Yeah-- the Atari roots (and Jay Miner's influence) clearly show in the Amiga.
An alternative future fiction I think about, when Commodore or Atari come up in conversation, is one where Irving Gould didn't run Jack Tramiel out of Commodore and Warner Communications listened to Atari's old guard engineers and released new platforms (versus running the home video game industry into the ground trying to milk the 2600 forever).
Obviously, in that world the Amiga would have ended up being an Atari product and the ST a Commodore product. I think both companies would have been healthier and, as such, would have been able to do more with the platforms. Their combined influence might have actually given the IBM PC and Macintosh a run for their money.
I think Atari would have done right by the Amiga. A properly executed version of it would have been a fantastic games console and I think Atari could have done that. It's hard to say what the home and business computer future of an Atari Amiga would have been, but it Atari would have made a kick-ass Amiga console.
Likewise, the ST could have been a lower cost Mac killer, especially if they leaned-in to Mac emulation / compatibility. I think Commodore had the chops and credibility to execute the ST as a business computer in a way the real Tramiel-run Atari never could. Atari couldn't overcome the stigma of Atari being a video game company.
yeah, substantially agree. But I also think if only Atari and Commodore teams could have just been one company... it would have been glorious. Somehow. The market couldn't afford to be split like that, the pie wasn't big enough.
Also I was an Atari ST user back then, and loved it. But the Tramiel's didn't "get" software in the early days. They failed to make the right investments to keep TOS/GEM actively developed (e.g. as a Mac alternative) until it was too late (they hired Eric Smith to work on MiNT and then MultiTOS in the early 90s but they were already done as a company by then).
And then three fundamental hardware mistakes with the ST were:
1. not shipping it with the Blitter from the start so it couldn't compete on games, obviously with the Amiga but even with 8-bits of the time
2. forcing the ROM size down to 192kB so they had to size optimize the crap out of GEM before shipping (waste of precious development time), especially including tossing away all of GDOS (which had support for proportional fonts and printer drivers etc). A 256kB or 512kB ROM would have solved a lot of problems with what I'd think wouldn't have been an insane BOM cost bump.
3. Minor but long term annoying -- tying the cartridge port to only have 128kB of address lines. If they had given it 256kB or 512kB address ability their later expansion issues (OS upgrades etc) would have been much improved.
As for the Amiga, great machine but a) it cost too much at the start so failed to catch immediate fire (the 500 rectified this to some degree) b) interlace.
> And then three fundamental hardware mistakes with the ST were:
> 1. not shipping it with the Blitter from the start so it couldn't compete on games, obviously with the Amiga but even with 8-bits of the time
I don't think a blitter is that big of a deal, especially for games. A sprite/tile architecture would be better for games.
I wish that the ST came with the YM2203, instead of the YM2149. That would make it an even better machine for music, with the addition of 3 4-op FM voices.
Frame rates on games on the ST were terrible, which just came down to there not being enough cycles in a single frame to really move stuff around. Sprites or tiles would be great but are a bit specific. Blitter hardware subsumes all of that under a more general utility. The STe's blitter when it finally came along was great. But by then it was too late, nobody was going to make games for it because the market was too small.
Once clockspeeds got up to what the Falcon could do, it was unnecessary. But again, too late.
The Amiga also struggles with frame rates, with most games running at 30hz/25hz. There are quite a few games that have better gameplay on the Commodore 64 port than the Amiga port.
The only arcade games that use the bitmap/blitter architecture were mostly Williams games like Robotron, Joust, and so forth. Everything else was tiles/sprites, except for the Atari vector games.
Despite its obviously far lower MIPS rating the 6502 could just get more "video game" type work done in a clock cycle than a 68000. 68000 interrupt responsiveness was also pretty terrible.
Looking back 68000 had little business in video game type machines. I like the 68000 from a programming POV but it's faster for doing a pile of fast integer calculations than it is at moving memory around and responding to interrupts.
But Atari and Commodore were also imagining their machines to be targeting productivity more than games, so.
The frame rate of games of the era was dictated by the frame rate of the video output. They would have struggled with higher frame rates, but that was entirely moot.
