I'd bought a second hand Quadra 840av off a work colleague, then ran MagicMac on it. But it wasn't as compatible as I'd hoped so sold the Mac then used the money to buy a TT and TTM194 monitor off an advert in Atari World magazine.
Love this so much!! I like running just the opposite...Mac OS on my Falcon (with an 060 in it). It's one way to get more late software for the software-poor Falcon. Running Warcraft II on an Atari makes me smile.
Absolutely; while the Amiga had the upper edge in terms of arcade perfect ports the Atari was king of MIDI and emulation.Hats off to specular emulation :p
Haha, yes. I'm with you on that. I wanted my Atari to show its potential. Once I'd moved on I didn't really need any of the old software, which was, for the most part, underwhelming. The fixed width font in almost every app and most programs disregard for multitasking caused by the lowest common denominator approach grated!
@@thetechnoshed well, I dont think that there was any software area where Falcon was held back by native software that you would be better of with emulated Mac, other then some games. What runs on MagicMac runs fine on Falcon under MaciC. MacOS did not have preemptive multitasking back then, Falcon had 3 chices, MagiC, MultiTOS or MiNT/FreeMiNT. And fixed font width? Majority of productivity software had option for outline/vector fonts after 1993, so what are you talking about? Yes, if you used program from 1987....
It’s an interesting topic this because a lot of us had Falcons or upgraded STs and saw Atari had abandoned us. Sooner or later a decision was needed… I went with the Mac but (iirc) 1997. So I lasted a long time! :) Got a power Mac and used MagicMac a lot until I gradually replaced those programs with Mac equivalents. Stupidly sold my Falcon and TT around 2002 I think. Stupid!! Biggest regret ever as I’ll never be able to afford one again :/ Anyhow a brilliant video 👍🏻
Sorry, but this time I have to disagree. While MagicMac was indeed some kind of "savior" for ATARI folks and was presented even in various ST mags as one, the MagicMac was actually not a Falcon replacement. It was ST/MegaSTE/TT030 replacement. First of all Falcon can have larger VRAM then your Peforma, second no, Falcon can do more then 640x480@8bit out of the box, and with some overclock way more then that... Third, Falcon is not just pure faster ST, Falcon has much better audio system your Performa has not and does have DSP which can speed up a lot of operations that will outperform Performa with 68LC40. Fourth, adding a FPU to Falcon was fairly easy, rather cheap and almost a mandatory upgrade (I didnt know any Falcon owner who didnt have the FPU), the Performa 475 did not have this option but to be fair, you could run MagicMac on any 68030-40 Macintosh. Edit: also it is not true that ATARI abandoned Falcon one year after its release, it was abandoned before the sales started.
@@madigorfkgoogle9349 Yes but you didn't mention price :) and the video was talking about second hand. Plus you could part ex them at some places. For interest, buying from Micromac, a 68882 cost $39 and a 68040 cost $99. Expensive, but cheaper than a RAM upgrade 😂
TH-cam deleted my reply because I mentioned prices. Short answer, about 2x. But not applicable, I was just making it clear that the upgrade was possible and was often done in the second hand era.
@@phipli No, the price of 68882 was around 50UKP and 350-400UKP for 68040 in 1996, thats why Apple used much cheaper 68LC40 on budget models. Changing CPU is not same as affordable adding of FPU in socket that is already present on the Falcon mainboard. And I was referring to video, not to what was or wasnt possible. Lets see if youtube will let this pass.
no, same as this video is a bit misleading, the Magic Mac is NOT a Falcon replacement, it is a TT030 replacement. There are apps that do use the DSP, and stock Falcon does outperforms or at least matches even a native Amiga with 68LC60 there.
