The future of consoles

Yeah. Unfortunately for us old geezers there's an entire generation of young gamers who have grown up with a digital online gaming landscape who care less about how they get something and more about the convenience of when and where. That generation is entirely accustomed to not owning things and simply consuming what they can where they can.

It's going to feel like it will take a long while for the transition to happen, however, it will ALSO feel like it happened all at once... after it does.

It will be fascinating to see how it all unfolds. That's why preserving it's history is so important! Once the full shift is made... gaming will never be the same again.. there's no going back...and that's terrifying to some people.

 

You missed it. It's already happened. According to both Sony and Microsoft, most people buy their titles digitally now for both PlayStation and Xbox. And it's not even all that close.

It won't be too long until many publishers and developers abandon physical distribution entirely unless the platform holder requires them to release a physical version. Some developers and publishers are already choosing not to release some of their games on physical media anymore.

Regards,
SB

 

Amiga CD32 was Commodore's last gamble. They had no money anymore to do anything besides repackaging old stuff. Quite sad how Apple could survive with the System POS for so long while CBM completely fumbled what they had.

 

For folks who never owned an Amiga, it's sometimes difficult to understand how far Commodore were ahead in engineering in the late 1980s and early 1990s, they were doing some crazy cutting-edge stuff. The Amiga always had a forward-looking design and Commodore had their 'AAA' chipset in development (following OCS and ECS) which was very competitive with PC developments, then they ditched that to work on Hombre - a RISC-based 3D-accelerated architectures literally years 6-7 years ahead of the competition.

As somebody who loved their A1000, A2000, A1200 and A4000, I find Commodore's demise one of the most frustrating failures in the tech field.

 

One thing I heard a few different times but never bothered to research into the accuracy of the claim is:

A) The engineers behind Commodore produced a design that was rejected but then picked up from Atari and produced as the Atari ST lines.
B) The engineers behind Atari produced a design that was rejected but then picked up from Commodore and produced as the Amiga lines.

What's the actual history behind the Amiga and ST lineups?

 

It's actually pretty well documented - Ars Technia made a long series. The Amiga was designed by an independent team. They approached Atari about buying and marketing it, but Atari played hardball. They approached Commodore who gave them bags of cash and facilities. That's it.

Atari then rushed out the Atari ST which was a close as you could get to an Amiga without years of engineering to make custom chips - which they were already working on. Commodore was founded by a guy named Jack Tramiel and he forced out of Commodore during the Commodore 64 years. He founded Atari in 1984, buying the company Warner owned so competition between Tramiel and Commodore was bonkers.

 

Thanks for that. It always felt to me that the Amiga was fairly close to the Atari 8Bit series with how the custom chips worked.

 

The Amiga hardware was co-designed by the guy who made the Atari 8-bit computer chips -Jay Miner.

 

It was Atari turning down Jay Miner's (key architect for the chips used in the Atari 2600 and other Atari consoles) proposal to create a chip and chipset that could be used in a personal computer and/or console (what would become Project Lorraine at Amiga) that led to him leaving Atari to help found Hi-Toro which later became the Amiga Corporation.

However, Amiga Corporation ran out of money and approached Atari for a loan. As part of the loan conditions if Amiga did not pay back the loan in a short amount of time (IIRC they were given one month) then Atari would gain exclusive rights to the chip (designated Lorraine) for one year. Commodore then acquired Amiga Corp. and attempted to nullify those contracts.

After a bunch of legal maneuvering during which the Lorraine project was put on hold, the lawsuits were settled and the Lorraine project proceeded which ended up with the Amiga 1000.

Part 2 of the Ars Technica series talks about this in more detail. But it leaves out key parts like Jay Miner being key in the design of Atari console chips prior to his leaving Atari due to them not approving his proposal to make a chip and chipset that could be used in a personal computer as well as a console (project Lorraine).

Regards,
SB

 

'The future of consoles' to 'the history of consoles' j/k, its an intresting read

 

I still have the legendary Devcon manual in a shelf where they introduced the AAA stuff and then a year later on a more exclusive national CBM dev conference in April/May 92 or so they talked that their next systems would only come with AA. 1200 and 4000 were pretty much cost optimised systems.

