Hi everyone,
this was on my TODO for a very long time. I'm sure that you are aware of the existence of Atari HQ CD-ROM and various leaked source code and documents available at Lonny Pursell's fantastic Atari Document Archive.
On one rainy afternoon I went through all of the folders and noticed a lot of interesting files there, related to the area I'm heavily invested in: Sparrow, Falcon030, Falcon040, Microbox. But they were all those ancient formats, as Christian Zietz had already found out. Since the schematics were already decoded, what about the rest?
Namely: what I had saved (frankly, I can't vouch that I had saved *all* of the files, maybe I skipped some, I don't remember anymore) is 710 files:
- PageStream 2: 209
- Plain text, incl. 68000 assembler source: 148
- GEM Metafile: 104
- DynaCADD 2.0: 91
- AutoCAD DXF: 78
- WordPerfect 4.1 for Atari ST: 26
- CorelDRAW 2 (pre-3.0 format): 21
- Microsoft Write for Atari ST (Mac Word 1.x format): 12
- WordPerfect 5.0/5.1 for DOS: 11
- 1st Word Plus: 4
- AutoSketch, HP-GL: 3
Initially I planned to obtain each program (usually an Atari application) , open the file, read it and in the best case convert it into something readable (like print to PDF via Hatari or so), in the worst case at least document my findings. As you can imagine, this is a really time-consuming job and every time I started I also quitted very soon afterwards.
However since I have gotten accustomed to using Claude for various boring tasks, it was just a matter of time to find this TODO and let throw Claude at it. To be honest, I didn't expect much: maybe some summary which Claude decodes from the proprietary formats using brute force or something like that. Its output (Claude Opus 5 1M context + xhigh thinking) blew me away. It converted every single file into a perfectly readable output, using a custom-made python script harness!
So that uncovered a whole new world: weekly status reports, memos and faxes, service guides, hardware specs, manufacturing orders and even 245 drawings exposing assembly views, PCB silkscreens, pinouts, flowcharts, diagrams and even the nice logo you see above.
Since it is not in my power to read through all of it now (I'd rather code, you know...) I asked Claude for one more favour: to create a story from all of this data. And again, I was blown away. See for your self!
My updated Sparrow page with the story about Falcon origins: https://mikrosk.github.io/sparrow
Complete converted archive: https://mikrosk.github.io/sparrow/techpubs (each SVG has a text version for easy grep'ing)
I'm pretty sure there's a lot to explore, Claude is infamous for skipping / not understanding the whole context so don't rely on its generated Falcon history!
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