Was A1200 to blame for Falcon's failure?

[Cobe]

Lets go now this opposite direction. I'm sure theres a lot of people with some opinion about this.

I can only say that I got Falcon few years ago, and had high hopes but it dug a whole in my heart bigger than Amiga did.

[Bruce Abbott]

Yes, the A1200 was to blame.

Let's compare the specs of the Falcon to the A1200, which was released at the same time in competition with it.

CPU:
Falcon - 16MHz 68030.
A1200 - 14MHz 68EC020 (effectively only 7MHz due to slow ChipRAM).

FPU:
Falcon - socket for 68881 or 68882.
A1200 - none.

DSP:
Falcon - Motorola 56001 clocked at 32MHz (16 mips).
A1200 - none.

Onboard RAM:
Falcon - up to 14MB.
A1200 2MB of slow ChipRAM only, not expandable.

RAM bus speed:
Falcon - 16MHz.
A1200 - 7MHz.

Screen modes:
Falcon - up to 16 bit chunky at 640x480 VGA.
A1200 - no chunky.

Blitter:
Falcon - 16MHz.
A1200 - 7MHz. Blocks CPU when in operation.

PCM Sound:
Falcon - 16-bit input and output at up to 50 kHz - 8 stereo channels
A1200 - 8-bit output only up to 28kHz (56kHz in some screen modes), 4 channels

Synth Sound:
Falcon - Yamaha YM2149.
A1200 - none.

Floppy disk:
Falcon - 1.44MB HD drive.
A1200 - 720k DD drive (880k in proprietary Amiga format only).

Hard drive interfaces:
Falcon - internal IDE and external SCSI-II with DMA.
A1200 - Internal IDE only - slow PIO mode only.

Serial Ports:
Falcon - 2
A1200 - 1 (unbuffered, doesn't work reliably above 9,600bd)

MIDI:
Falcon - yes.
A1200 - no.

ROM cartridge port:
Falcon - yes.
A1200 - no.

Network:
Falcon - LocalTalk-compatible LAN port
A1200 - none

To be fair, the A1200 did have a PCMCIA port which theoretically could be used for ROM carts or network cards, but ROM cards were rare and expensive and the slot wasn't compatible with standard PC cards. So it was pretty much useless.

As you can see, the Atari Falcon beat the A1200 hands down in practically every department, providing all the things Commodore should have put in the A1200 but was too incompetent to do so (to the disappointment of Amiga fans everywhere).

With the Falcon having such awesome specs, who would buy an A1200? 100,000 brainwashed Amiga fans, that's who. Despite its clear superiority only ~14,000 Falcons were sold. This is totally the fault of the A1200 - and Commodore of course. They downplayed the A1200's numerous flaws, lied about what it could do and tricked people into buying it with fancy box artwork and a low price. Those who were suckered into buying one soon regretted it, but by that time it was too late for the Falcon.

[Pyromania]

I bought the A1200 and found it very enjoyable. The Falcon was missing one very important feature. It can't run Amiga software!

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

the slot wasn't compatible with standard PC cards. So it was pretty much useless.

My network card begs to differ

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Those who were suckered into buying one soon regretted it

I knew exactly what I was buying because I bought mine from a friend who moved to the peecee. Bought a Blizzard 1230 MK4 a while later. Never regretted any of it, and I'm still the happy owner of that machine.

[Tigerskunk]

What I learned in this thread is, that the Falcon was one hell of a machine.
In the end of their days Atari really went all out.

[DanyPPC]

Is it a joke ?

Ok, Atari Falcon is a great machine, but A1200 can be expanded, has a real palette of 24 bit, 262000 colors on screen in HAM8, PAULA DAC offers better sound than Yamaha... etc...

And Workbench OS is better than Atari OS...

[kamelito]

Written by a friend of mine back in the day. Falcon’s lovers hated him
https://obligement-free-fr.translate...en&_x_tr_hl=fr

[fxgogo]

Atari was failing all by itself. The Falcon did not need the 1200 to help it to the grave.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Tigerskunk

What I learned in this thread is, that the Falcon was one hell of a machine.
In the end of their days Atari really went all out.

