While I usually do not contribute to this kind of sensless discussion on which dinosaur was better than the other dinosaur I somehow did. Must be the commodore/amiga virus that lives within me.
Anyway I was reading dr Marillion comparison between the Falcon030 and the A1200 and I can only say that (after doing some research) he is right about the A1200.
The Falcon 030 looks better in comparison of RAW specs. Nowhere I have been able to find evidence of the 030 being hooked to a 16 bit bus.
Falcon spec sheet
[Edit: The keen eye spied that this spec sheet is listed under the 16bit catagory. The sheet itself however states the machine has an 32/32 bit architecture]
I have no idea how fast it really feels when using it. I must say a stock A1200 crawls when using 640x256 in 8 bitplanes. It is just begging for fast ram. Having no hands on experience with the falcon I can say nothing about it. But still I am impressed by the specification sheet of the falcon.
As for price I have no clue either. This IS important since the price of the machine is used by the consumer to class the machine. Maybe the A1200 is outclassed here and an A4000/040 is a better object for comparison.
As for the OS I'm in the dark too. Yes, I hear saying one should not call TOS an OS but anything that operates a system is an operating system. I read the OS that was standard on the falcon has preemtive multitasking. I wonder how it 'feels' when using it.
There is no denying in the fact that AmigaOS was probably designed better from the start. So it is very likely that, despite the impressive specs, the OS the falcon was operated with still lagged behind.
Anyway in general I'd say Atari's where behind the Amiga technically. But the last flagship the falcon is sure did some catching up. Not so surprising since the Commodore management where too busy smoking sigars and forgot about investing into development.
Fun thread! But since I am not a
Paleontologist I'm going back to give my dino a spinn. Got beaten by the SWOS AI and am after some revenge ;-)