Warning! This was expected to be a long text, and so it turned out as such. If you’re trying to read this in one go, then a large mug of your favourite beverage may be recommended, along with the optimum most comfortable and least disturbed sitting position. Anyway, enjoy!
The long and winding story of CiH’s Falcon and some of the places it has been to.
Preamble:- Once upon a time, back in 1992, there were a lot of excited words poured out about a new and transformative computer coming from Atari. This was the near mythical Atari Falcon 030. Quite a lot of these words came from me, as the Maggie Diskmag editor cheerleader.
The Falcon 030 was Atari’s attempt to bring the next generation of home computing to life after the long saga of the ST series. The new buzzword, multimedia, was bandied about freely, unironically. There was a lot of excited near magical thinking about the specification of such a wunder-machine. As we all realise now, it required some serious cognitive input from the very best people to get the most from it. Also that there was the looming tsunami of beige commodity Wintel boxes, crashing down and swamping all hopes and dreams of a long happy commercial lifespan for the Falcon.
Some of the advertising from Atari was a bit off and hard to understand.
Still, this article is not for regrets and recriminations, but is the story of one long-lived bird in particular.
Mine…
1993.
In the beginning..
My story with owning actual hardware starts from the Seventh 16-Bit Computer Show at the Wembley Conference Centre, back in February 1993. (Did I mention that writing this long report will involve me re-reading a lot of old issues of Maggie and Alive? No?) Our first sighting of a ‘live’ but captive developer Falcon was at the Future Entertainment Show in Earls Court, the previous November, on the Microdeal stand.
Wembley had Atari UK in attendance, with various things being shown. This included the standard high colour pictures and Autodesk style animations, through to the bizarre 286 PC add-on board from Compo Systems, with the unfortunate Falcon in question running Windows 3.1. No DSP-smashing demos yet. We’re nowhere near those.
This was the first opportunity to buy, or more correctly, pre-order one of these mythic beasts. There were several music-orientated stands present at Wembley, I put a deposit down with a prestigious musical hardware seller, Brixton Exchange Mart (BEM) to reserve mine. Delivery to the store would follow, soon(ish).
Some time later, in April, myself, and two compatriots from the local computer club, who shall be named ‘Mark’ and ‘Dave’, make our way down to the premises of Brixton Exchange Mart (BEM), Coldharbour Lane in Brixton, London. The short wait turned out to be longer than expected, due to import delays from Atari. I’m getting one of the first three that they can get their hands on. Due to the delay, I’ve even managed to get £100.00 off the original asking price of a hefty £999.00 for the 4MB with 65 MB hard disk. I had ordered a £499.00 1MB Falcon originally (to upgrade later), but these were never going to appear. In retrospect, the full fat Falcon was the best idea all round.
The premises of BEM are in a dingy, dodgy area of London. There are very expensive musical instruments on display, including a Les Paul Original Gibson guitar. There are also very strong secure shutters for when the store is closed.
When we entered the hallowed premises, there was a collection of specialist retail fans, not at all sure if they were customers able to afford to buy anything there, noodling around with the original expensive musical instruments.
We are expected. The remaining money is handed over in a blur of maxed-out credit card and actual cash. A box with ‘Falcon 030’ and an outline graphic of the computer in question stencilled on the side is produced, then placed in a big black plastic bin-bag. All the better to disguise the contents from any lurking low-lifes with ill-intent, in the mean streets outside.
An excited train journey home follows. We even got into a ‘discussion’ with some Amiga people on the train about our new purchase. The box is unpacked. I seem to remember trying to get some ST games and demos running, anything at all with a massively high dud rate. There were no Falcon specific wares, just yet. I got the David Braben game ‘Virus’ going, speeded up by the 16 MHz and all as the most notable item to work. For reference, the Atari “entertainment” offering with the pack, GEM Breakout, was swiftly thrown to one side.
I’ve never been back to the Brixton Exchange Mart. During the course of writing this article, I looked them up. They went out of business around twelve years ago, Quietly slipped out of sight without fanfare. Maybe I should have developed higher income earning habits, learned to play guitar and gone back for that Les Paul Original?
Early days..
The new bird did show its face at a couple of the Wellingborough Computer Club meetings. Nothing much to show the first time, apart from speeded-up ‘Virus’ and a play-test of a tiny very new 50 KHz DSP-based modfile player, hot from the hands of one Martin ‘Griff’ Griffiths. The playback quality, compared with the STE version of 50 KHz, tested through the same hi-fi, was very distinctly favourable to the Falcon.(‘Bladeswede.mod had everyone in raptures of audio pleasure, with people claiming to hear things they couldn’t have done on previous inferior audio.) This was the club meet where Sammy ‘Michael Schussler’ Joe was staying over with me, and the source code for Delta Force Maggie was passed to me, in another fateful epoch defining gesture.
By the time that the second fortnightly meeting rolled around. I had started to receive more ‘Warez’ from contacts, including Kev ’Sh3’ Dempsey. The ‘Termfin’ demo was a star of that show, along with some early direct to hard disk audio demonstrating.
Things carried on in the same steady vein for a while after with a gradual accumulation of early demos and other things, each time a little more ambitious in scope. The next significant happening was the VoCon Sci-Fi convention, somewhere in Kent, in October 1993.
I was hanging around with a bunch of Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy (HHGG) fans at that time. This was before demo parties became an item for me personally. The general idea of the convention or ‘Con’ was HHGG themed, with an element of dressing up, yes, even me. There was a dedicated computer room, featuring the mad imaginings of one Dave ‘Pixie’ Hodges, who was also one of the regulars at the Wellingborough Computer Club.
