Modernising the Amiga at Forty
benjamin.computer
benjamin.computer
It's not an accelerator. It's a full hardware Amiga emulator that uses the actual Amiga as a simple I/O daughterboard. You're not really operating your Amiga hardware at this point, you're using the Vampire. I'd say it's _equivalent_ to running a PiMiga (also not an amiga), or if you hooked up something that turned your Amiga's keyboard and mouse/joystick ports into USB devices, then plugged them into a PC running WinUAE - which is entirely fine to do, but none are really using a real Amiga as an actual computer
It's a bit like some retro car modding scene where as long as the car body looks kind of familiar it's all fair game.
There is a belief among Amiga enthusiasts that the Amiga should have won, that had it not been for sabotage from without (e.g., Microsoft) as well as sabotage from within (upper management, particularly Irving Gould, being interested in squeezing profits out of the C64 and existing Amiga lines rather than R&D), the Amiga would have been a decade or more ahead of the rest of the industry and may have become the dominant computing platform. Kitting out Amigas with more advanced hardware than any real Amiga would have been able to be contemporaneously equipped with thus becomes an alternate reality game: what if Commodore hadn't failed? what if the Amiga were still a contender into the late 90s and beyond? To borrow your analogy, it's like kitting out a 1967 Chevy Impala with a modern engine and drivetrain, to imagine what it would have been like had the values of the '67 Impala, including looks and the sense of being fun to drive, had persisted into the era of fuel injection and continuously-variable transmissions. Maybe it's not an Amiga in terms of actual Amiga hardware configurations, but the idea is that in this alternate universe, what an Amiga is would have changed.
this made me laugh, good stuff
As a hardcore Amiga user and developer from 1985 to 95, the platform was amazing for the time but having studied the history, talked with some of the key players and thought about it a lot (probably too much), I've sadly come to the conclusion there was no way the Amiga could have survived the 90s as a viable platform. As a retro enthusiast and tech history buff I find it interesting to play the hypothetical game "Time Traveler's Ten" where we go back in time and change up to ten critical decisions or mistakes that were made. Given the same constraints as existed then (financial, technical, market, etc) if different paths were taken and key mistakes avoided can we change the eventual outcome? No matter which decisions or which alternate choices we make, there's no way to take the Amiga as it originally shipped in 1985 and plausibly play the facts and choices into it being a significant and financially viable third platform behind Wintel and Mac in 2000. Even if we mind-control Commodore Chairman Irving Gould to invest the company's resources in R&D instead of pillaging them, even if Microsoft supports the Amiga as much as the Mac - it helps the Amiga sell more and survive a few years longer but eventually only delays the inevitable. As someone who had "Amiga Persecution Complex", this deeper understanding has laid to rest those feelings of being "robbed of a glorious future by a few stupid mistakes."
The reality is there were tectonic shifts changing the computer landscape. The first was the shift from CISC to RISC. Motorola saw the writing on the wall long before the 68060 was even announced that the 68K architecture was a dead end. They decided continuing to pour resources into optimizing the 68K to be competitive was too costly and would become a losing game (probably correctly given their fab technology and corporate resources), and instead chose to break with the past and partner with IBM in moving to Power PC. For Atari, Commodore, Apple et al this was a planetary level asteroid impact. If developers and customers lose all software compatibility with your new products, that makes the choice of moving to your next generation not much different than moving to another platform entirely. Only Apple managed to survive (and even they almost didn't). Arguably, they only treaded water with great design and marketing until saved by the iPod.
We also need to consider the other huge asteroid heading for vertically integrated non-Wintel computer platforms right behind the CISC/RISC asteroid. In the early to mid 90s Moore's Law scaling was allowing desktop computers to improve rapidly by growing dramatically more complex. It was getting to be more than one company could do to win on each separate front. On the Wintel side, the market solved this complexity by splitting the challenge among different ecosystems of companies. One ecosystem would compete to make the CPU and chipset (Intel, NEC, Cyrix, AMD), another would make the OS (Windows/OS/2), another ecosystem would compete to make the best graphics and yet another would compete on sound (Creative, Yamaha, Ensoniq, etc). It would require a truly extraordinary company to compete effectively against all that with a custom vertically integrated computer. There was no way a Commodore or Atari could survive that onslaught. The game changed from company vs company to ecosystem vs ecosystem. And that next asteroid even wiped out stronger, better-capitalized companies that were on pure RISC architectures (Sun, SGI, Apollo, etc).
