Falcon CT60

Atari Falcon CT60

Version Française

The most powerful of my Ataris: more than 20 times the speed of a stock Falcon and 7 to 8 times the speed of my accelerated TT!

What's in the box?

What's in the box?

68030 mode

CPU Motorola 68030, 32 bits, 16MHz with cache
ST Ram: 4MB

68060 mode

CT60 card, CPU MC 68060 at 95MHz
Ram in this mode: additionnal 256MB SDRAM
CTPCI card bringing 4xPCI slots
Graphic card PCI Radeon 7000

The CPX for CT60 settings

The power of the CT60

I compared four computers with Kronos:

In gre the TT 48MHz with a NOVA card, 16bits and 68MB RAM
In blue, the stock Falcon 16MHz, 4MB, 256 colors, it is the base 100
In green, the Quadra 68040/33MHz running MagicMac in 16 bits
In red, the CT60/100MHz with 256MB Ram and the Radeon 7000 in 16bits

We can note that:

CT60 = 30 times the Falcon for CPU and VDI
CT60 = 270 to 1090 times the Falcon for FPU and OpenGL
CT60 = 7 to 15 times the TT/48 for CPU and VDI
CT60 = 18 to 29 times the TT/48 for FPU and OpenGL

Note: my Falcon doesn't have a FPU 68882.

Concerning memory, the CT60 looks a bit slow, but this test is limited to ST RAM (witch is the same in 030 or 060 mode) and the Video memory. The details show that:

The Quadra gets good marks with regular and powerful results.
The CT60 speeds up the memory accesses in ST RAM by 1,5 to 2,4 times
The use of the Radeon 7000 gives a high writing speed to the video ram, 10 times the ST Ram!
Moving blocs from screen to screen is 170 times faster than with the SR Ram!

Note: many programs use TT Ram (the 256MB of my SDRAM) with a fast 100MB per second access and won't be limited by the ST Ram that offers a 4MB per second access.

External Setup

Push button ON/OFF
Switch for 030/060 modes
Power supply ATX
Falcon Ex-PSU for the hard drive (*)
IDE Maxtor 4GB hard drive (Master)
ZIP IDE 100MB (Slave)
flat ribbons to the CTPCI
4xPCI with graphic card Radeon 7000
VGA is (for the moment) on the videl

(*) two HDD died on the ATX psu, so, I re-used the Falcon power supply to isolate this last hard drive not knowing where the problem was coming from!

Internal Setup

For installing I mostly used the pages of

Rodolphe Czuba, designer of the CT60 and CTPCI
and the one from Patrice Mandin for the CTPCI

Here are the cards plugged into the Falcon. The original power supply is to be removed and an ATX PSU replaces it. So you can see:

The CT60 with its processor 68060 under the fan.
The daughter board CTPCI with connectors to the external PCI card
The two flat connectors to the PCI
On signle SDRAM memory, I use a 256MB one
The ATX power supply plugs here.
Cables to ON/OFF and 030/060 mode switches
The power connector of the Floppy drive is redirected to the CT60
The IDE connector

The IDE connector

I installed a flat IDE ribbon to use two 3,5" drives. For this, I had to build an adapter to the 2,5" connector of the motherboard.


I used this cheap and easy to find 2,5" to 3,5" adapter	The white molex connector is useless and doesn't fit into the Flacon, so I cut it carefuly without cuting an IDE track.	Then it fits easely into the Falcon!

Finaly, I can plug two IDE devices: one hard drive as the Master and one ZIP as the Slave.
Note the "feet" I made with an old mouse pad to separate the drives and let some air cool them.

ATI Radeon 7000

Here is the external setup for the PCI cards. You can see:

A Molex connector with +5V and +12V
Another wire to bring 3,3V
Flat connectors from the CTPCI
Note how the cards are directed with regard to the PCI connectors
VGA card ATI Radeon 7000
VGA output to the monitor

At last, I installed the graphic card.

In this mode, with NVDI, the speed increases again as the Falcon don't have to access the slow ST RAM for video operations but uses instead the fast RAM integrated to the graphic card.

My programs writing directly to the video RAM still work on this config!

My settings are 800x600 with 16 bits, that's what you see on the image next.

Software

Software can encounter adaptation problems with the CT60 for various reasons:

the cache size of the 68060 is more important, auto-modified code or loading libraries without flushing caches can lead to crashes. (*)
the use of a graphic card requieres the graphic software to manage the 16/24 and 32 bits modes with their different encodings.

(*) To solve this problem, the CPX of the CT60 offers a mode in wich caches are disabled for 5s each time a program is run or a library is loaded through PEXEC. But this lowers the global performances!

APL 68000 (MicroAPL):

Several problems have been fixed, see the page dedicated to the APL 68000

ASSEMBLE (Brainstorm):

the editor AEDIT has a menu entry to assemble the current edited source. Its crashes because of a lack of cache managment. Here is a patched version to solve the problem.

Pure Debugger:

a 68060 version of this debugger exists. It works well with the videl but has redraw problems with the Radeon. In spite of this, it can help with some limitations. You'll find it at Medusa Systems into the file Hadessh.zip .

assembly source of PureDebugger 60

M_PLAYER 3.30:

my program didn't manage correctly the caches when unpacking the IV32 routine, this is fixed. I also added the support for direct video access in 16 bits on the Radeon. Here is the correct version.

FORTH:

my interpretor/compiler didn't manage the caches when assembling to RAM, this is fixed in this version.

GEMVIEW 3.18:

The main program has been patched not to hang with the caches problem when laoding modules. You still have to install the full shareware package from Dieter Fiebelkorn's page and then replace GEMVIEW.APP with mine!
Update: the new patch doesn't overwrite the registering infos! (Thanks to Lonny Pursell!)

Zero-X 2.0:

This program, an sound editor, doesn't support 16 or 32 bits mode for its graphic window. I have written a launcher that redirects its display to my own routines for true color modes. This also works on a TT with a graphic card (I will add a support for 256 colors on graphic cards later). I moved the allocation of three large graphic buffers to the TT Ram to free the ST Ram for sound. Here is the folder to download.

Without using the patch... With ZX_TRAP.PRG!

Calamus:

NOVACAL is a screen driver for Calamus to make it support 15/16/24 and 32 bits modes. Some screen modes don't requiere NOVACAL (just test it!), for others, you must have it!

Without using NOVACAL in 16 bits... With NOVACAL!

RUNME1ST is a little launcher I wrote to fix programs that load executables modules without updating the caches. It runs well with Calamus. For more details, see below.

Run me 1st

This tool allows you to run any program that loads executables modules and that don't update the caches. It runs with Calamus (with GEMVIEW it can run but without the delay option!) and can be used to fix any other program with this bug.
You can also specify a delay after witch caches are not touched anymore (to gain power) supposing that modules are loaded at startup. Read carefuly the docs in this archive!