This is like picking up a refreshing cold can of Cherry Coke, only to discover it's that zero sugar monstrosity. Never ever do this again, especially to a ex-Falcon owner which strangely enough was destroyed by a full can of Sugary Cherry Coke in late 1994...
From the US perspective: prior to the Falcon launch, there were already add-on boards for the Atari ST line of computers which included Motorola 030 processor board with 32 bit ram, 68882 floating point co-processor boards, 80386 boards which would allow you to boot into dos mode. I had installed these boards in many computers for our customers and I installed a 25Mhz 68000 accelerator board with a floating point co-processor on my own machine to help in development of my own software. At one point, I was working with other developers of boards which included a DSP co-processor and a VGA adapter card for the ST line. Sadly, Atari's fate was sealed before the commercial arrival of the Falcon. San Diego had a large computer enthusiasts base back in the early 1990s and there was a convention which brought in thousands of people to see what was going on in the computer industry: PC, Macs, Amigas, Ataris, etc. And while it wasn't nearly as big as ComicCon is now, it was a large group. Atari had the opportunity to showcase their Falcon030 computer at our convention, but chose instead to show it off to 100 people at an Atari user group in Boston. I sold off my computers after that, realizing that, while the computers were competitive with the Amigas and Macs, the company was short-sighted and doomed to failure.
These Hardware history/review/documentary videos is why I am here in the first place. I know they're time consuming, and probably don't pay for themselves , but thanks for making them.
We had one at the studio I used to work at. It was being used mainly for Cubase, and also as a controller for Yamaha Digital Consoles (DMP7s). It was quite the workhorse, as it was still being used on a regular basis as late as 2002.
Mate I'm watching many retro vids at the moment, but I swear blind yours are the best. Always a great balance of research, humour, enthusiasm, sarcasm, and passion. Even if the machine in question isn't of nostalgic value to me, I still watch it.
Even though i'm more of a console guy myself i still love watching these "documentary style" video's on these 80's and 90's computers, done in a fashion only the Nerd can do!
I remember my guitar teacher had a Falcon in his studio, running Cubase. He ran his studio equipment with it through MIDI, which was like total and utter magic to me at the time.
Interestingly the Atari ST and Falcon was pretty big with musicians/producers at the time (probably because of its built-in MIDI interface), but for the general public it wasn't that popular in the US, unlike in in Europe. From my experience, the C64 and the Amiga machines were all the rage in US.
I think it was a great shame that the practical aspects of Atari/Amiga/Commodore range - music, DTP etc was always rather downplayed in favour of bloody "games", complete with their sounds like a stomach overcome with digestive problems. A case in point here - why pay £499 for a Falcon to play games on when you could do the same job with a £199 machine?. Play up the fact that you could produce WORK on it for a fraction of the cost of Windows/Mac machines, and sales would have been steady. There must come a point in life when you don't just want to sit and play some daft game night after night.
We had a couple home studios so we could each work on music at our own homes, then bring floppies to the other house to combine ideas. We used Cubase on an Atari 1040 STF, and an Atari 520 STFM which I added RAM to make it a non-produced 1040 STFM equivalent since I needed the RF output for flexibility, yet only used the modulator once before getting a dual color/mono monitor setup. Before that, we used the older Atari 8-bit computers for MIDI control, a 1200 XL, (my personal favorite of the 8-bit family), and an 800XL that was later replaced with a 130XE. Later we bought a MEGA4 STE, I think, for 16-bit audio recording and editing. There were a few options to pick between such as Digidesign and Hybrid Arts, as well as a bunch of smaller and cheaper units from various smaller start-ups that we could use with the Atari ST and Mega computers. We tried one that claimed to be great and used newly available DSP technology to make it smaller and more capable. We bought it on a trial basis, and found it was absolute garbage! It would record fine it seemed, but on playback, it was heard that a sample (or more) were actually dropped about every 30 to 45 seconds. If you were deaf it may have been ok, but for music production with ears that can hear when data is lost it was too glitchy for any real use. It was returned within the week. Don't ask me what it was, as it was something I never wanted to see again, and have blocked details from memory from the trauma I experienced. We then found another promising add-on box, that needed proper examination. I think it was still in a beta state, but being sold with great promise. If I remember correctly, it had SMPTE sync, that we used to sync with other machines we used with MIDI, as well as SPDIF ins and outs to make backups of 2-channel audio tracks and import them back in using a DAT machine. This was a fully proper 16-bit recording and editing workstation that we did multi-track work and mixing with. I think it was only 8 tracks of audio, so we did LOTS of digital mixing to get many vocal parts recorded and mixes down to fit the limits of the hardware. It could never have been down without saving many DAT tracks for later mixing. No, I do not remember what it was called either, after many marathon mixing and editing sessions I was happy to put it into a dark box and take the SCSI drive over to my PC for video editing... I have not looked in that dark box since. There is just no need to, with the newer software and hardware that has since come out that is so much more powerful and capable on the PC hardware platform. For me it is still Cubase for all things audio, but Nuendo if video is also needed. The higher audio resolution of Nuendo would also be recommended if doing massive audio track mixdowns to reduce audible digital rounding errors at the mixing stage.
Great video. I'm a big ST fan, so great to see more content on Atari and especially the Falcon. Really well resourced, informative and entertain as always. Keep up the awesome work. 👍
YES! This is EXACTLY what I come to Nostalgia Nerd for. I know these documentary pieces must take a phenomenal amount of work but they truly are the shining jewels of the channel. I enjoyed this video with English Muffins, Strawberry Conserve and a nice cup of tea.
I really had a soft spot for the Falcon 030 too. It ran so many home music studio at the time - people would bring their Falcon to bigger studios and it still had more than enough grunt and locked timing (esp with a second MIDI box) to control a master record session. This is a fantastic look back at the system - thanks tons for the vid!
It's such a shame that both Commodore and Atari were so damn disorganized back in those days. They were developing so many cool and profound devices, but shot themselves down. Great video!
@@little_fluffy_clouds a core principle of marketing is knowing how to make the market. Being able to identify what people will want when they do not even know that they want it. Ge the "Ohhhh! Wow! I want that NOW!" reaction to a thing the person had no conception of until the instant of encountering it is a major goal of marketing. The tough sell is the person who still says "Why would I want that?" even after you've explained to them exactly what the thing is and how it can be of benefit/use to them. It's especially annoying when the tough sell is at a company that makes a similar product and you're attempting to explain to them how this new thing *will make them more profit* if they market it appropriately. For example the PCI Express x1 Type E USB 3.x adapter card. This product did not exist for a long time, even though it should have. PCI Express x1 Type C USB 3.x cards came into existence just about simultaneously with the launch of USB C. What's the difference? Type C is the external port. Type E is the connector for internal connection to front panel Type C ports. A large number of motherboards have but one Type E connector, or none at all. A large number of motherboards have one PCIe x16 slot and one or more x1 slots. Until fairly recently the shortest PCI Express card with a Type E connector was x2. To use it a desktop PC would have to be one of the very rare models with open ended slots, one of the rare models with a slot shorter than x16 but longer than x1, or a board with two x16 slots for GPUs and give up one to the x2 Type E card - but many boards with dual x16 slots have one only connected as x4 and shared with an NVME SSD slot. So an x2 card cannot be plugged in when a motherboard mounted SSD is installed. The x1 Type E card *should have always existed* from the advent of USB C. Creating one would be dead simple. Take the single port x1 Type C card they already make and re-arrange the traces to solder on an internal Type E connector. Over the course of more than a year I contacted every PC peripheral card maker with an x1 Type C card in their product line and gave them the spiel on the untapped market for an x1 Type E card, why the x2 Type E cards were slow sellers (they can't be used in the majority of PCs), and how it should be a quick and easy job of designing a x1 Type E card. I mostly got no replies, and a few negatives from short sighted companies refusing to understand the opportunity they were ignoring. Every so often I'd google "PCIe x1 Type E" and one day there it was. (Cue chorale vocal hit.) I've no idea if finally someone forwarded one of my emails to the right people or if someone independently wondered why that product that should exist didn't, and decided they had to make it. The next product that doesn't exist but should? An NVME to SATA adapter. NVME to USB C exists for 4x PCIe SSDs so why isn't there an adapter to convert it to connect to a SATA port? Ultimate top speed wouldn't be important. ExpressCard to USB 3.0 adapters have existed since the intro of USB 3.0 and they cannot hit the top speed of USB 3.0, due to ExpressCard only having PCIe 1.0 x1. There also needs to be ExpressCard to USB C. The USB C PCIe x1 cards for desktops suffer the same speed limitations when plugged into older motherboards with PCIe 1.0. They still work! An ExpressCard version is merely a change of form, the electronics would be exactly the same, and the power pins to the ExpressCard USB 2.0 port could be tapped for additional power.
Having too "many cool and profound devices" was part of their problem. Rather then make one product good then improving upon it, they kept going in different directions which financially spread themselves too thin and no one product got to benefit. Atari was the worse at this, who at one point had too many product lines that was just cannibalizing their own marketshare. Total lack of focus. Jack of all trades, master of none.
Love this... Thank you.. I bought my falcon030, ex demo, with (has) a broken lid 200 quid in 1992 or 3. Drove to London, from devon, to collect 16mb ram at a very low price of 100 quid, which it still has in it. Bought 65mb hard drive from an auction. Added a clock doubler to 32mhz... It's in need of some TLC, but I'm moving soon so I will have space to have my STFM, STE, Falcon030 and my BBC Master out and running.. great video.. made my day..
@@paullangton5834 Yes, but Beast wasn't one of them. The ST version of Beast was very poor. My point is that with the extra power of the STE or the Falcon, it would have been a much better game.
that was fantastic, easily one of the best youtube vids ive ever watched. Production was spot on, content and delivery perfect and even the end tune was great. keep it up!!!!
I have one of the very early Falcons, great machine, you could even get 1024x768 or higher resolution out of it if you ran it on a high phosphor monitor that could slow scan. but really when it came out it was doomed, the pc market had already won
@@scarlett5924 i am aware, but it was expensive, and unusual on a consumer desktop. 800x600 was generally considered to be "high resolution" for home use. my very first windows desktop , was windows 3.1 which came out the same year as the falcon, i drove that at 1024x768 as normal, and that required a very expensive BNC plugged monitor. i think it would do 1280x1024 but at a reduced pallet. my next step up was 1600x1200, around the win 95 era
@@yetidynamics It wouldn't do that stock. You must have had aftermarket software/hardware to allow for the additional resolutions. I did have such a device. 1280x1024 was interlaced at 16, which was ok at the time.
