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Atari Falcon030

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145 pointsrbanffy97 comments

I really loved my Falcon 030, which I primarily used for music production in the 90s.

I already had an 1040 ST(FM) before it, but the Falcon 030 was really nice because of it's integrated DSP and the faster 68030 of course. It allowed 8 track hard-disk recording integrated into MIDI sequencer at a price much lower than the alternatives like Macintosh Sound Tools / Pro Tools systems. You could even have some effects like reverb with the DSP (nowhere near todays quality of course, but good enough for demos).

Basically one of the first affordable real DAWs.

Replying to my own comments because I missed the edit window...

I just remembered that the Falcon was actually my first personal system with Internet access and a web browser. The browser was called CAB, I think some incarnations still exist for macOS. And you had to use some additional software for the TCP/IP stack, because TOS didn't have one. I think I was using something called PPP Connect, which only really worked with CAB and related tools, and an alternative stack called STinG. Detailed memories are vague though.

I used iCab (the Mac port of CAB) for a few years in the early '00s since it had a very good balance of features and resource usage. It's still around but it's been rewritten to use WebKit so there's not really much point to it anymore.

http://icab.de

I was using OmniWeb for a while, but basically the same thing happened to it ;)

OmniWeb was great! Loved the vertical tabs. I wish Safari supported them. My screen is far wider than it is tall and vertical scrolling is a natural movement, darn it!

Same here, first computer I ever bought and connected to the Internet ! I think I had to fiddle some PPP settings back then (I think 94-95 ?) with the help of my local ISP to get it working (tech support was nice enough to entertain/help teenage me), but it all worked great in the end. I managed to boot it up a few years ago (it did have a VGA out via an adapter which helps a lot).

At that point I can't quite remember if PPP Connect required MultiTOS/MinT/MagiC or not ? I think maybe only one of the stack did. I definitely remember CAB was the good/last browser option but it wasn't the first. Can't remember the name of the first one, or the email client though.

It was also my first Linux computer, somehow, which I installed on a iomega Zip (SCSI ?) drive. I think it took 15 minutes to launch X11 and at that point the whole thing was excruciatingly unusable.

Also first computer I overclocked, a french company called Centek had made a tiny board that reclocked the 68030 from 16 to 25 MHz. I looked it up and found their website here : http://centek.free.fr/atari/ct2/ct2_hist.htm

Looks like the version I have (probably Centurbo 1 rev2 ?) overclocked both the CPU an the bus (which may or may not impacted the RAM ? Hard to remember). They made a few iterations, going up to 50 MHz.

Many extremely fond memories of that machine in any case. But at that point the PC market was opening up and there was no going back.

> Also first computer I overclocked, a french company called Centek had made a tiny board that reclocked the 68030 from 16 to 25 MHz. I looked it up and found their website here : http://centek.free.fr/atari/ct2/ct2_hist.htm

Oooh that brings up some memories! I remember that name and I know I had some overclocking card, not sure anymore if it was the CENTurbo II though or maybe the Nemesis/CENTurbo 1. I'm pretty sure it was not a CT60 or Afterburner 040, as those were probably above my budget. But now that I read about it, all those names ring some bells again ;)

There was also something that allowed use of PCI graphics cards IIRC, but that might just have been the CT60 actually.

It was fun tinkering with all that stuff, what a contrast to todays unified RAM soldered everything computers...

Long time lurker here. Decided to create an account to respond.

I actually used to own a C-LAB Falcon Mk II for a few years before I sold it off after the great tech layoffs of 2023 just to make ends meet. It was a really neat system... almost something of an anachronism, considering C-LAB pumped these out well after Atari bailed on computers in exchange for putting all their eggs in the ill-fated Atari Jaguar basket.

To that end, I'm unduly impressed with the community around this computer. I've gotten more online help on the Falcon than I ever did on any other retro system I've owned in the past. The fanbase is clearly passionate. I even sent my C-LAB Falcon over to Centuriontech out in the Czech Republic, and he did an outstanding job on a capacitor replacement job I needed done. The multilayer PCB made working with some of the components a bit tricky, especially for a soldering iron novice like myself.