I don't get why this should be called a Falcintosh. Maybe we can call it GEMintosh, but for it to be called Falcintosh it would need to be able to replace a Falcon. Which it can't. It has absolutely nothing to do with the Falcon. What made the Falcon the Falcon are its graphics and sound capabilities and its DSP. The Performa has none of it. Sure, it can run proper GEM applications but absolutely nothing that would be written for the Falcon. Or try to run ST games on it. I doubt that any commercial games will run on the Performa. Don't get me wrong, it was well known in the early 90s that the best professional Atari computer comes from Apple, but the Falcon is and was never a computer for standard applications. It can run them and it was still a significant boost from a normal ST but it's simply the wrong computer to compare it to the Performa. The Falcon has an 030 and is limited to 14MB of RAM and to a 16 Bit bus. What do you expect when you compare it to a machine that has a 040 with 25 or 50Mhz and 4-36MB of RAM running on a 32Bit bus? If there is any counterpart then it would be the Atari TT (equipped with TT RAM). (And the Performa would still be the better choice).
But what about an Amiga emulating a Mac Emulating an ST, now that would be interesting to see, the reason I say that is an Amiga with same processor as the Mac ran faster than an equivalent Mac.
that's fine if you happen to have a spare, say three thousand pound lying around :-)
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@@commodoreisnottheonlyfruit :) Or if you were fortunate to acquire several units years ago when they were comparatively cheap. ;) Regardless, the best Falcon is still an original unit with a nice accelerator and RAM card.
Atari St was okay in the 68000 days, but I never saw a 68030 ST here in the USA. I believe they have compatibility issues, worse than on the Mac 68030 machines with their 68000 software. Atari tragically never made it to 68040.
There was an in house prototype of a 68040 Falcon. It was in a box that was almost identical to the song ps2 cause, apparently Sony used the Atari design in their patent submissions
Some interesting things about the 475. As well as being expandable to 1MB VRAM and supporting 8bit at 1152*870, they actually aren't capped at 36MB RAM, they even take 64 and 128MB simms for up to 132MB, or technically 260MB with a SIMM Saver (which won't fit in the case). Lastly and most importantly, they have a software controllable CPU clock! It was recently discovered that you can bump them up to higher speeds by poking certain registers. 33MHz is easy, 40 is possible and I've got mine to 50MHz including some hardware mods. Its a brand new discovery, so we're still improving the software.
I did see something about this very recently, that was a resistor / jumper hack. You're saying that this is a software fix? that's amazing. Do you have a link to a forum page or a blog about it?
@@commodoreisnottheonlyfruitVery recent, as in last week and a half. No soldering required, purely software. TH-cam doesn't like people posting links, but my last video upload is applicable.
I've always wanted to get an iMac running MagicMac to replace my old ass STe, but I was returning to university and needed a Windows PC for programming classes. Had I've known about Virtual PC, I would had held off getting a Pentium PC for school and save up more for an iMac to run both MagicMac & Virtual PC. And yes I know MagicMac is more for running serious GEM applications than games but there was also an ST emulator called NoSTalgia for the fun stuff.
Interesting video. Would have been also interesting to see the performance of full-blown 68040 equiped Performa. And what about music software (Cubase, Notator) and hardware extensions? Is it somewhere mentioned in the software documentation?
I believe that they did support cubase, but I don't imagine that the support would be 100%. the ST line with hardware MIDI built in was a beast. A musician friend of mine says the timing on the ST is rock solid. His modern gear with MIDI over usb or ethernet suffers from horrendous clock drift at times. as for hardware, I can't see any that would work,
Well the falcon is quite underpowered but I am surprised of how badly the performa performs (pun intended). From your real use tests it seems like the difference in performance is just on the CPU and bus speed. In the early days there was an accelerator for the falcon (mighty sonic/eagle I think) that was really cheap (but being a broke student I couldn't afford) and would give 32Mhz 030 and TT RAM to the falcon. Something like this would make your Mac seem really slow in comparison. Of course like others said it's more like a TT and less like a falcon but I get your point as well.
Could one run FreeMiNT on a "Old World" Motorola 68k Mac? I despise MacOS versions prior to Mac OS X as they were prone to crashing due to MacOS's cooperative multitasking. I'd love a way to run a preemptive multitasking OS on an "Old World" 68k Mac
it's an interesting question. MagiC obviously runs, well, Magic. But since it supports the unified file system idea and it's preemptively multitasking, you can get the MiNT experience through command line tooling.
