*********************************** AM/FM ***********************************     Commodore's Big Music Cock-up, part II     (This was in fact a letter to me from our PD Music Disk Reviewer Wayne Andrews, but it's an interesting point of view on the "Commodore Music Cock-Up" article I wrote for AM/FM #12 (and which was also printed as a readers' letter in CU Amiga May 1993), so I've taken the liberty to publish a part of Wayne's letter. Hope you don't mind, Wayne. [Ed]).  Bjørn, I got hold of the "CU Amiga" magazine today, and saw your letter. I agree with your points to a certain extent, Commodore really don't know what they're doing, when it comes to marketing the Amiga, but the trouble is the Amiga can do a lot of different things. When you look at the market leaders in each type of application; Atari ST - MIDI Music, Apple Mac - DTP, IBM Compats - Business, and Amiga - Cheap video and graphics presentation, you can see that with a few bits of extra hardware, and a bit of pressure on software developers, the Amiga could conceivably lead the market in MIDI music and DTP, and with the right licensing could perhaps make an impact on PC's. It seems to me that Commodore got a bit panicky with the now commonplace Super-VGA cards in the PC's, and sought to expand the graphics of the machine to keep it's share of the market in graphics and video. Commodore were probably going to release the A4000 with a DSP, but because of their panic with the graphics decided to halt the development of their DSP chip, and to start shipping the A4000 ASAP. The saddest thing is that according to a developer who was given an A4000 to test, it did originally have a MIDI IN, OUT and THRU port, but these were later removed!? Are Commodore ever going to take a risk and try to capture some of the MIDI market? Knowing them, they'll probavly let the Atari Falcon become industry standard, and then just make some half hearted effort; A MIDI OUT port on only perhaps. So why is the Amiga regarded as a games machine; it's got great graphics, sound, and it's got a load of custom hardware that's very good for making aliens move around. It's perfect for games - of course it's perfect for everything, but you don't see kids buying it for excellent utilities, they all want to get it home and play "Super Duper Mega Blaster XXXVII". It's a sad state of affairs, and why should you stick with an Amiga when you can run better software on other computers; in your business, time is money after all. Commodore have all the business sense of a brain-dead cockroach, let's just hope that eventually they DO put a DSP in, they DO put in MIDI ports, and then developers might see the Amiga as a proper machine, and actually write decent applications for it. Time will tell. *********************************** AM/FM ***********************************