Atari Falcon 030 - Review & Overview

Рет қаралды 13,330

3 жыл бұрын

This a short review and overview of the failed 32-bit Atari Falcon computer.
Special thanks to the Retro Computer Museum (RCM) in Leicester for letting me make this video.
Please donate to this great cause: retrocomputermuseum.co.uk/
#retrogaming #atarifalcon #atari

Пікірлер: 72

@TPau65 3 жыл бұрын

I love my Falcon and nowadays I'm a bit proud owning one! 😃 But it's quite obvious that the Falcon was developed and produced "with the hot needle" back then. There are so many hardware flaws, which you'll discover only at second glance: No (real) line-level audio output (like STE or Amiga) with crappy 3,5mm connector and strange bass-boost circuitry (which was corrected later with the C-Lab Falcons!), microphone input instead of line-in, very sensitive and uneven bus system (almost all Falcons need additional clock patches as a workaround) etc etc! The DSP is a nice feature though and could have been used for so many more things, if only Atari had more focused on the Falcon line instead of rushing out a half baked Jaguar console! 🙄

@goddessesstartrekonlinefle3061 11 ай бұрын

Mostly seconded :D I also love my Falcon, but, speaking personally I feel the "hardware faults" where very much "over egged" (especially by Amiga owners in the day). I personally never had to change or repair my Falcon from day of purchase and didn't have a single issue with it (although in fairness, I didn't get mine until 1994, so it was already 1/2 year(s) old then, so perhaps Atari got on top of the issues e.g. maybe owners buying on 'day one' had an awful experience I could never fathom as a later adopter *shrug*); That mentioned though, all the FOG peeps only had positive stuff to say about the system, and I recall they released details of a circuit modification to fix the line noise on the FOG disks; Also, whilst, if I was listening to silence, I could hear line noise, I could only hear it post-amplification and on maximum volume. I could never hear it when actual music was playing, so as a non musician I was more than happy with the quality back then. Though, I entirely sympathise with the Music making community (who really need 100% clear and crisp line out) but, personally, I found it excellent (better than PC sound on the kinds of cards I'd experienced). It's a great shame that it was so underpowered though, even on release, compared with the types of 3D accellerator which got released not long after I bought mine, and the Pentium chip coming onto the PC market (it was a losing proposition, Falcon wiped the flaw with 286/386 and 486 even at 66mhz, but couldn't compete with the Pentium IME.

@cygil1 10 ай бұрын

"Clock patch"?

@tradinglive 2 жыл бұрын

Love my Falcon as much I love my Amiga 1200... fantastic hardware

@peterpereira3653 3 жыл бұрын

Bought an Atari Falcon 030 with CPU modification running at 32 MHz.With Motorola 68882 FPU at 50 MHz.And in a desktop style case.Was a very capable machine for the time.Was the last home computer we bought before moving onto a Windows 95 PC.

@richardpeel6056 9 ай бұрын

At the time the Atari Falcon was launched in the UK you could still buy brand new Atari ST FM and STE in the shops. I had only recently upgraded from an ST FM to an STE and the Falcon went out of production before I'd even seen one locally. The people in the computer clubs were still using Sinclair Spectrum, BBC B and Commodore 64 computers, they never moved across to GUI computers. They were doing Basic programming and not getting involved in video editing or music sequencing. The 8 bit computer users weren't going to upgrade until they were using Windows 95 at home and at work.

@ThePeterCorne Жыл бұрын

Amiga 1200, not 12000

@AzumiRM 6 ай бұрын

That's what I thought. 12,000?? 😂

@arnolttbromanskie9733 3 ай бұрын

Thanks for the video 👍I was at the Atari booth at the CeBIT to experience the new computer and I ordered my Atari Falcon 030 in Autumn of 1992. It just arrived a few weeks before the fried bits demoparty takes place in April 1993 in Bremen/Germany. It was a easter weekend and I code the whole time with very less sleep 😮 If I remember right the price was 2199DM and I own it today 💪 Sadly the battery must be replaced and the original hard-drive ist not working any more. 😢Back then I like to have a 68040 with an integrated FPU and a better clock speed. Luckily the Falcon has an expansion socket for the FPU 👍. But today it doesn’t really make sense the accelerate old computers, because the genuineness is more charming to me. 🤔 The real advantage was the DSP. I liked that MAC instruction. To multiply two 24bit values and add it to an result register in two cycles at 32MHz was blazingly fast 💪 in comparison to the 68030 at 16MHz MULS instruction at 28 cycles (if I remember right) for 16bit values.

