Falcon: yes or no?

[+DarkLord]

Well...it has an internal hard drive. The only thing I ever used the SCSI II port for

was a CD-ROM.

 

Not sure why a 2nd floppy drive was needed?

 

Also, there is an adapter for VGA and an adapter for the ST monitors. Also,

you could get a special multisync adapter that would let you use both modes

with a compatible multisync monitor, and just switch between them. Handy.

 

[Chri O.]

F030 can use internal 2.5" IDE hard drive.

or this:

[Justin Payne]

59 minutes ago, DarkLord said:

Well...it has an internal hard drive. The only thing I ever used the SCSI II port for

was a CD-ROM.

 

Not sure why a 2nd floppy drive was needed?

 

Also, there is an adapter for VGA and an adapter for the ST monitors. Also,

you could get a special multisync adapter that would let you use both modes

with a compatible multisync monitor, and just switch between them. Handy.

 

Well, since I want to replace my internal with a Gotek but also have the ability to use floppies if there is a need, having an external floppy would be nice. I mean, the 1040ST had the internal and a port for an external drive so I don't know why they would take that feature away just because they added an internal HDD. I mean, at the time a lot of PCs had two floppy drives and the internal HDD.

[+DarkLord]

For me, honestly the only thing I ever did with a 2nd

floppy disk drive was to make backup copies with the

Blitz copier. 

 

[Chri O.]

To be honest on Atari falcon 030 second floppy Drive would probably be pointless.

One reason is 1.44 MB high density, the external second floppy drive port was missing one wire at least for detection floppy density.

Second reason is good luck trying to copy some newer damos created in recent years on Falcon 030.

Example: Falcon Demo Time, MUSIC  FAKEBIT.MP2   Size: 4.05 MB (4,255,200 bytes)

 

Edited July 27, 2021 by Chri O.

[calimero]

On 7/26/2021 at 3:29 AM, Chri O. said:

Back in the day (90s) Windows suck and it's BSoD (Blue Screen of Death) on Windows 3.1.

Thank Bill Gates it was only on Windows 3.x  

 

 

 

[Chri O.]

LOL?

[calimero]

11 hours ago, zzip said:

NT was solid, but lacked many drivers so wasn't great for gaming / home use.   XP was when they finally unified the NT and 9x codebase.

Try to Google (DuckDuckGo  ) difference betwen XP (aka NT ver. 5.1) and Windows 2000 (NT ver. 5.0). 
 

btw

Microsoft hire creator of VMS to made “normal” OS aka NT. He pull lot of people from DEC (creator of VMS) with him to Microsoft. 

Edited July 27, 2021 by calimero

[Justin Payne]

3 hours ago, Chri O. said:

To be honest on Atari falcon 030 second floppy Drive would probably be pointless.

One reason is 1.44 MB high density, the external second floppy drive port was missing one wire at least for detection floppy density.

Second reason is good luck trying to copy some newer damos created in recent years on Falcon 030.

Example: Falcon Demo Time, MUSIC  FAKEBIT.MP2   Size: 4.05 MB (4,255,200 bytes)

 

Well, I think if Atari added the port, they would add the extra wire to support 1.44 MB high density, yes? Also, I said the reason why I wanted it was that I'd like to have the internal be a Gotek while the external be a floppy drive just in case I ever needed to access a floppy disk on the Falcon. Still, back in the day, two floppy drives weren't unheard of in PCs so I would have liked to have the option of adding a second floppy like the other guys. Also, chances are new demos wouldn't be on floppies but if they were they would be spanned across multiple floppies just like how I backed up all of my pirated games on the PC.

Edited July 27, 2021 by Justin Payne

[calimero]

8 hours ago, zzip said:

I see that.   For some reason I thought it had both?    It would just be kind of annoying for someone with an ACSI enclosure (like me) migrating from an ST.

When ST was produces, SCSI was not finished as standard (even on paper) although I do believe that ASCI was inspired by SCSI, they have similarities. 
 

Falcon video connector have all ST lines so with simple passive adapter you can get DIN 13. 

[ParanoidLittleMan]

16 hours ago, Chri O. said:

F030 can use internal 2.5" IDE hard drive.

or this:

Of course that can - big % of Falcons sold had it built in. If I remember correct capacity was 60 MB.

[calimero]

7 hours ago, Justin Payne said:

Well, since I want to replace my internal with a Gotek but also have the ability to use floppies if there is a need, having an external floppy would be nice. I mean, the 1040ST had the internal and a port for an external drive so I don't know why they would take that feature away just because they added an internal HDD. I mean, at the time a lot of PCs had two floppy drives and the internal HDD.

