This is one of my top 5 dream computers. I never got to own any of them. As a long time Atari guy (800, 800XL, 520STFM) I saw the Falcon as the perfection of the ST line. It was just always outside affordability for me.
Atari truly did an injustice to the Falcon for pulling support it, not only for the machine but to those who actually purchased one. Most people would cringe at the idea but if they could have adapted a version of AOL, it easily could have made this an entry level internet surfing multi-media machine with just a few more polished software packages all-around and of course, creating one using the Jaguar GPU chipset as an updated model. Having a Jaguar, Lynx II and Falcon030 in the 90s was the dream! (sans the STBook, that I still lust for)...
Back in 92/93 I was a staunch Amiga fan, however when I heard about the Falcon I kind felt like that was what the Amiga 1200 should have been, in terms of spec and capability... The Falcon was and still is a great computer, and yours is a fantastic example, thank you for the video.
an amiga 1200 with a dsp and aaa graphics ie i think it was 10 bit planes and 8 meg chip was supposed to be the machine commodore lauched but medi ali wanted the cheaper option think its called hombre ie aaa search your find the upgrade we all could have had.
Also I'm Amiga fan and its true, Atari Falcom030 was far better than 1200, but its important know the years to understand a few things: * 1992-> A1200 realeased (Motorola MC68EC020 a 14.32 MHz) * 1992-> Atari Falcom030 released (Motorola 68030 a 16 MHz + Motorola 56001 a 32 MHz) * 1993-> Atari Falcom030 stop production * 1994-> Commodore bankruptcy * 1994-> The CPU Motorola 68060 was realeased This CPU can be used in A4000 or an unoffial support in A1200 (thats why you see so many demos with this CPU) * 1996-> Amiga stop production * 2002-> The accelerator board CT60/CT63 from Atari was released, with a CPU Motorola 68060 a 100MHz... But as Amiga fan, I think the best Amigao was A2000, and Atari Falcom030 without any doubt, a really beast.
I had bailed on the Atari computers by the time the Falcon 030 came out, but I was always curious about it. Cool computer! I still have have a 1040 STe and a TT030 that I take out of the closet and play with from time to time. The 80s and early 90s were fun years for computers. Great video, thank you!
Falcon 030 was 4 years too late. Atari's obsession with unix and the transputer doomed the TT. They squandered the Lynx, and then ruined the Jaguar. It's like after the ST, they simply couldn't do anything right. But neither amiga nor atari could stand up to the x86 juggernaut. Motorola simply wasn't able to scale 68k performance the way Intel did with x86.
Agreed. The market was moving so crazy fast back then that if you took a breath, the world would have moved on. Atari (and Amiga) had game changers in the mid-80's. If they had built on that they could have kept that lead. It's kind of amazing that Intel was able to stagnate as much as they did from 2010 to the late 20-teens recently.
@@turrican4d599 That might be true, but without software to take advantage of it, it's like the tree that fell in the forest. That in my mind is the saddest part of the story.
@@turrican4d599 the 68060 was released way too late, and it was way too expensive for what it was. motorola had already lost interest in the 68k line and had moved on to powerpc by then. x86 hardware was much cheaper and motorola based systems simply couldn't compete.
Atari and Commodore both got screwed by the so-called experts that unfairly criticized them even though they BOTH were better buys than any Wintel or Apple computer .
I owned one briefly in early 1994. There was a dearth of software for it that took advantages of the special hardware and wound up selling it 6 months later to get a 386 PC.
I know! I got lucky with the one I picked up. Too little too late, but with so much potential. While not perfect, it's pretty amazing what the team was able to pull together with the Falcon that we actually ended up with.
Blimey! I was happily sitting here listening along to you narrate the Falcon's features, rather pleased TH-cam had recommended a new channel to subscribe to, when I nearly spilt my tea as you suddenly pulled out a DFB1. Not even the 1X, but a hobbiest-built original! Many thanks for the kind words & keep going with the videos. :)
Thank you for the comment and for watching, but most of all for all the development awesomeness! Seriously, I'm super grateful for all the folks that do the kind of work you do as passion projects to keep these bits of history running and able to be tinkered with...these are clearly not to make $$'s. I picked up one of DFB1's that Foft (Mark) built and am delighted that I was able to get the FPU running stable at 50mhz (silicon lottery it seems).
As an Amigian back in the day this machine was like forbidden fruit. I would love to have owned one as I just thought the dark grey finish on em was just so attractive - and when the demos were coming through it was just next level!
I loved that era of computing. A lot of innovation back then. I remember thinking how the Falcon was finally the computer to defeat the Amiga. Thanks for showing it off, gotta get some upgrades for my STe!
What a beaut! I had no idea. Owned many Amigas in my day but never was around the Atari crowd. Thanks for the show and tell. Loved seeing the internals.
I only eva drooled over two computing items. I was younger back then. The Atari Falcon ( i owned an STe) and a 3DO (I owned a VCR and MegaDrive). Great vid. GG's.
Nice Falcon! I took my 1040STe to college with me, and Wolf had just come out, which a friend had running on his 386. The STe was still more powerful at least in terms of sound capabilities, and multiplayer with games like MidiMaze, etc. My dorm room was filled with guys frequently, where we'd play games like Chaos til the wee hours of the night! Great times!
The Compaq Deskpro 386 in 1987 essentially sealed the fate of the non-PC ecosystem. It really legitimized the x86 approach and simultaneously preserved a ton of legacy apps and allowed newer better apps to be developed. And the timing was early enough to keep the non-PC guys from getting sufficient traction, including Apple whose Macs were still way beyond DOS/Windows. However I think Atari could have been big in the consumer space, but maybe they doubled down on it by interpreting "consumer" as "gamer". And since they were a game company at their core, it wasn't unsound to focus on core strengths, especially with Apple committed to bringing Macs to more people and wooing developers.
Thanks for sharing! Great to see. Best computer I even bought! At the time I owned it, 386 and 486PC's when the norm and they just couldn't keep up. Sadly, the Pentium range ended all that easily outperfoming it (though clocked at 100MHZ, it kept up well running at only 16mzh for similar games). My only complaint was there was never a "Windows 95" style of operating system developed for it (there are some contenders, but nothing feeling quite as polished and good to use).
I think you have your rose colored glasses on, a 486DX2 already outperformed this machine easily . At best it could keep up with a 386-40 mhz (which is still pretty impressive)
@@Blackadder75 having owned both, your certainly wrong. At the time I couldn't hope to run background MP3 playing before my Pentium 100. I tried using WinAmp on a 486DX 25, it was jerky and frequently the OS itself crashed when running WinAmp. Now, if you had a specialist graphics card or a 3D accellerator card etc. Yes, the Falcon couldn't hold a candle to any of those machines, but as a raw machine with no special stuff. Falcon was WAY better and there's no Rose Tint at all. We had 486 DX 25's in the Computer labs and I I had a Falcon 030, 32mhz in my halls accomodation (I programmed for both and knew assembly language). I looked forward to getting back to use my Falcon. The one part that was initially poor on the Falcon was JPG decoding, then coders properly started using the DSP in software and even that was faster loading. Though, like I say, when the labs upgraded their graphics cards with onboard image processing support, your correct THAT configuration beats a Falcon hands down (e.g. Diamond cards or whatever). So NO I'm not talking with Rose Tinted glasses I'm recalling my experience in the day quite correctly When it comes to running Doom though, it took BadMood nearly 20 years to get goood performance for Doom. So if you use 3D software as the mark, even in software only availaible at the time a NON developer (e.g. someone who doesn't program both machines) might mistake the Atari Falcon as inferior. Also the Falcon is way harder to write good code for because it uses Plainar graphics. That was something I liked about the Lab PC's.
Hey hey! Thanks for your comment. Love your forum and shop (the RAM card is one of yours too). I am an avid customer and forum commenter / reader. Really appreciate you helping keep these computers running!
@@powerofvintage9442 Thanks for your kind words :) oh I did not notice the RAM card sorry, I think you mentioned wiztronics near the beginning, did not notice it was changed later on , D'oh. Thanks for your purchases, indeed every purchase helps fund & motivate future projects and developments :) forgot to say I built my first PC around 1995, mostly second-hand and used parts, primarily just to play doom ;)
If you we're into music production at the time you knew it existed , it was marketed foremost as a harddisk recorder but by that time the alesis adat allready cornered that market
@@DieselPLL adat had studiostandard just like akai and better ada convertors than early harddisk recorders plus smpte sync , HD recorders we're actually before adat ( PPG , synclavier ) but didn't catch on
@@cnfuzz I think the biggest issue in 1990 was HD price per Megabyte of storage, I've been playing with AudioTracker for Falcon 030 and ADAT 8ch input~output on Falcon DSP port. (see: Falcon 030 FDI+ Work In Progress), at ATARIAGE Forums.😁
56K DSP is capable of carrying out 16.5 Million Instructions Per Second (MIPS) for example: Intel i486DX, 8.7 MIPS at 25 MHz -- Intel i486DX 11.1 MIPS at 33 MHz -- Motorola 68030 9 MIPS at 25 MHz
The 56K was the Falcon's Achilles' Heel. It corrupted memory due to a bug in ROM that Atari wouldn't/couldn't fix and which led to the deserved demise of both computer and company. There were no proper development tools or information and no third party support from Germany like there was for the ST/TT so it died on the vine.
The Falcon launch was so strange. They announced 2 models. Of course everyone wanted the second system. 040 processor, detachable keyboard, more expandability. The Falcon stuffed in an ST case felt like a stop gap measure to get the system out at all. Preorders were lower than expected. Then it was delayed. There was this rumor on usenet that they were sitting on a boat waiting to be cleared to be unloaded.
They didn’t that was the TT, which stood for 32 32 the way ST stood for 16 32 based on the 68040 CPU. It was basically just a Mega STE with a 32 bit CPU.
Not to mention production quality control issues they claimed to have had, which is entirely believable though. All of their systems started out stronger but then ended up weakened by the hand of Atari. Like the Jaguar was originally designed to use a 68030 with 4MBof RAM only to be crippled by their decision to cut costs and use a 68000 instead and 2MB.
Beautiful machine the Falcon 030. I remember exactly the first articles in 1992. When it was released in 1993 they had already decided to shutdown the ST/TT/Falcon line. Too little, too late and too expensive. They were on the right track in the beginning. There was an 68020 prototype in 1986 which could have been released with the Macintosh II. The Atari TT was planned for 1988 or 1989. Instead of custom graphics they should have made it ISA compatible and deliver it with VGA and Network card in a bigger case. Additionally, software investments were to low. They did the right think to license the fantastic Omikron Basic, they should have licensed NVDI and lots of other tools like Interface RCS and MagiC! They could have licensed NextStep in 1993 and maybe bought Acorn/ARM, using a similar tech-move strategy as Apple. But as Leonard Tramiel explained it was a family business based on Jacks negotiating skills and not intended to lose money on big risks.
The 68030 wasn't cheap in 1992, and it wasn't as fast as PCs of same generation. The 68060 was super expensive and not widely available to consumers in the 90s. The 486DX2 wiped the floor with all of them on perf per dollar. The PC was the american muscle car of computers, it was rough and raw but it was cheap. Later they fixed the shortcomings like the OS, chipset, graphics and sound. The Archimedies spawned ARM. Many computer companies died, SGI, ICL, DEC, Sun, Cray, Spectrum, Acron, Commodore, Palm, Atari, too many to list. Others like IBM, Toshiba, HP, live on as shadows of their former glory.
Remember while I was lusting over a Falcon (couldn't afford one being just a teenager then) I ended up getting a 486DX4/100 chip that wasn't officially supported by the 386/486 motherboard I had at the time (it would flash red screen briefly upon bootup then go away) but it worked and that thing was insanely fast! Still, wish I could have had the Falcon during its prime with a ton of software and external CD.
Could Motorola and Atari have improved their lot by licensing cheaper clone chips and clone computers? Or would that have defeated the point of their ethos? 🙂 Unless I am mistaken, it was mostly *not* genuine IBM computers that made PCs widespread and some didn't even have genuine Intel x86 processors but rather AMD or others?
This is the best video about the Atari Falcon. In our country it was available for a short time and in small numbers, but the Amiga and Atari community argued for a long time what was better - A1200 or Falcon. I'm not sure if it was today that this dispute was settled. In any case, the Atari Falcon is a great computer and I'm glad you have your own copy.
