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Atari Falcon

atarimuseum.nl

70 pointsdebo_28 comments

Falcon030 was an eye popping machine.

Had an Amiga 4000/40 back then and it was clear for some time this era went down. Wanted a Falcon030 but couldn't get one, there was a lot of hope in the DSP to turn things around against PCs (for gfx). Got a Bebox instead, with it's dual CPU (back then!) but that didn't also take off. Switched to PCs then.

You had a knack for picking winning architectures for two products in a row. Steve Jobs breathed a song of relief when you went for a PC instead.

Yes, never found pre-OSX Macs compelling, had to use some Performas and Quadras. Luckily we had SGIs at work and NeXT Cubes at university, just to transition into a Mac Cube at work and then it was 20 years of OSX.

[Edit] More luckily for Steve, Woz dropped out or Apple would have gone the way of Commodore and Atari, forever stuck in one architecture, too little progress.

Naw. The Apple II would still exist but would have transitioned to the 68000, PowerPC, x64, ARM and Apple GS/OS would have become macOS.

Oh, wow, the Falcon was so cool when it came out, especially the 56k DSP. Back then computer magazines were quite technical, and there were articles about the 56k and how to program it. I remember seeing the Falcon at some local Atari trade fair and desperately wanted to have it. Unfortunately it was way way too expensive for me as a teenager. And even then, Atari fans dreamed that the Falcon would take off, and the announced MultiTOS would bring people back. But deep down everybody knew that it didn’t have a chance against PCs.

Interesting timing. They just announced the Atari 800XL Hybrid Gaming Console, coming out in April:

https://tech.yahoo.com/gaming/articles/atari-800xl-hybrid-ga...

Just a money-grab of the current Atari label owner, that company has nothing to do with the original Atari (which basically disolved in the mid-90s, with the label landing in the bargain bin of dead home computer brands - and since then the Atari trademark has been sold multiple times to ever more shady 'investors').

The Atari Falcon was an awesome GEM-based computer. It paired with the Amiga 3000.

More comparable to the Amiga 1200, I think.

Falcon had an 030, 1200 an 020

Sure, but there wasn’t that much of a difference between the 030 and 020.

Falcon and 1200 had the same form factor. They are the final 80s-style home computer for their respective brands.

The CPU in the Falcon was also clocked higher (available in 16 MHz or 25 Mhz) was limited by a 16-bit bus. A stock Amiga 1200's 68EC020 ran at 14 Mhz and did have a 32-bit bus was limited by having only "Chip RAM" (shared with custom chips).

The DSP was a difference though, for raw calculations. I think it might have been NeXT machines that had started the trend of having a DSP. Commodore had built a prototype of the Amiga 3000 with a DSP in it which was talked about at the time but it was never released. Amiga enthusiasts have only recreated DSP boards in more recent years.

On the Amiga, the various DMA devices such as the blitter, sprites, audio, disk, video could effectively steal cycles from CPU. I believe the original ST didnt have a blitter. Did the CPU on the ST suffer the same problems when it got its blitter and received higher resolutions ?

What set the Falcon apart from Amiga, especially for music production, was built-in MIDI (as its ST predecessors) and a Motorola 56000 DSP. It was probably the first affordable home computer that allowed 8-track digital recording in essentially CD quality.

GEM on the Atari ST did not get crippled after Apple's lawsuit against Digital Research over GEM being too much alike the Macintosh's GUI. Atari had already acquired rights to do further development of the port.

The Falcon was the only Atari ST model which would turn my head as an Amiga user :) Shame that it had such a short life though.

The company C-Lab that is mentioned in the article was the initial home of the Creator and Notator sequencers. Those would later evolve into Notator Logic and then Logic, now under the Emagic brand. Until Emagic got bought by Apple. The sequencer still lives on as Apple Logic Pro.

The also mentioned Cubase also still exists. The Cubase Audio Falcon version already included some native effects like reverb, thanks to the 56000 DSP. While not comparable in quality to what we have today, it would give musicians a glimpse into what would become Virtual Studio Technology (VST) a few years later.

So, that little computer has quite a bit of legacy in the music production world.

C-Lab invested at least as much effort into the copy protection system (which involved a cartridge-port dongle) as into Creator and Notator themselves. Gerhard wanted to be paid for his extraordinary effort.

Last I knew, the copy protection stands unbroken, even though some people had gotten partial emulation of the dongle working.

i'm sure claude will figure it out soon

I remember those cartridge port dongles, MIDI expansions and port expanders (Steinberg Midex, Emagic Unitor etc.)

I broke the copy protection using GPT 5.6 a couple months ago. I have a forked version of Hatari that can boot and run Notator and Creator by emulating the dongle. If there's interest I can make it available. I just got lazy about cleaning everything up into something others could use.

The copy protection itself was rather insane: https://gist.github.com/rdaum/91b8dad3fe5dd69a6bbfff404b81c7...

I pondered moving on and having it patch Notator itself to remove the copy protection once and for all. The other cracks that were out there for it never worked.

> So, that little computer has quite a bit of legacy in the music production world.

Well into the 2000s I saw a professional music recording studio with an Atari ST (not a Falcon) still hooked to MIDI gear. The reason was simple: fanless, totally quiet, machine. As opposed to the beige PCs from back then who hadn't discovered quiet PSUs nor quiet CPU fans yet (Be Quiet! and Noctua etc. weren't really a common thing back then).

People who haven't lived it on a daily basis have no idea how shitty loud our crappy old beige PCs were. Heck, even the HDDs were crazy loud back then. It really sucked: we came a long way.

Someone rebuilt the Falcon from scratch, seen recently at the VCF West. Pretty insane.

https://re-falcon.com

Only ever saw an Atari once at a Harvey Norman window. Never knew anyone with any Atari computer, everyone had a Commodore.

They were pretty common in Europe at the time. And basically ubiquitous in home recording studios.

Begged my dad for a c64 in the early 90s. The sales guy at Dick Smith talked him into an Atari ST 520. Soon after Atari Australia went broke and I learned about exchange rates and the Great Britain Pound.

A lot of musicians (outside the demo/tracker world) had atari 520/1040ste/f because it had midi sockets and cracked Cubase. This version precisely: https://ibb.co/bjFWjmD0

Apart from the screenshot background, yup, that's the one. *still using cubase.

I had to get the screen from internet archive, I gave my STE to a collector long ago :)

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