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Atari Falcon030

Hardware På svenska → Updated: 2026-10-03

Atari's last computer, from 1992 — a 68030 machine with a built-in signal processor that arrived just as everyone stopped buying anything but PCs.

The Falcon030 was meant to succeed the Atari ST: a 16 MHz Motorola 68030, a new video chip that could show up to 65,536 colours in true-colour mode and, the real selling point, a Motorola DSP56001 signal processor. The pitch was a cheap home studio, and it genuinely could record several tracks of audio straight to hard disk on a machine sold as a home computer.

The timing was worse than the engineering. Atari killed its computer line in 1993 to bet everything on the Jaguar console, and the Falcon sold in modest numbers. The small demoscene that stayed turned out to be stubborn: the DSP was excellent at texture mapping and audio mixing, and new Falcon demos still appear — usually tested in Hatari first.

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