Yeah if your secret sauce is a chip, with very particular timing and memory behaviour... you've just built in obsolescence. There's no abstracted API for doing the fancy graphics (at least not one used by games, etc), and the whole system is built around sharing the memory bus between CPU and VDP (not going to fly once memory & bus speeds became a fraction of the CPU speed and once cache was a serious thing)... it's just stuck in a grotto.. a neighbourhood that looks fantastic when you moved in but now the next city over is getting a brand new subway system while you're still stuck with an old fleet of busses.
Nevermind Moore's law and exponential improvements... you're stuck even falling behind in very incremental developments.
I also lived through this era, but from the Atari ST side. When I got my 486 it was a feeling of a kind of relenting "sigh" abandoning the 68k and its basic superiority... but economies of scale and the arrival of Linux (I used the very first versions, before the a.out->ELF transition even) made it worthwhile.
In 1992, I went from Amiga to a PC solely because of Wolfenstein 3D. I already felt like I was clinging to the Amiga platform. Most of my other friends in the Amiga world had moved on to other platforms. Doom came out about a year later, near Christmas 1993, IIRC.
The author bought their Amiga 500 in early 1992! It was already a "classic" by then.
> Ever since I saw an Amiga 500 at a friend's house in what was probably late 1988, I wanted one for myself. Back then, computers were uncommon, especially at home. Even though I went to a school in a fairly affluent neighborhood, few kids had home computers or video games.
This may be true in the US and Japan, the rest of the world were mainly using 8-bit (and increasingly 16-bit) computers in this era, so this scans really oddly outside the US.
I grew up on an 80s UK council estate (surrounded by poverty) and practically every kid had a computer, mainly Commodore 64, 16, +4, Sinclair Spectrum, or an Amstrad CPC (maybe a few BBC Micros dotted around, and some other oddities)
Lots of people had the early Atari consoles in the early 80s, but after that I didn't see a console until the Megadrive. Everyone, and I do mean EVERYONE had computers in the mid-late 80s to early 90s where I was growing up.
Nothing else like Video Toaster being available kept Amigas around for a while. 2001 my parent's cable provider still used them for guide/PPV channels.
Long time PC gamer here. I didn’t own an Amiga so I definitely have another POV.
1994?! Every single PC gaming store was flooded with PC CD demos.
Day of the Tentacle. Loom. Monkey Island. Rebel Assault. Myst. 7th Guest.
Every “AAA” release at the time was getting a “talkie” version with added FMV or cd audio.
Plus Doom, and then Doom 2.
I actually think the 93-96 period is basically the most hype I’ve ever seen the PC market, ever.
I’m sure Amiga had a lot of cool stuff still. The demo scene, the various Psygnosis games. But I never got on my radar beyond “this doesn’t need config.sys and it has more colors”.
The Amiga is a very interesting case. It started out extremely capable, with a complex architecture with multiple coprocessors tightly coupled to memory and the CPU.
As time passed, that complexity made it more difficult to build newer, better Amigas that were compatible with the software already written for it. All its unique features - graphics, 2D acceleration, audio - made it complicated to improve the machine. The PC, on the other hand, was very easy - you could throw out your CGA card and get an EGA or VGA, the same way you could plug in a generic sound card and get MIDI and PCM audio, along with an IDE port for a CD-ROM.
If the value proposition held, it could have survived longer, but this business of getting a new computer in order to get better video output gets expensive very quickly. I had EGA on my 10MHz XT-compatible and it was great.
Commodore was stuck in the 8-bit home computer model - mostly non-upgradable machines. This was the 1000 (it had a little upgradability), the 500, the 600, and the 1200. The 2000, 3000, and 4000 were seen as their professional counterparts, but they were all saddled by being compatible with games written for their built-in video and audio hardware that was quickly becoming inadequate compared to PCs.
Sadly, Atari didn't have as much custom hardware it would need to evolve, but still never quite made the leap from their self-contained machines to more modular ones that'd make it easier to compete with PCs. When they did, they opted for the VME bus instead of something simpler (such as a 16-bit ISA bus).
