exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

My name is Joel. I live in OH, USA.

I am a long-time Falcon admirer and today, I bought my first Falcon 030. I am excited to get started with this machine. I am an electronic musician and can't wait to use the Falcon to establish a different workspace for creating new things.

************ I have read several forum topics to help myself answer the following questions, so please know that I didn't just

This Falcon comes to me with some upgrades already under the hood:

German Falcon 030 w/ QWERTZ keyboard
DFB1X - 50 MHz
Clock patch v3
2 GB ATA SSD with HDDriver 12.04 installed
TOS 4.04
14 MB RAM + 128MB alt RAM
Motorola 68882 FPU
Socketed Dallas realtime clock/ NVRAM

As a Falcon newb, I mistakenly assumed that I would be able to run some old ST games I already had on hand like Tetris, King's Quest IV, etc. But nothing seems to run on this machine yet. It just hangs up. I always get a message saying, "You can only view or print this document."

GEMBENCH runs great. The test results seem impressive.

So, after a few hours of sincere troubleshooting, I am needing more information from experienced users to help close my ignorance gap. Why is nothing loading and running correctly? I have run a couple of games that were "updated" to run on the Falcon, but they don't run either.

Thank you for your help!

:welcomewave:

P.S. If you need "fixed" versions of games which will run from the hard disk you can look at P.P.'s web site: https://atari.8bitchip.info/fromhd3.php

:welcomewave:

Good day!

synclavier wrote: 14 Jan 2025 03:43 But nothing seems to run on this machine yet. It just hangs up. I always get a message saying, "You can only view or print this document."

That doesn't sound like a normal incompatibility error -- that's the message you get when you try to run a file from the desktop that doesn't have the right extension.

Most ST games would have expected to be run from boot (ie, disc in the drive, press reset [and perhaps hold ALT to skip hard disc booting]).

That said because of the HD disc drive, few copy protected games will work anyway.

The hard disc modified games Stephen linked may work better, but they're still very tied to the hardware they're expecting so you may not get much luck with the accelerator activated on many, even modded games.

Some should work without modification and be better for the upgrades. Civilisation and Frontier are obvious examples. 2D shooters or platformers that throw a lot of sprites around the screen tend to need to employ more shortcuts so are less forwards compatible.

BW

"You can only view or print this document." Could happen to a newbie if they downloaded a game in .ST format (intended for Goteks) and simply double clicked it. TOS says that when it doesn't understand what the file is.

:swave:

Welcome to the forum.

Always good to get more fellow Falcon owners on the forum.

I'll try to respond with more helpful info in the next day or two (and maybe some links to s/w you can try)...

Greetings to a fellow Falcon owner!
What sort of musical elements do you want to use it for?
Also you can open your own thread for the issue, maybe with a few photos of the file you're clicking on. As Steve suggested it might be Game.ST which is a disk image file and natively won't run or extract.

"The hard disc modified games Stephen linked may work better, but they're still very tied to the hardware they're expecting so you may not get much luck with the accelerator activated on many, even modded games." @Badwolf

Not sure about the Falcon, especially modded, but a surprising number of P.Pera's adapted games run on my 40mhz 68030 STacy.

And welcome Joel! :)

It'll take a while to get used to the Falcon but don't give up on it - it's a great machine!

There's a couple of other Atarian's pretty close to your neck of the woods in Ohio:

lp - maintainer of GFA Basic (editor) (he also has an ultra-cool Vampire setup)

Tillek/Klenotic - SysOp of the Star Fleet Headquarters BBs (he also owns a DFB1X Falcon).

@synclavier Here is something that might help:

http://www.klapauzius.net/Old_Games.htm ... _the_Crown

IMO these are the nicest 030 patched games available, try these versions out.