I had this machine and loved it. :) I remember it was the first home computer I owned where it could play MPEG-1 videos without hardware decoding assist. Great memories. Even had a board inside it that could use it as a Windows 3.1 PC. I lived in NJ and remember my mom driving me down to Severna Park, MD to the Atari store down there and I bought that old PC board. Like 30 years ago or close to that....
How was it, using it as a DOS/Windows PC? I wrote an article for Current Notes around 1993 advocating that Atari should promote that option to buyers, making it easier for them to switch back and forth between GEM and the PC environment, since I'd heard Atari had built a slot on the motherboard that would take an Intel board, and could enable users to run DOS. I figured promoting this would attract people to the Atari side of things. Probably wishful thinking, in retrospect.
@@mmille10 There was an addon-board from Sack Electronic GmbH (german company), which produced the FalconSpeed, which had his own 286-cpu on board. They also provided some software for it, so you could switch to the DOS-mode. It was good, but pretty expensive back in the day (I think, i payed 498 Deutsch Marks for it, which was a lot of money for a teenage-kid) and it was great for Windows 3.0 and 3.1. You could use every produtive software, that was available for windows. I wanted to use it to play some dos-games including Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and it started, but the colors were all wrong. I played for weeks with the game-data and changed the palette, so that the game somehow looked ok for me... But i can't remember, if there was any kind of sound under dos.
Thanks for the video! 13:50 Falcon had 16bit data and 24bit address bus, but 14MB limit was because of MMU. I’m not sure exactly why 2MB were masked, my guess is that has something to do with MMU DSP workings.
24 bits of address implies a 16MB memory limit. ROM memory and memory mapped IO takes the extra 2MB above 14MB. The 68030 is actually a 32 bit data and 32 bit address chip, but was cut down to 16/24 on the external bus of the Falcon.
Well, when you compare the late Atari designs like the MEGA STe, TT and Falcon to earlier designs like the ST, you can clearly see that Atari at this point was behind the latest technology quite a lot: The MEGA STe is basically an 8MHz STe design with an integrated 16MHz accelerator, the TT was designed as a 16MHz machine that got a hastily done 32MHz addon and the Falcon clearly wasn't designed as a 32bit machine - 16bit data bus and 24bit address bus scream 68000 or 68010, not 68020 or 68030 - just to present some more impressive and competitive numbers while after all the compromised design leads to a comparatively low persformance. As you noted yourself 24 bit addressing limits the address space to 16MiB, and as you surely know the M68K family of processors have a unified memory model and do not distinguish between data and I/O space. So where do you want to put your ROMs and I/O when not reserving some adress space for this purpose? Atari could have used the function code pins to extend the address space what they hadn't done.
@@TLang-el6sk I agree 100% Falcon030 started as Sparrow, a set of sound and graphics boards for the STE - with the SDMA, COMBEL and STE Shifter (later evolved to VIDEL), then it was planned as 68K board and only latter got 68030+DSP+SCSI. On the other hand, Falcon (without 030 in the name) was planned to be TT type machine in TT like case with full 32bit bus, 32MB fast RAM, DSP, 16-bit sound DMA, multi-slot VME, video and DMA expansion slots and both 68030 and 040 support. So, Sparrow team managed to coble up something working first, Atari management renamed it to Falcon030 because there were rumors about Falcon for a year already, and killed real Falcon 🤷
"Love at first sight computer" for me... I was lucky enough to find two of them .. both of which were stored in awful conditions by their previous owners... the first one even had a leaking cap.. the crazy thing about these computers is that their plastics never go "yellow" no matter what
19:34 the area of the audio section looks interesting! I see the seven brown ceramic caps which were soldered in quite "wildly" (there should be four more at the bottom side). Also the two ferrite coils with the red and green wires can only be found on the very last revision of the board. I would guess, that you've got the complete C-Lab audio modifications from a time where Atari sold their remaining Falcons to C-Lab, who did some audio mods on their MK-I and II Falcons. I guess you have line-level input and output at the mic/headphone connectors and the bass boost circuitry was removed.
