Falcon Video

FalconUK · February 13

Hi my name is Ian from a charity in High Wycombe UK called Central Aid. We help people and families in crisis with beds , furniture and white goods. We have been donated a Falcon 030 in good condition , no leads no monitor, it appears to boot OK with green light on and yellow flashing during boot.

We have no monitor cable though and I have tried many ways to connect to a modern TV with analogue tuning using the TV RCA phono type outlet and failed!

I want to test the unit and then sell it to allow us to assist more people.

I have a kind offer from a guy in North Kent, it is a long drive though.

Can anybody help please?

Kind regards

Ian Cranshaw

Zogging Hell · February 13

Generous donation! You should be able to get something from the RF on a new UK TV I believe although it would look god awful. There are a couple of things it could be unless your chosen TV is a bit fussy. Firstly a Falcon will take up to 30 seconds to boot to desktop with no floppy in the drive, so you will get a white screen up to that point after a very long memory check screen. Secondly and more likely, is that the NVRAM in the Falcon has died (this is kind of a system setting storage backed up on a battery powered chip which at this stage is well past its sell by date) or been left set to output in a resolution not supported by your TV. You could try and reset the NVRAM using something like this https://dhs.nu/files.php?t=single&ID=123 , but this requires you to have access to a good floppy disk and a means to write something to it. The NVRAM chip can be replaced but it is not a job for the faint hearted (soldering and delicate motherboards...). Finally you could buy either a direct scart cable (if your TV still has this) or something like this https://exxosforum.co.uk/atari/store2/0146.html which allows a normal VGA cable to be connected (some TVs still have VGA or it is more simple to convert this to HDMI if not).

Most likely if the floppy drive is spinning and the light going on and off, the Falcon is fine. If you have a floppy disk you could insert it and see if it access the disk and then stops (including the light at top right stopping). If it does this it is most likely to be alright. You would need to press space immediately after you turn the computer on to skip the memory check otherwise you could be there a while.