Still remember enjoying Descent. And how I argued with Commodore staff at conferences on why Amigas didn't move into hardware 3d as it was the clear future to see.
I love Amigas but seems like their fate was sealed by then. By the release of Doom in 1993 it was over for sure. Their whole shtick was that they had special hardware that let them do things PCs couldn't. Doom proved them wrong.
Pretty much on the money. The hardware guys tried though. Management delayed and delayed until they'd blown all the money.
In 90-91 ish they had a prototype AAA architecture and the specs were great. (3000+). PC's had caught up some way.
Instead management pushed a cheap, horrible, slower machine with none of the features, no SCSI II but CPU driven IDE and AGA in place of AAA. No DSP or voice recognition. No 16 bit Paula. That was A4000.
Then in 93(?) there was the planned 3D PowerPC reboot as PCs had finally caught up with AAA! Then they were no more.
Was really depressing going to DevCons and getting all the NDA info in this period.
From what I remember it was more like my Retina Z3 card but better. Had some discussions at conferences, it seemed Amiga hardware engineers didn't believe in 3D and were frozen in their graphics mindset of blitter and copper (huge when I wrote 68k demos in the mid-80s, but meaningless when 3D happened).
No it didn't, but it was started in 88 when keeping planar modes and adding 1280x1024 still made some sense keeping compatibility. Adding the DSP would have made a few new niches. In 93 it was all a bit too late - and they weren't even ready to ship then.
3D was in Hombre that was the PowerPC. Wildly different and no compatibility, so heaven knows how that would have played out. Only that was when we were all starting to play Doom at work :)
Edit: I searched and found this from Dave Haynie - who always seemed pretty straight talking. Weirdly some of the dates have 10 years added :D The 3D section and the following on Gould and Ali seems to sum up the train wreck pretty well. eg:
"When he got to Engineering, he hired a human bus error called Bill Sydnes to take over. Sydnes, a PC guy, didn’t have the chops to run a computer, much less a computer design department. He was also an ex-IBMer, and spent much time trying to turn C= (a fairly slick, west-coast-style design operation), into the clunky mess that characterized the Dilbert Zones in most major east-coast-style companies"
It doesn't have 3D, but what it does have is 8 and 16bit chunky graphics modes, which make doing software renderers a lot easier than the planer modes of the old chipsets.
With chunky graphics, you can write out an entire pixel with a single write, which is essential for rasterisation in software 3d games.
It's not like PCs got 3d graphics cards until late-95, the AAA chipsets released in 1993 might have allowed the Amega to hold on until 96, get proper Doom clones (and maybe even quake clones) and then get it's own 3d accelerators.
Just asking, because I'm interested. Do you use it to pay Amazon? Your phone bill? You power provider? These are the areas I (Germany) currently use SEPA direct debit and would know how SEPA payments is used/replaced in other countries.
utility bills and other regular stuff like that can be delivered electronically to your bank account in Sweden, such that you just log in and approve them. domestic online purchases are commonly paid by card, by a direct bank transfer that's done integrated as part of the checkout, or through Klarna where your just approve the purchase and then sort it out with them afterwards.
No (well, not quite), for online purchases in web shops I either just use my card or I use "bank direct payment" which goes via the same authorization (BankID smartphone app) used for both the direct to phone-number payments (Swish) and for online banking in most/all banks and other major companies and authorities.
I don't get paper bills for services such as phone/power/water/insurance/tv, they are delivered to my bank electronically and either paid automatically or I log in (BankID smartphone app) and confirm the payments.
So the transfer system isn't used for bills, but the same authorization system is used for bills/banking and direct transfer.
