ST Falcon Goes high on eBay

From: Hills, Paul <Paul.HILLS_at_landisgyr.com>
Date: Fri May 16 11:02:33 2003

Similarly, there are also sound cards now where the DSP is accessible. The
first sound cards that came out with DSPs on weren't
downloadable/programmable, but later ones were. $75 is a great price for an
experimental platform!

The good thing about the Atari Falcon at the time (a long time before DSPs
appeared on sound cards and before softmodems existed) was that there was a
public domain assembler for the MC56001, plus, thanks to Motorola's
commendable policy of selling silicon but giving away supporting software
(to a certain extent anyway), there was a huge library of public domain
libraries for the 56K DSP series.

There was also a commercial assembler/debugger for the MC56001 which was
only about £60. That allowed all the standard debugger facilities - single
stepping, register & memory view, breakpoints etc.

It just goes to show that technically good products never sell themselves.
The Atari Falcon was a dual-processor (MC68030 + MC56001) GUI-based machine
which had available a pre-emptive multitasking operating system (MiNT),
built in SCSI port & MIDI, 50kHz-sampling stereo 16 bit ADC/DACs, at a time
when PCs were twice the price with no sound card, no SCSI, and had just got
Windows 3.1...The Falcon flopped!

paul

-----Original Message-----
From: Dwight K. Elvey [mailto:dwightk.elvey_at_amd.com]
Sent: 12 May 2003 18:03
To: cctalk_at_classiccmp.org
Subject: RE: ST Falcon Goes high on eBay


>From: "Hills, Paul" <Paul.HILLS_at_landisgyr.com>
>
>That's a lot - it's not really a vintage machine, nor a particularly rare
>one. I still use mine as a MC56000 Digital Signal Processing (DSP) testbed.
>At the time, the £500 I paid for it was a quarter of what I would have had
>to pay to get a DSP experimentation card for a PC, and since I didn't have
a
>PC at the time it was a bargain.
>
>In addition to that, I wrote a series of articles about DSP for the ST
>Format magazine in the UK, for which they paid me £500, recompensing the
>computer's cost! Ha!
>
>paul
>

Hi
 For my DSP experiments, I got one of those "SoftModems".
It had a A/D-D/A, ADSP2100 Analog Devices DSP and RAM to load
the programs into. It only cost me $75 when new.
Dwight
Received on Fri May 16 2003 - 11:02:33 BST