When C= sacked half Los Gatos Amiga1000 designers where was Atari?

[oky2000]

In 1986 those clueless muppets at C= sacked half the people who built the world's most crushingly superior machine in history.......which was then turned into two ugly technically stagnant A500/A2000 models by people who had nothing to do with Amiga 1000. So why didn't Jack recruit them to build some superior enhancements to the original ST instead of messing about with what turned out to be not enough to beat 1985 A1000? Sack Shivji and his inexperienced custom chip absent designer if need be!

 

Don't know which of the two is the greatest mistake of all time.

[Christos]

I didn't know C= built the X68000...

[Zogging Hell]

I didn't know C= built the X68000...

 

lol surely he means the Commode 900?

[kskunk]

Why didn't Jack recruit them to build some superior enhancements to the original ST instead of messing about with what turned out to be not enough to beat 1985 A1000?

Since we're playing the 'why' game: Why would the Amiga design team want to build an enhanced ST?

 

I live and work next to Atari headquarters, and I've met some talented design teams. Those people work on the projects they want to work on. Every year, guys like Jack pop up with barrels of cash, and they say 'no', and instead do what they love.

 

I have a theory about this: There are no brilliant designers, just regular designers who sometimes get to do exactly what they were made to do. And when that happens, it comes out brilliant.

 

What did the Amiga design team love? They loved designing game machines. And so that's what they did next. No sooner had Commodore screwed up Los Altos, than most of the team went off and started designing... the Atari Lynx. Followed by the 3DO!

 

So, Atari actually DID get the Amiga design team!

 

What if Jack had enslaved them and forced them to do the ST plus instead? They'd probably hate it and do an uninspired, lousy, job. Or they'd design a joyful little game machine that would be roundly hated by the serious-business user that Jack was trying to seduce.

 

- KS

[atarian63]

In 1986 those clueless muppets at C= sacked half the people who built the world's most crushingly superior machine in history.......which was then turned into two ugly technically stagnant A500/A2000 models by people who had nothing to do with Amiga 1000. So why didn't Jack recruit them to build some superior enhancements to the original ST instead of messing about with what turned out to be not enough to beat 1985 A1000? Sack Shivji and his inexperienced custom chip absent designer if need be!

 

Don't know which of the two is the greatest mistake of all time.

Crushingly superior, you must mean Atari ST! great Price and out sold A1000 2 to 1

[Retro Rogue]

Why didn't Jack recruit them to build some superior enhancements to the original ST instead of messing about with what turned out to be not enough to beat 1985 A1000?

Since we're playing the 'why' game: Why would the Amiga design team want to build an enhanced ST?

 

 

Not to mention why would he even consider the possible conflict of interest being knee deep in several lawsuits with Commodore at the time. Commodore had already tried to shut him down by slapping lawsuits against Shiraz and two other ex-Commodore engineers for theft of trade secrets, why on earth wouldn't they do it again if a bunch of Amiga people came over?

 

 

 

 

[kool kitty89]

Why didn't Jack recruit them to build some superior enhancements to the original ST instead of messing about with what turned out to be not enough to beat 1985 A1000?

Since we're playing the 'why' game: Why would the Amiga design team want to build an enhanced ST?

Good point, and if they HAD been looking to build-up engineering staff more (let alone enhanced hardware in general), why not look towards some of the former ATG engineers instead? (granted, doing that after the fact with the ST was far less sensible than trying to resurrect some of the existing ATG hardware -and software for that matter- in the first place)

 

Really though, it would have made tons more sense to stick with the existing engineers (in house and outsourced) for the ST. There's tons of simple (many rather foolproof) enhancements that could have been done. (and those who engineered the original -albeit simple- ST hardware probably would have been the best suited to handle that)

 

 

 

Not to mention why would he even consider the possible conflict of interest being knee deep in several lawsuits with Commodore at the time. Commodore had already tried to shut him down by slapping lawsuits against Shiraz and two other ex-Commodore engineers for theft of trade secrets, why on earth wouldn't they do it again if a bunch of Amiga people came over?

 

 

 

 

 

 

In 1986 those clueless muppets at C= sacked half the people who built the world's most crushingly superior machine in history.......which was then turned into two ugly technically stagnant A500/A2000 models by people who had nothing to do with Amiga 1000. So why didn't Jack recruit them to build some superior enhancements to the original ST instead of messing about with what turned out to be not enough to beat 1985 A1000? Sack Shivji and his inexperienced custom chip absent designer if need be!

 

Don't know which of the two is the greatest mistake of all time.

What would be the point though?

 

Many of the mistakes/missed opportunities for Atari Corp's computers weren't things that having better engineers on-hand would have helped at all.

