Modernising the Amiga at Forty

this made me laugh, good stuff

As a hardcore Amiga user and developer from 1985 to 95, the platform was amazing for the time but having studied the history, talked with some of the key players and thought about it a lot (probably too much), I've sadly come to the conclusion there was no way the Amiga could have survived the 90s as a viable platform. As a retro enthusiast and tech history buff I find it interesting to play the hypothetical game "Time Traveler's Ten" where we go back in time and change up to ten critical decisions or mistakes that were made. Given the same constraints as existed then (financial, technical, market, etc) if different paths were taken and key mistakes avoided can we change the eventual outcome? No matter which decisions or which alternate choices we make, there's no way to take the Amiga as it originally shipped in 1985 and plausibly play the facts and choices into it being a significant and financially viable third platform behind Wintel and Mac in 2000. Even if we mind-control Commodore Chairman Irving Gould to invest the company's resources in R&D instead of pillaging them, even if Microsoft supports the Amiga as much as the Mac - it helps the Amiga sell more and survive a few years longer but eventually only delays the inevitable. As someone who had "Amiga Persecution Complex", this deeper understanding has laid to rest those feelings of being "robbed of a glorious future by a few stupid mistakes."

The reality is there were tectonic shifts changing the computer landscape. The first was the shift from CISC to RISC. Motorola saw the writing on the wall long before the 68060 was even announced that the 68K architecture was a dead end. They decided continuing to pour resources into optimizing the 68K to be competitive was too costly and would become a losing game (probably correctly given their fab technology and corporate resources), and instead chose to break with the past and partner with IBM in moving to Power PC. For Atari, Commodore, Apple et al this was a planetary level asteroid impact. If developers and customers lose all software compatibility with your new products, that makes the choice of moving to your next generation not much different than moving to another platform entirely. Only Apple managed to survive (and even they almost didn't). Arguably, they only treaded water with great design and marketing until saved by the iPod.

We also need to consider the other huge asteroid heading for vertically integrated non-Wintel computer platforms right behind the CISC/RISC asteroid. In the early to mid 90s Moore's Law scaling was allowing desktop computers to improve rapidly by growing dramatically more complex. It was getting to be more than one company could do to win on each separate front. On the Wintel side, the market solved this complexity by splitting the challenge among different ecosystems of companies. One ecosystem would compete to make the CPU and chipset (Intel, NEC, Cyrix, AMD), another would make the OS (Windows/OS/2), another ecosystem would compete to make the best graphics and yet another would compete on sound (Creative, Yamaha, Ensoniq, etc). It would require a truly extraordinary company to compete effectively against all that with a custom vertically integrated computer. There was no way a Commodore or Atari could survive that onslaught. The game changed from company vs company to ecosystem vs ecosystem. And that next asteroid even wiped out stronger, better-capitalized companies that were on pure RISC architectures (Sun, SGI, Apollo, etc).

Finally, it's clear that post 1990 both Atari and Commodore were in increasingly weaker positions, not only financially but in terms of staff depth. While both still had some remarkably talented engineers, the bench wasn't deep. I know that at least at Commodore, toward the end they'd canceled their much improved, new Amiga chipset project (AAA). Even though it was almost complete with (mostly) working test silicon on prototype boards, they canceled it because it had become obvious future Pentium and RISC CPUs would outperform even the 68060 and AAA custom chips. At the time the company folded, Commodore engineering was working on the 'Hombre', an entirely new design which would have been based on an HP RISC CPU. For graphics the main thrust would have been new retargetable graphics modes for hi-res, high-frequency monitors (1280 x 1024). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset

The plan was to support legacy Amiga software with a 68K emulator on the RISC CPU driving a new chip created specifically to support legacy Amiga graphics modes. When I later read this, I was quite skeptical that Commodore could have developed hybrid software/hardware emulation in 18 months that would have covered enough of the legacy Amiga software library. Looking at the history of Amiga software emulators shows how hard it would have been. Also, as much as I loved the Amiga, the OS stack could then only be described as 'crufty'. It had been upgraded a little over the years but still contained major legacy components from different eras and many of the people involved were no longer at Commodore. Given that reality, the plan had been to base the new Amiga on Windows NT.

But - even if Commodore somehow overcame the myriad technical challenges, lack of resources and depleted talent bench, once a next-gen Amiga isn't based on the 68K, AmigaOS or the custom chips and boots Windows NT in XGA mode - is it still really an Amiga? Certainly, at least some of my software wouldn't have worked so, facing the decision to buy a new, quite different computer, why wouldn't users also look at the, probably, cheaper Packard Bell Pentium running Windows 95 down at Costco? After all, with the Pentium and Windows 95, the PC juggernaut had finally coalesced into a coherent whole that could be compelling to both home users and graphics, gaming, multimedia obsessed hobbyists. And new Doom/Quake quality games were coming out almost weekly.

No matter how we play the cards we're dealt, the historical deck is too stacked against the Amiga and the Time Traveler Ten game always ends with an unwinnable hand. While Commodore (and Atari, Sinclair et al) did make many mistakes, none of them were the root cause of their eventual demise. In each case, macro factors beyond their control that were baked into the market, the technology or their own DNA, had already sealed their fate. One of the Amiga's greatest advantages in 1985 was the brilliant custom chip set designed to exploit every quirk of analog video timing. As resolutions increased and 3D became essential in the 90s that huge advantage, arguably the reason we still talk about it, turned into one of the Amiga's biggest weaknesses. In many ways the Amiga blazed the trail showing the way to the future - but it was a future it wouldn't be a part of.

My Amiga 2000 had a 68000 CPU, a 68020 accelerator, an 8086 on the bridge board, a 286 accelerator, a Z80 on the SCSI controller, and of course the 6502 compatible in the keyboard....

(of course only up to 4 of those were in use at any one time)