As a life long Amiga user (still have a couple of original machines) it never fails to amaze me what can be done on our "16 bit" era computers. I never really got to know 16 bit+ Atari range. I had an 800Xl and VCS!! The OS and GUI looks horrible (sorry) compared to Amiga, but great to see the expansions can keep the old girl alive.
I was an STFM owner, saw the Falcon at a UK computer show and bought mine new. Later had the Titan Design 040 accelerator fitted then it was moved into a CLAB rack mount case. It was a wonderful machine BUT I later obtained a second hand TT with a Matrix graphics card which became my main machine due to that wonderful display...
The capacitor looking thing on the power supply feed are MOVs (metal oxide varistors) - basically, surge suppressors. It's interesting comparing the Atari TT with the Amiga 3000: decent video, sound, 32 bit, lots of memory, SCSI, et cetera, all built in. It's a shame they're so rare.
Interesting video! Didn’t know it can do mp3 playback and doom 😅 I bought a Falcon (4mb + harddisk) when it came out. Great computer, but no software at all back then. Still, I liked it a lot, but switched to a PC next year. My Falcon is in storage, but after seeing this video, I think I’ll go play with it and see if it’s still running.
Let me know in the comments how it's going! Feel free to reach out through the channel email: contact.powerofvintage@gmail.com if you have any quesitons!
@@powerofvintage9442 It's going very well actually. I found out that the memory was acting weird. Back then, I replaced the default 4mb memory board with a 4x30pin simm board. That was not the best idea. I had to break the shielding for it to fit and it never worked quite well. But now, thanks to your video, I found out that centuriontech makes a 16 (14) mb memory board. I ordered one and am waiting for it to arrive.
Yes the problem was not enough software. I had one, and it was painful waiting for content. Also most free software was mainly concept software, that wasn't polished enough to make it daily use or practical. I also felt the case it was released in was a desperation move, to save money. It really needed a business look, as most people were moving or wanting PC's with expandability.
As a Commodore 64 user dreaming about owning Amiga all my early life I had to hate the ST and even more the Falcon. I suppose I would not take them for free back then and when, and I admit, that was stupid. Atari made great computers and the Falcon was really a great achievement at its day. Shame I never owned one, neither I had the Amiga.
in the late '80s early '90s Atari was number #1 in R&D, but number zero with marketing. I was well aware of the Falcon coming out in 1992 and ordered mine right away from my usual Atari reseller in the US, but Atari did almost nothing to market it. I was shocked when it was discontinued so quickly. There was no reason for this, other than that they didn't even try. I still used my Falcon for many years and did not replace my Ataris with PCs. Eventually I replaced my Falcon with an SGI Indigo 2... but now I have a couple Falcons again. It's the best computer ever made. Obviously not the most powerful anymore... but still the best in my mind.
Nostalgia has driven the price up. I don't remember what Falcons were selling for when they were new. I took a wild guess of $1,700, since I bought a Mega STe system, with monitor for about $1,300 in 1992. I ran this guess through an inflation calculator, and got $3,823 in today's money. So, what you quoted is 22% off of that. Not bad for a computer that's more than 30 years old. I tried looking up prices in online copies of old Atari magazines from 1993, but the frustrating thing is all the sellers were saying, "Call for pricing." So, I take it they were trying to be flexible, not committing to a price for sale. It was the same for their TT's. Incidentally, I happened to find an Atari magazine of mine from 1995, and saw a price quote for Falcons of $799 ($1,654 today)! Of course, they were trying to sell off old stock by then.
I bought one on release in the USA in 1993. The base 1 MB version was US $999 but I opted for the 4 MB version for $1299. If you wanted 4 MB and an 80 MB IDE internal hard drive, it was $1499.
@@Sl1pstreams - Looking at the 4 MB, 80 MB HD model/price in constant dollars, I get $3,273, not too far off from the price quoted in the video. Though, I see the quoted model was configured with 14 MB RAM. I wonder how much the RAM upgrade would've added to the price, BITD.
