Covering the ST, the CPC, CP/M, Sinclair QL and even pre-OSX Apples.
I’ve always took the road less traveled when it comes to Tech. I had a ZX-81 when everyone I knew had a Vic 20, I choose Amstrad CPC over C64 and pounced on the Atari ST when the world and it’s dog bought an Amiga.
Love the breakdown of the specs of the machines. I stand to be corrected as my memory banks are a bit fuzzy, but did the ST not have a palette of 512 colours?
i noticed memory wasn't the same under geneva/neodesk steem emulator, width a 4 meg st. Word Up and works did not want to load saying memlry was the problem ... is there a switch or something that i am missing?
sorry for the delay in replying. by default nidi takes a ridiculous amount of memory. check the nidi control panel tool and set the cache size to a low value: say 80k
that's fine if you happen to have a spare, say three thousand pound lying around :-)
14 дней назад
@@commodoreisnottheonlyfruit :) Or if you were fortunate to acquire several units years ago when they were comparatively cheap. ;) Regardless, the best Falcon is still an original unit with a nice accelerator and RAM card.
I installed your image with Geneva Neodesk etc on my (real hardware) STE. I'm not sure why I don't have a neodesk control panel and can't get my accessories to show. Otherwise it's nice. Also Can Warp9 load with NVDI? Thank you for these videos and your images. I'm really enjoying having my ST up and running in a way my ST never did when I was using it in high school.
@@commodoreisnottheonlyfruit Yes, they are all in that directory. there is an acc that loads first named ACC. when I don't load it, everything works. What does it do?
But what about an Amiga emulating a Mac Emulating an ST, now that would be interesting to see, the reason I say that is an Amiga with same processor as the Mac ran faster than an equivalent Mac.
I don't get why this should be called a Falcintosh. Maybe we can call it GEMintosh, but for it to be called Falcintosh it would need to be able to replace a Falcon. Which it can't. It has absolutely nothing to do with the Falcon. What made the Falcon the Falcon are its graphics and sound capabilities and its DSP. The Performa has none of it. Sure, it can run proper GEM applications but absolutely nothing that would be written for the Falcon. Or try to run ST games on it. I doubt that any commercial games will run on the Performa. Don't get me wrong, it was well known in the early 90s that the best professional Atari computer comes from Apple, but the Falcon is and was never a computer for standard applications. It can run them and it was still a significant boost from a normal ST but it's simply the wrong computer to compare it to the Performa. The Falcon has an 030 and is limited to 14MB of RAM and to a 16 Bit bus. What do you expect when you compare it to a machine that has a 040 with 25 or 50Mhz and 4-36MB of RAM running on a 32Bit bus? If there is any counterpart then it would be the Atari TT (equipped with TT RAM). (And the Performa would still be the better choice).
Interesting video. Would have been also interesting to see the performance of full-blown 68040 equiped Performa. And what about music software (Cubase, Notator) and hardware extensions? Is it somewhere mentioned in the software documentation?
I believe that they did support cubase, but I don't imagine that the support would be 100%. the ST line with hardware MIDI built in was a beast. A musician friend of mine says the timing on the ST is rock solid. His modern gear with MIDI over usb or ethernet suffers from horrendous clock drift at times. as for hardware, I can't see any that would work,
Some interesting things about the 475. As well as being expandable to 1MB VRAM and supporting 8bit at 1152*870, they actually aren't capped at 36MB RAM, they even take 64 and 128MB simms for up to 132MB, or technically 260MB with a SIMM Saver (which won't fit in the case). Lastly and most importantly, they have a software controllable CPU clock! It was recently discovered that you can bump them up to higher speeds by poking certain registers. 33MHz is easy, 40 is possible and I've got mine to 50MHz including some hardware mods. Its a brand new discovery, so we're still improving the software.
I did see something about this very recently, that was a resistor / jumper hack. You're saying that this is a software fix? that's amazing. Do you have a link to a forum page or a blog about it?
@@commodoreisnottheonlyfruitVery recent, as in last week and a half. No soldering required, purely software. RU-vid doesn't like people posting links, but my last video upload is applicable.