(Fun fact for Terry Pratchett fans:- Dave met the author and inspired him to create a character, ‘HodgesAaargh!” The castle falconer who appears in various Discworld novels.) Dave’s day-job involved professional bird-scaring at Airports, which utilised actual birds of prey.
For people familiar with HHGG, we were role-playing the custodians of ‘Deep Thought’, the supercomputer trying to find the ultimate answer, to life, the universe and everything. This is where the answer ‘forty-two’ comes from. We are dressed up as the philosophers, MajikThais and Vroomfondel, (nothing wrong with those names, eh, Douglas Adams?!) false beards and dressing gowns to the fore!
Perhaps not?
The computer room included Dave’s heavily customised (added Marpet Extra RAM over the 4MB official limit), recased, massive box Mega ST, containing the ‘Real Hitch-Hikers Guide’, a database of various user added entries, all attempting a pastiche of the style of Douglas Adams. (I’m sure I added a couple myself.) Print-outs of the Guide (as a work in progress) were auctioned off for charity at these events.
There was another Mega ST set up with a pressure pad on the floor routed through the serial port, triggering Deep Thought related sound samples. A couple more random Atari’s, playing the Infocom HHGG adventure game and my Falcon.
The Falcon did not do anything specific there, apart from providing a bit of Truecolor distraction. Although it did record the Deep Thought audio samples pre-con. This venture was a qualified success, which could have done with a few more visitors to our bit of it, but we did get Dave ‘Darth Vader’ Prowse, there as guest of honour, to check our stuff out. The local TV station, Meridian, also managed to film the ‘Termfin’ demo in action.
And we all got roaringly, blindly, successfully drunk!
1994.
Things are moving.
Time goes on. More things are being made for the Falcon. There are proper demos at last. Names, such as ‘EKO’ and “Lazer’ feature strongly now. But there are many others interested in making new stuffs for the bird too.
The next time that my Falcon gets to travel, is in May 1994.
This time we are off to the ‘InConceivable’ event, somewhere in Staffordshire. There is a cut down on the computer room aspect. We are set-up centrally this time, not off to one side. The whole ‘samples triggered by pressure pads’ has been reworked. We have got better quality samples and even playing of Quartet (v1.5) tunes for something different, so we attract a lot more attention.
The drunkenness was epic, even by my lifetime achievement standards. (Hello Alt Party!) My travelling companion/room mate, Dave Hodges, gets completely alcohol dishevelled. He is forcibly removed from the room party by some of the other participants, then he locks me out of the room we’re supposed to be sharing! I stay up, with a lot of other stayer-uppers and manage to survive, just about.
Come to think, I’m not even sure if the Falcon did travel with me then? A lot of badly rearranged brain-cells from 1994. But it is fun to think that it did go along.
There was a famous demo party called Fried Bits, which had its second edition in 1994. Things were really moving. I even received an invitation to go there, but with only three weeks notice and limited finances, had to sadly pass this by.
1995
It’s a kind of birthday.
Time goes on and the new releases come thick and fast. There is the eternally famous Fried Bits 3 edition from Easter 1995., which some other people known to me did manage to attend. A pink-tinged person wrote up a thrilling sleepless report in Maggie, so I resolved to go to the next Easter party, which I did. The Falcon scene hits new peaks of excellence, names like ‘EKO’ and ‘Laser’ feature strongly, but also ‘Avena’, ’Stax’ and many others. We have been enjoying gaming excellence from the not-too-far-from-home Reservoir Gods.
Several of the Maggie issues were put together for final assembly (including Devpac) on my Falcon, especially in the period leading up to and after the (in)famous Maggie 5th Birthday issue, which featured a dedicated Falcon shell for the first time.
It is also fair to say that from Maggie issue 12 onwards, there was a close collaboration with the Reservoir Gods. This included article contributions, cover pictures, alterations to the Delta Force menu shell to make it more flexible. Then a Falcon edition of the menu shell was mooted. This was created by Leon ‘Mr Pink’ O’Reilly, with major inputs of excellence from the likes of Sh3 and Tat of Avena/Digital Chaos.
We decided on a proper launch party for the 5th Birthday issue. Pretty small scale, in a nearby, walking distance hotel from my apartment. You could fit half a Sommerhack’s worth of people in there, but my Falcon was in there of course. There was a bit of final debugging to get the new shell to co-operate with the early TOS 4.01, but it did. The first add-ons were also present by now. I had graduated to larger capacity hard drives and even a SCSI CD-ROM drive, which had its debut here.
This was a total success. Hot summer days, overheating internal hard drives and sleepless nights in a small crowded apartment included.
1996
This year carries on in the same steady rhythm. Further Maggie editions are produced on my Falcon. I’m getting to grips with the new Falcon menu shell. It is released on a 1.44MB disk, so a proper ‘disk magazine’ still, even with the extra graphical and music data, unlike some Disk Busting others.
I actually get to my first proper demo party this year. The perpetually referenced in these type of historical articles ‘Symposium’ party in Hittfeld, Germany.
Unlike previous Atari only or Atari dominated ‘Fried Bits’ parties. This was much more of an all-formats event, including heavy Amiga and PC attendances, with a large side-order of Commodore 64 fans. A foretaste of future Breakpoint and Revision Parties. The party has been heavily written about elsewhere (Maggie 20), so I won’t spend too long here. Apart from a brain-blasting 4K intro section, the overall level and quality of productions for our scene seems to be treading water, unsure what comes next after the glorious heights of the previous year.