@@sebclot9478 the Slow scan was purely software driven, I ran MiNT which i think handled it. I still have the computer, but i don't have the slow scan monitor anymore
Premier! Actually a decent Atari Falcon vid! I'm hoping for some decent Llamazap footage (yep, former Falcon030 owner here. I even also had a Milan machine back in the day. Gutted I lost 'em )
I still use both my TT and my Falcon even to this day. Both are massively upgraded from stock. My TT is sporting a 48Mhz CaTTamaran so its a bit quicker than stock. It also has 10MB STRAM and 16MB TTRAM. Its Running Magic v6.2 and Jinnee Desktop. My Falcon is a real beast! Its sporting a 120Mhz 68060 CPU on a CT060 Board, with 16MB STRAM plus 512MB TTRAM ( Although thats totally uselessly high ) It also has ATI 9200 Graphics and is running Mint & Jinnee and is installed on a 32GB mSata SSD. It is a friggin beast compared to stock, and yet its nothing compared to what some others have theirs setup as.
@@eMorphized The TT was going to be shipped with a version of unix that was called "SYSTEM V" Not only that, but MINT has the capability of adding things like X Support and *nix file systems as well as FAT32, so in a way, that was a unix compatible extention to the TOS system. It also allowed true multitasking too!
@@FatRakoon System V is the version of UNIX for which more software is made than any other iteration. It is used as the basis for Linux, BSD, and more. Solaris went with System 7, and all flavors eventually incorporated some of its features, but SysV was the start of it all.
@@eMorphized Yeah, I want to say that I know that, but I might just be thinking that I knew it? I certainly know that its a very old system ( Obviously if it was going to be used on the TT I suppose ), and I am sure I read something about it a while back when Linus Torvalds was developing Linux, but as for the exact info, I dont honestly know.
I bought my Falcon in the mid-90's in Germany. For German ST magazines, the Falcon was a breath of fresh air with lots of articles describing how to use the Falcon's features. I wouldn't say that Germany "won" though - German software companies, especially the ones producing high-end software, expected a true TT successor. The Falcon wasn't that machine. In fact, Atari continued to sell and ship the TT because unlike what you said, the TT did find a niche market as a capable and affordable computer for desktop publishing. Atari did promise a more professional Falcon while various third party companies tried to make the Falcon 030 more suitable for serious work via accelerators, desktop cases and expansions for VME cards. Meanwhile, Atari UK was crazy enough to sell the Falcon with only 1 meg of memory. At that point, going against the Amiga would've been futile - in order to get decent game support, Atari would had to sell at least 100000 units. Adding development time, you'd have ended up in late 1993/94 when it was clear that consoles and PC were the future.
mjaap A breath of fresh air? In mid ‘90’s 486 and Pentium based machines were everywhere. I have seen some late Amiga models used as side machine by some photographer in the late 90’s. Never heard about this
᚛᚛᚛ Mr. Vyper ᚜᚜᚜ Doesn't matter whether you heard about this - my comment was about the Atari market only and German Atari magazines reaction to it. That the rest of the computer world mostly never heard about the Falcon is obvious from its sales numbers.
mjaap My point is your (wrong) purchase was driven by some magazine reviews back in the days as like someone living in a Google filtered bubble that convinced you with personalized ads. In the real world Atari machines never had anything appealing compared to (even cheaper) competitors. But even a low volume of sales at some level keeps encouraging companies to push short-term crap on the market, since there will always be an idiot who will buy it.
It took me ages to save up for a 520STFM, then took me ages to save up for some games so when the Falcon came out I knew I couldn't afford to upgrade and by then I had got into PCs anyway, however I did have a Star LC-10 dot-matrix printer for my ST - I can still remember that distinctive aroma of a warm ST - Thanks for doing a video on the Falcon!
You absolutely aced this documentary! I love how you blend in your love for these computers with cold hard facts and nineties magazines and tv clips. Awsome! 10/10 would watch again!
A surprise see my clip in your video : "Atari Falcon 060 Quake" very good (maybe your best one) review and a big congratulations for your work.! greets!
I had a 1040 STE when the Falcon launched. I also had an A500 Plus. Whith simllar sized software collections for both. When the Falcon launched, I was super hyped by the specs and planned to sell both my 16-bit machines and get one. But due to backwards compatibility question marks, I decided to hold-off and wait and see how things progressed on the software side. Needless to say many others waited too and it soon became clear that Atari had screwed it all up! The A1200 lauched and was less powerful but cheaper. Plus, it had a huge back catalogue of OCS/ECS games it could play from day 1. I regretted the failure of the Falcon, but never regretted holding-off and not buying one!
The biggest issue was Atari should have made the Falcon as the Jaguar development system and included the Jaguars Object processor, and the Jaguar should have been based on a one chip Falcon (68030, 68882, DSP, Videl, Object Processor, Blitter and Sound on one chip (would have still had less transistors than on the Jaguar's GPU) but would have been more capable / flexible. It would have been much easier to develop for, ST/E compatible and would have saved a fortune in development costs. It would have also been a natural upgrade choice for people to have a Jaguar and a Falcon. Atari could have also made another version of the one chip version without the Object processor so it could be used in high end audio devices.
The Jaguar GPU was never actually finished, the version that shipped with the console was actually missing important address registers, chopping the potential performance of the chip to less then 1/3 of what it could have been. If Atari wouldn't have rushed the chip so much, it might have actually been competitive. Tho, given the shameful treatment of third party developers it proly wouldnt have made any difference.
if you want to see the true form of the Jaguar go check out the arcade version called the CoJag. It had a Motorola 68020 along with a fully finished GPU and 4MB of ram. The arcade version of Area 51 ran on this. There was another CoJag with a MIPS processor instead of a Motorola.
@@tHeWasTeDYouTh I own all the CoJag boards, even unreleased prototypes. The GPU on them is the same as the Jags. Furthermore, they use a Mips or 68020 to reduce actual GPU use, so the only parts really being used are the Object processor, Blitter and sound.
I thought the GPU had all the bugs fixed by the time of the CoJag since it was a year or two later when it came out. How much memory does a CoJag have for its games, I read in some places that say 4MB and others 8MB?
Bugs?, I mean don't get me wrong, it may have had bugs as well. But the chip was intentionally left unfinished to save on cost. This is just par the course for Jack Tramil style management. Keep treating your employees, suppliers, customers, and investors as enemies, and eventually they will be....... "Business is WAR!!!!!" -- Jack Tramil Note, this was done with the Commadore 64, and Atari ST as well (the SID chip was unfinished, and the shift register to serialize parallel communication with the floppy drive was never finished, The Atari STE's blitter chip was originally planned for the Atari ST). Jack was unafraid to push unfinished product in order to hit the market faster, save on cost, or snub the competition.
I like to think of myself as pretty knowledgeable when it comes to old systems (having lived through the lives of most of them) but I'd never heard of this. Great video as always. Cheers mate.
Also, some corrections: The STE had nothing in common with the EST, which was more similar with the later released TT (same graphics modes). The TT and Stacy were successful in their own way, but they were never machines for the average consumer. MultiTOS was not ready to put into ROM, although the last beta version of TOS 4 (4.92) hinted that Atari planned to change that at one point in time.
The Atari Falcon 030 was my first audio-midi computer. I bought it in 94. It had Cubase Audio Falcon 2.06 software. Steinberg 44.1 clock generator hanging on the dsp port. Softjee audio interface, SCSI II hard drive, and synths, synth modules. The analog master was a Nordmende HIFI VHS VCR. It was a lot of fun. Atari F030rever!
Thank you Nostalgia Nerd. I hadn't heard of the falcon before until watching your awesome video. I saved up £750 and in June 2019 I bought my falcon with 14mb ram and 160gb hard drive. It is the pride of my collection and someday I will get the elusive TT model. Again thanks and keep up the good work bud. 👍👍👍
I still cry for the Atari 1450, I was going to get it as my graduation present I was Pissed it Never Came out, and it went and took the Falcon down the same Path if Atari Just Never starting to drop Good Ideas and Quit Putting them on Hole it would Still be on of the Top Players List..
Great video! I love your stuff, I lived through the era of the Atari 2600 obviously until now and owned an Atari 520ST at launch. Watching videos like this allow me to re-live cherished moments from my past and I thank you for that. Keep up the GREAT work.
26:41 its good to see ya mister good man !! thanks for all you do for us, I watch you every weekend. I still have mi CPC 6128 tons of games + AMIGA 500 / 1200 + ATARI STE
I fell in love with Falcon when it was announced. Alas, half a year later I got my first PC, as it dawned on me that the era of Atari & Amiga was gone, and Falcon just came too late.
Such a good channel, Great content! I grew up in the 80's/90's with 386 win3.11 sblaster16 and used to use BBS's to download shareware at 9600kbps until 28.8kbps came out. I love re-living this era!!!
Loved this video. During the first uk lockdown last year, I got my stfm out of the loft to share some of the music I wrote on Steinberg pro 12, alas the floppy is not working due to well known issue. These were joyful times with loads of options, now we have three.
Damn fine info about a machine that I've never heard of. As an Amiga owner (4000/030), I'd say that the Falcon seems a formidable contender. It has some strengths (like sound-in) which is more PC-like (lacking in the Amiga). The Premier Stream was cool and different!
I used to run AmigaOS 3.0 on my Amiga 1000. I also had a deinterlacer by ICD. So I was able to run desktop (workbench) in 640x400 with 8 colors. 16 color mode ate too much chip ram. I went to the Amiga3000, and also installed Amiga OS 3.0 within hours. LOL. The Amiga vs ST comparisons... Amiga multitasking was much better, also filenames not limited to 8.3 filenames like MSDos.
Oh. Commodore was still a stupid company. Always was. They couldn't take themselves seriously. Very short-sighted. The Amiga should have destroyed apple/mac's. If the Amiga 2000 had a deinterlacer and not in a big stupid case for stupid PC slots. It could have been a serious business computer. And make an updated A1000, for lower cost business computer would have been welcomed. Basically something between the A500 and A2000. That's why I went with the 1000 and not the a500.
The Falcon was a machine I lusted over in '92, thanks in part to ST Format's coverage. At the time a friend and me were using the ST in the music Lab at school, as such we both got STE's which were a tad more affordable. Great vid!
I only ever seen one of these back in the day. It's specs were impressive, it was how the Amiga 1200 should have been before the cut backd on specs and chipsets. However, the Falcon came too late, the Amiga / Atari days had essentially finished and people had moved to the PC.
