Anyone else sometimes like to imagine what the Commodore Home Computer line would be like today if Commodore never...

I don't think it would've been possible except as an extension in the hobbyist community. There's a reason the Commodore Amiga was created.

Anyway, in your scenario the only way that OS and CPU could scale is through the use of many ASICs. Everything would have to be provided to the OS in a silver plate, you would offload to the CPU as little as possible.

Sound would be extended with a built in FM chip, like the one on the Commodore Sound Expander. SID would be retained for awesomeness and compatibility. PCM would need another chip.

Video would need its own VRAM as well as helper functions to deal with 3D, overlapping and anything common to SNES-like consoles. There should be functions to draw whole windows with transparency with just some few instructions. Low-res video (128x128) would be dealt with some cheap to implement Codec.

BASIC would need to be extended for networking but again, nothing would be dealt straight from it but it would mostly be offloaded to a networking subsystem stored in the Modem/NIC's firmware.

Horribly.

I had wondered something similar once: what if Apple had kept upgrading the II instead of introducing the Mac? Just look at the IIGS, it has the same mouse-based GUI as the Mac, only with color graphics, a badass Ensoniq sound chip, and backwards compatibility. Why couldn't they just have done that in the first place?!

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Too be fair, the Apple II used the same architecture as the Commodore 64, what makes a big difference vs OPs scenario is that Commodore actually owned MOS technologies and had full rights to the 6502 architecture. Apple meanwhile had to license the architecture from Commodore, who was their main rival at the time. Apple actually had an incentive to move to a new architecture. Commodore didn't. Commodore could've created their own 16-bit 6502 compatible CPU instead of going with the M68k for the Amiga and could've easily undercut similar 16-bit workstations in price

Its likely Commodore didn't think it would've been worth it and lacked the foresight to realize people value price and compatibility and that's why the IBM PC architecture destroyed all competition

There Commodore 64 already had extra chips for handling peripherals and I/O. There is literally 0 reason Commodore couldn't have eventually developed a North/South Bridge architecture similar to what Intel ended up doing down the line

It's like cost is not a factor for you.

Commodore literally owned all their chip fans and their architecture design. It literally would've made more sense for them to do that then what they ended up doing with Amiga

*fabs

amd64/x86_64 isn't even 8088/86 compatible. It would make more sense to do 6502 in verilog or emulation. There will never be a 64-bit variant of 6502/68k/88k because Motorola is dead and FreeScale/NXP barely care about PPC.

hooktube.com/watch?v=bS9hiSwL1KY
Modern x86-64 chips do an exceptional job at maintaining compatibility with the 8086 even if the actual modern architecture only superficially resembles it at best.

The Amiga is a whole lot more complicated than a C64. You can pretty much start coding right away on a C64 the same day you get it, and soon move into machine language. The Amiga has a steep learning curve and you need tools that aren't provided with the machine. Compared to the C64, very few people actually programmed it. In fact, if you read eab.abime.net for any length of time, you'll see a pattern emerge: the Amiga people are constantly whinning about how there's not enough new games made for it, but when someone does make a game, they complain that it's not "professional" enough and doesn't use the Amiga hardware to its fullest extent. Not only that's hypocritical, but it's self-defeating as well since it discourages newbie coders as the bar is set much too high.
In contrast, the C64 (and other 8-bit computers) have a much larger percentage of people who actually make games and demos for the platform. That's no surprise, since those systems are much more inviting and easier to program as well (unless you want to do something really fancy, but you'll hit the same program on Amiga, just on a different scale).

Shit, got a typo in there:
Also, Terry identified the problem and describes it perfectly. File is the first 2 minutes of:
No Changes to TempleOS Except Line-Reducing Optimizations.-_bTtmSxbcTc.mp4

Attached: output.mp4 (640x360, 11.78M)

wat. The Amiga was huge with programmers, way more so than the C64 where most people didn't make it past BASIC.

The Commodore 64 was more successful and loaded directly into a programming interface, it had SIGNIFICANTLY more programs than the Amiga.
Most Commodore 64 programs were indeed written in BASIC but BASIC did provide lower-level programming with PEEK and POKE that basically acted as machine code programming for people who knew what they were doing. Most commercial BASIC programs used PEEK and POKE

Truth is, most users who even tried to program (a small minority) didn't make it past BASIC on the Amiga, and they stopped bundling BASIC after Workbench 1.3, and had that AREXX shit (not good for games). The Microsoft AmigaBASIC that came with WB 1.3 was also kind of shit and buggy. The unrelated ABASIC that came with WB 1.2 was a lot better, but most users never saw it because that Workbench release didn't get sold for very long.
By the time A1200 hit, the manual that comes with machine is effectively just a pamphlet that tells you how to use the OS and load software. At that point the customer is considered just a user.
In contrast, most of the 8-bit systems expected that the user would write programs, and came with extensive documentation. Pic-related was for french Tandy MC-10 version (also came with equivalent manual for machine language).
But the Amiga that was much more complicated due to the custom chips had very little details on how to program it. You had to buy more books and tools. Most users didn't bother and just played games or ran some shrinkwrap software.

Attached: alice-manual.jpg (866x1248, 203.71K)

Even the Commodore 64 manual had a full memory map listing to aid in PEEK/POKE development

That's a really sketchy statement when "program" for the C64 often meant as little as "some thing I retyped from a magazine today". In terms of volume of code the C64 wouldn't even come close. Amiga software was about as complex as early PC software, had real toolchains that ran on the actual hardware, and its software was influential beyond the Amiga, for better or worse. I had skipped from C64 to PC and was quite jealous of how easy a time the Amiga guys had of audio/video.

PEEK and POKE were incredibly slow and even moving around sprites with them at a decent speed was difficult. It's been 30+ years but I still remember how awful the hot air balloon tutorial was compared to what could be done with assembly despite it doing almost nothing. Most software written in BASIC was hobbyist tier or the kind of thing we'd consider webshit's domain today like software for form entry. The only game in BASIC I can remember playing was Telengard and that was mainly due to its lineage and age.

Then those that did sure were productive. The C64 had essentially zero impact on the early PC but Amiga cursed us with having to deal with all sorts of wacky formats, coding schemes, extensions in front of filenames, mysterious variants of LHA that kept breaking, media tooling, etc.. There was a lot of crossover and information sharing in the BBS scene back then between PC and Amiga coders.

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That's kind of the point, really. BASIC was an introduction to programming, and if you wanted to really do anything fancy, you had to use machine language (especially since memory was limited to 64KB or possibly much less depending on your computer). But you could still make a lot of cool stuff in BASIC. Look at Eamon on the Apple II, for example. An entire community built around it and spawned no less than 250 scenarios. Not too shabby for a public domain BASIC game.
Then you look at Amiga and you see a lot of professional shrink-wrap software, and lots of commercial games. But not nearly as many homebrew games. And that says it all to me right there. The Amiga didn't function as much as a learning tool, but instead it was used as a PC or games console that used floppy disks instead of carts. It didn't enourage the user to write programs like the C64 or other 8-bit computers did (no matter how unpolished these games might be).