Atari Coldfire Project
| Also known as | Atari Coldfire Project, or ACP |
|---|---|
| Developer | ACP Volunteers |
| Release date | May 2012 |
| Introductory price | 599 Euro |
| Predecessor | Atari ST, Atari TT and Atari Falcon |
| Website | www |
The Atari Coldfire Project (ACP) or (FireBee) is a volunteer project that has created a modern Atari computer clone.
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.
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Wikipedia