I'd like to see the Archie version of Elite... Which emulator runs it?

BTW, yes, the DSP chip on the Falcon was the shiznitz

Archie is one, you can get it from here:-

http://www.geocities.com/SiliconVall...427/index.html

Red Squirell is another, get that here:-

http://www.redsquirrel.fsnet.co.uk/redsquirrel.html

You'll also need the RiscOS rom's, get them from here:-

www.google.com (Sorry I'm too lazy;))

Or here:-

http://www.retrocomputing-world.com/roms/Acorn/

Untested though so don't blame me;)

Elite on it's way to the zone:)

And now : ALL ABOVE IN ONE LINK :D

http://madjock.emulationworld.com/Acorn/Acorn.htm ;)

You can get Archie + RedSquirrel + RiscOS 3.11 + Elite there :D

Nope, no RiscOS 3.11 there, they have been removed.

Anyway, I always like to get the emu's from the homepages, get the latest information on them there, you can't trust emu news sites you know;)

I notice Conqueror is in the Archimedes TOSEC, any chance of uploading that?

Thanks Ian and retro! I'll have some fun :D

Falcon is better than A4000?!

I hope you meant Archimedes 4000 not Amiga 4000, otherwise the statement makes no sense whatsoever.

Falcon does not 'wipe the floor' even with an A1200. Although the Falcon has an '030 CPU, in most other respects the A1200 kicks arse over the Falcon, eg. graphics.

Amiga 4000, yes.

I think it;'s a more advanced machine. perhaps the A4000 kicks it GFX wise (to what extent? The Falcon has great GFX capabilities), but in other aspects, the Falcon was more powerful. Specially sound-wise.

Id like to check it out running though, this is nothing but an assumption. :)

I'm inclined to agree with Minuous here. The Falcon wasn't that great. The A4000 is a FAR superior box.

Decide for yourselves. The Falcon specs are below.

Note, the Blitter ran at 16MHz and the DSP 32MHz.

This was out of the box? Personally, it's no wonder the machine failed. Several of those features are things that the average user didn't neccesarily need or want, yet they were still there making for a too-high-pricetag machine. Since I'm not a hardware guru, exactly which items listed there are things that one could not upgrade to equivalent features on an Amiga 4000 (assuming the Amiga user decided to add them on). Then we can discuss which features of the Amiga 4000 that the Falcon could not achieve (like the excellence of AmigaDOS versus the crap of TOS, 1.44/1.76 disk capacity, MS-DOS conventions (uppercase filenames, 8+3 limitations), etc.

Hmm, it seems like you could buy one with only 1Mb RAM according to the specs!? It also seems Atari tried to trademark the word "blitter", in '92! :-(

The Falcon's palette is only 18-bit compared to AGA's 24-bit palette.

Yes, but I do recall an interview from "The One" magazine previewing games like Ambermoon, or No 2nd Prize 2 (I think), & their programmers were adamant that the Falcon was better than the AGA Amigas' especially in terms of 3D capabilities.
But, you did need a Hard disk & at least a few meg,(I think my mate's falcon had 4meg to get the best out of it.).
But it's soundchip was vastly improved.
My memories are hazy now, but I seem to recall seeing a couple of demo's which were quite impressive.
I think it's 65000 colour mode was a realtime thing, not like the HAM mode of the Amiga.
I'm not Atari fan mind you!! But like Retroman said, no software, no marketing,no Atari & ultimately a useless machine!

The A4000 would need to be upgraded to the Falcons specs, the DSP chip being the main thing.

The Falcon cost roughly £500, yet the A4000 cost at least £1000, without the upgrades it would need for the Falcons other stuff.

And I think all Falcons ever sold had 4 mb's of RAM.

Anyway, the OS for the Falcon was some sort of psydo-cross breed with TOS and Unix. Probably because the ST was my first computer I can't see anything wrong with TOS anyway.

It's standard GFX mode (Not counting all the ST modes keeped for compatability) was 640x480 with 256 colours (SVGA).

The AGA chipsets was VGA (320x2** with 256 colours) wasn't it?

The AGA chipset was capable of displaying more colours, your right there, but other than displaying pictures what else could you do with HAM-8 mode?

As the Zarkmiester say's the Falcon would be quite happy doing anything displaying all the colours it could.

