Product Code Database
The Atari Falcon030 (usually shortened to Atari Falcon), released in 1992, is the final personal computer from Atari Corporation.
Shortly after release, Atari bundled the MiNT operating system in addition to Atari TOS. TOS remained in ROM, and MultiTOS was supplied on floppy disk and could be installed to boot from hard disk.
The Falcon was discontinued in late 1993–a year after its introduction–as Atari restructured itself to focus completely on the release and support of the Atari Jaguar video game console. The Falcon sold in relatively small numbers, mainly to hobbyists.
The microprocessor is optionally supported by a Motorola 56001 DSP clocked at 32 MHz and performing 16 million instructions per second. Although it is oriented to sound processing (it is directly connected to the RAM and codec via an interconnection matrix), it is also capable of graphics processing (for example, calculation of , deformations, 3D projections, and JPEG decompression). It can even, jointly with the 68030, play MP3 files in real time.
Another innovation (for its time) is the VIDEL video controller. The possibilities offered by the graphics processor are limited only by its frequency (25/32 MHz core, adjustable to 50 MHz with a hardware accelerator) and the slowness of the RAM, as the graphics memory is shared with system memory which can degrade performance significantly when using high resolutions or video modes requiring many . The parameters are numerous; each timing of a video line (start, end, number of pixels, etc.) is adjustable, the image may be interlaced or not, and the vertical frequency can go down to 50 Hz interlaced to display on a television. The number of colors is also adjustable when VIDEL operates in bit plane mode. This mode is available for compatibility with the previous generation, but is quite complex to manage. There is also a true color 16-bit mode in which bits defining each pixel are grouped together to display 65,536 colors simultaneously, though CPU performance is degraded while displaying this mode.
In addition, Atari adopted the IDE bus in addition to the SCSI bus for connecting hard drives and CD-ROM drives. This allows for less expensive disk and CD-ROM devices, as SCSI interfaced devices remained relatively expensive. However, the IDE connector is internal and requires case modification to connect two hard disks or a single CD-ROM. The other drawback is that this early IDE port uses only programmed I/O unlike a SCSI drive that can directly access the RAM (DMA).
In 1995, the music company Emagic bought the rights to the Falcon hardware design and began producing their own versions. The Falcon Mk I was a direct continuation of Atari's Falcon030 with TOS 4.04. The Falcon Mk II addressed a number of shortcomings in the original design, making it more suitable to use in a recording studio (these were unofficially termed 'Cubase modifications') such as accepting Line-level audio in without the need for a pre-amp or mixer.
Due to its expansion capabilities, several accelerators have been produced. Some of them overclock the CPU and/or the bus, while others upgrade the CPU to a Motorola 68060.
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