I mean, that's just pedantic. Of course the display frame rate was fixed. The point is what the effective game loop responsiveness was. which was often a fraction of the actual display's capability. If you go back and play some of the classic games of that era, there's often low responsiveness to joystick movements etc.
Graphic fidelity on the 16-bit machines was great. Latency was sometimes bad, depending on how much they were trying to do in the game loop.
It's not pedantic because it means it was categorically not that the machine "struggled with frame rates" but that the frame rates were imposed by external factors.
I can't recall many games with "low responsiveness to joystick movements". On the contrary, latency from movement to action were typically lower than on modern hardware.
It is being pedantic, the others are talking about Amiga games when they say "the Amiga struggles". While the video output was always 50/60Hz, there were plenty of games that failed to update at that rate, taking 2 frames (25/30Hz) or 3 frames (16/20Hz) or some jittery janky mix inbetween.
It could be that what they wanted to do just couldn't be done in 1 frame. Or often it could, the games were just poorly optimised.
There were plenty of games where the code didn't care to pick up the joystick movements in a reasonable time, making the game feel sluggish, even if the joystick movements can be read directly from the CIA port.
Compare games with perfect framerates like Turrican 2, Superfrog or Leander, with games that don't, like Magic Pockets, Xenon 2, Driller. In fact, compare the official version of Stunt Car Racer with the cracked version, where the crackers massively improved the drawing speed and thus the framerate!
Compare the scrolling of <a href="https://youtu.be/V1R7Pd329Bc?t=1969" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/V1R7Pd329Bc?t=1969 or <a href="https://youtu.be/wFtLGDywZlg?t=553" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/wFtLGDywZlg?t=553 with <a href="https://youtu.be/_4U4ZW37haU?t=114" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/_4U4ZW37haU?t=114 or <a href="https://youtu.be/BXR2yswfC6E?t=862" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/BXR2yswfC6E?t=862 -- it's purely the programmer's fault.
> Or often it could, the games were just poorly optimised.
So in other words it wasn't generally an issue with the Amiga, but with sloppy work.
> There were plenty of games where the code didn't care to pick up the joystick movements in a reasonable time, making the game feel sluggish, even if the joystick movements can be read directly from the CIA port.
We clearly had very different experiences. To me that is not something that every concerned me.
> So in other words it wasn't generally an issue with the Amiga, but with sloppy work.
It's both. Programmers' visions for their games either had to be scaled back because the 68000 just wasn't fast enough, or they implemented what they wanted and it tanked the framerate. Sometimes they met in the middle because the programmers thought 25/30Hz was good enough. Sometimes even the finest programmers, with the most optimised code, ended up with a 25Hz game because what they wanted the game to be demanded it.
Of course, some programmers said "this entire game has to run in 1 frame" and made of sure that. Sometimes it's the same programmers, e.g. Sensible Soccer is typically 1 frame, but Cannon Fodder is often not. Uridium 2 is typically 1 frame but Fire & Ice is often not.
The Amiga 1200 opened up new games possibilities, not just because of its added bitplanes allowing 256 colours, but also because having 2MB of Chip RAM instead of 512KB, and a CPU roughly double the speed, made more games viable.
> We clearly had very different experiences
It will depend on the games you played. Something you can try as a challenge: complete the first level of Magic Pockets on an unmodified Amiga 500 (or an emulation of one at its normal speed). Feel how laggy and awkward it is. Even a video doesn't give you that understanding. Then try the first level of Superfrog.
68020 and onwards could also get substantially more work done in a cycle than a 68000. So Amiga 1200 or Atari Falcon not only had substantially higher bus speeds they were just ... better... at the CPU level in terms of how much work could be done.
> Their combined influence might have actually given the IBM PC and Macintosh a run for their money.
Not a chance, I think. Combine both and you still would not have beaten the sound philosophy, openness, speed, and flexibility of the IBM PC & compatibles. Ironically, to increase your chances massively, you'd needed to have enhittification (with its preference for locked-down rubbish antithetical to general-purpose computing) already dominating the market. Even as Amigas and Ataris were much more open than their cousin's terrible grandchild of today: Apple. A platform which many Amigatari nerdlingers of yesteryear gravitated to...
Being earlier to market seems like it would have made a huge difference in competing with the IBM PC. I don't know if the dominance of the PC was a foregone conclusion by 1985. If the Amiga and ST could have been relased in 1984 it might have made a difference. Either way it's fun to think about counterfactuals.