My Falcon does not attend. We’ve travelled using the cheapest possible method, an overnight bus to Hamburg. There are severe challenges to luggage space as well as personal comfort, only matched later on by budget airlines. We’ve actually brought a paper notepad and pens to write the realtime elements of our party report. Which is then typed in laboriously back home. This was a formula which was repeated for a few more parties, particularly the Alternative Party series in sunny Finland. Until we got to grips with load-carrying trans-European motor transport and can afford laptops.
We get our next chance to shine in public at the Autumn Atari Shows in September 1996. The occasion is the launch of a replacement print magazine, Atari Computing, to replace other publications, such as ST Format, that ceased publication. There was also another publication, of the electronic variety, being shown there too,
The show is over two days, day one at the Birmingham Motorcycle Museum, the other day at a place called the Four Pillars Hotel, somewhere near Heathrow Airport in London.
We’ve turned up with a seriously heavily re-worked ST menu shell for the release of Maggie issue 21. This comes courtesy of the coding genius of Tat of Avena, and does a brilliant job of updating the look and usability of the Delta Force original. There are two Falcons, mine and Felice’s, with a huge display sized telly on one small table, Tat has pushed the special occasion boat out a bit further still, with a brilliant intro for the ST edition. The Falcon edition hasn’t been shoved to one side either and puts on a similarly appealing appearance.
The show was successful all around. Atari Computing taking subscriptions way over their break-even point. We like to think we provided a large part of the spectacle too.
1997
This was an “interesting” year.
There has always been a tendency or preference to adding third party upgrades to boost the Falcon’s modest by current commodity PeeCee capabilities pretty much from day one. From simple CPU overclocking devices, to much more elaborate upgrades that add proper speeded up boosters, FastRAM etc. The (rather aptly named for me) ‘Nemesis’ offered a fifty percent speed-up for the whole system. The major attraction being that it was very cheap and possible (with the right skills) to self-fit.
This turned out to be a horrifying near miss. The person with the skills that I asked to take the job on, managed to get three-quarters of the way there, then something slipped! Fortunately, there was a fitting service available, so the wounded bird went off to The Upgrade Shop to complete the installation.
In that period, there was the Siliconvention Party at Bremen, which gave an unsuspecting world, the next leap in Atari Falcon demos, ‘Sonoluminescenz’. (Actually, not totally unexpected to me. I’d seen some preview screens on Tat’s Falcon. The original intention was to release a 96ktro in 1996 at the Symposium party, which didn’t come to pass. Some of these routines finally appeared in ’Sono’
Everybody loves a bit of 'Sono'!
There was a spring Atari Show, the follow on from the successful Autumn show, where I had to watch these glories on other people’s hardware.
At some stage in 1997, we go online!
The term ‘Information Superhighway’ was bandied about unironically. IRC Chat Relay was busy and amusing. The World Wide Web was just lacing up its running shoes and we all listened to the Terminator Death Throes / strangled Dalek tones of dial-up connections.
Some of us had been there a little earlier. There were Bulletin Boards for the Warez trading elite (Mark and Dave), Felice had something called Demon Internet, which was an early email / messaging service. When we first connected, it was a bizarre word of mouth process from person to the next person to rework the starting up instructions that didn’t quite seem to be there for your individual set-up.
There was no question of “It has to be a PeeCee, it has to be Windows, an up-to-date version with a gazillion patches needed” back then. People did connect and get online with relatively humble systems. You developed a certain serenity with the low bandwidth and low speed services. You got connected. You had full access to the internet and WWW of the time with no restrictions. Apart from being aware of phone bills, so waiting until after 7pm to log in at the cheapest price. And yes, my slightly bruised Falcon was up to the job.
1998
I’ll throw in a mention for the first edition of the Alternative Party which took place at Easter. This is in lieu of anything more traditional. It is my second proper demo party, missing out on Siliconvention the previous year, as being able to afford to go, but frustratingly not being able to book the time off. It’s a whole new country, an unfamiliar one, Finland. The Falcon does not travel, we’re doing another handwritten party report. The Falcon is at home to download the party release for the Senior Dads ‘Monomental’ demo, literally at around 5.00am, the morning of departure emailed to me by Mike James. I’m handing this entry in at the party. The party as a whole is a success, trying to sleep within it, isn’t.
Things slow down a lot shortly after. The next development on my side is a relationship happening (Nicky, who’s still around!) which sort of kicks the notion of free time for anything else in the head for quite a long time. The next issue of Maggie (number 27) is a long time forthcoming too. Following the Maggie/Undercover Mag ‘Beef’, there has been a dip in motivation, with some team members properly quitting.
It is later in November 1998, at the freezing cold, possibly open to the elements, Atari Show in Bingley Hall Stafford, where I acquire my second Falcon.
This is the Desktopper recased Falcon, on sale, courtesy of Steve Delaney of Floppyshop, who is selling up. I jump in, even before the show is open to the public and two hundred and fifty pounds later, I’m the owner of a rather tidy second Falcon. This was well before ‘LOL price’ became a thing, We were there as ‘exhibitors’, showing off the demo side of Atari entertainment and selling some surplus gear.
Yes, there was a need for it. Two main reasons.
My original Falcon, the star of this article, was showing signs of ill-health. An intermittent ‘fluttery’ mouse cursor. This was possibly related to the problematic Nemesis installation previously.