Finally, it's clear that post 1990 both Atari and Commodore were in increasingly weaker positions, not only financially but in terms of staff depth. While both still had some remarkably talented engineers, the bench wasn't deep. I know that at least at Commodore, toward the end they'd canceled their much improved, new Amiga chipset project (AAA). Even though it was almost complete with (mostly) working test silicon on prototype boards, they canceled it because it had become obvious future Pentium and RISC CPUs would outperform even the 68060 and AAA custom chips. At the time the company folded, Commodore engineering was working on the 'Hombre', an entirely new design which would have been based on an HP RISC CPU. For graphics the main thrust would have been new retargetable graphics modes for hi-res, high-frequency monitors (1280 x 1024). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset
The plan was to support legacy Amiga software with a 68K emulator on the RISC CPU driving a new chip created specifically to support legacy Amiga graphics modes. When I later read this, I was quite skeptical that Commodore could have developed hybrid software/hardware emulation in 18 months that would have covered enough of the legacy Amiga software library. Looking at the history of Amiga software emulators shows how hard it would have been. Also, as much as I loved the Amiga, the OS stack could then only be described as 'crufty'. It had been upgraded a little over the years but still contained major legacy components from different eras and many of the people involved were no longer at Commodore. Given that reality, the plan had been to base the new Amiga on Windows NT.
But - even if Commodore somehow overcame the myriad technical challenges, lack of resources and depleted talent bench, once a next-gen Amiga isn't based on the 68K, AmigaOS or the custom chips and boots Windows NT in XGA mode - is it still really an Amiga? Certainly, at least some of my software wouldn't have worked so, facing the decision to buy a new, quite different computer, why wouldn't users also look at the, probably, cheaper Packard Bell Pentium running Windows 95 down at Costco? After all, with the Pentium and Windows 95, the PC juggernaut had finally coalesced into a coherent whole that could be compelling to both home users and graphics, gaming, multimedia obsessed hobbyists. And new Doom/Quake quality games were coming out almost weekly.
No matter how we play the cards we're dealt, the historical deck is too stacked against the Amiga and the Time Traveler Ten game always ends with an unwinnable hand. While Commodore (and Atari, Sinclair et al) did make many mistakes, none of them were the root cause of their eventual demise. In each case, macro factors beyond their control that were baked into the market, the technology or their own DNA, had already sealed their fate. One of the Amiga's greatest advantages in 1985 was the brilliant custom chip set designed to exploit every quirk of analog video timing. As resolutions increased and 3D became essential in the 90s that huge advantage, arguably the reason we still talk about it, turned into one of the Amiga's biggest weaknesses. In many ways the Amiga blazed the trail showing the way to the future - but it was a future it wouldn't be a part of.
An Hombre-based Amiga would have been interesting, but I wouldn't have bought one.
I wouldn't have bought an Hombre either because I doubt I would have seen it as really an Amiga. My regret is that the earlier AAA chip set was never completed and shipped because I would have bought that computer. It wouldn't have changed the Amiga's eventual fate but we'd have another really interesting machine that would have likely been more of what we love about the Amiga from a retro perspective.
Frankly, this would have been a worthwhile pivot getting into 3D accelerators if the Amiga gambit wouldn't have paid off in the long run.
So I think you're right. There's no universe in which the Amiga was a serious contender. Every company is at risk of management blunders or changing market tides, and the scene is littered with the corpses of proprietarily integrated platforms that fell with their parent companies: not just the Amiga but Atari ST, SGI, Sun, DEC, Lisp machines, etc. The PC ecosystem outlasted them all and just kept going on, delivering the advantages those systems had in a cheaper, more accessible package.
The sole exception was Apple. I think Apple won in the long run by subsidizing Mac development with iPod/iPhone/iPad sales, and what this means is yet another market turn away from general purpose computing and toward devices that only run approved curated "apps" and are discarded rather than upgraded. Maybe Commodore could have anticipated this back in the day, but it would have been against the Amiga spirit I think.
I still love my Amiga 500. What it can do was amazing in the late 1980s, and I'm content to appreciate that for what it is.
I think this may have been more of a Europe-centric thing. Here in the U.S. by the time the PPC Amiga options were launched in 2002 it had been over 8 years since Commodore went bankrupt and the world had mostly moved on. By the early 90s the U.S. and European Amiga markets were increasingly different. Here the later lower-end Amigas like the 600 and 1200 never sold very well or had mainstream distribution and the higher-end Amigas (3000/4000) were mainly driven by video production with the Video Toaster (which was NTSC-only).
But also, the PPC transition was long rumoured during the late years of Commodore, and then announced as early as 1995[1] by Amiga Technologies after Commodore's bankruptcy but the PA-RISC based "Hombre" permanently on ice, so we had a long time to get used to the idea.
PowerUp was then announced in 1997, and Blizzard PPC was launched in 1998[2].
While the Phase5 cards obviously had limited use because the OS wasn't ported and they were crazy expensive, they still meant there was a relatively "smooth" continuity from 68k to PPC, with software slowly starting to add PPC support to accelerate certain things.
And the PPC transition had support from at least portions of the community even while Commodore was still alive and internally pursuing PA RISC.