I also have same idea: to put Gotek inside Falcon and to use external drive if needed but there is no external connector for floppy

 

is it possible to have two floppy drives on same internal cable? If is, then maybe gotek could be taken out from case and somehow fit under Falcon internal drive? (I do not know how Gotek looks inside... maybe it is small enought?). 
 

 

[Clint Thompson]

On 7/25/2021 at 3:38 AM, Justin Payne said:

which makes me really consider selling mine. ?

What does yours look like?

[atarilux]

20 hours ago, zzip said:

Yeah 90s Windows crashing was constant.  I remember Windows 98 even crashed during a Bill Gates demo.

 

But my friend's Falcon was also crashing constantly.  Not sure if that was just his unit or that's how they were.   I couldn't believe how many times he had to reboot.   As an ST user, I was used to the bombs, but not as frequently as I saw them on his Falcon!

 

Yes, my flame war comment was more about me potentially starting one, not what anyone had said before.

 

As for crashing, don't get me wrong I like the Falcon but as Zzip said above, it was far from stable. That said Windows 3.1 was terrible, Windows 95 was a more positive experience.. Not perfect though.

 

Going from (distant) memory, my overall experience of it was that the Falcon was a nice piece of kit but the OS just resulted in too many bombs. For me that was the worst part of the experience. 

 

 

[calimero]

To answer to original question:

 

If your family earn 1000 surplus, then buy Falcon!

 

e.g. Earn 3000€ each month and spent 2000€ for living.  
 

or earn 1500€ and spent 500€ for living 

 

then buy Falcon!

 

if you earn 5000€ and spend 4500€ each month, then do not buy it. 
 

Falcon worth two month pay check surplus (plus it will eventualy worth more! If it does not break...). 
 

 

Edited July 27, 2021 by calimero

[Justin Payne]

I think this conversation cursed me. I started my work PC this morning and got a PDC_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT error (AKA: A BSOD for Windows 10). Of course, this could be the result of a hardware issue with my Dell laptop. This thing isn't even 6 months old and I've had two (External docking station and MB failed) so it might not be Windows fault yet...but what are the chances. ?

 

UPDATE: Just rebooted a couple times and it resolved itself. I haven't plugged all of the external hardware devices back in but so far so good. ? It's also possible some automatic driver update happened. Since this is a work machine, they manage all of the updates. Of course, now Microsoft forces updates, which I understand but don't like and this has bit me. For some reason, I keep getting an update that totally screws with my network connection and can only be fixed with a driver rollback. It's happened twice on my personal laptop. Windows sees the device but just can't talk to it. 

Edited July 27, 2021 by Justin Payne

[Justin Payne]

7 hours ago, calimero said:

I also have same idea: to put Gotek inside Falcon and to use external drive if needed but there is no external connector for floppy

 

is it possible to have two floppy drives on same internal cable? If is, then maybe gotek could be taken out from case and somehow fit under Falcon internal drive? (I do not know how Gotek looks inside... maybe it is small enought?). 
 

 

Well, they didn't remove the second floppy drive from GEM so it's plausible that it could be supported. I'm eyeballing the manual now and I'm not immediately seeing anything that discusses the existence of how that Drive B icon is used. 

 

The Atari Compendium mention these ports that are available in the Falcon. Of course, not the authority on the matter so maybe when they were compiling this info, there was a plan for an external floppy port. 

 

Ports include parallel, serial, external floppy, SCSI-2, LAN, 4 joystick, MIDI
in/out, microphone, headphone, and ST compatible cartridge port

 

Unfortunately, even if it were an option, I'm not cutting into my Falcon case to add it. The only way it might be possible is if someone made a half-height floppy/Gotex drive that could use the existing floppy drive port and I'm not holding my breath for something like that OR allow for a external drive to plug into the Gotex drive. Anything where I don't have to modify the case, I'm up for. 

[zzip]

7 hours ago, calimero said:

When ST was produces, SCSI was not finished as standard (even on paper) although I do believe that ASCI was inspired by SCSI, they have similarities. 

Yup, I believe ACSI was designed from the draft SCSI standards, but it's different enough that you needed a pricey ACSI<->SCSI converter to hook up SCSI disks.

 

16 hours ago, DarkLord said:

Well...it has an internal hard drive. The only thing I ever used the SCSI II port for

was a CD-ROM.

Ultimately having in internal hard drive would be awesome!  but sounds like if I had upgraded from an ST to Falcon, migrating data from my ACSI hard drive to Falcon would have been a pain though.  I always assumed I could just plug it in to a Falcon.

[+DarkLord]

9 hours ago, ParanoidLittleMan said:

Of course that can - big % of Falcons sold had it built in. If I remember correct capacity was 60 MB.

 

It was, then Atari "surprise" updated it to something like 85 megs...at least that's what one of mine

came with.

