Author: shalroth (cpc10-seac22-2-0-cust612.7-2.cable.virginm.net)
Date: 05-17-2014 15:36
Straw poll: How many *STOCK* Falcon owners have 14MB?
I really, *REALLY* wish I had 14MB in my Falcon, along with the 688882 - but I think, of those Falcon owners who prefer to keep their birds as close to stock as possible, we could only afford the 4MB version at the time. 14MB upgrades aren't easy to come by these days. I had a Falcon ZRAM expansion board that I could have populated to 14MB - but I couldn't find a source for the required Z-RAM modules, so I sold it on. I think that's the closest I'll have ever been to owning a 14MB Falcon.
I think that most Falcon owners (and I'd dearly love to be proven wrong here so get writing) with more than 4MB are probably going to have some kind of accelerator. Don't get me wrong, a Falcon with a CT63 expansion or a CenTurbo and PCI Graphics card is a fearsome computer - but it isn't quite the same, and doesn't have the same charm as an unexpanded Falcon. I could play Portal 2 on the Apollo Guidance Computer, if I overclocked it far enough and gave it enough memory (I think it's been established that it's a Turing-complete machine)
Patrice Mandin's Doom Source port for the Falcon runs well enough in 4MB - and doesn't use the DSP (it's remarkably playable on a 16MHz host). His DSP version of the Doom Engine was awesome, lightning quick (I seem to recall it was up there with the 486-DX40 in terms of frame rate) and showed a lot of promise - but was buggy an incomplete, and crashed a lot. It too, ran in 4MB.
What's the extra RAM used for, out of interest? Is there a bunch of precalc tables loaded to make the ray casting easier? ...and, foremost on every ones lips, how much use does it make of the 56001?
(Sorry if I seemed a bit negative - I'm just bitter that I can't make the most of my Falcon because of the small RAM. I feel *REALLY* sorry for the poor ba$tards that bought a Falcon with only 1MB and no hard disc - they were available for £399 in 1993, which was the same price as my STE)
|
