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Comment by Max-q | Hacker News Reader

The trio Amiga, ST and Macintosh all had music software, DTP and graphics, but I think they ruled one craft each:

The ST became the king of MIDI.

The Amiga was the queen of gfx and video.

Machintosh created and ruled the DTP revolution.

Still, they had so much in common. If the three companies had made one OS and all standardized on the Amiga chipset, they could have won over the IBM PC.

Of course, back then, they didn't know how the PC would crush them all, at that time the three thought they were each others biggest competitors.

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It's kind of insane that the Amiga didn't do better, given it had much better graphics and sound than the PC at the time. It effectively had some simple accelerated 2D graphics. It feels like a wasted opportunity.

It was literally a matter of expansion and upgradability. People saw it as a “micro” with vendor lock in.

And probably the biggest "like living in the future" advantage out of all, true preemptive multitasking. However with the major Achilles heel of no memory protection; message passing done through pointer exchange was wonderful for insanely fast lightweight contact switching but terrible for system stability.

It’s not like anything with a comparable price had memory protection - windows at the time was equally unstable and lacking protection, and it didn’t even have preemptive multitasking.

The later Amigas (3000 for sure, don’t remember about 2000) did have the memory protection, used e.g. by Enforcer.

"Enforcer" did not provide full memory protection. It only protected the lower page of memory (which were used as lookup tables by the OS, example: address 4 which was the Amiga "Exec" base address), in addition to some unmapped areas of memory.

It definitely helped, but it did not prevent processes from writing all over each other like on a modern operating system.

It had preemptive multitasking when consumer windows was still stuck on cooperative technologies. Where one misbehaving application could crash the whole system.

There is an interesting "History of the Amiga" article in Ars Technica [1], and the sense I got is that the Amiga didn't win out for non-technical reasons.

It was, hands down, the best hardware/software combo out there. If I remember the article correctly, the Amiga failed for other reasons. Bad marketing, bad Commodore management decisions, etc.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/series/history-of-the-amiga/

this article actually explain it.

they didn't understand magazine article sold machines. so simple.

Those 3 68000 based machines did ok against the PC until the 486 arrived. At that point all Motorola had was the 68030, and it wasn't enough progression. If the processor line had had more legs, then maybe Commodore and Atari could've remained competitive. I think they both did 68030 based machines, but it was too small a step.

Then it became a battle of operating systems.

It wasn't just the 486. It was SVGA and SoundBlaster cards making the Amiga and Atari multi-media capabilities mostly irrelevant. The 486 also made 386 machines very cheap, which obviously worsened the problem.

Indeed, but it was just enough. In 1995, the PC was finally starting to move from 8-bit to 16-bit sound.

The Amiga was capable of 14-bit stereo sound in 1985. It required a trick that only became popular around 1990, but the hardware was capable on day 1.

Of note, the C64 was capabale of 8-bit sound on day 1 in 1981, but this was only discovered (by Linus Akesson IIRC) around 2010.

Even EGA was good enough for most people - and it was non-interlaced at 60Hz, much better than what Amigas could do back then. When VGA came out, it became clear the Amigas couldn't keep up with the ecosystem around the PC.

Amiga could do 384x240 (64 colors or 4096 color HAM) and 768x240 16 colors 60 Hz without any interlacing.

Much, much better than EGA.

The original chip set (OCS), which debuted with the Amiga 1000 in 1985, could display 320 by 200 in four colors, or 640 by 400 in 16 colors, and the colors selected from a gamut of 4096. This is non-interlaced in 60 Hz. A PAL display would have higher vertical resolution in 50 Hz.

It could go up to 16 colors in high res or 32 in low res, but this could slow down other operations.

Any resolution with 400 pixel vertical scan on the Amiga was interlaced, no exceptions until too many years after the first OCS and ECS chipsets released.

and when the solutions did come they were burdoned by kludges necessary so as not to break backwards compatibility - and especially not to complicate life for the killer app of the platform at the non-gaming level, the video toaster, which was very tightly integrated with the Amigas interlaced video system.

ECS and AGA could do non-interlaced 400 line scanning.

ECS could do non-interlaced 640x480 (+overscan) with 4 colors. In the documentation, 35 nanosecond pixels.

AGA same, but with 256 (or 262144 HAM) colors.

Almost nobody had a monitor that supported those modes.

Exactly what I was thinking of with respect to kludges necessary for backwards compatibility.

I think Commodore made one monitor that supported a bi-modal scan rate, and it was something like twice as expensive as the the regular Amiga monitor range. I also recall a somewhat exotic NEC 17" flat-face CRT monitor that was completely out of the question pricewise for almost anybody except institutions, that also could do it by virtue of having a continuously variable sync clock from 15 khz up to 45 or so.

People certainly had VGA monitors back then!

The problem is not VGA 31 kHz modes, but old 15 kHz ones.

Yes, I had one on my A3000 (which has a deinterlacer / scan doubler built in, so the old modes weren't a problem.)

Most Amiga modes are 15 khz. The average person with an A500 or A1200 would have a 1084S and get zero value out of the new modes.

Except, Calamus on the ST seemed to be light years ahead of anything else out there.

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