10 Amazing Atari Falcon Exclusives

[@tradinglive]

The Atari Falcon was a fantastic computer with amazing 24-bit graphics in hi-res, blitter, and 8 x CD-quality stereo channels... A computer capable of recording sounds directly to the hard disk and even decoding MP3s using the co-pro 16-MIPS DSP... you need a 486DX/68040 normally for that job. So please don't compare the multi-featured Falcon with gaming consoles! But if you do compare it, remember that most Falcon games were made by individual programmers.. and they were made for fun...!

[@whiskeysk]

your falcon is pure magic, the amount of colours it shows on SM124 is simply unbelievable!

[@TheLairdsLair]

I was waiting for the first person to pick up on that . . . . . .

[@whiskeysk]

@@TheLairdsLair what did I win haha

[@TheLairdsLair]

A pair of Jack Tramiel's underpants :P

[@peterpereira3653]

The Atari Falcon 030 is my favourite computer that I have bought. Still have my own to this day. Bought it upgraded with 32 Mhz CPU, 50 MHz 68882 FPU, 14 MB RAM in a desktop case. With a multisync colour monitor. Also have Apex Media software for it which was exclusive, to the machine and made full use of the 32 MHz 56001 DSP. Didn't buy many video games for it, mainly used it for productivity task. Such as video and some audio. The Atari Falcon 030 was more capable than these video games show. But it needs someone who can get the most out of the DSP and CPU combination. Used it until 1997 when I bought first IBM compatible PC with Windows 95 SE.

[@mrt.7146]

9-year old son dropped by and watched the video with me for a few minutes - his comment was "That looks like the Amiga!" - high praise from him indeed 🤩

[@Andy.Gledhill.Models.]

Hi mate. I am 62 years old now. I started gaming in the mid to late 1980's. I had a Spectrum +, Spectrum Plus 3 disk drive version, Atari St, Amiga 1200, Amiga CD32, then I moved onto PC's in the late 1990's. I can honestly say that I have never heard of an Atari Falcon lol. It must have passed me by somehow.

[@TheLairdsLair]

Follow the link in the description to my Atari Falcon review if you want to know more!

[@Andy.Gledhill.Models.]

@@TheLairdsLair Thanks. I will check that out. I wish I still had all my old retro computers. I had tons of extra kit for the Amiga 1200 when I had that. But I gave it all to my brother when I moved to PC's. I can remember that my first PC was a 486DX 66mhz with Windows 3.11 and something like a 10mb hard drive lol. Oh the joys of messing with MS Dos etc to get games to work.

[@hubertmitura2587]

In 1995 amiga already had digital sprites beatem ups : Taekwondo Master ("Super" ver. was also released) and Prawo Krwi (even with car and fpp sections), later developed by Techland (sic!).

[@BrunoFonsecaPT]

This video perfectly illustrates the problem the Falcon faced… no proper games or support from the industry. Most of these look terrible. Thanks for sharing these, great to see some Falcon content.

[@arostwocents]

Agreed. Interesting video though

[@marjon1703]

I remember when the Falcon came out on sale and no one with an ST thought the expense of upgrading was worth it. It just wasn't a big enough performance jump. The ST was brilliant at what it did which is why I still see them sat on shelves in sound studios now.

[@jeremygregorio7472]

The problem was the price was just nuts it was like $1,300 USD in America. By the time it came out you can find 386s for that. It's a pity because I would have loved to have seen what programmers could really do with that DSP

[@Waccoon]

@@jeremygregorio7472 Holy cow... that's a lot of dough for a computer in a keyboard! I paid $650 for my A1200 HD, and with a 4MB RAM and 32 MHz FPU upgrade, it came out to less than a grand. The motherboard of the Falcon is jammed packed full of chips, making it more of a kitchen sink design. No wonder it was so expensive.

[@madigorfkgoogle9349]

@@Waccoon Actually A1200 was just 100 UKP cheaper then base Falcon, even A1200 was expensive with HDD when it came out and Falcon is demolishing A1200 obsolete design. Its like Falcon is 1.5 generations more modern, even a same priced 386 is not a match, the comparable sound card for 386 alone did cost almost same as entire base line Falcon...

[@bigd5090]

@@madigorfkgoogle9349 The A1200 had some improvements actually in games released over OCS/ECS ones hence worth the upgrade! The ST had zero games to continue the STs legacy never mind improve on it! Backwards compatibility was pretty non-existent too! (Edit: with 'Backward' compatibility is up to 60-70% with the ST but this was not widely known in the early 90s).

[@justin42]

As an Atari fan, I desperately *wanted* a Falcon back in the day, but could never justify the cost. I think in reality that was a good decision, but I still find myself wanting one. But it would be for pure weird nostalgia. Such an awesome machine that never really had a chance to show what it was capable of....