Thank you very much! I also have an A1200 which I love as well. Both are excellent and both are different. I would say that the A1200 has more software available that takes advantage of its enhancements. Even if the Falcon's video output could be better than the A1200 AGA...if the majority of software didn't use the Falcon video, then it really didn't matter in the end.
I had a 1040ST back in 1986 or 87 when I was a teenager that I loved. I ended up jumping Atari ship for Mac (which I'm still on to this day). But I still love following what people are doing with the ST. I would love to have graduated up to something more powerful like this.
The best computer ever made. Fortunately I was still an ST user in the US at the time the Falcon was announced and I ordered mine from a local Atari/musical instrument store. I still remember how excited I was when they called me to let me know I could pick up my new machine! I was very confused and disappointed when I found out the Falcon was discontinued... but I still used mine as my primary computer for many years before getting into Macs and SGIs. Unfortunately I don't own my original Falcon anymore but at one point I realized my horrible mistake in selling it, so I bought another one.
@@powerofvintage9442 and that is why the prices are so outrageous, because many of you didn't sell their old machine (because nobody wanted it, after all it was a commercial failure) but they ended up in the recycling plant and got trashed. So very few survived
Had a pristine, early build low serial number Falcon030, with all original box and accessories. Used the heck out of it for years. Sold it 8 years ago on eBay to a European buyer, and used the proceeds towards a brand new house. Used it every year from 1992-2015 for my whole house Halloween displays for sound effects. I have videos of the Halloween sound effects and startup from my eBay posting.
The Atari Falcon 030 is my favourite computer that I have owned. I had an upgraded machine rather than a stock model. 14 MB RAM. CPU 68030 was able to run at 32MHz rather than the standard 16MHz. Was fitted with a FPU 68882 running at 50MHz. SCSI HDD 120 MB. DSP 56001 running at standard 32MHz. SCSI 2X Speed CD-ROM Drive. In a Desktop case. And owned Apex Media and some other software, that I can no longer remember the names of. It was a capable machine for the time, before I eventually went the PC Windows 95 route in 1997. This was a great video about Atari Falcon 030.
Nah it works mostly and to be 100% fair ALL of these accelerators are really just enthusiasts and hobbyists building them. I'm actually on the waiting list for another. I love supporting people who help the community in this way.
Good show for the 68030 running Doom. Nearly same performance as a 486 DX/25. I was using Mac in mid 90's and playing Doom on the folks PowerMac 6100/60.
That is quite a machine you have there, and it's certainly got some nice capabilities - and hidden talents, to boot ! This one certainly has its share of upgrades, too ! The first computer I owned was an Atari 600XL, (maybe it was an 800XL), but didn't have the peripherals to make good use of it, sadly. For me, that Atari lives on in emulation, and I took a step backwards to the Timex 1000, which was black and white, and eventually the US color version (TS-2068). I simply couldn't afford anything better for awhile. Eventually, I got to use an IBM system, and eventually bought a 286 machine. I had eyed an Amiga 500, and that didn't happen right away. That 2ns PC helped me get into emulation, and then things really took off, with DOS and Windows. Then, I eventually turned to emulating that TS-1000, and finally an Amiga 500. :) I got to say: "My how things have changed !". Thanks for that look into the advanced Atari machine, the Falcon 030!
A friend and I both had Atari STs in high school. I still had the STE version and an 8-bit Stereo Master sampler till 1998 when I got a Mac. He got the Falcon 030 when we were in 6th form. Wish I’d managed to get one myself. It was the best of both worlds with the familiar GEM interface and a UNIX under pinning in the way MacOS X eventually was. The audio features alone were amazing for the time.
It was a cool computer, but really was limited by the software available to it unfortunately. The Mac was probably the more practical and effective choice :)
@@powerofvintage9442 It’s why I got a Mac not a Falcon when I could afford to and haven’t used any other platform since apart from in a VM or emulator.
I grew up with an Atari ST in the late 80's/early 90's. I loved it and had allot of fun with it. It was particularly strong on strategy games such as Sim City, Populous, Megalomania to name a few. I was aware of the Falcon, but when it was time to upgrade I went for a PC. For me the killer app was actually Microsoft Word and a now affordable Cannon bubble jet printer. I suspect that is a unpopular thing to say as many people don't like Microsoft, but Word was very user friendly with lots True type fonts and a spell checker. It got me through University without spending all of my weekends in the library typing up essays.
Wow this guy has only been around for a few weeks but it seems like we already knew him forever after watching this computer tech video. How many of his Vintage Computers, Gadgets, Audio and Video hardware will the British even know about from The Power of Vintage.
I used to own one. The problem at the time was that the Atari ST community was already dying off and moving to PC's, so the Falcon wasn't getting the attention needed to bring quality software and upgrades of existing well used software. There were software issues between the ST content and Falcon. Most things felt unfinished and custom, not commercial. There were little to no specific Falcon games. It was also pricy so people felt it was better to use the money to move into PC's rather than risk the Falcon. I sold mine to a local Musician and if he still has it today, he's got a special computer antique on his hands.
Exactly this. After having a tricked out Mega STe I was disappointed with the Falcon. It’s a better proposition these days as decent mods and software exists but the prices are ludicrous. Back then, as you say, there was almost no software and what there was was pretty poor. In many ways it felt like a backwards step to me. Great hardware but nothing contemporary software wise really used it. I sold it for next to nothing after Atari crashed as the future looked bleak for anything new at that point. I still miss the MSTe, I don’t miss the Falcon.
@@iainlaskey7285 Exactly. Looking at the video, they should have released the Falcon in that business casing, having default CD ROM, and separate keyboard, straight off. They could have had extra kits to suit musicians, artists, business. Example an entry level tablet, stylus, and software, for artists. Midi and software for musicians, and for business free professionally made office suite software. Obviously too late now, but bad deployment killed it.
I was fortune enough to have 030 for a few months. It was my dream computer and such an huge upgrade from my 520ST. The Falcon I used had a 64MB HDD in four partitions, 16MB each. I remember copy some of my games from floppy to HDD. Games loaded instantly. Sadly I couldn't keep it. It was just for loan.
One of the best Falcon presentation videos (plus upgrades) I've seen so far! 👌 Some of the mods I also have in my Falcon, like the Noctua fan and double-CF card accessable from outside. Interesting to see you got the additional ceramic caps near the audio section and the modified filters (the coils with green and red wires) at the audio connectors. I only saw these on C-Lab Falcons! Would be interesting to see the bottom side of the board, if the Audio mod (line-in and out, removed bass-boost) has been done by the former owner. I did the C-Lab mod on my Falcon last year! Hope you don't mind if I link a video to this (german): th-cam.com/video/js68Dx4U0hw/w-d-xo.html 😉
Liked this review. I was an Atarian up until about 1997, when I went to a Windows PC. I was sort of excited about the Falcon leading up to its release. I was an Atari 8-bitter in the '80s, and got a Mega STe in 1992. Around the time the Falcon came out, I learned about MiNT by Eric Smith, and installed it on my STe. That was an involved process, because I had to compile it from source using GCC. I think that was the only way to get it. I ended up having to set up GCC as a cross-compiler on a Unix account I had through a university, and then compile the MiNT kernel (forget why I did it this way). Afterwards, I could compile future MiNT versions on my Atari. So, I got to experience a lite Unix environment, since I could install a pre-compiled set of GNU tools. I had slow multitasking inside TOSWin, sharing CPU with TOS on a 16 Mhz 68000. The way MiNT operated on STs was as an adjunct kernel, running alongside TOS. In today's terms, it would be similar to running a VM, running two OSes at once. TOS ran as it always did, as a single-tasking environment. MiNT ran a command-line shell, like Bourne shell, where you could multitask. It was supposed to be possible to install X/Windows on MiNT, but I never got around to that. Afterwards, I read about how Eric Smith was hired by Atari to make MiNT the kernel for the Falcon OS, called MultiTOS. They modified VDI and AES to multitask on top of MiNT. Smith said that MiNT originally stood for "MiNT is Not Tos" (recursive acronym, like "GNU"), and said, "Now it stands for 'MiNT is Now Tos'." I had the chance to try out a Falcon at the same local dealer where I got my STe. It seemed nice. Some of the pictures of its display I saw in Atari magazines, looking like photographs, and stories about it rendering color digital video in real time, were impressive. I read a story of Atari demo'ing the Falcon at a trade show, showing a Tina Turner music video playing on it, streamed off a hard drive, and people lifting a drape that hung over its table, looking for a VCR underneath, and not finding anything. :) So, yes, the DSP was impressive. The DSP was a selling point with the Falcon at the time, because it was the same co-processor that was used in the NeXTStation. Though, I don't know how many people went for that. I remember seeing a NeXT user spending some time with a Falcon, talking about it with the dealer rep., but ultimately passing on it. I think the main objection he had was there wasn't the software support he wanted. That's what I felt about it, too. I liked its potential, but how much worked with it? I had a little trouble with that with my STe. Some ST games wouldn't work on it. Many games only worked with the 1040STf, which was Atari's most popular model. As you said, the Atari market was dying out. Atari really limped along after its collapse in 1983. It made a brief splash in '85 with the ST, coming out ahead of the Amiga in sales for a year or two, but it lost ground after that. I was really struck listening to an interview with Bob Brodie, Atari's user group coordinator. He basically said Atari was asleep at the switch, completely blind to how they were being surpassed by PCs. By the time they realized it in the early '90s, it was too late to catch up. So, Sam Tramiel cancelled future development of the ST line, cancelled production of their existing line in 1993, and focused the company on their video game platforms.
@@powerofvintage9442- There's some more. :) David Small of Gadgets by Small was the guest of honor at a FRAUG (Front Range Atari User Group) meeting in Ft. Collins, CO, either in '92 or '93, and he demonstrated the Falcon for us. He showed us the GUI, and some things you could do on the Falcon, but the only thing I vividly remember of that demo was he set it up to play short sound effects when you pressed keys on the keyboard. We got a good laugh out of that, as they were funny sounds. I remember seeing this sort of thing again when Microsoft came out with Windows CE (you could assign sounds to GUI events; opening the Start menu, opening a window, etc.). He gave us some inside baseball on what was going on at Atari. He talked a bit about the dev. team that wrote MultiTOS, saying that rather than paying them in cash, Atari paid them in stock. 😱 We all let out a collective groan when we heard that, because we knew that Atari was a penny stock (selling for under $1 a share). So, surely the dev's sold theirs as soon as they could, rather than wait to see what would happen. Not a good sign. That was the feeling we had about Atari. We loved the computers, but the news we heard about the company didn't feel good. It was usually, "Atari is screwing up again," or in a few cases, "Atari screwed these people over." We kept imagining what their computers would be doing (how successful they would be) if Atari wasn't screwing up, and we kept hoping that somehow they'd get their head on straight, and produce a big hit. In a way, I think we were pleasantly surprised how long Atari computers stayed on the market, despite the company. From what I've heard from computer historians recently, the reason Atari computers lasted as long as they did, during the Tramiel years, was primarily because of their success in the UK and Europe, not the U.S., where they were a blip for market share. Atari's management in the UK/Europe seemed to have better ideas about how to market the machines in those markets than the U.S. management did about selling them anywhere. Though, it was the U.S. management that developed the technology that went into the computers. In terms of a market niche, the ST was very successful among professional musicians, due to its MIDI technology, which was seen as "best of breed." I even hear about musicians today who swear by it.
I well remember this machine, I ran cubase on it in a recording studio. I still have the A/D convertor and multiple audio out for it. Somewhere I still have the scsii 1gb HDD for it
I so adore the outer design of the late Atari Computers, starting with the redesigned 8-bit 65/130XE following the ST line up and finally ending with the 030. I wish the ST would have been a more successful machine and they would develop it faster towards a real competitor of the Commodore Amiga. And make a transition to a real competition for the Mac Users at that time. Today I would love someone taking that design language and doing sth similar with it on micro computers like Raspberry Pi and Linux on system Level. It would surely be a success, at least on the retro level
It was a case of being too late with the Falcon - as by then the PC had caught up and even surpassed the both the Amiga and ST, what with VGA, soundcards, MS-DOS 6.2 being easier to use, analogue joysticks, the impressive games like Monkey Island 2(being able to install them on a hard disk and no disk swapping like on the ST and Amiga), X-Wing, etc. The Falcon was an impressive machine as Atari had made the right decisions on two fronts : going with '030 processor and having the 16 bit DSP soundchip - which gave it a technical advantage over the AGA Amigas. Sadly, Atari wasn't to be not long afterwards. I can kind of see their logic in going with Jaguar, as only a few years afterwards Sony made the Playstation and then we had Microsoft and the Xbox. Things might of been a bit crowed though, you have to remember that Sega stopped making hardware after the Dreamcast.
