Organization: Computing Laboratory, U of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK NE1 7RU.
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In article <BxszLL.946@newcastle.ac.uk>, unregistered@newcastle.ac.uk (I.A. Inman) writes:
From: n0an7@turing.newcastle.ac.uk (H.S. Doyle)
Path: turing!n0an7
>
>The A1200 is a very nice machine - it might just yet stop me going PC.
>
>Three complaints though.
>
>1) 68020 processor - the Atari Falcon has a 68030.
>
>2) An 880K floppy drive? Why not HD? It won't cost that much!
>
>3) No sound chip upgrade? It's sad to say the Atari now craps on us in that
> department.
>
> ----------
>
>Commodore have released the A1200 at the 400 pound price mark (U.K.). They
>should release a version with a hard drive (and preferably, a HD disk drive) for
>about 150 - 200 pounds more.
>
>A new machine (Say A1800) could be released at the 600 pounds mark, this having
>a 68030 processor and more memory, and a new sound chip. This would give the
>Falcon some decent competition.
>
>It is safe to say the A600 is the new C64 (strange when you can still buy a C64),
>with the A1200 being the early ninties A500. We may beat off the PC`s yet!
Right, first:
1) Although the Falcon has a '030, because of its poor custom chip support it is
only faster at pure number crunching, and even at that it is not as faster as you
may think. With any other application (i.e. most of the applications that the
A1200 and Falcon have been designed for) the A1200 beats the shit out of the Falcon, due to the custom chips doing a lot of the work.
2) Yes, it's only got an 880K drive, but C= intend to release an external HD drive soon after Christmas, if not before, and you can bet there'll be internal HD drive machines out soon.
3) True enough, it's still got the same old sound chip, but you can't expect C= to think up a new graphics chipset and sound chipset too. Be patient, a new sound
chipset is bound to be out soon. Also, the Atari Falcon may have 16-bit sampling,
but the sound DMA is still only 8-bit which effectively means 8-bit samples. I've got more info on how the Falcon's sound isn't all Atari says it is, and I might post it up if I can find it.
Commodore are going to release a hard drive version of the A1200 soon after Christmas, if several reliable articles I have read are true. And it'll cost about 100-150 pounds more.
I doubt we'll see a 600-pound A1800 for a good while, I think the A1200 is an excellent low-end market filler. C='s next machine will be an AGA A3000 replacement I reckon, priced, at a guess, at just over a grand; A2400 maybe?
We'll definitely beat off the PCs, for the time being at least! The AGA chipset shits all over S-VGA, to say the least. Let's see IBM come up with a similar-cost rival to AGA in the near future!