Pretty much killed a lot enthusiasm but lead to the 3rd party push with 68060, RTG + Graphics cards and then PowerPC back then. If CBM had been able to release AA with the A3000 and AAA+RTG with 1200/4000 they could have remained competitive for a few more years at least.

P.S. Late80 to early 90s Amiga was imho the centre of creativity in uni/hobby programming. The people which then moved over to Linux/BSD.

 

I think the original Amiga by far the most forward hardware ever released. It revolutionised so many fields all at once. People who have never experienced Workbench can't understand how far ahead of the game its OS was too. Rock solid pre-emptive multitasking when the rest of the world was task switching fugly interfaces. It was such a fabulously designed piece a kit, a real work of magic in the same vein as consoles with their dedicated hardware. Things have had to move on, but as a result I think the Amiga will always be the GOAT.

 

I'm likely moving to a new house soon and after that if I get the chance I'll try to see if my A3000 will still boot and post a couple photos for those who want to see what the magic of the Amiga was all about.

 

It really needs to be seen alongside GEM and Windows and DOS etc. to appreciate it was an entire generation or two ahead on the software front.

 

I sold all mine, but I do have bootalble images of all my old Amiga HDDs and floppy discs, so I can boot into my old AmigaOS 3.1 desktop any time I like. It still has the Miami TCP/IP stack and my massive Spot fidonet message bases at the point when I switched over, along with my Devpac 3.0 assembly environment and a bunch of other random stuff.

 

Its funny how we are talking about old school consoles. We are looking into the past instead of the future. We were really having some good times when everything was manual and every single console function was an experience.
I guess it was resonating with our childhood internal instinct for exploration which involves hearing, seeing but also touching and manipulating objects.

Anyhow, where consoles are heading can be seen in Sony's and Microsoft's movements. I dont think Sony's exploration into the PC space and the "coincidental" studio acquisition by the two corporations is only an effort to get talent into the board.
I think they both know that the console as we know it will no longer exist. MS is purchasing the big studios to support, not the XBOX itself, but the whole offering brought by MS's ecosystem and subscription based service.

In fact Ken Kutaragi himself, in an interview during the PS2 era, he expressed that he saw the PS not being just that device under a TV but something that will exist inside other devices and broadband internet was going to be a big part of Playstation.
This is where both companies are heading. And thats why Sony is strengthening the collection of games brought from their studios and then bringing them to the PC.

Sony knows that MS is expanding the XBOX in PCs and home devices. At some point it wont be about exclusives in a traditional console. Its gonna be exclusives and a plethora of games existing in a platform agnostic ecosystem. MS's gaming ecosystem is not limited to XBOX hardware capabilities/performance/accessibility. Sony cant rely on just Playstation console hardware. They need to expand those games similarly as well as their portals of revenue. And thats why I believe they started investing on PC and they are looking into bringing a service similar to gamepass, since they believe competition's moves will offset the strength and viability of a console as just a single platform. They are creating market entries so they are ready to move fast. They will be cought off guard just as they were caught with their Trinitron TVs while others were releasing HD sets if they dont make moves. Otherwise the old model would have sufficed.

 

Didnt some Sony tvs have a PS2/PS3 build in?

 

I remember TVs that were supposed to have Cell processors.
I did a quick search and it looks like they released a small TV with a PS2 embeded at its base after the PS3 was released.
It looks stupid, the PS2 was already outdated and the TV wasnt anything special. It was limited stock it seems as probably they wented to get rid of left over PS2 hardware
https://thenextweb.com/news/sony-launches-bravia-tv-with-built-in-ps2-console

 

I think Sony had ambitions for the Cell way beyond the PS3, into the server/pc market perhaps. The CPU was extremely fast and efficient for specific workloads, but compatibility was a problem i suppose.

 

Yes they had a vision where Cell would be implemented almost in every device that does conputing. It boggles my mind how much money and time they ve spend and still the design was problematic or at least they didnt plan ahead for compatibility which it is why it died so fast.