I own a plethora of Atari computers and back in the day, I migrated from a 130xe to a 520STFM. When the Falcon released I owned an Amiga 1200 and the Falcon was almost impossible to find or buy here in Canada. I knew it was impressive, but I did not know that it could run Doom with stock settings; very impressive.
It can run Doom after passionate people coded it to use the DSP chip alongside the 68030 CPU. While I love my Falcon and the hardware is pretty cool, it didn't make as big of an impact as the Amiga 1200 among the everyday folks. I definitely had its niche in the music production industry though.
@@powerofvintage9442 I did see both the A1200 and the Falcon with 060's running Quake. However, the cost for such boards back then for Quake would be a silly purchase,while you could simply purchase a PC. Nevertheless, it's nice to see proper usage of your Falcon's DSP, using it as an FPU for Doom.
@@ridiculous_gaming totally true. It is cool though, the amount of passion that drives folks to come up with creative solutions though with these kinds of projects.
I had a falcon here in the UK on launch. Was in my teens and I had recently got insurance money for a broken arm, exactly what the falcon cost, £1000. I only ever used public domain demo's on it. Sold It after a few years to a musician. I had a STFM and a STE before it
I don't think the soundchip was capable of the treble response of the PC though there was definitely some hi hats muted on there. But the thing is getting Doom to run on an AMIGA/ST like computer full stop. It doesn't matter if there was maybe a bit of framerate lag or maybe a bit of high hats not emulated fully over the soundchip.
Although I started my computer journey with a TI-99/4A, when TI pulled the plug I moved on to an 800XL... then to 520st... then to an STe. My 90's upgrade plan had been to buy a Falcon...actually went into the store - the only store in town that 'stocked' them (he was going to sell me the floor demo), but it was the store owner himself who talked me out of it, saying that it was just too little too late, had little software support, and strongly suggested that I buy a PC instead. The was my town's "Athorized Atari Retailer", and even he had moved on from the Tramiels' Atari. I just held onto the STe for another year, and then a career-change required that I have a Mac or PC for home compatibility. Wish I would have known how valued the Falcon would have become...could have bought one as an investment opportunity back then, and played with it until I flipped it to add to my retirement jar (which I did with my STe's and Vectrex just last year.) Kept the TI...one never forgets their first love.
It's really interesting reading through STFormat from that time and all the hope being placed on the Falcon to "save" Atari. Then a fair bit of silence on it afterwards.
I loved this machine when I had it. Tons of demo mandelbrot flying programs where it would scale and zoom into those. But it was the first I had that would play MPEG-1 video without external hardware assist or expansion card. It was something my PC couldn't do at the time... but also, I remember buying a PC daughter board for this and plugging it in so I could run PC software on this machine. It didn't run DOS programs well (because most of those tended to just write to hardware which was typical for programs) but it did run Windows 3.11 very well. And the "Jaguar game port" wasn't one at the time since the Jaguar came later but when Jaguar was out, you could plug a Jaguar controller in it and write stuff for it. Some people made an adapter, I think, so you could plug in two Atari 2600-type controllers into each port.... also there are a few pins on it that let you use paddles and/or driving controllers. Back in the day of the Jaguar, Jeff Minter (developer of it) said you could hook up an Atari 2600 driving controller to the Jaguar port and play Tempest 2000 the way it was meant to be played... and I bought one just for it and sure enough, it worked. :)
I remember writing games in STOS Basic and finding a way to get those games to work on the Falcon030. :) I was the author of an app that would set those values in the app that STOS would reference your TOS version and set those OS values so the game would start..... STOSFix, I believe it was called.... it has been a few decades... different name but still me. I wrote a few simple little games as it was a hobby for me but I used to love playing those STOS Basic games on that machine and trying to make a 3D Pacman game once. Falcon ran it well.
I bought a Falcon 030. At the time I was running my own business (a roller skating rink) with a TT/030 and the 19" Atari Monochrome monitor (Moniterm) running Superbase and Pagestream primarily. I also had a payroll app and some other odds and ends of course, but mainly those two. I wanted the Falcon to be something more portable (I also had a Stacy with a 16mhz upgrade) and at this time I was working with a band, so I was going to use it for recording. Unfortunately, I was very disappointed. It was SO much slower than the TT/030, it wasn't even close really. There was also supposed to be 386 PC card for it, which of course never came out.
By the time the 030 came out in 1992, PC clones were taking over and both the Atari and Amiga machines were doomed (pun not intended) once sophisticated sound and graphics cards were developed for those PC clones by third parties. I knew of the 030 because I read all of the Atari magazines, owned a 1040Stf in 1992, but I saw the writing on the wall and knew the non-PC machines were doomed.
I know too little too late (failed gem). It is kind of ironic that in many ways the market has someone moved back to integrated graphics and sound at this point for many users especially on the lower end and with the Mac computers today.
Of course, I still dabble in vintage computers, but some of that is now using emulation, including the C 64 Mini. Nice little system. I should do a video, but there's plenty of those, for now. Great look into a past I almost joined ... :)
I had switched to Commodore by the time the Falcon came out, but had it been released just a few years before, it could have been such a gamechanger for Atari.
Agreed. I don't think either Commodore or Atari realized the pace of advancement they needed in order to stay relevant long-term. No one did really...but at the same time, it's easy to look backwards.
@@powerofvintage9442 and Lotharek (for the Vulture) unless that's part of Exxos, I'm not sure. It feels odd acquiring such an old machine that was nearly barebones during it's entire life. The one I got had no FPU, only 4MB RAM and the original but dead 80MB Connor HDD. (or whatever it was). Now I just need the 14MB upgrade board and the cable to connect it to a 1435 and I'm ready to rock like it's 1995.... (because that's when I learned about their existence in Toad Catalog).
The Falcon was the only ST I ever thought about getting. The OS ran well, the sound was at last better than the Amiga, graphics updated enough, it had potential. I thought I would wait a while then buy one! we know how that went.
I had a 520STFM, then a 1040STE to an Amiga 600 then A1200 before moving to PC. I had read about the Falcon in the ST magazines and it seemed insane for the time. Caps on the PSU probably weren't a bodge, that's a common place to add mains filtering even in modern PSUs too.
Quand je pense que le miens est en train de pourrir dans le grenier... Tout ça à cause de la foudre qui s'est propagée de la ligne téléphonique, à travers le modem, quelle époque les BBS, si j'avais débranché ce soir là, il serait encore en vie 😭. Enfin il me reste des bons souvenirs de 92-93, comme les copies de mes premiers CDs, j'avais un lecteur de provenance Apple, un graveur, copier des CDs avec un Atari en 1993, ce n'était vraiment pas courant. Je me souviens de mon premier jeu en CD-ROM : "Robinson's Requiem", il y avait des séquences vidéo, pour un Atari ! Seuls les 486 pouvaient faire tourner aussi bien leur version. j'avais l'impression que cette machine deviendrait un Hit, mais trop peu de jeux et de logiciels spécialement créés pour lui ont eu raison de sa courte vie, seuls les musiciens Midi, les amateurs de l'enregistrement en Direct To Disk, ont pu exploiter un bon moment la machine, pour un prix bien inférieur au NeXTstation ou à l'Archimedes d'Acorn. Moi j'avais une version trafiquée, le disque 2.5" IDE de 60Mo avait été remplacé par un 3.5" IDE de 420 ou 540 Mo, le revendeur avait charcuté le blindage interne pour le faire rentrer entre l'alimentation et le floppy... Rien de visible de l'extérieur, mais ça faisait étrange d'avoir une telle puissance dans une machine si proche physiquement de la gamme STf/ST-E, se passer des disquettes pour jouer, enregistrer de la musique en qualité supérieure au CD Audio, c'était une claque pour beaucoup... Après 1 an à attendre des bons jeux, je me suis résigné à jouer à mes anciens jeux ST, surtout ceux en 3d grâce un programme améliorant plus ou moins bien la compatibilité ST , car il n'y avait vraiment très peu de Jeux exclusifs, je me souviens de "MoonSpeeder" un jeu de course style course d'overcrafts utilisant un effet de mode 7 "Super NES". Pour info ta carte mémoire est une version améliorée, non officielle ; le Falcon 030 avait des Rams soudées sur cette carte fille, il n'y a jamais eu de barrettes SIM ou SIP dans un F030. Bon assez de nostalgie, merci pour tous ces souvenirs et bonne continuation. Salutations.
Nostalgia is the main reason why I do this hobby myself. It's what really makes working on these old computers fun along with the tinkering. Also thank you for the information on the RAM boards. Now I know it was an aftermarket upgrade.
The 68030's and 40's were good chips. I don't have a lot of ST experience, but my college roommate showed me Doom and MP3s running on his Quadra 840... his computer with a 40 MHz 68040 blew the lid off my 486 DX2-66, which couldn't decode MP3s well even with a sound card upgrade.
In the case of the Atari Falcon, the 68030 only does part of the heavy lifting. The DSP (digital signal processor) a Motorola 56001 takes over a large chunk of the workload.
My family bought an 520ST+ in 85 and my first own computer was an TT030 bought in the early 90s. My brother hacked together an VME to ISA adapter so i could use an Tseng ET4000 VGA card with NVDI as the driver. I used mostly Calamus SL wich was a pretty advanced DTP software back then. Bought my first PC in 95 and suffered for the next ten years until i finally settled on Macs…
Forget playing Doom. I bought my 2 Atari Falcons because you could perform 8 tracks of HDR (Hard Disc Recording). I did home made music CDs with these machines in 1998
By the time the falcon was available I had already moved to PC, the PC second hand market was full of bargains compared to the price of the Falcon. Still a really nice machine.
Thanks! As I've been collecting and tinkering with old computers, I'm constantly surprise at how capable these machines really were / are. The Commodore 64 with the GEOS desktop is kind of crazy as an example of what could be accomplished with just 64kb of RAM.
No, the lower (there are really two big parts) rf shield does not fit over the hobbyist version of the DFB1. I'm not sure if the Exxos version is of a shape that will fit with the rf shield on. The CT63 DOES fit with the lower rf shield on, but you need to remove the PSU to fit that one in.
Epic to see a detailed look and review of the hardware in this rare machine, really enjoyed that! Thanks! Don’t shoot the messenger too… but is that corner ‘030 CPU pin bent very close to the one next to it? I know… I don’t know why I spotted that either 😂
Im guessiing it's the 030 because of the 68030 Cpu. That's still a powerful cpu depending on what you want to do. Atari would have done well if they had produced a computer that was designed for game development that focused on sound and video with the ability to manipulate sprites smoothly. An expansion box with the ability to accept rom cartridges would have been a plus. Instead they were more interested in getting high. The company lacked focus, drive and dedication. What a shame.
It definitely was powerful in the late 1980's and more than the Amiga 1200 had used, but versus the brute force available from PC's and mid-range Mac's it wasn't nearly enough. The Mac IIsi mid-range mac was released with a higher clocked 68030 two years earlier in 1990 for example.
@@powerofvintage9442 Oh wow! Are you an engineer at Lockheed Martin? Sorry for going of topic. Your videos are great, highly detailed and technical, and I love the Falcon (the one from Atari AND the one from General Dynamics 😉)
trust you discharged yourself or had a strap on when touching those board headers. I was a huge atari fantatic back in the early 90s. I think in Europe there was a lot more going on. Started off with an Atari 1040STE, added a Titan Designs Reflex Graphics board to it (not cheap!), external harddrives, then moved to a TT with a Matrox I think graphics card. Spent far too much at the time although the competition then was only an Apple Mac which was way too expensive. Eventually I had to give in to PCs but now I'm a Mac user. I still miss the Atari though, it had a personality and certain charm. I remember the Falcon coming out just as I was leaving the Atari scene behind. It felt like it was just too late to the party, and seemed to fade away as quickly as it arrived. I'm a music focused user so the DSP side of the Falcon seemed attractive, but already PCs were way ahead and more afforable. Lovely though to see this video and find out what the machine offered.