Does anyone know if a Mac LC II could have run an Atari ST (520 or 1040) emulator and play games at native 60800 speeds? Games that were made for the Mac (Sim City 2000, Lemmings etc) were better on the Mac. But in the late 80s / early 90s, the ST had a much wider variety of games. Particularly arcade style games that were underrepresented on the Mac like Double Dragon, Super Hang On, Gauntlet II etc).
The LC II is pretty slow but is supported. The RAM is on a 16bit bus meaning 32bit reads need two accesses. They're about 15% slower in CPU benchmarks than the 32bit RAM Mac II with a 68020 and 28% slower than the IIcx, which is also a 16MHz 68030. But there are reproduction upgrades available and if you already have the machine, no harm in trying :) Make sure you get the logic board recapped as a matter of urgency if you haven't. They leak corrosive electrolyte and destroy traces, especially in and around the sound circuit.
Oh, but in CPU performance, the LC II performs about 3.5 times faster than an 8MHz 68000 Mac, so it might be fine for running 68000 Atari stuff if there isn't too much overhead for chipset emulation.
You specifically mention games. The problem is that most games accessed the hardware at really low levels and so won't work under Magic. A well behaved GEM game might, but they were few and far between.
I'd bought a second hand Quadra 840av off a work colleague, then ran MagicMac on it. But it wasn't as compatible as I'd hoped so sold the Mac then used the money to buy a TT and TTM194 monitor off an advert in Atari World magazine.
Love this so much!! I like running just the opposite...Mac OS on my Falcon (with an 060 in it). It's one way to get more late software for the software-poor Falcon. Running Warcraft II on an Atari makes me smile.
Absolutely; while the Amiga had the upper edge in terms of arcade perfect ports the Atari was king of MIDI and emulation.Hats off to specular emulation :p
Haha, yes. I'm with you on that. I wanted my Atari to show its potential. Once I'd moved on I didn't really need any of the old software, which was, for the most part, underwhelming. The fixed width font in almost every app and most programs disregard for multitasking caused by the lowest common denominator approach grated!
@@thetechnoshed well, I dont think that there was any software area where Falcon was held back by native software that you would be better of with emulated Mac, other then some games. What runs on MagicMac runs fine on Falcon under MaciC. MacOS did not have preemptive multitasking back then, Falcon had 3 chices, MagiC, MultiTOS or MiNT/FreeMiNT. And fixed font width? Majority of productivity software had option for outline/vector fonts after 1993, so what are you talking about? Yes, if you used program from 1987....
It’s an interesting topic this because a lot of us had Falcons or upgraded STs and saw Atari had abandoned us. Sooner or later a decision was needed… I went with the Mac but (iirc) 1997. So I lasted a long time! :) Got a power Mac and used MagicMac a lot until I gradually replaced those programs with Mac equivalents. Stupidly sold my Falcon and TT around 2002 I think. Stupid!! Biggest regret ever as I’ll never be able to afford one again :/ Anyhow a brilliant video 👍🏻
far better than putting it in the trashbin. Recently a redditor admitted to recently throwing out his Jupiter Ace, which is worth £1,300+ now.
Yes, it's strange how a falcon which was afforable in the day, is now a lottery winners toy!
GREAT video. neat topic. i'm just learning about the atari stuff. but this is good stuff. i had a bunch of the old macs in the day. thanks.
Sorry, but this time I have to disagree. While MagicMac was indeed some kind of "savior" for ATARI folks and was presented even in various ST mags as one, the MagicMac was actually not a Falcon replacement. It was ST/MegaSTE/TT030 replacement. First of all Falcon can have larger VRAM then your Peforma, second no, Falcon can do more then 640x480@8bit out of the box, and with some overclock way more then that... Third, Falcon is not just pure faster ST, Falcon has much better audio system your Performa has not and does have DSP which can speed up a lot of operations that will outperform Performa with 68LC40. Fourth, adding a FPU to Falcon was fairly easy, rather cheap and almost a mandatory upgrade (I didnt know any Falcon owner who didnt have the FPU), the Performa 475 did not have this option but to be fair, you could run MagicMac on any 68030-40 Macintosh.
