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Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: HopperJF on February 29, 2008, 09:29:51 AM
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Hi guys,
Just found an interesting article posted back in March 1993 reviewing the capabilities of the Falcon 030, the A1200 and the Mac Performa 400 and comparing them. It makes quite an interesting read.
The Falcon seems to trounce the A1200 in quite a few areas but the A1200 beats it to a pulp when it comes to video and graphics.
Here is the link (http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.atari.st/msg/e498ac6ac3b5ec35?hl=en&)
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I see no real comparisons (except MIPS) just features.
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According wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Falcon
Falcon's 030 CPU is connected to a 16bit bus.
What happened to 14bit Paula audio modes for the Amigas?
The Atari Falcon is the only computer here with a DSP (digital signal processor) chip.
Besides the blitter, the Amiga has a custom co-processor for video effects.
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I'll admit that many years ago, about the time the A1200 came out and I got mine ( I think I paid around $599 US dollars) and that was around 1994. I remember going into the one and only Atari computer store in town here and they had this "new" Atari ST falcon on display.
They had a "Demo" running on it. It had what looked like true color pictures and there was some pretty awsome realtime effects being done to the pictures. Stuff I still have never seen my Amiga's do.
Made me feel like the first time I say the NewTek Demo Reel 3 on Amiga or Shadow of the Beast. I was a bit jealous.
I have no idea what the demo was called, but would love to see it again to see if really was as good if I remember or if I was just having a little guilt having just dropped a bunch of cash on my A1200.
Of course I loved my A1200 and Amiga blows Atari out of the water, but that one demo seemed, well, pretty cool.
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I have a B&W 68030 Mac running system 7.01. My god is it slow!
Its like swimming in molasses.
I think OS3.9 on a stock 020 w/ 2mb or chip ram is faster! :lol:
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The A3000 was supposed to be released with AGA and a DSP, but you know C= always trying to mess around with their R&D dept, cutting funding, delaying projects, etc..
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Stupid thing is that there's stated that all three systems have multitasking, as if the cooperative multitasking of the Apple is equal to the preemptive multitasking of the Amiga. That's like equating windows 3.0 with Windows NT 4 :roll:
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AmigaHeretic wrote:
I'll admit that many years ago, about the time the A1200 came out and I got mine ( I think I paid around $599 US dollars) and that was around 1994. I remember going into the one and only Atari computer store in town here and they had this "new" Atari ST falcon on display.
They stated in the link: "However, models with hard drives were used for comparison purposes."
I guess this is why they state such high prices.
They had a "Demo" running on it. It had what looked like true color pictures and there was some pretty awsome realtime effects being done to the pictures. Stuff I still have never seen my Amiga's do.
Weren't the Atari Lynx, Falcon and the Jaguar been made by former Amiga engineers? :-)
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Darth_X wrote:
The A3000 was supposed to be released with AGA and a DSP, but you know C= always trying to mess around with their R&D dept, cutting funding, delaying projects, etc..
Damn, that would have blown everyones socks off back in the day. Too bad it didn't happen :-(
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Hammer wrote:
According wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Falcon
Falcon's 030 CPU is connected to a 16bit bus.
A standard falcon has a 16 bit databus, with a memory bandwidth of approx 4mb/s.
What happened to 14bit Paula audio modes for the Amigas?
Well, that's more of a trick. For example, clever programming made the YM chip in the ST output 6bit sound - but that's not something you usually put in the hardware specs.
I'd say the original article has a certain bias towards the Falcon:) (huge understatement).
Even though based on the same CPU family, I'd say it's very difficult to compare these machines. It all depends on which aspects you compare.
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Speelgoedmannetje wrote:
Darth_X wrote:
The A3000 was supposed to be released with AGA and a DSP, but you know C= always trying to mess around with their R&D dept, cutting funding, delaying projects, etc..
Damn, that would have blown everyones socks off back in the day. Too bad it didn't happen :-(
The Atari story in this case is not much different from that of the A1200. Atari had some really cool machines in the pipeline, but for cost reasons they decided to release a patched and souped up STE (i.e. the Falcon).
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The Falcon seems to trounce the A1200 in quite a few areas but the A1200 beats it to a pulp when it comes to video and graphics.
The Falcon did have a 16-bit chunky mode though.
