RETURN of the FALCON

So I hope all the Atari/hardware midi heads on here have been keeping tabs on this project:



http://acp.atari.org/about.html

can't remeber that I heard of this project before.
I had the C-LAB(later known as Emagic ) Falcon in the 90s and a LineAudio 8in/8out interface wich allowed 8track HD recording slow as hell if you want to edit the audio files but it worked and while the Falcon normlized the 8 tracks you can roll a fat blunt and smoke it. When you're finished the Falcon is probably reaady too

peace

Sorry to thread jack, but I have an iMac that I want to put into a rack mountable chassis like that one is in....Is it possible??

My LCD screen is bad and its $700 to replace.....I have a crapload of external monitors and dont want to have to have the imac take up space if Im only basically using it as a tower...feel me?


That Atari Falcon clone looks dope. Is it basically just an older spec PC? What are the benefits of running this instead of a pc/mac? I know a dude that tracks midi into an Atari for sequencing, but I coulnt understand why he went to all that trouble to sequence in the Atari when dude has an MPC, lol......

jonestown massacre wrote:Sorry to thread jack, but I have an iMac that I want to put into a rack mountable chassis like that one is in....Is it possible??

My LCD screen is bad and its $700 to replace.....I have a crapload of external monitors and dont want to have to have the imac take up space if Im only basically using it as a tower...feel me?


That Atari Falcon clone looks dope. Is it basically just an older spec PC? What are the benefits of running this instead of a pc/mac? I know a dude that tracks midi into an Atari for sequencing, but I coulnt understand why he went to all that trouble to sequence in the Atari when dude has an MPC, lol......

trouble?
Atari cubase is stable as hell and much more flexible than the average MPC sequencer (I'm not talkin about JJOS ). If I would have more space here I would use mine too.

peace

Im just sayin....The thing is a behemoth and he paid $$ for it. It seemed like trouble to me, hahaha.

jonestown massacre wrote:My LCD screen is bad and its $700 to replace

You could fix it yourself for a fraction of that. Nobody sends their stuff to Apple (or 'authorized' techs) for repair...

If you're not comfy cracking her open, then you can just buy the part and find someone to stick it in there for you for $100 or so. Sh1t I'll do it if you pay shipping...

Oh, I work in electronics...the part is $700, lol.... That shits outta control! I figure I can rig a chassis up with an external video port and spend 100 instead of 700.

$700 for an LCD? From where?

I didn't shop around, it was at the apple store

Lol

jonestown massacre wrote:I didn't shop around, it was at the apple store

Lol

Oh yeah nah nobody does that homie lol

Still, I'll probably have to pay at least 350 for the part elsewhere...I already have a chassis, a monitor and abunch of connectors, tools etc. I just figure if it can be done, why not, right? Especially if it only costs me time.

So wait, you think Apple only doubles their prices?

I don't know how much but it depends on which one you got. if its a 17" you could prolly find one for $150.

Its even worse, I can't get the part anywhere else:

http://www.ifixit.com/Answers/View/34146/Broken+LCD+Panel+Replacement

WTF is this??? In MY Atari thread?!? Take that vile crap to the Mac forum!

Ehhh these kids... In a sad, sick way it is kinda funny tho. I can just see them getting ahold of one of these things and being like "WOAHH... KOOL CASE DUUUUDE... but yo I don't wanna play breakout yo I just wanna stick my corporate closed source bloatwared Steve Jobs schmegma board in there!!!" After which they rip the thing open, cluelessly tossing the circuit board to the most advanced (and some would say the only true) multimedia computer over their shoulder between puffs so they can whack an imac board in there with a rubber mallet... only to have some Apple exec cancel their software license and brick the thing the next day ha ha ha....

Ah but seriously...

The Atari Firebee (pictured above) is designed to be Falcon compatible, but if you check the info you will see that the hardware spec is well beyond the original machine.

The advantage? Real parallel hardware in an architecture that was designed to do desktop multimedia from the ground up -- not some re-tooled office or graphics box patched with a billion software band-aids (on top of an already bloated legacy system) to give the thing halfway acceptable performance. It took ten years for Apple and Micro$oft to even begin to approach the performance both of this basic design as well as BeOS (now Haiku) -- another excellent system the big guys did everything to quash because they knew they couldn't compete with it on a level playing field.

Of particular concern to those who are drawn to the Atari is midi performance. Midi likes to run as close to the hardware layer as possible since it's an ancient standard that came out of an era where there wasn't much option otherwise. Atari was the only computer platform to include midi-specific hardware on the motherboard that was directly ported to the CPU core and a real hardware clock. Some people wonder why the midi clock outputs from their Mac/Windows DAWs are so sloppy, forcing them to sacrifice an audio output and invest in one of those expensive external click-to-clock boxes. It's because that signal is being generated by a simulated clock inside secondary software app on top of a heavily patched legacy system. Shoving it through a USB stack afterwards doesn't help matters. Latency and jitter (as well as general instability) are unavoidable in this type of setup. The more software band-aids you add to fix it, the more clock cycles get burned up and the more tricky the real time scheduling becomes.

The Firebee is more than an ST midi sequencer thou -- it's a souped-up Falcon with all the audio capabilities of that machine and then some -- plus modern interfacing and storage. Imagine this board as the basis for a portable DAW or "MPC type thing" Then you would be talking REAL digital music hardware. Neko? I don't think so. MPC "Renaissance"?? Bwaha ha ha... lame. No FisherPrice toys fer me I'll take the real thing.

Wow thou I can't get over how people could waste this thread about such an awesome piece of real multimedia hardware to talk about imac displays... OMG sooo pathetic OMG....








OMG...