[icedchai]

It felt like things advanced faster back then. The Amiga was a huge leap over other 16-bit platforms when it was released. Time doesn't stand still, and hardware wise the platform barely evolved between 1985 and 1994. AGA was the only major change to the platform, other than faster processors, which every other platform was also getting. Example: An Amiga in 1994 had the same sound chip ("Paula") as one released in 1985.

The slow, incremental improvements weren't enough to keep up with x86 and SVGA. Commodore really dropped the ball. If the 1200/4000 was released in 1990 instead of late '92 it might've been a different story. The 1200's performance was hobbled by lack of fast memory out of the box and a previous generation processor (68020, which as 5+ years old at the time.)

Early versions of the OS were also primitive and unstable. That didn't change until 2.0 which wasn't generally available until late 1990.

[cmrdporcupine]

Absolutely, but even if Commodore had rolled out new updates to the chipset sooner, experience is that people wouldn't really have used it because everything in that era was so tightly coupled to hardware -- with minimal abstraction and API [part of the joy them, tho] -- that people had to write to the lowest common denominator, or whatever was most popular.

Example: Atari's STe line got a nice blitter and more advanced sound hardware than the original ST about 2 years after the original ST launch, but almost no games used it. It just wasn't practical for game authors to target it when so many people had the original generation. (And hence the next generation didn't sell well because no compelling reason and so on). And in fact the marketplace was small enough that even just targeting either Amiga or ST and programming specifically for one and getting the most out of them wasn't done that much. People just wrote what amounted to a generic 68k planar bitmap graphics game that could be ported easily to either the ST or the Amiga, not taking advantage of the better features of either.

PCs were ugly and not nearly as sexy and fun as those machines from that era, but what they brought to the table was standards and upgradable commodity hardware.