@bhabbott

Quote:

If you had ever run a business you would (or should) know that the 'killer app' is an accounting package. Word processors and spreadsheets have their place, but are not the right tools for handling sales, purchases, inventory, and tax. Every business needs that stuff. OTOH, being able to run that accounting package and do word processing, spreadsheets, web browsing and email etc. at the same time is a distinct advantage.

Don't assume I'm not aware of accounting software, and especially my employer's accounting software. You're opening a Pandora's box with accounting software.

Look in mirror when Amiga's 1987 - 1988 has very weak in back office software.

Windows 2.x reached 2 million units sale in 1989 which exceeds Amiga's 1989 install base. Windows 2.x 386 has Virtual 8086 box enabled multiple text based DOS programs to be run.
This is not including Windows 2.x piracy.

IBM OS/2 1.x was brain dead with 286 until OS/2 2.0 386 in April 1992.

The flood of accounting software for Windows arrived with 1993 Windows 3.1. Many accounting software for Windows was in development during 1990 Windows 3.0's era.

Mac has found business niches that is larger than Amiga's Video Toaster and Lightwave.

Microsoft's empire is built on two main pillars i.e. Operating System (e.g. MS-DOS, Xenix, Windows) and Excel/Word.

Mac ports GUI Excel and Word for Windows 2.x was the beach head that displaced text based Lotus 123, WordStar and WordPerfect establishment.

Accounting software sector has it's own story.

Amiga ECS's release was delayed. Amiga's OCS didn't maximise A500's existing Chip RAM bandwidth for stable business high resolution modes during Windows 2.x's beach head.

Last edited by Hammer on 14-Jul-2024 at 01:14 AM.

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@bhabbott

Quote:

Didn't need it. If you were using an A500 in your business then you already valued low price over a fancy hires display. The A2000 was effectively just an A500 with slots and a bigger case and power supply, but could have had a graphics card if there was enough demand for it. There wasn't, because it wasn't needed. People who needed flicker-free hires just installed a flicker fixer card.

Commodore's Far East mass production was optimised with the A500 model without a single "out of the box" Zorro II slot compatibility, hence separating many thousands A500 production scale from the few thousand A2000 production scale.

You talk about demand factor when Commodore didn't create a large market for Zorro II.

Unlike Windows 2.x, AmigaOS 1.x wasn't RTG capable. Amiga's general-purpose graphics weren't partitioned when Commodore was alive.

Flicker Fixer with framebuffer (for de-interlace) is limited by the A2000 production scale, it's a hack and costly when compared to ET4000AX.

Quote:

In business the goal is to make money, not admire aesthetics. 99% of PCs in the 80's were run in text mode because unless you were doing CAD or desktop publishing it was more productive.

FALSE.

According to Dataquest November 1989, VGA crossed more than 50 percent market share in 1989 i.e. 56%.
http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/components/dataquest/0005190_PC_Graphics_Chip_Sets--Product_Analysis_1989.pdf

Low-End PC Graphics Market Share by Standard Type
Estimated Worldwide History and Forecast


Total low-end PC graphic chipset shipment history and forecast
1987 = 9.2. million, VGA 16.4% market share i.e. 1.5088 million VGA.
1988 = 11.1 million, VGA 34.2% i.e. 3.79 million VGA.
1989 = 13.7 million, VGA 54.6% i.e. 7.67 million VGA.
1990 = 14.3 million, VGA 66.4% i.e. 9.50 million VGA.
1991 = 15.8 million, VGA 76.6% i.e. 12.10 million VGA.
1992 = 16.4 million, VGA 84.2% i.e. 13.81 million VGA.
1993 = 18.3 million, VGA 92.4% i.e. 16.9 million VGA.

From the get-go in 1987, VGA reached 16.4 percent.

Quote:

So long as you could read the text the resolution was irrelevant.

FALSE. IBM MDA provided higher text mode resolution.

C128's higher resolution text mode was a weak #metoo and released late in 1985.

C64 is garbage for high-resolution text-based business resolution!

PC clones fulfill the "second source" business and government requirements.

Quote:

The only problem with this usage was that DOS wasn't multitasking.

The only problem is your argument is FALSE.

Windows 386 has virtual 8086 multitasking. When multitasking DOS application is required, there are solutions. Windows 386 is an important bridge between text-based DOS applications and Windows applications.

You don't understand Microsoft's Mac ports GUI Excel/Word effort to dislodge the text-based Lotus 123/WordStar/WordPerfect establishment.

Quote:

But any talk about the effect of hardware or software on a machine's marketability is irrelevant when that machine isn't a PC or Mac. The business computer industry settled on the PC in 1981, and weren't interested in any other platform after that.