Looks like the answer to "why only 14mb?" Question is due to TOS and the hardware registers are taking up the memory address space for those last two mb.
It was just over for specific home computers. As the PC compatibles got better graphics, CPU power and dropped in prices enough to get into homes, there was no place on the market left for anything else. Except very cheap game consoles and PCs. There was nothing that Atari or Commodore could have done that wouldn't make a difference in the end result. The era was over and that was it.
Approximately when did IBM PC clones equal or surpass using sound and graphics cards the sound and graphics capabilities of the Atari ST/TT and Amiga series at around the same price? Perhaps even before any price parity, the massive software support for the PC clones doomed (no pun intended) the Atari and Commodore machines. I should know as I was a 1040STf owner who transitioned to homebuilt PCs around 1993, but I may have held on to the ST beyond that point and just don't recall.
Jack Tramiel made its share of mistakes, and some of its past actions came back to haunt him (from all the people he alienated over the decades to his misunderstanding of software). But as you said, the PC killed pretty much everybody. As imperfect as it was, the PC had the sales volume which allowed economies of scale which crushed the competition. That said, I'd be very interested to know the inside story of the Falcon, i.e. what was the rationale behind the technical choices made.
its development started as project Sparrow, it was actually planned as a upgrade set for STE, project Falcon was different project that should have been successor to TT030.
I've listened to some history of it. Atari's publicly discussed strategy was to sell it as a business machine, perhaps with some creative applications, similar to their strategy with the TT030.
@@mmille10 that is just partially true. This intent was with the Falcon project and Microbox project. As I said the Sparrow project was intended as a upgrade pack for STE and since it was almost ready and the Falcon was far from completion, it was chosen that the Israel team Sparrow to be finalized for production and designated as Falcon030. After that a discussion erupted, since two major ATARI markets wanted a different product placement. Germany wanted to promote it as new gen general computing PC and UK wanted a gaming home computer. At the end both markets had different approach, where the German was more supported by ATARI HQ, since they didnt see much sense of two gaming products (Falcon and Jaguar), but having general/professional computer and a game console was OK. That was the reason Germany received Falcons 2-3 months earlier then UK market. But.... Sam Trammel killed the computer division before Falcons started to ship, so we almost didnt get any unit to the shops... Falcon would be a great product if the production would continue and there would be wider market adoption so there was more software development.
I bought an Atari Falcon as an investment because I thought it would be valuable since it was going to be one of the rarest Atari computers actually sold. Of course, gold would have been a better investment - I paid $1000 dollars for the Falcon, and it is only worth $3000. Gold would be worth $6600 right now. Of course, I am not missing out on any fun - my STE computer still works, I use it for art. I still have the Falcon and someday I nay do something with it.
Be aware that you may want to use your Falcon at some point. Because it has a battery inside (for the clock) which will die if you don't use it for too long; and once that happens, the Falcon won't work anymore. I know because I have a dead Falcon with that issue. Of course the battery can be replaced, but it's a bit of a hassle and requires soldering (which is why I haven't done it yet). OK, I guess the battery will die at some point anyway, but apparently it happens more if the computer wasn't used at all in a very long time.
@@bellissimo4520 That is exactly why I am not using it - I intend to replace the clock chip to avoid any damage to the rest of the computer. I last had the Falcon on in June, for about a half hour, after 30 years of storage. The chip battery is not rechargeable but, considering that it had only 10 hours of run time, the battery was new so that is why it started after 30 years. Although, I know that the battery will "give up the ghost" within days of starting and using the Falcon so, I need to get the new chip. Then I will work with it more.
There are two fans in the video. One is a motherboard case fan with a vent underneath to permit airflow into the case (so no chip there). The chip under the fan seen at 21:24 is on the CT63 accelerator which uses a 68060 CPU.
I had the 800 first, then the 130XE, and finally the 1040ST with Dave Small's Magic Sac (running Macintosh System 5 or 6) and the 68030 daughter board upgrade.