Impressively, near their deaths, both made PCs, but the PCs didn't share anything with their proprietary jewels. Both companies should know much better.
It was only difficult because Commodore fired engineers to cut cost. They left absolute minimum staff just to keep the lights on. One example - there was no one at Commodore capable of re-designing Paula stupid PLL to accept 1Mbit clock so Amiga could support HD floppies.
They had patents https://patents.google.com/patent/US4780844A/en they had design documents for original chip, they had chip fab, they had no one with skill nor will to pay for it. All it needed was adding switchable clock dividers to control logic.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 34.9 ms ] threadNevermind Moore's law and exponential improvements... you're stuck even falling behind in very incremental developments.
I also lived through this era, but from the Atari ST side. When I got my 486 it was a feeling of a kind of relenting "sigh" abandoning the 68k and its basic superiority... but economies of scale and the arrival of Linux (I used the very first versions, before the a.out->ELF transition even) made it worthwhile.
Discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39246825
The author bought their Amiga 500 in early 1992! It was already a "classic" by then.
Games consoles killed the Amiga, just like they did all other home computers that were primarily used for games.
I don’t know anyone that used the Amiga for anything other than games.
PCs survived because they were genuinely used for business, not just games.
This may be true in the US and Japan, the rest of the world were mainly using 8-bit (and increasingly 16-bit) computers in this era, so this scans really oddly outside the US.
I grew up on an 80s UK council estate (surrounded by poverty) and practically every kid had a computer, mainly Commodore 64, 16, +4, Sinclair Spectrum, or an Amstrad CPC (maybe a few BBC Micros dotted around, and some other oddities)
Lots of people had the early Atari consoles in the early 80s, but after that I didn't see a console until the Megadrive. Everyone, and I do mean EVERYONE had computers in the mid-late 80s to early 90s where I was growing up.
Doom didn't kill the Amiga. Wolfenstein 3D did. (2024)
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsADJa-23Sg (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40343333)
If it had started life as the cd32 then the company might still be around today.
1994?! Every single PC gaming store was flooded with PC CD demos.
Day of the Tentacle. Loom. Monkey Island. Rebel Assault. Myst. 7th Guest.
Every “AAA” release at the time was getting a “talkie” version with added FMV or cd audio.
Plus Doom, and then Doom 2.
I actually think the 93-96 period is basically the most hype I’ve ever seen the PC market, ever.
I’m sure Amiga had a lot of cool stuff still. The demo scene, the various Psygnosis games. But I never got on my radar beyond “this doesn’t need config.sys and it has more colors”.
As time passed, that complexity made it more difficult to build newer, better Amigas that were compatible with the software already written for it. All its unique features - graphics, 2D acceleration, audio - made it complicated to improve the machine. The PC, on the other hand, was very easy - you could throw out your CGA card and get an EGA or VGA, the same way you could plug in a generic sound card and get MIDI and PCM audio, along with an IDE port for a CD-ROM.
If the value proposition held, it could have survived longer, but this business of getting a new computer in order to get better video output gets expensive very quickly. I had EGA on my 10MHz XT-compatible and it was great.
Commodore was stuck in the 8-bit home computer model - mostly non-upgradable machines. This was the 1000 (it had a little upgradability), the 500, the 600, and the 1200. The 2000, 3000, and 4000 were seen as their professional counterparts, but they were all saddled by being compatible with games written for their built-in video and audio hardware that was quickly becoming inadequate compared to PCs.
Sadly, Atari didn't have as much custom hardware it would need to evolve, but still never quite made the leap from their self-contained machines to more modular ones that'd make it easier to compete with PCs. When they did, they opted for the VME bus instead of something simpler (such as a 16-bit ISA bus).
Impressively, near their deaths, both made PCs, but the PCs didn't share anything with their proprietary jewels. Both companies should know much better.
They had patents https://patents.google.com/patent/US4780844A/en they had design documents for original chip, they had chip fab, they had no one with skill nor will to pay for it. All it needed was adding switchable clock dividers to control logic.