Hint: market share from 1981 to 1982 is not with IBM PC.

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

Annual sales

1982
IBM PC compatibles: 240,000
Apple II: 279,000
Commodore 64: 200,000


1983
IBM PC compatibles: 1,300,000.
Apple II: 420,000.
Commodore 64: 2,000,000.
Apple crushed the Apple II clones.


1984
IBM PC compatibles: 2,000,000
Apple II: 1,000,000
Apple Macintosh: 372,000
Commodore 64: 2,500,000

....

1991
IBM PC compatibles: 14,399,000
Apple Macintosh: 2,100,000
Commodore Amiga: 1,035,000


1992
IBM PC compatibles: 18,300,000
Apple Macintosh: 2,500,000
Commodore Amiga: 390,000, the year when Commodore canceled its best-selling A500 model for sales flop A600.

The correct decision is AA500+ as another "Amiga 500" instead of A600 sales flop. The minimum is to continue evolved A500 instead of A600 flop.

Stop defending Commodore's crap decisions.


Quote:

The Mac managed to sneak into second place in the education and fledgling desktop publishing markets, but its impact on the industry as a whole was minimal.

Reminder, MS Office products for the Macintosh platform are significant.

Macintosh annual sales
1991: 2,100,000
1992: 2,500,000
1993: 3,300,000
1994: 3,800,000 (PowerPC changeover)
1995: 4,120,000

As of 1995: 20,622,000. Apple didn't have a wild unit sales decline like Commodore's 1992

Stop defending Commodore's crap decisions.

Under Steve Job 2.0 leadership, Apple is still recoverable.

Quote:

These CPUs weren't competition. Once you had built a machine around them the price difference was even greater, putting them in a totally different market. The CD32 was designed to be:- 1. Compatible with the A1200 so that it would be part of the same 'family' and increase the user base.

The less profitable CD32 cuts into A1200's production run. A1200 already has supply problems.

65,000 CD32s were produced for Amitech/Commodore Canada's desktop A2200 clone and they were locked up in the warehouse.

Quote:

2. As cheap as possible while still achieving 1.

CD32 wasn't popular in Germany which is Amiga's second-strongest market.

AGA Amiga install base
Germany:
Amiga 1200 = 95,500
Amiga CD32 = 25,000
Amiga 4000/030 = 7,500
Amiga 4000/040 = 3,800
Sub-total: 131,800

https://web.archive.org/web/20230726021525/http://www.bambi-amiga.co.uk/amigahistory/sales.html

UK:
Amiga 1200 (Oct - Dec 1992) = 44,000 (Amiga Format May 1993)
Amiga 1200 (Jan - Aug 1993) = 100,000 (Amiga Format September 1993)
Amiga 1200 (Xmas Q4 1993) = 160,000 (Amiga Format 56 Feb 1994)
Amiga CD32 (Xmas Q4 1993) = 70,000 (Amiga Format 56 Feb 1994)
Sub-total: 374,000

CD32 should have been the higher profit margin of A1200 to close the gap with Commodore's last quarter's $8 million dollar loss!


Stop defending Commodore's crap decisions.

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My original point has probably been missed. I said doom wasn't written for 486 and neither was it written for DOS.

It's evident from even a shallow examination or the sources that it was written for 32-bit integer systems (as a minimum) in general and to be portable. All the parts that depend directly on the platform/hardware are behind replaceable modules that have pretty clean C interfaces.

It it had been written specifically for DOS/486 there are many things you might be tempted to do differently.

Designing for portability ensures that you can migrate to whatever wins the platform wars regardless.

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@Karlos

Quote:

Karlos wrote: My original point has probably been missed. I said doom wasn't written for 486 and neither was it written for DOS. It's evident from even a shallow examination or the sources that it was written for 32-bit integer systems (as a minimum) in general and to be portable.

That was standard practice for games released on multiple platforms, and is good coding style generally. Nevertheless, Doom was originally designed to target popular machines with (as you say) suitable CPUs, and other hardware that would provide sufficient performance. At that time that effectively meant a 486 PC. Had it been intended to run on lower powered machines the game would have been designed quite differently.

And that's why Carmack said the Amiga was a non-starter, even though Dread proves he was wrong. A stock CD32 has the CPU, it has the colors, it has hardware C2P, it has the sound and the storage to support Doom. It doesn't have the RAM so some changes would have to be made there. But mostly it doesn't have the speed. When Carmack said it needed the full power of an 040, he was talking about a machine with 486 class performance - the machine Doom was originally targeted at. If he was targeting the CD32 he would probably try some other rendering technique that worked faster, or at least tweak the graphics engine to better suit the CD32.