@ I bought it from Dave smalls company, I don't remember the clock speed but it had cache memory and with the upgrade the Atari ran Macintosh software faster than any of the Mscs that were out at that time.
I had a falcon030. It was too little too late. Atari spent too much resources on distractions like the transputer and atari unix, and then the jaguar. In the end it wouldn't have mattered anyway - motorola couldn't scale the 68k to match x86 performance or price. Motorola gave up and moved to powerpc architecture, which floated them for a few more years. If the falcon030 was released a few years earlier it could have been competetive with the amiga.
Bought into the platform early on 94, could not find an ste anywhere so it was the only option, turned out the Falcon was not really compatible with st software. The base 1mb would not run much, ended up a costly upgrade route to 4mb and an ide hdd, hddriver etc, etc, pretty unstable too. After the success of the st/ste/mega/tt (midi ports) you'd imagine if Atari corp invested properly into their next system it would have been something special.
@@powerofvintage9442 Agree and trying to "compete" with intel/pc, suspect they rushed the Falcon out to try and recoup/mitigate the inevitable losses, what could have been eh?
What could have been would have needed to have begun with more dedicated software and hardware investment and much much earlier in the overall platform life....like in 1986. Instead, Atari invested in brick and mortar stores in Texas and basically lost nearly all the profit they had made over multiple years due to that mistake. They recovered much of it from a the results of a lawsuit, but that payout didn't happen until 1996 or so...
I put the Centurion PSU in my Falcon, and it makes a high-pitched chirp whenever I power off the system. Then again, the previous owner did a lot of weird changes to the sound circuitry. For now, I have out the original PSU in it.
Sure, the era of home micro computers was pretty much over, but atari still made a big mistake dumping the falcon for the jaguar. there was one industry that still embraced atari st line of computers for a long time, even after atari went out of business. the music industry relied on them for a very long time, and the falcon could have been a great upgrade (certainly with the build in powerful dsp) for all these musicians.
Doom was pretty much the end of the ST and the Amiga. Neither could run it particularly well but you could go out and buy a PC clone and it run fine. Now you can criticise x86 and DirectX. Neither is elegant from a technical point of view but when you've got multiple vendors building CPUs, GPUs and cards you end up with ultra cheap commodity hardware that gets faster and faster because it's a competitive market.
Im in Australia, there are virtually no Falcon's here for sale. I have a collection of 8 bit and 16 bit Atari's but I'm missing a Falcon, sell me one pls :)
@@powerofvintage9442I am sorry I maybe blind and stupid but I fail to notice you mention these ports in the video when you discribe all the other ports. Also when you open up the machine It's looks to me like there are no ports where they used to be on the ST/STE.
Hey I am in the middle of designing Falcon 030 eight channel 16bit sound output upgrade, just wondering if you're interested to be a beta tester ? I'm the someone that was almost ready too release the digital interface FDI+ for Falcon on Atariage forums.
I just remembered that BW Technoshed aka Bad Wolf had lately a Mega ST with some DSP56001 equipped "ATARI Sound Accelerator" board for Mega Bus in his video, maybe it could help you with development?
I had this machine and loved it. :) I remember it was the first home computer I owned where it could play MPEG-1 videos without hardware decoding assist. Great memories. Even had a board inside it that could use it as a Windows 3.1 PC. I lived in NJ and remember my mom driving me down to Severna Park, MD to the Atari store down there and I bought that old PC board. Like 30 years ago or close to that....
How was it, using it as a DOS/Windows PC? I wrote an article for Current Notes around 1993 advocating that Atari should promote that option to buyers, making it easier for them to switch back and forth between GEM and the PC environment, since I'd heard Atari had built a slot on the motherboard that would take an Intel board, and could enable users to run DOS. I figured promoting this would attract people to the Atari side of things. Probably wishful thinking, in retrospect.
@@mmille10 There was an addon-board from Sack Electronic GmbH (german company), which produced the FalconSpeed, which had his own 286-cpu on board. They also provided some software for it, so you could switch to the DOS-mode.
