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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

Erm... I see XOR for blinking cursors is obvious and should never be patented, but to blame only that for Amiga's demise is... a bit of an exaggeration. Management deserves most - in fact, almost all - of the credit for driving Commodore into the ground.

It's such a shame. Commodore made great computers.

The Amiga had sort of an identity problem. It was born a videogame console and NTSC timing was pervasive throughout the system and that made the design more complex as the machines evolved. They should have gotten rid of that as soon as they launched their second-generation machines.

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To be fair, the author does not claim that the XOR patent was to blame for Commodore's demise. Rather, the claim is that:

1) Management "bet the farm" on CD32.

2) XOR patent infringement claims killed CD32.

3) The failure of the CD32 product was the last nail in the coffin.

Tragic. I loved my Amiga 500 dearly. It makes one wonder what might have happened if Commodore could have held on for a few more years and (perhaps under new management) ridden the wave of internet-driven hardware sales to new heights.

Technically the Amiga Platform has always been rather agnostic about it's timing & video output. It spits out PAL / NTSC / RGBS in various funky resolutions, all you have to do is ask or set a jumper depending on the model. Secondly if it wasn't for this spot on NTSC carrier frequency that the Amiga could output we would never have seen products such as the Video Toaster. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster

Or this oddity, the A2024 with a 10hz-15hz refresh rate: http://www.amiga-hardware.com/showhardware.cgi?HARDID=863

Vaguely related, is that I once hooked up a monochrome VGA monitor to my Amiga 1200 by soldering the monitor's cable to a suitable Amiga video connector, and setting it up to be 640x480 VGA in the OS settings.

Worked a treat!

To be fair, the A2024 had a refresh rate of 60hz, but due to the way it "multiplexed" 4 screens, it had an effective refresh rate of ~15hz (60/4). A much different, and less interesting reality.

I don't think the first generation Amigas were that agnostic. You had chip RAM that was tied to video timings and fast RAM that wasn't. That indicates the motherboard timings were very coupled to the timings of the video generation circuitry and the dedicated chips.

>"It was born a videogame console"

That's not really the case. It was designed with computer graphics in mind - far more akin to a workstation than a game system. It was always intended as a full fledged computer as indicated by a multi-tasking operating system and peripherals such as the sidecar for the A1000 and the bridgeboard for the A2000. Standard serial and Centronics ports are further evidence of Commodore's intent.

Using standard video timing and providing stereo sound created significant benefits for audio visual applications - and in true Commodore tradition - the video system allowed the Amiga's to be used with a television as the monitor and reduced thereby reduced the cost of a basic system.

The Amiga 1000 was launched as a computer, but the product Amiga Corp (or Hi-Toro?) had developed when Commodore bought it was initially conceived as a videogame console. It was developed as a computer only after the games market collapsed.

almost all mass produced computers of that era (and essentially even present ones) have much of their timing derived from NTSC, not because they are explicitly designed to be connected to television, but because of component costs. Most of the commonly used VGA video modes are essentially NTSC and the 33MHz PCI clock (used as essentially "global" clock now) of modern PC is still generated by PLL from crystal that usually has some NTSC-friendly frequency. Reason is simple: you need PLL anyway to generate lot of different clock signals, so you can as well use cheapest xtal you can found, and that usually happens to be something that is used in lots of mass-market NTSC equipment. Today there are also some other common mass produced xtals (for USB, Ethernet and such things), but in 70's and 80's only mass-produced things that needed exact timing were clocks and television equipment.

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