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I own a Falcon030 and it is a nice machine. It can only be upgraded to 14MB RAM and that is 16-bit. You can get 3rd party CPU upgrades, even a 100MHz 68060! But the OS is really bad IMHO, Amiga OS is so much better, even 3.1 shines over TOS 4.04 and MagiC IMHO...
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TjLaZer wrote:
I own a Falcon030 and it is a nice machine. It can only be upgraded to 14MB RAM and that is 16-bit. You can get 3rd party CPU upgrades, even a 100MHz 68060! But the OS is really bad IMHO, Amiga OS is so much better, even 3.1 shines over TOS 4.04 and MagiC IMHO...
Back in the days, AmigaOS was certantly lightyears ahead of TOS. TOS didn't evolve at all until MultiTOS, and that wasn't even ready when it was released. Getting of topic - the OS went opensource after MultiTOS. FreeMiNT + a recent AES (XaAES) is a pretty nice posix like OS. MagiC is, and always was, crap.
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AmigaHeretic wrote:
I'll admit that many years ago, about the time the A1200 came out and I got mine ( I think I paid around $599 US dollars) and that was around 1994. .
I bought my A1200 before that. It was the 6th 1200 The Arundel Computers got in (in Glen Burnie Maryland)
That is the A1200 I still use today!
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Reading these posts makes me want to try out a Falcon, its a shame they are so rare. One that is upgraded with the latest OS would be interesting to see since I am used to Amigas and would like to see what a souped up Atari is capable of!
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HopperJF wrote:
Reading these posts makes me want to try out a Falcon, its a shame they are so rare. One that is upgraded with the latest OS would be interesting to see since I am used to Amigas and would like to see what a souped up Atari is capable of!
Actually I would go for an accellerated machine in that case, since "modern" OS distros sort of expect a 50Mhz 030/040 or - better still - a 060.
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I like th eidea of putting a 100Mhz 060 in a falcon. Will it truly fly, or fry like kentucky?
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http://cgi.ebay.com.au/Classic-Atari-1040-ST-and-genuine-Atari-Monitor_W0QQitemZ230234003151QQihZ013QQcategoryZ1484QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
Theres an atari ST for sale on ebay for $120 with monitor. (68000)
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Amithony wrote:
http://cgi.ebay.com.au/Classic-Atari-1040-ST-and-genuine-Atari-Monitor_W0QQitemZ230234003151QQihZ013QQcategoryZ1484QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
Theres an atari ST for sale on ebay for $120 with monitor. (68000)
:-o I still find ST's in skips...
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Amithony wrote:
I like th eidea of putting a 100Mhz 060 in a falcon. Will it truly fly, or fry like kentucky?
AFAIK it's the fastest 060 machine around. Bus speed is 100Mhz due to the use of SDRAM memory. Just like on the Amiga, chipram (or ST-ram, as it's called in Atari-space) is the main bottleneck in the system.
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I wonder if one might be able to Jam some more chip ram in somehow with a soldering iron :)
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Amithony wrote:
I wonder if one might be able to Jam some more chip ram in somehow with a soldering iron :)
Wouldn't help in this case, since it's the bandwidth that is the problem, not the actual size (well, more is always better, but it won't improve the bandwidth issur).
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spihunter wrote:
I have a B&W 68030 Mac running system 7.01. My god is it slow!
Its like swimming in molasses.
faster! :lol:
In Art School we used 68k black and white macs. I got so FEDUP, I went to one of those freaky electronics stores in NYC, you know the kind that sell, prcelain cats, luggage, batteries, cameras and at the time every computer brand.
I bought an Amiga 1000 for $150 and did all my Mac assignments uising Pagestream. The 1000 trounced the mac's display. I waited up to 1 minut for a simple black and white vecotr graphic to update on a b&w mac.
The Amiga connected to my TV and later (1084) and I got the Genlock that allowed me to run video on my workbench bacground eliminating alsmot all flicker.
LAter on used Emplant quite niceley. Having a MAc and AMiga in one box really was the best of both worlds.
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What did you think of the emplant? Did it feel at least as fast as the real mccoy?
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Crom00 wrote:
spihunter wrote:
I have a B&W 68030 Mac running system 7.01. My god is it slow!
Its like swimming in molasses.
faster! :lol:
I bought an Amiga 1000 for $150 and did all my Mac assignments uising Pagestream.
$150... that's a bit of a bargain!
