So looking back, it is obvious that neither Atari or Commodore would really be able to succeed in the long-term, although perhaps one of them could have become the 3rd “also-ran”.
For a while, Atari really thought they could be that third choice and some of their late-model computers have some impressive innovations. With that preamble over with, let’s talk about the last Atari computer: the Falcon030.
Paul Lefebvre
In my mind, Atari is a game and console company, not a computer company – I don’t have any sale figures, but I feel like the Atari general computers weren’t quite as popular in The Netherlands as they were in some other places.
Yeah and no. They *were* a games company but the ST changed everything. I had more than a few friends with them and we used them, extensively, for music. MIDI capabilities out-of-the-box and some very good, very cheap samplers (ST Replay et al). Decent machine for coding and a nice GUI. Sure there was the Amiga but the ST had a price/features point that was hard to beat. Especially if you pirated Cubase!
Had several Falcon030, and indeed most of this is true. Worst drawback was its memory limitation to 14MB in a proprietary format, while the STe adopted standard SIPP/SIMM modules. That is was running only at 16 MHz while the TT was at 32 MHz was another stab in the back. And the 16 bits bus of course.
On the brighter side, the DSP and 16 bits true color (65536 to be exact, taken on the main memory, slowing down the machine the higher the resolution/color count) plus true stereo 50 kHz direct-to-disk (up to 8 tracks using the DSP port), full IDE (44 pins portable format) and SCSI (crippled, needed GAL patch for high throughput) were a great update.
The OS was in ROM and not upgradable (you had to change a PLCC chip you wouldn’t find anyway). It was monotasking, like the ST, while Amiga, Mac and Windows were multitasking for a long while. MultiTOS (bundled in a floppy disk) was a resource hog and not very stable, not compatible with most of the legacy software the Falcon was supposed to be with.
Of course there was alternatives, hardware extensions came later, but to even get decent printing capability, you had to buy NVDI (or SpeedoGDOS), to get a more capable hard disk driver (ICD, Uwe Seimet, …), you had to buy one also. So from the “cheap” machine that came pretty bare, you had to open your wallet more often than not to bring your machine to a more usable state.
Or you just could buy a PC that came bundled with everything you needed, drivers coming for free with the devices you bought.
So all in all, it’s pretty normal the Falcon030 didn’t lasted very long, plus considering Atari’s last focus on the Jaguar, despite announcing the Falcon040.
A good video on it : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-RRODLUPV4
Hey Tom,
have you never heard of Cubase, Calamus SL, ZZ Volumes and many others ? Atari machines made desktop publishing a reality by offering a laser printer for half the prize of any others brand, relying on the gigantic ram (back then) of the Mega ST (4mb). The machine was a huge success in Germany in the pro markets for a while. The more powerful TT (68030 based) machines came too late unfortunately.
The Falcon is not a very good machine. Its 030 sits on a 16 bit motherboard impeding the performances. The DSP is very nice but not easy to program: it’s ASM only, there are three independent memory space to manage (Harward architecture) and it is not tightly coupled with the CPU. Furthermore a bare MultiTOS cannot do much and you’d better max out the memory.
In France, the Atari ST was a tremendous success so for many people, Atari was a computer company that also did a home console a long time ago.
Magazines were very enthusiastic when the Falcon was announced.
“The Falcon is not a very good machine. Its 030 sits on a 16 bit motherboard impeding the performances. The DSP is very nice but not easy to program: it’s ASM only, there are three independent memory space to manage (Harward architecture) and it is not tightly coupled with the CPU.”
Agreed. The popularity of Falcon was mostly due to recognition of ST and need for faster but compatible machine. At the same time due to MINT it modernized lagging OS.
Being and ex-Amiga user I might be biased, but having played with both machines, the main difference from an end user is that the Amigas had, for the time, a quite modern operating system while the TOS was crude and barebone to say the least. This did not change significantly during the course of the entire ST evolution (ST, STE, Mega, TT) and tread continued when the Flacon got out. The machine was compromised and it was late, but even if it would have been released two years earlier, the OS would have hindered it.
The Amiga was the 16-bit successor of the 8-bit Atari 800, the custom chips of both were designed by Jay Miner and the ANTIC, GTIA and POKEY in the Atari 800 are each like the Agnus, Denise and Paula in the Amiga, respectively.
The Atari ST was designed by Shiraz Shivji who designed the Commodore 64 and is more like a 16-bit Commodore 64 than it is like an Atari 800.
Considering the graphical interface that really nowhere the Commodore 64 introduced the public to, I wouldn’t say the ST is from C64 legacy. Nor the Amiga from the Atari 800, software wise.