Yep. When I found out that the machine exists (probably around 2008-ish) and saw what it could do it was very impressive. It just kind of shows that if you throw out minor updates to your existing machines at full price people just lose interest when you release something worth the money. Why does this sound familiar...

@OP: Nope, Atari managed that very fine on its own.

[drHirudo]

In short:
Amiga Rules, Atari SuXX.
In long:
The Amiga 1200 was the spiritual and technological successor of the Amiga 600, that improved in what Commodore went wrong with the A600 - bigger keyboard, more chip memory, more colors, so you can finally see these gifs downloaded from BBSes in true color, faster processors (for ... see gifs above), moderate to very good compatibility with older software and games, and good price.

The Atari Falcon was offering much more, but Atari focused more in their console endeavours - Lynx, Jaguar, which were totally incompatible with anything else, trying to set new standards in early to middle 1990-ies, where standards were already established for more than a decade.

One of the selling factors of the new machines (PC, Amigas, Macs) was their established software base, that can run out of the box. That's why 286, 386, 486, Pentium were advertised as fully backwards compatible. The Atari didn't offer any of these with their new machines. Falcons is great, but software utilizing it is miniscule. Same for Jaguar and Lynx.

On the other hand with simple Relokick 1.3 (which every A1200 owner that I knew had) you can run most of the old Amiga 500 games and be happy, even without the new newskoolish AGA scene.

BTW MIDI is irrelevant for the games, productivity software users (except for musicians), graphic artists, etc..

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by kamelito

Written by a friend of mine back in the day. Falcon’s lovers hated him
https://obligement-free-fr.translate...en&_x_tr_hl=fr

Google isn't translating it for me and my French is really bad. Fixed with new version of Firefox.

However I already see few things I missed. The Falcon has a built-in power supply, another plus over the A1200. And it was sold with 4MB RAM and a 65MB hard drive, not just 2MB and a floppy drive! Finally it came with MultiTOS, providing pre-emptive multitasking just like the Amiga.

Hmm, the review says it's a 'shame' that it didn't come with a PCMCIA port. Perhaps I was wrong about that. It also says the keyboard is 'rubbery and unpleasant' just like I remember the ST being (the A1200 has a wonderful keyboard IMO). And no external floppy drive port either, another point in favour of the A1200. And apparently MultiTOS is 20% slower than TOS, and GEM is a 'hack' with numerous graphical bugs. Sounds like the Amiga in 1985!

RAM seems a bit slow, 22 seconds to move 20MB is less than 1MB/s.

Turns out I was wrong about screen resolution (damn you Wikipedia!). 16 bit graphics is only possible in a maximum of 320x480 due to bandwidth limitations. Still you probably wouldn't want to go higher than 320x240 anyway so this isn't a big deal. More troubling is that all the other screens modes apparently use bitplanes - no chunky 256 color mode? The DSP chip might help here.

On the sound front we have more bad news. DMA is the same as the STe with only a few discrete playback speeds, not like the Amiga where each channel can play at whatever rate the note needs. This means a lot of mixing will be required, tying up the DSP or CPU. Sound recording works really well though, no external sampler required!

Even more bad news on the graphics front - higher resolutions slow the CPU down dramatically! And the CPU isn't as fast as you might expect either. A stock A1200 does 16% more Dhrystones in a 2 color screen, 49% more in 16 colors, and 32% more in 256 colors. Both are slowed down by more colors, but the A1200 beats the Falcon every time despite having a slower CPU. If you put FastRAM in the A1200 it doesn't slow down at all and blitzes the Falcon! (215% faster in 2 colors, 357% faster in 256 colors).

The Falcon's specs look great on paper, but in reality they're not so rosy. You're going to need that DSP to get any speed out of it (unlike the A1200 which goes faster without any fancy coding). This does not bode well for enhanced titles appearing on the Falcon. It could be years before developers start getting the most out of the DSP chip etc. - years it doesn't have.

[Megalomaniac]

The Falcon was £499 with 1Mb compared to the A1200 being £399 with 2Mb. Plus the A1200 had better graphics capabilities, especially for games, and better backward compatibility for games (much the same for serious software, aside from the Falcon having totally different sound hardware). Maybe the Falcon could have been the better system for serious software, though the fact that Atari only did the Mega STE pretty soon before the Falcon, and never did a 'big case' version of the Falcon hardware, limits it somewhat. It'd be like Commodore launching the A3000 only just before the A1200, and never doing the A4000.

