Is stock Falcon RAM on Daughterboard or Motherboard?

[AtariSociety]

My Falcon manual say's Falcons came in 1MB, 4MB, and 14MB models.

 

Is any of this ram actually on the Motherboard, like the 1MB and 4MB, but to go to 14MB, you use an daughtercard, or is all forms of ram a small card that plugs onto the motherboard?

 

Never explored a Falcon before in the inside and curious.

 

TJ

[AtariSociety]

4 hours ago, AtariSociety said:

My Falcon manual say's Falcons came in 1MB, 4MB, and 14MB models.

 

Is any of this ram actually on the Motherboard, like the 1MB and 4MB, but to go to 14MB, you use an daughtercard, or is all forms of ram a small card that plugs onto the motherboard?

 

Never explored a Falcon before in the inside and curious.

 

TJ

I figured it out.  Found a video of a Falcon being upgraded and showed it had a small 4mb card that was used so ram appears all card based.  tj

[Zogging Hell]

Yep all on a card, was a mixture of convenient and expensive, back when the Falcon came out. No 'cheap' simm upgrades after the STe was a bit of an annoying retrograde step.

[leech]

On 4/2/2023 at 4:01 AM, Zogging Hell said:

Yep all on a card, was a mixture of convenient and expensive, back when the Falcon came out. No 'cheap' simm upgrades after the STe was a bit of an annoying retrograde step.

Yeah, was all rather silly that they went from the original ST being a pain to upgrade to the STe/TT having SIMM slots to the Falcon going to a upgrade board, but still proprietary.  I also will probably never figure out why the Amiga had so many upgrade options for memory and other things, and the ST line were, for the most part, very hacky in appearance for any upgrades.  The Falcon, for example, has an expansion bus on on the top of it, whereas the A500 had one on the side, and under the 'trap door'.  Both the A500 and Falcon seem to have their expansion basically piped straight through the CPU, but having it accessible externally on the side like the Amiga seems far more logical for slapping things on for a normal user.

To the original question; I have seen memory upgrades for the Falcon that are basically an interface board to add SIMM slots, if you'd like to go that route, but I'm not sure if those cause more heat or not.

 

Edit: My guess for why they didn't have SIMM slots there instead; it was likely much cheaper to just slap a little connector or two on the board.

Edited April 24, 2023 by leech

[Zogging Hell]

1 hour ago, leech said:

Yeah, was all rather silly that they went from the original ST being a pain to upgrade to the STe/TT having SIMM slots to the Falcon going to a upgrade board, but still proprietary.  I also will probably never figure out why the Amiga had so many upgrade options for memory and other things, and the ST line were, for the most part, very hacky in appearance for any upgrades.  The Falcon, for example, has an expansion bus on on the top of it, whereas the A500 had one on the side, and under the 'trap door'.  Both the A500 and Falcon seem to have their expansion basically piped straight through the CPU, but having it accessible externally on the side like the Amiga seems far more logical for slapping things on for a normal user.

To the original question; I have seen memory upgrades for the Falcon that are basically an interface board to add SIMM slots, if you'd like to go that route, but I'm not sure if those cause more heat or not.

 

Edit: My guess for why they didn't have SIMM slots there instead; it was likely much cheaper to just slap a little connector or two on the board.

I guess the answer to the external connector not being on the Atari is there is a cartridge port instead, which presumably was seen as a better option in 1985, given all previous home computers having them. Bit of a mistake there, particularly given the low capacity (128k) and no write capability.. And I guess Atari themselves thought in 1985 that no-one would need much more than 512k or 1024k in the prospective lifespan of the ST (which in retrospect for the commercial games life of the ST seems mostly correct - 'power' productivity users would probably disagree). I don't really mind the Falcon having the memory inside for an upgrade, having it hanging off the bus on an edge connector on the side (along with a hard drive and everything else you need to get into the Amiga) seems a potential disaster in the waiting. It was easy enough in the Falcon to flip off the lid and swap in a card the one time I upgraded the ST memory, and it is not like you would want to downgrade it. An Amiga trapdoor style opening underneath would have been better, but given the Falcon was re-using the ST case it might not have been an option. 

[leech]

1 hour ago, Zogging Hell said:

I guess the answer to the external connector not being on the Atari is there is a cartridge port instead, which presumably was seen as a better option in 1985, given all previous home computers having them. Bit of a mistake there, particularly given the low capacity (128k) and no write capability.. And I guess Atari themselves thought in 1985 that no-one would need much more than 512k or 1024k in the prospective lifespan of the ST (which in retrospect for the commercial games life of the ST seems mostly correct - 'power' productivity users would probably disagree). I don't really mind the Falcon having the memory inside for an upgrade, having it hanging off the bus on an edge connector on the side (along with a hard drive and everything else you need to get into the Amiga) seems a potential disaster in the waiting. It was easy enough in the Falcon to flip off the lid and swap in a card the one time I upgraded the ST memory, and it is not like you would want to downgrade it. An Amiga trapdoor style opening underneath would have been better, but given the Falcon was re-using the ST case it might not have been an option. 

