Mastodawn

After decades of looking for one, I've finally managed to find an #Atari Falcon030. 🤩

Mine no longer had a functioning NVRAM and reverted to a low resolution and English defaults (this is a French machine). And it didn't save its clock.

The fix was to replace the chip (which contains both a battery and a few bytes of addressable memory). In its wisdom, Atari decided to solder it to the motherboard. So I desoldered it, put in a very thin socket and a replacement chip and it's happy once again.

Show thread

D. Schmudde Mar 20

@onegeekarmy wow congrats! Glad you can give it the love it needs. What a machine.

Show thread

Jean-Michel Durand Mar 21

@schmudde It's such an interesting machine. I've been an ST user for 40 years and they're like a second nature to me.

The Falcon030 is like an ST fever dream. It's familiar, but it's like everything has been stretched in every direction. It's fascinating.

Show thread

D. Schmudde

@onegeekarmy That's a funny way to put it.

I've always thought about it as the pinnacle of a "multimedia" computer. It was really riding that early 90s buzzword hard.

Having said that, it wasn't hype. It was really a fully-conceived and designed machine. And Atari Corp. was smart enough to lean into it: https://archive.org/details/AtariFalcon030Brochure1992/mode/2up.

I owned a TT030 for several years. It was also a beautiful machine. But not as fully-formed as the UNIXy CAD powerhouse it was intended to be.

Atari Falcon 030 Brochure : Atari Corporation : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Atari Falcon 030 Computer Brochure from 1992

Internet Archive

Show thread

Jean-Michel Durand 6d ago

@schmudde I meant that in the best possible way :)

As you point out, this was clearly a machine designed for pushing pixels and sounds. The creative potential is tremendous. And it makes modern computers feel a little boring and conventional when compared to it.

The TT030 was also brilliant, but far too expensive (and a little intimidating) for me at the time.