Atari Falcon 030 | Nostalgia Nerd 

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 RU-vid 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...

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'

You are MOST welcome.

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.

Oh, no. You dropped the ball so hard. "In-falcon-ceivable!"

@@Kevin-jb2pv get out

Are you falcon-well kidding me?!

We don’t care gang banger

I have one. Here you have it

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

I bought used Falcon 030 and Jaguar console just before their prices went sky high...

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 ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-WpwlZgQPCpk.html Quake 2 engine on stock falcon, not bad

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 😂

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"

I really hated leaving my Amiga platform behind. Well, I still have it but I don't use it anymore.

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.

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

“Hysterical” by Lexica

It’s secret

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 :)

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. :))

“Hysterical” by Lexica

There were MIDI interfaces for Amiga as well.

Excellent song indeed, also wondering where it came from...

“Hysterical” by Lexica

And the voices were hilarious!

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

Paul Gascoigne crikey... ray tracing... that takes me back!!!

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..

@@stevejennings3960 Ray tracing is back on new graphics cards I hear, except real time now.

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.

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.

They should make some kind of Falcon 040 PS/2 style MicroBox "Flashback" remake edition

It was a beautiful case and much nice than my Amiga 500.

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!

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!

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.