It was good, but pretty expensive back in the day (I think, i payed 498 Deutsch Marks for it, which was a lot of money for a teenage-kid) and it was great for Windows 3.0 and 3.1. You could use every produtive software, that was available for windows.
I wanted to use it to play some dos-games including Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and it started, but the colors were all wrong. I played for weeks with the game-data and changed the palette, so that the game somehow looked ok for me...
But i can't remember, if there was any kind of sound under dos.
@LaurenGlenn I think you are referring to Toad Computers. They were probably the only real Atari dealer left standing in the USA up till the late 90s.
Thanks for the video! 13:50 Falcon had 16bit data and 24bit address bus, but 14MB limit was because of MMU. I’m not sure exactly why 2MB were masked, my guess is that has something to do with MMU DSP workings.
24 bits of address implies a 16MB memory limit. ROM memory and memory mapped IO takes the extra 2MB above 14MB. The 68030 is actually a 32 bit data and 32 bit address chip, but was cut down to 16/24 on the external bus of the Falcon.
Well, when you compare the late Atari designs like the MEGA STe, TT and Falcon to earlier designs like the ST, you can clearly see that Atari at this point was behind the latest technology quite a lot:
The MEGA STe is basically an 8MHz STe design with an integrated 16MHz accelerator, the TT was designed as a 16MHz machine that got a hastily done 32MHz addon and the Falcon clearly wasn't designed as a 32bit machine - 16bit data bus and 24bit address bus scream 68000 or 68010, not 68020 or 68030 - just to present some more impressive and competitive numbers while after all the compromised design leads to a comparatively low persformance.
As you noted yourself 24 bit addressing limits the address space to 16MiB, and as you surely know the M68K family of processors have a unified memory model and do not distinguish between data and I/O space. So where do you want to put your ROMs and I/O when not reserving some adress space for this purpose?
Atari could have used the function code pins to extend the address space what they hadn't done.
@@TLang-el6sk I agree 100%
Falcon030 started as Sparrow, a set of sound and graphics boards for the STE - with the SDMA, COMBEL and STE Shifter (later evolved to VIDEL), then it was planned as 68K board and only latter got 68030+DSP+SCSI. On the other hand, Falcon (without 030 in the name) was planned to be TT type machine in TT like case with full 32bit bus, 32MB fast RAM, DSP, 16-bit sound DMA, multi-slot VME, video and DMA expansion slots and both 68030 and 040 support. So, Sparrow team managed to coble up something working first, Atari management renamed it to Falcon030 because there were rumors about Falcon for a year already, and killed real Falcon 🤷
One day I’ll own one. Lovely machine! Great video!
"Love at first sight computer" for me... I was lucky enough to find two of them .. both of which were stored in awful conditions by their previous owners... the first one even had a leaking cap.. the crazy thing about these computers is that their plastics never go "yellow" no matter what
Have a happy holidays Power of Vintage
Likewise!
19:34 the area of the audio section looks interesting! I see the seven brown ceramic caps which were soldered in quite "wildly" (there should be four more at the bottom side). Also the two ferrite coils with the red and green wires can only be found on the very last revision of the board. I would guess, that you've got the complete C-Lab audio modifications from a time where Atari sold their remaining Falcons to C-Lab, who did some audio mods on their MK-I and II Falcons. I guess you have line-level input and output at the mic/headphone connectors and the bass boost circuitry was removed.
I find angled functional keys VERY attractive!
Atari 4Ever
As a life long Amiga user (still have a couple of original machines) it never fails to amaze me what can be done on our "16 bit" era computers. I never really got to know 16 bit+ Atari range. I had an 800Xl and VCS!! The OS and GUI looks horrible (sorry) compared to Amiga, but great to see the expansions can keep the old girl alive.
I was an STFM owner, saw the Falcon at a UK computer show and bought mine new. Later had the Titan Design 040 accelerator fitted then it was moved into a CLAB rack mount case. It was a wonderful machine BUT I later obtained a second hand TT with a Matrix graphics card which became my main machine due to that wonderful display...