Are there any games that show what the Falcon (most specifically, the DSP, which sounds like it could have taken the Falcon's potential above the A1200, if properly coded, rather like the OCS Amiga's custom chips?) could do? Of the big companies only Silmarils really did anything for it, and that was all Falcon versions of their ST games - the A1200 got dedicated releases from Virgin, Gremlin, MicroProse, Core, Team 17, Mindscape, Interplay (all bigger than Silmarils globally)... Neither system won back developers who'd abandoned the ST and Amiga respectively, but the Amiga had a lot more developers still active when the machines launched. Had the Jaguar and Falcon used similar hardware for cross-portability there, that might've made some difference.

[Total Eclipse]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

And it was sold with 4MB RAM and a 65MB hard drive, not just 2MB and a floppy drive!

It was also sold with 1MB RAM and no HDD (for £599), making it pretty much unusable.

And at the time the Falcon was selling in the configuration you mentioned, it cost £899

At the same time, a 2MB A1200 with no HDD was £299 (half the price of the base level Falcon) and with a 64MB HDD was £449. Half the price again compared to the configuration you quoted, and that extra £450 left over could buy a 40MHz 030 processor with 4MB FAST RAM and still leave enough change for something like a second FDD.

The Falcon also suffered from a lack of software. Though the specs were impressive, games accounted for much of the popularity of the Amiga and ST. The Falcon was far more incompatible with the ST catalogue of games compared to the A1200, which would run the majority of games written for earlier machines. There were a small number of games in development for the Falcon, but every publisher would want to see a decent install base of computers before investing big money. In return, that lack of available software meant that nobody would invest a load of cash on a new computer that may not have much software available for it.

It was doomed from the start, without some proper STe compatibility.

A shame, as it's the one computer from that era that I'd love to own.

[Predseda]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

However I already see few things I missed. The Falcon has a built-in power supply, another plus over the A1200. And it was sold with 4MB RAM and a 65MB hard drive, not just 2MB and a floppy drive!

A1200 were sold with HDD too.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by Tigerskunk

What I learned in this thread is, that the Falcon was one hell of a machine.
In the end of their days Atari really went all out.

Very honestly, the Falcon is not the super turbo charged machine some tries to sell us.

An Amiga 1200 is much more open than the Falcon 030.

Remember : the power without mastering is nothing.

The 1200 while less powerful (no DSP), is a much better machine overall, with much more software to use or run, and without all the hardware bugs plaguing the Falcon 030.

For example, a basic Falcon 030 has a bug in the TOS v4.04 that makes it corrupt files with a size above 30mb. You need to use HD Driver and rise the buffer values to fix that : no HDD driver = no fix.

Such problem doesn't exist on Amiga 1200, and the 1200 can handle much bigger hard disk (SSD 2Tb for example).

Next, the 1200 is much faster on hard drive access than the F030, with PFS3AIO. No filesystem on F030 can beat that.

So well, ok, the F030 has a better display, it can emulate CPS1 or Neogeo games, but that's very slim to oppose to the 1200. And today the 1200 has the PIstorm, that is more powerful than the faster F030 turbo charged (ex: with CT board).

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by TCD

Yep. When I found out that the machine exists (probably around 2008-ish) and saw what it could do it was very impressive. It just kind of shows that if you throw out minor updates to your existing machines at full price people just lose interest when you release something worth the money. Why does this sound familiar...

@OP: Nope, Atari managed that very fine on its own.

No, they did not. Commodore were managing better than Atari (while both did terrible things). Commodore was more serious than Atari regarding all the management and documents.

This will appear in the book prepared by Marco Breddin.....

[CCCP alert]

I think from memory the Falcon is effectively a 16bit computer with a 68030, could be wrong but that was one of the retorts from Amigans, something about the ST compatibility.

Also, again I think from memory but not sure, the chunky mode is the 2 byte per pixel hi-colour variety not 256 colour only modes? Possibly confusing that with another machine but I think that was Falcon coders talking about it to me.