In retrospect, that too was the wrong bet, of course, but the point is that while there is a subset of the Amiga community that is very hung up in the original chipsets and 68k (and I'll admit I find the 68k family beautiful), the Amiga community also did often embrace deviations as long as they didn't change how it felt to use (I do think e.g. Hombre might have, though, so as much as it sucked that Commodore failed, maybe we'd have lost respect for them if they'd stayed alive)
[1] https://www.cucug.org/amiga/aminews/1995/at951111
[2] https://archive.org/details/cuamiga-magazine-099/page/n49/mo... - see page 50.
You’re probably still right, but I think the argument is a little more complex.
> The Macintosh line managed to transition to PowerPC, but they did so via software emulation. That would've been highly problematic for the kind of software (games and early multimedia - not DTP, which was the Macintosh domain) where the Amiga and Atari ST were at their strongest. Other m68k machines in common use included, e.g. Sun and NeXT workstations which would've been running highly portable code without 'tight' performance requirements. (source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43728024)
To which I responded: This is an excellent point and one I hadn't fully appreciated until reading your comment. Most of the popular 68K software on Macs (such as DTP) was more amenable, or at least tolerant, of running under emulation. Even the popular games on Mac like Myst weren't as real-time critical as popular Amiga and Atari ST games which tended more toward arcade style and sometimes even accurate arcade ports. While I'm sure there were arcade style games for color 68K Macs, they weren't the majority. Also, because the Mac didn't have so many tightly integrated custom co-processors, my sense is that Mac 68K software wasn't as tightly hardware coupled and counting on specific timing interactions. A fair amount of Amiga software would read and write directly to hardware registers instead of using OS calls and even if it only used OS routines, it could still be highly dependent on precise behavior. Once again, we see that aspects which had made the Amiga and Atari ST great in the 80s, made it harder to navigate the transitions necessary to survive the 90s.
It would be interesting to have modern emulator authors compare notes about the software libraries between these platforms. While I'm sure Mac emulator authors still found a lot of 'misbehaving' Mac apps to deal with, my sense is the Amiga software library was bonkers to support in emulation. The WinUAE Amiga emulator has long had a precisely cycle-accurate mode which is less performant but simply necessary in many cases. And as mature as WinUAE is, the team is still discovering edge cases where 40 year-old games and graphics apps have never been emulated correctly.
There's also different audiences. If you had an Amiga because it had cool, arcade quality games for the time... you'd be looking for more cool games in future. So you'd *probably look to the SNES and Megadrive, and then the Playstation. Hence you'd switch to them rather than stick with the Amiga.
Whereas, if you were a business, you're looking for the software you bought to keep working. If you were in publishing, you had Quark Express on Macs. If you were in music production, you had Cubase on Atari STs, Sibeleus on Acorns (though in the case of both of those, there was pressure on the software vendors to make an Intel/Windows version too). If you were is business, you had Word and Excel on IBM PCs and compatibles. Hence why you'd stick with that line of computers.
The Amiga never really had much of a "professional" following, even though its multimedia software opened up a lot of amateur creativity. There were only really things like the Video Toaster in the USA, and even that obscured that it was actually an Amiga.
That said... even the Mac was not certain to survive. In the 1990s, Apple suffered from a lot of clone Macs taking away their market share; ultimately what saved them was Microsoft being forced to keep them on life support (keep producing Office for Mac), and ultimately Steve Jobs return and bringing NeXT with him, which turned into Mac OS X and the iMac and renewed relevance.
> ultimately what saved them was Microsoft
Indeed. At the time of MSFTs surprise investment of $150M in Apple (supposedly arranged in a single phone call from Steve to Bill), more than one pundit opined that the Justice Department's anti-trust investigation into Microsoft was a major factor. I don't recall the exact timing of the suit being filed vs the investment but MSFT certainly knew well in advance that a suit was likely as the Justice Department investigated for years before filing. A key part of MSFT's anti-trust defense was that there were viable competitors, of which Apple was the best example. At the time of the investment Apple was, arguably, just months away from running out of cash. Jobs needed the money to buy time so he could rework the marketing and products.
I've always thought that investment was a smartly pragmatic move by Gates. It was a relatively cheap way to ensure he still had one competitor on life support that wasn't quite dead yet - and, although I'm sure Gates didn't expect it, MSFT actually ended up making money on the investment (although Gates would have happily given up that profit to not have the iPod->iPhone->iPad to compete with later :-) ).
Ah, the classic "Ship of Tramiel" gedankenexperiment.
My Amiga 2000 had a 68000 CPU, a 68020 accelerator, an 8086 on the bridge board, a 286 accelerator, a Z80 on the SCSI controller, and of course the 6502 compatible in the keyboard....
(of course only up to 4 of those were in use at any one time)
Quoting: "Applications are fun and fast!" Randomly attached (but viewable) stuff:
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/05/the-a-eon-amiga-x500...
[2]: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/neuro...