And IMO the Archimedies was far better technically than any Amiga or Atari computer anyway, it's just a shame the were killed by the British school system.

Who in their right mind would want to buy what they used at school, just Imagine the name calling;)

BTW I'm not pro the Falcon, it just seems better (Technically) than an equivalent Amiga.

Ohh, almost forgot, in my search for information about the Falcon earlier I stumbled across this site:-

http://www.old-computers.com

If you haven't seen it before it's quite informative, click on the museum bit. Very interesting, well to me anyway;)

I learnt something from there, a top site IMO. My appolgise if you've already seen it:)

Cool link. After seeing the name on the url, I was sure I'd seen it already, but I hadn't! :great

@Falcon
That was why I asked, because I'm not a hardware/techie type. But I have read comments from people who have described the Falcon as not operating as nice as its specs suggest. So I dunno.

As for OS, I just think TOS is TOSH. Any OS that limits you to 8+3 chars is off to a bad start, but it seems too closely linked to MS-DOS for my taste. And the GUI for their OS is even uglier than Windows 3.1. One has to reboot to change resolutions, as I recall. That fly looking thing on the cursor...I really wanted to like the ST, but TOS just made me puke. And reading that this made its way to the Falcon just tells me there's a serious hindrance afoot.

Also, I heard that despite keeping the graphics modes for older software, those old programs still croaked on the Falcon. The A4000 is still today expandable to a very modern machine with PCI slots for use with modern peripherals, in addition to Toaster Flyer usage. These are things that you aren't able to do on a Falcon now. I suppose somebody could program a way to use PCI cards with a Falcon, but it can never have Toaster or AmigaDOS functionality.

You maybe right, but we'll never know for sure, the Falcon is deader than a Dodo;)

Not having ever used or seen a falcon in action, but the fact it had unix elements in it's TOS might mean it's a bit more flexable than the older TOS's.

This is all imaterial though, because we'll never know;) At least we can still get Amiga's these days (Apart from when some git outbids at the last minute on EBay:mad)

What I said was that: out of the box, the Falcon was top value and better prepared than a stock A4000. Check out the prices in the ad attached.

But as Ian said, without software, who cares? From my view it was technically better. (So was the Jaguar, but it flunked. And so on. Atari and Commodore, the marketing marvels! Anyway...) Specially running in 65535 colors. For games that is TOPS. The same mode the X68000 has. The resolution 2D arcades usually work at.

And I didn't know that the Falcon kept the TOS. That is one awfully bad OS. It's just DOS with an ugly GUI atop.

The thing about compatibility is grey line. The AGA machines didn't run lots of old games either. But I wouldn't want to use ST Cubase if I had a machine that is SO pumped for audio production!

No, I'm not an undercover Atari fan :)

Hmm, attached ad, written with the M$ invisable ink fontset is it;)

And it was Retroman who said about the software;) (I agree completely though:))

TOS was based on CP/M which MS-DOS was based upon.

If Commodore wasn't in such bad financial shape, the machine they were going to release (aka the A3000+) would have kicked the Falcon's arse! But due to Commodore's lack of funds (and idiots running the company) they made made the cut-down AGA chipset/A4000 design. A big mistake was the fact they didn't make a 16-bit Paula. They should have at least kept the DSP chip design they were going to use on the A3000+ and put it into the A4000...
I do think the A4000 is a superiour machine in terms of the OS and the fact it had expansion slots, where as the Falcon was a step back for Atari by not giving it expansion slots in the first place. I believe Atari did make a prototype Falcon which did have expansion slots, but it didn't see the light of day of course. The Falcon does seem to have better hardware (DSP, and the 65,000 colour mode etc), but the A4000 can (and has) gone beyond what any Falcon can do, due the fact it has the capability to be upgraded in the first place, so I think the A4000 wins overall IMO.

The Falcon 040 was designed and ready to ship but it got scrapped as Atari pulled all its resources into the Jaguar.

A picture of the Micro Tower version can be seen below. I don't know much about it, but it did add many expansion slots to the original Falcon design.

Where is Burseg anyway? You'd think he'd jump at the chance of joining this discussion due to his all new Atari avatar.

I guess the "Lost Computers - Atari Falcon" thread we could have set up separately has kind of merged into this Archimedes thread now.