Atari Falcon with Cubase on ebay (UK)

[mal7921]

For anyone interested, it is at http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ATARI-FALCON-030- ... 4a9ef34371

This sold for £240 plus £15 UK shipping. Falcons still attract high prices.

[Atari Music Network]

Please let us know what your final selling price is. I have three Falcons myself and I might want to sell one of them to fund a new Coldfire (or Firebee as it is now called).

[mal7921]

Thankfully it's not one of mine, I had 3 but 13 Atari's was a tad excessive so I sold one to prop up funds. That got about £300 as I recall.

[Atari Music Network]

It's amazing how addictive collecting Ataris becomes. Everythime I see a non-yellowed Atari on Ebay or one that still has its box, I check my bank account to see if i can adopt another one!

[NCGM]

Mmmm...3x STE and 2x Falcon 030 here along with a boat load of addon hardware, plus a HUGE amount of software...well except for HDDRIVER v7.93 but maybe someone can help me out.

I also have other old micros; Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K (rubber keys) and ZX Spectrum+ 128K (heatsink on side). A Commodore 64 DTV computer in a joystick, but not had chance to work out how to add CF cards, keyboard etc. Also a Psion Series 3 and Series 3mx.


NCGM

[mal7921]

Do you have a later copy of HDDriver? If so you can request the earlier version for free.

Any chance that you have any Line Audio Design drivers anywhere? I do have things I can trade

[NCGM]

I've just had a quick look but sadly I cannot see any Line Audio Design drivers.

[Atari Music Network]

Which Line Audio drivers are you looking for? These products are suppossed to be compatible with Steinberg's FDI drivers, or am I wrong?

If there are such unique drivers, whoever has them, I ask that you please forward them to AMN as well so that they can be placed online for download.

Thanks!

[mal7921]

To be honest I don't know if it compatible or not, all I do know is that I can't get audio in from it regardless of the switch position on the connector. I'll have a look again later this weekend and see what I can find, though it looks like I may have some issues with the Falcons (One has no onboard audio, the other will not play with Cubase Audio)

[Atari Music Network]

As far as I understood, SoundPool and Line Audio breakout boxes are all compatible with the Steinberg FDI driver used in Cubase Audio. Have you tried using that?

[mal7921]

It's all connected with the FDI, Cubase see's the FDI fine, but I can't get an audio in from the FAD.

As it's late here and the kids are asleep, I'll have another look into this tomorrow as I also have some stuff to try on the temperamental Falcon.

Thanks for the info though, I'll look further into it.

[NCGM]

I've been trying all day to get some audio in Cubase Audio Falcon with zero success. CAF loads up and sees the FDI and FA8 fine, but when I feed it a digital audio signal (optical or coaxial) nothing happens; the audio monitor shows no activity on the meters, despite selecting FDI in the hardware settings page. At first I tried using my digital valve preamp which outputs 24-bit digital audio; I then tried my Philips CDR538 CD Recorder via the coaxial output and still nothing. Finally I tried just feeding an analogue signal into the Falcon mic input and that worked, i.e. the CAF monitor meters were active and I could hear sound. I could not record this audio to a track though, as it threw up an error window saying, "Channel 0 cannot record onto the drive '". I get this same error whether I use HDDRIVER v7.93 or v8.23, so I guess it must be related to something else.

Actually I forgot to mention at the beginning that at one point I had loud digital white noise, when I had a digital connection from the preamp I think. The CAF monitor meters were full blast when I activated them on a channel.


NCGM

[mal7921]

The white noise is probably because the FDI is 16 bit only (Some later ones were 24 bit capable, but Cubase on the Falcon is 16 bit only). The chances are then that you got autio in from the amp, but as the bit rate was too high, the top 8 bits would be lost rendering the rest of the audio data useless.

So this brings an interesting question over the CD player, was the SPDIF working and if so, what is different?

Also have you put either FDI_INIT.prg or MATRIX.PRG in your Falcon's auto folder? If not, both are on here and should be downloaded and installed on your Falcon. Matrix sorted out an issue with my FDI that FDI_INIT would not (Though FDI_INIT works fine now).

Funny how things are with this old stuff.

As for the write error, can you write to the drive from TOS? If you copied the contents of your Falcons internal drive to your external SCSI, does it all work fine?

If so, you could have a minor case of system clock issues, which require the Cubase clock fix (As one of my Falcons does). The issues can vary from Cubase or any program requiring heavy and fast SCSI access to random errors in Cubase.

One test I do for this is to format a Jaz disk, partition it and then test every sector and repeat this several times on the same disk. As the SCSI bus is in use, if there are any clock issues, the machine will either freeze or reboot.

[NCGM]

I did wonder if my FDI was new enough to support 24-bit but the serial number means nothing to me. On the back sticker it says, "Falcon Audio FDI Pack E No. 30578-02-140410108 and the UK box is crossed. I took apart the FDI and photographed it for reference. On the mainboard there is a sticker marked '10/93' and printed on the underside of the board is 'SPDIF 1'.

I have FDI_INIT.prg in the AUTO folder but I have not tried MATRIX.PRG yet, as I read it was for SoundPool badged devices. Can you have both programs in the AUTO folder or just one?

Regards the SCSI drive which is actually an IDE connected via an adapter. Yes TOS can format and read and write to it fine outside of Cubase. I can also copy from the internal drive to the SCSI one no problem. Infact since I took my CF card out of the internal IDE port earlier today, I am launching CAF from the SCSI drive. I took the CF card out because although HDDRIVER 7.93 detects the card when I run the SCSI ID Check selection, it does not show up elsewhere in the program to be able to format or install HDDRIVER to etc.

I did a sector test when I first formated the SCSI (IDE) drive with HD DRIVER. Only once through though but I had no problems.


NCGM

[mal7921]

So it's an IDE drive connected to the SCSI port via an adapter? That may be the issue then as there will be a delay caused by the adapter, even if other programs can write to it, Cubase will expect a responce from the drive within a set time, if the responce is too too long, Cubase will error on writing to the drive,

Silly thing is, the drive is probably faster than the SCSI devices around when the Falcon was available!

I'd at least look into the Jaz drives, I managed to get mine for £5.50 plus postage on ebay, though I'd get the 1GB models as the 2GB seemed to be flakey on my machines (Though work great for word processing and such like).

I'm debating what to do with my Falcons at the moment, the Cubase compromised one had a 68882 in it which I may put into the one that runs Cubase but the onboard audio does not work, then trade the Cubase compromised machine for a C-Lab Falcon Mk II that I've been offered, but I'm quite attached to my Falcons. May see what Simbo says about my machines on the other forum, assuming he wakes up over there.