The Atari Falcon Thread

[TL]

[align=center:225lgdi9]This thread is especially for DCultrapro who was asking about what the Atari Falcon was on one of his You Tube videos 

The Atari Falcon was released in 1992 and was the 32-bit follow up to the Atari ST/TT line. It shipped in the same case as the ST to save money and was barely supported leaving it to bomb massively and was scrapped by Atari only the year after so they could concentrate on the Jaguar. It did however, like the ST, carve a nice niche in the music scene.

Wikipedia Page



Along with the release of the machine Atari also announced several games including Jeff Minter's Llamazap!, Road Riot 4WD, Steel Talons (both conversions of Atari arcade games), Evolution: Dino Dudes and Raiden. The latter of which was never finished or released, there is a prototype version though.

Road Riot 4WD Atari Falcon version[/align:225lgdi9]

The machine still has quite a hardcore cult following and fans still produce homebrew games and demos for it.

Starstruck by The Black Lotus - Atari Falcon version

[Greyfox]

fantastic post...I completely forgot about the Falcon.

[TrekMD]

Very nice.  I had heard about the Falcon but had never seen one.  Yet another one of Tramiel's many blunders, I suppose.

[zapiy]

Wow what a fantastic machine that was..

[TL]

This is a great home brew game for the machine:

[Minerals]

Great stuff, looks like a Jaguar game

[TL]

Great stuff, looks like a Jaguar game

Funny because several people in the comments said that and suggested that the programmer port it to the Jag, would definately be a good fit.

[dcultrapro]

sounds awesome, whats that game in the bottom of your first post mate? have you got any gameplay? nice little machine thanks for the info!!

[TL]

sounds awesome, whats that game in the bottom of your first post mate? have you got any gameplay? nice little machine thanks for the info!!

The second video in my first post is a demo 

[dcultrapro]

yeah, it says starstruck or something on the youtube description? looks awesome but it all looked like fmv or prerendered movies rather than gameplay... is it something that is coming soon? looks awesome

[TL]

yeah, it says starstruck or something on the youtube description? looks awesome but it all looked like fmv or prerendered movies rather than gameplay... is it something that is coming soon? looks awesome

No its just a graphics demo using realtime 3D, people showing off basically 

[TL]

Atari own conversion of the Steel Talons arcade game on the Falcon:

[TL]

I just came across this awsome sounding and looking Falcon game 



This would also make a great Jaguar conversion!!!

[TrekMD]

That looks awesome!  Is it hard to convert these games to the Jaguar?

[TL]

That looks awesome!  Is it hard to convert these games to the Jaguar?

Not too difficult because the Falcon uses a 68030 CPU, which is backwards compatible with the 68000 chip in the Jag, so you can port the main code fairly easily. You need to convert all the graphics to run on the GPU, which is the hardest part. The sound isn't usually a problem as its just MOD music / samples on the DSP so easy to convert. The lost Jaguar version of Ishar III was just a pure Falcon port according to the programmer.