I agree that Atari and Amiga had more going on in Europe than the US. Love hearing about a graphics board on the 1040STe. How did it fit in? Did you have to put it in a desktop case?
@@powerofvintage9442 Titan Designs was a small UK company and clearly aiming at a very niche market. I bought their Reflex 1024 graphics card for the Atari STE. Believe it or not it actually fitted inside the STe case, although you did have to do a bit of modification. I recall it fitted on top of one of the chip sockets and there were a few cables that plugged elsewhere. Don't recall much about it though, except I think it did monochrome only up to 1024 pixels by 1024 pixels (which was pretty impressive at that time). I bought a Eizo Flexiscan paper white 21 inch monitor (weighed a ton) which they also sold to go with it. It was amazing for Logic on the Atari, although it was quite pricey. Some time after the release of the graphics card, I think they also released a Genlock for the Atari. I must have been one of the few customers that ordered it, it definitely felt like a prototype when it arrived and never worked properly. When I got the TT (2nd hand), I picked up the Matrox graphics card at a computer show. Seem to remember that cost something ridiculous like almost £1000, it gave you 256 colours at 1024 x 768 I think. However not many Atari programs supported it, so I found myself having a very selective and niche collection of software. My fave software though on the Atari was probably Calamus, followed by Notator Logic, Script (Signum systems?) wordprocessor, some awesome Font design software from a UK company and Ease/Magic desktop (an alternative to GEM). Wow memories!
i was on the amiga side of history whereas a lot of my friends had ataris. i still remember my friends brother getting a falcon but it was hooked up to a monochrome hi resolution monitor and use it for ray tracing - back then had to leave it running for days to render one image. we always wanted to use it to play games even though it gave 0 benefits to the ones we had, just because it was cool as it had a 030 a few years later i managed to get amiga 1200 from a newspaper advert for £25 as an elderly man had been using it for desktop publishing. it was a steal. bought a 040 accelerator card and some memory and then hit doom hard lol i always wondered if i could get it to connect to a lan party with a network card and tcp stack but never tested it
The Motorola 68030 CPU was a powerhouse and found a home in many computers that weren't IBM compatibles during its time, like the Atari, Amiga, and Macintosh. It was at least, if not more powerful than the Intel / AMD 386 DX CPUs. Unfortunately, the winds of the software market had shifted towards PCs, as they were becoming more and more numerous as the many brand name compatibles kept driving prices lower and lower.
Not really.) 030 was a slight improvement over 020, with a high demand for fast memory, not really available for that time. Intel was cheaper and with faster clocks.
Amiga owner back then. and yes we had a questionable attitude towards other systems (sorry). On the pro MIDI side of things though I knew the Atari was the winner. Years later when I was researching the early days of Cubase Audio I realised the magnificence of the Falcon. I have no feelings for the TOS, but that color and case design 🥰 I am crossing my fingers that there will one day be a MiSTer Falcon core so I can finally try out some early harddisk recording.
Doom was the killer app and was developed by a genius who knew how to get the most out of the intel hardware As a Mac user back then, I was also very envious of PC gaming. When Doom was finally made available for Mac it was such a lousy un-optimised port that you needed a high end PowerPC just to run it full screen. It’s such a travesty what happened to Commodore and Atari. I hate to think what would have happened had Apple gone under as well.
What happened to Commodore and Atari was really inevitable by 1992 (even 1990 really). Mature markets in most instances can only support 2, maybe 3 "standards" long-term. You can different many "brands" providing those standards, but only a few standards. Metric system and the other one (there used to be many many more). VHS and Beta video. Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo (you could argue that Nintendo has a distinctly different audience). Iphone and Android....and so on and so on. The battle was really for which one would make 2nd place, Apple, Commodore, or Atari.
@@powerofvintage9442 I don’t believe that at all. There are many mainstream tech markets in which more than two companies field competing products. Cars for example. Commodore and Atari were failed by bad internal management, just as Apple almost was.
Atari!!! My second computer (first *real* computer) was an Atari 520st. When the MegaSTe came out.. I tried super hard to save up for it. By the time I could afford it, the Falcon 030 was launched; so, great timing on my part. I still have it (I still have them both, actually)!! I love my Falcon. The original hard drive finally crashed, so I need to find a replacement for it, but other than that hiccup, it still runs beautifully. And.. oh yes... I did get and install the 486 card. So, the Falcon running a 486 isn't theory for me.
Amazing machine - technically it beats my A1200 Amiga, no doubt. But my Amiga had Workbench 3.1, and the Atari had TOS - the Commodore wins hands down on that point, TOS is horrible. In any case, neither machine was long of this world! Great video - nice to see one of these machines in detail.
I love the Falcon and Mint is really quite nice as well as EMUTos. That said, Workbench 3.1+ and other software designed for the later Amiga's really take more advantage of the hardware capability that the Falcon never really got.
The Atari ST/030 series was a wonderful industrial design. I always thought these Atari machines looked great. I can't find a reliable source, but I believe the 24-bit (address) circuit board limited the 030 to 16Mb max and 2Mb was 'shared' with the DSP, hence the '14Mb' limit.
Thank you for the answer! Agreed, I really do like the Atari designs....another super cool one that is probably the most rare is the STBook. For the early 90's it was one sleek notebook computer.
@@powerofvintage9442 We had a recording studio client that finally upgraded from their various Ataris (including FOUR Falcon 030s) in the early 2000s who told me he put them into IT-waste. He now tells me he regularly cries himself to sleep.
The Atari company in the Jack Tramiel era had many wasted opportunities and yet made such wonderful home computers. I think that was largely by accident since Jack's main goal was to one-up Gould at Commodore and show him who was the better mid-century businessman.
Back in the day I had an Amiga 500 and I would say I was more into the video capabilities of it. I know the ST had built in MIDI. In this one I guess you get a SCSI controller. It was a new day when I got my 486 66 though and now I am on a ryzen 5900X with a nvidia 3060. So it was what it was but NOTHING compared to my computer today.
I know there is a healthy Atari Computer Emulation Community out there; I am woundering if it is possible to create a modern version of the ST, Omega, etc, OS that runs nativly on modern hardware, and is able to be backwards compatible with these older systems. I'm thinking of similar to how Bootcamp can eun Windows natively on Intel based macs, so as ro not have the overhead and slowdown seen when using parallels. I have also seen a different technique now being explored with classic console games; which is overlaying a higher resolution graphics o wrlay onto the original graphics from rhe classic games. This could leed to a higher resolution version of Dungeon Master and other games, what do you think about this?
My first computer experience was a Unix terminal on a Vax11. I bought an Exidy Sorcerer MK II in 1981 with CP/M and eventually moved on to other things for a decade. When the time came for a new computer I naturally shopped around for an IBM compatible, eventually buying a 386sx notebook with MS Dos 4. Dos was so familiar, and we all know why. Anyway, looking back on my choices of computer I missed the GUI revolution. To think what I could have done with an Atari, Acorn or Amiga and probably at a massive saving (that laptop cost me a fortune in 91). I think the perception at the time was that these machines were only good for games. I was never into gaming and never considered their potential. Perhaps if Atari has put that technology into a box or tower with a keyboard and mouse it would have faired better, but then again, that didn't save Amiga either. Today, I use RISC OS on a RPi 400, but true to my origins I rarely stray far from Linux or FreeBSD.
The earlier Atari ST and STe both had a desktop version the Mega ST and Mega STe. In addition there was the high end Atari TT that had no keyboard wedge computer analog. That said I didn’t really know about them myself until the past few years.
@@powerofvintage9442 I used to like trawling the "vintage" section of eBay. So I have been aware of various Atari computers for a while, but certainly not during their hey day and certainly not their specs. I often wonder what the world would look like now if one of these had succeeded, graphics and MIDI alongside spreadsheets and browsers.
...later on CLAB bought the licenses and releases the Falcon as an MusicComputer (Falcon MK I - same as Atari / MK II - SCSII instead of IDE / MK X - in a more PC like case) ...also worth a look...the music studios starts to get digital in these times.
Do you know what the price was at launch and how that compared to the TT machines? Today, along with the Sharp X68030, its one the most expensive 68K machines out there.
I'll break out my STformat magazines from 92 and 93 and share some photos of the advertised pricing there. I can't recall exactly but I'll pull them out when I'm home later this week (traveling for business)
499 GBP base 1mb RAM, 899 GBP 4mb RAM +65mb hard drive. Converted to USD at that time the exchange rate was about 1.5 USD to GBP, so $750 for base and $1,350 for the upgraded version. Within a few months the higher end version came down to 799 GBP or $1,200. These values were taken directly from STFormat issues from late 1992 and mid 1993.
This is one of my top 5 dream computers. I never got to own any of them. As a long time Atari guy (800, 800XL, 520STFM) I saw the Falcon as the perfection of the ST line. It was just always outside affordability for me.
I totally understand!
I picked onw of these up cheap back in the late 90s. I kick myself everyday for selling it to get a stupid Mac.
@@Nibb31 That is the all-to-common story we've all been through in one way or another.
Atari truly did an injustice to the Falcon for pulling support it, not only for the machine but to those who actually purchased one. Most people would cringe at the idea but if they could have adapted a version of AOL, it easily could have made this an entry level internet surfing multi-media machine with just a few more polished software packages all-around and of course, creating one using the Jaguar GPU chipset as an updated model. Having a Jaguar, Lynx II and Falcon030 in the 90s was the dream! (sans the STBook, that I still lust for)...
Back in 92/93 I was a staunch Amiga fan, however when I heard about the Falcon I kind felt like that was what the Amiga 1200 should have been, in terms of spec and capability... The Falcon was and still is a great computer, and yours is a fantastic example, thank you for the video.
Thank you for the kind words!
an amiga 1200 with a dsp and aaa graphics ie i think it was 10 bit planes and 8 meg chip was supposed to be the machine commodore lauched but medi ali wanted the cheaper option think its called hombre ie aaa search your find the upgrade we all could have had.
Linux Slackware came out in 1993. I abandoned my Amiga for what was basically a $700 Unix workstation. Never went back.
Also I'm Amiga fan and its true, Atari Falcom030 was far better than 1200, but its important know the years to understand a few things:
* 1992-> A1200 realeased (Motorola MC68EC020 a 14.32 MHz)
* 1992-> Atari Falcom030 released (Motorola 68030 a 16 MHz + Motorola 56001 a 32 MHz)
* 1993-> Atari Falcom030 stop production
* 1994-> Commodore bankruptcy
* 1994-> The CPU Motorola 68060 was realeased
This CPU can be used in A4000 or an unoffial support in A1200 (thats why you see so many demos with this CPU)
* 1996-> Amiga stop production
* 2002-> The accelerator board CT60/CT63 from Atari was released, with a CPU Motorola 68060 a 100MHz...
But as Amiga fan, I think the best Amigao was A2000, and Atari Falcom030 without any doubt, a really beast.
I had bailed on the Atari computers by the time the Falcon 030 came out, but I was always curious about it. Cool computer! I still have have a 1040 STe and a TT030 that I take out of the closet and play with from time to time. The 80s and early 90s were fun years for computers. Great video, thank you!
Thank you for watching!
Falcon 030 was 4 years too late. Atari's obsession with unix and the transputer doomed the TT. They squandered the Lynx, and then ruined the Jaguar. It's like after the ST, they simply couldn't do anything right. But neither amiga nor atari could stand up to the x86 juggernaut. Motorola simply wasn't able to scale 68k performance the way Intel did with x86.
Agreed. The market was moving so crazy fast back then that if you took a breath, the world would have moved on. Atari (and Amiga) had game changers in the mid-80's. If they had built on that they could have kept that lead. It's kind of amazing that Intel was able to stagnate as much as they did from 2010 to the late 20-teens recently.
The 68060 was mighty fast! Couple that with AAA custom chips and it would have taken a Pentium 100 for Intel to come close.
@@turrican4d599 That might be true, but without software to take advantage of it, it's like the tree that fell in the forest. That in my mind is the saddest part of the story.
@@turrican4d599 the 68060 was released way too late, and it was way too expensive for what it was. motorola had already lost interest in the 68k line and had moved on to powerpc by then. x86 hardware was much cheaper and motorola based systems simply couldn't compete.
Atari and Commodore both got screwed by the so-called experts that unfairly criticized them even though they BOTH were better buys than any Wintel or Apple computer .
