| Nah, I still think the author has it right. The combination of cheaper, faster processors and a market that wanted to constantly upgrade is what killed the Amiga. As mentioned by an earlier commentor, who your market was really counted back then. Businesses have upgrade cycles every 3 years as they right off liabilities. That subsidises the next generation of improvements. Even if Commodore had access a single generation capable of fast 3D code it wouldn't have saved them. For example, the Acorn Archimedes had access to much better processors[1] and a chunky 256 colour mode at launch in '87.
That still didn't save Acorn[1] because they lacked those business upgrade cycles sales. I don't think an '87 Archimedes had enough umph to run Doom back then but it could have run something Doom like that the Amiga A500 couldn't if really pushed. It still wouldn't have interested the business users that really made the PC successful and by '93 Intel would still have been ahead. 1. 12Mhz 32 bit ARM2 was at least 7x faster than an 8MHz 68000 in 1987 and twice as fast as a 16MHz 386 using Drystone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture_family#ARM2 2. Although thankfully Arm did pretty well all things considered. |
An a3000 running Dread (https://youtu.be/vj-GVCcd4yo?si=X_R_f0TEnPHqOvVv) would be quite something!
What I'd love to see would be an Atari ST + T212 combo running doom (my electronics skills are not that good).
Also take a look at quake on the gba - 16mhz arm with cache. https://youtu.be/R43k-p9XdIk?si=yDycN7I3I4NWvEgU