From: barrett@iastate.edu (Marc N Barrett)
Subject: Re: I DID giev up on the Amiga!
Organization: Iowa State University, Ames, IA
Date: Thu, 23 Jul 1992 16:20:26 GMT

In article <1992Jul23.060305.23392@uwm.edu> gblock@csd4.csd.uwm.edu (Gregory R Block) writes:
>Advertising I'll give you.  R&D I won't.  I happen to think the R&D
>guys do a really good job.  They do deserve a raise of a few million
>dollars, though.  ;)

   I agree that the people at Commodore R&D are fine hard-working people,
but the overall effectiveness and productivity of Commodore R&D is not very
good, due entirely to the lack of forsight by management.  As a company, 
Commodore never gets new products to the market in time for them to be 
competitive.  When innovative products are designed, they generally reach
the market years late, at which time the products are no big deal.  
Commodore also has major problems in producing new systems in any quantity;
For instance, why is it that, in the Amiga's entire seven-year history, only
*ONE* Amiga has ever been produced that has anything other than a 68000 on
the motherboard?  Compare this to the number of Macintoshes that have been
developed by Apple that have '020s, '030s, or '040s on the motherboard.


>: Well hooray for Commodore!  If they are making a profit then surely there
>: is absolutely nothing wrong with them.  Excuse me.
>
>No, but that does show that they've been doing what you said they
>didn't:  Managing three lines of systems.  Not that the C64 needs much
>"management", but you get the point.

   I would not call Commodore's handling of the Amiga in the U.S. "management".
"Mismanagement" is the more appropriate word.

>: True, the R&D division at Commodore isn't much at all.
>
>No, I meant the division of the monies to be spent.  The Amiga is a
>rather large chunk of that, wouldn't you say?
>
>The fact that it doesn't equal apple's doesn't mean that it's falling
>in the gutter, either.

   Yes it does.  I ask you agin: what is the ratio of Amigas without 68000s
on the motherboard to Macintoshes without 68000s on the motherboard?  Or,
what is the ratio of Amigas with 24-bit palettes and 8-bit graphics on the
motherboard to Macintoshes with 24-bit palettes and 8-bit graphics on the
motherboard?  Or, an even more basic question: what is the ratio of Amigas
with built-in SCSI controllers to Macintoshes with built-in SCSI controllers?
Finally, what is the ratio of notebook Amigas to notebook Macintoshes?

   Yes, Apple is six times bigger than Commodore, but Apple turns out about
20 times as many products.  Commodore is turning out far fewer new systems
than their size indicates that they should be turning out, with respect to
Apple Computer.

>: What if I want a high-density floppy?  Of course everyone else in the
>: industry has had them for years now, but I have heard that there are a
>: few Amigas with the 1/2 speed hacks.  Too bad I can't just pop in a
>: common inexpensive HD floppy.
>
>The Paula can't read the data in at the speeds HD drives normally "put
>out" at, to coin a phrase.  Can't really be helped without a new
>chipset, can it?

   Commodore produced a new chipset; it is caled the ECS.  The Paula chip
just happened to be the only chip that wasn't improved.  If any hacks to
the Paula chip to make it handle HD drives are possible, Commodore had the
perfect opportunity to introduce such a chip with the ECS.

>: No, it would have been better if the persons in charge didn't have their
>: heads up their collective ass.
>
>Obviously not every "person in charge" has their head up their ass.
>Otherwise, you wouldn't see a lot of the things that are happening
>that are selling quite a few Amigae.  The Power-Up programs were
>extremely successful, and I heard lots of good stuff about the rebate
>programs.

   How many brains does it take to come up with something like the PowerUp
program?  If you were to replace the Commodore Board of Directors with 
chimpanzees, they could come up with better programs than this.  Commodore
has been doing programs like the PowerUp program for ten years.  I remember
a program back in 1983 in which you could trade in Ataris, ColecoVisions,
Timex/Sinclair 1000s, or other game machines and computers for $100 off the
price of a C-64.

>: I'm sure that you, Mr. Cluefull, will be glad to set me straight.
>
>I'll try.
>
>: Wow!  It can do all of that!  Too bad its color limitations are the same
>: as my A1000 built in 1985.  Of course, it can do such useful things like
>: display 160x960 interlaced 32 color and has that great 64 color palette
>: in the 31kHz modes.
>
>Think of it this way.  Superhires is GREAT for video titling.

   SuperHires is ONLY useful for video titling.  It's too slow for anything
else, has horrible color capabilities, and can't be deinterlaced.
 
>Productivity mode can conform to special-purpose modes such as
>synchronization to motion picture cameras, obviously interesting in
>multimedia usage.

   Since when would you want to use Productivity for this?  Most film 
projectors update at 44Hz.  It would be much better to simply reprogram one
of the lower resolutions for this frequency.

>  NTSC/PAL support allows multi-national support in
>video standards.