It's a real shame I had to sell it off, but bills needed to be paid, and I ended up making a profit on the sale, despite all the money I poured into repairs and cleanup of the system. Even with its dodgy software compatibility with older ST titles, it would have been cool to keep it in my collection for the long haul.

> By the end of the 80s, there were really only four major computer lines in the US. You had PCs (and their clones, of which there were many), Apple Macintosh, Commodore Amiga and Atari ST. For a short while there was also NeXT, but even with its big promises, great innovations and charismatic leader it didn’t survive as a hardware platform.

I rather see NeXT as a competitor in the market for Unix Workstations (Sun, HP, SGI, ...) and not as a competitor to the four mentioned (consumer) lines.

It was targeted at Universities, as a foothold customer, since it ended up too expensive for even prosumers.

It ended up mostly finding uptake in custom apps in the Fortune 500 (and kept it toe-hold in universities) while it lasted as a hardware platform, and then in its OS only incarnation.

And, yet, every Mac these days runs a direct descendant of NeXT's OS.

Such a shame we didn't get BeOS but Jobs and Gassee did NOT get along.

Jobs wasn't in charge at that point; Gassee wanted too much money for too little OS. BeOS was missing a lot of features.

If BeOS had the ability to output graphics to printers at the time, we'd be in a very different world today.

Indeed, first of all Apple might not be around any longer, without the reverse acquisition played by Jobs, who knows how well BeOS inspired Mac OS would turn out.

There would be no iPod taking Apple out of red zone.

There wouldn't be FOSS devs flocking into Apple hardware as replacement to sponsor Linux OEMs instead.

And it would be yet another C++ focused desktop operating system, assuming Apple would survive the transition in this alternative reality.

And every iOS device!

And every HomePod, Apple Watch, iPad and Apple Vision Pro. Plus the later Apple TVs. I think even some of their newer displays have the OS in there too.

Due to a serious of steps where Copland failed to deliver, Gasse wanting too much money, NeXT being acquired into what turned out to be a reverse acquisition.

We had an entire lab full of NeXT cubes at Purdue that nobody really knew what to use them for. I think they ended up giving them away after a couple of years.

Well, I'm Glad Tim Berners-Lee knew what to do with his.

I do wish NeXT had a better naming system in place. The first gen cube is called the NeXT Computer, later faster ones are actually called Cube but they’re all cubes to most people.

It certainly was. Also in the late 80s, Apple IIGS (a.k.a. Woz dream machine) was fairly successful on the US market, albeit obsolete and discontinued by the time the Falcon was introduced.

Too little too late indeed.

There is a footnote about Amiga offering preemptive multitasking 7 years earlier. Considering Apple users had to wait even longer (and less popular Acorn Archimedes / RiscOS is still struggling with "cooperative" MT, today), I think Commodore — or more accurately: the Amiga team — was way ahead of its time (also in terms of hardware) launching Amiga in 1985.

The funny thing is that the Amiga was actually developed by Atari engineers and the ST by commodore ones (ok I oversimplify the situation a little bit there but the history is really weird)

Amiga was a startup that was I understand set to work around the lack of a product development pipeline in Commodore and it was the founder of commodore left to try to repeat his success by reviving Atari. Basically commodore corporate was a big hot mess and both of these entities spun out of that. Atari was essentially otherwise a dead duck already. The acquisition of Amiga wasn’t enough to keep C= afloat and ultimately the product line was taken on by a German vendor …

> Amiga was a startup that was I understand set to work around the lack of a product development pipeline in Commodore

This is false.

> This is false

This is vacuous

> Amiga was a startup that was I understand set to work around the lack of a product development pipeline in Commodore

Amiga Inc. was founded in 1982 by engineers leaving Atari, at a time when Atari was still all-in on the aging 2600, and did yet not have a replacement product in the pipeline. So you identified the right problem at the wrong company.

Amiga's initial goal was to create a chipset for a next-generation console. While they were working on that, they generated revenue by selling 2600 peripherals (like the Joyboard [1]), but eventually got funding from Atari and negotiated a contract to license their new architecture as the basis for future Atari products.