The capacitor looking thing on the power supply feed are MOVs (metal oxide varistors) - basically, surge suppressors.
It's interesting comparing the Atari TT with the Amiga 3000: decent video, sound, 32 bit, lots of memory, SCSI, et cetera, all built in. It's a shame they're so rare.
Interesting video! Didn’t know it can do mp3 playback and doom 😅 I bought a Falcon (4mb + harddisk) when it came out. Great computer, but no software at all back then. Still, I liked it a lot, but switched to a PC next year. My Falcon is in storage, but after seeing this video, I think I’ll go play with it and see if it’s still running.
Let me know in the comments how it's going! Feel free to reach out through the channel email: contact.powerofvintage@gmail.com if you have any quesitons!
@@powerofvintage9442 It's going very well actually. I found out that the memory was acting weird. Back then, I replaced the default 4mb memory board with a 4x30pin simm board. That was not the best idea. I had to break the shielding for it to fit and it never worked quite well. But now, thanks to your video, I found out that centuriontech makes a 16 (14) mb memory board. I ordered one and am waiting for it to arrive.
Beautyfull machine
Always wanted one. Kept my 4MB STE running through the 1990s. Having a souped-up Falcon would be cool, but I've no idea what I'd use it for.
Yes the problem was not enough software. I had one, and it was painful waiting for content. Also most free software was mainly concept software, that wasn't polished enough to make it daily use or practical. I also felt the case it was released in was a desperation move, to save money. It really needed a business look, as most people were moving or wanting PC's with expandability.
8:50 The european Falcon keyboards have dark grey plastic.
As a Commodore 64 user dreaming about owning Amiga all my early life I had to hate the ST and even more the Falcon. I suppose I would not take them for free back then and when, and I admit, that was stupid. Atari made great computers and the Falcon was really a great achievement at its day. Shame I never owned one, neither I had the Amiga.
in the late '80s early '90s Atari was number #1 in R&D, but number zero with marketing. I was well aware of the Falcon coming out in 1992 and ordered mine right away from my usual Atari reseller in the US, but Atari did almost nothing to market it. I was shocked when it was discontinued so quickly. There was no reason for this, other than that they didn't even try.
I still used my Falcon for many years and did not replace my Ataris with PCs. Eventually I replaced my Falcon with an SGI Indigo 2... but now I have a couple Falcons again. It's the best computer ever made. Obviously not the most powerful anymore... but still the best in my mind.
Nostalgia has driven the price up. I don't remember what Falcons were selling for when they were new. I took a wild guess of $1,700, since I bought a Mega STe system, with monitor for about $1,300 in 1992. I ran this guess through an inflation calculator, and got $3,823 in today's money. So, what you quoted is 22% off of that. Not bad for a computer that's more than 30 years old.
I tried looking up prices in online copies of old Atari magazines from 1993, but the frustrating thing is all the sellers were saying, "Call for pricing." So, I take it they were trying to be flexible, not committing to a price for sale. It was the same for their TT's.
Incidentally, I happened to find an Atari magazine of mine from 1995, and saw a price quote for Falcons of $799 ($1,654 today)! Of course, they were trying to sell off old stock by then.
I bought one on release in the USA in 1993. The base 1 MB version was US $999 but I opted for the 4 MB version for $1299. If you wanted 4 MB and an 80 MB IDE internal hard drive, it was $1499.
@@Sl1pstreams - Looking at the 4 MB, 80 MB HD model/price in constant dollars, I get $3,273, not too far off from the price quoted in the video. Though, I see the quoted model was configured with 14 MB RAM. I wonder how much the RAM upgrade would've added to the price, BITD.
Looks like the answer to "why only 14mb?" Question is due to TOS and the hardware registers are taking up the memory address space for those last two mb.
It was just over for specific home computers. As the PC compatibles got better graphics, CPU power and dropped in prices enough to get into homes, there was no place on the market left for anything else. Except very cheap game consoles and PCs. There was nothing that Atari or Commodore could have done that wouldn't make a difference in the end result. The era was over and that was it.
