Machine Wars - Fight!

[idrougge]

One of the biggest mistakes with the Falcon was that the RAM could be either 1, 4 or 14 megabytes.

At the time of its release, 4 MB was extremely expensive, yet 1 MB was laughably useless on a machine with high colour graphics and VGA resolutions, not to mention MultiTOS.

2 MB, as used on the Amiga, was in the "Goldilocks zone", but out of reach for the Falcon.

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by trixster

Looking at the OP's topic, I guess it depends on how you wish to define what is "best"?

Actually the topic says FIGHT! and this is being way too civil.
So let's start.

AMIGA SUCKS!

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by trixster

Looking at the OP's topic, I guess it depends on how you wish to define what is "best"?

Is a computer inextricably linked to its software? Can they ever be separated? One machine might be massively more popular than an other, but does that make it "better"? A machine might have measurably better hardware than a contemporary but if the lesser machine is much easier to program for does that make it "better"?

I posted initially Falcon vs A1200 as a bit of a troll to get the thread moving but I think it's an interesting comparison. It would have been nice to see how the Falcon might have faired had Atari not pulled the plug on its computer division only a year after release iot concentrate on an even more ill-fated stab at the console market. It would be nice to see what might have occurred had Atari not decided to go-Acorn and price their machine out of everyone's reach. (I'm thinking Acorn A3000 here).

I happen to like the Falcon, I very nearly quit all my Amiga activities to get one, but the price point of them was utterly stupid.

Technically, the Falcon is better than a standard A1200, its still better than a standard A1200 with fast ram, but you can't escape the history.

Inspite of the Falcon being technically better ( and a lot of the Falcons features really should have been in the A1200 like the DSP ), you can't ignore the software, and people WANTED to develop for the new Amiga whilst utterly ignoring the Falcon.

If the Falcon had been priced the same as the A1200 and been put in a different case, history could have been very different.

[lordofchaos]

Originally Posted by Akira

Actually the topic says FIGHT! and this is being way too civil.
So let's start.

AMIGA SUCKS!

Those are fighting words!!! Amiga 4 life! long live the Amiga and it's glorious legacy!

One thing that's clear to see with a lot of these arguments is how much nostalgia can blind peoples objectivity, mine included. Amiga > Atari

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by lordofchaos

One thing that's clear to see with a lot of these arguments is how much nostalgia can blind peoples objectivity, mine included. Amiga > Atari

Very true.
One thing that collecting old shit gave me is more perspective, and learning about machines I normally wouldn't dare touch *cough*CPC*cough*, give them a chance and from my own experience decide if they sucked or not *cough*CPCsux*cough*


The Atari ST was quite alright I guess for some things, but it really sucked in many aspects. Not a machine I'm very fond of. I think the Amiga in average was a bit better.

[lordofchaos]

On the subject of the CPC, like yourself I tried to like it, I actually swapped a Sega Mega Drive for one, I had a soft spot for it because a friend used to have one and we'd play it during the summer, I wanted to capture some of the nostalgia, but it was short lived, the memory couldn't compete with the reality.. I still respect it as a machine and find it interesting, and I really like the colour palette, and the recent pinball dreams conversion is great.

What I find a little dubious is the claim it's only using a fraction of it's power, 40% I think, but if that's the case shouldn't we be seeing a perfect port of Shadow Of The Beast or something, how is that number quantified?

[saimon69]

When i did read the Machine Wars Fight thread title i thought at a new beat em up like street fighter using computers as opponents; sound so stupid that might come out something good :P

[kovacm]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

Well more or less. IF you talk about the true color mode, yes. The DSP, yes.

But all that is around, nope, the 1200 is more balanced.

=== flame start ===
How da fuck A1200 is more balanced.

First you need screen doubler to have some usable screen refresh rate.
I really never understood how ANYBODY could spent more than few hours in front of Amiga watching in text processor, CAD, DTP... or any other similar serious software while watching 240px low resolution 50Hz or 60Hz picture.
=== flame end === :P

Great, but still rather slim, site regarding Atari vs Amiga is: http://amiga.lychesis.net/knowledge/Comparison.html

btw
user Dennis got banned? Why?

Originally Posted by lordofchaos

Haha! Yes I must confess, I felt inspired after reading your exchanges.

The fanboy is strong with this one!

can you post link to thread?