In '84, Jack Tramiel left Commodore and acquired Atari, which Warner had put up for sale following the crash of '83. Tramiel brought a bunch of Commodore engineers over to a newly reconstituted Atari, and they became the core of the ST team.

This severed Amiga's relationship with Atari, and simultaneously left Commodore without an engineering team to design their next-generation products. After a bunch of lawsuits and back-and-forth negotiations, Commodore managed to acquire Amiga, and the rest was history.

So it's pretty valid to say that the Amiga was designed by Atari engineers and the ST was designed by Commodore engineers.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyboard

Corrected and clarified. Thank you!

Ah, the Joyboard, origin of Amiga's Guru Meditation error.

What happened with Commodore/Amiga and Atari/ST is an amazing bit of history. It really happened, of course, but it seems like it could have been the plot for a show like "Halt and Catch Fire".

Also at a given point, they were actually trying to compete into the UNIX workstation market, as a couple of Amiga engineering folks were really into UNIX.

Thankfully that never materialized as such, otherwise AmigaOS wouldn't turned out as special as it was, rather yet another clone, SGI style.

I’m wondering how this worked out so well for Apple 15 years later (A/UX notwithstanding of course) - perhaps unix was simply not mature enough at that stage

Easy, Linux folks got a laptop/desktop that actually works out of the box, and they weren't really into Linux religion, rather whatever does POSIX would do.

A lesson taken by Microsoft years later, as Project Astoria ashes got repurposed as WSL.

A/UX failed due to management, and politics between IBM and Apple.

It worked out well for NeXT. But it took a long time, NeXTSTEP was released at the end of the 80s. So it took them more than a decade and reverse take-over of Apple, together with the much more affordable Apple hardware.

Its a pity Amiga team chose the 68000 instead of the 68010, since the the Pro Amiga would have had protected virtual memory.

Their original goal was a gaming console, not a general-purpose computer.

One huge mistake was not to take Sun's hand and make the 3000/UX the low end option to Sun's workstation lineup.

We always hear the Commodore / Sun 3000UX rumor. I'm skeptical. Sun already had their own 680x0 line of workstations (the Sun 3 series), which started about 5 years before the A3000 was released. Why would they need Commodore? They were basically done with 68K by that point, just like all the other Unix workstation vendors.

Good point. It could be a stopgap. At the time the 3000 was launched, Sun was divesting from their 68K line in favor of the SPARC line, but the 3000 would fill a niche at a lower price point than Sun had with their own Sun/3 series (which were eye-wateringly expensive).

I wonder if they would've ported SunOS 4.x to the Amiga, or gone with modifications to Commodore's Unix, which was SysV based. I had a used Sun 3/60 for a while, back in the 90's.

It would have been yet another UNIX clone like SGI, without the features that make AmigaOS special in first place.

NeXTSTEP was great, because their UNIX support was a means to bring software into the platform, and have a checkmark for DoD deals, not the way to develop NeXTSTEP applications.

> There is a footnote about Amiga offering preemptive multitasking 7 years earlier.

The thing is, that's only part of the story.

There's a generation of techies who are about 40 now who don't remember this stuff well, and some of the older ones have forgotten with time but don't realise. I had some greybeard angrily telling me that floppy drives were IDE recently. Senile idiot.

Anyway.

Preemptive multitasking is only part of the story. Lots of systems had it. Windows 2.0 could do preemptive multitasking -- but only of DOS apps, and only in the base 640kB of RAM, so it was pretty useless.

It sounds good but it's not. Because the other key ingredient is memory protection. You need both, together, to have a compelling deal. Amiga and Windows 2.x/3.x only had the preemption part, they had no hardware memory management or protection to go with it. (Windows 3.x when running on a 386 and also when given >2MB RAM could do some, for DOS apps, but not much.)

Having multiple pre-emptive tasks is relatively easy if they are all in the same memory space, but it's horribly horribly unstable.

Also see: microkernels. In size terms, AmigaOS was a microkernel, but a microkernel without memory protection is not such a big deal, because the hard part of a microkernel is the interprocess communication, and if they can just do that by reading and writing each other's RAM it's trivially easy but also trivially insecure and trivially unstable.

