> The Amiga was dead the second they put all of those whiz-bang chips in them that allowed them to do things that the PC and Mac couldn't do.
Amiga wouldn't have existed, or mattered, in the first place without all of those whiz-bang chips in them, and wouldn't have survived the years it did without them even if some irrelevant version had happened without them. But that never would have happened to start with - Amiga, the company, was formed around the ideas of building a gaming system.
Looking at the history of Commodore, it's also not at all clear that this was the issue - Commodore was a deeply dysfunctional company, and had been for many years before they even bought Amiga, with extensive problems around underfunding R&D, but then randomly yanking projects and lacking product direction.
It became an issue certainly, because it meant that the dysfunction of Commodore was sufficient to kill the whole platform - a risk the PC hardware avoided thanks to clones, and the OS/hardware split of the PC platform avoided because even MS stumbling would've "just" have led to another OS winning out.
But without the features of the chipset, nobody would have cared. It was almost only in the US the Amiga was seen predominantly as a "professional" machine that sold as a competitor to PCs in the early years, and it wasn't in the US Amiga sold.
The bulk of the Amiga market was in Europe, especially the UK and Germany. Germany also did have a more professional market for the Amiga as well - with e.g. the A2000 being driven by demand from Commodore's Germany subsidiary, but not as the only thing.
To such an extent that after Commodore International failed, the Commodore UK management tried to finance a buyout of its own parent company, and kept operating for as long as they could still scrounge up stock.
[This US situation was created in large part because Tramiel, before he was fired and bought Atari, had seriously destroyed Commodore's US more 'serious' dealer market with price cuts without preparing the dealers followed by putting Commodore 64's in Kmart, and so when the Amiga was launched Commodore struggled to get sufficient distribution in outlets that could handle a much more expensive machine]
> Generally speaking, you stuck in a VGA card and CGA and EGA worked. When a faster card came out you stuck it in and loaded a TSR or drivers and things worked faster. Installed Windows? Get a card with Windows acceleration. 1280x1024@24-bits in 1992 while the Amiga was outputting TV resolutions.
This is very different from how I remember things. People were mocking the PC well after Commodore went bankrupt for how PC users had to muck around with drivers and weird command line settings while on the Amiga you just dropped driver in, and had cards that supported AutoConfig [1], which meant we would laugh at PC users whenever they mentioned IRQ's because all of that nonsense was automatic.
Amiga wouldn't have existed, or mattered, in the first place without all of those whiz-bang chips in them, and wouldn't have survived the years it did without them even if some irrelevant version had happened without them. But that never would have happened to start with - Amiga, the company, was formed around the ideas of building a gaming system.
Looking at the history of Commodore, it's also not at all clear that this was the issue - Commodore was a deeply dysfunctional company, and had been for many years before they even bought Amiga, with extensive problems around underfunding R&D, but then randomly yanking projects and lacking product direction.
It became an issue certainly, because it meant that the dysfunction of Commodore was sufficient to kill the whole platform - a risk the PC hardware avoided thanks to clones, and the OS/hardware split of the PC platform avoided because even MS stumbling would've "just" have led to another OS winning out.
But without the features of the chipset, nobody would have cared. It was almost only in the US the Amiga was seen predominantly as a "professional" machine that sold as a competitor to PCs in the early years, and it wasn't in the US Amiga sold.
The bulk of the Amiga market was in Europe, especially the UK and Germany. Germany also did have a more professional market for the Amiga as well - with e.g. the A2000 being driven by demand from Commodore's Germany subsidiary, but not as the only thing.
To such an extent that after Commodore International failed, the Commodore UK management tried to finance a buyout of its own parent company, and kept operating for as long as they could still scrounge up stock.
[This US situation was created in large part because Tramiel, before he was fired and bought Atari, had seriously destroyed Commodore's US more 'serious' dealer market with price cuts without preparing the dealers followed by putting Commodore 64's in Kmart, and so when the Amiga was launched Commodore struggled to get sufficient distribution in outlets that could handle a much more expensive machine]
> Generally speaking, you stuck in a VGA card and CGA and EGA worked. When a faster card came out you stuck it in and loaded a TSR or drivers and things worked faster. Installed Windows? Get a card with Windows acceleration. 1280x1024@24-bits in 1992 while the Amiga was outputting TV resolutions.
This is very different from how I remember things. People were mocking the PC well after Commodore went bankrupt for how PC users had to muck around with drivers and weird command line settings while on the Amiga you just dropped driver in, and had cards that supported AutoConfig [1], which meant we would laugh at PC users whenever they mentioned IRQ's because all of that nonsense was automatic.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoconfig