Wolfgang Kierdorf of "Retro is the new black" youtube channel is reviewing a rare kind of Falcon 030, which was donated to his channel: The combination of a Rocke Tower and the rare Falcon Speed PC card by German company SACK "capable" of running Windows 3.1.
Just in case you hear an incredibly unsympathetic AI voice as video narrator please switch to the original language on youtube (lovely English with German accent)
Both hardware items are hard to find these days. They were like the highend stage of expansion for the machine in the German Atari market, maybe until the Centurbo Cards appeared. The Rocke Tower had a very high standing in the community because of its smart design and quality. And the Falcon speed was one of the most advanced PC cards on Atari.
Ironically, the once strong wish in the Atari user base for catching up with the oh so wonderful PC world by using tower cases, external keyboards (and PC applications) turned around again mostly. At least to my impression retro computing people seem to prefer the classic cases again and are not particularly fond of using Windows 3.11 either. Finally, justice!
Comments
Not true. ATonce 386SX provided a much better hardware spec.
Frankly, that video looked like a clickbait to me, the rarest Atari computer on the planet, sure. It was for sale for 125 EUR a few years ago: https://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?t=38346.
Personally, I never owned one nor measured the performance but referred to this Atari document (https://www.atari-computermuseum.de/pics/scans/Falcon030.pdf) luckily preserved by atari-computermuseum.de (https://www.atari-computermuseum.de) (in German only though). There it is stated that the Falcon speed, while being based on a 286, is faster than a 386SX due to special Windows drivers. So maybe the "fastest" term only relates to Windows particularly and generally the ATonce 386 might have been faster. I gonna adopt the phrasing a bit. Thanks!
About your other point: I know all that clickbait stuff in the web is annoying, but I don't really see a 45 minute in-depth video on a 1992 Atari computer in the same boat. Sounds more like passion to me and personally I think it's nice that Wolfgang gave everyone interested the chance to look at such a Falcon and the PC emulation. At least I never saw it before.
It might be you also got that shocking AI voice talking (I got that here!), which is really horrifying and sounds clickbait-y indeed. In that case please switch to the original language, it's much, much more sympathetic!
A last remark: the price of an item at a certain point in time and the rarity of an item do not necessarily relate each other. This machine is quite rare for sure but this doesn't mean it has to cost much.
About the rest: perhaps it's due to the fact that I hadn't ever heard about the Rocke Tower ... HOLD ON A SECOND. Now that I read https://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?t=40179 I have realised that I have one at home.
So much for the rarity but I agree it's nice to spread the word about Atari setups.
One could assume the high-quality (Rocke) towers were thrown away less easily. So nowadays there may be disproportionally many left even
These special builds are mostly used for some professional function. And sadly when they have done their time in production they go to e-waste :(
Anyway I watched a bit into the video and he's describing the Mighty Sonic 32 memory slots as part of the PC board, I had to stop there :) I wish somebody like 505 could have had this machine instead, who actually know and use their Atari.