RISC OS had pre-emptive multitasking too... but only of text-only command-line windows, and there were few CLI RISC OS apps so it was mostly useless. At least on 16-bit Windows there were lots of DOS apps so it was vaguely useful, if they'd fit into memory. Which only trivial ones would. Windows 3 came along very late in the DOS era, and by then, most DOS apps didn't fit into memory on their own one at a time. I made good money optimising DOS memory around 1990-1992 because I was very good at it and without it most DOS apps didn't fit into 500-550kB any more. So two of them in 640kB? Forget it.

Preemption is clever. It lets apps that weren't designed to multitask do it.

But it's also slow. Which is why RISC OS didn't do it. Co-op is much quicker which is also why OSes like RISC OS and 16-bit Windows chose it for their GUI apps: because GUI apps strained the resources of late-1980s/very-early-1990s computers. So you had 2 choices:

• The Mac and GEM way: don't multitask at all.

• The 16-bit Windows and RISC OS way: multitask cooperatively, and hope nothing goes wrong.

Later, notably, MacOS 7-8-9 and Falcon MultiTOS/MiNT/MagiC etc added coop multitasking to single-tasking GUI OSes. I used MacOS 8.x and 9.x a lot and I really liked them. They were extraordinarily usable to an extent Mac OS X has never and will never catch up with.

But the good thing about owning a Mac in the 1990s was that at least one thing in your life was guaranteed to go down on you every single day.

The 030 was targeted for a Quake 2 engine port some years back, which got to an impressive amount of progress:

https://forums.atariage.com/topic/234077-quake-ii-engine-rew...

And here is the 030 (plus some aftermarket RAM) running Quake 1:

https://youtu.be/QFXSZlaQ1Wc?si=ZTt_N_nkJxENMETO

The onboard DSP definitely makes a huge difference to what it can do.

That Falcon030 has not only aftermarket RAM, but an aftermarket CPU.

Apparently (from the boot screen) it's a "Falcon/CT60" - so upgraded to a 68060 CPU, which should be more than capable enough to run Quake.

Edit: found it - https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/ct60-accelerator-upgr...

These are still available: https://centuriontech.eu/product/ct63-rev-2022/

There are also expansions for the expansion! People also use the CTPCI to run the desktop on a Radeon 7500. Alternatively there is an FPGA version of the graphics chip called SuperVidel.

Did Motorola ever take it beyond 68060, seems like I've read about an 080 (probably here on HN). Or was that just in the preplanning stages?

No, but there is a third party FPGA core available which is called 68080, it's used in a modern line of Amiga accelerators and clones.

http://www.apollo-core.com/index.htm?page=features

Not Motorola (or Freescale). After the 68060 they dumped the mc68k architecture outside the embedded market (68300 line) for the 88000 RISC architecture. After 2-ish generations of 88k, they dumped it for PPC.

There are numerous FPGA implementations of various folks ideas of what a post-060 mc68k might look like. There's also a 68070 from Philips that's a 68000+simple MMU+stuff; definitely not 060 class.

Doom was ported to the vanilla falcon making heavy use of the dsp: https://www.leonik.net/dml/sec_bm.py

Some weeks ago I switched on my old Falcon030 for the first time since 1997. The operating system feels surprisingly modern and fast. If it weren't for the low screen resolution, you could almost mistake it for an up-to-date window manager like XFCE.

I have the same opinion in regards to the Amiga, there are many workloads that they would do just fine nowadays.

Writing letters, basic spreadsheets, homemade flyers, reading email,...

Wonder how it would manage with TLS everywhere …

The tasks I listed don't require TLS everywhere.

These days they do. Everyone does their business on the web.

Sorry I get where you’re coming from but I was just adding this because as a vintage technology enthusiast this is an issue I come up against constantly.

In which part of "Writing letters, basic spreadsheets, homemade flyers" is TLS required?

Put the baseball bat down bro. You are describing something I do a lot, I play with old computers and try to put them to use. Pervasive cryptography has changed everything even stuff that’s ten years old has issues with certificates and deprecated versions. In any modern setting this is a serious handicap.

tl;dr our hardware requirements would be vastly slashed if we didn’t have an expectation of TLS everywhere.