I think the Amiga could have been released at least 6 months earlier if not for the litigation between Tramiel's Atari and Commodore gumming-up the works. The Amiga was massively more capable than the Macintosh of the day-- with preemptive multitasking, color, and NTSC video compatibility. There wasn't a Mac that held a candle to to the OCS Amiga graphics until the Macintosh II in 1987. I think a stronger Amiga marketing presence could have killed Macintosh.
VGA didn't come to the PC until 1987. The Amiga easily exceeded the capabilities of EGA. Windows 1.0 was released in 1985 and is much less capable and sophisticated than Workbench. I don't know much about the evolution of the native Amiga productivity software market. Failing the growth of that market in this counterfactual world arguably the A2000 and a bridge board was probably the first Amiga that could have seriously taken-on the IBM PC. That wasn't until 1987 in our timeline. It might have happened sooner in my hypothetical, but probably not years sooner.
Atari could have marketed the Amiga better than Commodore ever did. I recognize that's not really saying much. The post-Tramiel Commodore was an adrift ship of fools when it came to choosing which products to produce and how to market them. Commodore couldn't figure out what to sell (and how not to cannibalize or compete with their own products) or how to sell what it did produce.
I'm less sure what would have happened if the ST had been released as the Commodore product it arguably was. I do think a world where Tramiel stayed w/ Commodore would have made them more focused. They would have have developed fewer products (and likely no products that competed with other Commodore products) and aggressively driven costs down. I think a Commodore with Tramiel still heading it up would have been in a better position, financially and in terms of market perception, to put out a GUI-based business computer than Atari. I'm just not sure how much sooner I'd want to speculate a Commodore ST could have been released in this hypothetical.
The ST was also positioned more as a Mac killer than a PC killer, like my hypothetical Amiga.
You're likely right, though-- by 1985 the IBM PC was probably destined for dominance.
> I don't know if the dominance of the PC was a foregone conclusion by 1985.
I firmly believe it was, as it's the philosophy (i. e. the open architecture) that gave it such a headstart that the competition couldn't have catched up. Keep in mind what an open architecture really means in the world, i. e. not just the West.
> Failing the growth of that market in this counterfactual world arguably the A2000 and a bridge board was probably the first Amiga that could have seriously taken-on the IBM PC.
Pitting an already well-established and rapidly expanding open architecture and Commodore's first foray into an open architecture against each other wouldn't have, and indeed didn't, play(ed) out in the latter's favor.
The A2000, a workstation-class machine, arrived in March '87. Too late. Around that time Compaq had already sold around 25,000 of their first Deskpro 386 machines, which hit the streets half a year earlier. According to Michael Geran of E. F. Hutton & Co., Compaq sold 90,000 Deskpro 386 computers in the second quarter of '87 alone.
The bridgeboard was an option for cost-conscious operators, especially those with small businesses. They were well-received especially in West Germany where the A2000 sold well. Their limiting nature and performance wouldn't have made them relevant.
> I think a stronger Amiga marketing presence could have killed Macintosh.
IBM PC design philosophy was the furthest thing possible from “open architecture”.
The PC only became “open” when the industry basically strongarmed it open. Prior to clean-room BIOS cloning, IBM did pursue legal redress against early clones.
> I don't know if the dominance of the PC was a foregone conclusion by 1985
It absolutely was. Simply on account of the name on the grey box.
If it hadn't been IBM, maybe somebody like DEC may have gotten their shit together to take the market instead of farting around with overly high margin products and eating themselves from the inside.
But the way "business" culture was in the 80s the "respectable" productivity machine could not have come from the games/"home" market. Apple maybe but they opted instead to go close off the Apple II line (which in fact had a strong productivity sector thing going on, especially in schools) and push the Macintosh which was a good product but started off weak in terms of capability and costly on price.
In the early to mid-80s it was either going to be a CP/M machine or a CP/M-like machine (like the PC). These are Visicalc/Lotus-123/WordPerfect machines to their customers, and they cared not at all about graphics capabilities until later. Just needed 80 columns, floppies, and reasonable amounts of memory.