@boydpukalo8980 Жыл бұрын

I would love to own a Falcon some day. It was such a beautiful machine. With the insane $2000-3000 price in 2023 I doubt i will ever own one unless the retro market crashes. I am building brand new Amiga 3000 & 4000 systems, but re-creation Falcon motherboards do not seem to exist. Falcon is still my favorite, flaws and all.

@STR82DVD 3 жыл бұрын

Huge thanks is always young lad. Bloody hot in Ottawa, Canada right now so I'm staying inside in air conditioned comfort and watching your videos. 👍😉

@TheLairdsLair 3 жыл бұрын

Haha, I like being called young, it's been a while since anyone said that. Enjoy!

@STR82DVD 3 жыл бұрын

@@TheLairdsLair Well, I was 18 when the Atari 2600 made it's way into my first apartment in 1980. I'm starting to tell my age lad.

@IntoTheVerticalBlank 3 жыл бұрын

Love this video and this machine!

@timbob9910 Жыл бұрын

As an Amiga fan back in the day I have allot of respect for the Falcon. Their's plenty to like, the onboard DSP chip, the 030 CPU, 16Bit sound, the chunky to planer graphics hardware, SCSI, HD floppy drive. The main problem was the lack of support and the price, £599 for the 1mb ram version was just silly when you consider even the Amiga 1200 had 2mb ram as standard.

@KJohansson 3 жыл бұрын

The F030 was nice, but a bit too late to the party. Thanks for the video!

@teekay_1 Жыл бұрын

The Falcon could have been a serious player, and one that was ultimately better than the Amiga even with the AGA (and I say this as someone who was all-in on Amigas from the 1000 to the 4000). The problem was it arrived so late to the scene that the PC and Mac were the defacto standards by the time this came out, along with high quality sound and things like the VooDoo graphics cards were on the horizon. While the Amiga was doomed anyway because of the market, it was further hampered by the custom chip set which forced the entire machine to be built around a relatively slow clock speed limiting it's ability to render to high-def signals. All at the same time that PCI was on the horizon which meant that more mainstream machines didn't need customer chips if you had a huge pipeline . The 4000 was the final nail in the coffin because it didn't fundamentally change the architecture of system. it just had a faster CPU clock, a few more colors, and slightly better expansion. I do miss those days of multiple systems with unique capabilities and interesting quirks. Those were good times.

@miked4377 11 ай бұрын

they were good times... .... werent they...i miss those days gone by much to quickly....

@janwilt6974 7 ай бұрын

I love my Falcon! I’ve been testing all my ST and STe games and software on my Falcon and about 58% of the games will work on the Falcon. Most of the business software works. So that is not bad at all. STe games seem to most work since both computers use a blitter chip. I live in the USA and there are now a lot of home brews out for the Falcon!

@EgonOlsen71 3 жыл бұрын

Sad to see that somebody obviously used the wrong screws and damaged the case that way...:-(

@dragokills6990 3 жыл бұрын

I dreamed about one of these for a while, but then I got a Sega Saturn and kinda forgot all about it.

@baroncalamityplus 3 жыл бұрын

I was very active in the Atari Usenet groups when the Falcon was in development and during the launch. While I think the real cause of the Falcon and Amiga failures was everything switching to pc, there were a few factors that seemed to doomed the Falcon early on. First, few wanted the ST case. Which it wouldn't have been that terrible if Atari didn't announce a modern configuration (case, room for expansion, and separate keyboard). A significant number of users were going to wait for that version to upgrade and new users were expecting that form factor from all computers. Even Apple at that time was selling that way. Also, Jack Tramiel was trying to turn Atari over to his sons and they weren't the business man he was. Though they understood the market better than Jack did, they didn't have the command of controlling supply lines, manufacturing and keeping costs low that he did.

@plasmaastronaut 2 жыл бұрын

the A1200 and Falcon came out far too late. Optimum year was 1989 at the peak of their popularity, Commodore were selling A500s by the ton, but seemed to be throwing all their money in the paper shredder just as fast as they made it. 1990 was the last possible year for them to barely keep a hold on the multi-media home computer market, and they both just slept. When Amiga in 1991 released the A600 which was just a repackage of the A500 of 1987 it was clear they were shooting a dying animal to stem the pain. The A1200 was 2 years too late and half baked (no improvement in sound, and only modest improvement in gfx over the A1000 from 1985 ) . The Falcon was decent but it was 3 years too late.

@maroon9273 Жыл бұрын

@@plasmaastronaut both the falcon, a1200 and a400 should've been released in 1990 where both computers will flourish with more time on there side to compete with PCs.