 

In fact, they probably would have been best off by taking a minimalist approach to hardware enhancements in general (the boneheaded decision to not support simple expansion would hurt -they could work around that after the fact if they tried though).

 

Simple things like adding V/H scroll registers to the SHIFTER (maybe line fill too, but well short of the later blitter -simple and cheap enough to allow such a revision to be pushed ASAP and applied to ALL STs being manufactured when introduced). On top of that, they could have added a basic DMA sound circuit and/or the YM2203 sound chip. (that's something that might have been better to initially introduce on higher-end models -especially for music-oriented systems, and then later applied as a baseline standard -short of DMA sound, you could just have a simple DAC with an array of DACs to write to and avoid hardware scaling and hacking the PSG, but an embedded DMA sound chip would have been simple and a better investment overall)

 

Then there's one of the simplest/most foolproof enhancements possible for the system: faster CPUs, be it offering 10/12 MHz models or jumping straight to 16 MHz alone, there was a lot of potential for offering faster CPUs from day 1 (let alone later on). The only thing they'd have had to address was adding a wait state mechanism, but that should have been pretty straightforward. (at worst, they could have forced halts rather than wait states when the SHIFTER -or FDD/HDD/etc- needed the bus, but proper wait states would have gotten better performance -due to the many times the 68k wouldn't even be contending for the bus and thus not need to be halted; or they could have even hardcoded waitstates to fall within the bus access timing of an 8 MHz 68k -that would make it no better than an 8 MHz chip for bandwidth dependent performance, but far more significant for computationally dependent performance or other things with non-bus related overhead like interrupts -of course, better bus sharing logic could be added as time went on, maybe eventually adding a fastRAM bus to allow full parallel operation or resorting to buffering/caching instead)

 

 

Doing minimal video enhancements (significant, but technically simple and not a major shift to manufacturing either) could have filled the gap until a true generational shift to counter VGA (and go well beyond the stagnating Amiga) in the late 80s. Keeping things minimal prior to that would also leave options much more open for backwards compatibility with minimal waste (no old model blitter to support -could directly push for one optimized for packed pixels, etc, etc). They definitely should have gone the packed pixel route, probably with some sort of hardware interpreter to build onto the planar bitmap logic (either chained like VGA, or maybe using a packed to planar conversion ASIC like the CD32).

 

In hindsight, there's a really cool direct benefit to going that route as well: no blitter up to that point and shifting to packed pixel graphics would have made it ideal to implement the Lynx blitter (maybe some of its other coprocessing logic as well). The 68k is already designed to directly interface with a 6800/6502 compatible bus design, so interfacing with the Lynx Blitter probably wouldn't have been a major issue. (plus, assuming fast CPUs were standard by that point, the ST would already have moved away from interleaved DMA in favor of increasingly optimized serial bus accesses in line with the Lynx concept)

Though technically, since the blitter hard only seen limited (often high-level) use in software prior to the STe, Atari could have chosen to totally drop the old blitter and pushed for an enhanced SHIFTER with packed pixel support and the Lynx blitter (again, maybe some of the other coprocessing logic too), perhaps with patches/updates to many of the more popular older programs that made use of the older MEGA blitter.

 

That's another thing, it would have made tons of sense at the time to unify game console and computer hardware R&D as much as possible to get the best performance per cost (obviously some differences would be necessary, but having as many common components as possible would facilitated higher volume unified production for many components, consolidation of both console and computer hardware as designs evolved, ease of cross-platform development, etc, etc -the higher volumes certain components were produced in, or planned to be produced in, the more you could push more cost/performance advantageous chip design techniques -like standard cell or full custom rather than ULA or gate array ICs).

 

In that respect, they could have been pushing a mix of ST/lynx based hardware for computers, handhelds, and a new home console to succeed the 7800 at the end of the 80s. (don't bother with the Panther at all -rather odd that they ever did push that; it seems like the 7800 was the inspiration, rather odd given the 7800's graphics architecture was one of its weak points in terms of mass market support -not in terms of fundamental capabilities, but in terms of being "easy" to work with in general -the Lynx was praised for being friendly to work with due to the hardware and Epyx's development tools).

Heh, that may also have meant Flare designing the jaguar with compatibility with a lynx-related console in mind (no object processor, full focus on the blitter instead -probably meaning better texture mapping due to that too -and of course, a better funded Atari without the mad dash to push the Jag out in '93).

