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                        It's time to face the reality...
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The idea for this article  came up after  some new started discussions about the
sense of  producing stuff for extended  machines or accelerated ones. You surely
remember me  as one of  the "standard" fighters, but somehow  I changed my  mind
with the time.
Not because I'm an owner of an extended Falcon with 14 MB and FPU, nope, as this
doesn't helps  me to check the CT6o stuff at all, no, just because it is time to
face the reality...

The facts laying  on the hand  and can't be ignored anymore. The standard Falcon
scratches on any possible edge, as we speak of a machine that was designed about
12 years back and wasn't a highend machine at this time as well. The wonderchip,
the DSP, can't help here anymore, time moves  fast and the  claims you have to a
machine  are growing year by year if  you use your Falcon in the first place and
don't want to change to PC or Mac.

And if you want to  use your Falcon for all those nice new things, simply called
multimedia, that  means  for watching movies  or replay MP3  while you work with
some applications and surf around in the net, the standard machine is simple too
slow, too small, too simple... 12  years ago nobody could imagine the things you
do nowadays  with computers... But while  we all laughed about the upgrade mania
on PC and where happy about our Atari unique standards, we already droved into a
blind alley.

Interestingly the hardware developpers  found out about it very fast, simple and
highend  acceleration cards, fastram  cards, resolution enhancers as well as gfx
cards were  developped very fast, but  they all had in common that they were far
too expensive  and so weren't sold in major quantities, but this wasn't the main
problem for not producing special softwares for those cards, mainly the claim of
the majority  of the users, to  make the software  run on the standard machines,
somehow  had breaked out the first steps in this Falcon evolution as none of the
old boards  can be  called to be  used by  some programs  really to the edge, no
major  applications, no games, no demos... What was left were users who invested
a lot of money but got  no real  highend softwares  for it in the end as the big
standard run prevented the development.

This standard  was maybe a problem as it limited the coders somehow, to kick the
machine in  demo, games and  tools development any further needed extremely high
class  coding  knowledge  but this "optimize me to death" thing  slowed down the
development of new stuff as it needs a lot of time. And this limits brought many
people to the point to leave our system, many, many highend coders left us becoz
of the limits the Falcon standard and claim to hold up this standard has set and
prevented them in doing the stuff they wanted  to do... And so many users did as
well, leaving a quite limited system behind...

The machine stands on its final frontiers now, also FPU and RAM extensions can't
help on the point anymore, as the Falcons heart needs more power in the end.

We see this on any point, if it goes to replay MP3 files, watching  MPEGS, or to
work with  quite power  hungry applications, and  goes further if you think onto
the marvellous ACE Tracker  for example, as  the tracker  is fine but the replay
routines kick the standard Falcon down quite hard.
So the move  to faster machines  using turbo cards  is the next and only step if
you want to do the  things with your Falcon, that PC, Amiga and Mac freaks do as
well, using their machines for almost everything...

I think the  point to  speak of "standards" is  outdated today  as standards are
always some kind  of breaking shoes for the community  if it goes to  set limits
for available RAM for example.
The ones that  use accelerated  and extended Falcons want to see stuff for those
extended features  and they aren't to blame for the fact that they do the things
they want  to see by themselves, even  if they  leave the crowd  behind then, as
everyone who would have the possibilities would do the same, don't you think?

Now with the  CT6o the next step was done, leaving a big crowd with standard and
older accelerators far behind, but in comparison with previous accelerators, the
CT6o arrived  in two waves, creating  right from the beginning a small but quite
complete  hardcore  user  base, a thing  that didn't  happen with  the  previous
accerator cards. The main thing is that the new created Falcono6o community is a
quite autark  community, consisting of a big bunch of active coders  that surely
have the power to create a bunch of stuff for their little babies.

Therefore  they obviously  wont support  the standard  scene in the way they did
before  anymore, but  it isn't  really their  fault, as they did the things they
wanted to do, investing a lot of money into their machines to catapult them back
into the presence, while  the others stay left behind, somehow using an outdated
and "classic" system now that scratches on every possible edge.

But... is this really  a problem? Just take a look at the ST oriented community,
they still use this classic machine without mourning around but doing the things
they just  want to do  with those  machines... every  machine has  its frontiers
somewhere and if you want to go further you have to upgrade  your system or even
move to another one that provides the things you want to do.
If you want  to be a hardcore  Atarian using  standard machines you just have to
face  the fact, that this  machines are  too limited for the nowadays multimedia
run and normally the crowd will understand this.

So just stop this ugly pissing against the people who upgrade their machines and
go to use this extended capabilities and start things by yourself instead...

Just think...

_______________________________________________________________moondog_o3/2k4___