The second reason was that I was looking for a luxury upgrade, which became the Systems Solutions installed Centurbo CT2, with 50 MHz ‘030, FastRAM etc. This had its own installation saga, which had more episodes and cliffhangers than were needed, but that is a story for another time. Anyway, this got sorted out, so it took over as my main daily use machine. A lot of other would-be Atarian ‘Power Users’, not so close to the demo scene, were looking closely at the Milan 040 clone at the same time. The CT2 on the other hand, was the demoscener’s choice.
My Centurbo 2 Falcon, still going strong, as of last week!
The original Falcon was there that day, providing a traditional range of game and demo based entertainments, cheerfully unaffected by the freezing cold air. Nicky, who came along with Felice, another chap called Pete Augustin and I, was a bit more affected. Still, we live and learn, eh!
1999
This was a quiet year for my first Falcon. The CT2 machine was getting the lions share of attention, especially when it wasn’t working quite right. It took a visit to the November Stafford Atari Show, for Rodolphe Czuba himself to fix the final issue of a dead DSP static RAM.
I’ll quickly mention the mighty first edition of the Error in Line Party. My first proper ‘Fried Bits-like’ party, on the third attempt.
On this occasion, air travel rules out bringing extra hardware, but I’m loaned a Mega ST with a graphics card for my Maggie real-time ramblings. There was a Sure Trip to astound the ST fans, the Falcon scene still seemed to be working out how to follow ‘Sono’ from 1997. The party was the best ever! For now.
This is the year that the final regular issue of Maggie is released, issue 28. All thoughts are going towards the 10th Anniversary, next year, where we’re going to draw a line underneath things, once and for all.
2000
The first thing to note about the new Millennium, there are no bugs for Atari hardware!
Both Falcons and my STE are fine, and carry on working. This year, we’re having an intense three parties at different locations and times of the year, the first of these being the inaugural edition of Sillyventure at the barely plausible, tantalising and distant locale of Gdansk, Poland, at Easter. No Falcon goes out with me this time. We are running a marathon road-trip, through many miles of autobahns and less convincing eastern roads, with a stop-over at Havoc’s home in the Dutch Sky.
With five people and their assorted effects in one medium sized car, only *some* hardware can go in, which includes Matt Smith’s Falcon, Felice’s PeeCee, assorted screens and an ancient Toshiba laptop or ‘luggable’ which is where the realtime article was written on.
This party was epic, in all senses of the word, including the competition running times and journey there and back! Poland was a blast! Maybe we get to go back there some day? (Grin!)
There is the Second Edition of the Alternative Party in July. No original hardware, as we’re on budget flights, but a less disaster-prone analog notebook and pen report did the job. There was a nice Falcon demo, ‘Manchester Schwartzwurst’ released there, along with a less nice .MP3 encoded obscure music entry from yours truly (Graoumf Tracker, some samples created by a Maggie contributor, Jodie Smith and CT2 Falcon to encode, very slowly, to an .MP3 file.) Sleep and attempts to get this, were ‘interesting’, as usual.
An extra non-international travelling session, the Autumn edition of the Stafford Show in November followed.
On this visit, I went with Chris Crosskey of ASP Computers, certifiable Sinclair C5 owner and ‘Robot Wars’ entrant.
He provided a nicely pumped-up set of speakers. My original Falcon is attending this one, mainly to provide sound and visual distractions of a demo nature. This goes well, with only the occasional plea from other stand holders to turn things down. It is Saturday the 11th November, That date is notable as ‘Armistice Day’, or the day that World War One stopped. There is a specific time, 11am, as well, “The 11th hour of the 11th day” is when everyone is supposed to stop what they are doing, pull on their solemn trousers, assume a misty-eyed vacant stare into the far distance and silently contemplate the awful waste of it all for two minutes.
10.59 hours. I am still playing the rather loud ‘Ravey Davey’ Techno Drugs demo at full volume! Having rather forgotten about the two minute silence.
“PLEASE CUT THE SOUND, NOW!!” Bellowed the public address system.
So I did, hastily fumbled the speakers off just in time. No remembrances were harmed, as far as I know, anyway.
All the time, I’m working towards the final edition of Maggie. The first notion, was to release this on the actual 10th Anniversary of the Lost Boys Maggie debut in Spring 1990. In an inevitable tale, the deadline slips back to August, then eventually a resolve to kick this out at the 10th Anniversary STNICCC in December, whilst we are still in the year 2000.
There is another dismag just starting up, Alive Mag, out of the broken remains of Undercover Mag and Maggie. At this stage, there is ST Survivor as a joint editor, which eases the workload for both of us.
So all things come to pass at the STNICCC 10th Anniversary Edition. The original Falcon is coming out to play, along with my STE, the latter machine for realtime article, use of. The original Falcon does take part in the final assembly of the 10th Anniversary Edition Maggie. Most of the work had been done at home beforehand, but there were a couple of last minute bits to add in. It all holds together long enough and that is a successful release of the 10th Anniversary and final issue of (regular) Maggie. That machine also assists in running some of the competition entries, later on. That party was notable for the sheer luxury of fast internet and food provided. Both items available on an ‘all you can eat until you explode’ basis.
2001
How do you follow such an action packed year? How about another edition of the fabulous Error in Line party at Easter?
We’ve got the hang of road trips by now, so the original Nemesis Falcon, the hero of this story, comes with us once more. This is intended for testing and distribution of my first post-Maggie project, ASCII-Nation. This bizarre Star Wars knock-off, a comic book style presentation within the Maggie menu shell, was made out of ascii-characters.