[@arostwocents]

Get Amstrad to scratch that 'it never showed what it was capable of' itch and compare the bad Spectrum ports to the incredible modern games for it. The modern Amstrad Mario Bros actually does have 16bit quality sprites 😮

[@lucahitman]

maybe atari should have released the machine immediately on the market as a "professional" machine with a 68040 inside (040 has the built-in fpu) to attract graphicians and reytracer/cad users at the cost of having a higher price

[@Meebzorp5200]

Atari was in serious penny pinching mode at that point. I think there was a story regarding why they went with the 68030. It should have been a full PC style desktop with a detachable keyboard like the Atari TT for starters and not the wedge shape. Also at that point in time, the 68000 series CPUs were on their way out due to 386/486's. Apple dumped 68000s in favor of PowerPC in 1994. So the timing for Atari here was very awkward.

[@V3ntilator]

@@Meebzorp5200 Amiga CPU were replaced with PPC back then too. In fact newest Amiga One X still being made in 2024 uses PPC.

[@danleedev]

Every 8 years or so, I forget how woefully under-supported the Falcon was (is) and spend waaaay too much money on acquiring another. Thank you for saving me from that mistake yet again. Ugh.

[@arostwocents]

And then selling it? Surely you'd come out about even

[@colonelkomarov622]

Really missing the 90s techno/rave music style in actual games

[@lmcgregoruk]

Running looks like it just recolored the "mighty foot" from Duke Nukem 3D.

[@aluinie]

Wish i still had my Falon. The machine was great but because of the lack of games i moved on. The machine was really capable especially in the sound department and the fact it had 8 channels of sound compared to the A1200 was surprising to me considering the fact the Amiga had the better sound chip on the 16bit system.

[@madigorfkgoogle9349]

Amiga had inferior sound chip since day one. The lack of proper synthesizer chip was killing the capability of gaming computer with just 256KB of RAM. In 1989 ATARI demolished Amiga audio with STE and TT030... in 1986 Apples IIgs had better sound system then Amiga, Sharp X68000 totally obliterated Amiga....

[@daishi5571]

@@madigorfkgoogle9349 lololololololololololololol ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha hee hee hee hee hee Thanks for the laugh.

[@marcraygun6290]

I will always take the opportunity to mention i sold jeff minter his dreamcast

[@TheLairdsLair]

Hahaha, that's cool.

[@daishi5571]

Why do you hate Jeff Minter so! JK the DC was a great console.

[@Tommi1981]

​@@daishi5571cause everyone else does. Gotta sock it on someone. Just kidding. Who's Minter?

[@arostwocents]

Painium has the big problem of terrible shmups from the era with the background too busy to see the bullets, which would be fine with masking to make them show up, but they never bother with that 😢

[@kloakovalimonada]

That's so sad (and I had a C64 at that time!)... Thanks for the video!

[@vespasian606]

If they ever put a laptop assembly inside an Amiga/Atari case I'm in. In the 386 days there were a few advertisements for systems based around that profile but I have no idea if these ever really existed. Looking at your picture it doesn't look as if you'd be able to frankenstein something so it would probably have to be a dedicated case.

[@TheLairdsLair]

Amstrad made quite a few PCs that looked like the Amiga and ST.

[@vespasian606]

@@TheLairdsLair Had two Amstrad PC's. Not crap but they were a bit unreliable. When the market transitioned to the PC style seemed to go out of the window. I'll keep any eye out for those Atari/Amiga lookalikes. Thanks.

[@arostwocents]

​@@vespasian606it's odd because unique styles would make it harder to upgrade and that benefits producers, and would have years before the popularity of laptops and tablets over a pc

[@d_vibe-swe]

Dune from 2014 reminds me of Reeking Rubber that was never released. It was made by my friends in the Atari division of our demogrup Nature. I did the music for it :D

[@TheLairdsLair]

You mean Racer 2, Dune are the devs

[@d_vibe-swe]

@@TheLairdsLair Ah, ok, yes. I meant that :)

[@daishi5571]

It's completely missing the sense of speed, the controls were jank and the car scale was 8-( It was colourful and sounded good. The Falcon could have done better I'm sure.

[@BoomBox02]

I love that tune in the game Killing Impact. Does anyone know if this is available to download as a mod file somewhere??

[@TheLairdsLair]

Not that I know of

[@themidcentrist]

Hopefully we'll get an Atari ST mini that will also support the Falcon.

[@daishi5571]

I think I would like to buy that.

[@Callum-tm6xo]

The fact a 1992 computer can run that polygonal fps game whilst many pcs at the time struggled to run Doom just astonishes me. I’m actually surprised Atari did not go with similar hardware for the jag. The games already look better than most its library.