I owned one briefly in early 1994. There was a dearth of software for it that took advantages of the special hardware and wound up selling it 6 months later to get a 386 PC.
That was a big part of its demise.
Wish I owned one. I always wanted one. I always hoped they would have updated with the 040 and released the upgrade to the TT.
I know! I got lucky with the one I picked up. Too little too late, but with so much potential. While not perfect, it's pretty amazing what the team was able to pull together with the Falcon that we actually ended up with.
Blimey! I was happily sitting here listening along to you narrate the Falcon's features, rather pleased TH-cam had recommended a new channel to subscribe to, when I nearly spilt my tea as you suddenly pulled out a DFB1. Not even the 1X, but a hobbiest-built original! Many thanks for the kind words & keep going with the videos. :)
Thank you for the comment and for watching, but most of all for all the development awesomeness! Seriously, I'm super grateful for all the folks that do the kind of work you do as passion projects to keep these bits of history running and able to be tinkered with...these are clearly not to make $$'s. I picked up one of DFB1's that Foft (Mark) built and am delighted that I was able to get the FPU running stable at 50mhz (silicon lottery it seems).
Wasn't the FPU half clocked on the original DFB1 though ?
@@exxosuk You're right! For some reason (I'm sure it was my misunderstanding Foft's sale post )
As an Amigian back in the day this machine was like forbidden fruit. I would love to have owned one as I just thought the dark grey finish on em was just so attractive - and when the demos were coming through it was just next level!
I loved that era of computing. A lot of innovation back then. I remember thinking how the Falcon was finally the computer to defeat the Amiga. Thanks for showing it off, gotta get some upgrades for my STe!
Thanks! I wish I had been aware of this time and hadn't already moved to my Dad's PC.
What a beaut! I had no idea. Owned many Amigas in my day but never was around the Atari crowd. Thanks for the show and tell. Loved seeing the internals.
I only eva drooled over two computing items. I was younger back then. The Atari Falcon ( i owned an STe) and a 3DO (I owned a VCR and MegaDrive).
Great vid.
GG's.
Thank you!
Nice Falcon! I took my 1040STe to college with me, and Wolf had just come out, which a friend had running on his 386. The STe was still more powerful at least in terms of sound capabilities, and multiplayer with games like MidiMaze, etc. My dorm room was filled with guys frequently, where we'd play games like Chaos til the wee hours of the night! Great times!
Love the memories!
The Compaq Deskpro 386 in 1987 essentially sealed the fate of the non-PC ecosystem. It really legitimized the x86 approach and simultaneously preserved a ton of legacy apps and allowed newer better apps to be developed. And the timing was early enough to keep the non-PC guys from getting sufficient traction, including Apple whose Macs were still way beyond DOS/Windows. However I think Atari could have been big in the consumer space, but maybe they doubled down on it by interpreting "consumer" as "gamer". And since they were a game company at their core, it wasn't unsound to focus on core strengths, especially with Apple committed to bringing Macs to more people and wooing developers.
Thanks for sharing! Great to see.
Best computer I even bought! At the time I owned it, 386 and 486PC's when the norm and they just couldn't keep up. Sadly, the Pentium range ended all that easily outperfoming it (though clocked at 100MHZ, it kept up well running at only 16mzh for similar games). My only complaint was there was never a "Windows 95" style of operating system developed for it (there are some contenders, but nothing feeling quite as polished and good to use).
The Jinnee desktop was/is pretty nice. But you're right, it just couldn't keep up without all the hardware and software development over time.
I think you have your rose colored glasses on, a 486DX2 already outperformed this machine easily . At best it could keep up with a 386-40 mhz (which is still pretty impressive)
@@Blackadder75 having owned both, your certainly wrong. At the time I couldn't hope to run background MP3 playing before my Pentium 100. I tried using WinAmp on a 486DX 25, it was jerky and frequently the OS itself crashed when running WinAmp. Now, if you had a specialist graphics card or a 3D accellerator card etc. Yes, the Falcon couldn't hold a candle to any of those machines, but as a raw machine with no special stuff. Falcon was WAY better and there's no Rose Tint at all. We had 486 DX 25's in the Computer labs and I I had a Falcon 030, 32mhz in my halls accomodation (I programmed for both and knew assembly language). I looked forward to getting back to use my Falcon. The one part that was initially poor on the Falcon was JPG decoding, then coders properly started using the DSP in software and even that was faster loading. Though, like I say, when the labs upgraded their graphics cards with onboard image processing support, your correct THAT configuration beats a Falcon hands down (e.g. Diamond cards or whatever).
So NO I'm not talking with Rose Tinted glasses I'm recalling my experience in the day quite correctly
When it comes to running Doom though, it took BadMood nearly 20 years to get goood performance for Doom. So if you use 3D software as the mark, even in software only availaible at the time a NON developer (e.g. someone who doesn't program both machines) might mistake the Atari Falcon as inferior.
Also the Falcon is way harder to write good code for because it uses Plainar graphics. That was something I liked about the Lab PC's.
Good to see another Atari channel :) I purchase my falcon new back around in the 90s, still have it even today :) I also recognise the RTC ;)
Hey hey! Thanks for your comment. Love your forum and shop (the RAM card is one of yours too). I am an avid customer and forum commenter / reader. Really appreciate you helping keep these computers running!
@@powerofvintage9442 Thanks for your kind words :) oh I did not notice the RAM card sorry, I think you mentioned wiztronics near the beginning, did not notice it was changed later on , D'oh. Thanks for your purchases, indeed every purchase helps fund & motivate future projects and developments :) forgot to say I built my first PC around 1995, mostly second-hand and used parts, primarily just to play doom ;)
If you we're into music production at the time you knew it existed , it was marketed foremost as a harddisk recorder but by that time the alesis adat allready cornered that market
Well harddisk recording was faster then Alesis Digital Audio Tape (ADAT) Alesis came out later with ADAT HD24 recorder.
@@DieselPLL adat had studiostandard just like akai and better ada convertors than early harddisk recorders plus smpte sync , HD recorders we're actually before adat ( PPG , synclavier ) but didn't catch on
@@cnfuzz I think the biggest issue in 1990 was HD price per Megabyte of storage, I've been playing with AudioTracker for Falcon 030 and ADAT 8ch input~output on Falcon DSP port. (see: Falcon 030 FDI+ Work In Progress), at ATARIAGE Forums.😁
I remember the DSP chip being discussed in a German TV program back in the day.
It seemed to be very powerful
I seems to be the source of much of the capability the Falcon had back then!
56K DSP is capable of carrying out 16.5 Million Instructions Per Second (MIPS) for example: Intel i486DX, 8.7 MIPS at 25 MHz -- Intel i486DX 11.1 MIPS at 33 MHz -- Motorola 68030 9 MIPS at 25 MHz
@@DieselPLL It was the same family of DSPs used in Pro Tools TDM cards costing potentially 1000s in early 90s money.
The 56K was the Falcon's Achilles' Heel. It corrupted memory due to a bug in ROM that Atari wouldn't/couldn't fix and which led to the deserved demise of both computer and company. There were no proper development tools or information and no third party support from Germany like there was for the ST/TT so it died on the vine.
The Falcon launch was so strange. They announced 2 models. Of course everyone wanted the second system. 040 processor, detachable keyboard, more expandability. The Falcon stuffed in an ST case felt like a stop gap measure to get the system out at all. Preorders were lower than expected. Then it was delayed. There was this rumor on usenet that they were sitting on a boat waiting to be cleared to be unloaded.
They didn’t that was the TT, which stood for 32 32 the way ST stood for 16 32 based on the 68040 CPU. It was basically just a Mega STE with a 32 bit CPU.
Not to mention production quality control issues they claimed to have had, which is entirely believable though. All of their systems started out stronger but then ended up weakened by the hand of Atari. Like the Jaguar was originally designed to use a 68030 with 4MBof RAM only to be crippled by their decision to cut costs and use a 68000 instead and 2MB.
Beautiful machine the Falcon 030. I remember exactly the first articles in 1992. When it was released in 1993 they had already decided to shutdown the ST/TT/Falcon line. Too little, too late and too expensive.
They were on the right track in the beginning. There was an 68020 prototype in 1986 which could have been released with the Macintosh II. The Atari TT was planned for 1988 or 1989.
Instead of custom graphics they should have made it ISA compatible and deliver it with VGA and Network card in a bigger case. Additionally, software investments were to low. They did the right think to license the fantastic Omikron Basic, they should have licensed NVDI and lots of other tools like Interface RCS and MagiC! They could have licensed NextStep in 1993 and maybe bought Acorn/ARM, using a similar tech-move strategy as Apple. But as Leonard Tramiel explained it was a family business based on Jacks negotiating skills and not intended to lose money on big risks.
The 68030 wasn't cheap in 1992, and it wasn't as fast as PCs of same generation. The 68060 was super expensive and not widely available to consumers in the 90s. The 486DX2 wiped the floor with all of them on perf per dollar. The PC was the american muscle car of computers, it was rough and raw but it was cheap. Later they fixed the shortcomings like the OS, chipset, graphics and sound. The Archimedies spawned ARM. Many computer companies died, SGI, ICL, DEC, Sun, Cray, Spectrum, Acron, Commodore, Palm, Atari, too many to list. Others like IBM, Toshiba, HP, live on as shadows of their former glory.
Remember while I was lusting over a Falcon (couldn't afford one being just a teenager then) I ended up getting a 486DX4/100 chip that wasn't officially supported by the 386/486 motherboard I had at the time (it would flash red screen briefly upon bootup then go away) but it worked and that thing was insanely fast! Still, wish I could have had the Falcon during its prime with a ton of software and external CD.
Could Motorola and Atari have improved their lot by licensing cheaper clone chips and clone computers? Or would that have defeated the point of their ethos? 🙂 Unless I am mistaken, it was mostly *not* genuine IBM computers that made PCs widespread and some didn't even have genuine Intel x86 processors but rather AMD or others?
This is the best video about the Atari Falcon. In our country it was available for a short time and in small numbers, but the Amiga and Atari community argued for a long time what was better - A1200 or Falcon. I'm not sure if it was today that this dispute was settled. In any case, the Atari Falcon is a great computer and I'm glad you have your own copy.
Thank you very much! I also have an A1200 which I love as well. Both are excellent and both are different. I would say that the A1200 has more software available that takes advantage of its enhancements. Even if the Falcon's video output could be better than the A1200 AGA...if the majority of software didn't use the Falcon video, then it really didn't matter in the end.
Love the Turrican loader music in the Doom loading screen. Thanks for the interesting look at this computer!
Thank you!
I had a 1040ST back in 1986 or 87 when I was a teenager that I loved. I ended up jumping Atari ship for Mac (which I'm still on to this day). But I still love following what people are doing with the ST. I would love to have graduated up to something more powerful like this.
The best computer ever made. Fortunately I was still an ST user in the US at the time the Falcon was announced and I ordered mine from a local Atari/musical instrument store. I still remember how excited I was when they called me to let me know I could pick up my new machine! I was very confused and disappointed when I found out the Falcon was discontinued... but I still used mine as my primary computer for many years before getting into Macs and SGIs. Unfortunately I don't own my original Falcon anymore but at one point I realized my horrible mistake in selling it, so I bought another one.
Many of us realize the mistake of selling or throwing out these bits of history too late and end up buying them all over again :)
@@powerofvintage9442 and that is why the prices are so outrageous, because many of you didn't sell their old machine (because nobody wanted it, after all it was a commercial failure) but they ended up in the recycling plant and got trashed. So very few survived
Had a pristine, early build low serial number Falcon030, with all original box and accessories. Used the heck out of it for years. Sold it 8 years ago on eBay to a European buyer, and used the proceeds towards a brand new house. Used it every year from 1992-2015 for my whole house Halloween displays for sound effects. I have videos of the Halloween sound effects and startup from my eBay posting.
That's so cool!
I never had Atari but appreciate its aesthetic especially angled function keys
Agreed, I do like the look of the computer.
The Atari Falcon 030 is my favourite computer that I have owned. I had an upgraded machine rather than a stock model. 14 MB RAM. CPU 68030 was able to run at 32MHz rather than the standard 16MHz. Was fitted with a FPU 68882 running at 50MHz. SCSI HDD 120 MB. DSP 56001 running at standard 32MHz. SCSI 2X Speed CD-ROM Drive. In a Desktop case. And owned Apex Media and some other software, that I can no longer remember the names of. It was a capable machine for the time, before I eventually went the PC Windows 95 route in 1997.