I’ve been using the Nemesis Falcon more for away-days, even with the intermittent jittery mouse cursor. You will see it again at the following Mekka-Symposium 2002 party as well. I’ve left the CT2 Falcon at home, as I get the feeling that you could dislodge the accelerator card with one good jolt, if you’re not careful. So I don’t tend to move it around too much.
The party goes stunningly well, with genre-redefining Falcon entries, several of them in fact. My effort turned up in the wild compo for a reasonable second place. The party itself, Dutch biscuit-confiscating customs and all, was another epic, for the right reasons.
2002
Time goes on. We’re going to Alternative party again, almost as soon as the new year has drawn breath. My Falcy wisely stays at home, but an external hard drive’s worth of wares was smuggled into Finland, with Felice’s Falcon undertaking the perilous journey. His machine does survive the air travel and clattering around bumpy Helsinki streets in a suitcase ordeal, with some scars!
The big event for Easter 2002, is repeating the mistake that we made in 1996, by committing to go to the Mekka Symposium combined event. Only it didn’t seem that way before we went there. There was a larger Atari presence and release schedule mooted, than actually happened. This party was certainly a Breakpoint and Revision predecessor, with the huge and noisy main hall and hyperactive other formats sceners, but not many of the facilities to make such an event bearable. I won’t retell the story of the frozen sleeping tent, as you’ve all heard it before (Alive issue 5.) I can say that with motorised travel, via Havoc’s Enschede locale, my original Falcon came along.
Party vignette:- It’s the Saturday evening, or Sunday morning? I’m sitting next to Felice and Deez, with Nerve and Baggio close by. Deez decides to add some extra unscheduled mouse cursor movement, fiddling around with my JagPad when he thought I wasn’t looking. There was a workaround for the dodgy mouse cursor, with a routine that used the JagPad as a replacement mouse. I’m listening to absolutely anything stored on the hard drive, to try to block out the overbearing party sounds. The Falcon has had enough and stops working. A gradual onset of heat stroke is suspected. As a supremely ‘dogged by ill-fate’ away match, this last catastrophe is the poo-flavoured icing on a stale and mouldy cake.
Spoiler alert - A short rest later and it did come back on! No harm done.
We got back from that one, in my case, without a Passport which went missing in action in Amsterdam.
2003
Moving on to 2003, the three notable events that I went to, were the Alternative Party 4, with added Jeff Minter, no hardware taken with me. Using borrowed time on laptops to write the realtime / report.
There was a welcome return to Error in Line 3 at the Tusculum. For that one I took an Acorn RISC PC. And a dodgy fake demo.
There was also something called ‘Jagfest’ in June, somewhere in Kent, where the Atari Jaguar was the main focus, but my original Falcon came along for some noisy fun.
The big, big news for 2003, is the arrival of the fabulous CT60 accelerator. This promised to take the quest for power and speed way beyond anything offered with a Fuji badge to date. This had been pre-ordered as long ago as the Alt Party 3 in 2002, with a first use of PayPal being made.
The boards turn up over the summer. I get mine installed by Lyndon ’Stimpy’ Amson, in November. Amazingly, he’s managed to successfully transplant the CT60 board into my *original* Falcon. At the same time, the Nemesis booster was removed. (It was returned, I’ve still got it.) Even the jittery mouse cursor seems to have disappeared. There was a downgrade from 14 MB to 4 MB ST RAM, but there is 256 MB FastRAM in there now. The CT60, after one or two minor adjustments, seems to be doing just fine. This machine goes back to being my main ‘power-user’ system.
There was a *third* Falcon purchased from someone in Yorkshire for the sum of £200.00. We’re still a while from LOLprice. This potential host machine for the CT60 wasn’t needed after all. It eventually became Felice’s replacement Falcon, when his original machine died.
2004
The revived and given new purpose CT60 Falcon does just fine. There’s minimal adjustments and bedding in, such as the bus booster clock swapped from a 25MHz to a more stable 20MHz, quickly figured out.
It even gets to the first Outline Party, the brainchild of Havoc and others, keen to try a different solution to the difficult Easter party question. This is a modest success, including an 060 Falcon preview from Evolution, which never reappeared, and a neat wintry intro called ‘Traal’ combining the talents of DHS, Ephidrena and MJJ Productions.
As the summer gets hotter, it is apparent something isn’t quite right. The initial suspicion of an overheating issue is identified, then cured.
It turns out that the 68060 supplied, is really unhappy about overclocking above its native 50 MHz speed. The ambient room temperature can make a real difference between the ’060 working smoothly and starting to crash when it gets hotter. The CPU temperature gauge, a little known feature, derided as inaccurate, turns out to be useful here in diagnosis and resolution.
An extra 100mm cooling fan is positioned to blow extra air through the top of the case. It uses one of the spare 5v lines from the kludge PeeCee tower power supply. This actually works! The problem is permanently resolved with the later replacement of a more durable revision 6 68060.
2005
This is a big year for the CT60.
We attend the second edition of the Outline Party, still at Easter, still Atari-focused, this time, for the first time, with a female presence, as well as the usual hardware. It’s the colder version of Easter, but no harm was done. Nothing major attempted with this machine. A party report for Alive Mag got done on there. There was some kind of fake demo mentioned too.
Me probably working on a party report. either Outline 2004 or 2005. Felice's Falcon is set up next to me.
There is a major change come April. An interloper, a non-Atari system, the first to be owned with intent. The previous dabblings with Acorn Archimedes and Risc PC were just cheaply acquired secondhand diversions. There is now a Apple Mac Mini, from possibly the most ‘corporate’ hardware vendor, apart from the likes of Nintendo. It isn’t a beige Windows box though. It is neat and small, so intended to fit around everything else, not take over and gobble the limited space, like a tower PeeCee would.