Bro explain the HN audience how using AmigaWriter or PageStream, alongside a printer pluged via the Amiga printer port, requires TLS.

Well you’re really narrowing down the usescases to suit an argument we really don’t even need to have this is boring

You are free to explain the same to the other use cases I mentioned on my first comment, and I am still curious.

In case you go for email, I didn't mention the communication protocol, or possible existence of a gateway.

I though it was obvious: "you don't do what I do, exactly like I do it, therefore you are wrong". There's a lot of that type running around.

AmiSSL exists. Gemini browsers for Amiga too.

I know, I didn't specify Web browsing on purpose, because some "I feel smart" would exactly react as they did.

Turns out there is still a lot of uses a computer can serve without being plugged into the Internet.

Yeah except people don’t use computers like that any more. Sorry if that makes you feel “wrankled“

Not everyone is you.

I have the thick skin of Usenet and BBSs flamewars...

Traumatised people often think their defence mechanisms are virtues

That's true. When I didn't have internet at home in early 00's I did far more tasks than today. The thing is today, except for Debian (DVD/BD sets/ISO's), Hyperbola (offline mirroring, the repos are small) and few systems more, working offline seems odd as lots of things depend on fetching software via repos, or documentation, where you can't get that any more for lots of programming languages or software such as MS Office.

But, well, at least systems like 9front have static binaries, so they are easily shareable, and all the documentation it's offline.

And, universally, there's mbsync/msmtp for email, and news spooling via usenet. Sometimes I'd love an NNTP->Usenet bridge, so everything could be done offline from nearly any modern OS since the 90's, and just connect once to answer to all threads.

His point seemed pretty simple to me. If you're running local apps, not going on the Internet, you don't need TLS. Nobody expects a 30+ year old retro system to run a modern browser.

Wanted a Falcon030 back in the days, couldn't get one, settled with a Bebox.

Teenage me is envious of your BeBox.

I used the TOS alternative MagiC with NVDI and an alternative desktop called Jinnee on my Falcon back then (when I wasn't using it for music production, those programs where usually incompatible with MagiC).

This made the system feel pretty much state of the art.

https://www.atariuptodate.de/en/447/jinnee#img1

The Falcon was a nice machine (I still have one!) although it suffered from the characteristic Atari penny-pinching: still no MIDI thru port (on a machine which was otherwise amazing audio-wise - same DSP as the NeXT!) and while the new video modes were great, they used comparatively more RAM and were somewhat held back by the fact it still had a 16-bit data bus.

The OS didn't take anything like full advantage of the hardware, but any serious users at the time would have piled on extensions/addons/replacements like MagiC.

Massive penny pinching. The original design is here: https://mikrosk.github.io/sparrow/falcon_specification_19920... The 16bit bus limitation seems to stem from the RAM configurations - 2mb rather than 1mb would be the default config which cost more. As a result that kinda crippled the videl - only 16bit truecolour, lower clockspeeds on the CPU and videl, and slower ram access. 8 bit chunky mode was also planned, and a GPU - might have been the Jaguar TOM chip. I think MultiTos in ROM might have been planned at some point.

I never had any Atari computer back in the day, being born slightly after their heyday. But in about 2006 I became aware of the cool demoscene on these old computers and acquired a 1040 STFM and Amiga A500 to experience them properly and to play around with. And even though it was before my time there's just something special to me about the 16-bit era of computing. Computers had a sort of character to them back then.

I'd love to get a Falcon030 or an A1200 or something today but they're far more expensive nowadays than I think they're worth unfortunately, cool as they are. But I still have the STFM and A500 and I've upgraded/modded them as far as possible pretty much, and I do still turn them on from time to time.

As a sidenote, there is even an open-source recreation of the TOS operating system for the Atari 16/32 bit computers called EmuTOS that is in active development to this day. It just had a new release a few days ago: https://emutos.sourceforge.io/. And this new release happens to have better support for the Falcon video chip.

There’s an EmuTOS port to m68k QEMU too.

Some contemporary reviews:

https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/atari-falcon-030

https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/cubase-audio-atari-f...

