My Thoughts on Amiga

[CaptainCommodore]

Heres what I think is true,

First of all, Commodore went bankrupt in the early 90's due to many many mistakes made, and bad marketing skills. I've heard the CDTV is what did them in, due to the fact they may have been expensive to make, and it flopped. Some say with there "half the price" campaign, they did more bad then good, some people say they could of made more when the Commodore 64 came out. I disagree, but I've heard that said in places.

Commodore seemed to have a foggy past, but we all know the 64 is the best selling computer ever. And Amiga lived up to the 64, they were excellent computers. The "Only Amiga Makes It Possible" ad live up to the "I Adore My 64" ad, which was tough to do. I remember hearing the old radio commercials on some website, but I don't remember which one. Try www.commodore.ca

I don't have any Amiga's now, because I need to make room. I'm trying to invent a TV hook up that'll hook up ALL my gaming consoles. Thats right, Intellivision, Atari 2600, Sega Genesis, NES, SNES, N64, Sega Dreamcast, XBox, and most likely more. It hasn't been easy, but I'm getting there. Once I do, I'll have an Amiga work station. I've seen them in action, very cool.

I have a question though. Any one have some more history on the CDTV? I saw an old 15 minute infomercial somewhere, but thats it. I'd like to know the price and stuff. Can anyone help?
:::The Recycler:::

[carlsson]

I think Commodore made their first mistake by releasing the already by then much delayed TED machines (C16, Plus/4 etc). Rather than building on the strengths of the C64 and offering a natural upgrade, they focused on some low-end machine to replace the VIC-20 which already was commerically dead in 1984/85. The later C128 release is also something I can't fully understand, although there was a "cram 128K into a computer" craze during 1985 where the C128 fits together with Spectrum 128, BBC 128, Amstrad CPC6128 etc.

The CDTV, as I understand it, was an Amiga 500 (possibly with fatter Agnus?) with a CD-ROM unit in a different shell. It barely predated the Philips CD-I and friends, but in an era with several "standards" on data CDs and nobody really had a clue why computer software other than encyclopedias required CD sized amounts of data. Some claim that the less successful CDTV anyway gave Commodore valuable experience for their later CD32 release.

I'm not sure if even an earlier release of the AGA generation (given the same retail price) would've saved Commodore. Actually I'm not sure exactly what brought the company down.

Recently I looked up the Amiga 1200 and the Atari Falcon. Both were released simultaneously. The Falcon included a 030 and a DSP, but I'm not sure about its graphical capacities compared to the STE generation. The retail price for a HD equipped A1200 was maybe 2/3 or less than for a similar Falcon. IIRC it was one of the last Atari models as well?

[Unknown_K]

Commodore had too many R&D projects that never seen the light of day.
The TED machines didnt offer anything worthwhile to the C64 so it was a waste of time. The C128 was usefull because of the fast disk drives that held more data (double sided drives and the 1541 3.5"), it ran CPM (which was dying at that point) had 80 column text and a faster processor. The numeric keypad on the 128 also helped with buisiness apps.

The amiga made commodore a decent amount of money which they wasted on trying to made a set top box like the CDTV and much later the cd32 console (cdtv was a modified amiga 500 while cd32 was a modified a1200). The money sunk into the cd32 finally killed commodore (I think the A1200 did sell well for commodore and the company who started making them later).

Another thing that didnt hell commodore was their PC clone line which didnt make much if any money.