Hell there was terror in the microcomputer market when IBM made moves to go "downmarket" into it with the PCjr (which was a flop). The hype leading up to it, and the noises about how it would be a Commodore and Atari killer was insane.
I remember reading a fan-made alternate history for some sort of cyberpunk game setting back on usenet in the day.
The instigating effect that diverged the timeline was some sort of technological innovation around 1983-1984 that allowed an instant leap in CPU speeds and memory densities by many orders of magnitude. The timing of the advancement was such that the IBM PC architecture was hopeless outmoded and soon died off. Apple retrofitted the tech into their Macintosh line, so they stayed relevant, but the Amiga was still in the design stage and so was able to build their new OS and UI around the enhanced capabilities. It went on to dominate computing for the next several decades.
Their version of Amiga Intuition was able to include photo-realistic VR, global networking, massive neural nets, and so forth, which all contributed to the cyberpunkness of the setting.
LastTrain · · focus · HN ↗
EvanAnderson · · focus · HN ↗
An alternative future fiction I think about, when Commodore or Atari come up in conversation, is one where Irving Gould didn't run Jack Tramiel out of Commodore and Warner Communications listened to Atari's old guard engineers and released new platforms (versus running the home video game industry into the ground trying to milk the 2600 forever).
Obviously, in that world the Amiga would have ended up being an Atari product and the ST a Commodore product. I think both companies would have been healthier and, as such, would have been able to do more with the platforms. Their combined influence might have actually given the IBM PC and Macintosh a run for their money.
I think Atari would have done right by the Amiga. A properly executed version of it would have been a fantastic games console and I think Atari could have done that. It's hard to say what the home and business computer future of an Atari Amiga would have been, but it Atari would have made a kick-ass Amiga console.
Likewise, the ST could have been a lower cost Mac killer, especially if they leaned-in to Mac emulation / compatibility. I think Commodore had the chops and credibility to execute the ST as a business computer in a way the real Tramiel-run Atari never could. Atari couldn't overcome the stigma of Atari being a video game company.
cmrdporcupine · · focus · HN ↗
Also I was an Atari ST user back then, and loved it. But the Tramiel's didn't "get" software in the early days. They failed to make the right investments to keep TOS/GEM actively developed (e.g. as a Mac alternative) until it was too late (they hired Eric Smith to work on MiNT and then MultiTOS in the early 90s but they were already done as a company by then).
And then three fundamental hardware mistakes with the ST were:
1. not shipping it with the Blitter from the start so it couldn't compete on games, obviously with the Amiga but even with 8-bits of the time
2. forcing the ROM size down to 192kB so they had to size optimize the crap out of GEM before shipping (waste of precious development time), especially including tossing away all of GDOS (which had support for proportional fonts and printer drivers etc). A 256kB or 512kB ROM would have solved a lot of problems with what I'd think wouldn't have been an insane BOM cost bump.
3. Minor but long term annoying -- tying the cartridge port to only have 128kB of address lines. If they had given it 256kB or 512kB address ability their later expansion issues (OS upgrades etc) would have been much improved.
As for the Amiga, great machine but a) it cost too much at the start so failed to catch immediate fire (the 500 rectified this to some degree) b) interlace.
dosisking · · focus · HN ↗
> 1. not shipping it with the Blitter from the start so it couldn't compete on games, obviously with the Amiga but even with 8-bits of the time
I don't think a blitter is that big of a deal, especially for games. A sprite/tile architecture would be better for games.
I wish that the ST came with the YM2203, instead of the YM2149. That would make it an even better machine for music, with the addition of 3 4-op FM voices.
cmrdporcupine · · focus · HN ↗
Once clockspeeds got up to what the Falcon could do, it was unnecessary. But again, too late.
dosisking · · focus · HN ↗
The only arcade games that use the bitmap/blitter architecture were mostly Williams games like Robotron, Joust, and so forth. Everything else was tiles/sprites, except for the Atari vector games.
cmrdporcupine · · focus · HN ↗
Looking back 68000 had little business in video game type machines. I like the 68000 from a programming POV but it's faster for doing a pile of fast integer calculations than it is at moving memory around and responding to interrupts.