Does anyone know if a Mac LC II could have run an Atari ST (520 or 1040) emulator and play games at native 60800 speeds? Games that were made for the Mac (Sim City 2000, Lemmings etc) were better on the Mac. But in the late 80s / early 90s, the ST had a much wider variety of games. Particularly arcade style games that were underrepresented on the Mac like Double Dragon, Super Hang On, Gauntlet II etc).
The LC II is pretty slow but is supported. The RAM is on a 16bit bus meaning 32bit reads need two accesses. They're about 15% slower in CPU benchmarks than the 32bit RAM Mac II with a 68020 and 28% slower than the IIcx, which is also a 16MHz 68030. But there are reproduction upgrades available and if you already have the machine, no harm in trying :) Make sure you get the logic board recapped as a matter of urgency if you haven't. They leak corrosive electrolyte and destroy traces, especially in and around the sound circuit.
Oh, but in CPU performance, the LC II performs about 3.5 times faster than an 8MHz 68000 Mac, so it might be fine for running 68000 Atari stuff if there isn't too much overhead for chipset emulation.
You specifically mention games. The problem is that most games accessed the hardware at really low levels and so won't work under Magic. A well behaved GEM game might, but they were few and far between.
Well the falcon is quite underpowered but I am surprised of how badly the performa performs (pun intended). From your real use tests it seems like the difference in performance is just on the CPU and bus speed. In the early days there was an accelerator for the falcon (mighty sonic/eagle I think) that was really cheap (but being a broke student I couldn't afford) and would give 32Mhz 030 and TT RAM to the falcon. Something like this would make your Mac seem really slow in comparison. Of course like others said it's more like a TT and less like a falcon but I get your point as well.
I've always wanted to get an iMac running MagicMac to replace my old ass STe, but I was returning to university and needed a Windows PC for programming classes. Had I've known about Virtual PC, I would had held off getting a Pentium PC for school and save up more for an iMac to run both MagicMac & Virtual PC. And yes I know MagicMac is more for running serious GEM applications than games but there was also an ST emulator called NoSTalgia for the fun stuff.
Love this so much!! I like running just the opposite...Mac OS on my Falcon (with an 060 in it). It's one way to get more late software for the software-poor Falcon. Running Warcraft II on an Atari makes me smile.
Absolutely; while the Amiga had the upper edge in terms of arcade perfect ports the Atari was king of MIDI and emulation.Hats off to specular emulation :p
Haha, yes. I'm with you on that. I wanted my Atari to show its potential. Once I'd moved on I didn't really need any of the old software, which was, for the most part, underwhelming. The fixed width font in almost every app and most programs disregard for multitasking caused by the lowest common denominator approach grated!
@@thetechnoshed well, I dont think that there was any software area where Falcon was held back by native software that you would be better of with emulated Mac, other then some games. What runs on MagicMac runs fine on Falcon under MaciC. MacOS did not have preemptive multitasking back then, Falcon had 3 chices, MagiC, MultiTOS or MiNT/FreeMiNT. And fixed font width? Majority of productivity software had option for outline/vector fonts after 1993, so what are you talking about? Yes, if you used program from 1987....
I'd bought a second hand Quadra 840av off a work colleague, then ran MagicMac on it. But it wasn't as compatible as I'd hoped so sold the Mac then used the money to buy a TT and TTM194 monitor off an advert in Atari World magazine.
Could one run FreeMiNT on a "Old World" Motorola 68k Mac? I despise MacOS versions prior to Mac OS X as they were prone to crashing due to MacOS's cooperative multitasking. I'd love a way to run a preemptive multitasking OS on an "Old World" 68k Mac
it's an interesting question. MagiC obviously runs, well, Magic. But since it supports the unified file system idea and it's preemptively multitasking, you can get the MiNT experience through command line tooling.