This was a great video about Atari Falcon 030.
Thank you!!
Good introduction there, kudos! Generally a great look into this machine, thanks for sharing.
Thank you!
Always admired the graphical output of this thing for games... I was an Amiga kid though. Cheers.
Man... guy sold you that expansion board and it didn't work? Couldn't have been cheap... did he let you swap it out and try a different one?
Nah it works mostly and to be 100% fair ALL of these accelerators are really just enthusiasts and hobbyists building them. I'm actually on the waiting list for another. I love supporting people who help the community in this way.
@@powerofvintage9442 Buying a second one when the first one "mostly works"... hey, it's your cash, friend.
Good show for the 68030 running Doom. Nearly same performance as a 486 DX/25. I was using Mac in mid 90's and playing Doom on the folks PowerMac 6100/60.
That is quite a machine you have there, and it's certainly got some nice capabilities - and hidden talents, to boot ! This one certainly has its share of upgrades, too !
The first computer I owned was an Atari 600XL, (maybe it was an 800XL), but didn't have the peripherals to make good use of it, sadly. For me, that Atari lives on in emulation, and I took a step backwards to the Timex 1000, which was black and white, and eventually the US color version (TS-2068). I simply couldn't afford anything better for awhile.
Eventually, I got to use an IBM system, and eventually bought a 286 machine.
I had eyed an Amiga 500, and that didn't happen right away.
That 2ns PC helped me get into emulation, and then things really took off, with DOS and Windows.
Then, I eventually turned to emulating that TS-1000, and finally an Amiga 500. :)
I got to say: "My how things have changed !".
Thanks for that look into the advanced Atari machine, the Falcon 030!
A friend and I both had Atari STs in high school. I still had the STE version and an 8-bit Stereo Master sampler till 1998 when I got a Mac. He got the Falcon 030 when we were in 6th form. Wish I’d managed to get one myself. It was the best of both worlds with the familiar GEM interface and a UNIX under pinning in the way MacOS X eventually was. The audio features alone were amazing for the time.
It was a cool computer, but really was limited by the software available to it unfortunately. The Mac was probably the more practical and effective choice :)
@@powerofvintage9442 It’s why I got a Mac not a Falcon when I could afford to and haven’t used any other platform since apart from in a VM or emulator.
I grew up with an Atari ST in the late 80's/early 90's. I loved it and had allot of fun with it. It was particularly strong on strategy games such as Sim City, Populous, Megalomania to name a few. I was aware of the Falcon, but when it was time to upgrade I went for a PC. For me the killer app was actually Microsoft Word and a now affordable Cannon bubble jet printer. I suspect that is a unpopular thing to say as many people don't like Microsoft, but Word was very user friendly with lots True type fonts and a spell checker. It got me through University without spending all of my weekends in the library typing up essays.
a thing of unfettered beauty
I do like the industrial design of the Atari ST line (with the Falcon being the pinnacle)
Wow this guy has only been around for a few weeks but it seems like we already knew him forever after watching this computer tech video. How many of his Vintage Computers, Gadgets, Audio and Video hardware will the British even know about from The Power of Vintage.
I used to own one. The problem at the time was that the Atari ST community was already dying off and moving to PC's, so the Falcon wasn't getting the attention needed to bring quality software and upgrades of existing well used software. There were software issues between the ST content and Falcon. Most things felt unfinished and custom, not commercial. There were little to no specific Falcon games. It was also pricy so people felt it was better to use the money to move into PC's rather than risk the Falcon. I sold mine to a local Musician and if he still has it today, he's got a special computer antique on his hands.
This is exactly the problem.
I bought mine from a musician! He said he knew what he had but he was ok with letting it go to someone who would preserve it
Exactly this. After having a tricked out Mega STe I was disappointed with the Falcon. It’s a better proposition these days as decent mods and software exists but the prices are ludicrous. Back then, as you say, there was almost no software and what there was was pretty poor. In many ways it felt like a backwards step to me. Great hardware but nothing contemporary software wise really used it. I sold it for next to nothing after Atari crashed as the future looked bleak for anything new at that point. I still miss the MSTe, I don’t miss the Falcon.
@@s3vR3x That's was a nice gesture
@@iainlaskey7285 Exactly. Looking at the video, they should have released the Falcon in that business casing, having default CD ROM, and separate keyboard, straight off. They could have had extra kits to suit musicians, artists, business. Example an entry level tablet, stylus, and software, for artists. Midi and software for musicians, and for business free professionally made office suite software. Obviously too late now, but bad deployment killed it.
I was fortune enough to have 030 for a few months. It was my dream computer and such an huge upgrade from my 520ST.
The Falcon I used had a 64MB HDD in four partitions, 16MB each.
I remember copy some of my games from floppy to HDD. Games loaded instantly. Sadly I couldn't keep it. It was just for loan.
Nice machine! The Falcon was a sweet little computer.
Thank you! I’m a big fan of your channel!!
One of the best Falcon presentation videos (plus upgrades) I've seen so far! 👌
Some of the mods I also have in my Falcon, like the Noctua fan and double-CF card accessable from outside. Interesting to see you got the additional ceramic caps near the audio section and the modified filters (the coils with green and red wires) at the audio connectors. I only saw these on C-Lab Falcons! Would be interesting to see the bottom side of the board, if the Audio mod (line-in and out, removed bass-boost) has been done by the former owner. I did the C-Lab mod on my Falcon last year! Hope you don't mind if I link a video to this (german): th-cam.com/video/js68Dx4U0hw/w-d-xo.html 😉
Thank you for sharing your video! I have opened up the bottom when I replaced the "bios" chip and clock battery and there is some work there.
Liked this review. I was an Atarian up until about 1997, when I went to a Windows PC. I was sort of excited about the Falcon leading up to its release. I was an Atari 8-bitter in the '80s, and got a Mega STe in 1992. Around the time the Falcon came out, I learned about MiNT by Eric Smith, and installed it on my STe. That was an involved process, because I had to compile it from source using GCC. I think that was the only way to get it. I ended up having to set up GCC as a cross-compiler on a Unix account I had through a university, and then compile the MiNT kernel (forget why I did it this way). Afterwards, I could compile future MiNT versions on my Atari. So, I got to experience a lite Unix environment, since I could install a pre-compiled set of GNU tools. I had slow multitasking inside TOSWin, sharing CPU with TOS on a 16 Mhz 68000.
The way MiNT operated on STs was as an adjunct kernel, running alongside TOS. In today's terms, it would be similar to running a VM, running two OSes at once. TOS ran as it always did, as a single-tasking environment. MiNT ran a command-line shell, like Bourne shell, where you could multitask.
It was supposed to be possible to install X/Windows on MiNT, but I never got around to that.
Afterwards, I read about how Eric Smith was hired by Atari to make MiNT the kernel for the Falcon OS, called MultiTOS. They modified VDI and AES to multitask on top of MiNT. Smith said that MiNT originally stood for "MiNT is Not Tos" (recursive acronym, like "GNU"), and said, "Now it stands for 'MiNT is Now Tos'."
I had the chance to try out a Falcon at the same local dealer where I got my STe. It seemed nice. Some of the pictures of its display I saw in Atari magazines, looking like photographs, and stories about it rendering color digital video in real time, were impressive. I read a story of Atari demo'ing the Falcon at a trade show, showing a Tina Turner music video playing on it, streamed off a hard drive, and people lifting a drape that hung over its table, looking for a VCR underneath, and not finding anything. :) So, yes, the DSP was impressive.
The DSP was a selling point with the Falcon at the time, because it was the same co-processor that was used in the NeXTStation. Though, I don't know how many people went for that. I remember seeing a NeXT user spending some time with a Falcon, talking about it with the dealer rep., but ultimately passing on it. I think the main objection he had was there wasn't the software support he wanted. That's what I felt about it, too. I liked its potential, but how much worked with it? I had a little trouble with that with my STe. Some ST games wouldn't work on it. Many games only worked with the 1040STf, which was Atari's most popular model.
As you said, the Atari market was dying out. Atari really limped along after its collapse in 1983. It made a brief splash in '85 with the ST, coming out ahead of the Amiga in sales for a year or two, but it lost ground after that.
I was really struck listening to an interview with Bob Brodie, Atari's user group coordinator. He basically said Atari was asleep at the switch, completely blind to how they were being surpassed by PCs. By the time they realized it in the early '90s, it was too late to catch up. So, Sam Tramiel cancelled future development of the ST line, cancelled production of their existing line in 1993, and focused the company on their video game platforms.
Yes this. Love reading about your experience at the time it launched and what you were thinking.
@@powerofvintage9442- There's some more. :)
David Small of Gadgets by Small was the guest of honor at a FRAUG (Front Range Atari User Group) meeting in Ft. Collins, CO, either in '92 or '93, and he demonstrated the Falcon for us. He showed us the GUI, and some things you could do on the Falcon, but the only thing I vividly remember of that demo was he set it up to play short sound effects when you pressed keys on the keyboard. We got a good laugh out of that, as they were funny sounds.
I remember seeing this sort of thing again when Microsoft came out with Windows CE (you could assign sounds to GUI events; opening the Start menu, opening a window, etc.).
He gave us some inside baseball on what was going on at Atari. He talked a bit about the dev. team that wrote MultiTOS, saying that rather than paying them in cash, Atari paid them in stock. 😱 We all let out a collective groan when we heard that, because we knew that Atari was a penny stock (selling for under $1 a share). So, surely the dev's sold theirs as soon as they could, rather than wait to see what would happen. Not a good sign.
That was the feeling we had about Atari. We loved the computers, but the news we heard about the company didn't feel good. It was usually, "Atari is screwing up again," or in a few cases, "Atari screwed these people over." We kept imagining what their computers would be doing (how successful they would be) if Atari wasn't screwing up, and we kept hoping that somehow they'd get their head on straight, and produce a big hit.
In a way, I think we were pleasantly surprised how long Atari computers stayed on the market, despite the company.
From what I've heard from computer historians recently, the reason Atari computers lasted as long as they did, during the Tramiel years, was primarily because of their success in the UK and Europe, not the U.S., where they were a blip for market share. Atari's management in the UK/Europe seemed to have better ideas about how to market the machines in those markets than the U.S. management did about selling them anywhere. Though, it was the U.S. management that developed the technology that went into the computers.
In terms of a market niche, the ST was very successful among professional musicians, due to its MIDI technology, which was seen as "best of breed." I even hear about musicians today who swear by it.
I well remember this machine, I ran cubase on it in a recording studio. I still have the A/D convertor and multiple audio out for it. Somewhere I still have the scsii 1gb HDD for it
That's where this computer and its Atari ST siblings seemed to really shine outside of gaming in people's homes. Thank you for sharing!
@@powerofvintage9442 The only computers at the time with a MIDI interface built in so very easy to hook up to a synth or two
That board is sexy.. The machine "out fo reach" for us back in the day..
I had an Amiga, a 2500, until I switched to the PC/Intel/AMD type in 1994, which I use to this day. Cool viddy!!!
These were fun computers, Amiga's and Atari's.
Love these late era micro computers. Would have been so interesting to see what Atari and Amiga could have done if they'd kept going.
I so adore the outer design of the late Atari Computers, starting with the redesigned 8-bit 65/130XE following the ST line up and finally ending with the 030.
I wish the ST would have been a more successful machine and they would develop it faster towards a real competitor of the Commodore Amiga.
And make a transition to a real competition for the Mac Users at that time.
Today I would love someone taking that design language and doing sth similar with it on micro computers like Raspberry Pi and Linux on system
Level. It would surely be a success, at least on the retro level
I do really like the industrial design of the Atari line, especially the Mega STe and TT
"one more screw." There is *always* one more screw.
I know! Don't tell anyone, but I have unfortunately broken a few things in the past (I'm much better now) due to that "last screw" I forgot to remove.
Great Video - Unnfortunately, I never have seen this machine live
Thanks for watching!
It was a case of being too late with the Falcon - as by then the PC had caught up and even surpassed the both the Amiga and ST, what with VGA, soundcards, MS-DOS 6.2 being easier to use, analogue joysticks, the impressive games like Monkey Island 2(being able to install them on a hard disk and no disk swapping like on the ST and Amiga), X-Wing, etc.
