Was A1200 to blame for Falcon's failure?

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by TCD

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

What happened at Commodore is that they did what we call here "social abuse".

It's when a CEO or the high management members mix up the company money and assets (ex: private jet) with their own.

they sunk down the money commodore did with the Amiga (and C64, PC).

Atari Corp was a zombie, just waiting for the little push to collapse on the ground.

Two different stories here. Commodore for money robbed for personal use and Atari for money lost (they were lowest manufacturer of this market).

[drHirudo]

The Amiga 1200 was good purchase even for hardcore Amiga 500 fans. There were not many AGA games available at first, but some Amiga 500 OCS/ECS titles were utilizing the extra hardware (mostly the memory), but also HDD presented in the newer machines. I knew one person who was playing only 1 single game - The Settlers. This game played better on A1200, utilizing the extra memory and faster CPU. For other Workbench and PD games from Fred Fish disks or Aminet, the A1200 was offering the possibility to play them from RAM drive at very fast loading speed.

PowerPacker was decompressing files faster, etc.., etc.. Not much titles on the Falcon utilized the extra hardware, making no sense to buy it, except for professional use (music studio, or DTP).

[Megalomaniac]

By the time 030s became available for the A1200 in mid-1993 you could get undercut the £900 Falcon version with a faster A1200 for less - although an A1200 with fast RAM is probably just as fast as a Falcon in real terms anyway. The Falcon had an inferior OS and more bugs and limiations too. There are a few ports which the Falcon had as standard that the A1200 didn't, but they can all be added on by the small percentage of users who needed them.

On the games side the A1200 was probably more naturally capable, even if both machines had received equal manufacturer support AND developers had mastered fully exploiting the DSP. (even in the best case where the Falcon was more capable and developers did support it, Falcon owners would have had 2 years of 'lame A1200 ports' before most companies fully exploited it)

Heck, the A4000/30 cost little more than a 4Mb 65Mb Falcon, with a proper case and a monitor (though the high density drive reduced games compatibility).

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

It was not. The Falcon was a prototype machine

The machine sent to mail order firms was literally just that, a prototype, the case was a quick mock-up for developers and the like, the final case was due after the first shipment sold-through, of course they didn’t sell-through in Atari’s lifetime and the proper case design never saw the light of day.

[eXeler0]

Ah the Falcon, a fascinating topic.

Much has been said already, but some things are important to get right to understand the big picture.

*One gets the distinct feeling Atari barely believed in this product themselves. But it seems at least they were aiming at the more "serious market", trying to break free from the "toy branding" with the Falcon. The more capable machines with 4MB RAM and HD were about $1000 at launch...
But, it started with some sort of prototype expansion card for the 1040STE with a 030 and DSP (Atari FX1 / Sparrow) and prototypes were basically modified 1040STEs.. so if you want to aim at a new more serious market, maybe they should have chosen the other case for the computer (you know, the one that inspired PS2)
This 1040 legacy also meant the Falcon had some crippling design flaws that have been discussed a azillion times already...
Chunky Pixel mode was added, which is one of those nice things that commodore should have done ith AGA... anyhoo.. didnt exactly help in the end..

*Next disastrous thing was the launch of the machine. Check out the thread here in the forums about the "exact launch date" of the Falcon to get an idea how fuzzy and undefined the whole thing was.

*Finally, the only software makers interested in the Falcon were those who were in the music business. Everyone else was going to "wait and see". (What market is there for Atari Falcon only games for example.. its obvious this was a huge failure from day 1...

[Karlos]

I think the falcon could've been better with a 32-bit bus, for example but it's not as bad as we often think: Moving 16 bit words at 16MHz is slightly faster than moving 32-bit ones at 7MHz.

Overall it's a nice machine and when the DSP is out to good use, the results can be very impressive. Who hasn't seen the Quake3 level renderer running on it?

[ Show youtube player ]

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by Karlos

I think the falcon could've been better with a 32-bit bus, for example but it's not as bad as we often think: Moving 16 bit words at 16MHz is slightly faster than moving 32-bit ones at 7MHz.

Overall it's a nice machine and when the DSP is out to good use, the results can be very impressive. Who hasn't seen the Quake3 level renderer running on it?

[ Show youtube player ]

Sure, the DSP was nice.
In an alternative universe, the A3000+ was launched with the DSP and then the A1200 also got as part of a new Standard addition to the chip-set ;-)
I don't think a lot of ppl here would mind an A1200 with a chunky pixel mode and a DSP ;-)

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

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

I used it with a peecee serial mouse for several years. Worked well enough.

[klx300r]

Originally Posted by Pyromania

... The Falcon was missing one very important feature. It can't run Amiga software!

[TCD]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

*Next disastrous thing was the launch of the machine. Check out the thread here in the forums about the "exact launch date" of the Falcon to get an idea how fuzzy and undefined the whole thing was.

Let's not forget that the Amiga 1200 was 'launched' on 21.10.1992, but wasn't available in shops until well into 1993. Granted that was in tradition with other Amigas, but in 1992/93 every month counted.

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by Pyromania

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

Originally Posted by DanyPPC

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...

Same reasons I would choose A1200 over Falcon.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

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

I am not very familiar with Falcon, so I gotta ask some questions.

Does chunky helps Falcon tremendously in 3D games?
I've seen that demo someone posted and it's pretty impressive.
What about library of 3D games for Falcon? Is there some 3D games on Falcon that are impressive like that demo? I tried googling for Doom on Falcon, but all I can find is some fairly recent port in the makings.
Wouldn't Doom be the first game to port back in the days, and why nobody did it?

My most important question is: How much chunky helps to Falcon in comparison with A1200 that would have the same 030 proc (with additional card), same amount of Ram.. etc?