Approximately when did IBM PC clones equal or surpass using sound and graphics cards the sound and graphics capabilities of the Atari ST/TT and Amiga series at around the same price? Perhaps even before any price parity, the massive software support for the PC clones doomed (no pun intended) the Atari and Commodore machines. I should know as I was a 1040STf owner who transitioned to homebuilt PCs around 1993, but I may have held on to the ST beyond that point and just don't recall.
Jack Tramiel made its share of mistakes, and some of its past actions came back to haunt him (from all the people he alienated over the decades to his misunderstanding of software). But as you said, the PC killed pretty much everybody. As imperfect as it was, the PC had the sales volume which allowed economies of scale which crushed the competition.
That said, I'd be very interested to know the inside story of the Falcon, i.e. what was the rationale behind the technical choices made.
its development started as project Sparrow, it was actually planned as a upgrade set for STE, project Falcon was different project that should have been successor to TT030.
I've listened to some history of it. Atari's publicly discussed strategy was to sell it as a business machine, perhaps with some creative applications, similar to their strategy with the TT030.
@@mmille10 that is just partially true.
This intent was with the Falcon project and Microbox project. As I said the Sparrow project was intended as a upgrade pack for STE and since it was almost ready and the Falcon was far from completion, it was chosen that the Israel team Sparrow to be finalized for production and designated as Falcon030.
After that a discussion erupted, since two major ATARI markets wanted a different product placement. Germany wanted to promote it as new gen general computing PC and UK wanted a gaming home computer. At the end both markets had different approach, where the German was more supported by ATARI HQ, since they didnt see much sense of two gaming products (Falcon and Jaguar), but having general/professional computer and a game console was OK. That was the reason Germany received Falcons 2-3 months earlier then UK market.
But.... Sam Trammel killed the computer division before Falcons started to ship, so we almost didnt get any unit to the shops...
Falcon would be a great product if the production would continue and there would be wider market adoption so there was more software development.
I bought an Atari Falcon as an investment because I thought it would be valuable since it was going to be one of the rarest Atari computers actually sold. Of course, gold would have been a better investment - I paid $1000 dollars for the Falcon, and it is only worth $3000. Gold would be worth $6600 right now. Of course, I am not missing out on any fun - my STE computer still works, I use it for art. I still have the Falcon and someday I nay do something with it.
Be aware that you may want to use your Falcon at some point. Because it has a battery inside (for the clock) which will die if you don't use it for too long; and once that happens, the Falcon won't work anymore. I know because I have a dead Falcon with that issue. Of course the battery can be replaced, but it's a bit of a hassle and requires soldering (which is why I haven't done it yet). OK, I guess the battery will die at some point anyway, but apparently it happens more if the computer wasn't used at all in a very long time.
@@bellissimo4520 That is exactly why I am not using it - I intend to replace the clock chip to avoid any damage to the rest of the computer. I last had the Falcon on in June, for about a half hour, after 30 years of storage. The chip battery is not rechargeable but, considering that it had only 10 hours of run time, the battery was new so that is why it started after 30 years. Although, I know that the battery will "give up the ghost" within days of starting and using the Falcon so, I need to get the new chip. Then I will work with it more.
@@mikecaster4612It will work fine. I have owned 8 Falcons in the last 25 years. Some with dead batteries, and they power up fine.
What chip is under the fan? Thanks.
There are two fans in the video. One is a motherboard case fan with a vent underneath to permit airflow into the case (so no chip there).
The chip under the fan seen at 21:24 is on the CT63 accelerator which uses a 68060 CPU.
@ Thank you very much for the answer and for your other videos too.
I had the 800 first, then the 130XE, and finally the 1040ST with Dave Small's Magic Sac (running Macintosh System 5 or 6) and the 68030 daughter board upgrade.
That would have been quite a system. Do you remember which 68030 board upgrade you had?
@ I bought it from Dave smalls company, I don't remember the clock speed but it had cache memory and with the upgrade the Atari ran Macintosh software faster than any of the Mscs that were out at that time.