Edit:
also it is not true that ATARI abandoned Falcon one year after its release, it was abandoned before the sales started.
Adding an FPU to a Performa 475 is easy - the 68LC040 is socketed, you just unplug the LC chip and plug in the full 68040.
@@phipli you do know there was a huge price difference between MC68040 and 68882?
@@madigorfkgoogle9349 Yes but you didn't mention price :) and the video was talking about second hand. Plus you could part ex them at some places.
For interest, buying from Micromac, a 68882 cost $39 and a 68040 cost $99. Expensive, but cheaper than a RAM upgrade 😂
TH-cam deleted my reply because I mentioned prices. Short answer, about 2x. But not applicable, I was just making it clear that the upgrade was possible and was often done in the second hand era.
@@phipli No, the price of 68882 was around 50UKP and 350-400UKP for 68040 in 1996, thats why Apple used much cheaper 68LC40 on budget models.
Changing CPU is not same as affordable adding of FPU in socket that is already present on the Falcon mainboard. And I was referring to video, not to what was or wasnt possible.
Lets see if youtube will let this pass.
So one could run a Mac on a 060 Amiga and would run Falcon the fastest
no, same as this video is a bit misleading, the Magic Mac is NOT a Falcon replacement, it is a TT030 replacement. There are apps that do use the DSP, and stock Falcon does outperforms or at least matches even a native Amiga with 68LC60 there.
I don't get why this should be called a Falcintosh. Maybe we can call it GEMintosh, but for it to be called Falcintosh it would need to be able to replace a Falcon. Which it can't. It has absolutely nothing to do with the Falcon. What made the Falcon the Falcon are its graphics and sound capabilities and its DSP. The Performa has none of it. Sure, it can run proper GEM applications but absolutely nothing that would be written for the Falcon. Or try to run ST games on it. I doubt that any commercial games will run on the Performa.
Don't get me wrong, it was well known in the early 90s that the best professional Atari computer comes from Apple, but the Falcon is and was never a computer for standard applications. It can run them and it was still a significant boost from a normal ST but it's simply the wrong computer to compare it to the Performa. The Falcon has an 030 and is limited to 14MB of RAM and to a 16 Bit bus. What do you expect when you compare it to a machine that has a 040 with 25 or 50Mhz and 4-36MB of RAM running on a 32Bit bus?
If there is any counterpart then it would be the Atari TT (equipped with TT RAM). (And the Performa would still be the better choice).
What you say is correct. but Falcintosh is such a wonderful pun I could not resist it:-)
But what about an Amiga emulating a Mac Emulating an ST, now that would be interesting to see, the reason I say that is an Amiga with same processor as the Mac ran faster than an equivalent Mac.
@8BitRetroJournal di an amiga emulating a Sinclair QL emulating a zx81 for an April fools joke in recent years
Yeah, but it is emulation, which is crap and not the real thing..... So, the best Falcon is still, a Falcon (with 68060, 128MB RAM etc).
that's fine if you happen to have a spare, say three thousand pound lying around :-)
@@commodoreisnottheonlyfruit :) Or if you were fortunate to acquire several units years ago when they were comparatively cheap. ;)
Regardless, the best Falcon is still an original unit with a nice accelerator and RAM card.
Atari St was okay in the 68000 days, but I never saw a 68030 ST here in the USA. I believe they have compatibility issues, worse than on the Mac 68030 machines with their 68000 software. Atari tragically never made it to 68040.
There was an in house prototype of a 68040 Falcon. It was in a box that was almost identical to the song ps2 cause, apparently Sony used the Atari design in their patent submissions
Some interesting things about the 475. As well as being expandable to 1MB VRAM and supporting 8bit at 1152*870, they actually aren't capped at 36MB RAM, they even take 64 and 128MB simms for up to 132MB, or technically 260MB with a SIMM Saver (which won't fit in the case).
Lastly and most importantly, they have a software controllable CPU clock! It was recently discovered that you can bump them up to higher speeds by poking certain registers. 33MHz is easy, 40 is possible and I've got mine to 50MHz including some hardware mods.