The Falcon was an impressive machine as Atari had made the right decisions on two fronts : going with '030 processor and having the 16 bit DSP soundchip - which gave it a technical advantage over the AGA Amigas.
Sadly, Atari wasn't to be not long afterwards. I can kind of see their logic in going with Jaguar, as only a few years afterwards Sony made the Playstation and then we had Microsoft and the Xbox. Things might of been a bit crowed though, you have to remember that Sega stopped making hardware after the Dreamcast.
great video ....i really like the falcon..would love to be a lucky proud owner of this great machine•!
Thank you! It is a fun little piece of history...really a footnote and as I like to call it a "failed GEM"
I own a plethora of Atari computers and back in the day, I migrated from a 130xe to a 520STFM. When the Falcon released I owned an Amiga 1200 and the Falcon was almost impossible to find or buy here in Canada. I knew it was impressive, but I did not know that it could run Doom with stock settings; very impressive.
It can run Doom after passionate people coded it to use the DSP chip alongside the 68030 CPU. While I love my Falcon and the hardware is pretty cool, it didn't make as big of an impact as the Amiga 1200 among the everyday folks. I definitely had its niche in the music production industry though.
@@powerofvintage9442 I did see both the A1200 and the Falcon with 060's running Quake. However, the cost for such boards back then for Quake would be a silly purchase,while you could simply purchase a PC. Nevertheless, it's nice to see proper usage of your Falcon's DSP, using it as an FPU for Doom.
@@ridiculous_gaming totally true. It is cool though, the amount of passion that drives folks to come up with creative solutions though with these kinds of projects.
I had a falcon here in the UK on launch. Was in my teens and I had recently got insurance money for a broken arm, exactly what the falcon cost, £1000. I only ever used public domain demo's on it. Sold It after a few years to a musician. I had a STFM and a STE before it
I don't think the soundchip was capable of the treble response of the PC though there was definitely some hi hats muted on there. But the thing is getting Doom to run on an AMIGA/ST like computer full stop. It doesn't matter if there was maybe a bit of framerate lag or maybe a bit of high hats not emulated fully over the soundchip.
Your story of that period is almost exactly like mine apart from my "next Gen" upgrade was a Amiga 1200 with a HDD
It was an interesting and a bit sad time.
Although I started my computer journey with a TI-99/4A, when TI pulled the plug I moved on to an 800XL... then to 520st... then to an STe. My 90's upgrade plan had been to buy a Falcon...actually went into the store - the only store in town that 'stocked' them (he was going to sell me the floor demo), but it was the store owner himself who talked me out of it, saying that it was just too little too late, had little software support, and strongly suggested that I buy a PC instead. The was my town's "Athorized Atari Retailer", and even he had moved on from the Tramiels' Atari.
I just held onto the STe for another year, and then a career-change required that I have a Mac or PC for home compatibility.
Wish I would have known how valued the Falcon would have become...could have bought one as an investment opportunity back then, and played with it until I flipped it to add to my retirement jar (which I did with my STe's and Vectrex just last year.) Kept the TI...one never forgets their first love.
It's really interesting reading through STFormat from that time and all the hope being placed on the Falcon to "save" Atari. Then a fair bit of silence on it afterwards.
I loved this machine when I had it. Tons of demo mandelbrot flying programs where it would scale and zoom into those. But it was the first I had that would play MPEG-1 video without external hardware assist or expansion card. It was something my PC couldn't do at the time... but also, I remember buying a PC daughter board for this and plugging it in so I could run PC software on this machine. It didn't run DOS programs well (because most of those tended to just write to hardware which was typical for programs) but it did run Windows 3.11 very well.
And the "Jaguar game port" wasn't one at the time since the Jaguar came later but when Jaguar was out, you could plug a Jaguar controller in it and write stuff for it. Some people made an adapter, I think, so you could plug in two Atari 2600-type controllers into each port.... also there are a few pins on it that let you use paddles and/or driving controllers.
Back in the day of the Jaguar, Jeff Minter (developer of it) said you could hook up an Atari 2600 driving controller to the Jaguar port and play Tempest 2000 the way it was meant to be played... and I bought one just for it and sure enough, it worked. :)
I remember writing games in STOS Basic and finding a way to get those games to work on the Falcon030. :) I was the author of an app that would set those values in the app that STOS would reference your TOS version and set those OS values so the game would start..... STOSFix, I believe it was called.... it has been a few decades... different name but still me. I wrote a few simple little games as it was a hobby for me but I used to love playing those STOS Basic games on that machine and trying to make a 3D Pacman game once. Falcon ran it well.
Such a great video BTW. Forgive me for going down memory lane a bit... but it makes me want to revisit this machine and trying to find one.
@@LaurenGlennThank you!! The whole purpose I find with collecting is the tinkering and the nostalgia (going down memory lane). Thank you for sharing.
I bought a Falcon 030. At the time I was running my own business (a roller skating rink) with a TT/030 and the 19" Atari Monochrome monitor (Moniterm) running Superbase and Pagestream primarily. I also had a payroll app and some other odds and ends of course, but mainly those two. I wanted the Falcon to be something more portable (I also had a Stacy with a 16mhz upgrade) and at this time I was working with a band, so I was going to use it for recording. Unfortunately, I was very disappointed. It was SO much slower than the TT/030, it wasn't even close really. There was also supposed to be 386 PC card for it, which of course never came out.
Yeah, I saw some "advertisements" for both a 386 and I also think a 486 card in one of my ST Format magazines.
By the time the 030 came out in 1992, PC clones were taking over and both the Atari and Amiga machines were doomed (pun not intended) once sophisticated sound and graphics cards were developed for those PC clones by third parties. I knew of the 030 because I read all of the Atari magazines, owned a 1040Stf in 1992, but I saw the writing on the wall and knew the non-PC machines were doomed.
I know too little too late (failed gem). It is kind of ironic that in many ways the market has someone moved back to integrated graphics and sound at this point for many users especially on the lower end and with the Mac computers today.
I guess the good thing of buying it instead of a PC back in the day, that this machine is now worth a lot more then an old PC
@@FuZZbaLLbee Hah! true, if you'd held on to it long enough and didn't pitch it too soon.
Of course, I still dabble in vintage computers, but some of that is now using emulation, including
the C 64 Mini. Nice little system. I should do a video, but there's plenty of those, for now.
Great look into a past I almost joined ... :)
I had switched to Commodore by the time the Falcon came out, but had it been released just a few years before, it could have been such a gamechanger for Atari.
Agreed. I don't think either Commodore or Atari realized the pace of advancement they needed in order to stay relevant long-term. No one did really...but at the same time, it's easy to look backwards.
Good lord, that is a SICK looking machine🤤
It really is my holy grail machine. That said, the sad part is there isn't much software that takes advantage of its awesomeness.
i have one of these, I should probably get the 16mb (14 useable) upgrade before I can't anymore
They aren't that expensive. Both Exxos and Centuriontech have them in their online stores.
@@powerofvintage9442 and Lotharek (for the Vulture) unless that's part of Exxos, I'm not sure. It feels odd acquiring such an old machine that was nearly barebones during it's entire life. The one I got had no FPU, only 4MB RAM and the original but dead 80MB Connor HDD. (or whatever it was). Now I just need the 14MB upgrade board and the cable to connect it to a 1435 and I'm ready to rock like it's 1995.... (because that's when I learned about their existence in Toad Catalog).
The Falcon was the only ST I ever thought about getting. The OS ran well, the sound was at last better than the Amiga, graphics updated enough, it had potential. I thought I would wait a while then buy one! we know how that went.
I had a 520STFM, then a 1040STE to an Amiga 600 then A1200 before moving to PC. I had read about the Falcon in the ST magazines and it seemed insane for the time.
Caps on the PSU probably weren't a bodge, that's a common place to add mains filtering even in modern PSUs too.
Love all those computers!
I really miss the Atari line of computers. I still have my 800xl but I want to eventually have everyone produced in my house ❤
Quand je pense que le miens est en train de pourrir dans le grenier...
Tout ça à cause de la foudre qui s'est propagée de la ligne téléphonique, à travers le modem, quelle époque les BBS, si j'avais débranché ce soir là, il serait encore en vie 😭. Enfin il me reste des bons souvenirs de 92-93, comme les copies de mes premiers CDs, j'avais un lecteur de provenance Apple, un graveur, copier des CDs avec un Atari en 1993, ce n'était vraiment pas courant. Je me souviens de mon premier jeu en CD-ROM : "Robinson's Requiem", il y avait des séquences vidéo, pour un Atari !
Seuls les 486 pouvaient faire tourner aussi bien leur version. j'avais l'impression que cette machine deviendrait un Hit, mais trop peu de jeux et de logiciels spécialement créés pour lui ont eu raison de sa courte vie, seuls les musiciens Midi, les amateurs de l'enregistrement en Direct To Disk, ont pu exploiter un bon moment la machine, pour un prix bien inférieur au NeXTstation ou à l'Archimedes d'Acorn.
Moi j'avais une version trafiquée, le disque 2.5" IDE de 60Mo avait été remplacé par un 3.5" IDE de 420 ou 540 Mo, le revendeur avait charcuté le blindage interne pour le faire rentrer entre l'alimentation et le floppy... Rien de visible de l'extérieur, mais ça faisait étrange d'avoir une telle puissance dans une machine si proche physiquement de la gamme STf/ST-E, se passer des disquettes pour jouer, enregistrer de la musique en qualité supérieure au CD Audio, c'était une claque pour beaucoup...
Après 1 an à attendre des bons jeux, je me suis résigné à jouer à mes anciens jeux ST, surtout ceux en 3d grâce un programme améliorant plus ou moins bien la compatibilité ST , car il n'y avait vraiment très peu de Jeux exclusifs, je me souviens de "MoonSpeeder" un jeu de course style course d'overcrafts utilisant un effet de mode 7 "Super NES".
Pour info ta carte mémoire est une version améliorée, non officielle ; le Falcon 030 avait des Rams soudées sur cette carte fille, il n'y a jamais eu de barrettes SIM ou SIP dans un F030.
Bon assez de nostalgie, merci pour tous ces souvenirs et bonne continuation.
Salutations.
Nostalgia is the main reason why I do this hobby myself. It's what really makes working on these old computers fun along with the tinkering. Also thank you for the information on the RAM boards. Now I know it was an aftermarket upgrade.
The 68030's and 40's were good chips. I don't have a lot of ST experience, but my college roommate showed me Doom and MP3s running on his Quadra 840... his computer with a 40 MHz 68040 blew the lid off my 486 DX2-66, which couldn't decode MP3s well even with a sound card upgrade.
In the case of the Atari Falcon, the 68030 only does part of the heavy lifting. The DSP (digital signal processor) a Motorola 56001 takes over a large chunk of the workload.
Damn, was this a trip down memory lane...
Glad I could be of service!
My family bought an 520ST+ in 85 and my first own computer was an TT030 bought in the early 90s. My brother hacked together an VME to ISA adapter so i could use an Tseng ET4000 VGA card with NVDI as the driver. I used mostly Calamus SL wich was a pretty advanced DTP software back then. Bought my first PC in 95 and suffered for the next ten years until i finally settled on Macs…
Love it! I have a Tseng 4000 in my Mega ST. Very cool to see the desktop at those kinds of resolutions!
Yo That Doom Port is Wikid!
Forget playing Doom. I bought my 2 Atari Falcons because you could perform 8 tracks of HDR (Hard Disc Recording). I did home made music CDs with these machines in 1998
That's a real working Falcon!
By the time the falcon was available I had already moved to PC, the PC second hand market was full of bargains compared to the price of the Falcon. Still a really nice machine.
Yeah great video dude.. awesome insight into machine and your upgrades :)
LInk to those modern boards??
DFB1 by Exxos and Badwolf: www.exxosforum.co.uk/atari/store2/
CT63 by Centuriontech: centuriontech.eu/product/ct63-rev-2022/
Dude!I love your channel name
Thanks! As I've been collecting and tinkering with old computers, I'm constantly surprise at how capable these machines really were / are. The Commodore 64 with the GEOS desktop is kind of crazy as an example of what could be accomplished with just 64kb of RAM.
Excellent tear down, setup & demo. ? Does the rf shield fit over the df1 accelerator? Thanks
No, the lower (there are really two big parts) rf shield does not fit over the hobbyist version of the DFB1. I'm not sure if the Exxos version is of a shape that will fit with the rf shield on. The CT63 DOES fit with the lower rf shield on, but you need to remove the PSU to fit that one in.