Either way the piss poor A1200 games in general are due to the piss poor greed over quality publishers of home computer games that us Amiga owners had to put up with. Big software houses made millions in profit from Amiga 500 owners, when it came to give something back like a massive Hard drive only PC game type multimedia wonderwaffen for the CDTV...they all sat at their desks counting their millions with a thumb up their ass. The only thing responsible for shit games is the people making them or hiring the dev teams to make them and releasing piss poor products that jerk about the screen (A500 era).

Luckily the chances of getting an Amiga port job on the Falcon were as low as getting a Memotech MTX port job for the C64 because it didn't sell. worse than even the A1200 'blip' of sales.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

No, they did not. Commodore were managing better than Atari (while both did terrible things). Commodore was more serious than Atari regarding all the management and documents.

And yet they went out of business two years before 'Atari Corporation' did. Don't know if either company did terrible things, but they both certainly made terrible business decisions. I wouldn't want to judge which one of the two failed more gracefully

[meynaf]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

CPU:
Falcon - 16MHz 68030.
A1200 - 14MHz 68EC020 (effectively only 7MHz due to slow ChipRAM).

It's not that simple. Only memory operations are slowed down by chipmem, and the 68EC020 has small instruction cache. So it often runs full speed.
And IIRC the Falcon has 16-bit bus where A1200 has 32-bit bus...

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Yes, the A1200 was to blame.

It was not. The Falcon was a prototype machine with numerous bug and incongruities in its concept (much more than on the 1200).

Next, Atari completely failed on multiple points : the ST and STE computers were thrown away from shops, with the Amiga the winner.

They propose the Falcon 030 which look like the ST/STE. When a computer fails, you don't propose something that looks like what failed just before. It was suicidal to do that. They should have made another casing to have a chance.

Then, Atari failed completely regarding the public concerned by the F030:

Both the Amiga with the Workbench 3.0/3.1 and the IBM PC were at this time much more pratical to use.

Instead, they proposed the ultra obsolete and oldish TOS system, simply soupped up to get access to much more colors.

This was not what people wanted AT ALL.

I remember in 1993 a family who wanted to buy a computer. When the seller proposed to them the Falcon 030, the customer said to the seller "what am i going to do with that ?". Finally they decided for a PC. I stayed looking at the whole thing by curiosity, and that was it.

The Falcon 030 stayed 6 months maximum in the shops in my country. People were simply not interested by it. They wanted either the 1200, or an IBM PC.

Let's compare the specs of the Falcon to the A1200, which was released at the same time in competition with it.

(i have updated what you wrote since no one used the 1200 naked) :

CPU:
Falcon - 16MHz 68030.
A1200 - 14MHz 68EC020 (effectively only 7MHz due to slow ChipRAM).
50Mhz 68030 (blizzard board that all the 1200 users had)

FPU:
Falcon - socket for 68881 or 68882.
A1200 - none. (socket on the blizzard IV for it)

DSP:
Falcon - Motorola 56001 clocked at 32MHz (16 mips).
A1200 - none (there space for the DSP is on the motherboard).

Onboard RAM:
Falcon - up to 14MB.
A1200 2MB of slow ChipRAM only, expandable up to 256mb of fast with the
Blizzard IV on the FAST port under the computer

RAM bus speed:
Falcon - 16MHz.
A1200 - 7MHz. (much higher with the Blizzard IV using PC ram !)

Screen modes:
Falcon - up to 16 bit chunky at 640x480 VGA.
A1200 - no chunky (yep).

Blitter:
Falcon - 16MHz.
A1200 - 7MHz. Blocks CPU when in operation.
the 68030 in the blizzard is much faster than the Blitter.

