It may be sacrilegious but I did ponder recently - and the discussion about Photoshop made me think about it again - what would have happened had Atari gained control of the work from High Torro. The mercenary nature of Atari's act aside, would it have been made just into a games console? Would it have become the Atari ST (but with better specs and OS?)? Or would it have suffered a similar or even a less attractive fate then the current history? Any thoughts on this?

Last edited by gonegahgah on 07-Jan-2017 at 11:30 AM.

@gonegahgah

They seemed to want the custom chips not the actual Amiga 1000. The Hi-Toro team would have been disbanded even sooner (i.e. never hired by Atari after delivering the chips) and the Atari ST would have had better hardware but been delayed to market and would have cost more. OS development would have been minimal. Atari proved with the Jaguar that they were no more adept in handling a hardware advantage than Commodore. Sadly the Atari 2600 and Commodore 64 seem to have been one off mega successes for their respective companies, they simply couldn't re-bottle the lightning! A better outcome would have been a merger with Apple. Apple's marketing and in-house software development mixed with the Amiga's great hardware might have given an insurmountable advantage over the rising PC and helped the companies weather the 90s. A deal would have counted on Steve Jobs being a reasonable and balanced human being which sadly he wasn't

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@gonegahgah

It had had been developed a different ST wirh more graphics and music and more performant on games but with ugly Atari TOS.
But it had achieved full support and marketing by mother firm Atari so custoomers had had been more satisfied with it than it happened Commodore Amiga and Atari ST...
It had had featured external SCSI interface for hard disks and practical MIDI port as it happened with real ST so it had been again better practical music machine but unfortunately as long as ATARI was never interested in videomaking or connecting to TVs with a better signal ratio and with practical common TV ports, it had had been doomed showing better resolution and gorgeous color graphics only on dedicated expensive video monitors so it had had never hit market of video productions.
Newer versions had had sported more powerful processors, as this always was ATARI policy (opposite to Commodore) so customers had been completely satisfied with 68020, 68030, 68040 and PPC processors, so again it had been used as powerful machine for 3D developing as lomg as it was Amiga in its best times.
If ATARI had recognized the trend of whats had been happening with personal 3D making, sooner or later it had been equipping it with powerful internal 3D chip that had helped.3D produtions, game making, and game playing too, preceding and predating Sony Playstation, so this fabulous never born Amtari had had been still today on the market.

Steve Jobs had had reviewed it at CES Computer Show and had had judged this Amtari a computer with "Too much 3D Hardware"...

Last edited by Raffaele on 07-Jan-2017 at 11:31 PM.

_________________
"When the Amiga came out, everyone [at Apple] was scared as hell." (J.L. Gassée, former CEO of Apple France and chief of devs of Mac II-fx, interviewed by Amazing Computing, Nov 1996).