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[Haranguer]

Commodore was in trouble way before the CD32.

First, they fouled up one Christmas by replacing the A500 with the A500+, and selling it packaged with games that wouldn't run because they hit the hardware, and the hardware had changed.

The following Christmas, they released the A600, which was a big step backward from the A500. They also released the A1200, but there weren't enough parts. Very few people wanted the A600 - most people wanted the A1200, so they put off their Amiga purchases. By the time parts for the A1200 were available, Commodore had lost a second Christmas and was in trouble.

This, of course, came on top of the fact that they had terminated development on the A4000 and decided to sell the prototype instead.

It was only after that that the CD32 was even released. If everything had gone perfectly with the CD32, they probably still would have gone bankrupt.

It takes a special set of skills to go bankrupt while selling the world's most popular computer (C64) and the world's best computer (Amiga), but Mehdi Ali stepped up to the plate.

[hishamk]

Anyone care to drop a hello to good ol' Mehdi?

http://meridianassociates.biz/professional.htm

From the bio:
"His prior experience includes serving as the President of Commodore International, where he accomplished a major operational turnaround."

Some turnaround, I'd say.

[NorthWay]

Originally Posted by weirdami

What is a XOR cursor?

Not something C=/Amiga ever used to the best of my knowledge.

XOR (or Exclusive OR) as a bitwise operation has the inherent property that if you repeat it (i.e. do it twice) it is a NULL operation.
Why do you want that? Because then you can draw and erase an image in only two operations: Doing it once will show it on the screen (and "under" already existing graphics), doing it twice undoes it.

It also has another valued property in that it only uses 2 reads(source and data) and one write operation(source) per pixel.

The classic alternative to this is the save&restore with cookie cutter approach which is
- copy data under pointer to (static) buffer (read + write)
- cookie cutter bob paste (read source + data + mask(or generate mask from data if your display/hw fits) and write source)
- restore data under pointer from buffer (read + write)
Which is a whole lot more work and time as you can see, but it looks better visually.
I believe AmigaOS used a lot of this as late as 1.1.

Commodore (since 1.2 at least - someone correct me on mousepointer details) simply worked around this by using a hw sprite for the pointer.

[Haranguer]

Originally Posted by hishamk

"His prior experience includes serving as the President of Commodore International, where he accomplished a major operational turnaround."

Well, you can't argue with him. He certainly turned the company around. lol