   What is the big deal about that?  As Kevn Darling pointed out, there many 
are cheap, off-the-shelf video chips than can adapt to NTSC and PAL. 

>  The various VGA* modes give you a huge width
>selection while still getting a respectable amount of colors.

   Oh, yes, the infamous 160x480 and 160x960 HAM modes.  Too bad the
horizontal resolutions are lower than on my old VIC-20.

>: They don't even offer it as an official option.  A few "lucky" A3000
>: owners have them, but Commodore has not guaranteed their ability to
>: function as a HD floppy.  As for backwards compatibility, I'd gladly
>: sacrifice it if only to see some improvement after seven years.  I've
>: heard that the fabled AA chipset includes the old Paula, but I sure
>: as hell hope that rumor is false.
>
>How can they?  I've heard that they can't produce them cheaply, and
>they can't get any more of them.  That's what I've HEARD, anyways.

   Bullsh*t.  If Commodore were to commit to purchasing a large enough
quantity of these drives, there are probably many manufacturers of variable-
speed drive motors that would jump at the opportunity to sell a million HD 
drives to the Amiga market.

>And dropping backwards compatibility on the chipset is like going from
>the 680x0 series to some other RISC/CISC cpu.  It doesn't pay.

   Who said anything about dropping backwards compatibility?  To design a
chip with better capabilities you don't have to make it completely software
incompatible with other versions.

>: Use that wonderful programmable ECS to display a 640x480 16 color screen.
>: Wow!  That is exactly what stock VGA is!  The palette for VGA is larger
>: you say?  Well believe it or not it is easy to go from 18bits to 12bits.
>: Sure, you do lose a few hundred thousand colors, but for things like
>: DOS and Windows it wouldn't be much of a problem.  But what about the
>: 320x200 256 color mode?  Well doesn't the mighty Amiga with its wonderful
>: programmable ECS support 320x200 in 4096 colors?  The Amiga is the almighty
>: video wonder, so surely it won't have problems with the simple little
>: stupid non-programmable VGA displays.
>
>Except that there's a bandwidth-limit on current systems due to their
>16-bit nature.  Expect that to change.
>
>: I purchased my A3000 with the intention of buying an 040 board soon after.
>: Several people from Commodore were predicting that 040 boards for the 
>: A3000 would be easy to build and would sell in the $1000 range.  That
>: sounded great, but here it is over a year later and nothing is available.
>: Of course there is such a great selection of two and one of those is
>: from the company who claims that the A3000 has buggy chips and that the
>: Zorro III bus is not fast enough for their video board.
>
>I don't give that company a whole lot of respect, either.  GVP, and I
>think that's who you mean, makes their living by buying other people's
>designs, generally, and producing them, packaging them, and selling.
>
>: I am not so sure that C= can put out an 040 Amiga.  They were supposed to
>: be one of the first with an 040 system, yet NeXT and Apple have shipped
>: their second generation systems before Commodore can ship one.
>
>Such is life.  Problems occur.  And if all they were going to do, as
>you say, the NeXT and Apple companies have, is to throw in an 040 cpu
>into a run-of-the-mill architecture, that would be just fine.  But
>that's not the way it works, is it?  C= has always thrown new
>technology into things.  The A600 got a few new chips, and so will the rest.

   Oh, you mean the ONE new chip that is a no-brained cross between the older
Gary chip and a simple IDE drive interface.  Excuse me, but I'm not impressed.


>: Thank you so much for your little apology for Commodore's problems.
>
>A lot of them aren't really C='s problems, though, are they? 

   Which ones AREN'T Commodore's problems?  

> You
>simply want something other than what the Amiga has.  The Amiga's
>advantage, while not in color for video, has been there for speed.
>
>And a lot of the things that you ask for may be coming on the horizon,
>though patience is a virtue. 

   I've been waiting for SEVEN YEARS.  *TODAY* is the SEVENTH ANNIVERSARY of
the introduction of the Amiga 1000, and there are still absolutely no Amigas
whatsoever that have better sound or color capabilities than the Amiga 1000.
Expecting this much patience is unrealistic.  
  
> If I were C=, I'd wait until the falcon
>was, if it ever is, released, and then totally underprice them.

   And wait, and wait, and wait, while Apple, IBM, and the rest of the world
leaves them in the dust technologically.  Forget about Atari; competing with
slaggards willl get you nowhere.  How many of the Olympic althletes got to
the Olympics by competing against the slowest people in their classes?  Not
very many.

>(: (: (: (: Have you overdosed on smileys today?  Why NOT!?! :) :) :) :) :)
>(:"The person who said size doesn't matter was probably a very small man":)
>(:	gblock@csd4.csd.uwm.edu			Gregory R. Block         :)
>(: (: (: (: (: (: (: (: (: (: (: (: (:) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :)

---
| Marc Barrett -MB-  |  email: barrett@iastate.edu
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