PCM Sound:
Falcon - 16-bit input and output at up to 50 kHz - 8 stereo channels
A1200 - 8-bit output only up to 28kHz (56kHz in some screen modes), 4 channels

Synth Sound:
Falcon - Yamaha YM2149.
A1200 - none (Paula can emulate the YM2151 even)

Floppy disk:
Falcon - 1.44MB HD drive.
A1200 - 902k DD drive (11 sectors per track) (880k in proprietary Amiga
format only).
1.76Mb HD drive + Support natively Mac GCR+IBM/ST+Amiga
format

Hard drive interfaces:
Falcon - internal IDE and external SCSI-II with DMA.
A1200 - Internal IDE only - slow PIO mode only (The 1200 is faster than the F030 on hard drives access)

Serial Ports:
Falcon - 2
A1200 - 1 (unbuffered, doesn't work reliably above 9,600bd) (no one use that, should have been removed)

MIDI:
Falcon - yes.
A1200 - no (yes as an option, MIDI support is very good on the 1200 with Bars'n'Pipe => used at Psygnosis to make real music for Playstation games)

ROM cartridge port:
Falcon - yes.
A1200 - no (no need)

Network:
Falcon - LocalTalk-compatible LAN port
A1200 - none (network port added through the PCMCIA).

To be fair, the A1200 did have a PCMCIA port which theoretically could be used for ROM carts or network cards, but ROM cards were rare and expensive and the slot wasn't compatible with standard PC cards. So it was pretty much useless.

I tried networking through the PCMCIA port, it works well.

As you can see, the Atari Falcon beat the A1200 hands down in practically every department, providing all the things Commodore should have put in the A1200 but was too incompetent to do so (to the disappointment of Amiga fans everywhere).

Nope. The only thing that the F030 has better is the Chunky mode (for neogeo and cps 1 emulation), and the DSP. And that's all.

It's a Frankenstein computer with the defects you can find on prototypes machines. The 1200 was finalised, even if we got motherboards revisions, and it benefited from the publishers support.

Remember, Amiga users bought much more originals than the ST users did.
This was also a key in the 1200 winning over the Falcon 030.

The publishers never forgave Atari for what they did with full retail price games they gave with the ST/STF/STE series.

When Atari presented the Falcon 030, publishers refused to develop for it.
They said in substance "Fuck Atari, if they sell thousands of Falcon 030, we will reconsider development for this machine, but currently it's NO GO!"

With the Falcon having such awesome specs, who would buy an A1200? 100,000 brainwashed Amiga fans, that's who.

Not brainwashed. I own both machines, and the 1200 with a Blizzard and a 68030 / 50mhz mop the floor with the falcon : more softwares, more fun, faster on the hard drives access (even Kobold on Falcon which makes file copy or move faster is no match for an A1230 with PFS3AIO : the 1200 finish copying 30 files almost 2 minutes before the Falcon 030 (i use ultra fast compact flash on mine, and i use the desktop in 256 colors mode).

Despite its clear superiority only ~14,000 Falcons were sold.

The superiority was not clear at all. the Public wanted either the 1200 or the IBM PCs. The Falcon 030 was seen as Atari ultimate "bric à brac", with no support from anyone from the industry.

This is totally the fault of the A1200 - and Commodore of course.

Absolutely not. The 1200 benefited from the success of all the other Amiga computers, plus the publishers support, plus the good image of the Amiga in the public. That's how 144.000 A1200 got sold.

They downplayed the A1200's numerous flaws, lied about what it could do and tricked people into buying it with fancy box artwork and a low price.

The flaws in the Falcon 030 are much more embarrassing, requires someone that has a good soldering iron and experimented with touchy modifications. None of the A1200 (out of the capacitors pests) flaws are really a problem.

I'm sure you don't own a Falcon 030 (i do !) and this machine is not the graal depicted by some. It's in the end a very limited machine (an aborted one if we are honest), with 30 commercial softwares, with limited applications.

the 1200 is less powerful (since it has no DSP and a weaker display system), but is overall way better, you can do much more things technically and gaming wise with it.

Those who were suckered into buying one soon regretted it, but by that time it was too late for the Falcon.

The Falcon 030 was doomed during its conception, it was made from an Atari 1040 STE with a daughter board (with the 030+Combel+specific falcon chip), and it has its own shits on the hardware side. In order to get a Falcon fixed with everything working as intented, you need to do many modifications some of which are tricky to apply and install. Next, you have the Shit capacitors installed as usual by Atari in factory, and then, Atari had money troubles, which made the factories stopping the F030 production, this led to only 18.000 Falcon 030 produced. In France, we got 7.000 falcon 030 sent, but only 3000-4000 sold. The remaining was sent to Germany since the countries had problems to get them.

The A1200 has nothing to do with Atari internal problems.