But Atari and Commodore were also imagining their machines to be targeting productivity more than games, so.
vidarh · · focus · HN ↗
cmrdporcupine · · focus · HN ↗
Graphic fidelity on the 16-bit machines was great. Latency was sometimes bad, depending on how much they were trying to do in the game loop.
vidarh · · focus · HN ↗
I can't recall many games with "low responsiveness to joystick movements". On the contrary, latency from movement to action were typically lower than on modern hardware.
amiga386 · · focus · HN ↗
It could be that what they wanted to do just couldn't be done in 1 frame. Or often it could, the games were just poorly optimised.
There were plenty of games where the code didn't care to pick up the joystick movements in a reasonable time, making the game feel sluggish, even if the joystick movements can be read directly from the CIA port.
Compare games with perfect framerates like Turrican 2, Superfrog or Leander, with games that don't, like Magic Pockets, Xenon 2, Driller. In fact, compare the official version of Stunt Car Racer with the cracked version, where the crackers massively improved the drawing speed and thus the framerate!
Compare the scrolling of <a href="https://youtu.be/V1R7Pd329Bc?t=1969" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/V1R7Pd329Bc?t=1969 or <a href="https://youtu.be/wFtLGDywZlg?t=553" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/wFtLGDywZlg?t=553 with <a href="https://youtu.be/_4U4ZW37haU?t=114" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/_4U4ZW37haU?t=114 or <a href="https://youtu.be/BXR2yswfC6E?t=862" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/BXR2yswfC6E?t=862 -- it's purely the programmer's fault.
vidarh · · focus · HN ↗
So in other words it wasn't generally an issue with the Amiga, but with sloppy work.
> There were plenty of games where the code didn't care to pick up the joystick movements in a reasonable time, making the game feel sluggish, even if the joystick movements can be read directly from the CIA port.
We clearly had very different experiences. To me that is not something that every concerned me.
amiga386 · · focus · HN ↗
It's both. Programmers' visions for their games either had to be scaled back because the 68000 just wasn't fast enough, or they implemented what they wanted and it tanked the framerate. Sometimes they met in the middle because the programmers thought 25/30Hz was good enough. Sometimes even the finest programmers, with the most optimised code, ended up with a 25Hz game because what they wanted the game to be demanded it.
Of course, some programmers said "this entire game has to run in 1 frame" and made of sure that. Sometimes it's the same programmers, e.g. Sensible Soccer is typically 1 frame, but Cannon Fodder is often not. Uridium 2 is typically 1 frame but Fire & Ice is often not.
The Amiga 1200 opened up new games possibilities, not just because of its added bitplanes allowing 256 colours, but also because having 2MB of Chip RAM instead of 512KB, and a CPU roughly double the speed, made more games viable.
> We clearly had very different experiences
It will depend on the games you played. Something you can try as a challenge: complete the first level of Magic Pockets on an unmodified Amiga 500 (or an emulation of one at its normal speed). Feel how laggy and awkward it is. Even a video doesn't give you that understanding. Then try the first level of Superfrog.
cmrdporcupine · · focus · HN ↗
spankibalt · · focus · HN ↗
Not a chance, I think. Combine both and you still would not have beaten the sound philosophy, openness, speed, and flexibility of the IBM PC & compatibles. Ironically, to increase your chances massively, you'd needed to have enhittification (with its preference for locked-down rubbish antithetical to general-purpose computing) already dominating the market. Even as Amigas and Ataris were much more open than their cousin's terrible grandchild of today: Apple. A platform which many Amigatari nerdlingers of yesteryear gravitated to...
EvanAnderson · · focus · HN ↗
I think the Amiga could have been released at least 6 months earlier if not for the litigation between Tramiel's Atari and Commodore gumming-up the works. The Amiga was massively more capable than the Macintosh of the day-- with preemptive multitasking, color, and NTSC video compatibility. There wasn't a Mac that held a candle to to the OCS Amiga graphics until the Macintosh II in 1987. I think a stronger Amiga marketing presence could have killed Macintosh.
VGA didn't come to the PC until 1987. The Amiga easily exceeded the capabilities of EGA. Windows 1.0 was released in 1985 and is much less capable and sophisticated than Workbench. I don't know much about the evolution of the native Amiga productivity software market. Failing the growth of that market in this counterfactual world arguably the A2000 and a bridge board was probably the first Amiga that could have seriously taken-on the IBM PC. That wasn't until 1987 in our timeline. It might have happened sooner in my hypothetical, but probably not years sooner.