There is a reason for this. A need for the ‘modern’ internet, with a broadband connection is tapping on my door. A cable-based solution is already partially installed, so mere seconds later, or so it seems, there is a broad ‘interweb’ data pipe streaming in data 20x faster than my dial-up system, thanks to (the now defunct) NTL World. I say this should not change things too much, but it does. There is a slight de-focusing on the CT60 Falcon, as it is no longer having to be the main computing workhorse in the CiH household.
Other significant developments from 2005 include an October visit to the Jagfest in Kent, including an emergency request for someone to resolder a blown mouse connector from changing a power supply connector (which was sorted out.) I recall both the Atari 800 emulator with the Drunken Chessboard demo and Quake, the gothic FPS were seen there a lot.
I obtained a revision 6 68060 CPU, there was another Rodolphe-created gadget, the CTCM control module, so you could change the MHz of the CPU on the fly. I visited gwEm, in his north London lair. He was getting my original revision 1 ‘060, to install in his newly acquired CT63 card. Both lots of surgery were a success, so my CT60 was re-invigorated with 90 MHz speed. (It didn’t fancy going all the way to 100 MHz.)
I played around with various emulators, including Commodore 64 Frodo, an early Atari 2600 emulator. ZX Spectrum 128 and MSX got in there. My personal favourite, for ease of use, was the Sega SMS Plus emulator, which was able to use the Jagpad, and played quite a decent game of Sonic the Hedgehog.
2006
There is another Outline Party to go to this year. There is a format change. It is no longer an Easter party, running instead at the start of June, on the Dutch ‘Ascension Day’ holiday. This date is synchronised with Easter, so would take place earlier than this for future years. The other change is, that Outline is now a multi-format party. The intention to create a smaller friendlier format, where Atari and non-Atari mixing can take place, free of the overpowering and sometimes alienating experiences of the bigger parties. This seems to work, and Outline goes from strength to strength down the years.
CT60 was present and running some of the competition entries, such as ‘The Genocidal’, by the Dead Hackers Society.
From Outline 2006 - My CT60 in a packed up state. Note the kludge PC Power supply.
Some of the anticipated big demos start to arrive on the CT60. We had the pleasure of the Dead Hackers ‘Derealization’ at the Commodore focused ‘Big Floppy People’ party. Evolution had got there first, with their take on a richly detailed 3D world, at the Easter ‘Noise’ Party called ‘Supernatural.’
The Nature brothers were there, demonstrating a prototype Super Videl graphics card. They even had an ethernet adapter, ‘Ethernat’, which had been pre-ordered, passed to me, but was unfitted for a long time.
2007
This was the year that various ‘Real Life issues’ prevented too much activity. As nominated carer of a family member needing a knee replacement operation, this wrecked any potential travel plans for the first half of 2007. Anyway, the monster that was eating all our travel budgets took place in October of that year. Namely the Wedding of Felice in New York. The act of holy matrimony took place with myself, Nicky and Felice attending, making things legal with Paula. They’ve done well, not managed to kill each other, yet!
Atari-wise, apart from ongoing Alive Mag commitments, I was playing around with the early ‘Satandisk’ SD-Card hard drive replacement for the humble ST, created by Jookie, which was well good! (But superseded by something even better a short time later.)
2008
I’m feeling lazy, this was from my blog in April 2008 - On the CT60 side of things, a few SDL game ports are coming forward, with some hopefully non-idle chat about porting some demos from other platforms to it as well. One or two people may have already taken steps to doing this? I hope they feel up to sharing their results with the rest of us soon!
This entry is from August 2008. This seems to be the start of persistent hard drive issues that seem to doom this otherwise magnificently long serving Falcon.
I'm also experimenting with adding a compact flash as a replacement hard drive to my CT60 with (so far) partial success. This works perfectly well in normal Falcon 030 mode, but does not want to know when running as a CT60. There remains a definite question mark over the health of the current 'Travelstar' IBM IDE internal drive (known as 'Deathstar' for its reliability in certain quarters!) and I'm not totally sure there isn't an issue developing with the CT60 itself, or the area around the expansion port as it does not like to boot sometimes, and randomly freezes at other times? I suspect an upgrade of my HD-Driver version might help with the CF problem at least, more later, as they say.
Alt Party November 2008, new venue, huge numbers, Front 242 performing, no Falcon, we’ve got actual laptops for the realtime article and party reports. Others are focusing away from the Falcon at this time, with a stunning release from the Dead Hackers, reborn on the STE, ‘More or Less Zero’.
2009
A completed SuperVidel prototype is seen,
The rest of it has been written earlier, so here it is.
31st May 2009 blog entry - Outline ’09 returns me to my station with the reassuring news that a healthy CT60 still beats away under the layers of complication imposed by an iffy storage device.
You may recall that there had been a long-running issue with my original hard drive. The IBM Travelstar was a known bad job, but the Kingston CF-card purchased to replace it didn't seem to be much better. The latter works fine without the accelerator, but (at best) was very unstable with it. Having had the Nature Brothers ponder the issue, it appears that the CF-card isn't co-operative on one of their machines either. However, their CF-card booted and ran just fine on mine! When asking around for a better flavour of CF-card on the IRC, Haomaru, sometime Dutch MSX-botherer volunteered to send a spare 40GB laptop drive he had lurking and doing nothing, entirely for free! Cool or what? If it survives the rigours of postal travel, then hopefully there is an end to the hard drive issues and I have a fully working CT60 again.
