 Commodore
International
Commodore were the second Amiga owners, buying the Amiga
from the ailing Amiga Inc. in 1984. This was the company that made
the Amiga what it is today. Although many Amiga users disliked
Commodore because of their questionable business sense and the sale
of the Amiga as a game machine it was a time of unparalleled
success that made the Amiga one of the most popular computers in
the world. This article examines what Commodore were planning to
release just before they went bust during 1994.
It is hard to imagine what the Amiga would be now if Commodore
had released any of the systems that were in development. The last
of the Amiga custom chipsets, AGA was only intended as a stop gap
solution to move developers away from software that "banged the
metal" and onto more OS friendly routines. Until 1993 the AAA
chipset was on the cards for launch as the next generation, but was
then cancelled in favour of the Hombre project.
The reason given for this sudden change of plan was it did not
provide a significant advancement in technology to compete. The
Hombre chipset, developed by Ed Hepler, was based upon a
PA-RISC processor and used Dave Haynie's Acutiator
system architecture. The design used two chips- the PA-RISC core,
blitter, copper, etc. was part of a "system control" chip, roughly
analogous to Agnus/Alice/Andrea. The other was the actual video
display chip, similar to Denise/Lisa/Monica.
At first the chipset would be used in a low-end system. There
were plans for the first project to be a CD32 replacement game
machine with no software compatibility with previous Amigas. This
would have taken 18 months to develop (it would have been released
sometime during 1995/6). At the time there was no intention of
porting the AmigaOS or using HP Unix on the machine. Whilst the
engineering team were in favour of such a move it was always
presumed that AAA would see the light of day and would run AmigaOS.
Commodore were also feeling pressure around them, so there was no
money to do this. The Hombre chipset may also have been used later
as a graphics card in high-end Amigas.
Along with the development of the Hombre chipset there were
plans to improve the AGA technology and upgrade low-end Amigas such
as the A1200 and CD32. There is very little information about the
fabled AA+ chipset, only that it would have "tidied up some
bugs in AGA" and may have some kind of fast Chunky pixel mode for
improved 3D graphics. A new Amiga using the 68030 processor and
likely to have AA+ as standard was promised at the
World of Commodore '93. As part of their plans to upgrade the
current Amiga line, Commodore were planning to introduce A1200 and
A4000 CD-ROM drives. The A1200 model was demonstrated but never
released, the A4000 version was even further behind schedule.
According to unconfirmed reports at the time, the A4000 CD-ROM
sported MPEG on a Zorro III card, as well as Akiko. It was also
planned to work on the A3000, although some games probably won't
work since they require AGA.
Commodore stated at the World of Commodore show 1993, the next
Amiga would also feature an upgraded sound chip, possibly DSP that
was capable of better than CD quality sound. This would add support
for voice recognition (they were having problems with multi-lingual
support), support for up to 16MB of memory and finally, allowing
the user to define if it was chip or fast ram. The memory capacity
may not sound much nowadays but remember that in 1993 4MB was
considered more than anyone would ever need. ReTargetable Graphics
were also promised with the next Workbench release (4.0). All of
this was to be released late 1994.
Conclusion
Was Commodore's death the Amigas loss? Many people are glad that
Commodore were out of the picture at last. However, the timing of
the liquidation was unfortunate, if the Hombre had been released it
would have radically altered the Amiga market. It looked as if
Commodore were finally breaking away from the past and would
actually create an Amiga for the 1990's rather than remain on the
1985 design. There were also plans to rewrite the OS from scratch,
an effort that would have made AmigaOS much faster and portable to
other processors. According to former Commodore employees, the
company may have been on the virge of abandoning the entire US
market and move to Europe where they were more successful. This may
have been a wise decision to cut operating costs (Commodore UK and
Germany were better organised and had people working for them that
understood the computer). However, in the long run it may have led
to the Amigas demise in the US, which would have shrunk its market
to the size of the current Acorn niche.
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