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By the time I got the Emplant....
I purchased An A2000/ A2630 card ram and I used it with a Retina card, and even with all that Amiga kit i still came out cheaper than getting a real mac.
Much better with a Retina as the ESC chipset was slow, quite nice. I used it up until 1995-96 in coordination with the Macs at school. I actually used their roms and experimented with various configs.
Then I got an Amiga 4000 040 with a warp engine. That ran it much better as I had 32 megs contiguous ram. By then statetd using shapeshifter as well.
Today it really doesn't pay to tinker with such emulation. Matter of fact I'm using the Mac to Emualte the Amiga on my Laptop. Things have come full circle.
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The A4000 is just the best isnt it? I mean, the minimig has it's charm, but there is no real substitute for processing quality. Give me MotorolaHertz over Mhz any day ;)
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$150... that's a bit of a bargain!
Even in late 1989 in NYC, the Amiga 1000 was already being touted as "outdated" by the competition. The Amiga 1000 was virtually unsellable since the A500 and A2000 eliminated the need for it.
The Advent of cheap, powerfull 386sx 25 machines with VGA, and soundblasters made Amigas less desirable to the undeducated.
Back then I would find many deals like that as a few dealers didn't know what they had. They saw the commodore logo and figured it was one of those old C-64 type machines.
It was also a hard sell when you have a 386DX alongside and A3000. The A3000 is pricier and can only fo 16 color hi-res, yet the pc did 256 colors. Granted Woekbench 2.1 TROUNCED Windows in form and funciton. But the support of commodity hardware and cheaper faster spec really diminished any value the Amiga had. Such a shame. Having AGA introduced with the A3000 during 1990 would have made a difference.
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Crom00 wrote:
$150... that's a bit of a bargain!
Having AGA introduced with the A3000 during 1990 would have made a difference.
If AGA had been introduced in an across the board update to the Amiga Line in 1989... The Amiga might still be with us today... The Amiga chipset was old by the time the A500 came out...
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Amithony wrote:
The A4000 is just the best isnt it? over Mhz any day ;)
Trhoughout the past 15 years I've owned a A4000 030, A4000 Micronic Tower, A4000 040, and AT A4000T and Amiga 3000T.
The A3000 T design with AGA and IDE would be pretty much the perfect computer setup. I snatched up a 3000 T with a Vortex Golden Gate 486sx and. That was pretty cool. Amiga, PC and Mac all in one machine. I also used the Winstorm Sigma Designs Graphics and sound card.
Really cool stuff.
The A4000 T with a flicker fixer and Video Toaster Flyer and PPC with Cybergraphics was pretty sweet. Imagine how frustrating it was having this setup without a PPC Amiga os...
Then I finally sell the PPC card and Amiga 4000T to have the Power PC os avialable a couple of years later...
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$150... that's a bit of a bargain!
I think that seems like a bragain only becuase of the high prices we pay today on Ebay for Amiga items.
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What was this 'MagiC' OS ..?
Btw, it wouldn't be hard to add a DSP to Minimig etc..
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freqmax wrote:
What was this 'MagiC' OS ..?
Btw, it wouldn't be hard to add a DSP to Minimig etc..
MagiC OS was an alternative implementation of a multitasking TOS/GEM. While being quite efficient on a 8Mhz 68000 (iirc it was implemented mostly in assembler), it had a few flaws that made it unattractive compared to FreeMiNT (which is the opensource incarnation of MiNT, the multitasking kernel for MultiTOS). It wasn't multi-user, it had no file locking, no memory protection, no support for alternative filesystems or device drivers, and it didn't fully comply to Ataris specifications. The latter caused a divide in the community, since it made it difficult to support the different systems on the market. Personally I believe this was a deliberate choice by the MagiC developers, as it forced perople to use their OS.
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To sum up really, if Amiga put AGA in the 3000 then the A4000 would almost be totally pointless. Though the only reason to make the 4000 would be for the 5.25 bay.
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tokyoracer wrote:
To sum up really, if Amiga put AGA in the 3000 then the A4000 would almost be totally pointless. Though the only reason to make the 4000 would be for the 5.25 bay.
If you listen to the engineers, what was finally released as the A4000 was basically a cut down version of the original A3000... i.e. missing key features like the DSP etc... Dave Haynie has the original spec document on his website...