Atari could have marketed the Amiga better than Commodore ever did. I recognize that's not really saying much. The post-Tramiel Commodore was an adrift ship of fools when it came to choosing which products to produce and how to market them. Commodore couldn't figure out what to sell (and how not to cannibalize or compete with their own products) or how to sell what it did produce.
I'm less sure what would have happened if the ST had been released as the Commodore product it arguably was. I do think a world where Tramiel stayed w/ Commodore would have made them more focused. They would have have developed fewer products (and likely no products that competed with other Commodore products) and aggressively driven costs down. I think a Commodore with Tramiel still heading it up would have been in a better position, financially and in terms of market perception, to put out a GUI-based business computer than Atari. I'm just not sure how much sooner I'd want to speculate a Commodore ST could have been released in this hypothetical.
The ST was also positioned more as a Mac killer than a PC killer, like my hypothetical Amiga.
You're likely right, though-- by 1985 the IBM PC was probably destined for dominance.
spankibalt · · focus · HN ↗
I firmly believe it was, as it's the philosophy (i. e. the open architecture) that gave it such a headstart that the competition couldn't have catched up. Keep in mind what an open architecture really means in the world, i. e. not just the West.
> Failing the growth of that market in this counterfactual world arguably the A2000 and a bridge board was probably the first Amiga that could have seriously taken-on the IBM PC.
Pitting an already well-established and rapidly expanding open architecture and Commodore's first foray into an open architecture against each other wouldn't have, and indeed didn't, play(ed) out in the latter's favor.
The A2000, a workstation-class machine, arrived in March '87. Too late. Around that time Compaq had already sold around 25,000 of their first Deskpro 386 machines, which hit the streets half a year earlier. According to Michael Geran of E. F. Hutton & Co., Compaq sold 90,000 Deskpro 386 computers in the second quarter of '87 alone.
The bridgeboard was an option for cost-conscious operators, especially those with small businesses. They were well-received especially in West Germany where the A2000 sold well. Their limiting nature and performance wouldn't have made them relevant.
> I think a stronger Amiga marketing presence could have killed Macintosh.
That is an intriguing possibility!
LocalH · · focus · HN ↗
The PC only became “open” when the industry basically strongarmed it open. Prior to clean-room BIOS cloning, IBM did pursue legal redress against early clones.
The PC pivoted to open architecture despite IBM.
cmrdporcupine · · focus · HN ↗
It absolutely was. Simply on account of the name on the grey box.
If it hadn't been IBM, maybe somebody like DEC may have gotten their shit together to take the market instead of farting around with overly high margin products and eating themselves from the inside.
But the way "business" culture was in the 80s the "respectable" productivity machine could not have come from the games/"home" market. Apple maybe but they opted instead to go close off the Apple II line (which in fact had a strong productivity sector thing going on, especially in schools) and push the Macintosh which was a good product but started off weak in terms of capability and costly on price.
In the early to mid-80s it was either going to be a CP/M machine or a CP/M-like machine (like the PC). These are Visicalc/Lotus-123/WordPerfect machines to their customers, and they cared not at all about graphics capabilities until later. Just needed 80 columns, floppies, and reasonable amounts of memory.
Hell there was terror in the microcomputer market when IBM made moves to go "downmarket" into it with the PCjr (which was a flop). The hype leading up to it, and the noises about how it would be a Commodore and Atari killer was insane.
kbelder · · focus · HN ↗
The instigating effect that diverged the timeline was some sort of technological innovation around 1983-1984 that allowed an instant leap in CPU speeds and memory densities by many orders of magnitude. The timing of the advancement was such that the IBM PC architecture was hopeless outmoded and soon died off. Apple retrofitted the tech into their Macintosh line, so they stayed relevant, but the Amiga was still in the design stage and so was able to build their new OS and UI around the enhanced capabilities. It went on to dominate computing for the next several decades.
Their version of Amiga Intuition was able to include photo-realistic VR, global networking, massive neural nets, and so forth, which all contributed to the cyberpunkness of the setting.
vidarh · · focus · HN ↗