![]() ![]() Add a cdrom with multiTos (effectively unix with a GEM frontend) and you'd have a competitive machine even against the PC of the time. TBH the Falcon could have been much more, but Atari were broke and cheaped out on the 16bit bus, could've had 24bit VIDEL at 800圆00 and run Quake2 at 15-20FPS for £500 in 1992. The Falcon was actually developed using an ST with a processor socket, bearing out the simpler architecture could be abused more :) The Atari Falcon bears this out, a stock Falcon can manage to run Quake2 at 10FPS odd, a stock a1200 even with fastram can't get close. That combined with the much simpler design allows a newer machine to be much more powerful as it has to worry about backwards compatibility less. VGA-style cards), the ST was ahead as GEM allowed this from the start. The Amiga graphics layout is also (slightly) more difficult to work with, there's a trick for the ST to do quick chunky-to-planar (C2P) conversion, check out the texture mapping in Thunderdome demo ( )Īll said, yes the Amiga had more expansion cards for it, but the central bus system was a bottleneck as for the majority of Amigas, you had to use the built-in graphics, if you look at the a1200, the AGA chipset was a poor upgrade over the original chipset, hampered by backwards compatibility and the expense to needing to add a separate (fastram) bank to bypass the system bus for speed.Īs far as retargetable graphics goes (ie. The Amiga was much more closely tied to the hardware than the ST, by dint of it's bus system sharing between the blitter and CPU for chip RAM.Īdditionally, having the copper, sprites, scrolling, HAM and planar graphics modes meant that backwards compatibility is harder - just look at the difficulty of emulation for both of them. The only personal computer Floppy drives with flexible head positioning all used voice coil head actuator - Floptical, LS-120/240, Zip drives etc. The whole point of using a stepper motor is you dont have to worry about head tracking/alignment. All you are able to do is pick direction and step one track at a time. Floppy drive has a STEP (/STEP) and DIRECTION (/DIR) pins. Its impossible to move HEAD stepper motor between tracks. ![]() >If you formatted the disk with the tracks spaced closer together, by altering the stepper movement during that process, you would 'magically' get more space. "certain known amount" being one step per track > For an 80 track disk, the movement required to step between tracks was a certain known amount. This driver in turn received instructions from a dedicated Floppy drive controller (WD1771 and compatibles). No, it was under control of a stepper motor driver circuit located directly on a Floppy drive pcb. >In the ST era, the control of that motor was directly under the control of the operating system. ![]()
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