Atari already had the Amiga, paid for and financed its development from
March 3, 1984 through June 29, 1984 with $500,000 long before Tramiel
was ever in the picture. I even have a photo of the Warner Comm. owned
Atari check to Amiga that Dave Morse cashed. Atari was already well
into development of project "Mickey" a high end game console that would
use the Amiga chipset, I even have copies of the actual wirewrap board.
In court, the judge asked Dave Morse to present the June 84 CES version
of the Amiga, Dave Morse lied on the stand and said it was taken apart
and used for other revisions... of course we all now know that is a
complete lie, as Dale Luck brings that unit to the Vintage Computer Fest
shows each year. I have most of the court documents right up to the
sudden request to settle out of court.
The settlement details are private and sealed. My suspicion is someone
within Commodore, still loyal to Jack Tramiel, tipped him off about the
CES unit still being in existence and that evidence was presented to the
Amiga lawyers and then they immediately wanted to settle out of court.
Essentially the June 84 CES proto would've proved that Amiga had made
significant progress on the design from the Jan 84 CES model, that
progress made the machine workable and of course sellable to
Commodore... which meant all of that progress was due to Atari's
investment into the machine from the $500,000 and therefor Atari now
held a stake in the machine, despite the company paying back the money
to Atari the day before the June 30th deadline whereby Atari, Inc (Not
Tramiels Atari Corp) would then have access to all Amiga chip data and
materials to use according to the terms outlined in the March 1984
contract agreement (which I also have) all of this occured just days
before Atari was sold to Jack Tramiel. Jack knew nothing of the
Amiga-Atari agreement, if it wasn't for his son finding the cashed check
from Amiga in Atari's files, they may have never
have known...
...this is all going to be revealed in full detail quite soon, its been
over 500 pages of documents and has lead to a massive research project
that myself and Marty Goldberg have been working on for over 6 months.
Curt
Dan Roganti wrote:
----- Dave McGuire wrote:
I often wondered what it'd be like to
build a small computing with
Atari graphics hardware and Commodore audio hardware. That'd be
neat, eh?
That was the Amiga !!
All hail for Jay Miner !!
Too bad Atari lost out on this, I think they deserved to build this, but you know how
shifty Tramiel was :)
=Dan
--
http://www.vintagecomputer.net/ragooman/