Impulse for Falcon
The Falcon , the great successor of the good old ST , the source of rumors, the
machine that should bring everything back in the spotlight - well it didn´t
happen that way.
Quick flashback, it's 1992, you got most of your information from the computer
magazins of the time, if you were lucky you perhaps had access to a 14.4k modem,
no internet or other fancy stuff. The days of classic homecomputing are almost
gone, PCs starting to dominate. There is a last hurray in form of the Amiga 1200
and, arriving late, the Falcon 030. It was very clear from the beginning that
this attempt would lead to nothing, too expensive, no real marketing, no dealers
left.
One day we got a call from one of the remaining dealers we ordered the machine
at. I remember it beeing very late with the delivery date. So they called and
said "we got a couple of Falcons but only the version with 14 MB, do you want
this one?". Originally we ordered the 4 MB Version so we ended up with the 14 MB
version.
From a hardware point of view the machine was very interesting, 65000 colors
Truecolor mode and a fancy DSP, unfortunately the 68030 just wasn´t fast enough
anymore to compete against PCs with a 80486. The videopart wasn´t really fast as
it only had a 16 Bit Bus, but coming from the ST it was still a very competitive
machine especially against the main rival, the AGA Amiga 1200 .
As big fans of Arkanoid und Impact, we thought it would be nice to do something
on the Falcon , development of the game took probably around 1 year.
We intended to do an extra weapon system like the one used in Impact (if you
have not played this, take a look at it in a ST emulator, it's a great game),
that's why there are these litte boxes on the left and the right side, but in
the end just did the "standard" version like it is in Arkanoid.
A while ago, Matthias Domin of MD Games started a conversion to the Jaguar . This
version turned out to be very good, with lots of options for input devices.
I miss the Falcon.
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