[actionfromafar]

Commodore operations were very, very poor, too.

If they had been smarter with money, I'm sure they could have innovated in many many ways without giving up on backwards compatilibity. Sony put a PS1 inside the PS2. The Sony MSX2 contained an MSX1-on-a-chip.

Amiga could easily have had a PCI bus for external video chips.

And I'm not even going into the more crazy PS3-like ideas like "so, memory and bus speed are just a fraction of CPU speed? Ok, here are 32 parallel CPUs with their own chunk of the VDP bandwidth and their own local memory".

[vidarh]

The last iteration of the Amiga chipset Commodore worked on when they went bankrupt (Hombre)[1] was intended to be a 2-chip system providing a 64-bit 3D chipset with a PA-RISC CPU on-die in the in one of them that'd break compatibility, and be used for both standalone computers, set-top boxes and for a high-end graphics card.

To sort out compatibility, the idea was for an "AGA Amiga on a chip".

I'm not convinced Amiga-users would've been all too happy with all of this - or that PA RISC was a good choice, given what we know now -, but it certainly would've been a massive upgrade.

(What Commodore was close to completing when they went bankrupt, though, was AAA[2] - which would've seen far more modest but still significant upgrades, like wider buses, support for chunky graphics modes, higher resolutions, far higher video bandwidth; AAA was in testing when Commodore failed)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Amiga_Architecture_ch...