There was a time when the Atari ST was the perfect home computer. It was cheap, easy to use like the Mac, and offered a 'next gen' 16bit gaming experience before any of my friends had a Sega Genesis. I continued to be a diehard ST fan until the exact second I first saw Doom running on a PC.

When I was about 16 and considering spending my hard-earned money on my first computer, I was drooling over the Falcon. I wanted to make music, so the built-in MIDI ports on the Atari computers was very compelling. However... my best friend at the time was big into the Amiga so in the end I got an A1200 (and never regretted it). But I still drool when I see the Falcon!

I had a 1040stf back in the days, and waited for the falcon 030 to happen. Amiga, i386, etc happened - I eventually switched to pc before the falcon happened.

It sounds a bit cheesy , but I was much younger back then, and it felt like my team had let me down.

Computer wars ! Sounds silly now.

What’s interesting about the Atari ST (and successors) keyboard that I hadn’t noticed before is that the cursor keys are basically on the same height as the home row. This seems like it would me more ergonomic than the conventional placement at the bottom.

You are right, it was a bit more ergonomic. I remember taking some time to get used to the low cursor keys on PC keyboards way back when I inevitably had to stop using my ST and switch to a PC.

That said, the ST keyboards were notoriously squishy, lacking much in the way of tactile feedback. So many people didn't particularly enjoy them for touch-typing.

>This RFC patch series adds a DRM driver for the good old Atari ST/TT/Falcon hardware.

https://lore.kernel.org/dri-devel/cover.1669406380.git.geert...

"So looking back, it is obvious that neither Atari or Commodore would really be able to succeed in the long-term [..]"

To me this is not obvious at all, even in hindsight. There are lots of good points that support that argument, but I yet have to see one that is really compelling. Even if we combine all the little paper cuts together, while convincing, it is still far from pre-determining the future that came to be.

"Perhaps the biggest disappointment of the Falcon’s hardware design was its case. In order to save money (apparently), Atari used the 1040ST one-piece case design."

I am an Amiga guy and I hate to say it, but the ST was the most handsome of the bunch.

Amiga was really well used in broadcasting for a long time, even when ST and Amiga where on their way out, at least until graphic cards in PCs became a thing.

You bought the Atari ST for music, and Amiga for graphics. I saw STs in music studios well into the 00s.

I think the Amiga affinity for broadcast was that, iirc, it had either built-in or as an expansion, a genlock device.

Regarding ST for music, did you ever come across the Intelligent Music products? My roommate was the guy who wrote "M" and "Realtime", the latter especially being a really cool compositional tool. He did some stuff in that UI that was really innovative at the time.

The Amiga had the ability to sync the clock to an external video signal, and it also had a "color zero" signal present that would allow a genlock to know when to switch between the input video and the Amiga's video, so that you could superimpose Amiga graphics on top of video. As long as your input video was clean enough (my limited experience was SVHS without a TBC), the Amiga would remain stable.

No, familiar with Cubase. M sounds like a precursor to live performance setups such as Ableton!

> I am an Amiga guy and I hate to say it, but the ST was the most handsome of the bunch.

No way. The Amiga 3000 was the most handsome of them all. :)

Is that a stylised version of the original Elite game there in the screenshot? It doesn't look like the real game. Strange. Maybe Atari wasn't allowed to use that in their marketing?

This seems to match this demo from Eclipse: https://www.atarimania.com/pgesoft.awp?version=31698

Oh yeah good find!

It really seems inspired by Elite though.

A quick check on ebay shows they're going for ~$2600 (that was one with 14MB RAM and an added SSD. ) so about what they cost new in constant dollars.

My progression was Atari 800XL, Atari 520STfm, then Atari Falcon 030 - then switched to a Linux PC in the late 90s. My parents most likely sold my old computers but a few years ago I reacquired an Atari 800XL for old time's sake.

I thought this was going to be a retro-port of the classic Falcon 3.0 flight sim [0]

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_3.0

Fond, fond memories ... thanks.

Still have my full Atari 800 setup with a couple of drives and my Commodore 1702 monitor... which needs a total re-capping.

It's all a vestige of when computing was fun.

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