 

 

 

A big mistake Atari corp made with the ST was also not offering desktop from factor machines early on. That really could have helped position them for a "serious" business/computing/education market, even more so if big-box workstation class models had been introduced (more internal expansion, FPU options, maybe FASTRAM all on top of faster CPU options -maybe even '020s for the workstations).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I live and work next to Atari headquarters, and I've met some talented design teams. Those people work on the projects they want to work on. Every year, guys like Jack pop up with barrels of cash, and they say 'no', and instead do what they love.

Yep, the opposite is usually the case: think tank/small start-ups seeking out funding from major companies to allow them to do what they want in general. (technically, some companies have supported in-house think tanks with relative creative freedom -like Atari Inc's Advanced Technology division or Sega Technical Insitute- and that's probably what CBM should have done with much of the MOS/Amiga people -spun them off into a semi-autonomous think-tank sort of company, within funding limits of course)

 

I have a theory about this: There are no brilliant designers, just regular designers who sometimes get to do exactly what they were made to do. And when that happens, it comes out brilliant.

And sometimes those designers DO end up getting pulled in/consulted for others' projects, like Martin Brennan on Panther; but that also technically led to Brennan and Mathieson convincing Atari to support Flare II and thus "do what they wanted" (more or less) anyway.

 

What did the Amiga design team love? They loved designing game machines. And so that's what they did next. No sooner had Commodore screwed up Los Altos, than most of the team went off and started designing... the Atari Lynx. Followed by the 3DO!

Huh, funny that the Flare guys ended up doing a somewhat similar progression with Flare 1/Slipstream to Jaguar to Nuon. (with both the Nuon and 3DO being high-end multimedia entertainment oriented products)

 

Too bad the 3DO wasn't nearly as tight of a design as the Lynx in terms of aggressive cutting edge cost/performance. (that might have given it a realistic price point in spite of the flawed -albeit experimental- business model used for that machine)

 

So, Atari actually DID get the Amiga design team!

Yeah, too bad they didn't end up working the awesome Lynx hardware into more designs. (be it the computers and/or a new home game console -investing in the Panther project when the Lynx chipset was on-hand sort of boggles the mind)

 

What if Jack had enslaved them and forced them to do the ST plus instead? They'd probably hate it and do an uninspired, lousy, job. Or they'd design a joyful little game machine that would be roundly hated by the serious-business user that Jack was trying to seduce.

Except that might end up for the better. A game machine is what the ST was most successful as when all was said and done, especially in its primary European market (of course, it was mainly business/graphics/music stuff at first, but as the price dropped, it became a real consumer-friendly games machine).

 

Besides, being a good gaming chipset isn't mutually exclusive with a great/flexible business/art/music/etc machine. (that's really up to marketing -and form factor is part of that; you could have basically the same machine with a different form factor to cater to totally different markets -like the Amiga 2000 vs 500, albeit the 2000 had more expandability out of the box -though it REALLY should have had a faster CPU and probably FPU support)

 

Actually, Atari themselves had compromised the ST from a "serious" computer with the console form factor (rather than a proper desktop model) from day 1, especially in the US market and especially with how long it took to get the MEGA out. (even then they still lacked a big box model or workstation class machine . . . and then they went way overkill to a fault with the Transputer worksation when something on the level of the MSTE back in the late 80s would have been far more realistic for Atari's general market model -that and/or closer to an earlier TT for that matter, perhaps just a MEGA with 16 MHz 68k or '020 with fastRAM and FPU option, with the video upgrade coming later on)

 

 

And, again, Atari Corp really didn't need the likes of the Amiga team to evolve the ST, there's a ton of things they could have done differently on their own, but didn't for whatever reason.

 

CBM made a bigger mistake by not managing the Amiga (or MOS for that matter) staff more carefully. Keeping them partnered in a positive relationship/working environment would have been very significant. Managing things to support creative freedom and facilitated efficient, backwards compatible upgrades to the Amiga design would have been very important.

They also made that mistake when they lost many important MOS engineers. (with the right people, they could have actually evolved the C64 chipset efficiently -like do something along the lines of the C128 or C65 without tacked-on hardware and allow efficient consolidation of existing hardware, etc, etc -same for Atari for that matter, with the right engineers, they probably could have built the A8 hardware architecture to an impressive next-gen design -of course, the advanced technology division wasn't really moving in that direction)

Edited April 19, 2011 by kool kitty89

[kskunk]

A game machine is what the ST was most successful as when all was said and done, especially in its primary European market (of course, it was mainly business/graphics/music stuff at first, but as the price dropped, it became a real consumer-friendly games machine).

The ST and Amiga were all about multimedia to me, too, but I was a kid at the time.

 

In the mid-80s, it must have been hard to decide how much "fun" to put into a computer. IBM and Apple were printing money with machines that didn't care about multimedia and games one bit. (At least the PC had scroll registers, unlike the Mac!)

