I disagree on the premise that retrofitting dynamic RAM to the Vic would have been difficult — with the VIC interleaving there are no spare cycles for refresh accesses, and the access patterns aren't inherently tailored to achieve refresh by stealth — and that without a shift to dynamic RAM the rest of the market would have been selling 32, 48 and 64 kb computers a lot more cheaply than Commodore. I guess they'd have had to keep the existing static RAM and filled in the rest of the memory map with dynamic, which would have put them at a cost disadvantage both from having static RAM in there at all and just in terms of chip count. Which would have been anathema to Tramiel.orion70 wrote:Again, history is not made with "if", but Tramiel's tactic to obliterate the VIC with an (almost) incompatible big brother was not good for Commodore in the long term. It inaugurated a long list of parallel roads - see the infamous TED series in mid-80s - and prevented gifted programmers from fully exploiting the VIC's potential.
I think the success of the '64 is a greater benefit than the loss of money and opportunity caused by the idea that they could release new incompatible computers frequently as exemplified by the TED series. By the time of the Amiga they seem to have figured out that compatibility is important.
Otherwise, yeah, even without any change in graphics or audio the Vic could have been a competitive computer through the entire 8-bit subject to RAM constraints.
The game video posted, by the way, looks really good.