@bhabbott

Carmack wasn't wrong. He said the Amiga could not run Doom*. He said this at a time when most of the user base was still rocking an A500 class machine with 1MB which were way more common than AGA machines. Obviously there were machines that could have ran it in 1993 with a good C2P algorithm, but very few had those machines and said algorithms were not yet devised.

*He didn't say it couldn't run a similar type of game, he said Doom specifically. Grind is not Doom, no matter how similar it is in approach. Doom's memory requirement alone ruled out the majority of Amiga users in 1993 even before we talk about the requirements for hard disk installation and the limits of colour depth let alone CPU.

There's no need to rewrite history. He was right at the time and in context. It would be sever years before copy speed C2P was a thing.

By the time Quake came around, which was arguably far more resource intensive than Doom, id Software were happy enough to grant a license to Clickboom for an official port and Carmack was still very much the technical lead at the time. He could've easily refused it.

Had someone in 1993 approached id for an Amiga port of Doom for machines with a realistic specification, I doubt he would've have prevented it, regardless of what he though of the chances of success.

Far, far too much emphasis on placed on Doom tbh

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@Karlos and bhabbott
Yea, the average Amiga spec was too low and CBM was dead by the time Doom ports were being developed. The potential market likely looked very roughly like the following.

Amiga with 68040 - 50,000 units
Mac with 68040 - 5,000,000 units
SNES with Ricoh 5A22@3.58 MHz (16 bit 6502 family with 256kiB mem) - 50,000,000 units

The SNES hardware was barely capable even with cartridge hardware enhancements. The game was very low res and averaged 10-15 fps which is not far from a fast 68030. Like the NeXT hardware, the Amiga just didn't have a large enough market to be viable but was useful for development with its preemptive multitasking advantage. The Amiga was likely used in at least the SNES and 3DO ports of Doom (Amiga was the 3DO development system). Randy Linden talks about debugging the SNES version with the Amiga in the following video.

DF Retro: The Making of Doom on Super NES - The Original 'Impossible Port' - Randy Linden Interview
https://youtu.be/BIauSQ_hIgo

An interesting comment from the video was that the SNES version was the lowest cost way to play Doom. The price of the game with expensive hardware filled cartridge approached the price of the SNES console itself. A stock CD32 probably could have come close to playing a version of Doom that was as cut down as the SNES version without the need for expensive cartridge SNES life support. Just 1MiB of fast mem for the CD32 would have provided a large boost in performance and allowed Doom to be more faithful to the DOS version. CBM couldn't find their console market at that time as the budget console market was saturated unlike today where there is no microconsole market even as full consoles like the PS5 have pushed higher in price and low end hardware is cheaper than ever to produce. CBM realized mass production was necessary to gain market share but they failed horribly at marketing, market analysis, integration, product upgrades and timely product delivery.

@matthey

Quote:

matthey wrote: The price of the game with expensive hardware filled cartridge...

Some cartridges for game console had custom hardware that could be described as GPU.

It is a rather different hardware and market approach where RAM or CPU of a console might be to small or weak but the hardware expansion came with the game and where only available for this game.

That's the reason why the VIC20 had a lot of games on cartridges in opposite to the C64 where cassettes or disks where common. Just imagine a DOOM Package for the A1200 with 68EC30 and 4MB Fast ...

OneTimer1 Quote:

Some cartridges for game console had custom hardware that could be described as GPU. It is a rather different hardware and market approach where RAM or CPU of a console might be to small or weak but the hardware expansion came with the game and where only available for this game.

I believe the SNES cartridge had a DSP chip, a large ROM and even a small amount of SRAM to render into.

OneTimer1 Quote:

That's the reason why the VIC20 had a lot of games on cartridges in opposite to the C64 where cassettes or disks where common. Just imagine a DOOM Package for the A1200 with 68EC30 and 4MB Fast ...

Dungeon Master for the Amiga had bundles with a 512kiB memory upgrade.


https://www.filfre.net/2015/12/dungeon-master-part-1-the-making-of/

It isn't much more difficult to install a 68EC030 with 2-4MiB of fast memory in an Amiga 1200 but it would be more expensive, many floppies would still be needed and chunky to planar hardware would still be lacking, without a CD1200 which solves all the problems.

https://bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/product.aspx?id=1604 Quote:

The CD1200-Plug in card for Amiga 1200 included the Akiko chip, and an FPGA to control Akiko, control a Memory SIMM, and processor expansion socket for a Motorola 68030. An external CD unit based on the Amiga CD32 was connected via a cable with expansion capabilities for FMV. In an article in Amiga Format issue 59, it is clearly stated that the interface card, which plugged in to the A1200 trapdoor, was fitted with a SIMM socket. So basically the intention must have been to combine the CD-ROM interface with the possibility of adding fast RAM and a faster CPU providing a upgrade ladder suitable to your wallet.