 

[+DarkLord]

1 hour ago, Justin Payne said:

Well, they didn't remove the second floppy drive from GEM so it's plausible that it could be supported. I'm eyeballing the manual now and I'm not immediately seeing anything that discusses the existence of how that Drive B icon is used. 

 

 

 

I would assume, that with only one floppy drive, the B floppy drive icon was used to swap files between 2 floppy disks.

 

You drag/drop a file from A to B and TOS asks you to remove the floppy in A and insert disk B...  IIRC - been a long time.

 

[+DarkLord]

4 hours ago, atarilux said:

 

Yes, my flame war comment was more about me potentially starting one, not what anyone had said before.

 

As for crashing, don't get me wrong I like the Falcon but as Zzip said above, it was far from stable. That said Windows 3.1 was terrible, Windows 95 was a more positive experience.. Not perfect though.

 

Going from (distant) memory, my overall experience of it was that the Falcon was a nice piece of kit but the OS just resulted in too many bombs. For me that was the worst part of the experience. 

 

 

 

Amazing. Not my experience at all. I've owned 3 different Falcons and all of them were stable.

 

Only thing that ever crashed was poorly written code or when I was playing with demo's or ST

games, trying to get them to work on the Falcon.

 

I'm curious if the others in this thread would regard the Falcon as being "unstable"...

 

[ParanoidLittleMan]

10 hours ago, zzip said:

Yup, I believe ACSI was designed from the draft SCSI standards, but it's different enough that you needed a pricey ACSI<->SCSI converter to hook up SCSI disks.

 

Ultimately having in internal hard drive would be awesome!  but sounds like if I had upgraded from an ST to Falcon, migrating data from my ACSI hard drive to Falcon would have been a pain though.  I always assumed I could just plug it in to a Falcon.

Actually, all hard disks attached to ACSI port needed some kind of converter. Atari made Megafile, what was with RLL drive, so it needed converter.

Migration from ACSI to IDE can be simple, and done in 10-20 minutes, even with larger capacity Flash cards. 

If you use now popular IDE2SD converters you can use your SD card with data on Falcon directly - just need to run IDE driver installer on it, and problem solved. Well, if IDE driver supports byte swap.

Or if want to use CF cards on Falcon, or just want to copy SD card used with ST(E), TT to another one (for Falcon with IDE2SD) then can do copy of whole card with PC - that will be at least 10x faster than doing it with Atari. When is copied, need same thing on Falcon: run IDE driver installer.

[Justin Payne]

1 hour ago, DarkLord said:

 

I would assume, that with only one floppy drive, the B floppy drive icon was used to swap files between 2 floppy disks.

 

You drag/drop a file from A to B and TOS asks you to remove the floppy in A and insert disk B...  IIRC - been a long time.

 

yes, if memory serves me, that is how it works and I feel that's a smart feature but seems to be secondary to what the primary feature should be....giving your system the ability to do floppy drive to floppy drive copies. I mean, I always felt it was stupid that devs would default to assuming everyone just had one floppy drive. This might have been the case when they were $400 a pop but when we got into the ST days, if your software was contained on more than one disk, it should allow users to use them. I love that the Falcon has a built in HDD and yet a ton of ST software didn't allow you to install them on this device. Not everyone had HDDs in the mid-80's but by then end of the 80's, it was much more common and still ST software didn't provide that option. I suspect this was because of pirating but TBH, that didn't didn't really stop us.

[zzip]

1 hour ago, ParanoidLittleMan said:

Migration from ACSI to IDE can be simple, and done in 10-20 minutes, even with larger capacity Flash cards. 

If you use now popular IDE2SD converters you can use your SD card with data on Falcon directly - just need to run IDE driver installer on it, and problem solved. Well, if IDE driver supports byte swap.

Or if want to use CF cards on Falcon, or just want to copy SD card used with ST(E), TT to another one (for Falcon with IDE2SD) then can do copy of whole card with PC - that will be at least 10x faster than doing it with Atari. When is copied, need same thing on Falcon: run IDE driver installer.

Today we have these things.

 

But back in the day when I was deciding whether to upgrade to Falcon or go PC,  I woudn't have had these kinds of options.   I mean, I'm sure I would have figured out how to move the data somehow, but it would have been slower and more painful than I was expecting.

[atarilux]

3 hours ago, DarkLord said:

 

Amazing. Not my experience at all. I've owned 3 different Falcons and all of them were stable.

 

Only thing that ever crashed was poorly written code or when I was playing with demo's or ST

games, trying to get them to work on the Falcon.

 

I'm curious if the others in this thread would regard the Falcon as being "unstable"...

 

My general experience, was some years ago.. Running one programme such as Papyrus (a nice WP) was 99% of the time problem free. The usual problems arose when running desktop accessories or trying pre-emptive multitasking. You are probably right though that some of this is down to demos or badly written ST software. All that said, I still liked the machine.