 

And consumers were losing interest in "fun" home computers. Instead they wanted compatibility with the PC they used at work, or a Nintendo for fun.

 

These threads always go the same way: Why didn't Atari make the world's greatest fun-machine? I think except for us kids, nobody wanted to buy that anymore, and marketing knew it.

 

I've read inside accounts of both Commodore and Atari in this time, and both marketing teams were begging and pleading for PC compatibility in the next generation.

 

Now if Atari marketing had gotten their way, the ST would look more like the Tandy series of PCs: PC compatible plus multimedia. Tandy out-sold Atari for years and years with that product.

 

Lucky for us, the engineering teams ignored marketing, and built unencumbered 68K-based machines instead. Marketing had to rely on awful kludges like Side Car and PC-Ditto.

 

I'm glad they built what they did. I wouldn't have owned an ST if it were any more expensive, and I didn't care that it was unpopular in the US. Thank god I had a 68K to program instead of a 286 or something. For me, it was just right.

 

- KS

Edited April 19, 2011 by kskunk

[kool kitty89]

A game machine is what the ST was most successful as when all was said and done, especially in its primary European market (of course, it was mainly business/graphics/music stuff at first, but as the price dropped, it became a real consumer-friendly games machine).

The ST and Amiga were all about multimedia to me, too, but I was a kid at the time.

 

In the mid-80s, it must have been hard to decide how much "fun" to put into a computer. IBM and Apple were printing money with machines that didn't care about multimedia and games one bit. (At least the PC had scroll registers, unlike the Mac!)

Huh, CGA had hardware scrolling, I hadn't realized that . . . (EGA too I imagine, or PCJr/TGA for that matter). I knew VGA had scrolling (and packed pixels in 256 color mode, and some rudimentary hardware acceleration), but not the earlier ones.

 

Also, it would have been the Apple II that was largely printing money up into the late 80s, not the Mac. (in spite of Apples attempts to kill it off )

 

And consumers were losing interest in "fun" home computers. Instead they wanted compatibility with the PC they used at work, or a Nintendo for fun.

You're thinking of the US market though, not Europe. Europe only lost interest in "fun" computers because there stopped being competitive machines on the market to satisfy that. (you went from 8-bit and 16-bit computers dominating the game scene with consoles well behind in the mid/late 80s to consoles gaining to the point of being on par with computers by the early '90s, and then consoles pulling ahead in the mid/late 90s)

 

In the US, you went from the C64 being dominant in the mid 80s to consoles coming back in full force by '87 and PCs gradually expanding their multimedia capabilities. (to the point where a decent game/multimedia PC could largely match -or exceed in some respects- contemporary game consoles by the mid 90s -more so in the late 90s when hardware acceleration really got common)

You had a boom of PC gaming in the mid/late 90s that tapered off to an average 2ndary market (more or less) in the early 2000s. (IMO PCs are still generally better values for gaming than most consoles, at least if you focus on buying upgrades at the best prices -and build a machine that's well suited to upgrades; it's still not going to be cheaper out of the box than a console, but the upgradability and -much more so- the lower cost of games -new and used- makes it far more attractive -granted, DRM has gotten pretty ridiculous on PCs, so there's that hassle to deal with -not quite as bad on consoles by comparison)

 

These threads always go the same way: Why didn't Atari make the world's greatest fun-machine? I think except for us kids, nobody wanted to buy that anymore, and marketing knew it.

As I mentioned in my response to OKY2000, I don't think Atari Corp should have done that at all. They should have aimed at a decent flexible, low-cost machine out of the box with flexible expandability and a range of models to cater to different market sectors. (many being nearly identical internally, but differing in form factor, built-in expansion support, etc -and the high end workstation models with exclusive features-)

 

Even the low-end models should have at least had a general purpose expansion port (RAM, coprocessors, sound, video, etc -though some things could make more sense to expand via socketed chips internally), but offer a full expansion chassis (like the 1090XL) and desktop models with that expansion built-in. (or at least big box models like that; pizzabox could require an expansion chassis as well for full expansion)

 

The ST probably would have stayed ahead of the Amiga in Europe a lot longer if it had some basic upgrades that pushed closer (or ahead in some respects) to the Amiga's capabilities without compromising cost (hardware scrolling was the biggest issue -offering faster CPUs would have been significant across the board; scrolling was also significant for non game applications and a faster CPU obviously would as well -something Amiga lagged at severely as well).

But for the market in general, they shouldn't have been aiming at the Amiga at all, but rather focusing on expanding the ST based on its original merits and on emerging PC standards.

