Christian Brandt wrote:
> On 03.01.2013 12:00, Dombo wrote:
>> No, because the C65 was too little too late. The Amiga was more
>> powerful and already on the market for many years before the C65
>> would have entered the market.
>
> It wasn't "too little too late" it was "too much too different".
>
Any new 8 bit by 1991 was too little too late and a waste of time and money.
> A stripped down C128D might have sold well for $200-$300 without
> taking away too much from the amiga market. Remove the Z80, the VDC,
> increase memory to 256kByte, leave the good Basic 7.0 inside, maybe
> add GEOS into ROM, add an integrated 1571 drive (*1), voila, a true
> C64 follow-up, cheap to produce.
And nobody would have cared. How many C128 users ever use anything but C64
mode? Who used BASIC 7.0 anyway? Operating systems in ROM offer no
flexibility, so a bootable OS like GEOS from a NVRAM drive might have been
useful - but that adds to the cost. 5.25" drives were on the nose by then,
so 3.5" would have been an upgrade, but would have broken C64 compatibility
and killed it's market.
> Face it, 99% of all C64/C128 users never needed the Z80 and the VDC.
> And the other 1% would have been a lot better of buying a C64 and in
> addition a seperate Joyce computer which was a lot better in every
> aspect and cheaper too. It was a total waste of resources.
>
16/32 bit was the future, not more half-baked 8 bitters. Commodore had a
brilliant 16/32bit computer that they lay to waste partly due to wasting
development on pointless systems.
> (*1) not necessarily a true 1571 drive, thats one expensive bitch.
> Instead one could have integrate a dump 5,25" without CPU and let the
> normal computer CPU run things - cheap to produce and most likely a
> lot faster too. Only sector encoding and file system should have been
> compatible. Software would have been available fast because its "the
> new standard" and even without publisher taking responsible the
> cracker scene would have good fun porting games to run from the
> integrated dump drive.
Incompatible out of the box is a hard sell at the sales counter.
I think enthusiasts forget that it's the general public that needs to find a
reason to buy these systems en masse.