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A comment on Atari Falcon030.

Re:Atari Falcon030 by doop on Friday March 22, 2024 @07:17AM (#39789507)
The Falcon was a nice machine (I still have one!) although it suffered from the characteristic Atari penny-pinching: still no MIDI thru port (on a machine which was otherwise amazing audio-wise - same DSP as the NeXT!) and while the new video modes were great, they used comparatively more RAM and were somewhat held back by the fact it still had a 16-bit data bus.

The OS didn't take anything like full advantage of the hardware, but any serious users at the time would have piled on extensions/addons/replacements like MagiC.

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Re:Atari Falcon030 by alexisread on Friday March 22, 2024 @09:41AM (#39790665)
Massive penny pinching. The original design is here: https://mikrosk.github.io/sparrow/falcon_specification_19920... The 16bit bus limitation seems to stem from the RAM configurations - 2mb rather than 1mb would be the default config which cost more. As a result that kinda crippled the videl - only 16bit truecolour, lower clockspeeds on the CPU and videl, and slower ram access. 8 bit chunky mode was also planned, and a GPU - might have been the Jaguar TOM chip. I think MultiTos in ROM might have been planned at some point.
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