In addition to the OpenChrome DRM/KMS driver hoping to be finally mainlined in 2022 for supporting aging VIA graphics hardware from the long-ago days of their x86 chipsets, separately there is a DRM/KMS kernel driver in the works for something even older… A Linux DRM graphics driver for the Atari Falcon from the early 90’s.
Over the past two years a DRM driver has been in the works for the Atari graphics hardware with its built-in graphics chipset. This is not to be confused with the 2021-launched Atari VCS mini PC / game console, but the Atari Falcon personal computers out of the Atari Corporation from the early 90’s that featured Motorola 68000 series processors and a programmable video controller.
It’s not yet in mainline, so it’ll be fun to see if Torvalds is up for including such an old and niche driver once it’s matured. I’ve always wanted an Atari Falcon, but they’re even more expensive than most other classic computers, so that’s most likely never going to happen.
God I love that this exists. So niche yet kinda warms the heart
Nice! Linux Driver for the VIDEL? That’s amazing. I believe the VME drivers and such are in NetBSD. You should get a Falcon Thom, they are glorious machines!
If I win the lottery maybe.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/384921960791?hash=item599f230157:g:HlUAAOSwTAxiljMi
Woof.
or you can get a brand new firebee. it is basically a faster falcon.And it uses a true motorola 68k compatible ColdFire cpu and not fpga. they are very nice machines, and a great advantage is that you wont be afraid to power it up and risk the health of a falcon.
Except FireBee is not currently shipping
The ColdFire is not completely 68k compatible, with the FireBee some instructions are intercepted and processed in the FPGA.
Owned 3 Falcon at a time, one with CT60. The biggest problem was lack of stable software and memory (max 14MB for bare Falcon030). It was very challenging to do anything at all with it (16MHz, no good multitasking, no CD reader/writer, no decent printer support, even less scanner, …). And with a screen resolution hardly capable to even reach 1024×768 in 256 colors (with fine tuned video clock tweak) it was subpar in so many fields that a simple PC with a SVGA card would render it useless in a snap of fingers.
What was great though, the 68030, direct video and io fiddling. But again, beside Cubase and Notator for music stuff, the Falcon was hardly usable in an office environment. It wasn’t even good at games, mostly emulating STe games. A pity. Plus when the NVM battery dies, you’re left with a brick that needs hardware modification just because the battery was not into a holder but inside a chip. Don’t invest into this, keep good memories as “good memories”.
Kochise,
Early SVGA was very limited too before VESA standards. Was falcon always bad for it’s time or is it just that we’re comparing falcon to newer SVGA systems which continued to evolve?
Yeah, I think that’s why x86 ended up winning even though it was technically inferior to many of the competitors.
I didn’t know this. Well gotta give them credit, I thought non-replacable batteries was a more recent innovation, haha.
No SVGA, but more like standard Atari ST resolution (320x200x4 bits aka 16 colors “low res”, 640x200x2 bits aka 4 colors “medium res” and 640x400x1 bit aka “ST High”) and pseudo VGA (640x480x8 bits aka 256 colors and 320x240x16 bits aka 65535 colors). Plus some “overscan” variant on a TV. Basically the higher resolution and color depth, the slower the machine became as is was taken on the system memory and the CPU had to share the bus. And the colors other than 65535 were not “planar” but interlaced chunk of bits in memory, not just pixels mapping to bytes and voilà. It would have been way too easy.
There was good “office” applications, but nothing “integrated” so you had to launch several non compatible software to get the job done. And even getting vector fonts, you had to pay for another software. Same for scanning/printing, you had only basic support of a few hardware (Epson mostly). So nothing fancy. At least with Windows you got a pretty well integrated system after a while.
The NVM was supposed to last 10 years, which it did somehow. The problem is that the chip was soldered on the motherboard, and when the battery was dead, the system always booted in default settings. Like if your bios was reset at each power up. Nerve wrecking, especially as your video output can be wrong and scrolling on the TV like it is not tuned correctly.
Anyway it was a good experience, but a dead end anyway.
I don’t know about you, but I have a Falcon with a SuperVIDEL that can handle Dual-head 1080p… then again TOS is not designed for such resolutions, so you either need a giant screen, or not run it at that…
For the time it came out (1993), SVGA was still incredibly expensive, plus if you have 14mb of RAM and only used ST / Falcon software, or if things were optimized to use the DSP, you could use it for office work quite nicely. The 16mhz speed and 16bit bus was pretty dumb decisions, based on money. If the proper version (Falcon 040) had ever been released, it would have been killer. But Sam’s Atari was bleeding money, much like Warner’s Atari, and in a last ditch effort to save themselves, they killed the Falcon after it was barely available in favor of the Jaguar, which has some gems, but in a lot of ways has similarities to the Falcon. I always though they should have switched gears and sold the Falcon and Jaguar as PCBs you could shove into PCs… should have would have could have, I suppose…
Yeah, I’m speaking bare Falcon030, not with fancy unable to get SuperVIDEL ou CT60. The TT was 32 bits bus at 32 MHz, it wasn’t that difficult to get the Falcon030 there as well. The main problems were the memory limit (4MB was completely unusable and Atari had this stupidity not to put a SIMM support like in the STe but relied on a stupid connector format) that was also shared with video memory. The higher resolution, the less memory available, and the slower the machine, which was already running at 16 MHz top. And not that many applications that used the DSP (Apex Grafix?) even NeoN was only using the FPU that as not standard in the Falcon030 (and not easily accessible).
Well, the Falcon040/Microbox would have been great, but indeed, the Falcon030 was about to be abandoned before release, so no luck. And the Jaguar SDK was such a fiasco. Sad era.
About the battery replacement… you CAN replace them, but in Atari’s ultimate wisdom, they soldered them on, so it is a pain, you have to either do one of the hack jobs by cutting into it and soldering wires up to a new battery holder, or desolder the whole thing and put in it’s place a modern replacement that has the battery exposed.
Also it seemingly randomly bricks them, as neither of my Falcons have been bricked by them. And even if they don’t boot right up with a dead battery, there is a floppy disk you can boot off of that will reset it.
Is there a MIST core for a Falcon yet?
@northway, they need a good 68030 core first (sounds like they are close?) Then the 56003 Motorola DSP… then VIDEL and COMBO… sadly I am not sure if the MiST or MiSTer could fit the full Falcon.
I guess a Vampire 68080 from Apollo Core with a SuperVidel and a DSP 56001 it should do :p
Nah, a Rapsberry Pi or stronger SBC would be enough to emulate such an old technology.