Crappy comparison of Amiga 1200 vs Atari Falcon

[psxphill]

An extremely fair and balanced article. The Flacon was horribly crippled by its memory bus, but other than that it has the chunky gfx mode, the 16bit audio, a DSP and a 68030 which were all features missing from the Amiga 1200.

The only thing Falcon feature that was truly missing from the A1200 was the chunky video modes.

The 68030 on a 16 bit data bus was a terrible idea. It doesn't appeal to the low end or the high end customer, although it is better than an Atari ST.

Both computers were less than perfect because of the companies collapsing around them. Atari shipped Tos and a beta of MultiTos with the Falcon as proof. The A1000 got away with shipping a beta OS because the computer had more potential than others, but in 1992 neither the Amiga or Falcon had any long term potential.

I've not seen any development nightmares from Atari, but that is expected because Jacks sons Sam, Leonard and Gary were integral to the business. While commodores primary business was infighting and politics, they just happened to make computers as a side line. We at least know why AGA was cobbled together in haste and (the AA3000 at least) didn't end up with DSP and 16 bit sound.

p.s. The falcon case looks truly horrible.

[psxphill]

I always read that a 030 on a 16bit bus is not a good idea.
This might be true, although I did my tests on an A500+ with an ACA500 and my blizz030.
AIBB gave me the exact same results as on my A1200 except some results like Line test because of AGA.

It's not the same thing, in both cases the 68030 in your blizzard 030 is connected to a 32 bit bus. Only chip ram access will be 16 bit and most of the tests won't be touching it at all. I assume you left the 32 bit memory attached to the blizzard 030, remove that and you'll see the speed difference.

The 68030 in a falcon has no way of accessing any memory at 32 bit. In the Atari world ST-RAM is equivalent to 16 bit chip ram and TT-RAM is 32 bit fast ram, the falcon (without an accelerator) only supports ST-RAM.

So to get good performance you have to pay just as much for as an accelerator as you do on the A1200. Which makes the choice of 68030 rather strange. It's obviously a 68000 design with a 68030 shoe horned in as they only connect 24 address lines. The A1200 on the other hand can get 32 bit fast ram with just a cheap trapdoor ram upgrade. Although the A1200 is limited to 24 address lines unless you buy an accelerator.

[psxphill]

Lack of chunky modes is the least of your concerns when dealing with real 3D.

In terms of rendering it's pretty important. Texture mapping hardware and geometry/lighting maths in hardware are what you'd want next, but it would have made a huge difference.

Commodore should easily have been able to produce something with chunky pixels and non perspective corrected texture mapping in hardware (ie primitive PS1) by 1991. But they had to rush to get AGA out the door because they had been chasing AAA for so long. It would have still sold a boat load if it only had 8 bit colour and 8 bit sound, but they would have had to release another machine in 1994 to leapfrog the PS1 though.

Isn't this great?
Sometimes I ask myself why didn't we have games like this on amiga taking advantages of 040/060 :-/

People left on the Amiga seem to be intent on creating web browsers and other productivity apps, rather than writing games. If AGA hadn't been a rush to get something out of the door then it would have had chunky video and the blitter would be more than just the OCS blitter copy and pasted, and you'd have games like that on stock machines.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpwlZgQPCpk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjgWx3DE1CY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTxwfRl_I0U

No Amiga can do that with a 16 mhz 68030.

I think I can live without Quake 2 in low res at 6fps. The DSP helps with all that geometry sure, but the rest of the hardware can't keep up. I'm not sure why anyone would want a 16mhz 68030 with no fast ram on an A1200, apart from an extra 2mhz and the extra cache it would barely be any different.
 
 There seems to be some competition in the thread http://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=68&t=26775&start=950 I'm not quite sure why he's having so much problems with data caches on the Amiga though.

[psxphill]

C= produced the Amiga 4000CR (Cost Reduced) motherboard without a CPU to save a few dollars so why not the Amiga 1200?]

It was the other way round. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_4000#A4000-CR_version

The first Amiga 4000s were shipped without the cpu present on the motherboard but with a card in the cpu slot. They then started shipping them with the cpu on the motherboard and without the card, to save money on the cpu card.

It's much cheaper to put the cpu on the motherboard than ship it on a card, So if they had done that with the A1200 you would have to pay more for the same speed cpu.

£999? Wow, I had no idea! That's a lot of dough!

I'm pretty sure it was closer to £599.

[psxphill]

Interesting, so the 4000CR with CPU would be cheaper for buyers wanting a 68EC030 but I would have thought the percentage wanting a higher end CPU would be growing and decreasing the advantage of adding an unused CPU on the motherboard.