[kovacm]

Originally Posted by Gordon

If the Falcon is a Falcon, then the Amiga is an Eagle

nope!

Atari is still Eagle http://www.stcarchiv.de/stc1994/12_eagle.php

[kovacm]

Originally Posted by idrougge

One of the biggest mistakes with the Falcon was that the RAM could be either 1, 4 or 14 megabytes.

At the time of its release, 4 MB was extremely expensive, yet 1 MB was laughably useless on a machine with high colour graphics and VGA resolutions, not to mention MultiTOS.

2 MB, as used on the Amiga, was in the "Goldilocks zone", but out of reach for the Falcon.

Agree.

Rodolphe Czuba (designer and manufacture of CT60 - 68060 accelerator for Atari Falcon) argue that this was exactly reason why Falcon030 have 16bit bus:

"To have a 32 bit wide DATA bus for the CPU and to keep same performances using interleaving, Atari would have to provide RAM configurations of 2 or 8 MBytes. 2 is not enought, and 8, at the time the machine was done, was too expensive."

http://powerphenix.exxoshost.co.uk/r...h/technic.html

end result is that stock Falcon030 have same RAM access performance as Amiga1200 if you accessing 32 bit data but if you use 16bit data Falcon should be twice as fast as Amiga 1200. link: http://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?t=25185 (please add your own thoughts/data!)


This post by Jack Burton really show that Atari Falcon030 DESTROY Amiga 1200 in EVERY technical aspect: http://eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p=...2&postcount=13 - at the end: Amiga 1200 is merrily Amiga 1000 with double bus width and double frequency while Falcon is huge leap over ST.

You could argue that Amiga 1200 was "more balanced and rounded product" (?!?) but I do not see how; what was Amiga 1200 advantages over Falcon? Is it software? Atari Falcon had great graphics, music, DTP, CAD, database... software. What is exactly better on Amiga 1200 except LOVE

[kovacm]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

Amiga 1200 Vs Atari Falcon - on paper the Falcon is better, but the extra cost (the 1mb model was £599 at launch, a full £200 more than the A1200, let alone the £800 4mb model twice the price!) and sod all software support bar a handful of games shows it was no contest regardless of C; going bankrupt 18 months later

You got SCSI, 16 bit audio 50KHz, DSP, DSP port for digital audio in/out, audio in, hd floppy, chunk pixels mode, VGA, 68030 with MMU data/address cache, FPU socket, battery for clock, ... but no games


I made video inspired by infamous textual file actual back in 90s: "technical comparison between Atari's Falcon 030, Commodore's Amiga 1200 and Apple's new Performa 400 (aka LC II)": http://cd.textfiles.com/atarilibrary...C/MTRLACPU.TXT (I believe that everybody saw this text )

Here is video of text processor speed on Falcon030 and Mac LC II in 256 colors:
[ Show youtube player ]

and here is video of (stock) Falcon playing MP3 in multitiasking:
[ Show youtube player ]

I hope I will soon install my Amiga 1200 and put in head to head with Falcon030.

[kovacm]

Originally Posted by drHirudo

On the other hand the Falcon040 never made it, while the Amiga4000/040 or even A4000/060 was available.

You have 68060/100MHz SD-RAM accelerator called CT60/63 for Atari Falcon.

Best Amiga demos best performs on Atari Falcon

Silkcut on Atari Falcon: [ Show youtube player ]

[AnimaInCorpore]

Originally Posted by Akira

The Atari ST was quite alright I guess for some things, but it really sucked in many aspects.

What are those "many aspects"? In fact the main success came from the MC68000 CPU which was kind of a revolution in the home computer business. So there's not much left what you would miss from an Atari ST when you want to "work" with it.

[drHirudo]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

I happen to like the Falcon, I very nearly quit all my Amiga activities to get one, but the price point of them was utterly stupid.

Technically, the Falcon is better than a standard A1200, its still better than a standard A1200 with fast ram, but you can't escape the history.

Inspite of the Falcon being technically better ( and a lot of the Falcons features really should have been in the A1200 like the DSP ), you can't ignore the software, and people WANTED to develop for the new Amiga whilst utterly ignoring the Falcon.

If the Falcon had been priced the same as the A1200 and been put in a different case, history could have been very different.