I received your excellent Retro Tech book as a gift over Christmas, which I read knowing I was inevitably going to end up on a retro computer buying spree... The Falcon stood out as the machine I most want to get my hands on. Turns out it also seems to be one of the hardest to find! I’ve settled for a 1040STE for now, but the search continues...
Jesus, 14 MB in 1993? That's like almost $1000 in ram back then. EDIT: Had to check and make sure I wan't talking completely out my ass. 14MB in 1992 ran around $500, which is a little over $900 in today's money.
I remember wanting to upgrade my memory in my ST back in the day, about 92-93, from 512k to 1mb, but the extra 512k was £30 (£60 today) and when you're 12 that's a lot of money.
I remember when they announced the Amiga 4000 being able to take 128meg, that just blew my mind. still, it didn't stop me upgrading my CD32 to 10 meg :)
In the late 80s I started collecting game consoles and by the time Jaguar CD hit I thought I had "every atari" but I never knew about atari computers. I picked up an 800xl at a yard sale and started researching the past and even then I didn't know about falcon. Excellint history video. I've only recently learned about computers in the UK too
Real nice channel. Your Flickr pics are awesome. I'm also a retro fanatic and collector trying to do stuff in modest corner of YT, and I can tell you I really like the way you make videos: they are informative as well as entertaining. And your still pictures are really something, excellent choices of lighting, angle, presentation... Appreciate!
But you lost 50 fps animations of the C64, thank to the hardware scrolling and sprites which are not available on the ST. And you lost the good sound capabilities of the C64 hardware too. The ST was kind of Spectrum/Amstrad CPC with a 68000 CPU and more memory.
I too went from a C64 to the Atari ST and loved it. I spent more time using GFA Basic and other productivity applications on my ST than I did playing games. Now I have Hitari set up on my laptop and play around with the ST on there.
@@elephantrange No It Isn't. Saying changing tact Is completely wrong. KristianTV1974 wasn't splitting hairs, nor were there any leporine animals harmed or segregated In the making of his comment. He offered a plain and simple correction, with the addition of an etymological explanation... Can't get fairer than that.
@@telkentexas4053 Read back. I don't think you meant to reply to me. I said: 'that's splitting hares', meaning bunnies, in stupid fun. I wasn't discussing 'changing tack/tact'. That was your argument with KristianTV1974.
oh god that so reminds me of how borderline unplayable elite 2 was on atari st I got up to the biggest ship on it but you had to use the auto pilot for almost everything cos the controls were to juddery
20:04 That generic plate on the disk drive feels like such an aesthetic downgrade on the original ST case! As a matter of fact, to me, the cool uniqueness of the ST case revolves of course around the tilted function key row, but also the disk drive slot.
Thanks for the excellent story and for showing off your falcon. I really appreciate the effort you must be putting in to all your videos. I followed the C64 > Amiga > PC direction, but a friend did have an Atari STE and I thought it was great. His father used to make music on it, which is something I had always wanted to do but didn't have the option of on my Amiga 500.
Different musician I think 😉 He's a successful composer these days and as far as I know had no disabilities. Hey. Yes.. spending 2 days rendering a 3d ball with reflections in high resolution! Haha..
ray tracing never went away, it's used for all kinds of programming tasks now that we can efficiently do it in real time. For example, any time you interact with a 3d world using your (2d screen space) mouse cursor it throws a ray from the screen into the world to see what it hits and let's you interact properly. Ofc still used in renderering etc as well!
As an Amiga A500 Plus owner back in the day, my only exposure to anything ST related was when my friend from Kent came up to the North East with his parents to visit his grandparents, and he brought his 1040ST with him. :) Those were the only times I got to play Oids until someone ported it to the Amiga....... in 2014. Great video as always :)
Falcon was the first ST that had an OS that was decent. It wasn't as nice as Amiga OS 3 in general but it had fast screen updates and was snappy. I installed a few into some sound studios and it was miles better than the ST's I had used previously.
3:37 Is anybody commenting about the rainbow colored ribbon on the Transputer? I'm really triggered now EDIT: 26:37 Z and Y are switched on the keyboard?
Owned an Atari ST 520 FM got it for Christmas early 90's and loved it but it became harder to get games and I started wishing I'd got an Amiga, but that aside when I read about the Falcon 030 I wanted one so badly but the price killed that dream. I still own an ST but it's a 1040 FM got it from ebay after my original machine was killed when moving house. It saddens me to hear what Atari did to it's self the Falcon could of destroyed the 1200 and I would of still been able to get games into the late 90's. Excellent video, more Atari stories please.
17:24 i wonder where they got the design idea for the Playstation 2, all joking aside if this image or design and the PS2 aren't linked somehow i'll be very surprised. 29:00 Guess i got my answer
Dude, as an old Amiga-fan with no real interest in Atari I must say that I truly enjoyed this video! Learning all this (to me) new stuff and seeing the historical parallels to the Amiga hit me right in the heart. Sadly I've been having the realization that all the contenders in the home computer market were all really living on borrowed time vs. the PC, which is a sad, sad realization to say the least. Back in the days the future sure seemed a lot more colorful, but we've ofc gained an incredibly accelerated development from the PC platform itself over the past 20+ years. RIP old champions!
Since it was the pack-in game that came with my lynx (the first model, the really large one), it was the only game I had during the first 2 months I had the system, and I played the heck out of it! ;) It's sad it only had the 4 mini-games though, instead of the 6 (I think) on the desktop platforms...
I love all of your micro retrospectives! I live in the states so a great deal of the history has been new to me as the machines just never made it here. Cheers from Florida!
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Oh nice, so this is where my Sparrow footage went. Oh and there is even my Quake port! :) Nice overview, although the Falcon ICs shown are partially wrong - there isn't a Blitter chip (it's part of the Combel) and the DMA looks way more complex as it takes care of many things.
Always wanted one of these. I had a 1040ST back in the day, and still have a 520ST with 1 meg of RAM. I am a huge Atari fan and also had an 800, 800XL and a 130XE that I expanded the memory to 576K and ran a BBS on in the mid-late 80's.
I adored the ST back in the day. I bought a gently loved 1040st with original Atari Mono and Color monitors about 10 years ago, but I still lust after the Falcon
My ST journey started with a 520stfm back in the early 90s. I just came back from my holiday and my very first credit card was waiting for me, so I immediately got the bus into town and maxed it out. I tried my own 512k RAM upgrade to make it a 1040, but bodged the soldering and couldn't get it to boot at all (finally got it fixed). After I came into a bit of money I bought a MegaST 2 and got the matching 60MB hard drive. The drive was amazing but expensive at £768!!! I parted ways with it all before I moved countries, so sadly I no-longer have it. I was active in the demo scene back in the day too.
When I first heard of the Falcon 030, which was near the end of it being available new, my PC had a VLB video card capable of both higher resolutions and more colors at those resolutions. It also had a faster (IIRC 25 Mhz) 80486 CPU. Even worse for the Atari my PC was built of secondhand parts older than the Falcon and then current new PC stuff was even better. I looked at the specs on the sales flyer and said "Why would I want to downgrade?" Atari, Commodore and the rest of the companies who weren't Apple, IBM, or PC Clone makers failed because they kept up with their overly long development cycles of fully integrated computers instead of making motherboards with just the basics then having the fancy features modular on plug in cards. Then there was further increasing model and price variability (in the PCs) with socketed CPUs and offering different speeds on the same motherboard. Apple had socketed CPUs on many models but only rarely offered more than one speed choice in a model. Whenever they did have different CPU speeds in the 90's the faster option usually came at the discontinuing of the previous, slower, CPU. Had Atari followed the PC modular model *and* offered the full speed range of socketed 68030 CPUs *and* put all their fancy technology eggs onto one or two plug in cards - they would've had a system customizable from an affordable *competitive* price all the way up to high end. They also would've been able to introduce upgrades to plug in, replacing the originals. Discontinue an old package AND sell the new bits as upgrade kits to owners of previous models. Then they could've introduced new 040 systems, and sold the motherboards as upgrade kits. Apple and IBM did sell motherboard upgrade kits for some of their Macintosh and PS/1 and PS/2 systems. In Apple's case that sometimes included a major part of the computer's case due to moved/changed ports. Apple made a PPC upgrade for their Duo laptops that had display connectors for every type of disply used on all prior Duo models. The kit came with the mainboard and a new top case with trackpad, but you could used the original top if you preferred the trackball. I once bought for a pittance a stack of 386 PS/2 boards that had been pulled for upgrading to 486 boards. A while later I sold the lot to some surplus dealer as a decent profit. Atari and the rest just got stuck in the slower paced late 1970's and 1980's mindset where companies could take a while designing a new system, put it on the market and make bank off it for quite a while. But the 90's started seeing obsolescence of new hardware hitting in mere months. Atari etc just couldn't adapt quickly enough.
Quite true, unfortunately. Was happy to see third parties jumping into that niche though. The expandability you talk about is actually - from what I understand - what Atari Germany had wanted (they wanted a TT030/X and a Falcon030 with slots because of the German market using Ataris for more than just games) but never got. Sad. I liked the diversity of affordable architectures and platforms of the day. Now we're stuck with x86/x64 or ARM, Windows or Linux or MacOS on one hand and Android or iOS on the other hand. Yes, I know there is more, but I consider most of the other platforms very niche. Most stores will have these choices (luckily there is the Internet).
Simply look at 386/486 from early 90s to Pentium 3s at the end of the 90s...economically it was expensive trying to keep up with the evolving and new 3D game engines that required exponentially faster hardware. Nevertheless, Amiga and Atari ST hardware upgrades in the early 90s was very expensive for the average consumer.
@@johnny5wd567 Actually You are current stuck between Linux and Windows. There are some few proprietary OS'es that havn't gotten very much attention and market share, but most other major players beside MS Windows is based on a Linux kernel, and according to some you might some time in the not to far away future be stuck betwen Linux and Linux ...