If they wanted a higher end CPU they would buy the A4000/40.

You could argue there would be people who wanted to buy an A4000 without a cpu at all and add a third party one, but that would likely cause issues with people buying one and finding out it wasn't actually a stand alone computer. You'd also likely add more cost by having multiple SKU's. If you are buying an 060 board you can afford the low cost of the EC030 on the board.

It would likely have been cheaper for commodore to only ship the EC030 versions and sell anything faster as dealer upgrades.

Atari banned retailers selling Falcons via mail, unless the customer asked for written permission from Atari that they then passed on to the dealer. That would have severely hampered the uptake, which would have reduced the amount of software being created. It was hard enough for commodore to get developers to make AGA specific games.

[psxphill]

The thought goes:
Route the 28mhz signal from the oscillator directly to the CLK pin on the cpu. That should in theory run the cpu at 28Mhz.
and add fpu and 4/8MB trapdoor ram card....

I think it's unlikely that the 14mhz ec020 will run happily at 28mhz.

An fpu doesn't need to run at the same speed as the cpu, but all that surface mount soldering is not going to be fun. It's cheaper to just buy an accelerator (if you have the skills to do the mods then in the time you've spent tinkering with your a1200 you could earn money doing something else).

[psxphill]

3.5" IDE was no option:
- space (yeah I know they do fit, but surely not according to any spec)
- power consumption (add some RAM/CPU and drain a bit power at the ports and you'll have problem)
- most 3.5" drives at that time had problems sending there parameters, not a problem on x86 where those where strored in NVRAM after been read out at setup. 2.5" drive where much more reliable.

A low profile 3.5" drive, an uprated power supply and a buffered ide port worked fine. Yes it's not standard, but then plenty of amiga upgrades weren't standard.

[psxphill]

But in 1992 and on a budget C= would have offered drives around 50-200MB and most of them would not have worked.

I'm not convinced that most 3.5" drives had broken identify responses, but if commodore had placed an order then the manufacturer would fix it.

What really kills your argument is that the A4000 shipped first in 1992 with 3.5" drives and they worked, so they would work in an A1200.

They used 2.5" drives for size and power reasons.

[psxphill]

As well as operating systems originally intended for the Sinclair QL and its descendants like SMS2.

I'm surprised nobody ever ported amigaos to it.

[psxphill]

Problem is that AmigaOS needs atleast the CIAs to work at all and either the rest of the chipset or massive patching (CGX/P96) to be really usefull.

Yes, essentially you need to write a new bootstrap, timer device, new trackdisk device, a cgx/p96 driver, AHI device and an scsi/ide device.

Quite a difference to running MacOS or TOS on an Amiga where all you needed was the ROM-images and a few mild patches.

It's unlikely to be much different to be honest. At least the amount of Mac patches wasn't trivial.

I might be cautious in saying the PS4 has a "DSP". It is not targeted for general purpose audio processing, the main CPU is what does all that. The "DSP" mostly deals with encoding and decoding. Is that a DSP, or is it just another auxiliary processor that is cost effective at that task?

It's mostly a marketing term. A DSP is an embedded cpu that has certain attributes. It can be manufactured to purely run unchangeable software from an internal ROM to perform a single function and still be a DSP. Old modems for instance used DSP's, flash came along eventually and some of them could be upgraded. The first DSP was the TMS5100 used in the speak and spell.

http://ethw.org/Milestones:Speak_%26_Spell,_the_First_Use_of_a_Digital_Signal_Processing_IC_for_Speech_Generation,_1978

Within recent years a tms5100 chip has been decapped and the mask rom dumped.

[psxphill]

An original unexpanded 500, 1000 or 2000 isn't much better.

There are some ok Atari ST games and some ST games were ported to the Amiga without making many changes. The top Amiga games were much better on the Amiga though (for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNGXuQKSjhI)

The Sega Genesis came out some 3 years later than the Atari ST with more powerful hardware (plus its a computer vs console).

The major difference is it used a sprite and tile engine rather than bitmaps. Tiles work great for games, not so well for word processors.

[psxphill]

Shadow of the Beast probably needs 1MB of memory and maybe a fat Agnus where most early Amigas came with 512kB and the old Agnus.

Some people online claim they were able to run shadow of the beast on an a1000. Whether it was unexpanded or not is another matter.

Graphically it should be doable on an unexpanded amiga as it's mostly just a copper list, but I don't believe you could match it on an ST no matter what you did to it.