@shanehebert396 3 жыл бұрын

I would have LOVED to have gotten one back in the day but it just wasn't in the cards. By the time I was able to get a new machine (of any type) after my Atari 1040STfm, I was taking classes in college that required x86 computers (software only ran on that) so I ended up getting a 40MHz 80386 right after the 80486 came out (and the prices of the 386s dropped a lot).

@ecdhe Жыл бұрын

The reason for the Falcon's failure? I'd say it was too little too late, with a lack of killer software showcasing what the hardware could do. In 1985 the GUI was the ST's killer feature at a time where the Mac, the PC AT and Amiga were very expensive. But 6+ years later the PC was a real threat with a growing number of software taking advantage of 32-bit CPUs. I never saw any software on the TT or the Falcon which made me say "I want one!"

@NerdThingsAndMore 2 жыл бұрын

Good video thanks

@mariuszszarek1992 Жыл бұрын

Plis, correct the specs table... Amiga . Max. 262144 colours from 16.8 M in ANY resolution, but NOT true colour! Data bus -32 Bit!

@paullangton6102 2 жыл бұрын

i bought mine in 92 or 93, shop damaged (still is) for 100 or 200 quid (1mb no hdd) soon upgraded it.. now its 8gb CF and a 2gb CF, 14mb and floppy emulator.. need some tlc but im doing that when i can afford to..(not working).. thanks for the video.. Paul

@daviddyer3543 Жыл бұрын

Could the Falcon handle animation? For example, could it handle the animation style of MLP: Tell Your Tale, with sampled streamed episode audio?

@goddessesstartrekonlinefle3061 11 ай бұрын

Hardware wise it most certainly could; There was a software company called "Black Scorpion" who made ApexMedia which supports near real time picture morphing / FLV animations. That being said, I don't know there where any other software packages supporting that well. So, on the side of "software support", I'd say maybe its closer to "not really well".

@plasmaastronaut 2 жыл бұрын

falcon games look ropey af, 10~15 Hz, and Public Domain tier. its so amateurish. Where's the 50~60Hz and silk smooth pixel art animation that amiga games had as standard and later c64 games had. The Atari community just seem to revel in substandard gfx from the 2600,5200,7800 and ST that the amiga community shrugged off by 1989.

@rimbaud0000 2 жыл бұрын

Indeed. Terrible frame rate and sound quality

@Lachlant1984 8 ай бұрын

The music in some of the games you showed sounded very distorted, was that intentional? It's too bad I've never used one of these machines, really don't know very much about Atari's computers to be honest, but they clearly have their place in history? Is this unit backwards compatible with previous generations of Atari ST hardware and software?

@TheLairdsLair 8 ай бұрын

Falcon emulation is still pretty poor unfortunately, so that's the problem there. It's mostly compatible with the ST, but not 100%.

@Lachlant1984 8 ай бұрын

@@TheLairdsLair Were you using emulation to showcase the games?

@TheLairdsLair 8 ай бұрын

Yes, I can't afford a real Falcon! As I said in the video I had a short time with one at the Retro Computer Museum in Leicester and they only had the computer, no games to play on it.

@Lachlant1984 8 ай бұрын

@@TheLairdsLair Ah, now I understand, I must have missed that detail.

@plasmaastronaut 2 жыл бұрын

would like to see what the M56000 was capable of graphically. Kind of a strange processor to put in a multi media computer, though i know it was there to process mp3, programmers would have had fun learning what tricks they could get it to perform. Alas, the falcon community never reached critical mass.

@Corsa15DT 2 жыл бұрын

Where is the Atari community, why isn't making any software for the Falcon? You can see the Amiga community is very active!

@dreamcaster4754 3 жыл бұрын

Very very very cool indeed. This is my Atari dream machine.

@TheLairdsLair 3 жыл бұрын

You and me both! Only major Atari machine I don't own.

@ITGuyinaction 3 жыл бұрын

😀👍🍻

@Foebane72 Жыл бұрын

I've recently added several Falcon demos to my emulated Demoscene collection, but the only Falcon emulator, Hatari, is flaky and experimental at best, and I can't get most of them to work without glitches, and the 060 stuff is right out. Just a heads-up. Otherwise, what I've seen is quite impressive for the Falcon 030, more so than the games featured here. But that's just me, I've always preferred demos to games.

@goddessesstartrekonlinefle3061 11 ай бұрын

I recommend building Hatari release from the source. Found personally it's an excellent Falcon emulator, I got most all of the early demo's I had collected for the hardware working. I admit bias though, having contributed to the project. I did attempt to get the latest "Bad Mood" binaries running on it, and found I had to use the version specially built for the emulator (which does speak to your point) but I would certainly not describe it as 'flakey' (I would go for, 'incomplete', I suspect its because the DSP emulation parallelism is super difficult to get right).