"Why would I want to downgrade?" ... Then you havn't really gotten all the facts straight.. Actually the Motorola 68xxx Processor line was much better at just about anything compared to the X86 Series. Just a basic Atari ST 8Mhz 6800 could easily outperform a 16Mhz 80286 in various static math tests. Eg the same C Code could compile faster on the standard 68000 than a 80286, but of cause computer programs arent just a test in how many times you can calculate pi on each machine, wich has very little practical use for the average user. Both Commodore and Atari ended up being crushed by the broad success of the PC, and its quite funny Commodore said "When we heard Atari were going for the PC market we knew had already won" They did live a little longer than Atari, mainly due to Tramiel making so many business mistakes, and Atari was never a "big" company with a big money tank. The ST line was made in rush with kinda "kitchen table" design with cheap components, and it did make a remarkeable good job for how cheap and fast they slapped it together to try to compete with Commodore and Apple, but who ended their live as a home game computer company trying to sell PC's when the Amiga died ... The 68000 processor was for its time a much better platform but both Atari amd Commodore made some serious decission mistakes wich eventually made them faulter. Only Apple lived thru it even they also had some bad bumps along the road. If Tramiel had been a better business man he would have seen the niches that Atari was strong in .. mainly Music production and DTP, and focused on Developing the ST line into the Falcon as primarily a music production machine and The TT line to DTP use. The Jaguar was also a very promising. If the 2 companies hadn't been so much at war with eachother they shoulda merged in the early 90's and we may have had a completely different computer history If the Amiga and the Jaguar could have lived on as gaming computers and the ST /TT line for more professional use. Both closed end systems and open ended ones have their strength and weaknesses. Today we are moving more and more away from the nerdiness of old school computing where software and games were designed for specific often expensive hardware wich not everyone can afford. Soon people won't even care what hardware things use, just wich cloud service is right for my needs.
I never got to see a Falcon in real life. It was just this elusive wonder machine that most people never got to try. It would have been so fun to see what some serious companies could have done with the Motorola DSP chip. Those demonstrations apps on it with "harmonizing" effects is a total joke. I know for a fact that expansion cards for the first hardware based PC DAW systems used stacks of these DSP's to offload effect processing from the slow poke 486 and Pentium machines we had back then. I eventually sold my Atari ST and traded in my Cubase 2.0 Score for Cubase 1.0 for Windows. What a nightmare music production was on Windows back then. It took Steinberg and other audio software houses almost a decade to get a just somewhat working midi system with Windows. It was first with the arival of Windows NT you were able to get a decent Midi sync on a PC and it was first with USB 2.0 that we could actually get an audio interface with decent low latency. And even today an old fart 6800 ST with the Midi interface direct connected to the cpu databus still have a more "tight" midi sync than a modern PC. That with a computer that is more than 1000x as fast as these old machines. pretty amazing.
AWESOME video on the story behind the Falcon, I learnt so many things, thanks!!! As always, excellent editing and audio commentary, beautifully delivered with this superb voice of yours (love your accent!)
An 040 based computer probably would have flattened anything 386. The 040 is more comparable to the 486 feature set wise, and by more comparable I mean the 040 blew anything Intel had at the time out of the water. I think it just came too late and didn't gain enough traction, and companies like Atari and Commodore- who would have shipped its flagship consumer CPUs into a wider market- falling apart the way they did is a good part of why. I really wish we lived in the timeline where the Motorola 68k line did better, stayed competitive and kept evolving along side Intel to this day.
Yeah, that would be the tricky part. Apple didn't start shipping 040 based machines into the consumer market until... I think around 93? I believe it would have been possible a year earlier for Atari, but they would have had to go all in on the initiative.
If my memory is correct the other issue with Motorola chips are that they were expensive (in a rough comparison). The 68030 @25Mhz does ~9 MIPS so is roughly equivalent to a 486DX @25Mhz which at that time would have easily possible and with the hardware efficiencies of the Falcon would have trounced the PC. An 68040 in 1992 would have beaten the PC bloody, it wasn't until 1994 that Intel had a reply to Motorola in the form of the Pentium Vs 68060.
A bitter sweet video, highlighting the plight of the 8 and 16bit brigade in the early 90's... but when it comes down to it, I look at it this way. Commodore and Atari were tired brands. When I came in to a bit of money back in 1993, I didn't even consider an Amiga or ST, I went straight to PC.
Beautiful video, I nearly cried... Seeing those scans of ST Format articles really brought back fond memories. I really wanted to upgrade my STe to a Falcon but here in the States they were only available in limited numbers through one dealer (Toad Computers) and even then Atari Corp. dropped ALL computer support b/c they couldn't compete against Wintel & focused on the Jag instead. IMHO TOS still could have been a viable platform in the 90's as long as you didn't need to run anything on Windows.
Fantastic essay! I remember first hearing about the falcon when I was doing my GCSEs, and being so excited that perhaps finally we could lord it over the Amiga pricks. I would go into my local independent computer shop and hastle them with questions about it. There indifference spoke volumes, and after many, many launch dates coming and going I finally gave up, and even became an Amiga prick too. But I'll always be an Atari boy, and seeing your face grin with glee at finally living your Falcon dream was pure magic 😁👍
I had traded in my 1040 STE with 4MB memory and a Vortex ATonce286 hardware PC emulator for a Falcon with an accelerator board. Good value deal in terms of specs and unique things I could do with it, but less so for gaming as not all of the older ST games were compatible with the Falcon. Also, my Falcon came without an FPU. That was remedied by independent developers once they released Falcon-specific or Falcon-only games, but it was very late into the Falcon's existence and didn't really expoit any of its special capabilities other than the 16-bit 50khz sound and the direct colour ability. Really a shame that many apps only used the DSP for audio when that audio could have simply been prerecorded and played through the DMA sound system (like on STE), freeing up the DSP for other tasks. I don't regret going to a Falcon, but I did wish at the time I had kept my STE as well.
I was excited to see this video! Thank you for the clarity on the Atari. From my understanding, both Atari and Amiga were the True firsts of the multi-task market. I know very little of the Atari systems. I wish that Atari thrived.. i loved my Amigas. I have zero basis for comparison of the two. One lesson learned though.... The Software SELLS THE HARDWARE.
The Lynx was such an amazing machine...the Jaguar? Shows that powerful specifications without proper resources and libraries for developers equates to simple 16 bit ports. This was truly a shame. The Falcon? A mystery machine that I wanted back in the day, but also a piece of kit with very little software, sadly.
I always wondered about the Atari Falcon!!! thank you for this video because it was amazing!!!! hope you can do more Bad Influence episodes or go over old BBC shows!!!
Man, how long did it take you to research and edit this video?? 45 minutes of non stop information, historical footage, newspaper and magazine archives.. must have taken you forever to put this together. Excellent as always
Thank you for this informative clip! It fills in alot of facts and events of ATARIs end of history I didn't know about. Up here the ST computers had no dealers when the Falcon was released. I never even saw the STE, TT or MEGA STs when they were released.I envy your powerful productive toy!
Man I get sad whenever I see Motorola's name - it's astonishing just how important Motorola was in the entire electronics industry down to chip design.... up till the legendary Motorola RAZR 2007 afterwards they couldn't keep up having lost 4billion between 2007-2009 alone. Blackberry is always talked about but Motorola more than blackberry should have been poised to transition to today's era. and they were American :( given the choice id rather Apple Qualcomm Motorola
I thought I'd try out this new PREMIERE feature. I think the general gist of it is, we all get to watch it together, with chat. Isn't that cosy?
kind of a tease I know but at least we know its coming and we can look forward to something.....who's bringing the beers?
I think so far, what I have at least determined is this feature eradicates people who comment "First" on a video
@@Nostalgianerd From my experience of TH-cam livechats, someone will still try and say "first".
Nostalgia Nerd LOL
This is like picking up a refreshing cold can of Cherry Coke, only to discover it's that zero sugar monstrosity. Never ever do this again, especially to a ex-Falcon owner which strangely enough was destroyed by a full can of Sugary Cherry Coke in late 1994...
From the US perspective: prior to the Falcon launch, there were already add-on boards for the Atari ST line of computers which included Motorola 030 processor board with 32 bit ram, 68882 floating point co-processor boards, 80386 boards which would allow you to boot into dos mode. I had installed these boards in many computers for our customers and I installed a 25Mhz 68000 accelerator board with a floating point co-processor on my own machine to help in development of my own software. At one point, I was working with other developers of boards which included a DSP co-processor and a VGA adapter card for the ST line. Sadly, Atari's fate was sealed before the commercial arrival of the Falcon. San Diego had a large computer enthusiasts base back in the early 1990s and there was a convention which brought in thousands of people to see what was going on in the computer industry: PC, Macs, Amigas, Ataris, etc. And while it wasn't nearly as big as ComicCon is now, it was a large group. Atari had the opportunity to showcase their Falcon030 computer at our convention, but chose instead to show it off to 100 people at an Atari user group in Boston. I sold off my computers after that, realizing that, while the computers were competitive with the Amigas and Macs, the company was short-sighted and doomed to failure.
These Hardware history/review/documentary videos is why I am here in the first place.
I know they're time consuming, and probably don't pay for themselves , but thanks for making them.
As an Atari user from the 80s, I thank you for this great video, I can feel the love.
You are MOST welcome.
We had one at the studio I used to work at. It was being used mainly for Cubase, and also as a controller for Yamaha Digital Consoles (DMP7s). It was quite the workhorse, as it was still being used on a regular basis as late as 2002.
Mate I'm watching many retro vids at the moment, but I swear blind yours are the best. Always a great balance of research, humour, enthusiasm, sarcasm, and passion. Even if the machine in question isn't of nostalgic value to me, I still watch it.
Even though i'm more of a console guy myself i still love watching these "documentary style" video's on these 80's and 90's computers, done in a fashion only the Nerd can do!
I remember my guitar teacher had a Falcon in his studio, running Cubase. He ran his studio equipment with it through MIDI, which was like total and utter magic to me at the time.
Interestingly the Atari ST and Falcon was pretty big with musicians/producers at the time (probably because of its built-in MIDI interface), but for the general public it wasn't that popular in the US, unlike in in Europe. From my experience, the C64 and the Amiga machines were all the rage in US.
I think it was a great shame that the practical aspects of Atari/Amiga/Commodore range - music, DTP etc was always rather downplayed in favour of bloody "games", complete with their sounds like a stomach overcome with digestive problems. A case in point here - why pay £499 for a Falcon to play games on when you could do the same job with a £199 machine?. Play up the fact that you could produce WORK on it for a fraction of the cost of Windows/Mac machines, and sales would have been steady. There must come a point in life when you don't just want to sit and play some daft game night after night.
Yep, my school had one in the music class. I remember making a song with cubase :)
Atari ST, Cubase + Emax 1000 Sampler equaled Heaven for me.
We had a couple home studios so we could each work on music at our own homes, then bring floppies to the other house to combine ideas. We used Cubase on an Atari 1040 STF, and an Atari 520 STFM which I added RAM to make it a non-produced 1040 STFM equivalent since I needed the RF output for flexibility, yet only used the modulator once before getting a dual color/mono monitor setup. Before that, we used the older Atari 8-bit computers for MIDI control, a 1200 XL, (my personal favorite of the 8-bit family), and an 800XL that was later replaced with a 130XE.
