John VanSickle wrote:

> The management at Commodore should take all of the blame for the fall of 
> Commodore.  Developing killer new technology should have been top 
> priority.  Hindsight being 20-20, they should have designed the OS with 
> the highest possible degree of resource management (IE, not assume that 
> all graphics would be 8-bit forever), and then opened up the hardware 
> architecture and allowed clones.

Well, let's be fair here. The Amiga 1200 already has 24-bit colour and 
up to 12 bits per pixel. And it's still register compatible with the old 
chips.

If you had the money, there *were* in fact boards like the famous 
Piccaso that give you true 24-bit graphics. (Damned expensive though!) 
All "properly-written" applcations would transparently use this without 
even knowing it. What more resource management do you want?

The *problem* was all those games that bypass the OS and hit the metal 
directly to wring every last drop of speed out of the system. 
Unsurprisingly, as soon as you change any hardware, all your games 
break. (Or at least the vast majority of them.)

> As it was, some of the later CEOs did nothing more than collect their 
> salaries.

Apparently so.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

Post a reply to this message