Shredder11

I downloaded this ages ago but never got around to using it, but wow this has motivated me to do it sooner. I wonder how much video you can cram into a 4MB machine and could you possibly stream from a hard disk?

Wow, wow and finally WOW!!

Yeah why is it always wrong when the guys collect or own things, and yet always right when it comes to the women? Are houses the exclusive preserve of women?

Thanks John, it is lovely to hear stories from someone so dedicated and sincere towards the Atari models and the scene. I hope life is treating you a little better these days and it is also nice to see someone from the Atari past, being more human and generous towards the current loyal enthusiasts of today. Often you normally hear about someone being miserly and trying to prevent people from sharing things, which no longer hold any financial value to the copyright owner. Fortunately there are others like yourself who do not mind people sharing your good work amongst themselves for nostalgia or research, providing it is not for profit with dodgy DVDs on Ebay etc. Oh and who knows.....maybe some of those subscribers you mentioned, may yet get to read the issues they paid for and never received due to your difficult circumstances; I hope there is a happy ending for those people! Christmas is almost here too! So a huge thank you and a big welcome to the forum!

Well, had to pay € 800 for three new teeth (actually, a ceramic plated dental bridge) lately, and only had my bank account get back to its usual level with my christmas gratification. The current seller wants some 70 UKP for shipping his A3010 to continental Europe, and several didn't want to ship abroad at all. Well, I am not in a hurry. Thorsten Ahhh sorry to hear about the dental costs; my best friend pays a lot for his dental work too and I am so glad I have no fillings etc. Anyway regarding the cost of shipping for the A3010, if the weight is similiar to the ST I would expect it to be FAR cheaper than £70. I will soon be shipping one of my STe to Australia and according to the online quote, it will be £41 using http://www.parcelmonkey.de so to Germany it should be cheaper still.

There have been many A3010 on Ebay this year. Any reason why you are struggling?

Oi! Leave me alone, I only post when I have something stupid and irrational to say god dammit!

I remember seeing that Falcon on Ebay not so long ago. The mystery of the switch continues!

As someone who was on the front line of retail in the early nineties I would have to disagree with the above. You can't say the ST "gaming thing" lasted two or three years in the late eighties (UK) because it didn't. When I dipped my toes into computer retail the Amiga 500+ had been released and we sold Amigas like there was no tomorrow. Whilst our ST sales were never as good, and would continue to decline, we did shift large amounts of new releases for the ST month on month for some time. My impression of the UK gaming market ( at the time I was in it) was that it was quite polarised. You had the console (megadrive etc) market and the computer market. I wouldn't say console ownership "took over" - far from it. We all have our own experience of things and I just detailed mine, which was true from the life of myself living in West Yorkshire, England in their late teens along with my friends. I also base it upon all the shops and stores I frequented on a weekly basis throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s. All the people I knew completely moved away from the ST to the Megadrive or PC. As for music production, I actually can remember one guy with an Amiga, and he was from St. Albans, just outside London. I think he used the A600 and Music X sequencer, which I bloody hated with a passion! Everyone else I knew including myself used Cubase thankfully, and prior to this we used Pro 12 and then Pro 24. So maybe your personal experience is from a different region of the UK, where buying habits were maybe different and so on? Also maybe other parts of the country were more affluent?

As you may be able to see, my jumpers are set to the 'STe TOS unknown ROM type' or 27C1000 type; I suppose it depends on what the Atari C301165-002A and C301166-002A chip numbers correspond with. A Google result says they are TOS 1.06 UK; also the crashing issue did not happen the last time I tried it, so maybe they are not so buggy after all.

Regarding the ST and monitor use / ownership in the UK, my experience was that everyone used them on TVs via the RF port and nearly always for gaming. The only exception to this were people with the ST set-up specifically for pro / semi-pro music production, using Cubase and a hi-res monochrome monitor. I myself fell into both categories, although most of my gaming was done on the 8-bit machines throughout the entire 1980s. The only time I ever saw an Amiga in the flesh was in the local town computer shops, as I never met a single person or friend who owned one. Most people were still happy with using 8-bit machines until the start of the 1990s, when console ownership took over with the Sega Megadrive etc. The ST gaming thing did not last long over here, just two or three years in the late 1980s.

Are you sure that wasn't TOS 4.98? There was supposed to be an experimental TOS under development that was buggy as hell and caused a lot of crashes like what you described. It was never officially released, but some copies of it managed to sneak out. Someone might have burned it to EPROM and installed it in your machine at some point in the past or your machine might be an Atari developers machine that had the ROMs installed at Atari. I'd love to see some pictures of the ROM chips and any numbers on them to see if this was the experimental TOS version or if your ROMs just became corrupted somehow and are reporting their version number incorrectly. Not sure although it does have the authentic metal 4160 badge. Here is a link to a close-up photo of the TOS chips... https://dc2.safesync...G?a=IXhmWpM-blQ

I'm all STE'd up right now with three heavily upgraded machines and also a Mega STE Amazingly they all have the good DMA and AJAX chips etc, although one had a TOS that reported itself as v1.98 and crashed the machine if you clicked on the desktop info menu! I'm about to replace those TOS chips soon anyway, so no big deal.

I'm so pleased about this release! Feels like the old days!

Your voice sounds ok and just the right speed, although obviously a little difficult for English people to hear certain words, but nothing too bad. The video itself is dark and hard to see the hardware clearly, but you were just doing a quick test video so this is understandable, and you would probably make the quality better on the final video. I feel like doing a few videos myself of the Falcon doing various things, including music sequencing. I will probably write on paper a short storyboard of what the video will be about, and how it will be done. I like you do not have any quality video cameras or lighting, so it will be hard to get a clear result. Anyway any new videos featuring the Falcon are welcome, so keep up the good work!

Cool you look young and photos normally make most people look older too. So if you were clean shaven with a flicked boyish hairstyle..............you'd be right back at school!

Maybe do an .msa image of it as well.

Interview is 1998 according to the side bar menu on this website.

Off topic I know but.... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aj5G4G1iP1s

Yes but it was a slip of the tongue, because the graphics are what a BBC Micro would display and also at 01:05 into the video, it shows a close up of the BBC MIcro!

Our age group yes but not for me, which is a little awkward as I look very young for my age (40 next month); most people assume I am around University age or just after i.e. 23 was what I was told last week by a 19yr old guy. In the last three years I have been told that and I quote, "you're not old enough to remember vinyl but" or "I bet you don't use these CDs, you probably use those memory cards?". Another man a couple of months back said to me as I sat next to a busty 17yr old, "for God's sake just ask her out!", however she is too young for me and also has a boyfriend anyway. The thing is I think I have aged a bit in the last four years say, and I do not think I look as young as people say but hey whatever.

The software used right up until the late 80s was UMI. Google also brings up plenty if you look, including this: http://www.erasureinfo.com/features/privateear_24.html

Retro sex? That would be MILF surely!

Love the photo shelves approach as opposed to the usual text list; feels like I am in a cosy little shop looking for gems!