Having owned an Atari Falcon030 for many years I thought it was time I gave it a little upgrade.
When I bought my Falcon it came with 4MB of RAM and some of the latest productions require 14MB to run. The Falcon is getting a little old so the availability of spare parts is becoming an issue - another reason to upgrade now!
I found a source that made memory upgrades so I duly ordered one from Petr (RAM kartice), I paid £30 which is about about €42 but that included shipping from Czech Republic to the UK.
Before I installed the memory upgrade, I thought I should make sure it all worked. I turned on my falcon and the internal 84MB IDE hard disk made some very strange sounds. After turning the power off/on many times, the hard disk burst into life and I managed to back it up to my PC using Ghostlink. I had read about some people replacing their 2.5" internal hard disks with a compact flash (CF) card. As CF cards are solid state, they will virtually never fail (all flash cards do fail after 1000+ writes). A quick search on ebay and I found a 2.5" IDE to CF card adapter (seller was mobilesupply), the adapter cost £1 plus postage which from Hong Kong was £3.50. I also bought a 512MB CF card for £9 delivered from a UK supplier.
Ok so IDE to CF adapter, CF card & a memory upgrade to do... lets start.
First of all the Falcon cover has to come off, remove all cables including the mouse & joystick and turn the Falcon over. Remove the three screws from the front of the Falcon (short screws) then the three longer screws at the rear of the case. Turn the Falcon over and remove the plastic top.
I left the keyboard still attached but moved it to the right hand side so I could work on the Falcon. Now remove the screws that hold the metal shielding from the Falcon and gentle pull the shielding up starting at the rear, the metal slots under the lower metal shielding near the front of the case. You will have to disconnect the speakers as you remove the upper metal shielding.
Now the top is off, we can see the circuit board in all it's glory. In the picture below you can see the 2.5" IDE hard disk in place on some home made brackets I made many years ago.
If you have an internal hard disk, unscrew the brackets and disconnect the drive to leave the IDE cable. Note: In the photo below, you can clearly see my original 4MB memory module still in place at the front right of the photo.
The 2.5" IDE to CF adapter is a very simple piece of hardware as the controlling circuitry is all within the CF card itself. Leave the jumper on so it is set to Master.
Insert the CF card into the 2.5" IDE to CF converter
Now connect the CF adapter to the Falcon 2.5" hard disk cable
Ok, lets test the CF card to make sure it works. Leave the top off and connect all the cables to the Falcon. I would recommend connecting the power supply last and be careful not to touch the PSU as it will be live. I put HDDriver 8.16 on a floppy and booted up my Falcon. Open the A drive and select the HDDRUTIL.APP. Click on Harddisk in the menu and select Format, the Falcon should detect the CF card.
Now apparently you don't have to format the CF card as they come pre-formatted but I wanted to make sure it all worked so I formatted mine. Below you can see the CF being formatted.
Ok so far, so good. Now all you have to do is partition the CF card. My original hard disk was 84MB but the 512MB CF card obviously has more capacity so I made two partitions C (100MB) & D (388MB). My idea was the use the C partition to hold all the stuff I wanted to run at startup and use the D partition for all my utilities. The utilities are not used everyday and very little changes so there will be less writes to the CF card and it should last for many years. I have two external SCSI disks that I use for all my coding/hacks and they will take most of the day to day hammering.
Once completed, you will have to use HDDRUTIL to install HDDriver to the C drive. Once that is completed. Boot your Falcon and open both C and D drive to make sure they are ok.
I was contemplating putting a small slot in the rear of my Falcon so I could change the CF card (the adapters are not hot swappable) but it would involve cutting both the plastic case and the metal shielding. In the end I covered my CF card adapter in insulation tape and taped it to the end of the floppy drive. Reassemble your Falcon (don't forget to connect the speaker).
Now the CF card was working, I started on the memory upgrade. The upgrade took about 30 seconds to complete. First locate the old memory module next to the floppy towards the front of the case.
The original memory module is held in place with two connectors, to remove the old module, gently pull upwards. You can see the two connectors where the memory has come from.
The RAM Kartice looks like the picture below, this is the side you see once the memory module is installed.
The two pictures below show the module. The memory module takes a single 16MB SIMM and is a real quality piece of work.
To install the memory upgrade, carefully line up the pins on the larger connector. Due to availability of connectors, on my upgrade, Petr had to use a connector with two extra columns of pins on the smaller of the connectors (the one near the front of the case). If your upgrade is the same, make sure you line the larger connector up then gentle push the upgrade into place.
Once installed, turn your Falcon on and you should see it now has 14336KB bytes of RAM.