Reason For The Project
The Atari 16 and 32 computer systems (ST, TT and Falcon) were popular home computers in the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s. Atari withdrew largely from the computer market in 1993, and completely in 1995-1996 when Atari merged with JTS and all support for the platform by Atari was dropped. The systems Atari had built became increasingly left behind as newer and faster systems came out. The few dedicated users who were left wanted more processing power to develop more-advanced TOS applications, paving the way for a number of "clone" machines, such as the 68040-based Milan and the 68060-based Hades, both of which were considerably more powerful than the 68030-based TT and Falcon and the 68000-based ST/STe. These machines support ISA and PCI buses, which make the use of network and graphics cards designed for the PC possible (something no original Atari machines could do). The machines also support tower cases, making it possible to use internal CD drives.
A new clone named Phoenix never made it to market in final form. However, the powerful rev. 6 68060 CPU it would use did make it into a new accelerator board for the Falcon, the CT60/CT63 series, which meant that, for the first time, the Atari platform had a CPU rated at over 100 MHz. The use of a high-speed bus and PC133 RAM also accounted for a big performance improvement and significantly increased the Falcon's on-board memory limit from 14 MiB to 512 MiB with a CT60.
These systems were not mass-produced and are now hard to find. While the CT60/CT63 needs a Falcon “donor” system, and is still not as powerful as the ACP potential system could be, the ACP will use a completely new design, moving away from 68K CPUs to the newer ColdFire class, more powerful than even the fastest 68K chips while still having a largely similar (but not completely compatible) instruction set. It will also allow for the integration of many I/O ports that are currently only available through extensive hardware modification on the Atari platform.
Read more about this topic: Atari Coldfire Project
Famous quotes containing the words reason for, reason and/or project:
“The reason for the sadness of this modern age and the men who live in it is that it looks for the truth in everything and finds it.”
—Edmond De Goncourt (1822–1896)
“The real risks for any artist are taken ... in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it—when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.”
—Salman Rushdie (b. 1947)
“They had their fortunes to make, everything to gain and nothing to lose. They were schooled in and anxious for debates; forcible in argument; reckless and brilliant. For them it was but a short and natural step from swaying juries in courtroom battles over the ownership of land to swaying constituents in contests for office. For the lawyer, oratory was the escalator that could lift a political candidate to higher ground.”
—Federal Writers’ Project Of The Wor, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)