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A cut-down version of the A3000+, AA wasn't finished (maybe not even started) in 1990 ....
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Kronos wrote:
A cut-down version of the A3000+, AA wasn't finished (maybe not even started) in 1990 ....
http://www.thule.no/haynie/systems/amiga3k/docs/wishlist.txt
I'm pretty sure I read Dave taking about Pandora for the A3k... I guess it was the A3K+ he was taking about... :-/
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Yeah, Looks like it was the A3K+
http://www.thule.no/haynie/research/a3000p/docs/a3000p.pdf
But that was speced less than year after the A3K, so I assume the Pandora work was near complete by 1990... From the spec, it was only really the LISA chip that required much work... ALICE was based directly on the 2mb Agnus, and Paula was unchanged...
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Yeah, Looks like it was the A3K+
http://www.thule.no/haynie/research/a3000p/docs/a3000p.pdf
That would have been a seriously cool machine. The DSP would have access to main memory, cool. Even though the 56001 in the Falcon is fairly fast, the host communication impose a real bottleneck at times.
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What is the point of arguing what was state of the art a decade and a half ago?
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persia wrote:
What is the point of arguing what was state of the art a decade and a half ago?
Why not? The reason we have these discussions is because we are passionate about our hardware. Some might say, whats the point of owning an amiga when you can emulate one?
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persia wrote:
What is the point of arguing what was state of the art a decade and a half ago?
Nah, sorry dude, you got it all wrong. I dunno if I phrased myself in a bad way or something. It's about comparing features, not arguing. It's the last machines of their kind, and marks the end of the most interesting part of the history of home computing (if you ask me). Personally I choose the dark side, but I'm very interested in Amigas as well.
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persia wrote:
What is the point of arguing what was state of the art a decade and a half ago?
The Amiga is history! It's our history! It would be nice to think how different the shape of the compuibg landscape would have been if the bean counters had let their hair down...
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bloodline wrote:
The Amiga is history! It's our history! It would be nice to think how different the shape of the compuibg landscape would have been if the bean counters had let their hair down...
Amen to that! If I ever made it big. My first mission will be to get Amiga hardware back into production. How much would it cost do you reckon? Good to have a dream to aspire to, whether it's achievable or not.
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Amithony wrote:
Amen to that! If I ever made it big. My first mission will be to get Amiga hardware back into production. How much would it cost do you reckon? Good to have a dream to aspire to, whether it's achievable or not.
When I become a billionaire, I will fund the development of the ultimate Amiga, and the ultimate Atari. Then we could start bashing eachother again just like we used to! ;-)
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There's one piece of Atari Falcon history that most here are probably not aware of.
Twelve to fifteen years ago Pitney-Boes used to Falcon to control a huge (50+ feet long) envelope stuffing machine. They covered the Atari name on the CPU that I saw, but not on the monitor.
Around 2002 (I think) a Kansas City Amiga/Atari dealer told me the the company had come to him trying to find more systems. They still couldn't get a PC to reliably do the same job. Plus, the Falcon saved the job record / instructions to a floppy vs gosh-knows-what for the PC.
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shoggoth wrote:
Amithony wrote:
Amen to that! If I ever made it big. My first mission will be to get Amiga hardware back into production. How much would it cost do you reckon? Good to have a dream to aspire to, whether it's achievable or not.
When I become a billionaire, I will fund the development of the ultimate Amiga, and the ultimate Atari. Then we could start bashing eachother again just like we used to! ;-)
I was being serious! How many Millions do you reckon it would take to get it off the ground? Never underestimate the power of a great machine that could have done with a bit of marketing.
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Amithony wrote:
I was being serious! How many Millions do you reckon it would take to get it off the ground? Never underestimate the power of a great machine that could have done with a bit of marketing.
Depends on what you mean. Creating a new machine, or make new batches of existing models?
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Amithony wrote:
I was being serious! How many Millions do you reckon it would take to get it off the ground? Never underestimate the power of a great machine that could have done with a bit of marketing.
Well, first you want to get asus which bought gateway, to sell you whatever Amiga IP rights they own, then tell Amiga Inc that their "exclusive licence" is terminated. If asus won't sell you the rights, you will have to buy asus and asset strip the company leaving just the Amiga IP. asset stripping is a profitable business strategy so you may make more profit from asus than selling new amigas.
you must then come up with a stategy to kill off the PC.