TT 32 bit & Falcon 16 bit?

[ppera]

It's much more compatible than the TT is if that's what you mean. Yes you could say it's true. After all it started it's life as a daughterboard on the STE. Originally it was thought of as a 68000 machine too.

 

Yeah. It was called Sparrow.

[rustynutt]

Actually, the falcon being 16-bit is semi correct and semi wrong. I.E. the microprocessor is 32-bit, the data bus is 16-bit. The bus from RAM to the videl is 32-bit etc. It's the same argument as with the 64-bitness of the jaguar in reverse.

 

The Falcon 030 should of been called the Atari TS. lol (Thirty Two Sixteen)

 

 

Really, it is. It started out as a Super STE so to speak. The Sparrow is a 68030 much like the Falcon, with a bit less functionality. All this talk about 32bit programming and 16 bit addressing does get in to the Jaguar zone of discussion. On the Falcon, it depends on which chipset you are addressing. ST RAM on the Falcon must be addressed as 16bit (actually I think it’s 15 wide for some reason, I’m no expert or programmer), it was done that way to maintain compatibility with ST Video, video memory resident in ST RAM (Normal Falcon memory). If you have alternate RAM installed on the 32 bit CPU bus, writes and reads to ST RAM or ST Video must be buffered as they are two different widths. Same thing if trying to Blit graphics from fast ram (is that even possible?), or DMA reads and writes. If the Falcon would have been designed like the TT instead of sizing the bus with GALS, accelerator and video cards would have been plentiful as they would have been easily adapted. Instead, compatibility with the STE was built in, and well, you have what the Falcon is, a non-standard custom chip implemented concoction that is an absolute thrill to use, if it's your cup of tea.

The next step for the Falcon would be to trash the motherboard, burn all the custom chips into some kind of FPGA and glue the whole mess to a CT63 mounted on a Mini-ITX form factor. But then it wouldn't be ST compatible

Not responsible for spelling or mental errors.