The CD32 could have gotten by with just a 2-4MiB fast mem upgrade due to the Akiko chunky to planar hardware and CD-ROM. The real problem was that CBM was dead and the higher end Amiga install base was too small.

Last edited by matthey on 15-Jul-2024 at 01:11 AM.

@Karlos

Quote:

Carmack wasn't wrong. He said the Amiga could not run Doom*. He said this at a time when most of the user base was still rocking an A500 class machine with 1MB which were way more common than AGA machines. Obviously there were machines that could have ran it in 1993 with a good C2P algorithm, but very few had those machines and said algorithms were not yet devised.

The realistic method is to use A500's edge connector with a game cartridge that contains cheap 3D DSP + RAM bundled with a "killer app" 3D game.

The difference, Nintendo listens and supports Argonaut Games' SuperFX initiative.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_FX#/media/File:SuperFX_GSU-2-SP1_chip.jpg

With SuperFX and SuperFX2, Nintendo was able to bridge SNES with N64's 1996 release.

SNES has 256 colors chunky pixel mode via Mode 7 which is one less problem when compared to the Amiga's.

Last edited by Hammer on 15-Jul-2024 at 10:09 AM.
Last edited by Hammer on 15-Jul-2024 at 10:07 AM.

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@Hammer

For a system based on floppies, this sounds like an expensive way to go about it.

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@matthey

http://www.anthrofox.org/starfox/superfx.html

Quote:

With GSU-2 we have a larger chip package, with 112 pins instead of 100 pins, and since the SuperFX patent only covers the 100-pin model in any detail at all we don't know just what functionality was changed. Generally we associate the "SuperFX2" monicker with a chip that runs at full-speed (21.477 MHz) and can support (optionally) more ROM (16 megabits, as per Yoshi's Island). It is not two chips in one. That would cost alot more because the chip would have twice as many parts. The Super FX costed alot as it is. The initial cost to developers was reported to be $10 at the time, which is probably why so many third party games had such small memory sizes (4 megabits)--they wanted to reduce cost in other ways.

The cost for SuperFX2 (aka GSU-2) is $10. Memory components are costly.

CSG is not the only company that delivers "low-cost" custom chips.

A1200's 2 MB Chip RAM is about $52 and adding 1 MB Fast RAM, hence total memory cost is about $80.

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@Karlos

SuperFX2 has $10 cost. It was extra memory components that were costly.

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@Hammer

And what was the cost of a typical sidecar connector with enclosure for the A500?

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@Karlos

1. Retail asking price cloaks the BOM cost.
2. Low-volume production from small 3rd party add-on vendors has economies of scale issues.

Last edited by Hammer on 15-Jul-2024 at 01:14 PM.

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@Hammer

And what do you propose the retail asking price of an Amiga port, requiring a custom hardware interface to achieve, would be, in 1993?

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@Karlos

Like the SuperFX project, the platform holder has to be involved.

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@Karlos

If it was to be taken advantage for other games, a combo with a graffiti and fast ram could perhaps do help bringing 3d games to Amiga

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@Hammer

You seem to be living under the delusion that your suggestion was feasible. Sadly, I don't think it was. First of all, there was no "SuperFX" processor for the Amiga. The best you could hope for was an off the shelf DSP. Now you have to display what is being rendered. Is that going to pass back into the 32-colour OCS chipset? How? Or are you going to have to add some sort of minimum framebuffer implementation as well and a suitable display output? That hardware is starting to sound more and moreo cumbersome by the second.

You don't get any support from id in 1993 because the considered opinion of their cheif technical guy is that it's basically impossible. For the SNES port, the SuperFX already existed and had been tried and tested in other 3D tasks so it looks more achievable immediately. You have a large installed platform base so it's worth considering.

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@Karlos

Quote:

You seem to be living under the delusion that your suggestion was feasible.

It would be feasible for Commodore when it has CSG's chip fabrication capability. Are you aware of CSG's Amiga custom chip low cost?

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@pixie

Quote:

pixie wrote: @Karlos If it was to be taken advantage for other games, a combo with a graffiti and fast ram could perhaps do help bringing 3d games to Amiga

Well, if we are talking a dedicated 3D accelerator on the sidecar, additional RAM and an RGB port expansion for displaying pseudochunky displays, why not throw in the requirement for a serial port MIDI rompler for the music?

Your A500 becomes the Homer Simpson concept car to try and run a single game.

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