I had a falcon030. It was too little too late. Atari spent too much resources on distractions like the transputer and atari unix, and then the jaguar. In the end it wouldn't have mattered anyway - motorola couldn't scale the 68k to match x86 performance or price. Motorola gave up and moved to powerpc architecture, which floated them for a few more years. If the falcon030 was released a few years earlier it could have been competetive with the amiga.
Bought into the platform early on 94, could not find an ste anywhere so it was the only option, turned out the Falcon was not really compatible with st software.
The base 1mb would not run much, ended up a costly upgrade route to 4mb and an ide hdd, hddriver etc, etc, pretty unstable too. After the success of the st/ste/mega/tt (midi ports) you'd imagine if Atari corp invested properly into their next system it would have been something special.
I can see that happening...this really was an "orphaned" platform. Atari and really the rest of the market had moved on.
@@powerofvintage9442 Agree and trying to "compete" with intel/pc, suspect they rushed the Falcon out to try and recoup/mitigate the inevitable losses, what could have been eh?
What could have been would have needed to have begun with more dedicated software and hardware investment and much much earlier in the overall platform life....like in 1986. Instead, Atari invested in brick and mortar stores in Texas and basically lost nearly all the profit they had made over multiple years due to that mistake.
They recovered much of it from a the results of a lawsuit, but that payout didn't happen until 1996 or so...
I never understood why there were no "big box" STs with bus slots.
The Mega ST and STE and the TT each had one expansion slot each. Not nearly as much or as flexible as PCs or big box Macs or Amigas.
I put the Centurion PSU in my Falcon, and it makes a high-pitched chirp whenever I power off the system. Then again, the previous owner did a lot of weird changes to the sound circuitry. For now, I have out the original PSU in it.
Doesn't surprise me. Centurion tech stuff isn't great.
Sure, the era of home micro computers was pretty much over, but atari still made a big mistake dumping the falcon for the jaguar. there was one industry that still embraced atari st line of computers for a long time, even after atari went out of business. the music industry relied on them for a very long time, and the falcon could have been a great upgrade (certainly with the build in powerful dsp) for all these musicians.
Whe you showed all the ports you forgot the 9 pin joystickports at the underside.
hah! too true.
Doom was pretty much the end of the ST and the Amiga. Neither could run it particularly well but you could go out and buy a PC clone and it run fine. Now you can criticise x86 and DirectX. Neither is elegant from a technical point of view but when you've got multiple vendors building CPUs, GPUs and cards you end up with ultra cheap commodity hardware that gets faster and faster because it's a competitive market.
Im in Australia, there are virtually no Falcon's here for sale. I have a collection of 8 bit and 16 bit Atari's but I'm missing a Falcon, sell me one pls :)
ah,, the screws...
I had an STE... and decided to take it apart
How would you connect a wired mouse? I don't see mouse/joystick ports that used to be on the older Atari ST/STE.
Under the keyboard just like the STF / STE
@@powerofvintage9442I am sorry I maybe blind and stupid but I fail to notice you mention these ports in the video when you discribe all the other ports. Also when you open up the machine It's looks to me like there are no ports where they used to be on the ST/STE.
You are neither blind nor stupid. I missed those ports. I don’t use a teleprompter and thus simply missed them 😀
MIPS R3000A CPU can play MP3
Hey I am in the middle of designing Falcon 030 eight channel 16bit sound output upgrade, just wondering if you're interested to be a beta tester ?
I'm the someone that was almost ready too release the digital interface FDI+ for Falcon on Atariage forums.
Shoot me a link to your project at contact.powerofvintage@gmail.com
I want to learn more!
hi Diesel PLL, are you the Polish guy replicating various ATARI HW upgrades?
I just remembered that BW Technoshed aka Bad Wolf had lately a Mega ST with some DSP56001 equipped "ATARI Sound Accelerator" board for Mega Bus in his video, maybe it could help you with development?
Pretty sure my dad had one, none knows what happened to it 😢
That is sad
you should start searching, Falcon is worth 1500+ now days.