Later we bought a MEGA4 STE, I think, for 16-bit audio recording and editing. There were a few options to pick between such as Digidesign and Hybrid Arts, as well as a bunch of smaller and cheaper units from various smaller start-ups that we could use with the Atari ST and Mega computers. We tried one that claimed to be great and used newly available DSP technology to make it smaller and more capable. We bought it on a trial basis, and found it was absolute garbage! It would record fine it seemed, but on playback, it was heard that a sample (or more) were actually dropped about every 30 to 45 seconds. If you were deaf it may have been ok, but for music production with ears that can hear when data is lost it was too glitchy for any real use. It was returned within the week. Don't ask me what it was, as it was something I never wanted to see again, and have blocked details from memory from the trauma I experienced.
We then found another promising add-on box, that needed proper examination. I think it was still in a beta state, but being sold with great promise. If I remember correctly, it had SMPTE sync, that we used to sync with other machines we used with MIDI, as well as SPDIF ins and outs to make backups of 2-channel audio tracks and import them back in using a DAT machine. This was a fully proper 16-bit recording and editing workstation that we did multi-track work and mixing with. I think it was only 8 tracks of audio, so we did LOTS of digital mixing to get many vocal parts recorded and mixes down to fit the limits of the hardware. It could never have been down without saving many DAT tracks for later mixing. No, I do not remember what it was called either, after many marathon mixing and editing sessions I was happy to put it into a dark box and take the SCSI drive over to my PC for video editing... I have not looked in that dark box since. There is just no need to, with the newer software and hardware that has since come out that is so much more powerful and capable on the PC hardware platform. For me it is still Cubase for all things audio, but Nuendo if video is also needed. The higher audio resolution of Nuendo would also be recommended if doing massive audio track mixdowns to reduce audible digital rounding errors at the mixing stage.
Great video. I'm a big ST fan, so great to see more content on Atari and especially the Falcon.
Really well resourced, informative and entertain as always.
Keep up the awesome work. 👍
Bravo, Pete! Amazing work! Loved it! Thanks for the opportunity! Cheers!
So fun to here your voice at 10:25 !
Thanks ;) It was awesome to be part of this incredible video ;)
That funny laughter at 26:30 he-he-he
25:16 "This feels like a massive waste of Falcon power."
Unfalconbelievable.
Oh, no. You dropped the ball so hard.
"In-falcon-ceivable!"
@@Kevin-jb2pv get out
Are you falcon-well kidding me?!
Very tight production and editing skills sir, massive props!
04:45 That's Tobey Maguire in the Lynx commercial :D
Also, great work as always!
I love my C-Lab Falcon. What a machine.
I bought used Falcon 030 and Jaguar console just before their prices went sky high...
YES! This is EXACTLY what I come to Nostalgia Nerd for. I know these documentary pieces must take a phenomenal amount of work but they truly are the shining jewels of the channel.
I enjoyed this video with English Muffins, Strawberry Conserve and a nice cup of tea.
I really had a soft spot for the Falcon 030 too. It ran so many home music studio at the time - people would bring their Falcon to bigger studios and it still had more than enough grunt and locked timing (esp with a second MIDI box) to control a master record session. This is a fantastic look back at the system - thanks tons for the vid!
We don’t care gang banger
After the 800xl, Atari went slowly down the tubes.
It's such a shame that both Commodore and Atari were so damn disorganized back in those days. They were developing so many cool and profound devices, but shot themselves down.
Great video!
Yes, yet again, history has proven that simply making the best product is no guarantee of success in the market.
@@little_fluffy_clouds a core principle of marketing is knowing how to make the market. Being able to identify what people will want when they do not even know that they want it. Ge the "Ohhhh! Wow! I want that NOW!" reaction to a thing the person had no conception of until the instant of encountering it is a major goal of marketing.
The tough sell is the person who still says "Why would I want that?" even after you've explained to them exactly what the thing is and how it can be of benefit/use to them. It's especially annoying when the tough sell is at a company that makes a similar product and you're attempting to explain to them how this new thing *will make them more profit* if they market it appropriately.
For example the PCI Express x1 Type E USB 3.x adapter card. This product did not exist for a long time, even though it should have. PCI Express x1 Type C USB 3.x cards came into existence just about simultaneously with the launch of USB C. What's the difference? Type C is the external port. Type E is the connector for internal connection to front panel Type C ports. A large number of motherboards have but one Type E connector, or none at all. A large number of motherboards have one PCIe x16 slot and one or more x1 slots.
Until fairly recently the shortest PCI Express card with a Type E connector was x2. To use it a desktop PC would have to be one of the very rare models with open ended slots, one of the rare models with a slot shorter than x16 but longer than x1, or a board with two x16 slots for GPUs and give up one to the x2 Type E card - but many boards with dual x16 slots have one only connected as x4 and shared with an NVME SSD slot. So an x2 card cannot be plugged in when a motherboard mounted SSD is installed.
The x1 Type E card *should have always existed* from the advent of USB C. Creating one would be dead simple. Take the single port x1 Type C card they already make and re-arrange the traces to solder on an internal Type E connector.
Over the course of more than a year I contacted every PC peripheral card maker with an x1 Type C card in their product line and gave them the spiel on the untapped market for an x1 Type E card, why the x2 Type E cards were slow sellers (they can't be used in the majority of PCs), and how it should be a quick and easy job of designing a x1 Type E card.
I mostly got no replies, and a few negatives from short sighted companies refusing to understand the opportunity they were ignoring.
Every so often I'd google "PCIe x1 Type E" and one day there it was. (Cue chorale vocal hit.) I've no idea if finally someone forwarded one of my emails to the right people or if someone independently wondered why that product that should exist didn't, and decided they had to make it.
The next product that doesn't exist but should? An NVME to SATA adapter. NVME to USB C exists for 4x PCIe SSDs so why isn't there an adapter to convert it to connect to a SATA port? Ultimate top speed wouldn't be important. ExpressCard to USB 3.0 adapters have existed since the intro of USB 3.0 and they cannot hit the top speed of USB 3.0, due to ExpressCard only having PCIe 1.0 x1.
There also needs to be ExpressCard to USB C. The USB C PCIe x1 cards for desktops suffer the same speed limitations when plugged into older motherboards with PCIe 1.0. They still work! An ExpressCard version is merely a change of form, the electronics would be exactly the same, and the power pins to the ExpressCard USB 2.0 port could be tapped for additional power.
'Jay Miner built the Amiga C= fcuked it up'
Having too "many cool and profound devices" was part of their problem. Rather then make one product good then improving upon it, they kept going in different directions which financially spread themselves too thin and no one product got to benefit. Atari was the worse at this, who at one point had too many product lines that was just cannibalizing their own marketshare. Total lack of focus. Jack of all trades, master of none.
If this isn't worth a thumbs up, I don't know what is. Great video, excellent work!
Love this... Thank you.. I bought my falcon030, ex demo, with (has) a broken lid 200 quid in 1992 or 3. Drove to London, from devon, to collect 16mb ram at a very low price of 100 quid, which it still has in it. Bought 65mb hard drive from an auction. Added a clock doubler to 32mhz... It's in need of some TLC, but I'm moving soon so I will have space to have my STFM, STE, Falcon030 and my BBC Master out and running.. great video.. made my day..
No Amiga amongst your collection?
@@AbooSulaymaan no.. I owned one for a short while.. but my atari was more versatile for my job at the time..
@@paullangton5834 I see...it's a shame they never made a new STE version of Shadow of the Beast!
I vaguely remember there was a few amiga only titles...
@@paullangton5834 Yes, but Beast wasn't one of them. The ST version of Beast was very poor. My point is that with the extra power of the STE or the Falcon, it would have been a much better game.
that was fantastic, easily one of the best youtube vids ive ever watched. Production was spot on, content and delivery perfect and even the end tune was great. keep it up!!!!
I have one of the very early Falcons, great machine, you could even get 1024x768 or higher resolution out of it if you ran it on a high phosphor monitor that could slow scan. but really when it came out it was doomed, the pc market had already won
you could do that and higher on many computers before it
@@scarlett5924 i am aware, but it was expensive, and unusual on a consumer desktop. 800x600 was generally considered to be "high resolution" for home use. my very first windows desktop , was windows 3.1 which came out the same year as the falcon, i drove that at 1024x768 as normal, and that required a very expensive BNC plugged monitor. i think it would do 1280x1024 but at a reduced pallet. my next step up was 1600x1200, around the win 95 era
@@scarlett5924 Screen resolution wasn't the strength of the Falcon. It was plenty good in other ways.
@@yetidynamics It wouldn't do that stock. You must have had aftermarket software/hardware to allow for the additional resolutions. I did have such a device. 1280x1024 was interlaced at 16, which was ok at the time.
@@sebclot9478 the Slow scan was purely software driven, I ran MiNT which i think handled it. I still have the computer, but i don't have the slow scan monitor anymore
Premier! Actually a decent Atari Falcon vid! I'm hoping for some decent Llamazap footage (yep, former Falcon030 owner here. I even also had a Milan machine back in the day. Gutted I lost 'em )
I still use both my TT and my Falcon even to this day.
Both are massively upgraded from stock.
My TT is sporting a 48Mhz CaTTamaran so its a bit quicker than stock. It also has 10MB STRAM and 16MB TTRAM.
Its Running Magic v6.2 and Jinnee Desktop.
My Falcon is a real beast!
Its sporting a 120Mhz 68060 CPU on a CT060 Board, with 16MB STRAM plus 512MB TTRAM ( Although thats totally uselessly high )
It also has ATI 9200 Graphics and is running Mint & Jinnee and is installed on a 32GB mSata SSD.
It is a friggin beast compared to stock, and yet its nothing compared to what some others have theirs setup as.
Can gcc target the Falcon? Those RAM specs seem like it could theoretically be able to run a minimal UNIX distro.
@@eMorphized
The TT was going to be shipped with a version of unix that was called "SYSTEM V"
Not only that, but MINT has the capability of adding things like X Support and *nix file systems as well as FAT32, so in a way, that was a unix compatible extention to the TOS system. It also allowed true multitasking too!
@@FatRakoon System V is the version of UNIX for which more software is made than any other iteration. It is used as the basis for Linux, BSD, and more. Solaris went with System 7, and all flavors eventually incorporated some of its features, but SysV was the start of it all.
@@eMorphized
Yeah, I want to say that I know that, but I might just be thinking that I knew it?
I certainly know that its a very old system ( Obviously if it was going to be used on the TT I suppose ), and I am sure I read something about it a while back when Linus Torvalds was developing Linux, but as for the exact info, I dont honestly know.