Its a brand new discovery, so we're still improving the software.
I did see something about this very recently, that was a resistor / jumper hack. You're saying that this is a software fix? that's amazing. Do you have a link to a forum page or a blog about it?
@@commodoreisnottheonlyfruitVery recent, as in last week and a half. No soldering required, purely software. TH-cam doesn't like people posting links, but my last video upload is applicable.
Waw, new video, instant like.
OK, the most Computer of the 80's based on the 68 Motorola Chip.
I've always wanted to get an iMac running MagicMac to replace my old ass STe, but I was returning to university and needed a Windows PC for programming classes.
Had I've known about Virtual PC, I would had held off getting a Pentium PC for school and save up more for an iMac to run both MagicMac & Virtual PC.
And yes I know MagicMac is more for running serious GEM applications than games but there was also an ST emulator called NoSTalgia for the fun stuff.
I think NoSTalgia is one of the best names for a piece of software ever.
Interesting video. Would have been also interesting to see the performance of full-blown 68040 equiped Performa. And what about music software (Cubase, Notator) and hardware extensions? Is it somewhere mentioned in the software documentation?
I believe that they did support cubase, but I don't imagine that the support would be 100%. the ST line with hardware MIDI built in was a beast. A musician friend of mine says the timing on the ST is rock solid. His modern gear with MIDI over usb or ethernet suffers from horrendous clock drift at times.
as for hardware, I can't see any that would work,
Well the falcon is quite underpowered but I am surprised of how badly the performa performs (pun intended).
From your real use tests it seems like the difference in performance is just on the CPU and bus speed.
In the early days there was an accelerator for the falcon (mighty sonic/eagle I think) that was really cheap (but being a broke student I couldn't afford) and would give 32Mhz 030 and TT RAM to the falcon. Something like this would make your Mac seem really slow in comparison.
Of course like others said it's more like a TT and less like a falcon but I get your point as well.
It's hard to explain, but it does feel so much faster. I think the 040 architecture and the 80ns video memory are key
Could one run FreeMiNT on a "Old World" Motorola 68k Mac? I despise MacOS versions prior to Mac OS X as they were prone to crashing due to MacOS's cooperative multitasking. I'd love a way to run a preemptive multitasking OS on an "Old World" 68k Mac
There are 68k Linux variants that run on macs :)
it's an interesting question. MagiC obviously runs, well, Magic. But since it supports the unified file system idea and it's preemptively multitasking, you can get the MiNT experience through command line tooling.
ST's also! Mind you 68K Linux started on some dodgy platform called the Amigo or something similar
Does anyone know if a Mac LC II could have run an Atari ST (520 or 1040) emulator and play games at native 60800 speeds? Games that were made for the Mac (Sim City 2000, Lemmings etc) were better on the Mac. But in the late 80s / early 90s, the ST had a much wider variety of games. Particularly arcade style games that were underrepresented on the Mac like Double Dragon, Super Hang On, Gauntlet II etc).
The LC II is pretty slow but is supported. The RAM is on a 16bit bus meaning 32bit reads need two accesses. They're about 15% slower in CPU benchmarks than the 32bit RAM Mac II with a 68020 and 28% slower than the IIcx, which is also a 16MHz 68030. But there are reproduction upgrades available and if you already have the machine, no harm in trying :)
Make sure you get the logic board recapped as a matter of urgency if you haven't. They leak corrosive electrolyte and destroy traces, especially in and around the sound circuit.
Oh, but in CPU performance, the LC II performs about 3.5 times faster than an 8MHz 68000 Mac, so it might be fine for running 68000 Atari stuff if there isn't too much overhead for chipset emulation.
You specifically mention games. The problem is that most games accessed the hardware at really low levels and so won't work under Magic. A well behaved GEM game might, but they were few and far between.
hmmm, what about something a little more but still very cheap like an LCIII.. 32bit, similar to the Performa.. would be a cheap Falcon..??
@@pperk97 Good point. And still has the same form factor as the LC and LC II.