Yes, the price killed the Atari, much like the price killed the Amiga (compared to the IBM-PC compatible clones). But it retrospect the Amiga got pretty good software titles, even it's official death in 1994 for example
http://hol.abime.net/hol_search.php?..._released=1995
http://hol.abime.net/hol_search.php?..._released=1996
http://hol.abime.net/hol_search.php?..._released=1997

While the Facon was literally death and it received only PD/Shareware games after 1994 - http://www.umich.edu/~archive/atari/Falcon/Games/

At one time I've got an Atari MegaST with B&W display and PC emulator card and even Hard Drive inside (20 MB). I used it for some days, but I got bored with the crappy sound and black and white graphics pretty soon. Even the PC emulator didn't save it. I gave it away and I was glad that I got rid of this trash. To play games I needed separate color monitor or I was stuck forever with the ultra-high resolution crappy BLACK&WHITE display (good for business though). At least I was able to transfer software pretty easy to it with the use of CrossDOS, but the Amgia could play the YM music pretty okay, so there were 0 reasons to keep it (it was occupying space). For PC emulation PC Task worked better (and with colors) than the PC emulator card inside the MegaST.

[drHirudo]

Originally Posted by kovacm

You have 68060/100MHz SD-RAM accelerator called CT60/63 for Atari Falcon.

Best Amiga demos best performs on Atari Falcon

Silkcut on Atari Falcon: [ Show youtube player ]

Hah, I don't have 68060/100 MHz Atari Falcon, but I have 64-bit dual-core PWRficient PA6T-1682M AmigaOne X1000
[ Show youtube player ]

that can emulate all the Atari models, including the Atari Falcon
[ Show youtube player ]
so Amiga wins, Atari loses.

[kovacm]

So you can run Silkcut and other TBL demos on AmigaOne X1000 ?

[drHirudo]

Originally Posted by kovacm

So you can run Silkcut and other TBL demos on AmigaOne X1000 ?

Yes - http://os4coding.net/project/runinuae
And I can play avi movies with subtitles in Cyrillic - http://www.amigaos.net/software/70/mplayer
(was doing this for a long time on my microAmigaOne as well {Since 2005}).

[kovacm]

So you can run Silkcut demo like on any other PC?
very impressive...

NOT!

btw you are from balkan or Russia if you need ћирилица?
(едит: I see, you are from Bulgaria - I was really impressed when I saw at Bulgarian M-Tel how fine database and software Bulgarian people made to work with ћирилица; I was working with M-Tel for sometime...)

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by kovacm

=== flame start ===
How da fuck A1200 is more balanced.

First you need screen doubler to have some usable screen refresh rate.
I really never understood how ANYBODY could spent more than few hours in front of Amiga watching in text processor, CAD, DTP... or any other similar serious software while watching 240px low resolution 50Hz or 60Hz picture.
=== flame end === :P

Sorry this is BS, its like saying how anyone could use computers in the 80s or 90s full stop, people did it was fine, perhaps your eyesight was not so good? blatant shit stirring alert!

Originally Posted by kovacm

Agree.

Rodolphe Czuba (designer and manufacture of CT60 - 68060 accelerator for Atari Falcon) argue that this was exactly reason why Falcon030 have 16bit bus:

"To have a 32 bit wide DATA bus for the CPU and to keep same performances using interleaving, Atari would have to provide RAM configurations of 2 or 8 MBytes. 2 is not enought, and 8, at the time the machine was done, was too expensive."

so they ended up not with a 32bit wide data-bus, the budget model which was aimed at the budget market only shipped with 1MB in an recycled ST case for £600! and people think Commodore were bad! Anybody but Atari and the Falcon could have been an amazing machine.

[kovacm]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

Sorry this is BS, its like saying how anyone could use computers in the 80s or 90s full stop, people did it was fine, perhaps your eyesight was not so good? blatant shit stirring alert!

my eyes was used to rock stable, 71Hz, crystal clear SM124 picture

Even Amiga game coders prefer to use ST with SM124 than Amiga with Amiga monitors for coding

Originally Posted by Amigajay

so they ended up not with a 32bit wide data-bus, the budget model which was aimed at the budget market only shipped with 1MB in an recycled ST case for £600! and people think Commodore were bad! Anybody but Atari and the Falcon could have been an amazing machine.

Falcon is amazing machine with DSP, 16bit audio, chunk graphics, VGA, audio in, SCSI, realtime audio effect, harddisc recording, synth... much more amazing than Amiga1200 which is essential Amiga1000 with 32bit bus and 14MHz CPU.