I bought my Falcon in the mid-90's in Germany. For German ST magazines, the Falcon was a breath of fresh air with lots of articles describing how to use the Falcon's features. I wouldn't say that Germany "won" though - German software companies, especially the ones producing high-end software, expected a true TT successor. The Falcon wasn't that machine. In fact, Atari continued to sell and ship the TT because unlike what you said, the TT did find a niche market as a capable and affordable computer for desktop publishing. Atari did promise a more professional Falcon while various third party companies tried to make the Falcon 030 more suitable for serious work via accelerators, desktop cases and expansions for VME cards. Meanwhile, Atari UK was crazy enough to sell the Falcon with only 1 meg of memory. At that point, going against the Amiga would've been futile - in order to get decent game support, Atari would had to sell at least 100000 units. Adding development time, you'd have ended up in late 1993/94 when it was clear that consoles and PC were the future.
mjaap A breath of fresh air? In mid ‘90’s 486 and Pentium based machines were everywhere. I have seen some late Amiga models used as side machine by some photographer in the late 90’s. Never heard about this
᚛᚛᚛ Mr. Vyper ᚜᚜᚜ Doesn't matter whether you heard about this - my comment was about the Atari market only and German Atari magazines reaction to it. That the rest of the computer world mostly never heard about the Falcon is obvious from its sales numbers.
mjaap My point is your (wrong) purchase was driven by some magazine reviews back in the days as like someone living in a Google filtered bubble that convinced you with personalized ads. In the real world Atari machines never had anything appealing compared to (even cheaper) competitors. But even a low volume of sales at some level keeps encouraging companies to push short-term crap on the market, since there will always be an idiot who will buy it.
I see, your a troll. Sorry for feeding you. Enjoy your day!
mjaap Calling me troll won’t change the fact you purchased a nice piece of junk.
What's the song around 10:42?
It took me ages to save up for a 520STFM, then took me ages to save up for some games so when the Falcon came out I knew I couldn't afford to upgrade and by then I had got into PCs anyway, however I did have a Star LC-10 dot-matrix printer for my ST - I can still remember that distinctive aroma of a warm ST - Thanks for doing a video on the Falcon!
You absolutely aced this documentary! I love how you blend in your love for these computers with cold hard facts and nineties magazines and tv clips. Awsome! 10/10 would watch again!
Went to the Düsseldorf launch convention, had one Falcon030 and many other Atari computers. Many thanks for this travel back in time!!
A surprise see my clip in your video : "Atari Falcon 060 Quake" very good (maybe your best one) review and a big congratulations for your work.! greets!
Thanks very much, on both points. I did enjoy that comparison.
But... but Can it run Crysis? ohhh nooo i'm gonna get bashed for this, i just know it... hee-hee
there is literaly a guy above you saying it is his clip
@@billant2 th-cam.com/video/WpwlZgQPCpk/w-d-xo.html Quake 2 engine on stock falcon, not bad
I had a 1040 STE when the Falcon launched. I also had an A500 Plus. Whith simllar sized software collections for both. When the Falcon launched, I was super hyped by the specs and planned to sell both my 16-bit machines and get one. But due to backwards compatibility question marks, I decided to hold-off and wait and see how things progressed on the software side. Needless to say many others waited too and it soon became clear that Atari had screwed it all up! The A1200 lauched and was less powerful but cheaper. Plus, it had a huge back catalogue of OCS/ECS games it could play from day 1. I regretted the failure of the Falcon, but never regretted holding-off and not buying one!
The biggest issue was Atari should have made the Falcon as the Jaguar development system and included the Jaguars Object processor, and the Jaguar should have been based on a one chip Falcon (68030, 68882, DSP, Videl, Object Processor, Blitter and Sound on one chip (would have still had less transistors than on the Jaguar's GPU) but would have been more capable / flexible. It would have been much easier to develop for, ST/E compatible and would have saved a fortune in development costs. It would have also been a natural upgrade choice for people to have a Jaguar and a Falcon. Atari could have also made another version of the one chip version without the Object processor so it could be used in high end audio devices.
The Jaguar GPU was never actually finished, the version that shipped with the console was actually missing important address registers, chopping the potential performance of the chip to less then 1/3 of what it could have been. If Atari wouldn't have rushed the chip so much, it might have actually been competitive. Tho, given the shameful treatment of third party developers it proly wouldnt have made any difference.
if you want to see the true form of the Jaguar go check out the arcade version called the CoJag. It had a Motorola 68020 along with a fully finished GPU and 4MB of ram. The arcade version of Area 51 ran on this. There was another CoJag with a MIPS processor instead of a Motorola.
@@tHeWasTeDYouTh I own all the CoJag boards, even unreleased prototypes. The GPU on them is the same as the Jags. Furthermore, they use a Mips or 68020 to reduce actual GPU use, so the only parts really being used are the Object processor, Blitter and sound.
I thought the GPU had all the bugs fixed by the time of the CoJag since it was a year or two later when it came out. How much memory does a CoJag have for its games, I read in some places that say 4MB and others 8MB?
Bugs?, I mean don't get me wrong, it may have had bugs as well. But the chip was intentionally left unfinished to save on cost. This is just par the course for Jack Tramil style management. Keep treating your employees, suppliers, customers, and investors as enemies, and eventually they will be.......
"Business is WAR!!!!!" -- Jack Tramil
Note, this was done with the Commadore 64, and Atari ST as well (the SID chip was unfinished, and the shift register to serialize parallel communication with the floppy drive was never finished, The Atari STE's blitter chip was originally planned for the Atari ST). Jack was unafraid to push unfinished product in order to hit the market faster, save on cost, or snub the competition.
I like to think of myself as pretty knowledgeable when it comes to old systems (having lived through the lives of most of them) but I'd never heard of this. Great video as always. Cheers mate.
Also, some corrections: The STE had nothing in common with the EST, which was more similar with the later released TT (same graphics modes). The TT and Stacy were successful in their own way, but they were never machines for the average consumer. MultiTOS was not ready to put into ROM, although the last beta version of TOS 4 (4.92) hinted that Atari planned to change that at one point in time.
30:14 Andy Crane fails to understand that 17m colours is TRUE COLOUR, not the paltry 262,000 of the Falcon!
Hell yea something to sink my teeth into! I love these long videos!
The Atari Falcon 030 was my first audio-midi computer. I bought it in 94. It had Cubase Audio Falcon 2.06 software. Steinberg 44.1 clock generator hanging on the dsp port. Softjee audio interface, SCSI II hard drive, and synths, synth modules. The analog master was a Nordmende HIFI VHS VCR. It was a lot of fun. Atari F030rever!
I loved my TT with a ECL monitor for text and programming work.
Thank you Nostalgia Nerd. I hadn't heard of the falcon before until watching your awesome video. I saved up £750 and in June 2019 I bought my falcon with 14mb ram and 160gb hard drive. It is the pride of my collection and someday I will get the elusive TT model. Again thanks and keep up the good work bud. 👍👍👍
I still cry for the Atari 1450, I was going to get it as my graduation present I was Pissed it Never Came out, and it went and took the Falcon down the same Path if Atari Just Never starting to drop Good Ideas and Quit Putting them on Hole it would Still be on of the Top Players List..
Great video! I love your stuff, I lived through the era of the Atari 2600 obviously until now and owned an Atari 520ST at launch. Watching videos like this allow me to re-live cherished moments from my past and I thank you for that. Keep up the GREAT work.
I wish i had a 19 milliseconds hard drive
I have one. Here you have it
26:41 its good to see ya mister good man !! thanks for all you do for us, I watch you every weekend. I still have mi CPC 6128 tons of games + AMIGA 500 / 1200 + ATARI STE
I fell in love with Falcon when it was announced. Alas, half a year later I got my first PC, as it dawned on me that the era of Atari & Amiga was gone, and Falcon just came too late.
Wow, 4:12, the magazine ad shows a Atari Portfolio and they call it Stacy (the STacy was a laptop style ST)
Such a good channel, Great content! I grew up in the 80's/90's with 386 win3.11 sblaster16 and used to use BBS's to download shareware at 9600kbps until 28.8kbps came out. I love re-living this era!!!
I really love the ST aesthetic. My first computer was a 65XE
Snap, my first computer was also the 65XE
XE's are completely different from ST's.
@@Foebane72 That's why I said "aesthetic". The XE line design is inspired by ST
@@ahumeniy That's just down to the physical design of the cases being similar.
Loved this video. During the first uk lockdown last year, I got my stfm out of the loft to share some of the music I wrote on Steinberg pro 12, alas the floppy is not working due to well known issue. These were joyful times with loads of options, now we have three.
Damn fine info about a machine that I've never heard of. As an Amiga owner (4000/030), I'd say that the Falcon seems a formidable contender. It has some strengths (like sound-in) which is more PC-like (lacking in the Amiga). The Premier Stream was cool and different!
I used to run AmigaOS 3.0 on my Amiga 1000. I also had a deinterlacer by ICD. So I was able to run desktop (workbench) in 640x400 with 8 colors. 16 color mode ate too much chip ram.
I went to the Amiga3000, and also installed Amiga OS 3.0 within hours.
LOL. The Amiga vs ST comparisons... Amiga multitasking was much better, also filenames not limited to 8.3 filenames like MSDos.
Oh. Commodore was still a stupid company. Always was. They couldn't take themselves seriously. Very short-sighted. The Amiga should have destroyed apple/mac's.
If the Amiga 2000 had a deinterlacer and not in a big stupid case for stupid PC slots. It could have been a serious business computer.
And make an updated A1000, for lower cost business computer would have been welcomed. Basically something between the A500 and A2000. That's why I went with the 1000 and not the a500.
The Falcon was a machine I lusted over in '92, thanks in part to ST Format's coverage. At the time a friend and me were using the ST in the music Lab at school, as such we both got STE's which were a tad more affordable. Great vid!
I only ever seen one of these back in the day. It's specs were impressive, it was how the Amiga 1200 should have been before the cut backd on specs and chipsets. However, the Falcon came too late, the Amiga / Atari days had essentially finished and people had moved to the PC.
I really hated leaving my Amiga platform behind. Well, I still have it but I don't use it anymore.
I received your excellent Retro Tech book as a gift over Christmas, which I read knowing I was inevitably going to end up on a retro computer buying spree... The Falcon stood out as the machine I most want to get my hands on. Turns out it also seems to be one of the hardest to find! I’ve settled for a 1040STE for now, but the search continues...
Jesus, 14 MB in 1993? That's like almost $1000 in ram back then.