Which would be timely, as we have *two* demo releases for the CT60 which popped up at Outline '09. One of which was the sort of expected and keenly anticipated port of ''Starstruck' by the Black Lotus, coming from the capable hands of Mikro, he who is also organising the UltraSatan storage devices previously mentioned. The other was a nice and unexpected demo from our friends in Sweden, the Dead Hackers Society, who gave us 'Codein' which is effectively a very deluxe intro for a coding party in Sweden called SommarHack. This looks like a small but concentrated gathering for the hardcore creative people in the Atariscene. I'm not going to be able to make that one, as I'm (1.) Not that creative, and (2.) Will still be recovering from the Edinburgh expedition due in about a week's time.
Hmm, yeah, about the hard drive issue, maybe not. The hard disk that Haomaru kindly posted, didn’t survive the journey. As the 19th September entry reveals.
The current attempt to get the CT60 running with a new hard drive turned into a fizzle for various reasons. Haomaru's spare laptop hard drive did not manage to survive the rigours of the postal system and the drive heads were forlornly clicking around when I tried it. The SD-cards worked for a short time, before some unknown element started to cause random stoppages, (faulty scsi transfers of additional files after the first successful batch?) Then after these were reformatted, they seemed to 'learn' not to work with the CT60 again. Still, these can be recycled into the UltraSatan when it gets here shortly. The original 4GB Kingston CF-card still works perfectly with the Falcon in '030 mode but hates going to '060 mode. The spare hard drive I acquired by post which was packaged decently turned out to be a 3.5 inch model, which is a hefty beast and won't go into the standard Falcon case too well. Plus I've been rather short of spare time to spend chasing the issue around, so at the moment we're stuck here.
Still, I did get to run through and view the entire Black Lotus trilogy of demos, ported by Mikro, one Saturday. It's kind of emotional, seeing 'Starstruck' run on my original hardware, almost as if this isn't going to be bettered, as if this is the best we're going to get on that platform?
Gratuitous Crow Capture!
I really did feel that way once I’d watched Starstruck. Unexpectedly emotional, almost tearful. It was as if that is the very best we’re going to get. The demoscene, at least for 68K, can pack up and go home. Happily this was not to be the case.
2010 onwards.
Everything has gone a bit ‘Meuuh!’
The CT60 is still rejecting various attempts at adding on new hard disk storage solutions. I’ve got my STE and Centurbo 2 Falcon still to console me. Due to lack of motivation, the CT60 is effectively sidelined.
Alive Mag has ground to a halt too, issue 15 never appearing. I’m in a new venture, the Lo-Res magazine, based on the Wordpress online platform. This allows much enhanced presentation of articles with images, much like the current Atariscne.
There was a short lived revival attempt in July 2011. We seemed to have found a working SD-Card, but this only lasted a short time. Looking back, I think there were other age-related hardware issues lurking underneath.
It’s amazing the nearer we get to the present, the vaguer and less sharply defined my recollections become. Maybe it’s the blurring of similar events into one another. I’ve clearly been to too many demo parties. Or maybe there is a more general crowding out effect taking place with more and more ‘real life issues’ stealing away memories?
2012
My next acquisition is a luxury CT60 built into a customised rack mount case, courtesy of Dal of Atari Forum. This comes with a CTPCI card including a Radeon graphics card for the sum of £1200. Yes it’s not cheap, but it has an impressive specification. We’re still not in the realms of insane ‘Tulip-mania’ prices as yet, so yes, a sensible and appropriate price for such a jewel in the Atari crown. This takes over as my main high-end Atari system.
As the original CT60 had stopped working and had been replaced, it was surplus to requirements. At some stage, I’ve got in contact with ‘DML’ Doug Little. He’s working on his own projects and was looking for a CT60. I offer my dead system, for a very reasonable price. He’s got the tools and expertise to revive this, and would be looking at having a working CT60 for compatibility checks, Bad Mood anyone? Possibly, maybe, even an ‘060 specific project, maybe?
For various reasons, including one affecting DML that I would not wish on anyone, this does not happen. DML does purchase the CT60, but this goes into storage with a lot of other Atari gear for a long time.
2022
October 2002. An email from DML is received. He’s been to a storage lock-up and retrieved a load of Atari stuff. This CT60 Falcon is in there. He is starting to prod it back to life. It is suggested that I can purchase if back if I want. After the brief exchange, things go quiet. I’m not really pressing the matter.
2025
January 18th - An email to DML from me is prompted by the news that the unfinished Jaguar project from Titan Designs, the overhead view shooter, ‘Livewire’ is being reconstructed and released by Reboot Software. I’m assuming that he’s given his blessing to the project. It turns out that he has. Pretty quickly, without prompting, the discussion turns to the undead CT60 that he had got from me.
He’s still willing to sell it back, at a price not too far off what he paid in the first place. Well a bit more, with the work and materials going into it, which is fair. He’s going to have a good look at it, with a view to rectifying any underlying issues and put it back into service first!
June 7th 2025
So it’s come back home.
Yes it’s been a while, but you don’t rush quality work. Some of the delays have been down to some ‘real-life issues’ on my side in May. Nothing that couldn’t be fixed, won’t bore you with the details. Otherwise this article would have appeared a month or so earlier.
Doug’s prodding around resulted in quite a lot being done to the Falcon.
