That feels a bit like saying that the Tesla Roadster should have been a British style electric milk float. They both have electric power trains but it misses the point of what made the Roadster so interesting.
As far as I understand it, the chipset was originally designed to support a game console and they only pivoted because of the video game crash.
In a sense it's more like saying that what was originally designed to be an electric milk float should have been an electric milk float. That's also not an entirely fair because I agree that the Amiga makes more sense as a computer. As a game machine it was soon beaten by more specialized hardware that did exactly what action games at the time demanded really well and nothing else.
Ehm, I agree that Amiga was a great computer, but it would have been a great games console at least up until Super NES. Only PS1 had it beat, and by then Commodore was dead. In fact, several arcade games were built on top of Amigas.
> In fact, several arcade games were built on top of Amigas.
An exception that proves the rule, in the sense that they were all largely unsuccessful.
Successful video game systems like the NES, PC Engine, Master System, Megadrive and SNES were all designed around tile- and sprite based video generation, like successful arcade games. Similarity to arcade game systems (and arcade ports) probably made them more attractive to consumers and thus more attractive to publishers and developers.
Porting attractive arcade titles to the Amiga must have been an absolute pain because the Amiga doesn't particularly address their fundamental graphics model. You do everything with the blitter and copper and have to come up with clever ways to move lots of layers of tiles and characters around. What's trivial work on a system built these types of games (upload graphics and tile maps to VRAM, move sprites about and scroll tile layers by writing to a couple of position registers) becomes a puzzle on the Amiga.
Maybe, but I don't think the few data points we have (CDTV and CD32, that arcade system) are very reassuring.
I also think that the best Amiga games were better suited for computers, like point and click adventures or strategy games like Civilization. The arcade ports I can think of in particular are mostly of poor quality with some exceptions, so evidently it was hard to on-board people who could develop quality arcade ports for the system. The games that really pushed the system technically and that people tend to remember fondly were almost all released at least half a decade after 1985.
We will never know. CD32 was cool but way too late, it could have worked if Commodore was flush with money and had some sort of plan, but it had neither. CDTV was cool but very expensive.
But what I meant - what if there could have been arcade games based on the Amiga, so you would not have to port it to Amiga, but it would have already have been Amiga?
And games console with Amiga hardware but say, 256kbyte RAM and 32kbyte ROM cartridges would still have been an awesome games console. All games for that hardware would have been trivially ported (and possibly updated with more graphics and sounds) for the computer Amiga.
Another though - that would have provided games publishers with much needed incentive to continue making games for Amiga. Piracy was sooo prevalent they made almost no sales, especially late in the life cycle. ROM cartridges would have had a way around that and Amiga (computer) games sales would have been a nice to have side effect.
They had a prototype console. Irving Gould nixed it when faced with the costs and risks of starting production coupled with the cost of cartridges of sufficient size for typical Amiga games.
The projected investment would have made them unprofitable for at least two quarters at a time where they didn't exactly have stellar credit. It may have been a bad move, but they also would have taken a very substantial risk.