EDIT: Had to check and make sure I wan't talking completely out my ass. 14MB in 1992 ran around $500, which is a little over $900 in today's money.
depends on ram type
@@scarlett5924 The expensive type
The Falcon didnt have standard SIMM ram sticks but an special memory module that was very expensive at the time.
I remember wanting to upgrade my memory in my ST back in the day, about 92-93, from 512k to 1mb, but the extra 512k was £30 (£60 today) and when you're 12 that's a lot of money.
I remember when they announced the Amiga 4000 being able to take 128meg, that just blew my mind. still, it didn't stop me upgrading my CD32 to 10 meg :)
In the late 80s I started collecting game consoles and by the time Jaguar CD hit I thought I had "every atari" but I never knew about atari computers. I picked up an 800xl at a yard sale and started researching the past and even then I didn't know about falcon. Excellint history video. I've only recently learned about computers in the UK too
I would like to know the name of the tune going with the credits at the end...
“Hysterical” by Lexica
It’s secret
Real nice channel. Your Flickr pics are awesome. I'm also a retro fanatic and collector trying to do stuff in modest corner of YT, and I can tell you I really like the way you make videos: they are informative as well as entertaining. And your still pictures are really something, excellent choices of lighting, angle, presentation... Appreciate!
When I went from a Spectrum/Commodore 64 to an Atari ST, I was instantly amazed at the speed and graphics quality difference
Haha what a mistake
But you lost 50 fps animations of the C64, thank to the hardware scrolling and sprites which are not available on the ST. And you lost the good sound capabilities of the C64 hardware too. The ST was kind of Spectrum/Amstrad CPC with a 68000 CPU and more memory.
I too went from a C64 to the Atari ST and loved it. I spent more time using GFA Basic and other productivity applications on my ST than I did playing games. Now I have Hitari set up on my laptop and play around with the ST on there.
@@Barcrest No wonder, you didn't spent much time on games. :))
Really well made documentary, fun to watch from start to finish.
Thanks for the video and the hard work. 😃
*Changing 'tack', not 'tact'.. Like tacking in a boat is changing direction..
That's splitting hares.
@@elephantrange No It Isn't. Saying changing tact Is completely wrong. KristianTV1974 wasn't splitting hairs, nor were there any leporine animals harmed or segregated In the making of his comment. He offered a plain and simple correction, with the addition of an etymological explanation... Can't get fairer than that.
@@telkentexas4053 Read back. I don't think you meant to reply to me. I said: 'that's splitting hares', meaning bunnies, in stupid fun. I wasn't discussing 'changing tack/tact'. That was your argument with KristianTV1974.
Or changing tactics for those that don't sail.
Glad I'm not the only one that was bothering!
oh god that so reminds me of how borderline unplayable elite 2 was on atari st I got up to the biggest ship on it but you had to use the auto pilot for almost everything cos the controls were to juddery
Wait, is that Toby Maguire in that Lynx ad?
Indeed it is!
Yes!
I wasn't alone!
OMG at 4:46 that kid taking out the Lynx from his pocket... that large size is just comical... it's huuuuge... he-he
Also, I'm pretty sure the teacher that pursues him down the hall was a toady killed by Steven Seagal in "Hard to Kill"
20:04 That generic plate on the disk drive feels like such an aesthetic downgrade on the original ST case! As a matter of fact, to me, the cool uniqueness of the ST case revolves of course around the tilted function key row, but also the disk drive slot.
It was a beautiful case and much nice than my Amiga 500.
Thanks for the excellent story and for showing off your falcon. I really appreciate the effort you must be putting in to all your videos.
I followed the C64 > Amiga > PC direction, but a friend did have an Atari STE and I thought it was great. His father used to make music on it, which is something I had always wanted to do but didn't have the option of on my Amiga 500.
There were MIDI interfaces for Amiga as well.
Had a falcon when it launched, paid £1000 for it at silica in Sidcup. Only ever used it for tech demos then sold it to a musician.
I know a musician who had a falcon.. but also used it ray tracing.
the musician i sold to to had a disability.. if him then wow small world
Different musician I think 😉 He's a successful composer these days and as far as I know had no disabilities.
Hey. Yes.. spending 2 days rendering a 3d ball with reflections in high resolution! Haha..
@Steve Jennings Ray tracing is back on new graphics cards I hear, except real time now.
ray tracing never went away, it's used for all kinds of programming tasks now that we can efficiently do it in real time. For example, any time you interact with a 3d world using your (2d screen space) mouse cursor it throws a ray from the screen into the world to see what it hits and let's you interact properly. Ofc still used in renderering etc as well!
As an Amiga A500 Plus owner back in the day, my only exposure to anything ST related was when my friend from Kent came up to the North East with his parents to visit his grandparents, and he brought his 1040ST with him. :) Those were the only times I got to play Oids until someone ported it to the Amiga....... in 2014.
Great video as always :)
As an Amiga owner, I always found the interface on the Atari a load of TOS!
Falcon was the first ST that had an OS that was decent. It wasn't as nice as Amiga OS 3 in general but it had fast screen updates and was snappy. I installed a few into some sound studios and it was miles better than the ST's I had used previously.
...yes, it TOSed AMIGA Workbench in speed and practicality.
To be fair, the Amiga was far better at crashing because it lacked MultiTOS’s memory protection. 😂
I owned the Atari STe and the Amiga 500. Both were great and I have fond memories of them
Funny, cuz I've heard others refer to it as a GEM
This is your most amazing retro-documentary! Well done! I love my two 1040STEs and my 520STF...
3:37 Is anybody commenting about the rainbow colored ribbon on the Transputer? I'm really triggered now EDIT: 26:37 Z and Y are switched on the keyboard?
I think he was making a SJW kind of joke. Transputer for Trans people, who get their knickers in a twist if their pro-noun is said incorrectly. ;-)
@junosix still do.
Owned an Atari ST 520 FM got it for Christmas early 90's and loved it but it became harder to get games and I started wishing I'd got an Amiga, but that aside when I read about the Falcon 030 I wanted one so badly but the price killed that dream. I still own an ST but it's a 1040 FM got it from ebay after my original machine was killed when moving house. It saddens me to hear what Atari did to it's self the Falcon could of destroyed the 1200 and I would of still been able to get games into the late 90's. Excellent video, more Atari stories please.
17:24 i wonder where they got the design idea for the Playstation 2, all joking aside if this image or design and the PS2 aren't linked somehow i'll be very surprised.
29:00 Guess i got my answer
They should make some kind of Falcon 040 PS/2 style MicroBox "Flashback" remake edition
Dude, as an old Amiga-fan with no real interest in Atari I must say that I truly enjoyed this video! Learning all this (to me) new stuff and seeing the historical parallels to the Amiga hit me right in the heart. Sadly I've been having the realization that all the contenders in the home computer market were all really living on borrowed time vs. the PC, which is a sad, sad realization to say the least. Back in the days the future sure seemed a lot more colorful, but we've ofc gained an incredibly accelerated development from the PC platform itself over the past 20+ years. RIP old champions!
what music is playing at the end?
Excellent song indeed, also wondering where it came from...
“Hysterical” by Lexica
I had a 520 and 1040ST growing up (after our 800xl). I loved the machines!!!
The Lynx had the BEST version of California Games.
Jeremy Hidy without any doubt
@Rooflesoft Games
No.
Since it was the pack-in game that came with my lynx (the first model, the really large one), it was the only game I had during the first 2 months I had the system, and I played the heck out of it! ;) It's sad it only had the 4 mini-games though, instead of the 6 (I think) on the desktop platforms...
Programmed on an Amiga 😂
I love all of your micro retrospectives! I live in the states so a great deal of the history has been new to me as the machines just never made it here. Cheers from Florida!
Oh nice, so this is where my Sparrow footage went. Oh and there is even my Quake port! :) Nice overview, although the Falcon ICs shown are partially wrong - there isn't a Blitter chip (it's part of the Combel) and the DMA looks way more complex as it takes care of many things.
I wonder if he ever saw this comment, lol.
hey there is a dude saying your Quake footage is his
@referral madness Yes, it's based on Frank Wille's work on Amiga
@referral madness The original is in C and x86 assembly, so the port is a mixture of C and m68k assembly.
Always wanted one of these. I had a 1040ST back in the day, and still have a 520ST with 1 meg of RAM. I am a huge Atari fan and also had an 800, 800XL and a 130XE that I expanded the memory to 576K and ran a BBS on in the mid-late 80's.
17:23 beta PS2 lol :P
Now i know where Sony developers got the body style for the Original PS2.
I adored the ST back in the day. I bought a gently loved 1040st with original Atari Mono and Color monitors about 10 years ago, but I still lust after the Falcon
My ST journey started with a 520stfm back in the early 90s. I just came back from my holiday and my very first credit card was waiting for me, so I immediately got the bus into town and maxed it out. I tried my own 512k RAM upgrade to make it a 1040, but bodged the soldering and couldn't get it to boot at all (finally got it fixed). After I came into a bit of money I bought a MegaST 2 and got the matching 60MB hard drive. The drive was amazing but expensive at £768!!! I parted ways with it all before I moved countries, so sadly I no-longer have it. I was active in the demo scene back in the day too.
When I first heard of the Falcon 030, which was near the end of it being available new, my PC had a VLB video card capable of both higher resolutions and more colors at those resolutions. It also had a faster (IIRC 25 Mhz) 80486 CPU. Even worse for the Atari my PC was built of secondhand parts older than the Falcon and then current new PC stuff was even better. I looked at the specs on the sales flyer and said "Why would I want to downgrade?"
Atari, Commodore and the rest of the companies who weren't Apple, IBM, or PC Clone makers failed because they kept up with their overly long development cycles of fully integrated computers instead of making motherboards with just the basics then having the fancy features modular on plug in cards. Then there was further increasing model and price variability (in the PCs) with socketed CPUs and offering different speeds on the same motherboard.
Apple had socketed CPUs on many models but only rarely offered more than one speed choice in a model. Whenever they did have different CPU speeds in the 90's the faster option usually came at the discontinuing of the previous, slower, CPU.
Had Atari followed the PC modular model *and* offered the full speed range of socketed 68030 CPUs *and* put all their fancy technology eggs onto one or two plug in cards - they would've had a system customizable from an affordable *competitive* price all the way up to high end. They also would've been able to introduce upgrades to plug in, replacing the originals. Discontinue an old package AND sell the new bits as upgrade kits to owners of previous models. Then they could've introduced new 040 systems, and sold the motherboards as upgrade kits.
