FALCON30 expansion test fixture

[sety]

Hi all.

The Falcon service manual makes mention of a FALCON30 expansion test fixture. It apparently has 16K RAM on it and you can load the diag roms onto it amongst other features. Has anyone ever seen one of these? I can't find any reference to it except for the service manual.

Thanks!
Stuart

[derkom]

The Falcon service manual makes mention of a FALCON30 expansion test fixture. It apparently has 16K RAM on it and you can load the diag roms onto it amongst other features. Has anyone ever seen one of these? I can't find any reference to it except for the service manual.

Best Electronics has these. Have a look at http://www.best-electronics-ca.com/falcon.htm and scroll down to the Diagnostics section near the end of the page. It's not required for testing unless you want to test all the external ports.

The RAM on the test fixture isn't for the diag ROM. I presume it's just used to buffer data when testing the bidrectional ports.

[sety]

Are you sure about this? I interpreted the manual to believe it plugs into the expansion header on a near dead Falcon and provides some basics to get a minimal boot and give some low level info to get out of the dark. If this is the one from BeST, then I will definitely buy one.

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[exxos]

onboard blitter ? Has anyone seen a image of this kit ?

[derkom]

Are you sure about this? I interpreted the manual to believe it plugs into the expansion header on a near dead Falcon and provides some basics to get a minimal boot and give some low level info to get out of the dark. If this is the one from BeST, then I will definitely buy one.

Oh wow, that does indeed sound like a different device. My bad. Never heard of this one. Very interesting.

[mikro]

Just an update on this. Asked Bradley about it:

When we got the rights to clear out the Sunnyvale Atari parts department, we cleared out every shelf of Atari parts they had. On top of that we also cleared out the Atari Techs area to. Never saw any other Falcon Test hardware in both areas. It most likely was one of the Falcon test hardware pieces Atari was going to make in the future, but never got around to it.