Sorry, but this time I have to disagree. While MagicMac was indeed some kind of "savior" for ATARI folks and was presented even in various ST mags as one, the MagicMac was actually not a Falcon replacement. It was ST/MegaSTE/TT030 replacement. First of all Falcon can have larger VRAM then your Peforma, second no, Falcon can do more then 640x480@8bit out of the box, and with some overclock way more then that... Third, Falcon is not just pure faster ST, Falcon has much better audio system your Performa has not and does have DSP which can speed up a lot of operations that will outperform Performa with 68LC40. Fourth, adding a FPU to Falcon was fairly easy, rather cheap and almost a mandatory upgrade (I didnt know any Falcon owner who didnt have the FPU), the Performa 475 did not have this option but to be fair, you could run MagicMac on any 68030-40 Macintosh. Edit: also it is not true that ATARI abandoned Falcon one year after its release, it was abandoned before the sales started.
@@madigorfkgoogle9349 Yes but you didn't mention price :) and the video was talking about second hand. Plus you could part ex them at some places. For interest, buying from Micromac, a 68882 cost $39 and a 68040 cost $99. Expensive, but cheaper than a RAM upgrade 😂
RU-vid deleted my reply because I mentioned prices. Short answer, about 2x. But not applicable, I was just making it clear that the upgrade was possible and was often done in the second hand era.
@@phipli No, the price of 68882 was around 50UKP and 350-400UKP for 68040 in 1996, thats why Apple used much cheaper 68LC40 on budget models. Changing CPU is not same as affordable adding of FPU in socket that is already present on the Falcon mainboard. And I was referring to video, not to what was or wasnt possible. Lets see if youtube will let this pass.
no, same as this video is a bit misleading, the Magic Mac is NOT a Falcon replacement, it is a TT030 replacement. There are apps that do use the DSP, and stock Falcon does outperforms or at least matches even a native Amiga with 68LC60 there.
It’s an interesting topic this because a lot of us had Falcons or upgraded STs and saw Atari had abandoned us. Sooner or later a decision was needed… I went with the Mac but (iirc) 1997. So I lasted a long time! :) Got a power Mac and used MagicMac a lot until I gradually replaced those programs with Mac equivalents. Stupidly sold my Falcon and TT around 2002 I think. Stupid!! Biggest regret ever as I’ll never be able to afford one again :/ Anyhow a brilliant video 👍🏻
Atari St was okay in the 68000 days, but I never saw a 68030 ST here in the USA. I believe they have compatibility issues, worse than on the Mac 68030 machines with their 68000 software. Atari tragically never made it to 68040.
There was an in house prototype of a 68040 Falcon. It was in a box that was almost identical to the song ps2 cause, apparently Sony used the Atari design in their patent submissions
Where does one find the latest version of QED to run on real hardware (Atari Falcon) with NeoDesk 4? I downloaded both 68000 and 68030 images from github of 5.0.5 that are for some reason under freemint repo and they just crash on my system. I found QED that doesn't crash but it's an ancient version 3.
I got mine from here: freemint.github.io/ It's a part of MinT but should work with any TOS version. This is a great resource for major Abandonware apps (not QED) www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?t=32323 and this is a searchable index and download site for old shareware / freeware disks and is very useful exxosforum.co.uk/atari/PDL/FLOPPYSHOP/
@@commodoreisnottheonlyfruit Thank you! That's exactly what I tried, but no snapshot build of 5.0.5 works on real Falcon - keep getting abend error (not using MinT) oh well .. will stick to a version from "back in the day"
Great video, but how do you get NeoDesk to auto-boot without loading Geneva? I like the idea of Geneva, but I am hesitant. What is it's impact on Games? I had a bad experience with MultiTOS back in the day... I am using an ST with 4 megs and TOS 1.04.
Tried running this on an intel MacBook today running High Sierra 10.13.6 and the app reports that it needs macOS 10.15 or higher to run. Is this just a 'tick box' thing in the compiler settings to make it compatible, or are you using APIs that only exist in newer macOS releases?
The API is built using a Technology called .Net Maui. Microsoft mandates the minimum version that Maui supports, so unfortunately, I have no control over this.