@itsmatt517 6 ай бұрын

Valcon?

@Sinn0100 Жыл бұрын

I wonder how well this machine would have done with Doom? You said it came out in 1992 and while the processor is a little slow for Doom I bet Carmack could have made it happen had he decided to port it over. Back in 1993 you really needed a 486 variant with...it says a minimum of 4MB but I haven't seen it run well with anything under 8MB. I bet this thing could do a screaming port of Wolfenstein 3D!

@TheLairdsLair Жыл бұрын

There are ports of Wolf 3D, Doom and even Quake for the Falcon - I suggest looking them up!

@Sinn0100 Жыл бұрын

@@TheLairdsLair Consider that a done deal!

@NiklasSandbergK 3 жыл бұрын

Didn't mention that Atari had production problems manufacturing Falcon. So missed to deliver to alot of entusiasts who were willing to pay to be first.

@OGHUGO 3 жыл бұрын

Great Video.. Also first !

@johnhunt1725 10 ай бұрын

Seems to be comparable to a 386DX. Kinda ho-hum for its 1990 release date. Just as well, since Intel's newly minted 486 meant "doom" was literally just around the corner for both Atari and Commodore....

@vertigoz 9 ай бұрын

It's quite pricey for just 1Mb

@stephenwhite506 3 жыл бұрын

They go for crazy money now. Is there an emulator?

@TheLairdsLair 3 жыл бұрын

Yes, Hatari supports the Falcon.

@mojojomo6750 2 жыл бұрын

What's "crazy money"? I've got one, and I'm thinking of selling it.

@presidentetnw9271 Жыл бұрын

@@mojojomo6750 Would you still be willing to sell it?

@ropersonline 2 жыл бұрын

Your pronunciation of the computer's name makes me think this was a games console available as a store-brand product at Walmart. ("Walcon")

@TheLairdsLair 2 жыл бұрын

I think you need to clear your ears out . . . .

@ropersonline 2 жыл бұрын

@@TheLairdsLair I do think that at the very least, you sound closer to "valcon" (like Valkyrie) than falcon, but speaking of clearing my ears out, the computer voice at the very beginning of the video, what's that say?

@TheLairdsLair 2 жыл бұрын

"Welcome STUN Runner" from the game of the same name.

@ropersonline 2 жыл бұрын

@@TheLairdsLair Thank you! :)

@atari1040 11 ай бұрын

Unfortunately the worst model as atari was rushing too much so they didn't finish it and/or maybe they didnt care about this model because of Jaguar which was due to similar hardware issues was another disaster and Atari died (RIP). Much better is Mega STE and if somebody wants cool model for collection than TT is even better than falcon 030... sorry, brutal reality ;-(

@ShamrockParticle 3 жыл бұрын

"Lust after" 🤣. I resemble that remark! The Falcon was the true Amiga killer. Better hardware. Much better OS. Very capable of office as well as multimedia and games... I wish it had more development and goes in the US as well as keeping the mantra of how it ran faster than a Mac too. It was backwards compatible but few new games took advantage of it. Those that did were marvelous but weren't enough. I saw a video with someone painting the chassis of one a different shade of gray and the whole unit really took off. Rarely are such modifications good, but that one I'd side with. Might have helped back in the day as well, the Falcon for all its abilities looked a bit off with the darker keyboard and standard ST chassis. Wish I could find it again... A shame they didn't sell in the US. They cost a ton nowadays for such an authentic slice of history. Switching to solely game consoles didn't work on the number "64" alone during the bit wars. Nothing on the Jaguar screamed "revolutionary "... after that, Atari was just a logo.

@dlfrsilver 3 жыл бұрын

The Falcon OS is like st one : crap'n'awful. The amiga OS is tons better, nevermind os 3.1,3.5, or the 3.2 released recently.

@mojojomo6750 2 жыл бұрын

@@dlfrsilver Was going to correct regarding the OS as well. Atari's TOS was crap and MultiTOS an improvement but slow as hell - almost unusable even on a Falcon (got one) never mind the ST/E (one of those too). The only saving-grace OS-wise that the Atari ever saw was the wonderful Magic OS. Proper pre-emptive multitasking and fast as hell, since it was written entirely in assembly. If only Atari had bought the rights to it for the Ataris, things might have been different...

@Foebane72 Жыл бұрын

3:05 If that's an Atari Falcon game, then it's not impressive AT ALL.

@TheLairdsLair Жыл бұрын

It's a conversion of the arcade game Raiden and never finished sadly. But if you compare it to the arcade original it looks very close.