[@TheLairdsLair]

The Jaguar is much more powerful than the Falcon.

[@Callum-tm6xo]

@@TheLairdsLair as much then as it might be, I the community are definitely getting more out of the falcon than what they are with the jag. It’s a shame these computers are so expensive

[@Fredrikbornagain]

That duke nukem 3d clone is crazy

[@arostwocents]

He didn't know how to change to the pistol. Don't think you were meant to focus on kicking so much 😂

[@AzraelSWFC2011]

The Atari Falcon is my "Holy Grail" of Computers... I would 100% sell ALL my retro computers to obtain one. lol.

[@craigvard1639]

I wonder: what if Falcon and Jaguar would be one project.

[@TheLairdsLair]

That's exactly what the Atari Painter is, see the video linked in the description.

[@steinarvilnes3954]

Seem to me this machine was superior to Amiga 1200 when it came to games? Especially FPS game?

[@TheLairdsLair]

It's more powerful in some ways, if you look at the Atari Falcon Review video in the description there is a comparison of the two.

[@arostwocents]

Its interesting it failed so badly. It was released at a time when many things were failing tbf

[@madigorfkgoogle9349]

@@arostwocents it didnt fail on market, ATARI CEO decided to stop all computer production in favor of Jaguar console just few moths after Falcon production started. What failed was the A1200 that brought Commodore to bankruptcy.

[@daishi5571]

@@madigorfkgoogle9349 Your lack of knowledge is apparent to even the casual bystander of the Atari/Commodore debate.

[@davidtaylor5293]

All the soundtracks are very ravey. Will need to look into getting myself a falcon

[@fasteddy664]

Who knew that the Falcon could output a full colour display on a monochrome monitor, thats impressive! 🤣

[@byronarvanitis1189]

Racer looks amazing indeed 🎉❤ it's a shame most of the these games never got a port to the jaguar...😢

[@TheLairdsLair]

Yeah all of these would be great on the Jag.

[@byronarvanitis1189]

@@TheLairdsLair thanks for the content mate 🧉

[@Ghost-Chatting]

What did he say at the end of the fight

[@UK_Cobra]

If the Falcon was released instead of the ST, I wonder which would have been more revered, the Amiga or Falcon. (Both with the same CPU of course)

[@TheLairdsLair]

It's an impossibility, nothing like the Falcon could have existed in 1985. The STe however, that's what we should have got.

[@dimebagshawn]

Llama zap looks like they made an Empire Strikes Back but didn't have the license so they changed it to lamas.

[@rafaelokhdantas]

Why didn't Atari just stick to this project? I had to insist on that kitten called "Jaguar" that bankrupted the company!

[@dazsly]

Consoles released in that year were a half to quarter of the price less than the Falcon. Who would buy it for games?

[@TheLairdsLair]

Nobody bought it for games, it wasn't designed with games in mind, but it's still nice to see what it can do in that area.

[@daishi5571]

@@TheLairdsLair There were certainly people who bought it with games in mind as it was thought of as the next gen ST. The ST still had a following from gamers (shrinking as it was) that were looking for that upgrade and had the market continued like 1990/91 I'm sure the Falcon would have done much better, maybe not even abandoned by Atari.

[@BloodiedFearr]

OMG these games are amazing. The Amiga does not even compare. I thought they were PlayStation One games for a sec.

[@cathrynm]

Music on Racer 2 is decent.

[@faenethlorhalien]

A cursory googling session has shown me zero pages with games released for this system, which makes me think this list is gonna be extensive, as in "this is all that came out, bois". On the other hand, Google returning fuck all as results for a query is the new meta and I'm too lazy today to bugger around subreddits for people giving me the real info.

[@TheLairdsLair]

AtariMania is your best bet, although its really clunky because Falcon games are mixed in with Atari ST games for some reason, but you can filter by Jagpad (which only the Falcon and STe use and most STe games are Falcon enhanced) www.atarimania.com/list_games_atari-st-jagpad_control_28_S_G.html

[@Maraka77i]

Yes, unfortunely. Sorry about that... I did flag every Falcon only game internally in our database, but the website owner has still not made the option available to website visitors, even if I did the work over a year ago :/ Hopefully one day they appear... Other possibility to search for them in the meantime is to use RGB / VGA search links. It's a bit more accurate than to search by controller type :)

[@TheLairdsLair]

I tried that and loads of other stuff came up, I found Jagpad more accurate. I swear each game used to have [Falcon] in the title which made it much easier to search.