Epic to see a detailed look and review of the hardware in this rare machine, really enjoyed that! Thanks! Don’t shoot the messenger too… but is that corner ‘030 CPU pin bent very close to the one next to it? I know… I don’t know why I spotted that either 😂
I'll take a look at it! thanks for pointing it out.
Im guessiing it's the 030 because of the 68030 Cpu. That's still a powerful cpu depending on what you want to do. Atari would have done well if they had produced a computer that was designed for game development that focused on sound and video with the ability to manipulate sprites smoothly. An expansion box with the ability to accept rom cartridges would have been a plus. Instead they were more interested in getting high. The company lacked focus, drive and dedication. What a shame.
It definitely was powerful in the late 1980's and more than the Amiga 1200 had used, but versus the brute force available from PC's and mid-range Mac's it wasn't nearly enough. The Mac IIsi mid-range mac was released with a higher clocked 68030 two years earlier in 1990 for example.
Amazing video. Also love the cap 😉
Designed cooling for the turbine hardware in the engine in the early 00's
@@powerofvintage9442 Oh wow! Are you an engineer at Lockheed Martin? Sorry for going of topic. Your videos are great, highly detailed and technical, and I love the Falcon (the one from Atari AND the one from General Dynamics 😉)
@@AtariLegend started my career at Pratt & Whitney (jet engines)
"Winamp...it really kicks the llama's ass."
hah! In this case Falcamp :)
trust you discharged yourself or had a strap on when touching those board headers. I was a huge atari fantatic back in the early 90s. I think in Europe there was a lot more going on. Started off with an Atari 1040STE, added a Titan Designs Reflex Graphics board to it (not cheap!), external harddrives, then moved to a TT with a Matrox I think graphics card. Spent far too much at the time although the competition then was only an Apple Mac which was way too expensive. Eventually I had to give in to PCs but now I'm a Mac user. I still miss the Atari though, it had a personality and certain charm. I remember the Falcon coming out just as I was leaving the Atari scene behind. It felt like it was just too late to the party, and seemed to fade away as quickly as it arrived. I'm a music focused user so the DSP side of the Falcon seemed attractive, but already PCs were way ahead and more afforable. Lovely though to see this video and find out what the machine offered.
I agree that Atari and Amiga had more going on in Europe than the US. Love hearing about a graphics board on the 1040STe. How did it fit in? Did you have to put it in a desktop case?
@@powerofvintage9442 Titan Designs was a small UK company and clearly aiming at a very niche market. I bought their Reflex 1024 graphics card for the Atari STE. Believe it or not it actually fitted inside the STe case, although you did have to do a bit of modification. I recall it fitted on top of one of the chip sockets and there were a few cables that plugged elsewhere. Don't recall much about it though, except I think it did monochrome only up to 1024 pixels by 1024 pixels (which was pretty impressive at that time). I bought a Eizo Flexiscan paper white 21 inch monitor (weighed a ton) which they also sold to go with it. It was amazing for Logic on the Atari, although it was quite pricey. Some time after the release of the graphics card, I think they also released a Genlock for the Atari. I must have been one of the few customers that ordered it, it definitely felt like a prototype when it arrived and never worked properly. When I got the TT (2nd hand), I picked up the Matrox graphics card at a computer show. Seem to remember that cost something ridiculous like almost £1000, it gave you 256 colours at 1024 x 768 I think. However not many Atari programs supported it, so I found myself having a very selective and niche collection of software. My fave software though on the Atari was probably Calamus, followed by Notator Logic, Script (Signum systems?) wordprocessor, some awesome Font design software from a UK company and Ease/Magic desktop (an alternative to GEM). Wow memories!
i was on the amiga side of history whereas a lot of my friends had ataris. i still remember my friends brother getting a falcon but it was hooked up to a monochrome hi resolution monitor and use it for ray tracing - back then had to leave it running for days to render one image. we always wanted to use it to play games even though it gave 0 benefits to the ones we had, just because it was cool as it had a 030
a few years later i managed to get amiga 1200 from a newspaper advert for £25 as an elderly man had been using it for desktop publishing. it was a steal. bought a 040 accelerator card and some memory and then hit doom hard lol i always wondered if i could get it to connect to a lan party with a network card and tcp stack but never tested it
Thanks for sharing the memories! I really enjoy my Amiga 1200 as well. It's a great computer too.
The Motorola 68030 CPU was a powerhouse and found a home in many computers that weren't IBM compatibles during its time, like the Atari, Amiga, and Macintosh. It was at least, if not more powerful than the Intel / AMD 386 DX CPUs. Unfortunately, the winds of the software market had shifted towards PCs, as they were becoming more and more numerous as the many brand name compatibles kept driving prices lower and lower.
Not really.) 030 was a slight improvement over 020, with a high demand for fast memory, not really available for that time. Intel was cheaper and with faster clocks.
Amiga owner back then. and yes we had a questionable attitude towards other systems (sorry). On the pro MIDI side of things though I knew the Atari was the winner. Years later when I was researching the early days of Cubase Audio I realised the magnificence of the Falcon. I have no feelings for the TOS, but that color and case design 🥰 I am crossing my fingers that there will one day be a MiSTer Falcon core so I can finally try out some early harddisk recording.
Doom was the killer app and was developed by a genius who knew how to get the most out of the intel hardware
As a Mac user back then, I was also very envious of PC gaming. When Doom was finally made available for Mac it was such a lousy un-optimised port that you needed a high end PowerPC just to run it full screen.
It’s such a travesty what happened to Commodore and Atari. I hate to think what would have happened had Apple gone under as well.
What happened to Commodore and Atari was really inevitable by 1992 (even 1990 really). Mature markets in most instances can only support 2, maybe 3 "standards" long-term. You can different many "brands" providing those standards, but only a few standards. Metric system and the other one (there used to be many many more). VHS and Beta video. Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo (you could argue that Nintendo has a distinctly different audience). Iphone and Android....and so on and so on. The battle was really for which one would make 2nd place, Apple, Commodore, or Atari.
@@powerofvintage9442 I don’t believe that at all. There are many mainstream tech markets in which more than two companies field competing products. Cars for example.
Commodore and Atari were failed by bad internal management, just as Apple almost was.
Good movie !
Keep good work!
Atari!!! My second computer (first *real* computer) was an Atari 520st. When the MegaSTe came out.. I tried super hard to save up for it. By the time I could afford it, the Falcon 030 was launched; so, great timing on my part. I still have it (I still have them both, actually)!! I love my Falcon. The original hard drive finally crashed, so I need to find a replacement for it, but other than that hiccup, it still runs beautifully. And.. oh yes... I did get and install the 486 card. So, the Falcon running a 486 isn't theory for me.
That is so awesome! I had seen advertisements for the 486 card but have never seen it in real life.
@@powerofvintage9442 When ever it is I install the new HD, I could snap a picture whilst I'm in there.
Please do!! I’d love to see it running Windows 3.x or Windows 95!
Check Best Electronics for an original hard drive replacement. They bought the Atari stock when Atari went bankrupt.
Amazing machine - technically it beats my A1200 Amiga, no doubt. But my Amiga had Workbench 3.1, and the Atari had TOS - the Commodore wins hands down on that point, TOS is horrible. In any case, neither machine was long of this world! Great video - nice to see one of these machines in detail.
I love the Falcon and Mint is really quite nice as well as EMUTos. That said, Workbench 3.1+ and other software designed for the later Amiga's really take more advantage of the hardware capability that the Falcon never really got.
The Atari ST/030 series was a wonderful industrial design. I always thought these Atari machines looked great. I can't find a reliable source, but I believe the 24-bit (address) circuit board limited the 030 to 16Mb max and 2Mb was 'shared' with the DSP, hence the '14Mb' limit.
Thank you for the answer! Agreed, I really do like the Atari designs....another super cool one that is probably the most rare is the STBook. For the early 90's it was one sleek notebook computer.
@@powerofvintage9442 We had a recording studio client that finally upgraded from their various Ataris (including FOUR Falcon 030s) in the early 2000s who told me he put them into IT-waste. He now tells me he regularly cries himself to sleep.
I stilll use Winamp to this day, it's insatlled on my gaming PC along with a ton of music.
The Atari company in the Jack Tramiel era had many wasted opportunities and yet made such wonderful home computers. I think that was largely by accident since Jack's main goal was to one-up Gould at Commodore and show him who was the better mid-century businessman.
I wouldn't be surprised if that was a big driver behind Jack at Atari
Yeah I didn't even know Atari was still making computers at the time. I knew there were Amigas, but I thought they were only sold in Europe.
Same here. My family has already moved to the PC at that point.
Back in the day I had an Amiga 500 and I would say I was more into the video capabilities of it. I know the ST had built in MIDI. In this one I guess you get a SCSI controller. It was a new day when I got my 486 66 though and now I am on a ryzen 5900X with a nvidia 3060. So it was what it was but NOTHING compared to my computer today.
I know there is a healthy Atari Computer Emulation Community out there; I am woundering if it is possible to create a modern version of the ST, Omega, etc, OS that runs nativly on modern hardware, and is able to be backwards compatible with these older systems. I'm thinking of similar to how Bootcamp can eun Windows natively on Intel based macs, so as ro not have the overhead and slowdown seen when using parallels. I have also seen a different technique now being explored with classic console games; which is overlaying a higher resolution graphics o wrlay onto the original graphics from rhe classic games. This could leed to a higher resolution version of Dungeon Master and other games, what do you think about this?
My first computer experience was a Unix terminal on a Vax11. I bought an Exidy Sorcerer MK II in 1981 with CP/M and eventually moved on to other things for a decade. When the time came for a new computer I naturally shopped around for an IBM compatible, eventually buying a 386sx notebook with MS Dos 4. Dos was so familiar, and we all know why. Anyway, looking back on my choices of computer I missed the GUI revolution. To think what I could have done with an Atari, Acorn or Amiga and probably at a massive saving (that laptop cost me a fortune in 91). I think the perception at the time was that these machines were only good for games. I was never into gaming and never considered their potential. Perhaps if Atari has put that technology into a box or tower with a keyboard and mouse it would have faired better, but then again, that didn't save Amiga either. Today, I use RISC OS on a RPi 400, but true to my origins I rarely stray far from Linux or FreeBSD.
The earlier Atari ST and STe both had a desktop version the Mega ST and Mega STe. In addition there was the high end Atari TT that had no keyboard wedge computer analog. That said I didn’t really know about them myself until the past few years.
@@powerofvintage9442 I used to like trawling the "vintage" section of eBay. So I have been aware of various Atari computers for a while, but certainly not during their hey day and certainly not their specs. I often wonder what the world would look like now if one of these had succeeded, graphics and MIDI alongside spreadsheets and browsers.
...later on CLAB bought the licenses and releases the Falcon as an MusicComputer (Falcon MK I - same as Atari / MK II - SCSII instead of IDE / MK X - in a more PC like case)
...also worth a look...the music studios starts to get digital in these times.
True, given the mods on this one here that were there when I picked it up, I wouldn't be surprised if it had a history in a music studio.
Do you know what the price was at launch and how that compared to the TT machines? Today, along with the Sharp X68030, its one the most expensive 68K machines out there.
I'll break out my STformat magazines from 92 and 93 and share some photos of the advertised pricing there. I can't recall exactly but I'll pull them out when I'm home later this week (traveling for business)
499 GBP base 1mb RAM, 899 GBP 4mb RAM +65mb hard drive. Converted to USD at that time the exchange rate was about 1.5 USD to GBP, so $750 for base and $1,350 for the upgraded version. Within a few months the higher end version came down to 799 GBP or $1,200. These values were taken directly from STFormat issues from late 1992 and mid 1993.
I paid $999.95 for my Falcon in 1995. It has 4-megabyte memory and no hard drive.
Lots of musicians used this machine.
That was definitely Atari's market niche.
Building a pc in this form would be great
Love the hardware mods. It would be great if you could link in the description where you got them. (Like the battery mod, etc)
Pavel @ centuriontech has these NVRAM Mods. I had made these myself but don't have them in stock anymore.
In the description now😀
The reason it can't use all sixteen MB is that MINT/TOS at the time could only address 16 MB, and remaining 2 MB was Video RAM.
Thank you!