Apple and IBM did sell motherboard upgrade kits for some of their Macintosh and PS/1 and PS/2 systems. In Apple's case that sometimes included a major part of the computer's case due to moved/changed ports. Apple made a PPC upgrade for their Duo laptops that had display connectors for every type of disply used on all prior Duo models. The kit came with the mainboard and a new top case with trackpad, but you could used the original top if you preferred the trackball. I once bought for a pittance a stack of 386 PS/2 boards that had been pulled for upgrading to 486 boards. A while later I sold the lot to some surplus dealer as a decent profit.
Atari and the rest just got stuck in the slower paced late 1970's and 1980's mindset where companies could take a while designing a new system, put it on the market and make bank off it for quite a while. But the 90's started seeing obsolescence of new hardware hitting in mere months. Atari etc just couldn't adapt quickly enough.
Quite true, unfortunately. Was happy to see third parties jumping into that niche though. The expandability you talk about is actually - from what I understand - what Atari Germany had wanted (they wanted a TT030/X and a Falcon030 with slots because of the German market using Ataris for more than just games) but never got. Sad. I liked the diversity of affordable architectures and platforms of the day. Now we're stuck with x86/x64 or ARM, Windows or Linux or MacOS on one hand and Android or iOS on the other hand. Yes, I know there is more, but I consider most of the other platforms very niche. Most stores will have these choices (luckily there is the Internet).
Simply look at 386/486 from early 90s to Pentium 3s at the end of the 90s...economically it was expensive trying to keep up with the evolving and new 3D game engines that required exponentially faster hardware. Nevertheless, Amiga and Atari ST hardware upgrades in the early 90s was very expensive for the average consumer.
@@johnny5wd567 Actually You are current stuck between Linux and Windows. There are some few proprietary OS'es that havn't gotten very much attention and market share, but most other major players beside MS Windows is based on a Linux kernel, and according to some you might some time in the not to far away future be stuck betwen Linux and Linux ...
"Why would I want to downgrade?" ... Then you havn't really gotten all the facts straight.. Actually the Motorola 68xxx Processor line was much better at just about anything compared to the X86 Series. Just a basic Atari ST 8Mhz 6800 could easily outperform a 16Mhz 80286 in various static math tests. Eg the same C Code could compile faster on the standard 68000 than a 80286, but of cause computer programs arent just a test in how many times you can calculate pi on each machine, wich has very little practical use for the average user. Both Commodore and Atari ended up being crushed by the broad success of the PC, and its quite funny Commodore said "When we heard Atari were going for the PC market we knew had already won" They did live a little longer than Atari, mainly due to Tramiel making so many business mistakes, and Atari was never a "big" company with a big money tank. The ST line was made in rush with kinda "kitchen table" design with cheap components, and it did make a remarkeable good job for how cheap and fast they slapped it together to try to compete with Commodore and Apple, but who ended their live as a home game computer company trying to sell PC's when the Amiga died ...
The 68000 processor was for its time a much better platform but both Atari amd Commodore made some serious decission mistakes wich eventually made them faulter. Only Apple lived thru it even they also had some bad bumps along the road.
If Tramiel had been a better business man he would have seen the niches that Atari was strong in .. mainly Music production and DTP, and focused on Developing the ST line into the Falcon as primarily a music production machine and The TT line to DTP use. The Jaguar was also a very promising. If the 2 companies hadn't been so much at war with eachother they shoulda merged in the early 90's and we may have had a completely different computer history If the Amiga and the Jaguar could have lived on as gaming computers and the ST /TT line for more professional use.
Both closed end systems and open ended ones have their strength and weaknesses. Today we are moving more and more away from the nerdiness of old school computing where software and games were designed for specific often expensive hardware wich not everyone can afford. Soon people won't even care what hardware things use, just wich cloud service is right for my needs.
I never got to see a Falcon in real life. It was just this elusive wonder machine that most people never got to try. It would have been so fun to see what some serious companies could have done with the Motorola DSP chip. Those demonstrations apps on it with "harmonizing" effects is a total joke. I know for a fact that expansion cards for the first hardware based PC DAW systems used stacks of these DSP's to offload effect processing from the slow poke 486 and Pentium machines we had back then. I eventually sold my Atari ST and traded in my Cubase 2.0 Score for Cubase 1.0 for Windows. What a nightmare music production was on Windows back then.
It took Steinberg and other audio software houses almost a decade to get a just somewhat working midi system with Windows. It was first with the arival of Windows NT you were able to get a decent Midi sync on a PC and it was first with USB 2.0 that we could actually get an audio interface with decent low latency. And even today an old fart 6800 ST with the Midi interface direct connected to the cpu databus still have a more "tight" midi sync than a modern PC. That with a computer that is more than 1000x as fast as these old machines. pretty amazing.
AWESOME video on the story behind the Falcon, I learnt so many things, thanks!!! As always, excellent editing and audio commentary, beautifully delivered with this superb voice of yours (love your accent!)
An 040 based computer probably would have flattened anything 386. The 040 is more comparable to the 486 feature set wise, and by more comparable I mean the 040 blew anything Intel had at the time out of the water. I think it just came too late and didn't gain enough traction, and companies like Atari and Commodore- who would have shipped its flagship consumer CPUs into a wider market- falling apart the way they did is a good part of why.
I really wish we lived in the timeline where the Motorola 68k line did better, stayed competitive and kept evolving along side Intel to this day.
Assuming, of course, that it could have been priced in a competitive way..
Yeah, that would be the tricky part. Apple didn't start shipping 040 based machines into the consumer market until... I think around 93? I believe it would have been possible a year earlier for Atari, but they would have had to go all in on the initiative.
If my memory is correct the other issue with Motorola chips are that they were expensive (in a rough comparison). The 68030 @25Mhz does ~9 MIPS so is roughly equivalent to a 486DX @25Mhz which at that time would have easily possible and with the hardware efficiencies of the Falcon would have trounced the PC. An 68040 in 1992 would have beaten the PC bloody, it wasn't until 1994 that Intel had a reply to Motorola in the form of the Pentium Vs 68060.
@@daishi5571 Meh, the 486dx2-66 was dirt cheap in 93 and blew the snot out of the 68040 in real world usage.
I share your wish.
A bitter sweet video, highlighting the plight of the 8 and 16bit brigade in the early 90's... but when it comes down to it, I look at it this way. Commodore and Atari were tired brands. When I came in to a bit of money back in 1993, I didn't even consider an Amiga or ST, I went straight to PC.
As an Amiga 1200 owner back in the day I've leered over the falcon for many years, such a seductive machine. Shame about the 16bit data bus though.
Same here.. Although as soon as I got my 68040 MMU 8mb expansion card it was 2 fingers to Atari, I was playing Doom on the Amiga!!
The Amiga was the better machine by far. Two words, "Video Toaster". Amiga had it and no one else did.
I had the 128-bit Atari Condor 090 computer, it was vastly more powerful than any Amiga computer.
fail
I only had an Atari Budgie. Jealous of you Falcon, Eagle, and Condor owners back in the day!
Beautiful video, I nearly cried... Seeing those scans of ST Format articles really brought back fond memories. I really wanted to upgrade my STe to a Falcon but here in the States they were only available in limited numbers through one dealer (Toad Computers) and even then Atari Corp. dropped ALL computer support b/c they couldn't compete against Wintel & focused on the Jag instead. IMHO TOS still could have been a viable platform in the 90's as long as you didn't need to run anything on Windows.
24:55 - LGR music!!! :-D
Fantastic essay! I remember first hearing about the falcon when I was doing my GCSEs, and being so excited that perhaps finally we could lord it over the Amiga pricks. I would go into my local independent computer shop and hastle them with questions about it. There indifference spoke volumes, and after many, many launch dates coming and going I finally gave up, and even became an Amiga prick too. But I'll always be an Atari boy, and seeing your face grin with glee at finally living your Falcon dream was pure magic 😁👍
When I had an 1024 STE I'd have loved a Falcon but I think they were too expensive (for me at the time) and had really low availability
I had traded in my 1040 STE with 4MB memory and a Vortex ATonce286 hardware PC emulator for a Falcon with an accelerator board. Good value deal in terms of specs and unique things I could do with it, but less so for gaming as not all of the older ST games were compatible with the Falcon. Also, my Falcon came without an FPU.
That was remedied by independent developers once they released Falcon-specific or Falcon-only games, but it was very late into the Falcon's existence and didn't really expoit any of its special capabilities other than the 16-bit 50khz sound and the direct colour ability. Really a shame that many apps only used the DSP for audio when that audio could have simply been prerecorded and played through the DMA sound system (like on STE), freeing up the DSP for other tasks.
I don't regret going to a Falcon, but I did wish at the time I had kept my STE as well.
I was excited to see this video! Thank you for the clarity on the Atari. From my understanding, both Atari and Amiga were the True firsts of the multi-task market. I know very little of the Atari systems. I wish that Atari thrived.. i loved my Amigas. I have zero basis for comparison of the two. One lesson learned though.... The Software SELLS THE HARDWARE.
Very interesting video! Well done. I gotta ask though.. the outro music.. What is it? It's a pretty smashing tune! :)
“Hysterical” by Lexica
Fab video my family had the Atari STE when i was growing up, loved lemmings! love you video content the Falcon looks like a beast!
0:20 well, guess anyone in China won't be seeing this
The Lynx was such an amazing machine...the Jaguar? Shows that powerful specifications without proper resources and libraries for developers equates to simple 16 bit ports. This was truly a shame. The Falcon? A mystery machine that I wanted back in the day, but also a piece of kit with very little software, sadly.
Thank you from and small country called New Zealand. God Bless.
I always wondered about the Atari Falcon!!! thank you for this video because it was amazing!!!! hope you can do more Bad Influence episodes or go over old BBC shows!!!
Bring on the Falcon!
I had a 520ST, 1040STFM and a TT030 with both the color and mono monitors... great machines.
Man, how long did it take you to research and edit this video?? 45 minutes of non stop information, historical footage, newspaper and magazine archives.. must have taken you forever to put this together. Excellent as always
Thank you for this informative clip! It fills in alot of facts and events of ATARIs end of history I didn't know about. Up here the ST computers had no dealers when the Falcon was released. I never even saw the STE, TT or MEGA STs when they were released.I envy your powerful productive toy!
Man I get sad whenever I see Motorola's name - it's astonishing just how important Motorola was in the entire electronics industry down to chip design.... up till the legendary Motorola RAZR 2007 afterwards they couldn't keep up having lost 4billion between 2007-2009 alone. Blackberry is always talked about but Motorola more than blackberry should have been poised to transition to today's era.
and they were American :( given the choice id rather Apple Qualcomm Motorola