So I’ve used adapters, not the greatest, but on both lcd and crt it worked pretty well the only issue i had was it would resize the window incorrectly every once in a while on boot
@@commodoreisnottheonlyfruit That is my problem - I need to get an Atari formatted disk to get the NetUSBee files into my system. The USB floppy drives (for PC) only format 1.44 megabyte disks (I have one) which is not the 720K Atari disk. I like to get the NetUSBee going first but, don't know anyone with Atari computer who can send a disk.
@@commodoreisnottheonlyfruit Located in Redford, Michigan, just west of the Detroit border. Since my last comment, I have ordered an UltraSatan and a Gotek unit since I feel that I should have one as a second connection to my PC.
Nice video, but there are easier ways to split the TOS ROM such as using the Hi-Lo-Byte-Split python script. I bought some EEPROMS for £3 each and I'm going to program them using pi-eeprom-programmer, which as you might guess is a EEPROM programmer for the Raspberry Pi that uses the GPIO header.
I've owned all the models apart from the TT and even two Falcons. I first saw a Falcon 030 in a pro recording studio in 1992, but on my next visit the owner had got rid of it and gone back to his trusty ST. In 2010 I had a full blown fully upgraded Falcon 030 14MB 60ns, with all the SoundPool interfaces etc and Steinberg Cubase Audio 2.06, but I can see that being an early adopter that studio owner would have had major headaches getting it to run reliably. Mine was fine apart from getting a suitable SCSI hard drive for the audio files. Once that was obtained it ran ok.
Uh, no, the internet was not 2 years old in 1985. It got its start more like 15 years before that for things like email, FTP, and newsgroups, but the WWW didn't come around til 1991, not 1989. There are like 8 billion websites with this information, did you read any of them?
Yes I did. Here are a few key dates, from some of those billions of web sites Some key dates: 1991: The World wide web, started by Sir Tim in 1989 and made public in 1991. 1983: The internet forms as TCP/IP proliferates. That's why 1st of Jan 1983 is used as the Birthday of the internet. 1982: TCP/IP, foundation of the internet was standardized Pre '83 it was ARPANET and DARPANET, not the internet.
You awakened neural pathways that have lain undisturbed in me for about 30 years! I remember using that! And I loved the 68000 Hisoft assembler and debugger!
A Beautiful tool. Always wanted it but cash was sparse. Atari ST had such cool software. Cubase, Notator, GFA and Omikron Basic, Tempus Word, NVDI, KSpread, TurboAss, PureC. Software was really user friendly back then (on all platforms), before career-project managers took over.
I'd love to have the enthusiasm to revive the platform on which I learned 68k assembler, GFA-BASIC and C coding, proper GUIs, electronics and soldering, office programs like Texel and Signum!3, MIDI music production, Notator Logic and so much more. Looking back, my eleven years or so with the Atari Mega ST4 were pretty great (hardware-blitter chip, Turbo030 with 50MHz and 4MB fast RAM, two graphics cards, NVDI, MagiC, external ACSI hard disks and yes, Harlekin). MagiC!Mac even helped me onto my first Apple PPC machine, made me appreciate MacOS and later OS X (macOS nowadays). Making good money with coding and Linux administration, I learned about server-side stuff and actual IBM mainframes while shaking my head at the MS-Windows crowd. I had an Atari TT with a 19'' monochrome monitor and some proper SCSI hard disks for about a while and sold it for triple the price I paid. That's a long story in and of itself. Looking back at the Atari TOS and its many bugs, conceptual flaws and idiosyncrasies, its drive letters, its worse-than-DOS filesystem, I wonder why I didn't ever check out Amiga. Then again, I'm reminded of Amiga's horrible color monitor, its flurry of custom chips and weird graphics, and its lack of MIDI ports. My Atari stuff still works, but I'm so glad to live in a time when I have Linux, KDE, seemingly endless RAM and storage, Unicode, versatile and robust filesystems, USB in all its forms and global connectivity. I'm glad to be free of the restraints of 8-bit Amstrad or 16-/32-bit Atari. Thank you for your Harlekin video, it really brought back some memories. Cheers!
Great, thanks to your video I can use the NetUSBee to back up files without using the floppy drive. I don't have to mention how slow the floppy drive is - this device can beat me swapping out the floppy disk. The floppies are also rather space limited. I have ordered one.