[@relo999]

Yandex, seriously the amount of time I've looked for stuff on google is and not find anything is plain silly. They seemed to have changed the search algorithm at google, making things that aren't close to advertisement or social media hard to find. Sadly DuckDuckGo also seemed to have made similar changes as Google...

[@Maraka77i]

Yes it did. I removed them because I was under impression my modification will come online. I guess I have to revert to the old naming because this subject comes up pretty often.

[@tobyCornish]

In Running are you literally just kcking people to death for the entire game?

[@TheLairdsLair]

No, as I said in the audio you can also collect weapons, it's just that I clipped the footage before you see this.

[@brandong.1857]

Ah this is my beige whale. Cool video. The games look good.

[@federicocatelli8785]

Atari machine that would not suck compared to Amiga....

[@RamonSmits]

Radical Race seems like a poor port of Super Cars II from the Amiga

[@TheLairdsLair]

It's very similar yes, as I mentioned in the video, but poor? Definitely not.

[@RamonSmits]

@@TheLairdsLair it's an ok port but if you take the power of the Falcon in mind then I expect more

[@markgoldspink5109]

Radical Race? Super Cars 2 came out 5 years before that.

[@TheLairdsLair]

Well yeah, it's a tribute to the Super Cars games.

[@darkfalzx]

Falcon games had the same problem as Jaguar ones, where even the best games for the system would at best be considered mid on a more popular system, like PC or even Amiga.

[@TheLairdsLair]

Alien Vs. Predator says what?

[@darkfalzx]

@@TheLairdsLair Owned it. Played it. Beat it. It was okay. Slow, choppy, with some pretty flawed game design. Def not great or a must-play. It looked and sounded nice though.

[@TheLairdsLair]

Right. Whatever your opinion of the game, it's nothing the Amiga could do. I could name plenty more too like Sky Hammer, Hover Strike, Iron Soldier 2, Missile Command 3D, Rayman etc.

[@darkfalzx]

@@TheLairdsLair Not looking for an argument, but to each their own. Owned all of those games and played most of them long enough to form an opinion. The only one I ever went back to was Tempest 2000, so IMO it was the best Jag game. Even so, T2K had decent ports to PC and Saturn, where it was just one of many alright games. Same with Rayman.

[@madigorfkgoogle9349]

@@darkfalzx aha, so you compare a game on Pentium PC that did cost 2000+USD against a game on game console for 160USD and complain the PC could do better? A1200 was not a match at all, not even close.

[@stephenwhite506]

I can see why it failed, a lot of this stuff looks like B grade PD software. It doesn't look or sound much better than an A500 let alone an A1200. It needed a killer game that eventuated.

[@Jon867]

Atari was pitching and pricing the Falcon as a "pro" machine rather than a home computer (though in which case, why use the ST wedge design?) Muddled thinking from a company which was at this stage struggling and about to place all its remaining bets on the Jaguar.

[@Tossphate]

Rave seems to be a complete rip off of eliminator for the st

[@TheLairdsLair]

I literally said that in the audio . . . . .

[@Tossphate]

​@@TheLairdsLair😂 I had you muted sorry. Stealth mode.

[@josephrowe2202]

Let's be honest, both Atari and Commodore lost that battle. They both got bankrupt by having comparatively crappy products. They paid the ultimate price

[@markdillon5494]

The quality of these games looks like something the Amiga achieved in plentiful fashion years earlier. Too little and FAR too late.

[@madigorfkgoogle9349]

not really... for example Amiga never achieved sound quality of majority of those games, but there is alot more...

[@markdillon5494]

@@madigorfkgoogle9349 Sounds like the Amiga to me.

[@josephrowe2202]

Man a 100 dollar genesis or snes, puts this low budget shit to shame

[@TheLairdsLair]

Right . . . . . Or I can just enjoy both?

[@tradinglive]

This was a machine built for musicians, not gamers... but still, I like gaming on these old computers

[@LoganHunter82]

First

[@TheLairdsLair]

Not even close

[@LoganHunter82]

@@TheLairdsLair Damn... It was when I typed it

[@josephrowe2202]

Rebel vision, it's basically balloon fight on a very expensive platform

[@TheLairdsLair]

There is no game here called Rebel Vision. If you mean Killing Time then no, some similar gameplay mechanics but that's it.

[@josephrowe2202]

Dune 2014, running at singl digit fps

[@TheLairdsLair]

What is Dune 2014? No game here called that.

[@skywarp727]

I've never heard of this system before finding your channel. The games shown look and sound pretty good. Atari was right there in terms of performance, and design. It's a shame they went under. They're more of a Zombie brand now.

[@TheLairdsLair]

They were a zombie for a long time, but have done some really good things in the last few years.

[@skywarp727]

@@TheLairdsLair Agreed. I applaud the effort.