[feffe]

Ahh the Falcon, it was cool. It may be able to run quake2 but only at very low resolution and choppy frame rate. Still a feat of engineering.

I owned the machine and the following cheap design decisions bothered me a lot.

The memory bus was 16 bits although the Atari TT had a 32 bit memory bus. The machine was severely limited by the low memory bandwidth to main memory. It was only possible to clear about 6 MB/s to main memory, not copy. As a reference 320*240, 8 bpp, 60 Hz is 4.6 MB/s.

The main CPU should have been clocked at 32 MHz and not 16 MHz, The TT used a 32 MHz CPU released years earlier.

There should have been a chunky 8 bpp graphics mode. It would have been real useful to do things like quake. Only the 16 bpp mode is chunky and very bandwidth intensive because of the above mentioned points.

The DSP was really cool though, and useful. The link between memory (or host CPU) and the DSP was pretty slow though. I don't remember if you could DMA directly from the DSP to main memory or you had to go via the CPU.

I think both Atari and Commodore killed their businesses by not going any decent HW development between 85 and 89. Then it was too late.