 

 

I've read inside accounts of both Commodore and Atari in this time, and both marketing teams were begging and pleading for PC compatibility in the next generation.

With the clone market the way it was in the US, it certainly would have made more sense to push that angle (Atari DID do that starting in '87, but I'm not sure how successful they managed); as such, the ST line could be supported to cater to niche markets in the US while it remained mainstream (if not dominant) in Europe.

 

But what time period are you talking about for Atari and Commodore? (are you talking about Atari Inc marketing -indeed Atari inc HAD been pushing for PC compatibles alongside expanding their 8-bit line; or are you talking about TTL/Atari Corp -totally different company with a different agenda for the computer market)

 

Now if Atari marketing had gotten their way, the ST would look more like the Tandy series of PCs: PC compatible plus multimedia. Tandy out-sold Atari for years and years with that product.

Yes, Tandy probably could have done even better if they'd expanded their distribution beyond Radio Shack and maybe even pushed into Europe. IBM totally missed out on the lower-end/mid-range game/multimedia market when they screwed up the PCJr. Had the PCJr been like the Tandy-1000, IBM probably would have had a winner and more clones of that standard would have popped up in general. (as it was, it's rather odd that PCs didn't have any sound cards at all until 1987 -aside from the covox DAC; really strange)

 

Lucky for us, the engineering teams ignored marketing, and built unencumbered 68K-based machines instead. Marketing had to rely on awful kludges like Side Car and PC-Ditto.

Again, I don't think TTL marketing was ever pushing for PC compatibles at all (if they even had marketing teams), and if it hadn't been for Trameil, Atari Inc probably would have jumped into the PC market back in '84 or '85. (they'd been pushing for '83 even, but Morgan's reorganization efforts halted a lot of projects in the interim)

 

Of course, alongside the PC machines, Atari Inc also had several advanced (beyond Amiga) 68k workstation class machines fully prototyped back in '83 (shelved with reorganization). They'd been planning on having the Amiga chipset for a game console released in late 1984, but Amiga cheated them out of it with false delays (claiming they failed to produce working chips) in June of '84, then there was the accidentally cached return check that voided the contract (all happening within days of Warner's liquidation of Atari in early July). They also had a BDS Unix based OS with GUI intended for either their own 68k projects and/or the Amiga based design.

 

So, under Morgan, Atari Inc may have continued pushing the 8-bit line, added a PC compatible, and probably pushed the 68k based Gaza or Sierra (or a more mass market friendly configuration of the same chipset -less high end workstation level), the 2600 Jr, and 7800 all being pushed in 1984/85.

That also probably would have meant no good low-end 16-bit computer for Europe until the late 80s, if that.

 

I'm glad they built what they did. I wouldn't have owned an ST if it were any more expensive, and I didn't care that it was unpopular in the US. Thank god I had a 68K to program instead of a 286 or something. For me, it was just right.

Not so bad after the 386 came on the scene with flat 32-bit addressing in protected mode though, but that's a pretty wide gap. That, or 650x based machines still being expanded/evolved through the late 80s. (faster 6502/C02 derivatives, '816s, maybe better if the market demand spurred further architectural enhancements -but even more programming pains than x86 in some respects -or you could have had Z80 machines being pushed, maybe even the Z800/280 getting significant use )

 

 

 

Given the market in 1985, PCs hadn't quite saturated things yet, so Commodore or Atari Corp COULD probably have pushed in a lot further than they ended up doing (in the US), but Atari had funding limitations (mainly limiting marketing) and failed to push expandability or business-friendly form factors until years later (and generally failed to offer a flexible range of machines), while CBM ended up with a powerful but not so user friendly OS (not bad compared to DOS at least ) and got a bit weird with their market positioning on the machine. (they also lacked a wide range of machines until '87 -they should have been pushing low end and higher end models than the 1000 much earlier, and the high-end models needed more features -the 2000 should have had a 14.3 MHz CPU and FPU option)

 

Also, aside from direct PC compatibility, both could have pushed features to facilitate cross compatibility like PC compatible disk formatting (probably offer 5.25" accessory drives for better cross compatibility) and applications that went cross-platform with file compatibility. (they could have pushed PC emulator boards much sooner too, but having cross compatible media would have been far more significant, especially for the business market)

The ST would have had an easier time with that since the floppy formatting was already very close to PCs (I think the file system may have been a bit different for TOS/GEM than DOS though), and all you needed was double sided 3.5" and 5.25" drive options to really facilitate cross-compatibility.

 

Those are all things that made the Mac far more mainstream later on, but that was MUCH later and Atari/CBM could have had a massive heard start on the competition.