bob wrote:Was really a nice architecture
However, ALL of the 68k machines were closed ecosystems, unlike the IBM PC. Consequence: upgrade to a new processor, which in itself was difficult or expensive enough, and then the software would stop working because it all relied on the standardised hardware. Not only games, but also many applications. That set a negative incentive for innovation. Don't buy newer stuff or it will stop working. That's why 030 machines were not widespread, and nobody had a 040 one.
Meanwhile in the Intel ecosystem, the main issue was thoughtless game programmers who used fixed delay loops, making games unplayable with faster CPUs. But auto-calibrating delay loops against the RTC was no rocket science, and once that spread, you could safely buy something faster, and things still worked, only better. And everytime you bought new stuff, Intel made money that they put into cranking out ever faster CPUs. It became a self-accelerating cycle.