Comment by SwellJoe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SwellJoe | Hacker News Reader

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Commodore frequently made (bad) decisions based on cutting parts cost. Plus/4 was just plain cheaper to build than the C64, and they thought they could charge the same price for it...so, it looked great on paper to the bean counters. They just fundamentally misunderstood the market and the success of the C64 within that market and repeated that misunderstanding over and over again.

C64 was successful not just because it was cheap, but because it provided a lot of value. It was a powerful computer for the price. The Plus/4 couldn't provide C64 compatibility without including the C64 chipset, and those were the features that made C64 expensive (comparatively) to build. The Commodore 16 was an even bigger joke; at that point, nobody was shipping such an underpowered machine.

Similarly, they put a lot of resources into things like the CDTV, which was a five-year-old computer in a home stereo style chassis. At that point, cheap VGA and high-quality sound cards were already available. It was anemic, but because it was old tech, it was cheap to make. Just more cashing in on their previous successes by making lower value versions of good products.

The C64 wasn't seen as the "cheap" product, IMHO, it was seen as a good value. Where Commodore screwed up later was failing to deliver good value, while keeping the cheap price. The 64 was a revolution. And, the Amiga was, too, but on a different set of metrics (cheap and good value were not really Amiga characteristics, in a world with cheap PC compatibles with VGA and 16-bit sound flooding the market...the Amiga 500 was probably the last great value product Commodore ever shipped, and that's reflected in the relative success of the product).

>the Amiga 500 was probably the last great value product Commodore ever shipped

Agreed, the Amiga 1200 was too little too late, I remember when I first tried programming on the PC coming from Amiga, segmented memory and 16 colors, I thought no way am I ever gonna use this!

Next time I gave it a try there were dos extenders giving you a flat memory model as well as vga 256 color mode-x where each byte corresponded to a pixel on screen, which performed so much faster than the Amiga's blitter with bitplanes that it was suddenly very clear that it was all over for Commodore.

You probably mean mode 13h - 320x200x256 colour. Mode X is actually similar in some ways to the Amiga's bitplanes because it uses a planar memory arrangement. This is actually quite useful for fast drawing of pixels because in Mode X for example you can draw four pixels at once with one write.

> Mode X is actually similar in some ways to the Amiga's bitplanes because it uses a planar memory arrangement.

Mode X does not separate bitplanes. With Mode X, you don't need to write to 8 memory addresses to completely change a single pixel. (In the worst case, you needed one slow "out" and one fast "mov" instruction, if you wanted completely random access. However, no one ever did this, because you could simply draw every 4th pixel once for each bank, requiring just 3 (or 4) bank switches per frame.)

Mode X is nothing like Amiga bitplanes.

Also in Mode X each byte does correspond to a pixel on screen, it's just banked in 4 banks.

Mode X it interleaves framebuffer pixels into four banks. Top-left pixel at coordinates 0, 0 is in bank 0, next right is in bank 1, etc. until pixel at coordinates 4, 0 is again in bank 0.

You could also write same pixel to all banks at once (or in any combination).

On Amiga, bitplanes worked very differently. They were basically layered "2-color" bitmaps, one bit corresponds always to one pixel. 1 to 6 bitplanes (or 1-8 for AGA) could be combined to form 2^1 to 2^8 colors. So for example for 256-color display, you actually had to set eight bitplane pointers.

This type of bitplane arrangement made setting a single pixel very slow. You had to rotate desired color value bits and mask & set corresponding pixel in 8 different memory addresses...

Ah right, I think I was confusing it with EGA, where you have one bitplane for each colour component.

Right. I don't mean to dismiss the "value" of the C64. But it was more like Commodore accidentally released something good, and then sold at or below cost to run their lower-end competitors out of business. Commodore 64 obviously had a enthusiastic user base, but the users recognized the "value" more than Commodore did. Commodore's business model was selling a lot of cheap computers to people who wouldn't actually use them, so the Plus/4 was just as good as far as Commodore was concerned. And yes the Commodore 64 was seen as cheap -- you could walk into Target etc and get a computer for $250!

On the techie side of the internet now, a lot of people have a positive perception of Commodore because they got one when they were 13 or whatever and got into it. We don't hear from all the people who couldn't find a use for it or never bought the disk drive (another $250) and ended-up shoving it into their closet. At the time, Commodore was not considered a reliable well-run company. There's a reason the schools bought Apples.

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