It’s had the NVRAM replaced (socket added too), which would have been expected. That was a known fault for a long time generally. He’s also renewed a number of capacitors which were over-aged and out of range. This would improve the sound quality and system stability generally. The grubby motherboard has been cleaned up. It had a bath in a motherboard friendly cleaning solution.
The list goes on.
A Pico power supply has been added, with a smart on-off button. So no more kludge-box PeeCee external PSU. There are new switches to select CT60/F030 and for 16 MHz or 20 MHz boosted bus. This had been left ‘perma-boosted’ when Stimpy installed the CT60 originally. Doug has even 3D printed a new hard drive bracket for the CF-Card to fit in, and not flap about loosely. The floppy drive has been removed. It may well have been removed before it went north in 2012. I’ve got a USBee (cut down NetUSBee) on the cartridge port as my primary file transfer method, so the floppy is not needed. There was even an 68882 co-processor added for those times I might need Falcon 030 mode.
I almost forgot to mention the free copy of the ‘060 compatible Bad Mood, that he put on there!
I’ve been using it, gradually adding files over the last few days. Generally, it has been brilliant. The system feels nice and stable right now. I’ve been running random demos and applications with hardly any issues (zView is an exception right now. EDIT:- Cache delay, rediscovered, take care of that one!) I’ll get more confident as time goes on. It’s running as a plain TOS box currently. Mint will come later. I’d like to prepare another Compact Flash card beforehand for that eventuality.
Here it is, back home, running a nice state-of-the-art demo!
There is the odd niggle. Mainly how the CT60 was designed to fit into the expansion port in the first place. There is a lot of unsupported board at the back. There is also a lot of wiring, some of which relating to the new Pico PSU in the back, so putting the top case back on seems to disrupt the CT60 board enough to produce an ‘input not supported’ error message. Either the keyboard or power wires moving around. Doug has been considerate and advised which part of the board to press down on, to ensure a decent connection to the expansion port if it stops working properly. This seems to work. I’ve leaving the top case off for now, which also helps keep the operating temperature of the 68060 down. It’s set at 75 MHz right now, if you’re curious. There may be a future issue with the expansion port or pin connectors on the CT60 to address, but I’m hopeful this is not too much of a problem right now.
Some final thoughts.
Looking back, it is astonishing how much for granted we take our hardware, especially the rare and delicate pieces,
When the Falcon started dying it didn’t occur to me (or to a lot of other people in the same position?) that these machines can age and need expert care and restoration. There is the small matter of the mutilation that has taken place over the years, the tricky Nemesis fitting would not have helped. I think Stimpy did a good job of fitting the CT60, but there was no awareness or appreciation that small components can start to fail unseen, that an unstable power supply can slowly kill hardware. A combination of many small things going bad over time could make data storage ‘corrupty’ and uncertain? That dust and dirt builds up. That the travelling we did, in often sub-optimal conditions could have added its own layer of trauma?
With the Falcon, it seems like we’re now tinkering with vintage cars, not just any old classic motor, but old Formula One racing cars. It’s only really since skilled people like Exxos have brought their own hardware ability and viewpoints to the table, that there has been more awareness of the things that can go wrong and restoration that needs to be done. (There has also been a harsh light shone on the manufacturing practices and wide (in)tolerances of Atari hardware too as people have discovered.)
One thing I am sure of going forward. This machine is staying at home, It’s getting a pampered semi-retired easy life. It’s not going to travel again, unless it needs any further repair. Which I hope it doesn’t!
Anyway, it’s been quite a journey.
Appendix:-
Hardware upgrades and changes received by CiH’s Falcon since 1993. The heavily condensed version, if you didn’t want to read the overlong text before. Too late!
Original spec:- 16 MHz processor, 65 MB internal IDE hard drive, 4 MB RAM.
1993 added - 80 MB SCSI external drive, thank you Mark and Dave / RS Components. They also provided some interesting VGA and RGB leads/adaptors, which I’ve still got. The RGB cable was made from something heavy industry standard which could be used to throttle Godzilla, if such an unlikely scenario came to pass?
1994 added - 120 MB internal IDE, prone to overheating and sticking
400 MB external SCSI drive
1995 added - NEC SCSI External CD-ROM (2x speed) - Debut at Maggie 5th birthday party.
1997 added - Nemesis accelerator - now 24 MHz cpu and 48 MHz DSP (issue 1 Nemesis)
14 MB RAM and 68882 FPU added in that period, not sure of dates? Also a 340 MB internal IDE drive.
The Second Centurbo 2 Modded Falcon took most of my attention until 2003.
2003 added - CT60 68060 accelerator at 66 MHz, ST-RAM downgraded to 4 MB, but 256 MB FastRAM added. Early revision 060, prone to overheating. 4 GB IBM internal IDE drive.
2006 - Revision 6 68060, 90 MHz capable, no more overheating! Issues with hard drives breaking though. Trying to add CF-Cards only partially successful. 4MB SCSI hard drive.
2008 - 2012 - Lots of issues. Attempted several different storage solutions without success. Machine effectively non-operational.
2012 - Passed to Doug Little for him to revive, see main article.
2025 - Home at last, CT60 fully operational, NVRAM and some capacitors replaced. Pico PSU replaces original kludge-box power supply. Features the same revision 6 ‘060, but will be run at 66/75 MHz to preserve the rare and expensive CPU. USBee for easy file transfer, 4 GB CF-Card added for storage. Doug even added a 68882 FPU for ‘030 mode. Bad Mood (060 version) ran without any problems! Original SCSI devices can be reinstated. The motherboard had a really nice clean as well.
CiH - April to June 2025.
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