Yeah, the advantage of the edge connector on the side of the A500 is that you can do CPU accelerators, RAM, SCSI controllers, etc.  The Cartridge port on the ST was definitely rarely used, with the only ones coming to mind being diagnostic carts, the GCR mac emulations and the Cubase copy protection stuff.  None of which are game related   The ST was such a weird thing, since they clearly targeted productivity with the mono resolution support, yet the memory limits hampered it quite a bit.  I had the opportunity to get a free Mega ST many years ago, the only requirement was if I could figure out how to split up a massive database so they could move it onto a PC.  Sadly even my TT with TT RAM, I couldn't figure out how to get it to copy over without it running out of ram   Though I did recently buy one off eBay, so now I have a 1040STe, Mega ST, 2x Mega STe, TT030 and 2x Falcons!

[Zogging Hell]

15 hours ago, leech said:

Yeah, the advantage of the edge connector on the side of the A500 is that you can do CPU accelerators, RAM, SCSI controllers, etc.  The Cartridge port on the ST was definitely rarely used, with the only ones coming to mind being diagnostic carts, the GCR mac emulations and the Cubase copy protection stuff.  None of which are game related   The ST was such a weird thing, since they clearly targeted productivity with the mono resolution support, yet the memory limits hampered it quite a bit.  I had the opportunity to get a free Mega ST many years ago, the only requirement was if I could figure out how to split up a massive database so they could move it onto a PC.  Sadly even my TT with TT RAM, I couldn't figure out how to get it to copy over without it running out of ram   Though I did recently buy one off eBay, so now I have a 1040STe, Mega ST, 2x Mega STe, TT030 and 2x Falcons!

Lol quite the collection , you clearly needed a clone as well for that database, my old Milan has about 128mb, but perhaps is was a limit on ST (slow) memory that was the issue? What database was it?

[leech]

On 4/25/2023 at 3:39 AM, Zogging Hell said:

Lol quite the collection , you clearly needed a clone as well for that database, my old Milan has about 128mb, but perhaps is was a limit on ST (slow) memory that was the issue? What database was it?

I don't remember, it was like 25 years ago... Wish I could have gotten one of the generic systems, like the Milan, or Hades.

[Zogging Hell]

4 minutes ago, leech said:

I don't remember, it was like 25 years ago... Wish I could have gotten one of the generic systems, like the Milan, or Hades.

Ah fair enough, I can't remember what I did yesterday, let alone 25 years ago! The Hades was unobtainioum for me... far beyond my budget. I think I spent as much on the Milan as I would of on a decent PC, but as it allowed me to continue working with my Atari software and now in true colour with wads of memory, it was worth it for me at least. With Magic Milan it was the best 'ST' for productivity I've owned. Sadly it was only great for the 'serious' software, there wasn't much gaming going on.

[leech]

2 hours ago, Zogging Hell said:

Ah fair enough, I can't remember what I did yesterday, let alone 25 years ago! The Hades was unobtainioum for me... far beyond my budget. I think I spent as much on the Milan as I would of on a decent PC, but as it allowed me to continue working with my Atari software and now in true colour with wads of memory, it was worth it for me at least. With Magic Milan it was the best 'ST' for productivity I've owned. Sadly it was only great for the 'serious' software, there wasn't much gaming going on.

Stupid brains, I occasionally end up rearranging things and having something in my hand, then end up setting it down and 5 minutes later, damned if I know where I put it. 

 

But I am really curious on how many TOS/GEM workstations were sold.  Granted I'd still one day get a Firebee, but when they were being made, I definitely didn't have the money for one.  Now I do.  Though now I somehow feel like the Vampire / Apollo Core can replace those.  Granted I really wish we had some of the people working on EmuTOS for it would actually join the group as full on devs for them (in as much as anyone can do such a thing 'full time') and push forward the platform to support the Atari and Amiga at once.  Getting a fairly cheap / tiny computer that can run high end GEM applications, with maybe some gaming on the side, would be amazing!

[MrMaddog]

On 4/26/2023 at 6:51 PM, leech said:

Stupid brains, I occasionally end up rearranging things and having something in my hand, then end up setting it down and 5 minutes later, damned if I know where I put it. 

 

But I am really curious on how many TOS/GEM workstations were sold.  Granted I'd still one day get a Firebee, but when they were being made, I definitely didn't have the money for one.  Now I do.  Though now I somehow feel like the Vampire / Apollo Core can replace those.  Granted I really wish we had some of the people working on EmuTOS for it would actually join the group as full on devs for them (in as much as anyone can do such a thing 'full time') and push forward the platform to support the Atari and Amiga at once.  Getting a fairly cheap / tiny computer that can run high end GEM applications, with maybe some gaming on the side, would be amazing!

 

Sorry for the necropost, but yeah I've always wanted those TOS workstations or hell even something like MagicMac but they were all too expensive to import to North America at the time.

 

Just glad that FreeMiNT & EmuTOS are still being made and can run on other platforms now...

 

Quote

Getting a fairly cheap / tiny computer that can run high end GEM applications, with maybe some gaming on the side, would be amazing!

 

If you can get a hold of a RPi 3 or 4 then do get BeeKey!  It's the best and cheapest way to run a modern multitasking FreeMiNT setup and lets you play ST games & demos by double-clicking on the disk images.