Crappy comparison of Amiga 1200 vs Atari Falcon

[Thorham]

Lack of chunky mode meant that the A1200 sucked donkey-balls in 3D.

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

Plenty other fields were a stock Falcon was utterly useless compared to a stock A1200.

Didn't I say that the A1200 is the cooler machine of the two?

[Crumb]

For Amiga long ago should build 030/040/060/PPC processor card with DSP and 16-bit audio codec with mixer Paula and Line output and input and microphone/headphones/CD-input/Digital etc.

Cards on the clock port / Zorro is nothing special, inefficient.

Falcon DSP bus was quite slow too, slower than ZorroII. I guess that more DSP software could be ported to Delfina.

Falcon had nice 16bit screenmodes although it lacked sprites and its blitter was more primitive than Amiga's one.

Anyway skilled programmers use DSP to accelerate drawing lots of software sprites:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87EMhNkTkeo

they also have a nice NeoGeo emu, btw.

[vince_6]

Anyway skilled programmers use DSP to accelerate drawing lots of software sprites:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87EMhNkTkeo

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

[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.

[bloodline]

Don't forget that the Falcon was also horribly crippled by it's SW (read TOS) which allready was in legacy hell as it wasn't really planned for multitasking or HW expansion.

I was going to add the fact that the OS was atrocious was also a downside... But Mint was quite good, even though nothing ran on it... Yeah I should have said crappy 16bit data bus and crappy OS

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

People left on the Amiga seem to be intent on creating web browsers and other productivity apps, rather than writing games.

Ahh, productivity apps.  20 years late, but better late than never.  

My only other contribution to this thread is "Stupid Commodore, should've sold the A1200 with an '030 and some fast ram, or at least a higher clocked '020 and some fast ram.  Would it have killed them to just add a little stinkin' fast ram to the base system?"  *sigh*  Hindsight, I think this thread topic comes up every year or two!  

[Thorham]

Can't you guys just admit that the Falcon is more powerful and move on?

[paul1981]

The Amiga is not just another computer. They're alive, they have a soul. They're full of charisma from the moment electricity flows through their custom chips.

[vince_6]

The Amiga is not just another computer. They're alive, they have a soul. They're full of charisma from the moment electricity flows through their custom chips.

[Iggy]

The Amiga is not just another computer. They're alive, they have a soul. They're full of charisma from the moment electricity flows through their custom chips.

I'll swallow their soul.

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

The Amiga is not just another computer. They're alive, they have a soul. They're full of charisma from the moment electricity flows through their custom chips.

Spoken like a true poet.  

[amigakid]

Actually it is a pretty well written, non biased article.  Out of the box the Falcon was the better machine for a variety of tasks, although the A1200 did beat it in some things the Falcon was the better machine.  Also keep in mind at the end of the article when he talks about when adding more RAM to the Amiga it then overtakes the Falcon so....if both machines were upgraded then the A1200 would actually be the better of the two.  Nothing wrong with the article and the Falcon was a great machine also!

[matthey]

IMO, the technical and Amiga understanding of the article author could have been better but it is not deliberately biased. Both the Amiga 1200 and Atari Falcon had bottlenecks in stock form but the Falcon had more processing performance while not being the easiest to take advantage of. The DSP is very difficult to use from a compiler but can be useful for offloading the CPU for some tasks, especially related to audio. The Amiga 1200 is really meant to be expanded. I'm surprised C= didn't remove the CPU and some logic from the motherboard and ship them all with a CPU card (of choice) to save a few dollars and add higher margin upscale models. The low clocked 68EC020 is really slow but was no doubt very cheap for C= at the time. No CPU data cache and slow (chip) memory is a very bad combination and one of the reasons why a simple fast memory expansion provides a huge performance gain.

[BozzerBigD]

I liked the article too and remember the Games Master magazine comparison from the time. The A1200 was still the machine to get because of the Amiga software support. In terms of hardware the A1200 was a disappointment and you could argue that the Falcon was better hardware out of the box. The A1200 should have had a high density disk drive (if not a small hard drive), an upgraded Paula and fast ram as standard in 1992. By 1993 a 030 version should have been available. By 1994 a CD-Rom bundled 030 machine with AAA or chunky capable AGA/Akiko to support the CD32 software market and keep Commodore afloat.

[wawrzon]

IMO, the technical and Amiga understanding of the article author could have been better but it is not deliberately biased. Both the Amiga 1200 and Atari Falcon had bottlenecks in stock form but the Falcon had more processing performance while not being the easiest to take advantage of. The DSP is very difficult to use from a compiler but can be useful for offloading the CPU for some tasks, especially related to audio. The Amiga 1200 is really meant to be expanded. I'm surprised C= didn't remove the CPU and some logic from the motherboard and ship them all with a CPU card (of choice) to save a few dollars and add higher margin upscale models. The low clocked 68EC020 is really slow but was no doubt very cheap for C= at the time. No CPU data cache and slow (chip) memory is a very bad combination and one of the reasons why a simple fast memory expansion provides a huge performance gain.

as usual, within amiga subject, i cant really find a scratch in your reasoning..

[agami]

I've been fostering a hypothesis for a little while now that Commodore and Atari are actually one large bipolar schizophrenic company, Commotari

And when Amiga came along it made matters even worse; Both "Jekyll" and "Hyde" were in love with her.