🚀 go-pugleaf

I have the Falcon for 6 days now, and here are my first impressions:

Contents of the package:

Falcon 030
4MB
65MB Harddisk
VGA adaptor
English (!) manual
Game manual
CalApt plus manual
Driver Disk
Extra Disk with Landmines, Breakout, Talking clock, CalApt & Calculator

TOS:
TOS 4.01, no MultiTOS yet :-(


The Hardware

The case is full of hardware as one can see because of a small hump on
it's top :-). The keyboard feels almost like the old 1040 one.

The hardware works very well: AD and DA converters sound excellent (also
the bass is increased for headphones). Using 33 or 50 kHz it sounds
just like the cd-player itself. Sending data via DMA from one subsystem
to another works extremely easy. 
Together with another developer I've programmed a small programm to
produce an echo, using the DSP and both, the AD and DA converter.

Saving sounddata with 50kHz is no problem for the build in harddisk and
also the "slow" SyQuest cartridges work fine.

The videosystem is working correctly with all types of monitors. Although
the picture is quite far left on RGB-televisions. The picture is sharp
(better than STE quality).

The DMA-matrix is really a fantastic thing! Things can be done that
are absolutely impossible on PCs.


I think the hardware is ready to be sold. The software is a problem
at the moment. I don't think that ATARI will sell the Falcon to
many users as long as MultiTOS is not complete. Also some of the
included programs are not completely ready (One must start the
talking clock to initialize the sound system before landmine has
its nice sounds...). But it's good that we developers get the Falcon
now, so the users will have a bundle of software to buy, as soon as
the MultiTOS is ready.

I didn't any benchmarks up to now, because there is really too much
interesting hardware to be studied!!!

I think I will upload sone selfwritten demos to atari.archive in the
next weeks - so you can use them when you get your Falcon.

-- 
Harald Schoenfeld (hs@cnve.rrze.uni-erlangen.dbp.de)