[HomeLate]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

My most important question is: How much chunky helps to Falcon in comparison with A1200 that would have the same 030 proc (with additional card), same amount of Ram.. etc?

I wouldn't know if a stock Falcon could run Doom, but mine has a DFB1x accelerator and together with the DSP Doom runs great.
The DFB1x has 68030 and 68882 running at 40Mhz with 128Mb alt-ram.

I haven't tried Doom yet on my accelerated 1200 (Blizzard 1230) but I'm sure going to try if I figured out which is the best Doom port to run on Amiga's
I have ADoom on my 4000 with a full rev 5 68060 but it runs like crap. Probably due to the A3660 which is about the slowest you can get in a 4000.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

Same reasons I would choose A1200 over Falcon.



I am not very familiar with Falcon, so I gotta ask some questions.

Does chunky helps Falcon tremendously in 3D games?
I've seen that demo someone posted and it's pretty impressive.
What about library of 3D games for Falcon? Is there some 3D games on Falcon that are impressive like that demo? I tried googling for Doom on Falcon, but all I can find is some fairly recent port in the makings.
Wouldn't Doom be the first game to port back in the days, and why nobody did it?

My most important question is: How much chunky helps to Falcon in comparison with A1200 that would have the same 030 proc (with additional card), same amount of Ram.. etc?

Well it helps for chunky display task, like using a neogeo emulator or CPS1 emulator for example.....

[TCD]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

Does chunky helps Falcon tremendously in 3D games?

Here's a thread on AtariAge about the topic: https://forums.atariage.com/topic/32...tari-stfalcon/
I recommend to read it (even if it's quite lengthy).
Tiny spoiler: It didn't

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by TCD

Let's not forget that the Amiga 1200 was 'launched' on 21.10.1992, but wasn't available in shops until well into 1993. Granted that was in tradition with other Amigas, but in 1992/93 every month counted.

Most facts I've found so far suggest there were maybe 5000 Falcons released in 1992, and thats it, it wasn't really available until March/April 1993. And by the time they *were* available, Atari was already hyping the "amazing" Jaguar which then appeared just half a year later and probably pissed of a bunch of the early adopters and obviously, the game developers were confused.

The Falcon, had most of its killer features in the new & not backward compatible hardware (DSP, Chunkly mode). So the 16Mhz 030 CPU was welcomed but there it suffers from its 1040 STE legacy, so not the greatest boost.
You can see how the software devs would take the wait and see approach.
Out of the box the Falcon has the same 1MB RAM as the 1040STE, and the new cool stuff is not really compatible with the existing ST line , so what to do. As I mentioned, of course the music maker industry is already a niche so there they welcomed the new hardware and the DSP. And for musicians, the Falcon really was a good choice.
As you probably know, after Atari abandoned the Falcon, it was licensed by C-Lab, so they wanted to continue to sell the Falcons (MkII, MkIII) as pure music production machines..

So yea, the A1200 also had similar launch issues, but, Id say the situation was slighlty different for Commodre. The A4000 got a lot of attention so there was already a powerful machine that could run all of the old Amiga software but better and it would run the Video Toaster just fine etc.. So the A1200 was seen as the scaled down A4000 with good software compatibility etc..
And Commodore was usually targeting the lower end mainstream with underpowered but upgradable computers. And the A1200 really shined as soon as you added a small harddrive and something affordable as a Blizzard 1220/4MB.

[TCD]

You know that still sounds a lot like the story of the A1200 and the CD32. At least about the launch. Which is what I thought that point was about.

[Calabazam]

I do have an Atari Falcon at home because it is a legendary powerful computer that appeared and vanished like a comet and the only Atari one i like. I need to have someone qualified restore it for me though, to finally be able to use it. Got it cheap in the late 2000's.
In 1992, i was thinking it was better than the A1200. I'm glad i didn't have my first A1200 until 1998 because i would have been badly disappointed compared to my A500Plus i guess.

[Korban]

Nope. The A1200 was inconsequential in the scheme of things. The Falcon died all on its own (with some help from Atari).
Wouldn't have made a difference to the Falcon's success had the A1200 not existed at all.

[Inner200k]

Firstly what an interesting topic;

1. The Falcon is by far the superior machine hardware wise however it's desktop sucked from version 0 to be honest,

2. If a certain CEO had not of cut Amiga R'n'D down to a shoe string, and the Falcon had of been a success (thankfully it failed), then Amiga would have died first because they would have needed AAA not AGA to be competitive with the Falcon.

While the Falcon could have been successful it required a total OS overhaul which it didn't get, to be honest Atari's OS sucked from version zero they was never on the pitch let alone in the game compared to AmigaOS.

My roots come from Atari 2600-- through to Atari ST, I did own an Amiga 1.3 machine which I beat the crap out of physically (laterally I'm not joking I punched that thing like a wild boy) why? it loaded 2 versions of DPaint at the same time and I didn't understand why!? (young me did not understand it was a multitasking computer and it was supposed to do that if you click one too many times)

[redblade]

I don’t know why anyone didn’t add a dsp to Amiga 1200 accelerators, I’m sure the musicians would have brought them even now people aren’t adding them.
If the Falcon went with the 32-bit bus maybe consumers could have used them as a cheap Mac clone because Apple was allowing it to be cloned.

It’s funny how people complain about the Amiga not having Fast Ram or chunky display yet it didn’t save the Falcon even though you can easily upgrade the Falcon with SIMM sticks. Maybe the Falcon should have went with the EC030 instead of the full 030 unless they wanted it to be used as a UNIX machine.

Like the A1200 it needed software. They should have asked Adobe for photoshop