Comment Re:Apple III, Lisa, original Mac, NeXTcube all fai (Score 0) 232
You're a lying sack of shit. Jay Miner's chips ONLY went into the Amiga and Atari 2600. The C64's VIC-II chip was designed by Al Charpentier and Charles Winterble. Jay wasn't even involved with Commodore at that point. Atari refused Jay's suggetion to create a new chip set, which is exactly why he left Atari in the first place. You also don't realize that all sorts arcade hardware and home computers were using their own custom chips while Apple still didn't even have sprites yet. Apple never had the foresight to actually get someone who could actually design custom silicon on their team and still haven't to this day.
As for your bogus claim about "clock-streching" (I don't think you actually know what that term means), the only real issue was the fact that the Amiga's 68000 and chipset had to share access to the first 512k, hence why it was called "Chip Ram." Additional memory is mapped to "Fast Ram" and is ONLY accessible by the CPU. However, even with only 512k, a stock Amiga far outperformed a Mac even on non-graphical computations.
I am probably mis-remembering; but that doesn't warrant calling me a "lying sack of shit" now does it?
I was under the impression that Jay Miner designed custom graphics (and other) chips for the Atari 2600, as well as the 400 and 800, at least the first Amiga, the Atari ST, and the C64 (and possibly VIC-20). Perhaps I am giving him too much credit, for which I apologize to you and to his peers.
When I called Commodore to discuss embedding an Amiga 500 motherboard into a Stage Lighting console I was designing at the time, one of the things the guy I spoke with told me was that, at that point (around 1989/90), that about 1 in 4 Arcade games was actually based on an embedded Amiga 500, which I thought was pretty impressive.
As an embedded developer with around 4 decades of work experience, I most certainly do understand what "clock-stretching" means, and I thought I had read that one of the Jay Miner chips in the Amiga actually held the 68000's -DTAK (Data Transfer AcKnowledge) signal in the non-asserted state ("Hi", in this case), so that the graphics chip could access the memory bus (that's why there was a homebrew 68000 tweaker's newletter at the time, called "DTAK Grounded"). However, I must admit that my study and knowledge of the intimate details of the Amiga and Atari ST was only "in passing", and was purely based on reading some articles at the time. I have never actually laid hands on an Amiga of any version except in a store display, and only briefly messed with an ST. I did, however, own (technically still do) and wrote some software for a C64.
I do challenge your blanket claim that an Amiga is computationally faster than a Mac; because we have to start talking about "Which Amiga vs. Which Mac?"
But I can tell you which had a more stable operating system, and although the Amiga OS was quite the marvel of preemptive multitasking (any OS that can format a floppy while playing a game is to be respected and admired!), it was also pretty unstable overall (Frequent Guru Meditation Errors and all, ya know?). Yes, the infamous MacOS "bomb" Alert was also present more than it should have been, but that was more Application-specific than the Amiga Workbench crashes, at least from what I remember.
